Much like religion and nationalism, I don’t really have the emotional impulses necessary to really get into the idea of a holiday dedicated to eating turkey. Maybe this is just my personal failing, or a side effect of not being a farmer, but either way here I am, grumbling under my breath about how I’d rather be getting stuff done than eat.
Nevertheless, I observe that other people seem to like holidays. They spend large amounts of money on them, decorate their houses, voluntarily travel to see relatives, and otherwise “get into the holiday mood.” While some of this seems to boil down to simple materialism, there does seem to be something more: people really do like their celebrations. I may not be able to hear the music, but I can still tell that people are dancing.
And if so many people are dancing, and they seem healthy and happy and well-adjusted, then perhaps dancing is a good thing.
The point of Thanksgiving, a made-up holiday, (though it does have its roots in real harvest celebrations,) is to celebrate the connection between family and nation. This is obvious enough, since Thanksgiving unifies “eating dinner with my family” with “founding myth of the United States.” We tell the story of the Pilgrims, not because they are everyone’s ancestors, but because they represent the symbolic founding of the nation. (My Jamestown ancestors actually got here first, but I guess Virginia was not in Lincoln’s good graces when he decided to make a holiday.)
In the founding mythos, the Pilgrims are brave, freedom-loving people who overcome tremendous odds to found a new nation, with the help of their new friends, the Indians.
Is the founding mythos true?
It doesn’t matter. Being “literally true” is not the point of a myth. The Iliad did not become one of the most popular books of all time because it provides a 100% accurate account of the Trojan war, but because it describes heroism, bravery, and conversely, cowardice. (“Hektor” has always been high on my names list.) Likewise, the vast majority of Christians do not take the Bible 100% literally (even the ones who claim they do.) Arguing about which day God created Eve misses the point of the creation story; arguing about whether the Exodus happened exactly as told misses the point of the story held for a people in exile.
The story of Thanksgiving instructs us to work hard, protect liberty, and be friends with the Indians. It reminds us both of the Pilgrims’ utopian goal of founding the perfect Christian community, a shining city upon the hill, and of the value of religious tolerance. (Of course, the Puritans would probably not have been keen on religious tolerance or freedom of religion, given that they exiled Anne Hutchins for talking too much about God.)
Most of us today probably aren’t descended from the Pilgrims, but the ritual creates a symbolic connection between them and us, for we are the heirs of the civilization they began. Likewise, each family is connected to the nation as a whole; without America, we wouldn’t be here, eating this turkey together.
Unless you don’t like turkey. In which case, have some pie.
People often make the mistake of over-generalizing other people. We speak of “Indians,” “Native Americans,” or better yet, “Indigenous Peoples,” as though one couldn’t tell the difference between a Maori and an Eskimo; as though only two undifferentiated blocks of humanity existed, everywhere on the globe: noble first people who moved into the area thousands upon thousands of years ago, sat down, and never moved again, and evil invaders who showed up yesterday.
In reality, Group A has conquered and replaced Group B and been conquered and replaced in turn by Group C since time immemorial. Sometimes the conquered group gets incorporated into the new group, and years down the line we can still find their DNA in their descendants. At other times, all that’s left is an abrupt transition in the archeological record between one set of artifacts and skull types and another.
Even “Indigenous” peoples have been migrating, conquering and slaughtering each other since time immemorial. The only difference between them and Europeans is that the Europeans did it more recently and while white.
When we take a good look at the Indians’ DNA, we find evidence of multiple invasion waves, some of them genocidal. The Sururi, Pima, and Chippewyans are clearly distinct, as are the Eskimo and Aleuts:
DNA of the Eskimos and related peoplesDNA of the Aleuts and related peoples
Please note that Haak’s chart and the chart I have at the top of the blog use different colors to represent the same things; genetic admixture of course does not have any inherent color, so the choice of colors is entirely up to the person making the graph.)
The Karitiana are one of those mixed horticulturalist/hunter-gatherer tribes from deep in the Amazon Rainforest who have extremely little contact with the outside world and are suspected of having Denisovan DNA and thus being potentially descended from an ancient wave of Melanesians who either got to the Americas first, or else very mysteriously made it to the rainforest without leaving significant genetic traces elsewhere. I’m going with they got here first, because that explanation makes more sense.
The Pima People of southern Arizona had extensive trade and irrigation networks, and are believed to be descended from the Hohokam people, who lived in the same area and also built and maintained irrigation networks and cities, and are probably generally related to the Puebloan Peoples, who also built cities in the South West. An observer wrote about the Puebloans:
When these regions were first discovered it appears that the inhabitants lived in comfortable houses and cultivated the soil, as they have continued to do up to the present time. Indeed, they are now considered the best horticulturists in the country, furnishing most of the fruits and a large portion of the vegetable supplies that are to be found in the markets. They were until very lately the only people in New Mexico who cultivated the grape. They also maintain at the present time considerable herds of cattle, horses, etc. They are, in short, a remarkably sober and industrious race, conspicuous for morality and honesty, and very little given to quarrelling or dissipation … Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies: or, The journal of a Santa Fé trader, 1831–1839
Linguistically, the Pima speak an Uto-Aztecan language, connecting them with the Soshoni to the north, Hopi to the east, and the Aztecs to the south (and even further south, since the family is also spoken in Equador):
Map of Uto-Aztecan language distribution
The Aztecs, as you probably already know, had a large empire with cities, roads, trade, taxes, etc.
In other words, the Pima were far more technologically advanced than the Karitiana, which suggests that the arrow of conquering here goes from Pima-related people to Karitiana-related people, rather than the other way around.
Now, obviously, the Pima did not travel down to Bolivia, kill a bunch of Karitiana people living in Bolivia, rape their women, and then head back to Arizona. More likely, the ancestors of the Karitiana once lived throughout much of South and Central America, and perhaps even further afield. The ancestors of the Pima then invaded, killing a bunch of the locals and incorporating a few of their women into their tribes. The Karitiana managed to survive in the rainforest due to the rainforest being very difficult to conquer, and the Pima failed to mix with other groups due to being the only guys interested in living in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Those guys in the southern branch of the family are the Navajos and Apache. These languages are speculated to be linked to Siberian languages like the Yeniseian.
The Algonquin people (of whom the Ojibwe are part,) come from the North East US and Canada:
Map of Algonquian Language Family distribution
There also exist a couple of languages on the California coast which appear to be related to the Algonquin Family, possibly a case of Survival on the Fringes as a new wave of invaders migrated from the Bering Strait.
The Algonquins appear to have been semi-nomadic semi-horticulturalists. They grew corn and squash and beans, and also moved around hunting game and gathering wild plants as necessary.
Where we see red admixture in Haak’s graph, that means Siberian people. Where we see dark blue + orange + teal, that’s typical European. Most likely this means that the Algonquins in Haak’s data have some recent European ancestors due to a lot of inter-marriage happening over the past few hundred years in their part of the world. (The Chipewyans live in a much more isolated part of the continent.) However, some of that DNA might also have come with them when they migrated to North America years and yeas ago, due to their ancient Siberian ancestors having merged with an off-shoot of the same groups that modern Europeans are descended from. This is a likely explanation for the Aleuts and Tlingit peoples, whose dark blue and teal patches definitely look similar to those of other Siberian peoples. (Although, interestingly, they lack the red. Maybe the red was a later addition, or just didn’t make it over there in as large quantities.)
The Eskimo I have spoken of before; they appear to have wiped out everyone else in their immediate area. They live around the coastal rim of Alaska and northern Canada.
The Aleuts likely represent some kind of merger between the Eskimo and other Siberian peoples.
My summary interpretation:
Wave One: The Green People. Traces of their DNA appear to be in the Ojibwe, Eskimos, and Chileans, so they may have covered most of North and South America at one time.
Wave Two: The Pink People. They wiped out the vast majority of the Green people throughout North America, but as migration thinned their numbers, they ended up intermarrying instead of killing some of the Greens down in Central and South America.
The Green People only survived in any significant numbers deep in the rainforest, where the Pink People couldn’t reach. These Greens became the Karitiana.
Wave Three: The Brown people. These guys wiped out all of the Pink people in northwest Canada and Alaska, but as migration to the east thinned their numbers, they had to inter-marry with the local Pinks. This mixed group became the Algonquins, while the unmixed Browns became the Chipewyans.
Few Browns managed to push their way south, either because they just haven’t had enough time, or because they aren’t suited to the hotter climate. Either way, most of the Pink People went unconquered to the south, allowing the Pima and their neighbors to flourish.
Wave Four: The Eskimo, who wiped out most of the other people in their area.
But humans are not mere action-reaction systems; they have qualia, an inner experience of being.
One of my themes here is the idea that various psychological traits, like anxiety, guilt, depression, or disgust, might not be just random things we feel, but exist for evolutionary reasons. Each of these emotions, when experienced moderately, may have beneficial effects. Guilt (and its cousin, shame,) helps us maintain our social relationships with other people, aiding in the maintenance of large societies. Disgust protects us from disease and helps direct sexual interest at one’s spouse, rather than random people. Anxiety helps people pay attention to crucial, important details, and mild depression may help people concentrate, stay out of trouble, or–very speculatively–have helped our ancestors hibernate during the winter.
