SEASON ONE FINALE – PEAK NATIONALISM, PEAK CIVILIZATION?

Hello, and welcome to Relevant History! I’m Dan Toler. Way back in the introductory episode for Season One, I said this would be a podcast about historical concepts, and that I’d start out with a few episodes on the concept of nationalism. Five years and 68 episodes later – plus or minus a few bonus episodes – I think I’ve at least covered the first half of that history. Many of those episodes were only loosely based on nationalism, and instead served to tie events together or provide background for things that would happen later. I want Relevant History to stand the test of time and be something people can listen to years from now and still find value, so providing a sort of “baseline history” made a lot of sense. Anyway, by now I think I’ve established how and why nationalism – or, more accurately, the nation-state – became the foundation for modern international politics.

        -I started this season with the First Jewish-Roman War and the siege of Masada, which happened nearly 2,000 years ago, and a more recent episode looked back even further to King Mithridates VI of Pontus and the conflict between Latin and Greco-Persian cultures in ancient Anatolia. This conflict was fought not between kings and empires, but between peoples, between proto-nations. We ended in the late 1800s, in the 43-year interval between the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of World War I.

        -This era, known to history as the Belle Époque, or “Beautiful Era,” marks the high point of nationalism as a political ideology. Indeed, nationalism is so widespread at this time that it’s not so much an ideology as it is a consensus. Not coincidentally, the Belle Époque also marks the apex of Western – and therefore human – civilization. I know that’s a strong statement, so before we continue, let me take a minute to justify it.

        -To begin with, we have the obvious economic arguments. The Industrial Revolution comes to its full fruition during the Belle Époque, with rapid advances in communication, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, entertainment, and other areas of life. The telegraph slowly but surely gives way to the telephone, and for the first time in human history, people can speak in real time across any distance. Germ theory, sanitation, and anesthesia allow doctors to treat conditions that had once been incurable. Steamships turn arduous intercontinental journeys into more mundane affairs.

        -On a higher level, the Belle Époque represents the apex of civilization because it maximizes human flourishing, and what better measure can there be of a great civilization? And if we’re talking about human flourishing, what better measure can we take than the rate of population increase? People who aren’t flourishing don’t grow their civilizations, and we can see this in the historical record, where, for example, the population of Western Europe is about the same in the year 1,000 AD as it is in the year 1 AD, hovering at around 25 million people. The collapse of a major empire, a series of barbarian invasions, and multiple plagues will do that to you. By the year 1500, that number has more than doubled to just over 57 million. 200 years later, in 1700, the number is 83 million, so a little less than a 50% increase, or about on pace for the previous 500 years. But then, between 1700 and 1820, we start to see the results of the industrial revolution, with the Western European population skyrocketing to more than 139 million. At the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, that number has grown to just under 172 million. At the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, 192 million. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, 266 million. This massive growth comes despite the emigration of tens of millions of Europeans to the Americas and other colonies. And if you’re wondering where I got these numbers, I went to the same source Wikipedia uses for their article on European demographics: the Maddison Project Database at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. There’s a link in the description if you want to check it out and see their sources.

        -I want to hone in on this a little more because the European population boom of the 1700s and especially the 1800s is not driven by increasing birth rates. It’s tough to get good, accurate numbers for exact birth rates and death rates, but the general trend for European birth rates is down through this time period. People are still having enough children to grow the population, just not the half-dozen or dozen children that their great-grandparents would have had. However, improvements in medicine have drastically reduced childhood mortality. Prior to the industrial revolution, more people died as children than died as adults. In the Belle Époque, more children are living to adulthood, so even with a lower birthrate, the actual population growth rate skyrockets. Human flourishing – the hallmark of civilization. And here it reaches its peak not just with population growth, but also with a longer average lifespan, and a massive increase in the standard of living. Famine and starvation – historically a constant threat – are all but unheard-of in this new world, uplifting tens of millions from a millennia-old struggle for basic survival.

        -This rise in prosperity isn’t limited to Western Europe. It emanates from there, with populations growing and quality of life increasing through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, European colonial territories, and Japan.

