RKUL: Time Well Spent 05/05/2024

America after Christianity edition

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Your time is finite. Your phone and the internet stand ready to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments. 

Books, what else?

America is living through a religious transformation. The Baby Boomers grew up in a Christian America. More precisely, they grew up in a white Protestant America. A nation where over 60% of citizens were white and Protestant has now become one where only 30% are. More generally, in 1950 95% of Americans identified as Christian, while today 65% do. The future does not look promising for Christianity; most “Zoomers,” those born after 1995, do not believe it is necessary to raise children within a religion.

One of the major reactions to this changed socio-cultural landscape has been shock and fear  from the still Christian majority, which, within the space of 25 years, has seen the normativity of its beliefs in the public square challenged and abruptly curbed. In keeping with this trend, Barack Obama, who admitted that he believed in evolution more than angels, and Donald Trump, who gave himself away with his clumsy attempt to quote the Bible, were arguably the two most secular American Presidents in recent history. Despite media depictions of the rise of Christian nationalism, in reality the American Right in 2024 is clearly far more secular than it was 15 years ago; Heather Mac Donald’s unabashed atheism is not seen as so peculiar. But a subset of conservatives are grappling with the implications of the new religious landscape. Books like The Return of the Gods and Pagan America confront the decline of Christianity head-on as a fait accompli. 

This is of course not the first time that the West, or more accurately, the region of the world that became the West, went through a massive religious change. The end of ancient paganism, and the shattering of Latin Christendom during the Reformation, both had world changing consequences for culture and society. Edward Watts’ The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity and Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome describe the transition of the fourth century A.D., a period that saw the last pagan Emperor and the birth of a fundamentally Christian Empire.

Watts’ The Final Pagan Generation focuses on the elite men born around the time Constantine converted to Christianity, early in the century, over the course of their careers. The thesis of the book is that this was a generation raised to count on certainties and timeless values that were due to expire within their own lifetimes. The world into which they were born was easily recognizable to their ancestors, but the world in which they died at the turn of the fifth century had radically transformed. Watts’ narrative is one of rupture, transition and disorientation. The ancient pagan city, from its institutions to folk culture, is vividly depicted, its fall chronicled step by step. A world filled with gods and idols gives way to a radically different one.

In contrast, the late Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome is a story of accommodation and assimilation. While many, including Watts, argue that transition to Christian ascendancy came up against elite noble resistance, Cameron makes the case that elite paganism faded rapidly once the Emperor Gratian ceased financial subsidies to the old cults in 382 A.D. Material remains in the form of small statues and other artwork thought to be reflections of continued pagan practice and belief in the early Christian Empire, are instead in Cameron’s reinterpretation merely a continuation of the newly Christian senatorial elite’s traditional patronage of culture and the arts. The Last Pagans of Rome suggests that elite Christian adoption of pagan literature and philosophy actually smoothed the conversion of the pagan aristocracy by collapsing the distinction between the Christian and old Greco-Roman culture.

The Final Pagan Generation and The Last Pagans of Rome looks at Christianization from the viewpoint of classical historians ruminating over texts, temples and coins. Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History models the rise of the new religion within a quantitative social science framework. Starks’ thesis is that the spread of Christianity is best conceptualized as a bottom-up autocatalytic process, where new believers beget new believers through proselytization, leading to a logistic growth curve that was barely impacted by the conversion of elites. The details of his thesis remain under dispute today, but his quantitative modeling of early Christianity remains groundbreaking.

Of course, the Christianization of the Roman Empire was not the only major religious transition in the period before 1000 A.D. Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 spans both the pagan-to-Christian conversion, as well as the shattering of the Christian world upon Islam’s rise along its southern and eastern flanks. In keeping with Cameron’s model, Brown argues that the spread of Arab culture and the Arabic language were critical to the conversion of Christians in the early medieval period. Once formerly Aramaic-speaking Christians spoke the same language as their Muslim conquerors, the barriers to interaction and assimilation were sharply reduced. For Brown, the rise of the West is impossible to conceive of without the decline of the Christian East, and the breaking apart of the late Roman religious-cultural world.

Though Brown’s book ends around 1000 AD, which saw the inevitable beginning of the absorption of Scandinavia into the Western Christian world, many scholars have had qualms about the idea of a full conversion of Europe even after the elites abandoned paganism by the early medieval period. The Dutch Reformed professor Anton Wessels expresses this view in Europe: Was It Ever Really Christian? Wessels’ thesis is that popular folk paganism was pervasive right up until the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and arguably until the modern age of secularization. Scholars in this school of thought believe that post-Christian Europe was to a great extent not fully Christianized in the first place, though it is difficult to separate this argument from their emphasis on Protestantism, whose emergence they believe fully brought the Christian message to the masses through vernacular Bibles.

