Just a reminder to people leaving comments, I’m not the typical laissez faire moderator. Obviously you are immediately going to be banned if you go full-snark from the get-go (yes, some commenters are under the illusion that they are brilliant and wise, and unmoderated comment threads allow them to continue with that delusion indefinitely), but repeated stupidity also is going to result in abolition of commenting. Sure some commenters who I have banned are angry, but the reality is that you are probably less intelligent and informative than you’ve been led to think. Better you passively read than contribute to the discussion.

Second, I finished Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, and have been thinking about why the book rubbed me the wrong way. One, the author often writes beautifully.. So whatever qualms I had with the thesis it wasn’t difficult to push myself to finish it. Second, he has a thorough mastery of the material. There was lots of data to extract and assimilate. And I don’t object to the thesis itself, so I’m skeptical. There are plenty of arguments which I don’t agree with beforehand, and which I remain skeptical of, but are worth engaging in.

But here’s a relatively random passage which illustrates my problem:

Why did Ockham insist, above all, on God’s freedom? The biblical argument that freedom reveals the way humans are made ‘in the image of God’ suggests one possible answer. The nominalists were reasserting the Jewish sources of Christian thought against Greek influences. But there is another possibility. The canonist conversion of natural law into a theory of natural rights, founded on the assumption of moral equality, was feeding back into the conception of divinity itself. Emphasizing the claims of the will in human agency led Ockham to emphasize the same trait in divine agency. Human freedom and God’s freedom were becoming mutually reinforcing characteristics. This is why contingency and choice, rather than eternal ideas and a priori knowledge, loomed so large in this thinking. Ockham denied that the kind of a prior knowledge of the universe required by the doctrine of eternal ideas or ‘essences’ is possible. Exaggerating the capabilities of human reason, it compromises God’s freedom and power, his ‘sovereignty’. [page 308, Inventing the Individual]

This section is part of a broader section which seems to suggest that the medieval nomimalism opened up the way for empiricism and liberalism. This is not an original thought. But, I find it ironic because the problem with much of Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism is that it plays out as a logical explication of its own thesis, rather than supporting it with empirical data. In other words, Inventing the Individual oftentimes reminds me of beautifully written scholasticism. Larry Siedentop, the author, believes in the power of ideas to change the human soul. His argument is not a particularly original one, suggesting that the synthesis of Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion which manifested in the form of St. Paul laid the seedbed for the core assumptions of liberal individualism, which came to maturity over a millennium later. But the argument is rather thin on empirical examples of how individuals themselves conceived of themselves as liberal individuals, rather focusing on the 50,000 foot view from the organic development of social institutions, or the abstruse details of canon law.

In Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic Matthew Stewart makes a similar sort of argument, though the details obviously differ. Like Siedentop Stewart is a very good writer. His prose is not a drag to work through. Arguably he took a more novelistic tack, focusing more on personality and lives than Siedentop did (Stewart is focused I think on a more general audience). In addition, Stewart took a much softer touch in arguing for this thesis than Siedentop.* That probably is the key in being able to appreciate the work without being annoyed by the author’s agenda. Like Siedentop Stewart marshaled intellectual history to support his argument, but the explicit details of the argument served more of a coda, allowing the reader to come to their own conclusion. In contrast, in Inventing the Individual the author always talks about how the individual was invented! Yes, we get it. The individual was invented, rather than always being there.

Overall I can see why those who agree with the thesis proffered are enthusiastic about this book. It’s very well written, and it is dense with quite a bit of erudition. And, if you agree with the thesis, the relatively heavy-handed manner in which all roads lead to the invented individual won’t come off as so annoying. Rather, it’s probably just part of the backdrop which you barely notice. It’s rather different if you’re trying to convince someone, and you keep waving about the big hammer, threatening to nail the truth into their heads. For much of the text Siedentop almost takes for granted that the readers already accept the thesis, and enters into long sequences of propositions which beautifully outline how it all came to be, except for the fact that those who are unconvinced will object to every inference made in the sequence from beginning to end. It’s kind of like reading Alvin Plantiga.

* For what it’s worth I’m skeptical of Stewart’s thesis too. But it’s much more modest, and I think I can say with more assurance that there is something real there. Tracing intellectual pedigrees from the 17th century down to the 18th is a far easier haul than traversing the 1st to the 15th.

A new paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, The Kalash Genetic Isolate: Ancient Divergence, Drift, and Selection, illuminates and obscures the history of this enigmatic people. Some framing is necessary here for why the Kalash are important. The Kalash are a “pagan” people who live in the uplands of Pakistan. By pagan, I mean to say that they preserve the primal religious traditions of a strand of the Indo-Iranian peoples, untouched by Islam, or, later developments which led to “higher religions” which arose directly out of Indo-European religion, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma). It would perhaps be defensible to depict the Kalash as the pagans of yore, a fierce people unbowed by philosophical monotheism or the quietism which explodes out of aspects of the gita.