In excess, each of these traits is damaging, but a shortage of each trait may also be harmful.
I have commented before on the remarkable statistic that 25% of women are on anti-depressants, and if we exclude women over 60 (and below 20,) the number of women with an “anxiety disorder” jumps over 30%.
The idea that a full quarter of us are actually mentally ill is simply staggering. I see three potential causes for the statistic:
Doctors prescribe anti-depressants willy-nilly to everyone who asks, whether they’re actually depressed or not;
Something about modern life is making people especially depressed and anxious;
Mental illnesses are side effects of common, beneficial conditions (similar to how sickle cell anemia is a side effect of protection from malaria.)
As you probably already know, sickle cell anemia is a genetic mutation that protects carriers from malaria. Imagine a population where 100% of people are sickle cell carriers–that is, they have one mutated gene, and one regular gene. The next generation in this population will be roughly 25% people who have two regular genes (and so die of malaria,) 50% of people who have one sickle cell and one regular gene (and so are protected,) and 25% of people will have two sickle cell genes and so die of sickle cell anemia. (I’m sure this is a very simplified scenario.)
So I consider it technically possible for 25% of people to suffer a pathological genetic condition, but unlikely–malaria is a particularly ruthless killer compared to being too cheerful.
Skipping to the point, I think there’s a little of all three going on. Each of us probably has some kind of personality “set point” that is basically determined by some combination of genetics, environmental assaults, and childhood experiences. People deviate from their set points due to random stuff that happens in their lives, (job promotions, visits from friends, car accidents, etc.,) but the way they respond to adversity and the mood they tend to return to afterwards is largely determined by their “set point.” This is all a fancy way of saying that people have personalities.
The influence of random chance on these genetic/environmental factors suggests that there should be variation in people’s emotional set points–we should see that some people are more prone to anxiety, some less prone, and some of average anxiousness.
Please note that this is a statistical should, in the same sense that, “If people are exposed to asbestos, some of them should get cancer,” not a moral should, as in, “If someone gives you a gift, you should send a thank-you note.”
Natural variation in a trait does not automatically imply pathology, but being more anxious or depressive or guilt-ridden than others can be highly unpleasant. I see nothing wrong, a priori, with people doing things that make their lives more pleasant and manageable (and don’t hurt others); this is, after all, why I enjoy a cup of coffee every morning. If you are a better, happier, more productive person with medication (or without it,) then carry on; this post is not intended as a critique of anyone’s personal mental health management, nor a suggestion for how to take care of your mental health.
Our medical/psychological health system, however, operates on the assumption that medications are for pathologies only. There is not form to fill out that says, “Patient would like anti-anxiety drugs in order to live a fuller, more productive life.”
That said, all of these emotions are obviously responses to actual stuff that happens in real life, and if 25% of women are coming down with depression or anxiety disorders, I think we should critically examine whether anxiety and depression are really the disease we need to be treating, or the body’s responses to some external threat.
In a mixed group, women become quieter, less assertive, and more compliant. This deference is shown only to men and not to other women in the group. A related phenomenon is the sex gap in self-esteem: women tend to feel less self-esteem in all social settings. The gap begins at puberty and is greatest in the 15-18 age range (Hopcroft, 2009).
If more women enter the workforce–either because they think they ought to or because circumstances force them to–and the workforce triggers depression, then as the percent of women formally employed goes up, we should see a parallel rise in mental illness rates among women. Just as Adderal and Ritalin help little boys conform to the requirements of modern classrooms, Prozac and Lithium help women cope with the stress of employment.
As we discussed yesterday, fever is not a disease, but part of your body’s system for re-asserting homeostasis by killing disease microbes and making it more difficult for them to reproduce. Extreme fevers are an over-reaction and can kill you, but a normal fever below 104 degrees or so is merely unpleasant and should be allowed to do its work of making you better. Treating a normal fever (trying to lower it) interferes with the body’s ability to fight the disease and results in longer sicknesses.
Likewise, these sorts of emotions, while definitely unpleasant, may serve some real purpose.
We humans are social beings (and political animals.) We do not exist on our own; historically, loneliness was not merely unpleasant, but a death sentence. Humans everywhere live in communities and depend on each other for survival. Without refrigeration or modern storage methods, saving food was difficult. (Unless you were an Eskimo.) If you managed to kill a deer while on your own, chances are you couldn’t eat it all before it began to rot, and then your chances of killing another deer before you started getting seriously hungry were low. But if you share your deer with your tribesmates, none of the deer goes to waste, and if they share their deer with yours, you are far less likely to go hungry.
If you end up alienated from the rest of your tribe, there’s a good chance you’ll die. It doesn’t matter if they were wrong and you were right; it doesn’t matter if they were jerks and you were the nicest person ever. If you can’t depend on them for food (and mates!) you’re dead. This is when your emotions kick in.
People complain a lot that emotions are irrational. Yes, they are. They’re probably supposed to be. There is nothing “logical” or “rational” about feeling bad because someone is mad at you over something they did wrong! And yet it happens. Not because it is logical, but because being part of the tribe is more important than who did what to whom. Your emotions exist to keep you alive, not to prove rightness or wrongness.
This is, of course, an oversimplification. Men and women have been subject to different evolutionary pressures, for example. But this is close enough for the purposes of the current conversation.
If modern people are coming down with mental illnesses at astonishing rates, then maybe there is something about modern life that is making people ill. If so, treating the symptoms may make life more bearable for people while they are subject to the disease, but still does not fundamentally address whatever it is that is making them sick in the first place.
It is my own opinion that modern life is pathological, not (in most cases,) people’s reactions to it. Modern life is pathological because it is new and therefore you aren’t adapted to it. Your ancestors have probably only lived in cities of millions of people for a few generations at most (chances are good that at least one of your great-grandparents was a farmer, if not all of them.) Naturescapes are calming and peaceful; cities noisy, crowded, and full of pollution. There is some reason why schizophrenics are found in cities and not on farms. This doesn’t mean that we should just throw out cities, but it does mean we should be thoughtful about them and their effects.
People seem to do best, emotionally, when they have the support of their kin, some degree of ethnic or national pride, economic and physical security, attend religious services, and avoid crowded cities. (Here I am, an atheist, recommending church for people.) The knowledge you are at peace with your tribe and your tribe has your back seems almost entirely absent from most people’s modern lives; instead, people are increasingly pushed into environments where they have no tribe and most people they encounter in daily life have no connection to them. Indeed, tribalism and city living don’t seem to get along very well.
To return to healthy lives, we may need to re-think the details of modernity.
Politics
Philosophically and politically, I am a great believer in moderation and virtue as the ethical, conscious application of homeostatic systems to the self and to organizations that exist for the sake of humans. Please understand that this is not moderation in the conventional sense of “sometimes I like the Republicans and sometimes I like the Democrats,” but the self-moderation necessary for bodily homeostasis reflected at the social/organizational/national level.
For example, I have posted a bit on the dangers of mass immigration, but this is not a call to close the borders and allow no one in. Rather, I suspect that there is an optimal amount–and kind–of immigration that benefits a community (and this optimal quantity will depend on various features of the community itself, like size and resources.) Thus, each community should aim for its optimal level. But since virtually no one–certainly no one in a position of influence–advocates for zero immigration, I don’t devote much time to writing against it; it is only mass immigration that is getting pushed on us, and thus mass immigration that I respond to.
Similarly, there is probably an optimal level of communal genetic diversity. Too low, and inbreeding results. Too high, and fetuses miscarry due to incompatible genes. (Rh- mothers have difficulty carrying Rh+ fetuses, for example, because their immune systems identify the fetus’s blood as foreign and therefore attack it, killing the fetus.) As in agriculture, monocultures are at great risk of getting wiped out by disease; genetic heterogeneity helps ensure that some members of a population can survive a plague. Homogeneity helps people get along with their neighbors, but too much may lead to everyone thinking through problems in similar ways. New ideas and novel ways of attacking problems often come from people who are outliers in some way, including genetics.
There is a lot of talk ’round these parts that basically blames all the crimes of modern civilization on females. Obviously I have a certain bias against such arguments–I of course prefer to believe that women are superbly competent at all things, though I do not wish to stake the functioning of civilization on that assumption. If women are good at math, they will do math; if they are good at leading, they will lead. A society that tries to force women into professions they are not inclined to is out of kilter; likewise, so is a society where women are forced out of fields they are good at. Ultimately, I care about my doctor’s competence, not their gender.
In a properly balanced society, male and female personalities complement each other, contributing to the group’s long-term survival.
Women are not accidents of nature; they are as they are because their personalities succeeded where women with different personalities did not. Women have a strong urge to be compassionate and nurturing toward others, maintain social relations, and care for those in need of help. These instincts have, for thousands of years, helped keep their families alive.
When the masculine element becomes too strong, society becomes too aggressive. Crime goes up; unwinable wars are waged; people are left to die. When the feminine element becomes too strong, society becomes too passive; invasions go unresisted; welfare spending becomes unsustainable. Society can’t solve this problem by continuing to give both sides everything they want, (this is likely to be economically disastrous,) but must actually find a way to direct them and curb their excesses.
