Founding Questions

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful suggestions and kind words yesterday.

Tomorrow is Friday, so if you’ve got Mailbag Questions, your diligent striving to increase quality outputs is always appreciated.

In the comments on the Friday Mailbag, Bwana Simba wrote:

_{Severian, I always enjoyed your dysgenics posts. I have the one you made involving houses all being the same and white girls all dressing the exact same bookmarked. One day I will dig through your posts and find the one where you posted the photos of previous generations to compare to moderns, such as the photos of just random run of the mill 80s girls who are way hotter than modern gals. Honestly, I would greatly appreciate another, or even a compilation post. Hell, if you wanted to write a book, maybe even include photos, I would buy it in a heartbeat.}

Flattery will get you everywhere, bud. Let’s talk about Henry VIII. Complete with music blog kayfabe:

How great is that? Somehow Herman’s Hermits look exactly like I thought they would. Herman’s dance moves make Falco look like Michael Jackson. And that was 1965 — June 6, 1965. Almost exactly three months after the Marines first went ashore at Da Nang. The Sixties ™ were a weird and wonderful time.

I suppose a few disclaimers are necessary, for the benefit of newer readers (we seem to have gotten a few when the Z Man, PBUH, passed on to his eternal reward). I’m not a Medievalist. I’m not an Early Modernist. (Both terms d’art, and the Tudors occupy that weird space between “Medieval” and “Early Modern.” If you’re not in The Guild, you probably don’t know that there’s no such thing as a… Renaissance-ist, I guess; “Renaissance” being a term only used by the laity. “The Tudor Era” is unique enough in the Western tradition that there are people who would call themselves specialists in it, and obviously I’m not one of those). I am an amateur in this specific subject… but in general I am a professional, so at least I know some of what I don’t know.

Nor am I a doctor. My highest educational attainment in that area is a B+ in 9th grade Biology class… but come to think of it, that’s a significant achievement, as proved by Covid. All that bullshit about masks — “but viruses don’t work like that,” I said, recalling that long-ago lesson, in between dissecting the earthworm and the frog (they can’t possibly still do dissections in high school, can they? I can only imagine how many Snowflakes would get the vapors. Plus the scalpel could be considered a weapon… oy vey. Plus I remember you had to cut down to, and identify, the frog’s sex organs, and everybody knows there’s no such thing as sex, you’re assigned a gender at birth…).

So: Not an MD. What I know about nutrition and such I mostly get from bodybuilding sites, plus the self-experimentation of myself and others. I guess what I’m saying is, I could be wrong about a lot of this. But that’s part of the fun, no?

So: Second verse, same as the first. Just how big was this guy?

Or the more famous Holbein portrait:

I guess a further disclaimer is necessary: I’m not an Art Historian, either, or a Material Culture guy. But I know enough to walk you through the most important methodological issues. The first image is also a Holbein, apparently — at least, it’s credited to his school, from about 1560 (Henry himself died in 1547). It’s the last known portrait of Henry. The second is the most famous image of him, I believe from the Whitehall Mural; the original was destroyed by fire in 1698.

I can’t find the exact clip with my weak google-fu, but I seem to recall that Damien Lewis actually pulls that pose as Henry VIII in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall. But here’s something close:

The actor is Damian Lewis, most famous to Americans as Dick Winters from Band of Brothers, and a quick google search gives him Henry VIII’s approximate physical measurements as a younger man: 6’1″, 190 lbs. Which will serve as a jumping-off point, because while young Henry was approximately 6’2″ — we have one of his suits of armor from when he was still fairly young — he was described as broad-chested and muscular, which Lewis really isn’t…

…by our standards, anyway, and as a side note it’s greatly to Lewis’s credit as an actor that he pulls it off so well. I don’t remember a lot about Wolf Hall — I only saw an episode or two, and was pretty under the influence at the time — but he stomps around like a much bigger man. Tudor fashion helps — it really bulks out the upper body, and that’s another one of those “methodological issues” — but Lewis doesn’t come off as a physically imposing guy in interviews (or Band of Brothers); he really carries it well in Wolf Hall. There’s also some movie magic involved, of course — the guy he’s playing against (Mark Rylance) is listed as 5’8″, 148 — but still.

The point is, Lewis pretty closely matches our known images of young Henry VIII. According to his contemporaries, Henry VIII was a big, muscular man. According to us — well, according to me, anyway, and bearing in mind I’ve never met him personally — Damian Lewis looks like a slightly tall, trim man. That’s an unstated methodological issue, the one you always have to have in the background (and the one that’s easiest to forget): We have a much different physical frame of reference.

