RKUL: Time Well Spent 3/15/2025

Ides of March edition

Bear, pencil, O. Khan, age 7, 2025.

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?

2068 years ago today, on March 15th, 44 BC, assassins murdered Gaius Julius Caesar at the Curia of Pompey. Dramatized in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the plot against Rome’s dictator was rich soil for later storytellers. One of the most notorious assassins, Marcus Junius Brutus, he of Et tu, Brute fame was a son of Caesar’s mistress, Servilia. Not only that, in a magnanimous gesture, Caesar had recently granted Brutus, like many of his co-conspirators, clemency after defeating them in one of the late Republic’s many internecine conflicts.

Caesar’s murder marked the beginning of the Republic’s end, and the start of the last great civil war that presaged the Empire, which would itself begin under Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian whom he adopted as his son and heir, and who would come to be known as Augustus Caesar. But what if Caesar had not been assassinated? How would subsequent history have differed? Caesar had been planning an invasion of Parthia, the kingdom that had arisen on the soil of ancient Persia, to avenge the death of the Roman general Crassus. Though Octavian was a political genius, it was Caesar who was the tactical savant, as evidenced by his conquering Gaul in eight years. A Rome that had crushed Persian power before the Empire’s advent would have represented a historical force whose implications are hard to actually imagine.

Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: The Life of a Colossus places the spotlight on the Roman general’s martial achievements. This is expected; Goldsworthy’s Ph.D. research is in ancient military history. His dissertation was The Roman Army at War 100 BC – AD 200. Caesar was rich, yes. But Crassus was richer. And it’s true that Caesar won many victories at the peak of his life, in his 40’s. But Pompey triumphed in battle at the tender age of 23. Caesar’s pinnacle accomplishment was to fully subdue a domain as expansive and barbaric as Gaul, annexing it to the Republic with decisive finality. Goldsworthy outlines the Gallic campaign in exquisite detail, but also covers Caesar’s victories in the east, Macedonia’s conquest, Caesar’s relationship with Cleopatra, and therefore Egypt. By the time of his assassination, Caesar had established the Roman Empire’s outlines by both conquest and consolidation, even if the governmental apparatus that was to succeed the Republic only emerged under Octavian.

With Caesar’s passing, antiquity lost one of its greatest generals, the peer of Alexander the Great and Hannibal. Over 1,900 years after that assassination, another pivotal human being of a different stripe entirely was slain by a political enemy: Mohandas K. Gandhi, who preached peace, and gained fame for weaponizing nonviolence against oppressors. His assassination by a Hindu nationalist changed the course of Indian history, marginalizing the right-wing for a generation, and also clearing the field for Jawarahal Nehru’s program of industrialization, which Gandhi had in fact opposed. For a generation after independence, the Republic of India was committed to a program of Fabian socialism modeled on that the British Labour party proposed, wholly due to the lack of a Hindu nationalist right-wing opposition or an agrarian populism rooted in Gandhi’s artisanally-oriented economics.

Ramachandra Guha’s two volumes on Gandhi, Gandhi Before India and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948, are both thorough and accessible for readers innocent of the Mahatma’s biographical arc. Guha’s narrative spans the time from when young Gandhi, a Westernized lawyer was arguing for Indians’ civil rights in South Africa (where he spent two decades from age 23-44) to the abrupt end of his life, by which time he had articulated his theory of nonviolent resistance, focused his life around his Hindu spirituality and made the case for social reform of a traditional decentralized economy. Gandhi was a peculiar figure, a man who denounced the convention of untouchability, but could still celebrate the caste system’s power to dampen the hyper-individualistic competition he saw in the west. Though in the last decades of his life he dressed like a Hindu mendicant, Gandhi studied law in London at the Inner Temple, where future British Prime Ministers Clement Atlee and Margaret Thatcher also earned their qualifications. Though his vision of peaceful resistance has far outlasted his life, he took his meticulously detailed but utopian prescriptions for the Indian polity to the grave with him. Unlike the ideas of the Hindu nationalists who were attacked and banished from public life immediately after his assassination, Gandhian economics and political thought never made a comeback.

In Gandhi’s final year in South Africa, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. This famously furnished the spark for the Great War, what we now call World War I. Franz Ferdinand’s death unravelled a delicate balance, knocking into‌ motion a series of byzantine interlocking alliances that threw together two sides, the Entente of France, Great Britain and Russia versus the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The war’s conclusion marked the end of the old Europe, the close of the long 19th century; it saw the dissolution of the Czars’ Russian Empire, the end of the Habsburgs’ Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman dynasty’s fall. Franz Ferdinand was a relatively modern, forward-looking heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Without his assassination, a more peaceful and gradual shift in the balance of power is easily imaginable. Perhaps the Great War might not even have happened, and the deep chasm we perceive between the long 19th-century’s sunset finally in 1914, and the super-charged, post-armistice decades of modernizing after 1919, might not even mark our conception of our past and our progress.

