Okay, yes, obviously when you take the gut parasites out of people, they tend to gain weight immediately after. That’s not exactly what I’m talking about.
First, let’s assume you come from a place where humans and hookworms have co-existed for a long, long time. The hookworms that just about everybody in the American South used to have appear to have come from Africa, so I think it safe to assume that hookworms have probably been infecting a lot of people in Africa for a long time. I don’t know how long–could be anywhere from a few hundred years, if they’d come from somewhere else or recently mutated or something, or could be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, if they’ve just always been hanging around. Let’s just go with tens of thousands, because if it wasn’t them, it was probably something else.
Over a few thousand years of constant infection, you’d expect to develop some sort of biological response to minimize the chances of death–that is, your ancestors would have evolved over time to be less susceptible to the parasite. Obviously not getting the parasite is one great way to avoid getting killed by it, but let’s assume that’s not an option.
Another solution would be to just absorb food differently–faster, say, or in a manner that circumvents the parts of the gut that are normally infected. Over time, humans and parasites might tend toward an equilibrium–humans stepping up their digestion to make up for what’s lost to the parasite.
Remove the parasite, and equilibrium is lost: suddenly the human starts gaining a lot of weight, especially compared to people from populations that did not adapt to the parasite.
That functional a gut isn’t needed anymore, but it might persist for a while if there are no counter-evolutionary pressures.
So, I hear the Brontosaurus might return to the rolls of official dinosaurs, rather than oopsies. From Yale mag’s “The Brontosaurus is Back“:
“Originally discovered and named by Yale paleontologist O. C. Marsh, Class of 1860, the “thunder lizard” was later determined to be the same as the Apatosaurus… But European researchers recently reexamined existing fossils and decided that Brontosaurus is in fact a separate species.”
Well, these things happen. I’m glad scientists are willing to revisit their data and revise their assumptions. Of course, I have no idea how much morphological difference is necessary between two skeletons before we start calling them different species, (by any sane metric, would a wolf hound and a chihuahua be considered the same species?) but I’m willing to trust the paleontologists on this one.
The interesting thing isn’t the reclassification itself, which gets down to somewhat dry and technical details about bone sizes and whatnot, but the fact that people–myself included!–have some sort of reaction to this news, eg:
“Dinosaur lovers of a certain age are gratified. “I’m delighted,” says geology professor Jacques Gauthier, the Peabody’s curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology. “It’s what I learned as a kid.””
I’ve seem other people saying the same thing. Those of us who grew up with picture books with brontosauruses in them are happy at the news the brontosaurus is back–like finding an old friend again, or episodes of your favorite childhood show on YouTube. Perhaps you think, “Yes, now I can get a book of dinosaurs for my kids and share the animals I loved with my kids!”
Meanwhile some of us still cling to the notion that Pluto, despite its tiny size and eccentric orbit, really ought to be a planet. Even I feel a touch of anthropomorphizing pity for Pluto, even though I think from an objective POV that the current classification scheme is perfectly sensible.
Pluto is not the first round, rocky body to get named a planet and then demoted: in 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres, a small, round, rocky body orbiting between Jupiter and Mars.
Finding a planet between Mars and Jupiter was intellectually satisfying on a number of levels, not least of which that it really seems like there ought to be one there. For the next 50 years, Ceres made it into the textbooks as our fifth planet–but by the 1860s, it had been demoted. A host of other, smaller bodies–some of them roundish–had also been discovered orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, and it was now clear that these were a special group of space bodies. They all got named asteroids, and Ceres went down the memory hole.
Ceres is smaller than Pluto, but they have much in common. As scientists discovered more small, Pluto-like bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit, the question of what is a planet revived. Should all non-moon, round bodies (those with enough gravity to make themselves round) be planets? That gets us to at least 13 planets, but possibly dozens–or hundreds–more.
