Forever 21 might be a classic example of a small-time family enterprise that went super-nova.
It's owners continued to run it as if it were a small business, even as the company surpassed its own grandiose ambitions.
Forever 21 pioneered a new category of retail -- "fast fashion".
Fast fashion is dirt-cheap yet trendy.
Fast fashion, however, is not an example of "disruptive innovation".
Disruptive innovation consists of an obscure, cheap and inferior market that is entirely outside the mainstream finding a niche and improving over time until finally, and unexpectedly, it displaces the dominant market.
Fast fashion was actually the lower end of the incumbent market, and not a distinct market.
Mainstream corporations imitated Forever 21 and stole its fire.
This might be part of a larger pattern.
It is a pattern that one finds in the evolution of amusement parks, of the mafia and of Las Vegas:
A crude, small-time operation becomes big-time and corporate, then gets displaced by corporations from the mainstream.
That is, mainstream corporations appropriate a new product category that was pioneered by a outsider.
Is this now happening to Tesla?
Tesla, like Forever 21, is not an example of classic disruptive innovation.
However, Tesla is not at the low end of the mainstream market.
Like Uber, Tesla is actually at the high end of the mainstream market and working furiously to move downmarket and make its products available to ordinary people.
Unfortunately for Tesla, ordinary Americans are mostly not interested in sporty electric cars.
Ordinary Americans are smitten with big, bulky trucks.
That might even be true if Tesla makes futuristic trucks.
It will be affluent tech workers from Silicon Valley who will buy Tesla's trucks, just as they are the market for Tesla's cars.
Tesla may not pose an immediate threat to the mainstream auto and truck market in the USA.
However, Tesla is eating away at market share in high end vehicles.
In this way, Tesla is a bit like the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch seems to be displacing Swiss watches.
According to research firm Strategy Analytics, the Apple Watch, launched less than five years ago, now outsells the entire Swiss industry, which has been manufacturing wristwatches for 152 years. Last year, Apple increased sales by 36 per cent to almost 31m watches while the Swiss industry shipped about 21m in total, a 13 per cent decline.
The one solace for Swiss watchmakers is that they still generate more revenue: $21bn to Apple’s $11bn. But on current trends Apple will overtake the Swiss on that measure, too, by 2023.
However, there are different market segments in the wristwatch industry.
The low end of the wristwatch industry may be obsolete due to the rise of the smartphone.
That is classic disruptive innovation.
The new, disruptive product -- a clock you inconveniently keep in your pocket -- might not be perfect, but it is free.
To the ordinary person, a free portable digital clock is more valuable than the cheapest of wristwatches.
In contrast, the low end of the luxury wristwatch market is being disrupted by smartwatches.
The Apple Watch is killing Rolex at its low end.
But the high end of the luxury wristwatch market is doing better than ever.
René Weber, a luxury analyst at Bank Vontobel in Zurich, highlights the sharp contrast in performance between the low and high-end watch segments. Since 2000, Swiss watches costing less than $1,000 have seen their unit sales halve, while watches costing more than $5,000 have seen volumes triple.
Mr Weber says sales of the most prestigious watches made by Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet have been little affected by the smartwatch revolution. Indeed, there are waiting lists for some of their top-end products because of capacity constraints in manufacturing complex mechanical watches.
“You buy these Swiss watches for eternity, whereas you throw away a smartwatch after two to three years,” he says. “It is a different kind of watch, a different kind of experience.”
The flourishing of a luxury market at the high-end might represent a backlash to the democratization of luxury at the low end.
That is, what might be perceived as the product of growing inequality might actually (or might also) signify the devaluation of moderate luxury as it becomes more accessible.
The problem would be growing equality and a rise of status anxiety among those who were most affluent.
For example, higher levels of educational attainment reflect growing equality.
However, those higher educational attainment rates makes it that much more of an imperative for people to send their kids to the most expensive schools.
Since lower-division students are basically reading the same textbooks wherever they go, there is an increasing emphasis on luxurious amenities to distinguish schools.
So the obsession with exaggerating status symbols at the high end reflects increasing democratization in the middle (e.g., smartwatches, state universities).
Indeed, the democratization of the smartwatch market has been taking place since the introduction of the Apple Watch.
That is, the price of the Apple Watch has been falling since its release in 2015.
Initially positioned as a luxury product, with an 18-karat gold version that started at $10,000, the watch now starts at a new low price of $199 and is promoted as a health and fitness tool.
Another motive behind the growth of high-end luxury would be the desperation of incumbents who find themselves being disrupted.
Incumbent industries find themselves faced with a choice between adopting a new disruptive innovation or somehow competing against it.
Adopting a cheap, alien technology is neither what an incumbent wants to do nor even what the incumbent is capable of doing.
The rise of digital watches in the 1980s is an example of this.
The Swiss doubled down on sticking with mechanical watches.
In watchmaking, the quartz crisis (or quartz revolution) is the upheaval in the industry caused by the advent of quartz watches in the 1970s and early 1980s, that largely replaced mechanical watches around the world.[1][2]It caused a significant decline of the Swiss watchmaking industry, which chose to remain focused on traditional mechanical watches, while the majority of the world's watch production shifted to Asian companies such as Seiko, Citizen and Casio in Japan that embraced the new electronic technology.
One strategy is to try to undercut the disruptive innovation on price.
This is exemplified by the creation of the Swatch in the 1980s.
The Swatch was an attempt to compete against cheap digital watches by making accessible, trendy, entry-level mechanical watches.
Swatch (stylized as swatch) is a Swiss watchmaker founded in 1983 by Nicolas Hayek and a subsidiary of The Swatch Group. The Swatch product line was developed as a response to the "quartz crisis" of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Asian-made digital watches were competing against traditional European-made mechanical watches.
The name Swatch is a contraction of "second watch",[1] as the watches were intended as casual, disposable accessories.
The other strategy is to move upmarket.
This is "sustaining innovation", in which established products are improved upon.
Disruption theory differentiates disruptive innovations from what are called “sustaining innovations.” The latter make good products better in the eyes of an incumbent’s existing customers: the fifth blade in a razor, the clearer TV picture, better mobile phone reception. These improvements can be incremental advances or major breakthroughs, but they all enable firms to sell more products to their most profitable customers.
The iPhone -- the quintessential disruptor -- is itself an example of how incumbents flee upmarket in the face of disruption.
Efficiency innovations help companies make and sell mature, established products or services to the same customers at lower prices. Some of these innovations are what we have elsewhere called low-end disruptions, and they involve the creation of a new business model. Walmart was a low-end disrupter in retailing, for example, and Geico in insurance. Other innovations, such as Toyota’s just-in-time production system, are process improvements. Efficiency innovations play two important roles. First, they raise productivity, which is essential for maintaining competitiveness but has the painful side effect of eliminating jobs. Second, they free up capital for more-productive uses.
Toyota’s production system, for example, allowed the automaker to operate with two months’—rather than two years’—worth of inventory on hand, which freed up massive amounts of cash.
Eventually, improved efficiency will push down the cost of smartwatches so that they will become as ubiquitous as smartphones.
In the light of all of the above, it seems counterintuitive that Tesla is trying to manufacture electric cars for the ordinary "everyman".
