Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread – 08/09/2020

Reading Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. The author, Walter Scheidel, is my kind of thinker. This is a very rich and fertile book. Scheidel has thought long and hard about a lot of “big questions.” This is a page-turner.

I asked for more positive views on The Insight. I got two of them. A few more, please!

Mysterious carvings and evidence of human sacrifice uncovered in ancient city: Discoveries at the sprawling site have archaeologists rethinking the roots of Chinese civilization .

A new quantitative genetics textbook is out, Quantitative Genetics. I got a kindle copy, and it looks pretty good. This is a decent introduction that’s up-to-date for the 21st-century. Recommended.

Automatic inference of demographic parameters using Generative Adversarial Networks.

Estimating SNP heritability in presence of population substructure in biobank-scale datasets.

Genome Diversity in Ukraine.

Fast and Flexible Estimation of Effective Migration Surfaces.

The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road.

Democrats introduce bill to give the Federal Reserve a new mission: Ending racial inequality. If the Democrats really push through some of their crazy ideas lots of people will re-identify.

Controlling the false discovery rate in GWAS with population structure.

Allele Frequency Mismatches and Apparent Mismappings in UK Biobank SNP Data.

The Princeton Faculty’s Anti-Free-Speech Demands. These are Black Numenoreans.

Homicide Spike Hits Most Large U.S. Cities.

48 thoughts on “Open Thread – 08/09/2020

  1. Didn’t India have competitive states during the medieval era? Maybe the development of large nation states like in Europe was arrested because of the Mughals.

  2. Hello Razib,

    What did you mean by “lots of people will re-identify”?

    I’m not from Usa, but have interesting about us politics, because it have influence on the rest world.

  3. @Andryi

    “What did you mean by “lots of people will re-identify”?

    I think that he means that many whites will begin to focus on their own “race” identity.

    I think that’s right and really agree. Race is a Pandora’s Box — you can’t partially open it. The vast majority of “whites” in the US have been downplaying race and differences in race for the past 50 or so years. This process can easily reverse. And that would be bad. Really bad.

  4. no, i mean anyone who can ‘pass’ as black will become black. lots of whites will become native American. at that point south Africa style ‘race tests’ (like brazil has to do) will come into vogue.

    i don’t think it’s workable. but the democrats are going off the deep end on this stuff, like the republicans did and have on tax cuts (i don’t like high taxes, but it’s obv that the republicans are totally captured by their donor class on this and can’t say no and won’t say no, similarly with SOME democrats and idpol)

    i’m darker than many Black Americans. if i buzz my hair i think i can pass fine.

  5. More political than I like to go on this blog’s comments however worth a look if not seen already – Zach Goldberg’s big recent article more or less summarizing his work on what changes in frequency of terms in media and survey data tell us about the timing and causal direction of political changes in 2008 – to present https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening.

    It doesn’t really tell us anything much new that a thinking person wouldn’t already know, intuitively, of course. It’s admirable the degree to which he’s gone to empirically shore up the case. And it’s just good to have something to “point to” when we get to suggestions that the new “Woke” era is a backlash prompted by the events of 2016 and/or is overblown by “right wing media” who merely overreact to a few students with radical views, whose frequency and radicalism hasn’t really changed. (Beyond simply reacting to such responses with “Is that a joke?”). Of course most such people will just go halting state in response (if not privately, then in their public face). But at least its something.

    (Kind of a ironically, nostalgic feeling actually – reminds me of early “data blogging”, pre-2008, when I actually believed that internet bloggers analysing open data sets in public and in real time would almost “naturally” supplant the mass media’s questionable approach to factual reporting. And, in general, on the whole, I suspected, probably support more the common sense view of things, against massaging data in secret into rhetoric of liberation and cutely-counter-intuitive-but-also-untrue-cleverness in the public eye. But of course, the irony then is that this is an article that almost shows exactly the opposite actually happened!)

  6. @Razib

    Sorry, I misunderstood. However, what you say is already happening in the corporate sphere. I also think that the main response to these has been the creation of new victim/minority groups. We have seen that play out with the “Hispanic” category and the now for South and East Asians.

    It’s just today these preference mostly take place in the form of “negating the negative” (you cannot fire a protected individual w/o alot of paper work) and hiring preferences. Furthermore, most federal and state agencies have minority preferences as well. In addition to set-asides, many state agencies had preferential treatment if the owner could claim minority status (e.g. support with filing and other help).

    More importantly, I have to say that the woman with the blue eyes is drop dead gorgeous!!!

  7. I understood that America was facing a second civil war, complete collapse and disintegration. Well, welcome to a world ruled by totalitarian China. It will be useful for stupid leftists to feel it on their necks. Hooray comrades.

  8. I think a lot of people simply lack the ability to extrapolate and think consequentially.

    In many European cities we now have whole quarters in which the main presence of the European state is the European police, social workers and teachers. Without which, local ethnic organisations, kin groups, religious groups and gangs would control the streets already and the state would simply collapse.
    In the local schools the indigenous people are only a small minority, often mobbed and attacked, as there are conflicts between all these different ethnic groups which fight each other on a daily basis. The main conflicts, violence and discrimination, is between different ethnic and religious groups of immigrants, as well as gangs.
    Teachers being threatened on a regular basis, yet what is still a major part of the curriculum? The “historical crimes” of the indigenous people and culture, what bad they did, the French in colonial times, the Germans in WW2, how they still discriminate “people of color” or from a “different culture”, how the society is “unfair” and all that stuff. So they get the education which was made for the indoctrination of the local indigenous people, even though their background and social reality is completely different and indigenous people practically play no role in this classes and schools any more. Doesn’t matter, they still get the message: “The local people are bad, they did bad things, and if I have social problems, they might be responsible for it” and not their attitude, family, cultural background, own abilities etc.
    And that comes from teachers which have troubles to do sport education with girls, to have authority in front of the young students and their parents, which can almost no longer keep up any educational European standard in this chaotic environment and sometimes just try to get home safely after work.

    What is this? This is even wrong from the Cultural Marxist point of view, because it doesn’t help to create a “future paradise of egalitarianism”, it sews the seed for future unrest and violence, even directed against the very persons which teach that propaganda.

    This is both short sighted as well as arrogant by those doing it the and the “elite” ordering it. They “elites” have the focus on keeping the local population in guilt and dependence, so that they won’t organise themselves or choose a different political path than the one they have chosen, of which they are much more afraid. But what they also do, because of that, is to incite hate and future conflict. Yet they think it doesn’t matter to them. I say this is megalomania.
    They sit in their relatively safe homes, with their relatively safe jobs and guards, they think: “Not my problem what happens out there, we are just doing fine and everything goes according to the plan.”
    And many of the small executors, what do they think? They don’t have the money, they don’t have the guards, they get threatened already, but still they teach this troubled youth from the “problematic districts” that its all the fault of “white people”. What do they think they do with this? Motivate the young immigrants to work harder, to assimilate and to become model citizens? By telling them they and their approach is just fine, probably not ideal, but hey, you can’t do too much about, its the Europeans which are worse?

    This can only end bad, but sometimes I think a lot of white leftists just believe in some sort of “hidden white superiority”, as if they can’t be the victims of, say a pogrom next day, after spreading the message. Sometimes this reminds me of Jewish teachers which would teach their non-Jewish and already somewhat Antisemitic students “theories of Antisemitism” and how everything being the fault of their very own group. Because that’s what is is: “You don’t make it to the university…oh, that will be the fault of this bad discrimination in our still so racist white society…”
    Just think about it, for a moment, who would do that? Yet this is what the educational system in North America and Europe tells immigrants and people of color: There is a, still mostly, white teacher in front of them, teaching them about how bad white people and their culture are. Not what good they did, or what kind of culture they created any more, but just how bad everything is because of them. Look at the curricula, everywhere in the Western world, how the content was shifted for public schools in paticualr!
    Large portions of Antiquity or the Medieval Age don’t exist any more in historical classes, and if, only for debating about “the discrimination of women”…

    Great, I see a bright and peaceful future coming to us very soon, with many young people which will be full of enthusiasm to save and carry on occidental culture. This will be the greatest success story of all times.

    This is, I have to stress it, even inconsequential from the Cultural Marxist point of view, because these young people are the future majority in the cities, yet they get a bad basic education and still being told its everything the locals people’s fault and of this bad, bad discrimination they experience even if they don’t actually experience it – if they don’t make it socially. The teachers and media people might think that creates a revolutionary potential, but what kind of “revolution” they create in reality, did that thought cross their mind at all? That what they create might look different from what they had in mind?