There’s an obvious problem with having hundreds of planets, most of which are miniscule: kids would never learn ’em all. When you get right down to it, there are thousands of rocks and balls of ice and other such things zooming around the sun, and there’s a good reason most of them are known by numbers instead of names. You’ve got to prioritize data, and some sort of definition that would cut out the tiniest round ones was needed. Tiny Pluto, alas, ended up on the wrong side of the definition: not a planet.
Pluto is, of course, completely unaffected by a minor change in human nomenclature. And someday, like Ceres, Pluto may be largely forgotten by the public at large. In the meanwhile, there will still be nostalgia for the friendly science of one’s childhood.
I remember it like it was, well, maybe a year ago. I was on my way to the children’s section at Borders and Noble when I spotted Isabella Fonseca’s Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey‘s bright yellow cover, beckoning to me from a nearby table. My parents claim I was in middle school; I think it was highschool. Either way, the book went home with me: my first ethnography.
As an American–and a clueless teenager–I knew virtually nothing about Gypsies. I didn’t know that Europeans view them negatively, as tramps and thieves. I held romantic American notions of free-spirited musical wanderers, sculpted by the Renaissance Faire and Disney’s The Hunchback of Nortre Dame.
Disney’s Esmeralda
You might have guessed that I really liked Esmeralda*, even though I thought the movie overall was all wrong for its target market.
*To be frank, kid-me didn’t differentiate much between different sorts of medium-toned people.
So I was really interested in Gypsies.
Short pause for terminology discussion: Yes, I am well aware of the terms Rom/Roma/Romani, which were discussed in the book. While I am perfectly happy to call anyone by whatever name they prefer, I really dislike euphemistic treadmills, because they end up as ways for snobbish people to signal their superiority over the hoi polloi who don’t yet know the newest words, and then the old terms become ways for other people to signal dislike of the group. I don’t like getting pressured into signaling one of these two things, and dispute that anyone has the right to force others into this dichotomy. “Gypsy” is not used as an insult or ethnic slur in the US, and it is the name which most Americans are familiar with; “Romani,” by contrast, is largely unknown. Therefore I use Gypsy, though I mean no insult.
Anyway, as you might expect, the ethnography did its best to cast its subject matter in a positive light–anthropologists feel an ethical obligation not to negatively impact the people who were nice enough to give them interviews and let them live in their homes and tell them about their culture, after all.
I have not revisited the book in years, so I don’t feel entitled to make many claims about its quality. Obviously teen-me liked it, but teen-me didn’t have much to compare it to. If you want to learn about the Gypsies, its probably as good a starting point as any, so long as you keep in mind that anthropologists tend to wear rose-tinted glasses.
One thing I remember well, though, was the author’s explanation for why Gypsy yards are so full of trash: Gypsies have strong notions of purity, and abhor touching anything unclean–including other people’s trash.
I was recently thinking back on this (not coincidentally, while cleaning up some trash that had gotten scattered down my street,) and realized, “Wait a minute! Everyone thinks trash is dirty! No one likes touching it! But you do it anyway, because otherwise your yard ends up full of trash.” Obviously I wash my hands after handling trash; so can everyone else. In retrospect, it seems so obvious.
So often we claim deep cultural significance for completely ordinary things. Trash ends up in people’s yards because they don’t bother to pick it up.
I confess: I felt like I’d been lied to–and like an idiot taking so long to notice.
In my continuing quest to understand American gift-giving norms, I decided to test, (albeit informally,) my theory that the wrapping paper matters more than the present. Not that you can just give total crap and get away with it, (“Why is there a moldy shoe in this box?”) but that a mediocre gift paired with nice presentation will be appreciated more than a nice gift with bad presentation.
In the past, I have put a lot of (somewhat sporadic) effort into gifts, without feeling like they were much appreciated. I don’t mean that I received inadequate ego-stroking praise; I mean that I collected seedpods on a nearby mountain to grow flowers to give to a relative, and then when I returned again to their house, pot and flowers were gone and I never received so much as a thank you. Heck, I’ve been groused at because large, hand-crafted items arrived a week late because the months spent on them ran over by a few days.
