Robert Farley has prepared a short dialogue illustrating the history of airpower thought:
Sagredo: “We must do something!”
Salviati: “But what? The situation is complex.”
Simplicio: “I know! Airpower!”
Airpower Makes People Stupid
Monday, March 31st, 2014Russia Is Restarting Stalin’s National Fitness Program
Sunday, March 30th, 2014On March 24, Putin signed an executive order to bring back the Ready for Labor and Defense program, or GTO:
Back in the U.S.S.R., people of all ages were expected to participate in GTO. If you were 16 to 18 years old, you were enlisted in your high school’s “Strength and Courage” program, which included elements of military basic training. Not only did you run, swim, and do cross-country skiing, depending on the season, you also ran obstacle courses and practiced grenade-throwing minus grenades. Sometimes there was rifle practice, too.
Older people got off lightly but not completely. Men between the ages of 40 to 60 and women from 35 to 55 were expected to take part in the “Vigor and Health” program run by the GTO’s local branch. Driving the whole program was the quest for medals and glory amid huge pomp and ceremony. In its heyday, the GTO sponsored annual championships in towns and cities across the Soviet Union, with 37 million people taking part in 1975. The winners were feted on television and lionized in the state press.
Really, this is one of the least crazy things to come out of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Shots fired, large fights at Kansas City Zoo
Wednesday, March 26th, 2014Kansas City leaders are looking at changes to the zoo’s free admission days for residents of Jackson and Clay counties after large fights broke out and shots were fired at the Kansas City Zoo:
Mayor Sly James emphatically said Wednesday that “we had young people who were misbehaving badly.” However, he does not believe violence at the Country Club Plaza involving large groups of youth and Tuesday’s violence at the Kansas City Zoo are connected, saying they are isolated incidents.
“It’s not my job to take separate incidents that happened in one part of town and one that happened in another part of town for purposes of trying to create something else.Those are separate incidents. They weren’t the same people involved. It wasn’t the same place or the same time or circumstances,” he said.
However, some of innocent patrons caught up in the violence say they believe the Plaza violence and Tuesday’s violence at the zoo are connected and the city must do more to ensure families can be safe when going to Kansas City’s top attractions.
Residents of Jackson and Clay counties could get into free to the zoo on Tuesday because of voter support for a zoo tax. The day coincided with mild weather and spring break for many area districts.
[...]
Marc Hoefer was at the zoo with his wife, and 11 and 8-year-old children. An 11-year-old friend joined them.
“It was crowded. It was a different crowd. There was not a lot of courtesy. It was very packed and very tense,” he said. “There was a strong police presence. There were a lot of pockets of youth. You could see there was a lot of tension. I didn’t expect to walk about and see what I saw, but I wasn’t surprised.”
Nothing to see here. Move along. These were two totally different sets of youths misbehaving at different locations.
Michelangelo’s David Wasn’t an Underwear Model
Thursday, March 20th, 2014
Italian authorities are indignant that ArmaLite’s ad campaign depicts Michelangelo’s David holding one of its rifles — but they’re not indignant about many other depictions of the iconic statue:
This moral posturing is clearly about something other than respect for the sculpture’s “aesthetic value” or “cultural dignity.” Otherwise, officials would crack down on the David boxer shorts sold by countless Florentine vendors.
Depicting David as armed shouldn’t be the least bit shocking:
ArmaLite’s ads broke the unwritten rules. Instead of highlighting the hero’s body, they emphatically made him a warrior. Hence Franceschini’s objection to an “armed David,” even though every David is armed. “David famously used a slingshot to defeat the giant Goliath, making the gun imagery, thought up by the Illinois-based ArmaLite, even more inappropriate,” writes Emma Hall in Ad Age.
To the contrary, the gun imagery, while incongruously machine-age, was utterly appropriate. David did not use a “slingshot.” He used a sling. As historians of ancient warfare — and readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, “David and Goliath” — know, a sling was no child’s toy. It was a powerful projectile weapon, a biblical equivalent of ArmaLite’s wares.
Nor did Florentine patrons commission statues of David because he looked good without his clothes. They commissioned statues of David because he was a martial hero who had felled an intimidating foe. They made him a beautiful nude to emphasize his heroism, not to disguise his bloody deed. (Donatello’s David has his boot triumphantly on Goliath’s severed head.) Michelangelo’s giant was meant as an inspiration to locals and a warning to would-be invaders. He wasn’t an underwear model. He was a Minuteman.
