This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning
Hey everybody , this is Razib Khan with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And today I am going to be talking about something a little bit different, a little bit more cultural, perhaps then I usually discussed during the monologues and it's about the emergence of European identity of Western identity, and perhaps the identity of white people, whiteness, that sort of thing. And this is really relevant today. Because we talk about this all the time. And I feel to be entirely candid, I get quite frustrated and angry, because most of the people we talk about are very historically ignorant. I'll give you a concrete example. I'm not gonna name names, just because, you know, I'm not here to embarrass people. But, you know, about like, five years ago, more than five years ago, I'll actually, I think this was back when this might have been during the Obama administration, when the Democrats did not hate Russia as much as the Republicans. And so there was a, a intellectual, a think tanker, who’s a pretty prominent person actually, in the DC, greater intellectual sphere. And we were talking about what he was talking about Western civilization, and he included Russia in there. So this intellectual in, in DC, was talking about Western civilization and Russia, and I responded, Russia is arguably not part of Western civilization. In fact, it probably is not. And they were really confused. And they said, Well, you know, they're European. And I'm like, yeah, they're European. But, I mean, this is not something that Russians themselves have not thought about. Most of the listeners, hopefully will know a little about that, you know, Westernizer , versus the Slavophiles and Peter the Great and the people who resisted Peter, the grade of the reactions back. And you know, today in 2022, we obviously think about this a lot, because Russia is now in a moment, where it's asserting its distinctiveness from the rest of European civilization. What lurked in the background of this discussion I had with this DC Think Tank intellectual is that Russia is European and Russia is white, therefore, it is Western. And he didn't explicitly say that was quite obvious Russian people on the whole, not all but on the whole. They're white. And they look just like Northern Europeans. A lot of people in Russia look just like white Americans, like, you know, old stock, Northern European white Americans. Genetically, they are very similar to white Americans. Some of them have some Finnic ancestry and Tatar ancestry, but that's a minority. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of Russians out there, you know, over 100 million, what is it like 150 millio, 160 million, including the near abroad, whatnot. And so, you know, racially, they are like Northern Europeans. In fact, there's not much genetic difference all the way from, say, Britain, in England and Ireland, to the Urals. Traditionally, most of the genetic variation in Europe is actually a more of it is north south, for various reasons, which some of you know about, and I might allude to that later on in the discussion. But culturally, there's a big difference. And this difference goes back to Eastern Orthodoxy goes back to the Tatar yoke, it goes back to the basically long period of separation of Muscovy, and what became Russia, from the rest of Europe to its west. And it was not always separated like that. Some of you may know that one of the early Rurikid princesses, Anne of Kyiv, married into the Capetian, who Capetian royal family in France in the early, high medieval period. So there was a period when Russia was starting to be integrated when Kievan Russia was trying to be integrated with other European powers. This was before the really harsh period of the schism between the Eastern Church and the Western Church. You know, this is in the 1000s the 11th century AD, and then what happened is the Mongols show up and, you know, it just everything goes to hell in a handbasket, to be entirely Frank, those of you who watched you know Netsky and these films like know that Russia was basically brutalized and transformed by the Turco- Mongols, originally, I mean, really the Mongols and the Golden Horde, but they were Turkified. So that’s why they say Turco-Mongols, as that transformed Russia and out the other end came a very, very different state, society and culture from Europe to its west. So, you know, this assertion that Russia is European and that it's Western bothered me because this history is pretty well known, I thought, but it's not. Now, more recently, there have been other issues relating to Russia where, you know, frankly, there's been Russophobia and whereas Russophobia, before 2016 was culturally illicit. Now, it is licit because the intelligencia supports Russophobia entirely candidly, and you know, I don't need to go into that that's a separate thing. But now, the idea that Russia is fundamentally qualitatively civilizational ly distinct is quite accepted. It's accepted on ideological grounds and happens to be true, but the reason people accept it is they want it to be true. And so, you know, we're having this whipsaw about this issue. And, you know, I think I've always been pretty consistent. But other people change based on what they want. And that's frustrating. And now the left is very, very welcome, which, you know, the opening happened in the last five years, there's a turn against Western civilization, white supremacy, eurocentrism. So this brings to the fore what it means to be Western, white, and European. And there is an implicit assumption among many people who do not think deeply. That includes most of our intellectual elite, I think, at least a public intellectual elite that these, these are three identical, you know, things, but they're not, they're not just fundamentally not, you know, what is to be Western, what is to be European, and what is to be white are actually different. And when you confuse the two, or the three, it just really really muddles any coherency, in any insight. And it it deforms our understanding of history and the past, and it probably distorts our understanding of what the future would be. And you can see this actually going back to what I was saying earlier, when this, you know, somewhat mildly, Russophillic liberal intellectual, during the Obama period, wanted to assert that Russia was, well, it was a Western nation. This person was wrong. It's complicated. And on the whole, it's not really. And now you see how that matters. I do believe Vladimir Putin made a massive miscalculation invading Ukraine, we have the data, it's it's come in, but his ideas, his understandings, are informed by a sense of Russianness That is very different than what it is to be Western. And Ukraine, which actually helped contribute to that sense, in some ways, as a fact, is trying to become Western now is trying to re identify and reorient to the west. And I think that there strong materialist economic reasons for that Ukraine is I think, aside from Moldova or Albania is the poorest nation in Europe, it's it's very populous, so that you know, they want to be integrated into Europe. I get it. Okay. But the fundamental issue is, if we had understood how the Russians viewed themselves and thought about themselves, we wouldn't have been as shocked that Putin made the mistake that he did. And so that's why it's important to understand how things really are and not how they want to be, or how we want them to be, you know. So, let's start out with genetics, because that's the easiest thing to actually talk about. It's the most straightforward thing to talk about. So as I said, there actually isn't that much genetic difference between, say, Russians and northern French and English and Germans. This is a genetic continuum on the North European plane that goes from, you know, western Russia, all the way to the Atlantic. And this is defined by the expansion zone of what some of you will know as the corded ware people as the corded ware people moved westward, they transformed into other cultures, for example, the bell beakers in Western Europe, but fundamentally they are descended from these men that emerged out of the pontic steppe about 5000 years ago mixed with globular amphora European populations. In modern day Eastern Poland, Neolithic farmers and And most of the admixture about 25 to 30% was through the maternal lineage. Not all but a lot of it was through the maternal lineage with these males from the pontic steppe.
