I’m not a big reader on revolutions, but they rarely turn out the way revolutionaries expect them, and in the long view of history they often don’t turn out too well. But in the short-term they’re exhilarating.
When violence broke out last week and the looting started I was downcast. It was “explained,” by some among the intelligentsia that property crime was not truly violent against people, these, the same people who talk about the “violence” of words. The reality is that in the midst of the greatest economic contraction in generations the shock of the looting will redound to us all, though currently, the major sufferers that I think about are the owners of small businesses that were already struggling during the quarantine. But violence, disturbance, and fear impact us all indirectly. Lack of order, and low confidence the authorities, have major impacts on the accumulation of capital.
The best analogy to how people feel right now perhaps is the time after 9/11. Americans were angry. The invasion of Iraq was basically something that happened because “we wanted to break something.” That did not turn out well for anyone. The combination of the pandemic, economic stress, and the Great Awokening, set the conditions for an explosion. We’ll be cleaning up the mess for years.
Peter Turchin is the prophet of our times. I laughed when Peter first began predicting social breakdown. No more. Read Age of Discord.
Scalable probabilistic PCA for large-scale genetic variation data.
China’s Barely Begun Economic Recovery Shows Signs of Stalling. Who are they going to export to?
Whole genome analysis of four Bangladeshi individuals. No real pop-gen analysis.
The impact of global and local Polynesian genetic ancestry on complex traits in Native Hawaiians.
Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia. Looks very interesting from Christopher Beckwith.
Here’s a crazy assertion: the victory of legal analysis in Sunni Islam over philosophy is the victory of Turanian Buddhism over Greek paganism.
Towards complete and error-free genome assemblies of all vertebrate species.
Multi-ancestry genome-wide gene-sleep interactions identify novel loci for blood pressure.
SpaceX Lifts NASA Astronauts to Orbit, Launching New Era of Spaceflight
The reason for all this **spontaneous!!!!** protesting (and looting) is our governors didn’t like the growing popularity of genuine protests against the COVID tyranny. We did not happily accept our chains so they sent their wind-up toys to show us how to do it correctly. Holomodor here we come!
The combination of the pandemic, economic stress, and the Great Awokening, set the conditions for an explosion. We’ll be cleaning up the mess for years.
I completely agree and for the first time in my life I fear for the Republic.
Social cohesion in USA is declining. English is being supplanted by Spanish in large parts of the country. Mainline Protestantism used to be the majority religion of the elite and the population until the 90s but now it’s on life support. American atheists also tend to be more anti-religion in general than European atheists who seem to identify with cultural Christianity. Other extremely diverse countries like India at least tend to have a strong sense of long history, US doesn’t have that. There used to an American civic religion with the founding fathers as gods and the Constitution as scripture. But slavery is the Old Testament of the American civic religion and the new atheists(woke left) have used it to discredit ACR. So the American identity is increasingly not based on religion, language, history or civic nationalism but on some vague transnational liberal democratic values. Other countries like Canada also suffer from this problem and Canada was very close to splitting up in the late 90s but at that time they had good leadership and booming economy(and no global pandemic). Now USA is facing massive external pressures as well as internal divisions which is not a good recipe for a republic.
I find it striking that Razib Khan and other people commenting here never really mentioned the abhorrent income inequality that the US has been suffering in this latest decades, and mostly caused by the deindustrialization of the country, the post-1970s unmitigated expansion of unregulated capitalism fueled by unconstrained free-market ideology, and the rise in power of multinational corporations challenging and undermining state and local authority.
Large-scale manufacturing industries were very much associated with more equitable wages and long-term job security, and were replaced by the expansion of the service sector (like finance and information technologies) which are very unequal with a small number of extremely well-compensated individuals while at the other end of the spectrum, are far more numerous lowly paid individuals (and very educated) working under temporary hires.
This highly educated and energetic Millenial generation grew up and entered the job market under this very unequal and insecure economic environment. Of course, they are anxious, of course, they are radicalized. They still didn’t recover from the Great Recession, and now this pandemic and post-pandemic economic contraction will further radicalize that generation.
Don’t ignore the Big Elephant in the room. The economic system that we have been building in the last 40 years created a very volatile social environment.
I believe that in a lot of respects the pandemic created the opening for this sort of mass civil unrest. I do not mean in the sense that the millions of people unemployed is causing “economic anxiety.” Of course this is happening, but the statistical evidence doesn’t suggest a strong relationship between bad economic times and crime (crime fell during the Great Depression, and rose considerably during good economic times in the 1960s). I mean that COVID-19 seems to have caused the sort of “unmooring of priors” which tends to lead to social instability. When suddenly the unthinkable becomes reality, it provides an opening on an unconscious level to consider bucking established social norms in ways that one never would have before – probably because no one can really be certain what norms “groupness” suggests they should conform to, because it’s unclear what will survive the current era.
