tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21970519458224866842024-03-19T03:01:28.302+11:00Thinking Out AloudPostings on books (mainly non-fiction), a few films and matters of interest by Lorenzo from Oz (aka Downunder)Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.comBlogger1023125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-71241245211916324142023-04-15T17:01:00.003+10:002023-04-15T17:01:24.100+10:00Yes, I have a Substack<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfctf1EczSLXNftiZLfnlWgdDdN_SyWq98gy_5QCULyIXKARYvM0rhzp9YxyfJVk_vMk6Yy58Y3lMg3iI25DmkkkAwlUUu8cCBo6CQRK701tjQD3suntZl4u9mRT7obW-gbafZcuS9_S2hv86Sq30Re18zpDn7XKTLVpy4aeT8PRt9fP6Q9fm2gQ4z/s2334/943E3685-6B7B-4775-8558-84F38B3D7F82.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1562" data-original-width="2334" height="429" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfctf1EczSLXNftiZLfnlWgdDdN_SyWq98gy_5QCULyIXKARYvM0rhzp9YxyfJVk_vMk6Yy58Y3lMg3iI25DmkkkAwlUUu8cCBo6CQRK701tjQD3suntZl4u9mRT7obW-gbafZcuS9_S2hv86Sq30Re18zpDn7XKTLVpy4aeT8PRt9fP6Q9fm2gQ4z/w640-h429/943E3685-6B7B-4775-8558-84F38B3D7F82.webp" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Christine Roy, Unsplash.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>My poor blog, how I have neglected you.</div><br />I have abandoned you for my Substack, which is Lorenzo from Oz. It is <a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/">here</a>.<br /><br />I have written there on lots of things.<br /><br />In <b>July 2022</b>, I wrote on matters Trans. (<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/people-were-a-weird-mob">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/people-were-a-weird-mob</a>)<br /><br />I also wrote on information dispersal and disorientation with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/disorientation-and-information-dispersal">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/disorientation-and-information-dispersal</a>)<br /><br />Then I wrote on Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/whats-a-bot-or-few-million-between">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/whats-a-bot-or-few-million-between</a>)<br /><br />In <b>August 2022</b>, I returned to the Russo-Ukrainian War, in particular talking about why Russian autocracies have been one-trick regimes and keep pushing a strategy that keeps failing.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-latest-iteration-of-continuing">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-latest-iteration-of-continuing</a>)<br /><br />I also wrote on why ritual is such a pervasive feature of human societies, including the ritual elections of totalitarian regimes. <br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/why-ritual">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/why-ritual</a>)<br /><br />In <b>September 2022</b>, I wrote about the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and the power and value of monarchy.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/a-monarch-and-a-monarchy">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/a-monarch-and-a-monarchy</a>)<br /><br />In <b>November 2022</b>, I presaged the <i>Worshipping the Future</i> series of essays by me that are being published on Helen Dale’s Substack.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/introducing-worshipping-the-future">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/introducing-worshipping-the-future</a>)<br /><br />I also wrote about the economics (as distinct from the Economics) of migration.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-migration-scam">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-migration-scam</a>)<br /><br />In <b>December 2022</b>, I wrote about the <i>Worshipping the Future</i> series starting.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-worshipping-the-future-series">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-worshipping-the-future-series</a>)<br /><br />I also wrote about Social Justice as a social strategy: specifically a status-through-norm-dominance strategy.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/social-justice-as-social-strategy">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/social-justice-as-social-strategy</a>)<br /><br />In <b>January 2023</b>, I wrote about Marxism as prophecy and a model for political action.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/prophecy-and-political-action">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/prophecy-and-political-action</a>)<br /><br />I also wrote about how relationship to means of production is a dreadful basis for defining class.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/priests-and-warriors">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/priests-and-warriors</a>)<br /><br />I wrote about that remarkable polymath, Ibn Khaldun.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/who-was-ibn-khaldun">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/who-was-ibn-khaldun</a>)<br /><br />I discussed humans as the niche-creating species.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-niche-creating-species">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-niche-creating-species</a>)<br /><br />I discussed why the future is not what it used to be.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-future-by-default">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-future-by-default</a>)<br /><br />In <b>February 2023</b>, I wrote about how it is a mistake to over-rate the role of Marxism in current trends in Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”).<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/overdoing-marxism">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/overdoing-marxism</a>)<br /><br />I also wrote about the problems of the US mainstream media, the collapse of the previous business model, and how it is creates a “go broke, go woke” tendency.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/go-broke-go-woke">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/go-broke-go-woke</a>)<br /><br />I wrote about the connections between Zen thought and the flow states discussed by modern psychology.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/zen-and-the-art-of-flow">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/zen-and-the-art-of-flow</a>)<br /><br />I wrote about self-deception and various socially corrosive factors.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/self-deception-and-social-corrosion">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/self-deception-and-social-corrosion</a>)<br /><br />In <b>March 2023</b>, I wrote about basic patterns of human societies.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/basic-patterns-of-human-societies">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/basic-patterns-of-human-societies</a>)<br /><br />I also critiqued the concept of race, advanced the fiscal-sink hypothesis (that governments tend to under-police localities that are net revenue drains) and pointed out adverse incentives in “racial” matters.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances</a>)<br /><br />I discussed the need and difficulty of integrating evidence across disciplines.<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/wrestling-with-ideas">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/wrestling-with-ideas</a>)<br /><br />So far in <b>April 2023</b>, I have written a two-part essay, applying the evolutionary lens to economics. The first part is here:<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/humans-as-information-economisers">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/humans-as-information-economisers</a>)<br />The second part is here:<br />(<a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/humans-as-information-economisers-cae">https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/humans-as-information-economisers-cae</a>)<br /><br />Why have I neglected you, my blog? Well, this is free labour, but I earn money from Substack.<br /><br />I have not sworn off you, my blog. But you may become just a portico to my Substack.<br />Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-14011350091186185322022-11-24T09:52:00.000+11:002022-11-24T09:52:11.874+11:00Migration and destabilising politics<span class="kb" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span style="--tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0;"><i>The destructive non-electoral politics of institutional capture.</i><br /><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHllFNzkqp0r23zcoZZUGv9FeIJLZZb9y4g2g-VeiSUt-hW07PX4yLzHnP4iKfN4TfSTVW9NoW78Qckh7B-cpCJMUcoYfTybSUNgIbwMppEW0-vv8bRaRvLCJcmQMe9vPpNd8S3QMyWrN34T0VfLJTcbllDM7LvG9P9hpi8dZrWirv2i2SfxpBac3K/s1311/D2CA85F2-60B2-438F-8734-8525A7511E40.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1311" data-original-width="1216" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHllFNzkqp0r23zcoZZUGv9FeIJLZZb9y4g2g-VeiSUt-hW07PX4yLzHnP4iKfN4TfSTVW9NoW78Qckh7B-cpCJMUcoYfTybSUNgIbwMppEW0-vv8bRaRvLCJcmQMe9vPpNd8S3QMyWrN34T0VfLJTcbllDM7LvG9P9hpi8dZrWirv2i2SfxpBac3K/w594-h640/D2CA85F2-60B2-438F-8734-8525A7511E40.jpeg" width="594" /></a></div><br /></span><div><span class="kb" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span style="--tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0;"><br /></span></span></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Source: <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-growing-employer-power-have-generated-a-productivity-pay-gap-since-1979-productivity-has-grown-3-5-times-as-much-as-pay-for-the-typical-worker/">Economic Policy Institute</a>.</i></div><span class="kb" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span style="--tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0;"><br />Have done two new posts on Substack.<br /><br /><a href="https://helendale.substack.com/p/its-not-about-hasten-slowly-we-just">On Helen Dale’s Substack, I have posted on how the rate of social change does not de-stabilise conventional centre-right politics, it is change (or the threat of change) that by-passes electoral politics that does so.</a><br /><br />The post includes a discussion of how patterns of migration that supress the Baumol effect thereby suppress wages. (The Baumol effect is the way the high productivity/high wage end of the economy drags up wages generally, hence a hair cut in 2022 costs way more than a haircut in 1960 despite being the same service.)<br /><br /><a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-migration-scam">On my Substack, I have extended that point into an analysis of how easy it is to use migration against the local working class.</a><br /><br />Not only via suppressing the Baumol effect, but also via the Fogel effect (migration intensifying competition for positional goods), the Borjas effect (migration increasing returns to capital more than labour) and the Granovetter effect (migration supplanting local connections, so breaking up people’s local social capital).<br /><br />The latter piece concludes with a discussion of why (mainstream Sunni) Middle Eastern Muslim migration generates rather specific problems.</span></span></div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-60047349231155682772022-11-04T09:16:00.000+11:002022-11-04T09:16:11.747+11:00Introducing ‘Worshipping the Future’<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhO7glgYf7pboPTvHVBDlDY5_u6NRod4MGSh7AITxph4VLNf6pU_8cGQsRMSd3lzHHSMvI4HXvCompuPriTEk0RB9IRiif5rMAImg69BOViNsvZ4rfDi9kvpHql9UndsEmpSG_yIx3pM_qq0Yo7ZYAz2s4c1ZjWCDRKqzGVCL44RoTc3ds-VlA7s0c/s1481/556DE94A-48BF-4B0E-8513-0B6FF22EB10A.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1481" data-original-width="987" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhO7glgYf7pboPTvHVBDlDY5_u6NRod4MGSh7AITxph4VLNf6pU_8cGQsRMSd3lzHHSMvI4HXvCompuPriTEk0RB9IRiif5rMAImg69BOViNsvZ4rfDi9kvpHql9UndsEmpSG_yIx3pM_qq0Yo7ZYAz2s4c1ZjWCDRKqzGVCL44RoTc3ds-VlA7s0c/w426-h640/556DE94A-48BF-4B0E-8513-0B6FF22EB10A.jpeg" width="426" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Source: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.</i></div><div><br /></div>Blogging has been very light here. Mainly because I have been doing a lot of researching and writing for various major projects.<div><br /></div><div>Also, I now <a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/" target="_blank">have a Substack</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>What began as a critique of Marxism grew into a series of essays, now under the title of <i>Worshipping the Future</i>. I briefly explain how they grew into an essay series covering way more than just Marxism <a href="https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/introducing-worshipping-the-future" target="_blank">on my Substack</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>The essay series will be published on <a href="https://helendale.substack.com/" target="_blank">Helen Dale’s Substack</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>An essay introducing the series, <i>Human nature, liberalism, and the politics of transformation,</i></div><div> has now been published on Helen’s Substack. <a href="https://helendale.substack.com/p/human-nature-liberalism-and-the-politics" target="_blank">Enjoy</a>.</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-68851706945332314522022-07-05T17:01:00.002+10:002022-07-05T17:01:25.646+10:00Alienation, Commodification and Other Distractions<i>Ever since their inception, states have dominated the extraction of surplus.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="269" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*bUzfLFyMy6O8Qns1BJVEJQ.png" width="640" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Tomb of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menna">Menna</a>, Wikipedia commons.</span></div><br />Two concepts that, in their anti-commerce forms, get in the way of understanding social dynamics are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification#In_Marxist_theory"><i>commodification</i></a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_alienation#Marx"><i>alienation</i></a>.<br /><br />Regarding commodification (turning things into objects of exchange) we have been exchanging goods outside our immediate groups for perhaps as long as we have been <i>Homo sapiens</i>. Given that the only ways to get hold of something that you do not already have are to <i>make</i> it, <i>take</i> it or <i>trade</i> for it and that (1) we have not been generally able to individually make everything we need since we adopted a cooperative subsistence strategy (something which helped make us human) and (2) we probably want to discourage too much of the <i>take</i> option, that leaves trade. It is not remotely a coincidence that our material prosperity, capacity to engage in social life, personal freedom and autonomy, have all expanded as our trading has.<br /><br />There are certainly questions about what should or should not be traded, and in what circumstances. But everything useful has boundaries, albeit often fuzzy ones, beyond which it stops being beneficial. That comes from living in a universe where constraints are built into the structure of reality. Constraints that we navigate by engaging in various trade-offs.<br /><br />As for <i>alienation</i>, given that we have been trading for possibly our entire history as a species, it can reasonably be said to be incorporated within our evolved capacities, rather than being some psychic maiming. More specifically, the notion that there is something specifically bad about profit because it represents the extraction of surplus, of income that the providers of labour are otherwise entitled to, is a ludicrously simpleminded notion of profit.<br /><br />We direct our labour towards what we value, but there is always the risk of consuming (or otherwise using) more value than we produce. As commercial activity thus runs the risk of loss, covering said risk of loss is a commercially necessary function that folk generally are not going to do for free.<br /><br />Mistaking that labour is <i>directed towards</i> what we value for labour being the <i>determinant of</i> value obscures the central role of risk in structuring commercial activity. Those covering the risk have the greatest incentive to organise production so as to maximise the creation of value (and so minimise the risk of loss). This is why ownership of commercial enterprises by those covering the risk of loss has evolved in every commercially active society. Indeed, what exchanges are, or are not, going to be covered in that way by a particular firm is a question that helps set the boundaries of firms.<br /><br /><b>Surplus through limiting subsistence</b><br /><br />It is also a mistake to regard such normal commercial activity as the prime method of generating surplus (i.e., production in excess of subsistence) in human societies. Ever since their inception, states have overwhelmingly dominated the actual extraction of surplus, and still do. In every developed society, the tax share of GDP is far larger than the profit share.<br /><br />It is a myth that farming, the shift from taking food from the environment to making it by growing plants or raising animals, generates significant surplus on its own. What farming generates is a greater population: i.e., more babies. Hence farming’s ability to overwhelm and replace foraging across arable lands as farming populations swamped foraging populations.<br /><br />In order for farming, for food production, to generate significant surplus, said surplus has to appropriated <i>before</i> it goes to supporting more babies. In all state societies, the overwhelmingly dominant mechanism for extracting surplus has been taxation: that is, appropriation by the state. How can we look at the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, Angkor Wat etc, etc, etc and <i>not</i> realise that states dominate the creation and extraction of surplus?<br /><br />Someone deriving their income from taxes gains it by a far more pure “extraction of surplus” than does anyone in business. Unless the business uses coerced labour. But labour bondage is, in effect, private taxation: using coercion to extract the scarcity premium of labour.<br /><br />Businesses can leach off the surplus-extracting capacity of the state. This is known as <i>crony capitalism</i>. Crony capitalism harnesses the exploitative possibilities of the state through collusion between actors within business and within the state for the benefit of both, and the detriment of the wider society. Such colluding application, into the private sector, of the exploitative possibilities of the state is another manifestation of state dominance of the extraction of surplus.<br /><br />The existence of states do create incentives to privatise profits and socialise losses. But through the surplus-extracting nature of the state.<br /><br /><i>Alienation</i> and <i>commodificatio</i>n may be useful mechanisms to generate an ennobling narrative of oneself as a fighter against metaphysical evils, and to de-legitimise rival (commercial) elites. In their anti-commerce forms, they are, however, not helpful for understanding social dynamics.<br /><br /><b><i>References</i></b><br /><br />Yoram Barzel, <i>Economic Analysis of Property Rights</i>, Cambridge University Press, [1989], 1997.<br /><br />Jared Diamond, Peter Bellwood, ‘Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions’, <i>Science</i>, 25 April 2003, Vol. 300, Issue 5619, pp. 597–603.<br /><br />N. Blegen, ‘The earliest long-distance obsidian transport: Evidence from the ∼200 ka Middle Stone Age Sibilo School Road Site, Baringo, Kenya’, <i>Journal of Human Evolution</i>, 103 (2017) 1e19.<br /><br />Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020’, <i>World Inequality Lab Working Paper</i> N° 2021/15, May 2021.<br /><br />Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, & Zvika Neman, ‘Geography, Transparency, and Institutions’, <i>American Political Science Review</i>, 2017, 111(3), 622–636.</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-60219278103637827072022-04-22T16:08:00.004+10:002022-04-22T16:14:31.849+10:00The Media Parallax View<i>The problem with using a distorting social lens.</i><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjQIb8K-NillPI3UgR0hDfJJg76k1TuOp5yS2HtXd_nyDr5caq66TAjORFl42g6TyY-7ERQH-erb7iUZV3v9xkMo95iOkgnsxVqUdWvJai_OtFznExBDW9dS3yU5OtpN4d-QS1bTqBH3ec-ovyB2007LHEm4BaL0vicPS9N9RJW73oB3ovwKANddjh/s814/VSGscatter.png.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="808" data-original-width="814" height="637" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjQIb8K-NillPI3UgR0hDfJJg76k1TuOp5yS2HtXd_nyDr5caq66TAjORFl42g6TyY-7ERQH-erb7iUZV3v9xkMo95iOkgnsxVqUdWvJai_OtFznExBDW9dS3yU5OtpN4d-QS1bTqBH3ec-ovyB2007LHEm4BaL0vicPS9N9RJW73oB3ovwKANddjh/w640-h637/VSGscatter.png.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;">Source: <a href="https://theweek.com/politics/1002300/progressives-are-aggressors-in-the-culture-war-too">https://theweek.com/politics/1002300/progressives-are-aggressors-in-the-culture-war-too</a></i></div><div><br />A common trope of commentary, both inside and outside the US, for some years now (even before the Trump-apocalypse) was that the Republican Party had shifted rightwards. The trouble is, this is mostly not true.<br /><br />The views of Republican voters has <a href="https://jabberwocking.com/charts-of-the-day-heres-a-partisan-history-of-the-culture-wars-since-2000/">changed very little in recent decades</a>. The views of Democrat voters have shifted notably to the left. </div><div><br /></div><div>Republican voters have become more consistently conservative in their views, which has pulled the median Republican voter away from the centre. But the shift away from the centre of the median Democrat voter <a href="https://jabberwocking.com/if-you-hate-the-culture-wars-blame-liberals/">has been much stronger</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>As the above graphic demonstrates, in 2016 Democrat voters were much more clustered away from the centre in economic policy, and somewhat more clustered away from the centre in cultural politics, than were Republican voters. Movement in Democrat opinion has been driven <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-democrats-have-shifted-left-over-the-last-30-years/">by shifts among</a> liberal and college-educated Democrats, <a href="https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/indicators-of-the-great-awokening">which began before</a> Trump’s candidacy.<br /><br />So, from whence comes this view that the Republicans have become “much” more right wing?<br /><br />Partly, as Damon Linker points out, from <a href="https://theweek.com/politics/1002300/progressives-are-aggressors-in-the-culture-war-too">increased used of brinkmanship</a> by the Congressional Republicans. But this shift in tactics is not really a shift in opinion (though it may reflect a consolidation of opinion among Republicans).<br /><br />Mostly, however, it comes from the mainstream media, especially the “quality” media. The views of the mainstream media, especially the “quality” media, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening">have shifted sharply</a>, and increasingly intolerantly, leftwards in cultural politics. The result is, even with minimal shifting among Republicans, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11">the distance between</a> the views of the mainstream media, especially the “quality” media, and those of Republicans has steadily grown. </div><div><br /></div><div>As the mainstream media, especially the “quality” media, is the lens through which many Americans, and even more international media and their audiences, see US politics, the increasing expression by many American journalists of their growing distance from Republicans have created the illusion of the Republicans becoming “much more” right wing.<br /><br />It is a parallax effect. If there are two poles, and you are moving so that one seems closer and closer and other seems further and further away, it can look as if the receding pole is shifting, when it is your point of view that is actually shifting. Similarly, if you are retaining the same distance away from one pole that is shifting further and further away from another (stationary) pole, that can also create the illusion that the stationary pole is moving.<br /><br />Looking at US politics through a mainstream media, particularly a “quality” media, that has been shifting leftwards (in cultural politics), has created the illusion of shifts in Republican opinion that are much larger than they actually have been. Meanwhile, the same process has obscured the reality that leftward shifts in Democrat opinion have been significantly larger than any rightward shifts in Republican opinion.<br /><br />The collapse in advertising revenues has created something of <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/voices-from-the-collapse-of-mainstream-media-f36e2c8bd2fa">a “go broke, go woke” phenomena</a> in the US media, where falling revenues has led to smaller newsrooms that are more easily captured by the intolerant conformity of recent university graduates. This is making much of the media an ever more distorting lens through which to view US politics. Or US society in general. Or any public policy issues that touch on cultural politics.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>[An earlier version of this was <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-media-parallax-view-5426031b4889" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>.]</div><div><br /></div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-23402202741047404252022-02-26T18:03:00.000+11:002022-02-26T18:03:42.602+11:00On acknowledged possession<i>Property law rests on conventions that evolved before it and that can operate without it, or even against it.</i><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="518" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*Hofd_WB9j7RVOAeiED5sqw.jpeg" width="640" /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Waiting for the opening of a speakeasy in 1921 (Wikipedia commons).</span></i></div><br />Black markets, markets in illegal goods and services, demonstrate that state recognition and protection of property rights are not required for a market to operate. Black markets exist where the state bans the sale and/or purchases of specific goods and services and, as a consequence, will not protect the exchanges, goods, services or assets involved in, or derived from, such commerce.<br /><br />The state does not only fail to provide recognition and protection of property rights within the banned market, or any mediation or adjudication services; it actively denies such and seeks to suppress the trades and accompanying property rights. Yet, black markets exist. They can even flourish, generating great (if insecure and often violently contested) wealth.<br /><br />As various economists, such as Ronald Coase, Harold Demsetz and Yoram Barzel have explored at length, a trade, an exchange, is actually a transfer of control over some attribute or bundles of attributes. If such control is formally recognised and enforceable, then they are legal or formal property rights. But, as we have seen, trades can and do happen regularly even when formal legal ratification of such control, and their transfer, is actively denied.<br /><br />How can this be? Because the functional element in property is not formal ratification by a legal system or process, but <i>mutual acknowledgement</i> by the contracting parties and others that they interact with. Such acknowledgment may be active, or it may be passive acquiescence. Nevertheless, such mutual acknowledgement is all that is needed for people to exercise effective control over attributes and so for <i>economic</i> property rights to exist. Indeed, such mutual acknowledgement is what makes any property law functional in day-to-day operation. The old saw that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” points to the fundamental role of mutual acknowledgement in any property system.<br /><br />At this level, property-as-mutual-acknowledgement is a matter of <i>convention</i>, something you do in particular ways because others do so. (Language and fashion are classic realms of convention.) Property-as-mutual-acknowledgement generates basic conventions of resource use. If you have something in your possession, if you are exercising control over it, the information-economising presumption that simplifies human interaction is that it is, indeed, yours in the senses that matter. This mutual acknowledgement, as is normal for effective conventions, works because it works for everyone as a general presumption. People can operate on the basis of a common set of mutually-reinforcing, because mutually-beneficial and mutually-aligning, expectations.<br /><br />Property everywhere and always exists via such information-economising acknowledgement, creating mutually-reinforcing expectations. The key thing in property is not “<i>mine!</i>”, any silverback gorilla thumping his chest can claim that. The key thing in property is “<i>yours!</i>”: the acknowledgement by others that the thing is yours and remains yours until you pass it to another.<br /><br />A trade is just the process of transferring mutually acknowledged control over goods or services. All parties to the trade agree because they are getting something out of the transfer. Each gets the value they perceive out of having what the other previously had, or is going to provide, in exchange for what they themselves previously had, or will provide. An exchange they undergo because they value the former more than the latter. Hence, <i>gains from trade</i>: in cases of voluntary exchange, if both sides did not feel themselves to be better off, they would not have agreed to the trade.<br /><br />Even in cases of coerced exchange (providing goods or services to avoid some violent or other penalty), the coercion works because the transfer is judged better than the alternative by both parties. In the case of the coerced, it is judged better than the alternative <i>after </i>coercion is put into play. In the case of the agent applying the coercion, <i>before</i> doing so. It is the legitimacy and consequences of the coercion that drives our judgement about such coercive exchanges. Taxes and a mugging are both coerced exchanges, but they are not generally regarded as normatively equivalent.<br /><br />The power of mutual acknowledgement (and of information-economising, expectation-aligning, common presumption) is such that it permits black markets to operate <i>even in the face of the state denying formal recognition of such acknowledgment</i>. Indeed, even though the state is seeking to <i>actively frustrate</i> such mutual acknowledgement.<br /><br />Black markets can only operate because the state is unable or unwilling to make its ban fully effective. But the difficulty of doing so points to, and is part a result of, the willingness of the parties to make the banned exchanges. Trades based on mutual acknowledgement using generally convenient conventions of property.<br /><br />Because the parties involved seek to avoid the prohibiting efforts of the state, black market exchanges tend to gravitate towards places that are not regularly policed by the state. The level of black market activity in a locality tends to say more about the patterns in the policing efforts of the state than the inhabitants of the locality. Nevertheless, it is very easy for the inhabitants of such localities to be tarred by the association with the local black market activity. Something that can be useful to obscure the level of state responsibility for its (lack of) effective policing. And even more useful for dividing residents, citizens and workers by locality, or by features associated with locality.<br /><br />In practice, even the blackest of black markets is somewhat parasitic on the formal property rights structure endorsed or provided by the state, if only to more securely enjoy the benefits of income and assets acquired from illegal exchanges. Hence the appeal of <i>money laundering</i>: converting what is illegal into what is legal by moving assets and income out of the realm that the state seeks to ban into the realm that the state acknowledges (i.e. ratifies) and protects. Obviously, the intent of such laundering of money and assets is to avoid the risks and costs of hostile state action but successfully doing so also gains the benefits of state property protection and adjudication services.<br /><br />Thus, that black markets demonstrate that markets do not need the support and acknowledgment of the state to function does not mean that there are not major <i>benefits</i> in such support and acknowledgment. Including the various services the state may offer. Even if the state is purely motivated by the pacification needed to secure its taxation base, that normally entails some protection of property rights. Moreover, the pacifying state is likely to provide, or create social space for, or otherwise support, adjudication services as part of ensuring the social pacification that enables and supports its revenue extraction.<br /><br /><b>Trade or raid</b><br /><br />Black markets are, of course, notoriously connected to violence. This flows directly from the state refusing to protect and acknowledge black market exchanges. In the absence of state protection and adjudication, assets have to be protected, and disputes adjudicated, by private action. In the end, by private force.<br /><br />Moreover, black market exchanges happen through mutually acknowledged control of property. Such acknowledgement can be withheld or withdrawn.<br /><br />Exchanges outside the ambit of state ratification, protection and public adjudication are in the pre-state situation of the primordial <i>trade-or-raid</i> choice. Does one bargain to secure desired things that another has by trade or does one simply take by raid?<br /><br />Much of the point, and a very large part of the value, of state pacification is to minimise the attractiveness, and so incidence, of the raid choice. Thereby elevating the frequency and scale of the trade choice. Which can also further encourage the making of things, the third choice in acquiring something you do not already have, after take or trade. To the potential benefit of the state’s revenue.<br /><br /><b>Reducing transaction costs</b><br /><br />Elevating the frequency and scale of trades is the core benefit of effective systems of legal property rights. Clarity of property rights, ease of adjudication and reliability of their protection all lower transaction costs, potentially dramatically. <i>Transaction costs</i> being costs entailed in making an exchange or other interaction. Specifically, search and information costs; bargaining and decision costs; policing and enforcement costs.<br /><br />The lower transaction costs are, including the lower the risks involved in transacting and in having assets, and the greater the clarity in who has what rights, the higher the scale of transactions are likely to be and the more willing people are going to hold, and invest in, commercial assets. The state-revenue and economic growth advantages of this situation are likely to be very large.<br /><br />While the advantages of the reduction of transaction costs through an effective legal system are very real, this is very different from stating or implying that such a happy situation is <i>required</i> for commercial activity to occur. It is perfectly clear, from history and anthropology, that such a well-functioning system of property rights and law is absolutely <i>not</i> necessary for commercial activity, even considerable levels of commercial activity.<br /><br />As, of course, the case of black markets starkly demonstrate. More generally, as history and anthropology demonstrate quite clearly, mutual acknowledgement generating property conventions — whether or not such is formally ratified by the state and regardless of how efficiently or effectively the state does so — can still support considerable levels of commercial activity. Especially if agents within the state provide functional acknowledgment of property, even if formal ratification is lacking. Indeed, the case of post-1978 China demonstrates that such acknowledgement within the state apparatus can be sufficient <i>even though private commerce and ownership is formally illegal</i>. As it was in China <a da188b42015182c032ffc22a9692435d1d572172="" href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Fundamental-Institutions-of-China" s-reforms-and-xu="">until 2004</a>.<br /><br />China in the period 1978–2004 was not so much a matter of <i>black</i> markets — as the state was clearly not enforcing its bans on private property and private exchanges in anything remotely resembling a systematic way — as <i>grey</i> markets. Markets whose existence and exchanges were formally banned but functionally permitted. That such markets could operate at all, points to the key role of mutual acknowledgement in functioning property systems, every bit as much as black markets do.<br /><br />What made such markets functional was being acknowledged by agents within the state apparatus. Indeed, often engaged in by such agents. What evolved were patterns of acknowledgement by such agents that permitted markets to emerge based on conventions of property (including of the transfer of property). Markets that were not typical black markets, with their associated violence and often socially disruptive goods and services; but nor were they ratified by the state within a formal system of property law. Though they were parasitic both on formal state property systems and the social peace imposed by the Chinese state.<br /><br />The path of the People’s Republic from command economy to market economy, under the continuing regime of the Chinese Communist Party, can perhaps shed some light on a recurrent pattern in Eurasian history, where land starts as being owned by the ruler and, over time, becomes the property (with varying degrees of completeness and recognition) of intermediary social actors. Possibly all the way down to individual farmers. Versions of this pattern can be seen in Indian, European, Japanese and Imperial Chinese history. The difficulties and inefficiencies of central control, and the pervasive power of, and tendency towards, acknowledged possession, of property-as-convention, are clearly a recurring tension within state societies.<br /><br /><b>Manageable transaction cost</b>s<br /><br />Economic agents can use connections to reduce uncertainty and manage risks, further strengthening the conventions that generate mutually-acknowledged possession. (A <i>connection</i> being repeated, mutually acknowledged, interactions that both agents presumptively intend to continue, or that one agent can force to continue.) Connections provide a wide range of possibilities that, without achieving the level of uncertainty reduction (and so risk clarification) that efficient property-rights regimes generate, can nevertheless enable considerable commercial activity.<br /><br />Markets emerge when there is sufficient mutual acknowledgement of possession to generate property-as-convention in situations where transaction costs, and other risks, are manageable. We can identify three key elements based on the normal resource-creation-and-risk-management triad of <i>structured sharing</i>, <i>exchange</i>, and <i>connection</i> (that both <i>structured sharing</i> and <i>exchange</i> are embedded in, and interact with), plus the value of signalling your value as a social interlocutor.<br /><br />First, there is the element of a functional common space. Passive acquiescence in control of what others possess-and-so-control makes it much easier for everyone to act within the common social space. If the state does nothing more than block public violence, it effectively creates a common social space within which such passive acquiescence will be naturally ubiquitous. That alone is a powerful protector of functional property rights, even if the state does not formally ratify property rights or does not provide adjudication services (whether at all, or sufficient to cover the demand for such).<br /><br />Many societies have had private providers of adjudication services covering property disputes. Which folk have been willing to use for the same reason that they acquiesce in the possessing(s) of others: it eases their social interactions.<br /><br />Second, there is mutual signalling. Passive acquiescence signals that one is potentially a person easier to interact with. The more complete the mutual acknowledgement, the stronger the signal. Folk have a powerful incentive to acknowledge the possessing of others so that their own possessing will be acknowledged in turn.<br /><br />Such patterns of mutual signalling can also increase the willingness to use private adjudication services. By using such services, and abiding by their decisions, folk establish their reliability as social and commercial interlocutors. More generally, the broader the ambit of one’s repeated trading activity, the more value there is in a reputation for fair dealing; which includes respect for the possessing of others.<br /><br />The value of <i>Sharia</i>, and <i>Sharia</i> courts, in providing a shared system of commercial law and adjudication, had much to do with the spread of Islam along trade routes, particularly in the Malay world. More recently, the provision of such services also <a href="https://chartable.com/podcasts/conflicted/episodes/95118550-afghanistan-and-the-taliban">had much to do with</a> how the Taliban was able to maintain networks of support within rural Afghanistan, leading to its recapture of the country.<br /><br />One sign of how effective the suppression of violence in public spaces is, is how much effort those willing to violate the general pattern of presumptive possession put in to hide or obscure their doing so. What makes a riot a riot is the breakdown of such presumptive hiding of violence. Just as what makes looting, looting is the breakdown of presumptive acknowledgement of possessing by others. Though, at some point, looters will want a return to the presumption of possession so they can more securely retain their gains. A revealing instance of how much the violation of the presumptive possession by others is itself parasitic on a more general pattern of acquiescence in possession that generate the conventions of property. As previously noted, the general utility of possessing is a powerful motivator for ongoing patterns of mutual acquiescence in possession and the alignment of expectations to generate the conventions of property.<br /><br />Thirdly, there is the role of connections. The need to maintain and protect connections important to oneself may further encourage mutual acknowledging of possession, and an abiding by private adjudication, by raising the social costs of failing to protect and sustain a reputation as a reliable interlocutor. Especially if such connections also protect one’s own presumptive possession. The atomised individual may be more willing to violate such presumptions but is also a more likely target of such violations.<br /><br />The use of (typically kin) connections to provide protection-via-retaliation, which is a method for protecting life, person and property particularly common in horticultural and pastoralist societies, can set off cycles of feuding. One of the ways that states pacify is by breaking such patterns of retaliatory feuding.<br /><br />Societies with strong kin groups often use private adjudication services quite extensively, as protection of one’s standing within the kin group often helps motivate use of, and abiding by, such adjudication.<br /><br />Certain connections may also protect one’s violation of the presumptive possession of others. Hence the tendency of criminal gangs to form so as to protect, organise and enable such violations (and of the assets gained therefrom). They are also a very useful protective device when engaged in black market activity and may be necessary if operation within the black market involves significant issues of scale or complexity in provision. Every bit as much as other firms do, criminal gangs wrestle with choices of whether to transact <i>externally</i> through markets (or, being criminal, via taking) or internally through <i>organisation</i> (i.e. managed connection using pooled resources organised through some mixture of hierarchy and structured sharing). Boundary choices that depend, as with other firms, on questions of transaction costs and risk-coverage. (A transaction that one can profit from is also a transaction that one can lose from; covering the risk of loss is a fundamental factor in why firms exist and how they are structured.)<br /><br />The value in protecting the ability to interact through conventions of ownership based on mutual acknowledgement is so strong that injunctions against stealing (at least within the relevant in-group, the relevant normative community) are a universal feature of human societies. The conventions of property are thereby reinforced by social norms against (in-group) theft.<br /><br />Norms arise out of a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106452030004X">sense-of-should</a> based on the benefits of aligning expectations in a highly social species with considerable cognitive capacity due to having large, and metabolically costly, brains.<br /><br /><i>Social norms</i> are injunctions to act as expected, with sanctions also being expected to be imposed if such expectations are not fulfilled. The mechanisms to enforce anti-theft norms can include shunning, expulsion, violence, or other penalties. Whether enforced personally, by wider action within the community or by some authority. The universal evolution of normative injunctions against stealing (at least within the in-group) point to the ubiquitous value of the conventions of property.<br /><br />We can see that, even if there is no pacifying state, so that there is what one might call a pure trade-or-raid choice, there are many reasons that trades can and will still happen. There are many mechanisms for making transaction costs and risks sufficiently manageable that trades happen, even in the absence of any state. Indeed, even <i>against</i> the efforts of the state. Mechanisms that are viable because of the ubiquity of mutual acknowledgement as a basis for functional systems of property.<br /><br />The mutual convenience of the conventions of possession can establish functional property rights without any state action or formal legal acknowledgement. The conventions of property evolve naturally because we are so much a social and normative species, regularly engaging in mutual signalling and seeking to benefit from aligning our expectations.<br /><br />[An earlier version was posted <a href="https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/on-acknowledged-possession-3c39ac911018" target="_blank">on Medium</a>.]<br /><br /><b><i>References</i></b><br /><br />Yoram Barzel, <i>Economic Analysis of Property Rights</i>, Cambridge University Press, [1989], 1997.<br /><br />Cristina Bicchieri, <i>The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms</i>, Cambridge University Press, 2012.<br /><br />Cristina Bicchieri, <i>Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms</i>, Oxford University Press, 2017.<br /><br />R. H. Coase, <i>The Firm, The Market and the Law</i>, University of Chicago Press, 1988. Includes ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1937) and ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ (1960).<br /><br />Harold Demsetz, ‘Towards a Theory of Property Rights’, <i>American Economic Review</i>, Volume 57, Issue 2, May 1967, 347–359.<br /><br />Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, <i>Physics of Life Reviews</i>, Volume 36, March 2021, 100–136.<br /><br />Chenggang Xu, ‘The Fundamental Institutions of China’s Reforms and Development’, <i>Journal of Economic Literature</i>, 2011, 49:4, 1076–1151.</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-26029670046557803892022-02-15T18:23:00.007+11:002022-03-06T11:52:06.762+11:00How the prestige opinion media model encourages siloing and other disasters<i>Opinions that mark one off as one of the smart-and-the-good can have a disastrous effect on policy and organisations.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="427" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*PgMvtTXylRDRBWqhILNZMg.jpeg" width="640" /><a href="https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-angry-teenager-refusing-to-look-copybook-i-frustration-worried-pretty-women-wrinkling-her-forehead-keeping-folder-image92513673">Source</a></div><br /><br />In her <a href="https://lawliberty.org/book-review/policing-words/">review</a> of Andrew Doyle’s recently published book arguing the case for free speech, novelist, lawyer and commentator Helen Dale makes the following observation:<br /><blockquote>Relatedly, one of the most depressing characteristics of our contemporary media environment is what I’ve come to call “the silo effect.” Both social media (by dint of algorithms) and now conventional media (by dint of deliberate hiring and firing) are herding their viewers and readers into ideological silos. Once there, they’re unlikely to encounter anything other than intellectual comfort food with which they already agree.<br /><br />Cancel culture works best on little people — junior academics or low-level employees. Neither I nor Doyle (as we admit) can be cancelled. In both cases, people tried and failed: their behaviour parlayed our books into bestsellers. We can, however, be siloed. Unless you’re J.K. Rowling, siloing works on nearly everyone.</blockquote>Siloing started in academe, where the boundaries between disciplines encourages it, was massively aggravated by social media and then infected institutions as social-media-inflamed university graduates spread out into the workforce. The effect being worse in media due to the “go broke, go woke” problem of shrinking incomes leading to shrinking newsrooms more easily dominated by recent graduates. A process that intensified the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Inc.">Hate Inc</a>.