CounterIntuitive
by wjw on April 8, 2014
Recently I’ve encountered two counterintuitive, if not outright heretical, arguments about history and culture.
The first belongs to New Mexico’s own Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill, both biologists, who have marshaled evidence to support their theory that culture, including political culture, is a function of the disease pathogens infesting your particular neighborhood. If you have high levels of malaria, dengue, typhus, T.B., etc., then your culture becomes increasingly wary of outsiders who can contaminate your district.
. . . severe pathogen stress leads to high levels of civil and ethnic warfare, increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment, patriarchal family structures, and social restrictions regarding women’s sexual behavior. Moreover, these pathogen-avoidant collectivist tendencies, they wrote, coalesce over time into repressive and autocratic governmental systems. Want to understand the rise of fascism, dictatorship, and ethnocentric campaigns that dehumanize outsiders? Look to the prevalence of pathogen threats.
…So, as humans moved into drier and colder and less disease-ridden climates, Thornhill says, they likely discarded their costly xenophobic disease-avoidant ways and became less beholden to tradition, more willing to trade with others, and more accepting of technological innovations. Instead of censuring the individual maverick thinker in the group, societies eventually came around to rewarding those who challenged convention. With those changes came the rise of wealth and the spread of education to a larger and larger segment of the population. The more educated the population, the more people demanded participation in their governments. Democracies, premised upon the rights and freedoms of individuals, were the natural outcome.
…Moreover, the democratizing effect of lowering disease threats, they argue, can happen quite quickly—even within a generation.Freedom House, an organization that tracks governments, civil liberties, voter participation, and equality around the globe, considers 46 percent of all countries to be “free” today, as opposed to just 29 percent in 1972. Thornhill points out that this rise coincided with an era in which major health interventions, including vaccine programs, the chlorination of drinking water, and efforts to reduce food-borne disease, became commonplace in many parts of the world. Thornhill is not shy about the implications. If promoting democracy and other liberal values is on your agenda, he says, health care and disease abatement should be your main concern.
There would seem to be some significant exceptions to this theory, however. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did not exactly spring from ground saturated with malaria and dengue fever. But consider that the Nazi party began its rise to power in the aftermath of a Spanish flu pandemic that had killed over two million people across Europe—over half a million in Germany alone. And remember that much of Hitler’s poisonous rhetoric specifically suggested that Jews were disease carriers.
And I suppose that if you consider war to be a pathology, both Germany and Russia suffered disproportionately heavy losses, which might have triggered a cultural immune response in the form of Hitler and Stalin.
Mention of war brings us straight to Ian Morris’ heterodox War: What is it Good For? Morris begins with the statistic that the twentieth century, with its two world wars, its genocides, and its political upheavals, was nevertheless the safest 100 years in human history. Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’
Morris then goes on to suggest that war, or threat of war, is the only thing that keeps human beings civilized:
If the Roman empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls, if the United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans … if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity would have had the benefit of larger societies. But that did not happen … People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war, or fear that such a defeat is imminent.
Kind of sad if you’re one of the ones killed, raped, and/or dismembered, but the end results, sez Morris, are positive for posterity.
Why do I foresee a lot of really bad military SF demonstrating all this at length?
“So, as humans moved into drier and colder and less disease-ridden climates, Thornhill says, they likely discarded their costly xenophobic disease-avoidant ways and became less beholden to tradition, more willing to trade with others, and more accepting of technological innovations. ”
This is skating awfully close to “black Africans are inherently inferior”.
“People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war, or fear that such a defeat is imminent.”
Hasn’t this been the attitude of a zillion sci-fi movie bad guys? “Free people are free to act in bad ways. Therefore, freedom shouldn’t be allowed.”
I found their reasoning mildly interesting but unpersuasive.
“…the twentieth century, with its two world wars, its genocides, and its political upheavals, was nevertheless the safest 100 years in human history.”
Unless, of course, you happened to be a German or Central European Jew, or a Byelorussian or Ukrainian civilian.
To paraphrase William Gibson, safety in the twentieth century was distributed very unevenly.
The Better Angels of Our Nature (Why Violence Has Declined) by Steven Pinker is a stunningly good book that addresses similar themes. If the topic interests you, I highly recommend it.
Maybe someone we know could write some really good military SF demonstrating it?
Post hoc propter ergo hoc. Declining smoking rates correlate closely with declining homicide rates over the past 25 years, but I doubt they’re causally related.
The main reason people are xenophobic is not disease, but violence.
Violence by other humans was the primary adult cause of death everywhere before the development of the State; the archaeological record’s pretty clear on that. At least 35% of males and around 14% of female remains from those societies show evidence of death by violence, and that’s an underestimate because soft-tissue damage doesn’t show up on the bones. Eg., Otzi the Iceman — shot in the back with an arrow, and with ‘defense cuts’ on his arms.
So until historically quite recently, humans had a mortality pattern rather like wolves; high levels of intraspecific violence.
The emergence of the State cut down on this, but only to a degree. Up until quite recently, homicide rates were extremely high even in relatively peaceful countries — the rate in non-civil-war periods in medieval and early modern England, for example, was about 8x the worst ever recorded for modern America, including the height of the crack epidemic.
It’s only quite recently that violence has become extremely rare in some developed countries.
The “old Adam” is always there, though, ready to come back. It’s the default state.
Take three places to be born in 1895:
a) Germany.
b) Russia.
c) central New Guinea without outside contact.
— where did you have the greatest chance of dying by violence?
Right first time: it’s c).
The State monopolizes violence. Like any other Government monopoly, this restricts supply and drives up the price.
That’s quite literally true. Pre-State peoples don’t have big formal wars, no Verduns or Stalingrads, but they don’t have any -peace-, either.
It’s a continual round of grinding low-level violence punctuated by the occasional small-scale massacre.
That’s why in those old National Geographic pictures of primitive, out-of-the-way places you usually see every adult male carrying spear or other weapon.
“Don’t leave home without it.”
This was the default state for a long, long time. Since before the emergence of h. sapiens. It’s typical for a social predator, which is what we evolved as.
We’re rather behaviorally flexible, so some social arrangements can suppress this — but that’s just suppression. The “Old Adam” is always waiting to come back; it’s the default state.
DensityDuck: no, it’s more like “sub-Saharan Africa has a terrible disease environment for human beings”, which is pretty much true.
I don’t think it’s as important as the authors make out, but it’s undoubtedly the case. We evolved there, and so did our parasites and pathogens.
Ditto thinking it’s not saying Africans are inferior, but rather than African culture is adapted to its environment, which for the most part sucks.
Though I don’t know enough about African cultures prior to the Arabs and Europeans demolishing them, but the analogy holds well enough for Central American cultures, with their godlike rulers, oppressed peons, and constant warfare.
But how does this explain nomadic desert cultures, which display many of the syndromes mentioned here? I don’t think the Mideast or the Gobi are particularly toxic environments, are they?
Comments on this entry are closed.