It’s once again time to check my bookmarks and make a monthly roundup of interesting items from the web.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I have many things to be thankful for. To show my gratitude toward my paid subscribers, I’ve added a free month to all your subscriptions.
For anyone else curious about the paywalled archives or upcoming subscriber-only content, I’m offering a Black Friday Sale with 40% off. Offer closes next week.
Speaking of the archives: What was I linking to last November? Topics include the friendship paradox, institutional decay, life-boosting drugs, the failed coup at Open AI, and the Lincoln County War.
Religion
Sociologist Rodney Stark’s Rise of Christianity was on my to-do list for a Books post, but Scott Alexander beat me to it.
Stark’s question is how an obscure provincial cult rapidly became the official religion of the empire. His answer includes things like differential Christian fertility (Pagan Romans, at least the elites, didn’t much value kids), differential survival during periods of plague (Christians gave each other palliative care), and the attractiveness of the new religion to female converts (the hand that rock the cradle and all that).
Alexander’s lengthy review is critical on several points. One is that many of Stark’s factors don’t apply to Christianity’s success outside of Rome — the Norse weren’t a low-fertility, plague-ridden urban civilization, but Jesus still supplanted the Aesir. But I think it’s entirely possible that what allows a belief to ascend within a civilization can be different from what allows it to radiate outward once it’s institutionalized. As Dan Carlin says, in the contest between Christianity and the Aesir, only one side was playing offense — Rome and Constantinople dispatched missionaries, Upsala did not.
On the extremely altruistic nature of early Christians and the appeal of their morality, Alexander writes:
Maybe it was just selection effects? The kindest 1% of Romans became Christian, whereas later ~100% of people in Western countries were Christian and you had to operate the software on normal neurotypes? But this would imply a very different story of early Christian conversion than Stark gives us!
Or maybe it was persecution effects? Either persecution bled off the least committed X% of Christians, leaving only the hard-core believers behind - or something about proving themselves to a hostile world brought out the best in them?
How come there isn’t a carefully-selected, persecuted group of people today who are morality-maxxing and doing much better than regular society?