This begs the question: why do the people of the late 19th and early 20th centuries flourish to an extent never seen before or since? I would argue that nationalism and the nation-state system are part of the reason. More accurately, I’d argue that increased interpersonal trust and cooperation is what allows people to flourish, and that nationalism and the nation-state maximize the potential for that trust and cooperation. We humans have a fundamental need for belonging that goes back to our prehistoric, tribal roots. We’re a social species, and if we don’t have an in-group, a community to be a part of, we feel isolated. And because cohesive groups make all of their members stronger, a human without an in-group can never maximize their full potential. The bigger the in-group, the bigger the benefit, and the nation-state provides a larger, more cohesive in-group than earlier types of systems. At the same time, for an in-group to have any meaning, there has to be an out-group. Some other group or groups with different members who aren’t a part of your group. A group that includes literally everybody isn’t much of a group at all.

        -Now, why is that? Why can’t all of humanity just be one big group? Well, that’s because of a thing called in-group preference, or the tendency for members of a group to prioritize the interests of group members over the interests of outsiders. And the reason you’ll never get rid of in-group preference is because no matter how prosperous and technologically advanced a society becomes, eventually there’s going to be a shortage of something. Maybe it’s food. Maybe it’s oil. Maybe it’s rare earth elements. At some point, there’s not enough of some resource for everybody to have what they need, and the groups have to fight it out. That’s not to say that all human wars are a product of resource scarcity. But it is to say that even if you got rid of all the differences between peoples and turned humanity into one amorphous blob, there would still be an incentive for groups of people to “tribe up” to secure access to key resources. So no matter what moral beliefs or ethical system you subscribe to, you’re never going to get rid of in-group preference. As someone who, over the course of the last couple of years, converted to Catholicism, I would say it’s the fallen nature of our world. You could call it that. Or you could simply say that it’s a physical constraint of our physical universe – societies will grow and grow until they hit a resource limit, and then they’ll either stagnate or try to take resources from somebody else.

        -Attendant to in-group preference is the group’s ethos, by which I mean a sort of “code of conduct” as well as a reason for being. For example, the ethos of the British Empire was a dedication to Enlightenment principles, the Protestant work ethic, and a belief in the fundamental righteousness of the British people. This is how you end up with the British spending a great deal of money and manpower ending the West African slave trade. From the British view, slavery is wrong – full stop – and as long as the Royal Navy controls the seas, they will not allow slavery to stand. Compare that to the Spanish view of the slave trade, which did not conflict with their ethos of spreading Catholicism and hoarding colonial wealth. The ethos of a society can be hard to pin down, but in its absence, the group loses direction.

        -In-group preference is a strong motivator. Everybody wants to belong. But if your society has too much of an in-group preference, it can stagnate. A good example of this is the Edo Period in Japan, when the Tokugawa Shogunate hermetically sealed the Japanese home islands away from outside influence. By the middle of the 1800s, the Japanese are centuries behind the rest of the world in key areas of technological development, and it’s only thanks to their incredible hard work and discipline that they’re able to catch up without becoming a Western colony, and most societies don’t have the hard work or the discipline to execute that kind of metamorphosis. Point being, in-group preference is hardwired into us, and is essential for group survival, but it has to be balanced out with openness to outside ideas. Too much in-group preference, and society stagnates. Too much openness, and it ceases to exist as a coherent entity, like what has happened to many empires when they become too large for the in-group to have any real meaning. Think the British and the French and the Ottomans and the early Islamic caliphates. In-group preference breaks down, the group’s ethos loses its grounding, and the group fragments or falls prey to other groups with a more grounded ethos and stronger in-group preference.

        -If this theory is correct, then the most dynamic societies – the ones which lead to the most human flourishing – are those where the in-group is as large and open as possible while still maintaining a strong enough in-group preference and grounded enough group ethos to maintain cohesion and direction.

        -In ancient and prehistoric times, tribal societies were based on blood relationships. This type of in-group, the extended family, is hardwired into us, and it’s not even limited to humans. Other social mammals like chimpanzees, dolphins, and prairie dogs, have a similar social structure, so it makes sense that it’s how our earliest ancestors would live. A tribe has powerful, almost unbreakable in-group bonds, but the group is too small and insular to do anything more complicated than hunting and gathering. Large-scale coordination between thousands of people is impossible, so such a people will never form permanent settlements, meaning that they will never become civilized. They will achieve nothing. They will write nothing. They will leave nothing to posterity, and the life of one person will not be measurably better than the life of their ancestors a hundred or a thousand years earlier. Like chimps, dolphins, and prairie dogs, their existence will be brief, and they will leave no mark on the world. Their people will not flourish.

