Post 4400: 1493 by Charles C Mann

This has already joined Souls on Fire, Nine Nations of North America and Albion’s Seed as books which changed my entire framework for viewing things

Mann’s earlier book, 1491, upended much of what is commonly taught about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus.  I had known some of it; there was more I should have put together from pieces I did know; much was entirely new.  Short version: the effect of European diseases on the Native Americans, particularly in the areas settled by the Spanish and Portuguese, was far more profound than anything we had been taught in school. They wiped out 90%, perhaps even 95%, of the population.  Secondly, we continue to discover entire civilisations that were unheard of even a few decades ago, in the Andes, in the Amazon, in Mexico.  I reviewed it a few years ago, and followed up on that last year.

But upending pre-Colombian understanding is a smallish thing.  Few of us speak much of that, or connect it to our own history, physical or intellectual. The history of the world after 1500, especially in Europe and North America, is part of our intellectual furniture. It includes much that we use to define ourselves, our culture, and our enemies.  We discuss ourselves in a world connected to Martin Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Jefferson, and Isaac Newton.  Battles, royal successions, great thinkers, scientific advances – these are the influences that made our world.

Right?

Mann would rate their influence far lower, seeing them as riding atop deep currents that drove the actions of leaders.  From the moment the Columbian Exchange started in 1492, it changed the world.  Silver – vast piles of it from Potosi, far and away the richest city in the world.  Had you heard of it?  Me neither. It was in in the Andes, and its hiccoughs brought down the Ming empire in  China and bankrupted Spain - the two most powerful entities in the world.  Now unremembered. Mosquitos – and the differences among them – may have fueled most of the African slave trade and drawn our Mason-Dixon line for us, as well as extending a one-year Civil War on for four years.  Potatoes and sweet potatoes, tobacco, guano, beer and wine, horses, epidemics – these were the main players on the stage, driving the human decisions in ways we still have difficulty understanding. Our actions did not mean nothing, but neither were individuals of much influence, save by accident.

It upends everything you thought you knew.  You will never read world history from 1500, including the parts you thought you knew well, in the same way again.  It does not contradict what was known before so much as swamps it in newer, larger concepts.  Time and again I nodded to myself “I knew that.  Why did I not make the connection?”  It is strong evidence of the ability of narrative (as well as counternarrative and amendments) to channel our thought. 

What you know is still there, just pushed a few rows back. Northwest Europe colonised the world and became rich because of a few crops which allowed it to eliminate years of complete famine. That changed trade, acquisition, science, mortality, weaponry. That may be most of history. Is that an oversimplification and a bit of a stretch?  Absolutely.  Does it make as least as much sense as my previous understanding?  Probably.

Mann himself says "...any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S tuberosum should be ignored." So there.

People interested in environmental issues will have much to consider as well.  Mann declares that both the catastrophists and the free marketers are right, and provides a lot of information either could use to advance their arguments.  He concludes that the unregulated exchange and the free movement of goods across the world has indeed made humanity much more prosperous.  But it has also caused famines, epidemics, wars, and other suffering.  For those who worry that intensive agricultural practices might cause ecological collapse, Mann would say it already has.  Lots of times.  Yet he also gives evidence that it has fed the world, brought huge swaths of humanity into comfortable existences undreamed of before, and improved our cooperation and goodwill.  Both are true.  We won’t be able to keep our old assurances quite intact, none of us.  Okay, lots of us will anyway, because we will only keep the parts we like.  Yet I think even the most stubborn and polarised will pause.

There is also a lot here for those who wish to understand how the Far Eastern trade 1500-1900, both with Europe and the west coast of South America, connects with events we are more familiar with.

Removing The Means Of Suicide

Training today on suicide prevention by removing means. Take away points: suicide is turning out to be much more impulsive than thought.  Even those who think about it for months describe decision-points of “less than an hour” (70%) including “less than 5 minutes” (27%) at the end.  Interrupting them during that time reduces suicides 90%.  Therefore, removing the means even temporarily – locking up the pills, getting the guns to an uncle’s house, taking the keys to the car, etc – has enormous effect. Somehow an interruption breaks the spell.

Bonus: sometimes the family is frozen and the suicidal person is the best one to make the move to remove the means.

