Cargo Cults

I find Cargo Cults rather fascinating.

Briefly, once upon a time, folks living on small isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean were minding their own business, tending their little gardens or hunting/gathering/fishing, when World War II invaded.

When the soldiers weren’t busy shooting each other in front of the natives’ huts, they were generally busy building airstrips so they could land their planes, building hospitals, supplying the troops, etc. Sometime the troops were re-supplied by air–and sometimes these bags of food happened to drop into the local villages, rather than the hungry troops.

Then WWII ended, and all of the newcomers left. Goodby went the planes and the hospitals and the bags of food from the sky. And the locals, confused, tried their darndest to coax the newcomers back. They built runways and wicker planes, carved radio headsets and rifles out of wood. They reenacted the steps the newcomers had taken to make the sky gods send bags of food, and prayed to their new god, “John Frum.”

It appears that no one had bothered to tell these guys what the hell was going on.

It is easy to look down one’s nose at an ignorant person. But it is hard to understand shit if no one will tell you what is going on.

The “Other” is but a Foil for the Self

The “other”, somewhat by definition, is not someone you are particularly well-acquainted with. This is not generally a matter of malice–there are about 7.5 billion people in this world, and you’re only capable of really getting to know a couple hundred, at best. Even if you spent years of your life living in different countries, you’d still only manage to sample a small selection of the world’s people. For better or worse, most people out there are strangers.

People profess to care a lot about strangers. In a recent example, lots of people who aren’t gay and do not live in Indiana or run bakeries became very worried about laws affecting gay people and bakeries in Indiana. Your particular opinion on the subject is, I’m sure, absolutely the correct one, but that’s beside my point–the point is, it’s highly unlikely that you, the reader of this post, are actually affected by the legislation or even know anyone who is, just because the chances that you live in Indiana and are a baker or are gay are low. Your opinions are basically in support of (or against) someone else–total strangers.

There are three reasons to be skeptical of just about any conversation that hinges heavily on professed interest in the well-being of strangers:

1. Low information: We aren’t there; we aren’t on the ground; we don’t know these people and what they’re really going through. We’re getting our information second or third or more-hand. There is always a good chance that we are completely wrong.

2. No negative impact from being wrong: If I advocate for a water-conservation strategy for California that turns out to be totally wrong, Californians will suffer, not me. If I advocate a bad foreign policy position, foreigners will suffer, not me. If I advocate for laws that harm people or businesses in Indiana, I remain unharmed.

3. People don’t really care about strangers: Most people care deeply about their close friends and family, their pets, and some groups they identify with, like “Harley riders,” “Linux users,” or Muslims. They don’t actually care that much about strangers. The average American, for example, spends more money feeding cats than feeding starving children in Africa.

All of which means that even the best-intentioned people are often completely wrong, and factors other than rationally constructed, reasonably cautious, genuine concern for others tends to motivate us without us even noticing.

The myth of the “Noble Savage” is a fine example. It is generally credited to Rousseau, though probably someone else thought of the idea before he did, but the idea didn’t really gain too much currency while Euros while still busy killing “savages.” Other or not, you’re unlikely to be inclined to romanticize people you’re killing, and some folks–headhunters, cannibals, the Aztecs, King Gezo of the Benin Empire–were actually pretty horrifying. The notion that life in the “state of nature” was “nasty, brutish, and short,” had a lot of merit.

Still, neither Hobbes nor Rousseau (nor Locke) was actually advocating policies meant to affect “savages”; they utilize notions of the primitive “other” to advocate policies for their own societies.

Between lurid tales of head-hunting cannibals and depictions of dire, third-world poverty, it is pretty easy to see how people used these ideas to boost notions of Euro-exceptionalism and justify slavery, colonialism, war, and other horrors.

After WWII, people were justly pretty horrified at Euros and stopped believing Euro culture was all that–noble, enlightened Europeans looked just as bad as everybody else on the planet, except that now some of us were armed with nukes instead of pointy sticks and rocks, which is a pretty worrying situation.

So the savages got re-written. Anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, even commercials urging people not to litter began pushing the new narrative that non-Euros were, to put it plainly, better than Euros. American Indians became spiritual curators of nature; stone-age people became peaceful matriarchists; ethnographies were written portraying hunter-gatherer tribes as bastions of non-violent cooperation.

Many of the new narratives were total, factual nonsense. Indians don’t have an exceptional environmental record (though they did historically lack the tech and density levels to do too much damage.) There was no universal stone-age matriarchy. And most hunter-gatherers actually have pretty high murder rates.

