This was an excellent and horrifying review. It occurs to me that a recurring, though not universal, feature of these maladaptive societies is that they seem to have rules that are driven by maximal indulgence of the worst male impulses. The Marind-anim traditions are at the extreme end of this.
Before reading this I'd always thought of gender relations along an egalitarian vs. traditional framework, but I realize there's a second axis: friendly vs. adversarial. I hadn't thought about this axis because except for some internet weirdos, pretty much everyone in North America in 2024 wants men and women to love each other. Perhaps in an egalitarian structure, perhaps in one with required roles, but there's no notion that I am trying to hurt my wife and she is trying to poison me. This is nice, let's keep it this way people.
He actually has a whole chapter about this, I left out most of it, but adversarial and especially “men lounge around while women work like hell” dynamics abound.
Good point. I think most of us would be horrified if we learned a female friend wanted to poison her husband or a male friend only let his wife eat scraps. Despite a ton of competitiveness and anti-man or anti-woman rhetoric, our society still has the basic assumption that a husband and wife are on the same team and probably like each other, and that’s not universal
Interesting you mention that. I got a heavy dose of feminism growing up, and heard endlessly about how men were trying to force women to do things they didn't want to do (mostly sex and housework), and how any unwanted advance was harassment...so the best way to be a good person was to never talk to a woman in any kind of sexual way.
After that I read lots of evo psych books talking about the way men and women pursue reproductive strategies to maximize their wealth and offspring at each other's expense. It was always obvious to me the sexes were natural adversaries brought together by the necessity to mix gametes!
Now you have all these shows and articles celebrating divorce as liberating for women, bragging about how men are so awful women are finding new self-expression in dating each other, and the rom com is long dead because it's heteronormative or something. A large political gender gap has opened up among the young.
I mean, from what I can tell even a lot of the nasty stuff has some kind of positive ideal. The feminist woman wants a man who does laundry without being asked and holds the crying baby at 1am (not unreasonable things, especially if she works), only the really unhinged ones think men are irredeemably awful. Even the women sharing memes about how men are irredeemably awful don't actually treat the men in their lives as enemies. As for the divorce celebration, that just feels like sad cope to me. There is a general trend toward working class men abandoning their children. Whatever Emily Ratajkowski is up to, the far more normal thing is a guy not marrying or abandoning the mother of his children while grandma fills in to help with the kids.
Where I totally agree with you is that the political gender gap among the young bodes ill, and the neo-Dworkinists and Tatists suck and do seem to be getting more numerous. Reading about these cultures where women can't bear enough children because they are malnourished or injured reminds me in a strange way of this article about South Korea (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/south-korea-fertility-rate-misogyny-feminism/673435/), where's there's such a mismatch in male and female attitudes that women don't want to marry or have kids. The idea that gender war can crash a society, both hunter gatherer and technological hub, is terrifying.
Re. the footnote about sati - my understanding is that the women who got burnt alive were generally given a truly staggering amount of opium first, so they couldn't feel a thing. William Dalrymple has a long section about it in The Age Of Kali. He rules by the way, you should have a look at his books if you haven't read them already.
Obviously this is an important corrective to the Western idealisation of indigenous cultures (which is beginning to seem itself like just another maladaptive behaviour). One of the things that's really interested me recently is exploring the canon of "forbidden anthropology" - guys who are willing to say things like, actually this culture just fucking sucks, and who get in trouble because they violate the whole system of taboos that Western universities have developed around what kind of conclusions you're supposed to draw. Napoleon Chagnon might be the best known example.
Edgerton's first chapter is really interesting on this -- he argues that a big part of it is that when you've spent years living with people, you don't want to air their dirty laundry the general public, so all the really nasty stories just get shared at anthropologist cocktail parties. It's like talking crap about your mom.
I'm really enjoying thinking about the anthropologist cocktail parties where they all get a little tipsy and start telling the most insanely fucked up stories you have ever heard. Would be a good setting for a murder mystery.
I read "Into the Silence" a book about the Mallory expedition to climb Everest from the Tibetan face. Most members of Mallory's party had a dismissive attitude toward Tibetans, something to the effect of "they are superstitious and they don't bathe and their tea tastes awful". A minority of the party was intrigued or moved by Tibetan spirituality, and one guy took a particular interest in Tibetan melodies and how they related to European ones. A couple members of Mallory's party would go on to do anthropological work. Not surprisingly they were all from the faction who found Tibetans interesting and saw value in their culture.
