Echoes Underground

Why does everyone love the beach? We can think of no better explanation than us having evolved there. This theory is clearly ridiculous, but very hard to argue against - to our knowledge the scientific establishment has offered no strong rebuttal.

After all, it makes quite a lot of sense if you think about it. The beach is a great environment if you’re looking to escape the intense ape competition in the forest - lots of protein, and shellfish don’t even run away.

Our bodies seem to be well adapted to littoral life, too. Subcutaneous fat to keep us warm, large scooplike hands and slightly webbed fingers and toes for better swimming, large sinuses that make the head more buoyant, the mammalian diving reflex, no hair, the ability to hold our breath.

It also provides a narrative for some of our more difficult-to-explain developments. Breath control unlocked speaking. The protein, Omega-3 and iodine from seafood fed our larger brains. The support from the water while wading allowed us to unlock bipedalism.

We try some pushback. 1) Any theory that claims to explain everything is bound to be flawed. 2) This one in particular rests on a grossly simplistic, narrative-based understanding of evolutionary theory. We argue these points for most of the episode. Is the main argument against the Aquatic Ape hypothesis that it’s too good a hypothesis?

This is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We’re talking about games. We have racked up literally thousands of hours playing the Total War series, and countless Sundays spent staring suspiciously at each other over a gaming board. Why do we do this? Why do we enjoy it?

Games sometimes have a reputation of being antisocial, but that’s not true at all. In fact you have to develop pretty robust social skills to be locked in battle with someone (friend or stranger), humiliate them or be humiliated by them, and at the end not hate them or be hated by them. The goal, after all, is not to win - it’s to be invited back, to be able to play further games. The real game is infinite, not finite, so there is a subtle blend of competition and cooperation.

Of course playing Total War: Thrones of Britannia or Hearts of Iron IV on ones own is a bit less social, so what are you getting out of that? Well what is a game? A tightly controlled, limited simulation. Tightly bounded by rules, space and time, simulating an element of the world that we experience and have to contend with. It sections off a bit of reality, decides what’s important, sets a framework, and then the aim is to try and win. This gives you a safe space in which to hone skills that are useful - rational analysis, situational awareness, risk management, resource allocation, tactics. A dojo, if you will. “Drillers are killers”. But this is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

We must not forget the aesthetic aspect, though. If you play a game as if it’s a spreadsheet, it’s not much fun - we get quite enough of that in our day jobs. There’s got to be some “fluff” (narrative, vibe, aesthetic) to balance to “crunch” (rules, mechanics), else there’s no reason to play. But anyway, crunch without fluff isn’t how the world works. The reason humans respond so strongly to aesthetics is because aesthetics are an abstraction of the complex underlying mechanisms of the world - if something is beautiful, it’s because it has some adaptive value, however oblique. In the very best games, and in life itself, the fluff and the crunch are the same thing.

Board games mentioned:

• Twilight Struggle (reliving the Cold War one unfair defeat at a time)
• Spartacus (fighting and trading in ancient Rome… but toxic)
• Dominant Species (an evolutionary race for up to five players)
• A Victory Denied (ten hours if you’re quick, pushing chits around a map near Minsk as your choice of the Soviets or the Nazis either defending or attacking Moscow)
• Navegador (you’re rival Portuguese explorers, exploring the world and setting up trading posts)
• Scythe (vibe heavy conquest of nineteenth century Eastern Europe, plus mechs)
• Settlers of Catan (gateway drug)
• Bananagrams (Scrabble, but more stressful)
• Roger Penrose’s party game that explains how the physical laws of the universe came to be
• Warhammer (no introduction necessary)

Do you have the feeling that Christmas is just a LARP? Do you worry the perfect Christmas is always happening elsewhere? Do you find the pressure to have a good time overwhelming? Would you rather just be on your own?

Well you’re doing Christmas wrong, and should embrace the LARP for the good of everyone around you.