    And here is something funny about the new Cultural Marxist left: They always prefer to accuse the people which are closer to whites and to the state, as long as they don’t control the state themselves completely at least. What does this mean? Racism between two non-white groups is irrelevant, its like it doesn’t exist. Because it would contradict the narrative of a “peaceful multicultural and -racial future in the Matriarchat”, in which there will be no violence, no suppression, no discrimination, no wars and violent conflicts in general, when the exact opposite is the case. Homogeneous states and populations are more likely to be peaceful, the more diverse they are, the less peaceful they become.
    Looking at the USA, a lot of the violence happening is not at all related to “white racism”, but its between different other ethnic groups and gangs. They might accuse “white suppression” being responsible for this, but this wrong. Its the same in other places where there exist no whites.

    But how often do you hear about Afro-American “racism” against Latinos or Asians? “Racism” or better social conflicts between local black South Africans and immigrant Nigerians? This list can go on forever.

    So there is this absolute focus on “white issues”, as miniscule and ridiculous as they might be in comparison to anything else which happens around us.

    The next is the state: If there is a functioning state, if this state uses violence, almost regardless in which context, the state is wrong, the victim is right. Like you have a terrorist group or radical Islamists, like in Syria, which cut people’s throats, mutiliate them, burn them alive, do things which would have been exceptionally cruel in Medieval times, but if the Syrian state uses bombs to stop them, while the bombard with grenades peaceful neighbourhoods all the time, the “Syrian government” is the big war criminal, “the rebels” not. This was a case where different groups in the USA could be hooked.

    I remember debating with anarchists in my youth, they always said: “The state itself is a criminal, the state is evil…”

    Here you have something some extremist Libertarians and anarchists, which influenced modern Cultural Marxist movements, can come together in an absurd constellation: If the state organises, defends, acts, its always the state which is bad, regardless of what was the cause for its reaction, the motives behind it, whatever. You see that time and time again: The state is evil.

    But what do they think is the alternative? The alternative are gangs, tribal warfare or private ownership by the Plutocracy. In the end, in both cases, a rule by warlords. Take away the police, take away any state structure, create the “recipe for anarchy”, and what do you get? Collapse, breakdown, violence, bloodshed, massacres and at the end a totalitarian rule by the next best warlord which will determine autocratically what people are ought to do.
    The organisation of the state might have caused bloody wars, might even lead to the extinction of mankind in some sort of extreme scenario, but it is a necessary prereqisite for any sort of higher developed society and culture. Without which, nothing goes. You can only change how you organise or name it, but in the end, there is a state or there is nothing.

    But the extreme left, even now largely in charge, after their “long march into the institutions”, have still this “anti-authoritarian” and “anti-state” ideas in their heads. They became the new establishment, or at least the closest allies of the real Plutocratic establishment, with their state sponsored positions and protection, everywhere, yet they still want to stylise themselves as “anti-state rebels”. Honestly, that’s absurd.

    Whatever goes wrong with immigrants and minorities is no longer the fault of some sort of “racist establishment”, which is long gone, if it ever existed the way they imagine it, but can only be the fault of Cultural Marxists or the Plutocracy with which you are allied. They are in charge for decades now, they made all the programs, together. If something still goes wrong in this society, and more goes wrong than ever, its their fault, not that of the occidental culture.
    But that’s something they might only realise, if living long enough, when its too late. Because like I said, in fact they are megalomaniacs. They think they can erode everything, can blame everything they are themselves, ruin every protection they might have had, ally up with the greatest foes of social advancement and justice, with the Oligarchy, and still get away with it, even just create their Marxist wonderland THAT WAY? How wrong can you be?

  9. New Villabruna cluster individual from nearly 17000 years ago had ydna I2 and mtdna U4’9. Can’t wait to see if he had some ANE just like Villabruna 1 did.

  10. @Andriy & Eric K

    Razib mostly handled this, but implicit in the idea that you have to take active, concrete steps to rectify racial inequality, which is what Razib identifies the Democrats (correctly IMO) increasingly embracing, is that you will need to be able to formalize a rigorous definition of race so that you don’t have, say, Elizabeth Warren claiming she identifies as Native American and that she can support this through family stories, high cheekbones, and writing a recipe for Pow Wow Chow. Realistically, the United States (and other countries in the Anglosphere, if you look at Australia and who is/isn’t aboriginal) was never able to do this under white supremacist/nationalist Jim Crow, Indian blood quantum, and immigration laws, with the very crude one-drop rule used as a rough baseline, and the confusion over which races and castes in South Asia qualified as “white”, not to mention that almost all of the peoples of the then-current and now former Ottoman Empire who came to America were classified as white. Even Apartheid South Africa’s racial definitions got muddy when it came to white vs coloured (assuming that color was South Asian or other non-black) or coloured vs black. Nazi Germany is the only country I can think of to codify very strict criteria regarding race, and that obviously had very harsh, dehumanizing consequences, and that was with a population that was already overwhelmingly German such that the Nuremberg and related laws mostly served to formalize terrorism against the country’s small minority populations. Razib references Brazil, which in the past decade (as Anglosphere thinking regarding race-based affirmative action for college admissions was adopted by the PT government) adopted very crude and bizarre classification system for whether someone was sufficiently indigenous or black based on things like nose shape and brow ridges, and was quite farcical in a country that had had high levels of racial and ethnic mixing in the previous 200+ years if not more.

    In case you are interested, law professor David Bernstein has been compiling a kind of American “law of racial classification” review of how federal, state, and municipal agencies attempt to get around pure self-identification (the default standard) for purposes of affirmative action and minority-owned-business support programs. The federal judiciary has mostly looked the other way at these decisions by federal and state administrative law boards and advisory opinions by OMB and state/local-equivalent agencies, but if some of the initiatives that state and local Democrats, and now even some national ones, are proposing, the federal judiciary would 99% have to get involved as racial identity would become a contested proposition.

  11. @Razib Mindy Kaling’s brother buzzed his hair and passed as black. He go into med school. I think he wrote an article or book about it. Yes people will try to pass.

  12. i think i can pass too. i’m plenty brown.

    i got tacos once with a bald head and my told me the servers said ‘the black guy’ in Spanish. referring to me

  13. @Meka

    I get what Razib is trying to say.

    I also want to point out that such a state of affairs is not a stable social equilibrium.

  14. @Razib I have a strange experience. Forgive me if this seems a little long but I don’t know what to make of it and hoping you and others would chime in. A few years ago I saw my hospital birth records (my dad saved a lot of important documents to register my sister and I to the Indian consulate. I guess he wasn’t sure how long we’d stay in US) and it explains some of my experiences are different from other Indian Americans.
    Anyway, I noticed it said ‘W’ for white under race. I was born in 1982. My sister and I initially went to a parochial (Catholic) primary school even though we are Hindu (this is another story). My mom used to tell us that when she would drop us off, some parents would just come up to her and ask, “Why aren’t you and your kids dark?” This was the 80s and no such as being PC. My mom didn’t really have an answer. The staff at our apartment used think we were French until they saw my mom one night in a sari. Apparently they came up to my mom and asked, “We thought you were French. We were surprised you are Indian. You kids look white.” My sister has been confused for a person from Spain and my dad when he first came to the US in 1973 for residency was confused for Italian. In fact his nickname back then was Vinny short for Vinod and to poke fun that everyone mistaken him for Italian.

    Now I think this is all weird. I look at our photos and I don’t see how people were confused. However the last 10 years has been weird for me. Here in New York City, as an adult I’ve been confused for Hispanic (few come up to me and start speaking Spanish), an Italian couple that owned a sushi shop thought I was Italian, a Pakistani thought I was Pakistani, an Uber driver thought I was South American, one doctor thought I could be from Andhra Pradesh, some black people around the hospital I worked at would just say “As-salamu alaykum” as they pass by me, and one time at a United Nations party there Iranians who would just come up to me and speak Farsi. Traveling outside the US, people are confused as well. In fact the only person to nail what my ethnicity was an Indian doctor who was the son of an Indian Army Officer and traveled all over India. I know some desis/South Asians have been described as coconuts but no I don’t even get that. I had roommates in med school who just tell me, “You are white as bread.” Not sure if that was suppose to be an insult or a funny. Even some white girls who I guess were trying to be funny would say weird shit like, “Look! I have a tan and I’m more Indian than you.” or one according to one redhead I datedd, “I hate Indians, but your different.” WTF?!!

    Again sorry for the long message, but I don’t understand why I’m racially ambigious??? Do I pass for everything except Scandinavian, East Asian, and Black? My family looks Indian to me so why the confusion. Sooooo strange.

    P.S. If curious, I’m Marathi CKP descent.

  15. And in Brooklyn, in the subway some Orthodox Jews assumed I was Jewish. I’m thinking they though I was Sephardi Jewish because there is no way they would confuse me as one of their own. If someone knows my first name, then some think I’m Israeli but that’s because my first name can be a Hebrew name as well.