My point is that there is an obvious selection bias going on in anthropology. It will disproportionately draw in people who dislike the culture in which they live and want to leave it, and if they take an instant dislike to the culture they are studying they will leave quickly without publishing anything. On the whole it is good to have open minded people studying other cultures, but we have to accept that hefty biases are built in.
There's an interesting history of cultural anthropology called "Gods of the Upper Air" that basically argues that ethnography was invented by Franz Boas et al. in order to identify all the ways everyone else is better than Americans/Europeans and use it a stick to hit Western culture. (To be clear, the author thinks this is good.) But the selection bias is real, and logical -- I am forever perplexed by the academics who go into classics/history/literature without truly loving the people they're studying, and how much more so if instead of adjunct jobs you're dealing with Amazonian parasites!
Need a system where guys who absolutely hate bugs and weird smelling tea are drafted into the Anthropology Corps and forced to live in the Brazilian rainforest for twenty-five years. It's for the benefit of science!
This can be part of these tougher EU hate speech rules. "You've made one too many comments on Facebook we consider racist. Now you will have to live in the Amazon and do anthropology to counterbalance innate selection bias in the field".
There have been anthropologists who said nasty things about their subjects, and they have been panned. Colin Turnbull and Ik come to mind. You won't find anyone who has a nice thing to say about him.
Colonial policing seems to appear in this book as a Heaven-sent solution: a previously uninvolved third party arbitrating ages-old familial disputes with easy-to-understand, encoded laws. I think most societies throughout history would be delighted by such an intervention. Policing becomes more complicated when the police are made up of individuals or social groups with predetermined interests other than law enforcement. For instance, "N!ai, The Story of a !Kung Woman" (1980, available on Kanopy) depicts a Khoisan community forcibly transitioned by colonial administrators from a hunter-gatherer migrant community to a sort of refugee camp, but the intent of the administrators is mainly to secure the natural resources beneath the land previously inhabited by the Khoisan. It is hard to think of how the policing could have been neutral in such a situation.
The modal colonial intervention seems to be "cut out all that nonsense," which is great when it's actually nonsense -- being relocated to a reservation is probably better than killing yourselves off! -- but less great when it disrupts something actually good.
Edgerton several times references "Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman," which is on my to-read list; I wonder how it compares to the film.
I've read Nisa, and what stood out to me was the difference between what the author said (and wanted to see) vs what she described from the narrative of Nisa. She will say "girls aren't forced to marry" but then describe what looks an awful lot like a girl being bullied into marriage. Similarly "girls aren't forced to have sex" but then there's a girl literally killed for refusing to have sex with her new husband. And then "women aren't beaten that much" but Nisa makes it sound like a regular occurance. I consider that book a prime example of the anthropologist seeing what she wants to see.
First, congratulations on the birth of your child! Secondly, there’s no sign of post-partum brain fog in your fascinating essay. The horrendous examples of relationships between the sexes remind me of the ironic “de-motivation” memes that used to circulate, spoofing po-faced American corporate culture.
This meme in particular seems apposite to your discussion of primitive marital dystopias: “Have you ever considered that the true purpose of your life is to serve as a terrible warning to others?”
Your and your husband’s Substack posts are great.
I wish you both much success, as well as much marital and family happiness!
My wife and I lived in Western Kenya for a while. I remember driving through a small town and on the hillside next to the road two opposing groups if Guisii were lined against each other, armed with bows and knives. Reading this, I'm minded it could easily have been a wedding party.
Wondering how this squares with Joseph Henrich's work. The feedback loop for the cultivation of the cassava, for instance, seems extremely tight. Subtle deviations from an intricate method of processing and preparation can make the difference between food and poison.
But perhaps the reason that many of these small-scale societies can survive with such counterproductive health/hygiene/social coordination practices is because the feedback loops are so weak. For civilizations, we're used to seeing weak feedback loops during periods of decline. But in small-scale societies, perhaps there can be conditions that are so non-competitive that they can survive with counterproductive practices for centuries.
The feedback loop for acute cyanide poisoning with cassava is pretty tight, but the feedback loop for chronic cyanide poisoning isn't and tons of people in Africa are still suffering from it.
I like this book as a complement to/complication of Henrich. I think he's mostly interested in figuring out how adaptive things develop (and that you have to read Secret of Our Success as the first half of WEIRDest People in the World, it's all one intellectual project) and it's important to remember that not everything that develops is adaptive!
