Why the world is as it is

Why are things the way they are in the human world? 

It's a big question and we can take it for granted that any short answer to it is going to be wrong or at least incomplete. Nonetheless, we might find some manageably short and partially correct answers; or we might find answers that provide useful insights. The full answer to the question "why are animals the way they are?", to take a similarly large question, would be long, tedious and include reference to all kinds of brute facts themselves in need of explanation (genetic mutations, prevailing winds, continental drift, meteorite strikes, human activity etc etc). But once you know a few facts about how animals obtain energy, natural selection, sexual selection and genes then you have a set of tools with which to go about answering the larger question; and for many people you have provided all the answer to the larger question that they wanted in the first place.

What do I mean by "why are things the way they are"? Really, the question boils down to this: humans are all one species and yet different humans do things very differently: why? As Jared Diamond's interlocutor Yali asks him in Guns, Germs and Steel, "why is is that some people have so much cargo (i.e., the physical stuff of the modern world), while others have had so little?" But also, why is it that some believe some things and others believe other things? And is there a link between these different beliefs and all the cargo? If so, what is it?

Guns, Germs and Steel is one good attempt to answer the question. (Diamond's answer is in the title.) It looks as if he got the bit about zebras wrong, but Diamond is, I think, looking at some of the right kind of thing.

This is a review of a book about global economic history that tries to answer the question within what I suppose we might call politically correct constraints. Scott Alexander raises a number of problems with it and I think he is right to do so. Here's one: "New parts of existing countries are able to develop relatively quickly - for example, when the US took California from Mexico, it eventually converged to US (not Mexican) standards of living. If a New California were to rise out of the Pacific Ocean just west of the regular one, and Americans were to colonize it, I would expect it to also converge to normal US standards of living eventually. Why? In 2021, New California has nothing, and (eg) India has much more than nothing. How come we are more certain that New California will soon get First World living standards than that India will?" (A better attempt to answer the question, albeit on a smaller scale (US not the world), is here.)

But the point of this post is to draw your attention to this which, among other matters, provides an answer to Scott Alexander's question. It is a critical summary of Emmanuel Todd's L'invention de l'Europe, and it far, far more interesting than the constrained approaches of English-language economic history. I will not attempt to summarise what is already a summary of plainly a large body of work, but I would urge you to read it. It starts by saying things that you think you have already thought, but stick with at least as far as the explanation of the four premodern European family types and you'll see that it goes off in new directions.

Todd places a lot of weight on his analysis of family structures. Just to give you an idea of what kind of family structures he has in mind, the rest of this paragraph consists of some thoughts of my own prompted by Todd's ideas. The English family structure, since the Middle Ages, has been the nuclear family: when a child becomes an adult they have to leave the home and set up a new home. That's just the way it is in England; nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution breaking up traditional family structures - it's just being English. It's also just the way it is in our former colonies: in fact, there was an entire romantic comedy featuring major Hollywood stars called Failure to Launch based on the premise that a young man who has not left his parents' house constiutes a crisis that potentially needs professional attention. Now, in England at present we have a housing issue which might be summarised as follows: old people rattle around in expensive houses that are too big for them, while young people have to rent small flats and cannot buy family homes for themselves until the old people die and the young people inherit (and then sell) those big houses. This is often regarded as a major political issue, a potential cause of retarded family development etc etc. Potential solutions include: building lots of new houses on the countryside; rent controls (possible the single most tried-and-tested bad economic idea); Government (i.e. taxpayer) support for young people buying houses; despair; Jeremy Corbyn. But, so far, nothing has worked. In fact, the crisis is so great that in expensive parts of the country (especially London) it is almost (almost!) normal for young adults to return to their parents' homes for a year or two. I say it is almost normal, but it is nonetheless plainly undesirable to any right-thinking person. And I add that, also obviously, these young adults "return" to their parents' home, they do not "stay" there: English family structures require adults to leave home at 18, hence they must go to a university that is far away from their parents' home despite the fact that doing so is much more expensive for the whole family and not necessarily any better in academic terms than going to a nearby university. French people gonna French, but we're English and we leave home at 18. But now that I have put it that way, does it not all seem a little odd? Surely the problem is with the English family structure, not the housing market? Why don't young people live in extended households with parents, grandparents and so on? It is not, nowadays, because they don't want their parents to know they are having sex, is it? (And, anyway, they're not having sex: "66% [of men] had not had sex during their time as a student", says the BBC.) Nor is it because they don't like their parents, or vice versa. Why is it not normal for grandparents to move to a small bedroom in the attic of the house they have always lived in so that their children and grandchildren can live downstairs? (Would that help with the cost of childcare?) Why, if there is a "granny annexe" of this kind, must it be one built by the children onto their new home, rather than built by the grandparents onto their old home? Why isn't the children's income used to extend, refurbish and improve the family home rather than try to buy an entirely new one? Once you start asking these questions, you might see the world in a different way. I'm English and I like the English way. But it does seem a little odd that it seems to involve so many people living in unsuitable places. 