You might say “fuck them,” but family is something I have to deal with, whether I want to or not.
Was it the dirty flowerpot? My habitual lateness?
So this time, I grabbed a mediocre item I happened to have lying around and didn’t want, and that the recipient already had. It’s not a terrible item–it’s in good enough condition to still fit the gift category. Ten minutes before time to go, I hauled out the craft supplies and wrapped it up. (I can wrap anything, including soccer balls. I suspect it’s a side effect of being good at mentally rotating objects.) The net effect of ribbons and bows and paper and sparkles looked pretty darn good–much better than my usual technique of wrapping things in newspaper.
And success! Gift was actually appreciated (I even received a thank you.)
So as I was saying, withing the “normal” (average) range of IQ, most people who have the same number probably have about the same level of competency. But for outliers at the bottom end, it makes a difference how their low IQ came about, whether through natural genetic variation, or an unfortunate accident. A person’s level of impairment has a lot to do with their deviation from the IQ they should have been and the society at large–thus, a person who is naturally at 70IQ and comes from a society where they are average–where everyone is about 70–is perfectly functional, whereas a person who was supposed to have a 100 IQ but got dropped on their head and suffered brain damage is not going to be very functional.
An IQ below 80 is somewhere between borderline and severely impaired in the US; about 8 or 9% of people score below 80. About 2.5% score as severely impaired, below 70. People with IQs under 70 can’t be executed, and can only reach, at max, the intellectual level of a 12 yr old.* People below 60 have severe impairments and may never be able to live alone.
*Still putting them well ahead of the smartest apes–to be honest, people blathering on about how apes and dolphins are “as smart as humans” kind of get on my nerves.
And yet, many successful societies have survived without any ability to read or numbers beyond 3. These folks tend to score badly on IQ tests, but they survive just fine in their own societies, and I assume they are very happy with their lives the way they are. When people say that people in society Foo have average IQs around Bar, this is not the same as saying they are severely disabled–it’s a different kind of low IQ.
One thing I wonder about: let’s say someone was supposed to have an IQ of 140, due to genetics, but an accident interfered–say, they got dropped on their head–and they lost 40 IQ points. If they’d started at 100, they’d drop down to 60, which is pretty darn impaired. But they’ve only dropped to 100.
I assume that, even though they would test as “normal” on an IQ test, the loss of 40 IQ points would result in severe life impairment of some sort. I don’t know if the DSM/other ways of diagnosing people with disabilities could pick up on such people at all, or maybe they’d end up with some random diagnosis due to however the condition manifests. I also wonder how such a person would compare to someone who is just naturally low-IQ–would they have a better chance of thriving in a society that’s not as IQ-demanding? Or would they be just as dysfunctional there? Or would they have enough wits left about them to make up for the damage they’d suffered, and do fine in life?
One thing I suspect: growing up would be hell for them. Their siblings (assuming their 140 IQ parents manage to have any other kids,) would pursue advanced degrees and become doctors, lawyers, finance bros, or professors. Their parents probably are professors. Their parents would be pushing them to take advanced maths in elementary school (“Your brother could work with negative numbers when he was 4!) when they struggle with fractions, and they’d feel like shit for consistently being dumber than everyone around them. Their parents would shove them into remedial classes, because “average” looks suspiciously like “dumb a rock” when you’re really smart, and then force them to go to college whether they belong there or not.
Of course, this is what our society tries to do to everyone, under the assumption that enough… pre-k? tutoring? organic food? Sesame Street?… can turn anyone into a math professor.
The impression one gets from briefly skimming anything on IQ is that two people with the same IQ are (supposed to be) about equally smart. And within the normal range of IQs, for a roughly homogenous population, this is basically true.
But for those at the bottom of the IQ range, this is not true–because there are two ways to be dumb.
This is, obviously, an oversimplification. There are probably 7.2 billion ways to be dumb. But bear with me; I think the oversimplification is justified for the sake of conversation.
