The City

A brief history of urbanism

Let's take a look at the history of the city, which contains many useful lessons for building a state. This post is inspired by the "rural vs urban" debate on twitter, though that debate itself is fruitless and stupid; this is a short and sloppy post compared to what it could be, and despite its length it is still the bare minimum necessary to convey the necessary context for the debate to even occur.

In very early times, the country was home and the city was the "vacation spot", rather than the other way around. I begin with the start of written history among Indo-European descended peoples, and can merely speculate when I gaze further back. The initial state of Indo-European society was one of semi-nomadic pastoralists. We know that they were not as nomadic as the Mongols, because the child languages of PIE share a common ancestor for words referring to defensive walls, fortresses, and enclosures. (whereas they did not have a word for "ship" and "ocean"; their ancestors did not have ships and oceans.) They had clan forts, which were also sacred sites, and ranged pretty far to graze their livestock. The Mycenaean city-states were also much like this, with chief strongholds that did not have a whole lot of "town" around them ruling over broad territories. Viking territories are perhaps the best-documented example of pre-urban Indo-European existence, though pre-Norman Ireland and Scotland follow similar patterns as does Roman-era Germany. In Saga-era Norway and Sweden, there is hardly any action that occurs in a town; men rarely visit cities, and almost never for non-economic reasons; they call upon each other at their homesteads. The power structure of those states can be visualized as a network of farm-fortresses ruled by freemen connected to each other by friendship, marriage, kinship, and sworn oaths.

The Greek Polis arose out of Iron Age chaos and anarchy as a religious site first and foremost. First was built an altar, and the purpose of these altars and sanctuaries that surrounded them was to provide for cooperation between feuding clans. All it takes is for two patriarchs of two different clans to swear an oath under the protection of a god that could be accepted as an ancestor by both, and others can be brought into this peace later. These clans were still semi-nomadic, or at the very least had their own power centers in clan strongholds in the country, but they would be required to travel to the sanctuary to participate in rites and festivals, allowing cooperation against external dangers, and for protecting trade into and out of their lands; not to be discounted or given undue importance. The settling of feuds and clan violence in this manner proved to be highly adaptive, and clan leaders began first maintaining dwellings in proximity to the sanctuary, and later moving into those dwellings permanently, leaving their country fortresses to be managed by their households as lesser attachments.

Everything that ever gets done is the result of capable and powerful men hanging out together and making plans. Everything. Male friendship is the fundamental element of human society, remains so today, and will always remain so. For the ancient Greeks, far more could get done if one clan leader, now an aristocrat in a city, lived in walking distance to all the other aristocrats and could drink and talk with them at will. In accordance with this, the ancestor-worship of old declined and the civic religion of mediate gods (between ancestors and the IE All-Father) came into prominence. Rome was intentionally founded as a model of the Greek polis, though its initial elite were not local clan warlords, but members of a piratical band of mercenaries that exploited the decentralization of the Iron Age. Founding a city was a religious act, and relied on sacred oaths and participation in religious ritual in order to maintain elite cooperation. This is why the crimes of Socrates were seen as so heinous, though the eventual death of real faith in the power of these rituals not long after the execution of Socrates left the Greek polis unable to maintain its coherence; it was swept away in the tides of great empires which employed the social technology of the God-King, a lesser technology for elite cooperation, but far more functional than the at-that-point degenerated Greek.

Rome was a city that ruled the world; it had practically no state structure beyond the city itself. Its provinces were either ruled by local suzerains kept in line by the threat of the legions, or by direct autocracy under the highest ranking military officer present, and often both at the same time. The sacral nature of the city was transferred onto the Emperor, and eventually came to be a vague religious end in of itself; "The glory of Rome" quite literally meant the city itself; the Imperium simply meant "rule", it was where Roman power could be projected. For exactly this reason the founding of Constantinople was a profound break; though performed for practical reasons the spiritual significance of the new city was instantly elevated to peerdom with Rome itself. It was never a mere fortress or convenient seat of government or bureaucracy that later attained coequal status; the mere founding of it was a sacred act that conferred the necessary gravity.

