Saudi Arabia's Modernization and Liberalization, Germany's AfD Ascendant, Slow US Adoption of 5G Tech, We're All Bourgeois Now, Single Origin Theory Of Humans Dead?
By the late 1980s, the Soviet Politburo was aware that something was rotten in the country’s system and that reform was the only option to forestall an economic collapse that could unleash something even worse. The command economy was no longer working, and even worse, the Americans were experiencing a very healthy decade of economic growth that was putting even greater distance between the West and the Eastern Bloc.
Mikhail Gorbachev decided that he would have to force through two types of reforms to turn the Soviet Union around. The first was Perestroika (Reconstruction) which meant that the Soviet economy would have to be restructured even if it upset Marxist orthodoxy. The second was Glasnost (Openness), whereby politics would undergo liberalization.
The conceit at the time was that both economic and political liberalism were necessary in order to keep up with the West. The Soviets went on to try this approach, only to see the Soviet Union collapse and break apart. China’s Deng Xiaoping took one look at what happened to the USSR and concluded that Perestroika was necessary, but that they could do without the Glasnost. So far, he has been proven correct.
Others have taken note of this as well, with Russia adopting what has come to be known as “managed democracy”, whereby a strong state permitted pluralism only up to a point, in that any opposition would have to be systemic and loyal. The point of this restriction was to maintain stability, something that Russia’s experiment in political liberalism did not manage to achieve.
Since then, both China and Russia have quickly modernized, and both are able to implement grand economic projects on a national scale that western liberal democracies seem to no longer be able to do. Economic restructuring in both countries has proceeded apace without a genuine internal threat to its political system. Where once liberal democracy was seen as the only viable system of governance (Fukuyama!), an alternative presented itself to spectators around the globe.
One of those spectators was Mohammad bin Salman al-Saud (better known as “MBS”), the current ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. MBS realized some time ago that the Desert Kingdom needed to plan out a future for its citizens as the era of Big Oil would eventually come to an end. Saudi Arabia would require not only a new economy, but also a significant change in the attitudes of its own people, many of whom had grown both wealthy and indolent thanks to a very generous program of state subsidies. The Saudi system was not sustainable, and even worse, it was very, very corrupt.
TabletMag recently sent several of its writers out to the Desert Kingdom to investigate up close how MBS’ reforms have changed Saudi Arabia. There is a full collection of essays here, but I want to focus on this one from Armin Rosen, as deals in the specifics of interest to readers of this Substack.
The stage for MBS’ sweeping social and economic reforms was set in 2018:
In the fall of 2018, the new crown prince detained 400 of his relatives at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and pressured nearly all of them to turn over billions of dollars that they had allegedly embezzled from the state. At the time, the Ritz gambit seemed like an arbitrary and maniacal power grab. But much was accomplished. MBS broke the old economic elite, allowing a new one to arise in its place. The Ritz was part of the crown’s indigenization push: The crackdown fell hardest on figures who had expatriated the people’s wealth, spending their money on yachts and fancy real estate far beyond the kingdom’s borders.
The Ritz gambit showed that the crown prince could act decisively against perceived enemies, including within his own family. Some of them had publicly aligned with U.S. intelligence agencies that saw the reforms as a threat to their own longstanding, quasi-corrupt relationships inside the kingdom. The Ritz also encapsulated the sensitivity to the public psyche that has made the reforms so risky and yet successful so far: MBS was announcing to his subjects that their own government had been stealing from them for decades with total impunity—and, by implication, with the blessing of the crown—while also assuring them that the problem was on its way to being solved.
Medieval? Certainly. Democratic? Definitely not. But per Rosen, it worked.
