The rectification of names is a somewhat strange way to talk about something which is intuitively obvious to most: a properly functioning society needs people to know their appropriate place. This can sound patronizing and anti-egalitarian, but even in the relatively “flat” social structure of the United States this holds, as most would balk at being treated by a medical doctor who did not have the appropriate qualifications. Who someone is still matters at the end of the day, no matter the fact that we’re a society that is permeated in the idea that we are all equal before the law. Your doctor is someone who went to medical school. Your mother is the woman who raised you. And so forth. This issue is universal, across cultures.

Michael Schuman’s Confucius: And the World He Created is a look at a very different Weltanschauung from the perspective of a Western liberal, who nonetheless attempts to remain sympathetic to Confucianism. This is difficult in some cases, in particular in the domain of relations between the sexes, where the views of Confucius and his intellectual descendants were typically patriarchal. To me Schuman’s attempt to make an apologia for Confucius and the systems which descend from his original views are a little excessive, because it isn’t as if most of the readers are going to “convert” to Confucianism. Pure description would suffice. Two thousand year old systems of thought are usually understood to need some careful “interpretation” for modern contexts. This is needed for Confucianism because of its emergence in a particular time and place, and this-worldly orientation. Neo-Confucianism aside the fact of the matter is that most indigenous Chinese schools of thought are often thin on implausible metaphysics (e.g., the Way is relatively vague), but thick on rules and regulations for everyday life. Obviously those would be geared toward an ancient agricultural society, because that’s when Confucius and his followers lived.

As I’ve noted before Schuman’s is not an entirely academic book, it combines an intellectual biography of Confucius, with a history of Confucianism, as well as its modern day applications. Therefore one isn’t going to get into the details of the arguments about Confucianism which arose during the Song dynasty, and the reaction against Neo-Confucianism which occurred during the rule of the Manchus (yes, there were Confucian analogs to Salafists during this period!). The breezy treatment of these historical nuances probably benefits someone with more of a background in Chinese history, as you can fill in the blank spaces.

But I do think one can come away with a broader moral of what Confucianism can teach us about how to relate to each other and society as a whole. The period before the rise of the first Chinese Empire was an intellectually fertile one with many schools of thought which had their own theories of how to maximize human flourishing. Out of this ferment what we term Confucianism eventually won out during the Han dynasty two thousand years ago, though the original ideas of Confucius and Mencius were transmuted considerably. One must always remember that there is a distinction between what people say and what they do. As a matter of reality it does seem that a considerable amount of Legalism, even if it was notionally reviled, was laundered into the State Confucianism which began with Emperor Han Wu. In Confucius: And the World He Created the author recounts attempts to create a feminist-friendly Confucianism. This may seem ridiculous, but, one must remember that in some ways Confucianism was often an odd fit for the autocracies which co-opted it for nearly two thousand years.* Similarly, Christianity has been used to justify slavery as well as abolish it. The mental gymnastics are universal even if there are differences in detail. There is no shame in this.

The important insight we can gain from the longevity of a Confucian political philosophy is that its core theses do have some utility for complex societies. Unlike that of Rome the Chinese order of two thousand years ago actually persisted down to living memory, with the fall of the Ching in the early 20th century. Confucius believed he was a traditionalist, rediscovering ancient insights as to the proper relations between human beings. I suspect this is correct, insofar as the Golden Mean he and his humanistic followers recommended between the cold and cruel utilitarianism of the Legalists and the unrealistic one of the followers of Mozi is probably the best fit to human psychological dispositions (both the Legalists and Mohists were suspicious of the family).** In the disordered world of the late Zhou, on the precipice of the Warring States period, Confucius and his followers elucidated what was really common sense, but repackaged in a fashion which would appeal more systematically to elites, and scaffold their own more egotistical impulses (in contrast to the Legalists, who seem to have enshrined the ego of the ruler as the summum bonum).