  16. @AP, It doesn’t seem strange to me at all. Americans are not very good at knowing what small differences in appearance mean for ethnic background. So if they see someone who doesn’t look “black”, they may just assume “white”. Or if they think “white, but not northern European”, something will pop into their head which for some reason they associate with “white, but not northern European”. So it will look like they are randomly assuming you are Italian, Hispanic, Persian, Pakistani, Sephardic Jewish, whatever.

    Yes, different people will think you are “everything except Scandinavian, East Asian, and Black”.

    In the classical three-part racial division Caucasian/Negroid/Oriental (aka white/black/yellow), Indians were Caucasians and so “white”. Thus, the birth certificate.

  17. Thanks for the response. I guess it does make sense. It’s just an odd experience but in some strange way it does offer it’s own ‘freedom’ from what I discovered rather than being pigeonholed. I want to be clear, I’m not woke or claiming victimhood at all. I will say one thing though. I was pretty ignorant of my community when I was little. I didn’t have much contact with other Indians in the late 80s/early 90s. My neighbhors were white or Jewish mostly in Queens, NY. I had very little family here (cousins in New Jersey and they looked like us). My parents Indian friends were the same caste and they had light skin or light brown skin. Until we moved to Long Island and I went to a public school, I didn’t realize that many Indians and South Asians has a whole have darker skin tones. Of course it didn’t matter to me but I just didn’t realize. My experiences in my formative years were different from average Indian Americans. Even my first non related “auntie” was German-English strawberry blonde because she was married to my dad’s best friend who was Indian as well. That marriage caused a ruckus back when they got married in 1969. It’s funny, in many ways my parents were more assimilating and liberal back then than today. They had friends from other ethnicities (Polish, Jewish, Puerto Rican etc) Spoke English most of the time. Now all they do is watch Marathi TV from satellite, speak mostly Marathi, and have only Marathi friends. Things change I suppose.

  18. AP, you could just write “i look white, i’m CKP, why?”

    answer: the number of genes which code for ‘phenotypic race’ are far smaller than the whole genome (which accounts for genome-wide ancestry). there is more variance in groups in the former than the latter. this explains why you see high variance in skin color between siblings.

    a few dozen genes explain most of the variance in skin color. sample variance is inversely proportional to the sample size. so that’s why.

  19. LOL. I guess I could have said that but I don’t believe it. I think people’s perceptions are weird. Thanks for the explanation of variance in phenotype.

  20. as another commenter pointed out ppl see what their sensors are tuned to see. ie what is there training set.

    very light-skinned indians can look indian to indians because indian have a broad training set. non-indians do not

  21. You guys are absolutely right. I didn’t really think in terms of training set. I suppose my training set or parameters for “white” is narrow and I know what Europeans look like since I spent some time in Europe living and traveling. But that would suggest that the parameters for white are a bit wider than I realized for your average American given lack of exposure to human diversity. I have noticed those with greater exposure to people from different parts of the world are more in tuned to the subtle differences that exist but there aren’t many of them. I remember reading the book ‘Whiteshift’ by Eric Kaufman and didn’t quite know what to make of the fact that he believes based on data that by the 2050s/2060s those with substantial European ancestry will still be considered white. Essentially mixed raced whites will maintain the white majority. Kaufman himself looks mixed race to me but he is considered white which again suggests I have a broader training set than most Americans. I guess this has happened before in the 20th century with the expansion of the white category to include all Europeans instead of just Anglo-Saxons and Nordics. Soon it will expand to include mixed Asians, Hispanics, and probably other groups I haven’t thought possible. It is fascinating to witness the interaction of the US racial paradigm with the shift in US demographics. This begs the question though: will this future divide the desi community and fracture it even further between those who will be absorbed into the white category and those who will be absorbed into the black category?

    Then again maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about here. Maybe I’m out of my depth on this topic.

  22. I guess this has happened before in the 20th century with the expansion of the white category to include all Europeans instead of just Anglo-Saxons and Nordics. Soon it will expand to include mixed Asians, Hispanics, and probably other groups I haven’t thought possible.

    On the other hand, there is the Steve Sailer (and Razib Khan?) prediction that as racial preferences are made stronger for non-white groups, this process will stop and there may even be a “flight from white”. Sailer cites as an example south Asian groups pushing for a separate census category rather than the traditional Caucasian/white. (Ironically, the three category “scientific racism” was more inclusive than cultural racial division. That is why in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s anti-discrimination Americans often talked about “discrimination based on race, color, or creed”. Jews and the darkest South Asian were all Caucasians, so discrimination against them couldn’t be “racial” discrimination.) The Obama administration wanted to split out a Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) category.

  23. On topic of cultural evolution, looks like Turchin and collaborators published another paper in July on which is an iteration of the long-standing paper on the preconditions for the emergence of empires – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0516-2“Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia”. Latest version of models that have been published and floating about in various forms since 2009 (e.g. http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Steppe_JGH_reprint.pdf from 2009 and https://www.pnas.org/content/110/41/16384 from 2013).

    I’m not entirely sure exactly everything the newest paper adds to the model, but one thing it does saliently add is it does seem to add a variable for “Distance from First Empires”, which is useful.

    This is to account for the “the “First Empires” hypothesis – the possibility that the spread of large-scale societies and their norms and institutions was not due to any of the processes outlined above but may simply have been contingent on where the first such societies initially arose. Warfare may have been more intense initially near these regions, leading to scaling up of societies in neighbouring regions, and/or technological or social innovations may have diffused out from these regions.”. That’s something I’ve discussed before in the comments here so it please’s me to see that added (though its also something that has come up in other commentary, and Turchin and crew are smart enough to consider it for themselves, so I can’t claim originality or influence!).

    It’s a bit hidden in the supplements but their Figure S5, if I read correctly, shows that when the “Distance from First Empires” is included, it is dominant at explaining “Imperial Density”, in combination with “Duration of Agriculture” variables at the beginning of their sequence in 500 BCE! The predictive size of “Distance from Steppe”, on the contrary, is roughly 0 at the start of their sequence…!

    However, over time, these variables swap, and the “Distance from Steppe” variable rises to importance after 1200 BCE.

    See, excerpted: https://imgur.com/a/BNR9613

    That’s interesting; to me it suggests that the steppe is *not* actually important in explaining the initial distribution of state level societies in 500 BCE (except by if it determined the position of the initial empires, which is a bit questionable). But it probably is consistent with the observation of where more imperial forms tended to persist, particularly after 1200 AD to 1500 AD, after the decline of large late Antiquity polities in Europe, but before the rise of nation-states…

    That supports the Ko+Koyama model (https://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Koyama.pdf) where China tended to retain empires to counter steppe nomads, while empires tended to more collapse in the west (lacking that unifying force and facing multiple directions of threat). But doesn’t really so much support the idea that steppe societies were initially decisive in the formation of the earliest empires…

    On another aspect that they introduce, it does seem like there’s still a potential grumble for me in that they use a “potential agricultural productivity (rather than achieved productivity)” to test for whether the agricultural potential of land influenced the presence of complex societies there… (in their words effectively since achieved productivity is itself too much of an outcome of the cultural processes whose causality they seek to explain).

    It seems like the drawback of this is that they define it as a one-time only variable, but inevitably the potential agricultural productivity at any time point is variable; to use an extreme example, if your agricultural productivity is high with maize adapted to your climate, but maize is only in Central America at that time, and there’s no way to acquire the crop, then it’s a bit odd for a model to treat you as having high potential agricultural productivity at that time.

    To go back to an example that I (and I think owilleke) have brought up before, this research at Cahokia from May 2020 seemed to show that there was a sudden effloresce of cultural complexity with a sudden increase in productivity of maize agriculture, which was exogenous in cause and not due to any technological change caused by anything else (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200514131737.htm). That’s not really possible to explain in a model where “duration of agriculture”, “distance from first empires”, “distance from steppe” are predictive, but sudden increases in population size from increased productivity in agriculture don’t matter.

    Not unsympathetic to their one variable approach to characterize agricultural productivity potential, for the sake of simplicity, but I think ultimately models will need to characterize something like “natural agricultural productivity from available crops at given time” (to put it a fairly verbose way).

  24. Another observation I had is when I use my ‘American’ nickname Andy to make it easier on those in places (the South) where it’s unlikely the local population have met Indian Americans, I’ve noticed seamless integration.

    Anyway, we should expect a civilization-wide replay of the ethnic divisions that gripped the United States between the late 1880s and 1960s, during which time the Anglo-Protestant majority declined to less than half the total but gradually absorbed Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their children into a reconstituted white majority oriented around a WASP archetype. This was achieved as immigration slowed and intermarriage overcame ethnic boundaries, a process that still has some way to run.

