What I've been reading
The 10,000 Year Explosion, Common Ground, the Unnecessary War
Sharing notes and thoughts on these three excellent books. Check out other recent reviews of Boom and Paradise Lost.
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
A beautiful and radical book, a favourite this year.
Mankind is a kaleidoscope of genetic populations that are diverging rather than converging over time. Whilst potentially endlessly fascinating, such inquiry is generally taboo. No doubt there is so much for us to understand. Did you know dry earwax is common in China but unknown in Africa?
the obvious differences between racial groups are linked to gene variants that have recently increased in frequency and had major fitness effects. Blue eyes, found only in Europeans and their near neighbors, are the result of a new version of the DNA that controls the expression of OCA2 that has undergone strong selection, at least in Europe. Dry earwax is common in China and Korea, rare in Europe, unknown in Africa: The gene variant underlying dry earwax is the product of strong recent selection. We can confidently predict that many (perhaps most) as yet unexplained racial differences are also the product of recent selection. For example, we argue that the epicanthic eyelid fold found in the populations of northern Asia is most likely the product of strong and recent selection.
Can I admit I’ve never once noticed that Europe is the only place in the world to generate non-dark eye and hair colours, where varieties of red and blonde hair and green and blue eyes are common?
I’ve written before about the domestication of man, but Cochran and Harpending have some even harsher truths on our domestication:
If your ancestors were farmers for a long time, you’re descended from people who decided it was better to live on their knees than to die on their feet.
Elites tended peasants like farmers tend crops:
Since the elites were in a very real sense raising peasants, just as peasants raised cows, there must have been a tendency for them to cull individuals who were more aggressive than average, which over time would have changed the frequencies of those alleles that induced such aggressiveness. This would have been particularly likely in strong, long-lived states, because situations in which rebels often won might well have favored aggressive personalities.
There may even be a gene associated with this kind of aggressive behaviour. It’s associated with ADHD. Young boys are ill-suited to school as they long for the steppe and the endless sea — sound familiar?
We know of a gene that may play a part in this story: the 7R (for 7-repeat) allele of the DRD4 (dopamine receptor D4) gene. It is associated with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a behavioral syndrome best characterized by actions that annoy elementary school teachers: restless-impulsive behavior, inattention, distractibility, and the like.
And astonishingly, presumably due to long-lived states in China, these aggression-related genes are basically absent there. Perhaps this explains why East Asian communities at home and abroad exhibit low crime rates:
The polymorphism is found at varying but significant levels in many parts of the world, but is almost totally absent from East Asia. Interestingly, alleles derived from the 7R allele are fairly common in China, even though the 7R alleles themselves are extremely rare there. It is possible that individuals bearing these alleles were selected against because of cultural patterns in China. The Japanese say that the nail that sticks out is hammered down, but in China it may have been pulled out and thrown away
Cochrane and Harpending show how small gene advantages can come to dominate populations, and how some mixing between populations can endow populations with the advantages of both. Hence modern humans that mixed with Neanderthals may have gained certain advantages over those who did not mix. Ultimately, the genetic advantages that modern humans had over Neanderthals are why we are here and they are not:
The general assumption is that the winning advantage is cultural—that is to say, learned. Weapons, tactics, political organization, methods of agriculture: all learned. The expansion of modern humans is the exception to the rule— most observers suspect that biological differences were the root cause of their advantage. Biological advantages are particularly potent because they last: Archaic humans such as Neanderthals may have been able to copy some of the cultural attributes of modern humans (exemplified by the Chatelperronian toolkit), but they couldn’t become modern humans, couldn’t copy or acquire abilities that were consequences of modern human biology. So being an anatomically modern human was an enduring advantage, and thus genetics can explain a replacement process that seems to have taken about 20,000 years (from the original trek out of Africa to the last Neanderthals).
Did you know that Lancashire, Britain is populated by horse blood drinking steppe warriors?