Social liberalization via a relaxation of the most conservative aspects of Islamic rule has been the most visible impact thus far:
In another reversal of decades of national precedent, the Saudi women were dressed with far greater individuality than the men. Their hair was often worn in long black tresses that streamed below the shoulders of tastefully concealing gowns. In a not-so-distant past, a pricey handbag was a Saudi woman’s only means of flaunting any higher status in public, a realm she could only enter when covered head-to-toe in a black abaya. The abayas are optional now, as are the hijabs. “We’d never imagined we’d be here from five years ago,” said Tala al Jabri, a Riyadh-based and U.S.-educated investor in Saudi-based tech startups, who, like most of the other younger women on hand, looked like she was dressed for a cold day in Beverly Hills.
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As Syria and Libya burned, ISIS consolidated control of northern Iraq, and the Egyptian military crushed the country’s brief spell of elected Muslim Brotherhood rule, Saudi women saw the rapid disappearance of such mainstays of national policy as the driving ban, compulsory hijab, male guardianship laws, and employment prohibitions. A nationwide ban on cinemas was lifted in 2018. The once-ubiquitous religious police still technically exist, but they are almost never seen in public anymore and have lost all of their formal powers. Saudi Arabia no longer exports fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam, long its state ideology, and has largely ceased the promotion of Wahhabism even within its own borders. The country began offering tourist visas for the first time in 2019, reversing a long-standing official fear of the contaminations of the outside world.
For four decades, the Saudis were engaged in a program of exporting their Salafist version of Sunni Islam abroad via their control of Islamic charities that would raise built-for-purpose mosques across the Islamic world (and beyond), along with funding Mujahideen of various stripes in global hot spots. This was my main bone of contention with the Desert Kingdom, as I saw up close in Bosnia-Hercegovina the effects of their Wahhabism export program.
Economic reform:
The palace has courted even greater dangers in the economic realm. The government introduced a value-added tax, essentially the first tax regime in the country’s history, and then raised the rate from 3% to as much as 15% while slashing subsidies on energy and food. The government’s sovereign wealth fund has led a massive shift in state investments, pivoting the public sector away from its usual focus on extractive industries and into new realms like tourism, real estate development, entertainment, logistics, and hazily innovation-related projects involving things like cryptocurrency trading and the construction of a cube-shaped Sim City arcology in central Riyadh.
Old trading families and the once-influential import sector have lost much of their former prominence. “Economic power in the private sector is changing hands,” explained Mohamed Alyahya, a Saudi political commentator and fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Economic diversification is the only path forward for the continued existence of the Kingdom, something that took taking 400 powerful people hostage to achieve:
MBS’s reforms, whose effects are plainly visible in every area of Saudi life, amount to a wholesale rewriting of the kingdom’s social contract. The days of the palace using endless supplies of oil money and religious conservatism to drug Saudis into a mutually reinforcing culture of indolence and obedience are over. In its place, the population is now meant to derive its sense of direction and meaning from a rebooted idea of Saudiness, while its wealth will now come from exciting new economic sectors. It will be possible for the government to create these sectors now that it has purged the kleptomania of the former order, mostly through the detainment of over 400 allegedly corrupt members of the royal family at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton in late 2018.
With many of the old subsidies and handouts eliminated, the relationship between the state, the subject, and the market is no longer mediated through oil-financed social bribery: “It is a big mind-shift we’re trying to induce, of becoming productive citizens,” explained a young Saudi woman who worked on the reform package during her career as a private consultant, and is now studying for a graduate degree in the United States. “A productivity mindset, which is the essence of the vision, has been achieved,” she claimed.
What you will notice throughout this essay is that the wild success of Dubai as an international business and finance hub has significantly influenced MBS’ reformist drive. For example:
There have also been policy “nudges”: For instance, the Saudi government has implemented a new requirement that any company whose largest regional client is the Saudi state must have its Middle East headquarters somewhere inside of Saudi Arabia itself, which is part of a broader attempt to force large corporate offices to relocate from the United Arab Emirates. Other nudges have come in the form of capital, much of it from the government’s $620 billion Public Investment Fund. In another bid to keep young people engaged and employed, the state has taken a marked interest in every manner of tech play, pouring money into online retail and ride-sharing. The Central Bank has started its own “fintech sandbox,” which will make it easier for nontraditional financial institutions to operate in the country, explained Tala al Jabri, the startup investor. “I would not be investing in startups if I didn’t think they had a culture to disrupt markets,” she said as we both ignored the action below us on the Corniche Circuit. “Startups believe the government has their back,” al Jabri continued. “They think they can succeed because they think the government wants them to succeed.”
