Disclosure: I’ve not read the book. The type of article below is not the type of article that would require one to read the book. I’ve read many reviews of the book. I want to comment on the very idea of the Bronze Age Mindset. In fact, if this book truly was accepted in society, people would not conform to the exacts of the book. They would not even read the book. After all, people in the Christian era did not read the Bible. They conformed to the overall ethos which the Bible delineated, with help from priests. In the same way, if Bronze Age Mindset took hold, people would follow the basic abstract idea of the Bronze Age Mindset, which might be imperfectly explained in the actual book.
So what is the Bronze Age Mindset, and why should we oppose it? First we have to understand what it is. It’s not clear what it might be; it’s been a few minutes since the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age is characterized by warrior cultures. A good word for these cultures is “brutalism.” These were brutal cultures. These were cultures that often times genocided enemies, had high rates of slavery, forced women into marriages (usually polygamous), forced enemy women to become concubines, etc. The justification of these practices always follow a basic fundamental logic of “Might Is Right” a-la Ragnar Redbeard: Might Is Right - Wikipedia
Under Might Is Right, polygamy is good because the sorts of people who can convince (or force) multiple women to marry them are better. Why are they better? Because they pulled it off, that’s why. In order to convince the world to allow them multiple wives, they had to overpower the will of those who disliked the idea. By being the greater power, they became Right. Similar logic goes for war. We must, according to the internal logic of Might Is Right, accept war, and furthermore, be content when people lose wars, even if that loss is catastrophic or genocidal. Why is catastrophic/genocidal war ok? Because the winner of the war is Right by-means-of being the Mightier one, and it is the duty of all moral people to support the Righteous people’s success and survival. Why are they Righteous? Because they dominated, that’s why.
I am led to believe that Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) likes this idea. At least - he is writing his name under it. But perhaps he does not know what he is writing his name under. He would not be the first person to write his name under something he does not understand. We do it every time we buy a house or car, or do our taxes, don’t we?
So BAP supports this idea - he has made the argument that the lack of acceptance of this idea has caused all sorts of self-inflicted misery in society, perhaps including homosexuality. It’s a large claim. There are many in this world who would dispute this claim; they would argue that the misery that some people feel comes from a variety of other causes. But if BAP is correct, it seems like the rejection of Bronze Age ideas is a grave error, indeed - a fatal mistake. How could humans have screwed this up? Why do so many of us reject the Bronze Age mindset? Who accepts it, and who rejects it, anyways? What is really going on in the world? Let’s please examine the counter to this Bronze Age Mindset (BAM) idea, so that we can come to some kind of closure as to why everybody did not follow BAP, all of this time.
Are BAM societies better than non-BAM societies? Perhaps there is a fast-and-dirty way to get a sketch of whether BAM works better than other moral systems. So which of the great civilizations that we know a lot about were non-BAM?
…All of them.
All of them since Egypt, at least.
Every great civilization was characterized by its being less brutal than its barbarian neighbors, which it typically conquered and tamed. Every great society is less-BAM than the others around it. As the world gets less-BAM, the great societies get even less BAM accordingly. This is not the only dimension of society, but it is a big deal that brutalism is never observed to defeat corporatism. Never. Not even once. The USA is one of the few known examples of a society that has become more BAM in recent decades, cutting medical and welfare benefits, increasing health insurance costs, and allowing the 1% to hoard wealth and be historically un-charitable. Have things been getting better? BAP should be jumping for joy. Why isn’t he?
In the Middle Eastern region where civilization started, there is one culture which we know greatly of that maintained a Bronze Age Mindset. That was ancient Israel. It’s mindset is ossified in the Hebrew Bible. Back in the time that was described in the Hebrew Bible, we see how that nation was widely hated and often conquered by empires that were far more humane and advanced. The nation of Israel, as described in the Bible, was typically small and weak, and had a tendency to shed its own people - entire “tribes” - over time. It ultimately was “destroyed” by Rome, although this claim is debatable, and became a wandering diaspora that defined life by striving for riches in less-BAM-ish societies than ancient Israel.
As far as we can see, the BAM is a losing game. It is not clear if it is fun at all to live in a BAM society. After all, we see a little-bit of BAM-ishness with fundamentalist Mormonism, where polygamy is legal, and the dream of the religion is to fill the world with its descendants and become Gods in future lives. In that religion, they have no choice but to shed thousands of young men, called the “Lost Boys,” because these men cannot find a wife. Their religious order is a very small subset of Mormonism. Mainstream Mormonism (LDS Church) has much more success.
Every sublime artistic work, every grand achievement, almost every great thinker, was from a non-BAM society, and was a non-BAM person. Who exactly are we modelling ourselves after, if not them? Which societies do we want to be?
It is outside of the intended scope of this article to explain why non-BAM societies work. The hope of mine is that this observation - that the Bronze Age Mindset ended when the Bronze Age ended - will inspire people to create theories of human wellbeing that predict that BAM is not good for human flourishing.
Now, just change gears for a minute. Let’s talk about Yarvin. Yarvin loves BAP. Why does he love BAP? This is mind-boggling. This is the man who named himself after Meng Ke 亞聖 !!! Has anybody read the Mencius? I have. It’s exactly as wikipedia describes:
“The Mencius expands on the Confucian claims about the necessary practices of a good ruler. This consists of ‘virtue politics’ (dé zhèng 德政), ‘benevolent politics’ (rén zhèng 仁政), or ‘politics that is sensitive to the suffering of others’ (bùrěn rén zhī zhèng 不忍人之政). These refer to the ideal modes of governance, where enacted policies extend benevolence. Such policies result in a fair material distribution and protection for marginalized members of society. Confucius and Mencius contend that a good ruler must gain the devotion of the people through the exertion of benevolence and goodness; Mencius asserts Confucian ethics as the basis for achieving an ideal state.”
And, from the wiki for Meng Ke himself:
Mencius distinguished between superior men who recognize and follow the virtues of righteousness and benevolence and inferior men who do not.
What does BAP think about benevolence? Does the BAM advocate for the winners to be gentle/genteel/gentlemen/benevolent, as does Confucianism? Clearly, not. That is not what the Bronze Age is about. The Bronze Age is about Might Is Right: the divine right of the winners to claim the spoils (realistically, money and women), and the righteousness of making sure that the losers (realistically, almost half of society) fail at life (realistically, not pass on genes).
Under the Bronze Age, the great men are people like King David or King Solomon of the Hebrew Bible, who had hundreds of wives and concubines. And if many men in society are channeling that Bronze Age Mindset, we can bet our bottom dollar that there will be a lot of little King Davids out there, trying to take all of the women and money, callous to the men who are left with none.
This is the opposite of Confucian benevolence, which stresses the need of rulers to provide nice and dignifying lives for their subjects. As we know, Confucianism was, and basically still is, the civilizational moral system of the modern Chinese and Korean civilization, which is well past the Bronze Age. Yarvin is a sinophile himself; his kids went to a Chinese language immersion school, because he wants for them to be prepared for the Chinese-dominated future.
So how in HELL does Yarvin support this? It is directly contrary to his own namesake, for crying out loud!
I believe that the likely reason is that his support of BAP is fake. He must force a great many difficult friendships to have a presence in the right-wing space, and this is one of them.
But we can not be blamed, if we question: perhaps Yarvin likes BAP because of their ethnoreligious background, and because at some level, they are bound to the ugliness of the BAM within their own religion.