Fragments #1 – Giving Birth, Taint-Sunning, Spartan vs. American Eugenics, Illuminati, the CIA, & Societal Collapse
Thoughts and links from this week
Below is a new format I am trying out of shorter-form content to come out weekly – hopefully, this will break up the extended interregnums between my long-form pieces (I know you have been begging for more). If you like it: good; if you hate it: even better.
My first child was born a week ago. My wife had an all-natural homebirth, and I caught my child directly from the womb in my own bed. Through it all I learned a pivotal lesson: childbirth is messy business.
Ignaz Semmelweis learned this same lesson in 19th century Vienna. When observing the vast maternal and infant mortality disparities between midwifery and obstetric doctor deliveries, he urged medical doctors to wash their hands before caring for birthing persons. Unfortunately, his arguing for sanitation in the delivery room went against the scientific medical dogma of his day and for his rabblerousing Semmelweis was sent to an insane asylum where he was beaten to death. Fortunately, since then, the science has been settled!
Those doctors in Semmelweis’ day were too hung-up on theory and forgot the key rule: if it works go with it! For example: my wife and I had been attempting to conceive for over half a year. At the suggestion of a friend, while on vacation in Greece we decided to sun our undercarriages. Three weeks later we discovered she was pregnant! Perhaps sun-on-taint magic is real, perhaps I have been cucked by Helios – either way if it works, it works!
Ritual and religion live largely in this domain: Frazer’s seminal compendium of ancient and primitive beliefs The Golden Bough relates numerous ancient birthing superstitions: the Saxons wouldn’t lock any doors or gates, and Pliny the Elder considered it the highest offense to sit cross-legged or with knit fingers while a woman was in labor. When my wife began having contractions, I made sure all doors, windows, and drawers were ajar; sat legs and arms akimbo; and placed a bust of Artemis, the patron goddess of childbirth, in our room – and my wife had a remarkably quick four hours of active labor. Coincidence? I think not!
Birthing a child may have been easy but raising one is anything but. Take the Spartans approach for example – as Will Durant writes:
So maybe we don’t always have to follow the ancients…. At the very least, you probably shouldn’t go around espousing “ruthless eugenics” to raise the next generation, Montessori seems more au courant. However, around the fin de siècle people weren’t so pearl-clutchy – Teddy Roosevelt while president regarded eugenics, specifically white racial suicide, to be the “greatest problem of civilization.” In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard tells of how muckraking progressive journalist, Jacob Riis, was obsessed with racial purity, calling NYC “Jewtown,” claiming “money was [the Jewish] God,” and that Jews and dark-skinned European immigrants were diluting the white race. I only bring this up because Mr. Riis now has a park in Brooklyn named after him, complete with a golf course – I played nine holes there last summer (it’s pretty nice). So maybe you can get away with saying "the Jews are nervous and inquisitive, the Orientals are sinister, the Italians are unsanitary." Hell, you might even get your own park named after you in Jewtown too...
So many (most? (all?)) of early progressives were what we would now call racist – so what, that’s the past, and things change. Besides progressivism’s socially Darwinistic dark side, I am always fascinated by how truly revolutionary their effect has been on American society. In Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, the author lists out how local clubs, fraternal and sororal societies underpinned social aid in America. By the 1920’s these societies provided millions of Americans with welfare benefits, over $9bn of life insurance policies, and were the primary suppliers of medical insurance along with running numerous orphanages, and foster homes. But as the governments safety-net grew, bottoms-up social organization withered, I am reminded of Gall’s Systemantics:
Speaking of fraternal societies… the Bavarian Illuminati were a very real and important group that at their height spanned Europe from Italy to Poland. Founded on May 1, 1776, with the aim of replacing Christianity with a religion of reason, they attracted such intellectual lights as Goethe. One of their members, Franz Mesmer, who is known as the father of modern hypnotism and the root of the word mesmerize, dabbled heavily in alchemical and metaphysical esoterica. He was a fascinating man, who espoused the power of “animal magnetism” – if you want to down a fun rabbit-hole it wouldn’t hurt to start here or here.
For more timely covert operations let’s turn to the CIA – When not empowering first-generation Latinas with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, the CIA doesn’t appear to be doing much themselves – 70% of the intelligence budget goes to private contractors and much of the “soft-work” the CIA used to do is now outsourced to NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy. Niccolò Saldo’s blog, Fisted by Foucault, has a 5-part series on color revolutions across Eurasia and North Africa led by these organizations – interesting stuff. Not only focusing on politics or economics, CIA et al. have also shaped culture: Aaron Moulton put on an exhibit demonstrating how the CIA-backed Soros Foundation built the contemporary art scene in Eastern Europe, and how the “Socially Engaged Practice” within the arts has spread domestically, interesting listens here and here.
Keeping politics on the mind – three weeks ago I listened to a private talk with Citadel head Ken Griffin. He remarked that the US has spent more in real terms on COVID relief than it did in WWII. I recently read Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, rather sere stylistically but it gives a good overview of how and why societies decline once they reach a complexity point where growth and spending have diminishing marginal returns. As Griffin stated – “last century we spent $4 trillion to save the world, this time we spent $7 trillion for people to stay at home.” Though I have reservations about how much world-saving was done in WWII, I do give pause and think about what the future holds for my newborn child….
That’s all for this week and thanks for reading,
Zay