</i> media model analysed by journalist Matt Taibbi.<br /><br />The underlying pattern revolves around media, particularly “quality” media, providing a set of opinions — <i>prestige opinions</i> — the holding of which grant prestige by marking one as being of the smart and the good. The great benefit of prestige opinions is that you don’t have to know about a subject in any depth, you only have to know what the smart-and-good people think.<br /><br /><a href="https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/"><i>Luxury beliefs</i></a> (beliefs that provide status for elite folk while imposing costs lower down the social scale) are a subset of prestige opinions. “Defund the police”, with the resultant surge in homicides as vilified police <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3758251">withdraw from active policin</a>g, is an example of a luxury belief.<br /><br />So, at the most general level, we have “clickbait tribalism”, where media outlets pander to their subscriber base to build and maintain an audience, leaning into the in-group/out-group tribalism to which we <i>Homo sapiens</i> are so prone.<br /><br />In the “quality” media, prestige opinions operate as a particular version of such opinion tribalism, because they provide added status. Luxury beliefs are a subset of prestige opinions: the most directly toxic version of the status strategy.<br /><br />The siloing that Helen Dale describes above feeds off the prestige-opinion media model that public broadcasting zeroed in decades ago (though the operation of the model has intensified over time) and has always been a bit of a thing.<br /><br />Providing prestige opinions has increasingly become a service that public broadcasting and other “quality” media provide. The combination of surging <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Midwit">midwit</a> graduates in societies ever more flooded with information seriously upped the appeal of the economising-on-information (and cognitive effort), signal-you-are-smart-and-good service that the prestige-opinion media model provides.<br /><br />My 2000 “Virtue Over Veracity” article in <i>The Australian</i> newspaper was an early attempt to articulate the prestige opinion model of “quality” media (‘Print’s elite puts virtue above veracity’, <i>The Australian</i>, Media supplement, 22 June 2000.)<br /><br />In a <a href="https://graymirror.substack.com/p/three-shapes-of-journalism?r=hk471">recent essay</a>, Curtin Yarvis notes that ostentatious fact-checking is part of the prestige media package: these opinions are clearly superior, for they have been fact-checked. Even though such fact-checking is often just another form of narrative enforcing. Ostentatious fact-checking thereby does double service to the prestige opinion game: providing an ostentatious performance of accuracy while protecting the prestige opinions themselves.</div><div><br /></div><div>As Helen Dale observes in her book review, a specific view of the world that came out of media effects theory and related academic nonsense actively encourages siloing (in effect, self-curating what one reads):<br /><blockquote>Unfortunately, thanks to the now common belief that word choice is an effect of cultural hegemony, the problem for Doyle is that left partisans are likely to respond by refusing to read his book, if not actively seeking to get bookshops to drop it. And yes, this behaviour is rooted in adherence to a form of word magic. The view that words, ideas, and arguments can cause harm in the same way a punch does means safety is only possible if one refuses to engage. The logic is impeccable: when you think language makes the world, you are frightened of words. Worse, Mill’s harm principle is no defence against people who insist on equating spiritual or psychological harm with physical violence.</blockquote>As folk accept the providing prestige-opinions service that public broadcasting and other “quality” media offer, such opinions become assets, the value of which one seeks to protect. Refusing to read folk outside those who are equally invested in maintaining the value of such beliefs-as-assets is a form of self-protection. Beliefs that are assets both for status and for self-identity as a good-and-smart person.<br /><br />Add in all the above and you get intensified siloing and so intensified polarisation.<br /><br />Another way to think about it is that, with the (increasing) flood of information, it is hard to sort out signal from noise. Media companies offer signal-identifying services. The identified signal is more welcome if it accords with beliefs one is emotionally invested in. Hence the siloed tribalism of modern media.<br /><br />The signal identification is even more welcome if it provides status markers and status reinforcement. Hence the appeal of prestige opinions in “quality” media that already has a status element built into its marketing. That the "quality" media will report very similar stories in very similar ways, far from being a warning sign, is easily taken as a marker that one is getting The Truth. </div><div><br /></div><div>If the "quality" media does not report something, it is functionally not-a-thing for all those taking their cues from such media. The result is the behaviour of those responding to different cues becomes mysterious, and presumably malign. Because that feeds the status strategy and status differentiation.<br /><br />If the public beliefs impose costs on those of lower social status, the status signal is more effective still at status differentiating. Hence the generation of luxury beliefs. With all these processes being amplified by the reinforcing feedback effects of social media.<br /><br />Without even considering the problem of luxury beliefs, the problem is even worse. For prestige opinions only provide positive status if contrary opinions generate negative status. If opinion X is a sign of virtue, then opinion not-X becomes a sign of vice, of viciousness.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The prestige opinion model generates pressure for censorship of contrary opinions. Both among those for whom their prestige opinions are assets to be defended and those who purvey such prestige opinions, because central to the “service” they are applying is to also “identify” illegitimate wickedness and stupidity.<br /><br />So, it goes further than self-protective siloing. Many people have been encouraged by “quality” media (including by public broadcasting) to “invest” in beliefs as cognitive assets that mark them off as being of the smart-and-the-good while also allowing them to economise on information and cognitive effort. This leads them to demand, or support, censorship to protect those assets. </div><div><br /></div><div>Especially as those prestige opinions become reinforced and protected by a series of pseudo-intellectual smears. Once activated (e.g. TERF), the smear puts a fence around tagged opinion and tagged person, meaning that no further consideration is required. It is revealing how these smears represent an assault on the <i>character</i> of the person so tagged via their (actual or alleged) opinion. The smearing attack on moral character reveals very clearly that an in-group/out-group status game is being played.<br /><br />The “paradox” of journalists and reporters being in favour of censorship is no paradox at all. It is where their business model, and their own status strategy, leads them. For among the first to buy into the prestige-opinion model are those who push prestige opinions.<br /><br />What is acceptable trumps what is true (or might be true). Anyone who is in favour of any form of censorship of opinions clearly (whatever they may tell themselves) prefers what is acceptable to what is (inconveniently) true, or might be true. For censorship is not only an act of social dominance, it is all about policing the acceptable.<br /><br />Yet, the problem is worse still. Because the prestige-opinion model provides the “quality” media with an incentive to frustrate policy accountability. Any information or policy outcomes that contradict or undermine the prestige-opinion assets they have been providing, and adhere to themselves, attack both their own sense of status and their business model. (And yes, public broadcasters also have a business model: to create a core of active partisans for their services.)<br /><br />Moreover, not-for-profit organisations, including tax-funded organisations, lacking a clear “bottom line”, tend to reflect the interests of their staff. In the case of public broadcasting, the status strategies of their staff.<br /><br /><div>The conformity of opinion across "quality" media is reassuring for the consumers of the prestige-opinion model, as it reinforces the sense that folk who matter all agree on what is the righteous truth. In fact, that "quality" media is so readily dominated by rapidly emerging conformities in what is supposed to be the "first draft" of history is a danger sign. </div><div><br /></div>For issues where there often has not been enough time to test the accuracy of claims, and which will have very different significance depending on one's social position, values, interests and concerns, to generate such rapid conformities is a sign that there are strong pressures to hold the same (narrow) range of opinions. Opinions become <i>conventions</i>, things one does (or holds) because other people do. As they become markers of knowing status, they become <i>social norms</i>: opinions one is expected to hold if one is of the smart and good and will likely be subject to sanctions if one does not as people protect their status-and-identity assets.</div><div><br /></div><div>The prestige-opinion model also creates perverse incentives within bureaucracies: whether government, non-profit or corporate. The more folk have invested (at least cognitively) in prestige opinions as assets, the more they have incentives to block information that undermine their prestige-opinion assets. Including information relevant to the successful operation of their organisation.<br /><br />While the “go woke, go broke” dynamic is easily over-stated, it is not hard to find cases of marketing and other commercial decisions clearly based on the prestige-opinion status game that have damaged sales because too many customers were not interested in paying for status games they were not invested in and that shifted the product away from what they wanted. The pattern has become particularly marked in cinema, television and comics in the US and the rest of the developed Anglosphere.<br /><br />Journalist and first-rate science populariser Will Storr (whose latest book, <i>The Status Game</i>, is required reading to understand the world around us) made the point in <a href="https://youtu.be/OsuSjdB2yyo">his interview with</a> the Triggernometry boys that the modern world of science and mass prosperity was built on prestige increasingly accruing to competence and success. People gained prestige from being clever at inventing new gadgets and expanding our understanding of the world around us. As Alexander Pope (1688–1744) famously said of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727):<br /><br /><i>Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.<br />God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.<br /></i><br />The modern world, the mass prosperity on which the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, legal equality for women and so much more was all built on, came about because status through competence-and-success prestige came to dominate the pre-existing (and up to then dominant) status game of virtue, of propriety.<br /><br />The trouble is, competence and success through actual achievement is hard. Ostentatious performance of propriety is much easier. Social media makes it easier still and broadcasts the performative propriety much more widely.<br /><br />We are observing the increasing replacement of prestige through competence and success by status through ostentatious performance of propriety. It is polluting our public discourse, undermining democratic accountability and encouraging bad (even disastrous) policy.<br /><br />Michael Shellenberger’s latest book <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780063093638/san-fransicko/"><i>San Fransicko</i></a> provides vivid examples of such disastrous dynamics in US “progressive” urban policies. In the latter part of <a href="https://youtu.be/WlH3S-uLTIw">this interview</a>, Shellenberger discusses how uniformity of opinion among folk in the mainstream media frustrates accountability for bad “progressive” policies. What he is describing is a classic example of how media that both itself invests in, and purveys, prestige opinions undermines democratic accountability quite directly, fostering ever more disastrous policy outcomes.</div><div><br />The biggest problem in Western civilisation is the expansion of social milieu (public, corporate and non-profit bureaucracies; universities; school systems) where ideas are not reality-tested but they are status-selected. The prestige opinion model interacting with social media has made the problem <a href="https://hwfo.substack.com/p/memespace-egregores-and-maajid-nawaz?utm_source=url">WAY worse</a>.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>So, those opinions you have picked up from “quality media”. Are they assets you wish to protect? If so they may also be a spiralling social, organisational and civilisational disaster that you have bought into.<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div><div><br /></div><div>[An earlier version was <a href="https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/how-the-prestige-opinion-media-model-encourages-siloing-and-other-disasters-a315bd760975" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>. This post has been expanded since I first posted it.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-35686696146614651012021-11-28T11:51:00.006+11:002022-02-26T18:07:32.021+11:00The Holocaust was not a Great Lone Evil<i>And bad things come from pretending it was.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="477" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*A0FJu2GcYSBKLq5KmVAxqA.jpeg" width="640" /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933. Wikimedia commons.</span></i></div><br />A friend forwarded me this email:<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Never Forget: Holodomor Memorial Day</b><br /><br />In 1932 and 1933, 7 Million (estimated) Ukrainians were massacred by genocidal famine ordered by the Bolshevik government. Many were Christians. Students do not learn about the Holodomor in middle school, high school, or even college. There aren’t dozens of major Hollywood films depicting the horrific events that took place. Our politicians aren’t referencing the Holodomor every other day and visiting Holodomor Museums. If you ask any random American on the street about the Holodomor they will have no idea what it is. </blockquote><blockquote>Why is this? </blockquote><blockquote>American students grow up inundated with Holocaust movies, books, and education from grade school on up. American states like Florida even <a href="https://floridapolitics.com/archives/322486-never-again-house-passes-holocaust-education-bill/">pass laws mandating Holocaust education</a> for our children. <b>So why are we not learning about the Holodomor?</b> </blockquote><blockquote>Perhaps even worse: why is Holodomor Denial allowed while if you question any part of the Holocaust narrative you <a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_Holocaust_denial_is_legal">could land in jail </a>across many European countries. </blockquote><blockquote>In particular why are prominent members of the Jewish community, who know the realities of genocide in the 20th century, among some of the most prominent Holodomor denialists? </blockquote><blockquote>The state of Israel <a href="http://euromaidanpress.com/2021/06/29/israel-isnt-going-to-recognize-the-holodomor-as-genocide-ambassador/">refuses to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide</a>. </blockquote><blockquote>“The Holodomor “is definitely not a genocide,” <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/zuroff-israel-should-not-recognize-holodomor-as-genocide-578308">said Zuroff,</a> the head of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.” </blockquote><blockquote>About a decade ago Abe Foxman, the former head of the Jewish Anti Defamation League, met with the President of Ukraine to <a href="https://tv.gab.com/channel/a/view/former-head-of-the-adl-bullies-61a23c1cd3113b172cfa0c4a">pressure the government into downplaying the Holodomor.</a> </blockquote><blockquote>Maybe Mr. Putin can give us a clue as to why this is. </blockquote><blockquote>Putin: <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/1st-soviet-gov-t-was-80-jewish-says-putin-1.5282900">First Soviet Government Was Mostly Jewish</a>: “I thought about something just now: The decision to nationalize this library was made by the first Soviet government, whose composition was 80–85 percent Jewish,” Putin said June 13 during a visit to Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. Interestingly enough, around the same percentage of <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/all-the-jews-biden-has-tapped-for-top-roles-in-his-new-administration/">Joe Biden’s cabinet is Jewish too</a>. </blockquote><blockquote>Thankfully unlike the Ukrainian Kulaks, the <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2021/11/are-you-ready-to-be-an-american-kulak/">American Kulaks</a> are armed, but we must also be well versed in history so that it does not repeat itself. </blockquote><blockquote>Christians must never forget the genocide of millions of our Christian brothers and sisters. We must hold to account those who seek to deny, hide, or downplay this atrocity. We must educate our children about the horrors of what happened and we must not be afraid to “offend” people in the process of discussing the truth about these important matters. Objective truth is only offensive to those who hate and wish to hide objective truth. </blockquote><blockquote>Never forget.</blockquote>So, things to say. Many, many things to say.<br /><br />The first thing is the history in the email is mostly correct. One can quibble about some of the statistics, but (leaving aside motivation for the moment) the underlying historical facts are essentially correct.<br /><br />The second thing is to say is that while the facts are mostly correct, the framing of those facts really, really isn’t.<br /><br />There are three big things going on here. First, yes, Israel and the Jewish lobby has attempted to portray the Holocaust as the Great Lone Evil. Which it is most certainly wasn’t. Not only were other folk targeted along with Jews, the Holocaust is not remotely the only vile megacide of the C20th.<br /><br />Second, yes, Jews were involved in perpetrating the Holodomor. Something that Israel and the Jewish lobby really, really don’t want to deal with. Especially as it gets even more in the way of treating the Holocaust as the Great Lone Evil.<br /><br />But the Jewish communists who helped create the Holodomor didn’t do it because they were Jewish, they did it because they were revolutionary Marxists.<br /><br />Which is the third big thing. The Holodomor is not the only revolutionary Marxist terror-famine of the C20th. It wasn’t even the first terror-famine of the Soviet regime. That was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism">War Communism</a>.<br /><br />The Ethiopian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Ethiopia">terror famine</a>. The Chinese <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine">Great Leap Forward famine</a>. Cambodia’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide">Year Zero megacide</a>. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine">North Korean famines</a>. Soviet mass <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag">labour camp</a> slavery. Soviet <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Forced-Labor-Institution-Publication/dp/0817939423" target="_blank">workplace serfdom</a>.<br /><br />The history of revolutionary Marxism in power only starts in November 1917, so just over a century ago. Yet it is a history of megacide after megacide, mass oppression after mass oppression.<br /><br />These ALL get various degrees of the “down the memory hole” treatment. Most of them, no one of Jewish extraction had anything to do with. (Except of course, that they were based on the theories of Karl Marx, who despised his own [ancestral] people, just as he despised his own class.)<br /><br />Which gets back to the Jews involved in perpetuating the Holodomor didn’t do it because they were Jewish, they did it because they were revolutionary Marxists acting on the right side of history, pushing it towards its glorious liberating completion.<br /><br />Which is why these megacides and oppressions are so often shoved down the memory hole. Because lots of people in academe and education do not want to have any sort of awkward mirror to their own ambitions shoved in front of them.<br /><br />Do Israel and the Jewish lobby have a particular reason to memory-hole the Holodomor? Absolutely they do, twice over. First, because it gets in the way of the Holocaust as Great Lone Evil. Second, because it turns out that Jews motivated by a totalising ideology can be every bit as horribly, tyrannically murderous as any anti-Semitic Gentile.<br /><br />Is it contemptible that they act in this way to protect the lie (for it is a lie) of the Holocaust as Great Lone Evil? Yes, it is absolutely contemptible. And they should be shamed and scared into stopping being so utterly contemptible.<br /><br />The above email, which was sent out to a great many people, should be a great big warning of what happens when Israel and the Jewish lobby acts in such contemptible ways to preserve the lie of the Holocaust as the Great Lone Evil.<br /><br />But the email itself is contemptible. It frames (mostly truth) into its own contemptible falsehood. For implying that the Holodomor happened because (some of its) perpetrators were Jews strips the Holodomor itself of understanding, of its motivations, of its significance.<br /><br />This is what totalising ideologies who believe themselves to be on the right side of history lead to. Have led to, again and again. Those who are most reluctant to look into what the Holodomor tells us are those who most need to do so.<br /><br />Oh, and other folk should stop using historical facts to so profoundly misrepresent the Holodomor. The starved dead are not grist for your nasty obsessions.</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-1356116504516857082021-11-27T17:53:00.003+11:002021-11-27T18:11:54.363+11:00The niche-creating species<i>We are the cultural species par excellence, and so the species that creates its own niches.</i><div><br /><img height="427" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*fPjJ7gvoRVzrVljrFSWgJg.jpeg" width="640" /><i>Beaver dam, Hesse, Germany.</i><br /><br />The ecologist Paul Colinvaux, author of the classic text<i> <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178080/why-big-fierce-animals-are-rare">Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare</a></i>, made an observation in his <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/211/4488/1339">deeply flawed</a> book <a href="https://books.google.lk/books?id=r4ORAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s"><i>The Fates of Nations</i></a> that is very useful for modelling human social dynamics:<br /><blockquote>Unlike other animals, we can change our social habits to fit ourselves for new niches … P.42</blockquote>A niche being:<br /><blockquote>… all the things the things about a kind of animal the let it live: its way of feeding, what it does to avoid enemies, how it is fitted to the place it must dwell. P.19</blockquote>How, as he says elsewhere in the book, a species fits into the web of life.<br /><br />For instance, any theory of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction">elite over-production</a> is a niche theory, being based on the social dynamics of more people seriously aspiring to occupy an elite niche in a society than there are such niches to be filled.<br /><br />Within the biosphere, species typically have a specific niche that they fill. Even if they are a differentiated species, such as ants and termites, their form still dictates, along with interaction with other species and the world around them, the niche they occupy in the web of life.<br /><br />That interaction with other organisms and the environment can involve a certain amount of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_construction">niche construction</a> through impacts their actions have on the environment around them and on other species. Such niche construction can leave an ecological inheritance to their descendants. It can potentially increase the number of niches available for the species, or reduce the variability (and so increase the predictability) of the niche. Such niche construction provides, as part of the purposive (i.e. goal-directed) behaviour of living organisms, an ordering principle within the biosphere.<br /><br />The population of a species is set by the number of available niches for that species. (Hence, big, fierce animals are indeed rare.) The contest within species is to occupy one of those niches and reproduce more future occupants of those niches. Genetic lineages that successfully do so get to continue and those that don’t disappear. Different species (i.e. different sets of genetic lineages) compete to occupy and sustain niches within the nutrition and reproductive possibilities of the eco-system around them.<br /><br />All currently existing genetic lineages have genetic ancestries that are much older than their current species. A genetic lineage, in the process of evolution and replication, can pass through existing as, and within, many different species.<br /><br />Processes of adaptation can be expected to have some sort of search process inherent in them (as evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein has suggested) for ability to search out survival and replication possibilities increases the chances of continuing genetic replication. Replication being the game that genes play. One played via selection for or against traits within subsistence and reproduction strategies. (All one needs for a game, in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory">an analytical sense</a>, is feedback and response in the context of limited resources where some outcome, in this case staying in the game, is a "win": intent is not necessary.)<br /><br />Such search processes for successful replication possibilities, which includes niche construction, enables the biosphere to have the level of order it does. For random mutation is nowhere near enough to explain the observed level of order in the biosphere, even within geologic time frames. This is especially so given the periodic mass extinction events and the explosions in new species that follow them. It is natural selection acting on strategies, particularly with the genetic recombinations of sexual reproduction, that provide much more opportunities for search-and-discovery of new opportunities. <br /><br />A nice example of the interaction between search, niche, niche construction and genetic evolution is provided by the development of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence">lactase persistence</a> in humans. If pastoralists can evolve the capacity to continue to consume milk after weaning, that greatly increases (by <a href="https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/ORC00000242">around fivefold</a>) the calories they can harvest from a given area of grasslands, dramatically increasing the number of sustainable pastoralist niches. This has happened more than once in human history, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutionary_history">at least four</a> separate versions of such genetic mutation occurring in different pastoralist populations and subsequently rapidly spreading through such populations.<br /><br />The most widespread such mutation being that which developed among Proto-(or at least every early) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations">Indo-Europeans</a>. Indeed, their particular mutation provides an excellent genetic marker of their pastoralism and the extent of their spread. A spread which, in the case of the Indo-European pastoralists, was almost certainly sustained over such as a breadth of time and space precisely because lactase persistence gave them a biological advantage over other populations that could only be gained by other populations through interbreeding with the Indo-Europeans.<br /><br /><b>Trade-offs rule</b><br /><br />A niche always involves a series of trade-offs. Trade-offs both from pursuing the internal competition for available niches and for sustaining niches. The trade-offs a particular niche involves develop interactively with the energy-and-nutrient possibilities, and threat profiles, the niche occupant has to deal with to sustain itself and reproduce.<br /><br />What makes <i>Homo sapiens</i> so ecologically distinctive is the extent of our ability to choose new trade-offs, to shift across trade-offs, and so to adapt to, and create, new niches. An ability intimately interwoven with us being the technological ape, the toolmaking ape.<br /><br />There is no single human niche. There is, for instance, no single forager niche. As can be seen by comparing, say, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit">the Inuit</a> with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadza_people">the Hadza</a>. The human capacity to change interactions with the surrounding environment (and each other) so as to create new niches, even within the nomadic foraging pattern, is how we became the global ape.<br /><br />Our varied human niches are created and sustained by our cognitive capacity for learning and discovery and our cultural transmission of information and skills. Our niche construction is a manifestation of us being so much the cultural species. Human technologies are sustained via our cultures which in turn are profoundly affected by our technologies.<br /><br />We <i>Homo sapiens</i> are the niche-creating, indeed niche-multiplying, species. We can adapt to, and create, new niches. Doing so either in addition to, or replacing by, existing niches. Indeed, we can create and occupy multiple niches across and within human societies.<br /><br />Hence we have not only spread across the planet, becoming the global ape, but have also increased hugely in population. If you can create new niches, you can create new ecological spaces to occupy, with new resources to use.<br /><br />The human nomadic-forager niche was already more varied than the niches of any other species. Taking up sedentism added a new level of variation. Taking up farming and pastoralism extended that variation even further. As did creating chiefdoms and states. Industrialisation — the Great Enrichment — then increased the number and variety of human niches by further orders of magnitude. It also increased the fluidity of human niches, something information technology has ratcheted up further.<br /><br /><b>Human niches</b><br /><br />Malthusian models, models developed from the population-dynamics insights of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus">Rev. Thomas Malthus</a> (1766–1834), are models of the limits to population given available resources, including available technology. Niches are the analytical mechanism connecting population size to available resources. Malthusian models should therefore incorporate the insight of ecology that it is available niches that set the limit to a population. Hence Malthusian models should be based on niches.<br /><br />If this is not done, if people, rather than niches, are the unit of Malthusian models, it becomes much more difficult to deal with trade-offs within niches. Indeed, it becomes easy to operate such models in ways that are blind to such trade-offs.<br /><br />Conversely, switching to an ecological analysis, making niches the basic unit of the model, makes it possible to consider trade-offs within niches. For there will clearly be a range of trade-offs that are possible within niches that can yet remain viable such that occupants are able to reproduce. For instance, trading off more ready access to energy (calories) for lower long-term access to nutrients.<br /><br />This ability to shift trade-offs is not only compatible with <i>Homo sapiens</i> having the most biologically expensive children in the biosphere, it is a product of the cooperative cognitive complexity that those long childhoods evolve to sustain.<br /><br /><b>Quality versus quantity</b><br /><br />One of the possible trade-offs within human niches is between quantity of offspring and quality of offspring. The more skills are needed to successfully occupy the targeted niche, the more likely parents are to shift towards quality of offspring over quantity. Conversely, the less skills and learning are needed, the more likely parents are to shift towards quantity of offspring over quality.<br /><br />Farming is a lower-skill niche than foraging, given that it greatly reduces search costs and concentrates on a very small number of species. Conversely, the productivity of foragers <a href="http://cdn.marksdailyapple.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Kaplan_pp152-182.pdf">typically peaks around </a>45 years of age and foraging children typically don’t break even on calorie collection and consumption until they are almost 20. This is why mixed foraging-planting niches could be sustained by sedentary foragers, as they were, for millennia: there was very limited extra skill burden involved in planting some edible plant for later harvesting.<br /><br />The lower skill burden is also part of how farming lowered the cost of children. Farming (and plant and animal domestication generally) required less time training children, who could become more productive earlier, while sedentary living meant that children were more able to look after each other. The easy (after processing the harvested plants) access to calories from domesticated plants also permitted earlier weaning of infants and so increased fertility, enabling the quantity/quality trade-off to be made. (The energy/nutrient trade-off involved, resulting in worse health outcomes, emphasises that this was a quality/quantity trade-off.)<br /><br /><b>Connection, pooling and exchange</b><br /><br />As intensely social beings, whose survival and reproductive success depends fundamentally on cooperation, humans manage and sustain their niches through processes of pooling (sharing), connection and exchange. With <i>pooling</i> being: the use of common resources and <i>connection</i> being: a continuing series of mutually acknowledged interactions.<br /><br />We are the only species that regularly displays the behaviour of engaging in “truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”. While whether Adam Smith was right to call this a propensity or not <a href="https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/down-truck-barter-exchange">can be disputed</a>, it is certainly a distinctive, and recurring, human pattern.<br /><br />A pattern that occurs because we are so much the normative species, a crucial element in us being the cultural species <i>par excellence</i>. It is not that there is no culture at all in other species, nor anything that might reasonably be called normative behaviour. It is just that we display both at a rate orders of magnitude <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312008316_The_Cultural_Capacity_of_Human_and_Nonhuman_Primates_Social_Learning_Innovation_and_Cumulative_Cultural_Evolution">greater than other species</a>. Just as, and not coincidentally, our tool making and use is orders of magnitude greater.<br /><br />Exchange involves the exchange of property: what was yours becomes mine, what is mine becomes yours. The crucial idea in property not being <i>mine!</i>, any silverback gorilla with a harem can do that, but <i>yours!</i>, the acknowledgment of possession by others and associated rules of rightful transfer from one owner to another. Which is normative.<br /><br />The need to defend our social space, plus the information associations an owned thing can have, generates an <i>endowment effect</i> (valuing something we own over an identical thing that we do not). The effect on exchange behaviour tends to diminish with <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-List/publication/24091815_Does_Market_Experience_Eliminate_Market_Anomalies/links/586e68fb08ae6eb871bcfdea/Does-Market-Experience-Eliminate-Market-Anomalies.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=aXfj3c5Q0KEVWLSKmHM735NmPsiu8TAzgsxly--MX-UYhB7cMsaYwRb6VKrZCBjkz7vBDoqjTwXaG1OjmrR67Q.7qF0yBPx7WWOueiu--GO942WuFxHk8dzkOixnVD8IVootGX4elLuz4kj0EWhY585upY5XaMOCX30VdEtfXPjsg&_sg%5B1%5D=nmd96Q0us3ZK4wBOCxDBteSE1Al6J0Bpncun3kw11k8ZE3KcKnKe0wd0hn3t9_tFh6XbYI4fwT8N7v6QVedSlulujfg4rxDSjNujVDF3cCy6.7qF0yBPx7WWOueiu--GO942WuFxHk8dzkOixnVD8IVootGX4elLuz4kj0EWhY585upY5XaMOCX30VdEtfXPjsg&_iepl=">market experience in</a> trading such things, as distinct from <a href="https://danariely.com/tag/the-endowment-effect/">merely being an</a> experienced trader, for the more the owned thing then becomes something to be traded (i.e., transferred) rather than distinctively ours.<br /><br />A chimpanzee in a behavioural lab confirms <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/srep05182.pdf">more strongly to the</a> predictions of game theory — i.e. conforms more to the predictions of <i>Homo economicus</i> — than humans do because we <i>Homo sapiens</i> are far more normative than are <i>Pan troglodytes</i>. That far greater normative capacity is part of us being the cultural species and fairly clearly arose out of our highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies.<br /><br />Being so much cultural species, including being able to marshal exchange as part of socially and technologically constructing new niches, is what has made us the global ape. The discoveries of the anthropogenic sciences <a href="https://core.ac.uk/reader/211690345?utm_source=linkout">undermine both</a> the <b>cultural hegemony model </b>used by many sociologists and anthropologists and the <b>rational self-interest model</b> used by economists and political scientists.<br /><br />Human history is one of the social and technological construction of niches via the mechanisms of pooling, connection and exchange. For instance, shifting from nomadic foraging to sedentary foraging, and especially to sedentary farming, changes the dominant structure for pooling production and consumption from the multi-family band of shifting membership to (a typically) single-family household with much more stable membership.<br /><br />Social exchanges are exchanges in the context of connection; so in the context of a continuing series of mutually acknowledged interactions. Commercial exchanges are exchanges that, if they continue across time, include managing connection(s), but are otherwise discrete events involving transfers of resources via goods or services.<br /><br />Social exchanges are therefore dominated by the norms and expectations of connection. It would be an insult to offer to pay a friend or relative for a meal they have cooked for you.<br /><br />As commercial exchanges are exchanges where any connection arises from within the context of exchange, they are dominated by the norms and expectations of trading and commerce. It would be theft or fraud to not pay for a commercially-provided meal. (There is a useful discussion of the difference between social and market exchanges in Chapter 4 of Dan Ariely’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248"><i>Predictably Irrational</i></a>.)<br /><br />Any pooling in the case of social exchanges is based on the pre-existing (or sought) connections. Pooling in the case of commercial exchange results from the exchange itself.<br /><br />As social exchanges are based on the norms of connection, the level of mutual regard inherent in the social context of the path of interaction typically involve considerable density of information. Commercial exchanges are based on commercial norms that typically involve much lower levels of information, outside the exchange itself and associated patterns of exchange. This allows commercial exchanges to scale up much more than can relying on connection and local pooling. Hence such exchange can expand the size and number of human niches.<br /><br />Economising on information is much of the advantage of commercial exchange. Sufficiently dense patterns of exchange result in the development of <i>exchange goods</i>: goods held so as to be able to participate in future exchanges. At some point, a <i>medium of account</i> (i.e. full money) may develop, due to its value in economising on information: notably search, negotiation and accounting costs. (A <i>medium of account</i> being something used to both quantify and discharge obligations.) Increasing the scaling-up effect on the size and number of human niches of commercial exchange.<br /><br />Gifts and favours are investments in connection. An appropriate gift can express the strength of a connection by demonstrating how accurately the giver of the gift “sees” the other person and how important their connection is to the giver. A public gift makes a public display of these things.<br /><br />In societies with very little exchange, but very dense webs of connection, failure to be able to sustain the pattern of gifting that maintains connections can drive individuals into “gift bankruptcy” and so a form of debt-bondage. Just as with commercial bankruptcy, it represents a terminal inability to meet one's obligations.<br /><br /><b>Niche size and well-being</b><br /><br />Malthusian models for pre-industrial societies that use people as the unit of analysis imply, due to using the person as the unit being modelled rather than the niche, that human well-being will tend to return to a recurring steady-state, as increased resources are eventually matched by increased population. This makes it difficult for Malthusian models using people as the unit of analysis to conform to the strong evidence that farming <a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1186&context=nebanthro">was less healthy </a>than foraging. But, if the models focus on niche-size instead of human well-being, then different internal trade-offs within niches can be incorporated within the model, even if niche size tends to return to a recurring steady-state for a given level of technology.<br /><br />As mentioned above, a possible such trade-off is to have more readily available energy but less nutrients, resulting in smaller stature and worse health. As long as the trade-off does not get in the way of successful reproduction, it can be a socially viable trade-off. Indeed, if accepting the trade-off results in increased capacity to generate such niches for your descendants to occupy, it will become a successful, even dominant, trade-off.<br /><br />Trade-offs between niche size (so niche quality) and niche number (niche quantity) can occur in various forms. Where you are in the spectrum of control of resources determines the consequences of different decisions in intergenerational transfer of assets. Thus, single-heir systems, such as primogeniture, are structured to maintain a certain niche size. Single-heir systems typically involve accepting that one’s other children end up with smaller social niches.<br /><br />Elite over-production can be de-stabilising for societies precisely because more people are seeking (and having the resources to) compete for elite niches than there are elite niches to sustain them. Such competition, if of sufficient intensity, can be highly destructive to the normative order of a society.<br /><br />Elite over-production by polygynous hereditary elites is likely to have been a major cause of the transience of steppe empires, for example. Given that the herding productivity of grasslands was an enduring constraint on the number of pastoralist niches.<br /><br />Some niches need more resources to be sustained and/or are sustained at a higher level of health. Sufficient increase in resources, such as the great enrichment that began with the application of steam-power to transport by the development of railways and steamships, can lead to increases in both quantity and quality of niches and, if the cost of children rises sufficiently, to lower fertility.*<br /><br />As farming, due to its elimination of most search costs and concentration on a far narrower range of food species, required less skill than foraging, so could be contributed to more with a lower level of skill (i.e. children were more productive earlier in life), there was no pressure to increase the quality of children, but there were likely benefits to having more children. Including more capacity to create kin connections through marriage and more of a buffer against ageing.<br /><br />The first constraint in the construction of human niches is time. There are only certain amount of hours in a day. The second constraint is sustenance, the need for a certain amount of energy and nutrients to sustain oneself. Energy is more immediately urgent than nutrients, so it is possible to make a choice that provides sufficient energy but involves some deficiency in nutrients. This will have future health implications, but, as noted above, this may not block the continuation and replication of the niche.<br /><br />If the niche is going to be replicated in the next generation, then time and sustenance has to allocated to reproduction and training. At the core of <i>Homo sapiens</i> being the cultural species is direct or indirect investment in the training of offspring.<br /><br />Hence the potential trade-off here between quality of offspring and quantity of offspring. As we have seen, it is entirely possible to have a niche that reduces the cost of children, for instance making it easier to feed them and making it less likely to lose them in early infancy, yet also means that their long-term health is poorer. Ironically, a higher rate of infant mortality in a situation of restricted fecundity (due to long weaning periods, for example) may make for more investment in the quality of children. Particularly if there is more nutrient-rich food available to feed them.<br /><br />One of the changes industrialisation created was to markedly increase the returns to education while reducing the ability of children to contribute to household production. Improved sanitation and increased medical knowledge also markedly reduced infant mortality. This resulted in a dramatic shift away from quantity of children towards quality of children, with large falls in fertility rates.<br /><br />Thus, the foraging-to-farming shift from quality to quantity of children has been more than reversed. But at, of course, hugely higher population levels.**<br /><br /><b>Niche-creating species</b><br />Humans are members of a species that technologically creates a variety of niches by intensely social and cultural processes. Models of human populations need to be able to incorporate the reality of the creation of varied niches. Assuming a single human niche certainly hugely simplifies modelling, but the analytical accuracy cost in usefully analysing human social dynamics by doing so can become very high, very quickly. Similarly with attempting to model human population dynamics without being able to incorporate the varying trade-offs of human niches.<br /><br />Thinking of humans as the niche-creating species, and as niches as involving various trade-offs, clarifies human social dynamics.</div><div><br /></div><div>[<i>An earlier version was <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-niche-creating-species-ffd7ba32a54" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>.</i>]<br /><br /><b><i>End Notes</i></b><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">*Education of women tends to lower fertility because it increases the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost">opportunity cost</a> of children to women and raises the education cost of children. This is especially so in circumstances, such as high returns to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital">human capital</a>, where investing in quality of children is a more successful inter-generational strategy than investing in quantity of children. The higher-returns-to-human-capital effect is also a <a href="http://repec.org/sed2005/up.9254.1106834114.pdf">specific instance of</a> investing in more <a href="https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/18427/1/18427.pdf">concentrated asset inheritance</a> by offspring can favour single-spouse marriage over polygyny, if the number of offspring and/or spouses affects the level or persistence of asset concentration. The human capital effect, which was very intense for Brahmins (given the enormous levels of memorisation required to function as Brahmin), probably encouraged their tendency to single-spouse marriages. This investment in maximising household production through in-group marriage is likely the reason for the development of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C4%81ti"><i>jati</i></a> (caste) system, as a way of both <a href="http://www.sfu.ca/~cbidner/files/Bidner_Eswaran_4Dec2014.pdf">maximising household production</a> and generating protective connections. A system whose longevity shows up very clearly <a href="https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/272099/1-s2.0-S0960982210X00045/1-s2.0-S0960982209020685/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=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&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20210629T031743Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTY752QEZXA/20210629/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=217d1bacec3af5532daa74614fbdec01c112b66b4eeb42ec2b23b10fe4cf3b12&hash=198848c1b1adf677732f01495e48f88f031f23f1d1113cd8676da6bc8b463f64&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0960982209020685&tid=spdf-e2647756-3ceb-4274-ad6a-906ba7c1b80b&sid=0b389d054702d7406d6bd160ab2b39173695gxrqa&type=client&download=true">in the genetic patterns</a> of South Asia.