RKUL: Time Well Spent 06/06/2024

Almost Midsummer 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?

Western culture's religious foundation is indisputably the Bible. But it is also arguably one of its major literary foundations, alongside Homer and Virgil. To a great extent, the spread of printing and the maintenance of literacy in Western Europe owe their early success to the Bible. Though analyzing the text in a scholarly manner was attempted prior, the 19th century saw the flowering of Biblical criticism through a rationalist lens, beginning in Germany. This eventually spawned the conflicts between modernists and fundamentalists within Protestantism, and kicked off Christianity’s transformation from central tenet of Western civilization to a religion ripe for critique. But it also opened up a field of scholarship that examined the Bible’s origins and historical context; for example, the well accepted Documentary Hypothesis, where the Pentateuch comprises four originally independent sources: the Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomist (D), and Priestly (P). This is the foundation of literary critic Harold Bloom’s eccentric book The Book of J. Bizarrely, and against scholarly consensus, Bloom argues that J is a woman in the court of King Solomon, in his estimation, a writer on par with Homer and Shakespeare.

James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now focuses on the historical and anthropological context of the Jewish written tradition. Kugel talks, for example, of how the enemies of the Hebrews, the Moabites and Ammonites, descend from the incestuous union between Lot and his daughters. The enemies of the Jewish people in the texts of the Jewish people often have conveniently scandalous origins, perhaps justifying aggression or enmity with them. The stories within the Bible recapitulate ancient geopolitical fissures now long forgotten, but still very raw and vivid to those compiling the Bible. Kugel also explores the differences between ancient exegetes like St. Augustine and modern interpreters, as well as the theological implications that can be extracted from the text. 

How to Read the Bible is an excellent introduction to the flavor of modern Biblical scholarship, while Jonathan Kirsch’s The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible focuses on the salacious stories of sex and violence that are often pointedly overlooked in favor of the more morally elevated sections. Kirsch’s examination probes the historical and literary context for these stories, whose morality often reflects a foreign cultural framework. The ancient Hebrews were no saints, and some of their practices and actions would shock us today. Consider the story of Tamar who disguises herself as a prostitute, and becomes pregnant by her father-in-law Judah, begetting the lineage that would eventually include King David.

Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Hidden Book in the Bible goes back to the Documentary Hypothesis and unearths a thread uniting the books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, authored by J, who produced the world’s first extant fully-fleshed out narrative prose. These books contain the chronology of the covenant of the Jewish people with their God, and together unfold the theological nature of the Hebrew God. The “Holy Book” contains within it great literature; J’s hidden story exhibits none of the  dry religious ritualism of the P, the priestly source. This is because J’s story reflects their voice and  the intention of a specific author with an goal to narrate the story of his or her nation in an engaging fashion that evokes the emotional journey of the Hebrews and their relationship with their God. Friedman also wrote The Bible with Sources Revealed, which focuses on the authorship of the Pentateuch and defends the Documentary Hypothesis that is at the center of modern debates, and undergirds much of the broader discussion.

Modern Biblical criticism has been accused of training excessive skepticism on the veracity of the textual sources, reducing them to fiction and myth, rather than having been grounded in historical reality. Scholars who argued that the early years of the House of David, which lasted to 586 BC, was a fiction, were presumably chagrined when archaeological evidence yielded a reference to a king David within the appropriate time frame. Nevertheless some skepticism is good, and the classicist Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible mounts a modern day defense of a rationalist view of scriptural analysis. The Unauthorized Version makes some tendentious assertions in the attempt to starkly divide truth from fiction, but in the process marshals a massive amount of textual and archaeological evidence. You don’t need to accept all of Lane Fox’s conclusions to appreciate his scholarship and learn from the various arguments he makes.

Thought

Building software is so expensive that it is causing major problems. In the 1990’s I read in The Economist that by the 2020s all Americans would be systems administrators at that era’s rate of growth of IT infrastructure. Obviously that didn’t happen due to greater productivity and automation of those systems. But in a world where software eats everything, we need to confront the fact that we don’t really have enough engineers to code everything needed in the modern information-driven economy.