Gregory Clark on Social Mobility
Tuesday, March 18th, 2014
One of the things that will make this book controversial is that it’s claiming that all the standard methods for measuring social mobility in fact miss the mark, and are likely to find differences in social mobility across societies and time periods that are in fact just spurious. People look at income correlations across generations and extrapolate from that. What this book says is that although there’s a lot of random fluctuation in terms of people’s income or occupation, there’s a much greater underlying persistence. And only by looking at things like surnames do you see that feature.
If you look at England, for example, what we measure is whether you were at Oxford or Cambridge; how long you live, which is another good indicator of social status; occupational status; are you a member of parliament? Now one of the interesting findings here is that it doesn’t really matter which measure you use. For the families we’re looking at, all these things are actually highly correlated. The wealthy at any time are also the educated, members of parliament, those who live long. What the book shows is that there’s an underlying physics of social mobility which all of our political efforts seem to have no effect upon. And the startling conclusion is that we may never be able to change social mobility rates.
No doubt people will read this as a gloomy book. But the title, The Son Also Rises, was deliberately chosen to emphasise that there are some very positive elements in it. One of the things it emphasises is that the current data, which finds rapid social mobility in Sweden and slower social mobility in Britain and the US, and slower mobility still in South America, seems to suggest that you have massive social failures going on in a bunch of societies. The book finds no evidence of these failures because it finds very similar social mobility rates everywhere. Another implication is that if even in meritocratic Sweden you get very slow mobility, then it must be based largely on people’s abilities, aptitudes and drive. All that we’re discovering here is that we’re living in a surprisingly fair world—one in which, at birth, we could predict a surprising amount about your prospects. Is that a gloomy fact about the world?
Then he goes off the deep end…
One of the strong conclusions of the book is that if it really is the case that more than half of people’s outcomes are predictable, then we really have to rethink the idea that it’s OK in a society to make the rewards or penalties from the accident of [who] your parents [are] as large as the market is going to throw up. I started off my life as a free-market economist. But studies such as these have these have convinced me that, in some sense, the Scandinavian or Nordic model has many attractions. If you’re going to be at the bottom of the social order, it’s better to be at the bottom in somewhere like Sweden than somewhere like the United States. That’s a decision that societies have to make. You don’t need to give that much incentive to the upper group in society to still get educated, to achieve and to maintain their status. The incentives are very low, in monetary terms, in countries like Denmark and Sweden. It doesn’t change who succeeds.
Should It Really Take 14 Years to Become a Doctor?
Tuesday, March 18th, 2014Should it really take 14 years to become a doctor? Brian Palmer reminds us how this all got started:
An American physician spends an average of 14 years training for the job: four years of college, four years of medical school, and residencies and fellowships that last between three and eight years. This medical education system wasn’t handed down to us by God or Galen—it was the result of a reform movement that began in the late 19th century and was largely finished more than 100 years ago. That was the last time we seriously considered the structure of medical education in the United States.
The circumstances were vastly different at that time. Until the Civil War, private, for-profit medical schools with virtually no admissions requirements subjected farm boys to two four-month sessions of lectures and sent them off to treat the sick. (The second session was an exact duplicate of the first.) The system produced too many doctors with not enough training. Abraham Flexner, the education reformer who wrote an influential report on medical education in 1910, put a fine point on the problem: “There has been an enormous over-production of uneducated and ill trained medical practitioners,” he wrote. (Emphasis added.) “Taking the United States as a whole, physicians are four or five times as numerous in proportion to population as in older countries like Germany.”
In other words, our current medical education system was originally designed to reduce the total number of people entering the profession. The academic medical schools that sprang up around the country—such as the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889—made college education a prerequisite. Medical school expanded from eight months to three years and solidified at four years in the 1890s. Postgraduate training programs were implemented, beginning with a one-year internship. These were brilliant reforms at the time.
Over the past century, there have been additions to, but few subtractions from, the training process. Residency and fellowship programs became longer and longer … and longer. The path to some specialties is now almost comically arduous. Many hand surgeons, for example, complete five years in general surgery, followed by three years in plastic surgery, followed by another year of specialized hand surgery training. To be a competitive candidate for a hand surgery fellowship, it’s also strongly recommended to spend two additional years on research at some point during the process.
