Echoes Underground

How do we know that the fall of Rome in 479 AD was 1,546 years ago? Empires have risen and fallen since then, a dark age took place, historical records are fragmentary, not continuous, and they are often politically motivated or even fabricated. Do we really have any confidence that the Earth has gone round the Sun 1,546 times since Rome fell? Can we really trust the historical timeline?

There are some compelling arguments that there are a couple of hundred to even a thousand extra years in our timeline - years that didn’t actually exist. One version is that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II conspired to add 279 years to the Anno Domini dating system in order to place themselves in the year 1,000 AD and strengthen Otto’s claim to the throne.

The more interesting version, however, comes from Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian professor of mathematics who wrote History: Fiction or Science? He argues that the known physics of the moon orbiting the Earth disagrees with the historical timeline’s account of when solar eclipses happened (which imply a position of the moon at that moment in time). For example, the series of three eclipses that take place during the Sicilian Campaign according to Thucydides could only have happened nine centuries ago, not the 2,400 years ago the standard timeline places this event at. Physics and the historical record can only be reconciled if you accept that the historical timeline has hundreds of extra years added - either by accident and inaccuracy or via a grand papal conspiracy.

We go over Fomenko’s main arguments, and the obvious defences of the status quo - radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology, Occam’s Razor, or an analysis of who benefits geopolitically from the promulgation of this theory. But there’s enough uncertainty to leave a non-zero chance that perhaps there is something badly wrong with our understanding of the historical record. And even if it is rubbish, it’s an interesting idea to play with. Conspiracy theories, even at their worst, force us to examine the foundation stones our knowledge systems are built on, and it’s worth investing some time every now and then to check that they are indeed sound.

We have our first guest! Artem is a philosopher of corporate ethics with an academic background in economics, and he’s helping us explore what money is.

How do we even go about answering this question? Money is magic, it’s invisible, Marx spoke of the “alchemy of money”. We can trace the history of money, but to do that we already need a theory of what money is so that we can identify it in the historical record. A better approach is to think about the function of money - people when they cooperate face a coordination problem, and they require a technology to solve this.

The standard theory is that money arose from barter, which eventually got intermediated for convenience by an easily-transportable non-perishable good like gold or salt. This, however, does not explain a lot of what money does.

Take the American trade deficit - the world sends goods to America, and America sends dollars in return. Everyone wants some dollars in their pocket, not just to spend but to have, and they are happy to work hard to get them. So in effect, Americans can import stuff for free, just issuing bits of paper or numbers on a database to grateful foreigners in exchange.

Or take the Maria Theresa thaler, a silver coin issued by Austria-Hungary in the eighteenth century. Vienna used these coins to pay Ethiopia for its massive coffee imports, and around the Red Sea these coins became popular as they had a reliably high silver content and were difficult to forge. Long after Europe had moved onto the gold standard and they stopped being legal tender, and in the face of concerted efforts to replace them, these coins remained essential to trade between Persia, the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.

The credit theory of how money came can help explain these case studies. This has money as a form of IOU, solving the problem of intertemporal production (you will have a good to trade next week, but need something to eat this week), and an IOU from someone everyone trusts to be good for it is worth a lot more than an IOU from some random. Artem breaks new ground by giving an intuitive story based in an archipelago of fishing villages of how money as credit could have come about in a state of nature, and how it became abstracted into the form we experience today.

If you want to read more about this, we’ve put a reading list on our website. And in the name of honesty, we should confess that we were wrong on one thing - the Persians did have a coin, and it had a picture of a king on it.

Did life develop on Earth, or did it come from the stars? Is outer space actually teeming with life? One of our hosts spent the week down the Chandra Wickramasinge internet rabbithole and has some Opinions.

