What's more significant - classically liberal ideals being rejected by the leadership class, or broadly rejected or not even known or cared about by the masses? These forces seem to go hand in hand, and my question is, will the ultimate demise of it all be the result of top-down or bottoms-up emergent order phenomena? It seems to me that both forces must be barreling down the mountain together.
It’s true, of course, that in a democracy, the masses are important. Most people are sheep, though. They simply follow the leader they believe will benefit them most. Almost all the ideological groups are relatively small.
Henderson is flat wrong about humans being the only primates to organize for violence. Chimpanzees absolutely organize to execute attacks on individuals or groups. Goggle “Gombe Chimpanzee War” for instance, and just basic hunting. Other primates are less obvious, but almost all the social ones have intragroup factions that occasionally rise to focused violence against individuals or alliances by a rival coalition.
You are correct about chimps coordinating to fight and kill members of other tribes. It is fair to question his example.
On the other hand, maybe that doesn't mean Henderson is wrong. These fights sometimes result in a few deaths but from what I've seen it's rarely more than one or two so not mass murder. Also, "the way humans do" is a bit ambiguous.
... Nix that. This similar statement is more clearly wrong.
"a group of individuals who come together to deliberately attack a person or another group. This type of violence is unique to humans."
It's not just humans and chimps that do this but many pack or group predators do this too.
Yea, coordinated violence is the trade mark of most predatory social mammals, and definitely primates.
Chimps also do commit mass murder, although at the scale of their societies (10-20) the amount of murder to make it "mass" is admittedly pretty low; wiping out half a society only takes a handful of murders. The Gombe war was just one instance we have records of where chimps hunted down and eradicated a rival splinter group. No doubt there are many more instances that we just haven't been around to see; vanishingly few people spend the kind of time studying groups over long periods like Jane Goodall did.
The nature of chimp's violence against other targeted chimps is also rather horrific, things like specifically ripping off genitalia. It isn't just biting and striking whatever is handy. They know what they are doing.
I doubt that polygamy was a blip. Henderson's piece tends to put polygamy as a binary choice. The society pair bonds or it's polygamous. I don't think that's right. And polygamy tends to still be present in hunter-gatherer groups today.
In many successful organizations of all types a key management practice is to keep the younger members hungry. If they have an unsatisfying life they can be persuaded to work hard to get the better life they see in others around them. That's why many young lawyers at today still put in 100 hour weeks. They want the bling they see in the partners above them.
Hunter-gatherers were probably the same. Young men didn't get a spouse or any respect until they had distinguished themselves, usually in battle. Those that do make their mark AND survive can then be rewarded with responsibility and multiple wives. You can still see this in drug gangs as the lower level dealers are working very dangerous jobs for pay they could make at McDonalds. But the dream of what could be if they're successful sustains them.
I'm guessing it was always thus. Male hunter-gatherer society is a pyramid with extremely successful individuals at the top with most of the wives, relative successful men in the middle that are somewhat monogamous in the middle and lots of young men dreaming of how to build their reputation and move up the pyramid.
One way to look for it is to look at the marriage age of men vs. women. Most men had to prove themselves as good providers / hunters / warriors before moving up in society. So young girls marrying older men is the norm that can still be seen in older societies like Bedouins.
Overall one way still today to run an organization is to give most of the resources to the top performers, very little to the bottom, and channel the internal frustration toward outsiders. It's worked for countless generations, and I see no reason it didn't work before the dawn of civilization.
Not sure what Henderson's source for polygamy being a 'blip', but I'm not buying it.
While women frequently die in child birth, I suspect it is far more common for a group to have less men than women. This would seem to lead to some polygamy.
That said, I don't think his 'blip' meant there was no polygamy in other times, just that it was far less dominate. I'm a little skeptical it included the majority of women during the blip. I guess that would mean we've always been somewhat in both modes.
This was my thought. And of course killing the males of an outgroup and taking their women should lead to evan larger women to men ratio. I'm pretty sure evolution doesn't 'select' for monogamy but for reproductive success "in the moment". So the amount of nonogamy vs polygamy was probably pretty fluid.
And I seem to remember reading in a class way back when that in Nepal brothers frequently married a single wife, or a pair of susters. This was evidently to preserve ownership of a land resource.
From what I understand, most hunter-gatherer bands top out at about 50 people. So there simply aren't enough people to make a good pyramid.
Now that 50 can be misleading. Bands are somewhat fluid, there is travel between bands, and there may be 1,000 people who speak the same language and consider themselves part of the same "people". But in any one place at any one time ...