Some people have very low IQs because something bad happened to them–they were dropped on their heads as babies, ate a chunk of lead, or have an extra copy of chromosome 21. In these sorts of cases, had the accident not occurred, the individual would have been smarter. Their genetic potential, as it were, is not realized, and–with the exception of accidents affecting genetics–if they had kids, their kids would not share their low IQ, but reflect their parents’ genetic IQ.
The second kind of low IQ happens just because a person happened to have parents who weren’t very bright. There is a great range in people’s natures, IQs included, and some folk are on the low end. Just as Gnon made some people with 140 IQs, so Gnon made some people with 60. There is nothing wrong with these people, per se. They tend to be perfectly functional, at least in a society of other people like themselves–they just don’t score very well on IQ tests and tend not to get degrees in math.
People who have suffered some form of traumatic brain injury tend not to be very functional. They lose all kinds of functional brain processing stuff, not just the ability to predict which way the arrow is going to be rotated next. By contrast, people who are just not genetically blessed with smarts have built entire cultures.
To clarify, and use an extreme example, let’s think back to our most ancient ancestors. Since we can’t talk to them, let’s look at our cousins, the other great apes.
Koko the Gorilla can use about 1,000 signs and understands about 2,000 human words. Kanzi, a bonobo who can play Pacman, make stone tools, and cook his own dinner, understands about 3,000 words and 348 symbols. Both Kanzi and Koko are probably on the highly intelligent end for their species, because you don’t hear all that much about all of their classmates whom scientists have also been trying to teach to talk.
According to different websites on child development, a 2 year old human typically uses about 150-300 words; a 3 year old uses about 900-1000 words; a four year old uses 4,000-6,000 words.
As a general rule of thumb, human children, like great apes, understand more than they can say. So let’s say that Koko and Kanzi are about as smart as a human somewhere between 2 and 4 years old.
Now consider what would happen if you let your 3 year old (or someone else’s three year old if you don’t have one of your own) lose in the jungle: they’d die. Quickly. A three year old sucks at making omelets, their flint-knapping leaves much to be desired, and most of them aren’t even very good at Pacman. They’re also really bad at climbing trees and still need help opening their bananas, and they don’t really understand why they should avoid lions.
Bonobos and gorillas, by contrast, survive just fine in the jungle, so long as humans don’t shoot them.
A grown human with the intellect of a 4 yr old would not be functional, in human society or gorilla society. A gorilla with the language abilities of a 4 yr old human is a very smart and completely functional-in-gorilla-society gorilla. A gorilla is not dumb; a gorilla is exactly as smart as it is supposed to be.
Since the age when our ancestors diverged from the other primates, our species has been marked by increasing brain capacity and, presumably, intelligence. We’ve gone from doing one-to-one correspondence on our fingers to calculus and diff eq. Which means that a great many human societies have fallen somewhere in between–societies where the average person could count to ten; societies where the average person could do basic arithmetic; societies where the average person can do some abstract thought, but not a ton. Each society has its own level of organization and particular environment, requiring different mental toolkits.
But within our own society, we are not identical; we are not clones. So some of us are smart and some are dumb. But a person who is naturally dumb is generally more functional than someone who suffered some accident; there are different kinds of low IQ.
Did you know that white women cry a lot? And that it annoys the crap out of black women? I didn’t, either, but “White women’s tears” is a thing SJWs and anti-racists actually talk about. Apparently black women hate it when white women cry.
Betcha didn’t know that crying is a form of oppression.
The general sentiment is not just that white women cry a lot, but also that they do it specifically to avoid getting blamed for racism–like “crocodile tears,” implying that the emotions behind them are not real:
Personally, I’d never given tears a second thought (other than not particularly liking them,) until I stumbled upon these sorts of comments. If I cry, it’s because of emotions, not because I’m trying to avoid blame.
But I suspect these black ladies are actually on to something. White women probably do cry more than black women. No, not to get out of being called racist; they cry because they’re biologically inclined to deal with conflict by crying.