And that is the reality which we face today. Our world is not on the precipice of war, but social and technological changes are such that we are in a period where a new rectification of names is warranted. Old categories of sex, gender, religion and race, are falling or reordering. Western society is fracturing, as the intelligentsia promote their own parochial categories, and traditionalists dissent and retreat into their own subcultures. To give two examples, there are those who might find offense if addressed by the pronoun he or she, even though this is an old convention in Western society. In contrast, traditionalist Christian subcultures no longer have unified control of the public domain which would allow for them to promulgate the basis of their values. There are those who might accede to traditional Christian claims who can not agree with their metaphysics, which the traditional Christians hold to be necessary to be in full agreement.*** In contrast, the progressive faction which declaims the morally restrictive manners of the traditionalist Right in fact belies its own assertions by the proliferation of terms which serve to define the elect from those who do not uphold proper morals and manners.

The thinness of Confucianism metaphysics allowed for the emergence of religious pluralism in Chinese society (and the development of Neo-Confucianism as a form of the doctrine imbued with features eerily similar to Buddhism). But its metaphysical thinness is perhaps an explanation for why it could persist and reinvent itself, because one need not accede to metaphysical claims to see the sense in the priorities of Confucianism. The robustness of State Confucianism and the Chinese imperial order over thousands of years show that a unitary elite ethos oriented toward proper ordering of individual and social relations can be highly successful in enabling human flourishing in conditions of Malthusian constraint. Today due to productivity gains we live in a consumer society where individualism has pushed the scale toward anomie and atomization. But barring widespread CRISPR some things will not change about human nature, and the rectification of names will come back in some form and some way. In fact, it’s happening today. That’s not an assertion that’s “problematic.”

* For example, as promoted by traditionalists like Sima Guang Confucianism can arguably be thought of as anti-capitalist libertarianism in terms of preferred political economy. And yet today it is being drafted in the service of corporatist capitalist states such as Singapore.

** Though do note that what we know about the antagonists of the Confucians are often filtered through the Confucians themselves. History is written by the winners.

*** Also, there are historically contingent matters which make the traditional Christian subculture in the United States incongruous to outsiders. E.g., the connection between Christianity and jingoistic bellicosity seems very peculiar to those outside of Southern American Protestantism, as Christianity would seem inimical to such a viewpoint.

I’m at BIL right now. Interestingly there seem to be a more “LA” vibe this time around from what I recall in 2010 (when it was in Long Beach on the Queen Mary). By that, I mean less tech, more fashion and design. I have to

Apologies if I can’t post your comment right away, though I should be checking on my phone now and then. Please remember that you’ll be banned if you leave something insulting me (this doesn’t apply to those commenting on open threads usually, but hopefully lurkers will note this and save their own time and mine).

Still got my Kindle, and trying to get a few pages in here and there of Confucius: And the World He Created. It’s a pretty easy, if not excessively scholarly, survey (contrast it with Annping Chin’s book from a few years back). Ironically Confucius would recoil from the idea that he created a new world, with the standard model being that he revived ancient forms and ways. But the reality is that the emergence of a school around Confucius and his intellectual heirs did signal a change in the Zeitgeist of what became ancient China. Though to a great extent even if Confucius existed and believed he was an expositor of ancient ways, almost certainly for all practical purposes his interpretations would seem strange and novel for the ancients he had in mind. But, I do think that philosophies like those expounded by Confucius, and contemporaries further east in Eurasia at the same time, tapped into deep rooted human intuitions, which were attempting to find more rational and systematic justification in a new complex world.