By this point, however, the city had completely lost its original meaning and its utility, and became an object of worship itself, in a primitive and degraded way. The promise of welfare swelled Rome's population to obscene proportions, to the extent that the conquests of the Goths reduced it to a twentieth of its original size, and this was not through slaughter. Its inhabitants simply left, or starved; yeast life withering up in the absence of a titanic stream of gibsmedat. It astounds me sometimes to think of the severe and brutal military emperors of late times and realize that not a one of them ever weighed the idea of putting most of Rome's population to the sword. Though Alaric of course was once a Roman general himself and knew well what he was up against.

This brings us to medieval times, the millennium between more or less 500 and 1500. Many towns and cities had been built by the Romans, and these remained centers of trade and, in the early Dark Ages, state power. They had convenient walls already built, and we see the early Gothic nobility making these towns their seats of power alongside remaining Roman dux, a military title that would later be "duke". The late Roman fortress, with its crenelated walls, has architectural continuity with the European castle. However, the extreme violence of the era required more than a castle-town for defense. When you are waiting for reinforcements from Rome, it is easy to hide in a castle while the barbarians despoil the farmlands around. When you are the only reinforcements, and there is no Rome, you have already lost when you retreat to the castle. So the earliest kings to command obedience from large swaths of land devised defense-in-depth. They would build castles at the border, and within the country, in addition to the main seat of power. Which meant that if Germany came to invade France, and just walked past all the castles to Paris, it was now surrounded by armies. Hard to defeat someone in a castle, and too dangerous to just go around. Encourages peace.

And then they staffed these castles with loyal men. And found that now that the loyal men had castles, they didn't really need to listen to the King anymore. Rooting them out of their castle would prove extremely costly, and made the King vulnerable to further defection; after all, laying siege to a castle means that anyone around with an army who wanted to betray the king suddenly put the King in the position of a foreign invader, trapped between army and castle. So rather than try to keep his soldiers "employees", he ennobled them. They now owned the land both in fact and in law. Thus the medieval balance of power between kings and nobility was established. The kings needed the nobles for defense, and the nobles also needed the kings to relieve them should they become besieged in their castles by foreign invaders.

On the contrary, towns were generally much more vulnerable to siege. They were often walled, to withstand short sieges and especially opportunistic raids, but a town could not stockpile the food it needed to feed everybody inside, and it had a lot more wall to defend against storm than a castle did. Towns were especially reliant on being relieved by other armies; political power moved from the city to the country, dotted by a nexus of castles which could project force and withstand assault. This was not inherently due to the spirit of the Germanic barbarian; as I have mentioned, the Goths generally moved into Roman-built towns and made their seats of power there. Rather, this was particularly a response to Viking activity, and this detachment from towns was seen already in the constantly-moving court of the German Emperors, which had no settled center of power but traveled among its vassals. When the nobility needed to visit each other to coordinate, they would personally visit each others castles, or meet many at a time at the royal court or at a tourney held in an open field.

This form of state, of having a distributed elite rather than a tightly coordinated one, was rather novel in history. We looked at the ancient Greek cities; the alternative was "oriental despotism", a form of absolutism in which everybody important was in the royal court at all times, within visiting distance of each other. In the western system, Christianity provided the means for such distributed cooperation. I am not claiming, by the way, that Christianity was entirely responsible for the greatness of Europe, but neither will I claim that it was completely incidental, and that it was "white pagans wearing crosses" that made Europe great. In this case, Christianity acted as a reputation system; a nobleman you did not know personally might be known by reputation as a good christian, a title that did not signify weakness but honor and justness. Christian ethics were useful in political terms because in aggregate they accurately predicted how trustworthy and cooperative another warrior aristocrat was likely to be. The religious element that bound this elite together in cooperation did not require in-person public attendance of sacrifices and so on as a signal of civic unity as it did in the Greek polis; we can refer to Alfred the Great's christianization as effective in promoting a unified state as opposed to the fractious and weak petty kingdoms of Saxon England that were at constant war with each other to no greater glory.