    Notice that identifying with the white majority is not the same as being attached to a white-Christian tradition of nationhood. Only those with at least some European ancestry can identify as members of the white majority. However, minorities may cherish the white majority as an important piece of their national identity: a tradition of nationhood. I have family members who voted for Trump but not necessarily for this reason but do think the Democrats have gone crazy.

    Now in the United States, some 30 percent of Latinos and Asians voted for Trump and many lament the decline of white America. In surveys taken soon after the August, 2017 Charlottesville riots, 70 percent of polled Latino and Asian Trump voters agreed that “whites are under attack in this country,” and 53 percent endorsed the idea that the country needed to “protect and preserve its white European heritage”—levels similar to white Trump voters. In fact, non-white Trump voters express a much higher level of sadness at the passing of a white majority than white Democrats. A key question for the future of American politics is whether new generations of Hispanics and Asians will move closer to, or further from, the country’s white-Christian traditions.

    If leftists and progressives have it their way, we will have unrestricted immigration, lawlessness, and codified reverse oppression olympics/totem. As you suggested, a “flight from white” will come to pass. Combined with non-white group preferences, the nation will then balkanize.

  25. @Mekal: “Nazi Germany is the only country I can think of to codify very strict criteria regarding race”

    They had no strict criteria regarding race, with the exception of Himmler and the core SS organisation and even there its debatable. Otherwise not at all, this is against the historical evidence. The consequences of being put into specific categories, especially Jewish and Gypsy, were extreme and brutal, that is true, but the criteria as such were usually not. There were many blurred lines and categorisations and basically no “One drop rule” like in the United States. And even for Jews the cultural aspect was very important, whereas the racial was much more blurred, like if a half-Jewish person was of Christian faith, he was not considered Jewish, but if this person was part of the Jewish community, it was. This could in an extreme scenario result in one person being half-Jewish by descent, but not considered Jewish, whereas another person could be just one quarter Jewish, but considered “fully Jewish” (“Geltungsjude”), because all his parents and grandparents were part of the Jewish religious community. This means there was an element of cultural categorisation involved.

    I think the “One drop rule” is both the most extreme and most stupid racial categorisation and law ever made in modern history, from every perspective. Because in the end it fired back on the white racialised social system itself and created absurdities with which the USA still have to struggle. Like people being “identified as black” even though they are more than 75 percent of European descent, and the claim of “race being a social construct” being easier to make if “black” became a social construct indeed.

    I think its instructive if highly mixed Afro-Americans, of which some have some sort of pan-African ideals and even racial dreams, move to black Africa. A lot of them being recognised as mixed, even as “white” there, and there they can see if they are really “black” or not and how “racist” or prejudiced the local people are – towards them.

    The best example I can give on the issue was a mixed Afro-German woman, which thought when visiting the West African homeland of her father would be welcomed there “as one of them”. Yet when she walked through the village of her father, all the children which never saw a white person before were shouting “whitey, whitey” in their language, because for them, she was the most white person they ever saw in their life.

    I think that is quite instructive on the relativity of “race” and “racism” and also about the one sided anti-European and at the same time Eurocentric view on these issues. Another oxymoron of the Cultural Marxists. They want to destroy the European people and culture, yet they do it from a strictly Eurocentric and very one sided perspective, since that’s where they are coming from…

  26. @Obs About Nazi Germany, you are partly correct. The Nuremberg Laws passed in 1930s were not as strict and did not contain a one drop rule. One of its authors, Dr. Stuckart, did not want to cause distress to interracial couples and did not want them to be pushed toward the State’s racial enemies. He believed in protecting German blood no matter the quantity. However this all changed with the Wannsee Conference in 1942 and the creation of the Final Solution. By direction of Heydrich and the SS, half Jews were to be “evacuated” or allowed to remained in Germany if they accept sterilization. They even made it more complicated with half mixed and so forth. Stuckart thought this was lunacy because he felt this was ad hoc law. The SS would arbitrarily decide who was mixed. To him non German blood would disappear eventually so no need for something so extreme. But Stuckart’s reason which I mentioned earlier was even more weird though. He believed mixed race Germans were lethal because they combine the cunning of Jewish race and the superior intelligence of a Aryan/German. Therefore the State needs to make use of them while they exist but certainly don’t want to pass such strict laws that would drive them in to the arms of their enemies such as the Soviets or other “subhumans”. But at the same the German Volk had a responsibility to part of them that’s German. HIS WORDS NOT MINE. Like I said….bizarre.

  27. @AP: A lot of these ideas and laws were bizarre, but many people don’t know the reality of the National Socialist state and think of some sort of “Super Aryan only” law and society being made up there, while this was not the case at all.
    But you mention indirectly an important aspect, namely that German-Jewish mixed people were usually treated differently than other Jewish mixed people without German ancestry. The reason was primarily political, social and cultural again, because the own citizens should not get enraged if relatives, even fully Jewish husbands and wives, being treated badly, whereas in occupied territories, especially in the Eastern states, such considerations were of lower importance for them.
    The whole issue was hotly debated and disputed within the National Socialist leadership and there was no common position on it, which just shows the difficulties they had with the issue, until the war ended.
    To my best knowledge the vast majority of German-Jewish mixed ancestry people survived the war without deportation or sterilisation, since nothing of this was put into practise for them, unless they were persecuted for additional, like political or criminal, reasons.

  28. Another “Cultural/State Evolution” hypothesis paper that complements my above that may be kind of interesting. This time from Koyama and collaborators.

    This one is particularly cool as seems be a response to a blog post by Tanner Greer which formalized some observations by Jared Diamond and others, about certain kinds of geography being more and less conducive to state unifications, which Tanner termed “The Fractured Land Hypothesis” (https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2013/06/geography-and-chinese-history-fractured.html) and I believe was the first to term it that. Example of blog->academic dialogue.

    https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ab64/9a16762a33f934ad0001ef398df9e5923423.pdf“Fractured-Land and the Puzzle of Political Unification and Fragmentation” – January 2019

    https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Fractured_Land.pdf“Fractured-Land and the Puzzle of Political Unification and Fragmentation” – July 2020 version of the same

    Tanner tended to argue that China was *not* more fractured (and paper references that Turchin did to). This paper seems to be based on countering the claim that Europe was not more “fractured” than China by establishing that:

    A) emphasizing the role of heavy forest cover in disrupting the European plain.

    B) using a spatially explicit “Civilization” / “4x” style grid model to model state formation, to argue that while China may have more ruggedness overall, the position of its ruggedness was less situated to inhibit state formation.

    Using this they claim that agricultural productivity + the lack of fragmentation pretty much explains why a large and unified state arose in China and kept being recreated but not the European plain from France to Poland.

    I’m pretty positively disposed to this as I’m a bit of skeptic of Turchin’s alternative where the conflict between steppe+sown was the seed of empires. (Steppe probably did help the progress of civilization through the horse and the wheel and dissemination of innovations between East and West Eurasia, but by raiding and conquest as a spur to greater levels of military organization, per Turchin?). That said, I’m still not totally sure I find it convincing. They find that their model recreates dynamics, but I wonder if it isn’t overfitting.

    It also has some errors that they note in the Near East and South Asia, which are fairly significant, as a cost of optimizing for Europe vs China. There’s some claim that the steppe explains the Near East but this seems a bit have-cake-and-eat-it. A model that doesn’t explain much about the formation of states in the first region in which states formed and preceded those in China by literally *thousands* of years seems not much cop as a model. (Compared to that question, of why the Near East and Egypt were host to the first empires from which technology diffused, the question of why Europe was divided and China was not seems actually fairly unimportant?).

    And also wonder if forest cover and agricultural productivity is really as endogenous and non-contingent as they claim – isn’t it perhaps an effect as much as a cause (unlike mountains, rivers, etc, which cannot be moved)? Perhaps expanding Celts would have worked harder to chop down those forests with iron tools, and then work the land with the heavy plough, if the Romans hadn’t got to them first.

  29. China must be looked at from the topographical perspective and its divided by different river systems, of which the Hwangho was the most important historically. Basically once the Northern Chinese centre was unified, the logical next step was to move South, following those competitors from the North which fled there in the first place.
    Europe on the other hand is nowhere as clearly structured for a unification as China is, there is simply not one or two or three dominant river systems along which most of the civilisation could have evolved. Instead, there are many competing natural habitats, divided by rivers, mountains, forests and climatic zones.
    Once you establish your state as the dominant force on the Hwangho, much of China was yours, there is simply nothing comparable in Europe, not by the centrality, nor by the demographic power house the Hwangho represents. Old Chinese = Hwangho, like Egypt = Nile.