To understand the emergence of Protestantism and its role in stimulated public and private piety across Europe, you must understand the Reformation. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation is the most thorough narrative history on this topic I have ever read. He explains why Spain saw very little success for reformers, the essential role of Italian thinkers in Protestant heterodoxies and social and cultural factors in the success of state-driven reform in Northern Europe. The Reformation maps Europe’s modern cultural geography, which was established during this period, and brings home the geopolitical relevance of what might seem to be sectarian conflicts.

Thought

The Man Who Killed Google Search. Many complain that Googles’ search results are way worse than they used to be. There’s a specific person behind this, and he killed search at Yahoo as well.

Company Bosses Draw a Red Line on Office Activists The end of the “zero interest rate period” means the end of free money and overhiring. Employees can no longer make unreasonable demands on employers.

How a new class of Japanese stars is changing baseball Interesting story for those of us not following sports; Japanese players are becoming more and more common in Major League baseball. The piece also highlights culturally unique differences between baseball in Japan and baseball in the US.

Self-driving cars are underhyped. Matthew Yglesias is a believer. More generally, new innovations tend to be overhyped in the short-term, and ignored when they come to fruition in the longer-term.

Axios Sees A.I. Coming, and Shifts Its Strategy. The way you interface with information will transform in the next generation. First likely in journalism, but eventually in many professions like medicine and law. There is just too much simple information that is better handled by artificial means. Hopefully that will leave complex tasks to humans.

Data

The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans. The title does not overpromise. Also, a companion paper, A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.

Genome-first evaluation with exome sequence and clinical data uncovers underdiagnosed genetic disorders in a large healthcare system. Much as that is my bailiwick here, genetics is not just about inferring the past, it is now informing the present and future in the healthcare space.

Candidate Denisovan fossils identified through gene regulatory phenotyping. Basically, certain known fossils exhibit morphology predicted by Denisovan genes (they’re robust).

Palaeogenomic insights into the origins of early settlers on the island of Cyprus. They were from what is today Turkey, rather than the Levant. In other words, cousins of the earliest European farmers.

Evolution and genetic architecture of sex-limited polymorphism in cuckoos. Smoking out the genetic basis in sex-specific variation driven by evolution dynamics.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. I’ve posted two deep dives recently:

Little Steppe earthquakes: upheavals both demographic and scholarly:

Examining clustering results across various populations, I was able to estimate years ago that in aggregate, today about 12% of the world’s population is genetically Yamnaya. That is, if all the surviving DNA segments descended from that single ancient people were pooled they would account for 930 million humans. Even when I made that estimate it was clear to me that the original Yamnaya likely began from a small population; they were too genetically and culturally homogenous. But a confirmation of that using statistical methods was not viable because too few high quality Yamnaya samples were available to make that caliber of demographic inferences. This new study, using 428 individuals, 299 of these analyzed here for the first time, patches that shortfall. With these resources, researchers can look at patterns of diversity within DNA and infer population history from them. More precisely, scientists can detect bottlenecks and rapid population expansions through the signatures these demographic events leave written in the code of A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s.

Roma Termini: why cities both make us and break us as a species::

In the film Gladiator, set during the father and son reigns of Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, the only other member of the imperial family featured is Lucilla, daughter to the elder emperor, sister to the younger. In actuality though, over time, the historical Commodus had over a dozen siblings. But most of them, including his own twin brother, did not live to adulthood. Besides Commodus and Lucilla, their sisters Annia and Vibia survived to reproduce; but of Marcus Aurelius and his wife Faustina the Younger’s thirteen children, nine were not so lucky. So two in three children of the most powerful couple in the largest city in the world expired young, sobering testament to the non-negotiable caprices of biological forces in the lives of premodern people. Marcus Aurelius’ offspring lived and died subject to the same whims of nature as any peasant spawn. Roman medicine was primitive at best and counterproductive at worst. Ancient civilization had mastered arcane aspects of metallurgy, architecture and agriculture, but physiology, anatomy and immunology remained as mysterious to the Romans as they had been to their Pleistocene forebears. The conquest of human biology, and therefore scientific medicine and public health would have to wait all the way until humanity's most recent few centuries of history.

Discussion

All my podcasts go ungated two weeks after their Substack release. So I encourage subscribers on the free plan who’d like to automatically get them to subscribe to that podcast stream (Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are my guests (and monologue topics) since the last Time Well Spent:

• John Massey: Chinese dreams through Western eyes

• Eric Cline: After 1177 B.C.

• The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans

• Jeremy Carl: The Unprotected Class - How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart

ICYMI

Some of you follow me on my newsletter, blog, or Twitter. But my own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com.

There you’ll find links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, links to more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• My total feed of content

• My long-time blog, GNXP

• A group blog, Secular Right, vintage at this point, but worthwhile for Heather Mac Donald’s prescience

• My Indian/South Asian-focused blog, Brown Pundits

• Some of my past pieces for UnHerd, National Review, The Manhattan Institute, Quillette, Palladium and The New York Times 

• My old podcast, The Insight

• This podcast, Unsupervised Learning

Over to you

Comments are open to all for this post, so if you have more reading/listening suggestions or tips on who I should be talking to or what you hope I’ll write about this year, lay it on us.