Which brings us to another peculiarity of the Kalash: they are white. By white I do not mean white Europeans. They are not. The genetics is not in dispute, the Kalash are distantly related to the other peoples of South Asia. Some South Asians remind white Europeans (and also white West Asians) of themselves when they look at them face to face. But this tendency is heightened in isolated mountain peoples, such as the people of the Chitral valley. Among the Kalash it is more the norm the exception, ergo, legends of descent from the armies of Alexander the Great. In a previous age this paradox of an exotic and pagan barbarian people whose external appearance was white was utilized in fiction. Rudyard Kipling’s novel The Man Who Would Be King is set among the people of “Kafiristan,” what is today called Nuristan. Eight years after the publication of Kipling’s book the people of this region were forcibly converted to Islam by the king of Afghanistan. Even today if a Westerner wants to “pass” as an Afghan it is mostly plausibly as a Nuristani, because some among these people look to be Western in their outward appearance. The Kalash people were under British rule, and so were shielded from conversion to the religion of peace. Today the Kalash are surrounded by territories infested with Pakistani Taliban. Though protected by the state of Pakistan and vigilant against interlopers, it still seems unlikely that they’ll pass through the next generation unconverted.

The Kalash Genetic Isolate is open access, so I invite you to read it. I saw part of the above figure at ASHG 2014. The important aspect of this paper is that it confirms that the Kalash have a great deal of “shared drift” with MA-1, the canonical individual which represents the ancient North Eurasian people who contribute ~10-20% of the ancestry of Northern Europeans and 30-40% of that of Native Americans (and nearly as much as some Caucasian peoples). Unfortunately the tables don’t show f3 statistics of each population, so we aren’t totally clear which population is which in the ternary graphs. But we can make some guesses. The outlier South Asian group is almost certainly the Sino-Tibetan Sherpa group. The South Asian groups include the Gujarati sample from the 1000 Genomes, as well as HGDP populations such as the Sindhis. The West Asians are Iranians, Palestinians, Turks. etc. if this is correct it seems to depict South Asians as sharing a great deal of drift with MA-1. There is also a second plot which shows that Kalash share a great deal of drift with La Brana, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer from Spain. In contrast to the result from MA-1 it does not seem that other South Asian groups share this drift. To me this is tentative support for the contention in last year’s Science paper that there was some gene flow from Europe to the Kalash over the past few thousand years.

But I need to end here on a down note. Though a lot of the results in this paper are fine, the interpretation strikes me as totally out of kilter with their own citations! They say:

LD decay showed that the Kalash were the first population to split from the other Central and South Asian cluster around 11,800 (95% CI = 10,600−12,600) years ago. This estimate remained constant even after the addition of an African (YRI) population or when the Kalash were compared with different subsets of non-African populations. The pairwise times of divergence with other Pakistani populations ranged from 8,800 years ago with the Burusho to 12,200 years ago with the Hazara.

Most of the populations and clusters that they are speaking of here did not exist when the divergence has been adduced. The Hazara for example are a compound population which emerged in the last 1,000 years due to the admixture of Mongols upon a Persianate substrate. The Uygurs are similar. The “Central” and “South Asian” population genetic clusters are refications of admixed groups which have emerged in the past ~4,000 years. That is, thousands of years after they purportedly diverged from the Kalash. The problem here is that the authors keep forcing their interpretations into a tree, when population genetic history for humans in the Holocene has not been a tree at all. As outlined in Towards a new history and geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA it is plausible that every major group of humans today (major = numerous) is the product of fusions of branches of the human race which were sharply diverged during the Pleistocene. The genomes of individuals and peoples then represent a complex and reticulated graph of interlaced histories. Reducing them to branching trees obscures rather than illuminates.

The deep divergences being inferred here strike me as likely a function of the fact that the authors do not take into account that South Asian populations are themselves a compound of two very distinct groups. One of these, the “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI) are very diverged from the groups of western Eurasia (and, the “Ancestral North Indians”, the ANI). The peoples to the south and east of the Kalash have much higher fractions of ASI, so the calculation of a divergence that is >10,000 years before the present is simply reflecting the very deep divergence of the ASI ancestry from the West Eurasian heritage of the Kalash (note, it is important to remember that the Kalash also have ASI, but just at lower levels).

Overall, this is an interesting paper. There are notable nuggets in it. For example, phenotypically the Kalash are lactose tolerant, but they lack the common Eurasian variant in totality. That implies that there is another variant in the LCT region unique to the Kalash. This also implies that the Eurasian variant has spread relatively recently into Northwest South Asia, perhaps post-dating the arrival of the Indo-Aryans! But the discussion is marred by the straightjacket of tree-thinking, imported from macroevolutionary contexts into a population genetic one, where it is less useful.