    Concerning state building, its not the steppe which is decisive, but highly developed pastoralist warrior cultures, which create different selective regimes, belief systems and cultures as a whole than people which transition directly from hunter gatherers to farmers. These direct to farmer cultures have tendencies of their own, which are, in my opinion, negative for the long term development and competitiveness. One aspect being the extreme importance of a rigig religious and social system, in which there is less of a dynamic and rationality. Typical might be Theocratic rulers, a weaker patriarchy and human sacrifices for example.

    Therefore a farmer culture being genetically and culturally improved by getting a strong pastoralist input and the state being created by the fusion will be superiour to a typical farmer only culture.
    Also, militarily, the pastoralists have the advantage of mobility and highly trained, effective warriors in comparison to a farmer society with a lower militarisation and more one sided selective regime.

    The Pontic-Caspian steppe was special in this respect because different genetic and cultural inputs were fused on it, and it was a huge habitat with many small units which could compete with each other to develop the best agro-pastoralist culture which finally captured all others and expanded beyond. The tradition evolved from a population which was not Neolithised before, but lived along the rivers of North Pontic region.
    Two of the more remarkable regional European developments came from there, the first from the Western European and North Sea hunter gatherers, resulting in the first big agro-pastoralist shift and the spread of yDNA I2, the second from the North Pontic foragers in the Lower Don region, which evolved the agro-pastoralist warrior society to the next level.

    China too had a later Neolithisation, in comparison to the Near East, and most of the Hwangho civilisation too came from Northern hunter gatherers living along the rivers with a higher population density.

    So there is an increasing level of higher level foragers in river systems adopting productive economy rather than being replaced from:
    South Eastern Europe -> North Western Europe -> North Pontic steppe region -> Northern China.
    For Northern China the impact of the incoming Neolithics was very, very low.

    “There’s some claim that the steppe explains the Near East but this seems a bit have-cake-and-eat-it. A model that doesn’t explain much about the formation of states in the first region in which states formed and preceded…”

    The role of the steppe people in the Near East was played the agro-pastoralists and pastoralists from the mountains and deserts. It was the same dynamic, but on a smaller scale. If you look at the spread of Sumerian and its later replacement by Semitic tribals, this repeats the situation of let’s say Tripolye-Cucuteni vs. steppe people/Indo-Europeans to some degree.
    The Near East had two pushes from warlike pastoralists, one from the North, the Indo-Europeans, the other from the South with Afro-Asiatics. At the beginning of this process there were many other state structures from preceding farmer cultures probably, but more likely from local and especially Caucasian pastoralists.

    Now the question remains how Sino-Tibetans came up, but most likely they too were rather agro-pastoralists or pastoralists with steppe influences at least – that’s the most likely origin story. If not, they might be the only highest level culture which survived by just adopting innovations from the steppe, but not founded by warlike pastoralists. However, I don’t think so.

  30. @AP & Obs
    Thanks for clearing that up, I did get carried away with my opinion on the Nuremberg Laws; what I was trying to say was that they had laws which were very clear on how ancestry determined your legal status on racial hygiene grounds, not that they were obsessed with maintaining blood purity (well aware that quarter Jews could still be classified as German, not to mention the various “subhuman” Eastern European races who could be “bred” into fully German, because Nazi German racial laws were a eugenicist program unlike, say, old European nobility purity rules which tried extremely hard to keep non-noble blood out). The one-drop rule is obviously more exclusionary, but it functioned mostly as a social convention and was exceedingly difficult to put into law: if you were less than 1/8 black (or Native American), it was very easy to pass as white, despite this being significantly more than “one drop”. Mostly, no one would remember your ancestry past your great grandparents. IIRC the plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy, was 1/8 black, an “octoroon”, and he was specifically picked as a plaintiff because opponents of segregation wanted to point out the absurdity.

    The Nazis, in studying American law in designing the Nuremberg laws, had noted how difficult and muddy the Anglo-American system of racial classification was, and wanted something more clear-cut. If we are to have a legal regime in this country in which race really matters for legal purposes, it will have to be considerably more clear-cut than social conventions like “one drop” or “paper bag test” given about 60 years of integration (or more in other places), which is what I was getting at.

  31. @AP

    I trace this to the 1990s, when liberals that genuinely wanted to see improvement in the lot of black Americans grew increasingly sick and exasperated by right-wing and moderate (which includes Clinton-style Democrats) fingerpointing at “black culture”, sometimes in a racist way and sometimes not, as a key reason for why black Americans were struggling so much in the cities two to three generations after the civil rights movement. So a lot of them gradually ended up embracing as a matter of rhetorical defense the horseshoe-style alignment of fringe Afrocentrists and white supremacists that “black culture” is a fundamental part of being a black person, and thus it’s racist to criticize these practices or to promote other ones as more optimal. The truth is that a lot of “white values” in the US are just middle-class bourgeois values, not any different than what you’d find in Japan or Hong Kong, and these things are a major draw to conservative-leaning immigrants, white or not, to the US. It’s why the country has long functioned so well: save money, don’t have kids out of wedlock, don’t do drugs, dress clean-cut, stay in school and study hard, buy a house in the suburbs, don’t get involved in the criminal justice system, refrain from physical violence over disagreements, protect property rights, make life decisions carefully based on economics rather than tribal, religious, caste, or ancestral loyalties, trust and respect the police and your local government.

    The fact that the intellectual left assault on these values as “white” and thus racist to defend has now bled into rhetoric and even policies coming from mainstream Democrats will affect how Hispanics and Asians who like these values perceive “the white majority” or “European heritage” generally. It’s not like they don’t notice the simultaneous occurrence of “we won’t stop people from toppling statues of Washington and Jefferson because they owned slaves and that upsets black people” and “we won’t do anything about people putting graffiti on your business or porch steps, because it’s just property damage and a valid form of cultural expression and even protest, it’s wrong to use the police and the legal system against it. But we will prosecute you if you try to use force to stop it.”

  32. @ Mekal

    I like your latest comment. I guess I defend “white” values and that makes me culturally “white”. I’m an American conservative/Republican of Indian descent but this drives the Indian community up the wall I’m sure. I accept there is a Judeo-Christian foundational cultural matrix but that doesn’t mean I believe in Christianity and really that’s not required. The reality everyone is really a hybrid of different cultural influences that we don’t notice. Those “white” values or “Asian” values make sense to me but I don’t quite understand why overwhelming Indian-Americans vote Democrat. I often hear it’s because the Republicans push Christian tradition and to some extent I can see that but that’s much less true today than 10 years ago. I believe it’s because many of the Indian-American democrats are really immigrants or children of the immigrants from the 1970s/1980s India which was drenched in socialist ideology. The economy over there didn’t work for them and couldn’t become upper class despite being upper caste so they came here. Once they made it, I think deep down they want to become the new gatekeepers because that’s what socialism creates: a new party elite or vanguard. Not all Indians are like that of course. My parents are pretty conservative but democrats but they believe welfare should be limited but fall for the democrats lip service to diversity at times but this time they aren’t falling for the Kamala Harris VP pick. In fact my parents feel Trump is on to something about China and doing what’s right for America. They would often say that when they first came here, America had pride in it’s borders and as immigrants you have to respect that. So much as changed since then. My dad didn’t really have to come here to be honest. His life was pretty good in India. He wanted to come here as an adventure and to escape the stringent collectivist mentality. He is individualistic in that way. But these values seem to be waning or being attacked for being “white” values. Razib touched on family structure in another website but my mother and I had a conversation a few weeks ago about it. She is a strong supporter of nuclear families. I didn’t realize until I looked into their upbringing that neither of them lived in extended family homes and neither did their parents which is highly unusual. Many more Indians have which may explain why so many vote Democrat especially now since there is hostility to the concept of nuclear family structure. BLM ideas of “It takes a village to raise a child” is now mainstream among socialist and the Democratic party. This is an irony since Indians used “white” values to become successful but now seem to turn their back on it.

    This will sound bizarre but my mother told me in her Indian English way said that she likes black people and is against police brutality but with the rise of BLM she is “sorry to say that black will never be the majority in this country. America will always be white majority.” I think I understood what she was saying. She was commenting on the cultural dominance in this country which makes me wonder. If my mother, an immigrant feels this way, how many others feel this way too? The liberal media, BLM, Democrats, and the AOC brigade are in for a rude awakening.

  33. Yes but it’s a term used since the 1930s to emphasize common ground between Christians and Jews especially to combat antisemitism at the time. Now it’s an accepted term that enough understand the meaning. But I understand what you are getting at.

    Off topic: I’m watching Kamau Bell’s United Shades of America on CNN. How the hell does this man have his own show? He’s an idiot and I can’t believe he gets to influence American discourse. My head hurts.