I think this is in part why revolutions have such a dismal track record. People often blame this on socialism, but the track record for “liberal revolutions” was often just as dire. It seems like revolutions which basically decapitate the ruling class and quickly get down to business writing a constitution have the best track record – likely because the level of disruption of civil society is limited, allowing things to quickly get “back to normal” for most people,
That said, there is no evidence as of yet that this is triggering some sort of reactionary backlash in the U.S. I’ve actually been somewhat shocked at how Trump has had now had two different crises teed up for him which could in theory help conservatives (COVID-19 and now this) and he entirely blew the politics of the first, and appears to be blowing the politics of the second. I suppose it goes to show that he is not the adept politician that his supporters adore and many of his opponents fear, because he’s not even able to accomplish what even George W. Bush was capable of doing for a short period of time (turn a crisis to his own advantage).
The riots may have derailed the nascent recovery. Over half of American workers are employed in companies with fewer than 50 workers. The riots have been especially hard on these businesses.
The riots have also exacerbated the divisions in American society. There are now gaping chasms between left and right and black and white. There will be on healing now.
Beside Turchin, whose books I have read, there is William Strauss’ and Neil Howe’s “The Fourth Turning,” which also predicts chaos now. Whereas Turchin’s analyis is economic, Strauss and Howe give a psychological/generational reason for the chaos. The explanations are complementary. It is disturbing that they reach the same conclusion.
By the way, both explanations apply to the entire West, and possibly Asia, too. Germans, French, Russians, Japanese, et al. should not gloat. They are undergoing the same processes.
“The reason for all this **spontaneous!!!!** protesting (and looting) is our governors didn’t like the growing popularity of genuine protests against the COVID tyranny. We did not happily accept our chains so they sent their wind-up toys to show us how to do it correctly. Holomodor here we come!”
Idiotic.
Apologies in advance — current events are eating at me and I think that this may be the best place for me to vent.
Let me start with saying that if all evidence about the death of George Lloyd is in the public domain, I have no problem with the police officer facing the death penalty. No one should be violently restrained for a non-violent offence.
However, this has nothing to do with race, BLM or any of that other stuff.
I’m so tired of the Democrats and their fellow travelers scapegoating people like me for their policy failures and internal conflicts. The Democrats have been failing their inner city voters (especially black) for decades. Specifically, the conflict between the needs of their voters and their public unions funders. You see it in the failure of Dem mayors and prosecutors to deal with bad cops like this guy. You see it in education where the needs of the unions have outweighed the needs of the students (google NYC “teacher rubber rooms”).
But, no — this is not a government failure — this is my fault. A immigrant Jew who came to America with no money. Its my fault cause of some mysterious “privilege” that I have.
That’s not what scares me, though. It’s all the historical precedent of politicians blaming the Other for their own failure to live up to their own Utopian promises. It rarely ends well…
Thank you for reading and apologies if this was not the appropriate forum.
“Lack of order, and low confidence the authorities, have major impacts on the accumulation of capital.”
Only in the areas the riots happen (cf. da sixties).
Given America’s failures, I’ve started hating this country:
https://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2020/05/31/thank-xi-jinping/
” mostly caused by the deindustrialization of the country,”
No.
“the post-1970s unmitigated expansion of unregulated capitalism fueled by unconstrained free-market ideology”
No.
“The riots may have derailed the nascent recovery.”
No.
“No one should be violently restrained for a non-violent offence.”
Disagree entirely.
Interestingly, Russia’s media establishment seems to be one of the only major ones in the world to have a dim view of the current riots (they had a favorable view in 2014; Iran and China seem to have a favorable view).
A partial summary of Turchin’s book from Amazon.com sets forth its basic premise:
“Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability. These crisis periods—“Ages of Discord”—have recurred in societies throughout history. Modern Americans may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, more surprisingly, with ancien régime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that there is nothing new about our troubled time, and that similar ages arise periodically for similar underlying reasons? . . . The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.”
I like the concern of what Turchin is trying to do, but have real doubts about the quality of his application of the theory to the facts, for example, his attribution of great importance (more than I think is justified) to mass shooting phenomena.
@HarryJecs “American atheists also tend to be more anti-religion in general than European atheists who seem to identify with cultural Christianity.”
This differing attitude has a lot to do with the very different nature of Christianity on opposite sides of the pond.
Europe’s Christianity is comprised primarily of established or formerly established dominant mainline Protestant and/or Roman Catholic and/or national Orthodox Christian denominations, whose long associations with government defanged them and also allowed them to persist without being brutally subject to evolutionary pressure in a free religious marketplace. Most of these dominant national Christian denominations, moreover, have been increasingly less vibrant by measures like participation in religious services since at least the 1960s, if not earlier. So, there is much less that is objectionable about them to actively campaign against (not nothing, of course).
Also, overt anti-clerical, anti-religious thought has been an important component of political thought on the European left for all of the 20th century, and really, all of the way back to the late 18th century Enlightenment era, in a way that largely faded away after the anomalously secular founding era of the United States.