The Sarmatians were steppe nomads from the southern Ukraine who spoke an Iranian language. The classical historian Cassius Dio said, “The Sarmatians were a savage uncivilized nation... naturally warlike, and famous for painting their bodies to appear more terrible in the field of battle. They were known for their lewdness… They generally lived on the mountains without any habitation except their chariots.… They lived upon plunder, and fed upon milk mixed with the blood of horses.”
They were famous for their heavy cavalry, who fought with lances, longswords, and bows. The Romans had fought them in A D 92 and knew their quality. In A D 175, Marcus Aurelius hired 8,000 Sarmatians into Roman service and sent 5,500 of them to northern Britain. At first they were attached to one of the Roman legions there, Legio VI Victrix, but when their twenty years of service were up, they were settled in a permanent military colony in Lancashire. Apparently they never went home: The colony is still mentioned almost 250 years later.
Or about Roman-era plant-based contraceptives?
In classical times, there was a plant called silphium that grew in a narrow coastal strip of Cyrenaica, modern-day Libya. Its resin was used as a contraceptive and abortifacient. The resin appears to have been very effective, preventing pregnancy with a once-a-month pea-sized dose. Silphium eventually became too popular for its own good. Never domesticated, it was overharvested as demand grew. As it became scarcer, the price rose until it was worth its weight in silver, which drove further overharvesting and eventually led to one of the first human-caused extinctions in recorded history.
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas
Common Ground traces the stories of three Boston families in a microcosm of American life: the African-American Twymons, the working class Irish McGoffs, and the slightly snootier Yankee Divers. Spanning multiple generations, their tales span a vast and changing America, from its puritan origins and hopes, to the desperate flight and settlement of Irish Catholics, to the internal migrations and tribulations of her blacks. Their stories culminate in the tensions and struggles around desegregation busing: the state-enforced practice of bussing black and white kids in the 1970s to different schools to even out racial imbalances. This was effectively forced upon Bostonians by judicial decree, a derivative of the strange ruling in Brown v Board of Education that held that segregation was inherently unequal. I am reminded of Clarence Thomas’s words:
The problem with segregation was not that we didn’t have white people in our class. The problem was that we didn’t have equal facilities.
This degree of social engineering runs against the American pathos of freedom, and perhaps the only reason it happened was that it only applied to public schools. Hence it effectively pitted working class blacks against working class Irish. If you could send your kids to a private school you did. So began (or perhaps continued) the phenomenon of white flight and the decimation of American public schools and inner cities. Another example of an estranged distant elite enforcing its abstract ideals on a messy frontier (added to the Indian Wars, the Spanish Crown’s attempts at regulating conquistador behaviour in the New World, and so on).
It’s hard for me to be certain from the far flung fringes of the empire, but it seems this whole episode has been memory-holed. Perhaps along with the general violence of the period.
Lukas’s epic is generally liberal in its posture. He paints the family scions in loving detail. Seeing the world through their eyes garners sympathy. That makes some of the twists even more shocking. The portrayal of the black Twymon family is sympathetic, but the overall portrait is grim. Fathers are drunks, bums, and mostly absent. The women make do in tough lives, and their daughters are studious and promising. But then they get frisky young and one gets knocked up at 13. In an unexpectedly brutal and shocking turn, one of the sons rapes a white woman. Thanks to court records, we are given a detailed tour of the rape, which I will spare you. The level of detail Lukas provides leaves no room to blame magical ‘systematic’ forces outside the family. These girls disobeyed their poor mother and made bad decisions. The son grew up in the same home under a decent mother and he raped a woman for no other reason than he wanted to. Lukas renders agency to all his protagonists and that agency leads to grim ends for the Twymon family.
The story of the Divers’ descent into hell and transformation from hopeful liberals to disabused and set-upon residents is heart-breaking — and occasionally funny. Liberal aspirations meet a punch in the face. Local liberal school experimentation and success meet the heavy hand of state intervention and indifferent bussed families. They tried to live their ideals and were crushed in the process.
