Links for November 2024
Religion, history, states, avoidance, whale and chimp cultures
It’s once again time to check my bookmarks and make a monthly roundup of interesting items from the web.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I have many things to be thankful for. To show my gratitude toward my paid subscribers, I’ve added a free month to all your subscriptions.
For anyone else curious about the paywalled archives or upcoming subscriber-only content, I’m offering a Black Friday Sale with 40% off. Offer closes next week.
Speaking of the archives: What was I linking to last November? Topics include the friendship paradox, institutional decay, life-boosting drugs, the failed coup at Open AI, and the Lincoln County War.
Religion
Sociologist Rodney Stark’s Rise of Christianity was on my to-do list for a Books post, but Scott Alexander beat me to it.
Stark’s question is how an obscure provincial cult rapidly became the official religion of the empire. His answer includes things like differential Christian fertility (Pagan Romans, at least the elites, didn’t much value kids), differential survival during periods of plague (Christians gave each other palliative care), and the attractiveness of the new religion to female converts (the hand that rock the cradle and all that).
Alexander’s lengthy review is critical on several points. One is that many of Stark’s factors don’t apply to Christianity’s success outside of Rome — the Norse weren’t a low-fertility, plague-ridden urban civilization, but Jesus still supplanted the Aesir. But I think it’s entirely possible that what allows a belief to ascend within a civilization can be different from what allows it to radiate outward once it’s institutionalized. As Dan Carlin says, in the contest between Christianity and the Aesir, only one side was playing offense — Rome and Constantinople dispatched missionaries, Upsala did not.
On the extremely altruistic nature of early Christians and the appeal of their morality, Alexander writes:
Maybe it was just selection effects? The kindest 1% of Romans became Christian, whereas later ~100% of people in Western countries were Christian and you had to operate the software on normal neurotypes? But this would imply a very different story of early Christian conversion than Stark gives us!
Or maybe it was persecution effects? Either persecution bled off the least committed X% of Christians, leaving only the hard-core believers behind - or something about proving themselves to a hostile world brought out the best in them?
How come there isn’t a carefully-selected, persecuted group of people today who are morality-maxxing and doing much better than regular society?
He concludes that the advantage of Christian morality might have been something only seen in a Pagan world where such beliefs were new:
Maybe we should think of early Christianity the same way - when the idea of love first struck a population without antibodies. If so, we may not see its like again.
It reminds me of one of his old articles: “CBT in the Water Supply.”
In any case, it’s good to see a public intellectual of Alexander’s standing address work by a serious sociologist.
Also on the topic of religion, Ryan Burge at Graphs about Religion presents work on whether religious people are more or less fearful (regarding a variety of things) than the irreligious. He finds evidence for a curvilinear relationship: The least fearful people are either very religious or not religious at all, with those in between reporting more fear. If you break it down by political affiliation, though, the relationship disappears among Democrats — religion and fear have nothing to do with each other — while among Republicans it’s linear and inverse, with greater religiosity leading to less fear.
States as Independent Variables
Lorenzo Warby’s “In the Shadow of the State” discusses the role of states in shaping social and technological evolution. Contra Marxian materialism, he thinks differences in state structure between China and Europe drove social and technological divergence.
The Chinese state became a structure that dominated its society, using kin-groups as social structuring mechanisms that enabled the state apparat to economise on its downward reach….
There was no military aristocracy; no self-governing cities; no armed mercantile elite; no organised religious structures beyond local temples….
The result was a kind of “thin” civil society in between kin-based local autonomy and bureaucratic administration. In contrast, Western Europe had weaker, fragmented states as well as weaker, smaller families, with a correspondingly thick layer of mid-range institutions that fostered cooperation and competition.
It reminds me of Patricia Crone’s observations in Pre-Industrial Societies about how China got too civilized too early, hampering further economic and technological development. Jared Diamond made similar arguments toward the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Given lots of news about China overtaking the West in science, technology, and industry (see recent posts by physicist Steve Hsu), one wonders if Western dynamism has either declined or become less relevant under modern conditions.
States as Dependent Variables
Perhaps Western society is now on the path to becoming overly bureaucratized and stagnant, ruled by a literati selected by an education system increasingly disconnected from the realities of production and administration. Add in an opium crisis, and you’ve got Qing America.
