Modernity Viewed from the Other End

What the hell do we gnow what we gnow, and how?

The Contraptions Book club January chat discussion of Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz is now underway and will continue for the next week. The March pick is Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates.

We’re heading into the third month of the Contraptions book club, and I’m really glad we’re doing this. Without this structure, I probably wouldn’t be reading the set of books I have laid out, and certainly not with the larger program of collaboratively reconstructing early modernity in mind. I hope you guys are enjoying it too.

Here are some reflections on the February book, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, and a preview of the March pick, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.

Raiders, Rulers, and Traders

Raiders, Rulers, Traders definitely lived up to its good reviews, and all my expectations from the preview post a month ago. The book ended up seriously refactoring my understanding of all history in general, and Asian history in particular.

It was particularly illuminating to look at Indian history (which I thought I knew well) through an equine lens. The view is radically subversive, and up-ends even the conceptual integrity of the idea of India. Maybe we should think in terms of horsey and non-horsey South Asian cultural zones.

Here’s a lightly edited version of a note I sent to a mailing list of Indian friends from my college years in Mumbai. This is a very well-read group, most of whom are way nerdier and way more knowledgeable than me. All this was news to them too, which is saying a lot:

Been reading a lot about steppe nomad history lately and learned a fascinating bit of etymology. The word horde as in Golden Horde derives from the Turkic-Mongolian "ordo" which actually means something like "camp" or "headquarters" ... and I should have connected the dots immediately but I didn't and someone had to point it out, that the word "Urdu" also derives from the same root. But as (correctly) taught in Indian history texts, the connotations in India have stayed around "camp" as in "camp language." There's something fascinating about the English word ending up meaning "chaotic barbarian swarm" and the Indian word ending up meaning "language of refined poetry." Two conquered territories that had polar opposite linguistic reactions to the same loan word and conquest experience.

The book… offers a rather dramatic and mind-bending reframe of all Asian history as basically being about horse economics, with the steppe nomads being the main supporting actors. There's quite a large chunk devoted to Indian history, horse-oriented edition, and it's striking how different it looks from a horse economics point-of-view.

Random selection of factoids:

1. Urdu words siyasat (politics) and riyasat (government) both derive literally from "horsemanship." And "king's stirrup" was a metaphor for rule in Mughal times. Throughout Asia, the "ship of state" metaphor was actually the "horse of state" metaphor. Reins > steering/tiller.

2. From steppe-nomad pov, the Kushans are the most important "Indian" dynasty (arguably they should be considered an Afghan dynasty not just because of the geometry of their boundaries but because their empire ran on horse-trade economics). In general, Indian history is way more connected to the rest of Asian history than I thought, and the connection is 80% horse-related (20% buddhism-related?). A lot of what both Chinese and Indian rulers did was try to solve the balance of trade issues caused by the vast cost of importing horses. China doubled down on silk and ceramics, India on cotton textiles, in part to solve this problem. China paid with a lot of gold, but India being gold-poor, and gemstones not being as convenient, had to develop a mass commodity supply.

3. The silk road was really the horse road. Silk bolts were more a kind of currency than a trade item. Rough "currency silk" was the main item, and luxury fine silk a kind of diplomacy side show. The vast bulk of economic value transfer was in the form of horses, and largely within Asia (since both China and India imported vast numbers of horses, which for different ecology reasons don't breed well in either place). The European luxury goods trade was almost an epiphenomenon.

4. The Kumbh mela apparently began as a highly cosmopolitan and secular horse trading festival. The Pushkar festival is today more known for camels, but also was historically a horse trading festival. A lot of Central Asian politics was driven by competition to control the horse trade to India. The Mughals declined once they lost Afghanistan primarily because they couldn't control the horse economy.

5. The bulk of early Portuguese commerce in India was not shipping spices to Europe, but the seaborne horse trade from Arabia to the Deccan. Since the Mughals tried to cut off horse supply to the Deccan in their conquest campaign, the Deccan powers had to rely on seaborne imports from Arabia. The Portuguese even built special horse transports that outcompeted the Arabs because their ships could carry 150 horses at a time instead of 60 on the Arab dhows. And once they controlled the Arabian sea, they made sure all the horse trade moved through Goa.

6. Neither Rajputs, nor Marathas, were originally horse-based powers, but became horse-borne learning from the Central Asian conqueror types. Both groups bred locally adapted horse breeds, as did the Nayaks in the south. The Indian horse population got slowly Indianized through Mughal rule. Central Asian and Arab breeds were still the most valuable, but Indian breeds took over the volume market. Shivaji apparently got his start stealing and trading horses from the Mughals to other Maratha chiefs (this may be a bit exaggerated by the book)

7. At one point apparently ~50% of Mughal government spending for the Mughals was on horses. That's about the level the US govt spends on healthcare iirc.