This transformation also reveals Lukas’s bias. Here he describes the liberal Colin Diver’s descent from enlightened liberal to depraved racist:
The dark-on-light nature of most South End crime was a reality which even the most committed South End liberal could not gainsay.
Such polarization was bringing out a latent racism in Colin— something he’d never felt before.
Is he racist though? Given the “reality” Lukas notes and that Diver’s neighbourhood is overrun by hoodlums?
Similarly, this framing is comically outrageous:
As the first blacks bought houses there, unscrupulous real estate people warned Jewish families that they had better sell quickly before their property lost its value. Speculators snapped up the homes at panic prices, then resold them at huge profits to incoming blacks. Real estate agents made big commissions on the rapid turnover. Once begun, the process fed on itself. In a few years, the Jewish population of Mattapan plummeted from about 90,000 to barely 1,500—an abrupt shift that was accompanied by fierce social conflict. Through much of 1970 and 1971, Boston’s newspapers were filled with stories of murders, rapes, and muggings, many of them committed by young blacks on elderly Mattapan Jews. The Jewish Defense League patrolled the area, armed with rifles and baseball bats.
What exactly is unscrupulous here? That the neighbourhood crime rate has shot up to such an extent that the local Jews need to form their own defensive militia? How are the real estate agents, newspapers, and Jewish families the villains? Has Lukas considered its the violent criminals who are the problem?
The book’s portrayal of the local media apparatus also dispels the myth of impartiality. Newspapers push what their owners want, and those owners are hobnobbing with one local oligarch or another. Media are players not mere observers.
I’d love to read a book detailing the history of the American black movement for sovereignty vs the one for integration. There used to be loud voices calling for black self-determination in America or abroad. But at some point that movement seems to have died, and the one for integration / desegregation won total victory.
There seems to be a magic number, a proportion of total residents, under which an ethnic minority will do just fine and the majority will take not much notice (10 — 20%?). After which tensions seem to arise and neighbourhood characters fundamentally change. If there has been any systematic study of this, please send my way.
The history of Irish immigration and settlement of Boston also (unintentionally?) begs the question whether it was good for the protestant Americans that preceded them. Not obvious.
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan
A powerful retelling of the great horrors of the twentieth century. How did Europe end up killing a ~100 million of its people across both world wars (including the influenza epidemic that sprang from WWI)? How did the European Allied victors of the war end up devastated? How did half of Europe end up under the rule of murderous communist despotism for half a century more?
Buchanan blames Britain. Britain either globalised a regional conflict, prolonged the wars, or failed to strangle the Soviet or Nazi monsters in their cradles.
Buchanan has an ace up his sleeve in making the argument: imagining a better counterfactual twentieth century is a very low bar. It’s hard to imagine a worse one. And so his job is to point out any number of hinge moments preceding WWI through to WWII where Britain may have acted differently to avert total calamity. Why did Britain go to war for Poland when she could do nothing to help her? Why did Britain ally with Stalin, who carved up Poland with Hitler? And then subjected her to a half century more of communist rule? Why was Poland worth a world war in 1939 but not later? Buchanan’s answer is she was not worth a world war. Nothing’s worth a world war. Hitler did not want a war with Britain, let alone her distant, sleepy giant cousin in America. So why did Britain declare war on Germany? Would not leaving Germany to squabble with the Soviets to her east and France and her allies to the west been better, in line with Britain’s role in centuries past? Leaving herself and America out of it? Again, it’s hard to imagine that leading to a worse outcome, to more Poles or Jews or other Europeans dead. Britain sacrificed it all to stand atop Hitler’s grave.
It’s hard not to concede at the very least that Britain’s victory was pyrrhic: her empire dismantled, heavily in debt to the US, and socialist at home for decades to come, she began the century at the zenith of her power and ended it a poor lonesome crag on the edge of a continent.
