1. What place is there for brawn in the age of brains?
In the age of the programmer-as-priest, the fintech bro, the knowledge society, what use is there for those men and women who chase a life of sun and steel? The low hanging fruit is to denounce those who chase physical excellence as pursuing mere aesthetics, selfishly satisfying vanity. This is surely not the case!
The pace of change in the last 100-odd years has far outstripped the inbuilt human capacity to deal with change. But despite the strident calls for “upskilling” or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” there always remains a place for human muscle.1
Many minds far greater than the present author have concluded that the soaring rates of depression in people in the Modern West (recall that central to this newsletter’s worldview is the idea that we are all now living in the Modern West) correlate to the lack of the activities that have accompanied and engaged human beings from the originary scene to now.
In simpler terms, most of the things human beings have historically needed to do to stay alive and survive have been externalised or automated. So human beings, who have an innate neurofeedback loop to reward us for performing actions that have historically helped us survive, languish for lack of Actual, Tangible, and Personal mastery over our surroundings. Our lives have changed so radically over the past two centuries that we are critically lacking various activities that used to make us happy and provide meaning.
2. We have effectively become unanchored from the ancestral environment.
Your ancestors and their ancestors spent much of their time outdoors, on their feet, scanning near and far across the plains horizon or multiple layers of forest for food, opportunities, and threats. They lived in clans or tribes averaging 150 people and were heavily invested in the social life of their community. They slept together, hunted together, had tribal ceremonies and rituals together, ate together, and went to war together.
All of this was necessary.
All of this is necessary still.
And yet these conditions are sorely depleted if not completely absent in the artificial environment modern people find themselves in. And thus we see that humans have to search for facsimiles of these actions e.g.:
Running replaces tracking and moving;
Sports and video games replace war and personal competition;
Shows replace experience and friendship;
Social media replaces real-life conversation;
Fandom replaces tribal affiliation;
Hobbies replace mastery and meaning;
Politics & ideology replace conversation and religion.
Am I pooh-poohing book clubs or group knitting or joining a local rugby team? There’s something almost silly about many of these activities, and yet they seem to make us happy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying knitting, even if you’re making toy octopuses instead of sweaters. Nor does there seem to be anything wrong with enjoying a movie or a game. The problem comes when people get addicted to these activities, which may be increasingly likely as our ability to make fake activities – like hyper-realistic special effects in movies – improves.
This is not idle speculation either. Who after these last two years can deny that it is vital to understand the ancestral lifestyle, seeing as it provides solutions for problems that could only have arisen in Modern life?
Consider how many people report poor mental health or feelings of depression. It is astonishing how many cases of anxiety or depression can be resolved with more exercise, less screen exposure and more time outdoors in the sun, fixing the gut microbiome through eating an ancestral diet, and spending quality time with friends.
Or consider the rise in eating disorders. It appears that eating disorders are a Modern problem. There was some study not too long ago that showed that on the island of Fiji the rate of eating disorders went from 0 to something like 30% after the island was equipped with TV/Internet. Nowhere in the historical or anthropological record do you find instances of men/women starving themselves unless for a religious ritual, and even then it appears very seldom.
I think evolutionary adaptation has equipped us to obsess (for good or ill) about food. Traditionally it was hard to get food, so that obsession makes sense. But in the modern world, with food so easy to get, that obsession can head off in unhealthy and unprecedented directions. Who could ever have foreseen the rise of a society in which mukbang culture and anorexia exist side by side at the same time? Modern world has many novel stressors that have distorted or hijacked human drives that were otherwise well calibrated and healthy.2
Taken to its logical conclusion, we might find that we have become effectively unanchored from ‘ancestral’ humanity, and are forced to develop a brand new idea of what it means to be human.
3. Barbaric and Primitive are not synonymous.
We proceed under the assumption that the best way to thrive in the future is to emulate the life-ways of the past. To regain the strength and versatility of the primitive barbarian without lapsing into actual barbarism.