That sort of mass production is too stressful, and undermines Tesla's image as futuristic and exclusive.
Abstact: Openness and rigor comprise a duality. Openness and rigor may seem mutually exclusive, but in the world of decision-making policies, neither can properly exist without the other. This can be found in the response to epidemics, the selection process of presidential candidates in the USA, the method of ranking competitors in sports and the exclusivity and inclusivity of college admissions.
Response to epidemics
There were two widely cited shortcomings in the response of the government of China to the emergence of COVID 19 in Wuhan:
a lack of openness and transparency, and
a lack of strong, decisive measures to contain the virus.
In a sense, the government of China has become a kind of military regime.
Openness cannot be expected in such an environment.
This regime has a habitual determination to deny any sort of social problem in China.
In fact, it cannot seem to admit these problems to itself.
Thus, the government failed to take the kind of tough action that one would expect from such an authoritarian regime.
It's the worst of both worlds.
So there might be several lessons to be learned from this episode.
A combination of openness and toughness is the best policy.
People tend to have temperamental inclinations to embracing exclusively either openness or rigorousness, making a combined policy less likely.
Without a combination of both openness and rigor, the policy outcome might end up exhibiting neither openness nor rigor.
Openness and rigor apply to the procedures of the electoral process.
Primaries
Idealists and populists want a political system to be as open as possible.
That in itself is not a bad thing.
In fact, it is an excellent thing insofar as it brings in new ideas and perspectives and new talent.
But by itself it is a very bad thing.
A competitive system should be as open as possible, but also as rigorous as possible.
For example, in the early stages of the primary season in a US presidential election, there should be as many people on that stage as possible.
But there should be a steady process of weeding.
For those who do get weeded out, it feels like yet another example of the great injustices in the world.
That is irrational.
That's like the contestants on "American Idol" being given the boot because they just don't have the talent.
Even the nice judges are saying, "Look, honey, you just cannot sing."
With tears in her eyes the contestant protests that "I know in my heart that I can sing!"
The weeding process can fail to happen during the primaries.
The top candidates may switch places in the polls, but they are secure in their overall status as the serious contenders.
It's not a nice thing to say, but everyone else is a waste of time.
That's just simply the reality.
Can the principle that a system should be as open as possible and as rigorous as possible be applied to sports?
Sports
"Sudden-death elimination" seems too arbitrary.
It seems neither rigorous nor open.
It's less open because a competitor who loses just one match is sidelined for the season.
It is less rigorous because the element of luck takes on a more central role in such a system of rapid elimination.
A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion.
The arbitrariness of single-elimination competitions can be seen in tennis tournaments.
Sometimes a champion having a bad day will be suddenly and unexpected defeated and eliminated from further play by a middling player having a great day.
Because the lucky middling player will soon enough be defeated and eliminated makes this system absurd.
Single-elimination competition does have the benefit of providing an exciting life-or-death gladiatorial struggle.
But by taking a top-ranked contender out of contention for the rest of the season, matches that would have been even more exciting at the higher levels are not going to happen.
A more thorough system of competition would be "round robin".
It is more open because each competitor plays against every other competitor.
It is more rigorous in that it insures that it is the better competitor advances up through the ranks.
A round-robin tournament (or all-play-all tournament) is a competition in which each contestant meets all other contestants in turn.[1][2] A round-robin contrasts with an elimination tournament, in which participants are eliminated after a certain number of losses.
One problem with round-robin systems is that because each competitor must play every other, the playing season is long and tedious.
But there might be a way of addressing this.
Games would be scheduled earlier in the year than the current system.
The first games would involve the lowest ranked competitors from the previous year.
So the very first game would involve the competitor that came in last place versus the competitor who came in second-to-last place.
Only later in the season would the top-ranked competitors from the previous year begin to play.
But there might be an additional measure taken to make the competition more intense.
There would be two leagues, major and minor.
A major league competitor could be demoted into the minor-leagues for losing too many games in a season.
A minor-league competitor could be promoted into the majors by, say, winning enough championships over the years.
Can openness and rigor be applied to the educational system?
Meritocracy (merit, from Latinmereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos 'strength, power') is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class.[1] Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.
The NYT columnist David Brooks claims that there are two forms of meritocracy at work in the USA -- one that produces the elite and one for the rest of us.
There are at least two kinds of meritocracy in America right now. Exclusive meritocracy exists at the super-elite universities and at the industries that draw the bulk of their employees from them — Wall Street, Big Law, medicine and tech. And then there is the more open meritocracy that exists almost everywhere else.
Those who manage to survive and thrive in the hyper-competitive world of the elite meritocracy tend to become ultra-liberal in order to broadcast their virtue.
In the exclusive meritocracy, prestige is defined by how many people you can reject. The elite universities reject 85 to 95 percent of their applicants. Those accepted spend much of their lives living in neighborhoods and attending conferences where it is phenomenally expensive or hard to get in. Whether it’s the resort town you vacation in or the private school you send your kids to, exclusivity is the pervasive ethos. The more the exclusivity, the thicker will be the coating of P.C. progressivism to show that we’re all good people.
The elite meritocracy has a serious work ethic.
People in this caste work phenomenally hard to build their wealth. As Daniel Markovits notes in his powerful new book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of workers in the top quintile of earners who work more than 50 hours a week nearly doubled.
Their talents and efforts translate into massive productivity.
People in this caste are super-skilled and productive. There are more than 70 law firms, Markovits notes, that generate over $1 million in annual profit per partner. When Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion, it had only 13 full-time employees.
It has been asserted that the problem with growing social inequality is with inequality of wealth, not income.
That is, the problem is not high incomes of professionals but with stock and real estate ownership of businessmen.
Actually, the problem might be the income of the elite-educated professional classes, not stock owners.
That is, the problem is not the top 1% of stock owners, but the top 20% of income earners.
A few years ago, people in this elite professional caste seized on research by Thomas Piketty, who argued that rising inequality is caused by the shift in income away from labor and toward capital. The investors are to blame! But, Markovits argues, roughly 75 percent of the increase in the top 1 percent of earnings is caused by shifts in income within labor. These highly educated professionals attract vast earnings while everybody else gets left behind. A cardiologist used to earn four times as much as a nurse; now it’s seven times as much.
The liberal professional classes have become a quasi-aristocracy that reproduces itself by passing its advantages on to its own children.
Parents in the exclusive meritocracy raise their kids to be fit fighters within it. Markovits calculates how much affluent parents invest on their kids’ human capital, over and above what middle-class parents can afford to invest. He concludes that affluent parents invest $10 million more per child. The resulting highly honed, high-performing young people are amazing — and endure the stresses you’d expect. At the best law school in the country, Yale, 70 percent of the students say they experience mental health challenges.
It's a closed system.
The elite meritocracy promotes talent, but from a limited, over-educated pool of students, typically from the liberal professional classes.
What Brooks does not mention is that the professional classes are really just highly paid super-technicians.
The result is a kind of clueless sterility, devoid of creativity and critical thought.
Here is the Amazon description from William Deresiewicz's 2015 "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life":
A groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation’s top schools should be—but aren’t—providing: “The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those ‘sheep’), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem” (People).
