I’m old enough to remember an America that wasn’t too far from the 1960s. One of my childhood best friends had a mother who was a “hippy” in a classic sense, dressing like a “flower-child” deep into the 1980s. Basically, her sartorial sense was frozen in the second half of the 1960s, when she was at university. She was no longer with my friend’s father, who suffered from post-traumatic stress due to his experiences in Vietnam.* The late 1960s and early 1970s really had a huge impact on my friend’s life.

The people who went through the 1960s as young adults, the Baby Boomers, experienced something that transformed our culture. 1964 was closer to 1944 in many ways than it was to 1968. In Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson the author argues that one of the reasons that the sociopathic cult leader was able to flourish in Southern California during this period is that people had no expectations of a future anything like the past. People expected literally anything to happen. No matter how crazy.

Since the late 1960s, we really haven’t seen anything similar in terms of cultural tumult. The period between 2015 and 2020, for example, isn’t that shattering. On the other hand, I wonder if in some ways 2015 will be seen as a watershed. That was certainly the year many of us started to be worried and confused about what was going on in this country.

But the reason I’m posting this is to ask older readers who remember the 1960s: does this feel similar in any way? Clearly there is a contrast, in that the late 1960s was filled with hope, and the early 2020s not so much.

* Strange note, many years later when I lived in Berkeley, California, at the other end of the country, I ran into my childhood friend’s half-brother, who was a computer science graduate student at Cal. He had a very distinctive last name, when he told me where he had grown up I realized who he was.

Being raised as an American in the last quarter of the 20th-century gives one an interesting perspective. The period between 1975 and 1995 was characterized by worries about decline. From the tail end of the post-1965 crime wave to the psychological trauma of the oil shocks, the rise of Japan, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, it wasn’t an era without angst clearly. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, we had turned a corner, even if we were not aware of it. The crime wave was abating, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Japan was entering its “Lost Decade.”

By the year 2000, the United States of America was the “hyperpower”. The period between 1995 and 2015 was defined by our unipolar moment. In the late 1990s, it looked as if wage growth had finally come back to the broad middle and lower classes, and the American model, and more broadly the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”, was here to stay.

Obviously things have changed. Though 9/11 is arguably one of the most important cultural events in the early 21st-century for Americans, with hindsight I think this exogenous shock really only had an impact on the margins in relation to the long term trends, which are driven by endogenous forces. The 2008 financial crisis didn’t come out of a vacuum but reflected serious and deep structural problems in the way capitalism was organized. And, more or less, the vast majority of economists didn’t predict it. It left many of us highly skeptical of “expertise”, as well as the ability of the market to self-correct and not be captured by corrupt parties gorging on rents.

The 2010s have been a mixed affair. Internally there has been recovery from economic distress, and the news for the middle and lower classes is not all bad (full employment is good for those with few skills!). That being said, high levels of inequality and the manifest reality that globalization benefits the very top of the income and wealth distribution seems hard to deny. The second great modern era of globalization is now facing critiques from both the Left and the Right.

Externally, the hyperpower/unipolar moment is fading, if not totally faded. Though on a per unit basis China is less productive and powerful than the USA, in the year 2000 it was 4% of the world’s GDP, and in 2017 it was 15%. In the year 2000, the USA was 31% of the world’s GDP, and in 2017 it is 25%. The 1990s expectation, shared by many Americans, that China would become more liberal and democratic as it became wealthier has not been validated by the facts on the ground.

Internally there are high levels of polarization and low levels of trust in institutions and leaders in the USA. Various positional races (e.g., university educations for everyone!) combined with a relatively stagnant pie (e.g., more legal degrees than lawyers) leave even the aspiring upper-middle class suspicious of their prospects. The overhang of personal and public debt and the possibility of government debt crises and problems funding entitlements loom over the horizon for the working-age population.

We are not doing badly as a nation, exactly. But rising morbidity in broad swaths of the population reflects uncertainty at the robustness of the prosperity we do have (as well as economic marginalization of those with fewer skills).