But that’s all beside the point; that was never the point. No one wrote ethnographies about the Bushmen with the intention of somehow affecting the Bushmen (who couldn’t read them, anyway.) The point of all these stories is to change the self; to influence one’s own society to rise to the level of these mythic, noble savages.

This is the purpose of most myths: to instruct people in proper morality and inspire them to behave well. Done well, myths probably aren’t particularly problematic.

There are some problems to watch out for, though:

1. The “other” isn’t actually mythic. They are real people, and claiming total nonsense about them can have real effects on them (good or bad).
2. A mythos of self-hate can do actual harm to yourself/the people you were trying to inspire to be better.
3. I have an irrational affection for honesty.

(I suppose, 4. Saying really incorrect things about other people can make you sound dumb, but this is a minor issue.)

A lot of our tribal signaling (ie, “politics”) is conducted via expressing opinions about the other. Homosexuality, as previously referenced, is a good example of this; gay folks are only about 3% of the population (and gay people who want to get married are an even smaller %,) so most people expressing opinions on the subject don’t actually know that many gay people. If they turn out to be wrong, well, it’s not them and it’s not their friends, so there’s not that much incentive to be correct. But if socially signalling group membership is of direct benefit to the individual (which it generally is,) then people will signal group membership by saying whatever is useful to say about others–and reality be damned.

Pasting on our Plastic Smiles

Yes, my friends, I went out and socialized this weekend.

It was awful.

Don’t get me wrong. I can socialize. I can paste on a plastic smile and make appropriate small talk. I’ve been to dinner parties with professors and hung out with hobos. I just don’t necessarily enjoy socializing.

The area I stayed in is one of the whitest in the country, an island accessible only by a ferry ride on which I saw a woman wearing a dress so ugly it could only have been horribly expensive and a Rolls Royce, the kind of place where a little cabin in the woods is worth a million dollars. The folks I stayed with commented on how nice it was that the $25 ferry boat toll “keeps the riff-raff off the island” and have framed pictures of Obama in their house.

Well, there is no $25 toll to my community, so the riff-raff comes here. The folks I visited can vote for more immigration and bussing and section 8 housing, and it has no effect on them, because they live in an all-white million dollar community accessible only by ferry. And if some poor or middle class person says, “Hey, this has bad effects on me!” they look down their noses a and call that person racist.

Rich and poor alike are barred from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges, and rich and poor alike may only avoid crime, environmental destruction, and their wages being driven into the toilet by purchasing million dollar homes on exclusive islands.

These people have no fucking shame.

The Past Makes ISIS Look Good

“The April 20, 1859 edition of the Macon Messenger [1] carried a short obituary notice for King Gezo stating, “…His majesty, the King of Dahomey, the great negro seller of Africa, has departed this life. He was in the habit of ransacking all the neighboring African kingdoms, for the purpose of making captives, whom he sold to the slavers. At his funeral obsequies, his loving subjects manifested their sorrow by sacrificing eight hundred negroes to his memory. He is succeeded by his son, King Gezo II.”1. Marriages and Obituaries From the Macon Messenger; Willard R. Rocker 1988King Gezo’s soldiers also did a lot of beheading. Oh, yes, many of them were women, members of the “Dahomey Amazons,” so I guess they’re the sorts of folks that academics like to hold up as shining examples of how gender egalitarianism dominated the world before evil Europeans stepped in and changed everything.

Of course, many of those women soldiers were foreign captives or child soldiers forced into the army by their families, so I find it difficult to get too excited about female empowerment that’s basically jut slavery.

Reality is a Social Construct

I agree that gender is a social construct. So is sex. (So is the other kind of sex.) So is species. So is “fish”. So is blue. So is reality.

People say “X is a social construct” as though this were some deep, profound statement about this thing being actually some form of mass delusion.

All “socially constructed” really means is that the definition of a word–or concept–is agreed upon via some form of common consensus. Thus, the meaning of words can be changed if everyone decides to do so.

“Gay” was once socially constructed to mean “happy.” Now, by popular consensus, “gay” means something else. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, homosexuality and pedophilia were conceptually linked–we would say, homosexuality was socially constructed to include pedophilia. Today, the two terms are not seen as synonymous–the social construction has changed.

You ever notice that “red onions” are purple? Our socially constructed categories of “red” and “purple” have changed.

We all filter the raw material data of reality through the ideas, concepts, patterns, and categories already in our heads–our assumptions about the world can lead two different people to have radically different experiences of the exact same physical reality.