What has been left unsaid in this essay is that MBS feels secure enough to launch these social and economic reforms without fear of an Islamist backlash, something that kept previous Saudi rulers awake at night.
Liberal democracy as unnecessary and an obstruction:
Citizens in a democracy, including the elected leadership, must resign themselves to the wondrous and horrible reality that public space is basically unmanageable, and that the state probably can’t forcibly eliminate things one might think are unspeakably evil, like gun ownership or abortion or the fentanyl trade. The Saudi government takes the opposite approach: The state exerts a tight grip over the public realm while respecting its subjects’ traditional sovereignty over the home. Private spaces are still considered sacrosanct—the police don’t go hunting for alcohol or sexual deviancy beyond locked doors, and unless you’re a jihadist, there is no Mukhabarat that seeks to penetrate the inner spaces of your true self. “There are consequences for expression here,” as one Riyadh intellectual put it, “but not for thought. You can think whatever you want.”
The system’s essential clarity explains why the Saudi leadership is so convinced that the population will continue to trust in its guidance and vision even as society becomes freer and more exposed to the outside world. There is mass deception at work in most autocracies, which retain the ceremonies of democratic procedure and other performances of civic openness in order to hide which section of the regime or the security services actually holds power—or to create the constant sense of terror that comes with living in a place where the rules are strategically obscured. There are no comparable lies at play in Saudi Arabia, according to Alyahya. “Mohammed bin Salman doesn’t pretend to be a Jeffersonian democrat, and nobody pretends to have voted for him,” he explained.
Will it work? Only time can tell.
One of the undercurrents of the TabletMag visit to Saudi Arabia was the shock rapprochement between the Kingdom and Iran. Writers at the Jewish publication are naturally not too fond of Iran, but have shown themselves to be savvy enough to understand that it has been the behaviour of the USA in the region that has caused MBS to question its motivations and overall strategy.
Recall that under President Trump, the USA brokered a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, whereby their de facto alliance would serve as the bedrock for a “more stable” Middle East. I believe that MBS favours Trump and the GOP and that he could shift course once again if there is a change in the White House after next year’s presidential election.
Germany’s Der Spiegel (the country’s version of the USA’s Time Magazine) is a horrible, horrible publication. Objectivity is at most an afterthought, if thought of at all. Its content is predictably mainline liberalism wedded to Atlanticism. The only benefit that a reader could derive from reading it is to understand what the mainstream establishment is thinking at the moment.
At present, Germany is being governed by a three-way coalition comprised of the SDP (social-democrats), the FDP (free market liberals), and the Greens, the worst party in Europe. The country has officially entered a recession, one that was entirely avoidable, and is happily taking a sledgehammer to its own economy by not only cutting itself off from Russia, but also lecturing China on human rights, while demanding that it change its internal politics to reflect western liberalism.
Little wonder why the upstart AfD (Alternative for Germany) party is now polling at between 16-18% nationwide, making it the third most popular party after Merkel’s CDU and the SPD. More and more Germans want an alternative to what is on the menu.
Besides daring to challenge in the established parties, the AfD greatest sin is in its opposition to open borders for Germany. This sole position is enough to have it deemed “extremist” in the eyes of German media, mainstream politicians, the NGO complex, academia, and so on. They are the “deplorables” of Germany, and they must be crushed.
Much like we saw in Sweden with the Swedish Democrats, a “firewall” has been erected in Germany to keep AfD out of power on the national level. For Der Spiegel, this isn’t enough; the party must be kept out of power at the regional and even municipal levels, because it is “extremist”:
The world wars, says Tino Chrupalla, head of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), were "a catastrophe" for Germany and Europe. They "divided the continent and weakened it permanently."