Those of us who came to maturity in the late 20th-century was proudly told about the reality that we were the Eternal Republic. Our Constitution was the oldest still in use. Our republic may not have been perfect, but it was as good as it gets. The idea that the Eternal Republic might have an ending to its story seemed absurd barring nuclear conflict, at least in our time, and across the generations alive at the end of the 20th-century.

More broadly, as Steven Pinker has highlighted, there has been broad growth in prosperity and wealth across the world. The American story is not the only story. But if someone told you that other citizens were doing well when you struggled, would that make you happier? Americans are not struggling, but we get a sense it is no longer “morning in America.” Rather, it is closer to dusk.

Foundational to the idea of the Eternal Republic is that our society, our culture, our nation-state, is so beholden to the values of liberty and democratic governance that it could be no other way. First, let us admit that this perfect republic has had its drawbacks and black-marks, most especially in the domain of racial slavery and racial segregation. With that being said, a broad commitment to the idea of liberty, autonomy, and the value of each citizen, has allowed for the circle of fellow-feeling to expand.

But the question is this: are the commitments to liberty and democratic governance due to individual principle, or institutional scaffold and contingency? If the citizens themselves do not have a deep commitment to the principles, the abstractions which undergird governance, then if the institutions begin to lack legitimacy, and the contingencies of history shift just a bit, one can foresee a scenario where liberal democratic citizens sing a very different tune very soon.

My view of human nature and social cognition is that people will believe and do what their ingroup leaders demand of them. For various reasons, American elites have generally taken an extremely liberal attitude toward freedom of expression. This, despite public surveys which suggest broad popular skepticism of offensive speech. If the consensus among American elites for freedom of speech erodes at all, I believe that the extreme policy position would quickly retreat in the face of populist disquiet and factional elite manipulation of government organs to silence their rivals.

The confidence in the Eternal Republic was rooted in the reality of American economic ascendency in the 20th-century. The reality that wage gains and prosperity were both broad-based. The expansion of rights and dignity to racial minorities was consonant with the broader elements of the foundational principles. America had always been the most powerful. America had always been the richest. And of course, America would always be the freest and the most democratic.

Over the last five years, I have come to be more and more skeptical of the robustness of the Eternal Republic. My rationale is straightforward. The cultural preconditions of the Eternal Republic were rooted in deep foundations. Shocks to the vigor of the Eternal Republic failed to topple it because of the accumulated capital of generations. But capital can eventually deplete with both shocks and gradual erosion. Once the system is no longer robust, novel contingencies can transform cultural expectations rather quickly. Cultural change is nonlinear because most people conform, and quickly bend before the cold new winds. Americans have a conceit that we love liberty. And I think we’re sincere in this. But the philo-Semitic Germans of the 1920s became something quite different in the 1930s, and atheistic Leftist Soviet men and women of the 1970s and 1980s have shape-shifted at least twice since the 1990s.

Is America and are Americans special because of something deep with us, or were we lucky? To be frank I fear the latter may hit close to the mark. If that is so, then eventually luck runs out…

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic argues that The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts. This is in response to some controversy because several eminent historians on the Left (there are hardly any historians on the Right in any case) published a pretty strong critique of the 1619 Project. If you don’t know the names, you should (at least if you ever have thoughts about American history).*

But even before I saw Serwer’s piece I assumed he would write something in The Atlantic that basically said what he said. This is a game of tribes, and there is no way Adam Serwer of The Atlantic was going to write anything that was negative about Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times Magazine. In the game of middle-school lunch-table cliques, the fashionable glossy intellectual magazine set is always going to close-ranks against academic nerds. It’s a matter of professional honor and interest.

I think a shorter version of Serwer’s argument is that the 1619 Project isn’t a work of academic history, but a form of writing that exists to engage and reorient the questions, perspectives, and direction, of the broader public discussion. On its own, this is not an unreasonable position. But I doubt any fair-minded individual would agree that Serwer would accept this argument for positions and viewpoints he disagreed with on the merits. That is, “let’s look past the facts in this case, and focus on the bigger picture….”