I remember an article on the now-defunct neuropolitics (now that I think of it, the Wayback Machine probably has it somewhere,) on an experiment where groups with varying numbers of ‘liberals” and “conservatives” had to work together to accomplish tasks. The “conservatives” tended to solve their problems by creating hierarchies that organized their labor, with the leader/s giving everyone specific tasks. The “liberals” solved their problems by incorporating new members until they had enough people to solve specific tasks. The groups that performed best, overall, were those that had a mix of ideologies, allowing them to both make hierarchical structures to organize their labor and incorporate new members when needed. I don’t remember much else of the article, nor did I read the original study, so I don’t know what exactly the tasks were, or how reliable this study really was, but the basic idea of it is appealing: organize when necessary; form alliances when necessary. A good leader recognizes the skills of different people in their group and uses their authority to direct the best use of these skills.
Our current society greatly lacks in this kind of coherent, organizing direction. Most communities have very little in the way of leadership–moral, spiritual, philosophical, or material–and our society seems constantly intent on attacking and tearing down any kind of hierarchies, even those based on pure skill and competence. Likewise, much of what passes for “leadership” is people demanding that you do what they say, not demonstrating any kind of competence. But when we do find competent leaders, we would do well to let them lead.
Disease is the enemy of civilization. Wherever civilization arises, so does disease; many of our greatest triumphs have been the defeat of disease.
Homeostasis is the idea that certain systems are designed to self-correct when things go wrong–for example, when you get hot, you sweat; when you get cold, you shiver. Both actions represent your body’s natural, automatic process for keeping your body temperature within a proper range.
All living things are homeostatic systems, otherwise they could not control the effects of entropy and would fall apart. (When this happens, we call it death):
Non-living things, like robots and corporations, can also be homeostatic–by hiring new employees when old ones leave, or correcting themselves when they start to fall:
Like organisms, organizations that are not homeostatic will tend to fall apart.
For this post, we will consider four important forms of homeostasis:
Normal homeostasis: the normal feedback loops that keep the body (or organization) in its normal state under normal conditions.
Defensive homeostasis: feedback loops that are activated to defend the body against severe harm, such as disease, and reassert normal homeostasis.
Inadequate homeostasis: a body that cannot maintain or reassert normal homeostasis.
Over-aggressive homeostasis: an excessive defensive response that harms the self.
Normal Homeostasis
Normal homeostasis creates (and depends on) moderate, temperate behavior. Mundanely, when you have not eaten in a while, you grow hungry and so eat; when you have had enough, you feel satiated and so cease. When you have not slept in a long while, you grow tired and head to bed; when you have slept enough, you wake.
Obesity and starvation are both symptoms of normal homeostasis not operating as it should. They can be caused by environmental disorder (eg, crop failures,) or internal disorders, (pituitary tumors can cause weight gain,) or even just the individual’s psyche (stress renders some people unable to eat, while others cope with chocolate.)
If your body is forced out of its normal homeostatic rhythms, things begin to degenerate. After too long without sleep, (perhaps due to too many final exams, an all-night TV binge, or too many 5-hour energy drinks,) your body loses its ability to thermo-regulate; the hungry, cold, and malnourished lose their ability to fend off disease and succumb to pneumonia. Even something as obviously beneficial as hygiene can go too far–too much washing deprives the skin of its natural, protective layer of oils and beneficial microbes, leaving it open to invasion and colonization by other, less friendly microbes, like skin-eating fungi. Most of this seems obvious, but it took people a rather long time to figure out things like, “eating a 100% corn diet is bad for you.”
A body that is not in tune quickly degrades and becomes easy prey to sickness and disease; thus moderation is upheld as a great virtue and excesses as vice. A body that is properly in tune–balanced in diet, temperate in consumption, given enough exercise and rest, and nourished socially and morally–is a body that is strong, healthy, and able to deal with most of life’s vicissitudes.
(Gut bacteria are an interesting case of normal homeostasis in action. Antibiotics, while obviously beneficial in many cases, also kill much of the body’s natural gut bacteria, leading to a variety of unpleasant side effects [mostly diarrhea,] showing that too little gut bacteria is problematic. But the idea that our gut bacteria are entirely harmless is probably an over-simplification; while being effectively “along for the ride” means that their interests align roughly with ours, that is no guarantee that they will always be well-behaved. Too much gut bacteria may also be a problem. One theory I have read on why people need to sleep–and why we feel cruddy when we haven’t slept–is that our gut bacteria tend to be active during the day, which produces waste, and the buildup of bacterial waste in your bloodstream makes you feel bad. While you sleep, your body temperature drops, slowing down the bacteria and giving you a chance to clean out your systems.)
The homeostasis theory of disease–the idea that an unbalanced body loses its ability to fend off diseases and so becomes ill–should not be seen as competing with the Germ Theory of Disease, but complementing it. Intellectually, HTD has been around for a long time, informing the Greek medical treatises on the “four humours,” traditional Chinese medical ideas of the effects of “hot” and “cold” food, the general principle of Yin and Yang, many primitive notions of magic, and modern notions about probiotics. HTD has led to some obviously (in retrospect) bad ideas, like bleeding patients or eating things that aren’t particularly non-toxic. But it has also led to plenty of decent ideas, like that you should eat a “balanced” diet, enjoy life’s pleasures in moderation, or that cholera sufferers should be given lots of water.
Defensive Homeostasis
Defensive homeostasis is an extreme version of normal homeostasis. Your body is always defending itself against pathogens and injuries, but some assaults are more noticeable than others.
One of the most miserable sicknesses I have endured happened after eating raw vegetables while on vacation; I had washed them, but obviously not enough. Not only my stomach hurt, but every part of me; even my skin hurt. My body, reasoning that something was deeply wrong, did its very mighty best to eliminate any ingested toxins by every route available, profuse sweat and tears included.
Luckily, it was all over by morning, and I was left with a deep gratitude toward my body for the steps it had taken–however extreme–to make me well again.
it is important to distinguish between the effects of sickness and the effects of the homeostatic system attempting to cure itself. This is a crucial mistake people make all the time. In my case, the sickness made me feel ill by flooding my body with pathogens and their resultant toxins. The vomiting felt awful, but the vomiting was not the sickness; vomiting was my body’s attempt to rid itself of the pathogens. Taking steps to prevent the vomiting, say, by taking an anti-nausea medication, would have let the pathogens remain inside of me, doing more harm.
(Of course, it is crucial to make sure that a vomiting person does not become dehydrated.)
To use a more general example, fevers are your body’s way of killing viruses and slowing their reproduction–just as we kill microbes by cooking our food. Fevers feel unpleasant, but they are not diseases. Using medication to lower mild fevers may actually increase [PDF] mortality by interfering with the body’s ability to kill the disease. Quoting from the PDF:
“…children with chickenpox who are treated with acetaminophen have been shown to have a longer time to total crusting of lesions than do placebo-treated control subjects [15]. In addition, adults with rhinovirus infections exhibit a longer duration of viral shedding and increased nasal signs and symptoms when treated with antipyretic medications [16].”
Additionally, artificially depressing how sick you feel increases the likelihood of getting out of bed and moving around, which in turn increases the likelihood of spreading your sickness to other people.
Fevers of 105 degrees F or above are excessive and do have the potential to harm you, and should be treated. But a fever of 102 should be allowed to do its work.
Likewise, in the case of cholera, the most effective treatment is to keep the sufferer hydrated (or re-hydrate them) until their body can wipe out the disease. (Cholera basically makes you lose all of your bodily fluids and die of dehydration.) It is easy to underestimate just how much water the sufferer has lost; according to Wikipedia, “Ten percent of a person’s body weight in fluid may need to be given in the first two to four hours.[12]” Keep in mind the need to replenish potassium levels while you re-hydrate; if you don’t have any special re-hydration drinks, you can just boil 1 liter of water and add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 6 teaspoons of sugar, and 1 mashed banana; in a pinch, probably any clean beverage is better than nothing. Untreated, 50-90% of cholera victims die; with rehydration, the death rate amazingly drops below 1%:
“In untreated cases the death rate is high, averaging 50%, and as high as 90% in epidemics, but with effective treatment the death rate is less than 1%. The intravenous and oral replacement of body fluids and essential electrolytes and the restoration of kidney function are more important in therapy than the administration of antibacterial drugs.”
This is super important, so I’m going to repeat it: Don’t confuse the effects of sickness and the effects of the homeostatic system attempting to cure itself. This goes for organizations and societies, too.
Unfortunately, much of our economic theory is not based on the idea that societies–or the Earth–trend toward homeostasis, but on the assumption of infinite growth. The economic proponents of open borders, for example, basically seem to think that there are no theoretical limits to the number of people who can move to Europe and the US and take up a Western lifestyle.
Pension plans (and Social Security) were also designed with infinite growth in mind. Now that TFRs have dropped below replacement across the developed world, many countries are faced with the horrifying prospect that old people may not be able to depend on the incomes of children they didn’t create for their retirement. I suppose the solution to such a problem is that you only let people with 3+ children have pensions, or design a pension system that doesn’t require a never-ending process of population expansion, because the planet cannot hold infinite numbers of people.
Declining TFR is not a disease, it is a symptom, most likely of countries where ordinary people struggle to afford children. The fertility rate will pick back up once the population has shrunk enough that there are enough resources per person–including space–to make having children an attractive option.