Narcissistic, Also Racist

A police official in Wolfeboro recently made offensive racial remarks. It torqued people off more because the remarks were about Obama, but to my mind it would be about the same if he said the same about the kid next door. He used the word nigger, and would not apologise because “he meets or exceeds my definition of the word.” Everyone focussed on the racism, because that’s considered the worst sin to have currently, and we want to hit bad people with our top criticism. But I like paying attention to words and what they reveal about the thinking underneath. I believe that people reveal what they really mean eventually if you let them go on long enough.

 I wrote something similar about NFL-player Riley Cooper, who seemed to be using racial insult instrumentally to get his way and wound as much as possible. I saw that as different from racism, and probably worse. The police official’s comments may also be something worse than racism, though in yet another direction.

 Note to new readers: It’s important to try and wrap your head around the idea that racism isn’t the worst of sins, nor is homophobia, intolerance, sexism, or the other favored Top Sins of our era. I admit it is initially counterintuitive, because there are decent historical and cultural reasons for their prominence, and it’s the world you grew up in and absorbed. But racists are just the regular old garden-variety sinners that Jesus ate with all the time.* His anger was directed more at folks like the celebrities and politicians of our day who make a great show of supporting Good Causes – suspiciously, always the fashionable ones (see Matthew 6.) You know, folks who you and I usually applaud for caring so much, bringing attention to important issues, devoting their time, and providing leadership. Those folks tread on dangerous ground. We should be glad we don’t have to face their temptations to self-righteousness, because few come out unscathed.

 Back to Wolfeboro. The offending official claims he is not a racist, because he doesn’t think all black people are niggers, he likes some just fine. It’s not surprising that people don’t want to be thought of as having society’s worst sin, because that would make them one of society’s worst people. But the reasoning is always of that form. I’m not a bad driver, because I never drink and drive and I keep both hands on the wheel. Well, great about the sobriety and paying attention, Chumley, but you were driving 90mph through a school zone, so you’re a bad driver. But this having a personal definition of important words has a narcissism about it that’s worse than racism. It would be easy to dismiss word usage as a comically minor infraction, but if one expands the examples, I think you will take my point. Abusers often have idiosyncratic, troubling definitions of what love is; sexual perpetrators of what consent means; violent people of what justice is. I am not one who believes that bad definitions create bad behavior so much as that bad thinking reveals itself in bad definitions. Narcissists don’t get it. They don’t share in the general pool of knowledge, because at some level they choose to regard their own internal impressions as more important than our shared humanity.

 The individual in question might be reasonable, even humble or deferent, in other areas of interaction. That isn’t usually the case – general arrogance is more likely. But it does happen that people are narcissistic in few areas, or only one. I make no comment about him in any other opinions. He qualifies as racist because it is pretty generally known that black people dislike the word nigger coming out of the mouths of white people for any reason. (Yes one can find or imagine the occasional counterexample. Irrelevant.) If you haven’t picked that up yet, your claims of respecting some black people are just empty. You missed one of their big-ticket items.

But he’s not racist so much as Narcissistic, Also Racist. Much more worrisome.

Tangent: There may have been times and places years ago when the distinction the police official made was more common. I remember a person being shouted down in the 60’s who was trying to make that claim “I say there are two kinds of black people in the country. Some are niggers…” An occasional person spoke like that when I was in Virginia in the 70’s. I recall Senator Byrd, who was much older than I, talking about having known many “white niggers” as late as 2001, which seems a related distinction. But it’s not a distinction I have any understanding of, so I can’t shed any light on it. I’d be pretty suspicious of it no matter how far back we’re talking about. I wrote about nigger not long ago.

 *I know, the popular representation of those are people who like to party, and drink, and flirt, dance, gamble, dress sexy, and make jokes and have a good time – what prudes call “sinners,” but actually the best sort of people. It allows society to completely redraw Jesus in its own image. The theological version is to think that Jesus had some special affinity for outcasts, to import all that American mythology. Pure rubbish, but powerful rubbish, because we like to redraw Jesus in our own image that way as well. We can blame Hollywood or New York or Nashville, but it’s us.

Mere Cat

Thank you, Erin.

Social Justice

A Person Of Influence where I work has become increasingly fond of referring to our obligation to social justice in our hospital's ethical decisions. I dislike this on a number of grounds.  First, the preening, in a Matthew 6 manner, is increasingly obvious.  He is justifying the injection of some of his favorite political ideas into the discussion and attempting to secure the high moral ground with this. 