As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass.
Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to “practical” subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it.
“Excellent Sheep is likely to make…a lasting mark….He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America….Mr. Deresiewicz’s book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness” (The New York Times).
The poster child of the liberal upper-middle class professional caste might be Mark Zuckerberg, son of a dentist and a psychiatrist.
For all his bold talk -- "Move fast and break things" -- he is a technician, not a rebel.
For all his technical brilliance, Zuckerberg is devoid of critical thought and creativity -- perhaps less reflective than the average person.
Zuckerberg was once naively idealistic, but now all he has is a reactive combativeness and a determination to win.
At no point has he attained any wisdom.
Following the 2016 election, President Barack Obama gave Zuckerberg a long personal lecture about how Facebook is hurting and not helping American democracy.
Zuckerberg came away puzzled.
The sole life experience of affluent technicians from the professional class is a harsh technical education.
These people have assumed positions of leadership.
The leaders of old -- say, George Washington -- might have been less intelligent.
But the old elite was educated into the humanities at elite schools, and they did serves as officers in wartime, they did have life experience.
The Excellent Sheep are closed.
The are over-trained too narrowly and are inbred within the professional class.
Oddly, however, by being "hothouse flowers", their education is not truly rigorous.
They are admirably scholarly in their method and focus, but not erudite in their breadth.
Brooks contrast this closed elite with what he calls an "inclusive meritocracy".
Arizona State University, which is led by Michael Crow[,] defines itself not by how many people it can exclude but by how many it can include. The need for higher education is greater than ever, so A.S.U. has rapidly expanded to meet that need. Between 2013 and 2018, undergraduate enrollment rose by 45 percent. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of engineering students grew to 22,400 from about 6,400.
A.S.U. has done it by increasing its reach into those who are underserved. The number of first-generation students has more than quadrupled since 2002.
Everything is on a mass scale. A.S.U.’s honors college alone is bigger than Stanford’s entire undergraduate enrollment. It graduates more Jews than Brandeis and more Muslims than Jews.
The system seems open enough.
But is it rigorous?
The quality has risen along with the size. Research expenditures double every six to eight years, and a number of academic departments are nationally recognized as among the best for the quality of their research.
Despite all this research, the focus is pragmatic.
The atmosphere is much more democratic and accessible to all. Faculty members are treated less as scholars within rarefied disciplines and more as interdisciplinary intellectual entrepreneurs. The goal is immediate social impact as much as expanding knowledge, so, for example, A.S.U.’s Watts College of Public Service & Community Solutions is enmeshed with local residents to transform a Phoenix neighborhood.
ASU might be inclusive.
But is ASU rigorous?
There was once a comment in the Chronicle of Higher Education as to the rigor of state universities.
The comment asserted that there are three types of higher educational institutions:
Elite universities for the best and the brightest.
Small college for those who want to teach and learn.
State universities for those who need credentials for the job market.
The comment went on to note that when one visits the library at an elite university on a Thursday evening, the library is packed with students and professors preparing for a long, hard weekend of study.
It then said that when one visits the library at a state university on a Thursday evening, the place is vacant of patrons because "The drinking has commenced."
The research done at a state university might be rigorous, but the academic program is probably not at the level of a prestigious college or elite university.
To increase rigor at a state university, the rigor would have to be built in to the primary and secondary levels of public education.
For example, academic standards and funding of public elementary and high schools would be raised in order to create a "college ready" student body.
But then, in another strategy to improve rigor, students who are not academically inclined would be prepared for a non-college career track -- despite being given a high quality academic education in K-12.
That's probably not going to happen.
It might be added that inclusiveness must be an active process.
That is, inclusiveness is not just admitting large numbers of people into what is a self-selecting process dominated by the upper classes.
And insofar as inclusiveness is active, it has its own rigor and exclusiveness.
One example is giftedness.
Most students in gifted and talented programs are supposedly not really classic gifted students.
They might be better understood as the kind of very bright, high-achieving students who attend small prestigious liberal arts colleges, who are generally:
from New England or the northeast in general,
Asian or Jewish, at least in part, and/or
the offspring of schoolteachers or professors.
Giftedness is distributed evenly throughout the social hierarchy and all ethnic groups.
Such underprivileged gifted students can be identified, but it does take some effort to do so.
Yet such efforts are usually not taken.
The exception might be sports, because coaches will approach tall, fast or large students and try to entice them into a program.
Would society dedicate resources to identifying gifted and potential high-achieving students hidden among the academically unremarkable student population?
More pointedly, would the upper-middle class, which values the education of their own offspring so highly, push for such a policy?
That is, would they want such a policy of active evaluation even if it created more competition for their own kids?
So far, they have not.
What about the working class?
They generally don't value things that have little practical purpose, and they don't want their kids to develop abnormally (which is what giftedness is).
This is a tragedy of the commons because developing talent is a matter of national security.
This might shift the focus away from colleges and universities in terms of inclusive meritocracy.
That is, the real focus should be on cultivating all students at the elementary level, and later at middle school and high school.
The process now seems quite passive and unsophisticated.
But even if a more advanced form of evaluation were implemented, it seems inherently difficult and expensive.
Moreover, creativity in particular is difficult to identify.
Certainly, there does seem to be a need to find some sort of upward path for the working class.
In 2005, the New York Times published a series on social stratification in the USA entitled "Class Matters".
The articles mention that in the 1950s, when C. Wright Mills wrote "The Power Elite", there was a barrier to entry to the tiny ruling class.
That barrier between the "power elite" of policy decision makers -- politicians, elite bureaucrats, corporate leaders -- has disappeared.
Today, most of the elite decision makers derive from the upper-middle professional classes.
However, a new barrier has appeared between the working class and the middle class -- something that did not exist in the 1950s.
Back in 2005, the intuitive solution to this unexpected development was to send the working class to college.
In retrospect, that is problematic.
The working class, even when they are academically prepared for college -- and even when they are gifted -- do not understand college, and cannot relate to it.
There is a tendency for them to amass student debt and then drop out.
College may be synonymous with opportunity for those who have ascended through the academic ranks, but for the working class, there is no such connotation.
In equating personal and social progress with higher education in such a narrow fashion, the system is ironically closed to the working class.
The system is neither really open nor is it rigorous.
Water fluoridation is the controlled adjustment of fluoride to a public water supply to reduce tooth decay. Fluoridated water contains fluoride at a level that is effective for preventing cavities; this can occur naturally or by adding fluoride.[2] Fluoridated water operates on tooth surfaces: in the mouth, it creates low levels of fluoride in saliva, which reduces the rate at which tooth enamel demineralizes and increases the rate at which it remineralizes in the early stages of cavities.[3] Typically a fluoridated compound is added to drinking water, a process that in the U.S. costs an average of about $1.11 per person-year.[2][4] Defluoridation is needed when the naturally occurring fluoride level exceeds recommended limits. In 2011 the World Health Organization suggested a level of fluoride from 0.5 to 1.5 mg/L (milligrams per litre), depending on climate, local environment, and other sources of fluoride.
In the USA, there has long been opposition to fluoridated water.