In contrast, the long standing absence of an established church in the U.S. (somewhat later in coming in New England than the adoption of the 1st Amendment would suggest, but still long standing), has produced a very different kind of Christianity in the United States, especially in the wake of the Second Great Awakening which gave rise more or less directly to modern American Evangelical Christianity in what was previously the most secular part of the United States, in a toxic brew intertwined with the ideology of American, race based, chattel slavery and subsequence post-Civil War segregation systems in the American South.
Competition has also honed American religious institutions to greater potency in sometimes anti-establishment ways that were impossible in established churches.
There is no real counterpart of white and Hispanic Evangelical Protestant Christianity or African-American Protestant denominations (let along denominations like the Mormons) in European Christianity (outside small, but vibrant immigrant churches), that comprise perhaps half of American Christian adherents and a larger share of American Christians for whom religion plays an important part in their daily lives. And, while “being religious” is part of the American national identity, no one or two Christian denominations are deeply tied up in what it means to be an American in most parts of the U.S. (the Deep South, Utah and Idaho excepted).
As a result, American Christianity (especially the part that comes up as relevant in political discussion) has a much deeper strains of anti-science, anti-intellectual, and hate directed at certain groups, than any significant European Christian denomination. These draws scorn from atheists and the anti-religious sentiment of American atheists is closely mirrored by anti-Evangelical sentiment within the (anemic) Christian left and the (ineffectual) elites of the mainline Protestant denominations.
ohwilleke,
I’d actually go a bit further comparing Christianity in Europe and the U.S.
Essentially, the European experience was there was an established church, which formed part of the political establishment, and played a political role defending the ruling class. As a result, all reformist movements from the Enlightenment onward had at least an anti-clerical bias, and eventually became outright atheistic.
In the U.S., in contrast, faith was kept separate from political power from the beginning. We often think only of the “freedom of religion” in the first amendment, but the Establishment Clause was also important, because the Founders wanted both to stop religious control over government and government control over religion. And for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it worked. Oh, particular movements within the American church – social gospel movements informed by Christianity that informed issue-based advocacy on areas like abolition and temperance. But this alternated with periods where the secular world was seen as “unseemly” and faith instead turned inward. This probably helped to keep Christianity strong, because there was a muscular discourse within the faith, with people on all sides of issues (both reformists and reactionaries) meaning faith was never delegitimized even when certain power structures were.
Ironically the rise of the religious right in the U.S. seems to have caused the demise of America’s identity as a uniquely Christian-identified nation among those in the West. To grossly simplify, the religious right sought to turn evangelicals – who were formerly all over the map in voting patterns – into doctrinaire Republicans, and used abortion and some other “wedge issues” to do so. They may have had some success with this, but on the flipside the last 20 years has seen a lot of nominal Christians who were left-leaning entirely abandon Christanity, arguably due to the increasing identification with a faction they did not agree with (essentially, what happened in Europe generations ago). I would tend to think this was a bad outcome if you’re concerned with universal human salvation, rather than crass political power, but I’ll leave that to the Christians to decide.
I just finished Steve Pincus’ “1688,” which is partially a new argument about what is a “revolution,” in order to explain why the Glorious Revolution is the first modern revolution. His claim is that revolutions occur when states seek to modernize themselves, and provoke a response that is both a rejection of that form of modernization and the emergence of competing forms of modernization. He quotes Tocqueville in support: “Experience teaches us that, generally speaking the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.”
His description of England in 1688 resembles Iran in 1979, both in the fact that each state is becoming stronger and more centralized amidst an expansion of the economy. The changes advantaged some more, than others, though often the benefits seemed to flow to the prestige of the state. The opposition rejected the state’s modernization, some professing their own alternative modernization, and the results were a mix that not all of the revolutionaries appreciated.
@Harry Jecs — I don’t you think you can analogize the 1995 referendum (which I believe is what you are referring to) to your description of the trajectory of American society. It was all about the separatist dreams of Francophone Quebecois, rather than a dissolution of all of Canada, and the grievances were cultural and linguistic rather than economic.
If anything, the loss of the Yes side had more to do with its leaders’ mis-steps than with anything the No side did.
Canada didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a strong “civic religion”, like the USA, to lose in the first place; and the USA doesn’t have a Quebec to precipitate separation referendums.
@ohwilleke
“As a result, American Christianity (especially the part that comes up as relevant in political discussion) has a much deeper strains of anti-science, anti-intellectual, and hate directed at certain groups, than any significant European Christian denomination. These draws scorn from atheists and the anti-religious sentiment of American atheists is closely mirrored by anti-Evangelical sentiment within the (anemic) Christian left and the (ineffectual) elites of the mainline Protestant denominations.”
I disagree.
