RKUL: Time Well Spent 4/04/2025

April Showers and Early Spring Edition

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?

Recently on social media, a debate broke up about the “Great Man Theory” of history, explicitly pioneered by Thomas Carlyle, but implicitly subscribed to in some form by many lay people. Online, the debate was between Nate Silver and a number of academic historians, the latter of whom find the theory wrong-headed and outmoded. But ‌for many regular people, it seems entirely plausible; how can you deny that Isaac Newton’s brilliance transformed our understanding of Celestial Mechanics? Set against this are historians who focus more on broad social and economic forces less reliant on individuals and more on aggregate historical events that drive general trends, from Marxist historical materialism to the multi-disciplinary Annales school.

Of course, both dynamics, the individual and social, are relevant. The evidence is that Napoleon Bonaparte was a classic great man, brilliant and courageous, the fact of whose presence, given his command of tactics and logistics military historians have calculated increased the probability of his armies winning by some 30%. But a general like Bonaparte could only have risen to power and prominence in a particular historical-cultural context. He was, after all, an ethnic minority from the lesser nobility of a newly annexed island. Enlightenment rationalism had made late 18th-century France far more open than a century prior, when the young Bonaparte’s talents might well have gone unnoticed.

Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon: A Life, a massive 2015 biography of the French general, illustrates this persuasively. The young Bonaparte was the right man at the right time. Roberts’ narrative clarifies that the young Corsican was a prodigious talent, undertaking extensive intellectual feats whether at peace or at , penning unpublished novels and corresponding with such brilliant contemporaries as the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. At the military academy, Bonaparte excelled in the quantitative sciences then revolutionizing the art of war, when the physics of Newton’s mechanics were applied to the artillery field. Though the France of his youth was still a monarchy deferential to the nobility of blood, in his 20’s it underwent a revolution that overturned the old social order, throwing open opportunities for the arriviste.

But the man has to meet the moment. Though most are aware of Bonaparte’s failed Russian campaign, he won 50 of the 60 battles in which he fought, and his armies inflicted 1.5-2 times as many casualties on his enemies as they suffered in turn. From 1805-1807, France under his rule defeated Austria, Prussia and Russia, in sequence. While many military leaders are known for their tactical and strategic acumen, Bonaparte was famously an organizational genius. Recognizing that “an army marches on its stomach,” he offered the prize that stimulated the invention of canned rations.

Revolutionary France’s victories in the last decade of the 18th century were not Bonaparte’s alone; France won the War of the First Coalition against the entire range of European powers because it was the first nation-state to mobilize its entire population for war. But the later wars of conquest and hegemony in the first decade of the 19th century were driven in large part by the Corsican general’s brilliance. The decade-long French Empire (1804-1814) was likely the product of Bonaparte’s brilliance and ambition, as he and his fellow citizens established military, political and cultural hegemony over the European continent. It was during this period that Europe’s legal systems were reformed, resulting in the Napoleonic Code, that Jews were first liberated from their ghettos and that old institutions like the Holy Roman Empire were finally abolished. It is clear from Napoleon: A Life that a single great man’s accomplishments laid the seedbed for later social and cultural revolutions decades beyond, from 19th-century nationalism to the assimilation of Jews like Karl Marx into the mainstream of European culture.

Bonaparte’s life is rich with texture, detail and significance even to those reading about him in 2025, thanks, in large part to his extensive correspondence. But many figures in the distant past never truly loom into detailed focus even when we clearly perceive their great impact and that their actions shaped the lives of those more vividly rendered. This is likely the case of the late Republican dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, whose tyranny was both a warning and a model for later Roman strongmen from Pompey to Julius Caesar. Arthur Keaveney’s Sulla: The Last Republican attempts to shed light on a shadowy figure who would serve as a bogeyman for future generations. A wastrel from a patrician family fallen on hard times, the young Sulla came into an inheritance through marriage with an older woman, and leveraged his new opportunities by becoming such a brilliant general on the battlefield that the conservative faction in the Senate soon looked to him as their savior against reformers attempting to alter the Roman Republic’s basic structure.