        -Probably the earliest larger-than-tribal in-groups were created by regional religions, with various, probably-related tribes gathering at central locations for what are most likely religious festivals. Think of places like Stonehenge or Göbekli Tepe. I didn’t really talk about this in the show because this isn’t history; it’s pre-history. But it does represent a level up from earlier tribal societies. It’s here, in the late stone age, where we start to see evidence of wide-scale cooperation. We see things like incense brought from hundreds of miles, or of various types of pigment brought from multiple distant locations to produce paint and makeup, again, most likely for religious purposes.

        -Next, around 10,000 BC, we see the Neolithic revolution. Seemingly out of nowhere, humans in various locations start settling down, abandoning their old hunter-gatherer lives for the relatively more stable lives of settled farmers. This gives us the first settled tribes, which form the first cities, where people from multiple tribes live in close proximity to each-other. Now, these people probably share similar religious beliefs, because they’ve been participating in regional religious festivals, but that’s about all they share in common. People have to get used to living together, and it’s tough to say how this shakes out because we don’t have writing yet.

        -By the time writing appears, we’re in the copper age, and it’s no surprise that the copper age is dominated by empires. A society with metal tools has massive advantages over one that has only stone tools, so it’s likely that the first metalworking cultures simply conquered their non-metalworking neighbors. It’s tough to say. Empires also allow one group to monopolize resources, so you see even larger, more complex empires in the Bronze Age, which require access not just to one metal – copper – but also to tin, since you have to mix the two together.

        -Throughout the period of empires, which extends into the classical world and the early Christian period, most of what we would call “foreign policy” is driven by access to resources. I didn’t talk about this much on the show, but during the episodes on the fall of Rome, I did talk about how when the Romans lost access to their Dacian gold and silver mines, they had to debase their currency, and it accelerated the decline of their empire. The stories of Rome and other ancient and classical empires reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the imperial system. An individual or tribe is able to gain great power over others, but there is no coherent group ethos. Society is held together by some combination of force and bribery, and when leaders lose access to wealth or power, they quickly lose control of the entire system. Look at how many Roman Emperors were killed by their own Praetorian Guard.

        -Many empires, like the Egyptians as well as the Romans, attempted to make their leaders into god-kings, to harness religion as a unifying force and manufacture an empire-wide in-group. This has varying degrees of success, with the Egyptian Pharaohs enjoying millennia of domination under their revered rulers, and the Romans barely taking their Emperors’ claims of godhood seriously. Ancient China is similar, although the god-king is replaced with a human Emperor who has received the “mandate of heaven.” West of China, later empires will level up from god-kings to monotheistic religion. This phenomenon reaches its climax in the Crusades, with the Christian and Muslim worlds fighting to a stalemate until inter-group infighting weakens both sides and they can’t fight anymore.

        -This transition from empire to a loose, wide-scale theocracy is mostly a failure. The group ethos of monotheistic religion is strong, but its in-group preference is weak because there are no restrictions on membership – at least not in Islam or Christianity. It’s no surprise that you get, for example, the greedy Venetian bankers trying to take advantage of the Byzantines, occupying Constantinople, and effectively cutting the Christian world in two between east and west.

        -In both Christianity and Islam, the god-kings and their successors become weak. In Islam, this happens almost as soon as the Ottomans take over Constantinople. Their empire soon softens, divided along national and linguistic lines, with each little region having its own special privileges and obligations, and the Ottoman Empire slowly weakens and falls apart. In the Christian world, the Pope never has quite the same universal authority as the Caliph, but what authority he does have is weakened first by the split between East and West, and later by the Protestant Reformation.

-I should note that there are overlapping sources of sovereignty in the European feudal system. You have Christianity on the one hand, but also local rulers whose claims to legitimacy are rooted in land ownership – sometimes dating back to the Roman Empire. Perhaps this is why the medieval system fails. It lacks coherence. If Lord Ethelred and Duke Louis are both appointed by God to rule their lands and they go to war over a border dispute, is God on both of their sides? It’s a question more than one Pope tries and fails to resolve.

-Local rulers dominate throughout the medieval era, but slowly, the small kingdoms of that time period give way to the larger, more centralized kingdoms of the Enlightenment Era. This transition benefits the few at the expense of the many. Rulers like the kings of France and Spain and the late Ottoman Sultans become opulent, and in their efforts to create unity, hand out gifts to local aristocrats and make them wealthy in turn. Soon, the people see little reason for in-group preference. Why give your life for a leader whose only ethos is personal enrichment? Today, we would say that by some time in the mid- to late-1700s, at least in Europe, the social compact is broken. The Chinese might say that the leaders have lost the mandate of heaven.