8. This shouldn't be surprising, but it is: horse culture is much more central to Asia, and Asia to the evolution of horse culture, than Europe. Despite all the history of horse-borne knights and cavalry glory, it really is more defined by naval and infantry power. Horses are an A-plot in Asia (going back to Greece-vs.-Persia) and a B-plot in Europe.

Beyond Indian history, I think this horse-centric view of history has made my view of history a lot more “horizontal,” focused not on civilizational cores, but on cross-civilizational flows.

For example, the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman empires constituted a literally horizontal band across South and West Asia for a few centuries, and had a lot in common beyond just Islam, and Persian as an elite language. They were also the horse-borne “gunpowder empires” that developed several elements of early modernity together, in collaboration, on horseback.

In a way, they should be considered a single confederacy. Certainly, modern Turks seem to think so. Way back in grad school, I had some Turkish friends, one of whom matter-of-factly said something like “Oh yeah, we ruled India for several centuries.” It took me a minute to realize he was talking about the Mughal empire, and I didn’t feel like contesting the assertion because I couldn’t find a good frame to counter it.

Throughout that era, the royalty of the three empires kept up strong diplomatic and marital relationships, and often sought refuge with each other when they were on the wrong side of domestic courtly intrigues. This was not, as I’d thought, a result of them viewing themselves as part of a connected Muslim ummah. The connective tissue was not really Islam, but Central Asian horse culture. More Turkic-Mongolian than Arab (Mughal is the Indian word for Mongol). Outside of a brief conquest of Sind, and trade relations by sea, Arabs did not have much to do with the Islamization of South Asia. It was primarily a Central Asian project.

Further West, it is fascinating how little the horse mattered in Western Europe, despite being a prominent symbol of the ruling class. Europe was shaped more by infantry and boats (the “horses” of the “water steppes”). It wasn’t until the rise of Russia as a great power (via the steppe side of its origin story rather than the European side), and the beginning of the Great Game in Central Asia, that horses began to matter for Western Europe. And in the Americas (where the horse initially evolved but went extinct), horses barely mattered at all, arriving as a human-bred, genetically modern species, playing only a brief but iconic role in the settlement of the West. Though the Americas are ecologically very similar to the Eurasian steppes, the horse arrived too late to significantly shape its history. But it did shape the national narratives of the Americas (through the American cowboy, Mexican vaquero, Native American adoption, and the Argentine gaucho). Through these narratives, the horse plays a much bigger role in the idea of the Americas than in the actuality of it.

In Asia, the reverse is true: the horse was economically and politically central, but is barely acknowledged in the national narratives of modern Asian nations.

Finally, staying with the machinic tenor of our readings, I was looking for ways in which the nomad steppes served as part of a larger global machine in early modernity, and two analogies occurred to me.

1. The horse was something like a civilizational battery. Horse-power was literally a kind of bottled-up solar energy that helped supply the energy needs of all the civilizations around the periphery of the steppes. Solar power grew the steppe grasses, which the horses fed on. They multiplied so easily (“recharging” the battery), and required so few humans to manage, the nomad cultures (who were numerically dwarfed by the sedentary civilizations around them) could breed and export a large surplus. Much as energy-surplus regions export surplus electricity today.

2. The horse was also something like blockspace on a blockchain, in the sense that the main economy of the Silk Horse Road was horses themselves. Not the things they carried. Kinda like how the main economy organized by cryptocurrencies is blockspace.

Horses lost their importance not with the rise of small firearms like I’d thought, but with the rise of the automobile (for transportation) and air power (which rendered them militarily entirely ineffective).

What role did horses play in the creation of modernity? I suspect the biggest impact came via the installation of cosmopolitanism in world affairs.

We do not think of the modern Islamic band of political geography as particularly cosmopolitan or even culturally modern. Quite the opposite in fact, especially the one-time epicenter of raiding, ruling, and trading that is Afghanistan.

But through several critical centuries, the horsey areas of the world were the most cosmopolitan and culturally modern places on the planet, through which ideas, technologies, and linguistic influences flowed, and which also drove a vast amount of genetic mixing. Even after Islam became the dominant religious force in horse-land, earlier animist, Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian practices didn’t die out. In fact several of them persisted all the way to modernity. More than Islam, it was Russia and China (and later Britain) carving up horse-lands among themselves that mostly wiped out the naturally syncretic spiritual landscape of the steppes.