One crazy idea comes from the outcomes movement:
American medical schools and residency programs have traditionally relied on the “tea steeping” method: They expose students to information for a prescribed amount of time, and assume they’re ready at the end of it. Years can be added if a student demonstrates gross incompetence in exams, but there’s no opportunity for exceptional students to accelerate the process. Offering that chance makes educators uncomfortable—both because it relies heavily on imperfect examinations and because it partially undermines the traditional process—but it’s time to experiment.
“Experiment” is the key word. The fundamental problem here is that the argument between traditionalists and reformers is essentially theoretical—we are in an evidence vacuum. It’s ironic, because in virtually every other aspect of medicine, tradition and intuition were discarded decades ago. Researchers rigorously test what is the best moment to start someone infected with HIV on antiretrovirals or a patient with high cholesterol on statins. But doctors have very rarely examined their own training. When Emanuel and Fuchs published their proposal two years ago, they could find just a single study comparing the competence of physicians from the traditional four-plus-four medical education system with that of doctors from shortened programs.
There is no reason not to do this important research.
Us and Them
Monday, March 17th, 2014Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics, Jerry Z. Muller says:
After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things cannot be so different elsewhere.
Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.
But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.
A familiar and influential narrative of twentieth-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the postwar decades, western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union (EU). After the fall of the Soviet empire, that transnational framework spread eastward to encompass most of the continent. Europeans entered a postnational era, which was not only a good thing in itself but also a model for other regions. Nationalism, in this view, had been a tragic detour on the road to a peaceful liberal democratic order.
This story is widely believed by educated Europeans and even more so, perhaps, by educated Americans. Recently, for example, in the course of arguing that Israel ought to give up its claim to be a Jewish state and dissolve itself into some sort of binational entity with the Palestinians, the prominent historian Tony Judt informed the readers of The New York Review of Books that “the problem with Israel … [is that] it has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ … is an anachronism.”
Yet the experience of the hundreds of Africans and Asians who perish each year trying to get into Europe by landing on the coast of Spain or Italy reveals that Europe’s frontiers are not so open. And a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other words — where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict citizenship laws — in Europe the “separatist project” has not so much vanished as triumphed.
Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects ethnonationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately after World War II. European stability during the Cold War era was in fact due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the ethnonationalist project. And since the end of the Cold War, ethnonationalism has continued to reshape European borders.
(Hat tip to HBD Chick.)
Roots of the Western Hostility Toward Israel
Monday, March 17th, 2014The lesson many in the West took from the Holocaust is that nationalism is bad, Richard Pater says, while the message Jews took from it is that nationalism is necessary. Brendan O’Neill adds:
This cuts to the heart of today’s fashionable disdain for little Israel. What many Westerners seem to find most nauseating is that Israel is cocky, confident and committed to preserving its national sovereign rights against all-comers. In short, it’s a lot like we used to be before relativism and anti-modernism. I think that Israel reminds us of our older selves, our pre-EU, pre-green days, when we, too, believed in borders, sovereignty, progress, growth.
Now that it’s de rigueur in the right-thinking sections of western society to be post–nationalist and multicultural, to be fashionably uncertain about one’s national identity, the sight of a border-fortifying state offends and outrages us. In the words of George Gilder, author of The Israel Test, Israel is now hated more for its virtues than for its political or militaristic vices. It’s hated for remaining devoted to ‘freedom and capitalism’ when we’re all supposed to be snooty about such things.
If Israel is unofficially being made into a pariah state, it isn’t because of its foreignness, or even necessarily its Jewishness, but rather because it is too western for our liking. We loathe it because we loathe ourselves.
(Hat tip to David Foster.)
Lessons of World War I
Monday, March 17th, 2014Victor Davis Hanson shares some of the lessons of World War I:
But the crux is why exactly did Germany believe in late summer 1914 that it could invade neutral Belgium, start a war with France, draw in Britain and Russia (and eventually the U.S.), and expect the Schlieffen Plan to knock out France in a matter of weeks, allowing a redirection to Russia to ensure the same there?
Yet what seems fantastical today was deemed entirely logical in the Germany of 1914 — given prewar British reluctance to support France, American isolation, the utter French collapse in 1871, the Russian humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the ongoing political instability that threatened to unwind the Russian czarist state, the amazing surge in German dreadnought construction that promised to nullify traditional British naval supremacy, and the inability of France, Britain, and Russia — and the United States — to craft a credible deterrent force to convince Germany of the folly of any aggressive act, a viable strategy that had actually worked well enough to deter the Kaiser in the prior so-called Moroccan crises.