<br /><br />**See economist Robin Hanson’s ongoing discussion of contemporary society as a struggle between <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.html">farmer and forager</a> patterns and ethics.</span></div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-33601207964926048982021-11-18T16:09:00.004+11:002022-04-11T21:19:48.755+10:00The Out-of Expansions<i>There have been four major out-of expansions by </i>Homo sapiens<i>.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="193" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gtXIEirNcBOuRXcituv35A.jpeg" width="400" /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">Source: Jared Diamond, Peter Bellwood, Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions, <i>Science</i>, 2003, Vol. 300, Issue 5619, pp. 597–603.</div><br />Four great out-of population expansions have widely dispersed <i>Homo sapien</i> populations. The out-of-Africa expansion of foragers; the out-of-the-river-valley expansion of farmers; the out-of-the-steppe expansion of pastoralists; and the out-of-Europe expansion of settler empires and states.<br /><br /><b>Out of Africa: the expansion of <i>Homo sapiens</i></b><br /><br />Whether an exit from Africa around 100,000 years ago was successful or not is still debated. From around 60-50,000 years ago, there was a sustained exit from Africa. <i>Homo sapiens </i>spread to occupy all continents except Antarctica, absorbing and replacing all other <i>Homo </i>populations. These foragers spread at a rate of about 10km a year, at least in areas without existing <i>Homo</i> populations.(1)<br /><br /><i>Homo sapiens</i> are more gracile than other <i>Homo</i>, so likely lower in reactive aggression and thus more cooperative. Though the delay in the exit(s) from Africa, and the long period of coterminous occupation of Eurasia (maybe 20,000 years), suggest only a marginal advantage over Neanderthals, although this may have changed over time. This spreading of <i>Homo sapien</i> foragers concluded with the settling of southern regions of South America around 14,600 years ago.<br /><br /><b>Out of the river valleys: the expansion of farmers</b><br /><br />Starting around 11,000 years ago, farming populations expanded across arable land, absorbing and replacing foragers. The process is still going on in Africa, Amazonia and elsewhere. In Oceania, farmers occupied islands without previous human habitation, reaching New Zealand probably around the year 1320.<br /><br />The transmission from foraging to farming was a lengthy one. While not generally more productive per hour of effort than foraging, farming was able to extract many times more calories from arable land, lowered the cost of child-rearing and created an increased protection problem, encouraging the development of more coercive capacity.(2) Hence the continuing expansion, and dispersal, of farming populations.(3) Farmers and farming generally spread across arable land at a rate of around 1km a year.(4) The development of farming also had significant adverse health consequences, with deteriorations in dental health, loss of height, increased infectious disease and more signs of metabolic stress.(5)<br /><br />Farmers seem to have traded-off less food-search time (food search being more difficult for child-minding) for more food-processing time (easier for child-minding) and more immediate access to energy (calories) (so quicker weaning of children) for less long-term access to nutrients. </div><div><br /></div><div>The flesh of plants are much more likely to be toxic to humans than is the flesh of animals while plant calories and nutrients are often significantly less bio-available than are animal calories and nutrients. Hence the increased need for processing to use plant foods. Hence also the existence of an calorie/nutrient trade-off when shifting from a more animal-based diet (as foraging diets generally have been) to the plant-based diet of farming. (Much of modern food culture has been systematically trading-off taste and calories against nutrient quality.)<br /><br />With the development of farming and pastoralism, there was a dramatic narrowing in male genetic lineages. The rate of elimination of male lineages varied by region. Overall, only about 1-in-17 male lineages survived this harrowing of male lineages. (Female lineages were almost entirely unaffected.)(6) This harrowing of male lineages was a result of the expansion among agro-pastoral peoples of the (social) technology of aggression against fellow humans.<br /><br />The development of pastoralism intensified the pattern of elimination of male lineages.(7) The harrowing of male lineages largely came to an end with the development of chiefdoms and states. That is, when the technology of exploitation overtook the technology of aggression — conquered males became providers of tribute and taxes, so were worth protecting. </div><div><br /></div><div>The biggest single thing states do after extracting surplus (taxing) is pacify: they don't want their taxpayers killing each other.<br /><b><br />Out of the steppes: the Indo-European pastoralist expansion</b><br /><br />Pastoralist populations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe domesticated the horse (though the Botai people further east may have domesticated horses earlier) and, from about 5,000ya, and continuing until about 3,000ya, expanded into Europe, the Iranian plateau, the Tarim Basin and Northern India. During these surges of settlement, Indo-Iranians develop the horse-drawn chariot (c.4,000ya).<br /><br />The steppe-descended pastoralist population eventually expanded across all of Europe, interbreeding with the Neolithic farmers. Though not in the Basque Country and Sardinia.(8)</div><div><br />The original steppe pastoralist population had, like various other pastoralist populations have, developed a mutation for lactase persistence. This enabled much higher metabolic return from post-infancy consumption of milk. Different pastoralist populations in Afro-Eurasia have developed different lactase persistence mutations.(9)<br /><br />Dairying broadens access to nutrients and enables the extraction of around five times as much calories from grassland as could be done via ruminant meat consumption.(10) This biological advantage likely enabled millennia of expansion, resulting in Indo-European languages, and cultural patterns ultimately derived from steppe pastoralism, covering Europe, the Iranian plateau and Northern India.<br /><br />After the Indo-Europeans settlement surges had petered out, Indo-Iranian peoples also pioneered horse archers and heavy lancers (c.2,700ya). Later pastoralist peoples continued to periodically ravage, or even conquer, agrarian peoples. Only the Arab and Turkic dispersals resulted in large-scale demographic expansion beyond pastoralist heartlands. In both cases, settlement following imperial conquest.<br /><br /><b>Out of Europe: the empires-and-settlers expansion</b><br /><br />Beginning c.1500 and petering out c.1960, European populations expanded across Siberia, the Americas and the Antipodes.<br /><br />The combination of competitive jurisdictions, single-spouse marriage, the abolition of kin groups (requiring the development of replacement mechanisms of social cooperation), as well as being able to entrench social and political bargains in law (as law was not based in revelation, unlike <i>Sharia</i> and Brahmin law) meant that Europe had far more variety of political institutions than elsewhere. This gave the selection processes of history far more to work with, resulting in Europe developing more effective states. Christian Europe’s swift adoption of the printing press after 1450 greatly aided the dissemination and development of information and technology while reducing administrative costs.<br /><br />With gunpowder, the compass, and ocean-going sail technology, Europeans spread out from Europe in a largely maritime out-of expansion. The out-of-Europe expansion included waves of settlement. (The Russian conquest and settling of Siberia did not need the maritime step, though riverine expansion was important in parts of Siberia.)<br /><br />Settlement generally followed, sometimes preceded, imperial expansion. Both the Russian and American nation-building-through-settlement were also imperial projects, although animated by rather different ideas and institutions.<br /><br />The Europeans acquired a portmanteau biota of supporting plant and animal species. Where their portmanteau biota became dominant, Europeans became the dominant human population, creating neo-Europes. Where the biota failed to do so, they did not.(11)<br /><br />Being Eurasian, so resistant to the Eurasian disease pool, gave Europeans a disease advantage in the Americas and the Antipodes. Having much more effective states was their advantage within Afro-Eurasia and allowed them to exploit their disease advantage far more completely and speedily outside it. Their advantage in state (and other cooperative) organisation eventually (albeit temporarily) expanded their control across regions where they were systematically disease-disadvantaged (including Sub-Saharan Africa).<br /><br />The <i>Homo sapien</i> advantage is non-kin cooperation. Medieval European Christian civilisation put non-kin cooperation “on steroids” and so Europeans equipped with compass, gunpowder, ocean-going maritime technology and the printing press created the Eurosphere across four continents plus Siberia and ended up dominating the planet — until other peoples learnt their tricks.<br /><b><br />In general</b><br /><br />The expansions have been getting faster: taking at least 35,000 years; 11,000 years; 2,000 years; 500 years.<br /><br />The, currently underway, fifth great out-of expansion — the out-of-the-countryside movement to the cities — is a series of concentrations, rather than a dispersal.<br /><br />Each of the out-of dispersals has its specific characteristics, but each represents <i>Homo sapiens</i> behaving like <i>Homo sapiens</i>. Indeed, behaving like any biological population with access to new resources, including new abilities to access resources.</div><div><br /></div><div>[<i>An earlier version was <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-out-of-expansions-623d873f1f90" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a></i>.]<br /><br /><b><i>Endnotes</i></b><br /><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>B. Llamas, L. Fehren-Schmitz, G. Valverde, J. Soubrier, S. Mallick, N. Rohland, S. Nordenfelt, C. Valdiosera, S. M. Richards, A. Rohrlach, M. I. B. Romero, I. F. Espinoza, E. T. Cagigao, L. W. Jiménez, K. Makowski, I. S. L. Reyna, J. M. Lory, J. A. B. Torrez, M. A. Rivera, R. L. Burger, M. C. Ceruti, J. Reinhard, R. S. Wells, G. Politis, C. M. Santoro, V. G. Standen, C. Smith, D. Reich, S. Y. W. Ho, A. Cooper, W. Haak, ‘Ancient mitochondrial DNA provides high-resolution time scale of the peopling of the America’s,’ <i>Science Advances</i>, April 2016, Vol.2, №4, e1501385, suggests that it took 1.4kya to people the length of the Americas. As this is a distance of roughly 14,000km, that is an expansion rate of around 10km a year.</li><li>Samuel Bowles, ‘Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging,’ <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</i>, March 2011, 108 (12) 4760–4765.</li><li>Jared Diamond, Peter Bellwood, ‘Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions,’ <i>Science</i>, 25 April 2003, Vol. 300, Issue 5619, pp. 597–603.</li><li>Joaquin Fort, ‘Demic and cultural diffusion propagated the Neolithic transition across different regions of Europe,’ <i>Journal of the Royal Society Interface</i>, 2015, 12: 20150166.</li><li>Katherine J. Latham, ‘Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body,’ <i>Nebraska Anthropologist</i>, 2013, 187.</li><li>Tian Chen Zeng, Alan K. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ <i>Nature Communications</i>, 9 Article number: 2077 (2018), published 25 May 2018.</li><li>Patricia Balaresque, Nicolas Poulet, Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Patrice Gerard, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Evelyne Heyer & Mark A. Jobling, ‘Y-chromosome descent clusters and male differential reproductive success: Young lineage expansions dominate Asian pastoral nomadic populations,’ <i>European Journal of Human Genetics</i>, January 2015.</li><li>Iosif Lazaridis, ‘The evolutionary history of human populations in Europe,’ <i>arXiv</i> 1805.01579, submitted on 4 May 2018.</li><li>Hadi Charati, Min-Sheng Peng, Wei Chen, Xing-Yan Yang, Roghayeh Jabbari Ori, Mohsen Aghajanpour-Mir, Ali Esmailizadeh and Ya-Ping Zhang, ‘The evolutionary genetics of lactase persistence in seven ethnic groups across the Iranian plateau,’ <i>Human Genomics</i>, (2019) 13:7. Scholarly discussions of lactase persistence in Europe often pay remarkably little attention to the same specific lactase-persistence mutation occurring in Europe, Iran and Northern India, so must have spread by a pastoralist, not a farming, population.</li><li>Latham, op cit. Morton O. Cooper and W. J. Spillman, ‘Human Food from an Acre of Staple Farm Products,’ <i>Farmers’ Bulletin</i>, №877, October 1917, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, <i>The 10,000 year explosion: how civilization accelerated human evolution</i>, Basic Books [2009] (2010) cite the <i>Bulletin</i> for their discussion in Chapter 6 of the Indo-European expansion, including the role of lactase persistence.</li><li>Alfred W. Crosby, <i>Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900</i>, Cambridge University Press, [1986] (1993).</li></ol></div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-37058585414578754472021-10-23T15:17:00.001+11:002021-11-18T16:41:35.322+11:00Don’t fall for the Activist’s Fallacy<div class="separator"><i>Intent is not the only thing to judge policies or theories on.</i></div><div class="separator"><br /><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img height="360" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*3bpoAb4OwPrGSklYYsokQg.jpeg" width="640" /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Source: <a href="https://www.iied.org/climate-activism-time-covid-19">https://www.iied.org/climate-activism-time-covid-19</a></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Within the expanding debate and political controversies over CRT (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory">Critical Race Theory</a>), the Activist’s Fallacy is regularly on display.<br /><br />The Activist’s Fallacy operates as follows:<br /><blockquote>We are doing X because we are against Y.<br />You are against X<br /><i>Therefore</i><br />You are for Y.</blockquote>The Fallacy can be recast in negative terms:<br /><blockquote>We are doing X because we are for Z.<br />You are against X.<br /><i>Therefore</i><br />You are against Z.</blockquote>Either way, the Activist’s Fallacy is about making declared intent the dimension on which the entire controversy turns.<br /><br />It also comes in cry-bully versions, such as:<br /><blockquote>We want to control speech to stop trans folk harming themselves.<br />You are against such control of speech.<br /><i>Therefore</i><br />You are against stopping trans folk harming themselves.</blockquote>In the case of Critical Race Theory, the Activist’s Fallacy comes in versions such as:<br /></div><blockquote><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">Critical Race Theory seeks to confront racism.</div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">You are against Critical Race Theory.<br /><i>Therefore</i><br />You are against confronting racism.</div></blockquote><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">Or:<br /><blockquote>Critical Race Theory allows us to learn about racism.<br />You are against Critical Race Theory.<br /><i>Therefore</i><br />You are against learning about racism.</blockquote>The Activist’s Fallacy relies on declared intent being the only important motivational feature of whatever theory or policy is being put. With motivation being the dimension that all responses have to be graded on.<br /><br />As a rhetorical and status strategy, this is highly effective. As long as everything can be construed as being first and foremost about intent, then any opposition becomes opposition to the declared intent, just as support becomes support for the declared intent.<br /><br />Since the intent is, of course, going to be noble, that elevates the nobility of those pushing the theory or policy and de-legitimises any critics. They become malicious, callous, some sort of -ist or -phobe.<br /><br />There is a lot of colonising of people’s decency going on. As well as people not wishing to have their status as one of the smart and good stripped from them by use of stigmatising labels against them: the submit-or-be-stigmatised choice.<br /><br />So, by making intent the dimension upon which the controversy turns, motivation becomes the key grading factor. You can’t decide you are against Critical Race Theory because it is false, or because you think it has pernicious social implications. No, it is all about the declared intent of Critical Race Theory and whether you are “anti-racist” or not.<br /><br />If one accepts the theory that society is a structure of oppression and domination, and that social interactions (including discussions) are all about power relations, then the Activist’s Fallacy is not merely a rhetorically useful status play, it is a natural implication of your world-view.<br /><br />Which, of course, implies that there are things deeply wrong with your world-view. For the Activist’s Fallacy is still a fallacy. It is still bad reasoning, no matter how rhetorically useful it is. Nor how much of a congenial status play it is.<br /><br />There are a whole lot of things wrong with Critical Race Theory, starting with it simply not being true that racism is pervasive in contemporary Western societies, or that disparities between groups are primarily the result of current racism, or that persistent disparities demonstrate systemic racism. It is a false analysis of social dynamics. Critical Race Theory’s racialisation of everything is also deeply pernicious in its effects on social dynamics and public policy.<br /><br /><b>Structural roles</b><br /><br />Something that is very clear from the history of investing grand social meanings onto race, aided by “race” having visible physical markers, is that elite race talk is always a divide-and-dominate mechanism. And Critical Race Theory is very much elite race talk: it came out of elite universities.<br /><br />We tend to over-rate the importance of conscious intent in human actions. As Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski (1921–2007) noted:<br /><blockquote>Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible…<br /><a href="http://www.ponerology.com/"><i>Political Ponerololog</i>y</a><i>: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes</i>, p.163.</blockquote>The over-rating of the role of conscious intent tends to be particularly likely when there are powerful social, institutional or organisational feedbacks and incentives in play. We find it very easy to tell congenial narratives about ourselves — to ourselves and to others — about beliefs (and actions) that may have other reasons to resonate with us. Especially if they also resonate with other folk in similar social positions, so that there are selection processes in favour of developing mutually congenial patterns of action and accompanying justifying narratives.<br /><br />Instead of asking about <i>conscious </i>intent, let’s consider interests and feedbacks. Let’s instead ask the <i>Who-Whom?</i> question; the <i>who benefits? </i>question.<br /><br />Who benefits if Critical Race Theory is not subject to searching critique about its factual accuracy and its social implications? Who benefits if US society is more intensely racialised? Who benefits if race-delineated divisions increase? Who gains status and career opportunities from spruiking up such racialising? Probably not workers, local residents or the general citizenry.<br /><br />Those wielding the Activist’s Fallacy want to tell a noble story about their own intentions and a malicious story about the intentions of those who disagree with them. If they want to play that game, a deeper look at incentives and interests, about why certain narratives are so appealing and to whom, may not take analysis where they want to go.<br /><br />Recognise the Activist’s Fallacy for what it is: a self-serving evasion. And don’t fall for it. Be prepared to call it out for the dishonest, self-aggrandising, rhetorical ploy it is.</div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">[A previous version was <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/dont-fall-for-the-activist-s-fallacy-52328c2000a9" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>.]</div></div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-73763107363683398402021-10-13T14:43:00.001+11:002021-10-13T14:43:34.249+11:00The existence of intersex people illustrates how sex is biological and binary<i>Folk are intersex because of how their biology is within complex and varied manifestations of two sexes</i>.<div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="266" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*5LhPIA-NrqyLOzG5G8MhzQ.jpeg" width="400" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Participants at the third International Intersex Forum held in Malta, December 2013.</i></div><br />There is this rather tedious game that is sometimes played where the existence of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex">intersex</a> people is somehow taken to indicate that either sex is not biological or that sex is not binary.<br /><br />Any suggestion along the former lines is easily dealt with: a person is intersex if they have a specific type of pattern of biological features. That is, <a href="https://www.unfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/UNFE-Intersex.pdf">in the words of</a> the UN OHCHR (the UN Human Rights Office):<br /><blockquote>Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (including genitals, gonads and chromosome patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.</blockquote>Those sex characteristics are, of course, biological. It is the biological structure of their body that makes someone intersex.<br /><br /><b>Use-referent confusion</b><br /><br />The wording <i>typical binary notions of male or female bodies</i> is a genuflection towards sex as a socially constructed category. That categorisation within a language is a social act does not make the thing being referred to thereby socially constructed. To act as if it does is to confuse <i>use</i> of a term with the <i>referent</i> of the term.<br /><br />This use-and-referent confusion, this confusion between category and object, is not a case of failing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction">to distinguish between</a> <i>use</i> (“I like eating cheese”) and <i>mention</i> (“'cheese' has six letters”), but it is similar level of logical error. That the practice has evolved of calling a particular set of dairy products <i>cheese</i> does not mean those dairy products are socially constructed by that act of categorising. However socially embedded cheese-making may be, such dairy products are created by a series of physical processes and have a physical existence not dependant on the categorising conventions of particular languages.</div><div><br /></div><div>Both types of logical error come from the <i>aboutness</i> of language and thought; from us using language to speak, and categories to think, <i>about</i> other things.<br /><br />Sex existed long before anyone was developing categories about sex. Sex continues in the biological world all around us, regardless of what categories we may choose to use, and how.<br /><br /><b>It’s all about the gametes</b><br /><br />If your body is structured to produce small, self-moving (motile) <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/gamete-gametes-311/">gametes</a>, you are male; regardless of whether any viable gametes are actually produced. If your body is structured to produce large, not self-moving (sessile) gametes, you are female. Also regardless of whether any viable gametes are actually produced. A gun does not stop being a gun by removing its firing pin or filling in the barrel.</div><div><br /></div><div>At its base, sex is defined by reproductive function. Such a pattern of only two types of gametes means that sex is, at its base, in its biological function, binary.</div><div><br /></div><div>If the evolutionary die were to be thrown to generate new genetic combinations, there had to be at least two gametes. If there were more than two gametes, that would greatly increase the difficulty in successfully reproducing. If there was going to be two gametes, one that was injected (so was small and self-moving) and one that received (so was large and not self-moving) also maximised the chance of successful reproduction. Hence, male and female gametes.</div><div><br /></div><div>Given certain basic conditions, if a species reproduces through the combining of gametes (i.e. reproduces sexually) then having two types of gametes — small, self-moving (motile) gametes and large, not-self-moving (sessile) gametes — is the only evolutionary stable outcome. Hence, in our biosphere, sex is binary because there are only two types of gametes.<br /><br />Thus, there is no third sex at the level of gametes. There are neuter forms of females in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality">eusocial</a> insects. In some species, an individual can change sex. But there are only two sexes in the sense of only being structured to produce one of two types of gametes. Some individuals partake of characteristics typical of both sexes. That does not make them a third sex.<br /><br />While, in its base evolutionary function, sex is binary, the manifestations of the binary nature of sex in organisms can get quite complex. That sex is binary doesn’t mean that bodies are. In a way, that is probably the evolutionary point. A widely accepted hypothesis among biologists about why species adopt sexual reproduction via gametes is that it was an evolutionary adaptation to deal with pathogens. By sexually reproducing, the genetic die are being thrown again and again, giving sexually reproducing species a much better chance of having genetic lineages that could survive a particular pathogen.<br /><br />In us <i>Homo sapiens</i>, as mammals, there is a set of characteristics that are specifically typical of the male-body structure and a set of characteristics that is specifically typical of the female-body structure. If you have some characteristics from both sets, you are intersex. But it is precisely the existence of these two sets of sex-typical <i>biological</i> characteristics that creates (1) the possibility of being intersex and (2) enables identification as intersex.<br /><br />So, the existence of intersex people does not confound either the biological or the binary nature of sex. On the contrary, it refers to a set of people with various patterns of biological characteristics that can only be identified as falling within the set of intersex people because of the binary and biological nature of sex. Human <i>bodies</i> are bimodally distributed, but with sufficiently fuzzy boundaries that some folk are intersex, they overlap the distributions somewhat.<br /><br /><b>Evolutionary pressure</b><br /><br />Arguments about, for instance, the concept of binary being binary — something is either perfectly binary or it is not binary — are ways of avoiding grappling with the biology. For biology has lots of fuzzy boundary concepts (e.g. <i>species</i>). Defining <i>binary</i> in a way that means nothing biological of any complexity is likely to meet it is not a proof that sex is not binary. The small self-moving gamete/large not-self-moving gamete difference is binary in the sense that counts in terms of reproductive function. Reproductive function that is subject to, and shaped by, evolutionary pressures.<br /><br />It is that evolutionary pressure that makes, sex, in its base evolutionary function, binary and its physical manifestation in human bodies bimodally distributed. <br /><br />If there were actual hermaphrodites in a species with males and females, there would be grounds for calling them a third sex, as their bodies would be structured to produce both gametes. That would not, however, change the binary nature of sex in its evolutionary function.<br /><br />The key confusion is failing to grasp that the binary nature of sex applies to its evolutionary function. If conjoining gametes is how reproduction happens, and there are only two sorts of gametes in play, then sex is binary. It is that simple.<br /><br />This is <b><i>not</i></b> a claim that individual organisms cannot have a mixture of features. It is not even a claim that individual organisms cannot move across the boundary from one sex to another. It is also not a claim about animals conforming absolutely to to two, and only two, rigidly distinguished physical structures. It does not even preclude an organism producing both types of gametes, either sequentially or simultaneously.<br /><br />The binary nature of sex is not defined from structures of bodies inwards. It arises from reproductive function outwards. As a biological process, reproduction has consequences for physical structures, but these can be quite complex and varied. A complexity and variance that does not in anyway change the binary nature of sex, though it does considerably complicate its expression in biological structures.</div><div><br /></div><div>Animals have <i>sex roles</i>: the behavioural manifestation of sex. The manifestation of sex in a deeply cultural species is even more complex, hence <i>gender</i>: the cultural expression of sex. With gender we are in much more varied, and culturally evolved, territory.<br /><br />In summary, there are only two sexes at the level of basic reproductive dynamics, defined by there being only two types of gametes. There is no third sex at the level of reproductive dynamics because there is no third type of gamete. Hence, sex is binary, however complex the manifestations in bodies of that underlying only-two-types-of-gametes pattern may be.<br /><br />So, when folk say that<i> sex is binary</i>, what they should mean is that there are two types of gametes. And when folk say that <i>sex is not binary</i>, what they should mean is that the biological expression in actual bodies of the binary nature of sex is bimodal rather than binary. Though it is a clumsy and misleading way of doing so.<br /><br />The rest is just tedious word games, with more than a dash of logical confusion.<br /><br />[Previous version <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-existence-of-intersex-people-illustrates-that-sex-is-biological-and-binary-f7d965de8189" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-51220920194236249122021-10-07T20:03:00.006+11:002021-10-07T20:23:18.118+11:00Wielding the mask of science<i>Official health has a persistent pattern of presenting as science-based things that are not.</i><div><i><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="400" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gnB-vTP_9ZuuEkjXChpGmA.jpeg" width="400" /></div></i><div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Source. Taken from <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ketoadapted/photos/a.10155846415371446/10157513545821446/?type=3">here</a>, original research and data from <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5326984/pdf/met.2016.0108.pdf">here</a>.</i></div><br />Despite the efforts of the wilder shores of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory">critical theory</a> and its critical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructivism">constructivist</a> derivatives (such as critical race theory) to present science as white, patriarchal, heteronormative and similar morally-disabling things, science retains a great deal of authority in Western societies. Particularly in areas of policy concern that clearly should be based on good science. Hence public policy, and policy advocacy, regularly presents itself as being based on sound science.<br /><br />Thus uses of terms and phrases such as <i>trust the science</i>, <i>scientific consensus</i> and, as terms of de-legitimisation, <i>science denialism</i>.<br /><br /><b>The evolution test</b><br /><br />In areas such as health, nutrition, medicine, dentistry there is, in fact, a pretty reasonable rule-of-thumb to apply about how well science is being applied: the evolutionary lens. Ask yourself: does this claim make sense in the light of human evolutionary history? If the answer is no, there is a good chance that it is wrong. If the answer is yes, there is a much higher chance of it being correct.<br /><br />So, if humans have been eating something for thousands of generations (meat, fish, saturated fat, salt, tubers) then there is a good chance that it is fine in your diet. (Nutritional-value or health-risk claims against them typically have <a href="https://openheart.bmj.com/content/3/2/e000409">very poor</a> evidentiary bases.) Though differences in how they are cooked or when, including how often, they are eaten provides a complicating factor.<br /><br />If humans have been eating something for only a few decades (<a href="https://youtu.be/pHnPinYI2Yc">seed oils</a>, ultra-processed food), then there is an good chance that it is not good for you.<br /><br />A similar point applies to eating patterns. If an eating pattern has been common for thousands of generations (one, two, maybe three, meals a day, little or no snacking), it is probably good for you. If an eating pattern is much, much more recent (eating several times a day due to regular snacking), then it is <a href="https://youtu.be/JzUmK2zkOvM">probably not good</a> for you.<br /><br />Modern Westerners have about the same daily energy expenditure <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503">as hunter-gatherers</a>, so levels of physical activity are less of a factor in explaining <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight">rising obesity</a> than one might expect. Which strongly suggests that changes in diet and eating habits has been the main factor in rising obesity.<br /><br />It is frightening how much of the nutrition advice from official health sources does not pass the test of the evolutionary lens. Then again, a fair bit of medicine and dentistry also fails the test of the evolutionary lens. (For instance, the silly claim that it makes evolutionary sense that we grow redundant teeth, especially as foraging populations are generally known for their wide jaws and healthy teeth.)<br /><br /><b>The mask of science (nutrition)</b><br /><br />Much of the nutrition advice from official health (i.e. government health departments and regulatory bodies) wields the mask of science. It presents itself as being based on the science, when it is not. Or, at least, is not based on good science.<br /><br />The problem is, it is hard to do nutrition science well, because of nutrition’s inherent complexity. That means it is easy to do nutrition science badly, and even easier to do it to an agenda.<br /><br />As the food industry (using the term ‘food’ somewhat loosely) is huge, there are enormous revenues at stake. So the capacity to fund, present and cherry-pick poor or misleading science is great. And, indeed, frequently done.<br /><br />Unfortunately, official health also has perverse incentives. Not only are there the pressures of very well-funded influence-peddling but there are the inherently perverse incentives due to the tax-funding of health departments.<br /><br />We pay organisations to do what makes their income go up, because that will have by far the strongest reinforcing incentives and feedbacks on what they do. If the metabolic health of the population gets worse, then health expenditure, including tax-funded health expenditure, goes up.<br /><br />So, official health gets more revenue if they give us metabolically counter-productive advice and they get less revenue if they give us metabolically sound advice.<br /><br />This is what economists call <i>perverse incentives</i>. Evolutionary biologists would call it <i>adverse selection</i>.<br /><br />Unfortunately, welfare states are full of perverse incentives and processes of adverse selection. We can define the welfare state as:<br /><blockquote>a structure whereby taxes are spent to reduce or ameliorate social harms via various tax-funded bureaucracies that receive more revenue if the social pathologies tend to increase and less if they tend to decrease.</blockquote>If we want to define the welfare state in terms of the state apparatus itself, then the welfare state represents:<br /><blockquote>a process whereby the state apparatus colonises (i.e., expands into, and receives increased revenue from) its own society rather than other societies.</blockquote>Government health departments, in effect, colonise our collective ill-health. It is perhaps not a shock that the metabolic health of Western populations has been <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109713023747">getting worse</a>, and has been getting <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PrevalenceOverweightAge6-19.GIF">worse faster</a> since governments started promulgating official nutrition guidelines in 1980.</div><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="300" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*_eU4jXWLsHNWR_2R7bAL8w.gif" width="400" /></div><br />If you are wondering what specific mechanisms have led to the official nutrition guidelines making our collective metabolic health worse, they can be summarised as:<br /><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Encouraging us to eat more frequently, leading to our bodies being chronically flooded with insulin, driving up rates of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_resistance">insulin resistance</a>.</li><li>Encouraging more consumption of carbohydrates, leading to more fat storage (as set out in the chart at the top of this post).</li><li>Paying no attention to the <a href="https://youtu.be/7kGnfXXIKZM">massive increase</a> in use of (<a href="https://youtu.be/4WgI9JK1xpo">highly inflammatory</a>) seed oils.</li><li>Demonising saturated fat on the basis of <a href="https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/10/769">no good scientific evidence</a>. (And eating less fat means eating more carbohydrates.)</li></ol>The official nutrition guidelines have been structured, by feedback and selection processes, to generate deteriorating metabolic health in a way that permits the use of the mask of science to cover nutrition guidelines that no one concerned for their health, or the health of their family, should actually follow. US defence forces, for example, are suffering <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2016/09/11/the-u-s-military-has-a-huge-problem-with-obesity-and-it-s-only-getting-worse/">adverse health consequences</a>, likely <a href="https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/2018/11/14/military-and-recruits-too-fat-to-fight">due to following</a> the official nutrition guidelines.<br /><br />Indeed, without the mask of science, more folk would be come aware of what a diabolically bad job the nutrition guidelines have done, if improving the health of the population was the goal.<br /><br />Of course, if the aim is to increase government health expenditure, then they have been excellently effective. Which appears to be precisely how the selection pressures have operated.<br /><br />As we contemplate the deteriorating metabolic health of Western populations, Thomas Jefferson proved to be prophetic in his 1787 <i>Notes on the State of Virginia</i>:</div><div><blockquote>Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.</blockquote><b>The mask of science (Covid 19)</b><br /><br />We can also see the mask of science being use to cover policies not grounded in good science in the official responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.<br /><br />Covid-19 is a respiratory (so seasonal) illness of <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8027509/">metabolic distress</a>. That is likely why children and adolescents have been largely immune: their metabolisms are generally sufficiently healthy that they are far less vulnerable.<br /><br />One of the things that became clear relatively early is that outdoor transmission is not a significant vector for spreading the virus. Conversely, Vitamin D deficiency is a vector for <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/new-study-found-80-percent-of-covid-19-patients-were-vitamin-d-deficient">increasing the likelihood</a> of suffering badly from the virus. (Likely a major factor in why darker-skinned folk in northern latitudes had higher rates of illness and death.) Also, social interaction is well known to reduce stress and so increase capacity to resist disease.<br /><br />So, we should not have been telling people to stay out of the sun and the fresh air, or to wear masks outdoors, as airborne transmission risk is about <a href="https://youtu.be/Z30pZ3dDCO8">effective volume</a> of air. Yet, using the mask of science, this is precisely what has been done in many jurisdictions. The case for lockdowns is also <a href="https://shahar-26393.medium.com/">much weaker</a> than is often recognised. (See also <a href="https://lockdownsceptics.org/">here</a>.)<br /><br />Masks do, however, operate as a strong social signal. A signal that gets its power from use of the mask of science.<br /><br /><b>A tale of two (US) States</b><br /><br />Florida and California are both large population US states, (21m to 40m people) at similar latitudes (so similar seasonal patterns). Florida has a higher population density, though California’s population is slightly more urbanised (95% to Florida’s 91.2%). Florida has an older population (median age of 42.5 to 37) as you would expect from a well-known retirement destination.<br /><br />So, other things being equal, you would expect Florida to have a higher pandemic death rate than California. <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/">California</a> has a death rate of 1,595 per million people. <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/">Florida</a> has a death rate of 1,721 per million people. So, higher, as one would expect. But not very much higher: 126 more deaths per million or 8% higher. Rather less of a difference than one might expect, given that Florida’s median age is 15% higher than California’s.<br /><br />Yet the measures in California to combat the pandemic have been way more intrusive and expensive than what has been done in Florida. Moreover, California’s death rate has been closing on Florida’s, as California’s second (seasonal) wave was much worse than its first.<br /><br />Florida not discouraging people to go outside and enjoy the sun, and not requiring masking outside, does not seem to have had significantly adverse effects. As, one would expect, if one was following the actual science rather than those wielding the mask of science.<br /><br />The systematic attempts to suppress any public consideration of the <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/">lab leak hypothesis</a> was another, particularly egregious, case of the use of the mask of science against actual science. Also egregious has been <a href="https://youtu.be/DGqGQPnKYDs">the suppression of</a> discussion of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/ivermectin-why-a-potential-covid-treatment-isnt-recommended-for-use-157904">potentially viable</a> treatment for Covid-19, Ivermectin (longer discussion <a href="https://youtu.be/Tn_b4NRTB6k">here</a>). I have no idea about whether Ivermectin is effective, or in what circumstances. But suppression the discussion is nonsense and not in any way "doing science". <br /><br /><b>Advice not given</b><br /><br />It was clear relatively early on in the pandemic that Covid-19 was a respiratory (thus seasonal) disease of <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/underlying-evidence-table.html">metabolic distress</a>, with poor metabolic health <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286828/">greatly increasing</a> your risk factors. By changing your eating habits, you can improve some markers of metabolic health in a few days, some in a few weeks, the rest within a few months.<br /><br />These changes needn’t be all that expensive. Indeed, simply eating less frequently (aka <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting">time-restricted eating</a> or intermittent fasting) to give your body a rest from being flooded with insulin can be very effective.<br /><br />As far as I am aware, at no stage did official health tell us that. Either they didn’t know the above or they didn’t want to admit what crap their official nutrition guidelines are.<br /><br />Either way, the selection processes operating on official health did not favour optimising the policy response to the pandemic. But they certainly did involve much use of the mask of science. Rather less use of actual science.<br /><br />Stop and consider how many unnecessary deaths there may have been from the Covid-19 pandemic because official health has perverse/adverse incentives.<br /><br />They are a mere fraction of the premature deaths every year from using the mask of science to push bureaucratically (and corporately) convenient nutrition guidelines rather than providing nutrition advice well-grounded in our evolutionary history, so in actual science.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>[An earlier version was <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/wielding-the-mask-of-science-9773ca133d23" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-50430883890025173452021-09-28T23:27:00.001+10:002021-09-28T23:41:22.359+10:00Feedback explains how occupations and industries align politically<i>Why those who struggle with the physical world lean conservative and those who deal with the abstract lean progressive.</i><br /><img height="222" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*iTwZhyeKP3j13P9VcNRQ_w.png" width="640" /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Source: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11">https://www.businessinsider.com.au/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11</a></i></div><br />In his book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions"><i>A Conflict of Visions</i></a>, economist Thomas Sowell sets out two visions of human nature and social possibilities that drive much of politics: the <i>unconstrained or utopian vision</i>, whereby human society could achieve unparalleled harmony and felicity if people were freed from various social constraints, and the <i>constrained or tragic vision</i>, whereby human nature, the demands of creating and maintaining social order and of wresting wealth from nature, operate as fundamental constraints that any social order has to deal with.<br /><br />What are indeed enduring constraints, and how amenable particular constraints are to human action, is not always obvious and can change over time. Western civilisation has gone through the emancipation sequence — abolishing the slave trade and slavery, Jewish emancipation, adult male suffrage, votes for women, women’s liberation, civil rights, gay liberation — largely because constraints changed, including increasing ability to contest claims about what are, or are not, enduring constraints and what trade-offs should be accepted.<br /><br />The above chart summarising the pattern of political donations by industry and occupation, shows this conflict between the constrained and unconstrained visions playing out in contemporary US politics. Though there is no reason to think that the patterns are much different in other developed democracies.<br /><br /><b>Progressivism trumping liberalism</b><br /><br />As contemporary progressivism has become increasingly, indeed, in its source writings, proudly, illiberal, I am going to mostly substitute <i>progressive</i> for the <i>liberal </i>label above, as it far better describes the dynamics of politics which derives from the unconstrained vision. In particular, how much such politics is directed to, or derived from, a notion of the transformative golden future (progressivism) rather than a commitment to general human freedom and autonomy (liberalism). Though inflated notions of harms from words, so that restrictions on speech and ideas are claimed to be needed to defend human autonomy (at the cost of restricting human autonomy, but only “bad” autonomy) can be a bridge from liberal to progressive politics.<div><br /></div><div>The <i>transformative golden future</i> is not the mere wish that the future be better than the past, but that it be so profoundly better as to eliminate social ills entirely. To the extent that problems of creating and sustaining order that human societies have had to contend with can be largely or entirely superseded.