How did it come to pass? And did it need to? That is what Buchanan unpicks in considerable detail.
Buchanan is an excellent writer and his narrative is seductive. Not only is the outcome of the wars indisputable — 100 million dead Europeans, Soviet subjugation of half the continent, an emaciated Britain — but it’s also not hard to believe that the dominant WWII narrative in the west is a little glib. A small example: why did Italy side with Germany after being allied with the west in WWI? And no, it was not due to ideological alignment between the fascists. Mussolini was perhaps at the receiving end of the greatest unrequited political love story of the twentieth century. This is what Mussolini thought of Hitler:
“Hitler is the murderer of Dollfuss . . . a horrible sexual degenerate, a dangerous fool.” Nazism was a “revolution of the old Germanic tribes of the primeval forest against the Latin civilization of Rome.”
Another stab at the dominant WWII narrative:
In 1938, Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939, Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better—to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole? (A.J.P. Taylor)
Part of the issue is that WWII is so vast, one might find data to support any narrative. And yes, one might find endless counterfactuals in any sequence of history. And yet…
Buchanan spends a bit of time trying to convince us that not only did Churchill fundamentally err, but that he was a moral monster: for the German starvation blockades, for the terror bombings of German civilians, and even a racist. This line of argument seems to me unnecessary, provocative, and the least interesting part of his book.
That Britain erred catastrophically, that Churchill was a superb war chief but a totally failed statesman: these contentions seem not that controversial? Sure, it subverts the dominant WWII mythos, but it doesn’t diminish the villainy of the twentieth century monsters Stalin and Hitler (alongside Mao).
Edit: I think this article is the perfect rebuttal, arguing that if Hitler had simply not invaded Poland, he could have achieved many of his goals and not effectively committed suicide:
I’ll finish off with a summary of Buchanan’s thesis in his own words:
It was Britain’s secret commitment to fight for France, of which the Germans were left unaware, that led to the world war with a Kaiser who never wanted to fight his mother’s country. It was Britain’s declaration of war on August 4, 1914, that led Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India to declare war in solidarity with the Mother Country and drew Britain’s ally Japan into the conflict. It was Britain’s bribery of Italy with promises of Habsburg and Ottoman lands in the secret Treaty of London in 1915 that brought Italy in. Had Britain not gone in, America would have stayed out.
It was Britain that converted a Franco-German-Russian war into a world war of four years that brought down the German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires and gave the world Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.
It was Britain whose capitulation to U.S. pressure and dissolution of her twenty-year pact with Japan in 1922 insulted, isolated, and enraged that faithful ally, leading directly to Japanese militarism, aggression, and World War II in the Pacific.
It was Britain’s lead in imposing the League of Nations sanctions on Italy over Abyssinia that destroyed the Stresa Front, isolated Italy, and drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler.
Had the British stood firm and backed Paris, the French army could have chased Hitler’s battalions out of the Rhineland in 1936 and reoccupied it.
Had the British not gone to Munich, Hitler would have had to fight for the Sudetenland and Europe might have united against him.
Had Britain not issued the war guarantee to Poland and declared war over Poland, there might have been no war in Western Europe and no World War II.
Britain was thus the indispensable nation in turning two European wars into world wars.
I of II
Depressing to see you shilling for the Darryl Cooper of his day.
"It was Britain whose capitulation to U.S. pressure and dissolution of her twenty-year pact with Japan in 1922 insulted, isolated, and enraged that faithful ally, leading directly to Japanese militarism, aggression, and World War II in the Pacific."
I can't remember who pointed this out: if you want to blame a country for something, you give it agency, and deny all other countries agency. It's one of those things that, once you've been warned about it, you see it everywhere. Here Buchanan is doing it to a ludicrous extent. In 1922 the United States wants something, and Britain acquiesces, and this alienates Japan. And this leads somehow "directly" to decades of Japanese militarist frenzy, American embargoes, Pearl Harbor, and eventually Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who is to blame? Britain, of course. Because it has agency, and Japan and even the United States don't.