Chrupalla speaks of Germany’s "defeats." He doesn’t, however, speak of the millions of dead, nor does he make mention of the Holocaust.
Instead, Chrupalla says that he finds it problematic "to always link remembrance with the question of guilt." Culpability issues should be "superseded by the question of the accomplishments of every civilization." That, he says, is a process the AfD would like to initiate. "Historical guilt should no longer determine the way we act."
Those who may still have been wondering where the AfD stands on the political spectrum and what to think of the party’s leader – who is fond of referring to himself as a mainstream conservative – such utterances should make it abundantly clear. The quotes come from an interview Chrupalla gave to the right-wing extremist blog "Sezession," which appeared two weeks ago – right around the time when the rest of Europe was observing Victory in Europe Day.
The purpose of Germany is to permanently atone for its acts during WW2. Everything else is secondary to that directive.
Chrupalla’s comments are reminiscent of the rather shocking claims of his predecessor Alexander Gauland, who is today honorary chairman of the AfD. In 2018, Gauland said that Germany had a "glorious history that is much longer than 12 years." And: "Dear friends, Hitler and the Nazis are but a spot of bird shit on German history."
Denouncing Hitler and the Nazis isn’t enough. Constant and permanent self-flagellation is the bare minimum that any German must do.
The incident shows once again just how entrenched the AfD has become, how the party has become an accepted part of Germany’s political landscape. Ten years after its founding, so many have grown used to the party and its beliefs that not even historical revisionism is sufficient to trigger a debate. Instead, other parties have begun cooperating with the AfD time and again, particularly the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), which is part of Germany’s current governing coalition.
There comes a point when a party becomes big enough that it can no longer be ignored without risking total democratic sclerosis.
Despite being monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on suspicions of right-wing extremism, the AfD doesn’t just have representatives in almost all of Germany’s state parliaments and in the Bundestag, the federal parliament in Berlin. It is also polling higher in public opinion surveys than it has in five years.
Germany’s version of the FBI monitors the AfD, going as far as checking out their Whatsapp messages. This is natural for a state built on the defeat of Nazism, whereby political paranoia of any right-of-centre political party is baked into it. There is no doubt that many in the centre and on the left side of German politics would like to see the party banned should it become even bigger than it already is.
Now watch this:
But what about outside the party? During the initial years of the AfD, other parties insisted that the firewall was sturdy, even though cracks were showing even then. Is that firewall still holding up? The answer: It is, at the very least, eroding.
Leipzig-based political scientist Steven Hummel, who works for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the Left Party, has identified fully 18 instances from 2019 to the end of 2022 in which the Saxony chapter of the CDU cooperated with the AfD on the municipal level. In most of those cases, the two parties worked together in making committee appointments, but sometimes also on individual issues. In December, for example, the CDU in the Bautzen regional council voted in favor of an AfD proposal to exclude a certain class of refugees – those who have not received asylum but who cannot currently be deported – from welfare support payments.
First of all, they quote an individual who works for an organization named after a communist who attempted to seize power in Berlin to turn it into a soviet republic. No shame whatsoever.
Secondly, Der Spiegel would have German parties reject cooperation with AfD on the municipal level for matters as mundane as garbage collection. I guess if the AfD is for clean streets, then the ‘proper’ political position would be to oppose clean streets.
Political scientist Vicente Valentim from the University of Oxford performed a rather intriguing experiment in an effort to answer that question. He presented study subjects with real statements made either by AfD functionaries or by German center-right politicians – statements that were virtually identical in content and tone. He didn’t provide the names of the politicians who made the statements, but did indicate the party they were from.