To us, this is a physically imposing man with those approximate stats:

That’s Dylan Thieneman, a football player just drafted into the NFL — 6’0″, 201. This guy is a real hoss: He ran a 4.35 40 at the scouting combine, had a 41″ vertical leap and a 10’5″ broad jump, and bench pressed 225lbs 18 times. It’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, as Thieneman is a professional athlete… but also not, because for one thing, a Renaissance (for convenience) prince like Henry VIII would’ve spent a lot of time in physical training. For another, though, and much more importantly, that’s how contemporaries talked about young Henry: He was a real hoss.

(I know, I know, he was the future King of England, so a bit of flattery was to be expected. But only a bit: He was expected to lead men into battle personally, and actually did; too much flattery would get both the prince and the flatterer killed, because the flatterer would be right there with him. So when someone like Charles Brandon says that Henry was a hoss, we can believe him. Incidentally, the Showtime softcore porn series The Tudors cast a young Henry Cavill (6’1″, 220) as Brandon:

And a young Jonathan Rhys Meyers (5’10”, 160) as Henry VIII.

Of course, most of us don’t go around wondering about the physical statistics of historical figures (Julius Caesar: welterweight?). But I think it matters, because I believe there’s a much closer mind-body-behavior connection than we commonly suppose, and that one of the fundamental issues underneath a LOT of Clown World is simply the oddity of the Postmodern physique:

We are NOT built for permanent caloric surplus. We’re not even really built for long-term caloric sufficiency. Humans are exhaustion hunters. That’s our metabolic baseline. I’m also not an evolutionary biologist, so I’m not going to go any further into that, but exhaustion hunting is just as much a mentality as it is a metabolism. That’s our firmware. But thanks to our big brains — especially big European brains — we’ve used our firmware to massively change our hardware. We have yet to fully explore the recursive firmware and software changes.

With that in mind, back to Henry VIII. There’s been a lot of speculation about why he seemingly went crazy in his later years: He had syphilis. He really was crazy (as in, he had a schizoid break). Cultural factors, structural factors, “psychohistory”… they’ve all been applied to him, because his personality was as singularly outsized as his person. And you will bear in mind — always — that I am not Expert, nor anything close to Expert, on the Tudor period. But I’ve read a fair amount about the guy and his world, and I have to say, what he most sounds like to me is:

A Juggalo.

To me, Henry VIII sounds a lot like your typical Twitter-addicted SJW. Mutatis mutandis, of course, and there’s a LOT of mutatis between 1526 and 2026, but the underlying syndromes are very similar. The extreme emotional lability being the main one, but consider that none of his contemporaries could figure him out either. He was quite intelligent… for certain values of “intelligent;” guys who thought they were smarter than he was very often found out the hard way that they weren’t, and found themselves shorter by a head. But getting him to accept Reality was a task that even people who were unquestionably smarter than he found nearly impossible. It’s probably apocryphal, but Wolsey’s supposed admonition to Cromwell about their mutual master is true in spirit, anyway: “Be very careful what you put into that head, for you will never get it out again.”

That’s grossly oversimplified, of course. I’m suggesting “gross obesity” was A factor, not the factor, in his apparent mental disintegration. And it’s recursive, not linear — he started getting fat thanks to his Juggalicious personality; his excess fat reinforced his already Juggalicious tendencies.

What’s funny is, when you free Historians (and doctors; indeed, Academics generally) from the confines of The Current Thing they can do interesting work along those lines. This image, for instance

is from a PubMed article exploring the possibility that Henry VIII was impotent due to excess adiposity; it’s a CGI visualization of his body based on artistic representations and his surviving armor (which he is known to have worn at least once — ask Pickle Rick how the Material Culture guys determine this stuff — so he was once that size, bare minimum).

If someone like myself were to suggest (as I am indeed suggesting) that Henry talked like a fag and his shit was all retarded in no small part because he was so obese, I’d get hauled up on hate crimes charges. Healthy at any size!, yelled the Feminists, and of course your body composition has no effect whatsoever on your physical performance (ask “Lia” Thomas), and obviously it has no effect whatsoever on your mental performance (ask any Girlboss), except when it has ALL the effects (ask any troon, and therefore the taxpayer must pay for “gender affirming care”), and so on.

But if you can make your research recondite enough, and publish in a sufficiently micro-specialized journal, you can get away with stuff like this sometimes.