I have various questions about Todd's work, which I have set out below. You should probably read the link first in order to understand what the questions are about, but if you find them interesting then that will give you reason to look at the link. 

First, some thoughts from a British perspective. It seems to me that Todd's theories would predict that Jewish people would do better in nineteenth century France than in England, and yet England is where we see Disraeli becoming Prime Minister, the Rothschild barontcy created in 1847 and the peerage in 1885, while France saw the Dreyfus affair. Or am I just being romantic about the history of Anglo-Jewry? What about primogeniture for British entailed land and titles: does that affect his theory of English family structures? Also, I am not sure that the differences between the various parts of the Celtic fringe are clear enough: why was Ireland so Catholic but Scotland and Wales not? Quibbles, I think, but, as with Diamond's zebras, one wants to be sure that the factual substratum is correct.

Second, from my old-fashioned feminist perspective, I wonder whether he gives enough attention to the place of women. I don't say that to be down with the cool kids, simply for methodological reasons. Let me give an example. Todd has an interesting treatment of differing amounts of miscegenation in European imperial possessions. I suppose a fair comparison might be between South America (Latin colonialism) and Africa or Australia (Anglo colonialism), where in each case the native populations survived European diseases: in these places the Anglo settlers did not mix with the native populations but the Latin settlers did. "Anglo-segregation and Dutch Apartheid are the norm whenever these peoples [English and Dutch hyper-liberals] come into contact with non-whites". But, on the other hand, English imperialists did mix with native populations during their early Indian colonial adventures and I understand that there is a marked contrast between before and after the Mutiny/Sepoy Revolt. Surely a big factor in whether European men married or cohabited with local women is whether women from the imperial metropolis were prepared to settle abroad? My impression is that English women were (perhaps surprisingly) ready to venture abroad, even in difficult climates, either alone or with English men; my impression is not that English men were particularly keen to force women to go overseas. One might take that as an aspect of English liberty (i.e. it does not undermine the overall thesis) but it changes the explanatory mechanism for lack of miscegenation. (And was French non-white citizenship and miscegenation any different from English?)