So, when these red-pill guys say, "Polygamy is how things have always been," they are describing a brief blip in human evolutionary history.
----
It's not the length of time, but the scale of the selection pressure.
Ashkenazi Jews were only selected for intelligence in a particular place and time that is infinitesimally small by this standard, and yet look at the results.
It seems like most religions have a "flood myth" to explain the violent transition when only 1/17 male lines survived.
I think there is something to our long hunter gatherer history but also that human being can evolve relatively fast (provided enough selection).
Agreed. I would add that I don't think these things are entirely pre-determined, either. The gorilla model is one alpha male who monopolizes a group of females. The chimp/bonobo model is that females copulate with multiple males, and thus paternity is uncertain so the males don't invest heavily in any females' offspring but they do coexist together in the same group. I think if you look at human behavior, there's a bit of an element of both of these (ie, high status men form harems when they can, but also...orgies and group sex are a thing). The conclusion I would draw is that humans have multiple reproductive scripts programmed into these big brains of ours and can activate whichever one is advantageous, depending on circumstance and opportunity.
The quote from Seel sounds generally accurate. But where does it lead? Fifty years from now will we think it was a bigger threat in 2024 versus many other times in our past? I doubt it.
Why isn’t polygyny more widespread? Considering the dysfunctions of most families, it would seem that most men simply don’t have the resources (time, money and charm) for the demands of their one wife and one set of children. Sure, the idea of multiple wives and multiple sets of children sounds great, but only the wealthiest and charming of men have enough resources to support that fantasy. Most men have to work full time to support one family, both financially and emotionally. And here we are living in the wealthiest of times. Widespread polygyny is at best yet to come.
"In the ancestral environment, an outsider was typically viewed as a member of a hostile neighboring society, and regarded as nonhuman." That doesn't sound right to me. We know a lot about hunter-gatherer societies because when Europeans arrived in North America and many other less developed regions, the natives were all primarily hunter-gatherers and the interaction was extensive and extensively documented. Some tribes were exogamous - they only sought marriages outside the tribe. I think that even among other tribes, people sometimes married across tribes. There was also much organized trade between tribes. I have seen many accounts stating that captives were adopted as full members of the tribe - both men and women, both native and European. I can't vouch for the official account of Thanksgiving, but certainly there were many tribes who sought actively to cultivate constructive relations with European clans. Outsiders were viewed with suspicion, but also with curiosity and a frequent willingness to cooperate.
When thinking about our species, the unique features are our large energy burning brain. That 2% of our weight burns 20 to 25% of our energy. Evolution requires that each incremental change creates a net fitness improvement which means that a small increase in brain capacity must have had a large energy reward to support that brain expansion.
We know our ancestors (different species with small brains) had some fire as they developed smaller jaws indicating cooking that provides more digestible and softer foods (about a 30% energy gain). Our jaws got smaller before our brains got larger which says fire was a very simple technology not much more complex that the simple tool use we see with todays primate species. Large primate clans also didn't drive excessively large brains.
Stone and wooden tools (fire hardened spears, etc) existed before our species with large brains, but not all rocks are created equally for making stone tools. That means somewhere some stranger with tools made of obsidian or flint came into a group where the leader had the following choices: 1- Kill him (normal primate behavior) and take the rock; 2- Just steal the rock and let him live; 3- Give him some food and shells for his females in exchange for his rock and have him take that long march back to his volcano and get more rock. The start of "specialization and trade" would be the invention that would have a high enough energy payoff to drive the evolution of a large brain to handle the complexity of keeping track of whom you could trust and who you couldn't as the number and distances of trade increased.
The energy advantage of having good stones like obsidian and salt for preservation of foods would dramatically increase human survival. The social invention of "specialization and trade" does provide a mechanism to drive the evolution of a very large brain to handle the complexity of trade over long times and large distances.
Science should show the distances the stone tools moved from their source rock (volcanic in the case of obsidian). Not my field.
As for HEXACO, my wife and I and most of our close friends and favorite family members are high on the honesty/humility. But we perforce are around and interact with those who aren't.
I'd say that low honesty/humility isn't exactly a marker of the Dark Triad, but it is certainly a warnng sign of the possibility. Had I known that decades ago I could have saved myself a lot of trouble, pain, and suffering.
But notice also, that being high on honesty/humility can lead to internal menal health concerns.
You are correct about chimps coordinating to fight and kill members of other tribes. It is fair to question his example.