  34. @obs: These direct to farmer cultures have tendencies of their own, which are, in my opinion, negative for the long term development and competitiveness. One aspect being the extreme importance of a rigid religious and social system, in which there is less of a dynamic and rationality.

    Typical might be Theocratic rulers, a weaker patriarchy and human sacrifices for example.

    (The Han Chinese) might be the only highest level culture which survived by just adopting innovations from the steppe, but not founded by warlike pastoralists.

    Human sacrifice seems roughly about the same level in pastoral and agricultural societies at a given level of complexity and hierarchy. You see this practice emerging in Scythians ( by classical report) and some at Sintashta complex (by archaeology), and no less if it in Indo-European origin societies; Celts, Vikings, Indo-Aryan sati.

    Rulers tend to have some divine sanction and separate themselves in most societies, for a given level of complexity. Demigod kings are pretty common. We don’t have any direct evidence for those that but consider the following for an archetypally nomadic pastoralist people: “For instance, in The Secret History of the Mongols, a radiant being descends through the roof of a lady’s yurt and fathers Bodonchar Munkhag, founder of Genghis Khan’s dynasty.”. Trumped up divine origins are probably equally common among pastoral people.

    Practices like ruling family incest however, themselves extremely rare, and class linked endogamy, might be more sustainable in large scale societies with more established institutions and more stability over time though. Then as you move through history, the literate cultures that those more stable agricultural societies invent ultimately undermine those ideas (‘Axiality’ – the literate Egyptians invent writing and notions of justice and universality in religion, which spread to the Hebrews and others, which then spread back to undermine of divine kings, accompanied by some invasion too). (As an aside the example of legitimation of sibling incest which survives latest is in Zoroastrianism, a religion often claimed to have a particularly strong proto-Indo Iranian influence).

    Weaker patriarchy I don’t know about; most comments in literature are that this relates to male share of subsistence, which can be high or low in agri societies depending on agricultural regimes; ploughs>hoes, etc. But even when low within the boundaries of the general universality of male political dominance, doesn’t seem to have too much clear effect on how fit societies are in war or anything like.

    I don’t know if ‘highest level’ is definable (it seems subjective though I expect you’ll have some complex explanation of how it’s objectively true and you know it). Though you could also point to Japan, much of SE Asia for cultures that had limited influence from pastoralists. Japan produced the warrior culture that tended to be most seen as a the most worthy adversary, in the pre-modern period, together with an agricultural system in which domestic animals were almost eliminated. The Kinh Vietnamese, of MSEA zone sheltered from pastoralist influence, probably led the most relatively successful guerilla insurgency of the 20th century.

    Re; rationality, there have tended to be a lot of these ideas that occasionally get floated that propose that pastoral peoples and the Indo-Europeans in particular are responsible for traits seen as defining and essential to “Western Culture”. ‘The Republic’, ‘individual thought’, ‘logic’, etc. This somewhat begins with these ideas of Gustaf Kossinna of course, who was more or less pushing a revisionist view that the Indo-Europeans (who he took to be synonymous with the Corded Ware Culture, which he took to be synonymous with ancient Germans) were the true origin of these important ideas. It continues to some extent through those he inspired and to some extent as a repeated independent invention of an idea for the same romantic era reasons he came up with it. While this is open for debate, I think this is mostly wishful thinking, when placed in contrast to the older view that sees those ideas as originating in a complex chain that really begins in the earliest urban societies of the Near East and contingent circumstances, technological advances etc there (‘Ex Oriente Lux’ if not ftw, closer to truth).

  35. @Matt: There is a difference between some sort of divine legitimation and a Theocratic rule by priest-kings, to be as specific as possible.
    Concerning human sacrifices, its not just about whether they appear, especiailly for criminals or in war, probably even for the burial of a “great man”, but whether they are a structural element of a society.
    Completely free from Pastoralism and direct forager to farmer societies were present in Mesoamerica. Something like a more complex state which practised that kind of human sacrifice, mutilation and pain-inflicting rituals like in America is largely unknown from Eurasia.

    And the most despotic and demi-god and priest-king societies practically all emerged from the ruins of earlier, more ancient pre-state to early state structures.

    Most pastoralist warriors knew a divine king, or “a chosen one”, but this was usually more related to this personal charisma and role as a leader of the army and people, rather than his divine dynasty as such. That’s one of the reasons why the more pastoralist-warrior derived states had more democratic and federal tendencies in comparison. In Europe this was “a problem”, but also a good thing, until Roman style Christianity emerged and even beyond.

    I think how Alexanders rule over his fellow citizen/tribal Macedonian clans and soldiers was viewed, and how his ideas of making himself a demi-god king with absolute powers were seen, is quite instructive and might even be typical for the different heritage.

    So there is a quite fundamental difference in how more pastoralist and free warrior societies were organised, looked at leadership, religion and rituals.

    “Weaker patriarchy I don’t know about; most comments in literature are that this relates to male share of subsistence, which can be high or low in agri societies depending on agricultural regimes; ploughs>hoes, etc. But even when low within the boundaries of the general universality of male political dominance, doesn’t seem to have too much clear effect on how fit societies are in war or anything like.”

    The male kin based societies have many crucial advantages, even more so the agnatic ones. Because that way all the brothers and cousins, even from different mothers and maternal lineages, can be seen as close kin which derived from one mythical ancestor. So one male relative fights for the other, one fighter in the rank protects his relative to the right and to the left.
    If they conquer another group, they can decide whether they take the young women alive, and whether and in which way they integrate them into their group and kin. So they can multiply easier and faster, by operating on the basis of male kin groups, than if the female role would have been stronger.
    Also, it usually changes a culture and its perspective on life and society, if the male dominance is fairly pronounced. Its a simple way of structuring kin groups effectively and forming networks and military units based on myths and real ancestry – which also pays off biologically, because direct relatives win and lose together.

    Simple put, male kin groups are, usually, the more effective warriors and more competitive, everything else equal, especially in a situation in which expansions are possible, in which case they are fairly likely to mix, with the conquered womenfolk of their enemies.

    “I don’t know if ‘highest level’ is definable (it seems subjective though I expect you’ll have some complex explanation of how it’s objectively true and you know it). Though you could also point to Japan, much of SE Asia for cultures that had limited influence from pastoralists. Japan produced the warrior culture that tended to be most seen as a the most worthy adversary, in the pre-modern period, together with an agricultural system in which domestic animals were almost eliminated. The Kinh Vietnamese, of MSEA zone sheltered from pastoralist influence, probably led the most relatively successful guerilla insurgency of the 20th century.”

    The highest level cultures or civilisations are those which adopted a variety of practises and innovations, including the systematic breeding of animals and plants, the use of metals, minimum Bronze, preferably Iron, the development of a writing system, educational system, developed philosophy and minimum basic sciences, including medicine and astronomy, began to discared primitive thinking and superstition on a broad scale, developed and used advanced technologies in transportation and logistics, a money based economy, etc.

    Japan is first and foremost a grandchild of China and child of Korea, so to look at Japan without looking at how the Chinese civilisation came into existence is pretty meaningless. But even then the Korean-Japanese seem to be directly related to agro-pastoralist warrior societies indeed.

    Some advances can be made in one region, by one people, then transferred to another which might lose some of the prerequisites for it, but carrying it on. Like we don’t have to know how to build computers to use them.
    In a similar way the spark could jump over, but then again, it was from a group which went through what I described. And this is true for Korean-Japanese on a double-level, because first the central source was Chinese, and second the Korean-Japanese people might have had a class of pastoralist warriors from the mainland even before.

    “The Kinh Vietnamese, of MSEA zone sheltered from pastoralist influence, probably led the most relatively successful guerilla insurgency of the 20th century.”

    The Vietnam War is a complex subject, but it was of course no independent guerilla war, but more a civil war with US intervention. Anyway, I don’t say that only pastoralist derived people can fight, even less so in a guerilla war, which follows its own rules.
    Even on the contrary, I referred to disciplined warfare among kin groups, producing a society and culture which, put on top of a farmer society, made it more competitive and state-building, as well as more humane on the long run.
    That’s what I said, not that other cultural units can’t fight or won’t be able to build a state of their own. It just goes faster and more successful with the usual recipe of a developed farmer culture being overtaken by developed pastoralist warrior groups.

    “It continues to some extent through those he inspired and to some extent as a repeated independent invention of an idea for the same romantic era reasons he came up with it. While this is open for debate, I think this is mostly wishful thinking, when placed in contrast to the older view that sees those ideas as originating in a complex chain that really begins in the earliest urban societies of the Near East and contingent circumstances, technological advances etc there (‘Ex Oriente Lux’ if not ftw, closer to truth).”

