An Introduce
Das ist der Grundrisse des Fara Suparare. What is this substack about? What is ethology? What is the Hajnal Line? What does ‘fara suparare’ mean? Why am I writing about this stuff?
In this initial poast I set out in five parts the guiding concepts, assumptions and motivations behind Fara Suparare: Journal of Balkanik Ethology.
What is this substack about?
Fara Suparare: Journal of Balkanik Ethology is a pseudoscientific, non peer-reviewed publication of a largely speculative character. It is concerned with noticing (nooooooooo not *THAT* kind of noticing! That would be fascist!). You will find but scant measures of science or hard data in it, to which the only rational reaction is:
Specifically and principally, Fara Suparare is a catalogue of my observations—as an obstinately unreconstructed and bigoted Anglo, resident long-term in the Balkans—of the behaviour of the Romanian people (Romania being, culturally if not geographically, a member of the great happy family of Balkan nations). Secondarily, it is a venue for my attempts to explain the behaviour I observe.
Here I must enter a caveat: my observations and explanations are necessarily the product of generalisations, which are in turn based on the range and limitations of my own experience. It is for readers, should there be any, to judge whether and how the limitations of my experience might affect the validity of the observations and generalisations I make. I welcome all critical commentary in this vein.
What is ethology?
Briefly defined, ethology consists in the scientific observation and explanation of animal behaviour. As applied to particular human populations, the name of this line of enquiry in the Greek word ethos becomes both vivid and problematic: it is the study of the distinctive character of particular human groups in contrast to others. Ethology is therefore extremely racist.
When all is said and done Romanians are human (if you prick them, do they not bleed?), and in humans behaviour is an element of culture. It is, in fact, culture in motion: the way the human body is poised and directed, the manipulation of technology, the attitude to and disposition of space and…other things.1 In this substack I want to show how Romanian culture differs in motion, and not merely as static matter, from that to which you (as, presumably, an Anglo by birth or acculturation) are accustomed.
My speculative explanations of the BALKANIK2 behaviour of the Romanians are generally founded on the following premises:
(1) Culture (of which social conduct, i.e. observable human behaviour, is a principal part) must come ultimately from somewhere.
(2) It seems likely that this somewhere is in some proportion genetic (i.e. innate but not immutable) in origin.
(3) Owing to historical factors, Romanians must be in some measure genetically distinct from Anglos.
(4) Thus, Romanian behaviour, where it differs from that to which I am accustomed, may well have a genetic component.
With the foregoing in mind, I address myself in this substack chiefly to the fourth of the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen’s ‘four questions’:
Evolutionary history – How does the behaviour compare with similar behaviour in related species, and how might it have begun through the process of phylogeny?
For my purposes, ‘related species’ means ‘Anglos’: people of pure English descent (if only on their non-Asian side) from an Anglo-founded country. The making of such distinctions between Romanians and Anglos is of course WRONG and DIVISIVE, because we are all EUROPEANS and are thus all the same and equal. We are all deserving of an equal place in the ETHNOSTATE.
But what are the historical factors through which might have arisen the (as I tentatively propose) genetic and consequent behavioural differences between Anglos and Romanians? To answer this question I will ask and answer another question on your behalf, to which you probably already know the answer because you are all too well acquainted with HBD (Human BioDiversity), which is sort of spiritually Gen X/Boomer and has been passe for at least 22 months now, since we have all transformed into 48 year-old vitalist spiritual Zoomers. Nonetheless, the question before us is…
What is the ‘Hajnal Line’?
In 1965 John Hajnal proposed that family systems in Europe before 1940 (in particular, at a fixed point in 1900) could be classified according to two broad criteria: age of first marriage and the proportion of people who got married in the first place. He adduced evidence that in Western Europe, behind a line extending from St Petersburg to Trieste, people typically married later. Moreover, a relatively large number of people, compared to those east of the line, did not marry at all.