One of the lessons of the outbreak of World War I is the importance of perceptions. At some point in 1914 the German military and diplomatic community concluded that the country not only could pull off a successful lightning strike against France, but could do so without starting a world war — given various events over the prior decades.
Such flawed thinking is a good reminder that appearances often matter as much as reality in provoking wars.
Why Good Works Produce Bad Results
Sunday, March 16th, 2014Foreign aid organizations are having a harder time raising money, because people are realizing how much aid gets stolen after arriving in the countries where it is needed, but before it gets to the people who need it:
The plundering has gone on for so long that the thieves have gotten greedy and sloppy. For example, the refugees from the 1960s-70s war in southern Morocco (West Sahara) decades ago are still sitting in Algeria supported by foreign aid. But it’s become increasingly obvious that, while the aid organizations are regularly providing aid for 120,000 refugees there are only about 40,000 real refugees in the camps. The rest of the aid goes to make a few Polisario (the rebel group that runs the camp) leaders and Algerian officials millionaires and many more underlings wealthier. For years people who lived in the camp have casually told outsiders, including reporters, details of how aid is stolen and resold and deals made with air officials to keep the loot coming.
The Palestinian aid scams are increasingly being documented, in part because Palestinian leadership has been split since 2007 between Fatah and Hamas and partisans for both groups are willing to offer up details of the misbehavior of their rivals. Israel has been complaining about this aid abuse for decades and now Palestinians are corroborating, in detail, many of the Israeli charges. This puts increasing pressure on donor nations to push Palestinian leadership. Some donors are not bothering with that and have simply stopped giving.
Now there are over three million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan and the plundering is already underway despite the obvious suffering of so many of those in the camps. Moreover cell phones make it easier to document and expose the theft. No wonder the UN is having a hard time raising the $6.5 billion is says is needed to keep the camps going.
The UN, and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are also in big trouble because of unruly refugee camps. It’s not just the thieves, but other types of criminals as well. The Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are increasingly out of control because this. Aid groups operate under the protection of local security forces, but as is often the case the locals are unable or unwilling to supply sufficient police or troops to keep the peace in these instant cities created by the aid organizations. While the Turks can mobilize sufficient additional forces to keep the camps peaceful this is not the case in Lebanon and especially Jordan because both nations have long had too much unrest and not enough money for a lot of police.
Aid groups are also beginning to confront the harmful side effects of their good works. The worst side effect is how rebels and gangsters sustain themselves by stealing food and other aid supplies, as well as robbing the NGO workers themselves. Usually the main complaint is the increasing attacks on aid workers. In the worst cases aid workers are assaulted or robbed and that eventually escalates to some getting killed. This is a trend that has been on the march upward for several decades. Islamic radicals have been particularly active in terrorizing and killing the foreigners who are there to help them. Aid workers are usually caught between different factions within the refugee camps. All factions see the aid groups as a source of income and supplies.
In the case of Syria there are also problems with Sunni Islamic radicals keen on chasing out all non-Moslem foreigners. The refugee camps for Syrians are particularly vexed by criminal gangs that prey on everyone, especially the women. The rebel groups recruit teenage boys to fight or, in the case of Islamic radical groups, to be suicide bombers (called “birds of paradise”). Younger boys are often sexually exploited (a common problem throughout the region).
[...]
The employees of NGOs, while not highly paid, are infused with a certain degree of idealism. These foreign NGOs bring to disaster areas a bunch of outsiders who have a higher standard of living and different ideas. Several decades ago the main thing these outsiders brought with them was food and medical care. The people on the receiving end were pretty desperate and grateful for the help.
But NGOs have branched out into development and social programs. This has caused unexpected problems with the local leadership. Development programs disrupt the existing economic, and political, relations. The local leaders are often not happy with this, as the NGOs are not always willing to work closely with the existing power structure. While the local worthies may be exploitative, and even corrupt, they are local and they do know more about popular attitudes and ideals than the foreigners. NGOs with social programs (education, especially educating women, new lifestyle choices, and more power for people who don’t usually have much) often run into conflict with local leaders. Naturally, the local politicians and traditional leaders have resisted or even fought back. Thus the Afghan government officials calling for all NGOs in the country to be shut down. That included Afghan NGOs, who were doing some of the same work as the foreign ones. The government officials were responding to complaints from numerous old school Afghan tribal and religious leaders who were unhappy with all these foreigners, or urban Afghans with funny ideas, upsetting the ancient ways in the countryside. Moreover, the Afghan government wanted to get the aid money direct, so they could steal more of it.