I find it interesting to speculate on this kind of thing, simply because there are so few historical figures prior to the Modern Era who would’ve had access to sufficient calories to even get that fat. And of them… well, for the most part we have to take contemporaries’ word for it, and see above, about that physical frame of reference. Contemporaries called France’s Louis VI “the Fat,” for instance, but we have to take Abbot Suger’s word for it; we have no existing royal portrait taken from life. England’s Edward IV was considered grossly fat later in life, and we do have some contemporary-ish views of him:

And…well… there it is. He looks a bit doughy by PoMo standards, but who knows how he carried it at the waist? With Henry VIII, though, we have that presentation armor. We can thus largely discount for artistic style, both in painting and sartorially (which was a thing. Consider the Arnolfini Marriage, by my main man Jan Van Eyck:

Mrs. Arnolfini isn’t pregnant there; that’s just the fashion of the early 1400s. You can sometimes see it in renditions of the Madonna (though I can’t find a Van Eyck Madonna with it, alas), where it would be actual heresy to paint her as pregnant (except for the obvious). I don’t know of a period in men’s fashion which tried to make guys look big at the waist, but I am not Expert. Certainly men’s fashion often strived for an appearance of extreme overall bulk — see the Whitehall Mural, above. Henry’s fat there, but he’s also dressed very wide, as was the style at the time).

Taking the computer image as mostly accurate, then, the first thing that strikes me is how Current Year it looks. I mean, he’s fat, even by Current Year standards, but that looks like a Current Year weight distribution to me. As opposed to the corpulence of other parts of the past:

That’s Daniel Lambert, the heaviest known person in history up to that time: 5’11”, 700 lbs. That’s a painting (he died in 1809), but we can probably take it as accurate, given that he was a bona fide medical curiosity. It’s also likely that his weight gain was entirely “natural” — he had no symptoms of a glandular syndrome, though of course we have to take their word for that. PoMo obese people carry it a bit differently.

We’re on a bit surer ground closer to the 20th century. “Fat Men’s Clubs” were a real thing back then:

_{Fat men’s clubs were a type of social club that peaked in popularity from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, primarily in the United States. Membership was typically limited to men weighing over 200 lb (91 kg), and members were generally quite wealthy as well. Fat men’s clubs declined in the 20th century as male obesity transitioned to being perceived as a primarily negative trait.}

Obesity as conspicuous consumption — yeah, that tracks with the Gilded Age. I just want to note the minimum weight requirement: 200 lbs. Even those of us who aren’t porkers have complained about how silly the “body mass index” is, that your doctor still somehow uses — guys like Tom Cruise aren’t just overweight, but obese, by BMI; I personally know guys who are shredded who get tagged as obese at the doctor’s office.

The point I’m trying to make is how recent these changes are. I forget where I saw it — someone with better google-fu than mine, please check — but the average size of a US Army recruit during WWII was 5’8″, 145. This is at the tail end of the Depression, of course, so those guys would be undersized — apparently recruits were expected to gain between 5 and 20 lbs. during Basic Training — but still. I’m only a couple inches taller than that, and I weighed 145 in junior high (and I wasn’t within a mile of overweight).

Fortunately we have some photos of the Fat Men’s Clubs:

We also have pictures of circus freaks — that is, people who exhibited themselves as particularly fat:

One has to be careful not to overgeneralize from a few examples, but those guys just seem to carry their weight differently from modern fat people: Much more in the lower waist and upper thighs. As opposed to Henry VIII, who looks much more Current Year: heavily localized in the upper abdomen.

And as opposed to an “ordinary” physique. You have to exercise a bit of ingenuity to find pictures of 19th century men with their shirts off — I’m sure they exist, but I’m really sure I don’t want to do that google search — so I went for medical photos from the Civil War. Obviously we’re not a squeamish bunch around here, but.. yeah. Anyway:

(incidentally, that’s the result of a surgical procedure called a “resection.” These days it’s primarily done as cancer treatment, but at least early in the Civil War they tried it as an alternative to amputation). This photo appears to be fairly contemporaneous with the injury, so his physique (probably) isn’t the result of atrophy; he’s just small. That’s a typical-ish mid-19th century American physique.

That photo is dated 1865.

How tough did that sonofabitch have to be, to survive what looks like an abdominal wound?

This guy is surprisingly hippy (though obviously some of that is the angle), and note the photo’s provenance — this is from the Army Medical Museum; there was a serious push to document the “medical and surgical” history of the Civil War, as it was “fought at the end of the Medical Middle Ages,” as Jonathan Letterman himself (I believe) once said.