Some participants only received statements made by AfD politicians, others only those from center-right politicians. Some received both sets, and still others saw the anti-immigration statements from the AfD next to comments from center-right politicians in support of immigration. Afterwards, study participants were asked whether they would sign a petition opposing immigration from Afghanistan and where they thought public opinion stood on the issue – and whether the statements they had read made a difference in their choices.
The result: "Sometimes, who says something is just as important as what is said," Valentim says. When the extreme right voices its opposition to immigration, for example, it only had an influence on those who were already sympathetic to the extreme right. The statements from the center-right, by contrast, had an effect on broader swaths of society. "Politicians from mainstream parties play a decisive role when it comes to maintaining democratic norms," he says – or undermining those norms. "The study shows that it is dangerous when democratic parties adopt certain positions espoused by the extreme right."
Never once is AfD’s supposed extremism defined, it is supposedly self-evident, or, at least, should be to us.
Sensible positions are ‘extremist’, and therefore must not be held by others. Agreeing with these extremists on some matters “threatens democracy”.
In addition, the right-wing party profits from the constant crises that have beset Germany and from the poor communication skills of the current government. First there was the coronavirus, then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then the energy crisis and inflation. Now, Germany finds itself consumed by a rancorous debate about home heating and by rising migration numbers. Uncertainty among many has been the result.
Could Germans be turning to AfD because the ruling coalition in that country is so shit? Nah, it’s because they are extremists.
Over-regulation was a key feature of the command economies of the Eastern Bloc, especially in comparison to the more laissez-faire West. Less than two generations later, it’s the Communist Party-run China that sees itself able to implement new technologies more quickly than the free-market USA.
David Goldman (sometimes known as “Spengler”) has been sounding the alarm on China’s rapid technological advancement for some time now, warning that it is leaving the USA in the dust in many areas pertaining to economics and to the military as well. In this short dispatch, Goldman illustrates the picture of how China is way ahead of the USA in the adoption of 5G technology for manufacturing:
While Chinese factories have installed 6,000 private 5G broadband networks to support AI applications in manufacturing, only a handful of large US manufacturers have done or are planning to do so.
General Motors, which sold more cars in China than in the US last year, was an early adopter, and machinery giant John Deere expects to have a 5G network operating sometime late in 2023. But there is no indication of widespread adoption as in China.
A key obstacle to 5G adoption in the United States is a cumbersome regulatory framework that makes it hard for private networks to gain access to wireless spectrum. “Spectrum supply is also a serious problem and part of why we haven’t seen more commitment to onshore, non-consumer 5G,” a US official told Asia Times on background.
C-Band, a mid-spectrum range of cellular broadband frequencies, would support private 5G networks well, but its deployment has been blocked by interagency wrangling. The Federal Aviation Administration claimed that C-Band might interfere with the avionics of commercial aircraft, a position disputed by wireless providers, who point out that C-Band is widely used in other countries and never has been associated with an airplane accident.
The US Defense Department meanwhile objected to commercializing another part of the wireless spectrum in the 3.1 to 3.45 Gigahertz range, claiming that it would cost $120 billion to relocate military equipment using those bands.
Turf fights and regulatory constraint seem to be more common these days than ever:
Because of these obstacles, one US official said, “It might well be more than five years before any spectrum designated for commercialization is brought to market, and probably another year before there’s significant service available.”
The benefits of private 5G networks:
Low latency and high capacity allow 5G networks to enhance factory automation. High-speed cameras upload thousands of pictures per minute to the Cloud, where AI algorithms identify defective parts, malfunctioning equipment or other manufacturing snags.
Huawei’s first fully automated factory began operations in August 2022 for the appliance manufacturer Midea. The suite of AI applications made possible by 5G doubled the factory’s shipping rate, Huawei claims.
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In April, the top Chinese auto manufacturer BYD unveiled a compact electric vehicle with an $11,300 sticker price, well within the range of consumers in China and large parts of the Global South.
5G networks also multiply the productivity of ports and mines. Mining operations routinely damage communication cables, a problem solved by broadband.