        -When that happens, revolution is the only logical outcome. I want to return to a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, which I read in Episode 65. He’s speaking to the Chamber of Deputies, the French legislative body, on January 29th 1848, only three weeks before the government falls to a popular revolution, and he’s warning the government that this is going to happen. And in the course of his speech, he compares the government to the Ancien Regime. He says:

        “Think, gentlemen, of the old monarchy: it was stronger than you are, stronger in its origin; it was able to lean more than you do upon ancient customs, ancient habits, ancient beliefs; it was stronger than you are, and yet it has fallen to dust. And why did it fall? Do you think it was by the particular mischance? Do you think it was by the act some man, by the deficit, the oath in the tennis court, Lafayette, Mirabeau? No, gentlemen; there was another reason: the class that was then the governing class had become, through its indifference, its selfishness, and its vices, incapable and unworthy of governing the country. That was the true reason.”

        -When the old leaders become unworthy to rule, they are overthrown, and in their place, by the end of the 1800s, we see a new social compact, based upon the concept of the nation. Political sovereignty now comes not from some strongman with the most troops or some god-king with the biggest cult, but from the people themselves – from the nation. The nation provides a happy medium between the clan or city-state and the religion or empire. It has a large enough in-group that a dynamic, innovative society is possible, but the group is still small enough that it can share a common ethos that keeps it grounded. It’s the best of both worlds.

Going back to the mid-season roundup episode I did oh so many moons ago, I talked about several versions of nationalism, and how these versions of nationalism can generate an in-group that’s more or less exclusive. You have, for example, ethno-nationalism, which is often tied to a particular region where a certain people are “the people of the land,” so to speak. This is very exclusive. You have civic nationalism, which is based around an acceptance of a certain set of norms, and this is very inclusive. Somewhere in-between, you have squishier things like language, religion, and culture. It can be any or all of these things. It can be anything that creates an in-group and provides an ethos for that group. So when I ask “What is nationalism?” the answer is the belief that legitimate political sovereignty is held only over members of a particular in-group with a shared ethos, and is derived from the consent of the people of that in-group.

        -In that same episode, I asked whether nationalism was a social construct, and I said “yes.” I stand by that, but to be clear, all bases of political authority are social constructs. The nation-state itself has its roots in the Treaty of Westphalia, but before Westphalia, there were city-states, kingdoms, empires, chiefdoms, and merchant republics. Europe and Japan both developed feudalism in response to a rapidly-decentralizing empire. All of these systems were developed by human beings in response to a particular environment and set of circumstances.

-If anything, I would argue that the only “natural” form of government is a tribal system based on family relationships. Those relationships are biological, not social, and existed before we humans had brains large enough to construct anything like a concept of legitimate political sovereignty. The fundamental unit of society isn’t the individual, because in the state of nature, a lone individual isn’t a free agent pursuing their own fulfillment. They’re dead. The fundamental unit of society is the tribe, and anything else we create is built on top of that.

-When we talk about the classical era, or the age of exploration, or the feudal era, each one has its own zeitgeist, its own way of talking about ideas like sovereignty and political legitimacy. And as that zeitgeist changes, so too do different types of society rise and fall. In the eyes of the people, Charlemagne received his authority from the Pope, and therefore from God. Even Napoleon arranged for a Papal coronation. If someone today were to declare himself Emperor of Europe and the current Pope were to somehow agree to this and crown him in a public ceremony, nobody would take it seriously. Why? Because Europe used to be super-religious and now it has become secularized. The zeitgeist has changed. The old sources of authority no longer hold weight with the people, and anyone who wants to claim sovereignty will need to find a new source of legitimacy.

-All of these political systems have risen based on a set of particular strengths and fallen due to internal flaws. Take the Age of Exploration, which began when the Spanish and Portuguese discovered the New World in their quest for the East Indian spice market. Europe at the time was relatively poor, and the way to become rich was to build an overseas empire where you could extract resources, build a functioning economy, and trade with the homeland. By the 20th century, those same empires have become almost impossible for manage for countries ravaged by two world wars, they’re oftentimes resource sinks rather than a source of wealth, and an anti-colonial zeitgeist makes it hard for leaders to justify holding on to even the more profitable colonies. However you weight these causes, conditions on the ground had forced the great empires to yield to a flaw in their own design: that never in history has a small imperial core governed a massive territory for more than a brief time period. Empires either become cosmopolitan, like Rome and China, or they fracture, like the Ottoman Empire and… also China.