Curiously, the point about genetic mixing is what separates both human and horse cultures of the steppes from their sedentary counterparts. Steppe nomad tribes are so confusing in part because they freely mixed and interbred with each other across a vas range, and with the settled civilizations they periodically conquered. The word “Hun” for example, refers to at least three entirely different groups of steppe nomads separated by thousands of miles in space and centuries in time. For a philosopher, the word “Hun” is interesting to contrast with the word “Venus.” While the unified idea of “Venus” coalesced out of the separate ideas of the “evening star” and “morning star,” the unified idea of “Hun” fragmented into separate ideas in different corners of the steppes, with better historical knowledge.

This is not a special case. Steppe nomads were always smeared and entangled over larger swathes of spacetime than sedentary peoples are used to dealing with. This has persisted into modernity. People sharing the same ethnonym like “Turk” look vaguely Chinese at the Eastern end of the steppes, and vaguely European at the Western end, a fact that still endlessly confuses us. But perhaps it is us sedentary types who harbor confused and confusing identities.

Steppe nomads apparently believed in the same mongrel-supremacist approach when it came to horses. A robust culture of horse-gifting among the very mobile and wide-ranging tribes kept the genetic makeup of steppe horses robust and disease-resistant. By contrast, the sedentary civilizations, especially in the West, adopted tightly controlled pure-breeding approaches to horses, just as they did with people. Apparently, throughout the 19th century, the British tried to “improve” other horse populations by carefully breeding them with the (heavily inbred and culturally preferred) English thoroughbred, while keeping the pure-breed line stable with mighty efforts. The Russians tried something similar with certain prized Central Asian breeds. Both efforts failed in similar ways.

This idea of “horse racism” strikes me as very funny. From a sedentary point of view, the steppe nomads must have seemed barbaric in part because they had adopted cheerful and indiscriminate miscegenation as a civilizational philosophy, both for themselves and their horses. But from a steppe nomad point of view, the sedentary civilizational cores must have seemed uniquely hidebound and close-minded.

So perhaps most importantly, horse culture, especially in its late stages, shaped the modern mind. For a brief period after the Turko-Mongol conquests (12th-16th centuries), arguably, the nomad-dominated civilizational cores were much more cognitively modern than the sedentary cultures they displaced. Modern rational administration, bureaucracy, logistics, commerce, and other elements emerged in their domains. I think this is in part because late-stage horse culture was more technologically complex and demanding than medieval agriculture and animal husbandry.

Running densely populated societies based on horses, especially in regions that are not natural habitats for them, requires a complex urban culture, significant agricultural surpluses, complex metal-working, and so on. It wasn’t till the early industrial era that agriculture started getting more complex than horse-breeding. For the steppe nomads, trying to rule even Iran and Anatolia, let alone India or China, from horseback, must have felt a little bit like a military space program. It was a very artificial thing to do, and required a great deal of modernity development to pull off. And sometimes it didn’t work. The Seljuks, for instance, ended up in Anatolia in part because Mesopotamia was too inhospitable to horses. Once there, they transformed historically agricultural Anatolia into pasturage, and agriculture didn’t return till industrial modernity.

Reading this book right after reading about the equally precocious early modernity of Venice (the January read, City of Fortune) suggests some striking parallels. The horse-borne steppe nomads and the boat-borne water-steppe nomads solved many of the same problems, though not always in the same ways (the steppe nomads were way bloodier with their “solutions,” arguably counting genocide in their list of inventions). Both groups essentially had to establish technocratic, republican, knowledge-based societies.

Speaking of cognitive modernity, that’s a good segue point to our March pick.

Preview: Bruno as Hermetic Sage

Bringing our book club arc back from the Eurasian steppes to Italy, I picked Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno amd the Hermetic Tradition because I wanted a deep dive into the emergence of the early modern mind.

To situate this read in the larger picture of the emergence of modernity we’re trying to build up, just as Venice and the steppe nomads (particularly the Turkic-Mongol chapter) introduced new ways of organizing and governing societies on a fundamentally technocratic and cosmopolitan basis, leading to the rise of modern secular republicanism and its political descendants, other groups introduced new ways of thinking. Bruno was an exemplar of one such group.

Here, rather than looking at broad intellectual cultures, so to speak, I wanted to pick specific individual minds situated in particular narrow intellectual traditions. The two I’ve picked are Giordano Bruno, the subject of the March pick, and Ibn Khaldun, the subject of the April pick (if you feel like reading the two books side-by-side across two months go ahead, but I’m going to tackle them in series).

Both were precociously modern thinkers who are hard to understand outside the context of the early-modern intellectual traditions they were part of. So by exploring their lives from the perspective of how they experienced them, we will possibly understand something important about the birth of modernity. Think of these next two exercises as deep body-switching simulation exercises. Not what it would be like for you or me to be Giordano Bruno or Ibn Khaldun, but for them to be themselves.