The water fluoridation controversy arises from political, moral, ethical, economic, and safety concerns regarding the water fluoridation of public water supplies.[82][106] For deprived groups in both maturing and matured countries, international and national agencies and dental associations across the world support the safety and effectiveness of water fluoridation.[3] Authorities' views on the most effective fluoride therapy for community prevention of tooth decay are mixed; some state water fluoridation is most effective, while others see no special advantage and prefer topical application strategies.[12][16]
Without going further into the details of that controversy, a review of ideologies might explain objections to water fluoridation.
However, there is a bigger point being made in this survey of ideologies.
Distinct ideologies form alliances with other ideologies.
Over time, a coalition comprised of diverse worldviews will clump together in a fused identity that denies that internal differences exist within.
That is, political parties get amnesia about their own internal diversity.
Libertarian. Libertarians maintain that rational choice at the individual, micro level is the most effective, efficient and practical basis of all public policy. For example, fluoridation may not be so necessary in places where fluoride toothpaste is fastidiously used.
Conservatism. The conservative worldview sees society as complex, organic, slowly evolving and mysterious in its operation. For the conservative, it is wrongheaded for the government to impose its rationalist agenda on a social reality that nobody really understands. For example, historically, farmers all over the world have resisted the advice given to them by scientists who refute the superstitions and traditions that govern farm work. After all, it was know-it-all, rationalist scientists who recommended that the skeletons and brains of slaughtered cows could be dehydrated, powdered and fed to herbivorous cattle as a supplement -- a practice which led to bovine encephalitis (mad cow disease). Unlike libertarians, conservatives emphasize morality over rationality and practicality. In particular, conservatives are wary of "moral hazard" -- rewarding wrongdoing and penalizing virtue and hard work. Hence, conservatives oppose bank bailouts, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and universal ("free") health care. For conservatives, parents need to teach their kids to brush their teeth and avoid eating candy.
Romanticism. A romantic worldview is not a political ideology, yet strains of romanticism can be found throughout the ideological spectrum. In the 19th century, the backlash against the excesses of the French Revolution led to a refined articulation of the conservative worldview. Conservatives opposed the centralization of state power as the imposition of artificial, mechanical structures on a complex, living organic whole (community, culture). Romanticism weaponizes this worldview and advocates the overthrow of repressive structures. Romanticism, in fact, calls for liberation from all structures, even the traditional structures that conservatives seek to preserve. Romantics rebel against moral restrictions imposed on the emotions, against the persecution by society of the free individual, and against the colonization of indigenous peoples -- in particular, against the conquest of Europe by the Muslim Turks. Ironically, romantics tend to be upper-middle class and/or over-educated -- the classic "tenured radical". On the one hand, their radicalism is informed by their lack of common sense and real-world experience. On the other hand, they are also driven by semi-conscious feelings of guilt over their semi-privileged background. They are neither the "haves" nor the impoverished "have-nots", but rather "semi-haves" raised in prosperity and later marginalized. Likewise, racially, they are not mainline white Protestants, but neither are they the black underclass. Rather, they are so often ethnically "in between" -- Asian Americans, Jews, Catholics or mixed race. In the USA, young, over-educated, urban
"socialists" are not really socialists or populists, but rather
romantics who would rebel against socialism and (rural) populism if they
actually lived within the confines of a socialist economy or a
(small-town) populist community. For romantics, fluoridation of the water supply, like GMOs, represents a corporate-state conspiracy against what is natural.
Populism. Populists are egalitarians and localists who despise control of society by distant, out-of-touch elites. They tend to live in rural areas. In the USA, they used to be Democrats. Unlike libertarians, who share their localism, they are not rationalists. For example, populists hate elites, they hate change ("neophobia"), and they hate outsiders (xenophobia) -- but what they hate most of all is education. Unlike conservatives, who share with populists a distrust of change and of "big government", populists do not have a problem with moral hazard. For example, populists do not have any problem at all with "free" universal health care. They do have a big problem when health care coverage is mandatory and they are forced to sign up for it (e.g., as with the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare"). In general, populists don't care about fluoridation of the water supply because they don't even know what fluoride is. In fact, they might support it if it means that they can land a job with the government. But if libertarians, conservatives and/or romantics make an issue over fluoridation, populists just might join in the opposition against "all these things being crammed down our throats nowadays by those elites in Washington".
All four of these ideologies can now be found in the Republican Party.
Libertarians and conservatives have long been pillars of the Republican Party.
This alliance is unique in some respects, although Americans so often equate libertarians and conservatives.
In contrast to this very American fusion of libertarianism and conservatism, in the rest of the world the dominant form of conservatism has long been Christian Democracy.
In American terms, Christian Democrats can be understood as socially and culturally conservative, yet fiscally liberal.
In practice, Christian democracy is often considered centre-right on cultural, social and moral issues, and is a supporter of social conservatism, but it is considered centre-left "with respect to economic and labor issues, civil rights, and foreign policy" as well as the environment.
Angela Merkel of Germany is a Christian Democrat, although she advertises herself as progressive.
In fact, it could be argued that Barack Obama is similar to Merkel in this respect -- a cultural conservative who hides it brilliantly.
The Conservative Party of the UK are akin to Christian Democrats.
In this light, Margaret Thatcher was an outsider, an American-style libertarian-conservative hybrid.
Indeed, perhaps Ronald Reagan might have been the converse of Barack Obama -- a libertarian who hid it brilliantly.
The neoconservative movement had a strong romantic strain.
They were typically over-educated Jews and Catholics who were once leftists (liberals, socialists, communists).
Now the Republican Party is overrun with populists.
This four-part coalition -- libertarians, conservatives, romantics, populists -- keeps the Republicans in power.
But it doesn't make them happy with each other.
When Nixon began to woo northern Catholics and white Southerners into joining the Republican Party during the 1970s, he was opening the door to populists.
Interestingly, populists share a general political orientation with the Christian Democrats -- socially conservative, fiscally liberal.
["30 Rock", "Subway Hero" episode, Dennis Duffy explains his politics to CEO Jack Donaghy]
Abstract: Civilization emerges slowly through the cultivation of custom. Religion transforms outward aggression into inward guilt, crippling the emotions but making complex social life possible. Sophisticated, snobby courtly life also inhibits the impulses. Violence -- and taxation -- becomes the monopoly of stable, powerful states. Also, with the increasing complexity of social order and the development of science and the rise of democracy, revenge increasingly becomes prohibitively expensive as the destructive power of the response increases by many orders of magnitude. The world increasingly becomes a more peaceful place precisely because it is less safe, with the very real potential for the deliberate extinction of all life.
In the face of epidemics, the handshake has been recognized as one method of transmission.
The elbow bump has been suggested as a substitute.
The question at hand is how customs can change and how they begin in the first place.
The handshake seems to have multiple origins.
Another mystery is the origins of the military salute.
What would seem most alien to Americans would be the formal bow practiced in northeast Asia.
On the one hand, the Greek and Macedonian aversion to bowing contributed to an emergent stereotype about the authoritarianism of "oriental" societies.
On the other hand, the custom of bowing was later adopted in the Roman Empire, and contributed to the European notion of the monarch as divinely sanctioned.
The adoption of authoritarian Asian political culture by the West is also found in Russia.