Hajnal mapped his typology of marriage patterns onto the closely overlapping scheme of Frederic Le Play, who in the 19th century suggested that multi-generational and patrilocal (i.e. married women living with husband’s family) households were substantially more prevalent to the east than to the west of roughly the same line.
Wikipedia’s entry on the Hajnal Line is here.
The work of Le Play and Hajnal was expanded upon by Emmanuel Todd, who, like Le Play, was also interested in intra-European differences in family structure. From the combined work of these three, we get maps like this:
Evident from the map above is that, east of the Hajnal Line, the ‘community family’ of the exogamous sub-type predominates. However, Romania as delimited today (circled) is split in two: the westernmost third belongs to the ‘community family (exogamous)’ type; in the eastern two-thirds the ‘egalitarian nuclear family’ type prevails.3 In other words, this map makes Romania as a whole look less ‘communal/eastern’ than we might expect from the work of Hajnal etc. Indeed, western and eastern Europe in general are less sharply distinguished than we might (or might not) wish them to be. ‘Communal’ families, shown in red, are not absent from parts of the west, and ‘individualistic’ families—in yellow, blue and green—are not missing entire from parts of the east (i.e. in addition to eastern Romania almost all of Poland is shown as ‘non-communal’).
But we must beware the tyranny of exceptions! For there are three obvious patterns that do conform to a meaningful east-west European split. First, in England proper (i.e. excluding Cornwall and parts of the northwest) the ‘absolute nuclear family’ is dominant. Second, the ‘absolute nuclear family’ is not found anywhere east of Denmark. Third, to the west of the Hajnal Line non-communal family structures are vastly in the majority; only central Italy and parts of southern France are anomalous. The Hajnal Line is not a perfect fit with Todd’s family-structure typology, but it matches well enough to suggest a meaningful distinction.
The Anglos according to perfidious Celtoid Alan Macfarlane
Let us concentrate for a moment on England as an individualistic outlier. In the 1980s, the anthropologists Peter Laslett and Alan Macfarlane examined the historical roots of the distinction between English household formation, as far back as the late Middle Ages, and patterns evident in the rest of Europe, particularly (but not only) in the east. As Macfarlane says:
In the majority of what are often termed 'peasant' societies, the household is 'complex', that is to say, several married couples (parents and brothers) live together as 'extended' households, or at least act as, ‘extended' units, sharing a budget and work even if not sharing physical space. This means that the household size tends to be quite large and complex.
In England, however,
… since at least the sixteenth century, households were predominantly 'simple' or 'elementary' and very small. People lived with their young children, as they do today, and these children tended to leave home in their teens. It was considered extremely difficult, if not impossible for parents and married children to live together. Despite a slight expansion in the size and complexity of the household in the nineteenth century, there has really been no deep change in the [English] household during the last five hundred years.
This … stresses the individual. From very early on, a child is being trained to be an independent entity, for he or she will leave home and never return. The social unit will be broken up, and the individuals scattered to be swept here and there by 'market forces'.
Macfarlane argued that English commoners4 were made subject to market forces by the institution of Anglo-style primogeniture, which:
… basically puts the continuation of an economic unit above the needs of younger children, in other words makes economic ties more important than social ones. Or, to put it in other ways, an institution which sacrifices the short-term bonds of affection to one's children, to the long-term benefits of preventing an estate being split in pieces in each generation.
Although 'portions' may be, and were, left to other children, the effect of this institution was basically to tell younger children that they have no inalienable rights in their parents' property. Yet even this peculiarity was not the end of the matter. The English took the separation of the economic rights, property, and social rights, the blood line, even further, by making it possible to 'disinherit' the oldest child. In fact 'disinherit' is the wrong word, for there was no 'inheritance'-just a movement of property down a customary channel, to the oldest son, if no other arrangements were made.