And you know, the recent work actually on ancient DNA has shown this globular amphora Neolithic lineage it's very, very prevalent across much of Europe, especially in Northern Europe, because there were some places where the, where the synthetic mixed populations did not actually mix much further. So Scandinavia is one case where this is true, whether the Funnel Beaker population the Neolithic population these are related to globular amphora. They're from the same Anatolian farmer expansion. This funnel beaker population was totally replaced by the incoming battleaxe population. And the battleaxe population did have farmer ancestry through globular amphora, but not from funnel beaker. In Western Europe, it was different there was more assimilation of the Neolithic substrate in some places. And then once you start to go south, obviously, there was more assimilation. So the north and south difference that we are seeing in Europe genetically today, we now know from ancient DNA, that this is due to the steppe like progress of indo Europeans, and the lesser impact of indo European ancestry in southern Europe, as opposed to Northern Europe. So in Northern Europe, more than half of the population, or more than half of the ancestry can be attributed to indo Europeans expanding out of the corded ware complex, whereas in southern Europe, it's less than half. In some places like Sardinia it is, it is actually on the low side, you know, perhaps as low as 10%. But in other places like Spain, northern Italy, in Greece, it's 30 to 40%, you know, high 30s, around 40%, maybe. So it's still not trivial. But these genetic components of Neolithic ancestry from Anatolia and the pontic steppe ancestry are quite distinct. And so if they vary geographically, what you are going to see then is, you know, high differences north to south, in contrast, going from Lithuania all the way to England, there's not that much variation, because there wasn't that much admixture with the Neolithic farmer, as some of you know, in Britain, about 90% of the ancestry was replaced. So there was only an absorption of about 10%, of Neolithic farmer ancestry of local Neolithic farmer ancestry that people that build Stonehenge, you know, the last Neolithic society, after 2000 years of being in Britain, there is an upsurge in Neolithic ancestry later, but we now know that that's mainly from Gene flow from mainland, southern parts of Central Europe, there was more indigenous Neolithic survival, and they were absorbed later. In any case, those are details. You know, we are talking about European identity, and whiteness, and Western civilization, obviously, let's not even talk about Western civilization, these people are barbarians. When the Romans encountered the Northern Europeans, as most of you know, they're wearing tattoos, the picts are literally the painted people, you know, they look like white people that, you know, have tattoos, and all sorts of, you know, body ornamentation and things like that, like, from Papa New Guinea or something. They were not that much further developed, you know, culturally. So, you know, we don't talk about European identity, or Western civilization, but we can talk about, you know, what is the genetic constituencies, Constitution of, you know, people we recognize as white, you know, white European, well, they didn't really exist 5000 years ago, we know that for a fact. Now, there are people in Europe, obviously, 5000 years ago that, you know, would be able to pass as white and probably could have gotten citizenship in the United States, as white people. Some of you might remember in 1790, naturalization was limited to white, you know, free white people, right. And so you have to decide who was white. So this was done in local courts in the United States, often, and there were objections to certain people. So people from India, for example, were usually rejected, sometimes they were accepted, and then it was appealed and their citizenship was taken away. People from the Arab world, like from Syria, were generally allowed begrudgingly to naturalize, right, so Italians, you know, people from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Jews, they were all allowed you to naturalize. So there is this myth that, oh, well, Jews and Italians were not viewed as white. Well, legally they were and even though the founding Anglo Saxon and to some extent German and Irish, that kind of came in between did not view them as white or as totally white. Legally, they accepted them as white and allowed them to naturalize, even though they did did so begrudgingly you know, there's some of this attitude towards Catholics is Well, there's a whole ideology in the 19th century that basically made it so that the Irish are this fundamentally alien race to the English. And we now know that's all pseudoscience, genetically, there's not that much of a difference. The western English in particular actually quite close to the Irish, most of the variation is actually driven by Anglo Saxon migration into East Anglia, Norfolk, that region in the East of England. And so, you know, all of that was pseudoscience driven by religious and cultural bias, right. So in terms of whiteness, this is a big category. So 5000 years ago, were there white people? Well, you know, if you count Italians is white, if you count Sardinians as white, if you count Syrians as white? Yes, there definitely were. Okay. Now, there are some people who have a narrower conception. And so, you know, I mean, these people are not, they don't necessarily need to be racist. Some of them are, some of them have, like racial. You know, although the word racist, I just say some of them have racial sentiments and perceptions and feelings. And, you know, they will, they will say, people from Spain or Italy or Greece are not really white. Okay, if those people are correct, there were almost no white people probably really no white people in Europe 5000 years ago, because the genetic constituent constitution of Northern Europeans did not exist 5000 years ago, that actually came into being after 5000 years ago, between 2500 BC and 3000 BC as the Globular Amphora Neolithic population mixed with the incoming yamnaya Post Yamnaya Pontic steppe people I have posted on my Twitter feed and in some of my posts, reconstructions of the yamnaya. And what do they look like? Well, you know, they look, you know, kind of white, you know, in terms of they can kinda pass, but they're, they're generally swarthier. And we know this, because we have the genes we can look in. And pigmentation prediction in Europeans is actually really, really good, especially within the last 10,000 years, because so much of it has been studied for forensics. So the yamnaya were overwhelmingly dark haired, and, you know, their complexions would probably range from brunette white, to, you know, olive, light brown, and they were generally but not exclusively dark eyed. So, you know, I don't know where we would classify them today. But, you know, they definitely did not look like Northern Europeans. What happened, it seems, is the yamnaya. As they moved north and became corded ware they mixed the local populations. And some of the local populations had higher fractions of say, blue eyes, much higher than the yamnaya because they had Western European hunter gatherer ancestry, other relatively lighter skin because they had the Neolithic farmer ancestry. Mostly darker hair, though, there were some places in Scandinavia where there are pockets of people with lighter hair. But in general, what we think of as the very, very pale Nordic phenotype really was not present in most of Europe, from what I can see in the ancient DNA 5000 years ago, by about 2500 BC to 2000 BC, there's large regions where there was so a lot of the individuals that show up in Britain, what became Britain in 4500 BCE with the bell beakers. They look just like modern British in terms of pigmentation. But if you look closer at the data, it is quite clear to me and to other people that even during the Bronze Age, during the very early Bronze Age, only Copper Age over 4000 years ago, Northern Europeans were considerably darker and complected in complexion than they are today. So the easiest way, actually to test this is look in the Baltic region, where the frequency of blue eyes is extremely high, above 90% in places like Estonia, and look at the samples. Look at the samples from the ancient period. Now if they're above 90%, if they're around 90% 85 to 90% in Estonia, that means since the blue eyed genes are segregating OCA2 HERC2 genetic locus,
the frequency is actually well above 90, right like so that the point nine is actually the square of the underlying allele frequency today, and if you look at the ancient DNA, it was considerably lower. It wasn't low, you know, but if you're going from .7 to 95 That means there's natural selection and that means a fraction of light eyes and light hair has actually increased noticeably between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and actually probably into the medieval period about, I think it's like six years ago. Now, there's a paper in Science that actually looked at Whole genome sequences from England. And when you look at whole genome sequences very deeply, and when large numbers, you could detect natural selection up to a very recent period, and it showed that the English, not only were they getting their skeletons were getting more fragile. That's just a common thing among pharma populations. They were getting lighter in in complexion into the medieval period. Okay. So, you know, I'm talking about white people. I mean, this is obviously a phenotype, right? It's a trait, it’s a set of characteristics. And my point is 5000 years ago, you know, most of the people in Europe, if they had emigrated to the United States, in the 1890s, people like Madison Grant would have said, no, actually think there would have been no immigration because very few people, actually, nobody would be genetically like someone like Madison Grant. And probably almost nobody looked like Madison Grant. So Madison Grant was a prominent public intellectual, a Nordicist that argued for restriction, restricted immigrations, on racial grounds from people from Southern and Eastern Europe, because he believed that Northwestern Europeans had characteristics and traits that were different and important, and should be favored by the American system of immigration and government. So you know, what happened over the 2000 years gaps in classical antiquity, where we start to have records is was natural