But to those obsessively focused on their unsustainable pensions, low TFR is a disease, and it has to be fixed by bringing in more people, preferably people who will have lots of children.
“Japan must import more people!” the NY Times constantly screams. “They don’t have enough to fill the pensions!”
Just as treating a fever inhibits your body’s ability to fight the real disease, so importing people to combat a low TFR inhibits your country’s ability to return to a proper ratio of resource to people, making the problem much, much worse.
Mass immigration => bigger labor market => lower wages => lower TFR => underfunded pensions => demands for more immigrants.
Inadequate Homeostasis
Inadequate and over-active homeostastic systems are pathologic conditions rendering the self unable to respond appropriately to changing conditions in order to reassert normal homeostasis. For example, people with a certain mutation in the ITPR2 gene cannot sweat, increasing their chances of dangerously overheating. People with AIDS, of course, have deficient immune systems, because the virus specifically attacks immune cells.
Inability to maintain or reassert homeostasis in biological systems is most likely a result of damage due to mutation or infection. In a non-organism, it is more likely a result of the organization or entity just having been created with inadequate homeostatic systems.
A mundane example is a city that has expanded and so can no longer handle the amount of traffic, trash, and rainwater run-off it produces. The original systems, such as sewers, roads, and trash collection, could handle the city’s normal variations back when they were designed, but no longer. Traffic jams, flooding, and giant piles of trash ensue.
At this point, a city has two choices: increase systemic complexity (ie, upgrade the infrastructure,) or decrease the amount of waste it produces by people dying/moving away.
Rome had obviously been in decline since around 100 AD, probably due to the Antonin Plague–most plagues are, of course, homeostasis violently reasserting itself as a result of human societies becoming too big for their hygiene systems. In the 400s, the Roman empire collapsed, leading to sieges, famines, and violent barbarian invasions and an end to tax revenues and supply networks that had formerly supported the city.
By 752, Rome had dropped from 1.65 million people to 40,000 people, but the city reached its true nadir in 1347, when plague reduced the population to 17,000, which is even lower than the estimates for 800 BC. Rome would not return to its previous high until 1850, though if I know anything about near-vertical lines on graphs, it’s that they don’t go up forever. When the collapse begins again, I wonder if the city will return to its 1000s population, or stabilize at some new level.
I’ve spoken before of La Griffe du Lion‘s Smart Fraction Theory, which posits that a country’s GDP correlates with the percent of its population with (verbal) IQs over 120. These are the people who can plan and maintain complex systems. This suggests that, unless IQs increase over time, counties may have a natural limit complexity limit they can’t pass, (but many countries may not be operating at their complexity limits.)
A different kind of inadequate homeostasis is Mission creep, when organizations start seeing it as their job to do more and more things not within their original mandate, as when the Sierra Club starts championing SJW causes; in these cases, the organization lacks proper feedback mechanisms to keep itself on-task. Eventually, like MTV, the organization loses sight entirely of its original purpose (though to be fair, MTV still exists, so it’s strategy hasn’t been unsuccessful.)
Over-Active Homeostasis
Allergies and auto-immune disorders are classic examples of over-active homeostatic systems. Allergies happen when the body responds to normal stimuli like pollen or food as though they were pathogens; auto-immune disorders involve the immune system accidentally attacking the body’s own cells instead of pathogens.
Millions of years of evolution have equipped our bodies with self-correcting systems to keep us functioning, so that human pathologies are relatively easy to identify. Organizations, however, have endured far fewer years of evolutionary pressure, so their homeostatic systems are much cruder and more likely to fail. We can understand biological pathologies fairly well, but often fail to identify organizational pathologies entirely; even when we do have some sense* that things are definitely wrong, it’s hard to say exactly what, much less identify a coherent plan to fix it and then convince other people to actually do it.
*or perhaps in your case, dear reader, a definite sense
For organizations to continue working, they need adequate homeostatic systems to keep them on track and prevent both under and over reactions. The US Constitution, for example, establishes a system of “checks and balances” and “separate powers” mandated to the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, not to mention federal, state, and individual levels (via voting and citizen juries.) For all its flaws, this system has managed to basically keep going for over 200 years, making it one of the oldest systems of continuous governance in the world, (most of the world’s governments were established following the breakup of colonial empires and the Soviet Union), but these system probably needs revision over time to keep it functioning. (We can further discuss a variety of ways to keep systems functional elsewhere, but Slate Star Codex’s post on Why don’t Whales get Cancer? [basically, the theory is that whales are so big that their cancers get cancer and kill themselves before they kill the whale] seems relevant.)
All human civilization depends on homeostatic systems to keep everyone in them alive. We may think of civilization as order, but it is not perfect order. Perfect order is a crystal; perfect order is absolute zero. It is not alive; it does not change, move, or adapt. Life is a braid in spacetime; civilization is homeostatic.
I was thinking today about the Bay of Pigs fiasco–a classic example of “groupthink” in action. A bunch of guys supposedly hired for their ability to think through complex international scenarios somehow managed to use the biggest military in the world to plan an invasion that was overwhelmingly crushed within 3 days.
In retrospect,the Bay of Pigs Invasion looks like an idiotic idea; everyone should have realized this was going to be a colossal disaster. But ahead of time, everyone involved thought it was a great idea that would totally succeed, including a bunch of people who got killed during the invasion.
Groupthink happens when everyone starts advocating for the same bad ideas, either because they actually think they’re good ideas, or because individuals are afraid to speak up and say anything counter to the perceived group consensus.
There’s not much you can do abut dumb, but consensus we can fight.
The obvious first strategy is to just try to get people to think differently.
Some people are really agreeable people who are naturally inclined to go along with others and seek group harmony. These folks make great employees, but should not be the entirety of a decision-making body because they are terrible at rejecting bad ideas.
By contrast, some people are assholes who like to be difficult. While you might not want to look specifically for “assholes,” the inclusion of at least one person with a reputation for saying unpopular things in any decision-making group will ensure that after a disaster, there will be at least one person there to say, “I told you so.”
You may also be able to strategically use people with different backgrounds/training/experiences/etc. Different schools of thought often come up with vastly different explanations for how the world works, and so can bring different ideas to the table. By contrast, a group that is all communists or all libertarians is likely to miss something that is obvious to folks from other groups; a group that’s all ivy league grads or all farmers is likewise prone to miss something.
Be careful when mixing up your group; getting useless people into the mix just because they have some superficial trait that makes them seem different from others will not help. You want someone who actually brings a different and valuable perspective or ideas to the group, not someone who satisfies someone else’s political agenda about employment.
Alternatively, if you can’t change the group’s membership, you may be able to break down consensus by isolating people so that they can’t figure out what the others think. Structure the group so that members can’t talk to each other in real life, or if that’s too inefficient, make everyone submit written reports on what they’re thinking before the talking begins. Having one member or part of the group that is geographically isolated–say, having some of your guys located in NY and some in Chicago–could also work.
But probably the easiest way to remove the urge to go along with bad ideas for the sake of group harmony is to remove the negative social repercussions for being an asshole.
Luckily for us, the technology for this already exists: anonymous internet messageboards. When people communicate anonymously, they are much more likely to say unpopular, assholish things like “your invasion plan is fucking delusional,” than they are in public, where they have to worry about being un-invited to Washington cocktail parties.
Anonymous is important. In fact, for truly good decision-making, you may have to go beyond anonymous to truly a-reputational posting with no recognizable names or handles.
The internet helpfully supplies us with communities with different degrees of anonymity. On Facebook, everyone uses their real names; Twitter has a mix of real names and anonymous handles where people still build up reputations; Reddit and blogs are pretty much all pseudonyms; 8Chan is totally anonymous with no names and no ability to build up a reputation.
Facebook is full of pretty messages about how you should Be Yourself! and support the latest good-feel political cause. Since approximately everyone on FB have friended their boss, grandmother, dentist, and everyone else they’ve ever met, (and even if you don’t, employers often look up prospective applicants’ FB profiles to see what they’ve been up to,) you can only post things on FB that won’t get you in trouble with your boss, grandmother, and pretty much everyone else you know.
I have often felt that Facebook is rather like a giant meta-brain, with every person an individual neuron sending messages out to everyone around them, and that so long as all of the neurons are messaging harmony, the brain is happy. But when one person is out of sync, sending out messages that don’t mesh with everyone else’s, it’s like having a rogue brain cell that’s firing at it’s own frequency, whenever it wants to, with the result that the meta-brain wants to purge the rogue cell before it causes epilepsy.
I know my position in the Facebook meta-brain, and it’s not a good one.
The Facebook architecture leads quickly to either saying nothing that could possibly offend anyone, (thus avoiding all forms of decision-making all together,) or competitive morality spirals in which everyone tries to prove that they are the best and most moral person in the room. (Which, again, does not necessarily lead to the best decision-making; being the guy who is most anti-communist does not mean you are the guy with the best ideas for how to overthrow Castro, for example.)