On the other hand, maybe that doesn't mean Henderson is wrong. These fights sometimes result in a few deaths but from what I've seen it's rarely more than one or two so not mass murder. Also, "the way humans do" is a bit ambiguous.
... Nix that. This similar statement is more clearly wrong.
"a group of individuals who come together to deliberately attack a person or another group. This type of violence is unique to humans."
It's not just humans and chimps that do this but many pack or group predators do this too.
"I was ticked off at the way I was treated at Freddie Mac, and I set out to prove myself when I started my own business. I did something I have never done before or since: I networked like mad."
I'm going to bet you networked at Freddie little or not at all.
Thank you for another great Links to Consider. I particularly enjoyed your Rob Henderson interview excerpt on monogamy, and Rob's excellent book review of The Goodness Paradox. The Aaron Renn/John Seel article was disappointing however. My response is this...Don't make life difficult. Seel's article is overly complicated, messy and difficult. Let me remind them that to first order this is the situation: we live in a world where most people favor taxation to fund public education. Higher education too is very much publicly funded. This has created a welfare state for socialist-inclined people in which a lack of profit and loss incentives allow them to live at the expense of the rest of us with little consequence for their silly and dangerous ideas (e.g. DEI). Solution: cut the funding. If supernatural believing Christians want to take a more sophisticated step forward (and recruit more to their side), they should try to explain to themselves and the rest of us how it can be that their beliefs are or are not accordance with the law of physics. Isn't it quite simple to see that most people aren't going to believe in supernatural Biblical stories in the face of well established physical laws? Quit with the supernatural stories and see the metaphorical importance of the stories. Science can't explain everything, but it certainly makes the Bible look silly if the biblical professors take the stories as literal fact.
What's more significant - classically liberal ideals being rejected by the leadership class, or broadly rejected or not even known or cared about by the masses? These forces seem to go hand in hand, and my question is, will the ultimate demise of it all be the result of top-down or bottoms-up emergent order phenomena? It seems to me that both forces must be barreling down the mountain together.
It’s true, of course, that in a democracy, the masses are important. Most people are sheep, though. They simply follow the leader they believe will benefit them most. Almost all the ideological groups are relatively small.
Henderson is flat wrong about humans being the only primates to organize for violence. Chimpanzees absolutely organize to execute attacks on individuals or groups. Goggle “Gombe Chimpanzee War” for instance, and just basic hunting. Other primates are less obvious, but almost all the social ones have intragroup factions that occasionally rise to focused violence against individuals or alliances by a rival coalition.
You are correct about chimps coordinating to fight and kill members of other tribes. It is fair to question his example.
On the other hand, maybe that doesn't mean Henderson is wrong. These fights sometimes result in a few deaths but from what I've seen it's rarely more than one or two so not mass murder. Also, "the way humans do" is a bit ambiguous.
... Nix that. This similar statement is more clearly wrong.
"a group of individuals who come together to deliberately attack a person or another group. This type of violence is unique to humans."
It's not just humans and chimps that do this but many pack or group predators do this too.
Yea, coordinated violence is the trade mark of most predatory social mammals, and definitely primates.
Chimps also do commit mass murder, although at the scale of their societies (10-20) the amount of murder to make it "mass" is admittedly pretty low; wiping out half a society only takes a handful of murders. The Gombe war was just one instance we have records of where chimps hunted down and eradicated a rival splinter group. No doubt there are many more instances that we just haven't been around to see; vanishingly few people spend the kind of time studying groups over long periods like Jane Goodall did.
The nature of chimp's violence against other targeted chimps is also rather horrific, things like specifically ripping off genitalia. It isn't just biting and striking whatever is handy. They know what they are doing.
I should also note that cetaceans seem to display similar tendencies, but I don’t know if there are clear documented cases of it.
I doubt that polygamy was a blip. Henderson's piece tends to put polygamy as a binary choice. The society pair bonds or it's polygamous. I don't think that's right. And polygamy tends to still be present in hunter-gatherer groups today.
In many successful organizations of all types a key management practice is to keep the younger members hungry. If they have an unsatisfying life they can be persuaded to work hard to get the better life they see in others around them. That's why many young lawyers at today still put in 100 hour weeks. They want the bling they see in the partners above them.
Hunter-gatherers were probably the same. Young men didn't get a spouse or any respect until they had distinguished themselves, usually in battle. Those that do make their mark AND survive can then be rewarded with responsibility and multiple wives. You can still see this in drug gangs as the lower level dealers are working very dangerous jobs for pay they could make at McDonalds. But the dream of what could be if they're successful sustains them.