The lack of competition, usually by living in places that are so marginally desirable that other civilizations never bothered to take it over, seems to be a big factor. It is also important to remember that innumerable small societies emerged and died out with us ever knowing about it. In other words, the cost of getting things wrong is not ever showing up in the histories in the first place. Whole subspecies of human are occasionally found that never succeeded enough to leave their home range as it were; cultures can be even more maladaptive and in a hurry.
I think this essay is actually a strong argument in favor of Chesterton's Fence in modern society for this reason. It's probably not a coincidence that “sick” societies tend to persist in areas that are relatively inaccessible or undesirable (islands, jungle, arctic, or desert), because everywhere else is subject to grabby aliens. Despite this, historically there was a great deal of cultural diversity, and cultures that were both expansionary and stable were uniquely rare. Therefore, the fact that Chesterton's Fence applied well to the British Empire wasn't a mere accident of history, but a natural implication of it's Lindyness.
Yes, C’s F is a better argument when applied to a successful culture than an unsuccessful one, where success is measured in continuity and expansion. Still not a great argument if you don’t go full Chesterton and make sure you understand everything about the practice before considering changes, however.
Chesterton's Fence is a good prudential rule! Something that's been around for a long time is more likely to work than something new, and if you knock it down and then later realize you made a mistake it's hard to rebuild the same way. But "probably a good idea" is very far from "morally good."
Agreed, although I am not sure "probably a good idea" and "morally good" are so far. At least in terms of society scale processes. I have to think about that more, when I have not been awake for 18 hours. It does seem like morally good at the society scale almost has to line up with works more often than not, but then that might just be the usual failure mode of prudential rules, making one judgement on little evidence without gathering more evidence to make a better, more accurate judgement later. I am all about learning more before recommending or making changes being the morally superior move, and the moral imperative to improve one's judgements.
I've found Heinrich to be poorly supported on cyanide. There's no evidence that cassava can taste fine and cause poisoning (cyanide is bitter, after all). And chronic cyanide poisoning due to poor preparation is poorly documented. He cites one author (Tylleskar) who might document a cases of chronic cyanide toxicity. There have been other cases of chronic cyanide poisoning under conditions of malnutrition, or because conflict left people unable to detoxify it, but ... those people knew what they should be eating.
I wouldn't deny that most of what drives these behaviors could simply be chalked up to institutionalized dysfunction. Still, there also seems to be something about primitive societies that drives them toward the forceful and often violent expression of ambivalent human energies. An example of this would be the way some natives heaped riches and adoration on some young girl before ritually sacrificing her.
Jung talked about the tendency of the native psyche to splinter more easily than the modern due to arresting itself at a more fragmentary stage of consciousness. This condition is usually interpreted by them as the "loss of soul." Modernity has its manifestations of this obviously (i.e., neurosis), but the modern mind is far more "held together" in that it is not so hampered by fears and superstitions. The modern man commands his will more easily.
What I'm trying to say is that natives, in their more "fluid" state, seem far more easily swayed by the contradictory impulses that lie at the heart of human nature, and that—I think—has something to do with these behaviors.
I'm very thankful that the "Noble Savage" myth, along with all that other garbage Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought up, is being swept aside as actual science and research is being done. I'm often reminded that, during my childhood, the Maya were "innocent city-state builders who later died out due to their own induced ecological catastrophe. We could call learn something." As someone who actually knew a Maya girl, the Maya had not disappeared. New archeological evidence shows all the bloodthirsty Mesoamerican cultural that the Olmecs had demonstrated to the final days of the Aztecs. Let the myths be told, but let the facts be known.
>But at the same time, they imbued their environment with an appallingly large assemblage of aggressively evil entities: mermaids that enticed and then killed people, giant birds able to carry off and kill caribou and people alike, giant lake fish able to swallow a man with a single bite, and all manner of invisible ghosts and spirits capable of causing illness or death.
Interesting, when I was reading this, I thought a lot of more developed cultures have myths like "don't go into the forest, you will be eaten by a mythical creature". But they are functional - people get lost in forests, and there are also wild animal attacks, people do get eaten by bears. The whole practice of woodcraft, woodlands survival shows survival in the woodlands is not easy. We certainly don't want kids to go alone to the woods, so we invent a scary tale.
But there are no good reasons for a dozen trained and spear armed fishermen to not fish on a particular lake.