    I think Kosinna was right with many, but obviously not with all he said and he was too one sided, manoeuvred himself in a dead end. But that was not just his fault, because like many other great scientists and thinkers in these fields, he just lacked the information and data today even amateurs can look at, to check whether some ideas are true, or even just possible, or not.

    He was right about the absolutely central role of the Corded Ware culture for Indo-Europeans, he was right about the importance of their customs for the further development of civilisation.

    Still you are right too, and I will explain you why: Because it was the fusion which produced the highest level cultural development mankind saw up to this point. It is no coincidence that not the most pure blooded Corded Ware groups developed the high culture we see in Greece, but a mixed group which fused both traditions.
    Neither the Near East achieved what the Greeks did, nor did the Northern tribes. It was when these two met and both cultural traditions were united, the most productive socio-cultural environment was created.

    And the reason is again that what the Anatolian and Near Eastern cultures produced was the prerequisite which couldn’t come from the Northern pastoralists in a couple of generations. Yet the more rigid societal and religious system of the Oriental style was just a barrier which needed to be teared down to move on. Now the Northern groups which just took what was already produced, but without taking over the ballast themselves, could use the achievements even more effectively.

    The same was repeated when Medieval Christian Europe finally got rid of the most harmful Christian superstitious constraints and, exactly at that moment, got into contact with the Byzantine and Islamic culture, with the remains of its own occidental tradition preserved there. This was very helpful for the occidental world, but much more so for Europe than it ever was for the then dominant Islamic tradition. For the very same reason as the developments we see in the Near East, long before, could be used even more effectively by Indo-European derived cultures in Anatolia first, and finally Greece.

    Because quite often the path to an achievement also blocks other important developments and pathways for no good reason. Like Europe began to erode and dismantle its biological base for cultural and economic success, as well as the too strong emphasis on individuals. This was not necessary to do, in the way it was done, to be otherwise culturally and economically successful, but it was always a possible side effect of the path the occident took.
    Like with the Chinese culture, many East and South East Asian people actually copied the Chinese, for the success and leading role they had. But there too they copied the nonsense and what’s more a burden than helpful too. Since humans oftentimes just see the success of another people, and dismiss their own strengths or the failures of the role model.

    The Japanese got so successful and almost became the first real competitor for the Europeans because they learned the lesson earlier, quicker and more consequently. If they saw something doesn’t work, they abandoned it or tried to prevent it from spreading.

    The Roman success as well was not even based on them being so much better in anything than others, but by adopting, in a pragmatic way, what worked and abandon what does not. This was how the Romans became so successful and when they left that approach and got more negative than positive influences both from within and outside, rather than having an elite which rationally decided which is helpful and what not, it was done. It was much more difficult to do in the large Empire than in early Rome of course.

  36. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-california-requires-ethnic-university.html

    “California requires ethnic studies for university system” – “Students at California State University, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, will need to take an ethic studies course to graduate.

    The bill says the programs will have a special focus on “four historically defined racialized core groups: Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina and Latino Americans.

    The university had opposed the measure for over a year.

    Presented without comment.

  37. @obs, yeah, this is the problem with Eurasia (inevitably your topic if you speak of highest complexity societies), in that everything is so connected and confounded. Eurasia is home to Central Eurasian and steppe pastoralists, but also civilization and agriculture thousands of years older than everywhere else, and numerous technological developments. So that people can go, even if confronted by a non-pastoral people who speak a language which is not derived from any pastoral language, they can still somewhat wave hands and declare that it was ultimately a diffusion from pastoralists anyway via a complicated chain, and they were responsible in the end (e.g. even in SE Asia, some could claim that Buddhism is a pastoralist belief system and so on). But it is very hard to show that this is actually the true important factor at play.

    Africa has the same problem in that pastoralism is confounded with contact with the Near East, and the Americas in that pre-Columbian llama pastoralism just barely existed.

    I’m not saying these ideas of pastoralist moral and cultural pioneering is irredeemably stupid. Despite the Kossinna legacy, they’re common among fairly rational thinkers; David Anthony effectively espouses an iteration of it in WHL (“Indo-Europeans had a special pastoralist cultural code that allowed their expansion!”), I think Razib may have been sympathetic to a version thereof. (And then you get these versions of “Civilized technology + pastoralist ‘spirit’ is the magic combination”).

    I’d argue more against them on the basis that I think they’re a bit less parsimonious, my own biases*, and because someone has to for the idea to be properly tested. It usually looks like most take the side of the stereotyped heroic, free ranging, egalitarian ‘cowboy’ pastoralists (who are often seen as Western) vs the stereotyped servile ‘dirt digging peasants’ (who are seen as Other)! Jared Diamond’s and James Scott’s screeds against agricultural societies frankly have a *lot* to answer for! But hopefully we can do better than recapitulating wishful thinking in one way or another and actually come to a conclusion.

    * My biases which are more probably in favour of cultural change more internal to general rules of social scaling. Generally I’d guess pastoralism didn’t really specifically matter for divergence between Eurasia and the rest, and it’s all about agriculture and civilization being earlier. Contrast Turchin’s ideas on human sacrifice – http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/is-human-sacrifice-functional-at-the-society-level/ – where it’s kind of an aberrant phenomenon that is ultimately selected out by more sophisticated societies over time, due to scaling that gives rise to universal religions that reject it. Specific to particular rules of social scaling of cooperation and nothing really to do with subsistence per se. I think he perhaps overscrutinizes the ‘Big Men’ component in that link, but otherwise is probably not wrong.

  38. @Matt

    If the Cal State system decided to do this, I would not necessarily support the measure, but would chalk it up to the deans and administration being allowed to set the rules for graduation. But why is the California legislature setting specific types of courses as required for graduation? Usually state legislatures have no say over college/higher ed curriculum (as opposed to primary and secondary ed), even in public universities; that is a matter for the accrediting agencies, private entities regulated by a complex interplay of state and federal law. When the Republicans suggest nixing certain kinds of courses from public systems in states like North Carolina, it gets rightly criticized as a potential First Amendment violation. Are the Cal State Board of Trustees direct political appointees?

  39. @Matt: If you look at CJK, the influence of the pastoralist warrior cultures is absolutely evident, no doubt about that. Look at the development of Old Chinese, or how Korean and Japanese came into existence. When we have these ethnicities and cultures, as proven historical entities and even before, they were already transformed by pastoralist warriors.
    And of course, their influence spread down to South East Asia, both directly (like the Yi people), as well as indirectly with Chinese, but also Mongol and Japanese influences.
    How many language groups did spread with a higher culture before being transformed by pastoralists and survived to this day? Especially in the more competitive regions like Eurasia probably none at all.

    Concerning the changes in the religious and ideological framework, it is really remarkable that, from my point of view, the most typical features of the pre-Pastoralist cultures in relation to the later Pastoralist transformed are, let’s say “darker spirited” with a more rigid religious system, many taboos, very conservative social structures, a politial ruling class more oriented towards priests and priest-kings instead of warriors, philosophers and kings, no broad middle class of free men, a high investment in rituals and sacrifices, including very cruel and bloody human sacrifices. The law and exercise of power too was rather brutal and the political top more inclined to become despotic.

    “Contrast Turchin’s ideas on human sacrifice – http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/is-human-sacrifice-functional-at-the-society-level/ – where it’s kind of an aberrant phenomenon that is ultimately selected out by more sophisticated societies over time, due to scaling that gives rise to universal religions that reject it.”

    I say its not just related to upscaling and universal religion, but the way you view the world and how it functions. The more primitive farmer cultures are more directly dependent from natural forces, being stuck to a land from which they have to survive the next seasons, even if they are ready and able to move on later.
    This dependency from natural forces and a “small world” inevitably takes a toll. The cults of fertility and mother goddesses, which are not at all that “open and friendly” as Cultural Marxists matriarchical fantasies imagine it, even though that was no matriarchat of course, demand sacrifices.

    You see this tendency even in the archaeological records from Europe, with a higher tendency in the earlier, pre-steppe farmer cultures towards rituals and sacrifices, even human sacrifices, than the later European cultures as a whole. The Indo-European myths too reflect that conflict and tendency, with even the earliest showing a lower importance of superstition, of priestly rule, sacrifices and limitations of thought than in many other cultures around the world.

    And if you think about it, the more Liberal laws, the higher importance of clans and individuals in relation to a cult and central state, reflect this too. Just look at the Hittite laws, even though they are probably quite deviant already by all the influences they received, yet in comparison to many other law and state systems of the region this tendency is evident.

    On a gradient from the origins of higher culture in Mesopotamia to the steps done in Greece, the Hittites take more a position in the middle and the inputs which came from Lydia being of high importance, especially coinage. Not that I see all these things just in a positive way, they had tremendous negative effects on society as well, but they were nevertheless a prerequisite for the next steps of cultural evolution.