The idea of panspermia is that life is everywhere across the universe. More specifically, if abiogenesis did happen, it probably happened elsewhere, and there is life on Earth simply because life is widespread. Fermi’s Paradox makes this feel unlikely - if there’s so much life out there, why haven’t we seen it? Well, the leading exponents of panspermia argue that in fact we have, in fact the world is being hosed down by protein chains all the time, driven across the void by the solar winds. We don’t notice them because they’re the same as the protein chains that are on Earth already. Obviously.

More intense exponents - Sir Frank Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge - go further and argue that interstellar medium is not just filled with protein chains but is in fact riddled with bacteria and viruses. They’re everywhere, and the massive dust clouds we see in those beautiful false colour space telescope images are their desiccated corpses. Alarmingly, this seems to be backed up by spectrographic analysis (although we’re ill-placed to verify this), and high altitude weather balloons do get covered in bacteria. Now that SpaceX are getting Starship up and running and will be hitting Mars soon we might get some even stronger evidence about this soon - that will be the real test.

Why are scientists so against this? It’s nothing to do with the data, apparently - this is bias, an medieval Earth-centric prejudice. We used to believe that Earth was the centre of the universe, but then the Copernican Principle emerged and we now understand that from a cosmic point of view Earth is not particularly special. Nowhere is. Why can’t we apply this idea to life itself?

What’s gone wrong with the Church of England? We read a Spectator article by Marcus Walker about the process of becoming a bishop, which has become highly bureaucratic and secular - you are put on a management fast track and then hilariously have to apply for a Bishop job when it comes up.

And this is what the Church of England has become - the way it is run is basically nothing to do with Christianity. An imperialistic and expanding bureaucracy infected with secular notions of management seems to sit badly with… faith. There is a major philosophical conflict between this bureaucracy and the people who actually go to church, and that’s before you get into the Church’s politics.

There’s an additional tension in the Church of England between those who want to focus on the individual’s direct relationship with God and build it into their everyday life, and those who want to set aside an hour of their week in a beautiful space to refresh their souls in a curated manner and send them back out into the world to do their best.

Perhaps this latter conflict is built into what religion is - is religion a revolutionary force, or a conservative one? Is it unstable or stable, informal or formal? Should our spiritual energy be untamed, or channeled? Within the Church of England, this conflict is instantiated by its two most vigorous branches - Holy Trinity Brompton-led evangelicalism and beautiful, formal Anglo-Catholicism. Basically, should we focus on the Holy Spirit or on God the Father? Well, the Trinity provides an answer: God the Son, Jesus Christ, the force that resolves this conflict and transcends the two opposites. He’s both Dionysus and Apollo, female and male, subversion and maintenance, life and death. This is Christianity’s secret sauce.

So in fact we need both wings of the church - having just one will lead to its own species of error. What we don’t need is the bureaucracy, and in the conflict between Christ and the scribes/pharisees/Romans we can even see Him as an anti-bureaucratic force.

We can take this lesson out into the secular world. Politics and corporate life have become bureaucratised, and while this does in its own way solve the messy conflict between revolution and conservatism, it does so in a way that destroys the benefits of both.

We also wrestle with the nature of the soul, how blacksmithing works, and awkward pauses.

Why are so many rocks in the Arabian desert covered in ancient graffiti? And why is so much of this graffiti lists of ancestors? We coincidentally both read the same paper by Michael C.A. MacDonald, a complete legend, and it sparked an interesting chain of thought.

An oral society is not less sophisticated than a literate one. You lose a lot of value when you switch to literacy. In particular, you lose flexibility - in oral societies, poems for example change constantly with each retelling. New bits are added, the fat is cut, the themes are updated for the audience being addressed. The Iliad shows the power of what this process can achieve.

As a desert nomad, hospitality and cooperation between strangers is crucial. In a series of one shot prisoners’ dilemmas in a hostile and remote environment, how do you make this happen? You need to link your identity to a wider body, a clan. When you establish this link, your clan becomes accountable for your actions, and you for theirs. Furthermore, individuals far from home can establish how their two clans relate to each other by looking back up the chain and using this to establish a basis for cooperation.