selection and mixing and synthesis, and the phenotypes that we recognize today. Were there now, as I said, there's places like the Baltic, probably parts of northern Europe where, you know, people have continued to get lighter. We know for a fact that other things like lactase persistence, the ability to digest milk as, as an adult actually swept to frequency in continental Europe, during antiquity, medieval period, it was really late, like we know, it's just nobody really understands why there's papers on it, you can look it up. My only point is, it was super late. And nobody really knows what is going on there. Right. But a lot of the characteristics we associated with, you know, and like lactase persistence is a characteristic we associate with Europeans. But that's only in the last 2000 years. So a little earlier in Britain, nobody knows why it's a little earlier in Britain, but it's about 1000 years earlier in Britain, right. So we have these categories today. But, you know, by the time of Aristotle and Plato, you know, I think most of you would say, okay, they're white people, Aristotle and the Greeks, they describe people in the Thracians, as red haired, you know, and, you know, the Celtic peoples is having gold hair. So we start to have the range of variation of Europeans that we see now. Okay, so we have white people, right? And, you know, in the Middle East, we have, I don't know, off white brownish people, right, but they didn't actually think of think of this that way. Okay. So, as most of you know, the Greeks, were very xenophobic, and the word, you know, xenophobe is, you know, from Greek, right. And, you know, their major division that they had moral judgments about, was between themselves and those who did not speak Greek. Barbarians, okay. And there were people who are Greek who are part of Greek civilization that lived in western Anatolia, on the coastal regions like Miletus, you know, cities like that, and obviously, the faculties and then you had Greeks in the north, like in, you know, towards Epirus modern Albania. So you had a lot of different types of Greeks. But they all spoke Greek. They all went to the Olympic Games, there was a huge debate an ancestor of Alexander, I think he was an ancestor. I don't think it was a different dynasty might have been for whether Macedonians were allowed to participate in those games. Well, you know, they eventually allowed Macedonians to participate -seems like, they might have bribed them. But in any case, Greek identity was not based on race was we would understand it today. It was based on Greek speech and Greek culture. Now, they were not ignorant of racial differences. And I always like to point out if you read Heraclitus, or some of the other Greek ethnographers, they were very, they were actually relatively sophisticated. So you know, they knew people in Sub Saharan Africa, South of Egypt were quite dark skinned. And they knew people in Egypt had a lighter brown complexion, and they would describe the two as distinct. They didn't know much about India, but they noted specifically that the people in the North of India had the complexion of Egyptians so they were lighter brown, whereas the people in the south of India had the complexion of Ethiopians they were darker brown, but they also noted they were distinct from Ethiopians in that their hair was not woolly. So the Greeks are describing people exactly as they are they’re not being… they were smart. I mean, you know, anyone who's read Euclid, or you know, tried to read some Plato or Aristotle and Plato, um, these were smart people, they knew how to classify people, but they did not idealize the classifications in a way that we would understand. So for example, you know, the movie 300, kind of, and this was this was in 2007, this was still at the end of the war on terror period, you know, it was obviously leaning on this idea of the Persians were the Orient, and the East and the Greeks the West. Well, I mean, there's something there. But the issue is, there was no West, there was just a Greeks. And then there were people in Italy that were trying to copy them. So the Etruscans, their alphabet is based originally on a Greek alphabet that's based, obviously on the original Phoenician alphabet that the Greeks used. But you know, the Greeks are facing these aliens, these alien cultures, but, you know, they looked at everything around them as a sea of barbarism. People that were natural slaves, so you know, the people in the North, that had red hair and very pale skin. And then there are people in the South that that were too far south, and they had black skin. And of course, the Greeks, they lived at the perfect, perfect temperature, the perfect temperate climate, for mental function for civilization. That was their perception, right. And it wasn't just the Greeks, the Arabs also had these ideas, that the people in the North were too far north and the people in the South were too far south. And, you know, like, Baghdad was the perfect latitude, where, you know, people were of the, you know, proper middling complexion and whatnot. Right. But in terms of like our modern racial categories, you know, there were Ethiopians, they understood that people in India were darker skinned. There were some stylized representation. So the Iranians considered themselves red, which, I don't really know if that's, I mean, I don't know if it's, like, literally true, I think it's like a symbolic thing, right? We sometimes misinterpret these. But the point is, you know, 2500 years ago, they didn't think in racial terms, although they understood what human taxonomy was because they had eyes, you know, humans have natural folk biology. But when we talk about the Greeks, the Greek canons of the ancient Greeks, or the Romans being Eurocentric, and white supremacist, we're being anachronistic, right? If we're taking our values, and putting them back into ancient Greece, and Rome, and that's really stupid. So, you know, from the perspective of the Greeks and Romans, they wouldn't understand what we were talking about. I mean, they can figure it out, they're not stupid, but they would have to be educated in, you know, modern taxonomy. So for example, I would suspect, that an ancient Greek during the Classical Period, might be a little confused that, you know, in an American system or an American cultural taxonomy, you know, the Syrian is considered much more exotic to them, because they're white than someone from Ultima. you know, Ultima Thule like, you know, from Scandinavia, which to Greeks was really exotic, really far away, and they didn't know anything about and was just really strange. Syria, on the other hand, was something Greeks knew about, there were Greeks in Syria, there are Greek speakers Hellenized, you know, Syrians, probably, St. John of Damascus, The last of the Church Fathers, even though he was from Royal Arab family, Christian arab family, he spoke Greek and he wrote in Greek. So I think they would not understand the distinction that we are making. In terms of European the idea of Europe obviously, does come from Greeks, you know, the word itself, but it didn't have the meaning. And the relevance that it does today, it would be like saying, it's like telling an American that their North American like, that's literally true, we understand it, but
you know, Mexico, the United States and Canada, like do we really classify all those three is North America? No, it's Mexico and or the United States and Canada, because Mexico is where Latin America starts. And so we know there's a big cultural difference there. So geography is kind of irrelevant. I think for the classical Greeks and Romans, I think it's fair to say, you know, they didn't make that much of a distinction between the southern Mediterranean Eastern Mediterranean and northern Mediterranean. They obviously assimilated Gaul and Britannia into their worldview, they introduced villas, if you go to Bath, you'll see that all the you know, Roman, Roman ruins Roman architecture but, you know, to them Northern Europe was very, very exotic and strange. And I don't think they would have seen the Europeanness as the key, right? So the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, you know, famously, his mom was colonial descendant his father was probably Punic O or was either Phoenician or maybe like local, native Libyan. And, you know, he founded a dynasty that lasted for, you know, 35 years, I guess. And, you know, his wife was of Syrian origin. And so this wasn't a big deal. It wasn't it wasn't exotic. You know, there are descriptions of Septimius Severus that he was darker, but that wasn't a major issue. You know, because he was Roman. And the key is, you know, he came from, you know, quote, Our sea , the Mediterranean, this was a cultural unity. This changed with the rise of Islam. And so really, there is a big watershed period, in the seventh century when the unity of the Mediterranean was broken, right. And so this is where I get into what David - David Gress and from Plato to NATO makes an argue about that, to understand Western civilization. Okay, you need to understand the medieval period, you need to understand the conflict between Islam and Christendom, and most particularly the rise of Western Latin Christianity. This is really what the West is. So the Greeks and Romans are super important to the European canon. They're the foundation, but they were a fundamentally different people. And Tom Holland has a new book where he talks about it. You know, some of you that know about the ethics and morality of the Greeks and Romans is they're very different the way they treated slaves. You know, you know, we in the United States are starting to have some issues with factory farming. Well, there were slave factories in Sicily, where they bred slaves, and they, you know, work them to death. It was really horrible. It was like something that you would see the American South, but really the Caribbean. So the Greco Romans were, were a distinctly slave society. And this is not an issue that's common to the ancient world like Indian and China, slavery was not as ubiquitous and in China, they actually discouraged slavery, because the whole social system was predicated on free peasantry, on free peasants as the foundational study, right? So the Greco Romans were very different from us in some ways, and saying that they're white supremacist, or, you know, it's Eurocentric, to look at the Aeneid or the Odyssey in the Iliad, it's like, okay, these are not Europeans, in a way that we would understand that these