WARNING: This Diary is unusually long. It also contains ideas that differ from the mainstream thinking on Daily Kos.
It is my attempt to expose readers to additional ways of thinking about the terrorist attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
So, catch the bird but watch for the wave.
Introduction:
I never planned to be an Epistemologist. Yet now in an uneasy retirement caused by health problems three different universities have offered me academic appointments to teach undergraduate and graduate classes, supervise graduate students, and do research. There are rather more epistemologists than there are academic positions for them to hold so I was surprised.
At first I thought it might be my 38 years of teaching epistemology and my stunning student evaluations that interested them. Then I discovered it had become known to at least one Philosophy Department that I was a certified, status, card carrying indigenous person. Philosophy has a very serious whiteness problem and each Department that made me an offer is looking at major belt tightening by their University and a real threat to their existence.
I provide four big benefits to a Philosophy Department looking to save itself from the chopping block or being reorganized into non existence. The first is I am Indigenous, the second is I love to teach which is a rather rare attribute, third I fund my own research, and fourth I work on the cutting edge of a very hot area of research. I have been studying decision making in complex, dynamic and evolutive systems since 1991.
I love farming and ranching for the most part for the very physicality of it. But it also leaves many quiet, contemplative moments where I am alone with my thoughts and can think about thinking. The lack of profitability on the other hand has created some real problems.
I continue being a contract lecturer (Adjunct Professor) and locum tenens physician because I love the work. But it started out as just a way to live while I built the farm and ranch up to where they could be organic and regenerative and pay the bills and we are now diverse, profitable, and growing. I also started a biotechnology company to develop my own intellectual property though now there are 45 partners each doing their own research and generating intellectual property but at first it sucked money like some evil robot vacuum from Dyson.
Today I am wealthy in friendships, family ties, community, and experiences. These are the things my culture values. I am close to square with Mother Earth and working hard to make her happy. Philosophically my people believe in sharing and don’t think it is appropriate or even possible to own something. I have had to make compromises to the white, colonial hegemony but I have tried hard to honor the tradition.
The farms, the ranches, the companies I founded, the real estate, are all owned by family corporations. While I am a respected elder and founding partner I own a tiny portion of these corporations. My daughters, my daughters mothers, my grandchildren and great grandchildren, and my various partners (I don’t have employees I have partners) own the vast majority of these corporations. We don’t trade publicly and are what the law calls tightly held. I couldn’t sell my shares even if I wanted to which I don’t. So how much they are worth is totally irrelevant.
You see even wealth is a white, colonial construct. This is why indigenous philosophy matters. As a way of demonstrating that this society we live in, that establishes the size of the cells in our brain and the length of our sentences, is only one way of thinking about the world.
It is actually hard to recognize restraints on our own thinking. In class I use race based epistemologies to make my point. I posit the idea that indigenous science offers a real alternative to western science.
I guarantee you many readers are marshaling carefully crafted arguments against this idea even as you finish reading this sentence.
I want to point out that when I am teaching senior undergraduates and graduate students I think a big part of the job is getting them to learn to acknowledge their own biases, prejudices, and heuristics. If I am going to expose students to scholarship in the epistemology of STEM, in other words to get them to think about how STEM researchers know what they know, I need them to understand that how we think about knowledge and STEM is shaped by how we think about race, gender, language, and a lot of other stuff.
Stuff is a technical term. Seriously, you are going to encounter some big words and complex ideas as we go along so let’s get started with a bang. This is my colleague Bernard Cadet presenting his argument that the experimental method is no longer up to the task of understanding the modern world. It truly is worth reading the entire paper.
For a long time, before using electronic devices of navigation, sailors used to check their progresses using points of interest (POIs) as marks of their journey. These were particular points rich in information (a cape, an island ....) allowing the sailors to reduce uncer- tainty about its position. This is a typically cognitive process which allowed the sailors to mark out their route and see how they were progressing. Metaphorically, the term may be used in the study of decision-making to describe the cognitive work of the decision
maker watching out for indications to ensure that his line of thought progresses in such a way as to enable him to make a final choice: that of deciding the course of action to be embarked upon.
This chapter sets out to analyse several strategies or several models drawn up to give an insight into the decision-making process which, by definition (since several choices are pos- sible), always takes place in a context of uncertainty. A large part of the cognitive activity of the decision maker is directed at lessening this, by processing the information available in various ways. It is structured in four parts. The first part presents decision-making as a form of conduct and behaviour, so enabling it to be studied from the point of view of psychology. The second part, for the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with these questions, analyses two com- monly used decision-making models which, notwithstanding their differences, have this much in common: they make it possible to give an account of individual decisions. The third part, in a more innovative way, undertakes to study a very particular type of super-individual decision that concerning groups of human beings exposed to risk situations. How do those responsible for safety, whatever their particular role, take their decisions to avoid the generalisation of harmful consequences? Their ways of approach, very different from individual strategies, open up new perspectives. Situations like this have two advantages for researchers: (1) substantive (i.e. do the actions carried out lead to satisfactory responses to the critical case?); (2) epistemo- logical (i.e. how does one represent or conceptualise these situations?). The fourth part attempts to analyse the consequences of a development of this kind. The epistemological questions they give rise to are so important that they radically change the traditional decision-making models. This being so, there is a need for a changed paradigm amounting to no less than a “scientific revolution” of the kind described in Kuhn’s famous work.
It is vital to critical thinking that we expose ourselves to the thinking of people we don’t agree with. I don’t agree with Bernard but he has enriched my own thinking. I found myself, while riding the fence line last week, arguing with Bernard in my head.
In order to get my point across about taking on divergent thinking I force my students, I am known for being impossibly demanding but I make up for it in other ways, to read multiple papers about epistemologies of race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. This paper from Wagadu A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies is one I used two years ago. It was written by Shana Almeida.
This paper seeks to examine the role of Eurocentrism, dominance, hegemony and colonialism in the production and re-production of “legitimate” knowledge and knowers in the western world. Using race-based epistemologies, I will argue that the subaltern body is socially, politically and racially marginalized so that they can never express their ways of knowing and reasoning without being “Othered,” oppressed and repressed, across time and space. However, I also argue that, while the racialised Other is marginalized, s/he is also a necessary condition for the continuation of colonial and epistemic violence in mainstream institutions. The acknowledgement of this position is not meant to destabilize movements by racialised groups (or any other oppressed groups for that matter) to challenge the epistemic violence of imperialism that powerful groups continue to defend. Conversely, it is a matter of identifying an epistemologically sound space for racialised bodies in relation to dominance that secures these “alternative” ways of knowing; that allows for a “racialised Other” to speak. As such, the role and rigor of dominance is central to race-based epistemologies, and central to this paper. To begin however, we must link Eurocentric, western dominance to its historical and ontological roots, specifically to understand the nature of reality upon which racial classifications are based.
Ontology of race Scholars argue that in order to challenge racism in social research, we must be vigilant about deconstructing the nature of truth and reality upon which epistemologies are generally based (Anzuldua, 1987; Bernal, 2002; Canella & Lincoln, 2004; Denzin, 2002; Hill Collins, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 2000, 2003; Pillow, 2000; and Soloranzo & Yosso, 2002). In her book on racialised and gendered bodies in institutions, Puwar (2004) states that colonialism is the foundation of the fully human, individual white male subject, the irrational woman, and the wild, uncivilized non-white figure. The onset of modernity validated pure rational thought as mind over body. In the European imperialist project – whites are associated with
the mind, the flight from the body. Non-whites (or savages) are associated with nature, wilderness, and the body (Puwar, 2004). Women, as irrational, are also “of their bodies,” but men are not. Logic and rationality thus become symbolically white and male (Puwar, 2004). The pre-capitalist, modern, European cognition also created the white master and the non-white slave (Anderson, 1991). The exclusion of non-whites and women as persons, as humans, begins in this moment of (non) racial and (non)gendered colonial dominance. Many black and Aboriginal scholars contend that defining racialised bodies as animalistic, natural, or non-human denies their subjectivity and perpetuates dominance (Cheney, 2005). “Black Marxism” also begins by tracing the ontology of official non-human, non-personhood that is the black body (Mills, 1998). Edward Said furthers the distinction between the fully rational white male and the non- human racial Other in Orientalism, the epistemological and ontological distinction that continues to exist between the west and the east. In the European idea of the Orient, the east is primitive, backwards, heathen, and uncivilized; the west is natural, civil, Christian, and normal. Expanding on Hegel’s constitution of the subject as needing to negate the very diversity it produces, Said’s western subject is constructed by mediation through the other; the west (as natural, normal) cannot exist without the primitive and backwards east (Yegenoglu, 1998). “I am because we are,” (Mills, 1998, p.11; and Ladson-Billings, 2000, p. 257) the African saying, purports that the black body does not exist unless in relationship with others. As such, the denial of black existence is not individual; a black body does not exist because blacks as a group do not exist. “The non-existence is racial.” (Mills, 1998, p. 11)
Just so you know only about 1% of philosophers in academic positions are Black. As for Native American philosophers I think I will let Kyle White explain.