My guess is that myths can be very similar and it really depends on details whether they are functional or not.
A lot of these maladaptive practices probably developed from adaptive ones spiraling out of control. Lots of cultures have initiation rites for young man, not all of them are horrific. Etc. It’s a lot like dysfunctional family culture, where the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t can be very small indeed!
I have the book *Road Belong Cargo", from which the Wikipedia page is substantially derived, and I've read it at least twice. Much of it concerns Yali, the New Guinean whom Diamond used as a foil in his own book.
Yali was an amazing man, as you say a politician but also a real war hero who did a legendary trek of 40 miles through the densest and most impenetrable New Guinea forest with an Australian Army officer to escape the Japanese. He even visited the cities of Australia and had a close look at all its "cargo".
But he seems never to have escaped his tribal viewpoint. Even after visiting Australia he was still looking for the secret that would produce cargo for his people.
Jared Diamond was himself a bit like that New Guinea cargo cult leader visiting Australia. Yali believed there was a secret to the white man's cargo, so did Diamond. Yali thought the secret was straight up magic, Diamond thought it was magic technology and various sorts of luck and happenstance.
In 1991, back when he was just an ornithologist with a half-completed manuscript, Jared Diamond visited the Quaker study center Pendle Hill, near Philadelphia. I had dinner with him and, IIRC, Peter Bien (Kazantakis' translator, like Diamond of Jewish descent, but a "weighty Friend" for many years). Diamond had a Mennonite beard (no mustache) which seemed to me to accentuate the untrustworthy, fake feeling I had about him, that and his odd disinterest in ornithology. Not many years before I had been working a bit with ornithologists in Montaverde, which has more species of birds than anywhere else in this hemisphere, but he wasn't interested in quetzals with yard-long tails or the feeling of holding the world's smallest hummingbird.
Quakers, Friends of Truth, invented so much of the modern world that we nearly stand in the same relation to the Jared Diamonds of the world as they do to cargo cultists. They just can't believe the truth (in any sense), they think there must be some trick. Perhaps Jesus wasn't speaking entirely metaphorically In John 8:44.
Good review. Although I think the definition of conservatism is a bit reductive to be defined simply as "opposed to change", I'd rather define it as something like: Its not merely opposition to change but rather, it's about preserving valuable principles, institutions, and practices while allowing for organic development.
For the most even onion slices, do not make a lateral incision and do not make lengthwise cuts toward the centre of the onion.
Instead, imagine that the distance from the top to the bottom of the halved onion is 1. Now imagine a point that below the middle of the onion at -0.6. You want to aim your lengthwise cuts at that point.
Aiming toward the centre of the onion is okayish but you end up with alot of slices converging at the centre and producing infinitesimal pieces. Aiming at 0.6 below avoids this.
<i>My informant tells me that the Noble Savage is a less common trope in, say, China.</i>
In her <i>Taiwan's Imagined Geography</i>, which is about 17th, 18th, and 19th C writing (and illustrating) in mainland China about new newly acquired territory of Taiwan, Emma Jinhua Teng notes that in addition to what she calls the "rhetoric of privation" -- the indigenous Taiwanese are backwards savages lacking the benefits of (Chinese) civilization -- there was a Daoist-based "rhetoric of primitivism", which celebrated how the Taiwanese lived simpler, more noble lives without the corrupting luxuries, competition, and greed of civilization. ("As a result, a bifurcated image of the Taiwan indigene as savage brute and noble savage emerged in late imperial travel writing." and "primitivism served as a ready vehicle for self-reflexive critiques of Chinese society.")
This very same argument could apply to what I call "evolutionary midrashim." I don't know why, but we seem to pay academics to come up with stories to explain why everything looks how it does in evolutionary terms. It never seems to occur to them that sometimes neutral genetic changes ride the coattails of positive ones, and even a negative genetic change will persists if the organism can reproduce before it matters.
This was an excellent and horrifying review. It occurs to me that a recurring, though not universal, feature of these maladaptive societies is that they seem to have rules that are driven by maximal indulgence of the worst male impulses. The Marind-anim traditions are at the extreme end of this.
Before reading this I'd always thought of gender relations along an egalitarian vs. traditional framework, but I realize there's a second axis: friendly vs. adversarial. I hadn't thought about this axis because except for some internet weirdos, pretty much everyone in North America in 2024 wants men and women to love each other. Perhaps in an egalitarian structure, perhaps in one with required roles, but there's no notion that I am trying to hurt my wife and she is trying to poison me. This is nice, let's keep it this way people.