This is a Canadian’s view looking in, but it seems to me that American anti-theists have created these hillbilly Evangelical strawmen. Outside of cultural Christian Americanism they’re basically specters.
People forget that Evangelicals were a driving force behind emancipation and the civil rights movement. Contrary to the narrative it’s Evangelicals that have primarily opened their churches shelter undocumented migrants, rather than mainline Protestant churches. Evangelicals also have a higher percentage of Hispanics and Blacks than the general population.
I also don’t think the religious right sought to turn evangelicals into doctrinaire Republicans. Rather, as part of a idiotic divide and conquer strategy, the establishment left has been keen on slandering and villainizing what could have been it’s largest constituency, driving them into the arms of the right.
@Jason — From the polling I’ve seen, of all the major American religious groupings, Evangelicals are the most hard-line on immigration.
The identification of white Evangelicals with the Republican Party is not a new thing — it simmered throughout the mid-20th century and then solidified early in the Reagan era, as Evangelicals got more organized and more political. I gather that some of this was a reaction to the perceived failings of Jimmy Carter (who was himself Evangelical).
I welcome correction from those more knowledgeable about this history.
Re; HarryJecs comment, I think European vs American anti-religious sentiment can mostly be understood in the light of degree of political and intra-national struggle.
Irish Catholics and those contemporary sort university student hard-left Communist Brits can marshal entirely comparable degrees of hatred directed towards the Church of England, quite comparable to anything which you see in the US. Despite whatever apparently more pro-science positions are taken by the CoE.
But, they each tend to be soft on Catholicism and Islam respectively.
Similarly, a lot of the anti-Christian sentiment in the US really seems to be part of the American cultural North’s “The South Delenda Est!” imperative; the continuous cultural argument that the ills of American life stem from insufficient subjugation of White American Southerners and their culture 180 years ago, and that everything would be solved if White American Southerners were simply more repeatedly and decisively subjugated by government authority (smashing and banning of the symbols, breaking of the pride, etc.) and preferably eliminated as a cultural tendency entirely.
It seems often not really so much against “The Church” but again “The culturally Southern Church”. As an extension of the argument, or rather wishful thinking, that the continued problems the US faces with racial gaps and these leading to discord are due to the lingering legacy of the South, a legacy that could be purged, and not due to different groups largely simply being what they are and always will be (and because they’ll largely always be what they’ll largely always be, you better choose well at the outset, and if you don’t, well, probably you f**ked up your country forever, and you can never fix it).
I can agree with a lot of the comments and think too that European atheists are less aggressive, because many accept it as the regional cultural tradition and religion has no big impact on social life in general for most. Funnily the only people being extremely impacted by religion are those from sects of the American way. These are, more often, people apart, because their religious group’s ideas influence them on many ways and they are mostly active in their religious community, while you can be a good Lutheran or Catholic and a more regular person like the fellow atheist, this is different for those evangelicals and Mormons etc., which live a more different life quite often.
Concerning George Lloyd, its a tragic incident, but I wonder about two things:
– What if the victim of this police violence wouldn’t have been a black male, but a white person? Would there be a similar outcry? Would anybody care at all? People on the streets? Its like these leftists and black activists just wait for another coloured victim, what happens to other people in between is of the same interest? I doubt it.
– I have friends which were in the USA, German descent people, and they told me that the cops were just intimidating and unfriendly. They got afraid in a simple stop and search, what they never were in Europe. Its about how they perform, as if they have less respect for the people, are always ready to use violence and still got an authoritarian approach European police officers no longer have, at least in normal situations.
I mean there is really something about the American system which is less social, more brutal and egoistic, even though on the ground and in the communities people are oftentimes more friendly and helpful, as I heard too.
But talking about the judiciary, the police and prison system, the USA are seen as backward and brutal. Now I don’t agree with the soft approach in Europe for many reasons, but some of the administrative handling of even small breaches seems to be over the top in the USA. Of course, considering the reality and experiences on the ground, cops might take any black male quite serious, but its nevertheless a general, “transrace” issue I’d say. And it has little to do, for sure not primarily, with “systemic racism” by cops without a practical reason. Its a general feature.
You have such a brutal dog-eat-dog economic and social system in parts of the country, compared to other similarly developed societies, and at the same time people got into a brutal cop handling and prison system for almost nothing. You do a small thing and get treated worse than an animal. It doesn’t fit, it makes the social inquality and socio-cultural decadence of large parts of the American society even worse, even more apparent.
And to me this has zero to do with race, because Afro-Americans get minimium as much social help as their fellow white citizens in most regions these days. Its a general feature of the US system.
Its just that people of the Left made the race issue paramount, with the Cultural Marxist interpretation of suppressed people and the “intersectional” highest level victimhood, which was better accepted by the Plutocracy as well, because it didn’t touch the more fundamental issue of social inquality and exploitation on an ever grander scale since the 1950’s.