were, these are precursor people with a very different self understanding, even though you know, the Greeks and Romans were white, you know, I think we would call them white, they're white people, but they weren't necessarily Western, really, they, you know, wouldn't have cared that they were European, although geographically they were, they would understand that it didn't really mean anything back then, because Islam had not risen and broken the unity of the Mediterranean Sea. So what happened is, with the rise of the Arabs, obviously, there's still some trade going on. And some of you might know, there's some there's a whole system of books on the world systems economic history, tradition, that talks about - its called Charlemagne and Muhammad, I think, is the book. But it's basically the whole idea is the rise of Islam broke the trade, the trade network in the Mediterranean, that still persists into late antiquity. And it disrupted the trade all across western Eurasia and transformed a lot of things. For the purposes of this discussion. It transformed a lot of people who had thought that they were of the same kind of cultural continuum into very distinct. So in the modern world, you know, Islam is associated with, with, you know, brown people. That's not really how Arabs actually do think of themselves. I mean, they're obviously black Arabs, especially in places like Sudan, and some some in Egypt. And 10%, of Saudi Arabia's population is actually black in terms of mostly African ancestry. But, you know, they, they engage in pretty widespread discrimination against them. Arabs, generally do actually identify or consider themselves white in their own racial taxonomy. And, you know, genetically, they're much closer to Europeans than they are to people to the south of the East. So that makes sense. But they obviously have a darker complexion. But it's not like there's a break at the Bosphorus, they're Greeks and Italians that are quite dark, and some of it is due to admixture with Eastern Mediterranean but some of it is just that's just how they are. You can look at the ancient Greek genotypes and see that that's how they were in the past as well, even before the mass admixture, or you can see some of the frescoes where some people are depicted with pale haired blue eyes and other people are depicted very dark. And, you know, you see in some of the names with nicknames like Niger, there's some people were on the darker side, right. But that's not that big of a deal. And in in the medieval period, the race was not a big deal, either. Really. It's just that the civilizational difference start to become associated with geographical differences. Right? So in Spain,
there are a lot of Muslims who are of Iberian origin. And then after the Reconquista, a lot of Christians who are Muslim origin, right, and so there's some Moorish ancestry in Spain today. But, you know, not as much as you think. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that the Muslim population of Spain was actually converted out of the Christians. And so it just converted back to the religion that they had had, you know, 500 600 years earlier, you know, so the underlying genetics remained mostly the same, but the culture flipped multiple times. And when you're talking about, you know, conflicts with Muslims and Christians in Spain, there wasn't much physical difference. People could change there are records of people, you know, becoming spies. So they would change their clothes change the way they dress, obviously. And also, they spoke, they spoke each other's language well enough that they could actually pass, right? So they could just culturally be total chameleons. And this is obviously not something that's true. I don't know if you know, if they were Japanese, right. So it's, you know, Christianity, and Islam was not necessarily racialized at this period. But now we're starting to see very stark geographical differences. So after the Reconquista, and maybe before the Ottomans have really pushed it to Europe, you know, you have the situation where Europe is Christian, and the Mediterranean lands to the south and the east are becoming more and more Muslim to the point where after 1000 ad, there are no more Christians left, really, in the Maghreb. And there's very few are there large minority, but they're not a majority of the eastern Mediterranean anymore, right. So now we have a situation in the medieval period, where some modern conceptions of Westerness and Europeaness this start to make sense. So David Graeber, has ideas from Plato to NATO, is that the modern West is an outgrowth of the Greco Roman heritage combined with Christianity, which obviously originally was a Jewish religion, a Jewish sect, and then was transformed by Hellenism, you know, the contact with the Greeks. And then as it moved west, there were also Latin thinkers, like St. Augustine, who had their own, you know, overlay on the religion in the west. And this religion became the dominant ethos in Europe, and also south and east of the Mediterranean. Originally, Christianity was actually strongest in a place like Anatolia in Turkey, right? Mentioned the Turks took it over. And that's not true anymore. But the point is, you know, there's I think Hilaire Belloc, an early 20th century, Catholic reactionary, he said, Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe, that would be a ridiculous thing to say him 500 ad. In fact, Philip Jenkins, and I think he was at Penn State. He's a Baylor now he's an historian of religion. And he argues that up until about 800, ad, most of the world's Christians remained in the Middle East. And so they 800 ad, you have to remember that most of Germany was still pagan, Eastern Europe was all pagan Scandinavia was all pagan. So Christianity in Europe at that period was in the Roman regions of Gaul, some parts of Germany and the West in the south, obviously, Italy, Spain, Britain and Ireland. Right. So and southern Europe, you know, Southeast Europe. And so the point there is, the Association of Europe with Christianity and Christianity with Europe is very particularly historically contingent. Now, obviously, there are always Christians outside of Europe. Some of you may know that one of Genghis Khan's favorite daughter in law's Sorghaghtani was from a Christian family. So there were Persian Christians that somehow admitted to Mongolia. And there were some in Central Asia at that time, in the 1200s. Christians remained a huge minority in places like Egypt, in the Levant. Obviously Armenians to this day are Christian. So not trying to, you know, deny that they're Christians outside of Europe, you know, places like Ethiopia, they persisted, obviously, definitely modern period from late antiquity. But Christianity in Europe became synonymous by the late medieval period. And so we have this emergence of the West as Western Christianity. And this is where I want to go back to what I was talking about with regard to Russia. With the emergence of the Tatars, the Turks, the Turco-Mongols, they really really push the frontier of Europe to the west, and they did cut off Muscovy - Muscovy, from the rest of Europe. Originally, Kievan Rus was obviously oriented towards the west. It was in Kyiv you know, on the Dneiper. And you know, we know a lot more about the geography in the United States than we probably should at this point, because the war but you know, you look at the map like you have Kyiv in the south and the west where Moscow way to the northeast Moscow is where it is because it's a really convenient location for tributary relationship with the Tatar capital of Sarai which was on the Volga. And the princes the that Danilovich lineage I think of in Rurikid in Moscow was actually not a very senior lineage, they shouldn't have become the primary princes of the Russians, but eventually became the czars. But they, they were patronized by the Tatars
because their location, or they didn't even intermarry a little bit with the Tatars and the Tatars are married with them. Not saying that they're Tatar, like that's, again, a Western, a Western slur, kind of, but they were transformed, they were transformed in a lot of ways culturally, and I don't think we can deny that. So at the late in the late medieval period, we have this association of Christianity with Europe. But then we also have a separation between Western and Eastern Europe. And this separation is strongly associated with religion, and associated with, you know, the language that is used in the liturgy. So in the West, that's Latin in the east, local languages. I mean, Greek is used a lot, actually, even in non Greek areas, but a lot of times like they, you know, they switched to the local vernacular, so Old Church Slavonic, I think, in much of eastern Europe, that's Orthodox, it was used for a long time, right. So my point here is, it doesn't make any sense to talk really about Western people at all 2000 years ago. It's really weird and anachronistic and ahistorical to talk about Eurocentrism. So, you know, I mean, there's so many Greek thinkers that were in Alexandria, are they European thinkers, or are the African thinker? Or what does that even mean? I mean, it's just, it's just stupid, right? It's stupid. So just like, take a step back and realize how anti intellectual, it really is. And think about it. Now, obviously, I'm not saying that people need to, you know, will actually to other people, but just think about it, and maybe privately, bring it up. In certain, you know, I will not privately bring it up, I'll publicly bring it up. Not everyone's not like that, right. My point is, though, is like we're distorting our understanding of the past, people are entirely confused about what's going on. Because you know, what the Chinese called rectification of the names were terms aligned to reality, we are distorting reality, we are distorting reality by just mangling the terms. So by about 1400, though, you do have an emergence of, you know, European, this and proto Westerness Christendom, right. In Western Europe, it's quite distinct. When the English under Queen Elizabeth made recontact, with Russia, through Archangel, the port in the north on the White Sea. You know, the Russians were super excited. But, you know, it was just really exotic. The Russians were exotic at this point. They had been transformed by their isolation from Western Europe. And the English seemed really strange and foreign, even though the Russian royal family, you know, at that time, they were still like, classical Rurik is there not Romanovs, yet? We're actually cosmopolitan. So, Ivan the Great did not have that much what we would call great Russian ancestry. He was like, Ivan the Terrible Ivan Grozny, he was, you know, he had like Swedish and, and Tatar and other random things, I think some German. So, you know, they were very cosmopolitan, but they were an imperial people, rooted in an Orthodox Christian religion, that made them very different. And their idea of autocracy and their attitude towards Liberty were very different than what was evolving in Western Europe and within Western Europe, there were differences. So, you know, in the Rhineland, in the late medieval period, you know,