And then there’s this poor bastard:

Here’s another guy shot through the upper thigh:

Or, rather, shot in the upper thigh; the bullet caused a big compound fracture.

The point, comrades, is that these are ordinary young men. Given that 80-90% of Americans in the 1860s were employed in agriculture, it’s a pretty good chance that most of these guys were farmers, farmhands, something in that line. Which meant they were doing physically demanding work, of a kind I’m not sure even the more agricultural among the NBCs can really appreciate. If you get a chance, go into a rural antique store. Or, out where I live, there is (or was) a fad for decorating yards with old milk jugs and things like that. Ever tried picking one of those up?

And they’re empty. You can go ahead and add 50 lbs. or so; milk, like water, weighs about 2 lbs. per gallon. These guys weren’t anything special, physically, and their daily labor would probably kick the ass of all but the fittest among us.

And that’s what they looked like with their shirts off.

We’ve seen this one before, but here’s a Gilded Age guy who’s trying to hulk out:

That’s Eugen Sandow, the “father of bodybuilding,” and I picked that one specifically for the Arno Breker vibe (I’m still not down with Operation AIPAC Folly, so Party loyalty compels me). Here’s a more medically interesting view:

Great abs, zero pecs. Or here:

Ok, ok, that’s enough Quality Learing; I think FQ is now Pete Buttigieg’s favorite Reich-wing disinformation site.

I don’t know how one would begin to link this to behavior. I guess the main thing I’m trying to get at is, aesthetic considerations aside, that looks like real physical difference to me. We’ve talked about Sandow before — his training methods are known; he even gives “testimonials” from students, complete with their before and after measurements.

                  Before      After
                      Training.   Course.   Increase.

  Neck                  16          18½        2½
  Chest, contracted     38          40         2
    ”    expanded       44          47         3
  Upper Arm, Right      15¾         17½        1¾
      ”      Left       15          17         2
  Forearm, Right        13          15         2
      ”    Left         12¼         14½        2¼
  Waist                 30          30         —
  Thigh, Right          23½         24½        1
    ”    Left           23¾         24¼         ½
  Calf, Right           15½         16½        1
    ”   Left            15½         16          ½
  Height              5ft. 11in.  6ft. ⅜in.    1¼
  Weight                13 st.    13st. 6lb    6
  Lung Capacity         276         320       44
  Chest Expansion        6           7         1

                            ———————————————

Mr. Peters is a fine weight-lifter, having accomplished the splendid
feat of raising 210lb from the floor to arms’ length above the head,
_using one hand only_. This is probably the amateur record. As he is
only 23 years old there is yet plenty of time for him to far eclipse
even this striking feat.

A 47″ chest… interesting. The AI thingie gives Sandow’s own measurements as:

Peak Career Measurements (Circa 1893) Recorded by a physician near the height of his fame, these figures reflect a weight of 180 pounds and a height of 5’7 ½” (67.7 inches).  His specific limb and girth measurements included:

• Chest: 44.1 inches (normal) / 46.9 inches (expanded)
• Waist: 32.7 inches
• Biceps: 16.9 inches (right) / 16.1 inches (left)
• Thighs: 23.2 inches (right) / 22.8 inches (left)
• Calves: 15.4 inches (right) / 15.6 inches (left)
• Neck: 15.5 inches
• Shoulders: 20.3 inches

Compare that to the photos. Those look like pretty decent Current Year stats, but look how he carries them, compared to how an equivalent Current Year person with the same measurements would look.

Part of that is, I’m sure, a difference in training methods. Part of it is aesthetics (for some reason, we prioritize chest development, probably because the bench press is both easy to do, and easy to measure in competition, vs. the pulleys and shit Sandow was using). But part of it… isn’t.

At least, that’s my hypothesis, and I’ll frankly admit I’m just noodling at this point, but I want to moot something like this for discussion:

Prior to the Modern period — and we’re talking very late in the Modern period, say, 1850 or so — caloric insufficiency was a real concern. I’ve gone over this before: You see “natural” famines through the 17th century. “Unnatural” ones are still common into the early 19th century, and you’ll recall that by “unnatural” I mean “primarily caused, or at least heavily exacerbated, by politics” — e.g. the Potato Famine, which had a “natural” cause but was greatly exacerbated by H.M. Government’s response (let us please not re-litigate that in the comments; I can hear the ghost of my drunken Uncle Mike screaming about British perfidy from that Great Big Pub in the Sky).