Indigenous persons with PhD degrees in philosophy from anglophone universities and who work at U.S. institutions of higher education are relatively few in number, roughly less than 20 persons total, including those who are retired and those close to finishing their degrees. They have produced significant work, from Anne Water’s comparative philosophy, to Brian Burkhardt’s epistemology, to David Martinez’ histories of Indigenous philosophy, to Viola Cordova’s ontological and moral philosophy, to Dale Turner’s critical philosophy—and more philosophical projects and writings, of course, than I have the space to reference here.
And he is just getting started.
Even though, since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have always engaged in inquiry, like most other societies, Indigenous research must be articulated as a movement because U.S., New Zealand, Canadian and other settlers suppress Indigenous systems of inquiry and exploit Indigenous persons in settler research, which has given “research” a bad name among many Native people. Settlers rejected Indigenous systems of inquiry as nonscientific, subjected Indigenous persons to brutal research practices, forcibly divested Indigenous peoples through boarding schools of the building blocks of Indigenous systems of inquiry, including language, skill sets, and kinship relations, and created theories of genetics or history that relegate Indigenous persons to positions of inferiority, among other wrongs.
While the field of philosophy does not have some of the riskier research methods of other fields, there are nonetheless quite blatant problems of settler colonial erasure in the U.S. philosophy profession. Indigenous people typically only garner mention in teaching and research as cases or illustrations that factor into settler and other philosophers’ debates as evidence or counterexamples. Despite there being thousands of Indigenous philosophical traditions in North America, few if any philosophy departments offer more than a single class (if that) on any of these traditions, even the ones of the peoples on whose lands particular colleges or universities stand. Departments and professional organizations have also not engaged in reconciliation efforts as have occurred in other fields, such as geography.
More insidiously, philosophical topics are sometimes organized conceptually to convey falsehoods about Indigenous peoples, e.g. the debate over whether Indigenous peoples are justified in making “special rights” claims against “states.” It is also just troubling to be in a profession, at least in the U.S. context, in which you know that many of your colleagues were not raised to have any awareness of the thousands of Indigenous nations and communities living today—so many complex and diverse cultural, political, social, legal, economic Indigenous worlds that are erased from the perceptions, memories, and experiences of so many colleagues working in U.S. institutions.
The result is epistemological research into white privilege is done by, you guessed it, white philosophers. As you might also have guessed there is very little epistemological research into white privilege. Yet on January 6th, 2021 we saw what happens when white privilege meets stunningly poor risk assessment skills, horribly misdirected pattern recognition, and a near total absence of critical thinking skills.
Before I go on I want to introduce you to another seminal voice in thinking about white privilege, Charles W. Mills. In this wonderful and insightful article, Mills the author of The Racial Contract, introduces us to one of the cornerstones of white privilege, white ignorance.
White ignorance . . .
It’s a big subject. How much time do you have?
It’s not enough.
Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge,
the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment.
But . . .
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—
not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge.
Mills wrote that in 2007. In 2017 he provided an update to his thinking on the subject. The result is Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of White Liberalism. This collection of essays is a major contribution to racial epistemology. Get it and read it. I am sure you will never think about liberalism in the current classist way again.
For now I want to focus on developments in racial epistemology inspired by Black Rights/White Wrongs starting with this brilliant review by Stephen Steinberg.
In The Whiteness of Race Knowledge: Charles Mills Throws Down the Gauntlet Steinberg does a pretty good job of trash talking the white privilege of philosophers.
Here, Mills extends the range of his signature concept. His chapter on “White Ignorance”, begins with this salvo: Classically individualist, indeed sometimes – self-parodically – to the verge of solipsism, blithely indifferent to the possible cognitive consequences of class, racial, or gender situatedness ... , modern mainstream Anglo-American epistemology was for hundreds of years from its Cartesian origins profoundly inimical terrain for the development of any concept of structural group-based miscognition. (2017, 49) Thus, “white ignorance” is more than a blind spot: it consists of a will NOT to know, an odd stance for scholars who are presumed to be avatars of knowl- edge. Nor is “white ignorance” an individual defect. Rather, it is a collective amnesia with regard to centuries of conquest, colonization, and slavery, not to mention the subtle and multiple ways that these legacies permeate con- temporary society as well. The hallmark of white ignorance, as Mills writes epigrammatically, is “to evade and to elide and to gloss over” (1977, 130).
Mills shows how generations of political theorists have treated racism as an “anomaly” in an otherwise democratic and equalitarian society. Indeed, racial justice has not been “a major theme or sub-theme of hardly a single one of the numerous books on justice by white political philosophers written in the four decades-plus since the revival of political philosophy following John Rawls’ work” (2017, 115, emphasis in original). Mills adds incredulously: “How are such evasions possible in a country built on Native American expropriation and hundreds of years of African slavery, followed by 150 years of first de
jure, and now de facto, segregation?” (2017, 116). Mills provides a concise answer to his large question: The atrocities of the past now being an embarrassment, they must be denied, minimized, or simply conceptually bypassed. A cultivated forgetfulness, a set of constructed forgetfulness, and blindnesses, characterizes racial liberalism: subjects one cannot raise, issues one cannot broach, topics one cannot explore. (2017, 43)
Nor does Mills direct his fire only at those with retrograde tendencies. He also criticizes Marxists for their chronic tendency to subsume race to class. In his chapter on “Racial Exploitation”, Mills meticulously dissects the ways in which racial exploitation is a phenomenon sui generis – uniquely and fundamentally different from class exploitation. And why contemporary Marxists err in their belief that ending class exploitation is the most effective way of remedying racial inequalities. On the contrary, Mills contends that the failure to address race qua race is inimical to the class project: One can only be white in relation to nonwhites. So some or many whites may calculate, consciously or unconsciously, that by this particular metric or value they gain more by retaining the present system than by trying to alter it, even if by conventional measures they would be better off in the alternative one. It may well be, then, that apart from all the other problems to be overcome, this simple fact alone is powerful enough to derail the whole project. (2017, 134–135) Indeed, from George Wallace to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, we have witnessed how the cunning manipulation of race has been used to convince white voters to vote against their own interests.
Now let’s see where one of the most important voices in racial epistemology takes Mills and Steinberg’s ideas. Here from What is White Ignorance is Annette Martin demonstrating one of the numerous catastrophic costs of white ignorance.
The point is even clearer in the following case, where the explanatory limitations of the Cognitivist and Willful Ignorance Views lead to (what I argue is) an extensional inadequacy (2a):
[Precision Medicine] Dr. Mejilla knows that genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have shown that the safety and effectiveness of the drug tamoxifen depends on a patient’s genetic profile. However, because GWAS have been conducted primarily on European populations, Dr. Mejilla does not know whether her Indigenous Latina patient, Yusimí, will be able to safely metabolize the drug.
First, note that Dr. Mejilla’s ignorance about the likely effects of tamoxifen on patients like Yusimí forms part of a larger pattern of ignorance among medical professionals. Note also that Dr. Mejilla’s ignorance is not attributable to faulty cognitive practices, nor is it willful ignorance on her part. Rather, the problem is that GWAS have been conducted primarily on European populations. According to a 2009 analysis, 96% of participants in GWAS were of European descent, and as of 2016, fewer than 5% of GWAS participants are like Yusimí— that is, of African, Indigenous, or mixed ancestry.35 Researchers point to three key factors to explain the European bias in GWAS.36 First, it is preferable to build on existing data sets and patient cohorts for studies of this kind, so that historical biases are perpetuated by methodological norms. Second, people of color face disproportionate barriers in access to medical care and medical centers, which limit their ability to participate in studies. Third, communities of color have historically been subject to abuse by the medical community, generating distrust and an unwillingness to participate when the option is available.