the more autocratic, oppressive forms of serfdom disappeared, and you had farmers that started engaging in industry, and gains of productivity. And actually, German farmers from the Rhineland were recruited to Prussia in Eastern Germany to increase productivity by landlords, but there was, you know, the Prussian area was today in modern GD, you know, western Poland and the modern Eastern Germany, right, the former East Germany, were Prussia. And these areas were very backward and very distinct from Western Germany, which kind of stuff more of the term tone, but we would consider German culture today, really, the Prussians they set the tone because, you know, there are Garrison state, Prussian discipline, and coldness and efficiency and all those things. So that was, that's far later. My only point is a lot of the stereotypes and perceptions are starting to crystallize about 500 years ago, and we're starting to see and we're starting to See The origins of the lineaments of the modern world now, and so to rewind, because I've been talking for a while. So, by the end of the Bronze Age, kind of mostly Europeans genetically look like what you see today, there's still a little work to be done in Northern Europe, in particular, getting people, you know, to be as like, you know, pale as modern day people in Finland or whatever. But, you know, in general, I think people recognize already, by the end of the Bronze Age, what's going on upper age, Early Bronze Age, it would have been different, right? So the genetic racial identities were already there, not the identities, the racial realities is what I would say, like in terms of the genetic distributions, because the identities were just not really there, because you didn't interact with people that were very different a lot of the time, and if you did, whatever, it didn't seem like it was that big of a deal. Because, you know, most of Europe is still tribal societies and tribal societies are very different, you know, that modern nation states, by the late Medieval Period, though, you know, there's not that much difference genetically. But now, culturally, they're start some differences. And these cultural differences are the proto nations that we see with, you know, Britain and France and whatnot, the difference in Eastern and Western Christianity, and all of Northern Africa and West Asia, are basically just ripped away from any liminality, you know, because, you know a place like Anatolia, we can imagine an alternate history, where, you know, the Greeks, the Greek Empire, the Byzantines maintains control of Anatolia, that remains part of Christian Europe. You we could be saying that, Oh, well, you know, people from, you know, East Greece, or whatever we want to call it. Greater Greece are, you know, white Europeans, basically, even though they're on the other side of the Bosphorus, basically, they're Europeans. Because they're Christian, that's probably what you'd say. I think that's how Armenians and Georgians are treated, actually, today, even though they're on the south side of the Caucasus or, you know, it's arguable whether they're in Europe at all, they're really not in Europe, but since they're Christian, and, you know, they're relatively light skinned. I mean, they can pass a Southern European, probably, you know, so that's close enough, right? So you have, like, you know, the physical resemblance is and the cultural affinity that's close enough to, you know, they're seen as kind of European, whereas Turks, even though genetically, they're not really that different. They're seen as alien, because they're Muslim, you know, because they're part of a different civilization. So civilization is really mattering by 1400. In this period. So when we talk about the age of discovery, which is an old world obviously a Eurocentric word, by definition, you know, starting with a, really, starting with Henry, the navigator in Portugal, so before Columbus, right, they start to go down the coast of Africa, Portugal does, and then eventually Spain gets on board, and then eventually France and England. And so you have like the new world becomes conquered by Europe, and then eventually, you know, by the 1700s, in the 1800s, Europe just expands to the whole world politically. This whole period is very, very long it takes centuries, and people in the 1400s did not have the attitudes that people say had in the 1800s. So, you know, Christopher Columbus, was he a bad person? I mean, he seems ethically kind of bad with the slavery and all those other things not that different than a lot of people at the time. And the people he conquered, they engaged in cannibalism and headhunting. So, you know, like, let's not point too many fingers there. But, uh, you know, I don't know how accurate the, the paintings are. I think it is known that Columbus was a rather fair complected Genovese, you know, person from Genova. But I think the paintings and stuff that are pretty famous that I think you're probably imagining right now, if you're American, we're done from from long, long after, right. But in any case, did he view himself as, you know, a white person who bringing, you know, the White Man's Burden right to the new world, but he was in Africa earlier and involved in slavery there as well, right with, you know, black people? Well, I think what we need to remember in the 1400s is, and we look at the writings, they do have some sense that these people are racially different, but they're really thought of it in religious terms. Like they thought that they were Christian. And they were bringing Christianity to the heathen. Some of you know about that. I think, de las Casas like arguments about slavery, how the Native Americans have souls, they shouldn't be enslaved. And so his solution was to bring Africans but okay. That obviously didn't work out. That was not ethically appropriate. But my point here is, they had a different conception of how humanity broke down during this period. And it was not this cartoon cut out of white European racist going out into the world. So the Portuguese were atrocious everyone. Everyone knows this. You know, I mean, they were like, hated in the Indian Ocean, okay. But they also had a quote, civilizing mission, you know, there's Portuguese names all over the Indian Ocean now, you know, and they brought Catholicism to a lot of places. The Spaniards were the same. You know, the the interesting, the Protestant powers were not as like that they did not have strong missionary. You know, enterprises, very early on, they eventually did later. But really, you know, there's way more Catholics left in Sri Lanka than Protestants, even though the Dutch ruled Sri Lanka Dutch and the English ruled Sri Lanka for far longer than the Portuguese ever did. And that just shows you how important the you know, cultural mission - I'm saying this in a sanitary way - were to the Iberians. So I mean, the Philippines would have been Muslim today. If it wasn't for the Spaniards, by the way. There were already Muslims in Manila Bay, there are Muslim Emirates and Manila Bay, all of the Austronesian people in Southeast Asia eventually became Muslim unless there was some political, geopolitical thing that got in the way. So Philippines was conquered by the Spanish. And they Christianized everybody except for the very far south and Mindanao, the Moros which you guys know about. In Vietnam, there's an Austronesian people call the chans in the southern part of Vietnam. They were Islamisizing in the 18th century, but they were conquered by the Vietnamese who closed off the country, basically, to the, to the south. And so the chans still remain Hindu part of them remain Hindu and part of them are Muslim, in Cambodia, where they were still open to the rest of the world, they all became Muslim. So the point there is, you know, these like geopolitical interventions by the Iberian powers made a huge difference in the cultural topography of the world. So it wasn't simply about domination and extraction, it was somewhat about that, you know, get ignore the material consequences, or the material impulse, but there are cultural consequences that may be originally driven by the material input. So you want to get to get rich is glorious, but you know, Glory also goes to God. Right. So this is, this is what the Europeans, you know, what we call Europeans who think of themselves right at this period. But they were really first and foremost Christians. And sometimes their Christianity was very sectarian. Like this is before the Protestant, like, I'm speaking before the Protestant reformation. But, you know, even before the Protestant Reformation, it's quite clear that some Latin Christians did not necessarily view Eastern Orthodox Christians as real Christians. So you know, this is very true at the conference in Poland, Lithuania. And, you know, Muscovy What became the Russian Empire, but, you know, it was just Muscovy at the time. So with the decline of the Tartars, you know, Poland, Lithuania, started going at it with Russia. And so you had a civilizational conflict now. And, you know, Poland ends up conquering huge swathes of Muscovy Western Ukraine, Belorussia, there's all these Orthodox Christian peasants, and they start wanting to convert them. In any case, my point here is it's kind of like I've heard Peter the Great was the one who made sure that maps that had Europe went all the way up to the Urals, even though there were earlier maps and earlier understanding that yes, Europe did go to the Urald. The Poles did not want it to go beyond Poland, Lithuania, like they thought of themselves as the frontier of Europe. So when you're talking about, you know, the proto West Christendom, Latin Christianity, you have the situation where it pushes all the way out to the east Baltic, because Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, they were Catholic, you know, they were Christianized by the Swedes, or the Germans, or the Poles.