If tasked to do such thing I could write a Serwer-like piece about David Barton’s stupid books, such as Did America Have a Christian Founding? Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth. But most people writing for The Atlantic or The New York Times Magazine would laugh because punctilious attention to facts would matter. After all, facts and reality are important when the arguments are those you disagree with!

Sean Wilentz, one of the historians criticizing the 1619 Project, has been written recently about changing his mind about issues relating to the early American republic (slavery and the Founding). Whether you agree with Wilentz or not, this sort of attitude betrays a positivistic pretention. That the evidence is ultimately the measure of all things in his priority of things.

This traditional attitude is on the wane. The reality is more and more facts exist only in the service of polemic. Assertions of academic pedigree or standing exist only to buttress arguments from the authority for one’s own side, never to forward an understanding of the underlying issues at all. This is clear because it is so common today for polemicists to assert a lie, and call that lie good because the lie is in the service of good is good.

If you begin with the assumption of bad faith, you are probably on solid ground.

* Though I am not on Sean Wilentz’s “side” in The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, everyone should read the book!

A follow-up from an earlier post. Looking at a transect of Roman DNA I made the assertion that modern Roman Italian samples reflect the rural hinterlands of Lazio, which repopulated the city after its massive population loss of the 7th-centuries. This separate post is probably warranted because taking into account comments, I have reread and rethought, and I think I am going to update a few views.

But first, something I won’t update: it seems clear that Imperial Romans were genetically distinct and quite cosmopolitan in comparison to their Republican predecessors, but neither did they leave a clear imprint down to the future. The histories are quite clear that Imperial Rome was a reflection of the whole Roman Empire, with eminent intellectuals and aristocrats congregating from all corners of the world-state. That being said, the results from the paper confirmed the weight of the eastern provinces in their influence and demographic heft.

And yet for all that heft, the scions of the eastern provinces who settled down in and around the Eternal City left few descendants judging from modern Italian DNA. Why? Because cities were massive demographic sinks in the best of times, with endemic disease, combined with periodic shocks like plagues and invasions.

With the decline of the Pax Romana, and the shattering of the Mediterranean system with the rise of Islam, the demographics of the Roman people no longer reflected the world of antiquity. Rather, Romans became Italians once more, more or less. But, there were subtle differences from the Republican Romans. Modern Romans seem to be placed as you would expect between North and South Italians. The Italian peninsula as a whole seems to have received more “Pan-European” genetic influence since the Iron Age. The cumulative impact of Goths, Lombards, as well as the slave trade and the remnant of Imperial cosmopolitanism, has likely made a difference.

Unless you have been sleeping under a rock you are aware that there is a controversy around China and the NBA due to different standards of political speech in the USA and China. Obviously the major issue that looms over the debate is the reality that at some point in the 2020s China will become the world’s largest economy, and one of the major consumer engines of the world. From a corporate perspective, this hangs over all the discussion and consideration. The Chinese market is like El Dorado.

But I would like to draw attention to something Joe Tsai, owner of the Brooklyn Nets and co-founder of Alibaba, said on Facebook:

The one thing that is terribly misunderstood, and often ignored, by the western press and those critical of China is that 1.4 billion Chinese citizens stand united when it comes to the territorial integrity of China and the country’s sovereignty over her homeland. This issue is non-negotiable.

A bit of historical perspective is important. In the mid-19thcentury, China fought two Opium Wars with the British, aided by the French, who forced through illegal trade of opium to China. A very weak Qing Dynasty government lost the wars and the result was the ceding of Hong Kong to the British as a colony.

The substance of the dispute here on their face-value isn’t too important. Rather, from a commercial perspective the opinions of Chinese matter because there are 1.4 billion of them. Additionally, from a commercial perspective, the “objective truth” doesn’t matter. The “customer” is always right. Whether the Chinese have legitimate grounds for their beliefs is less important than what their beliefs are, because there are so many of them. The substance of beliefs may dictate consumption. Whether those beliefs are true or not is secondary (ask the supplements industry in the USA).