Also, someone asked me in the comments earlier why the books I recommend on cognitive science of religion seem to date to the early aughts. For example, both In Gods We Trust and Religion Explained are from 2002. I should also mention that there are other works which I don’t mention as much, but which are also good. For example, Harvey Whitehouse’ Modes of Religiosity is interesting. Naturally it dates from 2004. So in any case, the reason for this coincidence in timing is that I got what I wanted out of that period of reading and study in relation to cognitive anthropology, which includes topics beyond the purview of religion. I retain an interest in human social and political development over time, but my focus in the domain of cultural anthropology is strongly influenced by the sort of views espoused by Dan Sperber in Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, and the framework of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson in The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Since my time is finite usually I don’t focus on all the topics I’ve exhibited a fascination with in my life at any given moment. A quick skim of my Goodreads profile indicates that my interests are pretty catholic, at least compared to most people. But only for a few topics do I keep coming back to the same well (e.g., my interest in evolutionary biology goes back to early elementary school years). In most domains I check back in periodically, but if I think the findings are robust I stop following the field very closely.

This morning my attention was brought to an interesting piece in The New York Times, The Feel-Good Gene. It marshals an impressive array of scientific disciplines, genetics, biochemistry, and psychiatry. Concurrently Linda Avey on her Facebook page pointed to where you could find your genoptype for the SNP in question in 23andMe . Because it is geared toward a popular audience without scientific training the original article in The New York Times is a bit vague about the allele and SNP code. But Avey seems correct in her inferences, because the piece does cite an article in Nature Communications, ​FAAH genetic variation enhances fronto-amygdala function in mouse and human. So as the article notes the gene is FAAH, but it makes clear that the SNP is Rs324420. If you look up this variant you see that it is associated with many variations in phenotype. The results for the recent paper from last week, cited in the article, indicate that the mutant/derived allele, A, confers a reduction in anxiety in both humans and mice (the gist of the article). In certain contexts because of the reduced anxiety in individuals who carry the A allele they are better at learning, because they more rapidly “update” to conditions where their initial fear response was an overreaction. At this point I will tell you that I am “wild type.” In other words, I carry the ancestral allele, C, and am of homozygous genotype for that allele. In fact both my parents are homozygotes for the C allele. Since this is the majority allele in most populations that is not entirely surprising.

In passing the author of The New York Times piece observes that “roughly 21 percent of Americans of European descent, 14 percent of Han Chinese living in China and 45 percent of Yoruban Nigerians have been found to carry this gene variant.” These data are from the HapMap. According to them 45 percent of the Yoruba Nigerians in the sample carry the A allele, which means that presumably they are less anxious, on average, than the Chinese. Perhaps this aligns with some expectations or stereotypes you might have?

Well, I decided to check a wider range of populations, because it literally takes about 2 minutes. First, I looked in the HGDP browser. You can see that there is wide variation in African populations. The Mbuti Pygmies of Central Africa have a far lower proportion of the A allele than most European groups, in line with a few East Asian groups, as well as Papuans. Across much of Western Eurasia you see many populations at intermediate frequencies, but it looks as if in Europe there is a cline of A from north to south. One can confirm this with the much larger sample sizes of the 1000 Genomes browser. The highest proportion of A, which purports to be associated with reduced anxiety, is found among Finns, at 29 percent. Then there is the British sample at 24 percent. Finally, both the Spanish and Italian (Tuscan) samples return 16 percent. The South Asian groups all exhibit frequencies of A between 15 and 25 percent (at 18 percent for Bangladeshis, it makes sense why my family would be homozygote for C).

What about the phenotype in question? I’ll skip over the biochemistry, though it isn’t too difficult in terms of pathways. The original article states that “one community-based study of almost 2,100 healthy volunteers found that people with two copies of the mutant gene had roughly half the rate (11 percent) of cannabis dependence than those with one or no mutant gene (26 percent).” That’s not a trivial sample size, but it’s one study. But, it dovetails with the overall thesis, that the biochemical priors of individuals with the AA genotype might allow them to avoid addictions to “abused drugs, like cocaine, opiates and alcohol.” I’m a little confused about this assertion because I looked up the SNPedia page for this variant, and the first major association of an AA genotype is with alcoholism and drug use! Additionally, I did not mention one thing when surveying populations earlier: the groups with the highest frequency of the A allele are Amerindians. This is clear in the HGDP and the 1000 Genomes results.