Here's another example involving women. One point Todd makes is that a certain kind of family (the stem family) "because of strong parental guidance and transmission of cultural and economic capital over generations – correlates with high and precocious educational achievement (Scotland, Germany, Sweden, Jews, Japan, Korea…)". One sees the point: Jewish people have managed to transmit a high degee of cultural capital over a long period in difficult circumstances and have a high regard for learning, whereas the English are notoriously ill-educated, stupid, resistant to learning and, both at home and in our American former colonies, determined to undermine academic achievement wherever it can be found in the service of almost anything else, e.g. utility ("what's the point of learning Latin? we'll never need it"), fun (child-centered learning, learning through play, all those play times and long holidays, "let children be children", all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy), sport (muscular Christianity, the rounded individual, Waterloo won on the playing fields of Eton, the Boat Race and US college sports), political correctness (examples too numerous to mention, but look at the US idea of rejecting SATs for university entrance) - all of which is completely unlike, say, Germany. Ok, got it. But the transmission of cultural capital in the home - the cultural capital that is most relevant to passing on family structures, national identity, morals and values - is, surely, mostly done by women? So the question arises: are societies of high and precocious educational achievement ones in which women are typically educated to the same degree as men? That would imply a more egalitarian set-up, but the Scotland/Germany/Jewish/Japanese family is inegalitarian (in Todd's schema). Or, if cultural capital can be passed on without literacy or formal education, e.g., by learning folktales, religion and recipes at one's mother's knee, then what is the link between the educational achievements of these societies and their cultural transmission? (Note that it is easy to pass on economic capital without education, so the question only arises for cultural capital.) One might instead say that, for example for Jewish people, education was itself part of the cultural inheritance that was passed on (literacy being necessary to read the Torah) but then the need for education is merely contingent on the culture in question - a society might as easily be passing on complicated dances or something else that is historically hard to reproduce through book-learning.

Anyway, these are the sorts of question that occurred to me after reading the link, but they are no more than further encouragements to you to do the same. If you want to know why southern Spain 1900-1940 is like southern France 1700-1790, why Paris was the centre of contraception, why England and the Netherlands still have monarchies, why Germany did better than England in the Second Industrial Revolution (i.e. after 1870), why Scottish and Basque nationalisms are similar, why French socialism was so disorganised, why the FN has been such a big thing in France, why some countries (UK, US) can tolerate ghettos of citizens while other tolerate ghettos of non-citizens (Germany) and others cannot tolerate ghettos at all (France), why the UK Conservative Party stands for nothing in particular, why Germany produced Nietzsche .... well, I've given you the link.

3 bits of news from abroad (not America)

1. This is superb. It is a letter from around twenty generals, a hundred senior officers and more than a thousand other soldiers calling for a return to ... well, let's just say a return to the good old days. My browser offers me the option of translating it, but even if you take it out of French, you can't take it out of France. It begins: "L’heure est grave, la France est en péril, plusieurs dangers mortels la menacent. Nous qui, même à la retraite, restons des soldats de France, ne pouvons, dans les circonstances actuelles, demeurer indifférents au sort de notre beau pays." It tells us that "Nos drapeaux tricolores ne sont pas simplement un morceau d’étoffe"; it reminds us that the Primate of Belgium once said that "Quand la prudence est partout, le courage n’est nulle part"; and it concludes, magnificently, "On le voit, il n’est plus temps de tergiverser, sinon, demain la guerre civile mettra un terme à ce chaos croissant, et les morts, dont vous porterez la responsabilité, se compteront par milliers." One might never give such service to the old beau pays as De Gaulle, but one can try to emulate his prose. (Actually, I would recommend the translation: at one point it warns us about fearsome "surburban hordes", summoning in my mind an image of respectable families with sensible cars and a resigned attitude to softplay centres. Not the sort of people the Primate of Belgium wanted to see.)

2. On the other side of the world, New Zealand sends worrying (and apparently surprising) signals about its role in Five Eyes. This may be bigger news than the impending French civil war.

3. Also potentially huge news (and rather more cheering): "Two years on from the launch of a pilot programme, more than 1.7 million doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine have been administered in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, benefitting more than 650 000 children with additional malaria protection." More here.

Some really good links

Something for everyone here, I think.

1. This is about the shape of Rome, in both geographical and historical terms. Interesting from the start. 

2. Nicely done Wikipedia from the future.

3. Transcript of Balaji Srinivasan talking about well, so many interesting things, ranging from the Treaty of Westphalia to why should keep your expense low to cryptocurrencies to India. 

4. Why has nuclear power been a flop? 

5. Consciousness. I have to confess that this may take some re-reading.

6. Not aliens, drones. Full of fun thoughts: e.g. the fact that people are so embarrassed to say that they've seen a UFO means that you should disguise your drones as UFOs and then Americans won't report them to their bosses. (Also has a link to video of the secret US place where they experimented with recovered MiGs, if you like that sort of thing.)