And so they were part of Western Christianity, they were part of the West. So you have these Estonians way, way, way out there, the edge of Northeast Europe, and they're part of the same West, this commonwealth of, you know, what you would call Christian nations Catholic nation, you know, Catholicism, again, is kind of an ahistorical term in a way because it just became a term we had to use after the Protestant Reformation, right. But you know, these are just like, you know, Latin Christians all the way in Northern Europe. They go all the way into Spain, and obviously Western Europe, Italy, etc, etc. But they exclude Southeast Europe, which is under Ottoman rule, or is Russia or is, you know, Orthodox, and also, you know, all of all of Russia and the east, right. And so this is the division 500 years ago. So what happened in into early modernity? So I think that there's books like ´After Tamerlane’ by John Darwin. You can read about that, which talks about after Temür in the 1400s, late 14, early 1400s. How there was this gradual rise of Europe. There's arguments about the slow rise of Europe and the fast rise of Europe and the late rise of Europe. I don't want to get into all of those arguments. The point is, though it didn't happen instantaneously, in the 1500s and the 1600s, the English and other European powers and Mughal India. They have I'd like small outposts. And those outposts existed the sufferance of the Mughals and local powers, they were not dominant in any way. Similarly, Europeans were kicked to the curb and China multiple times after the age of discovery, so after Columbus, and the Europeans are like moving all across the world, they're not going from conquest to conquest. So for example, the Portuguese were very, very dominant in much of the Indian Ocean, especially the western Indian Ocean for a while, but then the Sultanate of Oman basically rose to just like, kick them out of many areas, you know, East African coast and around the Persian Gulf. And so that was the decline of Portugal, in many ways, a Portuguese, you know, power during the, you know, earlier part of the early modern period. And, you know, in the Indian subcontinent, and in China, and in Japan, Europeans could not dictate for a very long time. So, you know, you guys know, in Japan, because of, so I don't know, if this apocryphal, but basically, you know, southern Japan, Kyushu, in particular, Catholicism was becoming very prominent, and some stupid priest put on airs and said that, like, you know, told the local authorities that they were going to convert the whole country, and then that would mean that there would be part of Spain or Portugal or something like that. Something like that happened after that. There are massacres against Christians, they were extirpated. And, you know, whatever. I know about the hidden Christians, that's a separate thing. But they're mostly extirpated Japan close itself off to the world, except I think there was like, in Nagasaki, there was an island where they had Dutch, where they had Dutch merchants, and even the 18th century when there was like a hermit kingdom, basically, there's something called Dutch learning, which was the learning that was coming in through that island. So they still knew what was going on in the rest of the world. But they just want to isolate themselves. And they could, they could, they could isolate themselves from Europeans. So the new world is a special case, where you had a society that was pre metal, we have societies that are pre metal. So when the Europeans arrived in the New World, you guys have read Guns, Germs, and Steel. And if you haven't, you should, it's good book. There's like pathogenic reasons why the local societies collapse so fast. They're late Neolithic societies. So the European conquest of the new world. I mean, it was impressive. But you got to keep it in perspective. When you have a late Iron Age, you know, almost post Iron Age society encountering in Neolithic society, what do you expect to happen? And it took many, many centuries. You know, in southern Chile, there were still independent areas that the Spaniards had not conquered into the 19th, into the 19th century, so that the Chilean Republic that the New Republic of Chile and Chile, they had to conquer those areas. Right. And this is this is just the thing, the last Mayan cities were conquered by the Spaniards in the mid 1600s, I think, in Guatemala. So you know, this European conquest of the New World also took some time. So what started happening, and this isn't, and John Darwin talks about this, and you can read some of Jonathan Spencer's works about China, in the 1800s. Europe goes from being kind of rich, active and dynamic, to something really different. You know, you've talked about the enlightenment, the proto Industrial Revolution. And when I say Europe, I'm really talking about the western countries in Europe. The Iberian countries were quite dynamic, but they never really underwent the kind of take off to make themselves overwhelming. So the Philippines really the Philippines was run by Chinese traders for a long time. The Spaniards kind of had a skeleton crew there. And it was just they played balance of power. It wasn't like some super amazing domination. Right? What happened in the in the 18- In the 19th century, though, is Europe, took it to the next level. From an economic historian, technological perspective, you could say that this was okay. They access coal, they access fossil fuels. They started moving beyond organic energy, like beyond horses beyond horsepower, right. So you have railroads, you had steam ships, you had all of these things that were just, you know, wonder weapons, as we would call them, or like, you know, just like magical technologies, you know, so Arthur C. Clarke said any sufficiently sufficiently advanced technology is like magic. Europeans started having magic in the 19th century, right. Like they were like, white people were magic. And they started doing things that were, like, quite amazing. So what's quinine was invented on quinine. You know, you can survive malaria. All of a sudden, the Europeans could survive in Africa in the late 19th century and And they want to conquer the continent. Why? Because they could really there was no reason to, you couldn't read books, like read books, like, like blood and iron, or iron Kingdom about Prussia. You know, Europeans that were smart like Bismarck understood that the great scramble for Africa was all about ego. And it was not worth it. And Bismarck worked not to let Germany get caught up in that, like when he was pushed out. That's when Germany got caught up in that. It was a net sink. It's a transfer it was it was basically a tax transfer from the broad swath of taxpayers to small groups of gentry and nobles, who did extract value out of Africa, whether people like Cecil Rhodes and adventure or in Happy Valley in the highlands of Kenya, parts of South Africa, you know, where you had elites who would settle and do well, right. The Empire was good for certain types of elites, but probably, in most cases, not that big of a deal or net negative for other, you know, other parts of the citizenry. In any case, in the 19th century, Europeans start conquering everything.