Perhaps at the micro-level of interaction between individuals, descriptive "ethnomethodology" is the best way to record how social customs originate.
There might be a couple of ancient examples of how social conventions were inspired by the physical "defects" of Alexander the Great.
Inspired by the example of Alexander, sculptures with a curved torsos became an artistic convention in the Greek world.
Alexander re-branded the beardless look as macho.
Anthropologists have noted that there is a tendency across cultures for hair length to represent freedom of emotion.
Civilization involves emotional repression.
A macro-level analysis in historical sociology of personal grooming styles and manners has been carried out in the 1930s.
Religion channels the outward aggressive impulses back against the self.
Secular courtly life also reinforced personal inhibitions.
Another pacifying influence was the formation of stable dynastic states.
A political anthropology of the evolution of war would complement a historical sociology of the rise of modern European civilization.
Self-help. In small societies without governmental structures, revenge killings take the form of "self-help".
Feuding. In a system of feuding, revenge is taken against men in the family of the offender.
War. In societies with states, revenge is taken by entire countries.
WMD. With the creation of weapons of mass destruction, war can result in the death of all humans or even all life on the planet.
Historically, the world has gradually become more peaceful because the consequences of violence have risen by many orders of magnitude.
Democracy and science have promoted peace by making war too terrible to pursue.
Liberals and progressives might welcome the idea that war has become unthinkable.
There is a political alliance between progressives and liberals in the Democratic Party of the USA predicated on the liberatory potential of scientific and technical progress.
Yet one finds that the civilizing process is based not on liberation, but on increasing levels of inhibition and repression.
Americans like to imagine that their country is a model for the world, but in terms of promoting peace, Singapore would be a better model.
In the face of epidemics, the handshake has been recognized as one method of transmission.
Handshakes are known to spread a number of microbial pathogens. Certain diseases such as scabies are known to spread the most through direct skin-to-skin contact. A medical study has found that fist bumps and high fives spread fewer germs than handshakes.[1][2]
In light of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the dean of medicine at the University of Calgary, Tomas Feasby, suggested that fist bumps may be a "nice replacement of the handshake" in an effort to prevent transmission of the virus.[3]
Following a 2010 study that showed that only about 40% of doctors and other health care providers complied with hand hygiene rules in hospitals, Mark Sklansky, a doctor at UCLA hospital, decided to test "a handshake-free zone" as a method for limiting the spread of germs and reducing the transmission of disease.[19] However, UCLA did not allow the ban of the handshakes outright, but they rather suggested other options like fist bumping, smiling, bowing, waving, and non-contact Namaste gestures.
The elbow bump has been suggested as a substitute.
The elbow bump is an informal greeting where two people touch elbows. Interest in this greeting was renewed during the avian flu scare of 2006 and the 2009 swine flu outbreak, and the Ebola outbreak of 2014 when health officials supported its use to reduce the spread of germs.
To a limited degree, in the late 1960s in Hawaii, the elbow bump emerged as a social convention that emerged in response to the fear of contagion.
An early popularization of the elbow bump began outside the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement in 1969 with the lifting of the quarantine policy, which forced leprosy patients to live in an isolated peninsula on Molokai. Many of the settlement's residents were devout Christians; when they began attending church services outside of the settlement, the members of the church congregation were fearful of making physical contact with them. Priests, too, were wary of such contact with the former Kalaupapa Settlement residents, but as a sign of good faith they would touch elbows. This greeting became popular among churchgoers of Hawaii in the early 1970s. Because leprosy is transmitted primarily through mucus, there is some evidence that the elbow bump constrained infections.
Unrelated to disease, the elbow bump became a greeting among urban African American youth, but at best only in a unenthusiastic manner.
The elbow bump as a greeting is also attributed to be a derivative of the more well known fist bump, beginning in the 1980s.
The earliest written record of the elbow bump by David Grimes[3] supports this hypothesis.
More recently, Shaquille O'Neal demonstrated the derivative nature of the elbow bump in relation to the fist bump in 2004, when he dismissed Kobe Bryant's greeting with a half-hearted elbow bump.
Only half in jest has the elbow bump been recommended as a more hygienic replacement for the handshake.
The word "elbow bump" was considered for Word of the Year in 2009 by the New Oxford American Dictionary.[12]
At the open-air service of the Greenbelt festival of 2009, worshipers were encouraged to greet each other with the 'elbow bump of peace' instead of the more usual 'holy kiss' during the Christian rite of peace, because of concerns over swine flu.[13]
The question at hand is how customs can change and how they begin in the first place.
The handshake is found all over the world, but its origins might not be exclusively from Europe.
The handshake seems to have multiple origins.
It is theorized that it is a way of displaying that one is not carrying weapons.
Glancing over Greek artistic representation, handshakes seem to happen among the in-group -- within families, among soldiers, between friends and other Greeks.
It might not have yet become a formal greeting used to introduce strangers and foreigners.
Another mystery is the origins of the military salute.
This custom derives from the modern armies of the Western world.
One theory is that knights would raise the visors of their helmets prior to combat, and this evolved into a sign of mutual recognition.
Another theory is that up until recently, gentlemen would greet each other by doffing their hats.
The efficiency of military life demanded that this be replaced by simply touching one's hat as a sign of respect.
The salute is not directly related to the handshake, whereas the elbow bump is the grandchild of the handshake via the fist bump.
For this reason, if the handshake were prohibited, it would probably not be replaced by the salute.
This is because the elbow bump intuitively derives from the handshake, despite the initial oddness and novelty of the elbow bump.
What would seem most alien to Americans would be the formal bow practiced in northeast Asia.
It is said that the single most difficult maneuver for Americans who practice northeast Asian martial arts is the bow.
For Americans, the bow can feel like an act of abject self-abasement.
Historically, a resistance to bowing was an important source of controversy during Alexander the Great's conquest and rule of the Persian empire.
On the one hand, the Greek and Macedonian aversion to bowing contributed to an emergent stereotype about the authoritarianism of "oriental" societies.
To the Greeks, giving proskynesis to a mortal seemed to be a barbaric and ludicrous practice.
This may have led some Greeks to believe that the Persians worshipped their king as a god, the only Persian that received proskynesis from everyone, and other misinterpretations caused cultural conflicts. Alexander the Great proposed this practice during his lifetime, in adapting to the customs of the Persian cities he conquered, but it failed to find acceptance amongst his Greek companions (an example can be found in the court historian, Callisthenes) - and in the end, he did not insist on the practice. Most of his men could cope with Alexander’s interest for having a Persian wardrobe, but honouring the king as if he was a god by performing proskynesis went a bit too far.[5]
According to Arrian, Callisthenes explains the existence of separated ways of honouring a god or a human and that prostration is a way to explicitly honour gods. It is seen as a threat to the Greeks, ‘who are men most devoted to freedom’. According to Callisthenes, prostration is a foreign and degrading fashion.
On the other hand, the custom of bowing was later adopted in the Roman Empire, and contributed to the European notion of the monarch as divine.