<br /><br />A fundamental concept of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory">critical theory</a> and derivatives, the various critical constructivist theories such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory">critical race theory</a>, is that true social harmony and felicity can only be achieved if all oppressive ideas and structures are eliminated. With oppressive ideas being defined as anything that is taken to inhibit “progress”: that is, achievement of the transformative golden future. This explicitly includes any dissent from the precepts of, or derived from, critical theories. Hence, any politics derived from critical theory or its derivatives, as contemporary progressivism increasingly is, is thereby fundamentally opposed to freedom of speech and thought. This is very clear in writings such as Herbert Marcuse’s seminal, and increasingly influential, essay <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance"><i>Repressive Tolerance</i></a>. (The essay is available online <a href="https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html">here</a>.)<br /><br />Attempting to, and regularly succeeding, in getting people <a href="https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/people-getting-fired-for-referring">sacked or suspended</a> for violating linguistic taboos, is a profoundly illiberal style of politics. But it fits perfectly in with the idea that a transformative golden future is possible if oppressive ideas and structures — that is any ideas or structures that are not directed to, or that fail to facilitate, achievement of said transformative golden future — are eliminated.<br /><br />It is also a logical inference from Michel Foucault claiming that social dynamics are fundamentally matters of power. If arguments are not about trying to find the truth, or bargaining to achieve mutually compatible ends, but just expressions of power in a society dominated by oppressor-oppressed relations, then of course the “proper” thing to do is to suppress all those who express or “support” the “power relations” of oppression.<br /><br />As I have <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/scene-missing-progressivism-bcd554e11358">previously discussed</a>, the politics of the commitment to the transformative golden future has an enormous rhetorical advantage. For the transformative golden future, being a thing of the imagination, can be far more morally perfect than anything that is a result of the inevitable trade-offs trying to build something in the world must entail.<br /><br />Indeed, there is a ready-made, and oft-applied, pattern of critique by progressives of anything that does, or has, existed. Take some such thing, ignore why it exists, what trade-offs and constraints it has had to deal with. Then compare it to some moral principle or principles without any serious consideration of its function or the constraints it has had to deal with. Prove that it fails to entirely conform to the nominated moral principles and condemn it as illegitimate for doing so. </div><div><br /></div><div>To someone committed to the transformative golden future, this is a perfectly reasonable way to proceed, as all such constraints can be superseded when the golden future is achieved. If you are more concerned with how and why things work (or don’t), it is less impressive.<br /><br />Commitment to the transformative future has powerful motivation behind it. Not only does it have unbeatable moral grandeur because of its imagined lack of moral blemish, commitment to such moral grandeur reflects its splendour back on to those so committed. This further motivates dismissing as impermanent and dispensable all constraints that might dim said grandeur.<br /><br />Pursuit of the transformative golden future is held to be inherently morally ennobling. (Above all, by those so committed.) Political activism, specifically <i>progressive</i> political activism, becomes the highest moral calling, as it is directed towards achieving the transformative golden future that is the ground of all morality and of all positive meaning.<br /><br />Yes, this is a faith system.<br /><br />There is no information from the future and so it can be imagined to be as perfect as one likes. The golden transformative future thus acts as God in monotheism — the source of meaning, the ground of morality and the ultimate authority. Indeed, it operates as a source of divine authority: the divine being the realm of ultimate authority from which there is no accuracy feedback.<br /><br />Political activism to bring about the golden transformation future thus operates as a priesthood and key theorists as its prophets. We are absolutely dealing with a faith-system operating according to religious dynamics. With heretics, blasphemy, infidels and, if institutional circumstances permit, inquisitions.<br /><br /><b>Markers of being of the smart and the good</b><br /><br />This energising motivation, grounded in an imagined future so much better than anything that has or does exist, reaches beyond those explicitly committed to the transformative golden future, or to any particular theory of the transformative golden future. For derivations of these theories emerge out of this highly motivated reasoning and activism and are re-packaged as being what the smart and the good believe.<br /><br />Once such derivative beliefs are established as markers of being smart and being good, then anyone who aspires to being of the smart and good has profound status, cognitive identity and self-image reasons to buy into such marker-precepts. (And to be seen to so buy into.) In doing so, they also buy into the required-for-such-status consequence that those who fail to endorse what the smart and the good believe are morally and cognitively delinquent, as it must follow that they are either not smart, not good, or both.* This has become central to how prestige media functions — it sells narratives that tell you what the smart and good folk believe, and who (as being of the smart and the good) you therefore get to despise for not being of the smart and the good.<br /><br />In order to protect the signal of being of the smart and the good, dissent has to be de-legitimised. Hence pile-ones against those who dissent, because if such dissent is accepted as legitimate, then the markers of being of the smart and good lose their value. Pile-ons and denigration of dissent and dissenters are ways to protect the strength of the signals of being of the smart and the good.<br /><br />Having bought into these markers of being of the smart and the good, folk have then also bought into being motivated to block themselves from noticing anything that casts doubt on the precepts that define the smart and the good. This is bad for the general health of public and intellectual discourse, but excellent for the smart-and-good status strategy. A salient example of this pattern is that the more highly educated, “liberal” (i.e., progressive) one is, and the more trusting of the mainstream media, <a href="https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf">the worse informed one is</a> of the patterns of police shootings in the US.<br /><br />It is not only a problem of a general pattern of not-noticing. Much of the mainstream media is playing, and playing to, the same status strategy. A playing, and playing to, that is manifested in the <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening">huge increase in</a> recent years in the use of racial terms in US mainstream media. This is a measure of the expanding influence of critical race theory, and its derivative status strategy of anti-racism as being a prime marker of being of the smart and the good.<br /><br /><b>Abstracting progressivism</b><br /><br />If one works in an occupation or industry that deals with abstract ideas, or other products of the imagination, then faith in the transformative golden future, and its derivative markers to establish one is of the smart and good, is a very natural fit. Particularly if being of the smart is very much a matter of professional self-image. Who does not want to see themselves as being of the smart and the good?<br /><br />Looking at the chart of political donations above, we can see that not only are the industries and occupations of abstraction and imagination strongly predominantly progressive in their politics, they are far more intensively progressive than any industry or occupation leans conservative. The industries and occupations of the cultural commanding heights are, in terms of active politics, overwhelmingly progressive. If politics is downstream of culture, then much of the patterns of contemporary institutional and public politics makes sense.<br /><br />Those who buy into the unconstrained vision (or its derivatives) are very likely to be more motivated to care about, and be active in, politics. Their very sense of status and cognitive identity is strongly inclined to be activated by, and motivate, political action. Much more so than folk with different views of the world, of society, of human possibilities, of politics.<br /><br />The social power of being more systematically motivated about politics is real, as <a href="https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal">this thoughtful piece</a> on the institutional spread of “wokeness” (i.e., contemporary progressivism derived from critical constructivist theories) sets out. The piece is, however, marred by the silly claim that progressives care more about the future of their society than do conservatives. Being much more motivated to engage in political action, because it is tied up with one’s sense of status and cognitive identity, is not remotely the same as caring more about the future of your society. Indeed, a profound contempt for one’s own society, and its heritage, can be extremely politically motivating. Especially as part of rejecting present and past in the service of the transformative golden future.<br /><br />There is a sense in which wanting to de-legitimise and overturn the American project is very much caring about the future of the society you are currently in, but not in the sense that of identifying with the society as it is, or has been. This is not about a continuing future for that society, but a radical break from what has come before, and all the achievements and strivings that embodies.<br /><br />Caring more about politics is not the same as caring more about the future of one’s country. Politics is not the only way to care about, or invest in, the future of one’s society. Indeed, the more pervasive and intense competition over the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good">positional goods</a> of politics are in a society, the worse that society is likely to become.<br /><br /><b>Status games</b><br /><br />The unconstrained vision is very well set up for status and power games. Precisely because the animating vision is so morally splendid, it is very easy to generate a sense of profound moral commitment, but also a sense of moral grandeur. This can then be parlayed into a sense of moral prestige and, in order to achieve the golden future, patterns of social dominance.<br /><br />The grandeur of the moral claims can, however, also lead to a pervasive cheapening of moral discourse. For instance, the notion that, say, a lesbian of African descent with a tenured position in an elite university is “marginalised” and “oppressed” profoundly impoverishes moral language. If such a person is “marginalised” and “oppressed”, what are we to say about the situation of a slave, or the inhabitant of a labour camp, or the experience of a Russian serf?<br /><br />The appropriation of the language of oppression by not merely inhabitants of the most prosperous, most technologically capable, socially free societies in human history but by particularly institutionally <i>advantaged</i> members of such societies is profoundly offensive and highly self-indulgent. It is self-indulgent self-aggrandisement (“look at me, I am so oppressed!” “look at me, I am speaking for the oppressed!” “look at me, I am fighting oppression!”) that hugely cheapens the public moral compass in the service of a performative collective narcissism, an ostentatious display of moral status. It also has a (likely not coincidentally) disorienting effect on anyone who might want to express different views and concerns.<br /><br />Being very effective status strategies, very effective to harnessing prestige and wielding dominance, is at the core of how critical theory, and its derivatives, are also mechanisms of career advancement and social domination by holders of the “correct” sort of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital">human capital</a>. Ones that are particularly suited for, indeed likely to select for, toxic actors. Any powerful status strategy, particularly one with such minimal signalling costs, will attract, indeed select for, toxic actors.<br /><br />There is a very strong element of self-deception involved, so that people see the moral splendour they commit to and don’t see the status plays they are engaged in. This self-deception is carried off by manipulating salience, especially moral salience, so as to hide what is going on from others and from themselves. As a Polish psychiatrist observed, having spent decades observing the putatively “progressive” politics of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Poland dominated by pathological personalities:<br /><blockquote>Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible… </blockquote><blockquote>Andrew M. Lobaczewski, <a href="http://www.ponerology.com/">Political Ponerolology</a>: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, p.163.</blockquote>By being very consciously aware of the moral grandeur of the vision, and moral commitment involved, a lot of status games can be played without ever acknowledging to oneself or others that that is what is also going on. Indeed, that such status plays may be providing a great deal of the reinforcing feedback and incentives.<br /><br />We can tell, however, that the status strategy is, at bottom, a much stronger motivator than moral concern because, in any clash between the two, the status strategy, with its very strong protection-from-conformity-effects, almost invariably wins. Indeed, one of the things that distinguishes dissenters on the “left” is their refusal to play the status strategy.<br /><br />There are other consequences from this focus on the transformative future and expansive conceptions of oppression. If you define all constraints as oppression, so as being malign social constructs, that naturally leads to various levels of science denialism, as science explores the structures of things and constraints flow from the structure of things.<br /><br />The notion that constraints are embedded in structure of things (as science demonstrates in various ways) is inherently opposed to the unconstrained vision. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism">Lysenkoism</a> is an inherent, pathological tendency of golden, transformative-future progressivism. As, for example, trans activism is currently demonstrating. Though the Lysenkoist implications of transformative-future progressivism <a href="https://youtu.be/ZtlEfa4K46I">are invading</a> medicine <a href="https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak">much more widely</a>.<br /><br /><b>Enduring constraints</b><br /><br />Which brings us to the tragic or constrained vision. This cannot be simply labelled “right wing” or conservative, as some very liberal-minded or politically progressive (but not progressivist in the sense defined above) folk operate within this vision. Anyone who accepts that we are products of, and still subject to, evolutionary processes buys into a key element of the tragic or constrained vision, no matter how “left” their politics are.<br /><br />Nevertheless, conservative thought is very much grounded in the tragic or constrained vision. But so is the liberal tradition.<br /><br />The basis of the tragic or constrained vision is that constraints are real. That there are features of reality, and of us, that are not seriously plastic to human action and that we have to simply deal with, and act within, if we are to be effective. Particularly, if we are to be effective in promoting human flourishing or any achievable notion of the good.<br /><br />Now what those constraints actually are, and how plastic or not they are to human action, is much debated. This is much of the ground of dispute between liberals, conservatives and various tragic-vision authoritarians. While they may argue over the constraints, and where the practical limits are, that there are such constraints and practical limits is a bedrock assumption all these traditions share.<br /><br />Looking at the chart of patterns of political donations by industry above, we can see that the most politically conservative (so most constrained-vision) industries are mining and agriculture. They are immersed in the effort to wrest value from nature. They deal with the reality of physical constraints every day. Their daily feedback from their work tells them that constraints are real and pervasive. Of course they are much more inclined to conservative politics.<br /><br />The higher the “social constraints” elements of the work of an industry, the more politically liberal it tends to be. Social constraints are, at least to some degree, amenable to human action. The stronger, therefore, is likely to be the appeal of supporting human autonomy. Especially a notion of human autonomy less grounded in the constraints of tradition. Hence the more liberal patterns of politics in such industries.<br /><br /><b>Liberalism, autonomy and discovery</b><br /><br />But liberalism does not deny the reality of constraints. It is grounded in a view of human nature that both exalts human autonomy while also holding a certain, grounding suspicion about human nature and respect for the limitations of human action. Why do liberals push freedom? Because that respects human autonomy but also entails denying that there is some group out there who can be trusted with systematic power over others.<br /><br />Liberalism famously sees public discourse as a vehicle for discovery. We are constrained by what we do not yet know, but might yet find out. Testing ideas in open discourse permits, given such constraints, discovery to take place. Liberalism has been comfortable with private property and markets because they support human autonomy, operate as far more effective discovery mechanisms and limit the power of some over others.<br /><br />There is much truth in the liberal vision. For instance, markets and commerce are not good mechanisms to promote bigotry. It is why oppressive systems have always sought to impose limits on the market and commerce. Racial segregation, for example, required systematic state action because market processes will not deliver segregation. Indeed, various oppressed groups have often found the consensual patterns of commerce much kinder to them than the coercive structures of politics.<br /><br />One of the great rhetorical advantages of the unconstrained vision, the politics of the golden transformative future, is that it de-legitimises all the grounds from which one might derive liberal or conservative politics. Pointing to any constraint that gets in the way of the golden future can so easily be portrayed as complicity in whatever ills the golden transformative future will dispense with, as being a sign of being an -ist or a -phobe.<br /><br />Whether it is claiming that human nature limits what is possible, that wresting value from nature limits what is possible, or that the requirements of social order limit what is possible, any such argument can be charged as being complicity in oppression. If appeal to the constraints of human nature, the constraints of social order, the constraints of wresting value from nature, are all illegitimate due to being complicity in oppression, then there is no ground from which liberal or conservative arguments can be made. There is nothing for them to gain purchase from that upholders of the progressive faith need pay any attention to.<br /><br />Of course, attempting to argue people out of a faith system is a notoriously unfruitful activity.<br /><br /><b>Unconstrained imagination</b><br /><br />From mining and agriculture to law and pharmaceuticals, there is fairly clear more-conservative-to-more-liberal pattern of industries, directly connected to what sort of feedback their workplaces have to deal with, from the more physical to the more social.<br /><br />Then we come to four industries clustered together that are much more intensely skewed in their politics than the 12 conservative-to-liberal industries: newspapers and print media, online computer services, academics and the entertainment industry. These are, in the contemporary world, the cultural commanding heights industries. They are also extremely social industries that do not directly have to deal much with wresting value from the physical world or (in any strong feedback way) problems of social order. That is done for them by other industries.<br /><br />They are industries of the abstract and the imagined above all else. They are made for the politics of the unconstrained vision. Especially for belief in a golden transformative future. The combination of abstraction and lack of reality-feedback naturally encourages the idea that all constraints that in any way impede the golden transformative future are dispensable.<br /><br />Their attenuated reality-feedback also means that they are also made for status-strategy politics based on markers of being of the smart and the good. Especially given their intensely social nature, and their focus on abstraction and imagination. There is much greater capacity to select for agreement over competence, as what is “good work” has a high “what other folk in this industry believe is good work” element to it.<br /><br />Especially for claims that have no direct feedback-from-reality penalty for being wrong, but have a potentially high fail-to-conform-penalty.<br /><br />For instance, in terms of how career advancement works, an academic is only wrong if other academics agree that they are wrong. But that also applies to a somewhat startling extent within media, as the years of the Russiagate nonsense taught those who were paying attention.<br /><br />An extreme instance of lack of reality-feedback is provided within academe by education faculties, where pedagogical ideas repeatedly demonstrated <a href="http://anitacrawley.net/Resources/Articles/Mayer%20Should%20there%20be%20a%20three%20strike%20rule%20against%20pure%20discovery%20learning.pdf">not to work</a> are nevertheless simply re-packaged and re-pushed. Mainly because they are too convenient for status strategies based on a sense of moral grandeur from transformative activism. Which have been imparted in ever more intense forms to generations of school teachers and university administrators.<br /><br />One would think that box-office receipts might provide strong feedback in the Entertainment industry, but the flow of funds are so high that there is patently considerable cushioning effect from such box-office feedback. (If one is publicly funded, then that effect is almost entirely eliminated.)<br /><br />The flow-of-funds cushioning effect is even more pronounced in Big Tech. The motivation-feedbacks of the combination of moral self-image and status strategy have turned out to be, again and again, far more powerful than market feedback.<br /><br />Asking the question, <i>what are the reality feedbacks in this industry? </i>turns out to explain a lot about the patterns of politics in an industry.<br /><br />* Applying the language of Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), wielding the weapon of setting what it is the good and smart people believe is a key way what he calls the Cathedral operates.<div><br /></div><div>[An earlier version was <a href="https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/feedback-explains-how-occupations-and-industries-align-politically-39b6f6d844dc" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>.]</div></div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-9419603777921926572021-09-18T11:11:00.001+10:002021-09-18T11:11:10.809+10:00Why Americans are F***-ed in the head over race<i>The history of the US has generated persistent racial derangement. It has been far more of a case of structures generating racism than of racism generating structures.</i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih6Ihyphenhyphen52ktDpcLhyFNL_Cwffar48bhc62bTsRCI7fvjuVVI0K8ZHu3y53I7H27eruGuqxGB-IrljwNJHY0bSdsDC6FdnFHubWUujJQPJtvrNNrP5_5xwF3f3JfoNaMVT4ZOVEm9W0FQpw/s1200/1*upVAI48EIHkgt8tyJeCrHw.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="873" data-original-width="1200" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih6Ihyphenhyphen52ktDpcLhyFNL_Cwffar48bhc62bTsRCI7fvjuVVI0K8ZHu3y53I7H27eruGuqxGB-IrljwNJHY0bSdsDC6FdnFHubWUujJQPJtvrNNrP5_5xwF3f3JfoNaMVT4ZOVEm9W0FQpw/w640-h466/1*upVAI48EIHkgt8tyJeCrHw.png" width="640" /></a></div><div><a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening">Source</a>.<br /><br />People have a pretty good understanding of their own continental ancestry. People are also relatively accurate at picking out other people’s continental ancestry.<br /><br />This is not surprising. There was not much mixing of lineages across continents until relatively recently, at least outside continental border regions. This was due to the limitations of technology: specifically very limited transport capacitie. Moreover, thousands of years of separate genetic lineages, with genetic bottlenecks creating relatively small founder populations for various continents, meant that there are fuzzy-boundary, but relatively clear, patterns of physical markers of continental ancestry.<br /><br />So, a folk concept of race based on continental ancestry has some, relatively straightforward, patterns of physical-markers to work off. Hence the history of skin-tone descriptors of race. With <i>race</i> becoming to be understood as being continental, or some significant sub-continental region, ancestry. (Medieval Europeans had a rather different concept of <i>race</i>, one much more language based — so it made sense for a C14th commentator <a href="https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/1869/Bartlett2001JMEMS31MedievalandModernConcepts.pdf;jsessionid=2E2C83D6D7FC4044F4B77AFEDDC20E62?sequence=1">to talk of</a> Scotland being one nation with two races: highlanders and lowlanders as thy spoke different languages.)<br /><br />The US in particular has a long history of obsessing over race because continental origin coincided with fundamentally different roles in colonial society (the settlers, the dispossessed and the enslaved). Different roles that persisted into the country created by the American Revolution.<br /><br /><b>Slavery, settlement and racism</b><br /><br />As continents produce neither single cultures per continent nor single breeding populations per continent, analytically, remarkably little follows from physical markers of continental ancestry being relatively clear. But as physical markers of continental ancestry are collectively <i>visually </i>relatively clear, they can, very easily, have social meanings attached to them. Which, of course, has happened repeatedly. Especially when one region has systematically enslaved people from region(s) with different general patterns of physical markers. Or when folk from one continent have populated another. We can call these the <i>slavery effect</i> and the <i>settlement effect</i>.<br /><br />Both have proved to be powerful generators of racism: attaching normative ranking to continental (or region thereof) origin. That is, positive social meaning to one’s own group and (especially) pejorative social meaning to those with a different continental origin (and so a different social role).<br /><br />A third generator of racism has been imperialism: domination of a state created by one continental origin group over folk with differing continental origins. This has been a rather stronger generator of elite or theoretical racism than more general racism, as imperialism is mostly an elite activity. (A 2018 study found that the UK and Portugal, the two surveyed countries with the longest histories of colonialism, had generally<a href="https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2018/being-black-eu#TabPubKeyfindings2" target="_blank"> the lowest levels of racism</a> among the surveyed European countries.) Though all racism, and race talk, starts off as an elite discourse.<br /><br />The fourth generator of racism has been ethnicised religion. The classic version of this being racialised Jew-hatred.<br /><br />None of these factors are sufficient in themselves to generate racism. The Romans were mass-enslaving imperialists who settled new areas and tended to dislike Jews. Racism was not a feature of their culture.<br /><br />For the Romans were not a xenophobic culture regarding descent. Folk of any origin could become Roman citizens, including ex-slaves. Their slaves could be of any origin. Their society and their thought did not structurally differentiate by continental origin.<br /><br />Moreover, Romans traditionally were not moral universalists. So, they did not have to generate some generalised story about why some folk were slaves. Slaves were simply losers and if they were freed, and became Roman citizens, then they became winners. Folk would put that they were freedmen (i.e., ex-slaves) on their tombstones, as that showed how much of a winner they had become.<br /><br /><b>Islam and racism</b><br /><br />The first significant discourse grading people as cognitively deficient, based on physical markers of continental origin, came out of Islam. Islam being an imperial, evangelising monotheist (so morally universalist) religious civilisation that systematically enslaved people to their north (including Europeans, notably Slavs) and people to their south (Sub-Saharan Africans).<br /><br />Folk of such origins were repeatedly characterised by Islamic writers as being cognitively deficient. Often either due to too little sun (Northern Europeans) or too much sun (Sub-Saharan Africans). So, in Chapter Three of his <i>Tabaqāt al-ʼUmam</i> (<i>Categories of Nations</i>), geographer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Said_al-Andalusi#Tabaq%25C4%2581t_al-%25CA%25BCUmam_(Categories_of_Nations)">Sa’id al-Andalusi</a> (1029–1070) wrote:<br /><blockquote>The rest of this category, which showed no interest in science, resembles animals more than human beings. Those among them who live in the extreme North, between the last of the seven regions and the end of the populated world to the north, suffered from being too far from the sun; their air is cold and their skies are cloudy. As a result, their temperament is cool and their behaviour is rude. Consequently, their bodies become enormous, their colour turned white, and their hair drooped down. They have lost keenness of understanding and sharpness of perception. They were overcome by ignorance, and laziness, and infested by fatigue and stupidity. Such are the Slavonians, Bulgarians and neighbouring peoples.</blockquote>(The English word slave <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs_(ethnonym)#Etymology">likely derives from</a> Slav.)<br /><br />The patterns of castrating male slaves, and of incorporating the children of Muslim fathers into the <i>umma</i>, the Muslim community, meant that centuries of mass slavery failed to generate an ex-slave underclass within Islamic lands. But there are still linguistic traces of these centuries of mass slaving: <i>abd</i> in Arabic can both refer to slave (as in <i>Abdullah</i>, slave of Allah) and to Sub-Saharan African.<br /><br /><b>Christianity and racism</b><br /><br />The Americas were subject to imperialism and mass settlement from Christian Europe. Added to this imperialism and settlement, millions of slaves were imported from Africa. This made continental origins socially salient in the Americas and did so from within a morally universalising religious perspective Christianity). This was a situation made for racism to develop. Which it duly did.<br /><br />Hence the confused interaction between Christianity and racism. On one hand, the Gospel of Love applies to everyone. Indeed, from the earliest days of Christian European settlement of the Americas, there were devout Christians who spoke and agitated on behalf of the moral status of the inhabitants of the Americas as children of God.<br /><br />An early, and important, manifestation of this was the 1537 Papal Encyclical <i><a href="https://www.papalencyclicals.net/paul03/p3subli.htm">Sublimus Dei</a> </i>declaring that the inhabitants of the discovered lands, even if they did not know Christ, were children of God with natural rights and could not be enslaved. In the words of Pope Paul III:<br /><blockquote>… the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.</blockquote>This did not bar owning slaves someone <i>else</i> had enslaved. As African rulers were more than happy to take care of that stage of the process, <i>Sublimus Dei</i> had little effect on the Atlantic slave trade. </div><div><br /></div><div>The moral claims and reasoning of the Papal Encyclical were, however, in rather direct contrast with <i>Sharia</i>, which is entirely fine with enslaving non-Muslims who have not submitted to rule by <i>Sharia</i> (i.e. by Muslims), including sexually exploiting captured women. The last being endorsed no less than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_slavery#Ma_malakat_aymanukum">15 times in</a> the <i>Quran</i> and by the example (<i>sira)</i> and the acts and sayings (<i>hadith</i>) of the Prophet. A principle of <i>Sharia</i> is that the marriage of any woman captured by a Muslim man is automatically annulled by the act of capture.<br /><br />The Anglosphere abolitionist movement in the C18th and C19th had strong Christian roots. As did the US civil rights movement of the mid C20th.<br /><br />On the other hand, Christianity is a morally universalist religion. Like Islam, it required some justifying story about why you were systematically enslaving the children of God from Africa. It required some justifying story about why you were dispossessing the children of God in the Americas. </div><div><br /></div><div>Christian moral universalism later also required some justifying story why you were systematically denying the descendants of slaves political and other civil rights. These were never going to be good stories about the dispossessed, the enslaved, and the excluded. There were plenty of people who were racist, not despite being Christian, but because they were Christian.<br /><br />Enlightenment thought, which was also morally universalising, had much the same confused interaction with race and racism as Christianity. On one hand, the scientific impulse to categorise could be, and was, mobilised to propagate racist ideas. On the other hand, seeing the world as a shared globe inhabited by a single human species, along with a sense of expanding human capacities, made slavery morally problematic on a scale never seen before. Hence the rise of the abolitionist movements.<br /><br />As for the settlement effect, so long as the Amerindians were being dispossessed (and feared) by the settlers from Europe, the structural reasons to be racist against them remained strong. After they were subjugated and shoved into reserves, the underlying structural motives to be racist against them lost strength. The effortless virtue, and pleasures of contempt, that bigotry provides may linger, but the general social retreat from, and anathematising, of racism has further weakened what was already a form of racism in structural retreat. As the eminent political career of Herbert Hoover’s Amerindian Vice President, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Curtis">Charles Curtis</a>, demonstrated.<br /><br /><b>The intensities of slavery</b><br /><br />Slavery and its aftermath proved to be a different matter to self-justifying antipathy to Amerindians, who always had a certain warrior vigour going for them. As sociologist Orlando Paterson has <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Slavery-Social-Death-Comparative-Study/dp/0674986903/ref=sr_1_1?crid=C3KQNJEQGWAZ&dchild=1&keywords=slavery+and+social+death+orlando+patterson&qid=1622080042&sprefix=Slavery+and+social+de,aps,347&sr=8-1">brilliantly analysed</a>, slavery does much more then reduce people to property, it imposes on the slave a form of social death. They have no social standing, no family standing nor heritage to be acknowledged. Slavery is profoundly stigmatising and dishonouring, as it deprives the slave of the capacity to have honour or any status that casts doubt on being a slave.<br /><br />The slave States of the US operated one of the most closed slave systems in history. It became legally hard to manumit a slave and the stigmatising dishonour of slavery was not excised by freedom. A process of stigmatisation greatly helped by the slaves being of a different continental origin than the settlers. The generalised theories that justified slavery could not allow space for some moral transformation from not being a slave anymore.<br /><br />Roman slavery, not having that justificatory burden, and not being divided by continental ancestry, was far more open. Hence ex-slaves could become citizens and would even boast of how far they had come from their former slave status.<br /><br />In much of the Americas, an intermediary <i>mulatto</i> or mixed race (i.e. mixed continental origins) identity grew up. Such folk served useful intermediary roles between a small settler elite and large slave or indigenous population. This did not happen in the slave South of the US, as the political importance of voting, and the scale of European settlement, worked against a mixed-race identity emerging.<br /><br />There was no particularly useful social role that a mixed-race group could fulfil that was not already being filled by folk of European ancestry. Moreover, if ex-slaves and their descendants began voting in any numbers, they could begin to wield political power. Which was both politically threatening and an affront to the justifications for slavery. The result was the “one-drop” rule, whereby any African ancestry identified your slave origins, with all the associated stigmas and exclusions.<br /><br />These structures served the divide-and-dominate politics of the plantation elite. Before the Civil War, the plantation elite used a range of mechanisms to repress poor “whites”, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Masterless-Men-Antebellum-Cambridge-American/dp/110718424X">the masterless men</a>, who had no stake in the slave system but who traded and socialised with the slaves. After the Civil War, and the failure of Reconstruction, the plantation elite used the same range of mechanisms to repress the ex-slaves and their descendants. They simply racialised the operation of exactly the same repressive mechanisms that had operated against the masterless men before the Civil War into what became known as Jim Crow. The former masterless men were now on the “right” side of the exclusions, and were thereby incorporated into the Southern system.<br /><br />As African-Americans migrated to the industrialising cities, a version of such divide-and-dominate strategies turned out to be congenial to, and adaptable by, urban elites. Public policy was wielded to generate increasing residential segregation, as such segregation makes divide-and-dominate tactics far more effective.<br /><br />A note in Richard Rothstein’s revelatory <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+color+of+law&qid=1622081263&sr=8-1"><i>The Color of Law</i></a>, sets out the path of residential segregation. Residential segregation that was driven by public policy. Including intensifying under FDR’s New Deal. In the ten largest US cities:<br /><blockquote>…in 1880, the neighborhood (block) on which the typical African-American lived was only 15 percent black; by 1910 it was 30 percent, and by 1930, even after the Great Migration, it was still only about 60 percent black. By 1940 the local neighborhood where the typical African-American lived was 75 percent black.</blockquote>At all stages, such divide-and-dominate politics only worked because people bought into the political framings and discourses that legitimated them. Far more of our thinking and decision-making is unconscious than we realise. Social selection processes work on information and feedback: but not necessarily fully <i>conscious</i>, or sufficiently critically examined, information and feedback.<br /><b><br />Weakening racism</b><br /><br />The experience of the Second World War, both the mass mobilisation for a common purpose and the horrors of Nazi imperialism and racism, as well as the pressures of the Cold War, increased, both domestically and internationally, the embarrassment that American racism generated. At the same time, the continuing fail in transport and communication costs made it easier for marginal groups to organise, as did increased urbanisation and suburbanisation.<br /><br />So, the structural supports for divide-and-dominate racism weakened. The civil rights movement, and particularly Martin Luther King, brilliantly played up the moral embarrassment of racial exclusion. Both the Christian moral embarrassment and the American-ideals moral embarrassment. With mass communications making it easier to reach people for persuasive effect.<br /><br />Hence the successes of the civil rights movement and the retreat of racism from being pervasive within American society to being a moral shame. Though, as Glenn Loury makes clear in <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Anatomy-Racial-Inequality-Bois-Lectures-ebook/dp/B002OSY9YE/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Anatomy+of+Racial+Inequality&qid=1622081833&sr=8-1"><i>The Anatomy of Racial Inequality</i></a>, complex patterns of stigma have been rather more stubbornly persistent.<br /><br />From this history, we can see that <i>structural racism</i> (or analogues such as <i>systemic racism</i>) is generally not a useful term. For it has been far more the case that structures generate and mobilise racism than that racism generates structures. Nor are such structures a necessary part of the social system. They are more about bending the social system in a particular direction.<br /><br /><b>After the civil rights movement</b><br /><br />Which brings us to the graph at the top of this post and its odd pattern whereby “white” (i.e. Euro-American) Democrats were very much <i>more</i> likely to say that they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006, but “black” (African-American) and Hispanic Democrats were apparently somewhat less likely to say they knew someone who was racist in 2015 than in 2006.<br /><br />If someone knows more people they regard as racist than someone else, that can be because (1) they are more likely to meet racists; (2) they are better at identifying racism; (3) they are more expansive in their characterising of racism; or (4) some combination thereof.<br /><br />So, taking the 2006 results in the graph above, it could be that Euro-American Democrats were more likely to meet racists than Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. Or that they are better at identifying them than Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or that they have a more expansive definition of racism than do Hispanic Democrats and Euro-American Republicans. Or some combination of the above.<br /><br />If we move to the 2015 results, Euro-American Democrats were far more likely to believe they knew a racist than were African-American Democrats, Hispanic Democrats or Euro-American Republicans. They were also the only group who increased their likelihood of knowing a racist since 2006, and did so dramatically. By contrast, both African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats became, if anything, <i>less</i> likely to believe they knew a racist. (The shifts were not statistically significant but do accord with long term patterns of declining racism.)<br /><br />The most plausible read of this data is that racism has declined somewhat in the US (in accordance with long-term trends) but Euro-American Democrats have acquired dramatically more expansive definition(s) of racism. (Unless they are registering dramatically increased anti-white racism — we can reasonably give that low probability.)<br /><br />So, by 2015, Euro-American Democrats apparently lived in a US of significantly more racists among the people they interacted with, while African-American Democrats and Hispanic Democrats did not.<br /><br />If fluctuations in racism are largely driven by changes in structural factors, as history strongly suggests, that suggests a change in structural factors that is particularly affecting Euro-American Democrats, but not other folk. Something that is making race much more salient to them.<br /><br />An obvious factor is <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening">the massive increase</a>, since around 2010, in the use of racial terms by US elite media. As Democrats have far more confidence in elite media <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx">than do Republicans</a> (a long-term tendency that increased dramatically from 2015), the dramatic upsurge in the media’s use of racial terms could be accounting for much of the “more people know a racist” effect.<br /><br />Especially as there clearly has been an expansion of what counts, within elite race talk, as <i>racism</i>. Partly because our concept of a phenomena tends to expand <a href="https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/LEVARI2018COMPLETE.pdf">as the prevalence</a> of that phenomena shrinks. There has been, for example, a creeping expansion of <a 59d80703a6fdcc2aad065364="" concept-creep-psychologys-expanding-concepts-of-harm-and-pathology.pdf="" href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nick-Haslam/publication/295247201_Concept_Creep_Psychology" links="" s_expanding_concepts_of_harm_and_pathology="">what is labelled as harm</a> in Psychology. But there has also been an expansion of the concept of racism due to the expanding influence of intersectionality and critical race theory. Especially in the education of increasing numbers of younger journalists.<br /><br />Is there a structural reason for this increased focus on race? One is fairly obvious: the value of anti-racism as a status play. The more intense one’s opposition to racism, the greater the moral prestige in being ostentatiously anti-racist and, conversely, the greater the moral shame from failing to appropriately oppose racism. So, a status-play purity spiral gets set up. One that can be used to lever folk out of jobs. The bottom-up (but still elite) prestige play then becomes a dominance play. In a situation <a href="https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/elite-overproduction-brings-disorder/">of elite over-production</a>, such status-plays are a very useful weapon in struggles over opportunities and resources.<br /><br />Ostentatious anti-racism can make one reluctant to admit that racism has declined or to give credence to other factors in explaining social dynamics. One becomes invested in continuing to ascribe social meanings to race. The <a href="https://youtu.be/QDqy85KhALE">surge in hate crime hoaxes</a> fits in with this.<br /><br /><b>Function does not require intent</b><br /><blockquote>Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible… </blockquote><blockquote>Andrew M. Lobaczewski, <i><a href="http://www.ponerology.com/">Political Ponerolology</a>: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes</i>, p.163.</blockquote>The other reason for increased focus on race is less obvious, but has a longer historical pedigree. Overt racism might have become embarrassing, but the advantages to urban elites of divide-and-dominate politics has never gone away, so social selection pressures will continue to favour such politics. The more divided residents, workers and citizens are on racial grounds, the less elites have to deal with competing (against them) claims on resources. Symbolic race-identity politics are way cheaper for elites than politics that delivers good government. That is as true today in urban US as it was in the Antebellum or Jim Crow South. Hence racially-divided US cities are (by developed democracy standards) comparatively ill-governed, just as the Antebellum and Jim Crow South were in their time.<br /><br />If anti-racism can be turned into a racialised divide-and-dominate strategy, as clearly it can, then all the better for opportunity-hoarding elites. Especially for elites facing intensified internal competition for resources and opportunities.<br /><br />Intersectionality and critical race theory are very much elite products, coming out of places such as Harvard Law School. Nor do they have to be originally developed as divide-and-dominate mechanisms for social selection pressures to adapt them <i>into</i> divide-and-dominate mechanisms.<br /><br />Moral concern easily becomes status plays. Status plays are naturally divisive. Moral dominion easily becomes social dominion. Such feedback loops provide much for social selection processes to work on.<br /><br />Such outlooks and patterns of action do not have <i>appear</i> to their active proponents to be divide-and-dominate politics in order to function as such. Remembering that such framings and discourses work much better if folk can be convinced to go along with them, while social selection processes do not have to be entirely conscious. Especially as the prime mechanisms for self-deception are by manipulating salience. Particularly moral salience.<br /><br />One cannot force oneself to believe what one doesn’t believe. We can, however, use focus on, for example, image-self-protection, to block paying attention to awkward facts or considerations. This is especially easy to do with highly moralised concerns and self-images. Both because of their emotional power and because it is inherent in moral claims that they be normative trumps. That one has an ostentatious image of oneself as being not-oppressive does not guarantee that one is not buying into politics that are, in fact, oppressive or self-serving.