The point of this post is not to suggest that variation within the FAAH locus is not relevant to phenotypic differences in individuals or populations. There’s a lot of epidemiological, and now molecular, biochemical, and neurological, evidence that this missense mutation is important in a functional sense. It is likely to make a difference in outcomes. In The New York Times piece the author speculatively suggests that variation at this SNP somehow perpetuates personality heterogeneity in our species, and is a boon to a society. Granted, this doesn’t seem to be true in all cases, as the Mbuti Pygmies and Papuans may lack polymorphism here. But, it is interesting to me that the derived mutation is found at variable frequencies all across the world. There’s probably a evolutionary and biomedical story here to be told about some sort of balancing selection. But, as with many narratives which are fixated upon endophenotypes, the scientific conclusions aren’t quite cut and dried, and rather are still developing, because the endophenotypes themselves are at the end of a long causal chain.

One of the first things that the author of 2002’s Religion Explained had to address is the fact that everyone thinks they have the “explanation” for religion. Unlike quantum physics, or even population genetics, people think they “get” religion, and have a pretty good intuition and understanding of the phenomenon without any scholarly inquiry. Most people grew up religious, and know plenty of religious people. Naturally everyone has a theory to sell you informed by their experiences. This is clear in the comments of this weblog where people start with an assumed definition of religion, and then proceed to enter into a chain of reasoning with their axiomatic definition in mind, totally oblivious to the possibility that there might be a diversity of opinions as to the important aspects of religious phenomenon. This causes a problem when people begin at different starting points. Religion is obviously important. That is why Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations used it to delimit civilizations. Religion is also expansive.

In modern times the expansiveness can be a problem in terms of getting definitions right in any sort of conversation about the topic. On the one hand adherents of “higher religions” often dismiss supernatural beliefs outside of the purview of their organized systems as “superstition,” constraining the space of possibilities to an absurdly narrow set (this can be taken to extremes when narrow sects define all religions outside of their umbrella as “cults”). At the other extreme there are others who wish to include “political religion” more wholeheartedly in the discussion. In my opinion doing so makes it difficult to discuss religious phenomena in a historical context, as political religion is relatively novel and recent. As a phenomenon with many features it is not surprising that there are many other traits which resemble religion, but this logic rapidly leads to loss of any intelligible specificity. Therefore as a necessary precondition I tend to assume that religion must have supernatural agents at their heart. Basically, gods. But, all the accoutrements of organized “higher” religions, which crystallized in the period between 600 BC and 600 AD (from Buddhism to Islam), are not necessary to understand religion. In fact, as outlined in books such as Theological Incorrectness, taking the claims of organized world religions at face value can mislead in terms of the beliefs and behaviors of the mass of the rank and file, whose spiritual world is still strongly shaped by the same cognitive parameters one finds in primal “animistic” faiths. Summa Theologica is not only impenetrable to the vast number of believers, but it is totally irrelevant. And yet the concerns of intellectuals loom large in any attempt to understand the nature of higher religions, because they tend to occupy positions of power, prestige, and prominence. And importantly, they are the ones writing down the history of their faith.

It is useful then to differentiate between religion in the generality, which likely has deep evolutionary roots in our species. This is characterized by modal intuitions about the supernatural nature of the world. A universe of spirits, gods, and unseen forces. Then there are the complex processed cultural units of production and consumption which are the “world religions” of the past few thousand years, which have achieved a sort of stable oligopoly power over the loyalties of the vast majority of the world’s population. They are not inchoate and organic, bottom up reifications of the foam of cognitive process, perhaps co-opted toward functional or aesthetic purposes. Rather, world religions are clearly products of complex post-Neolithic agricultural societies which exhibit niche specialization and social stratification. They are the end, not the beginning. A complex melange of distinct cultural threads brought together into one unit of consumption for the masses and the elites, which binds society together into an organic whole. Think of the world religions as the Soylent of their era.

