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What aspects of pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon culture do you find particularly impressive or admirable? They strike me as no better or more civilized than any of the other mystery-meat Germanic tribes who kicked around the ruins of post-Roman Europe for a few hundred years before they figured out how to do Civilization again. The Normans were at least a more refined and literary people given their great level of integration with the continent.
And the Lombards and Ostrogoths didn’t? I mean, what are we talking about here? The armies of illiterate savages who sacked Rome were actually a civilizing force, but the pirate captains and their crew who harried the Caribbean were anti-civilization? What is the difference between these classes of people, other than the boats?
King Alfred passed a law for universal (free male) literacy in about 800: https://cpercy.artsci.utoronto.ca/courses/1001Guthrie.htm and Old English was the second vulgar (of the common people) European language used in widespread writing after the fall of Rome (the first was Old Irish).
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The fundamental disconnect is that you don't see what Nietzsche interprets as a continuity between the ancient barbarian conquerors and noble classes of civilization. You play the game of "oh I love the United States but I disavow the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Indians, sorry we were sooo barbaric for doing that!" Nietzsche related the future aristocracy with barbarian conquerors. The Pirates were not a "future aristocracy" they were a bitter underclass! The Romans, the Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons, they were Noble and the pirates were not Noble. Simple as.
The word "Aryan" denoted and was synonymous with "Noble", pointing towards an ethnic self-conception of these barbarian conquerors as Noble. The point being, the "barbarian conquerors" should be viewed as proto-Aristocrats, because they were across everything we regard as Civilization: the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Aryans, etc. They actually became the upper and ruling classes of the civilization you hold in high regard.
Not so much a civilizing force as a cleansing force of a civilization that decayed under dysgenic forces. And yes, those barbarians warlords did become the future aristocracy, particularly in Northern Italy.
The entire idea of a Pirate is as an inversion or ressentiment towards The Aristocract. The Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Greek, Roman, etc. is the aspirational aristocrat. Their genealogy actually composed the forces of civilization.
I absolutely do not say this, and in fact I have said the opposite numerous times on this very website. The society which conquered the Indians was at a significantly higher level of development than the tribes it subjugated. Thats the opposite of barbarism. More importantly though, it would be nonsensical for me to say such a thing anyway, because the Anglo-Saxons didn’t conquer the Indians. The English did! The Anglo-Saxons were a bunch of disunited, barely-literate savages. I note that you did not answer my question about which elements of their society you find impressive.
It took many intervening centuries of savagery before the English were anything like a real Civilization. The Wars of the Roses are every bit as pointlessly brutish and uncivilized as anything we see in war-torn Africa today. The “continuity” between the 6th-century dirt-farming tribespeople whom we call “the Anglo-Saxons” and the British who created the first globe-spanning Empire is so tenuous as to be entirely a matter of academic debate. Duke Wellington is as far away from the Anglo-Saxons as the Anglo-Saxons were from the early Iron Age.
Yeah, certainly there was an ethnogenesis resulting from the subsumption of and conflict with other barbarian tribes, especially the Vikings, etc... and that's kind of the point. You have a genetic substrate- those barbarians you hate. You have eugenic pressures due to war and disease and Medieval Law- itself undoubtedly influenced by Germanic ancestral legacy... It's all part of the formula. Why are you so adamant about disavowing the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings when you treasure the legacy they created- the civilization bearers and colonizers that created global empire? The point being what you identify as Civilization and Aristocracy is directly descended from these tribal warlords and these conquests. Unless you subscribe to Jared Diamond's hypothesis or otherwise HBD denial, that the British Empire has nothing to do with the genetic ancestry of the British and this all just sprung from the ground due to geographical features of the English continent.
Right, so obviously the whole point of eugenics is that it can substantially improve the genetic qualities of a people. And certainly some populations seem to have a higher baseline genetic potential or floor than others. However, that doesn’t mean that any such population is even close to fulfilling its potential at any given time. We can confidently infer that some percentage of the Anglo-Saxon population possessed heritable traits that could later be selected for. However, it’s far from clear to me that the actual culture of the Anglo-Saxons selected positively for those qualities in any meaningful way.
Why this matters so much to me is its direct relevance to the question: “How can we identify which population groups today contain significant untapped genetic potential?” And if we take seriously the proposal that we should try to pinpoint the groups that are the most thumotic - the most capable of coordinated violence, the most fanatically warlike and zealous, the most reproductively fertile - we get… the Houthis? The Taliban and the guys from ISIS? Tren de Aragua? Whoever wins the newest African civil war?
If that’s true… if we need to have our civilization razed to the ground by Venezuelan cartels and goat-fucking Central Asian mountain people in order to allow some civilization 1,000 years in the future to flourish… then I’d much rather the supposedly decadent and past-its-prime society I currently live in to continue shambling on indefinitely.
So your hypothesis is that the Culture of the Anglo-Saxons wasn't very important towards selection? That is a very dubious proposition prima facie, especially given that they had a very profound caste system and distinct noble class. I've already pointed to important features in English Law as having Anglo-Saxon roots, with the entire concept of a proto-Parliament existing in Anglo-Saxon culture.
So you have the genetic substrate, a legal system, a caste system.... and you are saying Anglo-Saxon culture wasn't important in selection?
What other people would you say did not have selection effects due to their culture? Obviously the Houthis are downstream of their own culturally-influenced selection.
Honestly, I do think the Online Right goes overboard on certain aesthetics, like trad girls in wheat fields and chariot riders and the like. But the notion that the selection of Anglo-Saxons was detached from their culture is just really silly.
What it comes down to is that the Anglo Saxons and Vikings are ancestral to the British people and multiple globe-spanning empires.
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