I don’t know if the new Department of Government Efficiency can or will scale back bureaucratic sclerosis. But the commission prompted Arnold Kling to write “If I ran the DOGE.” Excerpt:
I proposed that the number of agencies reporting to the President should be reduced from 157 to 8. If the President went with a COO, then all eight of these would report through the COO.
One goal of a re-organization would be to group units with overlapping responsibilities together, rather than keeping them in separate departments. This would reduce the extent to which one sub-unit of government has functions that duplicate or impede the functions of another sub-unit.
My X feed has been full of suggestions for DOGE that one could probably fit in a 2X2 table of “wise/unwise and likely/unlikely.” I’m not confident which go in which cell.
State of the Academy
Kling also identifies the pitiful state of American universities as the issue that most keeps him up at night. Noting that reflexive prejudice — four legs good, two legs bad — has replaced sophisticated thinking, he writes:
I have come to see this as the end result of the over-expansion of higher education, in terms of the number of students, the number of faculty and, above all, the number of administrators. As America involved more people in higher education, we reached lower down into the pool of intellectual ability. That would have been great if the result had been to teach more people to think deeply and carefully. But instead of raising mediocre students to excellence, our institutions of higher education have become saturated with mediocrity.
He also calls for separation of university and state.
For more hard looks at the academy, see this piece in Compact on “How Professors Killed Literature” and this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “Academe’s Divorce from Reality.”
Frankly I’m weary of hard looks at Ivory Orthanc — to quote Donald Sutherland in Animal House, “This is my job!” — but that doesn’t make them less true.
Tangentially related: Razib Khan interviews Wilfred Reilly on historical myths of the educated classes.
Ancient History & Prehistory
At Grey Goose Chronicles, Stone Age Herbalist relates how archaeology and genetics have confirmed a death recounted in one of the Scandinavian sagas.
The ‘Baglers’, the King’s enemies, raided the castle at Trondheim through a secret door and caused havoc within. One of their departing gestures was to dump a body down a drinking-water well and seal it with stones. The man in the well was already dead when he was dropped inside, and the whole affair is described within the saga.
Archaeologists recovered part of this well-man in 1938, and more recently recovered enough to bring modern analysis to bear. Together, DNA, isotropic, and radiocarbon evidence tell us what part of Norway he was from, what his diet was like, and narrow his likely time to between 1153-1277. All of this seems to confirm the saga and adds the detail that the man was likely one of the Baglers’ own casualties.
Herbalist notes the recent theme of sophisticated modern methods confirming oral traditions that were previously viewed with skepticism.
And there is evidence that oral traditions and other cultural practices can survive for extremely long periods with shocking fidelity. To give another recent example, an article in Nature Human Behavior presents archaeological evidence that a ritual Australian Aborigines were still practicing in the modern era dates back to the last Ice Age:
Here we report the discovery of buried 11,000- and 12,000-year-old miniature fireplaces with protruding trimmed wooden artefacts made of Casuarina wood smeared with animal or human fat, matching the configuration and contents of GunaiKurnai ritual installations described in nineteenth-century ethnography. These findings represent 500 generations of cultural transmission of an ethnographically documented ritual practice that dates back to the end of the last ice age and that contains Australia’s oldest known wooden artefacts.
The native Australians also have perhaps the oldest verified oral traditions in the world, with tales accurately describing long-extinct species and landscapes submerged by the retreat of the glaciers.
Herbalist has also pointed out how modern evidence verifies details from the ancient historian Herodotus — like Scythians making quivers of human skin — that would otherwise seem like embellishments. Ironic, then, that recent genetic evidence runs counter to Herodotus’s claim about the origin of the Armenians, despite that particular claim having higher standing based on linguistic evidence.
In other news of the very old: Archaeologists in Georgia unearthed a Bronze Age tablet with an inscription in an unknown language, there’s evidence that fishing with nets is at least 15,000 years old, and footwear may be as much as 100,000 years old.
A lot of things are older than you might think. The converse is that some things are more recent than you might think: Tristan Rapp on X reminds that while the Great Pyramids were being built, wooly mammoths still roamed in Siberia, giant lemurs in Madagascar, and possibly giant ground sloths in the Caribbean.