As for the acts of violence and plundering: Most of those people just use it as an excuse for violence and rebellion they long waited for. And the main reason for the Covid-19 lockdown being important for this is not yet the economic crisis, this will come and will be much more ugly than anything we are talking about so far, but that these spoiled brats are frustrated and bored.
I could see it here in Europe, under much milder conditions, the young people got bored and frustrated, they just wanted to go back to their “normal” consumer-style party life. They wanted to meet with friends freely, wanted to get rid of the masks, do their “normal” (what’s considered normal these days…) life.
And I’m talking about socially and economically secure, well-educated and overall disciplined and calm people. But nevertheless, the situation was itching them.
And boredom of the youth, especially a less educated, less diciplined, less calm one, is no thing anyone should take easy. Not at all. Because in all times these youngsters were the battering ram for a violent change. However, I don’t see that in the USA so far. This is rather the expression of general frustration and boredom. Not directed enough, not big enough, many harmless young people just participating because they are frustrated with the system, the president, their current situation, but its all low level. The predominantely Black and MENA banlieus in France experiencet the same and worse more than once.
Doesn’t mean it can’t get worse and the crisis isn’t over yet, it just started.
“‘Spelling the Dream’ Review: A Long Spell of Dominance: Sam Rega’s documentary looks at the Indian-American phenoms who’ve been dominating the Scripps National Spelling Bee.” By John Anderson | June 2, 2020 | https://www.wsj.com/articles/spelling-the-dream-review-a-long-spell-of-dominance-11591130906
“… Although Indian-Americans make up about 1% of the U.S. population, they’ve won the Scripps National Spelling Bee 12 years in a row. Last year, when judges decided to declare an eight-way tie among the unbeatable kids on stage outside Washington, seven of those winners were of Indian descent. In fact, 26 of the past 31 winners have been Indian kids. …
“Spelling the Dream,” directed by Sam Rega, can’t avoid intersecting (or decussating) with the Oscar-nominated “Spellbound” (2002), which concerned the 1999 National Spelling Bee; Nupur Lala, the winner then, appears for Mr. Rega to reflect on her victory. Although “Spelling the Dream” begins with the octet of 2019 winners, it is really about the 2017 Bee and the format is reminiscent of the earlier film. …
“… Winning the spelling bee, as becomes clear throughout the film, became a big deal to them because Indians had won it and continue to dominate. It has become an important part of the Indian-American immigrant experience, even if Balu Natarajan—the first child of South Asian immigrants to win, and now a doctor—didn’t think it was that big a deal when he triumphed in 1985. “Other people,” he recalls, “informed me it was a big deal to them.”
“Some of the analysis seems dead on: … Indian parents are very often multilingual and their children are exposed to the structures, nuances and interrelationships of different languages from an early age. One of the things of note during the competitions themselves is how many contestants prepare themselves to spell a specific word by asking the official pronouncer … for its origins, alternate pronunciations and, sometimes, whether parts of a word in question are rooted in this language or that. It reveals the rather sophisticated process by which many of the Indian-Americans approach the competition, which … isn’t won on words like “logorrhea” anymore. …”
@Walter: There is an even simpler truth to this. There are more than a billion South Asians and more than a billion East Asians and for many of them coming to the West, especially the USA, and getting high level education there, is a life goal. If not for themselves, then for their kids.
If you have such ambitious parents and a good starting point, coming from the best 1 percent of this 1 billion, you surely will make an impression more often than not in comparison to the American average.
That’s social selection par excellence from a huge pool of people. Imagine all European countries would send their best, most talented and ambitious 1 percent youth to places like India or China and you get what its about.
In some cases that’s even a problem for the home countries, not as much China and India anymore, but others, because question is how many of these talents come back?
So you have a two side problem: The top 1 percent from huge countries taking places at the university locals can’t get any more and the loss of some of the most talented people to a foreign country for the giving ones.
That’s not necessarily real problem at all and can be part of a healthy exchange, but like always, it needs to be balanced out and happen in proportion.
One of the questions I asked myself is, when modern US Americans from other ethnicities see these South Asian kids doing their best, is this a motivation to try harder and get better, or is it another reason to don’t try really hard anymore.
The leftists mostly talk about blacks being discriminated, but they aren’t other than in a quite a similar way overall. If you see others excel, supposedly with quite an advantage and better outcome, are you trying harder, or are you giving up?
Like training for sprint running as an East Asian in a country with many West Africans. Is that the path you take, usually, even if you have some talent, at least relative to “your people”?
I think such effects are more powerful than “real discrimination” actually, but that still doesn’t mean they are always causal for the difference in outcome, which might persist even if trying hard, but they are causal for a lower average outcome than would be possible – one of the causes.
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-document-maize-mesoamerica.html – Paleodiet reconstruction of “unparalleled” discovery of remarkably well-preserved ancient human skeletons in Central American rock shelters (from that description I suspect their petrous bones and ossicles will be of great interest to adna researchers 😉 ).