The historical context of this is well known, all the way back to Karl Jaspers. Over two thousand years ago the ideas which we would later term philosophy arose in the eastern Mediterranean, in northern India, and northern China. They were absorbed by various organized religions in each locale. The complex social-political order of those years also persist in the institutional and bureaucratic outline of these religious organizations. Ergo, the Roman Catholic Church is the shadow of the Roman Empire. The Sangha probably reflects the corporate nature of South Asian society even at that early time.  Though some set of elite practitioners of these religions tended toward philosophical rationalism, others were attracted toward mystical movements which elevate the existential and esoteric elements of religious experience. Both mystical and rational variants of religion exhibit a commonality in that they are patronized by elites with leisure to spare upon introspection or reflection. Formal liturgical traditions co-opt the human propensity for heightened emotional arousal in collective group contexts to ritualize subordination and submission to central authorities, which serve as the axis mundi which binds the divine to the world and proxies for the gods.

This only scratches the surface of the phenomenon in question. And these are not academic matters; religion is a powerful force in the world around us. This is why studies such as this in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia, are heartening to see. The importance is not the topic of study, or even the conclusion, but the methods. Using phylogenetic techniques the authors get a crisper understanding of the dynamics. Even if one quibbles with their conclusions one can at least grapple with it formally. Nature has a good piece surveying the response, though please ignore the hyperbole in the title!

The gist of this conclusion to me seems to be similar to the one in relation to lactase persistence: cultural and social change set the preconditions for evolutionary change, evolutionary change did not trigger cultural and social change. Complex multi-ethnic expansive societies arose somewhat over 2,000 years ago. The world religions developed in this environment as natural adaptations, which allowed for these societies to persist over time and space in a manner that was recognizable. The diffuse world of gods and spirits were distilled down to the portable essence which would serve to bind and tie diverse peoples together (in practice for much of history this only applied to the elites, as the populace still retained what basically could be termed folk paganism). The verbal models supplemented by formalism is probably what is needed to truly gain a deep insight into the nature of a phenomenon as slippery by ubiquitous as religion.

Several people have contacted me about the Aylmer twins, who exhibit very distinct phenotypes. In short, one twin is very fair skinned, to the point of being a redhead, while the other twin has visibly African features and a darker complexion. What caught my attention is that their surname is the same as the middle name of R. A. Fisher. Perhaps they are related in some fashion to the father of evolutionary genetics?

The “science” behind the story is not particularly novel. Rather, for whatever reason the British tabloid press in particular seems to love publicizing variation in phenotypes which are racially coded in mixed-race families. I’ve been talking about “black and white twins” for so long that it’s not something I really wanted to revisit, as there isn’t much novel to say.

But, it is important to note that the media representations of this phenomenon often play a semantic shell game. Though some in the press are not reporting it, is not hard to find out that the black parent in this instance, the twins’ mother, is actually mixed-race. That is, she is about half African in her ancestry. Therefore, though the expected proportion of African ancestry in her daughters is 25 percent, random variation could result in individuals with sharply increased, or decreased fraction. People of mixed African and European heritage who exhibit visible African ancestry are often coded socially as black. But these twins are not “biracial” in a symmetric sense when it comes to genetics, even if they are as it concerns the social construction of racial identity.

One way the science here could be demystified is taking into consideration this important genealogical detail of the mother and making an analogy to populations. The twins can be thought of as backcrosses, as their mother is an F1, and the father is a “parental” type (100 percent European). In a genetic trait which is governed by one gene crosses back to the parent population of an F1 can result in a wide range of phenotypic outcomes, depending on the nature of the expression of the alleles. Since human pigmentation is governed by a relatively small number of genes (most of the inter-population variation is probably due to half a dozen loci), some of the same dynamics applicable to monogenic traits in the case of a backcross apply here, though to a diminishing extent. As it turns out in this case the “black” twin invariably has the traits of both African and European populations, just like one of their parents, the F1, while the white twin resembles one of the “parental” populations.