What we need to do is establish and maintain a ritual space that sits outside the mundane, and to achieve this we propose the following steps:

1. Go to church, either the night before or in the morning - it is no surprise that Christmas without Christ feels a bit weird and empty
2. Follow this with some healthy outdoor activity, working with your hands, getting muddy and uncomfortable - a feast if you’re not hungry is weird, and it’s great for male bonding and general communing with the seasons
3. If possible, have a critical mass of people present to keep the revelry going throughout the day - people peaking and crashing at different times, and on different points of the alcohol cycle, general chaos. Perhaps it’s even worth reaching out to your extended family…
4. Don’t overthink the lunch - a roast lunch is actually pretty simple to pull off, so focus on the basics and enjoy yourself, and even if you screw it up everyone’s drunk so won’t notice or, at worst, will find it funny. But also don’t suffer alone - people want to help with the cooking, and it’s actually another great social bonding tactic
5. Accept tradition, don’t fight it. Christmas needs rituals. In fact, it needs:
6. Leadership - someone has to stand up and say what everyone’s doing, what the rituals are, and then everyone else will slot in behind that, relax and have a great time
7. Confidence - don’t keep second guessing yourself or apologising. Do what you’re going to do, do it your own way, and do it with confidence.

Interestingly we hardly mention presents at all.

Selected Wikipedia references: Beer can chicken. Chibuku. Lady Day. The Rites of Passage.

Onto the third Discworld book, and we can see Terry Pratchett starting to hunt bigger game. This book is about magic and sex, as in biological sex, and really goes in on exploring a theme in a way that none of his later books do. It does this by looking at male magic vs female magic. Neither is seen as superior, but they are different.

What is female magic? “Magic out of the ground, not out of the sky.” Nursing and psychology. It’s therapeutic in nature, it puts the world back together, it keeps things on track and keeps things moving. It’s concerned with the mundane, with everyone’s journey through life. Healing, supporting, reconstituting, sympathetic - it’s not always clear that there’s any magic going on at all, but it is.

And male magic? More like maths and physics, the sort that creates nuclear weapons. Transgression. Crossing boundaries. Ideas. Power. Prestige. Legibly impressive and grand.

As Granny Weatherwax puts it: “books and stars and jommetry.”

The two come into conflict, and out of the conflict comes synthesis. The witches learn that brute force magic is useful sometimes. The wizards learn that it isn’t always the best option.

“The best book I have ever read for exploring the difference between the sexes” - Echoes Underground Podcast, December 2024

So our co-host has cast aside his smartphone, and has bought a £25 Nokia ripoff. No maps, no Whatsapp, no social media, no internet. It’s terrible. It’s transgressive. It’s the future.

In this episode, he defends his life choices. This isn’t about the hazards of social media, he claims - this is about the addictiveness of the physical device itself. Being bored is actually great. Daydreaming is great, your mind wandering is great, and this is not something that can happen if you compulsively reach for your phone when there’s nothing much going on. The phone anesthetises you, mutes your thoughts, it’s nice, hours can pass and it’s fine but nothing has changed, nothing has moved forward, and you realise later that you’ve lost two hours of your life.

Imagine being a child and not daydreaming. Not being bored and creating your own fun. Not struggling to create something that reflects your subjective experience. Not having time to reflect on your experiences and integrate them into your personality. Not using language to describe experiences to your friends and what they meant to you.

Imagine being an adult.

Controversial opinion of the day. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst way of running a state apart from everything else we’ve tried. One of our hosts rejects this, and says that actually we know of and have tried far better ways of steering the ship of state.

We talk of the original, some say ideal, democracy - Athens. Did Athens do better over the long term than its non-democratic neighbors? Probably, but the timescale is short. Did democracy lead to better decision making in the detail? No. Democrats killed Socrates. And then the Sicilian expedition, mentioned in Thucidides, shows the assembly of a radical democracy being persuaded to make a terrible geostrategic error by a demagogue whipping them into a frenzy.

What are we looking for when we’re choosing a system of government? Perhaps 1) high average quality of ruler, 2) stable transitions of power, 3) legitimacy, and 4) a method of selecting leaders that is consistent with the stories the nation tells itself.

And the latter is most important. While we can argue about how to steer and trim the ship of state, deciding where to sail it is most important, and here vibes and aesthetics start to matter more. Sacral kingship has undeniably better vibes and aesthetics than democracy. It reflects a desire for struggle, greatness, agency, the overcoming of obstacles, and this contrasts with the passivity, complaicency, stasis, security, and safety evoked by democracy.