I'm guessing it was always thus. Male hunter-gatherer society is a pyramid with extremely successful individuals at the top with most of the wives, relative successful men in the middle that are somewhat monogamous in the middle and lots of young men dreaming of how to build their reputation and move up the pyramid.
One way to look for it is to look at the marriage age of men vs. women. Most men had to prove themselves as good providers / hunters / warriors before moving up in society. So young girls marrying older men is the norm that can still be seen in older societies like Bedouins.
Overall one way still today to run an organization is to give most of the resources to the top performers, very little to the bottom, and channel the internal frustration toward outsiders. It's worked for countless generations, and I see no reason it didn't work before the dawn of civilization.
Not sure what Henderson's source for polygamy being a 'blip', but I'm not buying it.
While women frequently die in child birth, I suspect it is far more common for a group to have less men than women. This would seem to lead to some polygamy.
That said, I don't think his 'blip' meant there was no polygamy in other times, just that it was far less dominate. I'm a little skeptical it included the majority of women during the blip. I guess that would mean we've always been somewhat in both modes.
This was my thought. And of course killing the males of an outgroup and taking their women should lead to evan larger women to men ratio. I'm pretty sure evolution doesn't 'select' for monogamy but for reproductive success "in the moment". So the amount of nonogamy vs polygamy was probably pretty fluid.
And I seem to remember reading in a class way back when that in Nepal brothers frequently married a single wife, or a pair of susters. This was evidently to preserve ownership of a land resource.
From what I understand, most hunter-gatherer bands top out at about 50 people. So there simply aren't enough people to make a good pyramid.
Now that 50 can be misleading. Bands are somewhat fluid, there is travel between bands, and there may be 1,000 people who speak the same language and consider themselves part of the same "people". But in any one place at any one time ...
So, when these red-pill guys say, "Polygamy is how things have always been," they are describing a brief blip in human evolutionary history.
----
It's not the length of time, but the scale of the selection pressure.
Ashkenazi Jews were only selected for intelligence in a particular place and time that is infinitesimally small by this standard, and yet look at the results.
It seems like most religions have a "flood myth" to explain the violent transition when only 1/17 male lines survived.
I think there is something to our long hunter gatherer history but also that human being can evolve relatively fast (provided enough selection).
Agreed. I would add that I don't think these things are entirely pre-determined, either. The gorilla model is one alpha male who monopolizes a group of females. The chimp/bonobo model is that females copulate with multiple males, and thus paternity is uncertain so the males don't invest heavily in any females' offspring but they do coexist together in the same group. I think if you look at human behavior, there's a bit of an element of both of these (ie, high status men form harems when they can, but also...orgies and group sex are a thing). The conclusion I would draw is that humans have multiple reproductive scripts programmed into these big brains of ours and can activate whichever one is advantageous, depending on circumstance and opportunity.
Organized violence > disorganized violence. The legions defeated the Gauls despite the Gauls being physically stronger.
Same for organized economic production over disorganized. Work smarter, not harder.
Organization requires a degree of intelligence.
Jews were forbidden from engaging in warfare, and actually given special privilege to do certain brain work (usury, commerce).
Chinese needed to organize irrigation and keep the empire together.
The brain is a calorie expensive organ and head size at birth can cause miscarriage, so that's the disadvantage. The species found an equilibrium.
The quote from Seel sounds generally accurate. But where does it lead? Fifty years from now will we think it was a bigger threat in 2024 versus many other times in our past? I doubt it.
Why isn’t polygyny more widespread? Considering the dysfunctions of most families, it would seem that most men simply don’t have the resources (time, money and charm) for the demands of their one wife and one set of children. Sure, the idea of multiple wives and multiple sets of children sounds great, but only the wealthiest and charming of men have enough resources to support that fantasy. Most men have to work full time to support one family, both financially and emotionally. And here we are living in the wealthiest of times. Widespread polygyny is at best yet to come.
Lol. How many billionaires are there? How many wives do you think a billionaire could support?
Obviously this is not a complete list of factors.