Anyway, what happened to the towns? With the political element removed from them, they reverted to being mere economic centers. It is more efficient to engage in trade and manufacture when you have a high supply of labor and customers nearby. This is all obvious stuff. Cities got very rich off of trade, to the extent that most ended up buying political autonomy from the lords to whom they paid tribute. This was possible because law in medieval times was more or less contract law, and resembled an "ancap paradise". Many rights that democracy considers unalienable or universal were able to be bought and sold on an individual level.

But the rich citizens of wealthy towns and cities were generally able to buy a number of accommodations from lords and kings that approximated self-rule as republics in the old sense, with classes of citizens and noncitizens, migrant labor from the countryside who ended up working for wages within the city. Such migrants were considered to be the lowliest of all men in medieval times. The proletariat of the medieval city had very few rights compared even to serfs and tenant farmers. (The evolution from serfdom to tenant farming is beyond the scope of this piece). And despite these cities being, in structure and government near-identical to the cities of Roman or even Greek times, they generally failed entirely to wield political power at scale. They were impotent as centers of power, and did not even have superior internal harmony, being riven by petty factional conflicts over trade and manufacturing monopolies and such in street warfare and tedious intrigue that has the most in common with gang or mafia drama.

There are a few exceptions, when cities such as Venice or Amsterdam could build merchant empires that made them resistant to siege, and could withstand protracted warfare in attempts to secure greater autonomy, but on the whole, cities were very flammable and war was bad for business. These actions were always actions of resistance; the city retained no ability to impose its military will on princes and kings. Even when kings took exorbitant loans from bankers in order to finance warfare, the general trend was that kings would assiduously pay down the interest while leaving the principal of the loan outstanding, often for centuries. In effect, this acted as a tax on the city that the banks had to more or less eat as a loss.

This general balance of power was upset with the development of firearms, which did not change the battlefield very much (indeed it made cavalry even more important for a time) but had profound effects on the castle. When you send knights to take a castle, now they have a castle, and you have to treat them as lords. When you have cannons, you send some soldiers to blow down a castle, and now those soldiers do not have a castle, so you can just pay them, give them a nice medal, and send them home. The rise of the star-fortress over the castle goes along with the consolidation of royal authority and "age of absolutism". With this the palace takes the place of the castle; if the enemy gets within shooting distance of where the King lives, you've already lost the war. And yet the city does not take any place of special significance. The palace is indifferent to the city; oftentimes it was located well outside the city proper, something that would be religiously unthinkable to the Greek. To cite Greek urbanism in defense of modern urbanism is ridiculously mendacious; there is no longer any shrine, any temenos, any sanctuary lending the agglomeration of buildings its essential sacred purpose.

Even today you have hilariously ignorant academics saying "civilization means cities" without a shred of understanding of how the substance behind the outward form has changed and what it was originally for. The city even by 1100 AD was a mere "economic zone", a place where merchants could easily talk to other merchants and artists to other artists. When the politics of the castle declines and the politics of fort-and-palace takes its place, the city is completely passed over as an entity in the eye of the king and the noble; it is not a consideration the way Rome is for Alaric or Athens was to Xerxes, it is merely a source of plunder or tax and conscript farm.

It is Democracy that raises the city to prime importance, and why much of the "Right" cannot get away from worshiping it. The mass movements of the 19th century, starting with the French Revolution, were movements of bureaucrats within absolutist apparati, and their instrument of revolution was the urban worker, the shiftless slave, neither a rooted plantlike peasant or a mobile beast-of-prey man. Again, in medieval times this was the lowest class of all, treated as scarcely human by the citizen of the city. It is his "camaraderie", the communal camaraderie of the bunkhouse, the brothel, and the artist's salon under the banner of the priestly bureaucrat, a learned commoner raised to a station of power within an absolutist mechanism of governance, that forms the basis of "democratic movements". The romantic nationalism of 19c is also like this; it is a "rootless ethnicity", a construction that dissolves local identity and caste as a form of cope for the atomized migrant urbanite.