But this is not a dynamic limited to this context. Do you remember the Islamic mosque and cultural center that was slated to be built near the World Trade Center? The project was abandoned after various groups, including some 9/11 victim families, felt that it was offensive. Though I didn’t believe that the center had anything to do with 9/11 as such, I do recall being vaguely sympathetic to their feelings. In hindsight, this was clearly the wrong call by me in light of broader trends in our culture.

Since that time the reign of feelings over facts has proceeded apace. In American society, the facts at hand matter less and less, than who the people are who have their own reaction, perception, and subjective experience, of the facts. The fact that 9/11 families were uncomfortable determined the ultimate course of construction. The fact that college students are uncomfortable that someone is going to speak who wrote something that offends them 20 years ago is key factor that determines if the invitation will be rescinded. The overall objective fact of something is incidental in comparison to the visceral reaction.

One of the things that I have witnessed which illustrates this trend is the way Richard Dawkins is viewed by young “enlightened” people. Dawkins has always been a bit of a brusque and direct individual in regards to what he believes are the facts irrespective of the target. In 2006 he was commissioned by Britain’s Channel 4 to take lead on a documentary titled The Root of all Evil. When The God Delusion was published Dawkins’ intellectual celebrity rose to new heights.

Not so in 2019. The reason? Richard Dawkins is 78. In fundamental ways, he has not changed. He is an old man. And, he has a naive and to my mind an overly simplistic view of the importance of truth above all things. But those are his sincere beliefs. As such, he expresses his views without much equivocation and in a simple and open manner which is now often highly offensive to many people who a decade ago admired him. The primary reason is that Richard Dawkins is an upper-middle-class white male, and the targets of his criticism, for example, a hijabi in Bradford, England, are not. How sympathetic the targets are matters a great deal. The logic or empirical basis less so.

In the late 2000s I recall a friend of mine at the time, an academic philosopher, explaining to me that in the context of the offense, the intent of the offender is irrelevant when compared to the reaction of the offended. This seemed like a bizarre view to me at the time, but in this decade this view has become more and more mainstream.

When these ideas were first being articulated several decades ago there was still a strong hope and expectation that economic liberalization in China would lead to political liberalization. I shared that hope. It seems that in many ways we were wrong. Rather than the internet as a means for free expression, it has become an essential tool of commerce and social control and manipulation. My vague impression is that most  Chinese are either politically apathetic or somewhat nationalist and anticipating warmly the geopolitical power of their nation-state on the world stage.

In contrast, in the United States I feel we are in a parochial cultural moment. On the Right, the slogan “Make America Great Again” is reflective of nostalgia for the 20th-century. On the Left, particular concerns with the failings of the American project loom larger than the larger dynamics in human history (as opposed to the mass decline of poverty in places like China over the last generation). Around the year 2000 many Americans had a view of the 21st-century where prosperity would transform the rest of the world into cultural clones of America. This would have resulted in universal particularisms and sensitivities. That is, the ascendency of post-modern thinking, and the rise of subjectivism would have been constrained by a common cultural framework directed and shaped by American and European elites. What is “problematic” here would be “problematic” there.

That has not happened. Rather, Alistar McGrath’s general prediction in The Twilight of Atheism has come to be. I say general because atheism has not collapsed in a specific sense (on the contrary, as irreligion has increased greatly in the United States). But particular cultural understandings of what is right and proper have come to the foreground with more muscular robustness as the Enlightenment ideal of a universal shared reality fades.

One of the more nihilistic aspects of the intellectual revolution triggered by the influence of Michel Foucault is to reduce perception and comprehension as simply outcomes of power relations. I would argue that what we see today in the corporate response to the rise of Chinese economic power is the reshaping of truth and sensitivities toward broadly Chinese outlines due to Chinese power. What one sees here is the convergence between capitalist kowtowing toward power, and the reality that more and more people acknowledge and accept that power determines our understanding of reality.