Then you add the flexibility of an oral society, which enables cooperative fabrication - aha, that Diogenes in my family tree must be the same Diogenes that’s in yours. A link is established, the record updated. We can see genealogies shifting over time as the relationships between clans shifted, the record updated as a result of thousands of interactions and negotiations.

We propose that this is a proto distributed ledger, an ancestor of today’s blockchains. There is not a single source of truth, but instead thousands of nodes all holding part of the overall database. The power is in the overall consensus, the agreement between all the players in the system. In fact if you can get enough nodes to agree to change the record, they will outvote everyone else and the change will become the truth.

While a centralised database has enormous benefits to productivity, we lose flexibility, the ability to change and forget and collaboratively create an updated reality. This ability to be inconsistent, to develop and change, is part of our human advantage, and a permanent central record of everything we’ve done means we’ve lost something.

We look at a book called The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme, which tells the story of Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire - Octavian (“a cold and mature terrorist”) vs Mark Anthony (of Anthony and Cleopatra). It was written in 1939, a charged year for any discussion about dictatorship, and is now required reading for university classics courses. It also turns out to have high relevance to British politics.

Syme’s thesis is that every government is formed of individuals. The real decisions do not take place through official forums, they are made privately and informally through the interactions of these individuals. That is how power is actually exercised, how power is actually formulated, and anything else is a story told on top of this to give it respectability and prestige.

Doesn’t this feel contemporary? COVID-era decisions were not made by debate in cabinet, but rather by four guys in a WhatsApp group under a lot of personal pressure. Companies not lead by the org chart but actually run by small groups of people who get on.

Octavian in fact represented the interests of the populari, the populists - the soldiers, the dispossessed aristocrats, the urban plebians, the wealthy but alienated merchants. Against them were those who held property and existing political power and were therefore against fundamental change - the establishment, if you will, or the optimati as they called themselves.

Again, contemporary! Britain today is ruled by the optimati - those with a vested interest in the current bureaucracy and its proliferation, and those who own property and want it to retain its value, the two groups coordinating to maintain the status quo. In the background you have the populari, and on the rare occasions where this group in any country takes power it’s called a revolution.

Do we need a revolution?

We’ve both had reasonably legit shoulder injuries recently. How do we feel about it? What have we learnt?

Well firstly it’s inconvenient. It turns out you use your shoulder for a lot of things. No more jiu-jitsu for a bit.

Secondly, it hurts. While it’s positive to get the occasional recalibration of our pain scales, it is remarkable how debilitating pain can be. It is much better being uninjured than being injured, in a way you don’t appreciate day-to-day.

But perhaps most profoundly, it’s confronted us with our mortality. We go through life with our minds filled with the mundane and abstract, careers and salaries and emails and politics. But sometimes something real, an injury or death, intrudes on it and for a time puts everything in perspective. Perhaps it’s no bad thing to get the occasional reminder of the fact we’re going to die, and to face up to it, if we’re going to live a good life. A memento mori.

So what have we changed? Fitness, for one. If we didn’t realise that our shoulders were important until we lost their use, what about everything else? Given that our bodies are going to fall apart eventually, are there steps we can take to keep our bodies working well for longer? And do these steps have positive moral externalities? Can you even have a powerful intellect without a powerful body? So one of our co-hosts has resolved to stare death in the face and get jacked (the other already is, can you guess which?).

Reading list: Baldwin in Brahman, The Wisdom of Mike Mentzer, Sun and Steel, The Iliad

Not content with one hour of arguing that Britain should double down on a powerful navy at the expense of all other military spending, we’re back for more - plus lamentations about not having joined the navy ourselves, examinations of our youthful decision making, tales of naval derring do from our family mythologies, and the slightly heretical suggestion that we’d perhaps be better off as the 51st state of the USA.

So what’s so great about a navy?

It’s a more strategic weapon. Large scale warfare boils down to trade, getting the materials you need to keep fighting and being able to support your allies. Disrupt this and you win, much more comprehensively and quickly than via other means, and this is what warships do well.