In the comments below I mention offhand that though on the order of half the genetic ancestry of Latin Americans is European, many salient aspects of their culture are overwhelmingly European (e.g., language, religion, and dress etc.), despite being inflected by Amerindian influences. This is not surprising. Analogies between cultural and biological evolutionary process are useful because one can leverage similarities in terms of formal modeling, but, one can also realize that there are large differences in the dynamics. In particular, cultural evolutionary process exhibit a great deal of horizontal transmission and age cohort effects, and biases in vertical inheritance. Though biological evolution via Mendelian genetics is not a blending process on the fine grain, in the aggregate one inherits half their genetic material from each parent to produce a blended genome. Not only that, but via the law of segregation one exhibits an equal probability of inheritance of one’s parents’ paternal or maternal genetic copies (meiotic drive being an exception to this).

On the population wide scale this enforced symmetry between parental contribution has consequences. Between two diverging populations with common ancestry one only needs one migrant between the two per generation to prevent drift apart. The logic is rather straightforward. Large populations require less migration because of reduced genetic drift. Small populations exhibit more drift, but one individual is a much larger proportion of the population, dampening the divergence. This is why between group inter-demic selection (“group selection”) is treated with some skepticism by many biologists; for selection to operate one needs heritable variation partitioned between the groups. That variation is unlikely to accrue between neighboring populations, and it is strange to imagine “competition at a distance” with no interaction (as between inter-continental scale population differences).

The difference with cultural group differences can be traced to the nature of parental inheritance. An individual whose parents speak different languages does not usually speak a language which is a hybrid between the two, which would be the case if a biological analogy with complex traits were appropriate. Rather, they may speak both of their parents’ languages, or even a single one. If the latter, often it is the case that the individual conforms to the dominant culture of their peer group within the population in which they were raised. In this way populations can develop very strong between group differences, which partition groups nearly perfectly due to a high between population differences in trait and marginal within population differences.

As a concrete example in a pre-state society one can imagine endemic warfare between two valleys in Papua resulting in the exchange of women due to raiding and kidnapping producing relatively little genetic distance across them. But the cultural distance could easily be maintained if the children of foreign women careful to adhere to the cultural norms of their paternal heritage, so as to minimize the perception that they are any less “real” members of the group into which they were born. Probably the most famous example of trivial non-functional between group differences that serve to signal in such a manner is the origin of the term shibboleth.

In 2008 my friend Michael Vassar, in agreeing with Peter Thiel’s thesis about the decline of innovation, suggested that the only game changing technology of the 21st century so far had been the iPhone. 2008 was young year yet for what we then termed “smartphones,” which my daughter now thinks of simply as the “phone.”* I remember vaguely that my response was that the 21st century was young, and we didn’t know what impacts the new phones would have on our every day life.

One truism has been that the new phones have cannibalized whole sectors. Think maps and watches. This week I realized that it had finally happened to my iPod shuffle, from which I have been moderately inseparable since January of 2008. The morning checklist of what I have on me no longer necessarily includes a shuffle, because as long as I have a power source (as I do at the office) there’s no reason why the phone’s battery life should be an inconvenience.

The 19th century was the age of steam and the train. The 20th century was the age of oil and the automobile. We never really had a nuclear age. But it looks like this century will be the age of electricity and the phone. Though what we mean by “phone” is going to change a great deal, to the point where the term itself will be a curious anachronism. Children in the next generation my wonder why we call them phones in the first place.

* To be fair, in terms of pure telephone utility I think the older flip phones were better as single feature devices than the current smartphones (battery life, robustness, etc.).