The world is not out there, the world is created by us.

Growing up with a lot of Mormons I was exposed to their culture a fair amount. Though Mormonism is really distinct as a culture, with folkways and mores (jello!), there are a lot of weird beliefs there too.

One of the arguments presented as supporting the validity of the religion is that the Book of Mormon is very extensive. How could we imagine that Joseph Smith, a relatively uneducated young man, could have written it by himself? It is such a long and detailed narrative. The scripture is then evidence of divine provenance and inspiration.

At the time I didn’t have much to say to that argument, though I was skeptical. Now I have something more to say to that. In the context of the time and place, the Second Great Awakening in greater New England, it is not surprising that some enterprising you man created a scripture that many would find convincing (at least convincing enough).* The Mormons were the most successful of the new religious movements to come out of the northern United States during this period, but it was an extremely culturally creative time and place. If a new scripture was going to be created in the USA, this is when conditions were most ripe.

In antiquity, some Christians asserted that the emergence of a unified Roman Empire was ordained by their God to serve as a vehicle for the rise of Christianity. Indeed, I have argued that something like Christianity was probably inevitable with the rise of Rome. There were broader historical-cultural forces at work. As I am not a believer in Christianity (or any religion), I don’t think that the unifying religion necessarily had to have all the particular features of Christianity, but Christianity clearly sufficed. The cultural victory of Christianity in the Roman Empire was unlikely in a specific sense, but someone was going to probably have a cultural victory.

Which brings me to Islam. Like Mormons, many Muslims assert the nature of the Koran is proof of Muhammad’s revelation. After all, he was an illiterate merchant. How could he have produced such work? Setting aside revisionism about the nature of the Koran (and Muhammad), there is a broader issue about the miraculous conquest of much of the Roman Empire, and all of the Persian Empire, in the 7th-century by the Arabs.

The magnitude and scale were clearly incredible.

But was it truly that great of a surprise? Historically peoples from the fringes and margins have been prominent in Near Eastern history in engaging in takeovers of older civilizations.  Amorites, Kassites, Aramaeans, Medes, Persians, Parthians. Right before the rise of the Arabs, the Turks created a short-lived trans-Eurasians Empire, and after the decline of early Islam, the Mongols created another (and before the Mongols the Turks had become dominant within Islam after their adoption of the religion).

Scholars such as Peter Turchin, Christopher Beckwith, and Victor Lieberman have observed the relationship between the civilizational “marches” and “cores” over the past few thousand years (also see Ibn Khaldun). Over time the cores become inert, somnolescent, and they are conquered and revived by eruptions from the march. The Zhou, the first great Chinese dynasty which served as the cultural foundation for imperial China were semi-barbarized. The revival of the Chinese Empire under the Sui-Tang was spearheaded by semi-barbarized marchland elites as well. The Seleucid hegemony of the old Persian lands was wrested from their control by the Parthian Arsacids, who were of Central Asian origin (in contrast, the Sassanians came out of the old Persian heartland in the southwest). The Maurya focus of power was in Maghda, on the edge of Aryavarta.

The Arab conquest was not surprising in the grand scope then. It was not inevitable, but neither was it entirely unlikely. In later centuries the Arab hegemony gave way to a Persian revival (e.g., the Buyids and Samanids), which gave way to Turkic hegemony. The rare aspect of the Arabs is the creation of a new civilizational mythology and identity. That is, Islam.

Of the peoples listed above, the only analog I can see here is the Zhou, who seem to have fused their own particularities (e.g., emphasizing the worship of an impersonal Heaven as opposed to a more personal Lord on High) with the broader matrix of late Shang proto-Chinese culture, and therefore created the identity we later think of as quintessentially Chinese. Though the roots of Han Chinese civilization do go back to the Erlitou, 1,000 years before he Zhou, the broad outlines are Zhou.

xTo evaluate these unique, surprising, and novel events in history, one always has to keep in mind the broad scope. When seen across the patterns of history the individual perturbations are clearly part of the moving river of events, inexorable and directional.