The emperor Diocletian (AD 284-305) is usually thought to have introduced the practice to the Roman Empire, forming a break with the Republican institutions of the principate, which preserved the form, if not the intent, of republican government. However, there is some evidence that an informal form of proskynesis was already practiced at the court of Septimius Severus.[6] The political reason for this change was to elevate the role of the emperor from "first citizen" to an otherworldly ruler, remote from his subjects, thus reducing the likelihood of successful revolt, which had plagued the Empire during the preceding 50 years.
The adoption of authoritarian Asian political culture by the West is also found in Russia.
Russia finds its origins as a colony of the Vikings.
The Scandinavians possibly imported the institution of the assembly, although it might have already existed in the Slavic world.
The origin of the veche is obscure; it is thought to have originated in tribal assemblies in the region, thus predating the Rus' state. After the Novgorod Revolution of 1136 that ousted the ruling prince, the veche became the supreme state authority, although princely power was relatively limited in Novgorod from the start since no hereditary dynasty had been established there.
The traditional scholarship lists among the powers of the veche the election of the town officials such as the posadnik, tysyatsky, and even the archbishop (he was then sent to the metropolitan for consecration); it also invited in and dismissed the princes.
The Mongols invaded and conquered the Russian lands in the 13th century, and ruled for two centuries.
The invasion, facilitated by the beginning of the breakup of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, had incalculable ramifications for the history of Eastern Europe, including the division of the East Slavic people into three separate nations: modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus,[6] and the rise of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
The Russians had typically been fragmented and factionalized prior to the Mongol conquest.
Subsequently, a centralized, authoritarian form of government centered on Moscow emerged to defeat the Mongols.
In a way, the Russian state became and inherited the Mongol state.
Historians argued that without the Mongol destruction of Kievan Rus', the Rus' would not have unified into the Tsardom of Russia and, subsequently, the Russian Empire would not have risen. Trade routes with the East went through Rus' territory, making them a center of trade between east and west. Mongol influence, while destructive to their enemies, had a significant long-term effect on the rise of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Being colonized by the Mongols led to a lasting sense of humiliation and grievance by the Russians.
Russians continue to nurse this sense of resentment and paranoia and project it toward the outside world.
Yet Russian political culture still maintains the traces and contours of Mongol rule.
Historians have debated the long-term influence of Mongol rule on Rus' society. The Mongols have been blamed for the destruction of Kievan Rus', the breakup of the ancient Rus' nationality into three components and the introduction of the concept of "oriental despotism" into Russia.[citation needed] Historians also credit the Mongol regime with an important role in the development of Muscovy as a state. Under Mongol occupation, for example, Muscovy developed its mestnichestvo hierarchy, postal road network (based on Mongolian ortoo system, known in Russian as "yam", hence the terms yamshchik, Yamskoy Prikaz, etc.), census, fiscal system and military organization.[17]
The period of Mongol rule over Russia included significant cultural and interpersonal contacts between the Russian and Mongolian ruling classes. By 1450, the Tatar language had become fashionable in the court of the Grand Prince of Moscow, Vasily II, who was accused of excessive love of the Tatars and their speech, and many Russian noblemen adopted Tatar surnames (for example, a member of the Veliamanov family adopted the Turkic name "Aksak" and his descendants were the Aksakovs)[18] Many Russian boyar (noble) families traced their descent from the Mongols or Tatars, including Veliaminov-Zernov, Godunov, Arseniev, Bakhmetev, Bulgakov (descendants of Bulgak) and Chaadaev (descendants of Genghis Khan's son Chagatai Khan). In a survey of Russian noble families of the 17th century, over 15% of the Russian noble families had Tatar or Oriental origins.[19]
The Mongols brought about changes in the economic power of states and overall trade. In the religious sphere, St. Paphnutius of Borovsk was the grandson of a Mongol baskak, or tax collector, while a nephew of Khan Bergai of the Golden Horde converted to Christianity and became known as the monk St. Peter Tsarevich of the Horde.[20] In the judicial sphere, under Mongol influence capital punishment, which during the times of Kievan Rus' had only been applied to slaves, became widespread, and the use of torture became a regular part of criminal procedure. Specific punishments introduced in Moscow included beheading for alleged traitors and branding of thieves (with execution for a third arrest).
In Russian political culture, one therefore finds a dualism similar to that of the Germans between the private and public realms.
They join the greatest boldness of thought with the most obedient character.
In the private realm, they exhibit classic Western creativity and critical thought in the arts and sciences -- in fact, much beyond the scope of the English-speaking world.
In the public realm, they are limited to political autocracy.
In the Russian case, this autocracy is disorganized.
["Alexaner Nevsky", 1938, egalitarian Russians encounter their authoritarian Mongol overlords who demand bowing @4:25]
How can the origins of social conventions be identified?
Perhaps at the micro-level of interaction between individuals, descriptive "ethnomethodology" is the best method to record how social customs originate.
Ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction.
Ethnomethodology provides methods which have been used in ethnographic studies to produce accounts of people's methods for negotiating everyday situations.[5] It is a fundamentally descriptive discipline which does not engage in the explanation or evaluation of the particular social order undertaken as a topic of study.
For the ethnomethodologist, participants produce the order of social settings through their shared sense making practices. Thus, there is an essential natural reflexivity between the activity of making sense of a social setting and the ongoing production of that setting; the two are in effect identical. Furthermore, these practices (or methods) are witnessably enacted, making them available for study.[3][9] This opens up a broad and multi-faceted area of inquiry. John Heritage writes, "In its open-ended reference to [the study of] any kind of sense-making procedure, the term represents a signpost to a domain of uncharted dimensions rather than a staking out of a clearly delineated territory."[12]
IIRC, ethnomethodology is not strictly sociology.
Good, old fashioned sociology consists of the study of social structure, especially social roles.
In contrast, ethnomethodology studies how these forms emerge and evolve through the creation of meaning through the interaction of individuals.
There might be a couple of ancient examples of how social conventions were inspired by the physical "defects" of Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great was supposedly afflicted by spinal curvature.
When the greatest sculptor of the period, Lysippos, made a statue of Alexander, the curve was included and used to enhance the statue.
This became Alexander's favorite statue.
Inspired by the example of Alexander, sculptures with a curved torsos became an artistic convention in the Greek world.
One might therefore expect shaving to become a custom within a vast empire like Rome, and among troops who were professional soldiers rather than tribal warriors.
Hence the fixation in a professional military on short hair styles and making one's bed perfectly every single morning and other ways of enforcing orderliness.
Civilization involves emotional repression.
Emotional repression makes people unhappy, but the alternative is violence and chaos.
The Civilizing Process is a book by German sociologistNorbert Elias. It is an influential work in sociology and Elias' most important work. It was first published in Basel, Switzerland in two volumes in 1939 in German as Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Covering European history from roughly 800 AD to 1900 AD, it is the first formal analysis and theory of civilization. Elias proposes a double sociogenesis of the state: the social development of the state has two sides, a mental and political. The civilizing process that Elias describes results in a profound change in human behaviour. It leads to the construction of the modern state and transition of man from the warrior of the Middle Ages to the civil man of the end of the 19th c.
In the first part of the study, Elias studied the development of manners, such as table manners.
These outward personal manners developed in relation to the re-establishment of Christianity in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Religion channels the outward aggressive impulses back against the self.
In this way, violent tendencies become manifest in the form of feelings of guilt and the emergence of a conscience that abhors sin.