Early modern pirates were far more technologically advanced than medieval, “primitive” Han Chinese rice farmers. That being said, they were also far more cruel and violent. Civility is not exclusively a function of all technological advancement, although tech advancements often do lead to higher levels of “civil cooperation” or social domination.
I see a strong tendency not only on the so-called Right but across the West of attempting to vastly over simplify what the downward trajectory of industrial civilization will look like. Maybe it’s because people watch too much TV or films but most seem capable only to imagine either an apocalyptic/post-nuclear wasteland a la Mad Max, or some autistic Rousseauian “RETVRN TO NATVRE”. Am not negating the possibility of either, but I will say that both seem far less likely to me within the next hundred years than a slow and bumpy regression down the technology ladder to something the Earth can actually sustain for a long period of time. We will still have much knowledge and technical know-how. Modernity is a genie that, once let out of the bottle, has no intention of going back.
4. Contemporary strength and fitness culture is a reaction…
… to decades of increasingly sedentary lifestyles, automation of the workplace, rising obesity and falling testosterone levels. The cultural, political, economic and physical degradation and displacement of masculinity sends desperate men in search of totems, symbols and habits that imbue them with a sense of vigor and accomplishment.
The gym is one of the few remaining spaces where Modern men feel unconstrained. The weight room is where they can hammer their bodies into the shape of an ideal. Everywhere else, they are criticized and condemned for attempting to impose their will on anything, especially when it endangers the delicate wellbeing of the sensitive, the weak-willed and comfortable.
But it is not just men who have been captured by this preoccupation with fitness, with functional strength and cosmetic improvement. Modern society generates schizoid tendencies in its men and women, on one hand filling them with toxic and sickening industrial foods that fatten and distort the natural human form; and on the other hand drilling into them via advertising & media an obsession with leanness, longevity, youth and attractiveness.
This explains a glaring paradox: Much of the population sinks into sloth and gluttony, feasting on easily accessible frozen meals, fast food and high fructose corn syrup + seed oils, AT THE SAME TIME THAT others flit from diet to diet, swapping up painstakingly crafted routines, gyms and fitness ideologies in a desperate pursuit of strength, sex appeal and a feeling of vitality. These two tendencies interact in convoluted and unhealthy ways, with some viewing the attempt to get in shape as disempowering towards those who remain fat and unhappy.
In general, an industrial society in which the bulk of its population has no natural physical economic role will struggle to manage the health and beauty of its subjects, and will appear to support both the explosion of obesity as well the "health, strength & wellness” trend directed against it.
We will continue to see deranged efforts to recapture lost physical proportions and dismiss the idea of physical health and beauty as fascist. Snacking yourself to death AND meticulous, calorie-tracking bodybuilding routines both illustrate a social and physical environment seriously out of scale.
Recommended reading: Victor Davis Hanson’s insightful article, Brawn in the Age of Brains.
The Modern world is many things, and one of its chief characteristics is the bewildering variety of things that can make people anxious/nervous. Did Grog the hunter gatherer ever have to worry about whether he’d pass his exams or get a job? They didn’t have to deal with the stresses of living/working in huge groups and they married young, eliminating years of pointless dating/wondering if they’d ever meet someone suitable. Naturally, hunter gatherers have plenty of stresses of their own, but they seem more acute – either there is food, or there is not. Either there is danger, or there is not. Our stresses are mild but chronic… more things we just have to live with. I am not convinced we got the better end of the deal.
The essential issue comes down to tension between technological civilization and primal vigor. This was understood by the Hellenes, who contrasted the unrestrained barbarism of the Scythians with the effete subjection of the Persians. Of the two the Greeks considered the Scythians to be the better, but they themselves aimed to strike a balance between savagery and civilization, retaining the strengths of the former whilst accessing the benefits of the latter.
Our own society has gone too far down the path of civilization; the resulting biological deracination is the source of our physiological and spiritual ailments. We have forgotten that "mens sana in corpore sano". One trains one's body so that one's mind may be healthy; one trains one's mind so that one's body may be strong. Our aim should be athletes who think like philosophers, and scientists who look like Frazetta.