(Many will argue against this conception of "nationalism"; the point is that yes, a German in 1300 also saw himself as a German, with the idea that Germans spoke similar languages and had similar blood, but "German" was one of many identity groups which would include his principality, his locality, the lord he served, the guild he was a member in, the church he attended, and the promises he owed to and was owed by others. All of these made real demands of him and had serious implications as to his place in the hierarchy. There was no use appealing to "German unity" when Saxony went to war with Prussia, but there was when the Emperor declared war on France, and so on. The German princes' complaint against Emperor Barbarossa, that he was neglecting his German Nation in favor of imperial adventures in Italy, is cited along other episodes and arguments in favor of the idea of pre-19th century nationalism, but within its historical context it displays that duty to those of similar birth, or natio, is one of many duties a man or state is obligated to; the character of leveling nationalism made it guilty of far worse imbalances in its destruction of existing structures of manful loyalty than what the German princes accused Barbarossa of.)

The American project was doomed from the start because of this; many who wanted a Republic were yearning for a network of aristocratic freemen similar to Norway during the viking era or Iceland shortly after, in which men could dispose of their own with near-absolute impunity and the state exists mostly to remediate disputes between these armed farmer-pirate-merchant-mercenary lords. Such states were indeed free and noble, and the considerable violence that does occur between freemen in this condition might be considered no less noble; coordination against external threat is often lacking, but the opportunity for an imperial Manifest Destiny drove the cooperation of "private interests" for mutual glory and profit, having no large or dangerous states nearby to contend with. Yet on the other hand, since at least the Unitarian capture of Harvard, many who wanted Democracy were desirous of imposing the above-mentioned camaraderie of the city on the countryside; not the Viking spirit of the freehold but the feminine gossip of the town, of shriveled women peeking at you through their windows and policing conformity, though in the US this bore a religious rather than a nationalist banner; the temperance, suffrage, and abolitionist movements all tentacles to dissolve private rights and impose priestly control.

These two contradictory spirits formed the core of American civil conflict, and the latter won the upper hand. Those who wanted Republic could simply leave to settle the frontier, or retreat into true privacy in the woods and hills, as the Cathedral marched on. The city ceased to be a mere economic zone and became a seat of theocratic power, where priests and bureaucrats could walk down the road to talk to each other, and where they were near to merchants and industrialists who they could shake down for taxes. "The right" did not abandon the cities; the Right never held the cities! The right-wing conception of "urbanism" does not involve people with power living in a city, and it arguably has not done so since Alaric burned Rome sixteen hundred years ago! Nor did the Cathedral defeat the Old Republic because of its control of cities; living in cities is simply a necessary feature of priestly-bureaucratic states! The city is not a magic totem that grants power when you hold it; real life is not a map strategy video game! Though the manufacture of the advanced technology necessary to win wars made control of cities crucial in the 19th century, nothing in the military vulnerability of cities changed; it was still possible for a ruler in the countryside to compel obedience from a city. The reason the Confederates lost is not because their rulers did not live in cities, but because their rulers did not build and own factories in those cities. Such a thing was considered beneath a plantation aristocrat, though it was not beneath the aristocratic lords of manorialism, who operated factories behind their castle walls during the Dark Ages and compelled their serfs to labor in them.

The city rose as an economic zone because manufacturing is naturally amenable to it, and high industry involved a great amount of manufacture; raw materials and labor both are more cheaply acquired there, there is a ready market at hand for the goods produced, and the presence of other manufacturers and merchants in the vicinity provides the in-person element necessary for deals to be concluded. It rises in political importance under democracy, as it is a natural vote bank and necessary site of elite coordination; fraud is as natural as anything in a democracy, nowhere more so than in the city.