5G broadband can link thousands of cameras in a coal mine, sending thousands of images per second to the Cloud, where AI algorithms identify potential problems before they cause damage, according to Huawei Technologies, the world’s largest provider of 5G hardware and applications. Operators on the surface control giant tunneling machines and conveyor belts with a minimum of personnel underground.
At China’s Tianjin Port, a 5G/AI system has reduced the unloading time for a large container ship to 45 minutes from the previous eight hours. Automated cranes read bar codes on containers and place them rapidly onto autonomous trucks that bring them to automated warehouses.
Goldman lists the handful of US manufacturing concerns stateside that have introduced 5G networks, and also adds that two football stadiums are headed that way as well.
In the meantime, the Biden regime is focused on green energy, a technology that is “not yet there”, the exact same criticism that some Americans make of 5G tech.
Referring to the anarchists and communists of 1930’s Spain, Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno quipped: “…in Spain even the atheists are Catholic”.
Unamuno was referring to how Catholicism was the foundation of Spanish civilization, and that it was so ingrained in the culture that even those totally and violently opposed to it were hopelessly formed by it. This is why I insist that we are all liberals now, even if we reject liberalism outright.
David Polansky goes even further, telling us that we are all bourgeois now, even if some decry it.
I managed to annoy a bunch of people the other day, and not just because it was a day ending in “y.” What happened in this case was that the unfortunate (and apparently accidental) killing of a homeless man on the MTA generated some wide-ranging, if not exactly edifying, discussion. A video of a left-wing reporter arguing that concern for comfort and safety was essentially bourgeois circulated, to predictable online outrage.
I responded thusly:
This triggered a round of responses that can be summed up as: “the desire for peace and security is a human—not just a middle-class—one.” In particular, I saw a number of responses insisting that the desire and need for security is as universal as that for water and air. It would be hard to conceived of a clearer illustration of the ways that the horizons of modernity have enclosed us in such a way as to seem to comprise the universe itself.
Anti-bourgeois sentiment is as old as the bourgeoisie itself:
To see the contours of that process, it helps a bit to reflect on the opposition to it, which in turn defined much of Western culture for the past two centuries. While bourgeois remains a term of disparagement in some circles, it is difficult now to remember how much more intense anti-bourgeois sentiment was in the not-too-distant past. Moreover, while we conventionally associate anti-bourgeois sentiment with the Marxist left (such as the comment that triggered this post in the first place), this is to forget that many of the most passionate bourgeoisophobes hailed from the right, and that their critique of the bourgeois was overall more substantial. Because the principled leftist critique was that the bourgeoisie were exploitative and unproductive—a charge that, however true, simply didn’t leave much for discussion—leftists would largely over time adopt the right-wing criticisms of the bourgeoisie (as dull, as complacent, as philistine, as petty, etc.) as their own.
Suffice it to say, the anti-bourgeois critique predates Marx by a good ways--indeed it is very nearly coextensive with the bourgeois type itself. This type had scarcely begun to dominate civil life in Europe before Jean-Jacques Rousseau could already describe him as follows:
Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of these men of our days: a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing.
Note that this was written back in 1762, before the United States had even come into existence. Though Rousseau had nothing on the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who declared that the sight of the bourgeoisie made him want to simultaneously weep and vomit, and who was known to sign his letters in Latin: "GUSTAVUS FLAUBERTUS, Bourgeoisophobus.”
The bourgeois man—far more than capital—was the bête noire of Jean-Paul Sartre, a figure who is less regarded these days, but was in his time a public intellectual of considerable stature. Sartre’s own hatred of the bourgeois arguably went beyond anything required by a leftist economic program and likely played a role in his philosophical and political valorization of terrorism as an authentic alternative.
A definition:
Here it is most useful to consider the more expansive definition of the bourgeois man as the figure who is chiefly motivated by the avoidance of violent death. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (following Thomas Hobbes) highlighted: bourgeois existence is characterized by the elevation of fear over virtue. Anyone who supposes that this merely describes the average individual has to contend with the historical record here.