If we accept that all sources of political sovereignty are social constructs and are therefore the work of flawed humans, then it follows that those constructs are themselves flawed. When subjected to the right set of conditions, they will collapse, and be replaced with something new. I would contend that the flaws in nationalism, as adopted by European civilization in the late 19th century, have already led to the collapse of that civilization as the people of the 19th century would have understood it. Let me explain.

        -First, what do I mean when I say that European civilization, and more broadly, Western civilization, has collapsed? I won’t hammer this point too hard, because I’ll be going into a lot of detail next season. But look around you. On the surface, it looks like we’ve come a long way since the late 1800s. We have smartphones, smart TVs, and AI assistants. We can import food from anywhere in the world, or travel across the Atlantic in an afternoon. We eradicated Smallpox. So far, so good. Now look deeper.

        -Every European country has a birth rate below replacement level. Monaco, a small and wealthy city-state on the French Riviera, is the only exception. The French total fertility rate sits at around 1.6 children per woman, lower than at any time since the end of World War I, when most of the country’s young men were dying in trenches and almost no-one was starting a family. Don’t get smug, Americans; the US fertility rate is only around 1.8, which is still well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Russia, which traditionally relies on manpower to overwhelm its enemies in wars, sits at 1.4. That probably won’t help Ukraine, which has a fertility rate of about one child per woman. Other Western countries show a similar trend. Brazil has a fertility rate of a little over 1.6. Argentina? Around 1.5. Most of Latin America is similar, with even Mexico’s relatively robust 1.9 children per women coming in below replacement level. To be fair, the fertility rate is falling in most industrialized countries, not just in the west. China and Japan both have fertility rates well below replacement, and South Korea’s 0.7 children per women is about to go from five-alarm fire to civilizational catastrophe.

        -This is true, but although Fertility rate may be the most important measure of human flourishing, there are others. Across the West, literacy rates are plummeting. In the US, 28% of adults are either totally illiterate or functionally illiterate, meaning that they can’t understand anything more complex than a simple bullet-point list. An additional 29% of adults are what we would call “barely literate,” meaning they can understand a long online article or a short story, as long as it doesn’t contain any unfamiliar vocabulary. If you can read a novel and then tell somebody what it was about, you’re more literate than 57% of Americans. Don’t get smug, international listeners. The US numbers are right in line with the international numbers in the study I’m using, which comes from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, and is conducted almost exclusively in Western countries. The people of the 18th and 19th centuries went to great lengths to educate people and create a literate population. Go back even further, and nearly everybody in Puritan New England was functionally literate, because it was considered your duty as a Christian to read and understand the Bible. Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Charles Dickens didn’t write for a handful of literary buffs. They wrote for popular audiences, and popular audiences ate up their work. Can you imagine what those people would have thought if you’d told them their descendants wouldn’t even be able to understand their popular culture because it was too complex? They’d think it was the end of the world.

        -We used to put our government offices in beautiful neoclassical buildings. Now we put them in hideous Bolshevik brutalist blocks. In a hundred years, our children’s entertainment has gone from Walt Disney to whatever slop Pixar is putting out this Christmas. Our music is so bad that some of the most popular tracks are made by AI. Our movies have the same heroes as 50 years ago, built on the same myths as 80 years ago. Basically, we have no mainstream culture that isn’t recycled. We imitate the creations of our ancestors, but because we do not understand what motivated our ancestors to begin with, we achieve nothing. Western society has collapsed because it has lost its ethos.

How does this relate to nationalism? Nationalism is a political philosophy, meaning it’s a system of beliefs about how people ought to be governed. It proceeds from the in-group’s ethos, not the other way around, which is a fancy way of saying that politics is downstream of culture. As I argued in this series, the godfather of nationalism was none other than Cardinal Richelieu, the French Chief Minister who helped centralize the state under King Louis XIII, and who was willing to do just about anything to advance the interests of the French people – up to and including siding with the Protestants in the Thirty Years’ War. In his political testament, Richelieu writes:

        “The public interest must be the only end of the prince and of his councilors, or at least both are obliged to take it so seriously that they put it above all others.

        “It is impossible to conceive of the good that a prince and those who serve him in his affairs can do if they follow this principle religiously, and one cannot imagine the evil that can happen in a state when the private interest is put above the public and regulates it.

        “True philosophy, Christian law, and politics teach this truth so clearly that the councilors of a king should keep reminding him of such a necessary principle. Nor can the prince be too severe in punishing any of his councilors who are miserable enough not to practice it.”