He actually has a whole chapter about this, I left out most of it, but adversarial and especially “men lounge around while women work like hell” dynamics abound.
William Buckner is great on this stuff, though it can be hard to read.
He has an old blog and a substack called Traditions of Conflict, which is rarely updated: https://traditionsofconflict.com/
And his couple of articles for Quillette are gold:https://quillette.com/author/william-buckner/
Especially: https://quillette.com/2018/06/07/explaining-monogamy-vox/ and https://quillette.com/2019/05/09/a-girls-place-in-the-world/
Good point. I think most of us would be horrified if we learned a female friend wanted to poison her husband or a male friend only let his wife eat scraps. Despite a ton of competitiveness and anti-man or anti-woman rhetoric, our society still has the basic assumption that a husband and wife are on the same team and probably like each other, and that’s not universal
Interesting you mention that. I got a heavy dose of feminism growing up, and heard endlessly about how men were trying to force women to do things they didn't want to do (mostly sex and housework), and how any unwanted advance was harassment...so the best way to be a good person was to never talk to a woman in any kind of sexual way.
After that I read lots of evo psych books talking about the way men and women pursue reproductive strategies to maximize their wealth and offspring at each other's expense. It was always obvious to me the sexes were natural adversaries brought together by the necessity to mix gametes!
Now you have all these shows and articles celebrating divorce as liberating for women, bragging about how men are so awful women are finding new self-expression in dating each other, and the rom com is long dead because it's heteronormative or something. A large political gender gap has opened up among the young.
Andrew Tate is the descendant of Andrea Dworkin.
I mean, from what I can tell even a lot of the nasty stuff has some kind of positive ideal. The feminist woman wants a man who does laundry without being asked and holds the crying baby at 1am (not unreasonable things, especially if she works), only the really unhinged ones think men are irredeemably awful. Even the women sharing memes about how men are irredeemably awful don't actually treat the men in their lives as enemies. As for the divorce celebration, that just feels like sad cope to me. There is a general trend toward working class men abandoning their children. Whatever Emily Ratajkowski is up to, the far more normal thing is a guy not marrying or abandoning the mother of his children while grandma fills in to help with the kids.
Where I totally agree with you is that the political gender gap among the young bodes ill, and the neo-Dworkinists and Tatists suck and do seem to be getting more numerous. Reading about these cultures where women can't bear enough children because they are malnourished or injured reminds me in a strange way of this article about South Korea (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/south-korea-fertility-rate-misogyny-feminism/673435/), where's there's such a mismatch in male and female attitudes that women don't want to marry or have kids. The idea that gender war can crash a society, both hunter gatherer and technological hub, is terrifying.
Re. the footnote about sati - my understanding is that the women who got burnt alive were generally given a truly staggering amount of opium first, so they couldn't feel a thing. William Dalrymple has a long section about it in The Age Of Kali. He rules by the way, you should have a look at his books if you haven't read them already.
Obviously this is an important corrective to the Western idealisation of indigenous cultures (which is beginning to seem itself like just another maladaptive behaviour). One of the things that's really interested me recently is exploring the canon of "forbidden anthropology" - guys who are willing to say things like, actually this culture just fucking sucks, and who get in trouble because they violate the whole system of taboos that Western universities have developed around what kind of conclusions you're supposed to draw. Napoleon Chagnon might be the best known example.
Edgerton's first chapter is really interesting on this -- he argues that a big part of it is that when you've spent years living with people, you don't want to air their dirty laundry the general public, so all the really nasty stories just get shared at anthropologist cocktail parties. It's like talking crap about your mom.
I haven't read any Dalrymple but my husband reviewed one of his books here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-in-xanadu-by-william-dalrymple
I'm really enjoying thinking about the anthropologist cocktail parties where they all get a little tipsy and start telling the most insanely fucked up stories you have ever heard. Would be a good setting for a murder mystery.
I read "Into the Silence" a book about the Mallory expedition to climb Everest from the Tibetan face. Most members of Mallory's party had a dismissive attitude toward Tibetans, something to the effect of "they are superstitious and they don't bathe and their tea tastes awful". A minority of the party was intrigued or moved by Tibetan spirituality, and one guy took a particular interest in Tibetan melodies and how they related to European ones. A couple members of Mallory's party would go on to do anthropological work. Not surprisingly they were all from the faction who found Tibetans interesting and saw value in their culture.