<br /><br />Coverage by elite media of deaths in police custody, or at the hands of police, is particularly revealing. There is a general problem of police training and accountability in the US. One that varies <a href="https://copinthehood.com/variations-in-police-involved-shootings-by-city-and-county/">far more by jurisdiction</a> than it does by race (whether of police or civilian protagonist). If media had reported these things accurately, then a broad coalition could have been built up to improve police training and accountability.<br /><br />Instead, by <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening">intensely and selectively</a> racialising their coverage, the “racist cops” narrative was firmly established by elite media. Turning this into a specifically African-American-and-police problem rather than a general accountability-to-the-citizenry problem and allowing those propagating, and those accepting, the narrative to thereby parade their ostentatious anti-racism. A way easier, and more immediate, social and cognitive reward than doing the hard work of increasing police training and accountability. Hence “defund the police”: a simplistic but convenient symbolic politics that was way easier to pander to than improved police training and accountability.<br /><br /><b>Revitalising divide-and-dominate</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Even better, one of the key mechanisms for divide-and-dominate has been to fail to provide effective policing in African-American urban communities (as measured by homicide clearance rates), thereby generating much higher homicide rates in those communities. (In rural US, Euro-Americans and African-Americans have <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446205/pdf/10754973.pdf">identical homicide rates</a>.) These differential levels of violence do more to racially divide US cities than any other factor.<br /><br />The “racist cops” media narrative, and activism, so congenial to moralised self-image, and their associated status plays, has increased the level of violence in those localities and so increased the most racially divisive element in US cities. If one was seeking to revitalise divide-and-dominate politics, it would be hard to do better.<br /><br />A <a href="https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf">recent study found that</a> the more educated you were, the more politically progressive you were, and the more you trusted the media, the less well informed you were on police shootings. (But the more conveniently you believed, as far as divide-and-dominate politics went.)<br /><br />Social intent does not entail social function. Social function does not entail social intent.<br /><br />Elite race talk is always a divide-and-dominate mechanism. Elite race talk has, historically, been racist. Indeed, racist discourses have always started off as elite theories. But anti-racist race talk works just as well as a divide-and-dominate mechanism, provided one continues to ascribe social meanings to race and do so in pejorative ways. Which, of course, is what all the talk about whiteness, white supremacy, white racism, etc. does.<br /><br />It is still a case of structures generating the assigning of divisive social meanings to race, far more than the reverse, seeking to bend the social system to their benefit. Even doing so within ostentatiously anti-racist rhetoric and moral framings.<br /><br />What is <a aame_chose="" c3="" est_la_m="" href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus_%C3%A7a_change,_plus_c">that French saying</a>? <i>plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose</i>: The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing …</div></div><div><br /></div><div>(An earlier version was <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/why-americans-are-f-ed-in-the-head-over-race-a8acfd97c104" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a>.)</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-60675450605066619262021-09-11T17:02:00.006+10:002021-09-11T17:02:41.101+10:00The vulnerability gap and the collapse of courtship<i>Much of contemporary feminism is engaged in an unfortunate game of let’s pretend.</i><div><br /><img height="426" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*2IW6xDcknfQ6LIMi8BKkMQ.png" width="640" /><br /><br />In any sufficiently complex and mobile species that uses conjunction of <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/gamete-gametes-311/">gametes</a> to reproduce, the only <a href="https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/22831/Lehtonen&Parker2019.pdf?sequence=1">evolutionary stable outcome</a> is to have one type of gametes be small and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motility">motile</a> (self-moving) and the other type to be large and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessility_(motility)">sessile</a> (not self-moving). Reproduction then requires the conjunction of a small gamete with a large gamete.<br /><br />If there are no neuters in the species, and the species is divided into two sexes, one producing small gametes (males) and the other producing large gametes (females), then the only evolutionary stable outcome is for equal numbers of each sex, as shortage of one sex would lead to it having an evolutionary advantage, leading to production of more of that sex until the chances of being a vehicle for successful genetic replication equalise.<br /><br />The existence of a small-gamete (male) sex and a large-gamete (female) sex is likely to lead to courtship behaviour, as the large gamete sex incurs more risks in reproduction. So members of the small-gamete sex have to demonstrate sufficient fitness to members of the large-gamete sex to be worth the risks of reproduction.<br /><br />Courtship behaviour occurs in many species. The most extreme version being the male having to offer his body for the consumption by the female in order to mate. Courtship does not occur in every species: it is not a feature of herd/harem species, for example. But it is a common pattern among species.<br /><br /><i>Homo sapien</i> children are, in terms of required parental investment to raise children able to also achieve successful reproduction, the most biologically expensive children in the biosphere. Among contemporary foraging populations, children do not reach calorie break-even point (providing as many calories as they consume) until <a href="https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/46603844/Embodied_Capital_and_the_Evolutionary_Ec20160618-27827-pd0oin.pdf?1466289441=&response-content-disposition=inline;+filename=Embodied_capital_and_the_evolutionary_ec.pdf&Expires=1621386561&Signature=J5lY2Wc3YRKTqwkJFVPj3ePHE6Rie5bvjn34Ly~sGZxYD2fxp9NgRC2tN2iSnr~4w57afaMrcQG5Jg0BCIke9hpNTs~V4wRac8-wVG6wbfjWpX~rvambs-ANmw1NIMtUEhvAND3mobDtuDL1~UPF6tJo~lg6Kicf-yCnnYZiNCaA8r3Q-N6wWSsZ47~BUQ9Ni2UfCBos3jV583WLvpsaXoLMmF5BFifh1lSqjwr6pqA7Sma3V-g7l1qb8asctYM1KHt1BrVlwz9~Bb9M7cKYyAwXLg5c5YkDYou3sf9iisfZI2pVreoHedbgl8ZT~41AIGvpGQwKcaPXM--0DSg8fg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA">around age 20</a>. They have to be fed and taught across that time and are particularly helpless infants.<br /><br />This means that <i>Homo sapien</i> women have particularly high risks in reproduction. This includes elevated risks of dying in childbirth due to the large heads of human babies. They also have to care for particularly helpless infants, supervising and feeding dependant children, and help socialise juveniles. (Humans have a particularly long juvenile period.)<br /><br />So there are lots of risks in reproduction for <i>Homo sapien</i> women. It is therefore hardly surprising that human societies have tended to evolve elaborate and/or lengthy courtship practices. Given that <i>Homo sapiens </i>evolved grandmothers (i.e. women with particularly long post-reproduction lives, so they could invest in their children’s children, having stopped having their own children) this courtship could be also, or even mostly, directed towards the parents of the potential bride.<br /><br />Lots of foraging societies required the prospective groom to provide one or two years of bride service to the parents of the prospective bride. This compensated the parents for losing services of the daughter but also demonstrated ability to provide; that the prospective groom was able to perform the food provision needed to support future children.<br /><br /><b>Courtship</b><br /><br />Courtship is therefore a product of the vulnerability gap. This vulnerability gap is not only the gap in the respective risks involved in reproduction, both child-bearing and child-rearing, it also pertains to men being <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#where-are-men-much-taller-than-women">about 7% taller</a> and <a href="https://www.worlddata.info/average-bodyheight.php">13% larger</a>, with women <a href="https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/22586/1/miller_andrea_1990Dec_masters.pdf.pdf">having on average</a> 66% of the lower body strength of men and 52% of the upper body strength of men. (Despite the current trend towards fictional presentation of the contact-fighting capacity of men and women as equal.) In upper body lean body mass, <i>Homo sapiens</i> are almost as sexually dimorphic as gorillas.<br /><br />Compared to other mammals and primates, <i>Homo sapiens</i> are relatively under-muscled for their size, with a relatively high fat content, even in healthy, lean <i>Homo sapiens</i>. We are the fat ape because our very expensive brains need a high base level of energy, and our higher fat stores buffer our energy-expensive brains against fluctuations in food intake. <a href="https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/underbodycomp.html">Women have higher body</a> fat content than men at healthy weights as they also have to cope with pregnancy and lactation: i.e. feeding a second energy-hog brain while buffering both brains’s energy intake.<br /><br />Compared to other primates, <i>Homo sapiens</i> have relatively low levels of differences between the sexes in size and strength (even if more than is often acknowledged nowadays). <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/667538">This suggests that </a>human males have invested less in muscles for mating success and more in behaviour for parenting success. (A complicated interaction, if parenting effort can also aid mating success.) In contemporary foraging societies, on average, men dominate the provision of calories to the group <a href="https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/46603844/Embodied_Capital_and_the_Evolutionary_Ec20160618-27827-pd0oin.pdf?1466289441=&response-content-disposition=inline;+filename=Embodied_capital_and_the_evolutionary_ec.pdf&Expires=1621679649&Signature=ahBrenpcRblXfwfUPBnHELuMcpDvEFf2r3mry8bCrouPDk1cC~zPOmNgbk0r~FUvYZN39HrGPePujZyIaqZRah2tg7E3FMrQZgqZPUlj-GXbabFZ7D88UiuX4fgHZaY6nycHTzcbG1Sg-AWfn0uOf2mJLzZmrMBtDJPf25ZFUKg6CQOJxju4z~AOkCRrtxCH0VZSzeCMOA2ht7tqJPfWGtO0Um7GaoPsagJehXC0n611mGhJfHCLyZpZdR428mH2hgI9gp3pjxSa83-zUt5fqYVC2bmQFagmKgpc2NibN0sV5EQAFNPSfp8PHzGtQuYT2Cq1EfY6F~Iguolv53InxA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA">and overwhelmingly dominate</a> the provision of calories to children that have been weaned.<br /><br />In farming and pastoralist societies, if women were not confined to women’s quarters, and otherwise largely kept out of public spaces, and the choices of women (rather than their parents and kin) had sufficient status, various mechanisms evolved for men to signal their respect for the vulnerability gap. This was particularly a feature of Christian societies, given that Church doctrine said that a woman had to consent for a marriage to be legitimate and strictly mandated only single-spouse marriages. In Western society, the socially evolved mechanisms to show respect for the vulnerability gap involved such things as opening doors for women, letting women go first, and so on.<br /><br />Muslim observers in Christian Europe were often bemused by the way Christian men publicly deferred to women. For instance, in the C17th, famed traveller <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evliya_%C3%87elebi">Evliya Çelebi</a> reported of Vienna that:<br /><blockquote>I saw a most extraordinary thing in this country. If the emperor encounters a woman in the street, then if he is on horseback he halts his horse and lets the woman pass. If the emperor is on foot and meets a woman, then he remains standing, in a polite posture. Then the woman greets the emperor, and he takes off his hat and shows deference to the woman, and only when she has passed does he continue on his way. This is the most extraordinary spectacle. (Bernard Lewis, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Muslim-Discovery-Europe-Bernard-Lewis/dp/0393321657">The Muslim Discovery of Europe</a>, Pp287–8.)</blockquote>With (1) the legalisation of the Pill and abortion, giving women unilateral control over their own fertility, (2) advances in modern medicine massively reducing the risks of childbirth, and (3) expansion in low-risk employment opportunities outside the household available to women, the vulnerability gap has dramatically shrunk.<br /><br />The result has been the collapse of courtship across developed Western societies into a pale shadow of its former self. Indeed, the very notion became suspect. So did the everyday chivalric courtesies towards women. They were re-read as implying the incapacity of women, their lack of equality (viewed in terms of comparative anthropology, a rather extraordinary claim, as such deference was a function of the status of women being higher than in many societies), and had to go.<br /><br /><b>The decline of male enforcement</b><br /><br />As women essentially demanded control over the policing of treatment of them, previous mechanisms whereby men enforced proper behaviour by other men towards women have largely fallen into abeyance. This may have led to a paradoxical situation of more public deference to women (and public repression of male assertiveness) yet a range of predatory behaviour by a relatively small number of men becoming less socially policed. It has been suggested to me that one reason for women adopting “non-binary” gender identities is that they are saying “I will not be prey”. (The evidence suggests that rape has generally become <a href="https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245">significantly less common</a>. But rape was always a criminal matter and there are other forms of predatory behaviour well short of rape.)<br /><br />The previous normative dispensation of connecting sex strongly to marriage was a fairly easy set of norms to enforce. The enforcement was somewhat random, and was not particularly effective at stopping rape, but it did operate to inhibit a range of predatory behaviour by men within social networks.<br /><br />It is, however, hard to enforce norms that are in flux. It is even harder to enforce norms if one is not told, if men are left out of the information loop. The previous normative dispensation of sex and marriage being closely connected, with people living in relatively dense social networks, was rather simpler to enforce than one where sex and marriage had become decoupled and social networks have frayed.<br /><br />Enforcement also varied with social circumstances. Lower down the socio-economic scale, people are more vulnerable to things going wrong and are more likely to deal with men with little to lose. So, normative enforcement tended to be more physical: taking the transgressing male out the back and giving him a belting.<br /><br />One of the consequences of decades of feminism is that men have, on average, <a href="https://users.nber.org/~jwolfers/papers/WomensHappiness.pdf">become happier than women</a>. Given that (1) the obligation to provide for one’s family is increasingly shared between the sexes and (2) there are more acceptable sexual outlets, it is not surprising that male happiness has risen compared to female happiness. But being functionally relieved of the burden of enforcing norms against other men has probably also had an increased-male-happiness effect.<br /><br />The other element in play is the fraying of social connections. This can be understood in terms of what I call the <i>Granovetter effect</i>, the importance of the pattern of connections (i.e. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital">social capital</a> or what anthropologists call <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2999363/">relational wealth</a>) for life prospects. The Granovetter effect is:<br /><blockquote>the less of other types of capital one has command of, the more important social capital, and particularly local social capital, is for life prospects.</blockquote>The Granovetter effect is derived from sociologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Granovetter">Mark Granovetter</a>’s classic paper <a href="https://sss.ulab.edu.bd/msj/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2020/10/Optional-The-strength-of-weak-ties.pdf">The Strength of Weak Ties</a> (~61,000 citations) and, even more, his follow-up paper <a href="https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/31945177/Granovetter_1983.pdf?1380018544=&response-content-disposition=inline;+filename=THE_STRENGTH_OF_WEAK_TIES_A_NETWORK_THEO.pdf&Expires=1621387369&Signature=XMsFHkK9ZQpQnlzLvmaWl7I5Vi0gCH7gP2eKHzr~dSfI~eEM14pW~xmZ6Xs3o2heKB304dnMWtgyY-iXZXlBPn9-VY7bBop12IHASJL5gzdzAgVm2G0-3em4TNL76mx7WYGoKH2xSxbPA0AlszkebDvYeEX6EbKpf6SC-mAY2tpW1Dqo85rbv3131qCRGIuLzskGFLSIVJodKXna-MeaZ3xMUsq8P-aZaLrXJEYsQWS5ZKyY~d0rFJtog1cw-HKIG1jtxKVM6sygrV2IdY8Q8nuFPDnnQmXS0tqu5KQ20CPpN4orHNH7MO3a~w8qehLrqFzQ5xUjGI2iVKm5VvMU3Q__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA">The Strength of Weak Ties: a network theory revisited</a>(~12,600 citations). The Granovetter effect happens to be particularly important in understanding the dynamics of forager societies, as patterns of connection are one of the two dominant forms of capital in forager society (the other being <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital">human capital</a>, i.e. learnt skills).<br /><br />Part of what social capital provides is enforcement of norms. As people become less connected, there is less bottom-up enforcement of norms. That gives more power to public signalling of norms but likely leaves women more vulnerable to a range of predatory behaviour.<br /><br /><b>Admitting, yet not admitting</b><br /><br />While the vulnerability gap had shrunk, it has not vanished. Indeed, over time, the vulnerability gap has come to be (without direct acknowledgement of its existence) subject to waves of intense focus, in terms of risks of sexual harassment and assault.<br /><br />On one hand, to admit the vulnerability gap seemed to be an assault on equality between the sexes. On the other hand, its reality has been the subject of intense public discourse in terms of sexual harassment and other forms of predatory or transgressive behaviour. Much of feminism seems to be playing a dual game of let’s pretend: let’s pretend there is no vulnerability gap but let’s also really talk up its (real and alleged) consequences.<br /><br />Maybe the chivalric courtesies were overdone. But they were a workable way of dealing with something real. Including having men enforce them on other men. A contradictory game of let’s-pretend-there-is-no-vulnerabilty-gap-yet-let’s-also-really-worry-about-its-consequences is not the path to evolving a new, workable, way of dealing with the (smaller but still real) vulnerability gap. Nor is having such dealing being something women decide the rules for, while men just passively go along with without being invested in their enforcement.<br /><br />Part of the problem is much of feminism is committed to a notion that there are no basic biological constraints, so we can write any social script we want to, if we apply enough harmonising social power to the problem. This is simply not true. There are basic biological constraints, the trick is to deal with them intelligently.<br /><br />Yet there are clearly feminists who regard admitting that reality as somehow to compromise the promise of equality between the sexes. Despite many folk pointing out that moral equality does not require identity in characteristics. One suspects, however, that the real objection is the threat to the vision of being able to remake human society in any way one wants.<br /><br />Sex is a biological reality. It is not a social construct. <i>Sex roles</i>, the behavioural manifestation of sex, has an element that is socially constructed, but only an element. <i>Gender</i>, the cultural expression of sex (i.e. narratives, framings and expectations about sex and sex roles), is even more socially constructed. Sex is binary at its base, and bimodal in its physical manifestations, but gender is neither, though it riffs off that bimodality. Nevertheless, such social construction is still an interaction between biological reality and social and other circumstances (such as technology, local ecology and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/671420?seq=1">the transfer of risks</a> away <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227823427_A_Model_of_the_Sexual_Division_of_Labor">from the care of</a> children).<br /><br />The basic biological constraints do not invalidate moral equality between the sexes, however large a problem they may be for over-reaching social visions seeking to achieve some transformative notion of social equality. But we will not achieve stable and effective ways of dealing with the vulnerability gap unless we acknowledge that biological constraints are real: that’s why the vulnerability gap persists.<br /><br />So, the trick is to find ways to deal with its reality. Not spin around and around playing a contradictory game of pretending the vulnerability gap does not exist while being so ostentatiously concerned (from MeToo to “rape culture”) by the consequences of it existing. Especially as any effective way to deal with the reality of the vulnerability gap is going to have to be one that works for, and is enforced by, both sexes.</div><div><br /></div><div>(<i>An earlier version was <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-vulnerability-gap-and-the-collapse-of-courtship-a35fd2923b54" target="_blank">posted on Medium</a></i>.)</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-85981694321381426322021-07-12T18:25:00.000+10:002021-07-12T18:25:13.717+10:00Ancestry, ethnicity and the hopeless confusions of race<i>Yes, ancestry matters but not in the way that makes race talk sensible.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="491" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/2560/1*uUpfJaSIUAQIcf1SQ9LXMQ.jpeg" width="640" />A <i>1904 depiction of Asian ethnicities.</i></div><br />The early medieval scholar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regino_of_Pr%C3%BCm">Regino of Prum</a> wrote the following:</div><div><blockquote>Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.</blockquote>For those (such as myself) not up on the their Latin, that translates as:</div><div><blockquote>The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.</blockquote>This quote has been much cited since. Its fourfold formula was frequently used by medieval writers. For instance, Bishop Bernard of St David’s wrote to Pope Innocent II <a href="https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/1869/Bartlett2001JMEMS31MedievalandModernConcepts.pdf;jsessionid=2E2C83D6D7FC4044F4B77AFEDDC20E62?sequence=1">referring to</a>:</div><div><blockquote>populos nostre provincie natione, lingua, legibus et moribus, iudiciis et consuetudinibus discrepare</blockquote>In English,</div><div><blockquote>the peoples of our province are distinct in nation, language, laws and customs, judgements and manners</blockquote>But manners are part of customs and laws entail judgements, so it is a more poetic version of the same fourfold formula.<br /><br /><b>About law</b><br />This was a region and an era where your law could be as much about which group you belonged to as where you lived. A single sovereignty could readily entail a variety of systems of law. A single system of law (e.g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Irish_law">Brehon law</a>) could operate across several sovereignties. A non-resident in a city involved in a legal dispute might be asked what laws he lived under.<br /><br />For much of the medieval period in Europe, particularly early in the medieval period, law was: the custom of the area. Which tended to mean: whatever we remember doing, last time this came up.<br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_II_of_England">Henry II</a>, the first Plantagenet king of England, used his Chancery and royal judges to develop what became the common law precisely because different people in different parts of England had different law (Norman, Saxon, Danish), with local variations. Royal judges would offer judgements that were both common across England and sought to synthesise the common elements between existing local laws, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#Medieval_English_common_law">creating the common law</a> of England.<br /><br />Common law can be understood as evolving customary law. One of its many fine features is that it provides a structure of law without any Parliament, or other legislating authority, having to issue any specific law. A system of law with, moreover, an inherent tendency to move towards consistency. Something that is not a notable feature of statutory law.<br /><br />In the modern era, law is very much a matter of state jurisdictions. So, setting law aside, that leaves us with <i>origin</i> (so descent or ancestry), <i>customs</i> and <i>language</i> as identifying an ethnic group. (<i>Nation</i> is ambiguous between state and people, but it is ethnicity that we are concerned with here.)<br /><br /><i>Ethnicity</i> is something that develops in a mixture of <i>separation</i> (you overwhelmingly interact with members of the same group) and <i>differentiation</i> (there is one or more other groups that are identified as not being of the same group). Geographical separation means that folk can much more easily have specific customs and a specific language. (And, of course, specific laws.)<br /><br />Ancestry matters because it is how customs and language are transferred across the generations. Yet the key thing is connections between people and common features that arise from the patterns of connection. A child adopted as a baby will be raised in the ethnicity of their adoptive parents and local community, regardless of their genetic ancestry. People are overwhelmingly raised by one or more biological parents, or adopted within the same group, so ancestry tracks ethnicity very strongly. But it does not drive ethnicity.<br /><br />The overwhelmingly dominant connection between ancestry and the ethnicity in which folk are raised, drives some muddy thinking about ethnicity (and race). The notion that DNA tests can determine ethnicity, particularly for policing boundaries between ethnicities in intermingled communities, is deeply confused thinking. The bits of ethnicity that matter are your customs, your language, your expectations, your received framings, your patterns of connection. None of that is genetic or genetically defined.<br /><br />Ethnicities can arise and fade away while genetic lineages continue. In his <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Art-Not-Being-Governed-Anarchist/dp/0300169175"><i>The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia</i></a>, James C. Scott notes that people and families in Southeast Asia would periodically choose new cultural identities, creating “crazy quilt” ethnic enclaves that ethnographers found perplexing. Ethnicities are nowhere near as primordial as is often pretended and ethnic identities can often be situational and strategic.<br /><br />Race has come to refer to continental ancestry and the concept, and its associated social meanings, has had the most social power when folk of different continental ancestry interact. Most notoriously in the Americas where settlers from one continent (Europe) invaded another continent (North or South America, as the case may be), imported slaves from a third continent (Africa) and then received migrants from a fourth continent (Asia). That skin tone and other physical features were strong indicators of continental ancestry interacted with these very different social roles to make race talk an easy, and sadly convenient, option.<br /><br />Yet continental ancestry on its own does not tell us what customs or languages you, or anyone else, has. No continental group, including Australian Aborigines, is a single ethnic or cultural group or users of a single language. Nor are they a single breeding population. Hence the speciousness of race — continental ancestry — as an analytical category, however socially convenient it has been for various folk to invest social meanings in physical markers of ancestry. Particularly as a divide-and-dominate dynamic.<br /><br />Race as continental ancestry is also a long way from the C14th chronicler John of Fordun describing Scotland as a land of one nation <a href="https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/1869/Bartlett2001JMEMS31MedievalandModernConcepts.pdf;jsessionid=2E2C83D6D7FC4044F4B77AFEDDC20E62?sequence=1">but two races</a>:</div><div><blockquote>Mores autem Scotorum secundum diversitatem linguarum variantur ; duabus enim utuntur linguis, Scotica videlicet et Theutonica, cuius linguae gens maritimas possidet et planas regiones, Scoticae vero montanas inhabitat et insulas ulteriores. Maritima quoque domestica gens est et culta, fida, patiens et urbana, vestitu siquidem honesta, civilis atque pacifica, circa cultum divinum devota, sed et obviandis hostium iniuriis semper prona. Insulana vero sive montana, ferina gens est et indomita, rudis et immorigerata, raptu capax, otium diligens, ingenio docilis et callida, forma spectabilis, sed amictu deformis, populo quidem Anglorum et linguae, sed et propriae nationi, propter linguarum diversitatem, infesta iugiter et crudelis. Regi tamen et regno fidelis et obediens, necnon faciliter legibus subdita, si regatur.</blockquote>Or, in English:<br /><blockquote>The manners of the Scots vary according to their language, for they employ two languages, Scottish [Gaelic] and Teutonic [Scots/English]. The race of Teutonic language has the sea coasts and lowlands, that of Scottish language inhabits the mountainous areas and the outer isles. The race of the sea coasts is domesticated, civilized, faithful, patient, cultivated, decently dressed, refined and peaceable, devout in church worship, yet always ready to withstand any harm done by its enemies. The island or mountain race, however, is wild, untamed, primitive, intractable, inclined to plunder, leisure-loving, quick to learn, skilful, handsome in appearance but vilely dressed, and continually fiercely opposed to the English people and language, but also to their own nation, on account of the difference of language. Nevertheless they are loyal and obedient to the king and the kingdom, and also easily subdued to the laws, if they are ruled properly.</blockquote><b>Intermingling</b><br />DNA as a convenient sorting mechanism is only likely to be reached for if people of different ethnicities (so different ancestries) are intermingling. If everyone lives in villages of the same ethnicity, but are aware of there being villages of a different ethnicity over there, the issue does not arise. It is only if folk within the same larger community have varied ancestries (and so varied ethnicities) that it is going to seem sensible to look for some “sure” marker, such as biological ancestry or (once the technology exists) DNA testing.<br /><br />The problems of maintaining separate identities in a situation of intermingling is what led to the development of the “one drop” rule in the US. If you had any element of African ancestry you were “black” (i.e. not “white”). It is a sign of how intense the stigmatising social meanings attached to being “black” were, the extension of the inherited dishonour of slavery onto their descendants, that no mulatto or mixed-race identity emerged in the US, in contrast to much of the rest of the Americas.<br /><br />Ironically, this pattern was largely because electoral politics — who could vote and for whom — mattered so much more in the US. In societies with proportionately smaller settler elites, where voting was not much of an issue, it tended to be convenient to have an intermediary group as social buffer and suppliers of services. In such situations, one gets gradations of ancestry rather than sharp continental-ancestry (“race”) divisions, where elite ancestry provides the most benefits and slave or indigenous ancestry the most handicaps.<br /><br />With the current attempts within the US and the wider Anglosphere to stigmatise the social meaning of “whiteness”, we are nowadays getting the same one-drop rule exclusion working in contemporary society, but going the other way so that any degree of non-European ancestry confers a presumptive moral advantage, making one “a person of colour”. But this just flips the pejorative effect while also wrestling with the problem of differentiation in intermingled societies. Situations of intermingling are much more likely to see situational or strategic use of ethnic (or racial) identities. </div><div><br /></div><div>It looks "racial" as the elite came from Europe and the slaves from Africa. But all elite structures have a strong element of ancestry in them (including in Leninist states). It is just that differing continental origins associated and associate different physical markers with different social/class status.<br /><br />To impose simple, dividing, categories on intermingled populations requires systematically ignoring (inconvenient) ancestry. The original “one-drop” rule in the US meant ignoring any European ancestry among those with African ancestry. The new version similarly generally involves ignoring any European ancestry among “persons of colour”.<br /><br />There is a long history of ignoring inconvenient ancestry. Patrilineal kin-groups generally ignored maternal ancestry, as matrilineal kin-groups generally ignored paternal ancestry. But the point in such cases was also very much to enforce differentiating boundaries.<br /><br />The great advantage of DNA is that it reveals the complexities of ancestry. It does not track the complexities of culture. It does, however, point to how genetic lineages pass through, and into, cultures.<br /><br /><b>Segregation</b><br />The use of public policy to impose residential segregation in the US, to the extent of attempting to break up integrated neighbourhoods, was another way of wrestling with problems of differentiation among intermingled folk.<br /><br />The enforced spread of residential segregation in the US, including attempts to segregate previously integrated neighbourhoods, is set out in Richard Rothstein’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853"><i>The Color of Law</i></a>. A note in the book quantifies the path of residential segregation, including its intensification under FDR’s New Deal. In the ten largest US cities:</div><div><blockquote>in 1880, the neighbourhood (block) on which the typical African American lived was only 15 percent black; by 1910 it was 30 percent, and by 1930, even after the Great Migration, it was still only about 60 percent black. By 1940 the local neighborhood where the typical African American lived was 75 percent black.</blockquote>Reducing intermixing by residential (and other) segregation is an obvious way to sharpen identity differentiation in a mixed society. This is typically done by giving one group a greater say than another. Whether it was such things as hostile zoning and resident activism in the US producing the aforementioned residential segregation, shuffling people off into reservations or giving one group claims over land that others cannot have.<br /><br />Such segregation can indeed sharpen identity, but at the cost of giving up the benefits of interaction with the wider society. Denying folk such benefits has often been the purpose of such segregation. It is likely to be the effect of it, regardless of intention.<br /><br /><b>Marriage</b><br />As is well known, intermarriage, a very intimate form of intermingling, blurs ethnic identity. Hence groups that wish to retain their separate identity either block intermarriage or require outside spouses to convert to their group. Such marriage boundaries then provide a way to continue intense patterns of connection that differentiate the group from outsiders.<br /><br />Religions have often been very much involved in setting up and policing such boundaries. As <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15">Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes</a>, the right sort of boundary laws can turn a minority into a majority:</div><div><blockquote>the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues — the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.</blockquote>The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam — and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. </div><div><br /></div><div>The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.<br /><br />Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small but continuing rate of interfaith marriages and little or no defection from the group folk are marrying into.<br /><br />Such boundaries and group identities have often been reinforced by participation in common rituals.<br /><br /><b>Vanishing heritage</b><br />John Wood Jnr <a href="https://youtu.be/F7QSI_quWOE">has observed that</a>, on the Euro-American (“white”) side of his family, folk can talk about a heritage reaching back to Europe. As can Asians with Asia or recent African immigrants with Africa. On the (slave-descended) African-American side of his family, there is a striking absence of such. The descendants of American slaves have no such identifiable specific ancestral heritage(s), as slavery mixed ethnicities together while slaves had no family rights.<br /><br />As sociologist Orlando Patterson <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674986903/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0">has pointed out</a>, the social death that slavery entailed, and the consequent <i>natal alienation</i>, separating slaves from any acknowledged line of ancestry or family rights, defined the slave far more then being property did. (Medieval serfs, for example did not suffer any such social death, any such alienation from family and heritage.) The process of Transatlantic exile of slaves, and their descendants, was a process of exile much more profound than that experienced by others arriving in the US and the rest of the Americas.<br /><br />The descendants of slaves imported into the Americas have the most “American” identities, as they have had to create their identities within the Americas and within the context of European settlement. (Indigenous Americans have identities that reach back before European settlement, so are not anchored in the creation of new societies that <i>American</i> implies.) It is not accidental that various quintessential American cultural forms, such as Jazz and Blues, are grounded in the experience of American slaves and their descendants.<br /><br />Within the US, the descendants of American slaves were an ethnic identity defined by “race”, i.e. African ancestry. They are now an identity submerged by “race”, as Afro-Caribbeans and recent African immigrants are both also “black”. (Though there is <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Acting-White-Ironic-Legacy-Desegregation/dp/030017120X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Acting+white&qid=1620942133&sr=8-1">some evidence that</a> American-born generations of such migrants may be at last somewhat socialised into attitudes of the descendants of American slaves; another instance of the effects of intermingling.)<br /><br />That no descendant of American slaves has graced the Presidential nomination ticket of either major US Party is very much obscured by focusing on race rather than ethnicity. (President Obama and Vice-President Harris are both examples of migrant heritage, not US slave heritage.)<br /><br /><b>Custom</b><br /><i>Culture </i>is a notoriously ambiguous term, with literally hundreds of definitions being offered by social scientists. <i>Custom</i> also suffers from a certain ambiguity. Fortunately, philosopher Cristina Bicchieri has done the work, setting out a rigorous theory of norms that helps clarify thinking on these matters. This is done formally in <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/grammar-of-society/2B063E9C9621C2340DEFB2BE15B3AEA5">The Grammar of Society</a> </i>and with a more practical focus in <i><a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190622046.001.0001/acprof-9780190622046">Norms in the Wild</a>.</i><br /><br />Using Prof. Bicchieri’s definitions:<br /><blockquote><i>Customs</i> are things you regularly do because they work for you. They may generate expectations among other folk but they are not driven by such expectations.<br /><i>Conventions</i> are things you do because other people do them. They both generate, and are driven by, expectations. Language and fashion are classic convention-driven activities. Conventions allow people to coordinate with each other.<br /><i>Social norms</i> drive things you do because other people expect you to do them and are likely to sanction you if you do not.<br /><i>Moral norms</i> drive things you do because you believe it is the right thing to do regardless of the expectations of others.</blockquote>The use of <i>custom</i> by Regino of Prum as quoted above clearly covers customs, conventions and social norms. In mixed societies, folk adopt and lose customs. They adopt and lose conventions. Both customs and conventions lose their distinctiveness, blurring identity. Similarly with social norms. So, once again, we can see the power of connection and the problems of intermingling.<br /><br />Thinking in terms of custom, convention and social norms brings out the power of religion as a creator and preserver of identity. For participating in common rituals can be a great binding and a differentiating mechanism. Indeed, they are much of the social effect of ritual.<br /><br /><b>Corrosive contradictions</b><br />But thinking in terms of custom, convention and social norms also brings out how much politicising and legalising identity becomes a morass of corrosive contradictions. Such attempts to differentiate seek to draw lines in ways that social intermingling must undermine.<br /><br />One ends up being at war with such intermingling — and so at war with any overarching common identity — while creating endless possibilities for strategic game-playing that is likely to be highly socially corrosive in its effects. Such identity-games can create simple categories that are appealing in their simplicity and disastrous in their lack of nuanced realism.<br /><br />Ethnicities evolve. They change, emerge, weaken, strengthen, mingle and divide according to circumstances. Attempting to create a legal, moral and political order based on primordial, unmixed and fixed identities is to build a series of noxious fictions into the social order that are at war with the complexities of the human in ways that invite bad, even disastrous, outcomes.<br /><br />There is no good form of identity politics. What look to be such (e.g. the various agitations for civil rights, whether for women, African-Americans, indigenous people, same-sex attracted …) have been attempts to gain the benefits of a common status, not a divided and differentiated one. To be judged <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream">by the content of one’s character</a>, not some general, differentiated, category. That is true of every emancipation struggle, from the campaigns against slavery onwards.<br /><br />Intermingling strengthens the case for a common humanity and a common citizenship. Contemporary identity politics do not represent the completion of the processes of celebrating a common humanity, and building a common citizenship, but the overturning of them. Hence contemporary identity politics replicating and adapting past methods for forcing differentiation on intermingled communities. But, then, divide-and-dominate retains <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening">its appeal to elites</a> and forcing differentiation has always been very useful for that. As it still is.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted, somewhat improved, <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/ancestry-ethnicity-and-the-hopeless-confusions-of-race-cc46ad3204f9" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-7594323556661187522021-06-22T10:00:00.010+10:002021-07-12T17:33:00.811+10:00Being sensible about Patriarchy<i>Just because something is used propagandistically does not mean it is not a thing.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="414" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/2168/1*cVE7a279YFTwcizVDYRJZQ.jpeg" width="640" /></div><br /><i>Patriarchy</i> is authority being presumptively male. The more presumptively male authority is, the more patriarchal the society is. At its simplest, <i>authority</i> is competence + deference. The wider and more significant the realm of presumed male competence, and of expected deference to the same, the more presumptively male authority is.<br /><br />That an area of life is presumptively male does not, of itself, generate patriarchy. Having presumptive sex roles is not patriarchal. The addition of <i>expected deference</i> is crucial. For without such expected deference, there is no authority, just things folk generally do.<br /><br />To understand patriarchy, we need to start with the basics of sex and gender.<br /><br /><b>Sex</b><br />Sex is determined by what <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/gamete-gametes-311/">gametes</a> your body is structured to produce. If it is structured to produce small, self-moving (motile) gametes you are male. If it is structured to produce large, sessile (immobile) gametes, you are female. This is so whether or not viable gametes are produced.<br /><br />If your body is structured to produce both, you are both male and female. If your body is structured to produce neither, you are neuter. (As distinct from being deliberately stripped of the ability to produce gametes, which is being neutered.)<br /><br />If your body has elements of both male and female sexual structuring, then your sex can be somewhat indeterminate (i.e., <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex">intersex</a>), but normally your body will favour one type of structuring over the other. Such mixed cases do not mean that sex is not binary. It just means that a (very small) proportion of folk do not have bodies that are entirely on one side of the border between sex-typical biological structures.</div><div><br />[Sex is binary at the level of reproductive function, due to there being only two gametes, but, in humans, is bimodal rather than binary at the level of bodies.]<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>We cannot do sex-reassignment or sex-change surgery. We cannot shift the structuring of your body to produce different gametes. We can only do <b><i>gender</i></b>-reassignment surgery that changes the visible physical manifestations of biological sex. Hence hormonal supplements are needed by trans folk, as we cannot change your body to change the pattern of hormones it produces.<br /><br /><b>Children</b><br /><i>Homo sapiens</i> are mammals. Female mammals have mammary glands so that when the child emerges, their immediate food source is on-tap.<br /><br />In most mammal species, that means the male plays no role in raising children, as the female is already committed (via the mammary glands) to feeding the children. This is the <b><i>cad strategy</i></b> for reproduction. The more the children have to be taught how to feed, and the longer they have to be fed before they can feed themselves, the more likely some male involvement in the feeding of the offspring is (the <b><i>dad strategy</i></b>).<br /><br />Male <b><i>provision</i></b> is not to be confused with mate-<b><i>guarding</i></b>. Mate-guarding is about taking possession of the fertility of a female for one’s own use, excluding other males. It implies nothing regarding the care of children. Most mate-guarding mammal species have cad-strategy males. They are just possessive cads.<br /><br />In contemporary foraging societies, on average, children do not “break even” in producing and consuming calories <a href="https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf">until about the age</a> of 20. So, a <i>Homo sapien</i> child, on average, has likely represented about a 20 year-feeding-protection-and-instruction investment. This was not possible without provisioning males.<br /><br />In contemporary foraging societies, men <a href="https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf">provide a majority of</a> calories to the group, an overwhelming majority of the protein to the group and almost completely dominate provision of calories and protein consumed by post-weaning children. The only evolutionary stable way to get males to invest that much effort in provisioning children is having them feed the children that are presumptively theirs. That is, to go beyond biological paternity and create the <b><i>social</i></b> role of father. Especially given the level of teaching required to get <i>Homo sapien</i> children able to fend for themselves.