Very enjoyable. I confess to particularly enjoying the English (or at least British) style of humour and writing generally.
There was a great deal about the book that was being reviewed - more than in most of the finalist reviews - and yet I didn't quite get the feeling I learnt much about the book. Odd - perhaps the criticisms and approvals were too flamboyant for me to feel that I'd heard the ideas presented completely accurately. A minor point, possibly.
Quite different from all the other reviews which was something I generally liked.
Minor points: the oxytocin literature is in shambles well beyond what you note; and Samuel Marshall's title is even better than you note (he's usually called "S.L.A.M." or "Slam"), and his results are even worse (a giant tissue of fraud).
Wikipedia says that others back up the claim that most soldiers don't fire, and I know I've read that most bullets fired in combat miss the target, but I guess it's hard to know if that's due to moral objections or just the practical difficulty of aiming at a target through the fog of war.
I have a feeling that discussion of the claim that most soldiers don't fire in battle has actually come up before on Slate Star Codex specifically, but I'm afraid I can't remember where.
It has come up in westhunter...I guess i am not the only one in 1CT following WH, so you may remember this from there;-).If i remember correctly, Greg said it was bollocks.
There can be hundreds of rounds fired to suppress a target while a designated marksman flanks and fires a single shot for the kill. This doesn't imply anyone was intentionally missing, even if only one out of a thousand bullets hit someone.
Also, people greatly underestimate the difficulty of hitting a moving target under stress. Again, a missed shot (even wildly missed) does not indicate intention (though, yes, part of the point of training is to improve at this task).
I agree, but the difficulty of hitting a moving target in a chaotic environment also means we don't know if people are intentionally missing. Can't really say either way was my point, although there are probably situations like the one you described in which that's probably not the case.
I probably don't underestimate the difficulty of hitting a moving target under stress, but that's mostly because my aim is so bad that I can't hit a stationary target while calm (with an air rifle, but aiming one of those should be much easier than a real gun - much less recoil to brace for!).
"The Germans had a tremendous 'marital ethos', placing a high value on loyalty, camaraderie and self-sacrifice."
Good catch, but I actually like it this way. If you grabbed someone off the street and described the 'martial ethos' in those terms, I'm tempted to believe large numbers would say, "you better believe it!"
I kind of liked it, too, but at least at my age I often type things I don't mean, even if they turn out clever, so I thought I'd point it out in case in future the author cuts and pastes. Good to see comments are read.
>(it'd be nice to check whether the effect moved from just below half to just above, but the paper is behind a paywall)
Just checked myself - it appears to go from .27 for female participants in the low-empathy condition to .73 for female participants placed in the high-empathy condition, and .4 to .73 for male participants.
>[P]articipants in the high-empathy condition were, once again, more likely to show partiality, helping Sheri at the expense of others who were more needy (.73), than were participants in the low-empathy condition (.33), x2( l,N= 60)= 10.31, p < .001.
> Now at first glance it looks like intelligence is our superpower, but Bregman disagrees. [...] Only in social learning do the toddlers demolish the apes. This shows that humans didn't take over from chimps because we're cleverer, but because we're better at learning from each other.
This review treats this claim skeptically, but it's argued in great detail (also including the "domestication" concept) in Henrich's *The Secret of Our Success*, reviewed by Scott at
Having read Henrich's book thanks to Scott's recommendation, I think these ideas are quite plausible and supported by a lot of evidence.
Henrich may have downplayed the importance of individual intelligence too much (e.g., the ability to do Piaget's "formal operational" reasoning is a *huge* deal), but I think he's established that a huge amount of what we might casually attribute to "intelligence" is really handled by culture, and that that's possible because of our tremendous predisposition to and capacity for social learning.
This doesn't directly prove or disprove Bregman's claim; clearly culture and social learning can both encourage and discourage violence and abuse of others, and the ingroup/outgroup thing is really complicated. In Henrich's account, social learning is more about letting culture give us capacities (and retain and refine knowledge) than about requiring those capacities to be either violent or nonviolent.
The domestication claim is discussed in chapter 11 of Henrich's book and is mostly focused on the idea that people have an innate capacity to learn and *want to follow and enforce* social norms from their cultures. Those social norms can then act as a check on all kinds of behaviors, including conflict and harm behaviors, but the details depend on the content of the norms. (Since I think Henrich is very committed to that latter idea, he would probably say that the extent to which people are "benevolent" depends enormously on the extent to which they've learned a social norm for benevolence from their cultures, but that they do at least have a kind of desire to learn how to cooperate with others with the society in which they grow up—whatever that consists of.)
Henrich's book is kind of optimistic in the sense that it foresees continued capacity for various kinds of progress, and various kinds of cooperation, but it doesn't specifically say that culture will always work well for everyone or every group in every case, or will always suppress every kind of violence, or anything.
This is where the reviewer lost me. I also read Henrich's book after reading Scott's review and also thought this point was plausible and well-supported, and the manner of the writer's dismissal suggested to me that he didn't really take it seriously. Maybe he has a real argument but figured that it would take up too much of the review to make it, but in that case, he should have at least alluded to Bregman (and Henrich) being *found* to be wrong, rather than just kind of taking it for granted that they're obviously idiots or acting in bad faith.
That's really helpful, and interesting. Thank you! I over reacted to Bregman's overreach where he argues that humans aren't cleverer than chimps. Good to learn that nonetheless passing on culture is at least as crucial to our success, probably more.
I enjoyed this review. In places the tone rubs me the wrong way; I think a lot of the entries have aimed for Scott's 'not afraid to criticise the author, and masterful at microhumour' and overshot into 'a bit mean to the author in places'.
Agreed. Also, tossing unrelated controversial comments like "American healthcare is the worst in the world", or comparing the US election troubles to Turkey or Hong Kong is distracting and small. Better editing could have remedied this and caught things like "President Lyndon".
Also agree. One thing I enjoy about Scott's better reviews is that they often comment something like: "I'm unsure about this." This review is a bit too supercilious to know what it doesn't know. Your examples are good, but this struck me the most:
> Bregman blames the shift from groups of 150 to nation states on the invention of God.
Which is followed by a very unenlightening discussion of religion, where the author gives a generalised top-down view of a very complex topic before rushing to some conclusions.
> All the other candidates for primeval religion are polytheisms which are not designed for pushing unification.
This is a vast and mostly unsubtantiated claim about polytheism, and one which comes from looking at polytheism backwards, rather than taking what preceded polytheism and then looking forwards. Polytheism was unifying in that familial and domestic gods, which were critically important, could be made to spread beyond just families. This was a big shift from early Roman law towards the later end of the period.
I think dbmag9 is right. I like humour in writing, but the tone ended up just irritating me.
I wonder if modern cynicism isn’t an adaptation to higher population density in order to hedge against tail risks: let’s say 95% of the population is decent and kind and nice, but 5% are evil. In a small town with 100 people, there will be about 5 who you have to look out for, and you’ll know who they all are.
But in a big city with 10,000,000 people there will be 500,000 people you need to avoid, and you have no hope of knowing who they all are. And the anonymity will further empower them to do evil things by increasing the chance they’ll get away with it. On top of that, you’ll have contact with a greater number of people every day, increasing the likelihood of you running into one of these people.
Good point. When one can't feel secure that either concern over reputation or strict legal and social accountibility are acting to regulate everyone's behavior, a potentially disastrous encounter with a stranger becomes something you have to worry about. Stories of such disastrous encounters sensationalized by the media will make you worry even more. If you or someone you know has personally experienced such an encounter, you'll worry even more. If you have a personality predisposed to anxiety, you'll worry even more.
Fear of the terrible but rare weighs more heavily on the psyche than the common and benign. The bigger the group, the more rare events will happen to any given person, which affects how everyone else thinks. All the more reason why big groups need a proportionately powerful system of binding beliefs and rules to create the conditions of minimally viable levels of social trust.
That might be what's happening, but it seems to me like it would make for a bad actual strategy. This is how I'm thinking about it: If you treat everyone with suspicion because they *might* be amongst the 5%, there will presumably be fewer people to help you out once you become a victim of one of those 5%.
At 10M scale the justice system mostly doesn't care who the victim is. At 100 scale things are pretty informal and reputation is everything, and even at 1k scale some people in the vigilance committee are going to know you, but at 10M scale you're talking about a full criminal justice system where all cases are more-or-less treated equally.
Personally I'm kind of cynical that modern cynicism has anything on ancient cynicism. Even Roman authors were pretty biting about the decline in trust, morals, and the quality of child-rearing. Maybe these things are the social psychology equivalent of Fusion Is Just Ten Years Away or We're Making Progress in Bringing Peace To The Middle East.
Completely off-topic but there has been tremendous progress in fusion tech. The cost of the MIT reactor (arc or sparc or whatever) is expected to be 100 times lower than ITER for the same power output (due to huge improvement in super-conductors).
I have started to hedge myself and I don't say Just Ten Years Away sarcastically anymore.
It is possible, yes. On the other hand...I expected high-Tc superconductors to make a big difference in fusion when they first came out, and that was when I was in graduate school 30 years ago. And there are still some real practical problems to solve, e.g. neutron activation of the surroundings, practical sources of economical fuel. It would be nice if those were solved -- a source of huge amounts of cheap electricity would have remarkable and salubrious effects.
I believe the MIT team has made progress on these issues as well. For example they have a design that allows opening the "donut" from the top and change the lining inside. (The superconductors come in the form of a tape that can make a very effective temporary joint).
Most important to me is the cost issue. When a proof-of-concept is expected to cost 50 billion dollars for a 30-year project, I expect only Nation-States do make the investment. And we know how effective governments are in general... But when the cost for the same thing is expected to be around 150 million dollars, I expect investment to flow for the private sector and competition to do its magic.
No argument there. I always thought poorly of ITER for exactly that reason -- it costs so much it will (1) suck all the oxygen out of the room for any other approach to fusion, and (2) it will tend to lock everyone into one particular approach via the sunk cost. Bah.
This comment is meaningful only to those familiar enough with the subject to know what "MIT reactor", "ITER", and "cost" mean in this context, but not familiar enough to already be aware of what you're saying. Also, citing "expectations" is a rather weak argument.
I'm pretty sure Carl knew what I was talking about.
To clarify: my point wasn't that fusion is 10 years away, only that I don't laugh or roll my eyes anymore when someone makes that claim.
I can rephrase my comment for you if you're not familiar with the context: ITER is a very large international project (a so-called megaproject), the cost of which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars, and the purpose of which is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion as a source of energy.
Ten years ago (about) a team at MIT announced that they were going to build a fusion reactor equivalent to ITER but using REBCO superconducting tape. The superconducting tape allows them to reduce the size of the reactor by one order of magnitude and the cost by two.
Since then a startup was founded as a spin-off of the project and I believe they raised 150 million or so to achieve the goal.
I'm not an expert on this subject, so I could be wrong about certain details or even completely off base. But I find it highly significant that the estimated cost of building a fusion reactor has gone from 50 billion to 150 million.
"Good news: Bregman does not propose that an alien obelisk dropped out of the sky into pre-history to tame us for its own inscrutable purposes. Bad news: Bregman has no idea why evolution should suddenly serve up a dish otherwise reserved for human interference."
No one has mentioned Richard Wrangham's the Goodness Paradox? He argues that humans self domesticated leading to a modern human race less prone to individual violence than other primates, but more cooperative and better at planned violence. I.e., our unmatched capacity for violence is a consequence of our niceness. Wrangham argued once languages developed and humans could cooperate, one of the things men cooperated at was killing off the most violent & disagreeable men. After a few thousand generations of this, here we are. I've heard of other theories to explain it but I'm not as familiar with them.
Also, the summary of Wrangham given in "Exercised" by Daniel Lieberman is not that it's about "individual" violence, but about "reactive" (responding instinctively to a slight) vs "proactive" (premeditated, cooperative):
"According to Wrangham, humans differ from other animals, especially our ape cousins, in having exceedingly low levels of reactive aggression but much higher levels of proactive aggression."
Parhaps our difference from apes in this respect has too do with how we evolved for the Savannah, wheres most other apes evolved for the forest. Analogously, compare ions with Tigers. Lions live in packs, Tigers live alone. Lions live on the savannah, Tigers live in forests.
> Pack hunting is typically associated with cooperative breeding and its concentration in the Afrotropical realm is a reflection of this.[7] Most pack hunters are found in the southern African savannas, with a notable absence in tropical rainforests and with the exception of the wolf and coyote, higher latitudes
I just looked up Asiatic lions (the only wild lions outside Africa), and despite living in forest habitat, they still form prides like African lions do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_lion
It's also worth noting that lions used to range through Europe and the Middle East, covering various kinds of habitat.
Small suggestion for the voting form when all reviews are published: Is it possible to make it not alphabetic but chronological? That's probably the only way I'll be able to correctly remember and grade.
"Now Curtis has cunningly compared an extremely specific (chained to a radiator) with a much more general (falling in love). But the numbers still work if you widen his point out to all kidnappings. Or all serious crime. This kind of thing is everywhere - George R. R. Martin is fond of calling A Game of Thrones a more 'grounded' Lord of the Rings. It's actually drastically less real, just nastier."
Less real in what respects? The linked articles don't seem to support this claim at all, they just analyze the realism of a particular narrow element of each property without comparing the two of them at all.
The blog he linked to has several articles about the realism of Gate of Thrones and Lord of the Rings respectively, and Tolkien generally comes off better overall. A better article to link to would be his three post series about Game of Thrones compared to the actual middle ages. In that series he specifically takes on the claim that Game of Thrones is "superior to other fantasy works because it showed a medieval society ‘how it really was’ or ‘more realistically’"
His opinions on Lord of the Rings as a whole is scattered over numerous posts, but they're worth a read if you enjoy historical nitpicking and education.
Looking through them now, but it seems to me like it's hard to draw an apples to apples comparison between them, because most of the elements it critiques in Game of Thrones simply don't get any exploration in Lord of the Rings at all.
Apart from that though, a lot of the critiques of Game of Thrones aren't that it's unrealistic, but that elements aren't characteristic of medieval Europe, but other times and places in history, which doesn't seem to line up with a characterization of "less real, but nastier."
Fair enough. I think the main point is that many people look at Game of Thrones and do believe it is an accurate view of how "nasty" the middle ages were, and it's not.
Having read through all of acoup on both series, the thesis is slightly more complicated than "what's depicted has never happen in the entire human history". It's more that Martin takes aspects of very different systems which simply cannot work together. Kinda like saying "tank turrets are real and jet planes are real so if we slab one onto another it's going to work just fine, so the warhammer 40k aircrafts are realistic". This applies e.g. to the political and economical system of the Westeros and to everything having to do with the Dothraki - the pieces taken out of different contexts and combined in a way that make no sense and cannot work.
Fort Lord of the Ring, IIRC the point is that while the details of economics and politics are not much explored, what is shown seems broadly compatible with the corresponding historical realities (modulo all the magic stuff I guess).
Although for things like tactics and logistics, the LotR (the book at least) is shown to be just plainly more accurate than the Game of Thrones. Armies move with physically plausible speeds and distances, formations and weapon/armor kits are more like what people actually used and so on. For an extreme example of math not working out spectacularly (and hilariously) in the GoT, I highly recommend the two Loot Train posts: https://acoup.blog/?s=loot+train
Funny, the economics of the Lord of the Rings is the one thing on which I thought you really had to suspend disbelief. I mean, nobody in the entire book has an actual paying job. (One gets the vague impression that the dwarves trade the lower-quality things they don't just make for themselves, I suppose.) I can't even remember more than a tiny handful of transactions of money, or anyone thinking about the expense of this or that. It goes without saying there aren't any shops or banks or outstanding loans.
Tolkien is writing out of a heavily class based society about an even more heavily class based society. Most of the characters we see on screen are aristocracy, and therefore don't have to work. It's subtle, but if you read the hobbit stuff at the start you realise that Frodo, Merry and Pippin are upper class, and Sam (the only one with a job!) naturally defers to them. This relationship has altered by the end of the book, as the experiences they've been through render the previous class distinction a bit silly.
Yes, I realize that, but even so. Only in the Shire does anyone even *talk* about farmers or planting and the harvest (e.g. Farmer Maggot, and yerch what a name). Nobody is poor in Esgaroth, and there are no shops or banks or rush hour in Gondor so far as I can tell.
As Neil said - hobbits are farmers or landowners, virtually everyone else are hereditary warrior aristoctrats who are not supposed to work, their occupation is ruling and fighting which is what they do pretty much the entire book. (Gandalf is an angelic entity so probably isn't exactly expected to have a 9-to-5 job either)
As for the lower classes not being represented, my understanding is that Tolkien is just mostly true to the sources of the era - they were written largely by said aristocrats who just didn't care about commoners and mostly didn't bother to mention them.
Also to nitpick, most people in the actual Middle Ages or Antiquity really did not have a *paying* job. The professionals who'd have a salary as we understand it were a pretty thin layer between the majority of subsistence farmers and the ruling class.
Meh. I admire Tolkien and his writings as much as the next fan, but to me there's no real question that economics just plays no serious role in his stories. We really have no clear idea who is rich, who is poor, how people earn a living, what role wealth and income and trade plays in Middle Earth. You can write plenty from an upper class viewpoint and still get in quite a lot of how the rest of the people live -- cf. Dorothy Sayers. Middle Earth is a little like The Federation in Star Trek, the economic relationships of men are just not part of the story.
The Loot Train was in the TV series, not in the books. The TV series went considerably beyond the books regarding the need to suspend disbelief.
Many of the issues in the books come from an inflation of scale. In order to make the setting seem fantastic, the author tends to inflate the sizes of everything by an order of magnitude - cities are too large for the economy, armies are too large for the method of organisation, distances are too large, walls are too high, and civilisations have lasted too long. I think this is a common trope in fantasy (citation needed).
The criticism I found most interesting was about the way armies treated the populace, which is perhaps relevant to the book being reviewed here. In GoT, the armies strip the land, and rape and kill the peasants. The criticism is that this behaviour was not common during the Middle Ages; it applied more to the Thirty Years War and later wars, when religious conflict was involved and the peasantry of the opposing side were seen as heretical.
It's going to become an unusually bad time when the unusually long and harsh winter hits, but I don't think the War of Five Kings is unusually nasty. Plenty of characters are veterans of previous wars, and I don't recall any of them saying that the current war is any worse.
World of Ice and Fire, and Fire and Blood, include accounts of previous wars. These wars are, at least from the elite perspective, often very bloody with whole noble houses getting wiped out. (I wonder how the continent has so many ancient houses, when they get destroyed so often.)
Perhaps people in this setting have a special instinct to kill during autumn and winter.
The TV show seems to have taken every opportunity to seize the Idiot Ball, so I agree it's somewhat unfair to judge the books by that. On the other hand, the pop culture knowledge of Tolkien is heavily influenced by the Jackson movies, so what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
From the collected letters (because I couldn't resist the opportunity to do this, and because it shows that Tolkien was well aware of the corruption that goes along with power; all headings mine):
"On the Tax Base of Númenor:
In the second stage, the days of Pride and Glory and grudging of the Ban, they begin to seek wealth rather than bliss. The desire to escape death produced a cult of the dead, and they lavished wealth and an on tombs and memorials. They now made settlements on the west-shores [of Middle-earth], but these became rather strongholds and 'factories' of lords seeking wealth, and the Númenóreans became tax-gatherers carrying off over the sea ever more and more goods in their great ships. The Númenóreans began the forging of arms and engines."
"On Magic:
I am afraid I have been far too casual about 'magic' and especially the use of the word; though Galadriel and others show by the criticism of the 'mortal' use of the word, that the thought about it is not altogether casual. But it is a v. large question, and difficult; and a story which, as you so rightly say, is largely about motives (choice, temptations etc.) and the intentions for using whatever is found in the world, could hardly be burdened with a pseudo-philosophic disquisition! I do not intend to involve myself in any debate whether 'magic' in any sense is real or really possible in the world. But I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the 'deceits of the Enemy'. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, good or bad (per se), but only by motive or purpose or use. Both sides use both, but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other 'free' wills. The Enemy's operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but 'magic' that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. Their magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. Their goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to us between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and 'life'.
Both sides live mainly by 'ordinary' means. The Enemy, or those who have become like him, go in for 'machinery' – with destructive and evil effects — because 'magicians', who have become chiefly concerned to use magia for their own power, would do so (do do so). The basic motive for magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by, and at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means. Of course another factor then comes in, a moral or pathological one: the tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting, and defiling as such. It would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho's introduction of more efficient mills; but not of Sharkey and Sandyman's use of them.
Anyway, a difference in the use of 'magic' in this story is that it is not to be come by by 'lore' or spells; but is in an inherent power not possessed or attainable by Men as such. Aragorn's 'healing' might be regarded as 'magical', or at least a blend of magic with pharmacy and 'hypnotic' processes. But it is (in theory) reported by hobbits who have very little notions of philosophy and science; while A[ragorn]. is not a pure 'Man', but at long remove one of the 'children of Luthien'."
Martin gave hostages to fortune with his interview at the Dublin con and saying things about "what is the economy of Gondor?"
That leads people to expect that you are going to address "the tax base of Westeros" and so forth in your own works, and Martin doesn't seem to have done any of that (he talks about the Iron Bank and the gold deposits which funded Casterly Rock but have since run out), but he doesn't really go into the nuts-and-bolts which leaves him open to the same criticism as he levels at Tolkien.
He talks about the Wars of the Roses, but his depiction of the wars seems more like the civil war between Stephen and Matilda (which was very nasty). He talks, as pointed out by Bret Devereaux, about basing the Dothraki on plains cultures, but instead produces a mish-mash out of the pulps.
So yeah: Tolkien said he wanted to write a national fairy tale for England, Martin says he's writing realism-style historical fiction in fantasy. When one falls down on "the tax base of my fantasy world", it is inevitable that the one claiming to be the realist gets the hammering for it.
Speaking as a Johnny-come-lately and rare commenter, this really is a wonderful comments section. Apart from being generally civil to one another, commenters bring so many interesting things in. Thanks for those links.
Especially Bret's claim that civilians were protected and not systematically killed is wrong, wrong, wrong. (The weird thing is that Bret himself talks about the systematic killing of civilians elsewhere on his blog).
The other claim that doesn't hold up to a fact check is "GRRM exaggerates the incidence of betrayal/backstabbing". Really ?!? Take a look at the War of the roses. Or the Life of Richard Lionheart, and you get the impression that actual Loyalty of the Noble towards their liege lords was more the exception than the rule.
All that said, I love acoup.blog . It is beautifully written, well structured, very informative, and most of the time very well reasoned.
TL;DR:
Tolkien is right on military Stuff, including logistics.
GRRM is right on the dark and gritty stuff.
GRRM is wrong on religion, logistics, cities, dothraki and some other stuff.
I think this ties into an issue that's largely glossed over in Brett's discussion of GRRM, (not really a failing because he's assessing the work from a historical perspective and not actually comparing him to Tolkien. ) GRRM's work seems dark and gritty in comparison, although there's plenty of splendor and happiness explored in the books, because they take place in a setting that's both more arbitrary and more morally demanding.
Tolkien drew heavily on legend, and his work was faithful to the character of legend. But legend tends to be characterized by moral simplicity and convenience. The good true king overthrows the usurper, and then things are better because the rightful king is in charge and he's a just man. There's no question of whether the fighting over the throne might cause more harm than the true king might do good, or whether the true king might be a decent man but a bad ruler, or whether he'll die in an accident a year later without an heir and plunge the kingdom into chaos again.
GRRM is clearly off base on some features of realistic setting design, but there's a level on which his work evokes a more realistic character than Tolkien's because Tolkien wasn't trying to adopt the character of history.
"There's no question of whether the fighting over the throne might cause more harm than the true king might do good"
Tolkien does address this, though lightly, with how Aragorn refuses to have his coronation in the immediate aftermath of the death of Denethor. He's aware of the mood of the city, and how the great princes (such as Dol Amroth) might react, and he maintains the low profile until he can garner their support and prove to them that he is worthy.
It's not directly in "The Lord of the Rings" but Minas Tirith did tear itself apart over the question of the succession to the throne after the death of the last King of Gondor, and even before that with (1) the settlement in Middle-earth of the "Black Númenóreans", the remnants of the "King's Men" party who survived the Downfall of Númenór: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Black_N%C3%BAmen%C3%B3reans
"The unrest that created the Kin-strife began when prince Valacar, son of King Rómendacil, married a woman of the Northmen of Rhovanion, Vidumavi. She bore him a son Eldacar, but many Gondorians of Númenórean blood were angered by this mixing of blood of lesser men and Númenóreans."
Ironically again, many of the defeated rebels who fled to Umbar eventually had their descendants mixing with and intermarrying with those of "lesser blood".
(3) The diminution of the blood-line over the centuries, meaning that with the death of the last king, there was nobody left with a clear enough and indisputable claim to the throne, and the arrogance of the Southerners meant that they rejected the claims of the last surviving Northerners to the joint throne:
"No new king was elected and the rule of Gondor passed to the Ruling Stewards, beginning with Mardil Voronwë. The Stewards were to rule "until the King returns", because it was uncertain at first whether Eärnur had been killed or not. In addition, Eärnur left without an heir, and while many others in Gondor could lay some sort of claim to the kingship, those claims generally had some sort of doubt, and no one wanted to risk another civil war like the Kin-strife."
All this underlies Aragorn's claim to the throne, where there is still the question of "is the line of Arnor entitled or not to claim the throne of Gondor?" and which is part of why Denethor rejects any such claim. Tolkien doesn't make a big upfront deal of it, but this kind of tension is still present and still underlying the entire question of "who rules now that Denethor is dead?", made even more complicated by the fact that they are in the middle of a giant freakin' war of destruction which will mean literal life or death for the entire free world. If Imrahil, for instance, decided to push his claim to the Stewardship because of his blood-ties to Denethor's family, that is a huge potential problem.
And since they don't yet know about Denethor's suicide, Aragorn is being very careful not to stir up more trouble than they need at this particular point - returning victorious from the field of battle, but with the war still on-going:
"Now as the sun went down Aragorn and Éomer and Imrahil drew near the City with their captains and knights; and when they came before the Gate Aragorn said:
‘Behold the Sun setting in a great fire! It is a sign of the end and fall of many things, and a change in the tides of the world. But this City and realm has rested in the charge of the Stewards for many long years, and I fear that if I enter it unbidden, then doubt and debate may arise, which should not be while this war is fought. I will not enter in, nor make any claim, until it be seen whether we or Mordor shall prevail. Men shall pitch my tents upon the field, and here I will await the welcome of the Lord of the City.’
But Éomer said: ‘Already you have raised the banner of the Kings and displayed the tokens of Elendil’s House. Will you suffer these to be challenged?’
‘No,’ said Aragorn. ‘But I deem the time unripe; and I have no mind for strife except with our Enemy and his servants.’
And the Prince Imrahil said. Your words, lord, are wise, if one who is a kinsman of the Lord Denethor may counsel you in this matter. He is strong-willed and proud, but old; and his mood has been strange since his son was stricken down. Yet I would not have you remain like a beggar at the door.’
‘Not a beggar,’ said Aragorn. ‘Say a captain of the Rangers, who are unused to cities and houses of stone.’ And he commanded that his banner should be furled; and he did off the Star of the North Kingdom and gave it to the keeping of the sons of Elrond."
Tolkien may not make as big a production of it as Martin, but he too is aware of power politics going on.
I'd agree that he was aware of the significance of power politics. But then, people who wrote down legends were certainly aware of the significance of power politics in their own times, and they depicted a world where those sorts of complexities and challenges were more marginal than in their reality.
I didn't really read that as a nod to Realpolitik, but more of Tolkien wanting to have Aragorn display the grace and Christian humility which is a key aspect of being a good king, for Tolkien. Throughout all his stories all the good rulers are graceful and modest, while arrogant and boastful rulers almost define his genre of bad kings -- think of the way the kings of Numenor came to grief.
Once I start quoting The Letters, I can't stop. So here's something about politics:
"On Politics (lack of):
I dislike the use of 'political' in such a context; it seems to me false. It seems clear to me that Frodo's duty was 'humane' not political. He naturally thought first of the Shire, since his roots were there, but the quest had as its object not the preserving of this or that polity, such as the half republic half aristocracy of the Shire, but the liberation from an evil tyranny of all the 'humane' [ humane: this (being in a fairy-story) includes of course Elves, and indeed all 'speaking creatures']– including those, such as 'easterlings' and Haradrim, that were still servants of the tyranny.
Denethor was tainted with mere politics: hence his failure, and his mistrust of Faramir. It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked. Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful. He had become a 'political' leader: sc. Gondor against the rest.
But that was not the policy or duty set out by the Council of Elrond. Only after hearing the debate and realizing the nature of the quest did Frodo accept the burden of his mission. Indeed the Elves destroyed their own polity in pursuit of a 'humane' duty. This did not happen merely as an unfortunate damage of War; it was known by them to be an inevitable result of victory, which could in no way be advantageous to Elves. Elrond cannot be said to have a political duty or purpose.
Auerbach's use of 'political' may at first sight seem more justified; but it is not, I think, really admissible-not even if we acknowledge the weariness to which mere 'errantry' was reduced as the pastime reading of a class chiefly interested in feats of arms and love.[ chiefly interested: that is as themes of 'literature', as an amusement. Actually most of them were primarily interested in the acquisition of land and the use of marriage-alliances in furthering their aims.] About as amusing to us (or to me) as are stories about cricket, or yarns about a touring team, to those who (like me) find cricket (as it now is) a ridiculous bore. But the feats of arms in (say) Arthurian Romance, or romances attached to that great centre of imagination, do not need to 'fit into a politically purposive pattern'. [Not unless 'political' is narrowed (or enlarged), so that we are considering imaginatively only one centre or fortress of order and grace surrounded by enemies: the unfilled woods and mountains, hostile and barbarous men, wild beasts and monsters, and the Unknown. The defence of the realm may then indeed become symbolic of the human situation.]
So it was in the earlier Arthurian traditions. Or at least this thread of primitive but powerful imagination was an important element in them. As also in Beowulf. Auerbach should approve of Beowulf, for in it an author tried to fit a deed of 'errantry' into a complex political field: the English traditions of the international relations of Denmark, Gotland, and Sweden in ancient days. But that is not the strength of the story, rather its weakness. Beowulf's personal objects in his journey to Denmark are precisely those of a later Knight: his own renown, and above that the glory of his lord and king; but all the time we glimpse something deeper. Grendel is an enemy who has attacked the centre of the realm, and brought into the royal hall the outer darkness, so that only in daylight can the king sit upon the throne. This is something quite different and more horrible than a 'political' invasion of equals – men of another similar realm, such as Ingeld's later assault upon Heorot.
The overthrow of Grendel makes a good wonder-tale, because he is too strong and dangerous for any ordinary man to defeat, but it is a victory in which all men can rejoice because he was a monster, hostile to all men and to all humane fellowship and joy. Compared with him even the long politically hostile Danes and Gears were Friends, on the same side. It is the monstrosity and fairy-tale quality of Grendel that really makes the tale important, surviving still when the politics have become dim and the healing of Danish-Geatish relations in an 'entente cordiale' between two ruling houses a minor matter of obscure history. In that political world Grendel looks silly, though he certainly is not silly, however naif may be the poet's imagination and description of him.
Of course in 'real life' causes are not clear cut — if only because human tyrants are seldom utterly corrupted into pure manifestations of evil will. As far as I can judge some seem to have been so corrupt, but even they must rule subjects only part of whom are equally corrupt, while many still need to have 'good motives', real or feigned, presented to them. As we see today. Still there are clear cases: e.g. acts of sheer cruel aggression, in which therefore right is from the beginning wholly on one side, whatever evil the resentful suffering of evil may eventually generate in members of the right side. There are also conflicts about important things or ideas. In such cases I am more impressed by the extreme importance of being on the right side, than I am disturbed by the revelation of the jungle of confused motives, private purposes, and individual actions (noble or base) in which the right and the wrong in actual human conflicts are commonly involved. If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict. A judge must assign right and wrong according to principles which he holds valid in all cases. That being so, the right will remain an inalienable possession of the right side and Justify its cause throughout. (I speak of causes, not of individuals. Of course to a judge whose moral ideas have a religious or philosophical basis, or indeed to anyone not blinded by partisan fanaticism, the rightness of the cause will not justify the actions of its supporters, as individuals, that are morally wicked. But though 'propaganda' may seize on them as proofs that their cause was not in fact 'right', that is not valid. The aggressors are themselves primarily to blame for the evil deeds that proceed from their original violation of justice and the passions that their own wickedness must naturally (by their standards) have been expected to arouse. They at any rate have no right to demand that their victims when assaulted should not demand an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.)
Similarly, good actions by those on the wrong side will not justify their cause. There may be deeds on the wrong side of heroic courage, or some of a higher moral level: deeds of mercy and forbearance. A judge may accord them honour and rejoice to see how some men can rise above the hate and anger of a conflict; even as he may deplore the evil deeds on the right side and be grieved to see how hatred once provoked can drag them down. But this will not alter his judgement as to which side was in the right, nor his assignment of the primary blame for all the evil that followed to the other side."