Aristocracy and Virtue:
When we think of aristocrats today, we mostly picture the trappings: fine clothing and jewelry, lavish castles, courtly manners, elaborate social hierarchies, and so on. But this is to focus only upon the (not infrequently inbred) heirs of this lineage, which originated not with lobster forks but with battle axes. This is not to insist (as some, like Charles Tilly, do) that ruling castes are essentially predatory mafias, and kings and princes mere gangsters. For one thing, few societies resemble Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Power requires means of legitimation beyond saying “because I can.” Hence, among other things, the extensive honor cultures that have surrounded most warrior classes, from Japanese samurai to English knights, and hence also the partnerships that historically arose between political rulers and priestly and clerical classes.
The social and political position they enjoyed was most visibly associated with the material finery and high culture that they both owned and patronized, but as military historian Michael Howard points out, “until the mid-eighteenth century these princes still derived their prestige, however, remotely from their status as warrior leaders, and were depicted as such in court iconography.” This is why dueling remained such a mainstay of aristocratic society.
More historical examples of virtue over fear:
Nonetheless, its customs endured among its heirs, as indicated by their higher mortality rate in WWI. Fully 800 British men of title died in battle within the first 16 months of that terrible war.
All this said, the association of citizenship and war is not limited to aristocracies. In relatively rare instances, settled societies resolved into less hierarchical political communities, like the Greek poleis and the Roman republic. But even these maintained a strongly martial outlook, engaging in near-constant warfare with their neighbors, and courage in battle was valued well above comfort and self-preservation. (We probably most associate this ethos with the Spartans, but even a brief look at Pericles’ Funeral Oration will indicate that it was hardly limited to them.)
By the same token, the Christian saints abjured the violence of pagan life—from gladiatorial combat up to imperial conquest—but as the stories of their lives (and deaths) make clear, they hardly prioritized security and self-preservation. Their greatest model after all was Himself a martyr.
What happened?
In a word, modernity. Beginning with Thomas Hobbes, a slew of thinkers encouraged us to begin to think of ourselves as material beings primarily concerned with staying that way. “The genesis of Hobbes's political philosophy is nothing other than the progressive supplanting of aristocratic virtue by bourgeois virtue.”Hobbes’ (and later Locke’s, Smith’s, et al.) thought is premised upon a rejection of both the pagan warrior ethos (which survived in modified form under medieval Christianity) and Christian piety. And in a curious sense, it combined the this-worldly outlook of the pre-Christians with the pacific understanding of the Christians to produce a harmonious version of materialism.
Getting us this to this point entailed what Nietzsche would call a “transvaluation of values”: a comprehensive reassessment of all that we most esteem in life. This entailed a substantial and lengthy project of education in conjunction with novel ideas concerning the possibility of scientific and technological advancement. What Francis Bacon would famously refer to the as the “ease of man’s estate.” Thus, we came over time both to see ourselves as creatures primarily desiring comfort and safety over pain and fear and to increasingly possess the means to ensure former over the latter.
Internalization:
Over time, we internalized this understanding such that it became difficult to comprehend that this was ever not the case, and we pathologize the kinds of behaviors historically associated with militaristic honor cultures (it doesn’t help that many of those behaviors are in fact pathological, at least as expressed in the modern world). It’s not that the bourgeoisie doesn’t historically signify an economic class as well, it’s rather that the existing class of traders, shopkeepers, bankers, and so on epitomized the particular qualities that a pacified society would require to flourish. And indeed that is more or less what happened, as they came to dominate the societies they belonged to.
And this project is more or less global. Japan since the Second World War offers something like a microcosm of this universal process, wherein within a matter of decades one of the most martial cultures the world has ever known gave way to one of the world’s lowest-crime societies along with a political economy dominated by cooperative salarymen.