To show that the Structuralist View can accommodate the case, I will focus on the second factor: the barriers to medical access. These barriers have obvious concrete consequences that help constitute white racial domination— they help create a medical system in which people of color systematically receive worse medical treatment than their white counterparts. But, importantly, these barriers also systematically contribute to white racial domination through the kinds of epistemic upshots that we see in Precision Medicine. Insofar as these barriers give rise to patterns of ignorance of this kind, they make it such that even when people of color are able to access medical care, they still fail to receive fair treatment. This creates systematic disparities between white and non-white patients that help constitute a system of white racial domination. Thus (a) the ignorance results as part of a process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice and ignorance of this kind, and (b) the ignorance is an active, systematic player in this process.
Further, I argue, it is important to include cases like this in our account of white ignorance, even if it is likely not what first come to mind when one hears “white ignorance.” It is crucial to realize that we systematically fail people of color, not just in terms of medical access and treatment, but, even more fundamentally, in terms of medical knowledge. Recognizing the epistemic and practical effects of these processes is important to understanding the epistemic dimension of white racial domination, as well as the way in which white racial domination sustains itself— and this is just what an account of white ignorance is meant to shed light on.
In this diary I am going to take as a given that white ignorance has a crucial role in both the creation and maintenance of white privilege. I am going to explore the consequence of this using the tools of non-linear mathematics, mathematical biology, and evolutionary biochemistry. In other words I am going to consider the riot on January 6th as a consequence of:
1. perturbations at the edge of chaos in complex dynamic systems leading to strange attractors of meaning
2. That white people live on islands of whiteness swaddled in privilege, and as a consequence of this biological and geographic isolation the biochemicals that lead to hyper masculinity had a competitive advantage over the biochemicals that lead to less risky and more risk aware masculine behaviors.
3. I am going to further argue that hyper masculinity makes intellectual humility impossible and ensures that epistemic peer matching is a farcical notion preventing hyper masculine people from ever engaging in meaningful dialogue with anyone who might help them realize how maladaptive their thinking has become.
I hope my argument that hyper masculinity (and yes women can be hyper masculinized as well) is at the center of the attack on the Capitol will encourage readers to think about the events we all watched unfold on January 6th in new ways. I have a growing concern that our passion for simplification may be preventing us truly understanding the significance of what we witnessed. And that lack of understanding make get in the way of us taking the corrective actions required to prevent the violence spreading and escalating.
We normally live in a world shaped by heuristics, approximations and laws. Our brains are not wired to engage in complex thought 24/7. We need these rails to guide us through life on safe tracks (safe for us and society) without having to think in detail about every little thing.
Unfortunately we live in a web of complex systems. These systems cannot be studied successfully using the tools of linear math or through reduction. Which doesn’t stop us from trying to use our conventional tools to understand a complex world.
We multidisciplinary mathematicians are working in fields like psychology, epidemiology, human performance, social science, and geography trying to develop new techniques for understanding the complexities of human behavior. Humans interact with other humans. Those interactions can impact either or both parties cognitively, socially, and even ethically and morally. These interactions literally shape how we think and feel about the world. Let’s consider just how many interactions there are on any given day in America. How on Earth would we ever model that?
The critical thing for the purposes of this argument is that in the attempt to model these big data, immensely complex, and dynamic systems we are thinking of new questions for the researchers in various fields to ask.
Challenging Privilege
We all need to think about our own privilege. Maybe I should say confront and challenge our privilege. I am finding this very hard. But here is an article from global citizen.org that helped me get started.
Thinking about privilege and challenging it is an ongoing exercise. It’s something that has become part of my daily consciousness. But it’s a difficult concept to grapple with - and one that I didn't come easily. I am constantly learning to challenge my position in the world, and understand the power imbalances that I am a part of. With friends, I sometimes will bring up the subject of privilege (not in a preachy way, I swear!) and am always surprised at how divisive the topic is.
Case in point: At a dinner with a friend to who works on Wall Street, I began discussing a recent New York Times article that looked at how high school students challenged and thought about privilege. I said, “I find it sad that a student was quoted as saying that she didn’t want to be called privileged, just because her parents were able to buy things.” There was a long pause, and my dining companion responded, “Well, who is to say she is privileged? She could be experiencing a lot of things that make her life hard.”
This comment is the crux of the issue when discussing privilege and how many misunderstand the term. Having privilege does not mean that an individual is immune to life’s hardships, but it does mean having an unearned benefit or advantage one receives in society by nature of their identity.
As an example of what happened when I started thinking about and challenging my own privilege I realized I was raised in a cradle of eminence.
A strong drive toward intellectual or creative achievement is present in one or both parents of almost all of the four hundred men and women of the twentieth century who are under investigation here. The parents of these celebrities are curious, experimental, restless, seeking. They are physically driving, intellectually striving; they respect learning, and they love truth and sometimes beauty.
I was born into a house full of intellectuals. Don’t get me wrong my childhood is one of extreme economic hardship but our house was filled with books and music and discussion. My parents both had university degrees and maybe more importantly kept learning their entire lives. They both went back to university in their sixties to pursue new fields. This is how you end up with a child like me who spent 17 years in university and just re-enrolled at 63.
Obviously growing up in that educationally enriched environment is an enormous head start in life. It is a privilege, something I was gifted at birth. And loving education and the life of the mind is intrinsic to my self identification.
But for now let’s return to my explanation of why the simplification of America makes me want to butt heads with a Bison bull.
This is the story of how I ended up working in Nonlinear Mathematical Biology. I was at wedding reception. Gabby was doing her social butterfly thing.
I was sitting at a table alone doodling on a napkin bored out of my mind. Then I had this intuition that the behavior of cancer tumors could be modeled and understood mathematically but that it would take new mathematical and statistical tools to facilitate this (I was working on the evolution of hormone receptors with particular application in oncology). I even had an idea what those tools might look like. That was almost 32 years ago. In that moment the three threads of my academic life, Mathematics, Biochemistry, and Evolution came together.
Later that night, in the moonlight, on a hill overlooking the North Saskatchewan River valley I proposed to Gabby for the 2nd of 8 times. For the first time I realized she was actually thinking about it. The entire night is burned into my mind.
While I have been farming and ranching pretty much ever since then, in the interstices, in the quiet moments of my life I have been developing these tools. I even started a company to develop my intellectual property. My first breakthroughs were actually in epidemiology and social welfare.
In simple English here is an explanation of the areas I have spent thirty years of my life studying.
Little more than a century has passed since Darwin's startling conceptual insight. Developments in probability theory and statistics within the last century have made a start toward developing the concepts required to understand fully variation in nature. But the mathematical concepts that will provide an integrated understanding of nonlinear dynamics in systems with variation between individuals have yet to be invented and analyzed. What Newton's calculus did for the ideas of Plato has yet to be done for the concepts of Darwin. Other biological problems in which the connection between variation and nonlinear dynamics is an essential aspect of understanding the underlying phenomenon are numerous.
A second and related grand challenge recurs throughout this report: the interaction of phenomena that happen on a wide range of scales in space, time, and organizational complexity. In studying biological systems one must confront an enormous range of scales. One deals with phenomena that range from molecular processes that happen in small fractions of a second, to evolutionary, ecological and population processes that occur on geological time scales. Similar ranges exist in space from the molecular to the biospheric, and in organizational complexity. We cannot develop the analytical or computational capability to treat this vast range of scales without encapsulating the behavior of smaller scales in models. One consequence of making such approximations is that we lose the detail that imparts confidence in models; yet we must develop ways to suppress detail and proceed to the more aggregated models that are statistically manageable.