What happened to these ‘disinherited’ young Anglos? Macfarlane says that many, before the industrial revolution at least, became servants or labourers:
From at least the fourteenth century, farm and domestic servants were widespread in England, up to a third or more households had servants. In 1380-1, it has been estimated that between fifty and seventy per cent of males in East Anglian villages, for instance, were employees designated as servants or labourers. This essential use of non-family labour continued throughout the centuries leading up into the industrial revolution. Indeed, it is tempting to call early modem England a 'servant mode of production'.
Strikingly, Macfarlane argues that:
Already, by the Anglo-Saxon period, the movement away from strong family blocks … had begun to occur.
Macfarlane believes, in other words, that individualism is more or less the primeval psychology of the Anglo, traceable soon after the irruption of the Ænglisc into history.
HBD Chick’s synthesis
In the early 2010s a blogger called HBD Chick (now apparently disappeared, probably into contented tradwife seclusion), embarked on an attempt to synthesise the findings of Hajnal, Macfarlane etc. with evolutionary psychology. Her innovation was in linking marriage patterns and household structure to intra-European differences as measured by constructs like average IQ, time preference and social trust/cooperation. Please take the time to look around her blog, which remains a valuable resource.
Of particular interest here is her suggestion that Macfarlane’s insights into the early inception of English individualism—manifest e.g. in simple household structure, inheritance law directed at estate integrity rather than the welfare of heirs and the consequent early release of children into the labour market—could explain well-attested differences5 between Anglo-descended peoples and easterners such as...I don’t know…let’s say for argument’s sake…Romanians.
For example, it is broadly acknowledged (though the data are not as good as one might wish) that Western Europeans have higher average IQs than Eastern Europeans. HBD Chick’s map, with Hajnal Line, shows as much:
DYMAs: the joint-second most intelligent people in Europe!
How did the pattern shown in the above map develop? HBD Chick’s answer, in summary, is that Medieval manorialism was native to and operated hardest and longest to the west of the Hajnal Line. Since manorialism was centred on the nuclear family, each generation’s offspring (among the commoners at any rate) were obliged to start their own nuclear households. This led to positive selection for genes for intelligence, as well as those for thrift, low time-preference (i.e. the capacity to delay gratification) and the ability to trust non-kin and build civic institutions outside the family.
However, as we have seen, there was variation in family structures within Western Europe. For instance, in ‘Stem’-type families—prevalent in the German lands, half of France, Ireland, the Scottish Gaeltacht and much of Scandinavia—offspring were at least sometimes assured an equal share of familial inheritance upon the death of their patriarch. In addition, by virtue of residence in the family home, one son (with his family) was guaranteed direct access to family resources during his father’s lifetime.
England, owing to its endemic ‘Absolute Nuclear Family’ structure, was a special case. Cast out of the ‘family’ home and denied access to its resources due to an ethos in which co-residence of parents and their children was considered distasteful, the offspring of the English commons were also subject to an inheritance custom that prioritised absolutely property rather than people (do Anglos even have families in any real sense?). Anglo children thus had to fend for themselves in the labour market until (and if ever) they came into their patrimony—a decision made entirely at the whim of their father.
Macfarlane’s Disinherited Young Medieval Anglos (DYMAs) therefore accrued a particular fitness dividend, compared to people in the less individualistic societies found almost everywhere else in Europe, from being more intelligent than their peers. This meant that genes associated with intelligence became particularly prevalent among the commoners of England.
But IQ is not everything. At least equally vital for DYMAs was the abovementioned suite of traits (thrift etc.) then under positive selection all over Western Europe. Again, because they were forced to depend solely on their own talents, DYMAs became especially marked by these traits.
Those DYMAs most generously endowed with both this trait package and relatively high intelligence were able to escape the labour market and go successfully into business for themselves. Their success in business increased further the fitness of the genes in question: successful DYMAs had more children who survived to bear children of their own. These children were more likely than people elsewhere in Europe to be intelligent and thrifty, to have low time-preference, to trust unrelated strangers and to cooperate with them to construct civic institutions.