Keaveney’s book is a slim 248 pages, because unlike Caesar, Sulla left no memoirs of his battlefield victories, and unlike Augustus, he did not patronize the great poets of his age. Much of what we remember of Sulla is recorded by his enemies, because ultimately, he was a failure, and the actions of the “last Republican” would seal the fate of the institutions he was attempting to revive. Sulla stated that "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.” This was born out by the brutality of his proscriptions against his enemies when he took dictatorial power. Sulla came to restore the old order, but ultimately he left the Republic fatefully scarred. The young Julius Caesar, scion of a family firmly aligned with the reformist faction in the late Republic, fled Rome at the height of Sulla’s reign of terror. Caesar never forgot the wrongs inflicted upon his family and friends when his enemies had regained the power of the Roman state. As dictator, Sulla curtailed plebeian power, restored the privileges of the Senate and saw to the elimination of what he deemed enemies of the state. In traditional fashion, Sulla retired to his country estates, leaving the Republic in the expert hands of others. But his dictatorial reign became the template for future radicals, who would ultimately tear down the Republic and replace it with an Empire.

If Sulla was the path-breaker for his young enemy, Caesar, the first Umayyad Caliph, Mu’awiya, was the Augustus of Islam. Though the fifth Caliph, Mu’awiya was arguably the Islamic ruler who laid the foundations of the system of rule that would define the civilization in the centuries to come. Mu’awiya established the hereditary principle for succession, consolidated conquered territories and sponsored continued military victories. But little in English focuses specifically on his life, in large part because later Muslims viewed him much more skeptically. It was under Mu’awiya that large-scale persecution of the Shia faction began, so modern Shia Muslims regard him as an unparalleled tyrant. But Sunnis too take a dim view of the fifth Caliph, because much of that sect’s worldview coalesced under the successor dynasty of the Abbasids, who, as grounds for their uprising, inveighed against Umayyad immorality and corruption.

But Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In devotes considerable time to Mu’awiya, his life, his genius as an administrator and his competence as a warrior. Kennedy’s narrative depicts a figure both rational and ambitious, who managed to wrest control of the Muslim community away from the family of the Prophet Muhammad himself. The fifth Caliph in fact seems to be a historically liminal figure, as much a warrior of Greco-Roman Late Antiquity as one of early Islam. Under Mu’awiya, the superstructure of the Roman and Persian Empires that the Arabs conquered remained intact; Greek was the Caliphate’s administrative language during Mu’awiya’s 19-year reign, from 661 to 680 AD. Islam’s legal and institutional structures that were so distinctive in later centuries, from sharia law to madrasas, did not exist under Mu’awiya. The early Umayyads, in fact, worshipped within the great Church of Damascus. It was turned into an exclusively Muslim house of worship 25 years after his death.

Nevertheless, the early Umayyads established the foundations of the civilization that would become the Dar al-Islam. Though later Islamic scholars would look dimly upon Umayyad claims of Arab supremacy, it was Mu’awiya and his successors who established the prestige of he Arabic language; its Fertile Crescent and North Africa adoption would eventually transform Arabs from an obscure ethnicity to a people whose language was spoken from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. Umayyad Arabicization was almost certainly a necessary precondition for Abbasid Islamization. Though Mu’awiya suffers from a reputation of impiety, his undisputed military prowess and political acuity solidified the Arab conquests and guaranteed the Caliphate’s permanence.

Mu’awiya’s lot as founder of a regime that would long outlast his fame and reputation, is not uncommon. The Tokugawa Japan that kept the islands under tight control and isolation from 1600-1850 was built on the victories of its founder, Tokugawa Ieyasu, but also on the accomplishments of his two predecessors and allies, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Their complex, sometimes fraught relationship is one of the central themes of Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan. Though Eiji Yoshikawa wrote it during World II, Taiko reads like an extremely detailed historical novel with no contemporary relevance to the 1930s when it was written. The first third of the novel chronicles the rise and fall of Oda, an irascible minor ruler who in 1560 decides to challenge a far more powerful rival in battle against the advice of his generals, and succeeds. Oda’s victory could have opened the path toward prestige and a safe grasp on power, but he instead uses it as an opening to re-fashion feudal Japan. His campaigns against the myriad rulers across the islands ultimately result in total victory, as he becomes the first great unifier of a previously decentralized regime.