This is a natural effect of language being language, rather than, say, rocks. It is not a profound statement. It is a caution that we may be led astray at times by conceptual categories, our categories/definitions may need occasional updating in light of new data, or that edge cases may not always fit neatly into broad categories.

Most people understand this intuitively, as part of how interfacing between our fallible little selves and reality works. That reality does not always conform exactly to our notions about it is confirmed every time we stub a toe.

When people start making a big deal out of social constructivism, it is natural to think this must be some big, profound, important insight, otherwise they wouldn’t be going on for so long.

But people only pull out this argument when they want to deny the existence of actual reality, not when trying to argue that your notion of “ornamental shrub” is socially constructed and you should plant a blueberry bush.

Reality exists, no matter how we care to conceptualize it and organize the data we’re getting about it. Most categories that weren’t invented for the sake of a novel (“elves” probably are totally made up,) exist because they serve some sort of functional purpose. Being able to call someone “male” or “female,” “black” or “white” or “Bantu” or “Japanese” allows me to convey a bundle of information to the listener–a feature of language obvious to virtually everyone who has ever engaged in conversation, except to folks trying to eliminate such words from the language on the grounds that they are made up and so carry no information.

A Zombie-Free Uncanny Valley

Maybe the Uncanny Valley has nothing to do with avoiding sick/dead people, maybe nothing to do with anything specifically human-oriented at all, but with plain-ol’ conceptual category violations? Suppose you are trying to divide some class of reality into two discrete categories, like “plants” and “animals” or “poetry” and “prose”. Edge cases that don’t fit neatly into either category may be problematic, annoying, or otherwise troubling. Your brain tries to cram something into Category A, then a new data point comes along, and you switch to cramming it into Category B. Then more data and back to A. Then back to B. This might happen even at a subconscious level, flicking back and forth between two categories you normally assign instinctively, like human and non-human, forcing you to devote brain power to something that’s normally automatic. This is probably stressful for the brain.

In some cases, edge cases may be inconsequential and people may just ignore them; in some cases, though, group membership is important–people seem particularly keen on arguments about peoples’ inclusion in various human groups, hence accusations that people are “posers” or otherwise claiming membership they may not deserve.

Some people may prefer discreet categories more strongly than others, and so be more bothered by edge cases; other people may be more mentally flexible or capable of dealing with a third category labeled “edge cases”. It’s also possible that some people do not bother with discreet categories at all.

It would be interesting to test people’s preference for discreet categories, and then see if this correlates with disgust at humanoid robots or any particular political identities.

It would also be interesting to see if there are ways to equip people with different conceptual paradigms for dealing with data that better accommodate edge cases; a “Core vs. Periphery” approach may be better in some cases than discreet categories, for example.

Oops, Looks like it was People, not Pots

There’s an exciting new study on Bronze Age genetics that you’ve probably already heard about but I’m gonna post about anyway because stuff like this is kind of like our core competency around here.

Summary: Scientist people sequenced genomes (did fancy lab things with genetics) on 101 dead Europeans/Asians from a few thousand years ago, to try to figure out who they were and where they came from.

One of the big anthro/archeology debates over the past 70 years or so has been whether the different layers of cultural artifacts (eg, pots) represent things being traded while people stay put, or people invading and bringing their new stuff with them.

To put it in a modern context, if you saw a picture of people from Papua New Guinea taken in 1900, wearing traditional tribal clothes, and then saw a picture taken a few decades later of people from Papua New Guinea wearing Levi’s and T-shirts, you might wonder if the people of PNG had gotten some new clothes, or if some people wearing Levi’s had gone to PNG.

The archaeological assumption pre-1940 or so was generally that different layers of cultural artifacts represented actually different groups of people, who had probably invaded and slaughtered the previous group of people. For a variety of reasons that you can probably figure out on your own, this view fell into disrepute around the mid 1940s, and so was replaced with the peaceful assumption that new cultural artifacts probably spread primarily through trade, not warfare. This is expressed through the phrase, “Pots, not people,” meaning that the pots were moving around, not the people.

So now we can sequence ancient genomes and shit, so we can actually take a look at the people in ancient burials and try to figure out if people in Layer of Pots A are related to people in Layer of Pots B, or if they are a totally different group of people. This is like squinting at the photographs of Papua New Guineans and trying to figure out if the people wearing the clothes look like they come from the same group, but with lab tools and science.

From an archaeology/anthropology perspective, this is big stuff people have been debating about for over a century.