Finds: Radiocarbon dating of the skeletal samples shows the transition from pre-maize hunter-gatherer diets, where people consumed wild plants and animals, to the introduction and increasing reliance on the corn. Maize made up less than 30 percent of people’s diets in the area by 4,700 years ago, rising to 70 percent 700 years later.
Suggests that even if maize has a 4500 BCE domestication date (which is not *that* early relative to the farming staples of Eurasia, even perhaps New Guinea!) may not have been a staple food of intensive agriculturalists in the Americas until around 2000 BCE. Which is actually pretty late in the grand scheme of things (after the Beaker expansion, around the time of Sintashta, late in the Old Kingdom).
Some of that may be explained by “slow domestication” of maize, which seems to be protracted and occured in an early stage in Mexico, then multi-regional – https://phys.org/news/2018-12-scientists-overhaul-corn-domestication-story.html
So that will add to the debate on where Native American civilisations and agriculture stood in terms of developing slower, or at a delay (or even at a delay, then faster) relative to Old World counterparts.
It may be that maize took a long time to fully domesticate, inhibiting a big “First Farmers” boom? So not much genetic turnover with farming in the Americas (unlike Europe’s 65-90%). But in later stages was a remarkably productive staple.
Related, corn introduced to Mississippi in fully fledged form, rise of complexity in Cahokia very soon after – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200514131737.htm . SW North America cultures had farmers with crops (goosefoot, sumpweed etc) but late maize seems to coincide with population boom.
Actually this latter particularly provides challenge to Turchin / Seshat model for rise of Cahokia, here – http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/what-do-the-mississippian-and-chinese-civilizations-have-in-common/. Turchin argues that Cahokia rise is about warfare and rise of frontier competition, more than productive agriculture. This argues productive agriculture probably sufficient enough… This is important as Cahokia provided him with a (scarce) independent data point from Eurasia.
Obs
USA should be seen as a developed version of Latin America rather than as a “European” country in the Americas. For whatever reason the New World society is a lot more violent than the Old World one. If you look up the cities with highest murder rates, they are mostly concentrated in the Americas. I don’t think it is poverty rather cultural. Poorer countries in Asia and Africa have lower murder rates. Maybe it has do with the type of people who settled in the Americas. You necessarily had to be aggressive to survive in the newly conquered continent. You probably were the conquerer. Probably a lot more willing to take risks than your peers back home. This willingness to take risks can result in an highly innovative society or a highly violent society both words Europeans use to describe America. And the people who continued to settle in the New World to this day tend to have some of those traits even though the frontiers have been closed for centuries. Indians content with their lives are not going to come to America. I think we have to remember that the majority culture of Americas has only existed for the last 400-500 years. That’s nothing in human history. It might take centuries for the two continents to calm down.
I think Turchin’s style of analysis goes back to 19th century ideas about a science of society and that political events are manifestations of deep underlying social forces.
I do not think it is an adequate or intellectually satisfying method of analysis.
The way I see it is that the human condition is full of sources of profound unhappiness and anger. Every society that has ever existed has been shot through with poverty, inequality, oppression, and misery. We don’t need to explain disorder. It is natural. It is order that needs an explanation.
Some regimes are better at controlling the lower orders than others. Revolutions so-called are just what happens when the regime collapses and every political entrepreneur who can summon up a crowd has at it.
In France in 1789, the Bourbon monarchy went bankrupt. Mobs from Paris took over and a bloodbath resulted. Napoleon discovered that a few field pieces could control the mobs and he became Emperor.
“Crisis in the Liberal City: The George Floyd protests expose the fault lines in metropolitan America.” By Ross Douthat, Opinion Columnist | June 2, 2020 | https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opinion/george-floyd-protests-city.html
“In place of any broad legitimacy, the liberal city relies for public order on wealth and entertainment, surveillance and prison sentences, pot and video games, elite guilt and lower-class forbearance.
“This is a decadent-but-sustainable arrangement under normal circumstances, but the coronavirus has exposed its weak points. Take away schools, pools, sports and movies and suddenly the infotainment complex is reduced to Zoom and Netflix and claustrophobia sets in. Tell people to wear masks and the surveillance camera doesn’t seem like such a threat. Close the colleges and suddenly the activist cohort and its more radical pupils are set idle. Put cops to work enforcing social distancing and their authoritarian temptations are magnified … and then all you need is a particularly brazen injustice to light the spark.
“Now that it’s been lit, the liberal coalition’s claim to represent order against Trumpian chaos or political competence against right-wing fecklessness is burning day by day. And the torching of its credibility has happened fastest among the white and woke. As public officials, white progressives lack both credibility with aggrieved protesters and full control over their own overzealous cops. As supposed custodians of public health, they’ve proven unable to sustain social distancing requirements when it’s someone other than disreputable conservatives challenging them. And as ostensible champions of facts and reason, they’ve been as quick as any Southern sheriff in the 1960s to blame outside agitators, false flags and even foreigners for their own misgovernment.”