<br /><br />The need for provisioning males for the raising of children gave a powerful incentive for women to adopt and follow norms regulating their sexual behaviour so as to encourage such male commitment. This is interactive. The stronger the restrictive sexual norms, the stronger male provisioning is likely to be. The weaker the restrictive sexual norms, the weaker male provisioning is likely to be. A common cross-cultural pattern is for men to be willing to use violence to enforce fidelity norms, as their social standing, including their identity as a father, is at stake. Another common cross-cultural pattern is for women expressing aggression towards another woman to cast doubt on her adherence to fidelity norms.<br /><br />A very common cross-cultural pattern is for a man’s mother to be concerned with policing the behaviour of his wife (or wives). She has an obvious interest in ensuring that their children are indeed (biologically) her son’s and in the protecting the reputation of her son. Remembering that propriety is, in this context, fidelity + reputation. Or, at least, preserving the <i>presumption</i> of fidelity.<br /><br />All known foraging societies recognise the social role of father. A small number of (farming) societies do not have the social role of father. Instead, men invest in their sister’s children. As a genetic replication strategy, given one shares less genes with a niece or a nephew than with a son or a daughter, unclehood is inferior to fatherhood — provided males can be reasonably confident about the paternity of children.<br /><br />The above patterns are the result of us being the big-brain ape and so the cultural ape. We are the fattest ape, as our energy-hog brains (our brains consume about a fifth to a quarter of our calorie intake) require a certain base level of energy to function. Hence we have more fat reserves than other apes. Women’s body naturally have significantly higher fat content than men’s bodies, as women regularly support two brains (the extra energy-hog brain being supported either in their womb, or via lactation).<br /><br />Our brains need time to grow after birth, <a href="https://youtu.be/YwbH1kE764M">due to constraints on</a> the size of a baby head’s able to emerge through pelvis (aggravated by bipedalism requiring narrower hips for physical stability). Hence how helpless our infants are, as far more of their development is after birth. They have to be fed and then taught. We have the fattest infants in the biosphere. Being the cultural ape, we have to learn to be effective occupiers of human niches by a mixture of being taught, observation and participation.<br /><br /><b>Risk and roles</b><br />Across this lengthy process of raising <i>Homo sapien</i> children, risks needed to be, where possible, transferred away from the care of children. Especially as if a mother died, her young children were also likely to die. This created human <b><i>sex roles</i></b>—sex roles being the behavioural expression of sex—that generally involved very different patterns of acquiring subsistence by males and females, hence quite different skill patterns.<br /><br />In foraging societies, men would engage in the more dangerous forms of subsistence (hunting larger animals, getting honey). Women would engage in the less dangerous forms of subsistence that you could do while minding the kids (gathering plants, hunting small, relatively immobile, animals such as lizards).<br /><br />A lot of the gathered plants would require significant processing, as plants (being immobile) evolve ways to discourage consumption of their flesh. This need for more processing of plant food tended to skew calorie and nutrient contribution in foraging societies to the energy-dense, highly bio-available nutrients in the food provided by men.<br /><br />Men tend to form teams, because that is how they provided for, and protected, their women and children. Women tend to form cliques, as intimate emotional connections provided support for the long haul of motherhood. One can see this pattern in almost any schoolyard.<br /><br />A complication is that the more disagreeable and less neurotic girls (“tomboys”) may gravitate towards team play. The more agreeable and more neurotic boys (“sissies”) may gravitate towards cliques.<br /><br />Some cultures had explicit roles for “manly” women and “womanly” men. Generally, however, a male who attempted to adopt female patterns was rejecting the risks that males were expected to shoulder. This was not a way to be respected.<br /><br /><b>Gender</b><br />Being the cultural species, <i>Homo sapiens</i> do not only have sex roles. We also have narratives and expectations about sex. Hence, we have <b><i>gender</i></b>: the cultural expression of sex. To a large degree, the categories of man and woman are socially created.<br /><br />Those who are same-sex attracted, or who are tomboys or sissies, are <b><i>gender</i></b>-dysphoric. They are somewhat alienated from standard expectations about sex. Trans folk are <b><i>sex</i></b>-dysphoria. They are alienated from the sexual structuring of their bodies.<br /><br />Being sex-dysphoric is likely to also imply wishing to fit into the behavioural and cultural expectations of the other sex. Being gender-dysphoric does not imply alienation from the sexual structuring of one’s own body. Conflating sex-and-gender is a great way to engage in muddy, even disastrous, thinking.<br /><br /><b>The absence of matriarchal societies</b><br />While it is certainly true that families, and even groups, can have matriarchs, <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Myth-of-Matriarchy-:-Why-Men-Rule-in-Primitive-Bamberger/d7ee913275a8a435ebf8f6cf9731ac06f885c8ef">no known human</a> <i>society</i> has been matriarchal. The requirement of men to take on higher-risk roles in order to support the raising of biologically-expensive children has meant that authority could not be presumptively female across a society. Hence the absence of matriarchal societies. Matriarchal families and figures are, however, entirely possible.<br /><br /><b>The non-universality of patriarchy</b><br />The absence of matriarchal societies does not remotely mean that all human societies are patriarchal in any strong sense. It is entirely possible to have a human society where male and female authority co-exists. That is, authority is not presumptively male across the society, so it is somewhat gender-egalitarian. Such societies are more common within particular patterns of subsistence, though a majority of societies known to the ethnographic record have been patriarchal. For instance, around 88% of traditional societies <a href="https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/3/17/where-are-the-matriarchies">only had male</a> political leaders (though political leadership is not the only manifestation of authority in societies). Nevertheless, even among generally patriarchal societies, the extent and intensity of the presumption of male authority has varied greatly.<br /><br />There are relatively gender-egalitarian foraging and horticultural (hoe-farming) societies. If a society does not create the social role of fatherhood, then it is also likely to be relatively gender-egalitarian, as inheritance will be female-line and the connections of men to the next generation will be via their sisters. In many societies, men treasure the sister’s son relationship — they are males of the next generation a man is unambiguously related to.<br /><br /><b>Patterns of leverage</b><br />What determines how patriarchal a society is — i.e., how strongly authority is presumptively male in the society — is the relative social leverage of men and women. Women always have the leverage of sex and fertility. Men have whatever leverage comes from not being tied to the day-to-day care of children.<br /><br />Any asset in a society that cannot be effectively managed while minding children, will be a presumptively male asset. Hence, while women have been very important for the <i>transmission</i> of culture, men have tended to dominate the<i> creation</i> of culture. Cultural narratives have thus tended to predominantly reinforce and validate male concerns. Hence also women have tended to be associated with nature (given their role in reproduction and child-rearing), <a href="http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_049.pdf">men with the</a> creation of culture. Such creation of culture is often conceived as <a href="http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_052.pdf">a struggle for order</a> against the more chaotic or resistant elements of nature.<br /><br />The classic assets increasing male leverage are pastoralism (i.e., animal herds) and plough farming. In such societies, the predominant productive asset will be a male asset. This has been universally true in pastoralist societies. It is usually true in plough farming societies, with a few exceptions. One exception was Pharaonic Egypt, as land was re-allocated after every Nile flood. It was effectively Pharaoh’s asset rather than an asset of village males. Another is if the society does not recognise the social relationship of fatherhood, such as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/the-kingdom-of-women-the-tibetan-tribe-where-a-man-is-never-the-boss">in Mosuo of</a> China. As there is no social role of fatherhood, land is passed down matrilineally and is not a male asset. (Men still do the ploughing.)<br /><br />If the main productive asset in a society is presumptively male, this makes women largely dependant on male provision. This generates patterns of presumptive male authority, though the degree to which it does so can vary widely.<br /><br />In low-population-density societies where the men are likely to be away, traditions of armed women are likely to develop so as to be able to defend hearth and home. This raises the leverage (and status) of women. In steppe societies, for example, while men owned the animal herds, women owned the dwellings; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt">the <i>yurts</i> or <i>gers</i></a>.<br /><br />Any pattern of periodic male absence tends to increase the status of women, as women will have to manage things in the absence of men. We can see this pattern operating in steppe societies, in Celtic and Germanic Europe, in Sparta (where men lived in the barracks for much of their life), in Rome (where elite men were often away in the service of <i>Respublica</i>) and in medieval Latin Christendom. This is generally an elite pattern, but elites disproportionately set social norms.<br /><br />These were all, to varying degrees, single-spouse societies in that even an elite man would only have one wife, and a woman one husband. (There is <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/56680196.pdf">some evidence that</a> the original Indo-Europeans may have operated a single-spouse marriage system.) Celtic and Germanic societies often did, however, permit concubines able to produce legally recognised children. (In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Irish_law#Inheritance">Brehon law</a>, for example, it did not matter for your family identity who your mother was, merely who your father was.)<br /><br />If elite males are required to have only one wife, then that tends to raise the status of women, as the natural thing to do is to have partnership marriages (united by care for their children), with the wife (or sometimes his mother) operating as their husband’s (or son’s) deputy when he is away and helping to manage the household when he is present. This is very much <i>not</i> the pattern in polygynous societies where wives competed for the prospects for their children. This meant that leaving one of the wives in charge in the absence of the husband was a recipe for disaster. (If concubines able to produce legally-recognised children were permitted, this tended to weaken the effect of having only one wife: mistresses are concubines whose children have no inheritance rights.)<br /><br />Single-spouse marriage societies thus tended to make women managing assets a normal part of the society, even if the main productive assets were presumptively male. This tended to raise the status of women and lessen the degree to which authority was presumptively male. Though the effect was much stronger if there were patterns of male absence. Thus Sparta (where men lived in barracks for much of their life) was noticeably less patriarchal than Athens. Rome was also noticeably less patriarchal than Athens, with Rome become less patriarchal as its empire grew, increasing the pattern of elite male absence and so wifely management of assets.<br /><br />Being a patrilineal society generates at least some presumption of male authority, as family identity is via the male line. If it is also a kin-group society, that means that family identity and kin structures will be organised around related males. This tends to increase male leverage within the society and the presumption of male authority. Especially if, as was commonly the case, the fertility of women is treated as an asset of their kin-group. (Treating women’s fertility as an asset of their kin group leads to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing">honour killings</a>, which are ways of enforcing commitment to the kin group.) As authority and wealth is typically transferred from father to son in patriarchal societies, such societies tend to be very controlling of female sexuality.<br /><br />If a society permits <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry">polyandry</a> (notably because of resource constraints where key productive assets lose value if divided), this tends to increase the potential leverage of women and to undermine any presumption of male authority. If a society permits <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygyny">polygyny</a>, that tends to undermine the social leverage of women. This is particularly so if the main productive asset is presumptively male, as then the wives of (elite) males will be competing with each other for the prospects for their children, where the favour of the (shared) husband is crucial. Clearly, that will foster a general presumption of male authority.<br /><br />Though it was true that even in societies that permitted polygamy, single-spouse marriages were the dominant form of marriage, again, elite patterns tended to dominate the generation of presumptions about authority.<br /><br />Hoe-farming (horticultural) societies meant women having a (much) bigger role in food production than in plough (agricultural) societies, as hoe farming can be done while minding the kids. This permits much higher levels of polygyny (as it reduces the level of provision males have to engage in to support a wife) but also makes women less dependant on male provision. Hoe societies tend <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/nunn/publications/origins-gender-roles-women-and-plough">to have stronger patterns</a> of female authority than plough societies. The question of the relative level of social leverage can become a complicated one.<br /><br />In societies where assets are transferred between generations, there can be something of a trade-off between <a href="http://Evolution%20of%20monogamous%20marriage%20by%20maximization%20of%20inclusive%20%EF%AC%81tness">between transmitting genes and transmitting wealth</a>. The stronger the incentive to minimise division of resources among children, the more likely single-spouse marriage systems are, bringing together male investment in high paternity-confidence children and female fidelity to her spouse so as to gain increased investment in her children. If such pressure is sufficiently strong all the way up the social system, polygamy may not be permitted.<br /><br />The more important investment in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital">human capital</a> of children, particularly sons, is for their prospects, the more likely it is that single-spouse marriage <a href="https://tind-customer-agecon.s3.amazonaws.com/5576ad45-9dc5-4ca4-847a-91de93454237?response-content-disposition=attachment;%20filename*=UTF-8%27%27dp030009.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Expires=86400&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAXL7W7Q3XHXDVDQYS/20210512/eu-west-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Date=20210512T215247Z&X-Amz-Signature=f84cbf797eaa6a622534e4075b845e192aeb50a88d7623eb0375538a4d7f8af2">is going to be</a> selected for. This likely helps explains why highly patriarchal Brahmin and Confucian societies had a wife and (maybe) concubine(s) pattern more than full-blown multiple wives. Indeed, the intense investment in memorisation required to raise a Brahmin child <a href="http://www.sfu.ca/~cbidner/files/Bidner_Eswaran_4Dec2014.pdf">likely explains the rise</a> of the Indian caste (<i>jati</i>) system.<br /><br />Brahmin law was particularly insistent on male authority. It was, after all, the society that valorised widows <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)">burning themselves to death</a> on their husband’s funeral pyre.<br /><br />How well members of a sex can coordinate with each other also affects social leverage. In polygynous, patrilineal, kin-group, plough-farming societies the ability of women, particularly elite women, to coordinate with each other was often very limited. Conversely, it has tended to be very easy for men in such societies to coordinate with each other, especially if male-only cults develop. Such cults <a href="https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/1/31/on-secret-cults-and-male-dominance">are very common</a> across human societies. Greater male coordination tends to increase male social leverage.<br /><br />Increases in population density, without a commensurate increase in applied technology, tend to reduce the status of women. As population density increases, there is likely to be less male absence, discouraging the arming of women and reducing the level of women’s management of resources. There is also likely to be more pressure on social niches, encouraging more rigid delineation of sex roles. England was significantly more patriarchal in the C18th than it had been in Saxon times, around a millennium earlier.<br /><br />Precisely because social leverage matters, history is not simply a pattern of upward improvement in the status of women, but of shifts back and forth.<br /><br /><b>Raiding and warfare</b><br />How raiding and warfare operates in a society also affects social leverage. If raiding and warfare is sufficiently endemic, that generates a premium on male cooperation. That tends to favour patrilineal kin systems, as related males who have grown up together are likely to be more effective in combat operations.<br /><br />In small-scale societies, especially patrilineal ones where women marry away from their natal kin, endemic raiding and warfare particularly tends <a href="https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/1/31/on-secret-cults-and-male-dominance">to generate male cults</a> as it is important for the men to be able to coordinate planned raids and attack without women warning their relatives. Such male cults often enforce their privacy through ferocious punishments. That increases male social leverage, generating a presumption of male authority and providing a social mechanism to establish and reinforce male authority.<br /><br />Endemic warfare and raiding can, however, encourage single-spouse marriage systems. Polygyny means that some men are cut out of the local marriage market. If circumstances are such that a premium is put on local social cohesion, then single-spouse marriage systems can be selected for so as to maximise the number of local males with a commitment to the local social order via having their own wife and children. (Note, this does not imply that reducing reproductive variance among men is what is being selected for.) Such pressure for single-spouse marriage for greater social cohesion can also apply to minority religious groups, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alevism">the Alevis</a>.<br /><br /><b>Shifting social leverage</b><br />What is hopefully clear from the above is that patriarchy is not some nefarious male plot. It is a social phenomena driven by the relative social leverage of men and women in a society. The level of patriarchy can thus vary widely between societies. It can also vary in the same society across time, if the underlying social constraints change in ways that shift the leverage between men and women.<br /><br />That the Christian Church sanctified single-spouse marriage (including no concubines), insisted on the importance of legitimacy (making it very important who your mother was and whether she was married to your father), insisted on female consent being required for marriage, strongly supported female testamentary rights (and the property rights entailed therein) and, in conjunction with manorialism, broke up kin groups, meant that the status of women was significantly higher in Christian Europe than was the case in Islam, Brahmin India or Confucian East Asia. As <a href="https://lorenzo-thinkingoutaloud.blogspot.com/2021/06/feminism-is-grounded-in-christian.html" target="_blank">I have noted previously</a>, feminism was only likely to arise within Latin Christendom-cum-Western civilisation.<br /><br />Technological change since the emergence of mass-prosperity societies, starting with the development of railways and steamships in the 1820s, has tended to further increase the status of women. The increase in the number of low-physical-risk jobs, the development of domestic technology (reducing the time-and-physical-skill-burden of managing a household), and the development of mass education (reducing the time-and-attention burden of raising kids), as well as shrinking family sizes, have all greatly increased the capacity of women to earn income outside the home. The fall in transport and communication costs has also made it easier for women to coordinate and organise.<br /><br />The most dramatic change, however, has been the legal and technological changes that have given women unilateral control over their fertility. This has decoupled sex and marriage, a huge social shift in itself. But it also meant that women have been able to invest in higher education, greatly increasing their employment as professionals, managers and other high-status jobs. These changes have also greatly increased women’s role in the creation of culture.<br /><br />Hence we now have the first societies in human history increasingly without presumptive sex roles. This is a dramatic cultural and evolutionary novelty. Needless to say, gender expectations and narratives have been in considerable flux.<br /><br />These changes also mean that men and women have fairly similar levels of social leverage. As biologist Bobbi S. Low <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bobbi-Low/publication/236974557_Gender_equity_issues_in_evolutionary_perspective/links/00b7d51a913b01e148000000/Gender-equity-issues-in-evolutionary-perspective.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=pV37LpO7QU9PDxxoMZ_vTnU9Wk5j7RK4GwtixzGakeq1RWTAjA_M2lmm22eW02lCBC0vfZY5AOTF6MD9VYpH2w.wq5Wi8UeLg0L0kMQplMQl49iKInQRYmZhoPk4bwVXUen9QDf_m36V6VdCJA8Opxd5knXcr2WixoP0gSI5bhUlA&_sg%5B1%5D=qRJE3LNcItp7a0J9tGgjVRp-COkqBj5ysuEox9qPrkfp58gVbR_rsOXLN_MJT6cYj4TgixSDaCB7x_V0xOw01sxo_TrXsAroA0YL40SVZAxS.wq5Wi8UeLg0L0kMQplMQl49iKInQRYmZhoPk4bwVXUen9QDf_m36V6VdCJA8Opxd5knXcr2WixoP0gSI5bhUlA&_iepl=">notes</a>:</div><div><blockquote>...men’s value to women is no longer solely or primarily resource value, and women’s value to men is no longer solely or primarily reproductive value.</blockquote>Women still have the leverage of sex and fertility, but that is strongly age-dependent, is somewhat weakened by the relative availability of sexual outlets and the undermining of the status and value (and so the appeal) of fatherhood.<br /><br />The presumption of greater maternal involvement in child-raising is a universal human cultural pattern that, while it shows variations among cultures, is substantially driven by biology. It is not a manifestation of patriarchy. Due to the biological processes of pregnancy and lactation, cultural conceptions of motherhood, while they do vary, vary much less than do cultural conceptions of fatherhood, which (unlike <i>biological</i> paternity) is a socially created role.<br /><br />Apart from some rapidly fading cultural traces, contemporary Western societies do not face the problems of patriarchy. Instead, developed societies face the problems of dealing with a dramatic level of evolutionary novelty. Such as the dramatic fading of presumptive sex roles.<br /><br />Beating the patriarchy drum may be emotionally satisfying, and have some residual propaganda value, but it is mostly just a giant, self-indulgent, distraction from working through the continuing implications of these dramatic changes and the sea of evolutionary novelty we find ourselves in.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted, somewhat improved, <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/being-sensible-about-patriarchy-9db12f99f0d6" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-66045488418660333852021-06-15T17:24:00.004+10:002021-06-15T17:24:46.527+10:00Narrative self-enforcement and the refusal to notice<i>If believing X makes one a good person, then avoiding evidence to the contrary preserves one’s virtue.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="246" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/2048/1*wV54Wjh3HgsZG9hwFhK6ag.jpeg" width="640" /></div></div><div><i>Don’t see, hear or speak anything that threatens my identity and standing.</i><br /><br />Contemporary progressivism regularly treats failure to embrace various beliefs or narratives as a sign of intellectual or moral delinquency (or both). The various <i>-ist </i>or <i>-phobe</i> terms that get bandied about label people as suffering morally crippling cognitive delinquency.* At its most trenchant, this attitude to dissent leads directly into an ongoing pattern of “submit or be stigmatised”: either accept claim X or be stigmatised as an <i>-ist</i> or a <i>-phobe</i>.<br /><br />The claim that those who significantly disagree are morally delinquent is often also tied to a claim of intellectual delinquency: that there are either (1) obvious facts or truths about the world that such dissenters are ignoring or denying. Or (2) that there are facts or truths about the world that folk clever enough to notice understand and yet those who disagree are ignorant of. Moreover, ignorant of in a way that is typically taken to either condemn them, or elevate those who do so understand, or both.<br /><br />Both sorts of claims are claims about being well-informed. That the folk making such judgements are so very well informed about how the world is, what other’s beliefs are, how the crucial factors work, and so on. Such claims imply a certain willingness to make an effort to be so informed.<br /><br />It is therefore quite striking to see a pattern of quite the opposite. A pattern of people using various techniques to <i>not</i> be informed. Or, more precisely, to not be inconveniently informed. Comedian Konstantin Kisin <a href="https://youtu.be/uVSgVlZjk8c">has observed that</a>, in the Soviet Union, you would avoiding looking at (or into) certain things, for if you did, that would lead to wrong-thinking, which was dangerous. A similar pattern has become increasingly pervasive in Western societies.**<br /><br /><b>The protective flaw</b><br />The most common technique I have observed to avoid being inconveniently informed is finding some reason why some commentator, publication or other source is so inherently flawed that nothing that they say can be taken seriously. What that typically means in practice is that the source in question does not adhere to the correct narratives and perspectives.***<br /><br />As a way of self-policing the information one receives, it is excellent. As a way of genuinely understanding what is happening the world around us, it is dreadful. Even if the alleged flaws ascribed to the source are actually in some serious sense a problem, just because a source has problem X it does not mean it is not an accurate source about Y. For instance, just because Sir Isaac Newton engaged in numerological examination of Biblical texts does not mean that he was not a great scientist.<br /><br />Statements should be judged on their factual merits. But this is precisely what is not being done. Instead, their author or bearer’s alleged position in the moral universe is taken to eliminate the possibility of them providing useful information.<br /><br />This is both a very bad strategy to being genuinely informed about the world and an attitude that is deeply corrosive to freedom, democracy and science. If a person, group, publication or whatever can be so comprehensively dismissed, then their entire participation in public discourse becomes “problematic”. The narratives of virtue are apparently so powerful, that it enables people and sources to be entirely cognitively dismissed in advance. While that is a deeply self-flattering attitude to take, it is also utterly incompatible with any serious commitment to freedom, democracy and science in its utter dismissal of any legitimacy for dissent and its blocking of anything resembling serious discovery processes.<br /><br />A version of this strategy is to dismiss some perspective or analysis because of who also endorses, propounds or agrees with it. This is, if anything, even worse because it makes cognitive and moral illegitimacy contagious.<br /><br />Such strategies are very obviously products of status strategies. They exemplify a sense of being profoundly morally and cognitively superior to any proponents of dissent.<br /><br /><b>Hijacking science</b><br />As part of the rhetoric of moral dominance, the hijacking of science to support narratives of virtue has become a recurring pattern. Such hijacking is a perversion of science in the service of establishing moral authority and narrative dominance. Philosopher Matthew B. Crawford, author of <i>Shopcraft as Soulcraft</i> (a nice review of which is <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2009/05/matthew-crawford-s-shop-class-as-soul-craft.html">here</a>), <a href="https://youtu.be/2oro0ttU2_A">expresses the fundamental conceptual error</a> involved well:<br /><blockquote>You can’t really follow the science because science does not lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, for example by quantifying the risks that attend each, to specify the trade-offs. But it can’t make the choices for us.</blockquote>Via such slogans as “follow the science”, science is being used as a rhetorical bludgeon in service of moral presumption. Any notion of rule by or through experts, including alleged moral experts, has to involve some moral framework, typically embedded in some legitimating discourse, that frames and directs the expertise. By pretending proper social action is a matter of “following” “the” science, the underlying moral framework is both hidden behind science (or claims about “the” science) and elevated out of the realm of the legitimately contestable.<br /><br />As Crawford points out, falsifiability is a key to what makes science, science. Authority, on the other hand, requires certainty (or, at least, an aura of certainty). Turning science into a tool and prop of authority means trading in what makes science, science in the service of generating deference. Science becomes incorporated in alleged certainties, so a faith system, so becomes something more like a religion.<br /><br />To wield science in such a way is to profoundly undermine it as a discovery process. This undermining is very congenial to all those who regard science as a tool of patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacy. It is not remotely a path that is in any way good for the health of science. Nor for freedom of thought, nor for democracy, as any dissent becomes “anti-science” and so illegitimate.<br /><br />Crawford makes the point that the expanding rule-by-expertise, which is also to a significant degree rule through emergency, involves:<br /><blockquote>... a de-legitimising of common sense as a guide to action.</blockquote></div><div>This fits in very nicely with “woke” progressivism, which characterises the entire existing society as a set of moral emergencies due to being a structure of power, oppression and marginalisation. Such progressivism also pushes moral narratives regarded as of such obvious moral power that any significant dissent is inherently delinquent. It grounds its justifications in complex theory. It sets up a structure of ever-evolving linguistic taboos developed by, and selected for, the highly educated in a way that naturally tends to exclude those who are less educated from the realm of legitimate public discourse. “Follow the science” and the de-legitimising of common sense supports all these elements.<br /><br />One of the reasons I have trouble identifying contemporary critical constructivist (i.e. “woke”) progressivism as “left” is because it is so profoundly antithetic to popular, and particularly working class, participation in public debate.<br /><br /><b>Identity self-protection</b><br />This hijacking of science as a moral bludgeon in the service of the prestige-and-dominance plays that are central to contemporary progressivism fits in very well with narrative self-enforcement. If progressivism is just “follow the science”, then any dissent must be “anti-science”. Anything that is “anti-science” is clearly not worth attending to, so can be excluded from one’s consideration, thereby protecting your adherence to the narratives that establish one as one of the smart and good people.<br /><br />Such narrative self-enforcement, such not noticing, is required to sustain the claim that one has to believe X to be a good person, the more so the more particular to a time and place such a belief is. And many of the current you-have-to-believe X-to-be-a-good-person claims are very particular to this time and place. Such as all the results of conflating <i>sex</i> (which gametes your body is structured to produce) with <i>gender</i> (the sets of behaviours, expectations and cultural narratives associated with how your body is structured).<br /><br />When folk wonder how mad and destructive claims keep spreading, the short answer is because so many folk have come to believe that either endorsing them is required to show you are a good person, that you are an informed person, that you are a smart person, or that adversely noticing their spread deprives you of such status. So long as such claims, or such avoidings of noticing, continue to be successfully paraded as being what the smart-and-good-people believe and do, people will continue to practice narrative self-enforcement so that they can stay within the set of persons who constitute the smart and the good.<br /><br />If I wanted to summarise contemporary progressivism in one sentence it would be (1): <i>the systematic sacrifice of discovery processes in the service of moral status</i>. (Including shielding one's moral status.) Or (2) <i>the possessors of human capital and the possessors of commercial capital getting together to screw over the working class</i>. (But that is a pattern for another time.)<br /><br />Narrative self-enforcement, blocking one’s own acquisition of inconvenient facts or confronting realisations, is engaging in such systematic, sacrifice of discovery so as to protect one’s sense of being one of the smart and the good. Doing so, so as to clothe oneself in the protective public status of being such.<br /><br />I used to wonder how people in the past could not notice that the social system, or key parts thereof, that they relied upon was threatening to, or was, collapsing around them. I now realise that it can be remarkably easy to simply refuse to see what is too cognitively threatening to notice.<br /><br /><b><i>ADDENDA</i></b><br /><br />*For instance, finding some statement that, if you squint at it in just the right way, can be derided as racist, thereby discrediting everything from that person or source.<br /><br />**Commentator Steve Sailer has just about <a href="https://www.unz.com/isteve/#blogroll">built a career</a> on noticing how (progressive) folk refuse to notice.<br /><br />***This can be used to discount an individual, a group of individuals or an entire organisation.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/narrative-self-enforcement-and-the-refusal-to-notice-521cdd750734" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-82992526128147564092021-06-14T15:54:00.004+10:002021-06-14T16:12:02.519+10:00The One-Stop Explanation of Why Marxism is Toxic Crap<i>The human disasters of actually existing Marxism flow directly from Marx’s theories.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="369" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1800/1*XiKsx9Zl6EfYuD3lRiS8ug.jpeg" width="640" /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Two toxic theorists and three mass murdering tyrants.</i></div><br />The most obvious feature of Marxism is that it has been the ruling ideology of a series of tyrannies, some of which murdered millions of their own citizens and all of which performed worse, typically disastrously worse, than their “capitalist” equivalents in promoting human well-being. The last point has been established by a series of clear natural experiments (North and South Korea, East and West Germany, China and Taiwan) but it also obvious if one just compares outcomes between reasonably similar states.<br /><br />Communism (i.e. revolutionary Marxism) was strategically <a href="https://youtu.be/aq3WtOuRCMw">the best thing that ever happened</a> for the US because it hobbled the two states most able to rival it, Russia and China. Both states have significantly fewer people, less wealth and lower standards of living, than they would have if neither had ever become Marxist.<br /><br />Despite this disastrous history being the most obvious feature of Marxism, there are plenty of people who still call themselves Marxists. They give this appalling history a series of hand-waving evasions that they would not, for a moment, grant to “capitalism”. Apparently, around a 100 million deaths in purges, persecutions and terror famines (i.e. from deliberate policies of Marxist regimes) and an unbroken series of tyrannies is not enough evidence that there might be something a bit wrong with the original theory.<br /><br />The justification will be something like “they did Marxism wrong”. This is just a hand-waving evasion. If you get the same basic pattern every time, then the outcome is inherent in the ideology.<br /><br />Marxism is based on two (interacting) fables that go back at least to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith">Adam Smith</a> (1723–1790). One is the labour theory of value whereby any return from production that does not go to the workers is return on labour that labour does not get. The other is the theory of class that emerges from the labour theory of value.<br /><br /><b>Getting class completely wrong</b><br />Marx’s theory of class is that it is based on the extraction of surplus (the return from labour that labour does not get) by landlords and capitalists. The state is the instrument or manifestation of the underlying class structure of society. This is a version of an historical fable that, even today, most social scientists accept some version of and has long dominated scholarly thinking about the state.<br /><br />This historical fable is that when humans developed farming, farming created surplus and social hierarchy from which the state arose. The state can therefore be understood as essentially an extrusion of the society that creates it. Marx’s famous statement that in capitalist societies <i>[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie</i> belongs firmly within this standard historical fairytale tale, one promulgated by Adam Smith and his intellectual heirs (which includes Karl Marx).<br /><br />Almost every element of this fable is incorrect. First, farming does not, by itself, create a surplus (that is, production in excess of subsistence). Farming does greatly increase food production, increasing the ability to extract useable calories from the arable landscape by up to a hundredfold, but that just leads to more people.<br /><br />For most of human history, extra food mainly meant extra babies. That is, more humans, more human biomass. This was a far stronger result from farming than any creation of more resources per person. Especially as it generally did not result in any such increase.<br /><br />Farming created more human niches rather than noticeably larger human niches. Indeed, it tended to create smaller human niches (in the sense of health and nutrition quality) than foraging, just (a lot) more such niches. The health of people living in farming societies <a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1186&context=nebanthro">was persistently worse</a> than that of foragers. </div><div><br /></div><div>The metabolic health costs of farming were worth it adaptively because they lowered the cost of individual children, so enabling people to have more children. In the genetic replication game that is evolution, farming was definitely a big winner over foraging.<br /><br />Human societies thus remained within the social dynamics originally analysed by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus">Rev. Thomas Malthus</a> (1766–1834) of population tending to increase to consume the food available. For farming to create a continuing and substantial surplus, food had to be intercepted and diverted before it led to more babies. (Technological and commercial surges in available resources provide complications that need not detain us.)<br /><br />Direct expropriation of food on any scale <a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/omoav/mayshar_et_al_jpe_2nd_11_oct_2019.pdf">was only practical if</a> there was significant stored food. This is why most farming societies did not create states. States arose in only a relatively small minority of farming (and no foraging) societies. Though all societies, including all farming, pastoralist and foraging societies, eventually had states imposed upon them.<br /><br />Farming generally results in significant amounts of stored food only if one is harvesting seasonal crops, notably grains. (Also potatoes, as potatoes are a seasonal, temperate crop that is relatively non-perishable, so function like a grain.)<br /><br />If one grows crops that can be harvested all year around, there is normally no significant storage, so no significant amounts of food to be systematically, and recurrently, seized before it supports more babies. New Guinea, in all its thousands of years of farming, trade and conflict, never produced anything resembling a state, or even a chiefdom, because it is a land of crops harvested all year round, with minimal storage of food. It lacked the taxable resource-base for chiefdoms and states to arise.<br /><br />Moreover, if one is living off seasonal crops, it becomes vital to ensure that (1) the stored food is available between harvests and (2) the stored seed-grain is available to sow next year’s harvest. Seasonal crops thus create a particularly intense protection problem. Even more so if there were other groups, especially pastoralist nomads, within raiding range. That protection problem encouraged the rise of specialist protectors (or organisers of protection), thereby providing a basis for the development of coercive power across generations: the basis for creating chiefdoms and states.<br /><br />The benefits of coordinating protection opened up the possibility for the systematic and recurrent appropriation of stored food sufficient to create and sustain chiefdoms and then states. Societies did not easily nor simply go from farming villages to states. There had to be some build-up of the capacity to defend, to coordinate and to appropriate. Hence chiefdoms preceded states (but not all chiefdoms created states).<br /><br />So, the farming-leads-to-surplus-leads-to-states fable about the origin and nature of states falls over at the start. The story about hierarchy is not much better. Most farming societies did not create much in the way of social hierarchies. <a href="https://tind-customer-agecon.s3.amazonaws.com/172ea11d-4800-432c-a3e3-6f3a16902373?response-content-disposition=attachment;%20filename*=UTF-8%27%27twerp_1130_moav.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Expires=86400&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAXL7W7Q3XHXDVDQYS/20210425/eu-west-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Date=20210425T083846Z&X-Amz-Signature=e63a370d5bba165c74a9f49098337726e3ba92d873f915078bc98e8912d819ab">Stored food was</a> the dominant source of social inequality and hierarchy. Though inequality and hierarchy was also a feature of controllable resources generally (such as salmon runs). But only some farming leads to stored food and only some stored food comes from farming. To generate enough surplus to support a state requires systematic and recurrent generation of enough stored food that the state can then appropriate sufficient food to reliably support itself.<br /><br />Sedentary foraging societies with stored food (e.g. salted fish) could and did generate social hierarchy, chiefdoms, slavery and warfare. It was stored crops, particularly grains, that usually generated the scale of resources required to generate states. (Sub-Saharan Africa, with its mixture of seasonal and non-seasonal crops, generated trade-and-slavery states, but trade also generates a storable goods protection problem.)<br /><br /><b>States and class</b><br />Once the state evolved in (or was imposed on) any society, it dominated the generation of surplus in that society. In a real sense, each state had to remake its originating society so as to sustain itself (and then impose the same remaking on any areas it conquered).<br /><br />The state was almost invariably not some “extrusion” of a society, it was the dominant structuring element in its society. If it could not structure society so as to sustain itself, it would either not arise in the first place or, if it could not sustain the required structuring of society, it would collapse. Even cooperative-bargaining (i.e. non-autocratic) states remade their societies. An example being the abolition of lineage-based tribes within both Athens and Rome and their replacement by territorial designations depending on where in the city one lived. (Judging by the <a href="https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/anthpubs/ucb/text/kas028-002.pdf">disappearance of kin terms</a> differentiating male- and female-line kin from classical Greek, such replacement of lineage-based kin groups seems to have been a general pattern in Mediterranean city-states.)<br /><br />The first, and arguably the greatest of historical sociologists, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun">Ibn Khaldun</a>(1332–1406) discussed states structuring their societies, using the Aristotelian language of form for structure rather than the more economistic language that we are, post-Marx, used to. Thus he writes:<br /><blockquote>… dynasty and royal authority have the same relationship to civilization as form has to matter. (The form) is the shape that preserves the existence of (matter) through the kind of (phenomenon) it represents. It has been established in philosophy that one cannot be separated from the other. One cannot imagine a dynasty without civilization, while a civilization without dynasty and royal authority is impossible, because human beings must by nature co-operate, and that calls for a restraining influence. Political leadership, based on either religious or royal authority, is inevitable. This is what is meant by dynasty. Since the two cannot be separated, the disintegration of one of them must influence the other, just as its nonexistence would entail the nonexistence of the other.<br />(Ibn Khaldun, <i>Muqaddimah</i>, Chapter 4, Section 1.)</blockquote>In other words, the state structures society. It cannot be assumed to be the extruded product of a society.<br /><br />Perhaps the most extreme example of such structuring is provided by Egypt, which generated the quickest, and most thorough, transition from seasonal-crop farming to highly centralised state. Yet, from the flight of pharaoh <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nectanebo_II">Nectanebo</a> II in 343BC to the officers’ revolt which overthrew the Albanian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali_dynasty">Alawwite</a> dynasty in 1953, Egypt was ruled by foreign empires or foreign dynasties. For almost 23 centuries, there was a state in Egypt, but there was not an Egyptian state. Even if each iteration of the state in Egypt adopted the techniques for exploiting Nile valley farmers developed by the pharaohs, whatever state ruled Egypt was not an extrusion or product of the society it ruled. It imposed structures on that society congenial for its continued rule and reflective of its (external) origins.<br /><br />States are typically not creations of class structures. Typically, they have been the dominant <i>creators</i> of class structures. States have dominated the creation of class structures as they have dominated the extraction of surplus and, typically in alliance with priesthoods and clerics or (in the case of China) secular clerisies, dominated the socialisation of function: what status various social groups had; what access to surplus they had and on what basis; what were their rights and obligations. Surplus + socialisation of function => class structure.<br /><br />So, states themselves are, historically, the dominant extractors of surplus and the dominant creators of class structures. The former is still true, by the way. Look at the size of the tax take in any Western democracy. It is way larger than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share">the profit share</a> of GDP. (Though, in the sense of income above subsistence, technology and economic structures dominate the creation of surplus, with the state taking far more of that surplus than do company profits.)<br /><br />But the most dramatic example of states as the dominant creators of class structures is provided by every revolutionary Marxist state. In each case, the ruling regime seized the state, atomised society and restructured society to serve its own power and purposes, thereby creating the class structure of its society. Marx’s theory of class proved to be self-refuting by Marxism.<br /><br />Marx’s theory of value claimed that surplus came from exploitation of labour by landlords and capitalists. So, if you abolished such exploitation, you abolished class. Marxist regimes abolished such designated exploitation by concentrating all social power in the hands of the ruling regime via the state: the actual historically dominant extractor of surplus and creator of class structures. So, of course Marxism-in-power created murderous tyrannies run by elites who extracted the surplus from society for their own ends.<br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin">Stalin</a> was able to extract far more surplus for his own purposes from a smaller-in-territory-and-population Soviet Union than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_II_of_Russia">Tsar Nicholas II</a> had from the larger-in-territory-and-population Russian Empire. Stalin created one of the largest <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sea%E2%80%93Baltic_Canal#Construction">slave systems</a> in history. He (re)imposed serfdom, as people were <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Forced-Labor-Institution-Publication/dp/0817939423">not allowed to leave</a> a workplace without the workplace’s permission. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_dynasty_(North_Korea)">The Kim regime</a> in Korea is, in effect, a recreation of the dynastic God-kings of early states, with more advanced technology.<br /><br />This pattern of tyrannical regimes extracting surplus for their own ends was not some weird, recurring accident. It was a direct result of Marx getting class fundamentally wrong.<br /><br /><b>Getting value wrong</b><br />So, why did Marx get class so completely wrong? Because he got value profoundly wrong.<br /><br />On this point, as elsewhere, there is not much point in engaging in some forensic analysis of what Marx actually wrote. While he was a rhetorically powerful reasoner (and asked some good questions), he was also a persistently dishonest one. That is, when he makes some claim that might be critiqued he adds in some fudging protection, so that he can always point to the protective fudge to evade critique. As he put it in <a href="https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1857/letters/57_08_15.htm">a letter to Engels</a>, one just uses a bit of dialectic to get out of any difficulty in analysis.<br /><br />So, consider Marx’s basic characterisation of profit: the return on labour that labour does not receive. Why do people engage in labour? Why did our original foraging ancestors engage in effort? To gain something they wanted. Why did they want it? Because it has some feature of characteristic they needed (nutrition) or otherwise valued (it tasted good, it was fun, it made getting food easier, and so on).<br /><br />So, the labour was directed to what people valued. That is the basic connection between labour and value: labour is typically directed to what people value. If the labour is successful, the value is gained. If the labour is not successful, then the value is not gained. Since success is not measured by the labour, labour is not the source of value. It “creates” value only in specific circumstances.<br /><br />So, labour is the “source” of value only if one completely ignores the discovery process involved in applying labour, in putting in effort, to successfully achieve value. Human history is fundamentally a history of discovery. The way labour is applied always relies on some previous process of discovery. Indeed, all of evolution is fundamentally a process of discovery: discovering what can be successfully replicated.<br /><br />What increases the value that labour, successfully applied via discovery processes, provides? Well, land for one. Foragers engaged in a lot of search activity to find that which they valued. What was available to be discovered made a big difference in how they went about that (how they applied their labour) and what they were likely to discover (what was the outcome of doing so).<br /><br />Foraging, especially hunting, is a skilled activity. People had to learn skills to be effective foragers. In contemporary foraging societies, the productivity of foragers peaks <a href="https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/46603844/Embodied_Capital_and_the_Evolutionary_Ec20160618-27827-pd0oin.pdf?1466289441=&response-content-disposition=inline;+filename=Embodied_capital_and_the_evolutionary_ec.pdf&Expires=1619344083&Signature=dEdBRyKG0rObrpoj97b8BdAWlCxeJ0AUg9SiVfdf4au9PgmxmWkBrA~Ly8R8R7z6LwnnfGEvZOJq-9ASVxgvKBqbGgsjDQW3BXWkH6ZCw8UTVrbzZ9SaIPcUYEgOKv6kOgcNdNHsSH6XjR1FcoOyk2yySFUlT3zvh5MBrqMDGsaJwvJZDjJGiq74vvHaMUf2olheuTfC~oFvxcuMTncE~aFbUghuS10a2TSYNJ72HyDmwxhc~3dyNehGSjOgF660iiKiOjngQ7YCaWfiNNqYOBNQGplDZYmxJDF5UcNTnxeB5QH9mP5HlLejKnnBZV2~fpzzPAdeaKVTm9s9eke7Gw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA">at about 45 years </a>of age. As humans increasingly adopted skill-based foraging techniques, that meant that older males could be desirable mates. The older the male, the longer the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere">telomeres</a> of their offspring tend to be, so the longer such offspring tended to live. This resulted in more human females living past menopause, which enabled them to finishing raising the children they had when they were about 40 and to invest in the children of their children (as they stopped having children of their own).<br /><br />The learned skills that meant productivity of the provisioning human males peaked at an older age were the cognitively incorporated — indeed embodied, including via <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory">muscle memory</a> — results of discovery processes. Labour is always effort + (past or present) discovery. Skilled labour simply incorporates a higher level of (past) discovery.<br /><br />What’s another thing that increases the value that labour, successfully applied via discovery processes provides? Tools. Which are a form of capital, the produced means of production. Humans became tool makers because that made their labour more productive. As skills are learnt, they are also a produced means of production, so <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital">human capital</a>.<br /><br />So, the more (useful) land, the more capital (including human capital) and the better the discovery processes, the more value the application of labour is likely to provide. Workers in developed economies have much higher wages than folk generally do elsewhere, or in the past, because they are supported by a great deal of productive land, capital and accumulated discovery processes.<br /><br />How does one get folk to look after the land, provide capital and engage in discovery? Make sure they gain benefit from doing these things. Why does every society ever known generate returns to land, capital and discovery? Because these things magnify the value that labour can achieve.<br /><br />Together, they create value in the sense of providing things people value. But the value comes from people’s reaction to the things provided. Economic activity “creates” value in that sense, and that sense alone. It “creates” value if it is successfully directed towards providing things people value and does not “create” value if it is not, regardless of how much labour and other resources might have been applied to such activity.<br /><br />There is another feature of economic activity not yet covered in the above. That is risk. The notion of discovery implies the possibility of not discovering. Or even of disastrous discovery (e.g. that thing that tasted OK was actually poisonous). Search involves risk. Effort involves risk. Not doing anything involves risk. Risk has to be managed. Good risk management is a very useful thing. It makes creating value, particularly doing so recurrently, from the application of a given amount of resources much more likely.<br /><br />Human foraging <a href="https://groups.anthropology.northwestern.edu/lhbr/kuzawa_web_files/pdfs/Bogin%20et%20al%20Annals%20Hum%20Biol%202014.pdf">is cooperative</a>. In contemporary foraging societies, individuals vary in their social connections, what anthropologists call <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49677412_Wealth_Transmission_and_Inequality_Among_Hunter-Gatherers"><i>relational wealth</i></a> and economists<i> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital">social capital</a></i>. Such connections function as information (i.e. discovery) networks and <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/srep29120.pdf">risk management networks</a>, as they are constructed by exchanges of favours. Management of risk has always been part of human activity and social organisation. So has land, so has capital.<br /><br />The analytical advantage of starting with foragers is:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>that is where we came from, <i>and</i></li><li>we can see basic economic patterns without exchange being a major factor. (Though evidence for exchange dates back to <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312457027_The_earliest_long-distance_obsidian_transport_Evidence_from_the_200_ka_Middle_Stone_Age_Sibilo_School_Road_Site_Baringo_Kenya">our emergence as a species</a>.)</li></ul>If exchanging something we produced or acquired for something that someone else produced or acquired has been going on for our entire history of a species, a mere 200,000 years or so, then we are probably adapted to engaging in exchange. Producing things for sale, for exchange, is not, in any useful sense, inherently alienating.<br /><br />Though it is not exchange itself that is allegedly alienating. Rather, if labour creates (all) value, then any value from productive effort that does not go to labour is return from labour they did not receive. That is allegedly the source of alienation.<br /><br />Those familiar with Marx’s writings, or Marxist theory, will notice I have ignored the use-value/exchange-value distinction. (Mainstream economics calls the first <i>utility</i>, and the second <i>price</i>, where cost is what you pay or imposed, which may or may not be priced.) This is because:<br /><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>exchange-value is driven by use-value, including use in exchange, as all exchange is driven by variation in valuations: we exchange what we value more for what we value less; <i>and</i></li><li>it is perfectly possible to make key points by considering foraging economies where exchange is not a major factor — they are instead dominated by connection and pooling. It makes it easier to see that that use-value/exchange-value distinction does not get you where Marx wants to go with it.</li></ol>So, moving to an exchange economy, you put land, labour and capital together in the hope of creating more value than was consumed. Suppose you fail. That is, you make a loss. Who covers the loss? Who is in the best position to cover the loss?<br /><br />Generally speaking, not the workers. They generally lack the resources to do so. More importantly, they lack the control to do so. Forcing folk to cover losses from processes that they do not control is a very bad incentive structure. So, the person who covers the loss better have sufficient control over the processes of production to affect the pattern of risk. Why would they cover the loss? Because of some hope of gain.<br /><br />You could pay them to cover the risk of loss. That is how one gets an insurance industry. Or, you could have them not only cover the losses, but also gain the profits. That provides them with an incentive to cover losses and to organise production so that profits are more likely.<br /><br />Hence the structure whereby business are owned by the people who put up the capital to cover the risk of loss and, in return, receive the profits. Does this remotely look like “the return from labour that labour does not gain?” Or does it look like the return from taking on the risks, from engaging in discovery, from organising land, labour and capital to be productive?<br /><br />Would labour be as productive without those things? Does doing those things make the labour more valuable? Does doing those things increase the return to labour? No, yes, and yes. Hence firms and workers can contract for mutual gain.<br /><br />The labour theory of value “works” by assuming success. By assuming that production of value is successfully achieved when labour is applied to production. So you don’t have to worry about discovery, risk, consuming more value than you produce, etc. But that just assumes away a whole set of hard questions.<br /><br />If all the value of production is returned to the workers in an enterprise, how do you pay for upkeep of land, acquiring and maintaining capital, managing risk, discovery processes? No enterprise can operate for any length of time by returning all the value it produces to labour. So, burbling on about “return to labour that labour does not receive” is nonsense on stilts. Especially given how much all these things affect the success of the application of labour. Firms generally don’t happen by workers congregating together and assembling the processes for creating value, as there is a lot more involved than labour.<br /><br />Marxist states were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Irrigation_canals">appallingly bad</a> at looking after the land and at maintaining buildings and equipment, were not good at providing capital for anything beyond the convenience of the regime. Nor were they good at discovery processes (apart from stealing other folk’s discoveries). Why? Because they were command economies and based on Marx’s labour theory of value, with the latter tending to exacerbate the problems of the former. All value was deemed to be created by labour: not by land, capital or discovery. Folk owning land or capital was inherently exploitive because they extract a “return from labour” that labour does not receive. The consequences of this fundamental misreading of the processes of creating value were predictable, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem">and predicted</a>.<br /><br />Pretending that payment for use of land, for creating and maintaining capital, managing risk, and discovery processes is not payment for value received is just another hand-waving evasion. As is pretending that it is payment for labour. Value is what labour (and use of land, and use of capital, and discovery processes, and risk management) is directed towards. Value is only produced by any of these things, including labour, if it is successfully so directed and is much more likely to be achieved if all these things are successfully so directed.<br /><br /><b>Property as incentive structure</b><br />The notion of private property emerges very early in human history, though it does not become a major feature of human societies until the development of sedentism, farming and pastoralism. The basic idea of property is not <i>mine! </i>— any silverback gorilla male with a harem can do that — but <i>yours!</i><br /><br />Exchange is a fundamentally normative activity: it makes what was yours, mine and what was mine, yours. We humans engage in exchange so readily because we are a far more normative species than are our primate near relatives. Our normative and cooperative capacities have made us the global ape.<br /><br />Chimpanzees conform <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262885591_Chimpanzee_choice_rates_in_competitive_games_match_equilibrium_game_theory_predictions">much more to</a> the predictions of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory">game theory</a> in strategic games than do humans because they are less normative than are humans. A <i>Pan troglodytes </i>in a lab is distinctly more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus"><i>homo economicus</i></a> than are <i>Homo sapiens</i>.<br /><br />As a group-living species that also pair-bonded, some notion of <i>yours!</i> had to develop to permit pair-bonding to happen. That is, both the males and <a href="http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/pub_female_ps.pdf">the females in</a> the group had to acknowledge some sense of the pairing being off limits to others.<br /><br />In contemporary foraging societies, young folk do not “break even” in their calorie contribution to the group <a href="https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/46603844/Embodied_Capital_and_the_Evolutionary_Ec20160618-27827-pd0oin.pdf?1466289441=&response-content-disposition=inline;+filename=Embodied_capital_and_the_evolutionary_ec.pdf&Expires=1619344083&Signature=dEdBRyKG0rObrpoj97b8BdAWlCxeJ0AUg9SiVfdf4au9PgmxmWkBrA~Ly8R8R7z6LwnnfGEvZOJq-9ASVxgvKBqbGgsjDQW3BXWkH6ZCw8UTVrbzZ9SaIPcUYEgOKv6kOgcNdNHsSH6XjR1FcoOyk2yySFUlT3zvh5MBrqMDGsaJwvJZDjJGiq74vvHaMUf2olheuTfC~oFvxcuMTncE~aFbUghuS10a2TSYNJ72HyDmwxhc~3dyNehGSjOgF660iiKiOjngQ7YCaWfiNNqYOBNQGplDZYmxJDF5UcNTnxeB5QH9mP5HlLejKnnBZV2~fpzzPAdeaKVTm9s9eke7Gw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA">until about age 20</a>. On average, in such societies, <a href="https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf">males dominate</a> the provision of protein to the group, provide a majority of calories to the group and overwhelmingly dominate the provision of protein and calories to children, once they are weaned. There was no evolutionary stable alternative than investment in children that they could be reasonably confident were theirs to getting males to provide for children at the consistency and level needed to raise such remarkably helpless human infants into adults, a process taking about 20 years.<br /><br />(Investing in one’s sister’s children — i.e., substituting unclehood for fatherhood — is a possible alternative, but it operates as the main mechanism of male provision for children in a very small number of societies. Given that nephews and nieces are more genetically distant from oneself than are sons and daughters, it is an inferior gene replication strategy. One typically adopted in circumstances of high uncertainty about the paternity of individual children.)<br /><br />Once you have farming and pastoralism, then property rights develop in earnest. Having someone gain the benefits from controlling some thing (or <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/economic-analysis-of-property-rights/74A5687E52AB91D8155B730F2F4D09FE">some attribute of the thing</a>) is often the only stable way to get around <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem">free rider problems</a> and <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243">tragedy of the commons</a>. It motivates better use (and maintenance) of the owned thing. This is why property rights are such a pervasive feature of human societies. Indeed, substituting control of attributes by their agents for more widely distributed property rights is often done by the powerful so as to make it easier for them to appropriate the labour, or products of the labour, of others. This was as true in Pharaonic Egypt as in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China or Kim Dynasty Korea.<br /><br />When regulation in modern societies goes wrong, it often does so by poorly aligning effective control over an attribute with the incentives to productively use said attribute. This is particularly likely to be true when discretionary power is given to an official. Especially as corruption is essentially the market for official discretion: the more official discretions there are, the more extensive such corruption is likely to become.*<br /><br />Regulation, especially if it involves considerable official discretions, can often be a considerable source of commercial risk. This tends to favour larger enterprises, as they can better manage such risks. Being larger provides them with more capacity to influence, even manipulate, regulatory processes. This perverse interaction between regulation, risk and response can be seen in any jurisdictions that <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-29/how-many-years-of-income-does-a-home-in-your-city-cost">engage in extensive land management via official discretions</a>.<br /><br />The coercive basis of the state, and its consequent ability to operate with, even benefit from, poorly aligned incentives makes it a much less reliable mechanism for encouraging human flourishing than is often assumed. Especially as you functionally pay an organisation to do what makes its income go up. Thus, government health systems get more income if the metabolic health of the citizenry gets worse, not better. Government health systems colonise the ill-health of the population, so have pervasive institutional interest in metabolic health getting worse, <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/met.2018.0105">as it has</a>. Hence crap official nutrition guidelines that are <a href="https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/bjsports/51/10/769.full.pdf">not based on sound science</a> but are generating obesity even <a href="https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/2018/11/14/military-and-recruits-too-fat-to-fight">in the US armed forces</a>.<br /><br />When Western states gave up their territorial colonies, they switched from colonising other people’s societies to colonising their own. (We call this process of internal colonisation “the welfare state”.) Much of that has involved colonising social pathologies, with the income streams received by state organisations tending to increase as the social pathologies that they are tasked with “solving” increase.<br /><br />Perhaps the best protection for state action is being judged by the publicly declared intent of policies. (Which is, of course, much easier to do than ferreting out actual effects, especially as they often require consideration of counterfactuals.) Marxism has very grand intentions. So do Marxist states. As they will tell you. At great length.<br /><br />Command economies become increasingly corrupt over time because they are so pervaded by official discretions. Informal “grey” market or illegal “black” ones <a href="https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.599.7534&rep=rep1&type=pdf">emerged to try and keep</a> the command economies working. They were both necessary to get around the pathologies of the system and a result of those pathologies. Command economies are also bad at managing and maintaining assets as those in control of such assets do not get sufficient (sometimes any) return from better management.**<br /><br />When <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School">Austrian school</a> economists von Mises and Hayek criticised command economics on the basis of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem">inability to calculate value</a>, they under-estimated the resilience of actually existing socialism because people adapted to the pathologies of the system. The informal and illegal markets, and other adaptations, were not enough over the long run. But they kept the command economies functioning longer and better than they otherwise would have. (Especially as it turned out that the planners were surreptitiously putting market information from the West into their plans.)<br /><br />As all human societies have to grapple with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem">free rider problems</a> and the <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243">tragedy of the commons</a> they have evolved a range of responses to deal with them. Which can include <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-pool_resource">local resource management regimes</a>. How arrogant do you have to be to think that abolishing all the mechanisms that evolved to deal with such problems was remotely a clever thing to do? Marxist-level arrogant.<br /><br />Though, with critical social justice and its associated forms of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-modern_constructivism">critical constructivism</a>, we are getting a new wave of such arrogance, one concentrated more on cultural rather than economic revolution. Then again, critical constructivism is, like Marxism, also a form of transformative, golden-future progressivism. One that traces much of its intellectual lineage back to Marxism and, like Marxism, represents the worship of the golden-transformative-future splendour in progressive heads.<br /><br /><b>Not only crap, but toxic crap</b><br />Marxism has disastrous outcomes because it is a crap theory of class based on a crap theory of value. Marxist historians can only make their analytical framework work by either ignoring whatever parts of history don’t fit or by ignoring the framework whenever it gets in the way of doing good historical scholarship. But Marxism does give its adherents a reassuring, though false, sense of understanding how societies work, how history works and the direction that history is going in.<br /><br />Marxism is a manifestation of progressivism: of belief in a transformative golden future that is taken to inherently ennoble its adherents. It encourages mutual worship of the splendour in their heads. It provides a heroic narrative that adherents can write themselves into. All based on disastrous falsehoods.<br /><br />With enough mutual worship of the splendour in progressive heads, any amount of tyranny, mass murder and mass death is possible. As we have seen again and again.***<br /><br />This is what makes Marxism not only crap, but toxic crap. Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (<i>Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen</i>), a vision of a society without alienation — a vision of a splendid future so golden that any sacrifice for it is worthwhile — is combined with a disastrously wrong conception of value and economic processes and, as a consequence, a disastrously wrong conception of class and, as further consequence, a disastrously wrong conception of the role and dangers of the state.<br /><br />The awful human cost of Marxism in power is not a result of some perversion of Marx’s thought. It is a direct consequence of his theories. It is a result of Marxism’s disastrous pretensions to, but profound failures of, understanding combined with justifying moral grandeur.<br /><br />Tens of millions of dead in an unbroken series of tyrannies testify to how much Marxism is toxic crap. It represents neither understanding nor moral grandeur. Just delusions of understanding lost in self-flattering heroic narratives that shield those adherents from self-understanding. Or asking the right questions to gain understanding. Marxism is toxic crap at so many levels.<br /><br />Yet Marxism remains profoundly influential, including via <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory">critical theory</a> and its offshoots. Not due to its analytical value, still less its moral value, but because of its rhetorical power and its ability to generate self-flattering, but profoundly mistaken, senses of moral and social understanding.<br /><br />We are a group-living species. So we are a status-concerned and status-driven species. Between the heroic narrative, the sense of moral grandeur, the mastery of arcane terminology, the sense of purpose, meaning, and understanding, Marxism--like golden, transformative future progressivism generally--is the basis of an industrial-strength collective status strategy. It turns out it does not need to be accurate about the world, it just has to provide the right motivation, the right sort of appeal, to enough folk who are happy to derive their sense of status and identity from what is in their heads. Apparently, no amount of tyranny and mass murder can trump that.<br /><br /><b>ADDENDA</b><br /><br />*Corruption need not be financial. There can also be moral and intellectual corruption whereby officials substitute status strategies, that is personal social or cognitive benefits (including ideological self-satisfaction), for genuinely public-interest-focused performance of their duties.<br /><br />**It is a misnomer to think of command economies as abolishing property rights. They confiscate private property and allocate legal property rights to the state. But<i> economic</i> property rights, control of things and attributes of things, are distributed across the apparatus of the state because such control has to be distributed for production and resource management to function. Distributing economic property rights across the state apparatus does so in ways that tends to suppress key information feedbacks, misaligns incentives, undermines quality control and encourages waste. Command economies are, in no sense, “solutions” to any alleged problem of property rights. They magnify such problems in ways fundamentally antithetical to human flourishing.<br /><br />***There is also the problem of such regimes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ponerology">selecting for pathological personalities</a>. The notion that commitment to the transformative golden future is ennobling provides cover for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad">Dark Triad personalities</a> while the creation of a single hierarchy of power in revolutionary command economies provides them with a single target to aim at. Their narcissism makes them self-focused on personal advancement, their Machievallianism makes them effective players of the self-advancement game and their psychopathy minimises any self-constraint on their actions, making them more ruthless players of the self-advancement game. Needless to say, selecting for pathological personalities, and handing them great power over others, is not good for promoting human flourishing.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-one-stop-explanation-of-why-marxism-is-toxic-crap-aa9b8648d17a" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-80373107298378557792021-06-13T17:11:00.006+10:002021-06-14T16:17:28.169+10:00“Scene-missing” Progressivism<i>Progressivism has great strategic and rhetorical power, and recurring intellectual patterns, yet institutions it dominates tend to decay.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="363" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/2048/1*3NCTOVo9TwCXD-zh6eyxOA.png" width="640" /><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg</a></div><br />Progressivism, in all its forms, justifies itself, both as a system of belief and in its rhetoric, by its commitment to a golden, transformative future. This is an enormous rhetorical advantage, as the imagined future can be much more morally grand than any actual existing present or past, with all the trade-offs, inconsistencies and failures anything that actually exists must entail.<br /><br />It is commonly held by progressives that that very commitment to the golden, transformative future, free of whatever sins or evils a particular form of progressivism focuses on, is itself morally ennobling. This is, of course, very self-flattering. But it also strategically useful, as it is a great way to hide, both from themselves and from others, strategic behaviour for their own benefit. Something we humans are very good at doing.<br /><br /><b>Strategising status</b><br />It is much easier to pursue shared interests if such interests can be paraded as, and bundled within, a noble cause while those with different interests and concerns can be portrayed as motivated by malign, or otherwise morally reprehensible, interests or concerns. A sense of one’s own righteousness can be an excellent cover for self-interest. Especially if it is used to block awkward information.<br /><br />The commitment to the golden, transformative future that is the hallmark of progressivism is typically taken to be so ennobling, that no serious dissent from the golden intent is regarded as legitimate. Claiming to be motivated by inherently ennobling concerns is a potentially powerful prestige-and-dominance strategy.<br /><br />The ostentatious moral concern provides a path to prestige, but only if dissent from the commitment to the golden, transformative future, and it attendant claims about the world, lacks prestige. Indeed, the more dissent is taken to involve negative-prestige (i.e. moral shame or malice) the more prestigious is the ostentatious moral concern.<br /><br />Conversely, if alternative views are legitimate, there is far less prestige to be had from taking any particular position. There is thus strong pressures and motives to pass off the attendant beliefs of progressivism as being what the smart and good people believe. So, if you dissent, you are clearly either not smart, not good, or neither smart nor good.<br /><br />The delegitimisation of dissent from the noble progressive concerns then provides a path to dominance: to destroying the reputation, career, standing, the ability to participate in public discourse, of others because they are clearly morally shameful or malevolent in failing to embrace the intent that flows from embracing the golden, transformative future. All of which makes it easier to increase the standing of, and resources flows and opportunities to, people like you.<br /><br />Progressivism, with its belief in the morally ennobling nature of the commitment to the golden, transformative future, is thus naturally inclined to become the mutual worship of the splendour in progressive heads. A highly motivating conjunction of cognitive identity, a sense of belonging, a sense of status, and a sense of purpose and meaning, all wrapped up in said mutual worship of the splendour in their heads. With, in contemporary society, much of institutional (and social) media operating to intensify these effects.<br /><br />For much of the institutional media has become organised around both following the status strategy themselves and in playing to the status strategy in others. Hence the pushing of various media narratives as establishing what good (and smart) people believe. And, of course, who to despise and reject. Which is the other side of status strategies. Journalists within institutional media have increasingly <a href="https://youtu.be/yq3y8UBguO8">become frightened of </a>what the reactions of other journalists would be if they publicly departed from what has become the “proper” opinions.<br /><br />We are a group-living, pair-bonding species. So we tend to have very strong status drives as well as concern for reputation. The status benefits, and rhetorical advantages, of progressivism have clear motivational power. Especially if they get reinforced by mutual signalling. Fear of being cast out if one dissents from any views that status strategies, and cognitive identities, embrace is another motivator to avoid dissenting.<br /><br /><b>Heroic narratives</b><br />We are narrative beings. We seek to be the heroes of our own life narratives. Each form of progressivism offers precisely such a heroic narrative. One both grand (so psychically inflating) and shared (so mutually reinforcing). For what can be more grand than transforming society, transforming human possibilities, transforming the global order?<br /><br />But a heroic narrative naturally also entails allocation of villainy. The more wicked the villains, and the pervasive the villainy, the more heroic opposing them is. This is why “<i>fascist!</i>” and “<i>Nazi!</i>” are so commonly part of progressivist rhetoric, for it makes their moral heroism all the grander (above all to themselves). It both manifests, and intensifies, their heroic life narratives.<br /><br />Hence also the emotional and relational aggression which is so much a part of progressivism. It is as if they are looking for reasons to despise millions of their fellow citizens. As, of course, they are. Hence the characteristic public emotions of progressivism, ranging from smug condescension (to all those not as good and clever as them) to vicious hatred. Such pervasive emotional aggression then generates among others submission (to avoid being subject to it) and counter-aggression (in defensive reaction).</div><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="222" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/1*iTwZhyeKP3j13P9VcNRQ_w.png" width="640" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11"><i>https://www.businessinsider.com.au/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11</i></a></div><br />Any process of polarisation, any forming of in-groups and out-groups, will have tribalised emotional aggression attached to it. The expanding progressive domination of the cultural commanding heights gives the emotional aggression of progressivism a great deal of institutional power and rather stronger patina of (pseudo-)sophisticated intellectual justification and cover.<br /><br /><b>Emancipation movements</b><br />Pausing here, we need to distinguish progressivism, the belief in the golden, transformative future, from the sequence of emancipation movements that has unfolded across the last two centuries or so: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833">the abolition of slavery</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_emancipation">Catholic Emancipation</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_emancipation">Jewish Emancipation</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_manhood_suffrage">adult male suffrage</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women" s_suffrage="">votes for women</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement">civil rights movement</a>, the expansion of <a e2="" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women" in_the_20th_century="" other_than_voting="" s_legal_rights_="">women’s rights</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory">queer emancipation</a>. While progressives were somewhat involved in some of the above movements, none of these movements were primarily driven by progressivism. They were not based on creating some golden, transformative future but instead sought inclusion in what already was. They sought a common moral status, a common civil status, based on a common humanity. They also represented, in the context of falling communication and transport costs and rising mass prosperity, the widening of participation in political bargaining that reaches <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Parliament">deep into</a> the history of Latin Christendom that was, Western Civilisation that it became.<br /><br />Contemporary progressives claim ownership of these movements. That is a case of having tickets on themselves without historical justification. A way of burnishing the splendour in their heads by a bit of historical hijacking. Meanwhile, contemporary progressivism is seeking to overturn the basic claim and aim of these emancipation movements in seeking inclusion in a common moral and civil identity, especially as pushed by the civil rights movement, by denying a common moral status and a common civil identity and attacking the notion thereof.</div><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="200" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1152/1*DMeccon89rWIDgCTEX8Tfg.png" width="400" /><a href="https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1385073662290694144">https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1385073662290694144</a></div><br />Contemporary progressivism has become very much about judging people by the colour of their skin, as a mainstay of the dominant, convenient and available, progressive status strategy. A status strategy originally developed in academe. Notably via <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory">Critical Race Theory</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality">Intersectionality</a>. Which are themselves offshoots of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory">Critical Theory</a>.<br /><br />Critical theory, by embracing the notion that the failure of working class to fulfil the revolutionary role that Marxist theory presumed for said working class demonstrated the cognitive delinquency (“false consciousness”) of the working class, as distinct from the clear vision and superior intent of the critical theorists, intensified the progressive, heroic narrative, status strategy already inherent in Marxism.<br /><br /><b>Progressivism as academic catnip</b><br />Academics are particularly prone to progressivism, especially the more their output is ideas and the weaker that empirical feedback is within their discipline. Academics operate in very status-conscious and reputation-concerned milieus. They typically have little experience of running anything except other academics. They seek status thorough their ideas. Their identity is typically wrapped up in being folk-who-know.<br /><br />The ennobling nature of commitment to the golden future, especially if it can be tied to theory that signals knowing-insider status, is thus inherently prone to appeal to academics and intellectuals. Hence the enduring appeal of Marxism (despite its track record of being the ideology of regimes of tyrannical mass murder) within the academy. But progressivism in general has become a default presumption in much of academe. One sign of this is that voting centre-left is treated in much academic output as unproblematic but voting centre-right is regularly analysed as displaying some of moral or cognitive delinquency (racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, etc.).<br /><br />There has been a long process of evolution within academe, and the graduate-employing advocacy economy, to optimise the various status strategies of contemporary progressivism. To cultivate, and intensify, a sense of the splendour in progressive heads. To find the most resonant heroic narratives and patterns of emotional and relational aggression. This includes constructing academic literatures to support and legitimate such status strategies and narratives. (What has been nicely labeled as ideas laundering.) They have evolved heroic-narrative status strategies that require remarkably little in the way effort, still less genuine achievement, to adopt and prosecute but can be used against folk of genuine human achievement remarkably effectively.<br /><br /><b>The demand for blank slate conceptions of the human</b><br />The mutual worship of the splendour in progressive heads, the progressive, heroic narrative status strategy, leads very naturally to particular patterns of ideas. The first is an attraction towards a blank slate notion of human nature. If human nature is a constraint, then there are limits to how wonderful the golden, transformative future, commitment to which is so ennobling, can be.<br /><br />Worse, the imperfect trade-offs of present and past may actually have good reasons to operate the way they do, given the constraints of human nature. This undermines or limits any progressive critique of such trade-offs. The more limited the possibilities of the golden future, the more legitimate past and present social arrangements are, the less splendidly the golden future shines and the more legitimate are contrary perspectives. So, the more committed one is to splendour of the golden future, the more hostile one will be do notions of constraining human nature and the more committed one will be to blank slate conceptions of the human.*<br /><br />Of course, commitment to blank slate notions of human nature involves rejection of evolutionary biology. Evolved beings are not blank slates. Indeed, we <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leda-Cosmides-2/publication/227614293_On_the_Universality_of_Human_Nature_and_the_Uniqueness_of_the_Individual_The_Role_of_Genetics_and_Adaptation/links/5d12e98b299bf1547c7f4633/On-the-Universality-of-Human-Nature-and-the-Uniqueness-of-the-Individual-The-Role-of-Genetics-and-Adaptation.pdf">could not be</a> so good at learning if we humans were blank slates. But plenty of folk have been, and are, willing to reject evolutionary biology. After all, the debate between radical feminists and trans activists is a debate between those who think evolution does not apply from the neck up (gender is entirely socially constructed) and those who do not think it applies from the neck down (gender is innate but not body-determined: so we can have women with penises and transwomen are as much women as ciswomen).<br /><br />Tomboys, sissies and gay folk are gender-dysphoric (they feel alienated from common gender presumptions). Trans folk are sex-dysphoric (they feel alienated from their biological sex). Confusing gender-dysphoria with what <a href="https://youtu.be/IGuutk5NViY">we should call </a>sex-dysphoria, but don’t, is proving a recipe for much, potentially disastrous, confusion. Just as calling transsexuals <i>transgender</i> <a href="https://youtu.be/lcdarXrpw7I">also seriously muddies</a> understanding. But the conflating of sex with gender arises out of blank slate notions of human nature.<br /><br /><b>Problems of nature</b><br />The mutual worship of the ennobling golden, transformative future, the heroic narrative progressive status strategy, also inclines progressives to discount the problems of simply dealing with nature, the problems of achieving subsistence and of creating wealth. If dealing with nature generates constraints, that once again limits how golden the golden, transformative future can be. It also risks giving existing arrangements stronger justifications while strengthening reasons to be sceptical about the golden, transformative future and the commitment to the same.<br /><br />Hence the tendency of a great deal of progressive thought to just skip over the problems of wrestling with nature and creating wealth and treat the issue as merely being one of intent. If enough resources are concentrated in the hands of people with strong enough commitment to the right intentions, then all will be fine. The disasters of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward">Great Leap Forward</a> in Mao’s China are a particularly intense manifestation of this wider pattern. Scepticism, on practical grounds, about whether such resources+intent arrangements will work as well as claimed are repeatedly treated as being hostility to the intent, to the noble motives, behind the commitment to the golden, transformative future and so are treated as illegitimate.<br /><br />Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (<i>Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen</i>) is the most famous and resonant manifestation of such hand-waving evasion of the hard issues.**<br /><br />The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem">economic calculation problem</a> is one manifestation of inherent problems of wrestling with nature. The problem being that markets provide ways of dealing <a href="https://statisticaleconomics.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/the_use_of_knowledge_in_society_-_hayek.pdf">with information on a scale</a> that no central planning system can hope to successfully replicate. The experience of command economies proved correct the economic calculation critique of socialist claims that the state could do it all. Hence command economies resorted (openly or corruptly or both) to market mechanisms to keep going, eventually openly evolving into market economies. Though not without much death and suffering on the way through. Including various collectivisation and terror famines.<br /><br />There are effective, thoroughly collective, economies in nature. Ants and other <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality">eusocial</a> insects can do collective economies efficiently as they are hormonally directed within a stable technology, with relatively simple patterns of discovery and action, and most of the nest or hive is not seeking to invest in genetic replication via their own offspring. Sterile workers and soldiers have no evolutionary strategy (as they do not replicate). They are offshoots of the evolutionary strategy expressed through the queen. None of these features apply to human societies. Especially not to human societies that aspire to any level of technological or other innovative dynamism. Biologist E. O. Wilson was correct <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/04/14/species/">when he said of</a> Communism, great idea, wrong species.<br /><br /><b>Problems of order</b><br />The final element of the evasion <i>troika</i> that the mutual worship of the ennobling golden, transformative future in progressive heads inclines progressives towards is profoundly discounting the problems of creating and maintaining social order; any social order.<br /><br />The problems of order extend well beyond the economic calculation problem, beyond accessing and creating resources and wealth. Human aggression is innate. We (generally) learn <a href="https://youtu.be/gMx-1tWIuF8">not to be aggressive</a>, but that does not always take. Hence the problems of crime; of protecting life, person and property.<br /><br />Human children are very biologically expensive to raise. We have never found a system superior for the flourishing of children to being raised <a href="https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/05/high-costs-fatherlessness/">by one’s biological parents</a>. And so on.<br /><br />Yet progressives regularly talk as if there is no inherent problem of information, incentives, public order, family structure. As long as folk with the right intent apply resources in the right way, it will all be fine. Defund the police becomes a natural narrative, if there are no inherent problems of social order. Regardless of <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/531386-understanding-black-americans-dont-ask-liberals">how much</a> homicide deaths <a href="https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/02/05/understanding_2020s_homicide_spike_659203.html">increase</a>.