Links for May, 2025
Memorials, Criminology, Secularization, Martyrdom, History, Homeschool
Welcome, dear reader, to my monthly collection of links to interesting items that don’t merit their own separate posts. And as always, consider becoming a free subscriber to keep up with my latest posts or a paid subscriber for full access to the archives and my eternal gratitude for the support. You can also support me with a tip at this Stripe link.
Now, onto items from around the interwebs.
Heroes
May 26 was Memorial Day here in the US, a holiday commemorating our fallen soldiers. It seems a good time to point out that the Association of the US Army freely provides comics recounting the exploits of Medal of Honor recipients.1 For instance, they have a comic on Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon, killed defending a downed Blackhawk pilot in Mogadishu.
They also have issues on the near-mythical Audie Murphy and Alvin York.
If you want an older comic, he’s one on the Medal of Honor citation for marine John Basilone. It was published during the war, so yes, the Japanese are negatively caricatured.
Speaking of the Medal: I can’t be the only 90s kid who read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and had to wait until the internet era to learn why the spaceship was named Roger Young.
Every Memorial Day, crossfitters do a grueling workout called “Murph” in honor of Navy SEAL Michael Murphy, killed in action in Afghanistan in 2005. The events surrounding his death were depicted in the 2013 film Lone Survivor. When his small team were surrounded and taking heavy fire, Murphy exposed himself by climbing onto a rocky precipice where his radio would be effective to call for help. He succeeded at the cost of his life. My late Crossfit coach, Jeff Giosi, was always impressed by the fact the dying man said “thank you” when told that help for his comrades was on the way.
My own family has mostly avoided war, but my paternal grandfather served in the Navy during WWII. I likely wouldn’t exist if his ship had suffered the fate of the USS Indianapolis — famously described by Robert Shaw’s monologue in the film Jaws. It’s also covered in detail in the Hardcore History episode “Nightmares of the Indianapolis.” Nightmarish indeed.
Criminology
The Oral History of Criminology is a wonderful project that records long interviews with major figures in the field. Here is their recent podcast episode with Frank Zimring. They’ve got interviews with many other great scholars, but I particularly enjoyed Richard Felson and, of course, Donald Black.
Pointer on the Zimring interview from The Lone Criminologist, who also shared this article by Jonathan R. Bauer and Jacob C. Day: “Money in the Bank: Progressive Problem Shifts in Criminological Science.” Their main question is why criminology fails to cumulate like a hard science, solving problems and moving onto new ones. Their title references a line from Paul Meehl:
“progressive sciences accumulate ‘money in the bank’ as genuine, replicable findings that provide a solid foundation for theoretical advancement, while social sciences engage in ‘box score’ science by merely tallying positive and negative findings without achieving cumulative progress.”
Bauer and Day locate the problem in a “precision crisis” — vague theories, rough data and measures, and blunt statistical tests. Quantitative methods in criminology rarely focus on precisely quantifying core concepts and their relationships, but rather:
“reflect a cookbook-like approach where standardized recipes for transforming data into publishable findings are routinely applied with little critical reflection on the form of knowledge generated. Graduate training embeds these routines, prioritizing publication quantity and speed over depth and precision: collect (or download) data, run regression models, report coefficients and pvalues, interpret direction and significance, and tell a compelling (perhaps post-hoc) causal story about them.”
Of course, all this generalizes to criminology’s parent field, sociology. I’ve thought for a while that inability to precisely measure has become a bottleneck for the field. I talk about it a bit in my review of Phillips and Cooney’s Geometrical Justice.
The lack of cumulation in sociology has been recognized for a while. See, for instance, Steven Cole’s 1994 article “Why Sociology Doesn’t Make Progress Like the Natural Sciences.”
See also Randall Collin’s claim that some areas of sociology have seen “Socially Unrecognized Cumulation,” including cumulative knowledge that fell out of fashion, or cumulative knowledge buried in specialties but not included in broad textbook accounts.
Religion and Society
In the last links post, I mentioned Max Weber’s idea of disenchantment — that modernization drives the supernatural and mystical out of the world. Most research on the matter focuses on involvement in formal religious institutions or belief in God. But it’s entirely possible more people are checking out of traditional religion at the same time that they’re adopting beliefs in astrology or alien abduction or ghosts.
That’s the idea behind a new article in Sociology of Religion testing secularization theory with a large US survey about a wide swath of paranormal beliefs.
Authors Corcoran, Scheitle, and DiGregorio first used factor analysis to identify four dimensions of “enchantment.” The first reflects America’s traditional mostly Christian religious culture, with concepts like God, the Devil, angels, demons, the soul, divine intervention, and so forth. The second — what they call “mental and spiritual powers” — seem like things that, in the US context, are mostly related to New Age mysticism, including belief in mindreading, the power of positive thinking, magical crystals, seances, and astrology. The third was belief in witchcraft and black magic, and the fourth was superstitions about luck, like black cats and broken mirrors.