“The Answer Isn’t a Free Lunch: What if they don’t want anything?” By Kevin D. Williamson | June 3, 2020
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/george-floyd-protests-progressives-have-done-poor-job-governing-cities/
“An NBC producer posted a piece of video early Tuesday morning that documented some of the looting in Manhattan, with the looters piling their loot into a Rolls-Royce Cullinan SUV, which goes for about a half-million dollars. …
“In Dallas, the looters hit (among many others) a shop called Traffic, which deals in very high-end designer clothes. … Rough justice is expensive: a thousand bucks for a pair of sunglasses, three grand for a pair of sneakers. We have a very peculiar kind of proletariat here in these United States. Les Misérables and a crust of bread it ain’t.
“We desperately want this to be about poverty, housing prices, unemployment, wages — anything that would provide us the opportunity to buy off the riots. That is not a dishonorable thing to do, necessarily, or an imprudent one, necessarily. We are a very, very rich society, and the best kind of problem for us to have is a problem that we can throw money at. If you’re a tough guy, you want every problem to be a fistfight. If you’re smart, you want every problem to be a brain-teaser. If you’re a lawyer, you want every problem to be a legal problem. If you have a great deal of money, you want every problem to be a financial problem.”
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@Harry Jecs: Its relative, because on the one hand the modern USA are much less brutal than Europe was some centuries ago, on the other hand its more so than todays West. America kept some traditional approaches Europe has lost during and after the 1960’s if its authority and punishing etc.
But I think what you are describing goes deeper too, namely to the foundation of the colonial states by immigrants, which came for money and material wealth, or their own sectarian belief and community system. They left fairly homogeneous states for a new state construct which concentrated on exactly that, material wealth and sectarian, small social units.
What many American regions therefore lack are homogeneity, ethnic unity, social cohesion, social responsibility, social security and strong communitarian, group oriented moral and code of conduct. Usually, the more you have of this, even in a poor region, the better for peace and non-violent conflict resolutions.
The bigger the differences between groups and individuals, the worse, because you don’t feel as much responsible, as connected to other people, probably with the exception of the direct neighbours and close friends and family. Yet even family being deconstructed to a large degree already.
So if you individuals “freed” from stable, meaningful social networks, in a society in which individual success, material wealth and just money are paramount, the only thing left is religion and a solid ideology which might keep people calm – that and the sheer threat of violence and punishment. That’s what the USA are for those not profiting enough, a society kept together by oftentimes more artificially, newly constructed cults and the fear of punishment. If there is nothing but money – on the lowest level – which matters, why not shooting someone you don’t know and like for 100 bucks?
Where is the limit? Poor societies with less violence are usually homogeneous and have a strong social cohesion, social control. Individualism is a luxury good, you have to afford it and you need to profit from it materially. Otherwise its a burden which makes you weaker than those acting more group oriented. You can see that in criminal gangs in the USA too. The more individualistic gangs of the English were pushed aside by Irish, Jewish, then Italian gangs. And in the Afro-American context gangs of Somalis are more successful too. Even if you are running a criminal organisation, its better for keeping people together if there is more to it than just the material success, the money. A code of conduct, honour, a sense for community etc. Otherwise its just a dog eats dog scenario.
If you look at the Afro-American community, since they got integrated but lost their sense of community, they are far worse off then before if looking at the key data like reproductive success, stability of the family, diseases, psychological well-being, violent incidents and social conflicts etc.
I’m always amazed about how much better and solid the older generation of Afro-Americans in places like Detroit is, in comparison to the younger ones with no jobs, drugs, free sex and no community and cohesion. It will get much worse once this grandparent generation is gone and the next grandparent generations will be of those which lost their place too.
There are suppressed people, really suppressed, around the world doing better, because they at least feel connected among themselves. If you kill the healthy base of the community, with purely individual success models, drugs and manipulation, poverty is much worse to bear, especially for people from the African tradition. America as a whole, lacking roots and cohesion, suffers from this and the communities are doing best which are the most like the source group. That’s even true for some Afro-American communities which just do their own thing in the Caribbean and elsewhere, doing better than those which lost their social cohesion.
I’d be a bit skeptical of ideas that migrant and settler societies composed of people who consciously leave the motherland are inevitably more violent. Australia and New Zealand aren’t (fairly standard West European homicide rate), and Canada’s not that high (still pretty close to standard West European homicide levels).
There’s probably something in the trajectory of the US that’s a bit unique among settler societies. Maybe freedom of action is embedded in psychology and that leads to a little bit less constraint in willingness to “defend” yourself or to attack another. The US certainly has a unique approach to firearms. Or its a complex mix of influences from broader immigration streams. Or drug and debt problems that are connected to homicide are more frequent. I dont know really know, only it seems not like the fixed destiny of ‘new’ settler societies, more a US thing.