* I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the witnesses were involved in the creation of the Book of Mormon.

One of the temptations of rejecting Eurocentrism in modern scholarship is to confuse the semantic terms for reality. Europeans have reshaped the semantic landscape over the past few centuries, but that does not mean that what the terms were pointing to did not exist in some form before.

Last year Aeon published What is the Muslim world? Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda. This led me to read The Idea of the Muslim World. This book did not convince me that colonialists had invented the Muslim world.

Rather, the rise of Europe and the West reconfigured preexistent identities and solidarities.

Today, I noticed Aeon published Race on the mind: When Europeans colonised North Africa, they imposed their preoccupation with race onto its diverse peoples and deep past. The author of this piece also wrote Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib. The book actually seems somewhat nuanced. That being said, the Aeon piece is focused on Europeans.

As someone who has read a fair amount recently on the Moorish period of Spain, one thing that is obvious and notable is that ethnolinguistic difference between various Muslim groups. Though 19th-century Europeans imposed a particularly harsh and brutal taxonomy on other peoples, the reality is that to engage in taxonomy is human. The Berbers and Arabs in Al-Andalus were divided due to the fact that Berbers were overrepresent military, while the Arabs had the cultural prestige.

There is an unfortunate trend today to see all past history as a reflection of the present. When you see this, understand that there’s shoddiness…

It is well known that in the 5th and 6th centuries of the Common Era the social complexity and economic productivity of the Roman cultural zone underwent a regression. There were two areas in particular where massive transformation occurred. The interior Balkans and Britain were ethnically and religiously changed in totality from their Roman-era state.

Romanian and Vlach dialects today are a testament to the strength of Latin in the interior Balkans, while Albanian attests to indigenous linguistic diversity. But the dominant languages today are Slavic, due to the putative mass migration of tribes under the leadership of the Avars in the 6th and 7th century. These regions also had to be re-Christianized. Something similar happened in Britain, where mass migrations of Germans transformed the language and religion of the whole region.

But we know that genetically the Balkan Slavs and English are actually genetically more like the earlier populations than descendants of migrants. This is not to say that the exogenous genetic material is trivial. It is significant. There was a mass migration of Slavs and Germans. It was just that these did not contribute to the preponderance of the genes.* And yet the language shifted, and the Christian religion faded.

How did this happen?

Late Roman society was defined by specialized economic functions on the production frontier. This was the ancient world’s equivalent of the “just-in-time” economy. In contrast, the Slavic tribes beyond the frontier were arguably even less influenced by Rome than the Germans. These were deeply rustic people. And that was their cultural advantage.

Using a biological analogy, the Late Roman society was like an asexual lineage maximizing short-term gains at the expense of long-term resilience. The “shock” of barbarian incursions in the 5th to 6th centuries totally unraveled the Roman system.

In contrast, small-scaling farming societies organized around clans and tribes, which is how the Slavs were organized, could maintain themselves. Often the Slavs were ruled by non-Slavic groups with origins in the steppes (Avars, Bulgars, etc.), but in the end, the Slavic identity swallowed up their rulers, more or less.

This new setup was successful enough to attract converts from local populations. There is circumstantial evidence that the Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex was actually originally British (look at the early names in the genealogy). They may have been post-Roman British aristocrats who “barbarized.” In Merovingian Francia, Gallo-Roman elites were taking to trousers and aping German Frankish style, but, on the whole the cultural balance was tilted toward the “Romans” rather than the “Germans.” Not so in Britain, it seems.

With all this outlined, it not so surprising that a complex urban society could be culturally assimilated in some ways by a simpler agro-pastoralist lifestyle. The further back you go into the past, the more likely it happened, because the less “robust” the cultural technologies of the urban society were.

* The gene flow into the Balkans was greater proportionally than into Britain. In some cases, more than 50% of the ancestry might be attributable to migrants in the northern and western regions.