Among their findings:
We see, for instance, that—independent of all the other measures included in the model—education is a significant negative predictor of all four enchanted worldview dimensions. Similarly, income is also negatively associated with all four enchanted worldview dimensions. This means that even if we equate individuals on all other characteristics, such as religious affiliation and political conservatism, we expect individuals with more education or more income to have a less enchanted worldview in both its religious and paranormal forms.
They also find that some factors predict one kind of enchantment but not another. For instance, you might have guessed that men are less likely than women to believe in New Age woo, but both sexes are similarly superstitious about luck and equally likely to believe in black magic.
On a related note: At Graphs about Religion, political scientist Ryan Burge analyzes people who are “spiritual, but not religious.” They’re actually rare than people who are both or neither.
(BTW, when I first heard someone describe himself to a girl this way in college, I took it to mean “I’m pretty sure I’m going to Heaven, but we can still screw.” Perhaps I was being cynical.)
Burge also discusses a specific kind of supernatural belief with the headline “Belief in the afterlife is on the rise.” The title is a bit misleading, as belief is more stable than not. But that itself is the interesting finding — it remains stable despite a general decline in religiosity. Also — contrary to that secularization study — it appears about as strong, or stronger, among the more educated.
On violent conflicts over religion, Bradley Campbell has a new paper called “Execution and Sacrifice: The Geometry of Martyrdom.” He’s looking at the classical definition of martyrdom as refusing to renounce one’s faith under threat of death:
The killings of Perpetua and her companions were fairly typical of the martyrdoms of Christians in the Roman Empire, and one distinct aspect of these killings is that they were partly involuntary and partly voluntary. The martyrs were not in a situation of their choosing, but they did choose death over apostasy. Similar killings have occurred in religious conflicts across a range of times and places. These include the martyrdoms of Jews such as the 90-year-old Eleazar, who in the second century BCE was tortured to death by authorities of the Seleucid Empire because he refused to eat pork. They include the martyrdoms of Muslims such as Sumayya bint Khayyat, who in 615 CE was stabbed with a spear by a clan chief in Mecca after she refused to renounce Islam. They include many of the martyrdoms of Protestants by Catholics, Catholics by Protestants, and Anabaptists by Protestants and Catholics in early modern Europe. They include many of the martyrdoms of Sikhs in the Mughal Empire…. They include the killings of about 4,000 Japanese Catholics — usually following extreme torture — in seventeenth century Japan. And they include more recent cases, such as the beheadings of 21 Coptic Egyptian construction workers in 2015 by Islamic State soldiers in Libya. [Citations omitted]
Martyrdom in this sense combines the coercion of a forced execution with an element of voluntary sacrifice. As such, Campbell argues, we’d expect it to arise in conflict structures that are intermediate between those most conducive to pure execution and pure suicidal sacrifice.
I propose that the geometry of martyrdom is as follows: Pure martyrdom is more likely when the group enacting the punishment is more organized than the targeted group, when the two groups are distant along one cultural dimension but close on others, and when the perpetrator and target groups are each highly solidary.
….Like other executions, pure martyrdoms tend to be downward, and the parties are culturally distant insofar as they adhere to different religions. The geometry is violent enough for execution, then, but the lethality is mitigated somewhat by some degree of closeness on aspects of culture other than religion. In pagan Rome, for instance, a common culture made it easier for an apostate to leave the church and integrate back into ordinary Pagan society. Rather than simply killing an accused Christian for past offenses, then, the authorities gave them the option to comply.
The martyr refuses to comply because of other factors that encourage suicidal self-sacrifice, including the solidarity of their own religious group.
The Past
Tristan S. Rapp has a piece in Quillette on “Ancient DNA and the Return of a Disgraced Theory.” 19th century archaeologists thought they saw patterns of massive conquest and population replacement in the ancient world. But in the mid-20th century, guilt-by-association with nationalists and Nazis led archaeology to reject such theories and reinterpret evidence as indicating peaceful diffusion of culture from one group to another — a migration of pots, not peoples.
As readers of Razib Khan well know, modern genomics tells us that the pre-war archaeologists were largely correct. Every now and then a wave of steppe invaders replaced the vanquished, or at least their male lines. More broadly:
Across the world, there has been a recovery of older, more dynamic narratives of prehistoric movements. In East Africa, the founding tales of the coastal Swahili people, who trace their origins to Persian adventurers from the city of Shiraz, have been strikingly vindicated after long being dismissed as mere legend. In Britain, the traditional narratives of a huge population movement bringing over the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons have now been confirmed beyond doubt. We can now trace the migrations of the Bantu peoples over Africa, the arrival of the modern Japanese in Japan, and even the definitive proof of pre-European contact between ancient Polynesia and the Americas. These are grand epics, etched in the hieroglyphics of our genes; stories of vast and often cataclysmic shifts spanning countless millennia, only now being unravelled. Yet, needless to say, the aDNA revolution has not been without controversy.
Rapp criticizes archeology for not adjusting well to the new evidence, with some scholars elevating certain narratives to ethical imperatives or expressing preferences for complexity over simplicity.