Conclusions: The Yamnaya are the Indo-Europeans (or proto-Indo-Europeans.) They started out around the Ukraine, then about 4,000 years ago, they spread out (cause they had horses and wagons and chariots and such with wheels,) toward the west and east. In Europe they became the Corded Ware Culture. The Corded Ware may have headed toward the Urals and became some of the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians, but that’s still fuzzy.

The Yamnaya had high (relatively) rates of lactose tolerance, so they probably helped spread that gene/the gene helped spread them. Blond hair and blue eyes are not Yamnaya traits–those came from elsewhere. They probably had pale skins, but so did most of the people already in Europe, so they didn’t change that.

I had already figured the Yamnaya were the PIEs (along with a bunch of other people paying even vague attention to the field,) but apparently my rough mental estimate of the time frame was off. 4,000 years ago is not that long–we have quite abundant records of life 2,000 years ago, so imagine what sorts of records or rumors those Greeks and Romans had about life 2,000 years before themselves.

There is much that we once naively took as fact, then skeptically decided was myth, then decided was fact again, like the existence of Troy. (Of course, there is also much that has turned out to be actually false. Like Herodotus’s dog-sized ants.) Perhaps some more of what seems mere myth in the Greek and Roman accounts will turn out to have some basis in history.

On the eastern end of the geographic range they surveyed, the steppe-folks out there were later replaced with a more Asian population that looks more closely related to the Native Americans (possibly descended from a population ancestral to both them and the Native Americans.)

I don’t know yet just how violent the invasion was–the existing European population was not wiped out, a la the Dorset. The groups mixed; modern Europeans (and many Asians) are a mixture of many population waves. But we do know now that these were people, not just their pots.

In 6th Grade, I Prayed Every Day for God to Turn me into a Mexican

Then, I thought, I would have friends.

In retrospect, if god had turned me into an Indian, I think I would have just about died of joy. I fucking loved Indians. Alas, scouring my family tree didn’t reveal even one great-grandparent who could conceivably have been a Cherokee princess.*

For irrelevant reasons, I got sent to a ghetto school for sixth grade. I had no friends at this place. The whites wanted nothing to do with me. The blacks were openly hostile. A few of the Mexicans were friendly, but when it came to recess, they played with each other, not me. And besides, they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t know much Spanish.

If only I were Mexican, I thought. If only I woke up tomorrow with beautiful black hair and brown skin, then I could have friends and my classmates wouldn’t hit me.

Sadly, god was not forthcoming. I was stuck with whiteness, pale, useless, disgusting. Maggots are white, I thought.

For some reason my parents tacked up on the wall a portrait I drew of myself in art class. The portrait was supposed to express my misery. Every time I walked past it, I thought, Why do they have that thing on the wall? They never understood.

By middle school, I’d latched onto an identity that I could reasonably fake. It wasn’t really mine, but it was close. I at least had the right facial features, and was legally related (through adoption) to some people from that part of the world, if you went back enough generations. This became my obsession. I studied the language. I saved up my allowance to purchase traditional costumes. I read histories and novels; devoured the music. I talked endlessly about my heritage, no doubt annoying the everliving shit out of everyone around me. (No wonder no one liked me.) I even dyed my hair to look more like my ethnic ideal and lied about my eye color.

In retrospect, that was pretty dumb. But I was a kid, lonely and desperate. The people around me had culture, community, history, identity, pride. And I wanted that. I wanted something to call my own–my own music, my own history, my own country.

The place where I grew up was, obviously, not terribly pleasant or special to me. “Whiteness” is not a trait whites are taught to be proud of; “white music” or “white history” are not things that I was aware of as part of my heritage. On top of that, I came from a part of the country with a reputation for backwardness and bigotry, also not things I was proud of. Ethnically, I do not really have a particular European country I can claim as my own–I am not a majority English or French or German or Hungarian or anything.

As a statistical outlier in many ways, I don’t fit in terribly well with most people, except with other outliers like myself. (Finding such outliers is, I suppose, one of the purposes of this blog.) Not fitting in and what that does to your psyche is a thing I understand.

I have known other people like myself–other people who, at some point in their lives, desperately wanted to be part of an ethnic group they weren’t born in to, leading to what an outside observer would call, “talking all the damn time about it.” I suspect Dolezal experienced something similar. I suspect she just wanted to fit in with the people she loved being with and an identity to claim as her own. Our politics may differ, but I still feel really sorry for her.

