A Shibboleth is a Stalk of Wheat

On the common origin of Whigs, Yankees, cowboys, and edgelords.

This month, David Brooks and Scott Alexander both published (paywalled) essays accepting a tiny amount of the blame for the rise of Trumpism. Brooks’s, “I Should Have Seen This Coming,” discusses how conservative Whigs like him were slow to realize that their team had become the “the cruelty is the point” side. To begin its recovery, he says, America needs its “next Whig moment,” modeled after the reaction to Andrew Jackson. Alexander talks about more meta issues—free speech, tolerance, open-mindedness. He wanted people to be able to work for or with the government, he writes, without having to recite social justice shibboleths. But what we got, just like his critics warned would happen, was a government that just reversed all of the shibboleths, which is significantly worse because it means canceling everything that uses words like “equity,” “justice,” or “climate change.” Maybe he should’ve stuck with the devil he knew.

In 20th-century Communist countries, if you shunned everybody spouting racist pseudoscience, in practice that meant sending everybody who believed in natural selection to Siberia, leaving cranks in charge of all agriculture and ultimately killing millions. But in 21st-century First World countries, if you didn’t shun the people spouting racist pseudoscience, they eventually took over and turned out to be just as ignorant and hateful as they sounded. “How should Whigs think about shibboleths?” seems like an irreducibly hard question.

So instead of trying to answer it, I’m going to talk about how the words “Whig” and “shibboleth” have kind of the same etymology.

The First Foreign Word You Hear

“Chuig!” If you lived in the north of England in the 17th century, that might be the first ever word you heard that wasn’t in English or Latin. Scottish people, speaking Scots Gaelic, would show up wanting to buy wheat. In Gaelic, “Chuig!” means “Go!” They’d shout it to their horses and cattle. In southern dialects, this is pronounced “Whig!” “Whig” or “whiggamore” became a derogatory term for these traders, then for a specific group of militant Scots who didn’t want to be ruled by a Catholic, and finally for the political party, which at first called itself the Country Party, that wanted to limit the power of the Catholic King James II.

The origin of “shibboleth” is a little murkier. It originally meant “stalk of wheat.” It got its modern meaning because of a bit in Judges 12, an account of a bloody conflict between Jewish tribes. After a battle, the survivors of the Tribe of Ephraim try to flee, but the victors control every crossable part of the Jordan River. Some people try to get through anyway by lying about which tribe they’re part of, so the guards make them say the word “shibboleth,” and their accent always gives Ephraimites away—they pronounce it with an initial “s” instead of “sh,” and are immediately executed. The story implausibly claims that 42,000 people are killed this way. As of this writing, Trump’s policies have only killed about 40,000 foreigners, and he’s had months.

The murkiness is that we don’t know why the word “shibboleth” was chosen out of all the words starting with the letter shin.¹ I’m going to speculate, but since I can’t prove it, this is more of a fable than a theory.

The Ephraimites lived in Central Palestine, which, as Judges 10:1 notes, is “hill country.” There’s a lot of fertile land, but not a lot of flat land, making it more suitable for grazing cattle than for growing wheat. So the Ephraimites were in an identical situation to the Scots—highlanders with lots of cattle and not a lot of wheat. When Ephraimite traders showed up in the lowlands and were asked what they’d come for, I imagine a common answer would be “wheat.” So one of the first words you’d hear in an Ephraimite accent would be “shibboleth.” Or probably a plural form like “shibbolim,” but I don’t know. Maybe people were carrying single stalks of wheat across the river Jordan. I won’t judge.

So it’s kind of the same story. The first foreign word you hear is spoken by somebody wanting to trade cattle for wheat, so it becomes your word for that kind of foreigner. And then, when you decide they’re your enemy, it becomes the mark of evil.

Brother Ephraim Sold His Cow

You have two cows. You’d rather have one cow and some grain, but it’s hard to grow grain where you live. Across the river, there’s a farmer with lots of grain and no cows. What do you do?

This is a 20th-century phrasing for a problem older than writing. Some of the first ever text, as far as we know, discusses it—the ancient Sumerian Debate Between Cattle² And Grain.

One popular strategy is violence. Kill the farmer and take his grain, before he kills you and takes your cows. Or kill the farmer and take his land, and now you’re the farmer and you can graze your cattle on your new farm in a pasture next to the grain. Ancient texts are full of conflict-based solutions. Cain is a farmer, Abel is a shepherd. Jacob is a farmer, Esau is a hunter.

Or you can try harder to be self-sufficient. Or you can resign yourself to a low-carb diet. But surely there’s another way.

Actually there are lots of other ways. Communes. Totalitarian governments. Terrace farming. But trade, whether it’s based in barter or currency, tends to be the easiest to set up and maintain. How do you know that one person has “too many” cows, and another one too much wheat? You can try all sorts of complicated things, or you can just ask them if they’d like to swap.