Tolkien is clear that the Elves had their own Fall, but in a different manner to that of Men. "The Silmarillion" takes a lot from Nordic mythology; if you compare the stories of Turin Turambar and Kullervo, you see the resemblance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullervo
Feanor is a fascinating character, so talented, so great, and so stubborn. I'm not a fan. Though there are those who do admire and defend the Feanorians. You can see how a single charismatic leader can cause an entire people to follow along with his very bad decisions. I find his death very darkly humorous, and I don't know if Tolkien intended that along with poetic irony (it would be of a piece with the kind of grim humour in ancient sagas): after all his great speeches and proclamations and all his (somewhat exaggerated) belief in his own abilities and powers, when he does finally get to Middle-earth on the trail of Morgoth, he is killed (in a relatively short time) because he doesn't have the strategic sense not to pursue the fleeing forces of Morgoth, he gets killed by a Balrog (not even in hand-to-hand combat with Morgoth) and knows in his dying moments that the Noldor he led haven't a hope of winning this war. Then he dies and his body is reduced to ashes by the fire of his spirit, leaving his sons bound by the dreadful Oath and the people who believed in him and followed him out of Valinor stuck in Middle-earth to wage a hopeless war. Nobody, not even the Valar, come out of it looking wholly blameless, and Feanor is the greatest casualty of his own pride precisely because of his very real greatness.
From the collected letters:
"There are other stories almost equally full in treatment, and equally independent and yet linked to the general history. There is the Children of Húrin, the tragic tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Níniel – of which Turin is the hero: a figure that might be said (by people who like that sort of thing, though it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo."
Okay, I am rebuked there for searching for the 'real' inspiration behind the tales. I want to quote a long bit from the letters about the Elves and their Fall, and that will probably hit up against the Substack comment limit, so breaking off here as (1/2)
Well, it was their turn. Men were Fallen in the Lord of the Rings, the Dwarves in The Hobbit. Nobody managed to avoid being ejected (through their own faults) from Eden.
If you like the Lord of the Rings universe, but prefer a more realistic take on the conflict a la Game of Thrones (first two seasons), have I got the book for you!
It's Kirill Yeskov's (1999) revisionist tale "The Last Ringbearer." Here is an example of his writing style & way to set up the conflict. We are in a meeting of the White Council, the theme is "The final solution to the Mordorian problem", and Saruman is adressing Gandalf:
“Have you any pity on them?”
“On whom?”
“On the people, Gandalf, the people! As I understand it, you have just sentenced the
civilization of Mordor to death, in the name of the higher good. But any civilization consists of people, so they would have to be exterminated, completely, with no chance of recovery. Right?”
“Pity is a poor adviser, Saruman. Haven’t you looked in the Mirror with the rest of us?”
Gandalf pointed to the large object in the middle of the table, which looked most like a huge bowl full of quicksilver. “There are many roads to the future, but whichever of them Mordor takes, no later than three centuries hence it will access the forces of Nature that no one will be able to harness. Would you like to once again watch them turn the entire Middle Earth and Far West into ashes, in a blink of an eye?”
“You are correct, Gandalf, and it would be dishonest to deny such a possibility. But then
you should exterminate the Dwarves, too: they have already wakened the Terror of the Deep once, and it took all our magic to prevent it from escaping. You know that those bearded tightwads are mulishly stubborn and not inclined to learn from their mistakes…”
“All right, let us not speak of what is possible, and speak only of the inevitable. If you do not wish to look into the Mirror, look at the smoke rising from their coal furnaces and copper refineries. Walk the salt pans into which they have turned the lands west of Núrnen and try to find one living plant on those half-a-thousand square miles. But make sure not to do it on a windy day, when salty dust rises like a wall over the plain of Mordor, choking everything in its path… And note that they have done all that barely out of the crib; what do you think they will do later?”
“Gandalf, a child is always a disaster in the house. First dirty diapers, then broken toys;
later, the family clock taken apart; to say nothing of what happens when he grows up a bit. A house without children, on the other hand, is a model of cleanliness and order, yet somehow its owners are usually not too happy about that, especially as they age.”
“Saruman, always have I been amazed by your cunning ability to turn another’s words
inside out, and disprove obvious truths via sly casuistry. But by the Halls of Valinor! it will not work now. The Middle Earth population is now a multitude of peoples living in
harmony with nature and the heritage of their ancestors. These people and their entire way of life are now under a dire threat, and my duty is to avert it at all costs. A wolf plundering my sheep has its own reasons for doing so, but I have no intent of figuring them out!”
“I am, by the way, no less concerned with the fate of the Gondorians and the Rohirrim than you are; but I look further into the future. Do you, a member of the White Council, not know that the totality of magical knowledge by its very nature can not grow beyond what was once received from Aulë and Oromë? You can lose it quicker or slower, but no one has the power to reverse the loss. Every generation of wizards is weaker than the previous one; sooner or later men will face Nature alone. And then they will need Science and Technology – provided you haven’t eradicated those by then.”
“They don’t need your science, for it destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!”
“Strange is the talk of Soul and Harmony on the lips of a man who is about to start a war. As for science, it is dangerous not to them, but to you – or, rather, to your warped self esteem. What are we wizards but consumers of that which our predecessors have created, while they are creators of new knowledge? We face the Past, they face the Future. You have once chosen magic, and therefore will never cross the boundaries set by the Valar, whereas in their science the growth of knowledge – and hence, power – is truly unlimited. You are consumed by the worst kind of envy – that of a craftsman for an artist… Well, I suppose this is a weighty enough reason for murder; you’re neither the first nor the last.”
“You don’t believe this yourself,” Gandalf shrugged calmly.
“No, I suppose I do not,” Saruman shook his head sadly. “You know, those who are
motivated by greed, lust for power, or wounded pride are half-way tolerable, at least they feel pangs of conscience sometimes. But there is nothing more fearsome than a bright-eyed enthusiast who’d decided to benefit mankind; such a one can drown the world in blood without hesitation. Those people’s favorite saying is: ‘There are things more important than peace and more terrible than war’ – I believe you’ve heard this one, no?”
“I accept the responsibility, Saruman; History will vindicate me.”
“I have no doubt that it will; after all, history will be written by those who will win under
your banner. There are tried and true recipes for that: cast Mordor as the Evil Empire that wished to enslave the entire Middle Earth, and its inhabitants as non-human monsters that rode werewolves and ate human flesh… I am not talking about history now, but rather yourself. Allow me to repeat my rude question about the people who hold the knowledge of the civilization of Mordor. That they will have to be destroyed, quite literally, is beyond doubt – ‘uproot the weed entirely’ – otherwise the whole endeavor is meaningless. I would like to know, then, whether you – yes, you personally – will participate in the weeding; will you cut off their heads yourself?.. Silence? Such are ever your ways, you benefactors of humanity! Craft the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem, sure, but when it’s time to implement it, you always hide in the bushes. It’s executioners you need, so that you can later point at them in disgust: it’s all their excesses…”
... Yeskov wrote in Russian, and the book was translated in 2010 by Yisroel Markov. It is sometimes derogatively pushed aside as "fan fiction", but The Last Ringbearer is a hefty 269 page work on its own, and Yeskov/Markov simply write better than the rather heavy-handed prose of Tolkien. Link here:
It's also fanfiction in that it takes canon characters and re-jigs them to fit the new author's purposes.
Saruman was *never* a humanitarian concerned with the poor wee Orc babies, and though I can see why someone whose tastes run to materialistic atheism should cast LOTR as "stinky old hokey fake religion versus True Shiny Science!", that is not the case.
There are good ways and bad ways to use science, and in Middle-earth many of the Most Advanced Minds used science and technology to create hellscapes because they had no care for the larger picture.
Saruman has a mind of metal and wheels, but Gandalf is not Anti-Science Mouthpiece. He is the Maia who went by choice to Nienna, the Power of Pity and Mercy. The "craftsman versus artist" jibe is neat, but that's because both Saruman and Sauron are Maiar of Aule and their mindset is making, creating, manufacturing using the 'science and technology' that revamped version of Saruman is presenting as the way forward for Men in the Fourth Age.
Gandalf is not concerned with that. He is concerned with healing, understanding, forgiving and judging.
I have no quarrel with your interpretation of LOTR.
But that is also why LOTR so obviously is "young adult fiction".
...since there is no problem in LOTR to identify who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. It is pushed down the reader's throat from the very start.
Man-eating wolf-riding cockney-speaking hairy untermenschen versus fair-haired white-skinned proper-English speaking high elves and cute Shropshire-stereotyping halfling natives..I wonder who the author wants us to root for?
There are no shades of grey, there are no real ethical dilemmas where no matter what you do, some dark effects is a price you have to pay; there is no Machiavellian manoeuvres between allies...
It is a very good yarn, and the minutiae Tolkien has built into his alternative universe is impressive to say the least. But the story as such is mind-numbingly predictable, and therefore boring, at least if you compare it to Game of Thrones (season 1 in particular).
...what makes Yeskov's "Russian" re-telling fun to read, is that he does not wholly reverse the good/bad distinction, with Mordor as the good guys and the elves/Gandalf-people as the bad guys. (My small extract is not representative in this regard.) Instead, there are shades of grey and cynical manipulators in many places.
Sauron is loosely modelled on Stalin, including his disastrous industrial policies and trademark tons-of-bricks humour ("where there is a man, there is a problem. Where there is no man, there is no problem"). Ok, Stalin/Sauron is not portrayed as the mass-murderer he was, but that would have oversimplified the story again. Yeskov wants to keep a bit open who to cheer on, if anyone at all.
...Well, the elves come across as particularly cunning, that must be said. But if you put yourself in the shoes of a Yeskov-elf, their behavior seems perfectly rational, from their perspective. Middle-Earth is a tough world, also for elves.
…and concerning the relationship between allies: Did Faramir become so totally star-struck that he wholeheartedly accepted Rohan's vassal-status to Gondor? If you believe a real king would yield to another king just like that, I own a piece of the moon I can sell to you cheaply... but again, how Gondor subordinates Rohan is not a reverse good-bad story either by Yeskov...it's complicated, which makes it fun.
Anyway, don't take my word for it, read the "Russian version" for the fun of it.
(...or don't, because life is short, and what one person considers a fun read is what another person reads as desperately boring. Which is how it should be. This is reading for pleasure only, after all.)
And in any case, we are pretty far removed from the book review by now! (Then again, that is arguably part of the charm of these ACT threads.)
Your annoyance (if I interpret that correctly) reminds me of how fans of Star Trek can be annoyed by Kirk/Spock slashfic. As in: "Couldn't you make up your own universe, your own characters, to tell your story? Why drag mine into this?" But of course that's in part the *point*. The author *chose* to use the same universe, and knowing the reaction of the fans. There can be many possible motives for that, but not many are 100% friendly.
It is recasting the Orcs as sentient individuals though, and that was something Tolkien was grappling with as a problem: they are in *something* of the same case as the Dwarves, being created by a sub-power without the power of embuing consciousness.
I think the approach there makes the question too easy; it's putting it on the level of allegory, which Tolkien staunchly denied: Mordor *is* Soviet Russia, the Orcs *are* the various peoples of the USSR, the West *is* casting them as sub-human beasts in propaganda, etc.
It's not that simple a question to answer. It's very tempting to recast the 'villains' as heroes, and sorry to gore any oxen, but I do see why this work is considered "fan fiction" because this is such a common trope: what if the Dark Lord was really a woobie? What if the 'good guys' were really the bad guys?
Using terms such as "The Final Solution" is disingenuous, and whether the author used such a term, any translator doing so knows *exactly* what they are doing. "Hey, Gandalf, you're Hitler and the Orcs are Jews! How do you like them apples?"
I would like to pose the question: what does the author think of the post-war de-Nazification of Germany? But Germany had its own civilisation! Yes, and a civilisation which somehow led to the creation of the architects of the Final Solution. The question loops around on itself. You of course do not destroy all the Germans, but in the middle of a war, you fight the enemy army in front of you and don't think (too much) about "but what are the hopes and dreams of this man?" And the Orcs had no 'civilisation' as such, but whatever Morgoth and later Sauron imposed on them. If the scattered remnants of the Orc army take to the hills in order to form roving gangs to pillage and plunder, they have to be dealt with like any criminals. The kind of plans Gorbag, for one, would like to implement if he gets a chance to slip away from Sauron's army in the chaos:
"‘They would,’ grunted Gorbag. ‘We’ll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. What d’you say? – if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.’
‘Ah!’ said Shagrat. ‘Like old times.’"
Radagast is the person or wizard to take into account here; after the war is over, he would be the one dealing with the question of 'how to treat the Orcs' since Gandalf is occupied with Elves and Men, but those are not the only species inhabiting Middle-earth, and Radagast 'the Simple, the Bird-Tamer' is concerned with them.
Well, death of the author and all that, but honestly, this is prime teenage/early twenties girl fanfic writer who thinks the lead villain is dreamy and needs to be redeemed and so anything he ever did was not his fault, it's the fault of the 'good guys' who forced him to do that (I may be jaundiced as part of a current fandom completely stans a guy who in canon murdered his own infant son, but he never did nothing bad ever according to the fans).
Tolkien went back and forth on the exact nature of the Orcs:
"It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of 'rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.
...'The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.' In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the 'gods', let alone of God."
Now, the question that author's version of Saruman raises is a good one:
"They would at least 'be' real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even 'mocking' the Children of God. They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.) But whether they could have 'souls' or 'spirits' seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible 'delegation', I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would 'tolerate' that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today. There might be other 'makings' all the same which were more like puppets filled (only at a distance) with their maker's mind and will, or ant-like operating under direction of a queen-centre."
If Orcs are now in the world, they are now part of the world, and can't simply be exterminated like vermin unless it can be proven that they *are* mindless, destructive vermin and there is no other way to deal with them. George R.R. Martin's little jibe about "baby Orcs in their cradles" is this way of thinking, but the Orcs didn't have cradles or raising baby Orcs in this way. We're anthropomorphising, at best, and using them as a stalking-horse for pet political preaching, at worst.
Speaking of "what to do with the enemy post-war":
"People in this land seem not even yet to realize that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. Whose brave men are just about as brave as ours. Whose industry is about 10 times greater. And who are – under the curse of God – now led by a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil: a typhoon, a passion: that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting."
"There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done."
But in the end, Tolkien is not writing about humans or any form of humans, even under an allegorical form:
"There is no 'symbolism' or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort 'five wizards = five senses' is wholly foreign to my way of thinking. There were five wizards and that is just a unique part of history. To ask if the Orcs 'are' Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs."
In case our Russian author is anyway unclear on that last point, the answer is a big HELL, NO! 😀
"[Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.]
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable".
I think (from the excerpt, I haven't read the book) that The Last Ringbearer is about industrialization being good, just as LOTR is anti-industrialization.
The intro of LOTR has a bit about needing to make compromises as the population goes up-- very few hobbits live in holes any more, and I wonder how the people of middle earth would have managed if they seriously didn't want to industrialize.
It's also part of the larger argument here: is the nasty brutish and short novel genre *genuinely* more 'realistic' than the heroic and idealistic? There are people who do awful things. There are also people who do marvellous, self-sacrificing things. If you're going to claim that "This work of dull grey misery is more true to life", you have to deal with the good things in life, including the good things humans do. Leaving those out is every bit as unrealistic as the Technicolour Middle Ages. The swing from that to "mud-smeared peasants in brown rags" was just as unrealistic, yet because it *seemed* more true-to-life (on the grounds that people are more cynical in their judgements) then it was taken as Real Historic Truth.
"To summarise, our slum fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible as spiritual fact. One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. The men who write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle classes or the upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed the educated classes. Hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it.
...The slum novelist gains his whole effect by the fact that some detail is strange to the reader; but that detail by the nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. It cannot be strange to the soul which he is professing to study. The slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. But to the man he is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the office and a supper at Pagani’s. The slum novelist is content with pointing out that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe looks dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But the man he is supposed to be studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe. The chiaroscuro of the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows are a light grey. But the high lights and the shadows are not a light grey in that life any more than in any other. The kind of man who could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind of man who could share them. In short, these books are not a record of the psychology of poverty. They are a record of the psychology of wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a description of the state of the slums. They are only a very dark and dreadful description of the state of the slummers.
...The realistic story is certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story. If what you desire is deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. But, at least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic story. The melodrama is much more like life."
I don't know whether Lewis was influenced by this essay, but Till We Have Faces did a remarkable job of showing the past as normal for the people who were living in it. I'm not sure I've seen any other book which as good on that particular point.
"The Screwtape Letters" also had a bit where the demon is advised to make the patient think that his unpleasant experiences (being caught up in an air-raid, neighbours being mean to him, etc.) are "real life", whereas his pleasant ones are all some kind of fantasy, even though, objectively speaking, they're all equally real and equally happening to him. I've always felt that was a swipe at the kind of pseudo-worldly-wise attitude which makes people say that GOT is more realistic than LOTR because the characters in the former are more unpleasant.
I've read pretty much everything posted on that blog, and the main thing is:
1. In terms of background, Tolkien studied extensively Old and Middle English texts and by extension their material contexts. The cultures portrayed in Lord of the Rings are quite specifically and intentionally modeled off of actual medieval societies. Martin... does not have nearly so thorough a background on the subject. I could find a couple mean quotes from him that suggest a general lack of interest in details and not much awareness of specifics.
2. In military terms, Tolkien is much more accurate. He is an actual former soldier who understands morale and how battles play out, both from a historical perspective and from personal experience. Martin does not understand the actual mechanics of battle very well, particularly the logistics side of things, thus the very silly numbers of troop totals and distances traveled.
3. In sociological terms, Martin is very very dire. This is most visible in his portrayal of religion and how Westeros handles trust and honor. Religion is portrayed as lower class, and the social and legal impact of religion is minimized because nobody appears to believe in it. Stannis does not believe in it enough to believe Melisandre is a true priest, but has a half-hearted commitment; his soldiers and lords appear to only believe in it just enough to get a half-dozen dunked in prison and then call it a day. This is absurd - just imagine a medieval king converting to Islam, for a quick and straightforward comparison. On the second point, trust and honor are not abstract concepts of goodness to be abandoned at the first opportunity, as it often appears, but vitally necessary parts of the administrative structure of a feudal realm - in the absence of trust (which is produced by honorable behavior), there is anarchy. While certainly betrayal does happen, well, contrast the Westerosi saying "words are wind" with the following quotation from Handbook for William, written by a mother advising her son on how best to behave as a vassal in another court:
"Think on that excellent servant of the patriarch Abraham. He traveled a great distance to bring back a wife for his master's son. Because of the confidence of him who gave the command and the wise trustworthiness of him who followed it, the task was fulfilled. The wife found great blessing and great riches in her many descendants. What shall I say of the attitude of Joab, of Abner, and of many others toward the king David? Facing dangers on their king's behalf in many places, they desired with all their might to please their lord more than themselves. And what of those many others in holy Scripture who faithfully obeyed their lords' commands? Because of their watchful strength they were found worthy to flourish in this world."
Part of the point of ASoIaF is that the treacherous behavior of so many of its characters is ultimately self-destructive; however true this lesson may be (and however much the portrayal of treachery in Westeros may be intended purely to display this lesson), its specific manifestation is unrealistic, precisely because people like the Freys and the Boltons would understand the ramifications of their behavior, as would everybody else.
(There are other parts where he is just absolutely blatantly wrong, like the clear sociological nonsense of “A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is deemed a dull affair”, but those tend to be in his "foreigner" societies like the Dothraki or the Unsullied.)
“A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is deemed a dull affair”
Yeah, that's where he gets sloppy about other cultures and about the 'realistic', 'based on historical real-world cultures' part of his novel.
There's a joke Scottish saying (Sir Alex Ferguson quoted it) that "it's not a wedding without a fight" and there's a similar attitude in Ireland, but the whole point is that you *try* to avoid fights and the like. People get drunk at weddings, and drunk people get into fights, but a wedding (or a funeral) is an affair where there is a lot of social expectations and roles and acceptable ways of behaviour, and violence is not part of them.
That's why things like The Red Wedding in Martin's world, and including folksongs in our own world where deaths happened, are the great, exceptional, instances of treachery and accepted as such. Weddings are about love, or if you're being practical, about family alliances. Since you are creating a bridge between two families, within the larger society both of them are part of, things like "deaths at a wedding" are very disruptive, are against the social expectations of the function of a wedding, and create rather than heal breaches.
So if it's a kind of joke about the Dothraki, then that's fine. But if it's anyway meant seriously, then it shows a dysfunctional society that *cannot* survive since deaths in a culture like create blood-feuds and vendettas, and if you're routinely having three new vendettas springing up every time anyone gets married, then you can't afford to have marriages - and the families of those holding the wedding probably get dragged in as collateral damage as well.
If you *don't* have blood-feuds springing up, then you don't have the honour-bound society that the Dothraki are portrayed as being on that level. And if you don't have any means of social sanction or punishment for murders, then you are not portraying a realistic society based on any human culture historical or not, you are portraying a fantasy gang Mafia culture.
Yes, one of the things that struck me about ASoIaF was that it's nominally a medieval/renaissance society, but in the real world, people then were very interested in virtue-- admittedly not the same thing as virtuous, but at least they knew it was important.
Instead, they have a few rules (no incest, no betraying guests) but no general concept of virtue. (Note: I've only read the books once, and not recently.)
I have a small bet with myself that the Iron Band will be ripping off its customers in The Winds of Winter. Defection is everywhere.
I really enjoyed the writing style (full disclosure: also a British Christian), it kind of discouraged me from reading the book which is possibly a good thing? It seems like what's good is not original and what's original isn't good, but I'm already exposed to lots of "Humans are good actually" rhetoric.
These Scott style reviews are really précis and critique, and mean you never need to read the actual book, unless you really want all the expansions. As someone said recently (can't remember who) most books should be a blog post, most blog posts should be a tweet, and most tweets should never be sent.
Sometimes I read I book review and think "definitely want to read this in full" - for example, Days of Rage was one of those, and the Precipice, and I guess 10 Rules for Life as well.
Other times I read a book review and think "I'll add the book to the ever growing list of books I may read if I have the time" - the Wizard and the Prophet, Antifragile and The New Sultan are on that list.
What I was talking about is a definite sense that "given the opportunity cost of reading a book, when I could be reading any other book instead, my time would probably not be best spent reading Humankind."
I agree that most of the value of any work can be condensed into something much shorter. I think this even applies to fiction as well as non-fiction - I often find that short stories are a lot more engaging and memorable than novels, since all of the filler is cut out. This is not an absolute rule of course, I just think it's a shame that longer works are incentivised more than shorter works. For example, there's a lot of great fiction writers on the internet, but once you've got a following they just put out a lot.
If you read 10 rules for life, you didn't read it in full, it's 12 rules for life (although, having also read it, it's 12 chapter titles and a swirl of ideas distributed randomly throughout the book. Peterson is better speaking than writing IMHO)
For some reason I keep making that mistake. I actually listened to the audiobook so that may have worked better than reading it, I kind of enjoyed the swirl of ideas but then I generally listen while doing other things, so my focus isn't 100%.
Audible is very cheap if you keep trying to cancel, they throw loads of free stuff at you to get you to stay, so I've listened to a lot of Audiobooks recently, including Debt, the Righteous Mind, Utopia for Realists and Profit over People. Those books (or at least their authors in the case of Chomsky) were suggested to me by "reviews", so my curiosity was definitely piqued.
My politics is basically just "contrarian" at this point, I disagree with everyone I've just listed but I enjoyed finding out why.
I did quite a bit of stuff on Audible, I just find my retention is really low that way (bad enough at the best of times).
Righteous Mind is good, both excellent content and really clearly written. I did quite a chunk of "Coddling of the American mind", just a bit too depressing!
I don't think my retention of audiobooks is any worse than reading a physical book, and it has the advantage that I can "read" while cooking or running. I do enjoy sitting down with a physical book, but it's hard to find the time!
Audible credits are often cheaper than buying the physical or even Kindle version of the book which was part of the appeal, and there's loads of really good fiction on there too - full cast radio plays are the best, I'm especially impressed that they managed to translate the Sandman from comic book to audio!
"Coddling of the American Mind" seems like the kind of stuff I hear enough about on culture-war podcasts anyway, plus I'm not American and I honestly don't care what they teach at colleges outside of STEM and Medicine anyway.
I don't think the point of the book is to be original research. This is not an acadamic work. More a synthesis of ideas floating around for a general audience. I see a lot into this book that is not original that is good. Some that is not original but bad. But not much that's comletely original (either good or bad). Although there are a few original things;
- The real life lord of the flies
- The Jos de Blok interviews
- Exposing people to the democracy 2.0 shit
- His idea about the origin of religion
Of these four points only the last seems properly bad.
1) What I read about the Stanford prison experiment is that two of the three groups turned out OK, and only the third group of guards became cruel. (Which fits pretty much what the reviewer says.) And further that the reason for this third group is that one of the guards became bored, and decided to try channeling the sadistic prison warden in the movie "Cool Hand Luke" just to see what would happen.
2) I'm a little skeptical of these stories of hundreds of people getting together to plan city budgets. I had a councilman who tried to get citizen input this way, and for me at least it didn't work. First, city budgeting is boring. Second, setting priorities involved questionnaires that demanded you put something like 20 municipal needs in priority order. Somehow, deciding which was the 15th highest and which the 16th highest seemed rather arbitrary.
3) "Love Actually" is not a movie about falling in love. Far too much of it is either about guys who cheat on their existing stable love in favor of a momentary lust, or about stalkers whose victims respond in the way they only do in stalkers' fanciful dreams. That's why "it's called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world."
"I'm a little skeptical of these stories of hundreds of people getting together to plan city budgets."
Also, the story is from Venezuela, which is a country with a governing ideology that stands to benefit from sucess stories of this kind. It's hard to tell if we're getting the full story. Nevertheless I'd like to send an American observer down to witness the sausage making to see how it actually works. There might be something that Anglosphere attempts to do the same thing are missing and that would be worth learning if so.
Venezuela and São Paulo are also in a region of the world (latin america) notable for its high corruption. A Mayor is cheap to bribe. It's a lot more expensive to bribe an entire city. (and even if you did, why not do so throuph public goods that benefit everyone ... improving the city).
Many Massachusetts towns are ongoing experiments in (2). They have what are called "Open Town Meetings," in which the citizens who attend are the "legislature." They take up "Warrant Articles" (the budget, the bylaws, employee salaries, etc.). They allow any citizen to get up and speak, and small numbers of citizens to introduce their own Articles for approval by the meeting. The towns that have Town Meetings are not notably better run than towns with more conventional systems.
As a resident of Massachusetts .... most town meetings approve pretty much everything that the town administration proposes. After all, the administration presents "the facts" and few people know enough to disagree. There are usually a few things that people do know about and care about which take up a lot of time at the meeting but a miniscule part of the town budget.
I don't disagree. The point is more that New England town meetings are an actual implementation of the idea of direct citizen participation in government. It is not a panacea, by any means.
I think contact under conditions of reasonable equality wears down prejudice, but quite a lot of contact left prejudice in place in the slave-holding south.
I have a pet theory for this: power corrupts empathy. If you believe that you have power or authority over someone else, that feeling blocks any empathy, and you feel justified in your coercion. However, if you meet someone on equal terms, your empathy is not blocked, and then you can develop friendship etc with them. A neurological basis for this is explained in the book The Master and the Emissary, in which the author argues that power is a left hemisphere emotion while empathy is controlled by the right hemisphere, and both hemispheres are always in competition with each other.
Well, you know, in the usual meaning of the word empathy gets in the way of an effective use of power. A boss that makes decisions based on his emotional mirroring of the joy or sorrow of whatever random employee he meets today is a well-recognized disaster. So is a military leader, for that matter -- or judge. Ironically, the only way to exercise power humanely is to have a modest but strictly limited emotional identification with the people who are subject to your decisions.
No such limitation applies if you're a peasant rather than a chieftain.
That’s exactly what the research says; contact as equals. Even better if y’all have to work together to get something important done. Then it doesn’t even have to be very long contact.
I've read Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy. My sense of it was that he had a good point that empathy was not and should not be the sole basis of moral reasoning--that it could be biased and lead to poor choices in certain circumstances--but I don't think that he successfully made the case that it was a bad thing overall. Empathy is important for facilitating communication and it's helpful for getting people to overcome animousity and distrust. It's essential for a lot of human cooperation. It just needs to be embedded in a larger ethical system supplemented with other forms of compassion.
Excellent review! Re: "The Lord of the Flies", my view is that Golding wrote it as a rebuttal of "The Coral Island" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coral_Island and so we're immediately into a literary contest of genres, rather than trying to be realistic descriptions of actual society (also Modernism would have been the influence on Golding as a young man, and he was writing in the post-war period, so all this meant that 'grimdark' was the favoured tone for High Literary Novels). So it's all very artificial, but for some reason we're a species that likes to think of ourselves as rough, tough and brutal, at least in our reading material.
Re: toddlers - they are very definitely not blank slates. There's a reason it's called The Terrible Twos, because they are developing minds and wills of their own and are out there getting stuck into everything. Favourite word: "No!" What you describe reminds me very much of all the (alleged) experiments trying to find out what the original language of mankind was, with kings ordering groups of babies to be brought up in isolation so that their first words could be interpreted without anyone teaching them a particular language.
Re: all the social science experiments - I do wonder how much "the ones who claimed afterwards that they only went along with it because it was a psychology experiment in a prestigious university, pretty clearly no one was actually being dangerously electrocuted" had to do with it. Certainly people *will* take orders from "official looking person with a clipboard" but by the same token, if you know that this is all an experiment taking place in a university run by Real Scientists, there probably is an element of "okay, best to just go along with this, nothing bad is really happening" as well.
Re: people don't need nearly as much managing as management claims - "We should be aware that the reason Jos de Blok can slice literally all the middle management out of his nursing company and end up only slightly cheaper is that he pays his nurses a lot more. So maybe don't give up on pay as a lever entirely."
I'm also willing to bet that he hires a *lot* more staff and that staff *don't* work as many hours. The first thing that both public and private health-care providers, from nursing homes to domestic aides, do is to cut corners and penny-pinch by cutting down on staff, hiring less-qualified staff so that they can pay them less, and fudge numbers so that staff are covering a lot more patients than they should officially be doing. This has a huge effect on quality of care, job satisfaction, you name it. If de Blok's organisation is deliberately not doing this kind of penny-pinching, no wonder staff are happier and clients report better care.
I think I fall somewhere in the middle here - I don't think people are as natively nice as Bregman states, but neither do I think that we're all ravening brutes. It's up to circumstances: I don't whole-heartedly agree with this quote from Deep Space Nine during the Dominion War (I do think the Federation has principles that it sticks to) but at the same time, it's not completely wrong:
"Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people... will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes."
Put people under pressure, and some of them will turn into diamonds, and some will just shatter.
I am delighted you mentioned Chesterton on the Cave Man. I'd like to quote an excerpt from his chapter on this in "The Everlasting Man":
"When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall."
Re: domesticated animals, I also wonder if they really are breeding the foxes for friendliness, or for cuteness. Humans find those kind of traits in animals appealing, even certain breeds of lizards as pets have big dark eyes and "smiling" mouths. If you keep selecting for "cute" animals, maybe that also involves "friendly" animals as well, since they are dependent on humans.
*Now* we do, but back when he was writing, there was a whole lot of speculation about what exactly primitive societies had been like with a lack of evidence.
H.G. Wells (ironically, as he was aiming for the "based on science" style) was one of the propagators of the notion of the violent cave man bashing his wife over the head with a club and becoming the tyrannical Old Man:
"True, I cannot set forth here in any great detail any actual proofs of these prehistoric origins; but I never heard of anybody bothering about historic proofs in connection with prehistoric origins. There is quite as much evidence for my favourite uncle’s theory of the primitive pillow as there is for Mr. H.G. Wells’s detailed account of the horrible Old Man, who ruled by terror over twenty or thirty younger men who could have thrown him out of the cave on his apelike ear;
...Nobody expects any historic evidence for things of this sort, because they are prehistoric; and nobody dreams of attempting to found them on any scientific facts; they are simply Science. I do not see why my favourite uncle and I should not be Science too. I do not see why we should not simply make things up out of our own heads; things which cannot possibly be contradicted, just as they cannot possibly be proved."
"To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined.
...In short these details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I have never been able to find it.
...In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard's Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something quite unconnected, one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and philosophical implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole question for us."
"This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural. Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science."
My understanding is that Australian aborigenes did have gerontocracies in which older men ruled over younger ones. I don't know if that applies to cavemen, but the "men's cults" discussed here serve to place older men at higher status:
Or Afghanistan, pre-1979 or so. Or Somalia, right now.
I understand that one of the ways in which the ongoing war in Afghanistan has really disrupted that society is that it has terminated the rule by village elders, who used to serve as a moderating influence on the younger hotheads.
Somali immigrants to the US have raised similar complained to me. Not about war, but that back home, tribal norms meant that the young men had to listen to their elders. This in turn kept them from doing all kinds of stupid and rash stuff.
> and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things
Not only this is hopelessly outdated, I strongly doubt it was correct at the time of writing. (But on the other hand, Dmanisi skull #4 is considered to be a proof that our ancestors took care of their elders almost 2 million years ago. And "I feel the spirit of cave-man rise within me, let me chew some food for my toothless great-uncle" works even better.)
They were selecting foxes for not minding being handled by humans, not for appearance. I suppose the cuter foxes might have been handled differently and tolerated it better.
"Belyayev set down strict guidelines for the breeding program. Goldman said, "Starting at one month of age, and continuing every month throughout infancy, "the foxes were tested for their reactions to an experimenter. The experimenter would attempt to pet and handle the fox while offering it food. In addition, the experimenters noted whether the foxes preferred to spend time with other foxes, or with humans." After the fox had reached sexual maturity at an age of seven to eight months, "they had their final test and assigned an overall tameness score." Among the factors that went into this score were the tendency "to approach an experimenter standing at the front of its home pen" and "to bite the experimenters when they tried to touch it."[6] By way of ensuring that the pups' tameness was a result of genetic selection and not of interactions with human beings, the foxes were not subjected to any kind of training and were only permitted brief periods of contact with people.[6]
"As reported on by Trut, the tests for tameness took the following form, which was still in use as of 2009: "When a pup is one month old, an experimenter offers it food from his hand while trying to stroke and handle the pup. The pups are tested twice, once in a cage and once while moving freely with other pups in an enclosure, where they can choose to make contact either with the human experimenter or with another pup. The test is repeated monthly until the pups are six or seven months old." At the age of seven or eight months, the pups are given a tameness score and placed in one of three groups. The least domesticated are in Class III; those that allow humans to pet and handle them, but that do not respond to contact with friendliness, are in Class II; the ones that are friendly with humans are in Class I. After only six generations, Belyayev and his team had to add a higher category, Class IE, the "domesticated elite", which "are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the 20th generation 35% were 'elite', and by the 30th generation 70% to 80% of the selected generation was 'elite.'"[2]"
Imagine the taming forces and scores we apply to each other. Not very surprising that most of us spend most of our lives whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking each other.
That's very thorough and they do seem to have tried not to interfere too much. But the end results also sound like the "oh, cute!" reactions humans have to certain animals, so I suppose friendliness = neoteny = cuteness since we probably are 'programmed' to find juvenile/infantile features appealing in order to make sure we take care of our infants and don't simply abandon them and wander off. Or if we do, that other adult members of the species will take care of them.
An interesting question is whether they would have succeeded had they chosen a species we consider naturally ugly. Would it be possible to breed snakes to be more appealing to humans?
Thank you for quoting this; also I believe “Dagmar Doubledick” is a most excellent name for an RPG character and shall be stealing it for my next campaign.
That and "Gorlias Fitzgorgon (that noble character)". Don't forget Gorlias if/when your campaign takes you through a haunted wood with the spectres of all the dead hanging from the trees! 😉
I was under the impression that "Lord of the Flies" was intended to lambast the education (some might say brainwashing) of well-to-do British schoolboys, in particular — not make any claims about human nature at large.
A key thing you need to understand about Dutch healthcare (and Dutch semi-government in general), is that it is micromanagement hell. There is a ton of administrative work pushed on healthcare workers, so they are effectively part-time managers anyway (in the reporting and paper pushing sense). Just very poorly paid and having to follow shitty rules, rather than use common sense.
Jos de Blok's solution was to somehow convince the insurance companies and the government to make exceptions to these rules (huge charisma?) and then make his employees do all kinds of administrative tasks that they probably prefer to offload to a manager, as we see elsewhere in the economy, where that is actually an option. Yet in Dutch outpatient healthcare, employees have only the choice between putting up with being made part-time managers and actually being able to do what they think is right, or being made part-time managers and being forced into working in a way they think is wrong. That the former wins over the latter is not evidence that managers are useless or that companies without managers can generally be competitive (note that you can often find exceptions to a rule, especially when there are niche environments that are atypical).
I think that in a more sensible regulatory system, Jos de Blok would be outcompeted by organizations with managers and other specialists who don't provide care themselves, as those are the companies that constantly win in less punishing regulatory environments.
> have been unable to establish whether Bregman has got his Nikolais muddled, or whether Stalin instituted a pogrom specifically against geneticists called Nikolai
Often a source of domestic fires; coming home drunk(ish) from a night out, feeling hungry, putting the chip pan on the cooker, then forgetting about it (because drunk) and it goes on fire and burns down the house. Not always drunken, accidents happen to everyone! Fire safety demonstration about how to deal with a chip pan fire from 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTrth1ywHM4
Less frequent nowadays because of electric deep-fat fryers and many more takeaway options so you don't have to cook your own fat-laden, high-carb meals after the pub 😀
"Which is odd because broken windows theory turns out to be based on one experiment done by our old friend Philip Zimbardo"
Wrong. Broken windows/"nuisance abatement" is the ONLY criminological intervention with a replicated randomized control trial. See Manzi's "Uncontrolled".
"New York's great crime statistics just reflect that violent crime was falling everywhere in this period"
It fell more in NYC. "Dynamic concentration" seems to be a big part of that.
"What we can say with confidence is that zero-tolerance policing massively, disproportionately, picks on ethnic minorities":
I forgot to add: per "The Nurture Assumption" on an experiment raising an infant alongside a chimp, the latter develops way quicker early on and so the infant would start imitating the obviously superior species. The human brain size runs up against the limits of the birth canal, so we start out relatively helpless compared to other species.
It may not be entirely that. We're a very long-lived species, with low reproduction rates, which tends to make us vulnerable to environmental change. One of the ways we compensate for that is retaining far more plasticity than most species, and one of the ways we do that is by being born in more of a "blank slate" condition so that we can adapt to whatever circumstances exist when we are born.
For example, it would certainly be more efficient for us to be born speaking a language, the way animals (mostly) are. But it's more adaptive if we are born with only an instinct to communicate and facility for learning language, and learn whatever language is actually extant and useful when we emerge. Takes a little longer, but we gain a lot (as a species) in being able to adapt to changing conditions *within individual lifetimes* instead of having to wait for new generations.
That blogpost 'refuting' Marshall calls it "all bullshit", but cites nothing to support that argument, so I'm not sure why you bothered linking it, as it brings nothing to the table but invective.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has:
> While the data he used to support this claim has been challenged, his overall conclusion - a significant number do not fire their weapons in combat - has been verified by multiple studies performed by other armies, going back to the 18th century
That has an actual citation (Holmes, Richard (2003). Acts of War: The Behaviour of Men in Battle), and the review itself referenced concrete examples (double loaded muskets in the Civil War) of this phenomenon that predate Marshall's specific claims.
I'm leaning to agree with the Wikipedia summary here: his data may be wrong but his conclusion seems correct.
The Wikipedia article is controlled by an editor eager to defend Marshall - to the point of citing an article that argues against the 25% claim as proof it is widely accepted! The sources it actually cites for the claims of studies backing it up (Beevor and Holmes) are rather poor - Holmes just mentions the claim while discussing Marshall's work, while Beevor's evidence (aside from Marshall) is an uncitied claims of Soviet concerns which does not say anything about what percentage refused to fire, a misinterpration of Lionel Wigram's views on morale (which have themselves been challenged), and another uncited claim of Germans taking similar views to Wigram, which again does not gives percentages and is probably also a misinterpretation.
I've read Acts of War, although it's been a few years. Holmes was working well after Marshall's fraud came out, and he's a lot less accepting than Dave Grossman of it. I think there's probably some truth that people tend to be reluctant to shoot other people, but that's a big difference from people not firing their weapons at all, which is what Marshall claims. The wiki article is wrong on this.
I am less sure that the double-loaded musket thing actually proves what Grossman (the likely source) claims it does. This is a known issue with muzzle-loading weapons, and the battleship HMS Thunderer had a nasty accident when one of the two guns in her turret fired, the crew missed the misfire, and double-loaded. This was during peacetime training, with a bunch of people involved. And they still screwed it up. So I'm skeptical that it's all malingering, as Grossman posits.
Like a number of these reviews, this one is brilliantly written in the details but needs editing. I have a plesant overall impression of wit, the well-turned phrase, and that the reviewer kind of liked the book, maybe a little against his better judgment, but I'm not entirely sure what the book is *about*.
People are nicer than you think? Social science research is often massively overinterpreted by the time it turns into a shibboleth? (Although the latter point would be made more persuasively if the review itself didn't quietly switch from deep skepticism about single "key" social science experiments at the top to a mild credulity about them at the bottom.) We shouldn't draw our ideas about human nature from popular novels? There's a lot of shitty management out there, so some shocking percentage of the time *reducing* management gets better results? If all of these, what is the thesis that ties it all together, somehow?
I suppose if you're a fan of snarky hatchet jobs that spend too much effort trying to be witty you might like this review. I found it severely lacking. From the first sentence I found the tone grating making it difficult to take the rest of the review seriously.
I admit I'm quite biased. I read this book last summer and found it was one of the most interesting things I've read in quite a while (and I read a lot).
The reviewer made some interesting and valid points. It's too bad he chose to do so in a way that I found so off-putting.
The blitz example reminds me of how in the testimony coming out about the UK covid response, most recently from Dominic Cummings, they seem to have made the same mistake again. With a widely held belief that a lockdown would be impossible as noone would obey it without draconian enforcement. But when it was actually tried Britain had some of the highest rates of adherence in the western world, and it required minimal direct enforcement
Thoughtful, enjoyable, and interesting review, thanks! There are a lot of run-on sentences, though. Also, formatting note: there's an incorrectly placed quotation mark at the end of the Part 1's first paragraph.
(I don't know what you're referring to or mean by "at one time we were looking into the literature on forecast accuracy measures. We found one using arctan." Are "forecast accuracy measures" stuff like Brier scores and log-scores and whatnot? (If so, what exactly was the measure (just arctan(probability)??), and what was their pitch for using something as random-seeming as arctan?))
Arctan gives the angular coordinate when transforming to polar coordinates ... and maybe that could related to something, somehow... ugh.
Some Google results indicate that someone once has used "arctan metric" |arctan(x) - arctan(y)| for some arcane purposes.
However, I do wonder if the author of the review is misremembering and saw something that used what is often called "arcsine transform", which is sometimes used on proportion data in range [0 ... 1] that is assumed to come from a binomial process. (Do not let the name fool you, it is actually arcsin(sqrt(x)).) Theoretically, under some circumstances, it should render binomial distributed data to something with constant variance. This kind of "variance stabilization" is supposed to make the data amenable for further analysis with methods that have some particular assumptions about variance. I wouldn't know it is actually useful for forecast accuracy.
After learning this transform and Freeman-Tukey transforms [1] existed, I have become wary of having any expectations what transformations people may think they should apply.
A common forecast error measure is Sum(|actual-forecast|/|actual|). This goes wrong if actual is 0. Observing that as x-> infinity arctan(x)->pi/2 the author of the paper proposed defining
e={ pi/2 if actual = 0
{ arctan(|actual-forecast|/|actual|) otherwise
Then taking error = Sum(e). While this avoids divide by zero errors, it doesn't give a remotely interpretable result.
Sorry for the late reply - I didn't feel I could respond during the competition without breaking anonymity.
“we're not led by toddlers, at least not since Donald Trump was voted out." (I'm allowed to be snide about your previous choice of president without actually understanding the issues at stake, just like you're allowed to be snide about Brexit without actually understanding the issues at stake.)”
No not snide but rather charitable if you look back at it realistically. Nor lacking in understanding. It was quite simply as bad as it looked
I notice that the absolute number matters less to me than the feeling of fairness.
I've purposefully work slowly and poorly when I noticed the boss did nothing other than own the building, and I've busted my ass for very little when the boss shows up to a job site to show willing.
Likewise, I'd rather work in a place where everyone is compensated fairly, then get a couple thousand more in a place where other people are getting screwed.
Oh, dear. I am not impressed by Bregman's scholarship. I haven't actually finished the review yet, but taking SLA Marshall at face value verges on scholarly malpractice, to put it nicely. One of my college professors would use even stronger words. He was making things up, and his stuff about people not firing their weapons has been thoroughly debunked.
I'm also skeptical of his view on the Blitz. To paraphrase a book I read many years ago, the average Briton's enthusiasm for Churchill's policies was inversely proportional to how heavily he was being bombed every night. Were the early advocates of air power overenthusiastic about how effective terror bombing would be? Yes, absolutely. Did governments that were being bombed have lots of motive to downplay the morale effects of the bombing? Again, yes. Is taking London Can Take It! at face value also borderline scholarly malpractice, given that it was made as propaganda for American audiences? Not as much as taking "Men Against Fire" seriously in the Year of Our Lord 2020, but this is really not impressive.
These are by far and away the two things I've run across so far that I'm most familiar with. And he's badly botched both of them. I believe that the amount of salt it is appropriate to take the rest of the book with is enough that the total consumed is going to be mostly sodium chloride.
The other point I feel qualified to comment on is the bit about German POWs and combat effectiveness. I am very much not a historian of ground combat in Europe in WWII, but from what I can recall, the general theory is that the Germans were more effective in combat because they had better NCOs and junior officers, and maintained high standards in those areas right up until the end of the war. The stuff on fighting for small groups is pretty standard cohesion stuff that all militaries use these days, and definitely not specific to Germany.
As for why they kept fighting when other nations would have surrendered, I'd guess that probably did have something to do with the Nazis and the fact that the people fighting in 1945 basically never knew a time when Hitler wasn't running the country.
Well that and Stalin's price for keeping the bulk of the Wehrmacht busy in the East was No Separate Peace, and *nobody* wants to surrender to the Red Army, surrending to Sauron's orcs would be preferable.
All I know about this is what I've seen regarding Pope Benedict XVI, who did have wartime service in the German Army in his youth (this was raised after his election by groups pro- and anti-him over "Nazi Pope?" https://abcnews.go.com/International/pope-benedict-dogged-nazi-past-achievements-jewish-relations/story?id=18469350). It seems that towards the end of the war that everyone was being conscripted, of all ages, as well as having things like membership of the Hitler Youth be compulsory:
"In 1941 he was compelled to join the Hitler Youth, and in 1943 he was drafted into the German military, serving in an antiaircraft unit in Bavaria before being sent to Hungary to set tank traps in 1945. He deserted in April of that year and was captured by American forces and held prisoner for a brief period."
So he was enrolled into the Hitler Youth at 14, drafted into an anti-aircraft unit at 16, and sent off to Hungary at 18. So yeah, I imagine there was a big difference between "okay, the Americans have arrived in my home town, it's safe to desert" and "last line between the Soviets and my home town", as well as more of a sense of fighting for the sake of each other because "this is a bunch of guys from my home town" or "we're all in the same boat, we were all drafted, none of us chose to be here" rather than fighting for "The 1,000 Year Reich".
I recall Bryan Caplan pointing out that support for any war seems to start out strong and then decline over time, and that includes WW2. But I can't find the post now.
The reviewer doesn't mention it, but Bregman is aware of Marshall's shortcomings, and does discuss them. Bregman's conclusion is that while Marshall screwed up his statistics, his conclusion has been replicated by people who didn't, and is therefore essentially sound.
Marshall didn't screw up his statistics, he committed academic fraud. His numbers for how many units he interviewed don't add up, his notebooks don't have the information behind the "ratio of fire" theory, and his assistant said categorically that he never asked his subjects about them firing their weapons. If this is the base that gives people the idea, then I'm going to examine everything that grows from it with the utmost skepticism. Particularly when later interviews of the same people Marshall made the original claim for say exactly the opposite. John McManus, who wrote a book on American combat soldiers in WWII, said he found 20 volumes of anecdotes of people firing their weapons.
I could maybe see the battle cited as a partial exception. It was almost certainly a night infiltration attack, which is going to be extremely confusing and chaotic. And there are going to be a lot of people who, quite rightly, decide that they're not going to fire unless they're sure of their target, and may never get a chance. But it does not generalize.
I did a bit more checking, and this seems to have taken place at Makin Island, which was far from the most heated battle of the Pacific War. The total Japanese force on the island was less than 800 men, of which only 284 were combat troops. To take this, the Americans brought 6472 assault troops. I'm drawing on Samuel Eliot Morison's account, and he describes the events as "a hideous night ... with Japanese infiltrating and green troops firing on anything and everything". But if that's what's happening, then I'm amazed that only 25% fired, but it wasn't due to reluctance to kill, it was because when you're terrified and spread out and confused, firing at noises in the dark is a good way to kill your fellows. The next night, American sentries proved more dangerous than the Japanese.
But seriously, Makin Island is the worst possible place to draw any broader lessons about ground combat. Yes, a lot of people didn't do much shooting because there wasn't much to shoot. I suspect if Marshall had been at Tarawa instead, he wouldn't have inflicted this myth on us.
I haven't read the book, but based on the review, it feels like Bregman read a well-argued book, remembers the basic idea but misremembers a lot of the details, and is now trying to explain it to me at a party.
"Teams of three had a leader designated at random, and a plate of five biscuits brought in while they were working on a task. In no group did anyone commit the solecism of eating the last biscuit. "
Adding to the pile-on of scholarship, Dacher Keltner's "Cookie monster" study should not be cited for anything. I did some digging on it a couple years ago, including a brief correspondence with Prof. Keltner himself on it. The original was a never-published 1998 manuscript, and the only data published is in a 2003 psych review article. That article gives a bar chart with the following (numbers estimate from the bar chart):
Average cookies eaten:
Low power High power
All male group: 0.8 1.3
All female group: 1.1 0.9
So, according to their data, the high-power males ate fewer cookies. Doesn't really support the story, does it?
My E-mails from Prof. Keltner below:
"That study was done by a grad student who stayed behind at UW Madison when I moved to Berkeley, then dropped out... so we never had the chance to publish other than in the Keltner, Gruenfeld, Anderson, 2003 Psych Review article.
Here are the methods
1. Same gender groups of three participants come to lab (participants were 96% White, average age about 21)
2. One is randomly assigned to position of power, based on a past leadership test they filled out. They are given the task of evaluating the other two participants' contributions to a collective task.
3. They are given several issues on campus to read up on and write policy for, based on information we provided: should alcohol be sold in the university center, should there be mandatory senior tests?; should religious groups get funding, etc.
4. 30 minutes into the study we place a plate of 5 cookies on the table, and see how many each participant takes.
5. We coded the videotapes for disinhibited eating.
That is it.
[...]
I'd say it was a small effect
[...]
We randomly assigned one person to have power but told them as a cover story it was based on a leadership test they took earlier in the semester
It was about 25 all female groups and 25 all male groups
> So, according to their data, the high-power males ate fewer cookies. Doesn't really support the story, does it?
I'm confused by this statement, isn't the preceding data saying that "high power" males at, one average 1.3 cookies, nearly double the 0.8 of "low-power" males?
Was the quoted line a typo meant to say "high-power females ate fewer cookies"?
Oops, I messed up the table, by switching some entries and misreading the 1.25 line as the 1 line. I wish I could just paste the bar chart in here; I wouldn't mess that up.
It would be fascinating to use consumption of resources that are more status-heavy for males -- I feel like who gets to eat what food is more of a female status symbol. For example, it would be very interesting to deliberately cause some of the chairs to be better than others and see which the high- and low-power males chose. My instinct is that men value social resources which are instruments of personal power -- better offices, better furniture, more power tools, more powerful cars, trucks, and weapons -- while females value those resources that relate to personal security -- more/better food, shelter, clothes, Facebook likes.
That might be the case, but I'm not sure what characterizes Facebook likes as representative of personal security rather than power. It seems to me more a measure of influence, at least as much power as security.
"Influence" is a rather feminine version of power. Male power tends to manifest as force, not influence. That's why I picked FB likes, which indeed give you influence, but not any more actual power (exercised through force). Had I chosen votes in a political campaign, that's a different story, because that ends up giving you direct power (exercised through force). Stereotypical men indeed like winning elections, but they aren't as keen on winning popularity contests.
I think comparing human toddlers to adult apes does tell us something useful. If human toddlers are as good as adult apes at non-social intelligence, that tells us that we're smarter than apes in that respect. And if human toddlers outperform adult apes at social intelligence, that tells us that the species gap in social intelligence is even bigger.
I feel that this is the most ambitious of the submissions so far (how about demolishing perhaps the three most famous experiments in twentieth century psychology for starters?). The author uses a critique of the book as a foundation to present an original thesis, relegating the book review itself to a mere sideshow.
Bregman does actually review the Robbers Cave experiment as well. He concludes that the animosity between the teams of boys was created by manipulation on the part of the adults running the experiment. It was actually the second such experiment Sherif had run. In the first one at Middle Grove he hadn't been as skilled at the manipulation, and the teams of boys he attempted to pit against each other became friends, and then figured out that the experimenters were trying to manipulate them into fighting each other.
I took part in an impromptu test of the Bystander Effect in early May in the late 1990s. During rush hour in downtown Chicago, a woman fell 53 feet from the Madison St. bridge into the Chicago River in front of perhaps one thousand pedestrians. She then splashed around in the cold water.
I was the only individual who ran and got the lifesaver ring from the east end of the bridge, then tied it to the railing and dropped it down to the woman, who grabbed onto it and held onto it until a police boat finally arrived about ten minutes later. I had to run for about 3 minutes from starting about a half block away on the west end and then running across the bridge to get to the life buoy and rope. (I also pointed at numerous gawkers as I ran by them, made eye contact and said, "Call 911.")
This was a pretty spectacular test of the bystander effect, although I think it might have been exaggerated in this case because most of the pedestrians probably had never noticed the life preserver stored behind glass at the east end of the bridge. I have very much of an Old Boy Scout personality, so I had 15+ years before taken note of the placement of this equipment just in case something like this ever happened and I would have to use it to save somebody's life. But most Chicago commuters are not like that.
Also, many on-lookers probably didn't think the woman was in much peril. She was splashing around, after all. My view was:
- It was early May, so the water was quite cold.
- It's not obvious how you would climb out of the Chicago River since it is lined with huge buildings like the Opera House.
- She may have had a concussion or other injury from the fall.
- She may have made a suicide attempt, then changed her mind when she didn't die, but if a large number of humans can't be bothered to rescue her, she may then decide she was right about killing herself after all. (I hadn't seen how she got over the railing of the bridge, only seeing her plummeting body out of the corner of my eye, but a witness later told me she had climbed up on the railing and jumped. To choose rush hour to do it suggests she probably wanted attention more than death, but it would have been pretty easy to die anyway even after changing your mind.)
I don't think the behavior of the other 999 or so witnesses was in anyway malevolent. They just seemed rather clueless. Many seemed to assume that somebody else would do something, which I did.
On the other hand, I was surprised I was the only yuppie to do the right thing. I would have thought 5 or 10 other yuppies would have responded equally productively. (This is not to say that nobody else helped. When I was trying to smash the glass over the life ring with my shoe and not making any progress, a man immediately figured out the situation and handed me his umbrella, which worked great.)
I suspect the huge number of witnesses suppressed individual initiative on the assumption that somebody else must be doing the right thing. Plus, probably 90% of the pedestrians were white collar workers (most on their way to the commuter train station to go to the northern suburbs). I suspect blue collar workers would have been less stumped by the sudden intrusion of a problem in 3 dimensional physical reality into their day.
I'm not sure you're really testing the Bystander Effect, i.e. the motivations of people to get involved. It seems not unlikely you are just testing the intelligence and/or experience of those around you. People routinely drown right in front of witnesses, because it is notoriously difficult to realize that a person in distress in the water actually is in distress. You hear a lot of lectures about this in Southern California every year as summer approaches -- "Drowning doesn't look like drowning" et cetera.
That's good to remember, but the situations are very different. Somebody falling 53 feet from the Madison Street bridge into the Chicago River with a huge splash was a spectacular event that riveted the attention of a huge number of rush hour gawkers, but almost nobody took action, even including merely calling 911.
In the early 1990s in Chicago, at the intersection of Western and Lawrence around dusk, I was in my car third in line at a red light when a young woman sprinted across the street to try to catch a bus. She was hit by a car, went up on the hood, and fell off on her head in the middle of the street. I said to myself, "If I weren't so far away, I'd get out and help her out of the street before somebody else runs her over, but of course somebody closer will get there first." After about 3 seconds, I said to myself: "Where is everybody? ... OK, I guess I will have to do this myself," and ran over to her waving my arms and helped her to the curb.
Now the bystander effect in this second case only lasted about the 15 seconds it took me to get there, where as in the bridge jumper case, the bystander effect lasted about 3 minutes. But in someways this car accident example was more striking because with the river jumper I started running immediately because I could picture where the life preserver ring was stored and I figured that most people closer than me had never noticed it. But his traffic accident case didn't require that kind of detailed knowledge to do something. You just had to run over to the victim and wave your arms to alert drivers. But nobody seemed to do it other than me.
Interesting. Maybe it's just Chicago, though. I lived for a time in one of its less savory sections and I would've been a little hesitant (compared to other places I've lived) to jump out of the car when something weird like that happened. You kind of never know in that burg. Maybe it's some weird set-up, or there's some truly screwed-up violent domestic situation working itself out in public in which you definitely do not want to get involved.
"I have very much of an Old Boy Scout personality"
You excluded gay people and atheists from your activities, conspired with like-minded government officials to divert public resources for your bigots-only club, and then made dishonest and vitriolic attacks on gays and atheists when they complained about bigots getting preferential access to public resources?
Boy Scout has a number of different connotations. There's the ideal of scouting (be prepared, a number of virtues), and then there's the way the scouts didn't extend their range of helpfulness thoroughly.
That's a little like saying the Declaration of Independence, with its stirring oration on natural human rights, is all horseshit because Jefferson owned black people, and if you use the phrase "we hold these truths to be self-evident" in an arch kind of way your listener should promptly call to mind the evils of slavery.
In contrast to the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts took proactive steps to keep boy botherers away, for which the BSA was frequently condemned for prejudice.
But, like the Catholic Church, the Boys Scouts have deep pockets of real estate so they both attracted plaintiff's attorneys.
> It's not obvious how you would climb out of the Chicago River since it is lined with huge buildings like the Opera House.
I think that a proper bystander effect doesn't merely require non-action, but also that people recognize that there is a plausible rescue plan that is not suicidal. The details you mention suggests that very many present probably saw no plausible way to rescue this person without taking huge risks.
There have been tragic incidents where one person got in trouble and rescuer after rescuer got in the same trouble & they all died. Not being a lemming should be distinguished from being a 'bystander.'
Also, I think that people tend to run on automatisms, social narratives and external direction much more than they want to (or even can) recognize due to ego issues around accepting their lack of true agency. The most common social narrative around drowning is not to throw in a life preserver, but to jump in after the person, dragging her to safety. In this case, the circumstances mismatched with that narrative, there being no place to safely drag her to. The less common social narrative around life preservers or calling the police requires that people stop focusing on the person who is drowning, and scanning the environment for tools or come up with a rather abstract plan where they will call the emergency services, who will then in turn come up with a solution. Taking attention away from the person in trouble is rather unnatural behavior, which probably has to be trained into people for them to be able to actually do it.
It's very easy to be judgmental of others in the context of a 'bystander effect' story where you are fed a narrative that presents the options that people had and are pushed into condemning that, versus responding that way when actually being in that situation and having to autonomously generate a response.
As I said, within two or three seconds of the woman hitting the water of the Chicago River from over 50 feet up, I started running for the life preserver ring and rope several hundred yards away in the expectation that nobody else of the many hundreds of witnesses would have ever noticed it _and_ remembered it in the moment.
I was surprised though by how I didn't see anybody calling 911 on their cell phones until I pointed at them and told them to do it. (I didn't have one.) This was in the late 1990s when pocketphones weren't as ubiquitous as they are today, but most of the rush hour bystanders were well-paid white collar workers.
It could be that practically nobody dialed 911 from a cellphone because this was back when cellphones tended to connect you to random distant 911 departments. I can't remember if this was before or after the time when it became much easier to reach local 911 on your cell phone. When I briefly had had a cellphone in 1991-1993, it was a complete crapshoot whose emergency services you'd reach by dialing 911. I was driving near the Chicago lakefront in the early 1990s and I saw an empty car on fire. So I called 911. But I got connected to a fire department in Harvard, IL about 40 miles to the northwest. At some after that various politicians were alerted to the randomness of dialing 911 from a cellphone and demanded reforms, which were eventually implemented.
Your experience is much more dramatic than mine, but illustrates the same general point.
I was in a car park with a companion who began to choke. Because I was aware of the bystander effect, I did what I thought was the right thing and pointed to two male bystanders who were engaged in casual conversation, made direct eye contact and politely but urgently asked for help, before turning back to my companion, who was by now partly collapsed and clearly in distress. The bystanders continued their talk, did not move, and offered no help of any kind. Multiple other people were walking through the car park and also did not offer any kind of assistance.
Fortunately my companion recovered after a few minutes. However once the drama was over I was struck by the complete unwillingness of bystanders to become involved.
Since then I have operated under the assumption that the bystander effect is either untrue or only functions under select circumstances, and that it will not be available in times of future crisis.
One useful lesson that came out of the much publicized Kitty Genovese case was that it was too hard to get in contact with your local police station in an emergency.
In the old days, phone calls had been routed through a human operator, so in 1930s movies, people are always rattling the telephone and shouting "Operator, get me the police!" But operators were getting scarcer, so in 1964 it was assumed you'd pull out your phone book and look up you local precinct station by its precinct number.
The Genovese case helped provide impetus for the spread of the 911 system of contacting emergency services.
Interestingly, the murderer, Winston Mosely, was also so strikingly and resolutely malevolent that a lot of modern prison safety measures trace back to efforts to contain him after his breakout and subsequent crimes.
Winston Mosely could have become notorious as an early part of the serial killer wave that built during the Sixties but instead everybody ignored the murderer and decided that the lesson of Kitty Genovese's death was "apathy."
Moving into a majority gypsy neighborhood has heavily biased me. Before I moved, I had had virtually no contact with any gypsies. I thought it was a shame how they were treated in society, spoke up when people around me made racist remarks, etc.
After I moved, I was threatened with assault *numerous* times, my phone was stolen, I was falsely accused of beating up an 8 year old kid, I've seen their children throw stones at stray cats and dogs, I've seen them all just leave their garbage where they stand, 10 feet from a garbage can, in the winter the air is impossible to breathe because several households burn rubber and other garbage.
Now I no longer speak up.
But that's just one data point, and the studies on American soldiers are no doubt much more important.
That is an interesting and relevant experience! Possibly contact leads to a more realistic view of an unknown group? If you have an incorrectly negative view (which I'm guessing was the case for white American servicemen of black American servicemen) then contact causes you to think more highly of them. If you have a falsely high view then it does the opposite - hence the advice 'never meet your heroes'.
I had a similar experience with busing. Grades 1-5 was a typical suburban school, 95% white. The little contact with black kids went fine, and I really liked Stefan and Jean-Claude (Hatian brothers). Then I was bused to the worst section of Tampa for grades 6-9 and got bullied daily, mostly by blacks.
I understand now that they did not like all these white kids invading their school and there was a reason for what they did, but it took me a while before I overcame that experience.
No, contact with minorities improves race relations. That is why the North is full of racists who want to implement Jim Crow and the South is full of gentle peaceable white folx who just want to get along.
But at the great risk of being a pedant, I get crabby whenever someone presents a Machiavellian as an unsophisticated asshole:
“Kelter ran a series of experiments from dorm rooms to summer camps where people meet for the first time, and establish pecking orders. What he discovered was that people who behave as The Prince recommends get run out of the camp.”
…Hah, a would-be leader of your summer camp taking Machiavelli’s advice would wipe the floor with his opponents! You get Machiavelli 180 degrees wrong.
For starters, Machiavelli is the first to stress the importance of being perceived as a nice guy. You just must not let the usefulness of this image get to your head, so that you actually become nice, i.e. unable to play dirty tricks on your competing would-be summer camp leaders when that serves you better. Preferably unnoticed of course, but you can usually rely on people having short-term memories anyway.
How about keeping the job as leader? Many, including many business leaders, have noticed the first part of Machiavelli’s famous advice: that it is preferable to be both feared and loved by your underlings, but that if you cannot be both, it is better to be feared than to be loved.
(Digression: Which is sound advice of course, in particular if you are running an Italian city-state, the enemy is at your door, and you are worried that your city-state underlings might strike a deal with the enemy and open the gates at night, so that they can enter and kill you. If your underlings only love you, they might be tempted to do it, to save their own skin; if they fear you, they will know that there are ways of torturing people that are far worse than death, if you should discover their plot in time.)
However, the second part of Machiavelli’s famous advice almost no-one knows (why don’t people read the classics any more?) He says that while it is better to be feared than loved, above all you must avoid being hated. For if your underlings hate you, you can never sleep peacefully at night, without guards at every door and every window; and there could be an assassin behind every tree. So your job is to be feared without being hated. How to you do that?
Machiavellis advice: By making your acts of suppression predictable. If your underlings know which acts that will get them in trouble, but also which acts that will leave them in peace, they will fear you but not hate you. And this is nothing less than the birth of the Rechtstaat (rule of law). Machiavelli is in effect pointing out that it is in the self-interest of a ruler to bind himself to a set of rules (laws) that binds everybody, including himself.
…sorry but I just had to get that defense of Machiavelli off my chest. He was no comic-book villain; and he was not an ordinary asshole.
(Actually he was a deeply religious man in his way, and/but desperate to see somebody becoming the absolute ruler of Italy, because any ruler was better than continuation of the decades-long Italian civil war. Being ruled by a stationary bandit (prince), regardless of whom, was better than being ruled by the innumerable number of roving bandits (to use Mancur Olson’s later dichotomy) that continued to lay waste to Italy, and make life for its tried inhabitants unpredictable.)
Read the book here, it is a slim volume, read in a couple of hours. I particularly recommend Chapter XVII: Concerning cruelty and clemency, and whether it is better to be loved than feared:
I remember being disappointed long ago to find out that Machiavelli was a writer rather than an evil ruler. I have no idea what underlying premises led me to be disappointed.
Yes, Machiavelli is about "Congratulations, you are the Prince! You now have a huge target on your back, here's how to keep from getting killed by the ambitious who are gunning to take your place". And Machiavelli was involved in Florentine politics which had always been a pit of vipers, from Dante's time onward; he was eventually himself exiled after the Medici managed to return to power again. So his practical experience would have been very much on the lines of "today in power, tomorrow in the dungeon" and hence his interest in "how do you manage to get power, and more importantly stay in power?"
He does insist on keeping on the right side of the fine line between being a ruler and being a tyrant, but he does also say that it is more practical and pragmatic, at times, to be feared rather than to be loved. If your enemies are hesitant about attacking you because they know that, should they lose, you will obliterate them without mercy, this works out better in the long run for all concerned: you're safe, nobody gets dragged into a war, and you can deal with your problems by other methods. Don't be wicked, but if you have to be severe, don't hesitate:
"Some may wonder how it can happen that Agathocles, and his like, after infinite treacheries and cruelties, should live for long secure in his country, and defend himself from external enemies, and never be conspired against by his own citizens; seeing that many others, by means of cruelty, have never been able even in peaceful times to hold the state, still less in the doubtful times of war. I believe that this follows from severities being badly or properly used. Those may be called properly used, if of evil it is possible to speak well, that are applied at one blow and are necessary to one’s security, and that are not persisted in afterwards unless they can be turned to the advantage of the subjects. The badly employed are those which, notwithstanding they may be few in the commencement, multiply with time rather than decrease. Those who practise the first system are able, by aid of God or man, to mitigate in some degree their rule, as Agathocles did. It is impossible for those who follow the other to maintain themselves.
Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
And above all things, a prince ought to live amongst his people in such a way that no unexpected circumstances, whether of good or evil, shall make him change; because if the necessity for this comes in troubled times, you are too late for harsh measures; and mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as forced from you, and no one will be under any obligation to you for them."
Machiavelli was arrested and tortured by the ruler of Florence before being exiled. All of this before he wrote his book.
He has in places a dry-as-dust humor I believe the people on the British Isles in particular appreciates. He wrote some lighthearted stuff as well, including the play The Mandrake/La Mandragola. So he was likely not a gloomy or sinister fellow, but more like a person you would enjoy to drink a beer or share a bottle of wine with.
There is a story that as he got old and friendless, he arranged for dinner parties in his house where instead of guests, he put a favorite book on each chair, and then he had evening dinner "conversations" with Cicero, Augustine, and the others...
When I tell this story to friends, most just think it sounds sad. But to me it has a certain melancholic sweetness.
Interesting that a reliable system of punishment gets you feared (possibly if the punishment isn't too extreme) while an unpredictable non-system gets you hated.
Thanks for the link - both to the article and to the blog. Love the first article, hope to read the others when time permits. And I've made a bookmark about this blogger which I did not know, certainly an interesting fellow.
Embarrassing and probably revealing on my behalf. I did not even look at the name, just automatically assumed based on reading the article and noticing the general theme of the blog.
I still manage to make that sort of mistake, but I've got some habits which keep it in my head rather than out in public.
I'm not sure it's possible to completely undo that sort of prior, I just hope to not spread it thus making the world a little better for future generations.
I liked this one. Some others seem to dislike it for its relatively high level of sharing-your-opinion-about-the-author-ness. But i was less put off by that. especcially when there have been a lot of reviews that read more like summeries than reviews to me. maybe im too autistic to pick up on the subtle opinion sharing in those?
It is worth noting that a fair chunk of Marshall's research practices are now believed to have been rather dubious, up to and including just making stuff up, to support his particular thesis that most people have an innate aversion to killing, and casualties in combat were caused by a small minority of "killers". This has to be put in the context of his confusion (and a broader confusion amongst some theorists) about why forces in modern warfare with their vastly more effective weaponry were not simply obliterating each other in a single engagement. Also worth noting that Marshall himself was not pushing this thesis as some sort of uplifting message about man's innate love for man - his whole focus was to find ways to turn more soldiers *into* killers, and this had some influence on militaries trying stuff like desensitisation training. His thesis was later expanded upon by David Grossman, who continued the idea that most killing is done by a small proportion of aces, and has contributed to the "sheepdog" idea you see floating around today in certain circles.
Whilst it is true that a relatively small proportion of rounds fired in combat end up hitting targets, and some soldiers never fire their weapons, but this has to be understood in the context of modern combat. In most engagements with modern weaponry, many rounds are used for suppression, and units are often shooting at others who they can barely see, meaning some soldiers may not have an opportunity to get a shot off. Whilst there are certainly cases of units or indeed whole armies being more or less enthusiastic in combat, I think this has to be understood in a historical context, because the reasons why are usually both complicated and idiosyncratic.
Based on my own reading and from talking to mihist enthusiast friends, some of whom are veterans, I would modify Marshall's thesis somewhat, most people except a small minority are averse to doing lethal violence *when they themselves are at risk of being killed in return*. When that risk disappears or is lessened, and it is easy to kill enemies at no risk to yourself, then you see a lot of the hesitation disappear and most soldiers can become prolific killers. One sees this a lot in ancient sources, talking about the sweet joy of killing fleeing enemies (and the simple numbers which show the greatest number of casualties is typically during a rout). One also sees this with early modern warfare, when the effective range of musketry would increase immensely when infantry were behind a stone wall or other defence giving them a feeling of safety. While under fire, most people will keep their heads down and return fire only in brief slices, this is how suppression works. But when not supressed by fire, most soldiers are quite capable of acting aggressively or popping up like jack-in-the-boxes to shoot an enemy running away.
In William Manchester's WWII memoir Goodbye, Darkness, there's a long description of Manchester shooting a Japanese sniper on Okinawa who was trying to shoot him. I believe it came down to that Manchester was situated so he only had to expose his right eye, while the Japanese sniper had to expose both eyes. (Note, Manchester was a _great_ storyteller, so I don't wholly trust everything he wrote.)
My guess is that a lot of soldiers won't behave like an outstanding sniper and carefully focus in on the enemy's face. But I would doubt that you'd stay very popular in your foxhole if if you didn't shoot suppressing fire to keep the enemy from carefully focusing on your faces.
>and how Mandela ended apartheid. Turning the other cheek works
Actually the ANC carried out bombings and assassinations
>Outperforming American prisons is like outperforming American healthcare. The reason we keep comparing our healthcare to yours is that American healthcare is about the worst in the world.
Actually this conventional wisdom is wrong. The US spends a normal amount relative to its GDP, with normal cost-per-service relative to GDP, but it consumes a lot more services. The worse life expectancy is the result of much worse lifestyle factors than other rich countries (obesity, homicides, car crashes) combined with diminishing returns on healthcare services.
>zero-tolerance policing massively, disproportionately, picks on ethnic minorities
So does every other kind of policing, because crime rates differ. What are they supposed to do, look the other way when a black youth steals your bike, just because he's black?
I'm generally sympathetic to Bregman's thesis here. But I was not impressed by his handling of the evidence regarding the level of violence, or lack thereof, among hunter-gatherers. It's not just that I disagree with his conclusion, it's that he presented it as the result of his careful study of the scholarly literature. Yet he seems to completely ignore the major works on the subject that make the opposite case. To get into the specifics, here's my commentary on his debate with Steven Pinker from ~a year ago:
Bregman cited three lines of evidence in support of his view: contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, skeletal remains and cave paintings.
Regarding contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, Professor Azar Gat writes in his magisterial study War in Human Civilization:
>Few hunter–gatherer peoples have survived in their original way of life until close to the present, and they too have been fast transformed by contact with the modern world. These extant peoples are now recognized to have had special features that are not wholly representative of the full range of the prehistorical hunter–gatherer way of life. They were largely confined to poor environments, such as the Arctic and deserts, which were unsuitable for agriculture. In some cases they were pushed there by the pressure of more populous agricultural communities, on whose margins they held a sometimes tenuous and subservient existence. In consequence, because of the low productivity of the environments that most surviving hunter–gatherers inhabited, they had very low population densities: fewer than one person per square mile, often far fewer, was the norm. They moved a lot to subsist and had very few possessions. As a result, they were remarkably egalitarian. Their main division of labour and status was related to sex and age. This is the prevailing image of simple hunter–gatherers, but it is partly misleading. Before the advent of agriculture, hunter–gatherers inhabited the entire globe, including its richest ecological environments. In many places, they still did when contact with westerners was made in modern times. Under these conditions, hunter–gatherers’ population densities, subsistence modes, mobility, and social order were considerably more varied than they are among more recent hunter–gatherer populations. All the same, fighting is recorded across the whole range of hunter–gatherer societies, from the simplest to the most complex...
>During the 1960s, cases of hunter–gatherer peoples among whom group fighting appeared to be unknown attracted all the attention. The most prominent of those cases was that of the central Canadian Arctic Eskimos. This is hardly surprising. In the first place, they inhabited one of the harshest environments on earth and were very thinly spread. Second, the resources on which they depended were also diffuse and could not be monopolized. It is not that these Eskimos lacked violence. They had a very high rate of quarrels, blood feuds, and homicide.Moreover, as we see later, to both their east and west, in Greenland and coastal Alaska, where conditions were different, the Eskimos were both strongly territorial and war-like.8 As mentioned earlier, the Kalahari Bushmen, east African Hadza, and central African Pygmies were also celebrated as entirely peaceful in 1960s’ anthropology. Being among the last hunter–gatherer populations that could be observed in their traditional way of life, they achieved a sort of ‘paradigmatic’ status.9 However, there is clear evidence that in the past they had been involved in fighting not only with their agricultural and pastoral neighbours, who had pressured them into their current isolated environment, but also among themselves even before contact with non-hunter–gatherers. Recent homicide rates among them were also very high, many times higher than in the modern United States of America, which registers the highest rates of homicide of all industrial societies. Only with the coming of state authority and state police in Canada and southern Africa did violence rates decline.10
>For all that, the argument here is not that all hunter–gatherers invariably fight. Human societies—be they hunter–gatherer, agricultural or industrial—have lived in peace for longer or shorter periods. Why this is so is discussed later. Yet most societies observed to date have engaged in warfare from time to time, including the simplest hunter–gatherers. One comparative study of 99 hunter–gatherer bands belonging to 37 different cultures found that practically all of them engaged in warfare at the time of the study or had ceased to do so in the recent past. According to another study, in 90 per cent of hunter–gatherer societies there was violent conflict, and most of them engaged in intergroup warfare at least every two years, similar to or more than the rest of human societies. The author of yet other comprehensive cross-cultural studies similarly concluded that ‘the greater the dependence upon hunting, the greater the frequency of warfare’.11
Regarding skeletal remains, Professor Gat writes:
>Our knowledge of hunter–gatherer fighting during the Pleistocene, the period spanning most of human evolution from 2,000,000 to 10,000 years ago, is inherently inconclusive. The evidence from these distant times is extremely patchy, and that which might indicate warfare can also be interpreted differently. Stone axes, spearheads, and arrowheads have a dual purpose and could have been used only for hunting. Wooden shields, leather body armour, and tusk helmets—familiar from historical hunter–gatherers—do not preserve. In fossilized injured bones, hunting and daily-life accidents are difficult to distinguish from those caused by fighting.6 Nevertheless, comprehensive examinations of large specimens of such bones have concluded that at least some of them were injured in combat. In some cases, arrow- and spearheads were found buried in the injured bones and skulls. A Neanderthal man from some 50,000 years ago, found with a stabbing wound in the chest from a right-handed opponent, is our earliest documented specimen.
>Later cases of interpersonal lethal injuries among Neanderthal men have also been identified. The evidence becomes more plentiful as we move closer to the present; preservation is better not only for natural reasons but because people began to bury their dead. At Sandalja II in the former Yugoslavia a group of 29 people from the Upper Palaeolithic have been found with their skulls smashed. Violent injuries were also found to be very common in Upper Palaeolithic cemeteries in the former Czechoslovakia. In the Late Palaeolithic cemetery at Gebel Sahaba in Egyptian Nubia over 40 per cent of the men, women, and children buried there were victims of stone projectile injuries, some of them multiple.7 Moreover, evidence of fighting among historically recorded hunter–gatherers, whose way of life was not very far from that of their Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, is abundant.
>The trouble with prehistoric times is that they cannot speak. Artefacts alone are mute. In the absence of writing, there is no story to tell, no concrete record of deeds, thoughts, or social life. However, in southern France and northern Spain in the late Upper Palaeolithic, this veil of darkness has been partly pierced by what is, historically, second best to a human voice: among the modern humans who inhabited these regions the emergence and flourishing of human art are best documented. Undoubtedly the most famous aspect of this artistic outburst is the exquisite pictorial representations of Upper Palaeolithic ‘cave art’. Unfortunately from the historical point of view, the drawings from the Upper Palaeolithic are mostly of animals, depicted in the liveliest manner. Humans comprise only three per cent of the images and, in contrast to the animals, their representations are very sketchy. There is only one human figure found that seems to be pierced with arrows.32 However, in Mesolithic ‘rock painting’ in the Spanish Levant (about 10,000–5,000 BC), representations of humans rise to 40 per cent of the total.33 These include several depictions of battle scenes, even though all sorts of alternative explanations, such as ritual and dance, were suggested by those who denied the existence of warfare among hunter–gatherers.
>More recent research has brought to light the wealth of Australian Aboriginal ‘rock art’, which is as old as its European counterpart. According to one study of over 650 sites in Arnhem Land in northern Australia, the oldest depictions include large animals but not humans. There, as well, human images begin to figure prominently only from about 10,000 years ago, and include numerous battle scenes. At first, these representations show mainly fighting among a few individuals or small groups, but from about 6,000 years ago there are also images of large-scale encounters: 111 figures participating in one battle scene, 68 and 52 in others.
The authors of the study reasonably speculate that the larger fighting groups may reflect denser and more complex human concentrations that had evolved in Arnhem Land by that period.34 In any case, as both the prehistoric rock art depictions of fighting and the recent evidence of warfare from the central Australian desert demonstrate, fighting took place in thinly as well as in densely populated areas. Depictions of battle scenes among the Bushmen in South Africa, apparently stretching back to the pre-Bantu (agricultural) period, corroborate this. The largest scene depicts 12 people on one side and 17 plus 11 ‘reserves’ on the other.35 Scenes of shield-bearing warriors similarly appear in the prehistoric rock art of the nomadic bison (buffalo) hunters and gatherers of the American Plains.36
>Evidence of violent death from the European Mesolithic is also traceable in the archaeological record: One of the most gruesome instances is provided by Ofnet Cave in Germany, where two caches of ‘trophy’ skulls were found, arranged ‘like eggs in a basket’, comprising the disembodied heads of thirty-four men, women, and children, most with multiple holes knocked through their skulls by stone axes.37 Rousseauites have interpreted this artistic and archaeological evidence as proof that warfare emerged only with the competition that grew with greater population densities and more complex societies. Others have connected the battle scenes to the invention of the bow some 20,000 years ago, which they suggested inaugurated warfare by making possible killing from afar. However, as the rich and diverse Australian data demonstrate, both claims are incorrect. Seeing coins only where there is light from a lamppost is one of the most serious possible distortions. The fact that fighting is recorded by the newly evolving art (and specifically with the later diffusion of human representations) does not mean that it evolved at the same time. What actually makes the archaeological signs of warfare from the Mesolithic, and even Upper Palaeolithic, less open to dispute than those of earlier times is growing sedentism. It left evidence of fortifications, burnt settlements, large-scale communal cemeteries, and, indeed, art—the sort of evidence without which archaeology grapples in the dark but which is necessarily absent before sedentism.
The most recent academic book I'm aware of on this subject is Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers, an edited volume published in 2014 that makes a seemingly quite persuasive case based on the archeological and ethnographic evidence from several continents for a "long chronology" of warfare preceding agricultural civilization. An article from 2019 in the journal Human Nature by Professor Raymond Hames argues, again seemingly quite persuasively, that the available evidence much better supports a Hobbesian rather than Rousseauian view of pre-civilizational warfare. The aforementioned Professor Gat also had a 2015 article in Evolutionary Anthropology making the Hobbesian case with regards to hunter-gatherers. And I would be remiss not to mention the late Lawrence Keeley's classic War Before Civilization, a fascinating, well-written, informative and concise book.
Anthropologist Henry Harpending found that the Bushmen he spent a couple of years hanging out with in the 1960s were peaceful while he was there, but when he talked to old ladies about their long lives, they often had hair-raising stories about how their second husband murdered their first husband before he was murdered by her third husband. Harpending's view was that Bushmen were indeed rather gentle, but when you don't have a state to impose a monopoly on violence, stuff happens, at least when measured over a long period.
"An armed society is a polite society." If in your village it's quite possible to be killed by your next-door neighbors if you annoy them sufficiently, it does seem likely you'd be in general a lot more agreeable, especially on small-stakes issues. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the state taking a monopoly on the use of force is that one of the restraints on being a generic asshole that exists in the primitive society is removed.
"Weeks later when they're rescued half of them are dead."
Ummm.... what? Only three boys died. Unlike the Tongan castaways, there were more than six of them.
"In 1966 Lord of the Flies happened for real - 6 teenagers went for a joy ride in a fishing boat"
The LotF characters are 6 to 12 years old. The Tongan castaways were 13 to 16, and they were a smaller group.
"When they were found 11 months later"
15 months. Unless you're talking about another group of six teenage castaways.
"Muskets from the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War .... found 90% were still loaded."
That sentence seems to be missing something. And when was this data collected, and why were there muskets still on the battlefield? Is the set of muskets still on a battlefield representative of the muskets in general? Is the percentage of muskets loaded at the end of a battle representative of what percentage were fired?
"I don't know of any studies showing Reality TV is bad for your mental health, but I'm happy to take it as read."
I can't recall ever coming across the idiom "take as read" before. Is it especially prevalent in BrE?
"There's a test called 'object choice' in which you hide a treat and then give the subjects hints (pointing at where it is) to see if they can find it... One hypothesis is that our ancestors bred dogs for intelligence"
Looking at where a finger is pointing is not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of convention. You might as well claim that bees are more intelligent than humans because humans "fail the find-the-nectar-by-watching-bees-dance test hard".
"became the cinematic face of the experiment, was a fake he put on after discovering he wouldn't be able to spend the time in jail revising"
I'm not sure how many Americans know that British people use "revising" to mean "studying" rather than "amending".
"(well, a bit under half if you discount the ones who claimed afterwards that they only went along with it because it was a psychology experiment in a prestigious university, pretty clearly no one was actually being dangerously electrocuted)"
How is that an excuse? The study was intended to answer the question of why so many people went along with the Holocaust. Why would you "discount" the people who figured the authorities knew what they were doing as an explanation for why people went along with the authorities rounding Jews up and disappearing them? If we're talking solely about the people who actually killed Jews, okay, but there was much larger complicity.
"Finally, some neurologists stuck a bunch of more and less powerful people in transcranial magnetic stimulation machine. They concluded that power kills mirroring - the empathetic process by which we copy the attitude of the people around us (you can tell that with a brain scan?)."
My understanding is that TMS is for altering the brain, not for observing it. It's not a "brain scan".
Also, there's a lot of places that could us commas, such as between "Bratton" and "officers" in "Furthermore under Bratton officers felt pressured to fine as many people as possible for minor offences, but to under report serious crime."
"The study was intended to answer the question of why so many people went along with the Holocaust."
Then it failed, unless we take it that "I'm trusting the authorities not to actually be doing bad things, only pretending to be doing bad things" is the lesson here. But the fact that the people who figured "this is a psychology experiment in a university, they aren't going to really electrocute anyone, much less to the point of death" were correct contaminates the whole thing. That means that you can't assign any culpability to those who 'went along with the Holocaust' because they may have been really ignorant of what was going on and genuinely believed the Jews in their neighbourhoods were (1) as traitorous as the legitimate authorities claimed (2) a real danger (3) were being sent off to places that were exile, not execution.
The moral we are supposed to take, I think, of all these 70s experiments was the whole counter-culture "don't trust authority, question it, don't accept conventional society" and that's fine. Except when your estimation of authority is correct, as in the experiment not really electrocuting anyone, and when there is a need for a central authority to give leadership that will be followed.
"[...] but what about violent situations like Kitty's? They were unstudiable until Marie Lindegaard had the bright idea of using CCTV footage of real incidents to evaluate bystander behaviour in violent situations. In these high stakes situations bystanders intervene [9 times out of 10], with the rate of intervention rising if there are more bystanders."
Doesn't the linked paper state the opposite? From the abstract:
"The results confirm our predicted association between social relations and intervention. However, rather than the expected reversed bystander effect, we found a classical bystander effect, as bystanders were less likely to intervene with increasing bystander presence."
I've reviewed this book as well. I found the evolution section to feel more credible, probably less due to the content Bregman presents but other evidence from "Secrets of Our Success". Here's my review in case anyone is interested:
Bregman has a beautiful idea, an ambitious idea. An idea to benefit the whole world and change the course of humanity. It might sound simplistic, but you have to believe in it with your whole heart: Humans are Good. Now if you take a moment and reflect it doesn’t take long to come up with some counter points. What about genocide? War? Yes those things are bad, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamental to being human. It’s the system that corrupts us and it’s our negative thinking about ourselves that condemns us. Our system always assumes the worst in people, so we shouldn’t be surprised that our system only turns up the worst in people. If only humans had a more optimistic view of who we are, then we would build a world to be more optimistic about.
The villain preventing this utopia is ‘veneer theory’. This is the belief that if you scratch away the thin layer of civilization from a person, then all you’re left with is some evil, savage animal. Bregman’s model turns the veneer inside out; instead it’s the products of civilization that are making us evil and if you scratch it away you reveal the good human beneath. The book never breaks this dichotomy by examining alternatives, such as realistic conflict theory or terror management theory. It never even mentions the possibility of alternatives, to Bregman if veneer theory is stripped away then the good will shine through.
His evangelism strategy is to select major cultural cornerstones of veneer theory and dismantle them piece by piece. What follows is a curated list of dark moments of humanity which are held under the detective's magnifying glass. When the villain's mask is pulled off it wasn’t human nature underneath, it was the media or civilization all along.
There’s a problem with this approach. Defeating cherry picked arguments from an opponent you claim is the only other option isn’t how you’re supposed to construct an argument. When you’re honest you should build a case from a body of evidence which supports your theory instead of trying to constellate your point from bullet wounds in your chosen foe. It’s understandable that some of the major oppositions need to be addressed, but Bregman relies on this strategy far too much.
Secondly, even after having the luxury of picking his battles, some of his takedowns fall a bit flat. At times they veer so far from his central thesis that the victory seems shallow or otherwise misses the bigger picture.
The most egregious example of missing the point is the discussion of Lord of the Flies. I understand that he picked this novel to dismantle as it is a long standing societal touchstone about the inherent evil of people, but there’s a problem: it’s not a real story. It's fiction. Bregman makes the mistake of trying to disprove the underlying theory by disproving the fictional analogy. He presents a single real life example where kids got stuck on an uninhabited* island and didn’t actually degrade into savagery. It’s a captivating story, but not a true reflection of Lord of the Flies, nor a solid premise for a thesis. It’s like finding a single example of someone who was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, but actually got out, and then exclaiming “Look, there are no such things as impossible situations!” More charitably you could see Lord of the Flies as a prediction of veneer theory but even then, one instance where a prediction didn’t pan out doesn’t automatically make your theory right.
*The island in the real life example was only deserted because slave trading had eradicated the natives living there, but for some reason he didn’t dive into this for his argument on human goodness.
The biggest point Bregman had to contend with are the atrocities that humans inflict on one another. It’s a difficult question to answer for everyone, but it’s even more crucial when your key idea is that humans are good. Bregman acknowledges this, but instead of tackling this important issue head on he steers the discussion to a place where he could win. The question he needed to answer was “How can a world where humans have committed numerous atrocities coincide with a world where humans are inherently good?”. His response is to look at four famous studies from before 1970 which said humans are some sort of bad. He points out flaws in these studies, and then treats the matter as resolved. That’s a side step any All Black would be proud of.
What’s worse is that two of those four studies aren’t even given the lit review they deserve. The Robbers Cave Experiment and the Bystander Effect have both been extensively examined beyond the original case Bregman tore down. The Bystander Effect does have some contradictory evidence, but the conclusions of the Robbers Cave Experiment have been supported a number of times. Humankind doesn’t bother to acknowledge the existence of any subsequent research.
His other two chosen papers, the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments are far more deserving of criticism, but even here his arguments aren’t slam dunks for his case. After taking down large chunks with valid critiques, he explains the rest away by suggesting that people were only electrocuting people to death and torturing other humans because “they were trying to be good” and help the researcher. He then relates this back to how actors of the holocaust, particularly Eichmann, thought they were doing a good thing so they’re not just pure evil. This is how he concludes the section on human atrocities.
It feels like a hollow explanation when related to other horrors such as slavery, the Rwandan genocide or the Nanjing massacre. Even when this explanation fits, I don’t think that perceiving yourself as a good person while you commit genocide makes you any less evil. It erodes Bregman's central idea from “humans are good” to “humans have intentions that they think are good” which is a lot less hopeful.
Humankind does have parts where it tries to build a case from the ground up, and these became my favourite sections. The first looks at life in hunter gatherer societies and the evolutionary pressure for friendliness. The second section slips into more of the ‘Management Thinking’ genre and looks at case studies from modern society. It turns out treating prisoners, employees, children and voters optimistically can generate systems which work better than what we currently have. This section acts as the conclusion for the other discourse, that with the death of veneer theory this is how we need to act for a better world.
I found this conclusion quite convincing, but unfortunately scattered amongst it were lapses that made me suspicious. For example, he’s trying to make a generalised case for all humanity, but almost exclusively chooses examples from a western viewpoint. He only addresses crimes of malice, and not the likes of negligence or indifference leading to climate change. He doesn’t mention discriminations like homophobia or ableism. He does mention racism, but also claims the enlightenment “invented racism” in the 18th Century, ignoring a millennia of abuse against minorities in the likes of the Muslim crusades, or Spanish colonialism. It doesn’t do well to build trust in the reader when you print glaring omissions like that.
Bregman is motivated to push the sins of humanity towards modern times. If our problems have been with us from the beginning, then society isn’t the problem - it’s us. I think there’s a more nuanced view out there that doesn’t need this shoehorning. It’s plausible that treating our fellow humans with kindness would be better for the world, but that we have great inherent capacity for evil and we should try and understand those situations to help avoid them.
Despite all this, I enjoyed the book. The chatty, journalistic tone made for an easy read even as Bregman delved into some dark chapters of humanity. The vaguely anarchist subtext made me smile, and his lesser case, which I’m calling “treat humans optimistically”, is well argued for. In the end I find myself agreeing with the spirit of what Bregman is preaching, but wishing for a book with more rigor to support such an ambitious, beautiful idea.
This is considerably better than the original review. Not as sparkling with clever repartee, perhaps, but solidly thoughtful, and above all well-organized. Thanks.
Thank you for the review. I believe the evidence that treating people decently can pay off, but that just makes it harder to understand why there are a lot of organizations and people who *don't* treat subordinates decently.
Short-term rewards for abuse? Early abuse which makes later abusive behavior an easy default?
I've wondered whether a lot of current bad behavior by management is that even management is too overworked (even at the top where it might be a choice) to think straight.
Well, Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world by being ruthlessly efficient in everything, and treating people well is certainly not something that the empire of Amazon is famous for. It would seem that broad organizational skill is necessary, whereas niceness is optional.
I think treating people decently can generate better systems, but that doesn't mean that the people currently with power will be the ones to benefit from that. Democracy treats people better and pays off with generally better systems, but the dictator that opens things up is still likely to end up on the chopping block.
Bregman points to a study that found giving people expensive BMWs to drive made them cut people off more in traffic. He extrapolated that to giving people power and riches will make them more selfish and so miss the bigger picture.
I wouldn't read too much into that though, he often points out how (apparently) in prehistory we used to kill those who got too greedy and it all started going bad once those people could defend themselves.
"(presumably either these slave traders have developed zombification, or else they completely missed the aim of their job)"
Ulch! I'm not sure whether you were consciously trying to derive it from this, but this is perhaps not the most tasteful comparison to make as a joke. A substantial part of how zombie beliefs propagated in the first place is thought to have come from experiences of the African slave trade, especially the fear of being revived after death to be forced to keep working…
"In 1958 Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut started an experiment on domestication. This was surprisingly risky, as at this point Russia thought evolution was a capitalist lie (Bregman claims that 10 years earlier Dmitri's older brother Nikolai, also a geneticist, was executed. "
Bit of a nitpick, but official Soviet ideology most certainly did support evolution. Just that the official ideology also supported the idea that personality traits were the result of environment, not nature, as otherwise socialism would be vulnerable to sociopaths, unable to produce a better race of men.
This was a lot of fun to read. I like the reviewer's perspective and the British snark with which it's presented. (Though the cross-Atlantic jokes are sometimes off-target; I have no problem with "American Civil War" but find "revising" as a synonym for "studying" to be utterly silly.) Unfortunately I wasn't able to fully keep up with the flow of the argument given the slightly stream-of-consciousness style. The reviewer shows commendable intellectual charity in giving the book the benefit of the doubt, but struggles with a similar need-- "intellectual empathy" maybe?-- in forgetting that most of us clueless ACX readers haven't read it. At times I felt like I was listening to one side of a spectacular debate. Although I'm willing to trust that it's the winning half based on what I heard, I don't feel comfortable concluding that unless I can hear the other side properly.
This blog has gone from a beacon of intellectual stimulation to pathetic posts over educated communists whining about Trump and wishing the world was a graduate school symposium.
Please start a new anon blog the world needs your writing
Regarding the domestication bit, I wonder if what we're really selecting for is "how much they appeal to humans". Because it should really be no surprise that humans are selected for that by evolution.
1) It's been 12 years since I listened to it, but as I recall when they were rescued there had only been two deaths (not half); however, they were in the process of a massive manhunt for the boy they'd previously elected leader and now were intent to kill also. And "burning down half the island" in the process.
2) There was a huge idyllic period that is glossed over between when they set up the council, and when the soldier parashoots onto the island and scares the shit out of them. I don't think this squares with its author is pushing 'thin veneer theory' but the opposite, the boys were basically good it was outside input *from* civilization / history / adults that made them fear / hate / fight / kill.
My reading is: humans are neither good nor evil, but we will willingly self-organize into functioning societies to maximize health and order / minimize surprise / restrain our baser instincts. And this usually works for long periods of peace / prosperity.
When something upsets our balance, we're prone to overreact, whether that's ([boosting the jealous opposition despite them previously being correctly determined to be a sub-optimal choice for leader (Roger/Jack)] or [choosing innocent scapegoats to punish for the problem(piggy)] or [destroying the institutions of order(the conch)] or [mob-rioting and killing the messenger here to explain the phenomenon that you're currently afraid of but don't need to be (Simon)]) or whether that's ([pulling together to take care of the survivors] or [call for the police / ambulance] or [clean up the rubble] or [donate blood])
Very enjoyable. I confess to particularly enjoying the English (or at least British) style of humour and writing generally.
There was a great deal about the book that was being reviewed - more than in most of the finalist reviews - and yet I didn't quite get the feeling I learnt much about the book. Odd - perhaps the criticisms and approvals were too flamboyant for me to feel that I'd heard the ideas presented completely accurately. A minor point, possibly.
Quite different from all the other reviews which was something I generally liked.
""...or at least British.."
Or some wider collection of islands....
Minor points: the oxytocin literature is in shambles well beyond what you note; and Samuel Marshall's title is even better than you note (he's usually called "S.L.A.M." or "Slam"), and his results are even worse (a giant tissue of fraud).
Wikipedia says that others back up the claim that most soldiers don't fire, and I know I've read that most bullets fired in combat miss the target, but I guess it's hard to know if that's due to moral objections or just the practical difficulty of aiming at a target through the fog of war.
I have a feeling that discussion of the claim that most soldiers don't fire in battle has actually come up before on Slate Star Codex specifically, but I'm afraid I can't remember where.
It has come up in westhunter...I guess i am not the only one in 1CT following WH, so you may remember this from there;-).If i remember correctly, Greg said it was bollocks.
There can be hundreds of rounds fired to suppress a target while a designated marksman flanks and fires a single shot for the kill. This doesn't imply anyone was intentionally missing, even if only one out of a thousand bullets hit someone.
Also, people greatly underestimate the difficulty of hitting a moving target under stress. Again, a missed shot (even wildly missed) does not indicate intention (though, yes, part of the point of training is to improve at this task).
I agree, but the difficulty of hitting a moving target in a chaotic environment also means we don't know if people are intentionally missing. Can't really say either way was my point, although there are probably situations like the one you described in which that's probably not the case.
I probably don't underestimate the difficulty of hitting a moving target under stress, but that's mostly because my aim is so bad that I can't hit a stationary target while calm (with an air rifle, but aiming one of those should be much easier than a real gun - much less recoil to brace for!).
S.L.A. Marshall was an intellectual celebrity in the postwar era, but his reputation is not at all good more recently.
Interesting review. But please change "marital culture" to "martial culture."
I can send you a copy of the paywalled article if you like. You might also read "Survival of the friendliest."
"The Germans had a tremendous 'marital ethos', placing a high value on loyalty, camaraderie and self-sacrifice."
Good catch, but I actually like it this way. If you grabbed someone off the street and described the 'martial ethos' in those terms, I'm tempted to believe large numbers would say, "you better believe it!"
Even I did it! 'marital ethos'
I kind of liked it, too, but at least at my age I often type things I don't mean, even if they turn out clever, so I thought I'd point it out in case in future the author cuts and pastes. Good to see comments are read.
" 9 Belgium schoolkids"
The adjective is *Belgian*.
>(it'd be nice to check whether the effect moved from just below half to just above, but the paper is behind a paywall)
Just checked myself - it appears to go from .27 for female participants in the low-empathy condition to .73 for female participants placed in the high-empathy condition, and .4 to .73 for male participants.
ghetto edit: total sample size for this experiment was 60, for 15 in each cell (male/female low/high-empathy).
hmm seems low, is there a p-value mentioned?
>[P]articipants in the high-empathy condition were, once again, more likely to show partiality, helping Sheri at the expense of others who were more needy (.73), than were participants in the low-empathy condition (.33), x2( l,N= 60)= 10.31, p < .001.
Thank you!
> Now at first glance it looks like intelligence is our superpower, but Bregman disagrees. [...] Only in social learning do the toddlers demolish the apes. This shows that humans didn't take over from chimps because we're cleverer, but because we're better at learning from each other.
This review treats this claim skeptically, but it's argued in great detail (also including the "domestication" concept) in Henrich's *The Secret of Our Success*, reviewed by Scott at
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/
Having read Henrich's book thanks to Scott's recommendation, I think these ideas are quite plausible and supported by a lot of evidence.
Henrich may have downplayed the importance of individual intelligence too much (e.g., the ability to do Piaget's "formal operational" reasoning is a *huge* deal), but I think he's established that a huge amount of what we might casually attribute to "intelligence" is really handled by culture, and that that's possible because of our tremendous predisposition to and capacity for social learning.
This doesn't directly prove or disprove Bregman's claim; clearly culture and social learning can both encourage and discourage violence and abuse of others, and the ingroup/outgroup thing is really complicated. In Henrich's account, social learning is more about letting culture give us capacities (and retain and refine knowledge) than about requiring those capacities to be either violent or nonviolent.
The domestication claim is discussed in chapter 11 of Henrich's book and is mostly focused on the idea that people have an innate capacity to learn and *want to follow and enforce* social norms from their cultures. Those social norms can then act as a check on all kinds of behaviors, including conflict and harm behaviors, but the details depend on the content of the norms. (Since I think Henrich is very committed to that latter idea, he would probably say that the extent to which people are "benevolent" depends enormously on the extent to which they've learned a social norm for benevolence from their cultures, but that they do at least have a kind of desire to learn how to cooperate with others with the society in which they grow up—whatever that consists of.)
Henrich's book is kind of optimistic in the sense that it foresees continued capacity for various kinds of progress, and various kinds of cooperation, but it doesn't specifically say that culture will always work well for everyone or every group in every case, or will always suppress every kind of violence, or anything.
This is where the reviewer lost me. I also read Henrich's book after reading Scott's review and also thought this point was plausible and well-supported, and the manner of the writer's dismissal suggested to me that he didn't really take it seriously. Maybe he has a real argument but figured that it would take up too much of the review to make it, but in that case, he should have at least alluded to Bregman (and Henrich) being *found* to be wrong, rather than just kind of taking it for granted that they're obviously idiots or acting in bad faith.
That's really helpful, and interesting. Thank you! I over reacted to Bregman's overreach where he argues that humans aren't cleverer than chimps. Good to learn that nonetheless passing on culture is at least as crucial to our success, probably more.
I enjoyed this review. In places the tone rubs me the wrong way; I think a lot of the entries have aimed for Scott's 'not afraid to criticise the author, and masterful at microhumour' and overshot into 'a bit mean to the author in places'.
Agreed. Also, tossing unrelated controversial comments like "American healthcare is the worst in the world", or comparing the US election troubles to Turkey or Hong Kong is distracting and small. Better editing could have remedied this and caught things like "President Lyndon".
Also agree. One thing I enjoy about Scott's better reviews is that they often comment something like: "I'm unsure about this." This review is a bit too supercilious to know what it doesn't know. Your examples are good, but this struck me the most:
> Bregman blames the shift from groups of 150 to nation states on the invention of God.
Which is followed by a very unenlightening discussion of religion, where the author gives a generalised top-down view of a very complex topic before rushing to some conclusions.
> All the other candidates for primeval religion are polytheisms which are not designed for pushing unification.
This is a vast and mostly unsubtantiated claim about polytheism, and one which comes from looking at polytheism backwards, rather than taking what preceded polytheism and then looking forwards. Polytheism was unifying in that familial and domestic gods, which were critically important, could be made to spread beyond just families. This was a big shift from early Roman law towards the later end of the period.
I think dbmag9 is right. I like humour in writing, but the tone ended up just irritating me.
I wonder if modern cynicism isn’t an adaptation to higher population density in order to hedge against tail risks: let’s say 95% of the population is decent and kind and nice, but 5% are evil. In a small town with 100 people, there will be about 5 who you have to look out for, and you’ll know who they all are.
But in a big city with 10,000,000 people there will be 500,000 people you need to avoid, and you have no hope of knowing who they all are. And the anonymity will further empower them to do evil things by increasing the chance they’ll get away with it. On top of that, you’ll have contact with a greater number of people every day, increasing the likelihood of you running into one of these people.
Good point. When one can't feel secure that either concern over reputation or strict legal and social accountibility are acting to regulate everyone's behavior, a potentially disastrous encounter with a stranger becomes something you have to worry about. Stories of such disastrous encounters sensationalized by the media will make you worry even more. If you or someone you know has personally experienced such an encounter, you'll worry even more. If you have a personality predisposed to anxiety, you'll worry even more.
Fear of the terrible but rare weighs more heavily on the psyche than the common and benign. The bigger the group, the more rare events will happen to any given person, which affects how everyone else thinks. All the more reason why big groups need a proportionately powerful system of binding beliefs and rules to create the conditions of minimally viable levels of social trust.
That might be what's happening, but it seems to me like it would make for a bad actual strategy. This is how I'm thinking about it: If you treat everyone with suspicion because they *might* be amongst the 5%, there will presumably be fewer people to help you out once you become a victim of one of those 5%.
At 10M scale the justice system mostly doesn't care who the victim is. At 100 scale things are pretty informal and reputation is everything, and even at 1k scale some people in the vigilance committee are going to know you, but at 10M scale you're talking about a full criminal justice system where all cases are more-or-less treated equally.
Personally I'm kind of cynical that modern cynicism has anything on ancient cynicism. Even Roman authors were pretty biting about the decline in trust, morals, and the quality of child-rearing. Maybe these things are the social psychology equivalent of Fusion Is Just Ten Years Away or We're Making Progress in Bringing Peace To The Middle East.
Completely off-topic but there has been tremendous progress in fusion tech. The cost of the MIT reactor (arc or sparc or whatever) is expected to be 100 times lower than ITER for the same power output (due to huge improvement in super-conductors).
I have started to hedge myself and I don't say Just Ten Years Away sarcastically anymore.
It is possible, yes. On the other hand...I expected high-Tc superconductors to make a big difference in fusion when they first came out, and that was when I was in graduate school 30 years ago. And there are still some real practical problems to solve, e.g. neutron activation of the surroundings, practical sources of economical fuel. It would be nice if those were solved -- a source of huge amounts of cheap electricity would have remarkable and salubrious effects.
I believe the MIT team has made progress on these issues as well. For example they have a design that allows opening the "donut" from the top and change the lining inside. (The superconductors come in the form of a tape that can make a very effective temporary joint).
Most important to me is the cost issue. When a proof-of-concept is expected to cost 50 billion dollars for a 30-year project, I expect only Nation-States do make the investment. And we know how effective governments are in general... But when the cost for the same thing is expected to be around 150 million dollars, I expect investment to flow for the private sector and competition to do its magic.
No argument there. I always thought poorly of ITER for exactly that reason -- it costs so much it will (1) suck all the oxygen out of the room for any other approach to fusion, and (2) it will tend to lock everyone into one particular approach via the sunk cost. Bah.
> but there has been tremendous progress in fusion tech
That's what I read 20 years ago. I do expect them to get it working eventually, but I wouldn't bet on it being within a decade.
This comment is meaningful only to those familiar enough with the subject to know what "MIT reactor", "ITER", and "cost" mean in this context, but not familiar enough to already be aware of what you're saying. Also, citing "expectations" is a rather weak argument.
Well, he was responding to me, and I do indeed know what all those terms mean, so it was a useful comment.
I'm pretty sure Carl knew what I was talking about.
To clarify: my point wasn't that fusion is 10 years away, only that I don't laugh or roll my eyes anymore when someone makes that claim.
I can rephrase my comment for you if you're not familiar with the context: ITER is a very large international project (a so-called megaproject), the cost of which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars, and the purpose of which is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion as a source of energy.
Ten years ago (about) a team at MIT announced that they were going to build a fusion reactor equivalent to ITER but using REBCO superconducting tape. The superconducting tape allows them to reduce the size of the reactor by one order of magnitude and the cost by two.
Since then a startup was founded as a spin-off of the project and I believe they raised 150 million or so to achieve the goal.
I'm not an expert on this subject, so I could be wrong about certain details or even completely off base. But I find it highly significant that the estimated cost of building a fusion reactor has gone from 50 billion to 150 million.
The Onion said recently that it's now just 9 years away.
The Onion has a surprisingly good track record of successful predictions. ;)
As noted by Gwern below, Marshall's observations on solders not firing their weapons have been broadly challenged.
"Good news: Bregman does not propose that an alien obelisk dropped out of the sky into pre-history to tame us for its own inscrutable purposes. Bad news: Bregman has no idea why evolution should suddenly serve up a dish otherwise reserved for human interference."
No one has mentioned Richard Wrangham's the Goodness Paradox? He argues that humans self domesticated leading to a modern human race less prone to individual violence than other primates, but more cooperative and better at planned violence. I.e., our unmatched capacity for violence is a consequence of our niceness. Wrangham argued once languages developed and humans could cooperate, one of the things men cooperated at was killing off the most violent & disagreeable men. After a few thousand generations of this, here we are. I've heard of other theories to explain it but I'm not as familiar with them.
Reminiscent of "Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
Also, the summary of Wrangham given in "Exercised" by Daniel Lieberman is not that it's about "individual" violence, but about "reactive" (responding instinctively to a slight) vs "proactive" (premeditated, cooperative):
"According to Wrangham, humans differ from other animals, especially our ape cousins, in having exceedingly low levels of reactive aggression but much higher levels of proactive aggression."
An oversimplification on my part. Probably should have specified the reactive vs proactive distinction.
Parhaps our difference from apes in this respect has too do with how we evolved for the Savannah, wheres most other apes evolved for the forest. Analogously, compare ions with Tigers. Lions live in packs, Tigers live alone. Lions live on the savannah, Tigers live in forests.
See also Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pack_hunter#Evolution_of_cooperative_hunting)
> Pack hunting is typically associated with cooperative breeding and its concentration in the Afrotropical realm is a reflection of this.[7] Most pack hunters are found in the southern African savannas, with a notable absence in tropical rainforests and with the exception of the wolf and coyote, higher latitudes
I just looked up Asiatic lions (the only wild lions outside Africa), and despite living in forest habitat, they still form prides like African lions do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_lion
It's also worth noting that lions used to range through Europe and the Middle East, covering various kinds of habitat.
Small suggestion for the voting form when all reviews are published: Is it possible to make it not alphabetic but chronological? That's probably the only way I'll be able to correctly remember and grade.
"Now Curtis has cunningly compared an extremely specific (chained to a radiator) with a much more general (falling in love). But the numbers still work if you widen his point out to all kidnappings. Or all serious crime. This kind of thing is everywhere - George R. R. Martin is fond of calling A Game of Thrones a more 'grounded' Lord of the Rings. It's actually drastically less real, just nastier."
Less real in what respects? The linked articles don't seem to support this claim at all, they just analyze the realism of a particular narrow element of each property without comparing the two of them at all.
The blog he linked to has several articles about the realism of Gate of Thrones and Lord of the Rings respectively, and Tolkien generally comes off better overall. A better article to link to would be his three post series about Game of Thrones compared to the actual middle ages. In that series he specifically takes on the claim that Game of Thrones is "superior to other fantasy works because it showed a medieval society ‘how it really was’ or ‘more realistically’"
https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-was-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-i/
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/12/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-iii/
His opinions on Lord of the Rings as a whole is scattered over numerous posts, but they're worth a read if you enjoy historical nitpicking and education.
https://acoup.blog/tag/lord-of-the-rings/
Looking through them now, but it seems to me like it's hard to draw an apples to apples comparison between them, because most of the elements it critiques in Game of Thrones simply don't get any exploration in Lord of the Rings at all.
Apart from that though, a lot of the critiques of Game of Thrones aren't that it's unrealistic, but that elements aren't characteristic of medieval Europe, but other times and places in history, which doesn't seem to line up with a characterization of "less real, but nastier."
Fair enough. I think the main point is that many people look at Game of Thrones and do believe it is an accurate view of how "nasty" the middle ages were, and it's not.
Having read through all of acoup on both series, the thesis is slightly more complicated than "what's depicted has never happen in the entire human history". It's more that Martin takes aspects of very different systems which simply cannot work together. Kinda like saying "tank turrets are real and jet planes are real so if we slab one onto another it's going to work just fine, so the warhammer 40k aircrafts are realistic". This applies e.g. to the political and economical system of the Westeros and to everything having to do with the Dothraki - the pieces taken out of different contexts and combined in a way that make no sense and cannot work.
Fort Lord of the Ring, IIRC the point is that while the details of economics and politics are not much explored, what is shown seems broadly compatible with the corresponding historical realities (modulo all the magic stuff I guess).
Although for things like tactics and logistics, the LotR (the book at least) is shown to be just plainly more accurate than the Game of Thrones. Armies move with physically plausible speeds and distances, formations and weapon/armor kits are more like what people actually used and so on. For an extreme example of math not working out spectacularly (and hilariously) in the GoT, I highly recommend the two Loot Train posts: https://acoup.blog/?s=loot+train
Funny, the economics of the Lord of the Rings is the one thing on which I thought you really had to suspend disbelief. I mean, nobody in the entire book has an actual paying job. (One gets the vague impression that the dwarves trade the lower-quality things they don't just make for themselves, I suppose.) I can't even remember more than a tiny handful of transactions of money, or anyone thinking about the expense of this or that. It goes without saying there aren't any shops or banks or outstanding loans.
Tolkien is writing out of a heavily class based society about an even more heavily class based society. Most of the characters we see on screen are aristocracy, and therefore don't have to work. It's subtle, but if you read the hobbit stuff at the start you realise that Frodo, Merry and Pippin are upper class, and Sam (the only one with a job!) naturally defers to them. This relationship has altered by the end of the book, as the experiences they've been through render the previous class distinction a bit silly.
Yes, I realize that, but even so. Only in the Shire does anyone even *talk* about farmers or planting and the harvest (e.g. Farmer Maggot, and yerch what a name). Nobody is poor in Esgaroth, and there are no shops or banks or rush hour in Gondor so far as I can tell.
As Neil said - hobbits are farmers or landowners, virtually everyone else are hereditary warrior aristoctrats who are not supposed to work, their occupation is ruling and fighting which is what they do pretty much the entire book. (Gandalf is an angelic entity so probably isn't exactly expected to have a 9-to-5 job either)
As for the lower classes not being represented, my understanding is that Tolkien is just mostly true to the sources of the era - they were written largely by said aristocrats who just didn't care about commoners and mostly didn't bother to mention them.
Also to nitpick, most people in the actual Middle Ages or Antiquity really did not have a *paying* job. The professionals who'd have a salary as we understand it were a pretty thin layer between the majority of subsistence farmers and the ruling class.
Meh. I admire Tolkien and his writings as much as the next fan, but to me there's no real question that economics just plays no serious role in his stories. We really have no clear idea who is rich, who is poor, how people earn a living, what role wealth and income and trade plays in Middle Earth. You can write plenty from an upper class viewpoint and still get in quite a lot of how the rest of the people live -- cf. Dorothy Sayers. Middle Earth is a little like The Federation in Star Trek, the economic relationships of men are just not part of the story.
The Loot Train was in the TV series, not in the books. The TV series went considerably beyond the books regarding the need to suspend disbelief.
Many of the issues in the books come from an inflation of scale. In order to make the setting seem fantastic, the author tends to inflate the sizes of everything by an order of magnitude - cities are too large for the economy, armies are too large for the method of organisation, distances are too large, walls are too high, and civilisations have lasted too long. I think this is a common trope in fantasy (citation needed).
The criticism I found most interesting was about the way armies treated the populace, which is perhaps relevant to the book being reviewed here. In GoT, the armies strip the land, and rape and kill the peasants. The criticism is that this behaviour was not common during the Middle Ages; it applied more to the Thirty Years War and later wars, when religious conflict was involved and the peasantry of the opposing side were seen as heretical.
I also think that ASoIaF is set in an unusually bad time-- it's not "realistic" for what that tech level is like in general.
It's going to become an unusually bad time when the unusually long and harsh winter hits, but I don't think the War of Five Kings is unusually nasty. Plenty of characters are veterans of previous wars, and I don't recall any of them saying that the current war is any worse.
World of Ice and Fire, and Fire and Blood, include accounts of previous wars. These wars are, at least from the elite perspective, often very bloody with whole noble houses getting wiped out. (I wonder how the continent has so many ancient houses, when they get destroyed so often.)
Perhaps people in this setting have a special instinct to kill during autumn and winter.
The TV show seems to have taken every opportunity to seize the Idiot Ball, so I agree it's somewhat unfair to judge the books by that. On the other hand, the pop culture knowledge of Tolkien is heavily influenced by the Jackson movies, so what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
From the collected letters (because I couldn't resist the opportunity to do this, and because it shows that Tolkien was well aware of the corruption that goes along with power; all headings mine):
"On the Tax Base of Númenor:
In the second stage, the days of Pride and Glory and grudging of the Ban, they begin to seek wealth rather than bliss. The desire to escape death produced a cult of the dead, and they lavished wealth and an on tombs and memorials. They now made settlements on the west-shores [of Middle-earth], but these became rather strongholds and 'factories' of lords seeking wealth, and the Númenóreans became tax-gatherers carrying off over the sea ever more and more goods in their great ships. The Númenóreans began the forging of arms and engines."
"On Magic:
I am afraid I have been far too casual about 'magic' and especially the use of the word; though Galadriel and others show by the criticism of the 'mortal' use of the word, that the thought about it is not altogether casual. But it is a v. large question, and difficult; and a story which, as you so rightly say, is largely about motives (choice, temptations etc.) and the intentions for using whatever is found in the world, could hardly be burdened with a pseudo-philosophic disquisition! I do not intend to involve myself in any debate whether 'magic' in any sense is real or really possible in the world. But I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the 'deceits of the Enemy'. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, good or bad (per se), but only by motive or purpose or use. Both sides use both, but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other 'free' wills. The Enemy's operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but 'magic' that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. Their magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. Their goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to us between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and 'life'.
Both sides live mainly by 'ordinary' means. The Enemy, or those who have become like him, go in for 'machinery' – with destructive and evil effects — because 'magicians', who have become chiefly concerned to use magia for their own power, would do so (do do so). The basic motive for magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by, and at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means. Of course another factor then comes in, a moral or pathological one: the tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting, and defiling as such. It would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho's introduction of more efficient mills; but not of Sharkey and Sandyman's use of them.
Anyway, a difference in the use of 'magic' in this story is that it is not to be come by by 'lore' or spells; but is in an inherent power not possessed or attainable by Men as such. Aragorn's 'healing' might be regarded as 'magical', or at least a blend of magic with pharmacy and 'hypnotic' processes. But it is (in theory) reported by hobbits who have very little notions of philosophy and science; while A[ragorn]. is not a pure 'Man', but at long remove one of the 'children of Luthien'."
Martin gave hostages to fortune with his interview at the Dublin con and saying things about "what is the economy of Gondor?"
That leads people to expect that you are going to address "the tax base of Westeros" and so forth in your own works, and Martin doesn't seem to have done any of that (he talks about the Iron Bank and the gold deposits which funded Casterly Rock but have since run out), but he doesn't really go into the nuts-and-bolts which leaves him open to the same criticism as he levels at Tolkien.
He talks about the Wars of the Roses, but his depiction of the wars seems more like the civil war between Stephen and Matilda (which was very nasty). He talks, as pointed out by Bret Devereaux, about basing the Dothraki on plains cultures, but instead produces a mish-mash out of the pulps.
So yeah: Tolkien said he wanted to write a national fairy tale for England, Martin says he's writing realism-style historical fiction in fantasy. When one falls down on "the tax base of my fantasy world", it is inevitable that the one claiming to be the realist gets the hammering for it.
Speaking as a Johnny-come-lately and rare commenter, this really is a wonderful comments section. Apart from being generally civil to one another, commenters bring so many interesting things in. Thanks for those links.
Bret Deveraux (the author of acoup.blog) is right to call GRRM out on his handling of religion, city size, logistics, and the dothraki.
BUT: His critique of GRRM's "dark and gritty" depiction of the middle ages is itself wrong enough to to have its own highly-upvoted entry on r/badHistory : https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/c2to6b/unmitigated_pedantry_about_unmitigated_pedantry/
Especially Bret's claim that civilians were protected and not systematically killed is wrong, wrong, wrong. (The weird thing is that Bret himself talks about the systematic killing of civilians elsewhere on his blog).
The other claim that doesn't hold up to a fact check is "GRRM exaggerates the incidence of betrayal/backstabbing". Really ?!? Take a look at the War of the roses. Or the Life of Richard Lionheart, and you get the impression that actual Loyalty of the Noble towards their liege lords was more the exception than the rule.
All that said, I love acoup.blog . It is beautifully written, well structured, very informative, and most of the time very well reasoned.
TL;DR:
Tolkien is right on military Stuff, including logistics.
GRRM is right on the dark and gritty stuff.
GRRM is wrong on religion, logistics, cities, dothraki and some other stuff.
I think this ties into an issue that's largely glossed over in Brett's discussion of GRRM, (not really a failing because he's assessing the work from a historical perspective and not actually comparing him to Tolkien. ) GRRM's work seems dark and gritty in comparison, although there's plenty of splendor and happiness explored in the books, because they take place in a setting that's both more arbitrary and more morally demanding.
Tolkien drew heavily on legend, and his work was faithful to the character of legend. But legend tends to be characterized by moral simplicity and convenience. The good true king overthrows the usurper, and then things are better because the rightful king is in charge and he's a just man. There's no question of whether the fighting over the throne might cause more harm than the true king might do good, or whether the true king might be a decent man but a bad ruler, or whether he'll die in an accident a year later without an heir and plunge the kingdom into chaos again.
GRRM is clearly off base on some features of realistic setting design, but there's a level on which his work evokes a more realistic character than Tolkien's because Tolkien wasn't trying to adopt the character of history.
"There's no question of whether the fighting over the throne might cause more harm than the true king might do good"
Tolkien does address this, though lightly, with how Aragorn refuses to have his coronation in the immediate aftermath of the death of Denethor. He's aware of the mood of the city, and how the great princes (such as Dol Amroth) might react, and he maintains the low profile until he can garner their support and prove to them that he is worthy.
It's not directly in "The Lord of the Rings" but Minas Tirith did tear itself apart over the question of the succession to the throne after the death of the last King of Gondor, and even before that with (1) the settlement in Middle-earth of the "Black Númenóreans", the remnants of the "King's Men" party who survived the Downfall of Númenór: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Black_N%C3%BAmen%C3%B3reans
(2) The civil war over, ironically, "purity of blood" amongst the nobles of Gondor: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Kin-strife
"The unrest that created the Kin-strife began when prince Valacar, son of King Rómendacil, married a woman of the Northmen of Rhovanion, Vidumavi. She bore him a son Eldacar, but many Gondorians of Númenórean blood were angered by this mixing of blood of lesser men and Númenóreans."
Ironically again, many of the defeated rebels who fled to Umbar eventually had their descendants mixing with and intermarrying with those of "lesser blood".
(3) The diminution of the blood-line over the centuries, meaning that with the death of the last king, there was nobody left with a clear enough and indisputable claim to the throne, and the arrogance of the Southerners meant that they rejected the claims of the last surviving Northerners to the joint throne:
"No new king was elected and the rule of Gondor passed to the Ruling Stewards, beginning with Mardil Voronwë. The Stewards were to rule "until the King returns", because it was uncertain at first whether Eärnur had been killed or not. In addition, Eärnur left without an heir, and while many others in Gondor could lay some sort of claim to the kingship, those claims generally had some sort of doubt, and no one wanted to risk another civil war like the Kin-strife."
All this underlies Aragorn's claim to the throne, where there is still the question of "is the line of Arnor entitled or not to claim the throne of Gondor?" and which is part of why Denethor rejects any such claim. Tolkien doesn't make a big upfront deal of it, but this kind of tension is still present and still underlying the entire question of "who rules now that Denethor is dead?", made even more complicated by the fact that they are in the middle of a giant freakin' war of destruction which will mean literal life or death for the entire free world. If Imrahil, for instance, decided to push his claim to the Stewardship because of his blood-ties to Denethor's family, that is a huge potential problem.
And since they don't yet know about Denethor's suicide, Aragorn is being very careful not to stir up more trouble than they need at this particular point - returning victorious from the field of battle, but with the war still on-going:
"Now as the sun went down Aragorn and Éomer and Imrahil drew near the City with their captains and knights; and when they came before the Gate Aragorn said:
‘Behold the Sun setting in a great fire! It is a sign of the end and fall of many things, and a change in the tides of the world. But this City and realm has rested in the charge of the Stewards for many long years, and I fear that if I enter it unbidden, then doubt and debate may arise, which should not be while this war is fought. I will not enter in, nor make any claim, until it be seen whether we or Mordor shall prevail. Men shall pitch my tents upon the field, and here I will await the welcome of the Lord of the City.’
But Éomer said: ‘Already you have raised the banner of the Kings and displayed the tokens of Elendil’s House. Will you suffer these to be challenged?’
‘No,’ said Aragorn. ‘But I deem the time unripe; and I have no mind for strife except with our Enemy and his servants.’
And the Prince Imrahil said. Your words, lord, are wise, if one who is a kinsman of the Lord Denethor may counsel you in this matter. He is strong-willed and proud, but old; and his mood has been strange since his son was stricken down. Yet I would not have you remain like a beggar at the door.’
‘Not a beggar,’ said Aragorn. ‘Say a captain of the Rangers, who are unused to cities and houses of stone.’ And he commanded that his banner should be furled; and he did off the Star of the North Kingdom and gave it to the keeping of the sons of Elrond."
Tolkien may not make as big a production of it as Martin, but he too is aware of power politics going on.
I'd agree that he was aware of the significance of power politics. But then, people who wrote down legends were certainly aware of the significance of power politics in their own times, and they depicted a world where those sorts of complexities and challenges were more marginal than in their reality.
I didn't really read that as a nod to Realpolitik, but more of Tolkien wanting to have Aragorn display the grace and Christian humility which is a key aspect of being a good king, for Tolkien. Throughout all his stories all the good rulers are graceful and modest, while arrogant and boastful rulers almost define his genre of bad kings -- think of the way the kings of Numenor came to grief.
Once I start quoting The Letters, I can't stop. So here's something about politics:
"On Politics (lack of):
I dislike the use of 'political' in such a context; it seems to me false. It seems clear to me that Frodo's duty was 'humane' not political. He naturally thought first of the Shire, since his roots were there, but the quest had as its object not the preserving of this or that polity, such as the half republic half aristocracy of the Shire, but the liberation from an evil tyranny of all the 'humane' [ humane: this (being in a fairy-story) includes of course Elves, and indeed all 'speaking creatures']– including those, such as 'easterlings' and Haradrim, that were still servants of the tyranny.
Denethor was tainted with mere politics: hence his failure, and his mistrust of Faramir. It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked. Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful. He had become a 'political' leader: sc. Gondor against the rest.
But that was not the policy or duty set out by the Council of Elrond. Only after hearing the debate and realizing the nature of the quest did Frodo accept the burden of his mission. Indeed the Elves destroyed their own polity in pursuit of a 'humane' duty. This did not happen merely as an unfortunate damage of War; it was known by them to be an inevitable result of victory, which could in no way be advantageous to Elves. Elrond cannot be said to have a political duty or purpose.
Auerbach's use of 'political' may at first sight seem more justified; but it is not, I think, really admissible-not even if we acknowledge the weariness to which mere 'errantry' was reduced as the pastime reading of a class chiefly interested in feats of arms and love.[ chiefly interested: that is as themes of 'literature', as an amusement. Actually most of them were primarily interested in the acquisition of land and the use of marriage-alliances in furthering their aims.] About as amusing to us (or to me) as are stories about cricket, or yarns about a touring team, to those who (like me) find cricket (as it now is) a ridiculous bore. But the feats of arms in (say) Arthurian Romance, or romances attached to that great centre of imagination, do not need to 'fit into a politically purposive pattern'. [Not unless 'political' is narrowed (or enlarged), so that we are considering imaginatively only one centre or fortress of order and grace surrounded by enemies: the unfilled woods and mountains, hostile and barbarous men, wild beasts and monsters, and the Unknown. The defence of the realm may then indeed become symbolic of the human situation.]
So it was in the earlier Arthurian traditions. Or at least this thread of primitive but powerful imagination was an important element in them. As also in Beowulf. Auerbach should approve of Beowulf, for in it an author tried to fit a deed of 'errantry' into a complex political field: the English traditions of the international relations of Denmark, Gotland, and Sweden in ancient days. But that is not the strength of the story, rather its weakness. Beowulf's personal objects in his journey to Denmark are precisely those of a later Knight: his own renown, and above that the glory of his lord and king; but all the time we glimpse something deeper. Grendel is an enemy who has attacked the centre of the realm, and brought into the royal hall the outer darkness, so that only in daylight can the king sit upon the throne. This is something quite different and more horrible than a 'political' invasion of equals – men of another similar realm, such as Ingeld's later assault upon Heorot.
The overthrow of Grendel makes a good wonder-tale, because he is too strong and dangerous for any ordinary man to defeat, but it is a victory in which all men can rejoice because he was a monster, hostile to all men and to all humane fellowship and joy. Compared with him even the long politically hostile Danes and Gears were Friends, on the same side. It is the monstrosity and fairy-tale quality of Grendel that really makes the tale important, surviving still when the politics have become dim and the healing of Danish-Geatish relations in an 'entente cordiale' between two ruling houses a minor matter of obscure history. In that political world Grendel looks silly, though he certainly is not silly, however naif may be the poet's imagination and description of him.
Of course in 'real life' causes are not clear cut — if only because human tyrants are seldom utterly corrupted into pure manifestations of evil will. As far as I can judge some seem to have been so corrupt, but even they must rule subjects only part of whom are equally corrupt, while many still need to have 'good motives', real or feigned, presented to them. As we see today. Still there are clear cases: e.g. acts of sheer cruel aggression, in which therefore right is from the beginning wholly on one side, whatever evil the resentful suffering of evil may eventually generate in members of the right side. There are also conflicts about important things or ideas. In such cases I am more impressed by the extreme importance of being on the right side, than I am disturbed by the revelation of the jungle of confused motives, private purposes, and individual actions (noble or base) in which the right and the wrong in actual human conflicts are commonly involved. If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict. A judge must assign right and wrong according to principles which he holds valid in all cases. That being so, the right will remain an inalienable possession of the right side and Justify its cause throughout. (I speak of causes, not of individuals. Of course to a judge whose moral ideas have a religious or philosophical basis, or indeed to anyone not blinded by partisan fanaticism, the rightness of the cause will not justify the actions of its supporters, as individuals, that are morally wicked. But though 'propaganda' may seize on them as proofs that their cause was not in fact 'right', that is not valid. The aggressors are themselves primarily to blame for the evil deeds that proceed from their original violation of justice and the passions that their own wickedness must naturally (by their standards) have been expected to arouse. They at any rate have no right to demand that their victims when assaulted should not demand an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.)
Similarly, good actions by those on the wrong side will not justify their cause. There may be deeds on the wrong side of heroic courage, or some of a higher moral level: deeds of mercy and forbearance. A judge may accord them honour and rejoice to see how some men can rise above the hate and anger of a conflict; even as he may deplore the evil deeds on the right side and be grieved to see how hatred once provoked can drag them down. But this will not alter his judgement as to which side was in the right, nor his assignment of the primary blame for all the evil that followed to the other side."
The Silmarillion is a good bit grimmer than LOTR. I wasn't expecting the elves to be so awful.
Tolkien is clear that the Elves had their own Fall, but in a different manner to that of Men. "The Silmarillion" takes a lot from Nordic mythology; if you compare the stories of Turin Turambar and Kullervo, you see the resemblance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullervo
Feanor is a fascinating character, so talented, so great, and so stubborn. I'm not a fan. Though there are those who do admire and defend the Feanorians. You can see how a single charismatic leader can cause an entire people to follow along with his very bad decisions. I find his death very darkly humorous, and I don't know if Tolkien intended that along with poetic irony (it would be of a piece with the kind of grim humour in ancient sagas): after all his great speeches and proclamations and all his (somewhat exaggerated) belief in his own abilities and powers, when he does finally get to Middle-earth on the trail of Morgoth, he is killed (in a relatively short time) because he doesn't have the strategic sense not to pursue the fleeing forces of Morgoth, he gets killed by a Balrog (not even in hand-to-hand combat with Morgoth) and knows in his dying moments that the Noldor he led haven't a hope of winning this war. Then he dies and his body is reduced to ashes by the fire of his spirit, leaving his sons bound by the dreadful Oath and the people who believed in him and followed him out of Valinor stuck in Middle-earth to wage a hopeless war. Nobody, not even the Valar, come out of it looking wholly blameless, and Feanor is the greatest casualty of his own pride precisely because of his very real greatness.
From the collected letters:
"There are other stories almost equally full in treatment, and equally independent and yet linked to the general history. There is the Children of Húrin, the tragic tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Níniel – of which Turin is the hero: a figure that might be said (by people who like that sort of thing, though it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo."
Okay, I am rebuked there for searching for the 'real' inspiration behind the tales. I want to quote a long bit from the letters about the Elves and their Fall, and that will probably hit up against the Substack comment limit, so breaking off here as (1/2)
Well, it was their turn. Men were Fallen in the Lord of the Rings, the Dwarves in The Hobbit. Nobody managed to avoid being ejected (through their own faults) from Eden.
If you like the Lord of the Rings universe, but prefer a more realistic take on the conflict a la Game of Thrones (first two seasons), have I got the book for you!
It's Kirill Yeskov's (1999) revisionist tale "The Last Ringbearer." Here is an example of his writing style & way to set up the conflict. We are in a meeting of the White Council, the theme is "The final solution to the Mordorian problem", and Saruman is adressing Gandalf:
“Have you any pity on them?”
“On whom?”
“On the people, Gandalf, the people! As I understand it, you have just sentenced the
civilization of Mordor to death, in the name of the higher good. But any civilization consists of people, so they would have to be exterminated, completely, with no chance of recovery. Right?”
“Pity is a poor adviser, Saruman. Haven’t you looked in the Mirror with the rest of us?”
Gandalf pointed to the large object in the middle of the table, which looked most like a huge bowl full of quicksilver. “There are many roads to the future, but whichever of them Mordor takes, no later than three centuries hence it will access the forces of Nature that no one will be able to harness. Would you like to once again watch them turn the entire Middle Earth and Far West into ashes, in a blink of an eye?”
“You are correct, Gandalf, and it would be dishonest to deny such a possibility. But then
you should exterminate the Dwarves, too: they have already wakened the Terror of the Deep once, and it took all our magic to prevent it from escaping. You know that those bearded tightwads are mulishly stubborn and not inclined to learn from their mistakes…”
“All right, let us not speak of what is possible, and speak only of the inevitable. If you do not wish to look into the Mirror, look at the smoke rising from their coal furnaces and copper refineries. Walk the salt pans into which they have turned the lands west of Núrnen and try to find one living plant on those half-a-thousand square miles. But make sure not to do it on a windy day, when salty dust rises like a wall over the plain of Mordor, choking everything in its path… And note that they have done all that barely out of the crib; what do you think they will do later?”
“Gandalf, a child is always a disaster in the house. First dirty diapers, then broken toys;
later, the family clock taken apart; to say nothing of what happens when he grows up a bit. A house without children, on the other hand, is a model of cleanliness and order, yet somehow its owners are usually not too happy about that, especially as they age.”
“Saruman, always have I been amazed by your cunning ability to turn another’s words
inside out, and disprove obvious truths via sly casuistry. But by the Halls of Valinor! it will not work now. The Middle Earth population is now a multitude of peoples living in
harmony with nature and the heritage of their ancestors. These people and their entire way of life are now under a dire threat, and my duty is to avert it at all costs. A wolf plundering my sheep has its own reasons for doing so, but I have no intent of figuring them out!”
“I am, by the way, no less concerned with the fate of the Gondorians and the Rohirrim than you are; but I look further into the future. Do you, a member of the White Council, not know that the totality of magical knowledge by its very nature can not grow beyond what was once received from Aulë and Oromë? You can lose it quicker or slower, but no one has the power to reverse the loss. Every generation of wizards is weaker than the previous one; sooner or later men will face Nature alone. And then they will need Science and Technology – provided you haven’t eradicated those by then.”
“They don’t need your science, for it destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!”
“Strange is the talk of Soul and Harmony on the lips of a man who is about to start a war. As for science, it is dangerous not to them, but to you – or, rather, to your warped self esteem. What are we wizards but consumers of that which our predecessors have created, while they are creators of new knowledge? We face the Past, they face the Future. You have once chosen magic, and therefore will never cross the boundaries set by the Valar, whereas in their science the growth of knowledge – and hence, power – is truly unlimited. You are consumed by the worst kind of envy – that of a craftsman for an artist… Well, I suppose this is a weighty enough reason for murder; you’re neither the first nor the last.”
“You don’t believe this yourself,” Gandalf shrugged calmly.
“No, I suppose I do not,” Saruman shook his head sadly. “You know, those who are
motivated by greed, lust for power, or wounded pride are half-way tolerable, at least they feel pangs of conscience sometimes. But there is nothing more fearsome than a bright-eyed enthusiast who’d decided to benefit mankind; such a one can drown the world in blood without hesitation. Those people’s favorite saying is: ‘There are things more important than peace and more terrible than war’ – I believe you’ve heard this one, no?”
“I accept the responsibility, Saruman; History will vindicate me.”
“I have no doubt that it will; after all, history will be written by those who will win under
your banner. There are tried and true recipes for that: cast Mordor as the Evil Empire that wished to enslave the entire Middle Earth, and its inhabitants as non-human monsters that rode werewolves and ate human flesh… I am not talking about history now, but rather yourself. Allow me to repeat my rude question about the people who hold the knowledge of the civilization of Mordor. That they will have to be destroyed, quite literally, is beyond doubt – ‘uproot the weed entirely’ – otherwise the whole endeavor is meaningless. I would like to know, then, whether you – yes, you personally – will participate in the weeding; will you cut off their heads yourself?.. Silence? Such are ever your ways, you benefactors of humanity! Craft the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem, sure, but when it’s time to implement it, you always hide in the bushes. It’s executioners you need, so that you can later point at them in disgust: it’s all their excesses…”
... Yeskov wrote in Russian, and the book was translated in 2010 by Yisroel Markov. It is sometimes derogatively pushed aside as "fan fiction", but The Last Ringbearer is a hefty 269 page work on its own, and Yeskov/Markov simply write better than the rather heavy-handed prose of Tolkien. Link here:
https://ymarkov.livejournal.com/270570.html
One o the reasons I like Tolkien is the absence of turgid speeches like that one.
every man to his taste.
It's also fanfiction in that it takes canon characters and re-jigs them to fit the new author's purposes.
Saruman was *never* a humanitarian concerned with the poor wee Orc babies, and though I can see why someone whose tastes run to materialistic atheism should cast LOTR as "stinky old hokey fake religion versus True Shiny Science!", that is not the case.
There are good ways and bad ways to use science, and in Middle-earth many of the Most Advanced Minds used science and technology to create hellscapes because they had no care for the larger picture.
Saruman has a mind of metal and wheels, but Gandalf is not Anti-Science Mouthpiece. He is the Maia who went by choice to Nienna, the Power of Pity and Mercy. The "craftsman versus artist" jibe is neat, but that's because both Saruman and Sauron are Maiar of Aule and their mindset is making, creating, manufacturing using the 'science and technology' that revamped version of Saruman is presenting as the way forward for Men in the Fourth Age.
Gandalf is not concerned with that. He is concerned with healing, understanding, forgiving and judging.
Yes.
I have no quarrel with your interpretation of LOTR.
But that is also why LOTR so obviously is "young adult fiction".
...since there is no problem in LOTR to identify who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. It is pushed down the reader's throat from the very start.
Man-eating wolf-riding cockney-speaking hairy untermenschen versus fair-haired white-skinned proper-English speaking high elves and cute Shropshire-stereotyping halfling natives..I wonder who the author wants us to root for?
There are no shades of grey, there are no real ethical dilemmas where no matter what you do, some dark effects is a price you have to pay; there is no Machiavellian manoeuvres between allies...
It is a very good yarn, and the minutiae Tolkien has built into his alternative universe is impressive to say the least. But the story as such is mind-numbingly predictable, and therefore boring, at least if you compare it to Game of Thrones (season 1 in particular).
...what makes Yeskov's "Russian" re-telling fun to read, is that he does not wholly reverse the good/bad distinction, with Mordor as the good guys and the elves/Gandalf-people as the bad guys. (My small extract is not representative in this regard.) Instead, there are shades of grey and cynical manipulators in many places.
Sauron is loosely modelled on Stalin, including his disastrous industrial policies and trademark tons-of-bricks humour ("where there is a man, there is a problem. Where there is no man, there is no problem"). Ok, Stalin/Sauron is not portrayed as the mass-murderer he was, but that would have oversimplified the story again. Yeskov wants to keep a bit open who to cheer on, if anyone at all.
...Well, the elves come across as particularly cunning, that must be said. But if you put yourself in the shoes of a Yeskov-elf, their behavior seems perfectly rational, from their perspective. Middle-Earth is a tough world, also for elves.
…and concerning the relationship between allies: Did Faramir become so totally star-struck that he wholeheartedly accepted Rohan's vassal-status to Gondor? If you believe a real king would yield to another king just like that, I own a piece of the moon I can sell to you cheaply... but again, how Gondor subordinates Rohan is not a reverse good-bad story either by Yeskov...it's complicated, which makes it fun.
Anyway, don't take my word for it, read the "Russian version" for the fun of it.
(...or don't, because life is short, and what one person considers a fun read is what another person reads as desperately boring. Which is how it should be. This is reading for pleasure only, after all.)
And in any case, we are pretty far removed from the book review by now! (Then again, that is arguably part of the charm of these ACT threads.)
Your annoyance (if I interpret that correctly) reminds me of how fans of Star Trek can be annoyed by Kirk/Spock slashfic. As in: "Couldn't you make up your own universe, your own characters, to tell your story? Why drag mine into this?" But of course that's in part the *point*. The author *chose* to use the same universe, and knowing the reaction of the fans. There can be many possible motives for that, but not many are 100% friendly.
Reminds me of HPMOR, in a good way (or at least, in a way people who like HPMOR tend to think of as good).
“ Yeskov/Markov simply write better than the rather heavy-handed prose of Tolkien” hahahaha
Translation is always hard. The same complaint is made in the opposite direction by English-speakers reading Russian novels in translation.
It is recasting the Orcs as sentient individuals though, and that was something Tolkien was grappling with as a problem: they are in *something* of the same case as the Dwarves, being created by a sub-power without the power of embuing consciousness.
I think the approach there makes the question too easy; it's putting it on the level of allegory, which Tolkien staunchly denied: Mordor *is* Soviet Russia, the Orcs *are* the various peoples of the USSR, the West *is* casting them as sub-human beasts in propaganda, etc.
It's not that simple a question to answer. It's very tempting to recast the 'villains' as heroes, and sorry to gore any oxen, but I do see why this work is considered "fan fiction" because this is such a common trope: what if the Dark Lord was really a woobie? What if the 'good guys' were really the bad guys?
Using terms such as "The Final Solution" is disingenuous, and whether the author used such a term, any translator doing so knows *exactly* what they are doing. "Hey, Gandalf, you're Hitler and the Orcs are Jews! How do you like them apples?"
I would like to pose the question: what does the author think of the post-war de-Nazification of Germany? But Germany had its own civilisation! Yes, and a civilisation which somehow led to the creation of the architects of the Final Solution. The question loops around on itself. You of course do not destroy all the Germans, but in the middle of a war, you fight the enemy army in front of you and don't think (too much) about "but what are the hopes and dreams of this man?" And the Orcs had no 'civilisation' as such, but whatever Morgoth and later Sauron imposed on them. If the scattered remnants of the Orc army take to the hills in order to form roving gangs to pillage and plunder, they have to be dealt with like any criminals. The kind of plans Gorbag, for one, would like to implement if he gets a chance to slip away from Sauron's army in the chaos:
"‘They would,’ grunted Gorbag. ‘We’ll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. What d’you say? – if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.’
‘Ah!’ said Shagrat. ‘Like old times.’"
Radagast is the person or wizard to take into account here; after the war is over, he would be the one dealing with the question of 'how to treat the Orcs' since Gandalf is occupied with Elves and Men, but those are not the only species inhabiting Middle-earth, and Radagast 'the Simple, the Bird-Tamer' is concerned with them.
Well, death of the author and all that, but honestly, this is prime teenage/early twenties girl fanfic writer who thinks the lead villain is dreamy and needs to be redeemed and so anything he ever did was not his fault, it's the fault of the 'good guys' who forced him to do that (I may be jaundiced as part of a current fandom completely stans a guy who in canon murdered his own infant son, but he never did nothing bad ever according to the fans).
Tolkien went back and forth on the exact nature of the Orcs:
"It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of 'rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.
...'The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.' In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the 'gods', let alone of God."
Now, the question that author's version of Saruman raises is a good one:
"They would at least 'be' real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even 'mocking' the Children of God. They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.) But whether they could have 'souls' or 'spirits' seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible 'delegation', I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would 'tolerate' that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today. There might be other 'makings' all the same which were more like puppets filled (only at a distance) with their maker's mind and will, or ant-like operating under direction of a queen-centre."
If Orcs are now in the world, they are now part of the world, and can't simply be exterminated like vermin unless it can be proven that they *are* mindless, destructive vermin and there is no other way to deal with them. George R.R. Martin's little jibe about "baby Orcs in their cradles" is this way of thinking, but the Orcs didn't have cradles or raising baby Orcs in this way. We're anthropomorphising, at best, and using them as a stalking-horse for pet political preaching, at worst.
Speaking of "what to do with the enemy post-war":
"People in this land seem not even yet to realize that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. Whose brave men are just about as brave as ours. Whose industry is about 10 times greater. And who are – under the curse of God – now led by a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil: a typhoon, a passion: that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting."
"There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done."
But in the end, Tolkien is not writing about humans or any form of humans, even under an allegorical form:
"There is no 'symbolism' or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort 'five wizards = five senses' is wholly foreign to my way of thinking. There were five wizards and that is just a unique part of history. To ask if the Orcs 'are' Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs."
In case our Russian author is anyway unclear on that last point, the answer is a big HELL, NO! 😀
"[Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.]
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable".
I think (from the excerpt, I haven't read the book) that The Last Ringbearer is about industrialization being good, just as LOTR is anti-industrialization.
The intro of LOTR has a bit about needing to make compromises as the population goes up-- very few hobbits live in holes any more, and I wonder how the people of middle earth would have managed if they seriously didn't want to industrialize.
It's also part of the larger argument here: is the nasty brutish and short novel genre *genuinely* more 'realistic' than the heroic and idealistic? There are people who do awful things. There are also people who do marvellous, self-sacrificing things. If you're going to claim that "This work of dull grey misery is more true to life", you have to deal with the good things in life, including the good things humans do. Leaving those out is every bit as unrealistic as the Technicolour Middle Ages. The swing from that to "mud-smeared peasants in brown rags" was just as unrealistic, yet because it *seemed* more true-to-life (on the grounds that people are more cynical in their judgements) then it was taken as Real Historic Truth.
And I'm going to quote Chesterton again:
"To summarise, our slum fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible as spiritual fact. One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. The men who write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle classes or the upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed the educated classes. Hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it.
...The slum novelist gains his whole effect by the fact that some detail is strange to the reader; but that detail by the nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. It cannot be strange to the soul which he is professing to study. The slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. But to the man he is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the office and a supper at Pagani’s. The slum novelist is content with pointing out that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe looks dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But the man he is supposed to be studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe. The chiaroscuro of the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows are a light grey. But the high lights and the shadows are not a light grey in that life any more than in any other. The kind of man who could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind of man who could share them. In short, these books are not a record of the psychology of poverty. They are a record of the psychology of wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a description of the state of the slums. They are only a very dark and dreadful description of the state of the slummers.
...The realistic story is certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story. If what you desire is deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. But, at least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic story. The melodrama is much more like life."
I don't know whether Lewis was influenced by this essay, but Till We Have Faces did a remarkable job of showing the past as normal for the people who were living in it. I'm not sure I've seen any other book which as good on that particular point.
"The Screwtape Letters" also had a bit where the demon is advised to make the patient think that his unpleasant experiences (being caught up in an air-raid, neighbours being mean to him, etc.) are "real life", whereas his pleasant ones are all some kind of fantasy, even though, objectively speaking, they're all equally real and equally happening to him. I've always felt that was a swipe at the kind of pseudo-worldly-wise attitude which makes people say that GOT is more realistic than LOTR because the characters in the former are more unpleasant.
The novels tend to be nasty brutish and long.
I've read pretty much everything posted on that blog, and the main thing is:
1. In terms of background, Tolkien studied extensively Old and Middle English texts and by extension their material contexts. The cultures portrayed in Lord of the Rings are quite specifically and intentionally modeled off of actual medieval societies. Martin... does not have nearly so thorough a background on the subject. I could find a couple mean quotes from him that suggest a general lack of interest in details and not much awareness of specifics.
2. In military terms, Tolkien is much more accurate. He is an actual former soldier who understands morale and how battles play out, both from a historical perspective and from personal experience. Martin does not understand the actual mechanics of battle very well, particularly the logistics side of things, thus the very silly numbers of troop totals and distances traveled.
3. In sociological terms, Martin is very very dire. This is most visible in his portrayal of religion and how Westeros handles trust and honor. Religion is portrayed as lower class, and the social and legal impact of religion is minimized because nobody appears to believe in it. Stannis does not believe in it enough to believe Melisandre is a true priest, but has a half-hearted commitment; his soldiers and lords appear to only believe in it just enough to get a half-dozen dunked in prison and then call it a day. This is absurd - just imagine a medieval king converting to Islam, for a quick and straightforward comparison. On the second point, trust and honor are not abstract concepts of goodness to be abandoned at the first opportunity, as it often appears, but vitally necessary parts of the administrative structure of a feudal realm - in the absence of trust (which is produced by honorable behavior), there is anarchy. While certainly betrayal does happen, well, contrast the Westerosi saying "words are wind" with the following quotation from Handbook for William, written by a mother advising her son on how best to behave as a vassal in another court:
"Think on that excellent servant of the patriarch Abraham. He traveled a great distance to bring back a wife for his master's son. Because of the confidence of him who gave the command and the wise trustworthiness of him who followed it, the task was fulfilled. The wife found great blessing and great riches in her many descendants. What shall I say of the attitude of Joab, of Abner, and of many others toward the king David? Facing dangers on their king's behalf in many places, they desired with all their might to please their lord more than themselves. And what of those many others in holy Scripture who faithfully obeyed their lords' commands? Because of their watchful strength they were found worthy to flourish in this world."
Part of the point of ASoIaF is that the treacherous behavior of so many of its characters is ultimately self-destructive; however true this lesson may be (and however much the portrayal of treachery in Westeros may be intended purely to display this lesson), its specific manifestation is unrealistic, precisely because people like the Freys and the Boltons would understand the ramifications of their behavior, as would everybody else.
(There are other parts where he is just absolutely blatantly wrong, like the clear sociological nonsense of “A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is deemed a dull affair”, but those tend to be in his "foreigner" societies like the Dothraki or the Unsullied.)
“A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is deemed a dull affair”
Yeah, that's where he gets sloppy about other cultures and about the 'realistic', 'based on historical real-world cultures' part of his novel.
There's a joke Scottish saying (Sir Alex Ferguson quoted it) that "it's not a wedding without a fight" and there's a similar attitude in Ireland, but the whole point is that you *try* to avoid fights and the like. People get drunk at weddings, and drunk people get into fights, but a wedding (or a funeral) is an affair where there is a lot of social expectations and roles and acceptable ways of behaviour, and violence is not part of them.
That's why things like The Red Wedding in Martin's world, and including folksongs in our own world where deaths happened, are the great, exceptional, instances of treachery and accepted as such. Weddings are about love, or if you're being practical, about family alliances. Since you are creating a bridge between two families, within the larger society both of them are part of, things like "deaths at a wedding" are very disruptive, are against the social expectations of the function of a wedding, and create rather than heal breaches.
So if it's a kind of joke about the Dothraki, then that's fine. But if it's anyway meant seriously, then it shows a dysfunctional society that *cannot* survive since deaths in a culture like create blood-feuds and vendettas, and if you're routinely having three new vendettas springing up every time anyone gets married, then you can't afford to have marriages - and the families of those holding the wedding probably get dragged in as collateral damage as well.
If you *don't* have blood-feuds springing up, then you don't have the honour-bound society that the Dothraki are portrayed as being on that level. And if you don't have any means of social sanction or punishment for murders, then you are not portraying a realistic society based on any human culture historical or not, you are portraying a fantasy gang Mafia culture.
Having participated in a wedding in Poland, people were surprised that there weren't any fights.
Having some fights now and then is a lot more sustainable if they aren't to the death.
Interestingly, not only was Tolkien a soldier, he was an officer in arguably the most unromantic and unpleasant war of all of history.
"Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed."
Yes, one of the things that struck me about ASoIaF was that it's nominally a medieval/renaissance society, but in the real world, people then were very interested in virtue-- admittedly not the same thing as virtuous, but at least they knew it was important.
Instead, they have a few rules (no incest, no betraying guests) but no general concept of virtue. (Note: I've only read the books once, and not recently.)
I have a small bet with myself that the Iron Band will be ripping off its customers in The Winds of Winter. Defection is everywhere.
I really enjoyed the writing style (full disclosure: also a British Christian), it kind of discouraged me from reading the book which is possibly a good thing? It seems like what's good is not original and what's original isn't good, but I'm already exposed to lots of "Humans are good actually" rhetoric.
These Scott style reviews are really précis and critique, and mean you never need to read the actual book, unless you really want all the expansions. As someone said recently (can't remember who) most books should be a blog post, most blog posts should be a tweet, and most tweets should never be sent.
Sometimes I read I book review and think "definitely want to read this in full" - for example, Days of Rage was one of those, and the Precipice, and I guess 10 Rules for Life as well.
Other times I read a book review and think "I'll add the book to the ever growing list of books I may read if I have the time" - the Wizard and the Prophet, Antifragile and The New Sultan are on that list.
What I was talking about is a definite sense that "given the opportunity cost of reading a book, when I could be reading any other book instead, my time would probably not be best spent reading Humankind."
I agree that most of the value of any work can be condensed into something much shorter. I think this even applies to fiction as well as non-fiction - I often find that short stories are a lot more engaging and memorable than novels, since all of the filler is cut out. This is not an absolute rule of course, I just think it's a shame that longer works are incentivised more than shorter works. For example, there's a lot of great fiction writers on the internet, but once you've got a following they just put out a lot.
If you read 10 rules for life, you didn't read it in full, it's 12 rules for life (although, having also read it, it's 12 chapter titles and a swirl of ideas distributed randomly throughout the book. Peterson is better speaking than writing IMHO)
For some reason I keep making that mistake. I actually listened to the audiobook so that may have worked better than reading it, I kind of enjoyed the swirl of ideas but then I generally listen while doing other things, so my focus isn't 100%.
Audible is very cheap if you keep trying to cancel, they throw loads of free stuff at you to get you to stay, so I've listened to a lot of Audiobooks recently, including Debt, the Righteous Mind, Utopia for Realists and Profit over People. Those books (or at least their authors in the case of Chomsky) were suggested to me by "reviews", so my curiosity was definitely piqued.
My politics is basically just "contrarian" at this point, I disagree with everyone I've just listed but I enjoyed finding out why.
I did quite a bit of stuff on Audible, I just find my retention is really low that way (bad enough at the best of times).
Righteous Mind is good, both excellent content and really clearly written. I did quite a chunk of "Coddling of the American mind", just a bit too depressing!
I don't think my retention of audiobooks is any worse than reading a physical book, and it has the advantage that I can "read" while cooking or running. I do enjoy sitting down with a physical book, but it's hard to find the time!
Audible credits are often cheaper than buying the physical or even Kindle version of the book which was part of the appeal, and there's loads of really good fiction on there too - full cast radio plays are the best, I'm especially impressed that they managed to translate the Sandman from comic book to audio!
"Coddling of the American Mind" seems like the kind of stuff I hear enough about on culture-war podcasts anyway, plus I'm not American and I honestly don't care what they teach at colleges outside of STEM and Medicine anyway.
I read Albion's Seed after Scott's review and very much enjoyed it. It is big enough that even his lengthy review could not get to all the good bits.
I don't think the point of the book is to be original research. This is not an acadamic work. More a synthesis of ideas floating around for a general audience. I see a lot into this book that is not original that is good. Some that is not original but bad. But not much that's comletely original (either good or bad). Although there are a few original things;
- The real life lord of the flies
- The Jos de Blok interviews
- Exposing people to the democracy 2.0 shit
- His idea about the origin of religion
Of these four points only the last seems properly bad.
In what sense is "the real life lord of the flies" real?
Apart from that it actually happened?
Great review. I'd lose the "Paris, France" joke. But, still, job well done.
Obviously the reviewer has never visited northeast Texas.
I've spent plenty of time in Paris and have never visited northeast Texas, and I still get them confused. I blame that movie with the catchy name.
Baghdad Cafe?
For the win!
1) What I read about the Stanford prison experiment is that two of the three groups turned out OK, and only the third group of guards became cruel. (Which fits pretty much what the reviewer says.) And further that the reason for this third group is that one of the guards became bored, and decided to try channeling the sadistic prison warden in the movie "Cool Hand Luke" just to see what would happen.
2) I'm a little skeptical of these stories of hundreds of people getting together to plan city budgets. I had a councilman who tried to get citizen input this way, and for me at least it didn't work. First, city budgeting is boring. Second, setting priorities involved questionnaires that demanded you put something like 20 municipal needs in priority order. Somehow, deciding which was the 15th highest and which the 16th highest seemed rather arbitrary.
3) "Love Actually" is not a movie about falling in love. Far too much of it is either about guys who cheat on their existing stable love in favor of a momentary lust, or about stalkers whose victims respond in the way they only do in stalkers' fanciful dreams. That's why "it's called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world."
"I'm a little skeptical of these stories of hundreds of people getting together to plan city budgets."
Also, the story is from Venezuela, which is a country with a governing ideology that stands to benefit from sucess stories of this kind. It's hard to tell if we're getting the full story. Nevertheless I'd like to send an American observer down to witness the sausage making to see how it actually works. There might be something that Anglosphere attempts to do the same thing are missing and that would be worth learning if so.
Good point.
Maybe, but São Paulo isnt.
Venezuela and São Paulo are also in a region of the world (latin america) notable for its high corruption. A Mayor is cheap to bribe. It's a lot more expensive to bribe an entire city. (and even if you did, why not do so throuph public goods that benefit everyone ... improving the city).
Many Massachusetts towns are ongoing experiments in (2). They have what are called "Open Town Meetings," in which the citizens who attend are the "legislature." They take up "Warrant Articles" (the budget, the bylaws, employee salaries, etc.). They allow any citizen to get up and speak, and small numbers of citizens to introduce their own Articles for approval by the meeting. The towns that have Town Meetings are not notably better run than towns with more conventional systems.
As a resident of Massachusetts .... most town meetings approve pretty much everything that the town administration proposes. After all, the administration presents "the facts" and few people know enough to disagree. There are usually a few things that people do know about and care about which take up a lot of time at the meeting but a miniscule part of the town budget.
I don't disagree. The point is more that New England town meetings are an actual implementation of the idea of direct citizen participation in government. It is not a panacea, by any means.
Delightful review. I suspect I got more out of this review than I would have if I'd set down to read the book.
I think contact under conditions of reasonable equality wears down prejudice, but quite a lot of contact left prejudice in place in the slave-holding south.
I have a pet theory for this: power corrupts empathy. If you believe that you have power or authority over someone else, that feeling blocks any empathy, and you feel justified in your coercion. However, if you meet someone on equal terms, your empathy is not blocked, and then you can develop friendship etc with them. A neurological basis for this is explained in the book The Master and the Emissary, in which the author argues that power is a left hemisphere emotion while empathy is controlled by the right hemisphere, and both hemispheres are always in competition with each other.
Well, you know, in the usual meaning of the word empathy gets in the way of an effective use of power. A boss that makes decisions based on his emotional mirroring of the joy or sorrow of whatever random employee he meets today is a well-recognized disaster. So is a military leader, for that matter -- or judge. Ironically, the only way to exercise power humanely is to have a modest but strictly limited emotional identification with the people who are subject to your decisions.
No such limitation applies if you're a peasant rather than a chieftain.
That’s exactly what the research says; contact as equals. Even better if y’all have to work together to get something important done. Then it doesn’t even have to be very long contact.
The slaves were not in conditions that would make contact likely to break down prejudices.
I've read Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy. My sense of it was that he had a good point that empathy was not and should not be the sole basis of moral reasoning--that it could be biased and lead to poor choices in certain circumstances--but I don't think that he successfully made the case that it was a bad thing overall. Empathy is important for facilitating communication and it's helpful for getting people to overcome animousity and distrust. It's essential for a lot of human cooperation. It just needs to be embedded in a larger ethical system supplemented with other forms of compassion.
Excellent review! Re: "The Lord of the Flies", my view is that Golding wrote it as a rebuttal of "The Coral Island" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coral_Island and so we're immediately into a literary contest of genres, rather than trying to be realistic descriptions of actual society (also Modernism would have been the influence on Golding as a young man, and he was writing in the post-war period, so all this meant that 'grimdark' was the favoured tone for High Literary Novels). So it's all very artificial, but for some reason we're a species that likes to think of ourselves as rough, tough and brutal, at least in our reading material.
Re: toddlers - they are very definitely not blank slates. There's a reason it's called The Terrible Twos, because they are developing minds and wills of their own and are out there getting stuck into everything. Favourite word: "No!" What you describe reminds me very much of all the (alleged) experiments trying to find out what the original language of mankind was, with kings ordering groups of babies to be brought up in isolation so that their first words could be interpreted without anyone teaching them a particular language.
Re: all the social science experiments - I do wonder how much "the ones who claimed afterwards that they only went along with it because it was a psychology experiment in a prestigious university, pretty clearly no one was actually being dangerously electrocuted" had to do with it. Certainly people *will* take orders from "official looking person with a clipboard" but by the same token, if you know that this is all an experiment taking place in a university run by Real Scientists, there probably is an element of "okay, best to just go along with this, nothing bad is really happening" as well.
Re: people don't need nearly as much managing as management claims - "We should be aware that the reason Jos de Blok can slice literally all the middle management out of his nursing company and end up only slightly cheaper is that he pays his nurses a lot more. So maybe don't give up on pay as a lever entirely."
I'm also willing to bet that he hires a *lot* more staff and that staff *don't* work as many hours. The first thing that both public and private health-care providers, from nursing homes to domestic aides, do is to cut corners and penny-pinch by cutting down on staff, hiring less-qualified staff so that they can pay them less, and fudge numbers so that staff are covering a lot more patients than they should officially be doing. This has a huge effect on quality of care, job satisfaction, you name it. If de Blok's organisation is deliberately not doing this kind of penny-pinching, no wonder staff are happier and clients report better care.
I think I fall somewhere in the middle here - I don't think people are as natively nice as Bregman states, but neither do I think that we're all ravening brutes. It's up to circumstances: I don't whole-heartedly agree with this quote from Deep Space Nine during the Dominion War (I do think the Federation has principles that it sticks to) but at the same time, it's not completely wrong:
"Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people... will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes."
Put people under pressure, and some of them will turn into diamonds, and some will just shatter.
I am delighted you mentioned Chesterton on the Cave Man. I'd like to quote an excerpt from his chapter on this in "The Everlasting Man":
"When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall."
Re: domesticated animals, I also wonder if they really are breeding the foxes for friendliness, or for cuteness. Humans find those kind of traits in animals appealing, even certain breeds of lizards as pets have big dark eyes and "smiling" mouths. If you keep selecting for "cute" animals, maybe that also involves "friendly" animals as well, since they are dependent on humans.
We've found enough ancient skeletons with crushed skulls to say a bit about cave men. We even found the frozen corpse of Oetzi.
*Now* we do, but back when he was writing, there was a whole lot of speculation about what exactly primitive societies had been like with a lack of evidence.
H.G. Wells (ironically, as he was aiming for the "based on science" style) was one of the propagators of the notion of the violent cave man bashing his wife over the head with a club and becoming the tyrannical Old Man:
"True, I cannot set forth here in any great detail any actual proofs of these prehistoric origins; but I never heard of anybody bothering about historic proofs in connection with prehistoric origins. There is quite as much evidence for my favourite uncle’s theory of the primitive pillow as there is for Mr. H.G. Wells’s detailed account of the horrible Old Man, who ruled by terror over twenty or thirty younger men who could have thrown him out of the cave on his apelike ear;
...Nobody expects any historic evidence for things of this sort, because they are prehistoric; and nobody dreams of attempting to found them on any scientific facts; they are simply Science. I do not see why my favourite uncle and I should not be Science too. I do not see why we should not simply make things up out of our own heads; things which cannot possibly be contradicted, just as they cannot possibly be proved."
"To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined.
...In short these details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I have never been able to find it.
...In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard's Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something quite unconnected, one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and philosophical implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole question for us."
(1/2)
"This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural. Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science."
(2/2)
My understanding is that Australian aborigenes did have gerontocracies in which older men ruled over younger ones. I don't know if that applies to cavemen, but the "men's cults" discussed here serve to place older men at higher status:
https://traditionsofconflict.com/
Or Afghanistan, pre-1979 or so. Or Somalia, right now.
I understand that one of the ways in which the ongoing war in Afghanistan has really disrupted that society is that it has terminated the rule by village elders, who used to serve as a moderating influence on the younger hotheads.
Somali immigrants to the US have raised similar complained to me. Not about war, but that back home, tribal norms meant that the young men had to listen to their elders. This in turn kept them from doing all kinds of stupid and rash stuff.
> and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things
Not only this is hopelessly outdated, I strongly doubt it was correct at the time of writing. (But on the other hand, Dmanisi skull #4 is considered to be a proof that our ancestors took care of their elders almost 2 million years ago. And "I feel the spirit of cave-man rise within me, let me chew some food for my toothless great-uncle" works even better.)
They were selecting foxes for not minding being handled by humans, not for appearance. I suppose the cuter foxes might have been handled differently and tolerated it better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
"Belyayev set down strict guidelines for the breeding program. Goldman said, "Starting at one month of age, and continuing every month throughout infancy, "the foxes were tested for their reactions to an experimenter. The experimenter would attempt to pet and handle the fox while offering it food. In addition, the experimenters noted whether the foxes preferred to spend time with other foxes, or with humans." After the fox had reached sexual maturity at an age of seven to eight months, "they had their final test and assigned an overall tameness score." Among the factors that went into this score were the tendency "to approach an experimenter standing at the front of its home pen" and "to bite the experimenters when they tried to touch it."[6] By way of ensuring that the pups' tameness was a result of genetic selection and not of interactions with human beings, the foxes were not subjected to any kind of training and were only permitted brief periods of contact with people.[6]
"As reported on by Trut, the tests for tameness took the following form, which was still in use as of 2009: "When a pup is one month old, an experimenter offers it food from his hand while trying to stroke and handle the pup. The pups are tested twice, once in a cage and once while moving freely with other pups in an enclosure, where they can choose to make contact either with the human experimenter or with another pup. The test is repeated monthly until the pups are six or seven months old." At the age of seven or eight months, the pups are given a tameness score and placed in one of three groups. The least domesticated are in Class III; those that allow humans to pet and handle them, but that do not respond to contact with friendliness, are in Class II; the ones that are friendly with humans are in Class I. After only six generations, Belyayev and his team had to add a higher category, Class IE, the "domesticated elite", which "are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the 20th generation 35% were 'elite', and by the 30th generation 70% to 80% of the selected generation was 'elite.'"[2]"
Imagine the taming forces and scores we apply to each other. Not very surprising that most of us spend most of our lives whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking each other.
That's very thorough and they do seem to have tried not to interfere too much. But the end results also sound like the "oh, cute!" reactions humans have to certain animals, so I suppose friendliness = neoteny = cuteness since we probably are 'programmed' to find juvenile/infantile features appealing in order to make sure we take care of our infants and don't simply abandon them and wander off. Or if we do, that other adult members of the species will take care of them.
An interesting question is whether they would have succeeded had they chosen a species we consider naturally ugly. Would it be possible to breed snakes to be more appealing to humans?
Thank you for quoting this; also I believe “Dagmar Doubledick” is a most excellent name for an RPG character and shall be stealing it for my next campaign.
That and "Gorlias Fitzgorgon (that noble character)". Don't forget Gorlias if/when your campaign takes you through a haunted wood with the spectres of all the dead hanging from the trees! 😉
I was under the impression that "Lord of the Flies" was intended to lambast the education (some might say brainwashing) of well-to-do British schoolboys, in particular — not make any claims about human nature at large.
A key thing you need to understand about Dutch healthcare (and Dutch semi-government in general), is that it is micromanagement hell. There is a ton of administrative work pushed on healthcare workers, so they are effectively part-time managers anyway (in the reporting and paper pushing sense). Just very poorly paid and having to follow shitty rules, rather than use common sense.
Jos de Blok's solution was to somehow convince the insurance companies and the government to make exceptions to these rules (huge charisma?) and then make his employees do all kinds of administrative tasks that they probably prefer to offload to a manager, as we see elsewhere in the economy, where that is actually an option. Yet in Dutch outpatient healthcare, employees have only the choice between putting up with being made part-time managers and actually being able to do what they think is right, or being made part-time managers and being forced into working in a way they think is wrong. That the former wins over the latter is not evidence that managers are useless or that companies without managers can generally be competitive (note that you can often find exceptions to a rule, especially when there are niche environments that are atypical).
I think that in a more sensible regulatory system, Jos de Blok would be outcompeted by organizations with managers and other specialists who don't provide care themselves, as those are the companies that constantly win in less punishing regulatory environments.
> have been unable to establish whether Bregman has got his Nikolais muddled, or whether Stalin instituted a pogrom specifically against geneticists called Nikolai
It was genetics in general, and yes, it was Nikolai Belyaev who was arrested and executed: https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=110574583 (the death claim is backed by 2 book sources).
Is "leave the chip pan on" a Britishism?
Often a source of domestic fires; coming home drunk(ish) from a night out, feeling hungry, putting the chip pan on the cooker, then forgetting about it (because drunk) and it goes on fire and burns down the house. Not always drunken, accidents happen to everyone! Fire safety demonstration about how to deal with a chip pan fire from 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTrth1ywHM4
Less frequent nowadays because of electric deep-fat fryers and many more takeaway options so you don't have to cook your own fat-laden, high-carb meals after the pub 😀
Public service warnings from the 70s: never overload the chip pan! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrSqXWzB2KU
And oven chips.
I was able to figure it out from context, but to my American eyes it suggested a component of a woodworking tool that needs periodic emptying.
Marshall was wrong:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/shoot-to-kill/
Don't rely on the Israeli daycare study either:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/10/revenge_of_the.html
Here's Robin Hanson on paying for results, which he thinks our system of capitalism doesn't currently do nearly enough of:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/07/radical-pay-for-results.html
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/science-2-0.html
"Which is odd because broken windows theory turns out to be based on one experiment done by our old friend Philip Zimbardo"
Wrong. Broken windows/"nuisance abatement" is the ONLY criminological intervention with a replicated randomized control trial. See Manzi's "Uncontrolled".
"New York's great crime statistics just reflect that violent crime was falling everywhere in this period"
It fell more in NYC. "Dynamic concentration" seems to be a big part of that.
"What we can say with confidence is that zero-tolerance policing massively, disproportionately, picks on ethnic minorities":
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/max-policing-is-disproportionate.html
On cynicism I'll cite Robin Hanson yet again. It leads to accuracy but also marks you as someone for whom cynicism is justified:
https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/metacynic.html
I forgot to add: per "The Nurture Assumption" on an experiment raising an infant alongside a chimp, the latter develops way quicker early on and so the infant would start imitating the obviously superior species. The human brain size runs up against the limits of the birth canal, so we start out relatively helpless compared to other species.
It may not be entirely that. We're a very long-lived species, with low reproduction rates, which tends to make us vulnerable to environmental change. One of the ways we compensate for that is retaining far more plasticity than most species, and one of the ways we do that is by being born in more of a "blank slate" condition so that we can adapt to whatever circumstances exist when we are born.
For example, it would certainly be more efficient for us to be born speaking a language, the way animals (mostly) are. But it's more adaptive if we are born with only an instinct to communicate and facility for learning language, and learn whatever language is actually extant and useful when we emerge. Takes a little longer, but we gain a lot (as a species) in being able to adapt to changing conditions *within individual lifetimes* instead of having to wait for new generations.
That blogpost 'refuting' Marshall calls it "all bullshit", but cites nothing to support that argument, so I'm not sure why you bothered linking it, as it brings nothing to the table but invective.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has:
> While the data he used to support this claim has been challenged, his overall conclusion - a significant number do not fire their weapons in combat - has been verified by multiple studies performed by other armies, going back to the 18th century
That has an actual citation (Holmes, Richard (2003). Acts of War: The Behaviour of Men in Battle), and the review itself referenced concrete examples (double loaded muskets in the Civil War) of this phenomenon that predate Marshall's specific claims.
I'm leaning to agree with the Wikipedia summary here: his data may be wrong but his conclusion seems correct.
The Wikipedia article is controlled by an editor eager to defend Marshall - to the point of citing an article that argues against the 25% claim as proof it is widely accepted! The sources it actually cites for the claims of studies backing it up (Beevor and Holmes) are rather poor - Holmes just mentions the claim while discussing Marshall's work, while Beevor's evidence (aside from Marshall) is an uncitied claims of Soviet concerns which does not say anything about what percentage refused to fire, a misinterpration of Lionel Wigram's views on morale (which have themselves been challenged), and another uncited claim of Germans taking similar views to Wigram, which again does not gives percentages and is probably also a misinterpretation.
I've read Acts of War, although it's been a few years. Holmes was working well after Marshall's fraud came out, and he's a lot less accepting than Dave Grossman of it. I think there's probably some truth that people tend to be reluctant to shoot other people, but that's a big difference from people not firing their weapons at all, which is what Marshall claims. The wiki article is wrong on this.
I am less sure that the double-loaded musket thing actually proves what Grossman (the likely source) claims it does. This is a known issue with muzzle-loading weapons, and the battleship HMS Thunderer had a nasty accident when one of the two guns in her turret fired, the crew missed the misfire, and double-loaded. This was during peacetime training, with a bunch of people involved. And they still screwed it up. So I'm skeptical that it's all malingering, as Grossman posits.
Like a number of these reviews, this one is brilliantly written in the details but needs editing. I have a plesant overall impression of wit, the well-turned phrase, and that the reviewer kind of liked the book, maybe a little against his better judgment, but I'm not entirely sure what the book is *about*.
People are nicer than you think? Social science research is often massively overinterpreted by the time it turns into a shibboleth? (Although the latter point would be made more persuasively if the review itself didn't quietly switch from deep skepticism about single "key" social science experiments at the top to a mild credulity about them at the bottom.) We shouldn't draw our ideas about human nature from popular novels? There's a lot of shitty management out there, so some shocking percentage of the time *reducing* management gets better results? If all of these, what is the thesis that ties it all together, somehow?
I suppose if you're a fan of snarky hatchet jobs that spend too much effort trying to be witty you might like this review. I found it severely lacking. From the first sentence I found the tone grating making it difficult to take the rest of the review seriously.
I admit I'm quite biased. I read this book last summer and found it was one of the most interesting things I've read in quite a while (and I read a lot).
The reviewer made some interesting and valid points. It's too bad he chose to do so in a way that I found so off-putting.
The blitz example reminds me of how in the testimony coming out about the UK covid response, most recently from Dominic Cummings, they seem to have made the same mistake again. With a widely held belief that a lockdown would be impossible as noone would obey it without draconian enforcement. But when it was actually tried Britain had some of the highest rates of adherence in the western world, and it required minimal direct enforcement
The UK government was also very pro-vaccine.
Thoughtful, enjoyable, and interesting review, thanks! There are a lot of run-on sentences, though. Also, formatting note: there's an incorrectly placed quotation mark at the end of the Part 1's first paragraph.
(I don't know what you're referring to or mean by "at one time we were looking into the literature on forecast accuracy measures. We found one using arctan." Are "forecast accuracy measures" stuff like Brier scores and log-scores and whatnot? (If so, what exactly was the measure (just arctan(probability)??), and what was their pitch for using something as random-seeming as arctan?))
Arctan gives the angular coordinate when transforming to polar coordinates ... and maybe that could related to something, somehow... ugh.
Some Google results indicate that someone once has used "arctan metric" |arctan(x) - arctan(y)| for some arcane purposes.
However, I do wonder if the author of the review is misremembering and saw something that used what is often called "arcsine transform", which is sometimes used on proportion data in range [0 ... 1] that is assumed to come from a binomial process. (Do not let the name fool you, it is actually arcsin(sqrt(x)).) Theoretically, under some circumstances, it should render binomial distributed data to something with constant variance. This kind of "variance stabilization" is supposed to make the data amenable for further analysis with methods that have some particular assumptions about variance. I wouldn't know it is actually useful for forecast accuracy.
More context about arcsine, if you have access: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21560670/
After learning this transform and Freeman-Tukey transforms [1] existed, I have become wary of having any expectations what transformations people may think they should apply.
[1] http://www.statsref.com/HTML/freeman-tukey.html
A common forecast error measure is Sum(|actual-forecast|/|actual|). This goes wrong if actual is 0. Observing that as x-> infinity arctan(x)->pi/2 the author of the paper proposed defining
e={ pi/2 if actual = 0
{ arctan(|actual-forecast|/|actual|) otherwise
Then taking error = Sum(e). While this avoids divide by zero errors, it doesn't give a remotely interpretable result.
Sorry for the late reply - I didn't feel I could respond during the competition without breaking anonymity.
“we're not led by toddlers, at least not since Donald Trump was voted out." (I'm allowed to be snide about your previous choice of president without actually understanding the issues at stake, just like you're allowed to be snide about Brexit without actually understanding the issues at stake.)”
No not snide but rather charitable if you look back at it realistically. Nor lacking in understanding. It was quite simply as bad as it looked
I was more bothered by the use of a hyphen rather than dash, than by the snideness.
Re. my feelings on Remuneration as motivation:
I notice that the absolute number matters less to me than the feeling of fairness.
I've purposefully work slowly and poorly when I noticed the boss did nothing other than own the building, and I've busted my ass for very little when the boss shows up to a job site to show willing.
Likewise, I'd rather work in a place where everyone is compensated fairly, then get a couple thousand more in a place where other people are getting screwed.
Oh, dear. I am not impressed by Bregman's scholarship. I haven't actually finished the review yet, but taking SLA Marshall at face value verges on scholarly malpractice, to put it nicely. One of my college professors would use even stronger words. He was making things up, and his stuff about people not firing their weapons has been thoroughly debunked.
I'm also skeptical of his view on the Blitz. To paraphrase a book I read many years ago, the average Briton's enthusiasm for Churchill's policies was inversely proportional to how heavily he was being bombed every night. Were the early advocates of air power overenthusiastic about how effective terror bombing would be? Yes, absolutely. Did governments that were being bombed have lots of motive to downplay the morale effects of the bombing? Again, yes. Is taking London Can Take It! at face value also borderline scholarly malpractice, given that it was made as propaganda for American audiences? Not as much as taking "Men Against Fire" seriously in the Year of Our Lord 2020, but this is really not impressive.
These are by far and away the two things I've run across so far that I'm most familiar with. And he's badly botched both of them. I believe that the amount of salt it is appropriate to take the rest of the book with is enough that the total consumed is going to be mostly sodium chloride.
The other point I feel qualified to comment on is the bit about German POWs and combat effectiveness. I am very much not a historian of ground combat in Europe in WWII, but from what I can recall, the general theory is that the Germans were more effective in combat because they had better NCOs and junior officers, and maintained high standards in those areas right up until the end of the war. The stuff on fighting for small groups is pretty standard cohesion stuff that all militaries use these days, and definitely not specific to Germany.
As for why they kept fighting when other nations would have surrendered, I'd guess that probably did have something to do with the Nazis and the fact that the people fighting in 1945 basically never knew a time when Hitler wasn't running the country.
Well that and Stalin's price for keeping the bulk of the Wehrmacht busy in the East was No Separate Peace, and *nobody* wants to surrender to the Red Army, surrending to Sauron's orcs would be preferable.
All I know about this is what I've seen regarding Pope Benedict XVI, who did have wartime service in the German Army in his youth (this was raised after his election by groups pro- and anti-him over "Nazi Pope?" https://abcnews.go.com/International/pope-benedict-dogged-nazi-past-achievements-jewish-relations/story?id=18469350). It seems that towards the end of the war that everyone was being conscripted, of all ages, as well as having things like membership of the Hitler Youth be compulsory:
"In 1941 he was compelled to join the Hitler Youth, and in 1943 he was drafted into the German military, serving in an antiaircraft unit in Bavaria before being sent to Hungary to set tank traps in 1945. He deserted in April of that year and was captured by American forces and held prisoner for a brief period."
So he was enrolled into the Hitler Youth at 14, drafted into an anti-aircraft unit at 16, and sent off to Hungary at 18. So yeah, I imagine there was a big difference between "okay, the Americans have arrived in my home town, it's safe to desert" and "last line between the Soviets and my home town", as well as more of a sense of fighting for the sake of each other because "this is a bunch of guys from my home town" or "we're all in the same boat, we were all drafted, none of us chose to be here" rather than fighting for "The 1,000 Year Reich".
I recall Bryan Caplan pointing out that support for any war seems to start out strong and then decline over time, and that includes WW2. But I can't find the post now.
The reviewer doesn't mention it, but Bregman is aware of Marshall's shortcomings, and does discuss them. Bregman's conclusion is that while Marshall screwed up his statistics, his conclusion has been replicated by people who didn't, and is therefore essentially sound.
Marshall didn't screw up his statistics, he committed academic fraud. His numbers for how many units he interviewed don't add up, his notebooks don't have the information behind the "ratio of fire" theory, and his assistant said categorically that he never asked his subjects about them firing their weapons. If this is the base that gives people the idea, then I'm going to examine everything that grows from it with the utmost skepticism. Particularly when later interviews of the same people Marshall made the original claim for say exactly the opposite. John McManus, who wrote a book on American combat soldiers in WWII, said he found 20 volumes of anecdotes of people firing their weapons.
I could maybe see the battle cited as a partial exception. It was almost certainly a night infiltration attack, which is going to be extremely confusing and chaotic. And there are going to be a lot of people who, quite rightly, decide that they're not going to fire unless they're sure of their target, and may never get a chance. But it does not generalize.
I did a bit more checking, and this seems to have taken place at Makin Island, which was far from the most heated battle of the Pacific War. The total Japanese force on the island was less than 800 men, of which only 284 were combat troops. To take this, the Americans brought 6472 assault troops. I'm drawing on Samuel Eliot Morison's account, and he describes the events as "a hideous night ... with Japanese infiltrating and green troops firing on anything and everything". But if that's what's happening, then I'm amazed that only 25% fired, but it wasn't due to reluctance to kill, it was because when you're terrified and spread out and confused, firing at noises in the dark is a good way to kill your fellows. The next night, American sentries proved more dangerous than the Japanese.
But seriously, Makin Island is the worst possible place to draw any broader lessons about ground combat. Yes, a lot of people didn't do much shooting because there wasn't much to shoot. I suspect if Marshall had been at Tarawa instead, he wouldn't have inflicted this myth on us.
I haven't read the book, but based on the review, it feels like Bregman read a well-argued book, remembers the basic idea but misremembers a lot of the details, and is now trying to explain it to me at a party.
"Teams of three had a leader designated at random, and a plate of five biscuits brought in while they were working on a task. In no group did anyone commit the solecism of eating the last biscuit. "
Adding to the pile-on of scholarship, Dacher Keltner's "Cookie monster" study should not be cited for anything. I did some digging on it a couple years ago, including a brief correspondence with Prof. Keltner himself on it. The original was a never-published 1998 manuscript, and the only data published is in a 2003 psych review article. That article gives a bar chart with the following (numbers estimate from the bar chart):
Average cookies eaten:
Low power High power
All male group: 0.8 1.3
All female group: 1.1 0.9
So, according to their data, the high-power males ate fewer cookies. Doesn't really support the story, does it?
My E-mails from Prof. Keltner below:
"That study was done by a grad student who stayed behind at UW Madison when I moved to Berkeley, then dropped out... so we never had the chance to publish other than in the Keltner, Gruenfeld, Anderson, 2003 Psych Review article.
Here are the methods
1. Same gender groups of three participants come to lab (participants were 96% White, average age about 21)
2. One is randomly assigned to position of power, based on a past leadership test they filled out. They are given the task of evaluating the other two participants' contributions to a collective task.
3. They are given several issues on campus to read up on and write policy for, based on information we provided: should alcohol be sold in the university center, should there be mandatory senior tests?; should religious groups get funding, etc.
4. 30 minutes into the study we place a plate of 5 cookies on the table, and see how many each participant takes.
5. We coded the videotapes for disinhibited eating.
That is it.
[...]
I'd say it was a small effect
[...]
We randomly assigned one person to have power but told them as a cover story it was based on a leadership test they took earlier in the semester
It was about 25 all female groups and 25 all male groups
"
> So, according to their data, the high-power males ate fewer cookies. Doesn't really support the story, does it?
I'm confused by this statement, isn't the preceding data saying that "high power" males at, one average 1.3 cookies, nearly double the 0.8 of "low-power" males?
Was the quoted line a typo meant to say "high-power females ate fewer cookies"?
Oops, I messed up the table, by switching some entries and misreading the 1.25 line as the 1 line. I wish I could just paste the bar chart in here; I wouldn't mess that up.
Average cookies eaten:
Low power High power
All male group: 1.3 1.2
All female group: 0.8 1.4
Here is my source. Chart is on page 104.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.203.2748&rep=rep1&type=pdf
It would be fascinating to use consumption of resources that are more status-heavy for males -- I feel like who gets to eat what food is more of a female status symbol. For example, it would be very interesting to deliberately cause some of the chairs to be better than others and see which the high- and low-power males chose. My instinct is that men value social resources which are instruments of personal power -- better offices, better furniture, more power tools, more powerful cars, trucks, and weapons -- while females value those resources that relate to personal security -- more/better food, shelter, clothes, Facebook likes.
That might be the case, but I'm not sure what characterizes Facebook likes as representative of personal security rather than power. It seems to me more a measure of influence, at least as much power as security.
"Influence" is a rather feminine version of power. Male power tends to manifest as force, not influence. That's why I picked FB likes, which indeed give you influence, but not any more actual power (exercised through force). Had I chosen votes in a political campaign, that's a different story, because that ends up giving you direct power (exercised through force). Stereotypical men indeed like winning elections, but they aren't as keen on winning popularity contests.
I think comparing human toddlers to adult apes does tell us something useful. If human toddlers are as good as adult apes at non-social intelligence, that tells us that we're smarter than apes in that respect. And if human toddlers outperform adult apes at social intelligence, that tells us that the species gap in social intelligence is even bigger.
I feel that this is the most ambitious of the submissions so far (how about demolishing perhaps the three most famous experiments in twentieth century psychology for starters?). The author uses a critique of the book as a foundation to present an original thesis, relegating the book review itself to a mere sideshow.
Now if he'd only done Robbers Cave, he'd be 4 for 4.
Bregman does actually review the Robbers Cave experiment as well. He concludes that the animosity between the teams of boys was created by manipulation on the part of the adults running the experiment. It was actually the second such experiment Sherif had run. In the first one at Middle Grove he hadn't been as skilled at the manipulation, and the teams of boys he attempted to pit against each other became friends, and then figured out that the experimenters were trying to manipulate them into fighting each other.
Thanks for that information. There was something about the postwar intellectual world that wanted to believe humans were kind of sh*tty.
I took part in an impromptu test of the Bystander Effect in early May in the late 1990s. During rush hour in downtown Chicago, a woman fell 53 feet from the Madison St. bridge into the Chicago River in front of perhaps one thousand pedestrians. She then splashed around in the cold water.
I was the only individual who ran and got the lifesaver ring from the east end of the bridge, then tied it to the railing and dropped it down to the woman, who grabbed onto it and held onto it until a police boat finally arrived about ten minutes later. I had to run for about 3 minutes from starting about a half block away on the west end and then running across the bridge to get to the life buoy and rope. (I also pointed at numerous gawkers as I ran by them, made eye contact and said, "Call 911.")
This was a pretty spectacular test of the bystander effect, although I think it might have been exaggerated in this case because most of the pedestrians probably had never noticed the life preserver stored behind glass at the east end of the bridge. I have very much of an Old Boy Scout personality, so I had 15+ years before taken note of the placement of this equipment just in case something like this ever happened and I would have to use it to save somebody's life. But most Chicago commuters are not like that.
Also, many on-lookers probably didn't think the woman was in much peril. She was splashing around, after all. My view was:
- It was early May, so the water was quite cold.
- It's not obvious how you would climb out of the Chicago River since it is lined with huge buildings like the Opera House.
- She may have had a concussion or other injury from the fall.
- She may have made a suicide attempt, then changed her mind when she didn't die, but if a large number of humans can't be bothered to rescue her, she may then decide she was right about killing herself after all. (I hadn't seen how she got over the railing of the bridge, only seeing her plummeting body out of the corner of my eye, but a witness later told me she had climbed up on the railing and jumped. To choose rush hour to do it suggests she probably wanted attention more than death, but it would have been pretty easy to die anyway even after changing your mind.)
I don't think the behavior of the other 999 or so witnesses was in anyway malevolent. They just seemed rather clueless. Many seemed to assume that somebody else would do something, which I did.
On the other hand, I was surprised I was the only yuppie to do the right thing. I would have thought 5 or 10 other yuppies would have responded equally productively. (This is not to say that nobody else helped. When I was trying to smash the glass over the life ring with my shoe and not making any progress, a man immediately figured out the situation and handed me his umbrella, which worked great.)
I suspect the huge number of witnesses suppressed individual initiative on the assumption that somebody else must be doing the right thing. Plus, probably 90% of the pedestrians were white collar workers (most on their way to the commuter train station to go to the northern suburbs). I suspect blue collar workers would have been less stumped by the sudden intrusion of a problem in 3 dimensional physical reality into their day.
I'm not sure you're really testing the Bystander Effect, i.e. the motivations of people to get involved. It seems not unlikely you are just testing the intelligence and/or experience of those around you. People routinely drown right in front of witnesses, because it is notoriously difficult to realize that a person in distress in the water actually is in distress. You hear a lot of lectures about this in Southern California every year as summer approaches -- "Drowning doesn't look like drowning" et cetera.
That's good to remember, but the situations are very different. Somebody falling 53 feet from the Madison Street bridge into the Chicago River with a huge splash was a spectacular event that riveted the attention of a huge number of rush hour gawkers, but almost nobody took action, even including merely calling 911.
In the early 1990s in Chicago, at the intersection of Western and Lawrence around dusk, I was in my car third in line at a red light when a young woman sprinted across the street to try to catch a bus. She was hit by a car, went up on the hood, and fell off on her head in the middle of the street. I said to myself, "If I weren't so far away, I'd get out and help her out of the street before somebody else runs her over, but of course somebody closer will get there first." After about 3 seconds, I said to myself: "Where is everybody? ... OK, I guess I will have to do this myself," and ran over to her waving my arms and helped her to the curb.
Now the bystander effect in this second case only lasted about the 15 seconds it took me to get there, where as in the bridge jumper case, the bystander effect lasted about 3 minutes. But in someways this car accident example was more striking because with the river jumper I started running immediately because I could picture where the life preserver ring was stored and I figured that most people closer than me had never noticed it. But his traffic accident case didn't require that kind of detailed knowledge to do something. You just had to run over to the victim and wave your arms to alert drivers. But nobody seemed to do it other than me.
Interesting. Maybe it's just Chicago, though. I lived for a time in one of its less savory sections and I would've been a little hesitant (compared to other places I've lived) to jump out of the car when something weird like that happened. You kind of never know in that burg. Maybe it's some weird set-up, or there's some truly screwed-up violent domestic situation working itself out in public in which you definitely do not want to get involved.
Right. Chicago's not particularly unfriendly for a big city, but it is a very big city.
"I have very much of an Old Boy Scout personality"
You excluded gay people and atheists from your activities, conspired with like-minded government officials to divert public resources for your bigots-only club, and then made dishonest and vitriolic attacks on gays and atheists when they complained about bigots getting preferential access to public resources?
Huh?
Boy Scout has a number of different connotations. There's the ideal of scouting (be prepared, a number of virtues), and then there's the way the scouts didn't extend their range of helpfulness thoroughly.
That's a little like saying the Declaration of Independence, with its stirring oration on natural human rights, is all horseshit because Jefferson owned black people, and if you use the phrase "we hold these truths to be self-evident" in an arch kind of way your listener should promptly call to mind the evils of slavery.
In contrast to the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts took proactive steps to keep boy botherers away, for which the BSA was frequently condemned for prejudice.
But, like the Catholic Church, the Boys Scouts have deep pockets of real estate so they both attracted plaintiff's attorneys.
I agree with your reaction - Huh? I guess No One in Particular was primed to go off on an in passing, benign to 99+% of the world descriptor.
> It's not obvious how you would climb out of the Chicago River since it is lined with huge buildings like the Opera House.
I think that a proper bystander effect doesn't merely require non-action, but also that people recognize that there is a plausible rescue plan that is not suicidal. The details you mention suggests that very many present probably saw no plausible way to rescue this person without taking huge risks.
There have been tragic incidents where one person got in trouble and rescuer after rescuer got in the same trouble & they all died. Not being a lemming should be distinguished from being a 'bystander.'
Also, I think that people tend to run on automatisms, social narratives and external direction much more than they want to (or even can) recognize due to ego issues around accepting their lack of true agency. The most common social narrative around drowning is not to throw in a life preserver, but to jump in after the person, dragging her to safety. In this case, the circumstances mismatched with that narrative, there being no place to safely drag her to. The less common social narrative around life preservers or calling the police requires that people stop focusing on the person who is drowning, and scanning the environment for tools or come up with a rather abstract plan where they will call the emergency services, who will then in turn come up with a solution. Taking attention away from the person in trouble is rather unnatural behavior, which probably has to be trained into people for them to be able to actually do it.
It's very easy to be judgmental of others in the context of a 'bystander effect' story where you are fed a narrative that presents the options that people had and are pushed into condemning that, versus responding that way when actually being in that situation and having to autonomously generate a response.
As I said, within two or three seconds of the woman hitting the water of the Chicago River from over 50 feet up, I started running for the life preserver ring and rope several hundred yards away in the expectation that nobody else of the many hundreds of witnesses would have ever noticed it _and_ remembered it in the moment.
I was surprised though by how I didn't see anybody calling 911 on their cell phones until I pointed at them and told them to do it. (I didn't have one.) This was in the late 1990s when pocketphones weren't as ubiquitous as they are today, but most of the rush hour bystanders were well-paid white collar workers.
It could be that practically nobody dialed 911 from a cellphone because this was back when cellphones tended to connect you to random distant 911 departments. I can't remember if this was before or after the time when it became much easier to reach local 911 on your cell phone. When I briefly had had a cellphone in 1991-1993, it was a complete crapshoot whose emergency services you'd reach by dialing 911. I was driving near the Chicago lakefront in the early 1990s and I saw an empty car on fire. So I called 911. But I got connected to a fire department in Harvard, IL about 40 miles to the northwest. At some after that various politicians were alerted to the randomness of dialing 911 from a cellphone and demanded reforms, which were eventually implemented.
Your experience is much more dramatic than mine, but illustrates the same general point.
I was in a car park with a companion who began to choke. Because I was aware of the bystander effect, I did what I thought was the right thing and pointed to two male bystanders who were engaged in casual conversation, made direct eye contact and politely but urgently asked for help, before turning back to my companion, who was by now partly collapsed and clearly in distress. The bystanders continued their talk, did not move, and offered no help of any kind. Multiple other people were walking through the car park and also did not offer any kind of assistance.
Fortunately my companion recovered after a few minutes. However once the drama was over I was struck by the complete unwillingness of bystanders to become involved.
Since then I have operated under the assumption that the bystander effect is either untrue or only functions under select circumstances, and that it will not be available in times of future crisis.
One useful lesson that came out of the much publicized Kitty Genovese case was that it was too hard to get in contact with your local police station in an emergency.
In the old days, phone calls had been routed through a human operator, so in 1930s movies, people are always rattling the telephone and shouting "Operator, get me the police!" But operators were getting scarcer, so in 1964 it was assumed you'd pull out your phone book and look up you local precinct station by its precinct number.
The Genovese case helped provide impetus for the spread of the 911 system of contacting emergency services.
Interestingly, the murderer, Winston Mosely, was also so strikingly and resolutely malevolent that a lot of modern prison safety measures trace back to efforts to contain him after his breakout and subsequent crimes.
Winston Mosely could have become notorious as an early part of the serial killer wave that built during the Sixties but instead everybody ignored the murderer and decided that the lesson of Kitty Genovese's death was "apathy."
Anecdotal evidence against the contact theory.
Moving into a majority gypsy neighborhood has heavily biased me. Before I moved, I had had virtually no contact with any gypsies. I thought it was a shame how they were treated in society, spoke up when people around me made racist remarks, etc.
After I moved, I was threatened with assault *numerous* times, my phone was stolen, I was falsely accused of beating up an 8 year old kid, I've seen their children throw stones at stray cats and dogs, I've seen them all just leave their garbage where they stand, 10 feet from a garbage can, in the winter the air is impossible to breathe because several households burn rubber and other garbage.
Now I no longer speak up.
But that's just one data point, and the studies on American soldiers are no doubt much more important.
That is an interesting and relevant experience! Possibly contact leads to a more realistic view of an unknown group? If you have an incorrectly negative view (which I'm guessing was the case for white American servicemen of black American servicemen) then contact causes you to think more highly of them. If you have a falsely high view then it does the opposite - hence the advice 'never meet your heroes'.
I had a similar experience with busing. Grades 1-5 was a typical suburban school, 95% white. The little contact with black kids went fine, and I really liked Stefan and Jean-Claude (Hatian brothers). Then I was bused to the worst section of Tampa for grades 6-9 and got bullied daily, mostly by blacks.
I understand now that they did not like all these white kids invading their school and there was a reason for what they did, but it took me a while before I overcame that experience.
No, contact with minorities improves race relations. That is why the North is full of racists who want to implement Jim Crow and the South is full of gentle peaceable white folx who just want to get along.
Nice review.
But at the great risk of being a pedant, I get crabby whenever someone presents a Machiavellian as an unsophisticated asshole:
“Kelter ran a series of experiments from dorm rooms to summer camps where people meet for the first time, and establish pecking orders. What he discovered was that people who behave as The Prince recommends get run out of the camp.”
…Hah, a would-be leader of your summer camp taking Machiavelli’s advice would wipe the floor with his opponents! You get Machiavelli 180 degrees wrong.
For starters, Machiavelli is the first to stress the importance of being perceived as a nice guy. You just must not let the usefulness of this image get to your head, so that you actually become nice, i.e. unable to play dirty tricks on your competing would-be summer camp leaders when that serves you better. Preferably unnoticed of course, but you can usually rely on people having short-term memories anyway.
How about keeping the job as leader? Many, including many business leaders, have noticed the first part of Machiavelli’s famous advice: that it is preferable to be both feared and loved by your underlings, but that if you cannot be both, it is better to be feared than to be loved.
(Digression: Which is sound advice of course, in particular if you are running an Italian city-state, the enemy is at your door, and you are worried that your city-state underlings might strike a deal with the enemy and open the gates at night, so that they can enter and kill you. If your underlings only love you, they might be tempted to do it, to save their own skin; if they fear you, they will know that there are ways of torturing people that are far worse than death, if you should discover their plot in time.)
However, the second part of Machiavelli’s famous advice almost no-one knows (why don’t people read the classics any more?) He says that while it is better to be feared than loved, above all you must avoid being hated. For if your underlings hate you, you can never sleep peacefully at night, without guards at every door and every window; and there could be an assassin behind every tree. So your job is to be feared without being hated. How to you do that?
Machiavellis advice: By making your acts of suppression predictable. If your underlings know which acts that will get them in trouble, but also which acts that will leave them in peace, they will fear you but not hate you. And this is nothing less than the birth of the Rechtstaat (rule of law). Machiavelli is in effect pointing out that it is in the self-interest of a ruler to bind himself to a set of rules (laws) that binds everybody, including himself.
…sorry but I just had to get that defense of Machiavelli off my chest. He was no comic-book villain; and he was not an ordinary asshole.
(Actually he was a deeply religious man in his way, and/but desperate to see somebody becoming the absolute ruler of Italy, because any ruler was better than continuation of the decades-long Italian civil war. Being ruled by a stationary bandit (prince), regardless of whom, was better than being ruled by the innumerable number of roving bandits (to use Mancur Olson’s later dichotomy) that continued to lay waste to Italy, and make life for its tried inhabitants unpredictable.)
Read the book here, it is a slim volume, read in a couple of hours. I particularly recommend Chapter XVII: Concerning cruelty and clemency, and whether it is better to be loved than feared:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm
I remember being disappointed long ago to find out that Machiavelli was a writer rather than an evil ruler. I have no idea what underlying premises led me to be disappointed.
Anyway, thank you for the summary.
Agreed, thanks @polscistoic.
Yes, Machiavelli is about "Congratulations, you are the Prince! You now have a huge target on your back, here's how to keep from getting killed by the ambitious who are gunning to take your place". And Machiavelli was involved in Florentine politics which had always been a pit of vipers, from Dante's time onward; he was eventually himself exiled after the Medici managed to return to power again. So his practical experience would have been very much on the lines of "today in power, tomorrow in the dungeon" and hence his interest in "how do you manage to get power, and more importantly stay in power?"
He does insist on keeping on the right side of the fine line between being a ruler and being a tyrant, but he does also say that it is more practical and pragmatic, at times, to be feared rather than to be loved. If your enemies are hesitant about attacking you because they know that, should they lose, you will obliterate them without mercy, this works out better in the long run for all concerned: you're safe, nobody gets dragged into a war, and you can deal with your problems by other methods. Don't be wicked, but if you have to be severe, don't hesitate:
"Some may wonder how it can happen that Agathocles, and his like, after infinite treacheries and cruelties, should live for long secure in his country, and defend himself from external enemies, and never be conspired against by his own citizens; seeing that many others, by means of cruelty, have never been able even in peaceful times to hold the state, still less in the doubtful times of war. I believe that this follows from severities being badly or properly used. Those may be called properly used, if of evil it is possible to speak well, that are applied at one blow and are necessary to one’s security, and that are not persisted in afterwards unless they can be turned to the advantage of the subjects. The badly employed are those which, notwithstanding they may be few in the commencement, multiply with time rather than decrease. Those who practise the first system are able, by aid of God or man, to mitigate in some degree their rule, as Agathocles did. It is impossible for those who follow the other to maintain themselves.
Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
And above all things, a prince ought to live amongst his people in such a way that no unexpected circumstances, whether of good or evil, shall make him change; because if the necessity for this comes in troubled times, you are too late for harsh measures; and mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as forced from you, and no one will be under any obligation to you for them."
A great & representative quote.
Machiavelli was arrested and tortured by the ruler of Florence before being exiled. All of this before he wrote his book.
He has in places a dry-as-dust humor I believe the people on the British Isles in particular appreciates. He wrote some lighthearted stuff as well, including the play The Mandrake/La Mandragola. So he was likely not a gloomy or sinister fellow, but more like a person you would enjoy to drink a beer or share a bottle of wine with.
There is a story that as he got old and friendless, he arranged for dinner parties in his house where instead of guests, he put a favorite book on each chair, and then he had evening dinner "conversations" with Cicero, Augustine, and the others...
When I tell this story to friends, most just think it sounds sad. But to me it has a certain melancholic sweetness.
Interesting that a reliable system of punishment gets you feared (possibly if the punishment isn't too extreme) while an unpredictable non-system gets you hated.
Yes. My intuition is that Machiavelli nailed it here. (It is in the end an empirical question, though:-))
One of my favorite bloggers (and scifi authors!) has a whole great series of posts on Machiavelli; the first post: https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/
They make a great case that Machiavelli was one of the first utilitarians!
Thanks for the link - both to the article and to the blog. Love the first article, hope to read the others when time permits. And I've made a bookmark about this blogger which I did not know, certainly an interesting fellow.
She's a woman.
Embarrassing and probably revealing on my behalf. I did not even look at the name, just automatically assumed based on reading the article and noticing the general theme of the blog.
...I'll have to have a stern look at what is apparently my implicit priors, that's for sure.
I still manage to make that sort of mistake, but I've got some habits which keep it in my head rather than out in public.
I'm not sure it's possible to completely undo that sort of prior, I just hope to not spread it thus making the world a little better for future generations.
<like> (as they say.)
I liked this one. Some others seem to dislike it for its relatively high level of sharing-your-opinion-about-the-author-ness. But i was less put off by that. especcially when there have been a lot of reviews that read more like summeries than reviews to me. maybe im too autistic to pick up on the subtle opinion sharing in those?
It is worth noting that a fair chunk of Marshall's research practices are now believed to have been rather dubious, up to and including just making stuff up, to support his particular thesis that most people have an innate aversion to killing, and casualties in combat were caused by a small minority of "killers". This has to be put in the context of his confusion (and a broader confusion amongst some theorists) about why forces in modern warfare with their vastly more effective weaponry were not simply obliterating each other in a single engagement. Also worth noting that Marshall himself was not pushing this thesis as some sort of uplifting message about man's innate love for man - his whole focus was to find ways to turn more soldiers *into* killers, and this had some influence on militaries trying stuff like desensitisation training. His thesis was later expanded upon by David Grossman, who continued the idea that most killing is done by a small proportion of aces, and has contributed to the "sheepdog" idea you see floating around today in certain circles.
Whilst it is true that a relatively small proportion of rounds fired in combat end up hitting targets, and some soldiers never fire their weapons, but this has to be understood in the context of modern combat. In most engagements with modern weaponry, many rounds are used for suppression, and units are often shooting at others who they can barely see, meaning some soldiers may not have an opportunity to get a shot off. Whilst there are certainly cases of units or indeed whole armies being more or less enthusiastic in combat, I think this has to be understood in a historical context, because the reasons why are usually both complicated and idiosyncratic.
Based on my own reading and from talking to mihist enthusiast friends, some of whom are veterans, I would modify Marshall's thesis somewhat, most people except a small minority are averse to doing lethal violence *when they themselves are at risk of being killed in return*. When that risk disappears or is lessened, and it is easy to kill enemies at no risk to yourself, then you see a lot of the hesitation disappear and most soldiers can become prolific killers. One sees this a lot in ancient sources, talking about the sweet joy of killing fleeing enemies (and the simple numbers which show the greatest number of casualties is typically during a rout). One also sees this with early modern warfare, when the effective range of musketry would increase immensely when infantry were behind a stone wall or other defence giving them a feeling of safety. While under fire, most people will keep their heads down and return fire only in brief slices, this is how suppression works. But when not supressed by fire, most soldiers are quite capable of acting aggressively or popping up like jack-in-the-boxes to shoot an enemy running away.
In William Manchester's WWII memoir Goodbye, Darkness, there's a long description of Manchester shooting a Japanese sniper on Okinawa who was trying to shoot him. I believe it came down to that Manchester was situated so he only had to expose his right eye, while the Japanese sniper had to expose both eyes. (Note, Manchester was a _great_ storyteller, so I don't wholly trust everything he wrote.)
My guess is that a lot of soldiers won't behave like an outstanding sniper and carefully focus in on the enemy's face. But I would doubt that you'd stay very popular in your foxhole if if you didn't shoot suppressing fire to keep the enemy from carefully focusing on your faces.
>and how Mandela ended apartheid. Turning the other cheek works
Actually the ANC carried out bombings and assassinations
>Outperforming American prisons is like outperforming American healthcare. The reason we keep comparing our healthcare to yours is that American healthcare is about the worst in the world.
Actually this conventional wisdom is wrong. The US spends a normal amount relative to its GDP, with normal cost-per-service relative to GDP, but it consumes a lot more services. The worse life expectancy is the result of much worse lifestyle factors than other rich countries (obesity, homicides, car crashes) combined with diminishing returns on healthcare services.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/
>zero-tolerance policing massively, disproportionately, picks on ethnic minorities
So does every other kind of policing, because crime rates differ. What are they supposed to do, look the other way when a black youth steals your bike, just because he's black?
I'm generally sympathetic to Bregman's thesis here. But I was not impressed by his handling of the evidence regarding the level of violence, or lack thereof, among hunter-gatherers. It's not just that I disagree with his conclusion, it's that he presented it as the result of his careful study of the scholarly literature. Yet he seems to completely ignore the major works on the subject that make the opposite case. To get into the specifics, here's my commentary on his debate with Steven Pinker from ~a year ago:
Bregman cited three lines of evidence in support of his view: contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, skeletal remains and cave paintings.
Regarding contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, Professor Azar Gat writes in his magisterial study War in Human Civilization:
>Few hunter–gatherer peoples have survived in their original way of life until close to the present, and they too have been fast transformed by contact with the modern world. These extant peoples are now recognized to have had special features that are not wholly representative of the full range of the prehistorical hunter–gatherer way of life. They were largely confined to poor environments, such as the Arctic and deserts, which were unsuitable for agriculture. In some cases they were pushed there by the pressure of more populous agricultural communities, on whose margins they held a sometimes tenuous and subservient existence. In consequence, because of the low productivity of the environments that most surviving hunter–gatherers inhabited, they had very low population densities: fewer than one person per square mile, often far fewer, was the norm. They moved a lot to subsist and had very few possessions. As a result, they were remarkably egalitarian. Their main division of labour and status was related to sex and age. This is the prevailing image of simple hunter–gatherers, but it is partly misleading. Before the advent of agriculture, hunter–gatherers inhabited the entire globe, including its richest ecological environments. In many places, they still did when contact with westerners was made in modern times. Under these conditions, hunter–gatherers’ population densities, subsistence modes, mobility, and social order were considerably more varied than they are among more recent hunter–gatherer populations. All the same, fighting is recorded across the whole range of hunter–gatherer societies, from the simplest to the most complex...
>During the 1960s, cases of hunter–gatherer peoples among whom group fighting appeared to be unknown attracted all the attention. The most prominent of those cases was that of the central Canadian Arctic Eskimos. This is hardly surprising. In the first place, they inhabited one of the harshest environments on earth and were very thinly spread. Second, the resources on which they depended were also diffuse and could not be monopolized. It is not that these Eskimos lacked violence. They had a very high rate of quarrels, blood feuds, and homicide.Moreover, as we see later, to both their east and west, in Greenland and coastal Alaska, where conditions were different, the Eskimos were both strongly territorial and war-like.8 As mentioned earlier, the Kalahari Bushmen, east African Hadza, and central African Pygmies were also celebrated as entirely peaceful in 1960s’ anthropology. Being among the last hunter–gatherer populations that could be observed in their traditional way of life, they achieved a sort of ‘paradigmatic’ status.9 However, there is clear evidence that in the past they had been involved in fighting not only with their agricultural and pastoral neighbours, who had pressured them into their current isolated environment, but also among themselves even before contact with non-hunter–gatherers. Recent homicide rates among them were also very high, many times higher than in the modern United States of America, which registers the highest rates of homicide of all industrial societies. Only with the coming of state authority and state police in Canada and southern Africa did violence rates decline.10
>For all that, the argument here is not that all hunter–gatherers invariably fight. Human societies—be they hunter–gatherer, agricultural or industrial—have lived in peace for longer or shorter periods. Why this is so is discussed later. Yet most societies observed to date have engaged in warfare from time to time, including the simplest hunter–gatherers. One comparative study of 99 hunter–gatherer bands belonging to 37 different cultures found that practically all of them engaged in warfare at the time of the study or had ceased to do so in the recent past. According to another study, in 90 per cent of hunter–gatherer societies there was violent conflict, and most of them engaged in intergroup warfare at least every two years, similar to or more than the rest of human societies. The author of yet other comprehensive cross-cultural studies similarly concluded that ‘the greater the dependence upon hunting, the greater the frequency of warfare’.11
Regarding skeletal remains, Professor Gat writes:
>Our knowledge of hunter–gatherer fighting during the Pleistocene, the period spanning most of human evolution from 2,000,000 to 10,000 years ago, is inherently inconclusive. The evidence from these distant times is extremely patchy, and that which might indicate warfare can also be interpreted differently. Stone axes, spearheads, and arrowheads have a dual purpose and could have been used only for hunting. Wooden shields, leather body armour, and tusk helmets—familiar from historical hunter–gatherers—do not preserve. In fossilized injured bones, hunting and daily-life accidents are difficult to distinguish from those caused by fighting.6 Nevertheless, comprehensive examinations of large specimens of such bones have concluded that at least some of them were injured in combat. In some cases, arrow- and spearheads were found buried in the injured bones and skulls. A Neanderthal man from some 50,000 years ago, found with a stabbing wound in the chest from a right-handed opponent, is our earliest documented specimen.
>Later cases of interpersonal lethal injuries among Neanderthal men have also been identified. The evidence becomes more plentiful as we move closer to the present; preservation is better not only for natural reasons but because people began to bury their dead. At Sandalja II in the former Yugoslavia a group of 29 people from the Upper Palaeolithic have been found with their skulls smashed. Violent injuries were also found to be very common in Upper Palaeolithic cemeteries in the former Czechoslovakia. In the Late Palaeolithic cemetery at Gebel Sahaba in Egyptian Nubia over 40 per cent of the men, women, and children buried there were victims of stone projectile injuries, some of them multiple.7 Moreover, evidence of fighting among historically recorded hunter–gatherers, whose way of life was not very far from that of their Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, is abundant.
Regarding cave paintings, Professor Gat writes:
>The trouble with prehistoric times is that they cannot speak. Artefacts alone are mute. In the absence of writing, there is no story to tell, no concrete record of deeds, thoughts, or social life. However, in southern France and northern Spain in the late Upper Palaeolithic, this veil of darkness has been partly pierced by what is, historically, second best to a human voice: among the modern humans who inhabited these regions the emergence and flourishing of human art are best documented. Undoubtedly the most famous aspect of this artistic outburst is the exquisite pictorial representations of Upper Palaeolithic ‘cave art’. Unfortunately from the historical point of view, the drawings from the Upper Palaeolithic are mostly of animals, depicted in the liveliest manner. Humans comprise only three per cent of the images and, in contrast to the animals, their representations are very sketchy. There is only one human figure found that seems to be pierced with arrows.32 However, in Mesolithic ‘rock painting’ in the Spanish Levant (about 10,000–5,000 BC), representations of humans rise to 40 per cent of the total.33 These include several depictions of battle scenes, even though all sorts of alternative explanations, such as ritual and dance, were suggested by those who denied the existence of warfare among hunter–gatherers.
>More recent research has brought to light the wealth of Australian Aboriginal ‘rock art’, which is as old as its European counterpart. According to one study of over 650 sites in Arnhem Land in northern Australia, the oldest depictions include large animals but not humans. There, as well, human images begin to figure prominently only from about 10,000 years ago, and include numerous battle scenes. At first, these representations show mainly fighting among a few individuals or small groups, but from about 6,000 years ago there are also images of large-scale encounters: 111 figures participating in one battle scene, 68 and 52 in others.
The authors of the study reasonably speculate that the larger fighting groups may reflect denser and more complex human concentrations that had evolved in Arnhem Land by that period.34 In any case, as both the prehistoric rock art depictions of fighting and the recent evidence of warfare from the central Australian desert demonstrate, fighting took place in thinly as well as in densely populated areas. Depictions of battle scenes among the Bushmen in South Africa, apparently stretching back to the pre-Bantu (agricultural) period, corroborate this. The largest scene depicts 12 people on one side and 17 plus 11 ‘reserves’ on the other.35 Scenes of shield-bearing warriors similarly appear in the prehistoric rock art of the nomadic bison (buffalo) hunters and gatherers of the American Plains.36
>Evidence of violent death from the European Mesolithic is also traceable in the archaeological record: One of the most gruesome instances is provided by Ofnet Cave in Germany, where two caches of ‘trophy’ skulls were found, arranged ‘like eggs in a basket’, comprising the disembodied heads of thirty-four men, women, and children, most with multiple holes knocked through their skulls by stone axes.37 Rousseauites have interpreted this artistic and archaeological evidence as proof that warfare emerged only with the competition that grew with greater population densities and more complex societies. Others have connected the battle scenes to the invention of the bow some 20,000 years ago, which they suggested inaugurated warfare by making possible killing from afar. However, as the rich and diverse Australian data demonstrate, both claims are incorrect. Seeing coins only where there is light from a lamppost is one of the most serious possible distortions. The fact that fighting is recorded by the newly evolving art (and specifically with the later diffusion of human representations) does not mean that it evolved at the same time. What actually makes the archaeological signs of warfare from the Mesolithic, and even Upper Palaeolithic, less open to dispute than those of earlier times is growing sedentism. It left evidence of fortifications, burnt settlements, large-scale communal cemeteries, and, indeed, art—the sort of evidence without which archaeology grapples in the dark but which is necessarily absent before sedentism.
The most recent academic book I'm aware of on this subject is Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers, an edited volume published in 2014 that makes a seemingly quite persuasive case based on the archeological and ethnographic evidence from several continents for a "long chronology" of warfare preceding agricultural civilization. An article from 2019 in the journal Human Nature by Professor Raymond Hames argues, again seemingly quite persuasively, that the available evidence much better supports a Hobbesian rather than Rousseauian view of pre-civilizational warfare. The aforementioned Professor Gat also had a 2015 article in Evolutionary Anthropology making the Hobbesian case with regards to hunter-gatherers. And I would be remiss not to mention the late Lawrence Keeley's classic War Before Civilization, a fascinating, well-written, informative and concise book.
Anthropologist Henry Harpending found that the Bushmen he spent a couple of years hanging out with in the 1960s were peaceful while he was there, but when he talked to old ladies about their long lives, they often had hair-raising stories about how their second husband murdered their first husband before he was murdered by her third husband. Harpending's view was that Bushmen were indeed rather gentle, but when you don't have a state to impose a monopoly on violence, stuff happens, at least when measured over a long period.
"An armed society is a polite society." If in your village it's quite possible to be killed by your next-door neighbors if you annoy them sufficiently, it does seem likely you'd be in general a lot more agreeable, especially on small-stakes issues. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the state taking a monopoly on the use of force is that one of the restraints on being a generic asshole that exists in the primitive society is removed.
"Weeks later when they're rescued half of them are dead."
Ummm.... what? Only three boys died. Unlike the Tongan castaways, there were more than six of them.
"In 1966 Lord of the Flies happened for real - 6 teenagers went for a joy ride in a fishing boat"
The LotF characters are 6 to 12 years old. The Tongan castaways were 13 to 16, and they were a smaller group.
"When they were found 11 months later"
15 months. Unless you're talking about another group of six teenage castaways.
"Muskets from the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War .... found 90% were still loaded."
That sentence seems to be missing something. And when was this data collected, and why were there muskets still on the battlefield? Is the set of muskets still on a battlefield representative of the muskets in general? Is the percentage of muskets loaded at the end of a battle representative of what percentage were fired?
"I don't know of any studies showing Reality TV is bad for your mental health, but I'm happy to take it as read."
I can't recall ever coming across the idiom "take as read" before. Is it especially prevalent in BrE?
"There's a test called 'object choice' in which you hide a treat and then give the subjects hints (pointing at where it is) to see if they can find it... One hypothesis is that our ancestors bred dogs for intelligence"
Looking at where a finger is pointing is not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of convention. You might as well claim that bees are more intelligent than humans because humans "fail the find-the-nectar-by-watching-bees-dance test hard".
"became the cinematic face of the experiment, was a fake he put on after discovering he wouldn't be able to spend the time in jail revising"
I'm not sure how many Americans know that British people use "revising" to mean "studying" rather than "amending".
"(well, a bit under half if you discount the ones who claimed afterwards that they only went along with it because it was a psychology experiment in a prestigious university, pretty clearly no one was actually being dangerously electrocuted)"
How is that an excuse? The study was intended to answer the question of why so many people went along with the Holocaust. Why would you "discount" the people who figured the authorities knew what they were doing as an explanation for why people went along with the authorities rounding Jews up and disappearing them? If we're talking solely about the people who actually killed Jews, okay, but there was much larger complicity.
"Finally, some neurologists stuck a bunch of more and less powerful people in transcranial magnetic stimulation machine. They concluded that power kills mirroring - the empathetic process by which we copy the attitude of the people around us (you can tell that with a brain scan?)."
My understanding is that TMS is for altering the brain, not for observing it. It's not a "brain scan".
Also, there's a lot of places that could us commas, such as between "Bratton" and "officers" in "Furthermore under Bratton officers felt pressured to fine as many people as possible for minor offences, but to under report serious crime."
"The study was intended to answer the question of why so many people went along with the Holocaust."
Then it failed, unless we take it that "I'm trusting the authorities not to actually be doing bad things, only pretending to be doing bad things" is the lesson here. But the fact that the people who figured "this is a psychology experiment in a university, they aren't going to really electrocute anyone, much less to the point of death" were correct contaminates the whole thing. That means that you can't assign any culpability to those who 'went along with the Holocaust' because they may have been really ignorant of what was going on and genuinely believed the Jews in their neighbourhoods were (1) as traitorous as the legitimate authorities claimed (2) a real danger (3) were being sent off to places that were exile, not execution.
The moral we are supposed to take, I think, of all these 70s experiments was the whole counter-culture "don't trust authority, question it, don't accept conventional society" and that's fine. Except when your estimation of authority is correct, as in the experiment not really electrocuting anyone, and when there is a need for a central authority to give leadership that will be followed.
Maybe a little picky: the Stanford prison experiment was 1971 but the Milgram experiment was early 1960s.
Minor correction but it's 'Dacher Keltner' not Kelter :)
"[...] but what about violent situations like Kitty's? They were unstudiable until Marie Lindegaard had the bright idea of using CCTV footage of real incidents to evaluate bystander behaviour in violent situations. In these high stakes situations bystanders intervene [9 times out of 10], with the rate of intervention rising if there are more bystanders."
Doesn't the linked paper state the opposite? From the abstract:
"The results confirm our predicted association between social relations and intervention. However, rather than the expected reversed bystander effect, we found a classical bystander effect, as bystanders were less likely to intervene with increasing bystander presence."
I've reviewed this book as well. I found the evolution section to feel more credible, probably less due to the content Bregman presents but other evidence from "Secrets of Our Success". Here's my review in case anyone is interested:
Bregman has a beautiful idea, an ambitious idea. An idea to benefit the whole world and change the course of humanity. It might sound simplistic, but you have to believe in it with your whole heart: Humans are Good. Now if you take a moment and reflect it doesn’t take long to come up with some counter points. What about genocide? War? Yes those things are bad, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamental to being human. It’s the system that corrupts us and it’s our negative thinking about ourselves that condemns us. Our system always assumes the worst in people, so we shouldn’t be surprised that our system only turns up the worst in people. If only humans had a more optimistic view of who we are, then we would build a world to be more optimistic about.
The villain preventing this utopia is ‘veneer theory’. This is the belief that if you scratch away the thin layer of civilization from a person, then all you’re left with is some evil, savage animal. Bregman’s model turns the veneer inside out; instead it’s the products of civilization that are making us evil and if you scratch it away you reveal the good human beneath. The book never breaks this dichotomy by examining alternatives, such as realistic conflict theory or terror management theory. It never even mentions the possibility of alternatives, to Bregman if veneer theory is stripped away then the good will shine through.
His evangelism strategy is to select major cultural cornerstones of veneer theory and dismantle them piece by piece. What follows is a curated list of dark moments of humanity which are held under the detective's magnifying glass. When the villain's mask is pulled off it wasn’t human nature underneath, it was the media or civilization all along.
There’s a problem with this approach. Defeating cherry picked arguments from an opponent you claim is the only other option isn’t how you’re supposed to construct an argument. When you’re honest you should build a case from a body of evidence which supports your theory instead of trying to constellate your point from bullet wounds in your chosen foe. It’s understandable that some of the major oppositions need to be addressed, but Bregman relies on this strategy far too much.
Secondly, even after having the luxury of picking his battles, some of his takedowns fall a bit flat. At times they veer so far from his central thesis that the victory seems shallow or otherwise misses the bigger picture.
The most egregious example of missing the point is the discussion of Lord of the Flies. I understand that he picked this novel to dismantle as it is a long standing societal touchstone about the inherent evil of people, but there’s a problem: it’s not a real story. It's fiction. Bregman makes the mistake of trying to disprove the underlying theory by disproving the fictional analogy. He presents a single real life example where kids got stuck on an uninhabited* island and didn’t actually degrade into savagery. It’s a captivating story, but not a true reflection of Lord of the Flies, nor a solid premise for a thesis. It’s like finding a single example of someone who was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, but actually got out, and then exclaiming “Look, there are no such things as impossible situations!” More charitably you could see Lord of the Flies as a prediction of veneer theory but even then, one instance where a prediction didn’t pan out doesn’t automatically make your theory right.
*The island in the real life example was only deserted because slave trading had eradicated the natives living there, but for some reason he didn’t dive into this for his argument on human goodness.
The biggest point Bregman had to contend with are the atrocities that humans inflict on one another. It’s a difficult question to answer for everyone, but it’s even more crucial when your key idea is that humans are good. Bregman acknowledges this, but instead of tackling this important issue head on he steers the discussion to a place where he could win. The question he needed to answer was “How can a world where humans have committed numerous atrocities coincide with a world where humans are inherently good?”. His response is to look at four famous studies from before 1970 which said humans are some sort of bad. He points out flaws in these studies, and then treats the matter as resolved. That’s a side step any All Black would be proud of.
What’s worse is that two of those four studies aren’t even given the lit review they deserve. The Robbers Cave Experiment and the Bystander Effect have both been extensively examined beyond the original case Bregman tore down. The Bystander Effect does have some contradictory evidence, but the conclusions of the Robbers Cave Experiment have been supported a number of times. Humankind doesn’t bother to acknowledge the existence of any subsequent research.
His other two chosen papers, the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments are far more deserving of criticism, but even here his arguments aren’t slam dunks for his case. After taking down large chunks with valid critiques, he explains the rest away by suggesting that people were only electrocuting people to death and torturing other humans because “they were trying to be good” and help the researcher. He then relates this back to how actors of the holocaust, particularly Eichmann, thought they were doing a good thing so they’re not just pure evil. This is how he concludes the section on human atrocities.
It feels like a hollow explanation when related to other horrors such as slavery, the Rwandan genocide or the Nanjing massacre. Even when this explanation fits, I don’t think that perceiving yourself as a good person while you commit genocide makes you any less evil. It erodes Bregman's central idea from “humans are good” to “humans have intentions that they think are good” which is a lot less hopeful.
Humankind does have parts where it tries to build a case from the ground up, and these became my favourite sections. The first looks at life in hunter gatherer societies and the evolutionary pressure for friendliness. The second section slips into more of the ‘Management Thinking’ genre and looks at case studies from modern society. It turns out treating prisoners, employees, children and voters optimistically can generate systems which work better than what we currently have. This section acts as the conclusion for the other discourse, that with the death of veneer theory this is how we need to act for a better world.
I found this conclusion quite convincing, but unfortunately scattered amongst it were lapses that made me suspicious. For example, he’s trying to make a generalised case for all humanity, but almost exclusively chooses examples from a western viewpoint. He only addresses crimes of malice, and not the likes of negligence or indifference leading to climate change. He doesn’t mention discriminations like homophobia or ableism. He does mention racism, but also claims the enlightenment “invented racism” in the 18th Century, ignoring a millennia of abuse against minorities in the likes of the Muslim crusades, or Spanish colonialism. It doesn’t do well to build trust in the reader when you print glaring omissions like that.
Bregman is motivated to push the sins of humanity towards modern times. If our problems have been with us from the beginning, then society isn’t the problem - it’s us. I think there’s a more nuanced view out there that doesn’t need this shoehorning. It’s plausible that treating our fellow humans with kindness would be better for the world, but that we have great inherent capacity for evil and we should try and understand those situations to help avoid them.
Despite all this, I enjoyed the book. The chatty, journalistic tone made for an easy read even as Bregman delved into some dark chapters of humanity. The vaguely anarchist subtext made me smile, and his lesser case, which I’m calling “treat humans optimistically”, is well argued for. In the end I find myself agreeing with the spirit of what Bregman is preaching, but wishing for a book with more rigor to support such an ambitious, beautiful idea.
This is considerably better than the original review. Not as sparkling with clever repartee, perhaps, but solidly thoughtful, and above all well-organized. Thanks.
Thank you for the review. I believe the evidence that treating people decently can pay off, but that just makes it harder to understand why there are a lot of organizations and people who *don't* treat subordinates decently.
Short-term rewards for abuse? Early abuse which makes later abusive behavior an easy default?
I've wondered whether a lot of current bad behavior by management is that even management is too overworked (even at the top where it might be a choice) to think straight.
Well, Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world by being ruthlessly efficient in everything, and treating people well is certainly not something that the empire of Amazon is famous for. It would seem that broad organizational skill is necessary, whereas niceness is optional.
I think treating people decently can generate better systems, but that doesn't mean that the people currently with power will be the ones to benefit from that. Democracy treats people better and pays off with generally better systems, but the dictator that opens things up is still likely to end up on the chopping block.
Bregman points to a study that found giving people expensive BMWs to drive made them cut people off more in traffic. He extrapolated that to giving people power and riches will make them more selfish and so miss the bigger picture.
I wouldn't read too much into that though, he often points out how (apparently) in prehistory we used to kill those who got too greedy and it all started going bad once those people could defend themselves.
It took me ~2 minutes to verify that Bregman did not “get his Nikolais muddled“: https://persona.rin.ru/eng/view/f/0/23958/belyaev-nicholas
Not a huge thing, but made me skeptical of the slightly snippy tone of the review.
Aside:
"(presumably either these slave traders have developed zombification, or else they completely missed the aim of their job)"
Ulch! I'm not sure whether you were consciously trying to derive it from this, but this is perhaps not the most tasteful comparison to make as a joke. A substantial part of how zombie beliefs propagated in the first place is thought to have come from experiences of the African slave trade, especially the fear of being revived after death to be forced to keep working…
"In 1958 Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut started an experiment on domestication. This was surprisingly risky, as at this point Russia thought evolution was a capitalist lie (Bregman claims that 10 years earlier Dmitri's older brother Nikolai, also a geneticist, was executed. "
Bit of a nitpick, but official Soviet ideology most certainly did support evolution. Just that the official ideology also supported the idea that personality traits were the result of environment, not nature, as otherwise socialism would be vulnerable to sociopaths, unable to produce a better race of men.
Brief review-of-the-review:
This was a lot of fun to read. I like the reviewer's perspective and the British snark with which it's presented. (Though the cross-Atlantic jokes are sometimes off-target; I have no problem with "American Civil War" but find "revising" as a synonym for "studying" to be utterly silly.) Unfortunately I wasn't able to fully keep up with the flow of the argument given the slightly stream-of-consciousness style. The reviewer shows commendable intellectual charity in giving the book the benefit of the doubt, but struggles with a similar need-- "intellectual empathy" maybe?-- in forgetting that most of us clueless ACX readers haven't read it. At times I felt like I was listening to one side of a spectacular debate. Although I'm willing to trust that it's the winning half based on what I heard, I don't feel comfortable concluding that unless I can hear the other side properly.
This blog has gone from a beacon of intellectual stimulation to pathetic posts over educated communists whining about Trump and wishing the world was a graduate school symposium.
Please start a new anon blog the world needs your writing
Regarding the domestication bit, I wonder if what we're really selecting for is "how much they appeal to humans". Because it should really be no surprise that humans are selected for that by evolution.
Re: Lord of the Flies vs. veneer theory:
1) It's been 12 years since I listened to it, but as I recall when they were rescued there had only been two deaths (not half); however, they were in the process of a massive manhunt for the boy they'd previously elected leader and now were intent to kill also. And "burning down half the island" in the process.
2) There was a huge idyllic period that is glossed over between when they set up the council, and when the soldier parashoots onto the island and scares the shit out of them. I don't think this squares with its author is pushing 'thin veneer theory' but the opposite, the boys were basically good it was outside input *from* civilization / history / adults that made them fear / hate / fight / kill.
My reading is: humans are neither good nor evil, but we will willingly self-organize into functioning societies to maximize health and order / minimize surprise / restrain our baser instincts. And this usually works for long periods of peace / prosperity.
When something upsets our balance, we're prone to overreact, whether that's ([boosting the jealous opposition despite them previously being correctly determined to be a sub-optimal choice for leader (Roger/Jack)] or [choosing innocent scapegoats to punish for the problem(piggy)] or [destroying the institutions of order(the conch)] or [mob-rioting and killing the messenger here to explain the phenomenon that you're currently afraid of but don't need to be (Simon)]) or whether that's ([pulling together to take care of the survivors] or [call for the police / ambulance] or [clean up the rubble] or [donate blood])