        -Now, Richelieu is an old-school monarchist, and he’s writing from the perspective of a king fulfilling his role as the head of state. But what he’s saying is that the king shouldn’t rule land out of pure self-interest like a feudal ruler. Instead, he should rule people and look out for their best interests. In Richelieu’s enlightened monarchy, the people might not be the source of the state’s sovereignty, but the state does exist to advance their interests. When nationalism comes into full bloom in the French Revolution, the nationalists are motivated explicitly by the principles of yet another political philosophy, enlightenment liberalism, where the people themselves are sovereign. And as I think history has demonstrated, enlightenment liberal principles are self-defeating.

        -This isn’t a knock on enlightenment liberalism. Well, it is, but the same criticism can be applied to any other political philosophy when you put it under a microscope, and that’s that when taken to their extreme and held up in the light of realpolitik, they can’t account for all variables in a world of flawed human beings. That’s impossible.

        -Cardinal Richelieu outlined the responsibility of the monarchy to care for its people. Instead of engaging in constant local disputes as they had under the old feudal order, nobles were to be subservient to the king and unite behind their shared French interests. By the time of Louis XVI, the French nobility had stopped behaving in a noble fashion, and were irresponsibly running up the national debt on the backs of working people, while Louis XVI and senior Church leaders did nothing. The ideal of monarchism was held up to the reality of human nature, and it turns out that a monarchy can thrive under a good king, and can weather a bad king, but it will totally fall apart under a weak king. The Ottoman Empire has a similar experience with weak emperors, but in slow motion. It hangs on into the early 20th century.

        -Enlightenment liberalism solves this problem by making the people themselves the sovereign. Who better to look out for the people’s best interests than the people themselves? When nationalism and liberalism both become dominant philosophies in the 1800s, this seems like a rhetorical question. And the reason for that is that liberalism and nationalism become dominant in a time and a place where people had shared moral boundaries, at least more so than in most times and places.

        -Human relationships rely on the enforcement of moral boundaries on people’s behavior. If there are no boundaries, no rational human can predict what their neighbor is going to do, or whether it’s going to be in the group’s best interest. Human relationships become impossible and disintegrate. Some moral boundaries are universal across all cultures. For example, I’m not aware of any culture where murder, meaning “the extrajudicial killing of a human being” is considered acceptable. Granted, the word “extrajudicial” can do a lot of heavy lifting, but you get my point. Other moral boundaries are not universal. For example, some in-groups don’t drink alcohol. Others have alcohol as a core part of their culture. These non-universal moral boundaries aren’t just part of social interactions. They flow from the in-group’s ethos, and in turn, they reinforce the boundary between the in-group and out-groups.

        -Enlightenment liberalism is rooted in the principle of individual liberty, and for that reason, it lacks any internal justification for any boundary that impedes the individual expression of that liberty. This makes it vulnerable to people who violate the boundaries that uphold the virtues necessary for a liberal society to function. For example, a liberal society depends on a high level of trust between its citizens, so something like “let’s all speak the same language” sounds like a good rule. But there is no justification in liberalism for that rule. The same goes for things like “don’t encourage young women to become OnlyFans models,” or “don’t fire thousands of your fellow citizens and offshore your entire production chain.” In an enlightenment liberal society, these things are deemed acceptable. Even if people don’t like them, they’re part of individual liberty.

        -A political philosophy doesn’t have to establish moral boundaries for a society. In a healthy society, those boundaries should flow naturally from the group’s ethos. But they have to come from somewhere. In the case of enlightenment liberalism, the society relied on old-school values that primarily came from religion. The Puritan New Englanders as well as American settlers south of the Mason-Dixon Line were fiercely religious, and while religious liberty was an important part of American tradition from the beginning, it was taken for granted that most citizens would have a certain shared set of values. This is true of the United States, but I would argue it’s equally true of any society founded on enlightenment liberal principles.

        -There’s a quote from the second American President, John Adams, that many of you may recognize the end of, but I want to read the whole thing because he makes the argument better than I can. In a letter written in 1798, near the end of the French Revolution, Adams says:

        “While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

        -De Tocqueville said the old European monarchies fell because their leaders had become unworthy to lead. What happens to an enlightenment liberal state when the people become unworthy to lead themselves? John Adams predicts disaster.