Organisms are complex assemblies of macromolecules reacting with each other in complicated networks. Many small parts of the network have an important influence upon the proper functioning of the system. Mutations, which change a single nucleotide along a strand of DNA, can affect the gross anatomy of an organism. The details of these subunits, their differences and their interactions, are important at certain levels, and we cannot yet be confident about which details become unimportant as we move to higher levels of organization. The problem may be more difficult than comparable problems in statistical physics, because the differences among subunits are greater. The distinction between these situations is analogous to the difference between assembling a large jigsaw puzzle and an orderly array of identical marbles. The complexity of biological systems is of a different order of magnitude than the problems that have been confronted successfully in mathematics, and mathematical theories are needed to develop insights into our newly accumulated store of biological knowledge.
The thing is living a life dedicated to exploring the complexities of the real world shapes your brain in unusual ways. For example, I am obsessed with understanding how populations of people who live year round at high altitude are able to have babies. If somebody whose family came from Europe even high altitude Europe to say Peru to live above 4,000 meters they would experience numerous fertility problems. The result is they would have trouble getting pregnant and even more trouble staying pregnant, spontaneous abortions. But if the woman, as soon as she knew she was pregnant moved to sea level her odds of having a healthy full term baby would be the same as if she had never gone above 4,000 meters.
The same thing, in part, turns out to be true of fertility problems when men and women from indigenous populations resident above 4,000 meters go below 3,000 meters. Spontaneous abortions increase dramatically. Premature births also rise.
Now you’d think this is possibly genetic because it can take multiple generations for these differences to disappear when populations move permanently from below 2,000 meters to above 4,000 meters and vice versa. We even know some of the genetics involved. We know enough to understand that different high altitude populations have evolved different solutions to the problems presented by high altitude and those solutions differ depending on how long they have been permanently resident at high altitude. The genomics turn out to be immensely complicated and the protein synthesis, protein structures, biochemistry, and feedback loops, initiators, promoters, stop codons, and the role of nonsense codons remains elusive.
Now what does that have to do with white privilege. Well in our work we call these populations but that is just a way of avoiding the use of terms like race. I bet I have your attention now. Each of the populations has a unique privilege, a genetic advantage at altitude, and it varies from population to population. More importantly it matters to their reproductive success. In some environments they are simply genetically superior.
Given such populations do exist could there not be populations that in some environments are disadvantaged by their genes? That are, in those environments genetically inferior? Could white ignorance and privilege not have genetic roots? Could white privilege not be a disease or perhaps a disorder with genetic roots in the sufferers whiteness?
Am I the only person who has ever had such a thought. Not even close but before moving on to discuss the possibility in more detail let me introduce you to one of my fellow travelers. Stephanie Malia Fullerton wrote a mind altering chapter in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance called The Absence of Biology in Philosophical Considerations of Race where she explores the way Biology has been air brushed out of epistemological discussions of race.
As this chapter will briefly outline, potentially a great deal. For while it is certainly true that science (specifically, the fields of physical anthropol- ogy and population genetics) has, in its investigation of genetic relation- ships among humans, shown clearly that no fixed, innate, biological differences categorically separate individuals understood socially as belonging to different racial groups, this is not the same thing as saying that no biological differences whatsoever exist among such groups. The population genetic investigations that have permitted the robust denial of a typological ontology of race also demonstrate that at nearly every human gene there is variation systematically correlated with geography, such that when the term race is based on aspects of geographic origins, racial iden- tity can, and often will, predict genetic differences among groups. That such differences are typically matters of degree rather than kind, that they represent only a very small proportion of the total biological variability ob- served in the human species, and that their morphological and biomedical significance remain in many cases uncertain does not take away from the fact that such differences are widely recognized and the continuing object of scientific and clinical attention. Thus to assert that “there is no biologi- cal basis to race” is to ignore both this continuing scientific interest and the social and biomedical implications inherent to such investigation.
Nevertheless, most philosophical accounts of race and ethnicity begin, almost as a matter of course, by refuting the relevance of biology to racial identity or identification.
Race is said to be a “biologistic fallacy” (Gates 1997, viii) that lacks “scientifically accessible referents” (Zack 2002, 4), and that “no existing racial classifications correlate in useful ways to gene frequencies, clinical variations, or any significant human biological difference” (Alcoff 2002, 15). Such statements, which are grounded in the authority of objective scientific investigation (albeit rarely via reference to a specific literature), reflect a widespread consen- sus understanding among philosophers and other critical theorists that “race” is, first and foremost, a social construction, and that indeed any potential natural correlates of the phenomenon can, and in fact must, be discounted in advance of its deconstruction. Obviously such claims sit uneasily in the face of widespread evidence of the ongoing scientific in- vestigation of the relationship between race and biology, and yet, as al- luded to earlier, they are not wholly without empirical justification. Population geneticists and physical anthropologists have demonstrated that a typological understanding of racial biological difference is unsus- tainable in the face of data describing patterns of genetic variation within and between human populations. The “no biological basis” mantra has thus propagated throughout much of the philosophic race theory canon, acquiring an epistemological significance disconnected from contempo- rary scientific investigation and debate.
This unreflexive propagation of a social constructivist understanding of race and racial identity relies on a peculiar form of ignorance, one in which specific features of the empirical record, not to mention pervasive scientific practices, have been systematically overlooked in favor of broad disclaimers relevant to only a narrowly applicable model of human bio-
The White Male Effect in the Capitol Riot
Spending time in all that complexity makes your brain uncomfortable with simple explanations for complex phenomena. Human behavior for example is immensely complex but we try to understand it in simplistic terms. This flies in the face of my lived experience. I have worked on a lot on problems in social welfare. Consider, as an example, how a modeler factors in differences in risk assessment abilities in determining the behavior of a mob. This article from Undark Magazine on the White Male Effect introduces the idea quite well and in part explains the attack on the Capitol.
But cognitive scientists long ago coined a term for the psychological forces that have given rise to the gendered and racialized political divide that we’re seeing today. That research, and decades of subsequent scholarly work, suggest that if you want to understand the Trump phenomenon, you’d do well to first understand the science of risk perception.
Let’s go back to 1994. That year, a group of researchers led by Paul Slovic published a studythat asked about 1,500 Americans across the country how they perceived different kinds of risks, notably environmental health risks. Slovic and his team found that White males differed from White women and non-White men and women in how they perceived risks. For every category of threat, White men saw risk as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other demographic groups. This is what they dubbed “the White male effect.” They also found that White women perceived risks, across the board, to be much higher than White men did, but that this was not true of non-White women and men, who perceived risk at pretty much the same levels, suggesting complexities worthy of further exploration. Eventually, expansions of this study would include a wide range of risks including handguns, abortion, nuclear threat, and capital punishment.
This actually goes to the heart of where I started my career as a modeler. The problem I was exploring was how to convince people to avoid behaviors that increase their risk of illness and death. For example, how do we get young people to avoid excess sun exposure? Is our budget for preventative health education being well spent? This is usually what my government clients want to know, is are their budget dollars being spent wisely, and how could they get more bang for their budget buck.
The answer is that in general it is not being well spent. This is because existing approaches to modeling use risk assessment assumptions that are far too simplistic. For one thing they don’t take into account the role of cultural status, let’s call it cultural, racial, or gender privilege in risk assessment. But there are other reasons as explained by Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, John Gastil, Paul Stovic, and C.K. Mertz in Gender, Race, and Risk Perception: The Influence of Cultural Status Anxiety.
Similar dynamics explain sex and race disparities in risk perception. Different ways of life feature distinctive forms of sexual and racial differentiation in social roles involving putatively dangerous activities. Accordingly, men and women, whites and African-Americans, form distinct attitudes toward risk in a manner that protects from interference the activities on which their status depends while authorizing re- striction of activities threatening to their status.
The data we have presented have important practical implications. Normatively, our data raise difficult questions about whether and how status-protective attitudes toward risk should be factored into the social-welfare calculus that guides risk regulators. Prescriptively, our data suggests the need for expressively sophisticated modes of risk communication, one that avoid status-protective resistance to public acceptance of empirically sound risk information.
Fear does discriminate. But it does so in a more even-handed way than had been previously real- ized. Women and minorities are more fearful of various risks. But the reason they are is that men (particularly individualistic and hierarchical white men) are more fearful of the loss of status that they would suffer were various risk claims to be credited in law. They are not the only ones, moreover, whose status anxieties impel extreme stances toward risk. This conclusion solves many long-standing puzzles about the nature and significance of variance in risk perception. But it also exposes many new ones.