It’s a lot more humane. Air power ultimately comes down to bombing civilians, while naval power tends more towards starving your opponents of the materials they need to keep fighting. Less collateral damage, but also a shorter war - and a shorter war is a more humane war. And even more humane is a war that never happens. If you can present a credible threat that you can take down an enemy’s trade network they are much less likely to start a conflict in the first place.

It would allow us to become the insurgents. Yes the Somalis and Yemenis have been projecting force hundreds of miles into the ocean with their tiny boats and embarrassing much larger powers, but that’s because the West has chosen to do nothing about them. We absolutely could smash them if we had the political will. Remember, the rules are a bit different on the ocean - you can’t hide. Well, you can, but you need nuclear attack submarines to do so - with these as the new capital ships, it would actually be the Brits who would be taking advantage of asymmetric warfare.

Finally, a major national project like this would provide Britain with a shot in the arm, a narrative to bring us together and revive our animal spirits. Everyone would get excited, believe in it, make sacrifices for it, and want to get involved - perhaps even turning down the high salary graduate job for a career on the High Seas.

As an aside, the record will show that we recorded this before the 2024 US election and called it perfectly... unlike some other podcasters we could mention.

Get your four piece guitar band in a room, deliver a killer performance, capture it with expensive microphones and set the levels on your mixing desks and what comes out of the speakers will sound… terrible. Turns out that we need bearded men called either Butch or Andrew spending days in a room full of mysterious and expensive boxes to get things to sound like what you hear on the radio.

What are these men doing, and why? Perhaps their job is bridging the gap between reality and perception. When you’re in a room watching someone perform and having a great time, your brain is doing a lot of work to make it sound as great to you as it does. On the radio, the brain doesn’t have as much to go on - and so the engineer has to fill this gap.

This leads us down a path discussing the predictive processing performed by the brain. The brain is constantly running a model of the world around us, and most of the time our senses are merely providing confirmation that this model is correct - it’s only when exposed to something unexpected that we actually wake up and focus. The brain is less stressed when its model is correct, so if music is conforming to our internal models we feel better. Melody, harmony and rhythm all boil down to patterns, and some patterns are more in line with the patterns that our brain deals with a lot and so feel more satisfying. It’s the musician’s job, or the audio engineer’s job, to bring out those patterns, and express them as well as they can possibly be expressed. Or something like that.

We spend quite a lot of time talking about Steven Wilson, apologies in advance. Shout out also to our co-host’s band, Trees on Venus. The EP rinsed at length on the episode is here (plug).

One of our co-hosts has started growing lion’s mane mushrooms at home. Is this the early phases of a midlife crisis? After all it’s all the fun of a veggie patch, for those who live in London and don’t have gardens. You get to deal with reality, with nature herself, which is a refreshing change for those of us with email jobs. But it’s also a lot more than a veggie patch - you get to buy all sorts of interesting things on Amazon, read volumes of dissident literature, and then feel like Walter White in your own kitchen. (This is still sounding like a midlife crisis, isn’t it)

The British are very hesitant around mushrooms - we’re an example of a mycophobic culture. We’ll eat button mushrooms if they’re presented neatly, but if it’s yellow and growing out of a tree we are highly suspicious. But, as Eastern Europeans and Southern Africans alike can tell us, this means we miss out on the good stuff - oyster mushrooms, lion’s mane, shitake. Tasty, and extremely good for you and your brain. And you can just grow that home!

This British hesitancy is likely because mushrooms at some point were seen as divine. Look at their place in our culture - fairy rings, gnomes living in toadstools. All highly supernatural, and that’s before you even start thinking about psychedelics.

Anyway, our co-host talks us through the process of growing mushrooms, from spore to fruit, from petri dish to plate. We discuss sterility, senescence, emergence, the general strangeness of fungi, and the value of artisanal knowledge in an increasingly connected, specialised and fragile economy.