-In the 1800s, alongside the rise of nationalism and enlightenment liberalism, something else happens across the Western world. More people than ever stop practicing their religions. If we accept that liberalism itself has been coasting on old religious and tribal values, then the decline in religion – the so-called “death of God,” – should be concerning. Without broad agreement on moral principles, those old religious and tribal values have become not just ungrounded, but are seen by many as illiberal. And so instead of staying inside the old moral boundaries, the state has dismantled them.

        -Leaving the religious question aside, the decline in moral boundaries threatens liberal society itself, because like any dominant political theory, enlightenment liberalism must stem from the society’s ethos. It must constantly be reinforced, or, lacking any moral justification other than popular appeal, it’s going to be abandoned. A strong enough in-group bias might prevent that, but enlightenment liberalism doesn’t have that either, so the elimination of moral boundaries is inevitable.

        -Without shared moral boundaries, enlightenment liberalism has eroded social trust and made human relationships more difficult. Witness the decline in fertility and the general malaise around dating, particularly among people who grew up in the age of social media. Without strong human relationships, without an ethos and implicit boundaries, there is no in-group. Without an in-group to uphold its values, enlightenment liberalism itself inevitably collapses. I hate to defend Robespierre, but I think he recognized this when he tried to establish his Republic of Virtue, complete with a secular religion that called back to society’s classical roots. Unfortunately, the only way he could think of to make society more virtuous was to guillotine anyone who wasn’t up to his standards, and you ended up with the Reign of Terror.

What I’ve just described isn’t some dystopian fantasy. It’s a description of what happens to the West in the 20th century. But the collapse of one political philosophy doesn’t mean the collapse of all political philosophies. We still have countries. We still have governments. We still have various groups vying for power within institutions that still very much exist. Much like at previous inflection points in human history, as with the fall of the Roman Empire or the rise of the Ottomans, the social contract is being renegotiated. This renegotiation begins in the early 20th century, but in the last few episodes, we started to see its early rumblings in the formation of the First International and the events of the Paris Commune.

        -Enlightenment liberalism is dead. Long live… what, exactly? The 20th century will be dominated by two ideologies, the first of which I would call postliberal nationalism. So secular monarchists, fascists, national socialists, the Japanese Empire, the modern Chinese Communist Party, and so on. These ideologies seek to maintain a nation-state with a nationalist political philosophy, but to replace the other half of that pair, the twin philosophy of enlightenment liberalism, with a philosophy that says we should vest sovereignty in a single person or party. Did the Italian people keep screwing up their economy and making everybody poor? Yes? No problem! Mussolini will run the country in their name, and he’ll make the trains run on time. Is the elected government about to turn Spain into a Communist country? No problem! General Franco is here to fight for traditional Spanish values. The strong leader will establish firm boundaries that will keep everyone in the in-group pulling in the same direction. Most forms of postliberal nationalism are authoritarian, but I have to stress that not every authoritarian ideology is nationalist. A nationalist regime is run, at least in principle, for the best interests of its people. For example, North Korea, despite the regime’s nationalist bluster, is not a nationalist regime. It’s a pure dictatorship operated for the benefit of the Kim family and their allies.

        -The second ideology that dominates the 20th century is what I would call globalism. This includes not just global communists, but also people like the dominant American political coalition, the so-called “bipartisan consensus” between neoconservatives and neoliberals who argue for the creation of a global pax Americana, as well as advocates for a global Islamic caliphate, and the neo-feudalist technocrats like those who dominate in most European countries. These ideologies seek to replace the national in-group with an even larger in-group, sometimes even encompassing all of humanity. Don’t want to return to the old days of rampant international piracy? No problem! The US Navy is here to ensure that the rules-based international order remains undisturbed. Is the Tsar sending millions of your friends and loved ones to die in an industrialized war while he and his friends live in the kind of luxury that would embarrass an Egyptian pharaoh? No problem! Comrade Lenin and the Communist International have got your back. Globalist ideologies can be openly authoritarian, but are more likely than nationalist ideologies to adopt the language of enlightenment liberalism. The distinction, again, is not the mechanism of government, nor does it matter whether the ideology is left-wing or right-wing. What matters is that the ideology advocates putting some global system or universal principles above the interests of the nation. The left-wing Soviets wanted to spread Communism throughout the world, and most types of libertarian want to turn the entire world into a free trade zone. Both are globalists.