So you have kleinen Europeans can survive in Africa, they have a Gatling gun, or, you know, they have all of a sudden automatic rifles, basically. And so they just mow everyone down. China was very, very contemptuous of Europeans as late as 1800. You guys know about the Opium Wars, where basically the Europeans just started kicking, kicking butt, right. And so now, they're starting to kick butt everywhere. And they're on a next level. So of course, they start to think, you know, we are the master race, like we are the Heron vote, as you would say, German, like the, you know, ruling people, because they are they are Europeans are literally the ruling people, like small numbers of Europeans with wonder weapons are going into the middle of China, and just gutting it. You know, and then China's I mean, China was, I mean, I've looked it up China was still the world's largest economy until like 1860, or 1870, when the United States actually overtook it, right, like the British Empire, if you aggregate the whole empire was was bigger, but Britain itself, which was actually a huge economy, was not as big, right? So you have this like massive transformation. And so when you go from the 18th, to the 19th century, you start to see what you recognize as white supremacy, like literal white supremacy, in terms of ideology that white people are winning because they're white, they're superior, they have these genetic gifts that other races do not have. So in the 18th century, Peter the Great famously adopted an Ethiopian slave he might have been from Chad, there's arguments about the things like Abdul Khanna, I think that's his name. In any case, the whole idea was the 18th century was like, Oh, well, you know, a blank slate tabula rasa, you could transform an Ethiopian slave into a general, which I think he did, and, and octagon, he intermarried with the Russian nobility. And actually, like his descendants, were actually quite successful in the military service class in the late in the late 80s. I think one of his descendants was a major general Captain great, and had some victories in the bulkheads. And yeah, so this sort of stuff happened, it wasn't that big of a deal. Now, in the 19th century, this would not have happened, you would not have tried to, you know, transform a black man in Europe into a general or an elite in any way. Because the climate intellectual climate change, like these people are not capable. But that's what they would say that right, like white people are to rule over the non whites. And, you know, people's attitudes towards all sorts of races that have been much different have changed. So in the 16th century, in the 1500s, Europeans, when they went out into the world, they saw that people in East Asia and China and Japan were light skinned, and they actually did call them white, like literally there because they're like, Okay, they're white skin. They're white. They knew they're not European, they knew that they're different. But they would say they were white, right? So they would also note, the Chinese were very advanced. And you know, some of you know that there was a massive craze for all things Chinese up until like the early 18th century and much of Europe. liveness was actually a big, big fan of things. Basically, this bureaucratic, secular Confucian state was a model for people like Voltaire, for Europe at the time. Obviously, that changed within a few decades. In Japan, you know, the Europeans noticed the Japanese were very industrious. Japan became the World Center actually, of gunsmithing for a couple of decades around 1600 Before Tokugawa Ieyasu shut it down. So, you know, the Japanese have been very, very organized, coordinated, had high human capital for a long time, you know, literacy was pretty high. The Confucian system meant that a lot of people in much of a Greater East Asia were oriented towards literacy is in contrast to like Southeast Asia and definitely South Asia, where it looks like literacy levels were lower. where there were a whole cast of people that their specialization was literacy. And most of the other the rest of the population did not bother, right. So they they're different human capital difference there. And Europeans notice these sorts of things, you know, they noticed that people in Africa tended not to have like large polities large states, their own, you know, bureaucratic societies in the new world, you know, obviously, the Maya, and the Aztecs and the Inca has reached some level of complexity. But these were basically the late Neolithic societies. And, you know, Europeans judge them wanting in many ways, I mean, human sacrifice, and all this other stuff didn't help. So the druids in in Northern Europe, were doing human sacrifice, and the Romans suppressed it, they actually, you know, chased them beyond the borders of the empire in places like Wales, destroying their refuges, because like, they did not like the fact that the druids were doing human sacrifice, they had all this secret knowledge. And you know, I mean, they're basically independent source of power. But I think the human sacrifice really pissed. A lot of classical Greeks off though, this is, again, separate morality, because I don't understand why human sacrifice is such a big deal when you can basically kill a slave and get off with a fight or something like that, because the slave is like an animal. But in any case, let's just set that aside, back in the 18th century, so we're starting to recognize a period where the terminology that we're using, you know, makes sense right. So, in the early 19th century, you had the East India Company period in Britain, or in in India, where it wasn't officially under, under your under the rule of England, or under the monarchy, it was actually ruled by the East India Company, in in lieu of the monarchy and the, the the grandees of the company, intermarried with local women, they lived like Indians in a lot of ways. In India, this change over time, as evangelical fervor Evan Jellicle Christian fervor took over, but also utilitarianism. So John Stuart Mill, James mill is father, you know that people have this idea of civilizing the Indians. And this is not necessarily about Christianity, but just becoming Western, those of you know, that macula, like wanted Indians to create a class wanted the British to create a class in India that was culturally like the British, except, you know, you know, obviously, they're of different color of different ways, right? So there was a civilizing mission, and you know, white man's burden, Kipling, all of these things. It's a very different attitude by the 19th century. But this is very, very new. And this is, you know, it makes sense in terms of economics, right? The Europe's wealth, Western Europe in particular, was not, you know, the gap was not large enough in, say, the 1600s that they could bully other Eurasian, or even African states around, you know, Sub Sub Sub Saharan African states were still, you know, I mean, like the Ethiopians, for example. They relied on the Portuguese to defend them initially against the Muslims, but then the Portuguese kept trying to convert them to Catholicism, and so they kicked them out, you know, they could kick them out. By the 19th century, this sort of thing ended and Europeans were going from strength to strength. And so you had an ideology of supremacism, but the supremacism reflected a reality. And so that's what it was. And the racial aspect, also started changing things, because Russia actually joined the Congress of nations. So you guys know about the peace of Vienna
1812. You know, the Russian elite at this period was Francophile. If you read War and Peace, you know that, but even though Russia itself was still, you know, Orthodox nation, so culturally distinct, the idea of race became strong enough, that the chauvinism of Western Europeans, the west of like, you know, post Latin Christianity, the Protestants and Catholics and Western Europe started expanding their idea of who could be part of Europe, to Russia, Russia became part of the Congress of nations. And, you know, their paintings of, you know, European nations facing the yellow peril, and Russia is part of it. Russia is white, it's European, you know, so the racial idea took over in a way in the 19th century to push aside a lot of the other ideas now, the racial idea you see in novels, like with the men who would be king, when they discover these pagans in Afghanistan, in what is today Nuristan was then Kafiristan, and they look European, and some of the people in the area do look European, and now we understand why. It's the steppe ancestry. Okay, that's, that's legit what it is. So many people look like Europeans, there'll be Eastern Europeans. But at the time, this area was not Muslim. And it was a lost white race. So there's a genre of lost white races. And why does this matter? Because those people had existed forever. There's people that you know, look European, in other places, whatever. But now that really matters, because these people might be assimable into the ruling class or the ruling caste, right. So, you know, Immanuel Kant, you know, started noticing, well, you know, the Parsis, they're white, whereas the most the Indians are brown. So they're making all these racial distinctions. And the British were also noticing, well, some of the elite Muslims are white, because they're mostly West Asian, and ancestry, whereas most of the population is black, like they just used the word black, because you know dark skin, right. So like this sort of stuff that we would recognize became really common in 19th century, but this is very, very new. This has nothing to do with the Greeks or the Romans. It has nothing to do with ancient history, or the development of the west or medieval Christianity, right? This is all new. So in the 20th century, obviously, this continued, there’s the eugenics movement, we know what happened in Nazi Germany. But it wasn't just the Nazis. I mean, people cared. I