Peter Frost speculates that whites, particularly white women, have been selected for neotenous traits, like pale skin and hair. (Frost has a ton of posts on the subject, so I’m not going to link to them all; you can just go read his blog if you want the details on his argument. I’m summarizing as relevant here; please forgive me if I’ve accidentally mixed in some arguments from West Hunter; it’s hard to keep my thoughts tagged with original authors for too long.)
This implies that white women are more neotenous than black women.
In many traditional African societies, women basically raise their children on their own/with the help of their kin networks, leading probably to a genetic preference for polygyny rather than monogamy and a personality type that we might characterize as strong, independent women. As I have previously noted, these societies happen to be very likely ancestral to much of the US’s African population.
By contrast, the cold, harsh winters of the northern European climate forced people into monogamous relationships in which the men did a lot of the back-breaking agricultural labor. Actually, Frost argues that it started before the advent of agriculture, but with mate selection on the ice age steppes:
“It seems that this evolution took place between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago—long after modern humans had arrived in Europe some 40,000 years ago. This is when Europeans acquired their most visible features: white skin, multi-hued eyes and hair, and a more childlike face shape. In my opinion, such features were an adaptation not to weak sunlight but to a competitive mate market where men were scarce because they were less polygynous and more at risk of early death. This situation prevailed on the European steppe-tundra of the last ice age, whose high bio-productivity made possible a relatively large human population at the cost of a chronic oversupply of mateable women. The result was an unusually intense degree of sexual selection.”
The problem with living in close proximity to men is that men are violent and aggressive. Luckily, men appear to already have a neural subroutine for decreasing aggression: look/act like a baby. Being around babies or small children appears to make men less aggressive/reduces the quantity of the sorts of hormones that lead to aggression, which leads in turn to men being less likely to murder their own children.
The development of neotenous features in women thus both increased the chances of men bonding with them and wanting to care for them (the neural subroutine for bonding with and caring for children hopefully does not require discussion,) and decreased their chances of being victims of male aggression as proximity increased.
Crying is chiefly a characteristic of babies and small children. Grownups cry far less; men have historically prided themselves (for better or worse) on not crying.
Tears are, for white women, an effective means of decreasing white male aggression. I’m not saying they’re a conscious strategy (though of course sometimes they are.) I’m saying that for thousands of years, white women who cried more were less likely to die childless than women who cried less. So most of the time, when they start to cry, it’s unintentional–they can’t help it. That’s just how they’re wired.
(Note: You don’t have to buy Frost’s line of reasoning to believe that white women cry more than black women; Greg Cochran attributes neotenous white features to selective pressure on white men to behave themselves in large social groups–the idea that “civilization” “domesticated” people; Rushton links longer infancy and childhood and late retention of neotenous features to brain development. There are many potential explanations, but one thing that does seem to be widely agreed upon is that whites are more neotenous than blacks.)
White women cry even when race isn’t being discussed (though this may not be obvious if your only interaction with white women is via SJW/anti-racist communities, where racism and women dominate almost all discussions.) White women love “tear jerker” movies, romance novels and women’s fiction, and all designed to make them cry. They weep over the Pope’s latest pronouncements. They cry about their hair and their weight and their makeup and just about anything, really. They probably even cry if you criticize their lab results. (Of course, if it’s a white dude who’s done nothing to contribute to the advancement of humanity but win a Nobel Prize in Physiology / Medicine for his discoveries of protein molecules that control cell division who says that white women cry [let’s not kid ourselves about the skin tones of most women in science,] then you’re an evil sexist woman-oppressor, rather than a brave social justice warrior helping create our new and better future by calling out racist white women for derailing the conversation.)
Black women, by contrast, haven’t been subject to the same neotenizing pressures. They simply aren’t wired to cry at the drop of a hat. To them, white women are acting like whiny babies:
Back in anthropology class, we talked rather extensively about ethics–specifically, What if you write things that hurt the people you’re studying?