ALL WE WANT, IS TO SERVE A GREAT KING, WITH MUCH HONOUR

We make our way chaotically through The Light Fantastic, the sequel to the Colour of Magic. We don’t concern ourselves too much with the plot, for what it is - a frenetic chase across the Discworld culminating in a special effects extravaganza in Ankh Morpork - and instead talk about Terry Pratchett’s philosophy.

Gender relations: are wizards to masculinity what witches are to femininity? Hierarchy, rituals, titles, institutions, ruthlessness, all these are present at Unseen University, but with a twinkle in their eye. Extreme competence worn very lightly, which is a masculine ideal of sorts. In fact is the librarian (an orangutan) peak masculinity? An ordered mind, bordering on autism, chilled but very strong and capable of extreme violence, motivated mostly by a desire for bananas.

The terror of the mob: Terry Pratchett really hates mobs. He’s pro the individual, he cares about the idea of the individual being sovereign and thinking for themselves. He hates groupthink, and a recurring motif in his work is that nothing is more horrifying than blank eyes. He’s aware how lucky we are to live in a society that does not have mobs, and aware that we need to always remain vigilant against them.

This and much more. Not bad for a writer of baroque fantasy parody.

We go through Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld book, the Colour of Magic, with a particular focus on the first six pages. A turtle swims through space to an unknown destination, a great city burns, and in the middle of it all the Discworld’s first tourist receives an inept guided tour from a failed wizard.

This is a science fiction book written in a fantasy world - the Discworld is entirely logical, it’s just logical about the wrong things. For Tolkein, magic was perfect, serious and could never be made fun of. For Pratchett, on the other hand, it’s inconvenient and annoying and doesn’t work properly and in this it’s like everything else in our lives. By making it mundane and poking fun at it, he’s making magic actually feel realistic - and as a result showing us how absurd our own world is.

On the subject of inept guided tours, we actually prepared for this episode in defiance of our normal approach. We had a plan, written out in a Google Doc, and it lasted almost exactly as long as Rincewind’s plans tend to. But it’s all for the best - we end up arguing that pulp fantasy is a truer descendent of Homer than the Great Literature of the last two centuries.

Terry Pratchett has had an enormous intellectual impact on both of us, and we discuss how a man from the eighties who wrote frenetic novels about wizards and dragons could have that effect.

We find one answer in a speech he gave about folklore. Pratchett’s stories are deeply grounded in the myths and legends of Olde England, and this allows them to draw on the wisdom of millennia to bring clarity and good sense to our present day concerns.

And then there’s fantasy. What used to be the primary form of literature (think of the Odyssey and King Arthur) became a bit embarrassing due to the Victorian fashion for naturalism, but we argue that fantasy allows us to play with ideas and see the everyday through fresh eyes. Plus it's more fun than Dickens.

This is an introduction, the first in an occasional series where we’ll go through each Discworld novel in turn to see what it can teach us about human life. And if you’re sceptical, or have been put off by mediocre television adaptations, give Terry Pratchett a go - you will find him sophisticated, deep, and above all human.

We have both invested thousands of hours into activities with no obvious utility. Music, sport, photography, travel, poetry, writing an entire unpublished novel… starting a podcast. Is this all just a hubristic waste of time, a shallow self-indulgence, or is there some value to these activities that goes beyond the fact that we enjoy them?

There is satisfaction in mastering a skill, there is value in expanding your comfort zone, and there’s a human drive towards capturing and communicating a subjective experience. But the ancients suggest that there is more going on here, that our hobbies could be essential to being able to live a good life.

Aristotle tells us that virtue lies between two vices - recklessness on one side, and cowardice on the other. To be virtuous is to conquer both of these, and to hold this middle course when dealing with difficult situations and the extremes of life. The challenge for modern man is that the classical virtues can only be forged through experience. You can’t learn them from a book, you have to live them, to actually face difficulties and extremes. But how can we do this when we work 9-6 writing emails in an artificially-lit office and then go home to watch Netflix? The answer, we argue, lies in our hobbies.

We also talk at some length about West African religiosity, and how if you want a feel for Classical religion it’s African animism you need to study or experience.