In the 1960s, the Cathedral ethnically cleansed whites out of most of its American cities with the help of its ethnic grievance cohort. This led to the death of American manufacturing; the existing labor in the cities was too low quality, and the population of the suburbs too dispersed, to sustain industrial civilization. I can only interpret this act as malicious and autogenocidal envy on the part of our rulers; the sheer hatred of civilization, industry, and the productive. The offshoring of American jobs was not the result of slimy Jew CEOs trying to destroy the American worker; American domestic industry was already dead, killed by the evil and stupidity of the Civil Rights Act, and the offshoring was a last-ditch defensive measure for the companies in question.

Most of those corporations remain shackled to the city, despite doing no manufacture there. Why? Why does Pepsico not move its corporate offices to South Dakota, where it will pay relatively no taxes and where its employees can live like kings in the beautiful countryside rather than in tiny apartments? Because they have been captured by the communist state; the regulators still live in the city, and the corporation must keep its offices open there so that they can personally bribe and beg the bureaucrats via "consultants". This is not a matter of custom or institutional inertia; to the extent that manufacturing is done in America it is done on "campuses" as far away from cities as it is possible to get. When BMW opens a new plant in Arkansas or something like that, it does so far out of commuting distance from men named "Tyrone", and at a very great distance from regulators. The main office, of course, remains attached to the parasitic state apparatus.

The result is that the city today serves absolutely no purpose. Aside from ports, which are and will continue to be useful, main distribution networks also bypass the city to the greatest extent possible. If New York were to be nuked tomorrow, many lawyers, accountants, consultants, and government employees, along with several good men, would die, but nothing important would change; it might in fact be a net positive. The modern city is an entirely parasitic entity which sucks wealth from the productive in order to enrich both the parasites themselves and their holy brown pets. To "take back the city" politically would require wresting control of election fortification apparati from those who wield them: pithily, all the blacks in the city would have to be given instant changes of heart and start voting red as a 90% bloc. The inner city black does not vote; ballots are simply filled out in the names of all adults, living or dead, who at one time resided within the city limits and run through the tabulator. To restore the city to greatness would require the mass removal of all of its indigents, upon which time factories could be reopened there and quality human capital could return.

But for what purpose? The city is too militarily vulnerable; it is simply a human shield behind which rulers can hide. Without even passing moral judgement on the Greek model of concentrating the great and competent within a city (this is certainly not the case today) versus the Northern model of far-flung and territorial great men, I have given a long history of military necessity dictating the concentration of political power. Shortly put, if your ruling class can be wiped out by a single nuclear weapon, or even a handful of them, your state is ngmi. The future will belong to decentralized power; and it will also belong to decentralized manufacturing and energy. Having one big factory, or even a handful of them, that makes all of your planes, bombs, and missiles, is incredibly vulnerable. The efficiency cost of multiple small factories will become a military necessity, just as it was a military necessity in the Dark Ages that farmers needed to live close enough to the castle to flee into it, and that manufacturing was done within the walls of a fortress. Similarly, a state that can fight and win an advanced war will have a huge number of very small and easily concealable nuclear power plants making energy, and an enemy will not be able to tell from the air what is a factory and what is a random civilian home.

Finally we come around to certain considerations for New Lacedaemonia. Because we are not founding it until the GAE becomes too weak to militarily contest it, we will not immediately need to harden it against the full war capabilities theoretically available to an advanced civilization. But we may choose to "jump the gun", making the choice to colonize early and then beat off an assault from a GAE that possesses some significant modern war technics. This latter case would require such measures of hardening against aerial bombing, ensuring that the value of a missile is always greater than whatever it blows up. The property-owning elite of Lacedaemonia may have to be semi-mobile, almost clandestine, managing its property remotely on a "constant vacation" that includes frequent visits and meetings with other members of the conquering class, but the level of this is going to be proportional to the military capabilities of those that threaten us. It is also quite likely that our men will be able to live in palaces and recline on jaguar skins. But it will not need cities for nearly any purpose.