Twitter and bloggers are anonymous enough to say disagreeable things without worrying about it having major effects on their personal lives; they don’t have to worry about grandma bringing up their blog posts at Thanksgiving dinner, for example, unless they’ve told grandma about their blog. However, they may still worry about alienating their regular readers. For example, if you run a regular Feminist blog, but happen to think the latest scandal is nonsense and the person involved is making it all up, it’s probably not worth your while to bring it up and alienate your regular readers. If you’re the Wesleyan student paper, it’s a bad idea to run any articles even vaguely critical of #BlackLivesMatters.
Places like 8Chan run completely anonymously, eschewing even reputation. You have no idea if the person you’re talking to is the same guy you were talking to the other day, or even just a few seconds ago. Here, there are basically no negative repercussions for saying you think Ike’s invasion plan is made of horse feces. If you want to know all the reasons why your idea is dumb and you shouldn’t do it, 8Chan is probably the place to ask.
Any serious decision-making organization can set up its own totally anonymous internal messageboard that only members have access to, and then tell everyone that they’re not allowed to take real-life credit for things said on the board. Because once you’ve got anonymous, a-reputational, a-name communication, your next goal is to keep it that way. You have to make it clear–in the rules themselves–to everyone involved that the entire point of the anonymous, a-name messageboard is to prevent people from knowing whose ideas are whose, so that people can say things that disrupt group harmony without fear. Second, you have to make sure that no one tries to bypass the no reputations by just telling everyone who they are. You can do this by having strong rules against it, and/or by frequently claiming to be everyone else and stating in the rules that it is perfectly a-ok to pretend to be everyone else, precisely for this reason.
Obviously moderation is a fast route to groupthink; your small decision-making messageboard really shouldn’t need any moderation beyond the obvious, “don’t do anything illegal.”
The biggest reason you have to make this extra clear from the get-go is that anonymous, a-reputational boards seem to be anathema to certain personality types–just compare the number of women on Facebook with the number of women on Reddit–so any women in your decision-making group may strongly protest the system. (So may many of the men, for that matter.)
Personal experience suggests that men and women use communication for different ends. Men want to convey facts quickly and get everything done; women want to build relationships. Using real names and establishing reputations lets them do that. Being anonymous and anomized and unable to carry on a coherent conversation with another person from minute to minute makes this virtually impossible. Unfortunately, building relationships gets you right back to where we started, with people neglecting to say uncomfortable things in the interests of maintaining group harmony.
This basic architecture of communication also seems to have an actual effect on the kinds of moral and political memes that get expressed and thrive in each respective environment. As I mentioned above, Facebook slants strongly to the left; when people’s reputations are on the line, they want to look like good people, and they make themselves look like good people by professing deep concern for the welfare of others. As a result, reading Facebook is like jumping onto Cthulhu’s back as he flies through the Overton Window. By contrast, if you’ve ever wandered into /pol/, you know that 8Chan slants far to the right. If you’re going to post about your love of Nazis, you don’t want to do it in front of your boss, your grandma, and all of your friends and acquaintances. When you want to be self-interested, 8Chan is the place to go; without reputation, there’s no incentive to engage in holiness spirals.
I don’t know what such a system do to corporate or political decision making of the Bay of Pigs variety, but if your want your organization to look out for its own interests (this is generally accepted as the entire point of an organization,) then it may be useful to avoid pressures that encourage your organization to look out for other people’s interests at the expense of its own.
The Puritans really get a bad rap these days. “The Pilgrims” get favorable treatment in some children’s books, but “the Puritans” are lucky to get a neutral description anywhere, much less a positive one. Much of the time they described in outright hostile terms, as bad people who oppressed women and children and nature and the Indians and so on and so forth.
Much of that is basically true, but what those accounts tend to leave out is that pretty much every other group on Earth was also terrible by modern standards.
You ever wonder what happened to Roanoke colonists? Chief Powhatan told Captain John Smith thathe’d killed them all. Why? The colonists had gone to live with another Indian tribe in the area, Powhatan and his soldiers attacked and slaughtered that tribe for local tribal politics reasons.
To be clear: the Roanoke (and Jamestown) settlers were not Puritans. Totally different group. I’m just commenting here on the behavior of the Powhatans, who massacred their neighbors, including the Jamestown settlers themselves (an attack that left a quarter of them dead.)
But if you pick up a children’s book about Pocahontas, do you read how the Powhatan people massacred the Roanoke colony and later tried to wipe out Jamestown? Or do you read about how the Powhatan loved nature so much they were constantly surrounded by a chorus of singing birds and magic trees?
Do you ever read a story about the Puritans in which they are surrounded by magical choruses?
I am picking on the Powhatans because they come up in the relevant literature, even though they had nothing to do with the Puritans. I could just as easily talk about the Killing Fields of Cambodia; ISIS; or folks like King Gezo and Madam Efunroye Tinubu, who became wealthy selling people into slavery and didn’t hesitate to slaughter hundreds of slaves for religious sacrifices.
History (and the modern world) has a lot of groups in it I wouldn’t want to live in or near. The Puritans, by contrast, are downright pleasant. When everyone else kept telling them their religion was annoying, they politely moved away from everyone else so they could go about their business peacefully. They were never much involved in the slave trade, worked hard, attempted to lead virtuous lives, taught their children to read, and even established schools for the Indians so they could learn to read.
Here we have a map showing genetic clusters in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Eastern England obviously has the most red, a product of Anglo-Saxon admixture. (Note that the A-S component isn’t a majority, even here.) Western England is more varied, showing less of the Anglo Saxon and more of the old Celtic (or perhaps pre-Celtic) bloodlines, simply because the Anglo Saxons et al landed on the south eastern shore and spread inward from there, leaving a fringe of less mixed native people on the western (and, obviously, northern) side of the Island. (Note also that “Celtic” is not a homogenous group, but more of a catch-all for everyone who just doesn’t have a lot of A-S.) Cornwall, Wales, eastern and northern England, and the English/Scottish border region all show up quite distinctly on this map.
And here we see where people from each region headed. They did not move randomly, but shipped off with their friends and families, aiming for places where people like them were already established. The Jamestown settlers, as I mentioned before, were not Puritans; they were in it for the economic opportunities and hailed largely from the western side of the island.
The Puritans hailed from the east side of the island, the Anglo-Saxon zone, but obviously were not a random assortment even here, as they were members of a relatively small religious sect that wasn’t all that well tolerated by the other locals. Personality wise, they remind me a lot of the Dutch (and not just because they lived in Holland for a few years.)
Here we can see where the various groups landed and then spread. The Puritans arrived in Massachusetts in 1620 and spread quickly:
to their fairly reliable present locations.
The Wikipedia claims that in contrast to the Jamestown colony, which was largely populated by men hoping to get rich, the Puritans consisted of a more even mix of men, women, and children who intended to raise children and build a civilization, a “Shining city upon a hill.”
Puritan Memes
The Puritans basically believed that god wanted them to run their lives via a joint-stock corporation with a semi-democratically elected board of directors.
Religiously, Puritanism is the kind of movement you’d expect from the Little Ice Age. They hated nice-looking churches, fancy decorations, and, one suspects, anything that smacked too much of “fun,” all of which they associated with their hated enemies, people who had insufficiently purged themselves of all vestiges of Catholicism. Their idea of a “good time” was attending church in a plain wooden building, then having a sedate meeting at home to discuss the sermons. (Anne Hutchinson got banished for hosting insufficiently sedate sermon discussions, after which the Puritans attempted to generally crack down on women enjoying church too much.)
Basically, the Puritans were trying to route religion through the logic parts of the brain. I don’t know if this is just because they had some other reason to hate Catholics, because they simply wanted to be rational about their religion, or if they just lacked the basic impulse toward irrational emotional experiences and so found ritual inherently strange and repellant.
Whatever the reasons for their attempt at striping down their religion to its barest, calmest bones, I suspect that religious belief is dependent on emotional rather than rational experiences, and thus attempts to conduct religion “rationally,” no matter how well-intentioned, quickly result in atheism. Ritual, symbolism, mysticism, and other altered, transcendent states instill an overwhelming sense of divine presence that mere logic cannot match.
By the 1660s, just 40 years after the Pilgrims had landed, the Puritan churches were undergoing a bit of a crisis due to the children and grandchildren of the original Puritans just not being as into church as their forefathers.
This is not much of a surprise; when it comes to breeding for particular traits, one must always deal with regression to the mean. The original stock of New World Puritans consisted of people who were so concerned about the English government not doing enough to root out the last few vestiges of Catholicism from the Church of England that they decided to risk death so they could start a new community on the other side of the ocean. Their children and grandchildren, having regressed a bit toward the religious mean, were not quite so devout.
This is a pattern I see among super-religious people today; they try their very hardest to pass on their religious fervor, but their children rarely turn out as religious as their parents.
The Puritans haven’t quite shaken the habit of attending church, even though they stopped believing in all of this “god” business long ago.
What else made the Puritans Puritans?
One thing I have noticed about Yanks is their almost compulsive drive to create organizations. (I swear, these people cannot hang out and watch TV together without establishing a set of by-laws and a treasury to handle snack funds.)
The Puritan colonies were not just a random assortment of huts tossed up on Massachusetts’s shores. They were company towns set up by joint-stock corporations like the London Company, Plymouth Company, and most famously, the Dutch East India Corporation, which preceded the London Company by about 4 years, making the Dutch the first people to use joint-stock corporations for international trade and settlement, which is why the whole business strikes me as so very Dutch.