    And then again, I think that the less restrictive, less “bound” spirit of the pastoralists from the open steppe was indeed very important in how it changed the cultural world. The sky god of light and reason plays its role.

    Of course, the problem always is that we can’t say for sure what the early farmer cultures would have done without that input. Would they have developed differently, but ultimately to the same niveau? Would they have needed more time, or even faster? Would they have reached the same status after all and like you say, the pastoralist input was irrelevant?
    But if so, why did not single farmer culture on a higher level survive? They all had too big weaknesses and the fresh blood and cultural inputs from the pastoralists always helped to overcome the stagnation on the long run. Unless the conquerors were too harsh and culturally lower, that they destroyed much more than they created, even on the middle and long run.

    One could also make a distinction between pure pastoralists and mobile agro-pastoralists, with the latter being the better state and culture creators. This was a transitional period and after which, there were more “pure” farmer and pastoralist cultures. From then on, from a specific level on, the pastoralist input was no longer that helpful or needed, because the important transformations were already done and more being destroyed by conquest than founded.

  40. Obs: Just look at the Hittite laws, even though they are probably quite deviant already by all the influences they received, yet in comparison to many other law and state systems of the region this tendency is evident.

    Yeah, I remember this being your preferred comparison when we discussed this topic before; Hittites vs Assyrians. Though both are of putatively pastoralist ultimate origin; Hitties IE, while Assyrians from East Semitic, and both influenced by societies that came “before” and who were absorbed and merged with (Hatti and various Mesopotamian groups).

    Interestingly enough, when it comes to those that came before the Assyrians, it’s noted about the code of Hammurabi, of highland pastoralist Amorite origins, “Unlike earlier Sumerian law codes, such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, which had focused on compensating the victim of the crime, the Law of Hammurabi was one of the first law codes to place greater emphasis on the physical punishment of the perpetrator … Although its penalties are extremely harsh by modern standards, they were intended to limit what a wronged person was permitted to do in retribution.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammurabi)

    Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu“For the oldest extant law-code known to history, it is considered remarkably advanced because it institutes fines of monetary compensation for bodily damage as opposed to the later lex talionis (‘eye for an eye’) principle of Babylonian law.”

    Codes seem, then, to possibly get progressively harsher with more pastoralist influence. So while we could talk about IE perhaps being an influence on a less harsh code of law, within the history of these ancient societies, codes that avoided cruel punishments don’t seem to correlate much to the level of pastoralist influence or that more “mixed” pastoral-agricultural cultural origins tends to restrain cruel punishments.

    We can also compare the Egyptians as a purer / more archetypically farmer society.

    One attempt to test “Axial” traits associated with more a egalitarian or morally bound sense of shared humanity in law and society is Mullins 2018 – https://tinyurl.com/y5fslv93

    That tends to suggest that Egypt is in their construction the leader on most “Axial” traits by some margin* (though not some related specifically to the Pharaohs!). More so than they judged the Hittites. Egypt is not known or marked for brutal / cruel punishments or human sacrifice either I don’t believe (other than some practice related to the burial of a pharaoh).

    There are probably some other comparisons like the Indus Valley Culture. Like with “Old Europe” I don’t believe in some of the “Shangri-La” kind of utopian, egalitarian descriptions of such people, but they aren’t marked by extreme hierarchy, stratification, human sacrifice, etc.

    Anyway, again I’m not saying this a verbotten hypothesis, but there are various ways it can be tested (such as Seshat’s using).

    Actually testing things using economic information inferred from archaeological data, to tell us about class and income distribution for instance, that which is formally measured from law codes when we’re lucky enough to have it available etc, all this sort of direct, open testing of hypothesis is necessary. That is needed to check the sort of romanticized notions that are not well founded on evidence, which can emerge.

    *These traits being given in their Table 2: 1 Moralistic punishment, 2 Moralizing norms, 3 Promotion of prosociality, 4 Moralizing omniscient supernatural beings, 5 Rulers not gods, 6 Equating elites and commoners, 7 Equating rulers and commoners, 8 Formal legal code, 9 General applicability of Law, 10 Constraint on executive, 11 Full-time bureaucrats, 12 Impeachment.

  41. @Matt: “Interestingly enough, when it comes to those that came before the Assyrians, it’s noted about the code of Hammurabi, of highland pastoralist Amorite origins, “Unlike earlier Sumerian law codes, such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, which had focused on compensating the victim of the crime, the Law of Hammurabi was one of the first law codes to place greater emphasis on the physical punishment of the perpetrator … Although its penalties are extremely harsh by modern standards, they were intended to limit what a wronged person was permitted to do in retribution.”

    This kind of “mirror punishment”/lex talionis is not that harsh or cruel, but proportionate. And it outlawed, to some degree, personal revenge, over-retribution and vendettas. I also don’t think that by just paying for a cruelty you come to a more just or humane law at all, even though that can be discussed. Yet you are right, the Hittite law was in that respect more similar to later laws of Northern people, even the various Germanic leges, in which payment for inflicted physical damage was also widespread.

    “That tends to suggest that Egypt is in their construction the leader on most “Axial” traits by some margin* (though not some related specifically to the Pharaohs!). More so than they judged the Hittites. Egypt is not known or marked for brutal / cruel punishments or human sacrifice either I don’t believe (other than some practice related to the burial of a pharaoh).”

    Egyptians are a special case I thought about too before writing my last comment. Yet for the Egyptians we have two issues, first, how the Egyptian culture came into existence and even how Afro-Asiatics spread to the region is still debatable, we might even see another case of stratification by different waves of immigrants, with different cultural regimes until Egypt reaches its historical, consolidated shape.

    Secondly, many of the traits I mentioned before being present in Egypt, like the enormous power of the god-king, the priest-class, the superstition and rigid religious system and control. Egypt was a state, for much of its existence, close to a Theocracy and even econmically, financially, it was quite conservative and structured.

    Nevertheless, they showed potential and advanced cultural developments, without, however, making it to the next level at the military, economic or scientific and geneally cultural sphere and at some point just got conquered in a row.

    “but they aren’t marked by extreme hierarchy, stratification, human sacrifice, etc.”

    It seems various Neolithic societies in Europe were much more inclined to practise head hunting and human sacrifices on a regular basis than even the steppe people at the same time. But that’s more of a general impression I got from the archaeological record, I can’t come up with a statistical analysis to prove. The same is true for the historical accounts and myths, more a general impression I have from reading various articles and sources, rather than something I can show statistically.
    The respective pantheons, religious and moral codes and laws of the repsective societies, when they entered the historical record, show a clear tendency, but yes, there are more ambiguous cases and exceptions, with the latter being hard to place and can be interpreted differently, like Egypt.

    Because Egypt was certainly a more advanced state, but this state was quite overwhelming in comparison to, let’s say the Hittites.

    Its also quite remarkable that some of the most important technological advancements were cultivated by the mixed Anatolian cultures, namely iron metallurgy by the Hittites and coinage by the Lydians, with the military, political, social and cultural advancements next coming from Greece. So the Aegean-Anatolian world most certainly was kind of an experimental ground exactly because of its fusion of Northern and Near Eastern trends. From the paper you linked to:

    “Turkey similarly shows evidence for ideological practices consistent with ideas of axiality, notably strong moralizing norms and moralistic supernatural beings as well as hints of an early secularization of ruler-ship; it has been suggested,for instance, that Hittite rulers as early as the mid-second millennium were not seen as divine figures, though they still based their legitimacy largely on ideological grounds (Hoffner 2006).”

    and

    “Turkey, the region known as Anatolia in antiquity, similarly offers evidence for the appearance of moralizing norms (proxy 2) tied to divine sanction and enforcement perhaps asearly as the mid-second millennium BCE in the early Hittite Kingdom (Collins 2007). It has also been suggested that early Hittite rulers were not seen as god-kings (proxy 5) (compared to, for instance, Egyptian Pharaohs), though they were legitimated by and closely tied to concepts of the supernatural (Hoffner 2006). Certainly, some elements of Bronze Age Anatolian life match the typical characterization of pre-axial, archaic societies.”

    One of the strengths and problems of the Egyptian state was its reliance on the priests and temples, which created large networks going even beyond Egypt itself and into the Levante, even Mesopotamia. This rigid religious, ideological and even financial control by one class at the same time made the state first more effective, but at the same time more vulnerable, because dependent, and less dynamic. So Egypt, while being quite advanced for its time, originally, is also a good example of why it was not them which moved on as much as others did.

    That’s also a major disappointment of the axial article you linked, because it mentions priests only on a side note, as if they wouldn’t have been that important for these questions, which is definitely not true.

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