Oda’s impact is that his wars destroyed the old order of Japan that had existed over the previous 200 years under the Ashikaga Shogunate. Rather than become the first among equals, Oda sought total power. His campaigns leveled the structures upholding late feudal Japan, and laid the foundations for early modern Japan. Oda attacked the power of the Buddhist temples, kneecapping an independent force that could check the nobility. His greatness, like that of many rulers, was more a product of the social forces he unleashed in destabilizing the old equilibrium, than of his short-term political or military victories.

One of the consequences of the reorganization of Japanese society and politics triggered by Oda Nobunaga’s consolidation of power in the 16th century was the nearly megalomaniacal ambitions of his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He invaded Korea, and harbored ambitions of conquering China. Ultimately, Toyotomi failed because though Ming dynasty China was in decline after two centuries in power, it still commanded East Asia’s largest armies, backed by the demographic heft of the Han people. The foundation for this massive polity dates back two centuries, to the conquests of a man born Zhu Yuanzhang to a peasant family in 1328 under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, but who would go on to found the Ming dynasty and reign from 1368-1398 as the Hongwu Emperor. In many cases China’s great dynasties take on a personality that reflects their founder; the Tang were‌ aristocratic, while the Qing never entirely shed the ethnic identity of their Manchu founders. The Ming, like the Han, were founded by a peasant, and its generally xenophobic populism likely reflects Zhu Yuanzhang’s own dispositions. A substantial section of F. W. Motte’s Imperial China, 900–1800 is devoted to his rise and Zhu’s improbable conquest of the world’s most populous country in the 14th century.

Zhu, like the Ming dynasty itself, was a balance between reinvention and loyalty to his origins. During his reign as Hongwu Emperor he imposed a Confucian despotism that would serve as a role model for the next six centuries of Imperial China. For much of his time as a rebel against the Mongols he was part of the Red Turban movement that espoused religious millenarianism. The Chinese elite imperial culture looked dimly on utopian religious movements led by charismatic figures given their capacity to foment division and exacerbate underlying instabilities, a fact underscored by Zhu’s suppression of extremist Buddhist sects during his tenure as emperor, but before he ascended to the throne he rode those religious energies to victory after victory. His life trajectory, from starving peasant to Buddhism monk to rebel general in a millenarian movement, illustrates the essentiality of reinvention and flexibility for those who come from nothing but grasp for everything. During his three decades in power as Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang refined a template that would later become a literary topos in the West for an oriental despot whose word was law and whose interests were by definition those of the empire he ruled. The Ming dynasty survived despite continuous Mongol assaults, Japan’s rise to become a rival, and the arrival of warlike Europeans to East Asian waters. Perhaps this can all be attributed back to the hard-headed nature of its socially insecure founder, who created an Asian despotism with deep cultural roots and a state that harnessed all the resources of the vast Han nation.

Thought

Abandoning DEI won’t fix academia’s left-leaning problem - Creating a balance of viewpoints on campuses requires more than discarding diversity statements. Megan McArdle lays out the structural problems with recruiting conservatives into academia in the wake of widespread repeals of DEI. Even if conscious selection based on ideology is banned, conservative self-selection will continue. Academia has a reputation as a liberal bastion, so conservatives opt for other professions, and therefore further depriving many fields of any chance at viewpoint diversity that might aid them in understanding/modeling the world better, not to mention an ability to relate to the broader public.

Which Identity is More Important: Race, Gender, or Religion? Gen Z is the least identitarian generation. Interesting in light of all the propaganda about identity they have been exposed to. Republicans care more about religion, less about race, Democrats more about race, less about religion.

The founding myth of progressive economics. My memory of the time, the period after 2008, aligns with Matthew Yglesias’ in this piece: it was just really hard to prosecute individuals for criminal offenses during the financial crisis. Historical truth matters, and sometimes it is easier to nail it if you lived through it and remember it well (anyone under 35 was pre-college in 2008, so many pundits who were not teen news junkies lack much personal memory to rely on).