I wrote about the development of these joint stock corporations and their importance in the history of the United States and Europe back in Les Miserables.
The original British and Dutch colonies of Jamestown, New York, Plymouth, etc., were literally corporations whose purpose was to make money for their stock holders by harvesting timber (England had cut down pretty much all of its trees and was reduced to burning mud and rocks,) growing tobacco, and carrying on trade with the Indians. In practical terms, this was the only way the Puritans could get the funding necessary to buy the boats and supplies they needed to get from England to New England.
“On April 10, 1606 King James I of England (James VI of Scotland) granted a charter forming two joint stock companies. … Under this charter the “first Colony” and the “second Colony” each were to be ruled by a “Council” composed of 13 individuals. The charter provided for an additional council of 13 persons to have overarching responsibility for the combined enterprise. Although no name was given to either the company or council governing the respective colonies, the council governing the whole was named “Council of Virginia.”
“The investors appointed to govern over any settlements in the “first Colony” were from London; the investors appointed to govern over any settlements in the “second Colony” were from the “Town of Plimouth in the County of Devon.”[citation needed] The London Company proceeded to establish Jamestown.[5] The Plymouth Company under the guidance of Sir Ferdinando Gorges covered the more northern area, including present-day New England, and established the Sagadahoc Colony in 1607 in present-day Maine.[6]”
(The Maine colony failed.)
Different colonies probably differed in how they handled the exact details of administration, but the general gist of things is that the Puritans believed that democracy was divinely ordained by John Calvin. Adult males who were formal members of the Puritan Church and had been “sponsored by an existing freeman and accepted by the General Court” (wikipedia) were allowed to vote for the colony’s governors.
Despite a deeply held religious conviction that they should work hard and build the best joint-stock corporation they could, the early Puritans had a very rough time of it in the New World and a great many of them died, which had a major negative impact on profits for the first few years. The investors in the Plymouth Colony decided to cut their losses in 1627, and sold the colony to the colonists, at which point they were technically an independent republic. The Massachusetts Bay company followed a similar path, first by relocating their annual stockholders meeting from England to Massachusetts, and then by buying out the remaining non-Massachusetts residents’ stock shares.
The British at this time were content to basically ignore the colonies (aside from the 10,000 or so who emigrated,) until after the English Civil War, when the newly restored king decided he was going to take over the colonies and rule them himself. Of course, you know how that eventually ended; the Puritans were too numerically dominant in their area and 1700s tech still too limited for Great Britain to control them for long.
As for daily life in the colonies, once they got the houses insulated and the crops growing, it wasn’t nearly so bad. There was plenty of land to till, child mortality was low, interpersonal violence was low, and the people seem to have been basically happy and productive.
I spent a while trying to decide whether the Puritans or the Jamestown colonists were more “liberal,” and eventually decided that “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless, at least in this context. Virginia produced democracy-loving deists like Jefferson, whereas the Puritans were, well, Puritans. Jamestown has been block-voting with the rest of the South pretty much since George Washington retired (and probably before Washington was even born), and Plymouth Colony has voted against Jamestown in almost every election, so we should probably just chalk the political divide up to “ethnic differences dating back to the Anglo-Saxon and Norman conquests of Britain” and leave it at that.
So I was researching the Mexican Revolution the other day–because hey, revolution–and you know, 1910-1920 really was a high point for socialism.
Pancho Villa, Mexican Revolution
We had the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, that election when instead of Dems vs. Repubs we had the International Socialist (Wilson) vs. the Nationalistic Socialist (Teddy Roosevelt) vs. whatever Taft was, normal conservatism or something. Wilson won and gave us the income tax (so we could tax the rich to give to the poor, and also a massive standing army,) the League of Nations, and the Federal Reserve.
Anyway, so I was researching the Mexican Revolution, and happened across Diego Rivera–you know him, he’s famous for being married to Frida Kahlo, who’s famous for being one of the twentieth century’s most over rated artists.
Frida Kahlo and Diego RiveraFrida Kahlo, self portrait
No, wait, Frida Kahlo is famous for having been married to Rivera, who’s famous for being an actually pretty good artist who painted a bunch of pictures of Marx and Lenin and the like inside the Mexican capital building. Which I suppose explains why Trotsky died in Mexico.
Detail of Man at the Crossroads, fresco at Palacio de Bellas ArtesDetail of Man at the Crossroads, fresco at Palacio de Bellas ArtesDetail of The History of Mexico showing betrayed revolution, located in the Mexican capital building (note Marx)
Anyway, yes, so Diego and Frida were hipsters. But I got to thinking–how is it that I know the name of Diego Rivera, (and even Frida Kahlo!) the guy who painted at least part of the Mexican capitol building, but I don’t even know the name of the guy who painted the US Capitol building?
I got 11 months of white history a year in school, and I don’t even know Diego Rivera’s opposite number?
Yes, there were probably multiple guys involved in painting the US Capitol building (and the Mexican Capitol.) But can you name any of them?
Neither can I, and I actually posted one of his paintings about a month and a half ago on this blog:
Brumidi also painted this lovely lady on the White House:
Liberty, by Constantino Brumidi, 1869
But Brumidi is clearly a nobody whose work is not worth remembering, whereas Frida Kahlo is so important, she gets a two-page spread in National Geographic’s Little Kids First Big Book of Who. (The book is actually more serious than it sounds.)
From Amazon’s description of the book:
“Introduce young readers to some of the world’s most interesting and important people in this bold and lively first biography book. More than 100 colorful photos are paired with age-appropriate text featuring profiles of each person, along with fascinating facts about their accomplishments and contributions. This book inspires kids about a world of possibilities and taps into their natural curiosity about fascinating role models from education advocate Malala Yousafzai to astronaut Neil Armstrong.”
The book awards Albert Einstein one entire paragraph, but Isabella Bird (who?) Jackie Robinson, and Amelia Earhart all get two-page spreads.
You know, can we please stop using Amelia Earhart as some sort of symbol of female accomplishment and empowerment, considering that Amelia is most famous for having failed spectacularly to fly across the Pacific and probably died horrible in a plane crash? If we have to scrounge around for female role models, can’t we find one who didn’t die hideously while failing at the thing she was supposedly paving the way for women to do? I mean, a woman recently won the Fields Medal, isn’t that some sort of accomplishment? Or do we only talk about math when whining?
Of course, Brumidi doesn’t even make it into the book.
I happened to be at the library because I was looking for a picture book about Teddy Roosevelt, because the kids wanted to know why teddy bears are called teddy bears. Roosevelt is generally acknowledged to be one of our greatest presidents–he once got shot in the shoulder by a would-be assassin, got up, and gave his campaign speech anyway. He won a Nobel Prize (I know, I know,) and folks even bothered to carve a mountain into the shape of his face to make sure that we all remember just how awesome he was.
Of course, there were no picture books about Teddy Roosevelt. I wasn’t surprised. I did find picture books about black female civil rights leaders (besides Rosa Parks;) a picture book about how poor Frida Kahlo was lonely and doubted herself when she moved too the US, but then she did ART and so it was all okay; a picture book about how slaves built the White House; a picture book about Loving v. Virginia; etc.
I did find a book by Newt Gingrich’s wife about how much elephants love America, and one by a Biden relation about a little girl who prays for god to bless our troops. It was shelved next to the children’s picture books about gay parents.
I did manage to find some decent-looking history books, but sadly, nothing on Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, who was he? Some guy who didn’t even make it into the Big Book of Who?
Peter Frost recently posted on female shyness among men–more specifically, on the observation that adolescent white females appear to become very shy among groups of males and suffer depression, but adolescent black females don’t.
Frost theorizes that women are instinctually deferential to men, especially when they are economically dependent on them, and that whites show more of this deference than blacks because traditional white marriage patterns–monogamy–have brought women into more contact with men while making them more economically dependent on them than traditional African marriage patterns–polygyny–and therefore white women have evolved to have more shyness.
This explanation is decent, but feels incomplete.
Did anyone bother to ask the girls why they felt shy around the boys? Probably someone has, but that information wasn’t included in the post. But I can share my own experiences.
For starters, I’ve never felt–and this may just be me–particularly shyer around males than around females, nor do I recall ever talking less in highschool due to class composition. Rather, the amount I talked had entirely to do with how much I liked the subject matter vs. how tired I was. However, in non-school settings, I am less likely to talk when conversations are dominated by men, simply because men tend to talk about things I find boring, like cars, sports, or finance. (I suspect I have an unusually high tolerance for finance/economic discussions for a female, but there are limits to what even I can stand, and the other two topics drive me to tears of boredom. Sports, as far as I am concerned, are the Kardashians of men.) I am sure the same is true in reverse–when groups of women get together, they talk about stuff that men find horribly dull.
Even in classroom conversations that are ostensibly led by the teacher, male students may make responses that just aren’t interesting to the female students, leading to the females getting bored or having little to say in response.
So, do black adolescent girls and boys have more conversation topics in common than whites?
Second, related to Frost’s observations, men tend to be more aggressive while talking than women. They are louder, they interrupt more, they put less effort into assuaging people’s feelings, etc. I am sure women do things men find annoying, like ramble on forever without getting to the point or talking about their feelings in these weirdly associative ways. Regardless, I suspect that women/adolescents (at least white ones) often find the male style overwhelming, and their response is to retreat.
