I just finished Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer, and found it very interesting (though it’s long at 900 pages). It’s a work of cultural history which identifies four dominant British cultures in America, and links them to the regions of Britain they came from.
I found it interesting for reasons that are hard to describe without going into excruciating detail, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in creating deliberate culture, or thinks that 900 pages of culture and history sounds like a good time. “Folkways” is the term Fischer used to describe a collection of “ways”- like time ways, death ways, power ways, wealth ways, and so on. Some of the ways strongly resonated with me (like the Puritan time way of “improving the time”) but other ways were simply repulsive, which made the conflicts between groups more interesting- while I could share the Puritans’ and Quakers’ disdain of the Cavaliers, it took a bit of mental growth to fully understand the Puritans’ and Quakers’ disdain for each other. (I found myself roughly midway between them.)
And everyone disdained my ancestors, the North Britons. I changed my surname from Potts during my Extropian phase years ago. Recently I learned that the Pottses lived as Border Reivers, part of the ancestral group of the Scots-Irish and other marginal Brits from the Border region who migrated to the Colonies and became the ancestors of the hillbillies, white trash and crackers in the U.S.
And everyone disdained my ancestors, the North Britons.
Yeah, present company included. But it was interesting to see bits of border culture that I strongly identified with, possibly as a result of growing up in Texas (which got some of its culture from the borderers; the rest is Cavalier, German, Mexican, and various other sources), which was one of the things that got me thinking about deliberate cultures and cultural mixing. The borderer conception of liberty, for example, is in some ways the ‘purest’ of them, and the one most similar to modern libertarian thought.
(Side note: I had always had trouble with libertarians whose favorite founding father was Jefferson, and this book helped me realize why- I get the sense that moderns who like Jefferson are primarily of cavalier cultural ancestry, and he was the most likeable and intelligent person from that culture. I had always much preferred Hamilton, his bitter political rival, who was a West Indian technologist (well, what passed for one in the late eighteenth century) who was a cultural outsider from all of the major American groups. But the Cavalier sense of liberty, which remains part of the culture of the south, is the freedom of an aristocracy to rule- the borderers are the ones whose idea of liberty was every man a sovereign, which matches up with the anarchocapitalists of today. But the borderers got that culture from living in actual anarchy, with all the violence and nastiness that that implies.)
Nonfiction Books Thread
I just finished Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer, and found it very interesting (though it’s long at 900 pages). It’s a work of cultural history which identifies four dominant British cultures in America, and links them to the regions of Britain they came from.
I found it interesting for reasons that are hard to describe without going into excruciating detail, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in creating deliberate culture, or thinks that 900 pages of culture and history sounds like a good time. “Folkways” is the term Fischer used to describe a collection of “ways”- like time ways, death ways, power ways, wealth ways, and so on. Some of the ways strongly resonated with me (like the Puritan time way of “improving the time”) but other ways were simply repulsive, which made the conflicts between groups more interesting- while I could share the Puritans’ and Quakers’ disdain of the Cavaliers, it took a bit of mental growth to fully understand the Puritans’ and Quakers’ disdain for each other. (I found myself roughly midway between them.)
And everyone disdained my ancestors, the North Britons. I changed my surname from Potts during my Extropian phase years ago. Recently I learned that the Pottses lived as Border Reivers, part of the ancestral group of the Scots-Irish and other marginal Brits from the Border region who migrated to the Colonies and became the ancestors of the hillbillies, white trash and crackers in the U.S.
http://robertpotts.co.uk/familyhistory/borderreivers.htm
Yeah, present company included. But it was interesting to see bits of border culture that I strongly identified with, possibly as a result of growing up in Texas (which got some of its culture from the borderers; the rest is Cavalier, German, Mexican, and various other sources), which was one of the things that got me thinking about deliberate cultures and cultural mixing. The borderer conception of liberty, for example, is in some ways the ‘purest’ of them, and the one most similar to modern libertarian thought.
(Side note: I had always had trouble with libertarians whose favorite founding father was Jefferson, and this book helped me realize why- I get the sense that moderns who like Jefferson are primarily of cavalier cultural ancestry, and he was the most likeable and intelligent person from that culture. I had always much preferred Hamilton, his bitter political rival, who was a West Indian technologist (well, what passed for one in the late eighteenth century) who was a cultural outsider from all of the major American groups. But the Cavalier sense of liberty, which remains part of the culture of the south, is the freedom of an aristocracy to rule- the borderers are the ones whose idea of liberty was every man a sovereign, which matches up with the anarchocapitalists of today. But the borderers got that culture from living in actual anarchy, with all the violence and nastiness that that implies.)
Has anyone read The Reason I Jump? Was it good?
“The 48 Laws of Power” has been mentioned on LW before, could be subtitled “The slytherin handbook.”
It’s on Jesse Galef’s Rationality.Slytherin shelf.
Yep. I remembered having bookmarked a summary of it, with the added commentary of “Slytherin seal of approval”.
“The 48 Anecdotes of Power”? It’s a fun read, but sometimes taken a bit too serious (like having 48-laws-themed tattoos...)
I think theres a significant gap between “this is an interesting read” and “tattoo this on yourself.” I Lean heavily towards the former.