Crimea Vice
Saturday, March 15th, 2014It’s a pretty strange world, Nick B. Steves says, when the best coverage on the Russian occupation of Crimea comes from Vice:
Derbyshire on Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance
Friday, March 14th, 2014There is nothing breathtaking in New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance, John Derbyshire says — if you already frequent websites like VDare, InfoProc, hbdchick, or West Hunter:
Most people don’t visit these websites, though, and are raised and educated taking the SSSM [which declares race to be a “social construct”] for granted. To them, the facts that Wade’s book presents and the ideas it discusses will come as thunderclaps.
This is the “shocking” keynote of the book:
New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.
The Germ Theory of Culture
Wednesday, March 12th, 2014Much of what we like to think of as politics, morality, and culture is really disease avoidance behavior:
Some species of primate, Thornhill told me, will ostracize sick members of the group to avoid the spread of disease. Cows and other ungulates are known to rotate their movements among pastures in such a way as to avoid the larvae of intestinal worms that hatch in their waste. And in ant societies, only a small number of workers are given the task of hauling away the dead, while sick ants will sometimes leave the nest to die apart from the group.
[...]
The threat of disease is not uniform around the world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regions have fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetter climates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of “pathogen stress.” Thornhill and his colleagues theorize that, over time, the pathogen stress endemic to a place tends to steer a culture in distinct ways. Research has long shown that people in tropical climates with high pathogen loads, for example, are more likely to develop a taste for spicy food, because certain compounds in these foods have antimicrobial properties. They are also prone to value physical attractiveness — a signal of health and “immunocompetence,” according to evolutionary theorists — more highly in mates than people living in cooler latitudes do.
[...]
Fincher suspected that many behaviors in collectivist cultures might be masks for behavioral immune responses. To take one key example, collectivist cultures tend to be both more xenophobic and more ethnocentric than individualist cultures. Keeping strangers away might be a valuable defense against foreign pathogens, Fincher thought. And a strong preference for in-group mating might help maintain a community’s hereditary immunities to local disease strains. To test his hypothesis, Fincher set out to see whether places with heavier disease loads also tended toward these sorts of collectivist values.
Working with Damian Murray and Mark Schaller, two psychologists from the University of British Columbia, and Thornhill, Fincher compared existing databases that rated cultural groups on the individualist-collectivist spectrum with data collected from the Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network and other sources. The team paid special attention to nine pathogens (including malaria, leprosy, dengue, typhus, and tuberculosis) that are detrimental to human reproductive fitness. What the team found was a strong correlation between collectivist values and places with high pathogen stress. In 2008, Fincher, Thornhill, Schaller, and Murray published a major paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that laid out the connection.
Thornhill and Fincher found further evidence for the pathogen stress theory by looking at geographical regions that had not only severe disease stress but also a highly diverse patchwork of local pathogen populations. The critters that make us ill — not only the viruses and bacteria, but also the ticks, flies, and mosquitoes that spread them — are tiny and lack the ability to regulate their own heat as larger organisms do. They often flourish only in very narrow climatic zones, where they are adapted to certain temperature and moisture levels. As a result, pathogen threats can be highly localized. One study, for instance, found at least 124 genetically distinct strains of the parasite Leishmania braziliensis across Peru and Bolivia.
If you were to live in such a pathogenically diverse place, you and your family would likely develop a resistance or immunity to your local parasites. But that defense might be useless if you were to move in with a group just a short distance away — or if a stranger, carrying a foreign pathogen load, were to insinuate himself into your clan. In such places, then, it would be important for neighboring groups to be able to tell the difference between “us” and “them.” With that thought in mind, Thornhill and his colleagues made a prediction: that regions with a balkanized landscape of localized parasites would in turn display a balkanized landscape of localized customs and conspicuous cultural differences among human populations — dialects, unique religious displays, distinctive art and music, and the like. While there is much more research to be done, early findings suggest that — particularly when it comes to the development of local languages and religions — pathogen stress does appear to spawn cultural diversity.