My point is that there is an obvious selection bias going on in anthropology. It will disproportionately draw in people who dislike the culture in which they live and want to leave it, and if they take an instant dislike to the culture they are studying they will leave quickly without publishing anything. On the whole it is good to have open minded people studying other cultures, but we have to accept that hefty biases are built in.
There's an interesting history of cultural anthropology called "Gods of the Upper Air" that basically argues that ethnography was invented by Franz Boas et al. in order to identify all the ways everyone else is better than Americans/Europeans and use it a stick to hit Western culture. (To be clear, the author thinks this is good.) But the selection bias is real, and logical -- I am forever perplexed by the academics who go into classics/history/literature without truly loving the people they're studying, and how much more so if instead of adjunct jobs you're dealing with Amazonian parasites!
Need a system where guys who absolutely hate bugs and weird smelling tea are drafted into the Anthropology Corps and forced to live in the Brazilian rainforest for twenty-five years. It's for the benefit of science!
This can be part of these tougher EU hate speech rules. "You've made one too many comments on Facebook we consider racist. Now you will have to live in the Amazon and do anthropology to counterbalance innate selection bias in the field".
An idea the right and left can get behind!
There have been anthropologists who said nasty things about their subjects, and they have been panned. Colin Turnbull and Ik come to mind. You won't find anyone who has a nice thing to say about him.
Colonial policing seems to appear in this book as a Heaven-sent solution: a previously uninvolved third party arbitrating ages-old familial disputes with easy-to-understand, encoded laws. I think most societies throughout history would be delighted by such an intervention. Policing becomes more complicated when the police are made up of individuals or social groups with predetermined interests other than law enforcement. For instance, "N!ai, The Story of a !Kung Woman" (1980, available on Kanopy) depicts a Khoisan community forcibly transitioned by colonial administrators from a hunter-gatherer migrant community to a sort of refugee camp, but the intent of the administrators is mainly to secure the natural resources beneath the land previously inhabited by the Khoisan. It is hard to think of how the policing could have been neutral in such a situation.
The modal colonial intervention seems to be "cut out all that nonsense," which is great when it's actually nonsense -- being relocated to a reservation is probably better than killing yourselves off! -- but less great when it disrupts something actually good.
Edgerton several times references "Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman," which is on my to-read list; I wonder how it compares to the film.
I've read Nisa, and what stood out to me was the difference between what the author said (and wanted to see) vs what she described from the narrative of Nisa. She will say "girls aren't forced to marry" but then describe what looks an awful lot like a girl being bullied into marriage. Similarly "girls aren't forced to have sex" but then there's a girl literally killed for refusing to have sex with her new husband. And then "women aren't beaten that much" but Nisa makes it sound like a regular occurance. I consider that book a prime example of the anthropologist seeing what she wants to see.
That seems to be a very common phenomenon in ethnography.
First, congratulations on the birth of your child! Secondly, there’s no sign of post-partum brain fog in your fascinating essay. The horrendous examples of relationships between the sexes remind me of the ironic “de-motivation” memes that used to circulate, spoofing po-faced American corporate culture.
This meme in particular seems apposite to your discussion of primitive marital dystopias: “Have you ever considered that the true purpose of your life is to serve as a terrible warning to others?”
Your and your husband’s Substack posts are great.
I wish you both much success, as well as much marital and family happiness!
Thank you! Also "no sign of post-partum brain fog" -- lol, lmao. I'm glad I hide it well.
Congrats!
My wife and I lived in Western Kenya for a while. I remember driving through a small town and on the hillside next to the road two opposing groups if Guisii were lined against each other, armed with bows and knives. Reading this, I'm minded it could easily have been a wedding party.
Wondering how this squares with Joseph Henrich's work. The feedback loop for the cultivation of the cassava, for instance, seems extremely tight. Subtle deviations from an intricate method of processing and preparation can make the difference between food and poison.
But perhaps the reason that many of these small-scale societies can survive with such counterproductive health/hygiene/social coordination practices is because the feedback loops are so weak. For civilizations, we're used to seeing weak feedback loops during periods of decline. But in small-scale societies, perhaps there can be conditions that are so non-competitive that they can survive with counterproductive practices for centuries.