I read that and couldn’t help wondering if mask wearing could be seen as a risk to status. Is wearing a mask causing status anxiety in individualistic and hierarchical white men? Are they spreading that status anxiety to others? Is refusing to wear a mask another example of the White Male Effect?
If so what status do they fear they will lose by wearing a mask? The answer, I believe, is their sex appeal. Trust me I know this sounds insane but the news article I am about to link talks about serious research and discussion of jaw and cheek anatomy. Facial anatomy is almost as common a topic on incel and white supremacist social media sites as talk of penis size and 2D:4D ratios. This is from sciencedaily.com.
According to palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum, men have evolved short faces between the brow and upper lip, which exaggerates the size of their jaw, the flare of their cheeks and their eyebrows. The shorter and broader male face has also evolved alongside and the canine teeth have shrunk, so men look less threatening to competitors, yet attractive to mates.
At puberty, the region between the mouth and eyebrows, known as upper facial height, develops differently in men and women. Unlike other facial features, however, this difference cannot be explained simply in terms of men being bigger than women. In spite of their larger size men have an upper face similar in height to a female face, but much broader. These differences can be found throughout human history. As a result, a simple ratio of measures could be used to calculate facial attractiveness in a biological and mathematical way.
Dr Eleanor Weston, palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum said, 'The evolution of facial appearance is central to understanding what makes men and women attractive to each other. We have found the distance between the lip and brow was probably immensely important to what made us attractive in the past, as it does now.'
But this isn’t the only way of thinking about masculinity. Here is a very recent paper positing that what is really in play with Trump supporters is Hegemonic Masculinity..
Donald J. Trump’s history-making ascension from nonpolitician to president of the United States has been explained in terms of an array of factors. Support for President Trump has been found to be associated with the antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism of Trump voters (1), as well as voters’ sexism (2⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–9), racism (10, 11), homophobia, and xenophobia (2). In addition, many of the factors that predict support of President Trump are confounded with group membership. Men (versus women), White people (versus non-White people), those with relatively less (versus more) education, and Republicans (versus Democrats and Independents) are both 1) higher in racism, sexism, nationalism and 2) stronger supporters of President Trump (12). Status threat, or the increase in cultural diversity that threatens the status quo, is a broader factor that predicts support for Trump and may account for many of the aforementioned associations [specifically, those who supported Trump in the 2016 election were those who felt the hierarchy was being upended and those who perceived more discrimination against White than Black people, Christians than Muslims, and men than women (13)].
As social theorists long have noted, the state and state-sponsored institutions reflect the ideology of dominant groups (14), promoting the broad endorsement and acceptance of cultural ideologies that reinforce and maintain the status quo (15⇓–17). Given that men have more physical, social, and economic power than do women (18), masculinity and manhood are valued and normalized, whereas femininity and womanhood are othered and in need of explanation (19). As de Beauvoir noted, the othering of women (or the gender binary) is at the heart of hierarchical systems that oppress women (19); this includes women with various intersecting identities (20), as well as men who belong to marginalized ethnic, economic, religious, and sexual groups (21). As a result, the state institutionalizes a male point of view (22, 23), and masculinity long has been embedded in the political discourse of the United States (24), perpetuated by candidates who strategically symbolize masculine ideals while attempting to emasculate their opponents (25). In fact, since the 1980s, Republicans have defined their party as masculine by femininizing the Democratic Party and running campaigns based on strength and protection (26). Therefore, presidential elections were, up until 2016, conducted to decide which man was best able to protect the United States from various threats—real or constructed (27). In 2016, Trump epitomized aggressive masculine traits and waged masculinity competitions (28, 29) against his fellow Republican opponents via imputations of failed masculinity (26), accentuating Clinton’s gender [e.g., “she’s playing the woman card” (30)], and her implicit threat to the presidency given gender role incongruity (31).
Our theory and research examined whether United States citizens’ endorsement of culturally valued and idealized forms of masculinity account for unique variance in support of Trump, over and above the variance accounted for by the various other factors noted at the outset of the article. To elaborate our theoretical backdrop and elucidate our hypotheses, we discuss the two primary ways in which masculinity has been conceptualized: masculinity as a precarious social identity and masculinity as hegemony. Within our consideration of each conceptualization, we discuss the relation of masculinity to status, power, and threat.
The 2D:4D Ratio’s Role in the Capitol Riot
It occurs to me that you may never have heard of 2D:4D ratios a serious handicap I am about to rectify. Finger length makes a great segue into the role fetal developmental biology may have played in the events of January 6th, 2021. First, a simple explanation of why finger length is relevant in understanding human behavior. Or perhaps I should say why some scientists think it is relevant.
We have no way, at this time of measuring hormone levels that a fetus is exposed during pregnancy. And I think most scientists would agree it would be wonderful if we could. Testosterone levels for example are involved in sexual development in the brain. Here is an excerpt from a very influential paper.
For observant readers one of the authors of this paper is Simon Baron Cohen. He is arguably the most well known autism researcher in the world. He is also Sacha Baron Cohen’s cousin.
The psychological study of sex differences has traditionally focused on spatial, mathematical, and verbal ability [2]. However, there is increasing interest in potential sex differences in social relationships. Several studies have shown a female advantage in reading nonverbal signals. A meta-analytic study by Hall [14] showed that females are on average better than males at interpreting body language, vocal tone, and facial expression. In a more recent study [15], women were better at attributing subtle mental states to a person, when interpreting the eye region of the face. However, not all studies show this effect [16]. Part of this variation may depend on the specific emotions being examined. For example, one study [17] showed that while females were better at identifying emotions overall, males were superior to females at recognising male anger.
Although a female superiority for language related skills is commonly accepted, actual results vary considerably across studies. This is not surprising given that language consists of a number of subsystems including phonology, morphology, the lexicon, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and discourse. There are well-replicated female advantages for verbal memory, spelling ability and verbal fluency in adulthood, although females do not have a larger vocabulary than males [2]. Developmentally, a number of studies have reported greater vocabularies and faster rates of language acquisition in girls [18].
Theory of Mind is the ability to make inferences about the intentions, beliefs, and emotions of other people in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Research into sex differences in theory of mind has been limited because many of the associated tests are not sensitive enough to detect subtle individual differences, such as sex differences [15]. There are several studies though that suggest that theory of mind may develop earlier in females, and that girls and women are on average better at making inferences about people's mental states and adjusting their behaviour accordingly [15,19,20]. These differences may arise, in part, from differences in social interest. Young girls even at 12 months old show a preference for dyadic interactions [21], spend more time watching a film of a face than a film of a car [22], and make more eye contact [23]. They are more interested in facial than spatial/mechanical stimuli even at birth [24].
It has been suggested and widely accepted in the scientific literature that the ratio between a man’s index finger and ring finger is related to the amount of testosterone he was exposed to in utero. The lower the ratio of index to ring finger the more testosterone. Now in the social world of incels and white supremacists this has become proof of their masculinity, right up their with square jaws and flaring cheeks.
I doubt this whole theory by the way, but I have a bias I need to declare, my ratio is 1. Supposedly this is quite uncommon. But it would mean I was exposed to roughly equal amounts of male and female hormones in my mother’s womb. Which according to white supremacists and incels would make me less masculine and less of a man than they are.
However, what it means is that men with ratios below 1 are more likely to take stupid risks than I am. I find this idea frightening given I have taken some terrifying and unbelievable risks in my life. How handicapped are low ratio men by their early exposure to all that testosterone?