In this way was initiated a gene-culture feedback loop in which individualistic Anglo institutions co-evolved with coldly rational, unfriendly, tight-arsed, autistic, horrible, individualistic Anglo genes. None of these conditions obtained east of the Hajnal Line.
Total Anglo World Supremacy!
From these processes of gene-culture co-evolution resulted a great freeing-up of individual talent. In the early modern period there was an efflorescence of Anglo inventiveness and practical innovation, followed by Anglo industrial capitalism and, inevitably in turn, Total Anglo World Supremacy (Whig history FTW). The consequent ubiquity of Anglo psychology embedded in all areas of life that involve real power—liberal-democratic government, business, science & technology—is what permits frequent and entirely valid assertions that Anglos have no culture. The real truth, though, is that Anglos are unique in being the WEIRDest of the WEIRD.
It is from this cultureless and family-less but spiritually un-longhoused perspective that, while resident in their country, I ungratefully critique the unalloyed insanity of the Romanian people (by which I mean of course ‘culture in motion’ or whatever I called it before).
A final note on the term ‘Hajnal Line’ (ARE YOU STILL READING PLIZ YOU WAKE UP)
Clearly, we are a long way now from Hajnal’s quite modest hypothesis. After all, his interest was primarily in marriage patterns. Were he alive in The Current Year, he would no doubt be appalled at the association of his name with Neo-Nazi pseudoscience. As Wikipedia says:
Nonetheless, in now-unfashionable HBD circles it is (or was) ‘Hajnal’s’ line that functions as shorthand for explorations of intra-European differences in things like IQ, time preference, social trust and individualism—and that is the sense in which I will use the term Hajnal Line in this substack.
What does ‘fara suparare’ mean?
As I said near the top, this substack is an exercise in noticing—and noticing is liable to offend some people, especially touchy Balkanoids. It is for this reason that I have named it Fara Suparare (FAH-RAH SOOP-AH-RAH-RAY; or Farrah super-rare if you are an Anglo), which means ‘no offense!’ in Romanian.
To my Romanian readers I say this: you are the cognitive elite of your nation, as shown below.
Why am I writing about this stuff?
Notwithstanding my strenuous effortpoasting on HBD/evolutionary psychology in paragraphs preceding, Fara Suparare is not really (or really only) a cheap attempt to recycle the most accessible bits of stale old HBD blogs in the formatte du jour (i.e. Substack). Wary of facile and/or monocausal explanations of the wonderful and vibrant diversity of Romanian ‘culture in motion’, I also intend to draw for explanatory material on hip young vitalist Zoomers such as John Murray Cuddihy (the better version of Kevin Macdonald, according to BAP), KMac himself (not the anti-semitic stuff!), the estimable Peter Frost, maybe the slightly-more-edgy-than-acknowledged Joseph Henrich and/or the rather wishy-washy Iain MacGilchrist, in addition to…various others I haven’t thought of yet I don’t know.
Sometimes, though, I will be content merely to write about what I observe—either because explanations are impossible or because the behaviour speaks for itself. There will also be at least one review of a film, very much from the other side of the Hajnal Line. I might even write a bit about music but probably not. Let us see.
PassportBros plz be carefuk!
We all know, I think, of the recently(?) coalesced PassportBro Movement. It seems to me that PassportBro-ism is completely understandable—I was once one myself, before I came here—yet it betrays too much optimism about the world outside the West. While I genuinely wish you well if you mean to depart permanently for the B A S E D E A S T, your problems are not necessarily going to be solved by forsaking Anglodom—or what little of it remains, and that only in the frigid bosom of your insensate Anglo ‘family’.