Again, although religion thus cripples the self emotionally, this makes complex social life possible.
Taking this further, religion is itself therefore comprised of aggression that has been transmuted into passive-aggressive resentment.
The first volume, The History of Manners, traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature", the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego".
One gets a glimpse of European life prior to Christianization in the form of illegal badger hunting in the UK.
Virtually all the hunters are working-class men in their twenties, never over thirty.
When their dogs catch animals such as deer, boar and badgers, in a frenzy, the young men kill the animals using shovels or knives.
If a dog is seriously injured, they kill the dog with a shovel; if the dog fails to hunt well, they shoot the dog.
The demographic most likely to get violent at bars are men between 21 and 28 years old. If you see such a group, go say hello. Ask open-ended questions, like: “Hi, what are we celebrating tonight?” Scan their faces for the levelheaded one. He will probably be older and less drunk. “When there’s a problem later, that’s your go-to guy,” Smith says. When violence erupts — which usually happens after midnight — pull the fighters apart, grab them around their chests in a big bear hug that keeps their arms down. Ask yourself if there is a victim. Should law enforcement be called? (You may face pressure not to call the police; such calls can be a factor during annual reviews of liquor licenses.)
This is the kind of semi-anarchic condition that Europe found itself in during the early Middle Ages.
The Catholic church had only recently been re-established.
The Crusades were in part seen by the Church as a way of exporting violence out of Christendom.
But it is not just religion that tames the manners.
Secular courtly life also reinforced personal inhibitions.
Court life was obsessively status conscious.
But this was not the explosively violent preoccupation with being respected that one still finds among young, urban gangsters.
Rather, the aspiration for status within the court was closer to the societally inconsequential jockeying for reputation that one finds in academia.
["The Taking of Power by Louis XIV", 1966, clip with discussion by Richard Brody]
Fortunately, at this time, Muslim Spain offered a model of courtly life -- refined, sophisticated, urbane, scholarly.
Ironically, this elegant, romantic Moorish influence from Spain lingers on in so much of what we associate with French culture -- but not in Spanish culture.
The French king Louis XIV proposed that France could become a fixture of European economic and cultural life if it developed its luxury goods market -- wine, perfume, art, cuisine, fashion.
Today, traditional luxury goods are the primary pillar of the French economy in a world of competition over high technology.
Another pacifying influence was the formation of stable dynastic states.
The first stage in this process is a vicious-virtuous circle of an increasingly large army being able to raise and keep taxes for its own continuing enlargement.
The second volume, State Formation and Civilization, looks into the formation of the state and the theory of civilisation. First, Elias explains that throughout time, social unity increased its control over military and fiscal power until possessing the monopoly over it. The progressive monopolisation of the military and taxation were feeding another (the political power was using tax money to pay its army and using the army to collect the taxes).
However, up until the Renaissance, the sociopolitical reality was local lords of the manor fighting each other for turf.
Elias describes several steps of the creation of the State:
*From the 11th to the 13th c.: there was an open competition between different houses where everyone was fighting to maintain and extend its power. For instance, after the death of Charles IV of France (1328), France formed a powerful agglomeration of territories. However, one cannot speak of a coherent kingdom yet because regional consciousness was still predominant, the interests of each territory and seigneury were prevailing.
Power shifted during the Rennaissance from the local lord of the manor to princes who maintained courts where subordinate clients could be cultivated.
* From the 14th to the 16th c.: the courts were progressively established, and vassals gathered around important lords. The feudality was princely (it was seigneurial before) because only the most powerful houses had maintained their power and extended it by taking over the territory of smaller houses.
Later, kings arose who could create and maintain centralized bureaucracies.
* After the 16th c.: the royal house is victorious and has a monopoly of power. It created a central administration and institutions. The competitions were now regulated: it takes place peacefully within the state to access a high position in the administration.
In such states, violence essentially becomes a centrally regulated public utility.
At the end of the process, the State is created and possessed the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. Elias also describes that the "absolutist mechanism": the state became the supreme body that coordinates the different interdependent group of the society.
Elias did not cover the topic of war between states.
A political anthropology of the evolution of war would complement a historical sociology of the rise of modern European civilization.
In the realm of international relations, there is a tendency toward more civilized behavior over time.
War finds its origins in revenge killing.
Self-help. In small societies without governmental structures, revenge killings take the form of "self-help". If someone kills your brother, you kill the killer. There is constant bloodletting in such societies. (One estimate is that up to 40% of males in the tribal areas of Papua New Guinea die from homicide).
Feuding. In a system of feuding, revenge is taken against men in the family of the offender. If someone kills your brother, a man in your family kills a man in their family. This results in a cycle of tit-for-tat retributions until, as in the Hatfield-McCoy feud or the feud in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", one of the families gets its act together and rubs out the other family. Because the stakes are so high in feuding compared to self-help, there is greater incentive to avoid violence, and so rates of violence decline.
War. In societies with states, revenge is taken by entire countries. If one man is murdered by a citizen of a foreign state or by state actors such as soldiers, every citizen is sworn to war for revenge. In 1914, a Serbian terrorist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, plunging Europe into WW1, which killed 40 million men. Because the stakes are so high in war compared to feuding, there is greater incentive to avoid violence, and so rates of violence decline.
WMD. With the creation of weapons of mass destruction, war can result in the death of all humans or even all life on the planet. Because the stakes are so high in war with weapons of mass destruction, there is greater incentive to avoid violence, and so rates of violence decline.
Historically, the world has gradually become more peaceful because the consequences of violence have risen by many orders of magnitude.
The pacificity of a society directed correlates with its size.
Most scholars agree the percentage of people who die violent war-related deaths has plummeted through history; and that proportionally violent deaths decline as populations become increasingly large and organized, or move from “nonstate” status—such as hunter–gatherer societies—to fully fledged “states.”
A study in Current Anthropology published online October 13 acknowledges the percentage of a population suffering violent war-related deaths—fatalities due to intentional conflict between differing communities—does decrease as a population grows.
The study ... cut across cultures and species and compared annual war deaths for 11 chimpanzee communities, 24 hunter–gatherer or other nonstate groups and 19 and 22 countries that fought in World Wars I and II, respectively. Overall, the authors’ analysis shows the larger the population of a group of chimps, the lower their rate of annual deaths due to conflict. This, according to the authors, was not the case in human populations. People, their data show, have evolved to be more violent than chimps. And, despite high rates of violent death in comparison with population size, nonstate groups are on average no more or less violent than those living in organized societies.
Have humans indeed evolved to be more violent than chimpanzees as the authors assert?
It depends on what the authors mean by "evolved".
Are the authors referring to the period of five million years of biological evolution since humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor?
There might be some validity to this argument.
Much of chimpanzee behavior consists of "reactive aggression", such as outbursts of anger.
On occasion, however, chimpanzees do engage in "instrumental aggression".
One example is when they carefully, quietly move into the territory of other bands of chimpanzees with the intent to kill as many of the enemy as possible.
With humans, aggressive behavior is skewed more toward this kind of deliberate and rational instrumental violence.
Even when humans do "reactively" lose their temper, most of the time their anger expresses itself verbally, not physically.