Though Bruno himself belongs to the 16th century (1548-1600), the book is about locating him in the Hermetic tradition, which evolved from late antiquity through the medieval era. So the story has a center of temporal gravity that feels like it’s located a few centuries earlier, at some sort of geometric mean between its origins in the first and and second centuries, and its Renaissance revival in the 15th century. The revival was due to Marsilo Ficino, whom I’d never heard of till I started reading this book.

Ficino, who was patronized by Cosimo de Medici, is better known for translating the works of Plato. But he also translated the Hermetica, the core texts of the Hermetic tradition. In fact, this seems to have been more urgent work at the time, since he set aside the Plato project to hurriedly finish translating the Hermetica before Cosimo died. Hermeticism and neoplatonism evolved together in the Renaissance, in an uneasy relationship with mainstream European Christianity.

One indication of why Bruno is an interesting figure to study: I was under the impression that he lived before Leonardo Da Vinci, but in fact, he lived right after (Da Vinci was 1452-1519). So there’s something about Bruno’s life and work that feels older. If you’d asked me to guess before I checked, I’d have guessed he lived in the 12th century.

Now that I’m into the book, it’s clearer why it feels this way.

Da Vinci was a hands-on builder, artist, and tinkerer, and as such his work is highly legible to modern humans, without much need to delve into his home intellectual tradition. Da Vinci needs no translation to appreciate. The work speaks for itself as easily to modern minds as it must have to early modern minds, with obvious, context-independent significance. And as far as I know Da Vinci, unlike Bruno, was not much of a philosopher, theologian, or magician. He was also more inventor than scientist.

Bruno though, was a bridge figure between a pre-modern way of knowing, rooted in theology and magical thinking, and a modern way of knowing, rooted in empiricism, which began with Galileo (1564-1642). He arrived at his best-known heresy — that of an infinite universe with the stars being distant suns, perhaps with planets orbiting them — not through empirical observations, but through weirdly prescient overextensions of magical-theological thinking.

While Copernican astronomy influenced both Bruno and Galileo, Bruno arguably did much more interesting and consequential things with it from a psychological point of view. While Galileo’s placing of astronomical knowledge on empirical rather than spiritual-mathematical foundations was a profound methodological leap, Bruno’s reconceptualization of the universe, including parts that would not yield to empirical methods until centuries later, was a profound ontological leap.

The cognitive transition to modernity was arguably complete by the end of the 17th century, completed by a much later pair of thinkers, Spinoza (1632-1677) and Leibniz (1646-1717). I highly recommend The Courtier and the Heretic about this pair, though it’s outside the scope of our book club reading. But the process began with thinkers like Bruno.

After that transition, a growing number of educated minds in the West began to think in ways that would seem very familiar to us, making up concepts and theories, looking for ways to validate them empirically or mathematically, and working up from material reality as much as downwards from ideas, without privileging either systematically. Like us, the typical educated 18th century thinker would have separated religious and secular tendencies of thought as a matter of cognitive discipline and hygiene.

But this is not how people typically thought about the world until about the late 17th century, and even then it would not have been a common mode of thought. But by the 18th century, it would not just have been common, but global. I have some speculative theories of parallel and independent cognitive transformations in Asia that I’m poking at, but by the 18th century, it would all have gotten connected up, thanks in part to Islam serving as a sort of intellectual connective tissue.

Galileo may have laid the foundations of modern (ie empirical) science, and paved the way for modern engineering and industry, but it was thinkers like Bruno who laid the foundations for the modern mind. His contributions to psychology, particularly relating to memory (I highly recommend Kei Kreutler’s Artificial Memory substack on these matters) underline this understanding of his significance in the history of ideas.

What primarily interests me though, is what modernity looks like “from the other end” so to speak. To minds for whom modernity in our sense would have been far in the future, yet a condition they somehow managed to prefigure in their patterns of thought.

We might entertain a radical thought: Setting aside the associated empirical behaviors of observation and experimentation, the ways in which we think today are not natural or inevitable, or even uniquely well-suited to discovering truths about reality. They are merely our way, in our time. Ways that might seem just as strange and alien in the future as hermetic and neoplatonic ways seem to us. Ways that might appear to be nearing exhaustion when critically assessed in the future, like 16th century hermeticism might seem to us today.

Yet, we may, even with our aged, nearly exhausted ways of seeing, see things we are not supposed to see, via intuitive leaps our methods do not really equip us to make.

Perhaps studying the mind of Giordano Bruno will help us more easily spot similarly prescient thoughts in our own minds today; thoughts that ought to be unthinkable until 2700.

Let’s find out.