Why Biden lost - A pre-write I did mean to publish. Basically Matt Yglesias says Biden has leaned too far against orthodox economics, and toward heterodox populism. Candidly, I think one of Biden’s problems is that he is not as intellectually self-assured or talented as Clinton or Obama, so I believe he favors more mediocre advisors and officials to match his own cognitive capacity (which was always lower than his Democratic predecessors, even before senility). Is Biden our midwit in chief?

The evolutionary mystery of the German cockroach - The species evolved to exploit human-built environments and exists nowhere else. So where did it come from? Beautifully written blog post by John Hawks that ends with genomic confirmation this cockroach evolved around the time of the Roman Empire.

Wolves, once confined to fairy tales, are back in Germany, stirring debate. Environmentalism and urbanization mean that some level of ‘rewilding’ is going to occur in very dense agricultural parts of Eurasia. Wolves are not just in Germany; they’re now all over Continental Europe. The British Isles obviously avoid this because of the English Channel.

Many Armies Struggle for Recruits. In Sweden They Turn Them Away. Since the army takes the best, the best apply. A virtuous cycle where those who did military service are perceived to be more competent and intelligent. In painful contrast to “McNamara’s Morons.”

Criticism Capture is More Dangerous Than Audience Capture - Nowadays, it's the unforced errors in response to criticism that kill you. Nobody asked me, but I’ll say it, people need to care less what others think and say, and do their own thing. This is especially true for “content creators” who have some level of independence. 

Data

Evidence for dynastic succession among early Celtic elites in Central Europe. Establishes the identity of elite high-status lineages via genetic ties between individuals in extremely rich burials across a broad swath of southern Germany and over generations. Some of these elites seem to have inherited their position through matrilineal descent, in contrast to most documented societies. Also makes it clear that Proto-Celtic Hallstatt southern Germany saw significant genetic change with the spread of Germanic languages from the north.

Human Y chromosome haplogroup L1-M22 traces Neolithic expansion in West Asia and supports the Elamite and Dravidian connection. In this model, southern India’s Dravidian languages derive from a prehistoric language family that stretched from the edge of Mesopotamia, across southern Iran and into Pakistani Sindh.

A complete and dynamic tree of birds. Cool phylogenetic preprint. Resolving the whole tree now appears to be in the offing, but the possibility of hybridization and the sheer number of bird species makes it somewhat complicated.

Philippine Ayta possess the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world. The pre-Austronesian people of the Philippines are fascinating because they seem to represent a very deeply diverged lineage of southeast Eurasians (which includes Australo-Melanesians) that somehow retain the highest proportion of Denisovan ancestry of all.

Admixture with indigenous people helps local adaptation: admixture-enabled selection in Polynesians. Seems to have happened everywhere; local populations were absorbed along with their favorable mutations, whether they be Neanderthals, Western European Hunter-Gatherers or Papuans.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. My most recent deep dive is on Brazil:

Brazil: a melting-pot genetic present and an uncharted deep past:

A century on from racial democracy’s heyday, Brazil is even more mixed as a nation, the reality of its undiminished inequalities a rebuke to Freyre’s glib formulation. There was never anything democratic about its racial dynamic, and even today Brazil’s myriad sub-ethnicities remain predictably arrayed in a hierarchical system. Race as a concept in Luso-America only partially corresponds to race in Anglo-America. The problems are not the same, nor can the solutions be. Because of near universal-scale mixing, Brazilians of diverse backgrounds exhibit very unique and variable appearances; in a nation where most people blend varying ratios of African, European and indigenous ancestry, identity inevitably remains a balancing act between personal preference and external appearance. Only about 10 genes control most skin color variation, so people with similar ancestries can exhibit starkly varied pigmentation. In the Brazilian racial taxonomy, taking a genetic test is far less relevant than physical appearance to determining your racial identity. Because of the ubiquity of diverse racial origins, whether you identify as white, black or mixed is a compound of your complexion, the hair you straightened or not, and the class status you have achieved. Far from some utopian café-au-lait racial democracy charting a course toward humanity’s post-racial future, Brazil today underscores the real challenges of a complicated history and the integration of peoples from at least four continents.

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:

• Chad Niederhuth: genetics in plants, from Mendel to GMOs

• Jonathan Keeperman: becoming Lomez

• Ryan Burge: Losing Our Religion

• Lost civilizations and the promise of new knowledge

• Akshar Patel: Modi's India in the 21st century

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 dig into next, lay it on us.