On a related note: I’ve lately been fascinated by the vindication of weird details in ancient writers like Herodotus. On X, LiorLefineder reminds us that of course the ancients had way more information about their own recent past than survives today:
The reason why Herodotus and other ancient writers are often more right than people expect them to be is because a work of history (literally meaning 'inquiry' in Greek) is not just a guy saying things, but a research project based on innumerable ancient sources. An ancient historian (contrary to other disciplines) can be more well-read and well informed on a period compared to his modern contemporaries due to a lack of survival of ancient sources, which is why we should not be quick to discard their opinions on relevant matters because "we now know better", as we often quite literally don't and can't
The sources for Pliny's encyclopedia were gathered from "2,000 books and from 100 select authors. The extant lists of his authorities cover more than 400, including 146 Roman and 327 Greek and other sources of information". Almost none of Pliny's sources survived to this day.
It’s always a little sobering and saddening to think about how many records were lost.
If you want a little optimism, the Vesuvius Challenge has their own substack for posting updates on their project to digitally open and read the library of charred scrolls from Pompei. For instance, a research team recently won a prize for being the first to decode a scroll’s title: On Vices, by Philodemus.
For more recent history, David Roman at A History of Mankind has a short explanation of why “Hitler & Mussolini Were Absolute Idiots.” The argument counters the view of Hitler as an evil genius by pointing out all the bits of geopolitical luck he managed to squander. Given the weakness of surrounding states and all the tailwinds fascism had in the 1930s, a smarter leader could have more or less taken over most of Europe without firing a shot. Cooperating with the USSR to divvy up Poland was particularly stupid, as it gave a major threat a bunch of fascist-leaning territory, all while guaranteeing a war with the democratic powers that had so far proven hesitant to fight.
My sense is that history remembers Mussolini as more of a clown, but per this article even that reputation isn’t low enough.
Home and Homeschool
At The Public Discourse, Ivana Greco has a piece on viewing parenting as a skilled occupation:
I sometimes encounter people who are shocked that I spend all day with my children. Several months ago, a neighbor—who is a lovely woman— told me something along the lines of: “I just don’t know how you do it.”
By the grace of God, we’ve been able so far to have our kids at home full time since they were born. Having never experienced otherwise, I find the attitude of Greco’s neighbor almost alien. But Greco, who transitioned to full-time homeschooler after first having her kids in regular school and daycare, understands:
I remember well the feeling of desperation when school closed unexpectedly, and I suddenly had to find something to do all day with my highly energetic and inquisitive little boys. What on earth would I do with them all day?
I know now that it becomes easier to deal with your kids all day . . . if you do it every day. Parenting is a skill, and you can develop certain aspects of that skill through repetition.
She then goes on to ask:
How might our society change if we understood parenting as a skilled occupation? …. Young doctors may be more energetic and familiar with cutting-edge technology, but when it comes to routine surgery, older is actually wiser. We don’t accord the same respect to the skills displayed by competent mothers and fathers at home as we do to surgeons, but perhaps we should.
Also on homeschooling: At The Intrinsic Perspective, Erik Hoel describes “How I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old.”
In my house we started reading lessons at age 3; Hoel started at age 2. My son, now five, read at a second-grade level. Hoel — who started earlier, created his own bespoke tutoring method, and is probably also just genetically smarter than us — got his kid there by 3.
Relevant to Greco’s point about “what do you do all day,” Hoel points to out that one virtue of early reading is that:
Holy smokes, does early reading make parenting easier sometimes!
It’s all the advantages of an iPad, none of the guilt. You’ve unlocked infinite self-entertainment. Long drive? Bring a book. Or five. Roman toddles into restaurants clutching a book as a backup activity, and reads while waiting in boring lines. It’s also calming, and so helps with emotional regulation. Toddler energy descending rapidly into deviance? Go read a book! It’s a parenting cheat code
Once my own children graduated from naptimes, we instituted a “quiet time” in its place, where they go to their rooms and read on their own for an hour while we catch up on whatever needs attention, like work emails.
On the topic of books and education, here’s a piece in The Federalist on “How To Start A Private Library To Preserve Literary Treasures For A New Generation.”
A friend of mine recently went to a chain bookstore in search of books she remembered from her own childhood to give as gifts to her grandchildren. She discovered to her surprise that books like that are not readily available.
…. Private libraries may be an answer to the problem of how unfashionable but good old books can be made available to those who want and need them. Here, technology is the friend of the old-fashioned: it solves the problem of how to match books with the people who want to read them.
The rest of the piece is a how-to.
I like the concept, but it seems like it would work better in a place with greater population density than the boonies where we live. I don’t imagine someone making an hour round trip to pick up a copy of the forbidden Seuss books. But perhaps a private library could rely more on mail, like early Netflix, only with no fee beyond borrower pays postage.
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Linked in this post:
; ; ; ; ;In the version that went out over email I typed “winners” but that doesn’t really seem right, given that most guys who get the medal die earning it and weren’t competing for it like a prize. When Audie Murphy was asked why he did the things that led to him getting the medal, he answered “They were killing my friends.”