The main obstacle is usually cultural differences. Staying in one place to grow grain tends to create a more, for lack of a better word, “civilized” culture. If you’re more mobile, you have less of an incentive to sacrifice liberty for stability; if conflict breaks out, you can just go somewhere else and take your cattle with you. The farmer and the herder can trade, but they see each other as uptight tyrants and lawless cowboys, so they’re never quite comfortable.

This exact situation has happened over and over and over again. Here’s an excerpt from The Debate Between Cattle and Grain, written about 5000 years ago:

Cattle and Grain should be sisters! They should stand together! Their alloy shall be unbreakable for all time. But of the two, Grain shall be the greater. Let Cattle fall on her knees before Grain. Let her kiss the feet of Grain. From sunrise till sunset, may the name of Grain be praised. People should submit to the yoke of Grain. Whoever has silver, whoever has jewels, whoever has cows, whoever has sheep shall take a seat at the gate of whoever has grain, and pass his time there.

And here’s a couple from the 1943 musical Oklahoma!

Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
One man likes to push a plough,
The other likes to chase a cow,
But that’s no reason why they can’t be friends.

And when this territory is a state,
And joins the Union just like all the others,
The farmer and cowman and the merchant
Must all behave theirselves and act like brothers.

But in the end, the cowman becomes a farmer, because that’s the way the world is heading. And everybody sings:

It ain’t too early and it ain’t too late,
Startin’ as a farmer with a brand new wife,
…
Gonna give you barley, carrots, and potatoes!
Pasture for the cattle, spinach and tomatoes!

Grain wins the debate by promising peace and order. In Sumeria, she boasts that she is “central to all princes” because of the power she grants. And, she continues,

I foster neighborliness and friendliness. I sort out quarrels started between neighbors.

The terms of abuse heaped on the cowman often change connotation over time—Whig and cowboy got reclaimed. Another word like that is “Yankee.” The oldest known lyrics to what became the song “Yankee Doodle Dandy” start with this line:

Brother Ephraim sold his Cow

That version dates from the French and Indian War, where homeland British soldiers fought alongside colonials. The British ones made up a song mocking American officers. In those days, the main way to become an officer was to buy a commission. In Britain, that meant only the right sort, young men with inherited wealth, could be officers. Brother Ephraim, whose Biblical name marks him as some kind of religious sectarian, probably a Puritan, isn’t the right sort. He’s new money—cow money.

During the Revolutionary War, the redcoats marched to an updated version, commemorating a real incident where a rebel was caught buying a gun from a British soldier.

Yankee Doodle came to town,
For to buy a firelock,
We will tar and feather him,
And so we will John Hancock.

The exact insults change, but it’s pretty much always something about a crude American coming into town to buy something and making a fool of himself. Cattle are often involved.

And there I see a swamping gun
Large as a log of maple,
Upon a deuced little cart,
A load for father's cattle.

The rebels adopted the song, and the name “Yankee.” Before, they’d called themselves Whigs.

It’s Always About Grain Exports

There’s a certain constellation of values and perspectives that shows up in many places and times, with many names. The least loaded, at the moment, is Whig. But the clearest, I think, is “pro-trade.”

Individual people have individual reasons for crossing a border, but collectively, border-crossers and those who rely on them are an interest group. If Scotland has lots of cows and England has lots of wheat, the more porous the border is, the cheaper cattle will be in England and wheat in Scotland. If that’s important to you, either because it’s how you make money or it’s how you eat, you end up opposed to war, strict or corrupt border control, and xenophobia.

An ideology grows from that seed. Trade is more valuable the more different the trading partners are. So you value tolerance, and eventually you go further and start valuing diversity. Trade is more valuable the richer your neighbors are, so you start to care about outcomes for everybody, even foreigners. You become ideologically opposed to the concept of purity, because that leads to closing borders. This has radical consequences, because most well-established ideologies have stayed alive by insisting on purity. So you end up questioning the core principles of the culture you were born to. You romanticize the people who live outside the law—your trading partners the cowboys, sure, but also pirates and rebels.

Opposition to Team Trade can come from disagreeing with any part of this. I don’t think it generally starts out anti-trade. But it often looks like the best move to make against Team Trade: halt the flow of foreign goods, and people get less interested in foreign ideas, then less interested in foreignness, less interested in nonconformity. If you want people to go along with that, you need them to believe that international trade is somehow making them poorer, not richer.

Edgelords Vs. Border Czars

In Scott Alexander’s essay, he self-deprecatingly refers to himself as an “edgelord.” I’ve done that too. An edgelord, as usually defined, is a derogatory term for somebody attracted to controversial ideas, preferably phrased offensively. Nietzsche, or more often a teenage boy who thinks he’s Nietzsche.

I don’t go out of my way to be offensive, and I hope I rarely am³. But I do go out of my way to be weird. Phrasing things in an odd way catches attention, in part because it advertises that I’m selling exotic goods. When I title an article “Higher-crime areas are safer,” I’m signaling that I have insights to share from a mindset, or a culture, that doesn’t define those words in a way that makes that sentence an oxymoron.