Unfortunately, a supposed Neanderthal skeleton has also turned out to be more recent than thought, but not in a blow-your-mind way:
It turns out, however, that the famous “Neanderthal of Ochtendung” was neither a Neanderthal nor especially ancient. It came from a modern human who lived in the seventh or eighth century AD: a contemporary of Charlemagne or the Prophet Muhammad rather than the woolly rhinoceros or the sabre-toothed tiger.
The case is being investigated as possible intentional fraud, along with other questionable findings from a senior archaeologist in Germany.
Social Distancing
One of my pet peeves during the Covid pandemic was the use of the term social distancing to mean physical distancing. People can alter social distance without altering physical distance, and vice versa.
If you want to see people altering social distance without physical motion, witness the recent left-skewed exodus from X to Bluesky, described by Helen Dale as “The Flounce.”
Curtailing interaction — avoidance — is a common way of handling grievances. The online world facilitates avoidance. As Tracing Woodgrains puts it on X:
“One thing I've learned being opinionated in public: a lot of the real criticism comes from the empty spaces. People silently reduce contact, stop replying, unfollow, cut ties. Most of the time, there's no confrontation, and not much use to one. You just notice they move on.”
Donald Black has a theory of avoidance the chapter “Elementary Forms of Conflict Managment” in his book Social Structure of Right and Wrong. But I think there’s much more to be done on the subject.
I think so far there’s been little work in another form of social distancing I find interesting: Handling a grievance by increasing cultural distance from the offender. For instance, an article at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examines how associating consumer goods and charities with political enemies makes them less attractive.
In collective conflict, what might initially be a small average cultural difference between two opposing groups of partisans gets exaggerated as each side increasingly rejects culture associated with the other. You can see it in America with all sorts of things, from vaccines to social media platforms, becoming blue and red tribe shibboleths.
You also saw a lot of weird forms of cultural and relational avoidance at the start of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, with Americans pouring out vodka they’d already purchased and a British orchestra cancelling performances of Tchaikovsky. Even the Wisconsin mustard museum got nationalistic about mustard:
Plus the Space Foundation removed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s name from their fundraising material.
NonHuman Cultures
Researchers think they’ve made some progress on understanding the complex vocalizations of sperm whales:
Sperm whales communicate with each other using rhythmic sequences of clicks, called codas. It was previously thought that sperm whales had just 21 coda types. However, after studying almost 9,000 recordings, the Ceti researchers identified 156 distinct codas. They also noticed the basic building blocks of these codas which they describe as a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet" – much like phonemes, the units of sound in human language which combine to form words.
There’s already some evidence that sperm whale “clans” not only can share elements of their repertoires through cultural diffusion but also might use parts of their repertoire to symbolically mark their own clan.
Orcas off the coast of Washington have been spotted wearing dead salmon on their heads, suggesting that an old fashion could come back around:
This is the first time they've donned the bizarre headgear since the summer of 1987, when a trendsetting female West Coast orca kickstarted the behavior for no apparent reason. Within a couple of weeks, the rest of the pod had jumped on the bandwagon and turned salmon corpses into must-have fashion accessories, according to the marine conservation charity ORCA — but it's unclear whether the same will happen this time around.
And new research uses genetic evidence to look at how population connectivity shapes chimpanzee technology. From the Science Daily coverage:
"We made the surprising discovery that it is the most complex chimpanzee technologies -- the use of entire 'toolsets' -- that are most strongly linked across now distant populations," says corresponding author Andrea Migliano, professor of evolutionary anthropology at UZH. "This is exactly what would be predicted if these more advanced technologies were rarely invented and even less likely to be reinvented, and therefore more likely to have been transmitted between groups."
Advanced technology for a chimp includes the techniques for termite “fishing,” using first a digging stick to open then nest then a specially prepared plant-stem probe to gather termites.
This is indirect evidence that homo sapiens social connectivity is crucial to our cultural evolution and may be the reason our ancestors supplanted their hominid competitors. Man, those weak ties are really strong.
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Substacks cited above:
(Grey Goose Chronicles), (In My Tribe), (Graphs about Religion), (Lorenzo from Oz), (Not On Your Team but Always Fair), (Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning).