Isegoria

Peter Turchin discusses the link between ecology and empire:

In the chapter entitled “Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes” Diamond pointed out that ecological zones (the technical terms is ‘biomes’) tend to be stretched from east to west, because climates, soils, etc. are more similar as one travels east or west, compared to north-south. As a result, crops and domestic animals can spread more easily along the lines of latitude (in the east-west direction). The Eurasian landmass is oriented along an east-west axis; it is also huge. Different plants and animals, domesticated in different parts of Eurasia, spread East or West quite readily. The end result was that each particular region could profit not only from crops and animals domesticated within it, but also from many other species domesticated in distant, but ecologically similar regions. As an example, peach was domesticated in China but it spread to Europe already in the Antiquity. Earlier, cereals, such as wheat and rye, readily spread from the Fertile Crescent west into the Mediterranean Europe. But it took millennia longer to spread north into Russia, although the distance that needed to be traveled was actually shorter.

An argument can be made that it should be easier for many other things to spread along the east-west axis — not only cultivars, but also human genes, artifacts, ideas, and even political power. As an example of the latter, think of the Roman empire. The Roman state evolved within the Mediterranean biome. Once it expanded beyond Italy, it rapidly spread West and East to other regions with the same ecology, from Spain to the Levant. Pushing beyond the Mediterranean ecological zone, however, proved to be much harder. The Roman push into the forests of northern Europe ended in the disaster of the battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 C.E., in which 20,000 legionaries led by Publius Quinctilius Varus were wiped out by an alliance of Germanic tribes. Being used to the Mediterranean shrubland/woodland habitat, the Romans had a lot of trouble with conducting military operations in northern forests, where “the trees grew close together and very high” (in the words of the Greek historian Cassius Dio). In the end, the Romans decided that conquering the Germans was more trouble than it’s worth.

In the east, the Roman expansion was stopped by the Syrian and Arabian deserts. The famous Roman defeat there was the battle of Carrhae (53 B.C.E), in which the invasion force of 35,000 legionaries plus supporting troops led by Marcus Licinius Crassus was virtually obliterated by Parthian cavalry.

Although deserts can be a serious barrier to people who are not used to them, for others, like the Arabs, they were essentially highways of expansion. After the Prophet Muhammad died, his successors expanded the Islamic Caliphate West into North Africa and East into Persia and Central Asia. Again, as in the Roman case, the shape of the resulting empire was stretched in the east-west direction. However, the biome at its core was not the Mediterranean, but the hot subtropical desert. Yet another example is the Mongol Empire, which stretched from Ukraine to Korea, with the Great Eurasian Steppe at its core.

Turchin actually collected data and tested this hypothesis:

We compiled a list of all large historical empires with territories exceeding a million square kilometers, and calculated the ‘latitudinal index,’ which measures the extent to which territories are stretched along the East-West axis.

Our results indicated that the physical and biological environment had a very strong effect on the shapes of historic states.

Free Northerner cites a young woman’s complaints about men behaving badly in public and largely agrees with her — until she goes on to blame this bad-boy behavior on the patriarchy:

Men being uncivil is not “the patriarchy”, it is the breakdown of the patriarchy. It is men being freed from the constraints which the patriarchy put upon them.

The left-wing feminist politics she advocates are the primary cause of this breakdown.

As an example of the old order, Free Northerner cites Samuel Proctor, who tipped his hat towards a woman and had this to say when she asked what he meant by that gesture:

Madame, by tipping my hat I was telling you several things. That I would not harm you in any way. That if someone came into this elevator and threatened you, I would defend you. That if you fell ill, I would tend to you and if necessary carry you to safety. I was telling you that even though I am a man and physically stronger than you, I will treat you with both respect and solicitude. But frankly, Madame, it would have taken too much time to tell you all of that; so, instead, I just tipped my hat.

And now we are free of such outdated notions.

(Hat tip to Foseti.)

Xavier Marquez examines the normativeness of democracy:

Democracy has become a sort of universally invoked standard, even though people vehemently disagree about its meaning. How do we know this? For one thing, almost every country in the world describes itself as a “democracy” in its constitutional documents. Using the data collected by the Comparative Constitutions Project, we can see that as of 2006, only 20 of 184 countries with some kind of written constitutional document did not describe themselves as democratic.

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Moreover, the assertion of “democracy” in constitutional documents is almost always accompanied by the assertion of the classical “liberal” norms: freedoms of speech, expression, religion, association, press, and the basic equality of all people. The constitutions of the most repressive countries all proclaim such freedoms. Let’s take the basic freedoms of association, speech, religion, and assembly, as well as the norm of equality before the law. Almost every constitutional document in the world (over 90%!) asserts all five of these; and among those countries that don’t, most proclaim their allegiance to at least four of these. Only two countries (New Zealand and Libya!) failed to mention any of them as of 2006.

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This might seem unsurprising; a cynic might say that I’ve only rediscovered the obvious impotence of constitutional restraints in the absence of supportive social and political realities. But it is nevertheless interesting, to my mind, that there is such a widespread need to assert these particular normative commitments, even as they are routinely violated, or interpreted in such radically restrictive ways as to render them politically meaningless. Among authoritarian elites, only the House of Saud and the Sultan of Brunei appear to have the courage of their convictions; everyone else hides behind a banner of rights and liberties.

According to the 2013 Reporters Without Borders (RWB) World Press Freedom Index eight of the ten countries with the greatest freedom of the press are monarchies.

Freedom wears a crown, one might say.

(Hat tip to Foseti.)

Scott Alexander explains the difference between Right and Left:

My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.

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I propose that the best way for leftists to get themselves in a rightist frame of mind is to imagine there is a zombie apocalypse tomorrow.

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Leftism wins over time because technology advances over time which means societies become more secure and abundant over time.

As a decent natural experiment, take the Fall of Rome. Both Greece and Rome were relatively leftist, with freedom of religion, democratic-republican governments, weak gender norms, minimal family values, and a high emphasis on education and abstract ideas. After the Fall of Rome, when Europe was set back technologically into a Dark Age, rightism returned with a vengeance. People became incredibly religious, militant, pragmatic, and provincial, and the government switched to an ad hoc and extremely hierarchical feudalism. This era of conservatism ended only when society reached the same level of technology and organization as the Greeks and Romans. So it’s not that cultures become more leftist over time, it’s that leftism varies with social and economic security.

Both rightists and leftists will find much to like in this idea. The rightists will ask: “So you mean that rightism is optimized for survival and effectiveness, and leftism is optimized for hedonism and signaling games?” And I will mostly endorse this conclusion.

On the other hand, the leftists will ask: “So you mean rightism is optimized for tiny unstable bands facing a hostile wilderness, and leftism is optimized for secure, technologically advanced societies like the ones we are actually in?” And this conclusion, too, I will mostly endorse.

Given that we are in conditions that seem to favor leftist ideals, the modern debate between leftists and rightists is, to mix metaphors atrociously, about how hard we can milk the goose that lays the golden eggs. Leftists think we can just keep drawing more and more happiness and utility for all out of our massive scientific and technological progress. Rightists are holding their breath for something to go terribly, terribly wrong and require the crisis-values they have safeguarded all this time.

Many supposedly simple solutions only work if you have a czar, Scott Alexander notes:

For example, take the problems with the scientific community, which my friends in Berkeley often discuss. There’s lots of publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like “I can’t believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do replication experiments. It would be really simple and it would vastly increase scientific progress. I must just be smarter than all existing scientists, since I’m able to think of this and they aren’t.”

And I answer “Well, yeah, that would work for the Science Czar. He could just make a Science Decree that everyone has to use the right statistics, and make another Science Decree that everyone must accord replications higher status. And since we all follow the Science Czar’s Science Decrees, it would all work perfectly!”

Why exactly am I being so sarcastic? Because things that work from a czar’s-eye view don’t work from within the system. No individual scientist has an incentive to unilaterally switch to the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make her research less likely to produce earth-shattering results and since it would just confuse all the other scientists. They just have an incentive to want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along.

Likewise, no journal has the incentive to unilaterally demand early registration, since that just means everyone who forgot to early register their studies would switch to their competitors’ journals.

And since the system is only made of individual scientists and individual journals, no one is ever going to switch and science will stay exactly as it is.

I use this “czar” terminology a lot. Like when people talk about reforming the education system, I point out that right now students’ incentive is to go to the most prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them, employers’ incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so that they can defend their decision to their boss if it goes wrong, and colleges’ incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in US News and World Report rankings. Does this lead to huge waste and poor education? Yes. Could an Education Czar notice this and make some Education Decrees that lead to a vastly more efficient system? Easily! But since there’s no Education Czar everybody is just going to follow their own incentives, which have nothing to do with education or efficiency.

There is an extraordinarily useful pattern of refactored agency in which you view humans as basically actors playing roles determined by their incentives. Anyone who strays even slightly from their role is outcompeted and replaced by an understudy who will do better. That means the final state of a system is determined entirely by its initial state and the dance of incentives inside of it.

If a system has perverse incentives, it’s not going to magically fix itself; no one inside the system has an incentive to do that. The end user of the system — the student or consumer — is already part of the incentive flow, so they’re not going to be helpful. The only hope is that the system can get a Czar — an Unincentivized Incentivizer, someone who controls the entire system while standing outside of it.

I alluded to this a lot in my (warning: political piece even longer than this one) Non-Libertarian FAQ. I argued that because systems can’t always self-improve from the inside, every so often you need a government to coordinate things.

Reactionaries would go further and say that a standard liberal democratic government is not an Unincentivized Incentivizer. Government officials are beholden to the electorate and to their campaign donors, and they need to worry about being outcompeted by the other party. They, too, are slaves to their incentives. The obvious solution to corporate welfare is “end corporate welfare”. A three year old could think of it. But anyone who tried would get outcompeted by powerful corporate interests backing the campaigns of their opponents, or outcompeted by other states that still have corporate welfare and use it to send businesses and jobs their way. It’s obvious from outside the system, and completely impossible from the inside. It would appear we need some kind of a Government Czar.

You know who had a Government Czar? Imperial Russia. For short, they just called him “Czar”.