Some of us who are evangelicals develop a particular sensitivity to those tones of self-righteousness, having heard them both in church and out.  Celebrities and politicians engage in these displays for Causes all the time.  It's pretty irritating.  It's even more irritating when you are right in the room with it.

Second, I dislike all modifiers to simple moral words like justice.  Like the authors who needed to point out that they were True Patriots, or Christians who try to grab the inside rail in giving their brands of the faith particular titles*, much mischief gets smuggled in. What's wrong with simple justice, patriotism, or Christianity? If you have to dress it up, I immediately suspect a disguise. Modifiers tend to signal that we are actually going to be ignoring the basic model of justice in favor of something we like better. By focusing our attention on certain aspects of justice, it necessarily shoves others into the background. That is only one step away from allowing injustice at that point, because we have a supposedly higher justice overruling it.

Not that we noticed, of course.

Thirdly, this is especially true of that modifier social when applied to justice. It turns out to mean "fashionable" or "popular" justice. I don't say that to condemn everything that comes to us under the heading of Social Justice.  Well-meaning people, some good things, all that. But it is precisely the type of language we use to deceive ourselves, on the way to deceiving others.

The Person of Influence and one of his public references to social justice got put in his place, providing an example of how "social" justice can be used to disguise injustice.  I don't think he noticed how badly he got schooled, but others did. We were discussing at Schwartz Rounds a patient who had badly injured multiple staff members, some of whom were out for months.  He was inadequately medicated because his father, a physician, was convinced that the boy had shown symptoms of NMS on a previous admission, and refused to allow antipsychotics.  There was in fact no evidence for NMS, and psychiatry is not the physician's specialty.  His belief was in fact bizarre, tied into his denial of his own symptoms.

The discussion centered around the line staff's impression that the father/guardian/physician had the ear of hospital administration to an unhealthy degree.  The appearance was that he had unprecedented access and influence, while staff members of lesser rank continued to be assaulted, put out of work, and in two cases, permanently injured. 

Several physicians in the audience weighed in on the discussion, as they often do. Their comments were indeed valuable and intelligent.  Then the P of I brought up how important it was that we kept social justice in mind in discussing ethical matters.  No one was quite sure what he was referring to in this context, actually.  But it struck a chord in one of the nurses, who sweetly and firmly jumped in: "Yes, I'm glad you said that.  We had several discussions on the unit of whether this situation might have been different if it were a nurse's son, or a mental health worker's son."

Yeah, that actually does come under the heading of "social justice," dunnit? Be careful what you wish for.

There were no further comments, other than a wrap-up by a psychologist.

*Stott's Basic Christianity and Lewis's Mere Christianity are reversals of this - modifiers that accentuate the simplicity and orthodoxy rather than obscure it.

One Summer, America 1927. Bill Bryson

When books of history, especially popular history, come out every year, conservatives tend to hold them at arm's length at first. As the 6 O'Clock News used to be the time for conservatives to yell at the TV in the old days, most popular history offerings that get a mention on NPR have at least a few sections that make them think Oh Stop. Examine your premises, will you?  Don't take those sources at face value.


Conservatives will eventually get around to reading them if they seem to have staying power.  They just want to know how prepared they have to be to throw the book down a few times.  And as they aren't much concerned with The Latest Thing, they don't much mind if that doesn't happen for a year or two.  In contrast, when I mentioned this book today, two liberals in the group had a quiet competition as to which of them had read it first, and then quickly, which of them had discovered Bryson first and was generally up on these things.  I generalise awfully about A&H Tribe liberals, but they continually oblige me by providing new examples of how accurate I am.

Bryson's newest will not be thrown down.  It's quite good, full of things you didn't know or barely knew, with a nice balance between truly important events and charming anecdotes.  There are indeed places where his bias is opaque to him but clear to alert readers*, but these are shruggable.  He doesn't miss many opportunities to kick his cultural opponents and does neglect genuine criticisms that could be brought against those he identifies with, but here's the thing: the folks he kicks generally deserve it.

So dig in.  Enjoy.

*Humorously for this region of the country, he mentions that middle-class Republicans were the group most convinced of Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt one sentence after informing us that Boston Irish workingmen heavily populated most of the demonstrations calling for their execution. Both could be true, but not easily. The narrative lacks a center. Or again, he keeps wanting Prohibition and eugenics supporters to fit his original assumptions.  They don't.  To his credit, Bryson does get this mostly right - he's just uneasy about it. 