The present:
All of which is to say, at the time of this writing, anyone reading these words is effectively bourgeois: at one end of the scale, no amount of money, cocaine, yachts, private jets, high-end prostitutes, etc. changes the qualitative fact that their lives are oriented toward material gain and away from violence and fear; Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg et al. share basic presumptions with the mass of Americans in a way that William the Conqueror or the Kangxi Emperor did not with their respective subjects. At the other end of the spectrum, working class bona fides do not cash out as a disregard for those same presumptions: that material gain is desirable, and loss of life and security are not, and questions of honor or mastery are neither here nor there.
To return to the the original impetus for this post, it is conceivable that our towns and cities will become more dilapidated and crime-ridden (though they’ve some ways to go before they reach the worst of the ‘70s and ‘80s), but there remains a difference between rationalizing decline and consciously rejecting the bourgeois ethos that has increasingly defined modern society for the past several centuries now. The periodic statements we still get dismissing concerns about public safety as so much small-minded middle-class prejudice are but a pale shadow of that old-time anti-bourgeois religion.
It would be a mistake, in any case, to equate these highly public pronouncements for a rejection of bourgeois survival in favor of honor-seeking behavior. What is on display is not a genuine embrace of danger in the spirit of a warrior, but rather the denial that such danger exists in the first place and the insistence that those who associate danger with X city or Y neighborhood are not just cowardly but likely prejudiced.
The question of danger then is not an object of philosophical difference; it has rather become the focus of quintessentially bourgeois status games. Complaining or the refusal to complain about crime and its associated dangers are merely tools of social sorting that have acquired an ideological valence in recent years. All of these are part of what Allan Bloom called “the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have undangerous experiments with the unlimited.”
“Performatively anti-bourgeois, yet of them”.
We end this weekend’s Substack with a look at an article from Nature that questions whether the notion of a single-origin for humans can still hold in light of the fact that the fossil and archaeological records have not confirmed this theory, and that genomics and statistical modeling cannot do so either:
Weakly structured stem models were found to explain patterns of polymorphisms by suggesting that continuous or recurrent contacts occurred between two or more groups that were present in Africa. This observation directly contradicts single population or archaic hominin admixture models; therefore, the genetic diversity that is currently present throughout Africa is likely due to weak gene flow from various ancestral populations over hundreds of thousands of years.
Furthermore, fossil remains that have been obtained from coexisting ancestral populations are likely both genetically and morphologically similar. In fact, the researchers believe that only about 1-4% of genetic differentiation that has been identified among the modern human population is due to genetic drift from stem populations.
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MbS has a long way to go before it can be said that he’s been ‘successful’. Most of the reforms (particularly wrt women) are hugely overhyped - and western expatriates are still hesitant to leave the UAE for Saudi whatever the policy requirements (or financial incentives). He certainly didn’t make any friends by routing out “corruption” (his own excepting of course), the large majority of the Saudi population are not tech investors, they’re regular middle and lower-middle class families currently being told that every cultural and religious value they hold is essentially worthless. Many cities in the Gulf are attempting to replicate the ‘Dubai model’ without taking into account that the 91% of the population that make the Dubai model possible aren’t Emiratis or even Arab. And I’ve yet to hear another living person say - “Hey, weekend in Riyadh?” Maybe they’ll put them at the Ritz...
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MbS has a long way to go before it can be said that he’s been ‘successful’. Most of the reforms (particularly wrt women) are hugely overhyped - and western expatriates are still hesitant to leave the UAE for Saudi whatever the policy requirements (or financial incentives). He certainly didn’t make any friends by routing out “corruption” (his own excepting of course), the large majority of the Saudi population are not tech investors, they’re regular middle and lower-middle class families currently being told that every cultural and religious value they hold is essentially worthless. Many cities in the Gulf are attempting to replicate the ‘Dubai model’ without taking into account that the 91% of the population that make the Dubai model possible aren’t Emiratis or even Arab. And I’ve yet to hear another living person say - “Hey, weekend in Riyadh?” Maybe they’ll put them at the Ritz...