Take the Yanomami (also spelled Yanomamo, not to be confused with the Yamnaya.) While there is some dispute over why the Yanomami are violent, and they probably aren’t the most violent people on Earth, they certainly commit their fair share of violence:
In 1967, anthropologist Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon published Yanomamö: The Fierce People, which quickly became a bestseller, both for anthropology students and the popular public. On the less scholarly side, Ruggero Deodato released the horror film “Cannibal Holocaust” in 1980, fictional account of Yanomami cannibalism. I have truly never understood the interest in or psychology behind the horror genre, but apparently the film has been banned in 50 countries and highly regarded by people who like that sort of thing–Total Film ranked it the tenth greatest horror film of all time, Wired included it in its list of the top 25 horror films, and IGN ranked it 8th on its list of the ten greatest grindhouse films–so I assume that means it was very horrific and very popular.
Aside from allegations that the anthropologists themselves gave/traded the Yanomami a bunch of weapons that resulted in a big increase in the number of deaths, there are claims that, due to the Yanomamis’ violent reputation, miners in the area have opted to just shoot them on sight. The Yanomami are a rather small, isolated people with no political power to speak of, little immunity to Western diseases, and a lot of negative interactions with miners.
In a more mundane example, an anthropologist I spoke with referred to widespread illegal drug use among a people they had lived with. No one wants to cause legal trouble for their friends/companions/hosts–getting people arrested after they opened their homes and lives to you would be really shitty. But the behavior remains. None of us is perfect; every group does things that other people disapprove of or that would not look so great if someone wrote it down and published it.
The Thumper approach–that most favored by Americans, I suspect–is to just try not to say anything that might be perceived as not-nice. Report all of the good, and just leave out the bad.
My inner Kantian insists that this is lying, and that lying is bad. Maybe I can gloss over illegal drug use, but if I write a book about the Yanomami and don’t mention violence, I am a baldfaced liar, and you, my reader, should be mad at me for deceiving you. If I am in the business of describing humans and fail to do so, then like a stool with two legs, I am not doing my job.
The other solution I see people employ is to dress up all of the potentially negative things in dry, technical language so that normal people don’t notice. This would be the opposite of making a movie like Cannibal Holocaust. We use terms like “genetic introgression” and “affective empathy” and “clades,” which people who don’t generally read technical materials on the subject tend not to be familiar with.
But there are times when there are no two ways about it–there are no polite, responsible ways to disguise the truth, you don’t want to lie, and you genuinely don’t want to cause distress or trouble for anyone.
We never came up with a solution back in class. I still don’t have one.
So I was looking at this map, trying to figure out what might be causing different rates of violence:
No data for non-EU countries like Norway and Russia
Clearly it’s not degree of Germaness, as the Germans have less (reported) violence than their cousins in France, the UK, and Denmark. Doesn’t look like a Hajnal line effect, as France is solidly inside the line and Greece isn’t. Doesn’t look like latititude, is Ireland and Denmark and Latvia are all around the same latitude. Probably not an immigration thing, as it’s a stretch to blame violence against half of Denmark’s women on whatever relatively small % of the population is immigrants, while Spain and Italy (which I’m sure also have immigrants) are down in the 20%s.
Then I thought, aside from Ireland, it does look rather like a map of when grain arrived in Europe. Maybe the violence is fueled by alcohol, and groups that have been exposed to alcohol for longer are more resistant to its effects. (And Ireland, btw, does not have as much of an alcohol problem as is generally claimed.)
So here is a map of the spread of wheat in Europe:
Since grain originated (as far as Europe is concerned) in Turkey, I suspect that it became a dominant dietary staple faster after introduction in Spain, whose climate is probably similar to Turkey, than in more northerly places like Scotland or Finland. Ireland does not appear to lag significantly behind England, but northern Scotland does. Sadly, this map does not show us the Baltic and Scandinavia, where I gather the hunter-gatherer-fisher-herder lifestyle held on much longer.
This map sheds some light on why the UK comes out with more violence than Ireland: the Scottish. The English look pretty okay overall, but the Scots apparently get drunk and beat their wives with the vigor of, well, I guess the French.