Even when you had caloric sufficiency, though, nutritional sufficiency was something else. Archaeology tells us that when they weren’t actually starving, most medieval peasants had caloric sufficiency. They might’ve even had excess calories, even relative to their energy expenditure (which — see above — must’ve been tremendous). It’s just that their calories were usually poor. Partly due to climate, partly to culture — Roman, and later Christian, cultures were centered around bread, which doesn’t work well in Northern European climates. So not only were they eating the wrong stuff, they were eating a lot of it, and taking some of the right stuff out of cultivation in order to grow (very poorly) the makings of the wrong stuff.

Again, these are my memories of archaeology, so don’t take it on faith, but I believe there was a big change in the Late Middle Ages. The Early Medieval diet was almost vegetarian; meat was a small percentage of overall calories, and confined to feast days or whatever. By the Late Middle Ages, meat was a big component of the daily diet. In other words, caloric sufficiency was coming more in line with nutritional sufficiency — they were both getting enough to eat (in fat times), and what they were eating was much more nutritionally adequate.

For a guy like Henry VIII, that might’ve had some bigtime effects. He could, and did, eat much more meat than the average person. He had access to a lot more refined carbs, too. Sugar, for one — you read up on medieval “fancies,” these big elaborate sugar pastries, and you practically come down with diabetes. They’d melt sugar into the shapes of swans and stuff, and that’s on top of all the other stuff. But he also ate a special type of bread, “manchet,” which would give RFK Jr. the vapors if he knew about it (and, of course, all the NPR dorks would immediately make sandwiches with nothing else).

There are lots of medieval recipe books around, and chroniclers loved talking about food — it was one of the most conspicuous display items. You know how, in Game of Thrones, G.R.R. Martin has to describe every fucking thing every character has ever eaten in loving detail? That’s not just because he’s a huge lardbody. He’s just mirroring his sources. As poorly as we PoMo people eat, a medieval king’s diet would put us in our graves in about a week. Eating wasn’t the king’s primary job, but I’m in no way joking when I say it was in the top five.

Imagine having access to all those calories, plus having them be nutritionally adequate as never before… and then add in a whole bunch more.

Fast forward to Eugen Sandow’s day. He of course knew that he needed to eat more, but his grasp of nutrition wasn’t super-advanced (not his fault; scientific nutrition didn’t really get going until the 20th century). But Sandow’s physical world was still much closer to the Middle Ages than to ours. Take a look around you right now. It doesn’t matter where you are — home, work, the car — most of what you see is plastic, or some kind of lightweight polymer. Replace all that shit with wood and steel — that was Sandow’s physical environment. I’m writing this on a laptop, for instance; it weighs maybe five pounds. As opposed to sitting with a typewriter on my lap, and do you see what I mean?

Hell, replace your polyester clothing with wool. Sandow had cotton, obviously, but most people didn’t, for a very long time. For most of European history, your clothes had nontrivial weight; you were burning a nontrivial amount of calories just by wearing clothes. Throw in the fact that he — and everyone before the later 20th century — must’ve spent some huge amount of calories just on thermoregulation, and although he didn’t have to worry about nutritional insufficiency, his body didn’t have to constantly preoccupy itself with the question of where to put the excess.

In other words, I don’t think it mattered too much what Sandow ate — the excess was going to go to muscle, more or less efficiently, simply because his “energy budget” was so high just from day to day life. He, and everyone else, probably burned off all the excess calories they had access to just by walking around — in their heavy-ass clothes, navigating their heavy-ass environment, with some huge amount of energy being expended on thermoregulation (one way or the other, not to mention that heat is a great appetite suppressant). Whatever exercise he did, the excess calories he ate went there.

As opposed to the Postmodern diet, which is both calorically and nutritionally excessive. Our bodies have no idea what to do with the “excess,” and by “excess” I mean the Alanis-engorging irony that we probably have too much good shit, especially when we don’t have to expend any energy in our physical environment. It’s 72 degrees in the house, summer or winter; thermoregulation just isn’t a thing — you have to try to sweat (or shiver). If you wear a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or whatever, you probably see that getting “10,000 steps” isn’t a big deal… but those steps require no real effort. In Sandow’s world, they did. You pull a gallon of milk out of the fridge — no big deal. You haul a giant steel milk jug up from the street — big deal. Their 10k steps took breathtaking effort, vs. ours. And so on.

No wonder we carry our weight differently… and when it comes to stuff like that, which affects hormone balances, are we willing to say that’s ALL it does?

Anyway, just some random thoughts (and a whole bunch of pictures of half-naked dudes). It’s been said before, but a recap can’t hurt. What say you?