Pre-addendum: You can talk about anything in the open thread. End Note

Still reading the second volume of Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in a Global Context, and it’s hard going. The issue is that the author’s prose is turgid, and I have a very high tolerance for that sort of thing as something of a scholarly book addict. Frankly the total length of the book is partly due to repetition. The upside of that is that you can skim over sections which are reiterated what has come before, but the downside is that you have to do this in the first place. With that in mind I decided to get Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, after a mention by Steve. I’ve heard about this book for a year or so, and just skimming through it I have to stay it’s an easier read in terms of prose style than Strange Parallels (granted, this was a low bar). But the very title itself highlights why I didn’t prioritize reading this book: a priori I’m very skeptical of scholars who attempt to infer the singular historically contingent origins of a particular contemporary social phenomenon. For example, inventing love, or inventing war, or inventing democracy.

As an example of what I mean, obviously the modern idea of republics has a great deal to do with the Roman republic. The term itself derives from the Roman example. But the general features which we would highlight as republican were not limited to Classical Mediterranean. Rather, it seems likely to me as societies develop there were attempts to maintain a less autocratic equilibrium in the transition toward complexity and scale, but they invariably failed (the example of the Roman shift from republic to empire is famous, but it is clear in the mythology and text that Mesopatamian civilization in the early Sumerian period was less autocratic and more oligarchic than it was later). A cross-cultural comparison is essential when asserting the sui generis character of any particular phenomenon. For example, if you are interesting the nature of millennarian religious sects, there’s no excuse for you not to know about the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, a Han dynasty movement indigenous to China (rule of thumb, if you are curious about comparing across cultures, just look at the two ends of Eurasia prior to the Mongols).

Finally, there’s the issue of evolutionary and cognitive psychology. I have written at length for over 10 years that many of the individualistic features of modern social existence are probably primal, insofar as the economic growth of the past few centuries in the West has allowed for the loosening or disintegration of mores which evolved organically as cultural adaptations to mass living during and after the Neolithic revolution. Obviously this model has drawbacks, in that there is not a perfect correspondence between the Paleolithic and modern lifestyles. But, I think where it is most evident is in domains of personal choice in regards to sexual partners, where the individual restraint and social constraint of many “traditional” societies have fallen away, to be replaced by individual utility maximization (at least in the short term!). This maximization I think can only make sense in light of the psychological priors which evolved in the context of small groups where pair bonds were an important feature of male-female relations.

In fact, the corporate “organization man” is the true cultural invention. Taking the thesis of Inventing the Individual at face value, it can perhaps be restated more precisely as Rediscovering the Individual. Western liberalism has inflected and interpreted the individual, but it was always there in chrysalis, trapped by the exigences of pre-modern agricultural society. In contrast, topology is a genuine novel cultural invention which has no ancient or prehistoric analog amongst humans.

On a different note, yesterday I listened to an interview with the author of Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, on the bloggingheads.tv (for what it’s worth, I always listen to the podcasts). The specific details were interesting, but the general arc is pretty straightforward, as it falls into the narrative of the “Nadir of American race relations”. The reason I’m mentioning this is that Robert Wright, author of many books, expressed surprise that race relations in New Orleans got worse during the late 19th and early 20th century. This ignorance surprised me, but even more annoying was his tendency to want to term the segregationist impulse among Progressives who enforced Jim Crow on New Orleans as “reactionary.” It seems he couldn’t restrain his Whiggish worldview and acknowledge that in this time and period the modern terms don’t apply very well. Though the nature of increased social complexity and economic growth does lend itself to a Whiggish worldview over the past thousand years or so, history has gone through many epicycles.

If you read a book like The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln it is hard to deny that between the Founding and the Civil War race relations got much worse over time, and that the inferior status of black Americans became much more explicit in law and social custom. After the Civil War there was a thaw, and then a ratcheting up of racial conflict, tension, and segregation, up until the early 20th century. To term the racial ideology of the United States “reactionary” is entirely misleading, as well as false. Rather, it was a novel cultural concoction which emerged in the 19th century, shaped by the economics of the slave economy and justified by religion, science, and history.

And as it is clear from the interview with the author of the Empire of Sin those progressives who believe that the arc of history is unidirectional, and that they have special insight into its ultimate telos, have often been mistaken. Unfortunately, instead of learning from history most people simply retrofit it into a theory of their own making and preference.