<br /><br /><b>Scene missing</b><br />Film-maker Mike Nayna likes to point out that progressive ideology has what <a href="https://twitter.com/mikenayna/status/1269443051774029824">he calls a</a> “scene missing” problem. There is the critique of what is. There is the extolling of what should be. But when it comes to explaining in detail how we get from where we are to that golden, transformative future, there is a blank. There is a scene missing in progressive political narratives.<br /><br />We can see all these not-grappling-with-the-awkward, “scene missing” problems in <i>The Communist Manifesto</i>, as is nicely set out <a href="https://youtu.be/j_MXSE3wUT4">here</a>. But this “scene missing” problem, this evasion of explaining the transition with any analytical seriousness, is pervasive in progressive thought.<br /><br />For here is the difficulty. If one was going to set out in detail how to get from what currently is to the golden future, what would one have to grapple with? The constraints of human nature, the constraints of wrestling value from nature, the constraints of creating and maintaining order. But, if you did that, it might turn out the golden, transformative future is not attainable. Which would have the confronting implication that the progressive status-strategy, the cognitive identity, the sense of meaning and purpose are all misplaced. Perhaps disastrously so.<br /><br />Hence, scene missing. Hence, the hand-waving evasions. Hence the rhetorical constructions used to cover analytical vacuity: <i>white supremacy, structural racism, dictatorship of the proletariat, false consciousness </i>… With critical social justice (“woke”) progressivism pushing the mad notions that society is all just structures of oppression, structures of power, inherently pervaded by racism, with no problems of order, social functionality, wrestling with nature or human nature driving what has evolved.<br /><br />Progressivism is forever generating the social science equivalents of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory"><strike>phlogiston</strike></a> [or, rather, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether" target="_blank">luminiferous aether</a>]. Analytically empty concepts without seriously analytical or empirical validity to cover the gaping holes where serious wrestling with the genuine problems that every single human society ever has had to wrestle with should be in progressive thought, but isn’t.</div><div><br />But such absence has been proving to be a huge rhetorical advantage. If the problems of human nature, of wrestling with nature, of maintaining social order are ruled out of consideration, there is no place to stand against the rhetorical power of commitment to the golden, transfornative future, of righteous intent. For that future can be as morally perfect as convenient and its perfection ennobles the ostentatious intent to march towards it. The intent to bring it about becomes rhetorical trumps. Any disagreement is an attack on the noble intent to do better.<br /><br />Maximising contempt for what is, and what has been achieved through history, maximises the moral glow of the golden, transformative future. Talking endlessly about the sins of Western civilisation, and sneering at any notion of it having achievements, serves the golden, transformative future status-strategy very well. This is what the process of selecting for the most effective status strategy has strongly tended to produce. Of course, if you cannot acknowledge, or even recognise, achievement then you are very unlikely to build anything genuinely favourable to human flourishing. If you characterise success as vice, you are likely to build a great deal of failure.<br /><br /><b>Institutions decaying</b><br />Hence anything that progressivism (i.e., thorough Leftism) dominates eventually goes bad. Because human nature does impose constraints, as does wresting subsistence and wealth from nature, as does creating and sustaining social order while the golden, transformative future status-strategy, with its contempt for what is or has been, blocks genuinely learning from the rich tapestry of human experience.***<br /><br />If you are not prepared to face the problems of human nature, of wrestling with nature, of social order seriously, if you treat dissent as illegitimate, if you close yourself off from discovery processes to protect your status strategy, your cognitive identity, your sense of meaning and purpose, your shared heroic narrative, then anything that folk like you dominate will become dysfunctional, with no response to the dysfunction except to double down on the ennobling worship of the golden, transformative future. That way lies massive losses in human well-being.<br /><br />With enough mutual worship of the golden, transformative future splendour-in-progressive-heads, any amount of tyranny, mass murder and mass death is possible. As we have seen again and again.<br /><br />For the moment, we are seeing a spreading pattern of progressive-led dysfunction in contemporary Western societies. Such as the collapse in productivity and quality of school systems, a collapse obscured by the growth of use of private tutors. (See examples <a href="https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites">here</a>, <a href="https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-refuse-to-stand-by-while-my-students?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter">here</a>, <a href="https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/you-have-to-read-this-letter">here</a> and a book length discussion <a href="https://www.connorcourtpublishing.com.au/SCHOOL-SUCKS-A-Report-on-the-State-of-Education-in-the-Politically-Correct-Era--MARK-LOPEZ-PhD_p_393.html">here</a>.) Such as the decay of the academy into increasingly fearful conformity. Such as the <a href="https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer">decay</a> of institutional media. Such as the decline of comics, film, television. And so on.<br /><br />Yet the current version of the progressive status strategy, arising out of the critical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism#Narrative_turn">constructivism</a> of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory">critical theory</a> and its derivatives, continues to go from strength to strength. Democracies seem to be unable to deal with <a href="https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-refuse-to-stand-by-while-my-students?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter">systematic institutional capture</a> by the progressive status strategy parading as righteousness. There may be a great deal of destruction of human well-being yet to come.<br /><br /><b><i>Added Notes</i></b><br /><br />*Alternatively, one can seek to remake human beings so that they suit the golden, transformative future. That ways lies mass killings and, potentially, eugenic engineering of the population.<br /><br />**The notion that profit is return to labour that labour does not receive also represents (and justifies) waving away the hard questions of wrestling with nature.<br /><br />***The commitment to the ennobling golden, transformative future also encourages progressives to adopt historical narratives that feed the sense of the splendour in their heads. Mythic history, setting up the right notions of historical villainy (and progressive moral heroism) is regularly generated and adopted. Such history is typically not much interested in the genuine complexities of the past. Then again, progressives are often not much interested in inconvenient complexities of the present either.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/scene-missing-progressivism-bcd554e11358" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-83107150771114059652021-06-12T17:22:00.000+10:002021-06-12T17:22:41.069+10:00The social dynamics of violence in scripture<i>Not only is the logic of belief not necessarily the logic of believers, the use of scripture is itself subject to evolutionary processes.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*MSdw3Dhe6GG8uh9dhIhLFw.png" /><i>Charles de Steuben, ‘Bataille de Poitiers en octobre 732', depicting Charles Martel confronting Abdul Rahman Al Gafiqi.</i></div><br />Educator and reform Muslim <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irshad_Manji">Irshad Manji</a> and evolutionary biologist and secular Jew <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein">Bret Weinstein</a> have a <a href="https://youtu.be/EHImNVAW_ko">very thoughtful discussion</a> about violence in scriptures and their different manifestation in (historical) Islam and Judaism. To state the obvious, there is a lot of violence in the <i>Quran</i> and there is a lot of violence in the <i>Torah</i>. Yet rabbinical Judaism, following the end of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_wars">Jewish revolts</a> against the Roman Empire, has a very different history of religious violence than does Islam.<br /><br />Well, than mainstream Sunni Islam. There are versions of Islam that have very similar trajectories to Rabbinical Judaism due to being historically embedded in very similar social dynamics and circumstances.<br /><br /><b>From Hebrews to Jews</b><br />Priestly Judaism (or, more accurately, the Yahweh worship of the Hebrews) was a violent religion. It was not, however, notably more violent than other religions of its time and place. It was also a religion of the Law of God, of law grounded in revelation, whose scriptures readily sanctified violence against other peoples and religions. (Including apostates within their own people.)<br /><br />The Jewish lands were conquered by the Romans, also a people of Law, but of law explicitly made by humans. Having Roman law, based on very different presumptions than that of the <i>Talmud</i>, effectively override the Law of God was profoundly offensive to Hebrew sensibilities. This periodically led to violent revolts that the Romans put down with their customary brutal thoroughness.<br /><br />Eventually, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohen#Destruction_of_the_Second_Temple">destruction of the Second Temple</a> saw the sacrificial role of the priests abandoned and the religious scholars, the rabbis, become the interpreters of scripture and the officiators of ritual. It also became clear that the Romans really meant it: they were prepared to deport, massacre, crucify and enslave whatever number of Hebrews were required to end revolts against Roman rule.<br /><br />So, the rabbis evolved a new approach whereby <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora">Diaspora Jews</a> were required to follow the Law of God but that law would be interpreted by carefully trained scholars in such a way as to permit the Jewish communities to survive and prosper as minority communities within gentile-dominated polities. Doing so while recognisably remaining themselves by remaining anchored in a tradition already many centuries old and which saw itself as reaching back to Creation itself.<br /><br /><b>Consequences</b><br />This socially and culturally evolved response to the clash between law grounded in revelation and law explicitly created by humans turned out to have monumental consequences. Christianity, evolving out of Judaism in a very law-concerned Empire, adopted the Roman notion that law, even Church law, was human, while developing its own priesthood.<br /><br />A few centuries later, Islam adopted law grounded in revelation interpreted by religious scholars. It never developed a priesthood as such.<br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccan_surah">Meccan Islam</a> took the rabbinical path of how to operate in a polity dominated by non-Muslims. But Muhammad became ruler of Medina, so the head of a polity; a wielder of violence who unified of Arabia by preaching and sword. The archetypal symbol of Muhammad is, after all, his sword. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medinan_surah">Medinan Islam</a> is a religion of rulership, of dominion.<br /><br /><i>Sharia</i>, the revelation-grounded system of law which evolved within the Islamic empire, is a system of law with no pre-imperial existence. It is also the only system of law that claims, by its nature, the right to apply to all humans everywhere. For it is the law of the Sovereign of the universe, discovered by trained scholars through the process of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiqh"><i>fiqh</i></a>, of Islamic jurisprudence. The key differences in one’s fundamental standing as a human being is between those who have voluntarily submitted to Allah’s sovereignty (Muslims), those who have submitted to the rulership of those who have submitted to Allah’s sovereignty, and so His law, (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi"><i>dhimmis</i></a>) and those who have failed to so submit.<br /><br />The clash between the Law of God and human law that convulsed the Hebrew lands of the Roman Empire is a clash whose consequences have reverberated across the entire history of Islam and Christendom and down to our present day. When <i>jihadis</i> kill, they do so in the name of the universal sovereignty of Allah.<br /><br /><b>Pastoralist origins</b><br />Moreover, Islam evolved in a polygynous, patrilineal, kin-group pastoralist society. Actually, that is mostly redundant. Almost every pastoralist society has been polygynous, patrilineal and organised via kin groups.<br /><br />Pastoral societies are polygynous because there is no reason inherent to pastoralism to evolve compulsory single-spouse marriage for elite males. On the contrary, that animals herds can increase undermines attempting to restrict the number of (usually male) heirs, or to maximise investment in the human capital of one’s offspring. That eliminates two powerful pressures for compulsory single-spouse marriage. While the value of extra connections encourages going for more wives, and more children, and so encourages polygyny.<br /><br />Pastoralist societies are patrilineal because one cannot look after animal herds while minding children, making herding a male activity with the animals being bequeathed to the next generation of males. (So down the patrilineal line.)<br /><br />Pastoralist societies are kin-group based as animal herds are mobile, so their protection is better managed through strong personal links (rather than territorial ones) that kin can provide, and provide better if related males are raised together.<br /><br />Hence the social selection pressures operating on pastoralist societies are for them to be polygynous, to be patrilineal and to have strong kin groups. The mobility such societies train people for encourages them to trade (to broaden their access to goods and services) and to raid (to broaden their access to goods and services). Both trading and raiding can improve male access to (sexual and fertility services) by improving their appeal as marriage partners within the society. Raiding also enables the seizing of women from outside the society. With the latter dispensing with any pesky consent difficulties.<br /><br />The Norse going-a-Viking were repeating this pattern on the seas, rather than across grasslands. (In the case of the Norse, polygyny operated through concubines, rather than multiple wives.)<br /><br />There was a significant pastoralist element to Hebrew society, which is why Jewish tribes flourished in Arabia up until the time of Muhammad. Their example, and the commonality in subsistence circumstances, made it much easier for Islam to adopt and adapt the Jewish model.<br /><br />But Hebrew society had also incorporated farmers and town dwellers. This gave monolatry (worship of one god) a powerful advantage, as it was a way of unifying farmers, herders and town-dwellers within the same ritual and moral community.<br /><br />This was particularly advantageous in the Middle East, as it has the most socially permeable ecological boundaries between farming and herding of anywhere in the world. It is the region of the world where farming land and pastureland are most intermingled, both physically and socially, with people shifting from farming to herding and back again, according to circumstances.<br /><br />This permability likely has a great deal to do with why monotheism is such a distinctive feature of the religious history of the Middle East. Any religious outlook able to unite people across the farming-herding divide had a powerful social selection advantage in the region. Monolatry, and even more monotheism (the claim that there is only one God), was thus adaptively favoured to evolve and prosper in the eco-geographical circumstances of the Middle East.<br /><br />Islam evolved in a polygynous, patrilineal, kin group, raiding society. <i>Sharia</i> evolved in an <i>imperial </i>polygynous, patrilineal, kin group, raiding society engaged in the most dramatically successful waves of religious conquest in history.<br /><br />The result is that <i>Sharia</i> not only sanctified polygyny, it also sanctified sexual predation against non-Muslim women. Doing so in the <i>Quran</i>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith"><i>Hadith</i></a> and the life of the Prophet, the key sources of Sharia. The 15 references in the <i>Quran</i> to those whom your right hand possess (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_slavery#Ma_malakat_aymanukum"><i>ma malakat aymanukum</i></a>) have been canonically taken to permit sex with captured women. Various <i>hadith</i> reinforce this. As does the actions of Muhammad when he ruled Medina, killing the males of defeated tribes and distributing the women and children as slaves to his followers. Hence <i>Sharia</i> holds that the marriage of a woman captured by a Muslim warrior is automatically annulled by the act of capture (obviously, so the captor can have sex with her).<br /><br />This set up <i>schemata</i> (patterns of belief) and <i>scripts</i> (patterns of action) that have operated across the entire history of Islam, and still have life within mainstream Sunni Islam. Yazidi girls raped by ISIS warriors <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html">reported that</a> their rapists cited religious justifications for their acts. Religious justifications that were <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rotherham-grooming-gang-sexual-abuse-muslim-islamist-racism-white-girls-religious-extremism-terrorism-a8261831.html">also reported</a> by the victims of “grooming gangs” in Britain.<br /><br />A polygynous society, where elite men have extra wives and concubines, generates lower status men who are effectively excluded from the marriage market. One classic response of such societies to this surplus of unattached men is “those people over there have women, take theirs”. A response almost invariably adopted by pastoralist societies and other raiding polygynous societies, such as the Norse. The difference is, Islam sanctified this response. Which had the further advantage of making it much easier to recruit <i>ghazis</i>, holy warriors, to operate on the borders of Islam; to raid infidels and soften the border lands up for the further expansion of Islam. Islam is the only human civilisation explicitly and systematically structured to be violently expansionary: i.e. imperial.<br /><br /><b>Dominion and practicality</b><br />Islam is structured to be an imperial religion of domination. If, however, dominion is not practical, due to being a permanent minority, then such minority versions of Islam are in the same position as post-diaspora Jews: minority followers of the law of God in polities dominated by others. Hence the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibadi_Islam">Ibadis</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isma" ilism="">Ismailis</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alevism">Alevis</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmadiyya">Ahmadi’s</a> generally look very “Jewish” in their behaviour and outlook: concentrating on the cohesion of their communities and avoiding being violent neighbours. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsis">Parsees</a> are an analogous case from outside the Mosaic religions.)<br /><br />In the right social circumstances, the <i>Quran</i> can turn out to be the basis of much the same social dynamics as the <i>Torah</i>.<br /><br />The Christian New Testament is considerably less violent in content than the <i>Torah</i>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_Bible"><i>Tanakh</i></a> or the <i>Quran</i>. Yet states Christian in religion and culture conquered almost the entire globe. That is because (1) those states competed fiercely, and violently, against each other, evolving to be highly effective states and (2) because imperialism is what states do when they can.<br /><br />The social dynamics of state competition mattered far more than the relatively pacific content of the Gospels and the Acts.<br /><br />So, scriptures on their own tell us much less than we might imagine. We have to consider how the use of scriptures evolves in different circumstances, thereby generating various social dynamics. Quite different scriptures can evolve very similar (or at least overlapping) social dynamics.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-social-dynamics-of-violence-in-scripture-41226f7aa0d" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.)</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-21972884035305641772021-06-11T17:33:00.002+10:002021-06-11T17:33:16.882+10:00Cousin marriage: it makes a difference which cousin<i>Cousin marriage in the Middle East works differently than does cousin marriage in South India.</i><div><br /><img height="433" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/4096/1*VlwZ5IflG9GJPcqOGWguMA.jpeg" width="640" /><br /><br />Dr Alice Evans has a <a href="https://www.draliceevans.com/post/why-are-southern-north-eastern-indian-states-more-gender-equal">wonderful blog post</a>, essay really, on why the situation of women in South India is generally better than that of women in North India. The piece is comprehensively researched and very well reasoned.<br /><br />I do however, have one quibble. It is with Dr Evans using cousin marriage in the Middle East to argue that cousin marriage in South India is not likely to be a significant explanatory factor in the comparatively better position of women in South India. The trouble with this is that cousin marriage in the Middle East is marriage within the lineage group, so therefore is <i>parallel</i> marriage.<br /><br />Given that kin groups in the Middle East are patrilineal (male line), women thereby marry male relatives within their own patri-lineage. Such marriages do not add to their kin connections but they also mean that women are not married into a completely different lineage. They are therefore not separated off from their natal kin.<br /><br />Such parallel marriages mean the women are not further disadvantaged in the way that marrying into a completely different patri-lineage can entail, which is why women in the Middle East are likely to favour cousin marriages. A favouring that might well matter more than expected in such patriarchal societies, as women have long been the marriage intermediaries in those societies. These being societies with a long history of sexual segregation.<br /><br />In South India, cousin marriages are <i>cross</i>-cousin marriages. That is, given that the kin groups are also patrilineal, they are marriages into a different patri-lineage with which there are already maternal kin connections.<br /><br />Such cross-cousin marriages mean that, while women are married into a different patri-lineage, their connections with their natal lineages are reinforced. Indeed, it is a sign that those female kin connections are valued.<br /><br />So women in South India acquire kin connections with such marriage but their natal connections retain significance. This is a stronger intermediary role than parallel-cousin marriage generally provides and gives them two sets of operative and valued kin connections to operate within and through. This puts them in a rather better position than women in North India.<br /><br />In North India, marriages are often arranged at least two villages away. So women are more thoroughly separated from their natal kin group and more completely dependant on their husband’s kin group and kin connections. It is a way of making the patri-lineage more coherent, likely as an adaptation to North India having a much greater history of invasion. It is, however, done so very much at the expense of women.<br /><br /><b>Marrying out, marrying in</b><br />Parallel (i.e. within kin group) marriages are actually quite unusual in human societies. Normally, kin groups enforce strong taboos against marrying within the kin group. This is typically enforced through strong ritual boundaries requiring differentiation between the spouse with the ritually significant ancestors and the spouse who is an import to the kin group.<br /><br />Such “ancestor worship” (though it is probably better understood as ancestor ritualisation) is incompatible with monotheism. Adoption of monotheism generally eliminates those ritual boundaries, leading to reasons to marry within the kin group becoming more socially dominant.<br /><br />Though not so much in the case of Christianity, which is antipathetic to kin groups and has a history of expansively anathematising marriage between relatives, though nowadays much less than it used to. A very good book on this is Michael Mitterauer's, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Why-Europe-Medieval-Origins-Special/dp/0226532534"><i>Why Europe?: the Medieval Origins of Its Special Path</i></a>.<br /><br />In the case of patri-lineages, marrying within the kin group means that daughters will be breeding warriors for the lineage, not for a different lineage. It also means that property (especially animal herds) remain within the kin group (as any <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_price">bride price or bride wealth</a> stays within the kin group) and that the genetic and kin-connection cohesion of the kin group will be increased.<br /><br />South India is not an area where monotheism is strong. So it retains the more normal pattern of kin groups marrying out (of the kin group). In the case of patrilineal groups, that means kin groups trade daughters. (Matrilineal kin groups trade sons.)<br /><br />In South India, it has been quite common for a man with an older sister to marry one of her daughters (i.e. a niece). Or else, the daughter of one of his mother’s siblings (i.e. a cousin). With the kin-connection consequences noted above. At the very least, they likely operate to facilitate or magnify the causal agents Dr Evans <a href="https://www.draliceevans.com/post/why-are-southern-north-eastern-indian-states-more-gender-equal">identifies</a>.<br /><br />So, while I agree cross-cousin marriage is not enough on its own to explain the better position of women in South India compared to North India, I would still argue that it helps to improve the situation of women in South India. Since parallel-cousin marriage in the Middle East is not a good analogy to cross-cousin marriage in South India, cousin marriage in the Middle East is not a good counter-argument against cousin marriage in South India having some significance for the relatively higher status of women compared to North India.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/cousin-marriage-it-makes-a-difference-which-cousin-e125db8d2b2" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]<br /><div class="ef cj fi jw w pa fk ju jy" data-test-id="post-sidebar" style="box-sizing: inherit; opacity: 0; pointer-events: none; position: fixed; top: 0px; transform: translateY(86px); width: 1404px; will-change: opacity, transform;"><div class="n p" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: flex; justify-content: center;"><div class="ap aq ar as at au av w" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 64px; max-width: 1192px; min-width: 0px; width: 1192px;"><div class="jz n ak" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: flex; flex-direction: column; width: 197px;"><div class="cj" style="box-sizing: inherit; pointer-events: none;"><div style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div class="kb s" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 32px;"><div class="kc s" style="box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 5px;"><a class="bv bw bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bx by bq bz ca" href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/?source=post_sidebar--------------------------post_sidebar-----------" rel="noopener" style="border: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; fill: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><h2 class="ba ka dp bc dm eh do" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #292929; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 500; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Lorenzo M Warby</h2></a></div><div class="kd s" style="box-sizing: inherit; padding-top: 2px;"><p class="ba b bb bc bd" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #757575; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px;">An accidental small businessman who reads a lot and thinks about what he reads, sometimes productively. Currently writing a book on marriage.</p></div></div><div class="fg ko s ao" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-top-color: rgb(230, 230, 230); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; position: relative;"><div class="kb cy s" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 32px; margin-top: 32px;"><span class="qo mu" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 8px; text-transform: uppercase;"><span class="ba b ke bc bd" face="sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #757575; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">LORENZO M WARBY FOLLOWS</span></span><ul class="qp" style="box-sizing: inherit; list-style: none none; margin: 8px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><li class="qq qr" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: grid; grid-template-columns: auto 1fr auto;"><div class="qs s" style="box-sizing: inherit; padding-right: 12px;"><a href="https://jjpryor.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="J.J. Pryor" class="s ck qt qu" height="20" src="https://miro.medium.com/fit/c/40/40/1*gAKKzLSV0drH2nH9Bvl_JQ.jpeg" style="border-bottom-left-radius: 50%; border-bottom-right-radius: 50%; border-top-left-radius: 50%; border-top-right-radius: 50%; box-sizing: inherit; display: block; height: 20px; vertical-align: middle; width: 20px;" width="20" /></a></div><section class="do" style="box-sizing: inherit; word-break: break-word;"><span class="qv mu s" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: block; margin-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 10px;"><a class="bv bw bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bx by bq bz ca" href="https://jjpryor.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="border: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; fill: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><div style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div aria-describedby="58" aria-hidden="false" aria-labelledby="58" class="ea" role="tooltip" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block;"><h4 class="ba b ke bc kf kg kh ki kj kk kl bd km" style="-webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-line-clamp: 1; box-sizing: inherit; color: #757575; display: -webkit-box; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; max-height: 20px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; word-break: break-all;">J.J. Pryor</h4></div></div></a></span></section></li><li class="qq qr" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: grid; grid-template-columns: auto 1fr auto;"><div class="qs s" style="box-sizing: inherit; padding-right: 12px;"><a href="https://nurainaly.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Noorain Hassan, BMS" class="s ck qt qu" height="20" src="https://miro.medium.com/fit/c/40/40/1*ReiGa53mIb9xv7SEShkysQ@2x.jpeg" style="border-bottom-left-radius: 50%; border-bottom-right-radius: 50%; border-top-left-radius: 50%; border-top-right-radius: 50%; box-sizing: inherit; display: block; height: 20px; vertical-align: middle; width: 20px;" width="20" /></a></div><section class="do" style="box-sizing: inherit; word-break: break-word;"><span class="qv mu s" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: block; margin-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 10px;"><a class="bv bw bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bx by bq bz ca" href="https://nurainaly.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="border: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; fill: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><div style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div aria-describedby="59" aria-hidden="false" aria-labelledby="59" class="ea" role="tooltip" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block;"><h4 class="ba b ke bc kf kg kh ki kj kk kl bd km" style="-webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-line-clamp: 1; box-sizing: inherit; color: #757575; display: -webkit-box; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; max-height: 20px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; word-break: break-all;">Noorain Hassan, BMS</h4></div></div></a></span></section></li><li class="qq qr" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: grid; grid-template-columns: auto 1fr auto;"><div class="qs s" style="box-sizing: inherit; padding-right: 12px;"><a href="https://ryanfan.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Ryan Fan" class="s ck qt qu" height="20" src="https://miro.medium.com/fit/c/40/40/1*1_U-Qs59Fb0DTW5bhZG9Eg@2x.jpeg" style="border-bottom-left-radius: 50%; border-bottom-right-radius: 50%; border-top-left-radius: 50%; border-top-right-radius: 50%; box-sizing: inherit; display: block; height: 20px; vertical-align: middle; width: 20px;" width="20" /></a></div><section class="do" style="box-sizing: inherit; word-break: break-word;"><span class="qv mu s" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: block; margin-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 10px;"><a class="bv bw bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bx by bq bz ca" href="https://ryanfan.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="border: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; fill: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><div style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div aria-describedby="60" aria-hidden="false" aria-labelledby="60" class="ea" role="tooltip" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block;"><h4 class="ba b ke bc kf kg kh ki kj kk kl bd km" style="-webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-line-clamp: 1; box-sizing: inherit; color: #757575; display: -webkit-box; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; max-height: 20px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; word-break: break-all;">Ryan Fan</h4></div></div></a></span></section></li><li class="qq qr" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: grid; grid-template-columns: auto 1fr auto;"><div class="qs s" style="box-sizing: inherit; padding-right: 12px;"><a href="https://thedreamerfromafar.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Belinda Mallasasime" class="s ck qt qu" height="20" src="https://miro.medium.com/fit/c/40/40/1*jFPJ50FEIAnL64-WccUIog.jpeg" style="border-bottom-left-radius: 50%; 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display: block; height: 20px; vertical-align: middle; width: 20px;" width="20" /></a></div><section class="do" style="box-sizing: inherit; word-break: break-word;"><span class="qv mu s" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: block; margin-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 10px;"><a class="bv bw bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bx by bq bz ca" href="https://andrei-tapalaga.medium.com/?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="border: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; fill: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><div style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div aria-describedby="62" aria-hidden="false" aria-labelledby="62" class="ea" role="tooltip" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block;"><h4 class="ba b ke bc kf kg kh ki kj kk kl bd km" style="-webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-line-clamp: 1; box-sizing: inherit; color: #757575; display: -webkit-box; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; max-height: 20px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; word-break: break-all;">Andrei Tapalaga ✒️</h4></div></div></a></span></section></li></ul><p class="ba b ke bc bd" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #757575; font-family: sohne, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px;"><a class="bv bw bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bx by bq bz ca" href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/following?source=blogrolls_sidebar-----e125db8d2b2--------------------------------" rel="noopener" style="border: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; fill: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">See all (361</a></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div style="box-sizing: inherit;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div></div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-91068591022913899182021-06-10T10:41:00.000+10:002021-06-10T10:41:32.232+10:00Feminism is grounded in Christian social dynamics<i>The Women’s movement is a product of conditions that existed in Western society but nowhere else.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="640" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1408/1*qj7qVKiTz02BaAStJipNnA.jpeg" width="466" /></div><br />Feminism was a product of North-Western Europe (and the settler Anglosphere) for very specific cultural and institutional reasons. The women’s movement had to come out of a culture which already gave women’s choices sufficient standing, where elite women could organise and deploy resources, where kin-group loyalties did not dominate and constrain, and where explicit political bargaining was already part of the institutional landscape. This combination of features occurred in no other cultures other than in the societies that descended from Medieval Latin Christendom.<br /><br />As I noted in <a href="https://lorenzo-thinkingoutaloud.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-wild-west-as-natural-experiment.html" target="_blank">my previous post</a>, European and Chinese settlers in the American West provided a revealing natural experiment about the difference in that status of, and possibilities for, women in a society that had sanctified single-spouse marriage and (apart from some fringe regions) eliminated kin groups (Christian Europe and its descendant societies) as against a society with polygynous marriage and powerful kin groups (China).<br /><br />The Church’s sanctification of a women’s consent as necessary for marriage elevated the status of women’s choices. As did the Church’s (admittedly bequest-hungry) support for the property and testamentary rights of women. Single-spouse marriage meant that elite women habitually had access to resources and were acknowledged as public organisers of resources.<br /><br />The lack of kin groups required the development of alternative mechanisms for social cooperation. It also meant that women’s fertility was not an asset of their kin group, so giving more power to their consent being required for marriage.<br /><br />Women’s fertility being an asset of their kin group — and connections within the kin group being essential for social standing, risk management, income prospects, wealth protection, etc — are fundamental drivers of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing">(dis)honour killings</a>; fatal enforcement of the restrictions on choices for women, with family members killing their own daughters in order to protect their standing within the kin group and local community.<br /><br /><b>Open source law</b><br />That in Christian Europe law was human (i.e. was not based on revelation) meant that those cooperative mechanisms could be entrenched in law, and so could the bargains they came to. A long history of explicit political bargaining developed with associated institutional structures. Structures that were most extensively established in what became Parliamentary states.<br /><br />In both Islam and Brahmin civilisation, law was based on revelation and dominated by religious scholars (<i>ulema</i>) or priestly castes (Brahmins). A legal system can create new precedents. It cannot create new revelations. While the varying capacity to enforce rulings on people and groups affects the evolution of revelation-based legal systems, as does having to deal with new circumstances, it is not possible within revelation-based law to get together and legally create, ratify or entrench new social bargains. This made it much harder to develop alternative social-cooperation mechanisms to kin groups.<br /><br />Moreover, neither <i>Sharia</i> nor Brahmin law were positive for the status of women. <i>Sharia</i> famously weights the testimony of male and female witnesses differently. While <i>Manusmrti,</i> the most famous Brahmin legal source, explicitly banned women from being independent and required wives to threat their husbands as if they were gods. This is, after, the legal-religious culture that gave us <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)"><i>suttee</i></a> (aka <i>sati)</i>.<br /><br />Between kin groups treating the fertility of women as an asset, dishonour killings, polygynous marriage lowering the status of women, and law enforcing (even sanctifying) subordinate status on women, other state-society civilisations were far more patriarchal than Christian Europe and its derivatives.<br /><br />In the Christian Eurosphere (Europe plus the regions where European settlers became the dominant population), the women’s movement utilised available social status, patterns and resources in new ways. It was still, however, very much a mobilising of the cultural and institutional resources that were available to be used in such a way. Hence, there is often relatively little time gap in Western societies between all men getting the vote and women getting the vote.<br /><br /><b>The emancipation sequence</b><br />The women’s movement was part of what we might call the <i>Emancipation Sequence</i> (banning the slave trade, banning slavery, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_emancipation">Jewish Emancipation</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_emancipation">Catholic Emancipation</a>, adult male suffrage, women’s suffrage, second-wave feminism, civil rights, queer emancipation …). Two centuries of mass movements organised to expand the legal rights and social participation of previously excluded groups, utilising the structures and possibilities within societies based on Christian social dynamics.<br /><br />Other civilisations produced mass movements, but they were invariably organised around religious and mystical (even occult) ideas, as other civilisations lacked well-established mechanisms for such explicit political bargaining.<br /><br />The key fight of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was over women getting unilateral control over their fertility. This put second-wave feminism in direct opposition to the Church and Christian sexual mores and teachings. This has obscured how much the women’s movement was very much a product of specifically Christian doctrines and consequent social dynamics. Hence feminism in other cultures being both derivative, and somewhat pale shadows, of its Western origins.<br /><br />The retreat from moral universalism that used to be a feature of progressive politics has seen Western feminists increasingly retreat from concern for women from other cultures, using the “but that is their culture” excuse. How far would the Western women’s movement have got if their opponents could simply close down their claims with “but that is our culture”? The women’s movement may have arising in Western societies but it also did very much seek to change key aspects of Western culture. It is very odd for contemporary feminists to deny that opportunity and lever to women from other cultures.<br /><br />The women’s movement was also built on the Christian roots of Western culture and social dynamics. History, it’s complicated.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/feminism-is-grounded-in-christian-social-dynamics-809203007338" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2197051945822486684.post-7283871313077931192021-06-09T11:21:00.001+10:002021-06-09T11:21:08.776+10:00The Wild West as natural experiment<i>In the American West, both Euro-American and Chinese-American societies had a shortage of women: but that had very different consequences for women.</i><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="640" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1446/1*3N7ymPB-L4ybPxq8OybZeg.jpeg" width="452" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Annie Oakley in the 1880s.</i></div><br />Thanks to the Christian sanctification of single-spouse marriage, its insistence that a woman’s consent was required for a valid marriage, and the disappearance (under the pressure of Christianity and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism" target="_blank">manorialism</a>) of kin groups from Europe (apart from the Celtic and Balkan fringes, where manorialism did not reach), women had much higher status in Euro-American society than was the pattern in polygynous societies with kin groups, such as Islam (which permitted multiple wives) and China (which permitted multiple concubines).<br /><br />In polygynous societies, particularly ones where men controlled the productive assets, and so wives were dependant on the incomes of their husbands, the wives (and concubines) of an elite male competed with each other for the prospects for their children. (Mistresses are concubines within a single-spouse marital system whose children therefore have no inheritance rights.)<br /><br />In kin-group societies, particularly patrilineal kin-group societies, the fertility of women was an asset of their kin group. So, women tended to be married off early, to maximise the value of their fertility and to minimise the chance of something unfortunate happening. Frequently to significantly older men. Especially as it often took time for men to get together the assets and social standing to make them good (multiple) marriage prospects.<br /><br />By contrast, in Christian society, an elite man would only have one wife, the joint parent of his heir and other legitimate children. She did not have to share that status of her husband with any other woman. It was thus common for even elite European Christian men to leave their wife in charge when they travelled. (Not something that was sensible for a husband with multiple wives to do.) </div><div><br /></div><div>A Christian wife, including of an elite male, was typically responsible for managing the household. Women having publicly acknowledged control of significant resources was a normal part of social dynamics. Both the Latin (Catholic) and Greek (Orthodox) Church held that a woman’s consent was required for marriage, with the lack of kin groups giving that consent greater weight.<br /><br />In the American Wild West in the later part of the C19th, it being a frontier society, there was a shortage of women. This was true among both settlers of European origins and those of Chinese origins. The consequences for the women of this shortage, however, differed dramatically between the two cultures.<br /><br />In Euro-American society in the West, married women tended to be treated with considerable deference. There was prostitution, but it was run by women. The prostitutes often made good incomes and pioneered social freedoms that contemporary American and Western women take for granted. The madams were often successful businesspeople: frequently, one of the most successful business people in their town. (Thaddeus Russell’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Renegade-History-United-States/dp/1416576134"><i>A Renegade History of the United States</i></a> is a useful source for this social history.)<br /><br />Western States pioneered votes for women, explicitly in the hope of attracting more women to their State. (The main argument against votes for women was that they would vote for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States" target="_blank">Prohibition</a>: which, of course, turned out to be true.)<br /><br />In other words, in Euro-American frontier society, the women reaped the benefits of their scarcity premium.<br /><br />The picture in polygynous-with-kin-groups (i.e. clans) Chinese society in the American West was very different. There, elite Chinese men mate-hoarded, regularly having a wife and concubines. The remaining women were largely forced into prostitution, controlled by the tongs or triads (which are substitute clans). So, in Chinese-American society in the American West, the scarcity premium of women was largely harvested by men.<br /><br />As the natural experiment of the American Wild West demonstrated, what marriage system a culture had, whether it was polygynous or had a single-spouse marriage system, and whether it was based on kin groups (particularly patrilineal ones) or not, had quite dramatic effects on the status and prospects for women.</div><div><br /></div><div>[Cross-posted <a href="https://lorenzomwarby.medium.com/the-wild-west-as-natural-experiment-503d25d2a299" target="_blank">from Medium</a>.]</div>Lorenzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00305933404442191098noreply@blogger.com0