The feedback loop for acute cyanide poisoning with cassava is pretty tight, but the feedback loop for chronic cyanide poisoning isn't and tons of people in Africa are still suffering from it.
I like this book as a complement to/complication of Henrich. I think he's mostly interested in figuring out how adaptive things develop (and that you have to read Secret of Our Success as the first half of WEIRDest People in the World, it's all one intellectual project) and it's important to remember that not everything that develops is adaptive!
The lack of competition, usually by living in places that are so marginally desirable that other civilizations never bothered to take it over, seems to be a big factor. It is also important to remember that innumerable small societies emerged and died out with us ever knowing about it. In other words, the cost of getting things wrong is not ever showing up in the histories in the first place. Whole subspecies of human are occasionally found that never succeeded enough to leave their home range as it were; cultures can be even more maladaptive and in a hurry.
I think this essay is actually a strong argument in favor of Chesterton's Fence in modern society for this reason. It's probably not a coincidence that “sick” societies tend to persist in areas that are relatively inaccessible or undesirable (islands, jungle, arctic, or desert), because everywhere else is subject to grabby aliens. Despite this, historically there was a great deal of cultural diversity, and cultures that were both expansionary and stable were uniquely rare. Therefore, the fact that Chesterton's Fence applied well to the British Empire wasn't a mere accident of history, but a natural implication of it's Lindyness.
Yes, C’s F is a better argument when applied to a successful culture than an unsuccessful one, where success is measured in continuity and expansion. Still not a great argument if you don’t go full Chesterton and make sure you understand everything about the practice before considering changes, however.
Chesterton's Fence is a good prudential rule! Something that's been around for a long time is more likely to work than something new, and if you knock it down and then later realize you made a mistake it's hard to rebuild the same way. But "probably a good idea" is very far from "morally good."
Agreed, although I am not sure "probably a good idea" and "morally good" are so far. At least in terms of society scale processes. I have to think about that more, when I have not been awake for 18 hours. It does seem like morally good at the society scale almost has to line up with works more often than not, but then that might just be the usual failure mode of prudential rules, making one judgement on little evidence without gathering more evidence to make a better, more accurate judgement later. I am all about learning more before recommending or making changes being the morally superior move, and the moral imperative to improve one's judgements.
I've found Heinrich to be poorly supported on cyanide. There's no evidence that cassava can taste fine and cause poisoning (cyanide is bitter, after all). And chronic cyanide poisoning due to poor preparation is poorly documented. He cites one author (Tylleskar) who might document a cases of chronic cyanide toxicity. There have been other cases of chronic cyanide poisoning under conditions of malnutrition, or because conflict left people unable to detoxify it, but ... those people knew what they should be eating.
Brilliant. Thank you.
I wouldn't deny that most of what drives these behaviors could simply be chalked up to institutionalized dysfunction. Still, there also seems to be something about primitive societies that drives them toward the forceful and often violent expression of ambivalent human energies. An example of this would be the way some natives heaped riches and adoration on some young girl before ritually sacrificing her.
Jung talked about the tendency of the native psyche to splinter more easily than the modern due to arresting itself at a more fragmentary stage of consciousness. This condition is usually interpreted by them as the "loss of soul." Modernity has its manifestations of this obviously (i.e., neurosis), but the modern mind is far more "held together" in that it is not so hampered by fears and superstitions. The modern man commands his will more easily.
What I'm trying to say is that natives, in their more "fluid" state, seem far more easily swayed by the contradictory impulses that lie at the heart of human nature, and that—I think—has something to do with these behaviors.
I'm very thankful that the "Noble Savage" myth, along with all that other garbage Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought up, is being swept aside as actual science and research is being done. I'm often reminded that, during my childhood, the Maya were "innocent city-state builders who later died out due to their own induced ecological catastrophe. We could call learn something." As someone who actually knew a Maya girl, the Maya had not disappeared. New archeological evidence shows all the bloodthirsty Mesoamerican cultural that the Olmecs had demonstrated to the final days of the Aztecs. Let the myths be told, but let the facts be known.
>But at the same time, they imbued their environment with an appallingly large assemblage of aggressively evil entities: mermaids that enticed and then killed people, giant birds able to carry off and kill caribou and people alike, giant lake fish able to swallow a man with a single bite, and all manner of invisible ghosts and spirits capable of causing illness or death.