Sacred Values
Tuesday, March 11th, 2014Sacred values, like devotion to God or a collective cause, signal group identity, Scott Atran says, and inspire non-rational exertions independent of likely outcomes:
In interviews, experiments, and surveys with Palestinians, Israelis, Indonesians, Indians, Afghans, and Iranians, my research with psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin finds that offering people material incentives (large amounts of money, guarantees for a life free of political violence) to compromise sacred values can backfire, increasing stated willingness to use violence toward compromise. This research, supported by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, shows that backfire effects occur both for sacred values with clear religious investment (Jerusalem, Shariah law) and those with initially none (Iran’s right to nuclear capability, Palestinian refugees’ right of return).
For example, a 2010 study of attitudes toward Iran’s nuclear program found that, for most Iranians, having a nuclear program has nothing sacred about it. But it had become a sacred subject through religious rhetoric for about 13 percent of the population. This group, which tends to be close to the regime, now believes a nuclear program is bound up with the national identity and with Islam itself, so that offering material rewards or punishments to abandon the program only increases anger and support for it.
While sacralization of initially secular issues blocks standard “business-like” negotiation tactics, work with political scientist Robert Axelrod among political leaders in the Middle East and elsewhere indicates that strong symbolic gestures (sincere apologies, demonstrating respect for the other’s values) generate surprising flexibility, even among militants and political leaders, and may enable subsequent material negotiations. For example, we find that Palestinian leaders and their supporting populations are generally willing to accept Israeli offers of economic improvement only after issues of recognition are addressed. Especially if symbolic gestures are tied to religious notions that are open to interpretation, they may be reframed without compromising their absolute “truth” (for example, rethinking Jerusalem as less a place than portal to heaven, where earthly access to the portal suffices).
Surprisingly few wars are started by religions, he notes — but religion takes on a critical role once things get going:
The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history, and only 123 (7 percent) were religious; a BBC-sponsored “War Audit,” which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years rated on a 0 to 5 scale for religious motivation (Punic wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation, and less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. But when conflict is framed by competing religious and sacred values, intergroup violence may persist for decades, even centuries. Disputes over otherwise mundane phenomena then become existential struggles, as when land becomes “Holy Land.”
During protracted intergroup conflict, secular issues tend to become sacralized and non-negotiable, regardless of material rewards or punishments, as with Iran’s nuclear program among regime supporters. In a multiyear study, we found that Palestinian adolescents who perceived strong threats to their people and were highly involved in religious ritual were most likely to see political issues like the right of refugees to return to homes in Israel as absolute moral imperatives, forbidding Palestinian leaders to compromise whatever the costs. Our work with Greg Berns and his neuroeconomics team suggests that such values become transcendent, emotionally-charged yet stable over time, and processed in the brain as duties bound by rules rather than utilitarian calculations. Neuroimaging also reveals that violations of sacred values trigger emotional responses consistent with sentiments of moral outrage.
Skimming the Top off of Foreign Societies
Tuesday, March 11th, 2014Amy Chua’s The Triple Package: Why Groups Rise and Fall in America focuses on eight prosperous minorities within the US. As Steve Sailer notes, many of these groups’ success in America is less the product of culture than of simply skimming the intellectual and financial top off of foreign societies:
Many Indians (total population back home: 1.237 billion) and Nigerians (169 million) in the US are here because they are related to somebody rich enough and smart enough to pursue graduate study in the US.
Cubans and Iranians (like the Vietnamese whom Chua leaves out) are refugees from the rich ruling class of extinct pro-American regimes. Cubans have recently been reinvigorated politically by the increasing ethnicization of politics. With all the emphasis on amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants, blow-dried Cuban politicians have elbowed their way to the front as the Hispanic Talented Tenth, a mediagenic elite more TV-savvy than actual illegal aliens, who tend to be short, round, and inarticulate in any language.
In fact, many Iranians didn’t even have to start over. They’re not just benefiting from their superior human capital; they’re living off their financial capital they looted from their native land during the oil boom of the 1970s. Years before the Shah fell, numerous rich Iranians relocated much of their fortunes to Beverly Hills.
Moreover, the current Iranian government isn’t ideologically anti-capitalist like Cuba, so many Iranians in the US (including, perhaps surprisingly, many Jewish Persians), continue to profit from enterprises back home while enjoying the good life in the Hollywood Hills. I’m sure you would similarly find that, say, Russians in Cyprus and Monaco are doing pretty well for themselves, too, without looking too hard for their cultural secrets.