When feminists say they need “safe spaces” away from men to discuss their feminism things, they aren’t entirely inaccurate. It’s just that society used to have these “safe spaces” for women back before the feminists themselves destroyed them! Even now, it is easy to join a Mommy Meetup group or find an all-female Bible study club. But, oh wait, these are regressive! What we need are all-female lawyers, or doctors, or mathematicians…
*Ahem* back on subject, if testosterone => aggression, it would be interesting to see if the difference in black vs white females is simply a result of different testosterone levels (though of course that is just kicking the ball back a bit, because we then must ask what causes different testosterone levels.)
I suspect that Frost is on the right track looking at polygyny vs. monogamy, but I think his mechanism (increased time around/dependence on men => increase shyness) is incomplete. He’s missed something from his own work: polygynous males have higher testosterone than monogamous ones (even within their own society.) (See: The Contradictions of Polygyny and Polygyny Makes Men Bigger, Tougher, and Meaner.) Even if women in polygynous societies were expected to behave exactly like women from monogamous societies, I’d expect some “spillover” effect from the higher testosterone in their men–that is, everyone in society ought to have higher testosterone levels than they would otherwise.
Additionally, let us consider that polygyny is not practiced the same everywhere. In the Middle East, sexual access to women is tightly controlled–to the point where women may be killed for extra-marital sexual activity. In this case, the women are effectively monogamous, while the men are not. By contrast, in the societies Frost describes from Sub-Saharan Africa, it sounds like both men and women have a great many sexual partners during adolescence and early adulthood (which explains the high STD rates.)
If polygamy increases male aggression and testosterone levels because them men have to invest more energy into finding mates, then it stands to reason that women who have lots of mates are also investing lots of energy into finding them, and so would also have increased levels of aggression and testosterone.
Speaking again from personal experience, I observed that my own desire to talk to men basically cratered after I got married (and then had kids.) Suddenly something about it seemed vaguely tawdry. Of course, this leaves me in a bit of a pickle, because there aren’t that many moms who want to discuss HBD or related topics. (Thankfully I have the internet, because talking to words on a screen is a very different dynamic.) Of course, if I were back on the dating market again (god forbid!) I’d have to talk to lots of men again.
So I think the equation here shouldn’t be +time with men => +shyness, -time with men => -shyness, but +pursuit of partners => +aggression, -pursuit of partners => -aggression.
None of this gets into the “depression” issue. What’s up with that?
Personally, while I felt plenty of annoying things during highschool, the only ones triggered by boys were of the wanting to fall in love variety and the feeling sad if someone didn’t like me variety. I did feel some distress over wanting the adults to treat me like an adult, but that has nothing to do with boys. But this may just be me being odd.
We know that whites, women, and the subset of white women suffer from depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental illness at higher rates than blacks, men, and pretty much everyone else. I speculate that anxiety, shyness, disgust, and possibly even depression are part of a suite of traits that help women women avoid male aggression, perform otherwise dull tasks like writing English papers or washing dishes, keep out of trouble, and stay interested in their husbands and only their husbands.
In a society where monogamy is enforced, people (or their parents) may even preferrentially chose partners who seem unlikely to stray–that is, women (or men) who display little interest in actively pursuing the opposite sex. So just as women in polygamous societies may be under selective pressure to become more aggressive, women in monogamous societies may be under selective pressure to have less interest in talking to men.
Eventually, you get Japan.
Amusingly, the studies Frost quotes view white female shyness as a bad thing to be corrected, and black female non-shyness as a good thing that mysteriously exists despite adverse conditions. But what are the effects of white female shyness? Do white women go to prison, become pregnant out of wedlock, or get killed by their partners at higher rates than black women? Do they get worse grades, graduate from school at lower rates, or end up in worse professions?
Or maybe shy girls are perfectly fine the way they are and don’t need fixing.
It’s a sedate party, I admit. But the canapes are delish.
There are two themes to this fairly open thread: How I Came to Be Me and Your Favorite Posts
It’s funny, but way back when I began typing little theories about human behavior into my graphing calculator during highschool math, I had no idea that the whole topic matter was taboo. Actually, I didn’t even believe in evolution back then–at least, I was pretty sure that evolution was a thing that Christians were not supposed to believe in. Nebraska Man and all that, you know. So I didn’t think of my theories as having anything to do with evolution, just “things that made sense.”
I remember one of them, on the symbolic/physical importance of sharing food among friends. For me to take some of my food and give it to you both helps ensure your continued existence, and decreases my my chances of existing. To give a friend a french fry or cookie from one’s own lunch tray was a sign of valuing the friend’s life enough to be willing to risk a threat to one’s own life to help the friend. This was the symbolism, I wrote, underneath both the importance of ritual food sharing with strangers–bread and salt in Russia, the inviting of people to tea or dinner–and more elevatedly, Eucharistic communion itself: the giving of Christ’s literal life, blood and body in the breaking of bread and giving of it to his disciples, ensuring their lives continued by ending his own.
Years later, when highschool days had largely faded from my mind, I was reminded rather vividly of this essay when a new Jewish friend promptly escorted me to their home and set out a kosher dinner, a good portion of which was bread.
Since this is my party, help yourself to the metaphorical bread and salt, wine and cheese. Or coffee, if you prefer.
But back to our story. I somehow passed highschool bio and got into college, despite being more or less a Creationist, where I did all of the normal college things. Alas, college is wasted on the young. Eventually I read a book on human evolution and decided that the book sounded a lot more sensible than that anti-evolution video they’d shown us once in Sunday School. The last chapter of the book–sadly, I no longer remember the title–wasn’t about bones and teeth and people trying to figure out which skeletons were hoaxes, but the evolution of human families in which grandparents exist. Now, sure, all that business about australopithecines sounded reasonable enough, but that last chapter blew me away: a complex emergent behavior / idea-thing like a family could also have been created by evolutionary adaptation.
At the time, I considered myself a liberal of the most upstanding character. I did all of the good liberal things–feminist, pro-trans, fat acceptance, LGBQ friendly, Pagan friendly, anti-war, anti-meat, anti-racism, anarchist, etc.
Then came Facebook and similar systems. Since I like debating politics, I tried to write entertaining essays for my friends, and promptly lost most of my friends. I also got kicked out of my feminist community for some trivial bullshit–I think I posted a response to another poster in the wrong section of a message board.
Now, I am not stranger to internet flame wars, but by this time, the whole business was starting to grate. Friends who were basically on the same side of the political system ought to be able to discuss political details without antagonism or declaring that the other person is secretly evil. At the very least, there ought to be some trust that your friends have good hearts and are trying hard. But I lacked some of the meta-level understanding of what was going on in liberalism necessary to safely traverse these waters–for example, I thought pretty much all liberals accepted evolution as true. It turns out that they only believe in evolution when conservatives are around. Among themselves, they deny that humans have “instincts” or that gender exists, and insist that the application of evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior is actually evil.
Then something major happened: I had a kid.
I lost friends over that, too, but I realized several important things:
Childbirth is absolutely horrific.
There is no possible way the differences in the amount of energy/risk men and women entail to reproduce could not cause different evolutionary pressures that would lead to different optimal mating strategies.
Feminist claims that parents teach their children gender roles are total bullshit.
Gender is mostly nature, not nurture.
Natural childbirth is a horrible idea (for the record, c-sections are also horrible and the recovery is worse.)
People politicize a bunch of issues that should not be politicized.
Something non-political also happened: the baby got sick. After a week of especially sleepless nights, I figured out what was wrong and how to fix it. I remember that moment, the sudden energy that came over me: NO ONE was going to stand between me and helping my child.
When feminists speak of “empowering” women, this is the feeling they mean. The feeling that you will do whatever the hell it takes to accomplish your objectives, and no one and nothing will stop you. I don’t think you can “empower” someone. It comes from within. It comes from the evolutionary urge to protect your children.
As it turned out, no one got in my way and everyone was actually super-helpful and the whole business ended well, with a happy, healthy child. Luckily my husband is an upstanding fellow who loves his children, too. But helpfulness is not one of life’s givens.
Around this time, the whole SJW movement was picking up steam, and the “privilege” concept became an unexpected sticking point. I thought the idea was basically nonsense, and said so. I later came across a conversation between–I thought–a friend and one of my best friends. “EvolutionistX isn’t worth talking to,” said the best friend.
I didn’t break up with liberalism. Liberalism broke up with me.
It had become increasingly obvious to me that the people in these feminist and SJW communities weren’t just wrong on a few issues, but that many of them were deeply psychologically disturbed, and the politics had become a cover/excuse/justification for not getting help and dealing with their issues. Many of them, to be frank, were disconnected from reality, and pointing out that physical facts contradicted them (I don’t mean totally controversial theories like evolution, but just basic stuff,) resulted in anything from banning to death threats. Unfortunately, the memeplex was becoming increasingly dominant, infecting communities that had nothing to do with politics and were officially apolitical.