Scratch a dozen whites, and I bet six of them secretly wish they could be something they aren’t. That’s why so many of them lie about being Irish, twisting one possibly Catholic grandparent or great-grandparent into a claim that they practically hopped off the land o’ blarney yesterday. No one wants to admit to being mostly English or German, even if they are.

I am struggling to come up with a neat and tidy conclusion to this post. I have obviously come to a point where I am comfortable admitting actual reality, and enough distance from the loneliness to think I was once kind of funny. I have some positive thoughts associated with various accomplishments of groups I have some kinship with. And I am an adult, busy with the everyday concerns of work, friends, family, etc.

But I look at my kids and wonder what sort of identity would make them happy.

 

*According to 23 and Me, I may actually have a sliver of Indian ancestry, but it’s pretty far back.

If you’re not my enemy, then you’re my friend, right? The white misperception of racial crossing

Whites–especially whites of my generation or slightly older–were explicitly taught (as kids and sometimes as adults) that there are no differences between racial groups; that all racial groups are friends; that it’s a small world after all. Our celebrities held concerts encouraging us to donate money to starving children in Africa, because, “We are the world.” We were promised a future of inter-racial harmony, where racial differences meant nothing more than liking tacos or needing less sunscreen.

Whites often fail at being racially inclusive, but they generally believe that they should be.

So it is generally with some surprise that whites learn that other people do not think the same thing about them. That a white person who marries a black person, attends a black college, dresses/styles her hair like black people, and devotes her life to the advancement of black causes might actually get rejected by other black people just because she isn’t black. Whites who have an interest in American Indian things, particularly religion, have another fine line to walk. You may watch respectfully, but you cannot join.

Some religions are very open to converts; Christianity in particular. Christians have trouble understanding that other religions might not be open to converts; other people might not want them.

As I see it, there are two main reasons to police the boundaries of a group: either because there are some benefits associated with being part of the group, like getting a job because you graduated from a particular school; or because you really hate people not in your group, like feminists who hate men so much they won’t let trans* folk into their gatherings.

Both of these notions go against white expectations. The anti-racist ideology teaches that there aren’t benefits associated with being non-white (that’s why it’s called white privilege, not black privilege,) and our generally cheerful assumption that we are all supposed to be friends, regardless of race.

Christianity and the Rise of the Art Instinct

I think there’s a book by the title of “The Art Instinct.” I haven’t read it.If anyone knows of any good sources re human genetics, art, and history, I’d be grateful.

As far as I know, some kind of art exists in all human populations–even Neanderthals and other non-AM primates like homo Erectus, I think, appear to have had occasional instances of some form of art. (I am skeptical of claims that dolphins, elephants, and chimps have any real ability to do art, as they do not to my knowledge produce art on their own in their natural habitats; you can also teach a gorilla to speak in sign language, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that this is something that gorillas naturally do.)

However, artistic production is clearly not evenly distributed throughout the planet. Even when we only consider societies that had good access to other societies’ inventions and climates that didn’t destroy the majority of art within a few years of creation, there’s still a big difference in output. Europe and China are an obvious comparison; both regions have created a ton of beautiful art over the years, and we are lucky enough that much of it has been preserved. But near as I can tell, Europeans have produced more. (People in the Americas, Australia, etc., did not have historical access to Eurasian trade routes and so had no access to the pigments and paints Europeans were using, but people in the Middle East and China did.)

Europeans did not start out with a lot of talent; Medieval art is pretty shitty. European art was dominated by pictures of Jesus and Mary to an extent that whole centuries of it are boring as fuck. Even so, they produced a lot of it–far more than the arguably more advanced cultures of the Middle East, where drawing people was frowned upon, and so painting and sculpture had a difficult time getting a foothold.

I speculate that during this thousand years or so of shitty art, the Catholic Church and other buyers of religious paintings effectively created a market that otherwise wouldn’t have existed otherwise (especially via their extensive taxation scheme that meant all of Europe was paying for the Pope to have more paintings. The (apparently insatiable) demand for religious paintings meant employment for a lot of artists, which in turn meant the propagation of whatever genes make people good at art (as well as whatever cultural traits.) After 700 or a thousand years or so, we finally see the development of art that is actually good–art that suggests some extraordinary talent on the part of the artist.

I further speculate that Chinese art has been through a similar but slightly less extensive process, due to less historical demand, due to the historical absence of an enormous organization with lots of money interested in buying lots of art. Modern life may provide very different incentives, of course.

Thus the long period of tons of boring art may have been a necessary precursor to the development of actually good art.