Our results suggest that prenatal testosterone exposure has organizational effects on a man’s recreational, financial, and social risk-taking propensity. Contrary to our expectations, there were no significant correlations between digit ratio and risk in the ethical and health domains among men. One explanation for this pattern of results is that, compared to ethical and health risk-taking, recreational, financial, and social risk-taking serve as more honest signals of desirable traits in men. Specifically, evolutionary theorists have hypothesized that sex differences in risk-taking stem from greater intrasexual competition for access to mating opportunities among men (Baker & Maner, 2008; Wilson & Daly, 1985). Risk-taking can therefore be a means of honest signalling to potential mates. For instance, using a domain- general measure of risk-taking (the Balloon Analogue Risk Task), Baker and Maner (2009) showed that risk-taking increased among men (but not women) when they were told that their risk-taking performance would be witnessed by a romantically available confederate of the opposite sex. Thus, risky behaviors among highly androgenized males can be indicative of traits that are both testosterone-related and highly desirable to potential mates such as ambition, confidence, financial capacity, and social dominance (Baker & Maner, 2008; Buss, 1989; Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002). These desirable traits are more likely to be displayed by recreational risks (e.g., engaging in dangerous sports), financial risks (e.g., investing in a risky business), and social risks (e.g., openly disagreeing with a boss) than by health risks (e.g., eating food that may make you sick) and ethical risks (e.g., buying an illegal drug). Hence, low rel2 (i.e., highly androgenized) males may be engaging in greater recreational, financial, and social risk-taking as a means of honest signalling.
Unexpectedly, the digit ratio effects were solely operative for the male samples. While we expected men to have higher risk preferences than women, we did not expect that prenatal T exposure would explain variance in risk among men but not among women. Theoretically speaking, we expected individual differences in risk tolerance among women to be partially explained by prenatal T exposure. Given that digit ratio has been associated with a number of masculine behaviors among women (Brown et al., 2002; Paul et al., 2006), the null effects in our female sample are somewhat surprising. A possible explanation for these null effects is that women are not likely to engage in risky behaviors as a form of mating signal (cf. Baker & Maner, 2009). Males tend to prefer traits in women that signal high reproductive capacity (e.g., physical attractiveness, youth), rather than traits associated with risk-taking (Buss, 1989; Li et al., 2002). Therefore, prenatal testosterone in women might promote intrasexual competitive signalling associated with reproductive capacity instead of risky behavior.
Our findings underscore the importance of controlling for ethnicity in digit ratio research. Previous 2D:4D research on financial risk-taking preferences has tended to yield significant effects only when ethnically homogeneous samples were used (consistent with Dreber & Hoffman, 2007; Apicella et al., 2008; Sapienza et al., 2009). Our results relating to 2D:4D and financial risk do not replicate this pattern in the literature (in fact, we only find support for a correlation between financial risk and 2D:4D in the heterogeneous male sample). However, the preponderance of our evidence (across domains and measures of digit ratio) suggests that controlling for ethnicity accounts for systematic variation within the data, thereby leading to a greater likelihood of uncovering effects. More precisely, we obtained a greater number of significant effects across risk domains in the ethnically homogeneous subsample of Caucasian men as compared to the ethnically heterogeneous sample of all men (seven significant correlations versus three, despite a substantial reduction in sample size in the homogeneous sample; see Table 2). Nonetheless, given that the digit ratio literature as a whole (and our study in particular) has revealed a considerable number of null and/or small effects (Voracek & Loibl, 2009 found that a quarter of the studies in the last decade yielded null or mixed findings), further research is required to establish the sample characteristics and psychological constructs that are most appropriate for producing robust effects.
In English, white men with index fingers shorter than their ring fingers are likely to engage in risky behaviors. In popular science articles it has been suggested women who don’t want a spouse that cheats should marry a man with a long index finger. On the other hand men with a 2D:4D ratios below 1 have stretched penises of greater length than men with ratios greater than one.
For the truly curious, Stubby Mushroom or as Republicans call him, President Trump has an index finger shorter than his ring finger but apparently his penis didn’t get the memo.
Was your first thought while watching the attack on the Capitol that you were witnessing the White Male Effect in action? Or that these men had to show us their faces, even if they were enhanced with beards, because they actually can’t go more than a few seconds without believing every woman they meet will be attracted to their hyper masculine face? Aren’t you curious about the 2D:4D ratio of the terrorists and their stretched penis length.
My bizarrely baroque mind throws up some pretty strange ideas and my first thought was Dimitrov and Woog were right.
In Making Sense of Social Complexity Through Strange Attractors they suggest the existence of Strange Attractors of Meaning (SAM).
The gist of what they are saying is that as dynamic system integrity breaks down the possibility of Strange Attractors of Meaning increases. This is because known attractors can combine, collapse or mutate leading to SAMs. I think of it like this. As the social bonds in a culture decrease people become open to new ideas about that culture and their role in that culture. Some of the ideas prove to have more influence than others.
Now add to that the idea that as the dynamic system integrity of a culture, society or country weakens, out on the edge of chaos very powerful SAMs are being born, ideas capable of causing major change for good or evil. This is where the source of the original challenge to a dynamic system’s integrity becomes important. In the last 21 years the two major challenges to the dynamic integrity of the system that is America have both had to do with privilege.
In the late 1980s as the gap between rich and poor began to increase the wealthy were better able to isolate themselves into enclaves of privilege. The charts below are from Pew Social Trends and show the rising income gap in America through these years.
However, something even more pernicious was happening during these years. Along with continuing high levels of racial segregation America began to experience increasing rates of economic and educational segregation. The rich and educated began to collect in larger and denser cities.
Housing prices in these cities have displaced poorer Americans who often are visible minorities and led to people living in their vehicles or becoming working homeless. Extended commutes for service workers are routine. These people are victims of economic and educational segregation.
Richard Florida and Charlotte Mellander have explored this development in their seminal The Geography of Economic Segregation.
Our key findings confirm the hypothesis. The findings of our regression analysis identify three key variables that are associated with economic segregation: Population Size, Population Density, and College Grads. These are all key factors identified in the literature on urban and regional economic growth. Economic segregation is greater in larger metros with larger populations. By virtue of their size, such metros have greater potential and capacity for groups to sort and segregate.
Economic segregation is greater in denser metros. These are the metros that have tended to attract affluent and highly skilled households back to the core—a factor that may lead to greater sorting and segregation which is greater in metros with higher levels of education. Education is a key determinant of regional income levels which in turn create more economic capacity for segregation and sorting. Economic segregation is also to some extent associated with measures of race and ethnicity, particularly the White and Hispanic-Latino share of the population, Housing Costs, and the share of commuters who Drive to Work Alone, our measure of sprawl.
Our research poses several implications for public policy. For one, the policy discourse which has focused mainly on economic inequality should specifically address economic segregation. While income inequality and economic segregation tends to be associated with one another, they are not the same thing. As
Bischoff and Reardon (
2014, p. 18) notes, “although income inequality is a necessary condition for income segregation, it is not sufficient.” A metro might be quite unequal but not particularly segregated if lower and upper income groups are distributed evenly across neighborhoods. Likewise, a metro could be highly segregated but relatively equal if its different economic groups reside in different neighborhoods.
Segregation by definition isolates more advantaged and less advantaged groups in different neighborhoods and communities, compounding the advantages of the affluent who have access to different and better schools, better personal and professional networks, and better amenities and services. Economic segregation also has the effect of limiting economic mobility of the less advantaged.
Obviously economic and educational segregation reduces social capital and that reduction leads to more reduction. It is a negative feedback loop. The less social capital you are born into the less able you are to achieve significant levels of educational attainment and educational advantage makes up a significant part of an individual’s human capital and it is a person’s human capital that often leads to economic advantage. Bluntly put high levels of social capital as an accident of the geography of your birth is an enormous privilege, totally unearned and low levels a major barrier to overcome.
This trend towards segregation of the rich and educated has combined with neoliberal policies like an agriculture policy of get big or get out and globalization of trade to devastate rural America. I have never seen that damage described more eloquently than in Are We Still Bowling Alone? by Aaron Renn.
A lot of the focus in Rust Belt and rural communities is on the economy, and rightly so. There are economic challenges that do need to be addressed. But in many cases the real problems are more than economic. They are social and perhaps even spiritual in a broad sense, a despair that has destroyed so many lives.
Some of this decline was captured in Robert Putnam’s 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently in a report commissioned by U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, vice chairman of the congressional Joint Economic Committee. Called “What We Do Together,” the report tracks the striking decline in many measures of social capital in the country since 1970. The share of 3- and 4-year-olds being cared for by a parent during the day, for example, dropped from 80 percent to less than half. Births from unwed mothers grew from 11 percent to 40 percent. The number of adults who think most people can be trusted dropped from 46 percent to 31 percent. People are spending less time socializing with neighbors. Participation in religion and in civic life has declined.