mean, there was a White Australia Policy, there's a white Canada policy, the United States still had a white migration policy from the old world like there, I think, if you were black, you could migrate just because the 14th Amendment, lawyers out there might correct me. But anyway, it's a little complicated. There was migration allowed from the New World, right? That's a separate issue. But the Oriental Exclusion Act, people from Asia, in general Indians were not allowed to also come in naturalize. So the immigration was after 1924 was designed to maintain a Northern European nation. And, you know, this was cultural. But it was obviously racial, too, you know, like, we were a White country, America was a white country. And, you know, I have, I have read things where people during World War Two, were super concerned that these Japanese were going to, you know, come into Australia, because Australia is a white country, and they're under threat. So there was a sense, and these are Americans are like, Oh, well, you know, they're white people, we need to, we need to, like, stick with them, because they're our own people, you know. So obviously, that explicit sense of racial solidarity, you know, disappeared after World War Two, because the Nazis and whatnot. But you know, I think that that was still there for a while. And during the Cold War, you had Russia versus America, again, two white nations, right. So, you know, this idea of white supremacy, and white people kind of ruling the world was a thing after World War Two, you know, into the Cold War, right. So I think that things are changing right now. Mostly, because if you already look, Asia is already starting to be the same amount of GDP, that it was the pre modern period, a lot of this just has to do with population. So European nations aren't reproducing, replacing themselves, etc, etc. You guys know, the math, but also, you know, some of these East Asian nations, in particular, are growing economically quite fast and achieving parity with the European nations Americans on a different level. But let's not go there, like we are blessed. And I don't know why. I mean, there's arguments about why we are but you know, we don't talk about that in detail. My own my point, though, is there was this, let's say, 150 years to 200 years, where the narratives that are dominant today about white supremacy Eurocentrism, European hegemony make a lot of sense. That's the early the modern period, you know, but it doesn't really make any sense for the medieval period. It's insane for the classical period. It doesn't really make sense for like, the age discovery for the early early modern period, I guess, is what I would say. When, you know, Europeans were notably dynamic, but they were not dominating, you know, and now we're kind of going into a phase where it's going back more towards a world of balance. Now, I think China is working really hard not not to catch up to the US I, you know, I think like, their current autocratic system is actually not going to work out for them. But let's just set that aside. The point is, you know, many of us are going to live to see a world after white supremacy, I guess, is what I would say. But the further we get closer to that world, the more people seem to be talking about it now. And so, you know, I haven't read enough Spangler to know but it's like, you know, sometimes when civilizations are in decline, they start looking back to the past a lot and getting really frantic. And there's these reactionary reflexes. I think this is a reactionary reflex. When I listen to people, and I hear people, I see people that are not white saying that they can't read Aristotle, because they can't relate to it. And, you know, all this stuff. They're not they're not, you know. Look, Aristotle hated all of us, you know, because we're not Greek. So this is ridiculous. There are certain human truths that are universal, that are found in the Bible, or the Analects, or the Vedas, and in Greek Greek philosophy and you know, if we're Western people, and I think, you know, culturally, we're Western people. So I said today, you know, black Americans, you know, they say Jesus Christ, this ancient Jewish man is their Lord and Savior because they're Christian, which is a religion that was incubated mostly in Europe for 1000 years. And they speak a language that Shakespeare wrote in. And they reside in North America among Scots Irish, and you know, west country English people descended. So, I mean, I get it, why some people want to read about the empire of Mali, or Songhai or whatever. But that did not lead to the culture that created black Americans, you know, just didn’t. It's just a fact. Even some of the customs that black Americans practice as distinctive to them, like jumping over the broom during a wedding might actually be a Scottish practice, you know, because those people from Scotland there at the time, you know, indentured servants. So my point here is, it's wrongheaded. It's embarrassing. It misses the deeper truths that even though people in the past were fundamentally alien, there's also universal humanity that was still there. Even though, you know, the Greco Romans in some ways were quite shockingly cruel. They're also capable of greatness, you know, some, some sorts of greatness that maybe we even have not achieved. Obviously, there was neoclassical phase, and there was the argument between the ancients and you know, those who believed in the ancients or the moderns. I think modern science obviously, is much greater than obviously, what any of the Greco Romans could do, but some of their literature, some of their plays, you know, read Aristophanes, I mean, that stuff that shit is good. You know, it's just, it's just fundamentally good. You can take the Byzantines for that, by the way, the arabs did not translate that they did not care about, you know, Greek humanities, you know, or if you read, I don't know if this is true, but it's often said, and some of you will agree that St. Augustine, you know, kind of invented a lot of the memoirs form that are so popular in the West today, you know, with his confessions. And if you meet them in the city of God like this is, this is a towering mind, although I'm not sure if his analytical sharpness is up there with the Greek fathers. But that's a whole separate thing. My point is, there's this richness of Western civilization that we are heirs of, if we live here, if we speak the language, you know, if we rub shoulders with people, you know, whose ancestors have lived here forever, you know, mine have not. But, you know, I will end on like a really weird note, just to show how like, this is just really stupid. Over the last couple of years, ancient DNA has, like, basically solved the question of indo Iranian origins. Okay, there's a paper from 2021 I believe, January, Nature Communications. Saag is the author Saag et all - this paper basically, like looked at ancient DNA in Russia, and it found the paternal lineage of someone like me, in Russia and Western Russia and Belorussia, like 4500 years ago, okay. Obviously, some of these people went south and east went to the Indian subcontinent, you know, and now people the Indian subcontinent speak a language that's indo European, you know, my family eventually became Muslim. So, you know, we didn't have any indo European religion, religious traditions for many centuries. But the point here is, you know, you know, I know that, like, you know, I'm from Asia, I'm Asian, I'm brown. But over the last couple of years, I just like, I found, I discovered that 4500 years ago, you know, about, like, 10 to 15% of my ancestry. Was in Belorussia, Right. So, this is not in the West, really, but it's in Europe. And that's weird, you know, and African Americans, a lot of them are half European. You know, I feel like we're racializing things, and I get why people are doing it. But it doesn't lead anywhere, positive. And ultimately, it is incoherent. Unless you're, you know, I mean, if you're a certain type of person that wants to ethnically cleanse the United States, it's coherent. But if you're not willing to do that, this balkanization I'm editorializing here this balkanization leads nowhere coherent, nowhere positive, nowhere unifying, nowhere elevating nowhere constructive. Nowhere besides decadence and civilization death. I think if you if you decide that you are not going to teach your children Plato, because he's a white supremacist, you are shooting your society, your people in the brain And I don't really like Plato, okay. Like, I really dislike the Republic, not gonna lie, much more of Aristotle guy, but Plato created the world we see around us in some ways, you know, at least through Christianity and Neo Platonism. And its influence on certain Christian thinkers like Augustine. You know, he's important, you know, he's important for everyone to know, you know, I think maybe Confucius is too I think he has a lot of wisdom. But, you know, Chinese civilization has not been as, you know, dynamic all across the world. So, we don't talk about that. But there are some truths there. Some universal truths come through this, you know, I think this rejection of things that are perceived as the other is a very primitive, narrow minded
way of looking at things, especially if you are an intellectual, some of these people are academics. Second. They're not, they're not they're not the other. They made you. You know, I mean, Ayatollah Khomeini was a big fan of Plato, Shia Islam actually, still has a strong philosophical streak. You know, I don't think he ever thought like, well, you know, Plato was, Plato was, would have like, disliked me because I'm Persian. No, that's, this is not what you should be thinking about. You should be thinking about the ideas and not the person. So yeah, I think that's my little sendoff about that issue. Ultimately, the Western classics, Western canon is important because you know, I'm speaking English. I mean, the United States. This is a western society. It doesn't really matter if non Hispanic whites become the minority. You know, Christianity is gonna be the largest religion. Christianity is not just a Western religion, but the West makes no sense without Christianity. That's just the fact. You know, you could argue with you me about it. I'm not a Christian. I've never been but it's just a fact. You know, Christianity is the religion you're not if you're not Christian in the West, right. Edward Said said Islam was his civilizational religion, even though he was raised an Anglican he was an atheist. This is, you know, this is the religion of Western civilization, right? So you can't deny that you can't deny the Bible's importance. You can't deny Greek philosophies, importance, if you are part of this post Christian, Christian, derived civilization. And so if you don't want to know your roots, because you deny that your roots are your roots, you're just fighting yourself. That is my view. And you do not understand what's going to happen in the future. Because you have no perception and conception of what happened in the past. This is anti intellectualism. At its worse, it is spreading. It is taking, taking strength from high minded idealism, supposedly, because white supremacy is bad. And, you know, the ancients were white supremacist. I mean, that's all it's all false. You know, that's just false. They were not. They were horrible people for different reasons. So, you know, most people across history have been horrible, and we strive to be better. We ourselves, you know, may not believe it or not, we might not be the perfect utopian end of history. We, ourselves are partaking of things that maybe future generations will be aghast at. So I think, you know, it's important to have that historical perspective. And you can't have that perspective perspective. Unless you know about the past. Ideally, you know about the past and many different cultures, but you have to start out with your own because just being is not enough. You have to think and analyze and develop and grow your brain and not just continue to exist in the matrix of your civilization. So with that, I think I have spoken long enough. And I will talk to you guys next week.
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