        -Postliberal nationalism seeks to maintain the old in-groups, but renegotiate the social contract. Globalism seeks to eradicate the concept of in-groups, which I think is doomed to fail because in-group preference is built into humanity. In the absence of any other in-group, we’ll simply revert to tribalism. Regardless, people crave a coherent governing philosophy, even if they don’t know it. Eventually, most will fall into one camp or another – postliberal nationalist or globalist – based on a variety of preferences. Even if only a small number of people recognize this, one or another in-group will gain control of parts of the liberal order’s residual power structure, and will use that structure to control the new order. Because this only depends on a small group of people recognizing what time it is and taking the opportunity, the rise of a postliberal world order is inevitable. It only remains to be seen what form it will take: postliberal nationalist, or globalist.

I don’t claim to have the answer to this question, because as I see it, this conflict is still going on, and in some ways, is only getting started. But the conflict starts at the dawn of the 20th Century, and that’s where I’ll be beginning Season Two of Relevant History. Season Two will tell the story of the World War Era, which for my purposes will run roughly from the death of Otto von Bismarck to the end of the Korean War. This will be the story of the apocalypse of the old world, but it’s also something else. The World War Era serves the same role in our modern society as the Greek Age of Heroes. It’s a set of founding myths for postliberal civilization, and like all myths, it needs to be studied. That’s why it’s relevant, and that’s why I hope you stick around for the next season.

        -Speaking of next season, I want to talk about what to expect next. Before I can record anything, I have to do a lot of research and basic outlining. I expect Season Two to be about as long as Season One – not in the total number of episodes, but in overall length. But unlike Season One, Season Two will be one continuous story. Some of the people who are alive at the beginning will still be alive at the end. Which means that before I record Episode One, I need to know at least the most important things that will happen in the last episode. Besides the World Wars, I have to read a lot about China and Chinese history, the labor movement, political Zionism, Korean history, the history of performance-enhancing drugs, and hermetic mysticism, among other topics. This is going to take time.

        -I’m not talking about taking years off or anything like that. It’s not like I have to read all the way through all of my sources before I start working. But I at least have to do a significant amount of reading, so here’s my plan. I’m going to spend the next couple of months reading and outlining the next season. After New Years, I plan to take a week off from work, which will be a good time to start writing the first episode of Season Two. My most recent episodes have tended to be pretty long, so assuming that pattern continues, I would anticipate the release of the first episode of Season Two sometime around early- to mid-March of 2026.

        -In the mean time, I intend to do two things. First, I’ll be doing a bonus episode on the history of anarchism. This will be my first interview, and I’ve always said I don’t do interviews, because that skill isn’t in my wheelhouse. In this case, the person is a personal friend, so it will be more of a conversation with someone I’m used to talking with. We’ll see how this goes, but at least I won’t be radio-silent, and hopefully it’s something you enjoy. The other thing I plan on doing is a new video for my patrons. I have a couple of ideas I’m kicking around in my head, both of which are related to Revolutionary War events that happened within easy driving distance of my house. I enjoyed doing last year’s episodes on Fort Adams, and it’ll be fun to do another episode where I can go to a location and do some real first-hand information-gathering and take some original photos. So patrons can expect something along those lines, and everybody gets an interview about anarchism, and then Season Two will most likely begin sometime in March.

        -Finally, a big thanks to all my patrons – both past and present. Mom, Jene McCall, Tim Hebel, Lars Nordstroem, Jason Kohn, Elizabeth Stanfeld, Nirav Mahajan, Andrew Daley, Ian, William Mathis, Holger Goeken, Kazik Surala, Andrew Langford, Boris K., Ross Nolan, Jean-Francois Savard, Anthony Metrulas, JHF, Philipp Ammon, John Smith, Alex Herron, Tal Kotlovker, Devin Hreha, Benjamin Hamel, John Edmundson, Heiliger Sturm, sagi frish, Neon D Luffy, Larry Zimmerman, Joshua Simpson, Pat, John, TonyNomad55, Duke, ryuhagokuu, Sanjay Saluja, Matt Snodgrass, Joan S., Natan Garstea, Dave Ehrenberg, Girl Friday, Christopher Turner, Jason Lanter, Joseph Wilson, Zazu Benben, Ruthie, Canaan McKiernan, and Marshall Yuan. You guys keep this show going. Thank you so much! And sorry if I mispronounced anyone’s name. Have a great Christmas, everybody, and if you live in North America, have a happy Thanksgiving too. I look forward to being back with that interview, and I can’t wait for next season. Thanks for listening!

THIS TRANSCRIPT IS LINKED FROM: https://www.DanTolerPodcast.com/