For example: at the ‘macro’ scale you might experience a long life under a government that doesn't hate you. But at the ‘micro’ scale you may very well miss the peculiar set of norms John Murray Cuddihy (there he is already!) referred to as civility—a very Anglo, and therefore precious, social commodity. For, I assure you, the civility you take for granted at home does not exist in Romania. This absence is just a fact of life here, irrespective of whether it is plausibly attributable to evolutionary-psychological mechanisms or any other kind of explanation.6
In subsequent poasts I will attempt to elaborate. In the meantime, Anglos please exercise the noble forbearance of your Ænglisc ancestors. Please also draw deeply upon the resigned Confucian stoicism, the dauntless campesino stolidity, the cosmic Hindoo passivity and the beneficent Hebraic endurance (tikkun olam!) you have inherited in varying proportions from your mother’s side of the family.
Thank you for reading this excessively long and undisciplined introductory poast!
Richard Dawkins coined the term 'extended phenotype' with reference to selection operating, typically for him, STRICTLY at the level of the individual gene:
An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes "for" that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.
Because it is an intelligent sounding expression, I might heretically and racistly modify the meaning of ‘extended phenotype’ to denote how group-level behaviour tends to modify the surrounding environment *if* it seemed likely to add anything (which at present it does not).
I know the correct form of the adjective is ‘Balkan’, yet writing BALKANIK in capital letters is very Balkan and makes me laugh a little. Do you also find it slightly funny? Let me know in the comments below!
This is the opposite of what one might expect on historical grounds. The western part of Romania was historically in the Hungarian/Habsburg sphere (more individualist…right? No?), with the east in the Slavic/Turkic/Ottoman sphere (more collectivist? No!). Thus I suspect that in the case of Romania (and Hungary, which is also shown as a preeminently longhouse society) the map is wrong, maybe because data was lacking. This would be no surprise. Taciturn, unobliging, unyielding—Romania ever defies the designs of the systematisers.
Macfarlane apparently believes that the English aristocracy were more lineage-centred than the commons, and tended to keep family estates intact for future generations. Gregory Clark’s alternative model posits a mass social ‘fall’ from the upper class rather than a ‘rise’ from the commons as the mechanism by which the Anglo middle class was formed. I rely here on Macfarlane’s explanation, but Clark’s is also plausible, and the two can be readily reconciled as a ‘meeting in the middle’. I note that both explanations, separately or combined, depend on social mobility. Where does this leave the normie/leftist meme of the perenially impermeable British class system?
As always, there are tiresome objections from revisionist Eastern European peasants…I mean pedants…to consider. This paper, by an aggrieved Polak (why are they always like this?), details some of them.
I am well aware that this section really only works as a negative justification of my motivations. As to my positive motivations, I can say completely without reservation that they are utterly negative.
thats all well and good but evolution is a sterile calvinist whig myth, (fits with the anglo theme of today's post) and the actual observable reality is that the process that anglo empiricists were trying to describe but failed (not high IQ enough, clearly) is known as "degredation", not evolution.
belarussians have an average IQ of 106 btw.
maybe they "evolved" out of romanians.
A few points:
It should be emphasized that cognitive ability, time preference, empathy, and individualism are not genetically interlinked. They can be brought together as part of an "adaptive package" but that package is not inevitable. East Asians, for instance, have followed a different trajectory of evolutionary change that has produced a different package of adaptations, i.e., high cognitive ability and low time preference, but also relatively low individualism and empathy that tends to be more cognitive than affective.
Format du jour, not formatte du jour.
hbd chick is still active on X (formerly Twitter) - @hbdchick
I became interested in this subject through a debate back in 1991 with Kevin MacDonald in the pages of Ethology and Sociobiology (now Evolution and Human Behavior). He was arguing that the mating system of Western Europe was created by Western Christianity (i.e., Catholicism). I was arguing that certain pre-existing tendencies created this system and later became embedded in Western Christianity. I now think more in terms of an evolutionary trajectory where an initial tendency toward individualism and weak kinship ties helped set Western Europeans on a trajectory of decreasing reliance on kinship and increasing reliance on other principles of social organization, notably the State and the market economy.