@Matt: I agree with your basic assumption that there is no such rule, but if you look at most of the American countries they have some of the traits in common I mentioned.
And those places, regions are among the most social, prosperous and especially ordered & non-violent ones, which are more homogeneous etc. That’s obviously true for the USA as well.
Another aspect is urbanisation. Urbanisation plus poverty plus the problems described above are deadly. The urban context is per se more anti-social and problematic, but with a very diverse and heterogeneous population, the kind of Capitalism and decadence of the USA, you get to a boiling point if things deteriorate just a little bit.
For me the perfect example for a downward spirale is really Detroit. It sums everything up which went wrong. Typically Detroit has one of the highest rates for violence in the USA.
Check the cities with the highest murder rates for some of the aspects I mentioned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
“All but 3 of the top 50 cities are in the Americas, with the remainder in South Africa.”
That’s no coincidence at all. If you are poor, have troubles, no community, only individualist anti-values and perspectives, with the wealth and decadence of a system and different ethnicities being something you have being confronted with every day, that’s the breeding ground for frustration, aggressiveness and violence. And that’s for sure even without genetic predispositions, which is a topic of its own.
But think how brutal life in many African and Asian countries is, yet the murder & violence rates in America are still significantly higher. No coincidence. People need their very own references which fit to their situation and predispositions, otherwise a dissonance being created which will tear people apart. In a highly “diverse”, heterogeneous society, you can’t achieve a solid reference for the majority, for every group in it, so as soon as problems appear which more homogeneous societies will just swallow, everything might crumble and conflicts escalate much easier on the individual as well as the group level.
Of course extreme ideologies, like e.g. Communism or Islamism can even tear apart an otherwise homogeneous society, but for the already split ones, everything gets more extreme much faster.
Concerning the USA I don’t understand all the fuzz about “sensitive speech” while there is this Gangsta Hip Hop culture which is anti-social per excellence and did a lot of damage throughout the world.
Obs:
I lived in the States for a decade, and my interactions with American cops was far more benign than your European friends experienced. Many were downright friendly. And I’m a brown-skinned Indian who looks matches the “Middle Eastern terrorist” profile (if one such exists). This also explains my disgust at the current mayhem, and the elite media rhetoric that is egging it on.
Clearly there are brutal cops out there but I’ll need far more evidence to believe that there’s an institutional racist conspiracy to humiliate and often kill innocent black men. To the contrary, the data seems to indicate that black men are caught committing crimes or felonies at higher rates. But identifying differences seems to strike lefties as racist in itself, so no analysis of the socio-economic factors behind this is possible. That’s left to the alt-right, which has its own shibboleths like genetics determining criminal behavior.
Anyway, for sane and rational voices on this topic, I watch the Bloggingheads podcasts between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. Much recommended!
@Numinous: I think its all about exploitable symbols being used by people which had their very own agenda long before.
There are more than enough cases of non-black people being treated brutally, even killed by cops and everything seems to happen in proportion to the frequency of criminal activities within communities, with little to no excess because of “structural racism”.
The far bigger problems are of the nature described and socio-economic.
The experiences came from people which were in California and Texas, probably more exceptional than I thought. I have no experience on the issue of my own, only second hand ones.
Either way it looks like America is over. I’m just curious how non black minorities and whites will be treated in the black ruled country we are about to become. I bet Biden is salivating over the idea of 14T in reparations.
As there are a few more ancient East Asian dna papers published, and Davidski of Eurogenes has added to his Global 25 PCA, here is a quick test using the Vahaduo website to model later populations with them.
Screenshots of results: https://imgur.com/a/oRyxG0u . Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/WcrbruDb
The populations I’ve chosen as sources are: Amur_River_Early_Neolithic, Boshan_Neolithic (North Chinese Coastal), Liangdao1 (South Chinese Coastal Neolithic), Yumin_N (North Chinese Inland Neolithic), Austroasiatic_Ho, Jomon, Nepal_Chokhopani, Sakalin_HG, Vietnamese_Neolithic.
(Ho included to mask out ASI ancestry).
Lots of proportions seem to make sense (e.g. Japanese seem to have about 15% Jomon ancestry, and no one else really has any, which seems about right. the early yellow river neolithic ancestry would seem to be best represented in Korea today – Korea has slightly more flow from South Chinese N, but Japan has quite a bit more flow from Jomon).
It does seem like present Northern Han have some Nepal_Chokhopani like inland element in this framework, and the post-Neolithic Yellow River populations do, relative to the Lower Yellow River early neolithic Boshan.
Older ancient dna from Tibet and Western China will help to sort this out, as Nepal_Chokhopani from 700 BCE is a bit anachronistic.
What sod you think ancient DNA from lower altitude areas of Nepal (and Assam) will show? Some sort of AASI + Tibetan like mixed population?
JS: I have no idea. Is that what you think is the most likely then?