7. What Wes Anderson is all about. If you are not a fan then this won't make you a convert, but I have warm feelings towards The Royal Tenenbaums, at least, and this captured much of what I liked in that. 

8. So, you remember Guns, Germs and Steel? Turns out it's wrong: you can domesticate zebras. And ride them very easily (video).

9. If you like stories about craziness in US education then here's another one.

10. Burn it all down! As Roger Scruton said. Or, rather, he said this: "I sometimes think that the greatest service to our culture was done by the person who set fire to the library at Alexandria, thereby ensuring that nothing survived of that mass of literature, other than those works considered so precious that each educated person would have a copy of his own. The communists had performed a similar service to intellectual life in Czechoslovakia, by preventing the publication of anything save those works deemed so precious that people were prepared to produce them in laborious samizdat editions. These would be passed from hand to hand and read with eager interest by people for whom knowledge, rather than career advancement, was the goal."

UPDATE - BONUS LINK 11. Of course Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's Dad.

"I too am a sinner"

Not long ago, I revealed a legal judgment from the future in which the Bible story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery featured. But we do not need to wait until 2050 to see some weird stuff happening to that story. Try this:

I see the point the authorities are trying to make. But the theology is, shall we say, a little unorthodox.

Read more here. 

This is eye-opening

This is the University of Chicago:

"After my first year of teaching, troubled by the unclear, disorganized, and utterly unaesthetic papers written by students who had, in theory, received the best (and certainly the most expensive) educations in the country, I tried a new method to inspire them to improve their writing. In my office hours, after confronting a student with the revisions they would have to make to whichever assignment, I would ask them to tell me the last book they had enjoyed reading. My naive expectation was that in response to their answer I could send them off to analyze what had made its author’s writing style seem so effective.

The exercise was a failure. Most students had not read a book for pleasure for years; they had no time. Even in college, away from their parents’ schedules, they kept themselves busy with student organizations that are often indistinguishable from classes (the finance and consulting clubs, membership in which is highly sought after, assign homework and study sessions). They have—or give themselves—no opportunity to read what they like."

Or what about this:

"Students write poorly because they have been stripped of agency. What they have instead of an internal locus of control, the ability to form their own personal standards and adhere to them, are stories, usually written by other people on their behalf, about how by dint of hard work and personal talent they have surmounted powerful and malevolent social structures. Such images of themselves, whether expressed in terms of the older meritocratic ideal or its new woke competitor, are a kind of camera obscura in which the students’ real powerlessness, their lack of even the most basic components of private life such as leisure time and personal taste, their total beholdenness to hegemonic social norms, are inverted.

Young people whose self-understandings are organized by narratives about their heroic resistance against racism and sexism, and excellence in the face of adversity, are rewarded by the university—and will be rewarded by employers, media, and other sources of legitimation—for their deft combination of meritocratic and woke discourses. They will have no reason to notice that they are kicking down open doors—that, far from racism and sexism holding back their access to elite spaces, they are being invited in on the basis of their ability to perform triumph over oppression."

Interesting and depressing throughout - read more here.

Handling the Truth - a postscript

"The leader of the Free French forces, Charles de Gaulle, made it clear that he wanted his Frenchmen to lead the liberation of Paris.

Allied High Command agreed, but only on one condition: De Gaulle's division must not contain any black soldiers.
...
Finding an all-white division that was available proved to be impossible due to the enormous contribution made to the French Army by West African conscripts.

So, Allied Command insisted that all black soldiers be taken out and replaced by white ones from other units.

When it became clear that there were not enough white soldiers to fill the gaps, soldiers from parts of North Africa and the Middle East were used instead.
...
In the end, nearly everyone was happy. De Gaulle got his wish to have a French division lead the liberation of Paris, even though the shortage of white troops meant that many of his men were actually Spanish."

Read all about it here. (Spotted by Tomiwa Owolade.)