******

One interesting bit in his outrages about all things eugenics, including some items he hasn't quite done his homework on, is focus on racial differences beliefs as if they are some unusual aberration that pop up around the 1920's in America - and more darkly elsewhere - for unclear reasons and constitute some enduring national shame.  Those beliefs are in fact the default setting for mankind, and there was nothing unusual about them showing up in America at all.  If anything, the focus on 1920's writing about the issue is a product of people of different races having more contact with each other, and evidence that reflexive belief in enormous racial (and ethnic) distinctives was beginning to be questioned for the first time in history. I don't think one can find a president before Harding who would not be considered racist by current standards (though they were sometimes egalitarian by the standards of the day.)

A similar theme came up over at HBD chick's comments sections, where one writer was trying to impress upon us how a Game of Thrones mentality of violence and revenge was very like Medieval Europe, a time of especial darkness and danger.  It was in fact one important stage of diminishing violence in mankind. Violence, cruelty, revenge, and bloodthirstiness are quite normal for humankind.  It is anything else that should elicit comment.  I often think of this when I encounter so many who have trouble with believing in God because of the existence of evil.  Only very recently has anyone in human skin imagined that people generally being good and getting along is their usual state.

Revisiting the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes’s book,  The  Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was popular in some circles in the 1980’s.  I recall some folks in the Prometheus and Triple-Nine societies speaking highly of it.  One in particular quoted sections in the newsletter, and summarized some of the key ideas.  I would hardly have been interested at the time except that Jaynes was attributing schizophrenia to this change in all human brains over time, and I felt obliged to squelch that sort of thinking pretty quickly.

I feel obliged to squelch many sorts of thinking pretty quickly, actually.  It’s what I do.

The Jaynes enthusiasts pushed back, trying to convince us that this fascinating overview of history, linguistics, consciousness, and psychology was in fact worth considering. I was unmoved. Every few years it comes up again, most recently in a comment thread at West Hunter, of all places.  A young psychiatrist brought it up today.  The book seems to have remarkable persistence.  I dismissed it before the assembled throng on the basis of what I knew 25-30 years ago, yet had to admit when challenged that I had not, in fact, read the book.  So he lent it to me.

I read a dozen pages over lunch and am pleasantly surprised.  He writes engagingly and his reading has been far-ranging.  More importantly, he seems to be defining some issues of the discussion very well, and pointing out biases and philosophical errors in the history of science in the 18^th-20^th C.  I remain highly suspicious of what I already know are some of his conclusions about linguistics, schizophrenia, and religion.  However, there may be things worth knowing along the way before we get there.

And it is just a good exercise to rethink things and take them under consideration again. I will be away on vacation, and will bring it with me.

Trace Bundy

I am wondering if the mountain locales are NH or VT.

Political Discussion

Another day on my FB feed in which the political argument consists of no positive arguments, only statements about how evil and hypocritical the opposition is. Usually it's got a (theoretically) witty poster, with lots of people who I mercifully am not acquainted with hitting the like button.  YEAH!  Preach it!

So. Three more people off my feed and into the background.  I mostly just follow my children.  Someone new requests to be my friend I nearly always accept, but everyone pretty quickly gets sent to the far reaches of the galaxy.

Bette Davis Eyes

Maybe it's just my dirty mind.  But since my second hearing of the song, with the slapping sound so prominent, Bette Davis's initials, and virtually every lyric of the song, how is this song not about BDSM?  The video seems to seal the deal.

And yet search engines suggest nothing of the sort.  If that was indeed the intent - of either DeShannon or Carnes - you'd think it would have leaked out by now. So I'm guessing it just isn't.

We Built This Village on a Trad. Arr. Tune

I hadn’t realised what I was getting in for when I came upon Half Man Half Biscuit.   I previously embedded one of their singles.  They are something of a punk version of Bare Naked Ladies, but I am afraid it is just too user-unfriendly for we who are not from England.  Apparently even the Irish and Australians have trouble hearing, let alone getting the many cultural references in their lyrics, because of the accent. However, some I enjoyed having explained as I looked them up.  There is a reference to the Mamas and the Papas in the song above which is actually the Mummers and the Poppers (to rhyme with The Coppers, an English folksong family, much as the Carters would be in the US.)  Which is typical punning sense for them. The song is track 14 on their album “Achtung Bono.”

They have much more imagination than I do.  I could never have come up with the title above

The Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project has the subtitle “179 pop tunes picked over by pedants.”  Well, who could ask for more, really?