It could be that humans are just as aggressive as chimps, but it is a different kind of aggression.
A comparison might be made here between the rates of child abuse between men and women -- rates which are supposedly equal.
Men tend to engage in physical and sexual abuse, whereas women tend to engage in verbal and emotional abuse.
That is, it's just simply different kinds of violence, some of which are more visible than others.
That being said, wild animals, even the great apes, are much more dangerous than domestic animals.
Even the matriarchal bonobos, much less violent than chimpanzees, are much more prone to reactive violence than humans.
Perhaps the authors mean something else when they claim that "people have evolved to be more violent than chimps".
Perhaps they mean the evolution of human technology?
The literature on violence among humans goes back as far as hunter-gatherers, who seemed to have been much more violent than later humans.
Yet major human innovations go back as far as 3 million years ago.
For example, hunting and gathering is relatively recent, emerging around 20,000 years ago.
The type of culture associated with the Mesolithic varies between areas, but it is associated with a decline in the group hunting of large animals in favour of a broader hunter-gatherer way of life, and the development of more sophisticated and typically smaller lithic tools and weapons than the heavy chipped equivalents typical of the Paleolithic. Depending on the region, some use of pottery and textiles may be found in sites allocated to the Mesolithic, but generally indications of agriculture are taken as marking transition into the Neolithic. The more permanent settlements tend to be close to the sea or inland waters offering a good supply of food. Mesolithic societies are not seen as very complex, and burials are fairly simple; in contrast, grandiose burial mounds are a mark of the Neolithic.
There period previous to the mesolithic, going back as far as 50,000 years ago, was also marked by technological and cultural innovation.
The Upper Paleolithic has the earliest known evidence of organized settlements, in the form of campsites, some with storage pits. Artistic work blossomed, with cave painting, petroglyphs, carvings and engravings on bone or ivory. The first evidence of human fishing is also found, from artefacts in places such as Blombos cave in South Africa. More complex social groupings emerged, supported by more varied and reliable food sources and specialized tool types. This probably contributed to increasing group identification or ethnicity.
An even earlier period began 300,000 years ago, and involved cultural and technical achievements.
Middle Paleolithic burials at sites such as Krapina in Croatia (dated to c. 130,000 BP) and the Qafzeh and Es Skhul caves in Israel (c. 100,000 BP) have led some anthropologists and archeologists (such as Philip Lieberman) to believe that Middle Paleolithic cultures may have possessed a developing religious ideology which included concepts such as an afterlife; other scholars suggest the bodies were buried for secular reasons.
The earliest undisputed evidence of artistic expression during the Paleolithic period comes from Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age sites such as Blombos Cave in the form of bracelets,[7] beads,[8] art rock,[9]ochre used as body paint and perhaps in ritual,[1][9] though earlier examples of artistic expression such as the Venus of Tan-Tan and the patterns found on elephant bones from Bilzingsleben in Thuringia may have been produced by Acheulean tool-users such as Homo erectus prior to the start of the Middle Paleolithic period.[10]Activities such as catching large fish and hunting large game animals with specialized tools connote increased group-wide cooperation and more elaborate social organization.[1]
An even earlier period that predated humans began 3 million years ago, with the adoption of stone tools.
This period might have seen the emergence of the cognitive foundations of language.
The Lower Paleolithic (or Lower Palaeolithic) is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. It spans the time from around 3 million years ago when the first evidence for stone tool production and use by hominins appears in the current archaeological record,[1] until around 300,000 years ago.
The move from the mostly frugivorous or omnivorous diet of hominin Australopithecus to the carnivorous scavenging lifestyle of early Homo has been explained by the climate changes in East Africa associated with the Quaternary glaciation. Decreasing oceanic evaporation produced a drier climate and the expansion of the savannah at the expense of forests. Reduced availability of fruits stimulated some proto-australopithecines to search out new food sources found in the drier savannah ecology. Derek Bickerton (2009) has designated to this period the move from simple animal communication systems found in all great apes to the earliest form of symbolic communication systems capable of displacement (referring to items not currently within sensory perception) and motivated by the need to "recruit" group members for scavenging large carcasses.
There was a long development of human technological, cognitive and sociocultural abilities.
The increased mental, cultural and technical sophistication also makes possible greater human pacificity.
However, this sophistication also laid the foundations for an enormous human capacity for instrumental aggression.
Together, the increased capacity for both instrumental aggression and pacificity makes pacificity not just possible, but necessary.
In summary, the tendency toward less war in the modern world is based on three pillars:
the greater human capacity for self-control compared to other primates,
greater psychological and social repression within developed societies, and
greater reluctance to engage in war between societies based on a horrendous cost-benefit analysis.
From this line of inquiry, perhaps the distinction can be made between three social conditions relating to war.
Volatility is the liability to change rapidly and unpredictably, in this context resulting from reactive aggression.
Peace is the absence of war.
Safety represents the low possibility of future war.
Chimpanzees, with their much greater tendency toward reactive aggression, are much more volatile than domesticated animals and humans.
Likewise, large, complex, modern societies are less volatile than more archaic small groups of humans.
For this reason, there might be a general tendency for modernization of society to enjoy greater levels of peace.
But this does not necessarily mean that the world is safer.
Because of the capacity for mass destruction, the world is much less safe although there is greater peace.
Again, it is in part the lack of safety that makes things so peaceful.
Liberals and progressives like to imagine that levels of violence have historically fallen thanks to the liberatory rise of democracy and the advancement of science.
This is true, but only ironically so.
Democracy and science have promoted peace by making war too terrible to pursue.
Democracy, nationalism and populism in the modern world can inflame entire populations.
Modern science arms men with weapons beyond imagining.
In the words of Winston Churchill:
"War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science.”
Liberals and progressives might welcome the idea that war has become unthinkable.
But there is a continuum of what "unthinkable" means.
"Unthinkable" might refer to the sense of horror of what modern war can do, and this serves as a deterrent. Robert McNamara claims that not only was nuclear war possible during the Cold War, but that it was inevitable, and that it was merely a fluke that it did not happen. But it did not happen largely because guys like McNamara knew that it was going to happen and they dreaded it.
"Unthinkable" might refer to a sense that other countries are not going to gamble with retribution to an attack, and this means that one can launch one's own attacks. This calculus was at work in the 2019 Iranian attack on Saudi oil fields, and in the American assassination of an Iranian general in 2020.
"Unthinkable" might refer to a complacent overconfidence that war is just not going to happen. This cavalier attitude would almost certainly guarantee that war will happen, as it did in the prelude to World War One. Optimists who theorize that war is on a downward trend might be unintentionally reinforcing this assumption.
The world seems now to be operating under the second assumption, that war is unlikely because it is too terrible to wage.
The optimistic rhetoric of progressives and liberals might push it into the dangerous third assumption.
There is a political alliance between progressives and liberals in the Democratic Party of the USA predicated on the liberatory potential of scientific and technical progress.
(Hence the mania surrounding the rollout of the latest iPhone.)
Yet one finds that the civilizing process is based not on liberation, but on increasing levels of inhibition and repression.
Americans like to imagine that their country is a model for the world, but in terms of promoting peace, Singapore would be a better model.