The analogy between foreign-sounding ideas and foreign-sounding merchants is strong. It’s strong enough that you usually find the pro-trade and pro-weird people in the same camp. But not always. Pro-diversity and anti-establishment is only a natural combination until the establishment becomes pro-diversity. The 21st century has seen some center-left institutions, in particular, slip more and more into anti-weird thinking. Anybody who doesn’t use the approved words, which by design are ever-shifting, is inherently suspect—you have an ethical responsibility, even, to ignore them. “We have to stop the spread of misinformation.” “Trust the experts.”

This shift, I think, is a big part of why Whigs are feeling confused and vaguely guilty about politics. We don’t have a side we can comfortably be on, and in politics it feels like you always have to pick a side.

But hell, we’re never comfortable picking a side. We’re the people Robert Frost described with “so altruistically moral/I never take my own side in a quarrel.” Taking a side means agreeing to stay on one side of a border, and that’s not what we do. We care about the quality of ideas, not their tribal affiliation. Which means we’ll always be those strange, annoying people shipping shibboleths across the border.

Bonus: outlandish.claims does the two cows joke

You have two cows. You’d rather have one cow and some grain, but it’s hard to grow grain where you live. Across the river, there’s a farmer with lots of grain and no cows.

Trumpism: Trump is horrified to learn that you’re trading cows for grain, because it means you’re running a cow trade deficit: exporting more cows than you’re importing. He announces his plan to kill both of your cows, thus neutralizing the problem. Everybody is against this plan, except for some nearby foxes hoping to score some raw beef. So he revises it down to just killing one cow. Very Serious People write about how good it is that he’s adjusting his policy in response to feedback. Trump then fires a gun wildly in the general direction of your cows, wounding one and killing a fox.

Equity-ism: The most important step is to acknowledge your cow privilege. You need to really internalize the fact that you only have more cows than other people because of generational wealth that can be traced back to atrocities committed by your ancestors against the farmer’s. Trading a cow for wheat would be exploitative—you don’t have a right to their wheat just because you have a cow they want. You consider simply giving them one of your cows, but then you read an article saying that charity is just a way of whitewashing systemic inequality. You still have two cows.

Lysenkoism: The committee on agriculture tells you to work harder so that you’re producing as much grain as the farmer. You go ask the farmer how he’s able to grow so much. He answers that he’s been selectively breeding his wheat to be hardier. You frown and tell him that that doesn’t actually work and it sounds like something Herbert Spencer would say. He asks you who Herbert Spencer is. You start to explain but realize too late the whole thing was a trap when a government spy pops out from behind a bush and arrests you for knowing about Herbert Spencer.

Late-Stage Epicureanism: You try to trade with the farmer, but he tells you he already has a deal with all of your neighbors where they give him some of their milk every day, and in return they’re allowed to work his fields and keep 10% of what they harvest. You ask why they’re willing to accept such a lopsided deal, and he explains that every so often, he sics the sheriff on a random noncompliant cowherd. You have more questions but are too scared to ask so you try to persuade yourself that this all makes sense.

Orangism: You declare yourself the rightful owner of the farm and rile up a mob to go kick out the interlopers. They kill and eat the farmer and his brother. With your new authority over the farm, you immediately pardon all of them.

Hyðelicism: You trade your cow for another cowherd’s bull. Soon you have a whole herd. Meanwhile the farmer has been improving and expanding the farm. Eventually milk and grain are so plentiful that nobody really has to worry about how to allocate them.

And finally, by guest author Claude 3.7:

Machine Learning: You have two cows. You feed them different amounts and types of food, measure their milk output, and carefully record all the data. After collecting enough data points, you build a model that predicts milk production. The model works great until one day it inexplicably predicts a cow should produce 800 gallons per day. You realize you need more training data. You acquire 10,000 more cows, each slightly different from the others. Your model improves dramatically, but now you're spending so much on cow maintenance that you can't afford grain anymore. A startup offers to buy your cow prediction algorithm for millions, rebrands it as "DairyCow.AI," and uses it to optimize milk production by feeding cows the absolute minimum nutrients required. Now you have two cows, no grain, and millions of dollars. You attempt to buy grain with your newfound wealth, but discover that the farmer across the river has also been acquired by a tech company that's using his land to build server farms for training larger cow models.

1. We also don’t know why this trick is supposed to have worked. In wars with East Asian countries, Anglophones have sometimes used “lollapalooza” the same way, which works because if you didn’t grow up around both “l” and “r” sounds, it’s really hard to avoid swapping or blending the two. But there aren’t any known languages in the time and region where Judges was written or set that didn’t have both “sh” and “s” sounds.

2. Often translated as “Sheep.” The word probably refers to any domesticated herd animal.

3. Except to Redditors, but that’s unavoidable. On Reddit, if you link to an article that mentions Laplace’s Law of Succession in the first paragraph, you will get a reply from the one person on Earth who passionately hates Laplace’s Law of Succession.