Philipp Blom’s 2010 The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 documents the idyllic age before, the decade+ at the Belle Epoque’s tail end, while Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War: Explaining World War I pins blame for the conflict that would destroy a civilization on a tragic British misperception of the actual scope of German ambitions. The Vertigo Years overlaps with the first great age of globalization, when British naval power imposed a regime of free trade and commerce on the open seas, and the US had not yet shifted from debtor developing nation to the world’s premier geopolitical power. This was an age when Communism was still a utopian vision, and such fertile modern fields as psychology and sociology were just taking first baby steps. Europe in the decade before the war was finally moving beyond the Victorian age of steam, but many of its external forms, whether fashion or government, remained relics of the past century.

Ferguson’s treatment is not so much an examination of the Great War’s mechanics, as a consideration of the conditions and structural factors that triggered it. He argues that British involvement in what was a fundamentally continental conflict was needless. German ambitions were not global, but local. The Kaiser was no Hitler, and the German political class were not Nazis. Today it is common to view World War I only as prologue to World War II, but Ferguson’s narrative argues it was a contingent conflict, driven by a host of diplomatic confusions and ideological blinders. The specific act of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was simply the final fatal step in the series of events that led to the clash between European powers.

Thought

How to Make Superbabies. Many academic scientists will tell you this post is nonsense, but they often underestimate the long-term possibilities of technology because of unexpected discoveries. I foresee the skeptics being surprised by the next few decades’ advances, as is so often the case in science; for my money, voices like Steve Hsu will probably be closer to the mark. At 9,000 words, the piece might seem like a chore, but I found the ideas worth engaging with, because it charts a possible, even probable, path forward. The specific details may not all be born out, but enough of it will surely come to pass that it matters.

In Huntington Beach, Politics on a Plaque. Red cities in blue states and blue cities in red states can offer such juicy reporting, because there is a lot of signalling driven by simmering frustration. But in the end, the cities always have to face the reality of the state in which they are situated. These political shifts within cities are more a barometer of the national mood of political polarization driven by culture wars rather than precursor to any genuine local policy changes.

The Uses and Abuses of ‘Social Construction’. To some extent everything is social construction; the model of the atom you see on posters is social construction. The issue is whether your social constructions are instrumentally useful in understanding reality or just ideological fictions.

To Save Academia, Hire Conservatives. This is a very long and detailed piece, but a major point is that academics need enough ideological diversity to connect to the broader public funding them. The response to the piece though has been petty outrage and rejection, so I’m not optimistic.

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It. A beautiful appreciation for the luxuries of the modern world by my friend Charles C. Mann.

Data

Tracing the Spread of Celtic Languages using Ancient Genomics. Preprint uses extremely subtle methods to differentiate across very genetically similar ancient populations in Europe in order to ascertain the origin of the Celtic-speaking groups in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age.

Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago. The key point here is that some anthropologists believe living as foragers in the rainforest is only feasible for humans if they engage in trade with agriculturalists. But 150,000 years ago, no agriculturalists had yet existed, so that theory is definitively falsified. Whether these were the ancestors of modern humans though is a different question.

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of anthropometric traits in 672,976 individuals reveals convergence between rare and common genetic associations. The vast majority of genetic variants remain at low frequency, but population-wide variation often lingers given the smaller number of common variants. Whole-genome sequencing of many individuals is necessary to understand low-frequency variants. Here they show that most heritability is due to common variants, and low frequency variants appear in the same regions of the genome as common variants.

A century of theories of balancing selection. A good review of the century-long attempt to understand how natural selection could maintain genetic diversity.

Ancient human extinction risk: Implications from high-precision computation and fossil evidence. Controversy has swirled about the feasibility of detecting bottlenecks as old as 1 million years through the human genome, so this preprint is worth reading closely; it promises to resurface as the center of an unresolved debate.

Unsupervised Learning Journal Club

I am trying out a new occasional feature for paying subscribers this year, an Unsupervised Learning Journal Club, where I review a paper or preprint of note. At the end of each edition, I invite readers to vote on papers/preprints for the future editions.. The first two editions have been on plague and the genetic evidence for matrilineal Celts:

Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest

Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception

Free subscribers can get a sense of the format from my ungated coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination

We were selected: tracing what humans were made for

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 since the last Time Well Spent:

• Graeme Wood: Germany's turn to the right

• Leighton Woodhouse: against the rise of the anti-woke cancel culture and MAGA

• Kevin Klatt: Nutrition, health, MAHA and GLP-1

• Charles Murray: 50 years on the public scene

• Titus Techera: Postmodern Conservative in a post-national Europe

• Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars

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.

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• Some of my past pieces for Palladium Magazine, UnHerd, The Dispatch, The New York Times, City Journal, National Review, Slate, Unherd, Quillette and Nautilus.

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 to read about in 2025, put it here.