These forms of social capital once sustained a sense of community during hard times and through the ups and downs of life. Today, many of these supports -- family, neighbors, churches and social institutions -- are much weaker. Government can provide financial assistance to people in need, but it can’t replace these human connections that are critical when we’ve just taken a punch to the gut.
The America of the 1970s and 1980s is dead and gone. It can’t be recreated. But America must find a way to rebuild its social capital if it hopes to change the trajectory of so many struggling people and places. Economic development is not enough.
If you have never read Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone get it and read it cover to cover. Why? Because whether you think he is right or wrong Bowling Alone is one of the most influential books of the last 25 years. And it is great fun to read and occasionally deliciously funny.
You will notice that Renn again talks about social capital. There is a growing body of scholarship talking about social capital’s importance. But I want to veer off and talk about negative aspects of social capital.
In an essay entitled The Dark Side of Social Capital Patrick T. Brown explores issues implicit to social capital. This includes the fact it is based on social networks which are defined both by who they include and who they exclude. But for me this is the money quote.
These concerns are nothing new, of course, but they have become more salient in an era in which social capital is increasingly a resource of the advantaged and an active hindrance to those who are outside looking in. The profound social fragmentation and bifurcation identified in recent years by Putnam, Charles Murray, and others is evident in terms of associational life and social trust as much as in crude economic terms. The differentiating element of social capital has traditionally been quality; now it is distinguished by quantity as well. Multiple research papers have found individuals from higher socioeconomic classes are more likely to register more social connections, have richer (and wealthier) social networks, volunteer more often, report higher social trust, belong to information-sharing networks in schools or other institutions, and be politically engaged. Contrary to popular belief, well-educated Americans are more likely to attend church (though rates among the college educated are starting to drift downward). When groups rich in social capital develop an identity that stresses exclusion and use policy levers to prevent access by non-members, the accumulation of advantage in networks defined by opposition to classes and neighborhoods other than their own becomes self-perpetuating.
POLICY'S LIMITS
This should point toward some of the limits of public policy as a means to advance meaningful unity. If a community's baseline of social connectedness is, to a substantial degree, baked in, no amount of neighborhood mixers is going to solve the problem of social advantage breeding social advantage. The counterintuitive solution might be creating the space for organic solutions, rather than seeking a proactive social-capital agenda. These kinds of efforts, by their very nature, can't be imposed through a top-down effort, but have to be cultivated by leaving space for community organizations to flourish.
A community is a cherished thing, and protecting it is a natural instinct. In an age of instability, we naturally turn to those like us. In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin wrote that American civil society has been weakened by a century-long assault from hyper-consolidation, followed by hyper-individualism, leaving it "not well positioned to turn subnational identities into interpersonal communities." Promoting social-capital habits that increase solidarity in this era of nationalist tendencies in policymaking and in-group hyper-definition in cultural habits will likely result in ever more balkanization and isolation.
The results of that Balkanization and isolation were on full display in the complete collection of thugs and terrorists parading around the Capitol defiling it with their poo in a pathetic imitation of their potty failures in pre-school.
This brings us to the other force which has been destabilizing the dynamic system that produces American society. The overproduction of Elites. And of course that brings us to Peter Turchin.
This interview with Turchin in the Atlantic’s December 20 issue evocatively titled The Next Decade Could be Even Worse is the best introduction to Turchin’s core ideas I have ever seen.
“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,” he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
[From the September 2019 issue: How life became an endless, terrible competition]
In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.
And here from an article Turchin co-wrote in Noema Mag called Welcome to the Turbulent Twenties.
Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites, who all too often react to long-term increases in population by committing three cardinal sins. First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded.
Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.
Such selfish elites lead the way to revolutions. They create simmering conditions of greater inequality and declining effectiveness of, and respect for, government. But their actions alone are not sufficient. Urbanization and greater education are needed to create concentrations of aware and organized groups in the populace who can mobilize and act for change.
The key part for me is that final paragraph. Notice the attention being put on greater education and urbanization. My bold guess is we will find most of the terrorists involved in the January 6th attack will turn out to be from Combined Statistical Areas. These are the areas where commuter patterns show metropolitan and micropolitan areas are united by commuting patterns. See map below. Notice what is missing, truly rural areas.
They will also have an average of a Baccalaureate. These are predictions you can check for yourself to see how I did. They will also be white. Vox had a great article Whiteness is at the Core of the Insurrection.
A white man, a smug grin on his face, hauls off a congressional lectern. Another sports a gun at his waist and carries zip ties, as if prepared to take hostages. Yet another places his foot on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk before stealing a piece of her mail and leaving a handwritten note: “WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN.”
Feces smeared throughout a federal building. Blood on the marble bust of a former president. Nooses on Capitol Hill. These are the images captured on January 6 when an enraged pro-Trump mob of hundreds flooded the gates of the US Capitol, America’s fortress of democracy.
And what they show is a brazenness, a fearlessness, an entitlement to conquer and destroy. These Trump fanatics could do whatever they wanted, take whatever they wanted, and no one would dare to stop them.
In other words the riot would never have happened without white privilege. But what is white privilege? Here from the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre is a simple definition.
Sometimes, referring to others as "white" or self-identifying as "white," may feel like we are reinforcing the problematic categories of "race" that we are trying to deconstruct. At the same time, we want to signal that we recognize that even as racial categories are a problematic social construct, racism, as well as the benefits that white-skinned individuals experience, are very real. The term “white privilege” (also referred to as white-skin privilege) can help us to unpack these systemic inequities. Put simply, white privileges are the unearned privileges that white individuals experience on a daily basis (often unconsciously) because they are not subjected to racism. These benefits are often “invisible” to white individuals because they feel like “a given,” like something that everyone experiences.
American scholar and activist Peggy McIntosh famously defines white privilege as:
“The unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed upon people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it. (Peggy McIntosh. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women Studies,” qtd. in Racial Equity Resource Guide).
In 1988, Peggy McIntosh published an eye-opening piece on white privilege entitled "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." This article was the first of its kind as it names, in very clear ways, 50 “invisible” privileges of being/appearing white. Many people of colour and Indigenous people (particularly those who do not "pass" as white) are acutely aware of these privileges—which they are denied on a daily basis; thus, the article also functions to give people of colour the language to name and understand their experiences as well.
The thing is white privilege is often challenged, white people are regularly presented with evidence of their privilege but many of them refuse to acknowledge their privilege. They do this by creating a self-identity in which they believe what they have they have earned by merit.
In the Tyranny of Merit the philosopher Michael J. Sandel demonstrates that modern attempts at building a Meritocracy simply entrenched white privilege further and increased the grip of Elitism on American public life.
Here is a quick primer from a review of Tyranny of Merit in Policy Magazine.
The answer to this, from progressive leaders like Obama (and, for this reader, even from the Trudeau government to a large degree) is nothing more than a technocratic faith that “incentivizing” market-based solutions and propounding “smart” policies is the answer. Economies must transition, labour markets be damned. Everyone would just naturally support these initiatives if they were given the facts without bias (e.g. the strong precedents for a carbon tax), and if they had the critical skills to evaluate them correctly.
Sandel’s riposte to this is worth quoting: “One of the defects of the technocratic approach to politics is that it places decision-making in the hands of elites, and so disempowers ordinary citizens. Another is that it abandons the project of political persuasion. Incentivizing people to act responsibly — to conserve energy or to watch their weight or to observe ethical business practices — is not only an alternative to coercing them; it is also an alternative to persuading them.”
As Sandel notes, there is no evidence to suggest that a government run with such meritocratic foundations governs well or wisely either. Assaying some of the most successful governments over the last century, including those such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s markedly uncredentialed cabinet, who governed through the Depression, he states it plainly:
“Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue — an ability to deliberate about the common good and to pursue it effectively. But neither of these capacities is developed very well in most universities today, even those with the highest reputations. And recent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight, and the ability to score well on standardized tests and win admission to elite universities. The notion that ‘the best and the brightest’ are better at governing than their less credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris.”