Neanderthals may have eaten maggots as part of their diet. Seems plausible; many foragers eat maggots because they are high in both protein and fat and easy to harvest off decaying carcasses. More interestingly, anthropologists are now arguing that Ice Age humans like Neanderthals probably ate a fair amount of partially rotten meat like modern Arctic people still do because it was the only way not to get protein poisoning.

Estimates Imply That Burden of Tariffs Could Fall Heavily on Consumers. The ad hoc nature of the administration’s tariffs is terrible for long-term economic stability. This is the geopolitics of tactics, not strategy.

Data

Adaptive Increase of Amylase Gene Copy Number in Peruvians Driven by Potato-rich Diets. This literature has been going back and forth; basically, amylase breaks down starch while you are chewing. But this jumps out: “Indigenous Peruvian Andean populations possess the highest AMY1 copy number globally.” Having a bigger, more diverse, sample size really helps.

The rise, decline and fall of clades. The emergence, diversification and extinction of species is the classic evolutionary dynamic that motivated Charles Darwin’s original work, and this paper uses empirical data in combination with a new model to understand the patterns of diversity we see around us.

Population-scale analysis of inheritance patterns across 858,635 individuals reveals recent historical migration patterns across the North Sea from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Really great application of large numbers of genomes and more fine-grained analytic techniques to answer recent historical questions about demographics and gene flow.

randPedPCA: Rapid approximation of principal components from large pedigrees. A lot of pedigree construction software gets very computationally expensive. This PCA-based method seems to be a cheaper way to make the same inferences.

Redefining the timing and circumstances of cat domestication, their dispersal trajectories, and the extirpation of European wildcats. I thought it was well established a solid decade ago that domestic cats arrived in Europe during the Roman period.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall, most recently a pair of pieces about Tibetans’ unique adaptations and unconventional path to enduring influence.

Soft power from the rooftop of the world:

The youngest Indian innovation in Buddhism, the Vajrayana tradition, which leaned on concomitant changes within Hinduism, came to maturity in an India populated by magicians of all religions bent on manipulating the forces of the universe via esoteric mental gymnastics. Tantric-influenced Buddhist monks and priests offered not just philosophical wisdom to their flocks, but magical powers. Medieval Tibet’s lamas, proud philosopher-kings who reigned as autocrats from fortified monasteries, were also wizards whose incantations and spells struck fear in their enemies and psychologically fortified their allies. Today, the Tibetan lamas’ Buddhism offers a glimpse of what might have been in India had it not been for Islam’s rise and Buddhism’s attendant expungement there. The Vajrayana adepts who fled north, just as their faith winked out of existence in their homeland, did more than transmit a fossil religion; in Tibet, Vajrayana Buddhism got a new lease on life, and would eventually vie with Mahayana sects, as well as Islam and Christianity all across northern Asia’s breadth.

A different kind of heart: Tibetans’ genetic uniqueness and enduring cultural sway:

More than a millennium ago, the Tibetan Empire, and after its fall, less officially, Tibetan elites, adopted and preserved a Vajrayana tradition on the edge of extinction by inviting Indian monks north of the Himalayas to translate their texts and impart their knowledge. Even as Buddhism fell extinct in the south, in Tibet the esoteric Vajrayana tradition continued, as centuries of translation projects and preservation turned the mountain redoubt into a repository of ancient wisdom. Though it is often said that Indian Buddhism went extinct, Tibet’s incredibly influential religion arguably represents the trajectory Indian Buddhism was already set on when its story was cut short. Though Vajrayana Buddhism’s soft power may bend, over the millennia it has proven incredibly robust in the face of persecution and political chaos. Even with the stern eye of the totalitarian Chinese state trained on suppressing the religion in the Tibetan homeland, the people remain steadfast in their devotion to the faith, their lamas, and their identity, uncowed torch-bearers for a tradition that withstood the predations of India’s Muslim empires, converted the fierce Mongol armies and captured the imaginations of believers across both the East and West.

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:

• Zineb Riboua: realism in foreign policy in 2025

• Mark Lutter: charter cities and the urban future

• Andrew Song: cooling the planet with technology

ICYMI

My own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com, including links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, and my 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 UnHerd, National Review, The Manhattan Institute, Quillette, and The New York Times

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.