By this point, I’d learned to just keep my mouth shut, and found some new things to do with my time. My husband introduced me to Jayman’s blog, and I read every word of it. Same for Evo and Proud, the sadly defunct Neuropolitics, and West Hunter. These guys are awesome. I learned so much anthropology I hadn’t learned in anthropology class, without the post-modern bullshit and constant negativity that had infected academia. I was still vaguely afraid of talking, but at least I had some good reading material.
Shortly after, I beheld, with terrifying clarity, the abyss. Suddenly I understood why liberals hate HBD and ev psych.
My break with the left came over an obscure case: protests surrounding the death of Marshall Coulter, a teenager who climbed over a homeowner’s 6-foot fence at 2 am and then got shot in the head.
Now, I understand that there are some innocent excuses for being in someone’s yard at 2 am, like being so drunk that you think you’re at your own home when you aren’t, or jumping a fence for a dare, with no intention of committing any harm. But it remains, like driving 120 miles per hour or poking bears, an activity that I regard has having a very high chance of killing you, and you should not do if you do not accept those risks. You certainly do not blame the bear for eating you after you poke it.
Likewise, if you act like you are breaking into someone’s house in the middle of the night, the natural and only reasonable consequence is that home owner (or resident) kills you.
Protestors weighed in, claiming that Marshall was just an innocent kid who hadn’t done anything wrong and didn’t deserve to die, demanding that the homeowner (who was being charged with attempted murder) be, well, charged with attempted murder.
Ironically, the police had actually been discussing Marshall as a possible suspect in a string of recent burglaries the day before he was shot trying to burglarize someone’s house.
The attempted homicide charges were only dropped against the homeowner because Marshall recovered enough from the bullet in his head to get arrested for three more crimes:
During the Trayvon Martin case, I had understood how someone could hear the story of a teenager walking home with a pack of Skittles and think that a great injustice had been done. This case had no such ambiguities. I realized the left had abandoned liberalism, in every traditional sense of the word. This was not about freedom; this was an explicit denial of the right of self-defense against someone intent on harming you, at least if you were white and they were black.
Every betrayal suddenly made sense. The meta-politics became clear. I felt like I finally understood everything, and I leapt into the abyss.
A friend of mine (if you’re reading this, hi!) had kept telling me that life is too short to worry about assholes. If I had to walk on eggshells around my other “friends,” then they weren’t my friends and I should get new friends.
Sage advice.
So here we are, 200 posts in, and people actually like my blog.
Thanks for reading, guys. I hope you like the next 200 posts.
I’m going to open up the floor. Tell me your stories, ask questions, or just chat. And if you feel like it, tell me your favorite posts for inclusion in the sidebar.
So how have the 20 yeas since apartheid ended benefited South Africa?
Certainly it has benefited some people. Many black, Indian, or mixed-race people who were shut out of the economic system, land holding, etc., have become wealthy or at least middle class:
1994 = end of apartheid
On the other hand, rising GDP looks like it’s more of a global trend than a specifically SA one.
Tim Stanley, of The Telegraph, weighs in on the “Things have gotten better” side:
“the economy has doubled in real terms and South Africa is now the economic super power of the region. Not only is this proof that an African economy can be run efficiently as part of the global community but it’s also a model that many other countries are following – with enormous success. With booms in minerals and telecommunications, African capitalism is in the ascendant. …
“But crime was always high under Apartheid – it’s just that a media blackout meant that it went unreported. Drugs, drink and gangs were common in the shanties, the product of decades of brutal marginalisation. This historic legacy combined with failed expectations after the end of Apartheid to produce an explosion of violence that exposed the white community, for the first time, to serious crime.” (emphasis added)
According to NPR, Desmond Tutu is more ambivalent:
“‘I didn’t think there would be a disillusionment so soon. I’m glad that (Nelson Mandela) is dead. I’m glad that most of these people are no longer alive to see this,’ a reference to a host of chronic problems such as corruption and poverty.”
Many people attribute the collapse in life expectancy in SA to AIDS, but statistically, the only way that many people are catching AIDS is if the vast majority of people in SA are having unprotected sex with hundreds of other people, which is both incredibly stupid and incredibly easy not to do, so yes, I lay full blame for declining life expectancies on the people engaged in life-shortening behaviors and the government that has failed to stop the epidemic ravaging its own people.
Obviously the crime rate is through the roof.
Graph is labeled incorrectly since apartheid ended in 1994, but you can still see the general trend.
SA has one of the world’s highest murder rates (at least outside of Latin America,) one of if not the highest rape rate, and I hear it has the world’s highest rate of infant rape.
I have heard that there is a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS, so often when a man discovers that he has AIDS, he goes and pays a local family for the right to have sex with one of their daughters. If the AIDS doesn’t clear up, then obviously the daughter wasn’t a virgin, and the family is compelled to offer up someone younger, more likely to be a virgin. If the youngest daughter happens to be a baby, then the youngest daughter happens to be a baby. This process continues until the AIDS goes away or you run out of daughters.
In my research, I have talked to people who live in South Africa and love it there, and people who live in South Africa and are terrified. I have read posts claiming that South Africa is thriving and on the upswing, and posts claiming that the whole place is a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
These are photos taken and uploaded by “The Real Realist” during a drive through Yeoburg, formerly one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Johannesburg. Now it is decayed, broken, boarded up, and overflowing with trash.
In other words, it looks like Detroit.
But maybe it always looked like that. Here are pictures Real Realist took of the Johannesburg Jewish Museum:
I bet it didn’t look like that back when it was a museum.
There are hundreds more such photos and stories. Go and look for yourself.
Some more perspectives:
(Pay attention especially around 42 minutes in)
I find this interesting because I first heard about something like this in a Reddit thread I ran across while looking for photos of South Africa. I can’t even find the thread, now, but someone in it described a phenomenon whereby a occupied business building (occupied by people doing business, I mean) would suddenly be invaded by hundreds of people (and their chickens) who had suddenly decided to live there. This of course made it difficult to do business anymore, so all of the business people had to relocate elsewhere. Meanwhile, the squatters, not knowing exactly how the buildings worked, would throw their trash and excrement into the elevator shafts. When the shafts filled up, the people moved on.
The only way to get rid of these squatters was by hiring small armies of men (the police will not do it,) to physically remove them in the middle of the night (being asleep makes it difficult to fight back,) and then the building gets surrounded by barbed wire and crews have to come in to thoroughly clean it before it can become an office building or anything else again.
I wrote this off as “unverifiable rumor” until I found this Christian Science Monitor Slideshow (see #15) with a photo of one of the men tasked with cleaning out these hijacked buildings:
Let’s talk demographics:
Population density map of South Africa (from Wikipedia)
According to Wikipedia, when the Brits arrived in SA, the Cape colony had roughly 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan, and 1,000 freed black slaves. However, that data is marked, “citation needed.” If we trust it, though, whites were, at the time, roughly 1/3 (33%) of the population.
If we squint, it looks like whites were just over 1/6th of the population in 1910–probably around 20%. By 1990, they had fallen to about 11%. Today, they’re at 9%.
What happens when you become a tiny minority in the country your ancestors built?
You lose it.
There is no practical way for 9% of the population in a “democratic” country to control the other 91%.
Love it or hate it, a country belongs to the people in it.
Yes, the whites saw this coming. They knew the demographics. They were even trying to encourage family planning, which was moderately successful:
Source: South African Regional Policy Network
Sorry, Boers. (And Brits.) You ran into a 3,000 year old unstoppable Bantu migration wave and lost. Your buildings will be burned and looted, the wealth your ancestors created, murdered for and died for will be taken by people who have no idea how to maintain it, and your entire country will crumble away. A few of you remain, in walled-off communities supplied by private roads, electricity, water, and police. If you don’t get killed, well, you might have a pretty good life.
One of the things I’ve found interesting about the Boers, during all this research, is how much they remind me of a lot of the NRx/alt-right/Moldbuggian types. The Cape Colony began, after all, as a corporation, founded by the Dutch East India Company. When the British took over the Cape, many of the Dutch, rather than deal with someone telling them what to do, decided to take the exit option and go found a new state. This was no trivial undertaking, and required (among other things,) militarily defeating the Zulus, starting a new country from scratch in the middle of nowhere, and fighting off the British.
They eventually failed because they were numerically overwhelmed by the British, both migrants they had allowed into their country and troops sent from abroad. Exit is useless if you do not or cannot secure your own territory.
There’s a fail state to democracy, which Malema so succinctly identified: long term, you don’t need to wage a war to take over a democratic country. You just have to out-breed your opposition.
Given a finite planet, (which we have,) breeding wars can only end in catastrophe. But the other option–not playing–means losing your country.
Could you get around this by simply not being a democracy? Saudi Arabia doesn’t let women vote, but I don’t see anyone putting pressure on them to change their ways. Singapore also manages to be a pretty decent place, (though it is tiny,) due to what looks like good management. Bring back the old Dutch East India Company. Let those who buy stock be shareholders; let the company buy what it can and manage it for the sake of its owners.
Conclusion: only let people into your country whom you like and would hypothetically be willing to marry and have kids with. Keeping a large population of subjugated people is impractical and cruel. If you don’t want them to be equals, give them their own country to do with as they please.
With a leadership that looks toward Zimbabwe as a model, I expect South Africa to look ever more like Zimbabwe.