This brings us to the second difficult idea I am presenting here. The segregation of wealthy and educated Americans into dense urban centers of privilege and their use of their social capital to deny entry to others in combination with a staggering overproduction of elites is behind the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. These forces led to the dynamic system that is American society becoming unstable and numerous Strange Attractors of Meaning began to be created on the edges of chaos. But to understand which Strange Attractors of Meaning had the most attractive power we need to consider the third great destabilizer of American society over the last 50 years, neoliberalism.
This quote is by George Monbiot and is from an extended essay in the Guardian Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems
Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papersoffer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?
Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
It is pretty clear that globalization and wealth extraction the evil twin step monsters of neoliberalism damaged the working class and the middle class in America. Both of which were predominantly white at the time of maximum damage. This set the stage for a particular Strange Attractor of Meaning to reshape American society.
Michael Kimmel the author of Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era called this aggrieved entitlement. I call it White Privilege meets Victimhood. On the website for the book he provides some useful insights.
That world in which white men grew up believing they would inevitably take their places somewhere on the economic ladder, simply by being themselves, is now passing into history. Yes, it's true they stood in line, played by the rules, and paid their taxes. It is the American Dream, the ideal of meritocracy. But that ideal misses how the deck was stacked in their favor for generations. They feel that anything even remotely approaching equality is a catastrophic loss.
The downwardly mobile lower middle class bought into the American Dream. They are true believers. To hear them tell it, if they worked hard, played by the rules, and paid their taxes, they, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, could buy a home and provide for a family. (Actually, they just needed to show up. They worked, yes, but on an uneven playing field.) But as I learned interviewing many of these men, that dream became a nightmare of downsizing, job loss, outsourcing, plant closings, shutting down the ma-and-pa store when Walmart moved in, losing the family farm. These men feel like they are seen as failures; they are humiliated—and that humiliation is the source of their rage.
This humiliation is deeply gendered, because when I say they wanted to support their families, they wanted to do it by themselves. The downwardly mobile lower middle and working classes are the last guys in our history to believe that they, alone, should support a family and that their wives "should not have to work." Like their moms and grandmothers, women were to be "exempted" from the work world. The core feature of American manhood has always been as "breadwinner."
He also met many angry women who had bought into this same view of the role of men. Kimmel talks of working moms who, however they felt about their work, felt they had been cheated out of a chance to try the alternative.
In fact, if you wanted to use one world for how these people feel “cheated” would be at the top of the list.
I want to draw your attention to three things. These people are feeling, not thinking. They are blaming “elites”. They have failed to grasp a vital truth about privilege.
Remember the earlier quote,
Having privilege does not mean that an individual is immune to life’s hardships, but it does mean having an unearned benefit or advantage one receives in society by nature of their identity.
In other words, even if all these people that attacked the Capitol were victims of neoliberalism they were and are all beneficiaries of white privilege.
Perhaps a brief summary might be helpful here. The beneficiaries of white privilege (and for that matter other unearned privileges) cannot accept that what and who they are is mostly a matter of luck. This clashes with the absurd but widely believed mythology of the American Dream. They must be, if the American Dream is true, meritorious individuals. Everything they have or are is the result of their own hard work. Nobody ever gave them a fucking thing.
If they lose even a tiny part of their advantage, if they even think they might lose their advantage this is an attack on their self identification as meritorious individuals. The only answer is somebody must be gaming the system. They must be being victimized.
The stage is now set for their radicalization. The individuals and groups executing that radicalization do not think of themselves as terrorists and fascists. They self identify as entrepreneurs, capitalists, religious leaders, and politicians.
It didn’t matter to Rush Limbaugh if these people were being victimized. He just quickly learned if he didn’t just acknowledge their aggrieved entitlement but encouraged them to feel even angrier they would tune into his radio show. He could sell those listeners to advertisers and make huge profits. Remember in neoliberalism the market determines virtue. If you are making money you are greatly virtuous.
Similarly all Rupert Murdoch has ever cared about is whether the garbage Fox News spews pulls viewers he can sell to advertisers. All Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party cared about was votes. All the evangelical churches and their leaders cared about was fools in the pews tithing. If misrepresenting important issues, cherry picking scripture until Christianity wasn’t just perverted but inverted and creating imaginary cultural wars drew worshipers, voters, viewers and listeners where was the harm. There is that wonderful neoliberalism in action. If it makes money it is good.
The problem of course is that all these enablers of aggrieved white people including the politicians were now in the entertainment business. And to hold on to their audience against competitors they had to top their competitors they had to keep getting more and more outrageous, more and more inflammatory. Now you have Alex Jones, the Tea Party, and the Koch Brothers making shit up and fanning the flames of white rage. There just weren’t enough conspiracy theories to go around so they produced new ones. And always it was the fault of snowflakes, libertards, Democrats, immigrants, women, Black people, the media and atheists and agnostics.
The stage was set for the Grifter in Chief.
His audience was trained not to question as long as they were getting their rage fix. Donald Trump could lie as much as he liked as long as he kept them enraged to the point of insanity. Not just that he could bleed them dry to keep his failing financial empire afloat. Meanwhile he could stifle opposition and even demand ass kissing obedience by pointing his “base” at any Republican who challenged his narcissistic self identity as King of America and the Second Coming.
So could all this be explained by testosterone levels in utero. There is some emerging science that says possibly. Check out “Born This Way”?
This paper contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, this is the very first study that uses individual information on prenatal exposure to testosterone to match subjects in the laboratory, which means our H and L types are defined ex-ante by design. Second, previous studies reported a relationship between L DR and success in competitive scenarios (e.g., in financial trading, Coates et al., 2009, and sports, Manning and Taylor, 2001). However, these studies cannot assess whether L DR individuals prevail due to superior competitive preferences or superior skills. Our study uses a contest game where there are no differences in skills. Hence, our setup lets us isolate the effects of FT on conflict behavior regardless of the differences in personal abilities. Third, we contribute to the contest theory literature incorporating biological factors for the first time. Finally, we contribute to the literature on gender differences in competition by reporting the surprising finding that males act primarily in accordance with their own biological type whereas females react to their rival’s type.
Viewing competition outcomes as a function of biological types can provide novel explanations for patterns observed in markets and society. When certain types are more likely to select into certain professions, such as financial trading (Sapienza et al., 2009) or entrepreneurship (Nicolaou et al., 2017), this will affect the nature of the competition. The nature of the competition, in turn, may also attract or favor the survival of certain types. Having a type suited to a particular competitive environment may be so important as to be part of human adaptive machinery: Cecchi and Duchoslav (2018) show that the exposure of pregnant women to violent conflict in Uganda has resulted in children born with lower DRs, who cooperate less in a public good game. These findings hint at a biological feedback mechanism that may contribute to vicious circles in conflict-prone societies. If we are to break such vicious circles, understanding the feedback mechanisms that propagate overly competitive or conflictive behavior is of key importance.
Our findings have another practical implication for policymakers and contest designers. Asymmetric behavior in conflict or competition results in asymmetric outcomes in terms of the likelihood of winning and ex-post payoffs. Our results show that effort provision in such competition partly depends on the way people are born. Hence, a designer with objectives such as maximizing total effort (e.g., sports), minimizing total effort (elections) or maximizing maximum effort (R&D races) may want to consider such biological factor along with any socio- economic factors while designing a contest. An important tool for a social welfare maximizing designer is affirmative action where the designer tries to level the playing field by using mechanisms such as head-starts, handicaps, quotas or effort caps (Chowdhury et al., 2019). To implement such affirmative action tools effectively, one may want to take biological factors (such as the DR) into consideration.
Conclusion:
Let me conclude by saying that it is not impossible that white ignorance, white privilege and genuine genetic differences in a sub population of white people, mostly men combine to produce economic and racial segregation, encourage elite overproduction, make neoliberalism and conspiracy theory attractive and thus destabilize society. And it is also conceivable that this destabilization creates an environment in which this genetically maladaptive sub population of white people, mostly men, just can’t cope. If I am even in the ball park we need to immediately take power away from these hyper masculine white men.
Now obviously I could be out to lunch. But I hope I have at least given you some new ways of thinking about the attack on the Capitol and introduced you to some new ideas. Perhaps I have even entertained you.
On the other hand perhaps the wave has caught you and taken you far off shore. All without you even seeing the bird. In which case, c’est la guerre.