Interesting, when I was reading this, I thought a lot of more developed cultures have myths like "don't go into the forest, you will be eaten by a mythical creature". But they are functional - people get lost in forests, and there are also wild animal attacks, people do get eaten by bears. The whole practice of woodcraft, woodlands survival shows survival in the woodlands is not easy. We certainly don't want kids to go alone to the woods, so we invent a scary tale.
But there are no good reasons for a dozen trained and spear armed fishermen to not fish on a particular lake.
My guess is that myths can be very similar and it really depends on details whether they are functional or not.
A lot of these maladaptive practices probably developed from adaptive ones spiraling out of control. Lots of cultures have initiation rites for young man, not all of them are horrific. Etc. It’s a lot like dysfunctional family culture, where the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t can be very small indeed!
I have the book *Road Belong Cargo", from which the Wikipedia page is substantially derived, and I've read it at least twice. Much of it concerns Yali, the New Guinean whom Diamond used as a foil in his own book.
Yali was an amazing man, as you say a politician but also a real war hero who did a legendary trek of 40 miles through the densest and most impenetrable New Guinea forest with an Australian Army officer to escape the Japanese. He even visited the cities of Australia and had a close look at all its "cargo".
But he seems never to have escaped his tribal viewpoint. Even after visiting Australia he was still looking for the secret that would produce cargo for his people.
Thank you, I’ve bought the book! Given the height of my to-be-read stack it may be a bit, but it sounds fascinating.
Jared Diamond was himself a bit like that New Guinea cargo cult leader visiting Australia. Yali believed there was a secret to the white man's cargo, so did Diamond. Yali thought the secret was straight up magic, Diamond thought it was magic technology and various sorts of luck and happenstance.
In 1991, back when he was just an ornithologist with a half-completed manuscript, Jared Diamond visited the Quaker study center Pendle Hill, near Philadelphia. I had dinner with him and, IIRC, Peter Bien (Kazantakis' translator, like Diamond of Jewish descent, but a "weighty Friend" for many years). Diamond had a Mennonite beard (no mustache) which seemed to me to accentuate the untrustworthy, fake feeling I had about him, that and his odd disinterest in ornithology. Not many years before I had been working a bit with ornithologists in Montaverde, which has more species of birds than anywhere else in this hemisphere, but he wasn't interested in quetzals with yard-long tails or the feeling of holding the world's smallest hummingbird.
Quakers, Friends of Truth, invented so much of the modern world that we nearly stand in the same relation to the Jared Diamonds of the world as they do to cargo cultists. They just can't believe the truth (in any sense), they think there must be some trick. Perhaps Jesus wasn't speaking entirely metaphorically In John 8:44.
Good review. Although I think the definition of conservatism is a bit reductive to be defined simply as "opposed to change", I'd rather define it as something like: Its not merely opposition to change but rather, it's about preserving valuable principles, institutions, and practices while allowing for organic development.
Oh, it’s a very dumb and reductive way of defining conservatism. Doesn’t stop people, though.
For the most even onion slices, do not make a lateral incision and do not make lengthwise cuts toward the centre of the onion.
Instead, imagine that the distance from the top to the bottom of the halved onion is 1. Now imagine a point that below the middle of the onion at -0.6. You want to aim your lengthwise cuts at that point.
Aiming toward the centre of the onion is okayish but you end up with alot of slices converging at the centre and producing infinitesimal pieces. Aiming at 0.6 below avoids this.
<i>My informant tells me that the Noble Savage is a less common trope in, say, China.</i>
In her <i>Taiwan's Imagined Geography</i>, which is about 17th, 18th, and 19th C writing (and illustrating) in mainland China about new newly acquired territory of Taiwan, Emma Jinhua Teng notes that in addition to what she calls the "rhetoric of privation" -- the indigenous Taiwanese are backwards savages lacking the benefits of (Chinese) civilization -- there was a Daoist-based "rhetoric of primitivism", which celebrated how the Taiwanese lived simpler, more noble lives without the corrupting luxuries, competition, and greed of civilization. ("As a result, a bifurcated image of the Taiwan indigene as savage brute and noble savage emerged in late imperial travel writing." and "primitivism served as a ready vehicle for self-reflexive critiques of Chinese society.")
This very same argument could apply to what I call "evolutionary midrashim." I don't know why, but we seem to pay academics to come up with stories to explain why everything looks how it does in evolutionary terms. It never seems to occur to them that sometimes neutral genetic changes ride the coattails of positive ones, and even a negative genetic change will persists if the organism can reproduce before it matters.