"In the ancestral environment, an outsider was typically viewed as a member of a hostile neighboring society, and regarded as nonhuman." That doesn't sound right to me. We know a lot about hunter-gatherer societies because when Europeans arrived in North America and many other less developed regions, the natives were all primarily hunter-gatherers and the interaction was extensive and extensively documented. Some tribes were exogamous - they only sought marriages outside the tribe. I think that even among other tribes, people sometimes married across tribes. There was also much organized trade between tribes. I have seen many accounts stating that captives were adopted as full members of the tribe - both men and women, both native and European. I can't vouch for the official account of Thanksgiving, but certainly there were many tribes who sought actively to cultivate constructive relations with European clans. Outsiders were viewed with suspicion, but also with curiosity and a frequent willingness to cooperate.
The Goodness Paradox is the best and most true description of humans as kind And cruel.
Very important is the pleasure of being aggressive against the out group target or bully.
When thinking about our species, the unique features are our large energy burning brain. That 2% of our weight burns 20 to 25% of our energy. Evolution requires that each incremental change creates a net fitness improvement which means that a small increase in brain capacity must have had a large energy reward to support that brain expansion.
We know our ancestors (different species with small brains) had some fire as they developed smaller jaws indicating cooking that provides more digestible and softer foods (about a 30% energy gain). Our jaws got smaller before our brains got larger which says fire was a very simple technology not much more complex that the simple tool use we see with todays primate species. Large primate clans also didn't drive excessively large brains.
Stone and wooden tools (fire hardened spears, etc) existed before our species with large brains, but not all rocks are created equally for making stone tools. That means somewhere some stranger with tools made of obsidian or flint came into a group where the leader had the following choices: 1- Kill him (normal primate behavior) and take the rock; 2- Just steal the rock and let him live; 3- Give him some food and shells for his females in exchange for his rock and have him take that long march back to his volcano and get more rock. The start of "specialization and trade" would be the invention that would have a high enough energy payoff to drive the evolution of a large brain to handle the complexity of keeping track of whom you could trust and who you couldn't as the number and distances of trade increased.
The energy advantage of having good stones like obsidian and salt for preservation of foods would dramatically increase human survival. The social invention of "specialization and trade" does provide a mechanism to drive the evolution of a very large brain to handle the complexity of trade over long times and large distances.
Science should show the distances the stone tools moved from their source rock (volcanic in the case of obsidian). Not my field.
As for HEXACO, my wife and I and most of our close friends and favorite family members are high on the honesty/humility. But we perforce are around and interact with those who aren't.
I'd say that low honesty/humility isn't exactly a marker of the Dark Triad, but it is certainly a warnng sign of the possibility. Had I known that decades ago I could have saved myself a lot of trouble, pain, and suffering.
But notice also, that being high on honesty/humility can lead to internal menal health concerns.
You are correct about chimps coordinating to fight and kill members of other tribes. It is fair to question his example.
On the other hand, maybe that doesn't mean Henderson is wrong. These fights sometimes result in a few deaths but from what I've seen it's rarely more than one or two so not mass murder. Also, "the way humans do" is a bit ambiguous.
... Nix that. This similar statement is more clearly wrong.
"a group of individuals who come together to deliberately attack a person or another group. This type of violence is unique to humans."
It's not just humans and chimps that do this but many pack or group predators do this too.
I posted this the wrong place and can't seem to delete it.
"I was ticked off at the way I was treated at Freddie Mac, and I set out to prove myself when I started my own business. I did something I have never done before or since: I networked like mad."
I'm going to bet you networked at Freddie little or not at all.
ideology of classical liberalism have been rejected by the leadership class.
By some. The political project for the immediate future is to prevent those from attaining power again.
Arnold,
Thank you for another great Links to Consider. I particularly enjoyed your Rob Henderson interview excerpt on monogamy, and Rob's excellent book review of The Goodness Paradox. The Aaron Renn/John Seel article was disappointing however. My response is this...Don't make life difficult. Seel's article is overly complicated, messy and difficult. Let me remind them that to first order this is the situation: we live in a world where most people favor taxation to fund public education. Higher education too is very much publicly funded. This has created a welfare state for socialist-inclined people in which a lack of profit and loss incentives allow them to live at the expense of the rest of us with little consequence for their silly and dangerous ideas (e.g. DEI). Solution: cut the funding. If supernatural believing Christians want to take a more sophisticated step forward (and recruit more to their side), they should try to explain to themselves and the rest of us how it can be that their beliefs are or are not accordance with the law of physics. Isn't it quite simple to see that most people aren't going to believe in supernatural Biblical stories in the face of well established physical laws? Quit with the supernatural stories and see the metaphorical importance of the stories. Science can't explain everything, but it certainly makes the Bible look silly if the biblical professors take the stories as literal fact.