I’d really like to see more complete versions of these maps, but oh, well. (Though I’m glad they left off Russia, which I suspect would change the scale on the graph, compressing the rest of the data into uselessness.)
Here are my suspicions: Grain (particularly wheat) started out over in Turkey and spread to Greece, Italy, Spain, the south-Slavic regions, southern French coast, and Germany, in about that order. These areas all seem to have low rates of domestic violence and, except for the Slavs, low rates of alcohol-fueled death. Perhaps the stats on that reflect differences in density or drunk driving laws, or the later admixture of another population like the Magyars that has less alcohol tolerance. East Germany clearly stands out as an anomaly that is probably due to the Cold War.
Wheat farming reached northern Europe later, reaching Scotland, Denmark, the Baltic, and Scandinavia last. Lower rates of alcohol-related death in some of these spots probably reflect people driving drunk less often due to local factors.
According to “investoralist”, in “The geo-alcohol belts of Europe,” “Episodic drunkenness seems embedded in the Nordic culture, so much so that most Scandinavian states have outrageously high alcohol taxes to discourage binge-drinking. In a country where alcohol is the most common cause of death among working-aged adults, Finland raised its alcohol taxes twice in the 2008-2009 period.”
He further quotes, “[W]hen Finns drink, they drink heavily. The important thing is that I believe that they are not only drinking away their cultural neurosis; they actually value the cathartic effect of Dionysian drinking. This leads to a situation where, as I have put it, you can’t single out the alcoholics at our parties because everyone is as dead-drunk as alcoholics. This leads to a cultural tradition where drunkenness is positively valued among rather large segments of the population. Therefore, there exists no cultural consensus regarding the positive effects of moderation.”
So I was reading a conversation over at HBD Chick’s the other day about why some people take her work way too personally (and confrontationally,) even though it clearly isn’t meant that way, in which someone pointed out that even if she doesn’t exactly mean it that way, if you call people clannish or tribal, they’re bound to get offended, because nobody likes clannishness.
But wait, I thought. I know people who like clannishness.
This seems obvious when you consider that the majority of people who live in societies-that-are-more-clannish-than-mine probably like their societies and prefer their level of clannishness to my society’s level, otherwise they would take steps to change their society. Even if they might balk at the words like “clannish” or “tribal” (or the insinuation that their society has higher levels of in-breeding than some other society,) there are plenty of practical aspects of clannishness that some people actually like.
In the clannish society, you can depend on your extended kin network to always have your back. Clannish societies are generally very friendly–compare the outgoing friendliness of southern Italians to the more reserved-natured Germans. People with strong kin networks are born with a supply of friends, role models, advice givers, and potential business partners. Their kinfolk will even stick up for them, defending them against outsiders.
The inverse of clannishness is atomization, and atomization is lonely and stressful. In the atomized society, you are stuck on your own, with no one to catch you if you fall. You might be a single mother or an only child, or a hikikomori. Either way, you’re alone–and most people don’t seem to cope well with loneliness.
(The downside to tribal societies is that friendly extroverts are more likely to punch you in the face.)
Several of my friends have visited or lived in societies that fall outside the Hajnal Line, and absolutely loved them. “The friendliest place I have ever been,” raved one. “The people there are so friendly, I hear they’d stop and talk to their neighbors on the way to the hospital!” said another. “I just got hit on for the first time in my life,” said a third. “The only place I have ever felt what it meant to have a loving family–if only my family were like that.” “Everyone was so hospitable and polite and absolutely mortified when my hotel got bombed.” “If it weren’t for my [obligations], I would move there in a heartbeat.” (Quotes from five different places.)
Some of these same people have gone through decades of loneliness in outbred societies. One friend had literally no friends for a decade, after losing a spouse to a divorce and a child and parent to death; two are considered unattractive and are perennially alone. Several have little to no relationship with their extended families; most live quite far from their nearest relatives.
So even if people may not like being called “clannish” or “tribal,” these societies certainly have their fans.