In reality, of course, Japan was not obligated to embark on a path of confrontation that led it into a hopeless war against a much stronger power for which it was utterly dependent for critical raw materials, notably oil. Japan had agency. It chose to use that agency badly, and the result was the annihilation of the Japanese empire and the occupation of Japan. Blame for that outcome rests on Japan, not Britain.
But of course giving and denying agency is Buchanan's whole book. Another example of making Britain out to be the villain when it was no more than a bystander is Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1935. France wanted to oppose this militarily, sought Britain's support, didn't get it, and acquiesced in the reoccupation. As a consequence, the Little Entente -- France's alliance with Germany's eastern neighbors -- was gravely weakened. Belgium declared absolute neutrality, which was to make joint planning with France near-impossible once war began. All this, Buchanan says, is Britain's fault for not supporting the French.
Except it's not. France, too, had agency. It could have gone ahead without British support. The Germans did not plan to resist -- the rifles the German troops sent into the Rhineland carried were not even loaded. A single battalion could have chased the Germans out of the Rhineland. But France chose to do nothing.
Also, note in passing Buchanan's hypocrisy. What Hitler was doing in 1935 was sending German troops onto German soil. You know that if Buchanan had been around then he would have been screaming at the top of his lungs that Hitler should be allowed to do what he wanted.
Sudentenland and Poland. Yes, if you know you're going to go to war, 1938/Czechoslovakia was a much better time and place than 1939/Poland. Czechoslovakia had a more modern army (the Germans used hundreds of Czech tanks when they invaded France in 1940) and much more defensible frontiers than Poland did. But at that time, the leaders of France and Britain did not yet believe that war was inevitable. Nor did their people. Chamberlain and Daladier were greeted with delirious joy on their return from the Munich conference. Yes, C&D should have known better. But have a little sympathy for fallible men trying to avoid a devastating war.
What happened after that: in March 1939, Hitler reneged on his assurances at Munich and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. It was that bit of treachery that induced Britain and France to give the guarantee to Poland. Of course they understood that they couldn't defend Poland directly; they hoped that the guarantee would dissuade Hitler from invading. Public opinion in Britain and France turned violently against Hitler between the Munich conference and March 1939. This was caused not just by Hitler's perfidy against Czechoslovakia but the further ramping up of Nazi aggression against the Jews -- Kristallnacht was in November 1938. That change in British and French public opinion helped cause a change in British and French policy, too.
II of II
Incidentally, although the British and French could not aid Poland directly, they were very much in a position to make Hitler repent his rashness when he did invade.
Gamelin, meeting with Polish army officers in the spring of 1939, stated that, in the event of war, the French armed forces would:
(1) initiate air operations immediately
(2) initiate "offensive operations with limited objectives" on the third day of mobilization
(3) if Germany concentrated its forces against Poland, "France would unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of its forces, 15 days after mobilization."
France did not, obviously, do that. But it could have! Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 6, the Maginot Line was fully manned with 75 mostly high-quality divisions in position opposite Germany or along the French and Belgian borders, along with 3,200 tanks and 115 air groups, as well ten squadrons of British bombers.
Opposite them were 30-40 German divisions composed mostly of second- or third-line troops with little training. No tanks, little artillery, and not even adequate supplies of horses and wagons. General Leeb, the German commander, rated German defenses before Belgium and Luxembourg as extremely weak. He deemed the Siegfried Line as little more than a facade.
There was no chance that the French and British were going to launch a massive offensive in September 1939. Gamelin was opposed, Gen. Georges was opposed, Daladier would have been opposed if anyone had asked him, the British were opposed.
But the fact remains that the French and British had the capacity to launch a large offensive in the opening weeks of the war, and that such an offensive would have had a very high probability of obtaining a crushing victory.
"A French attack on the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line [in September 1939]...would, as far it is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore a quick end of the war." _Hitler's Strategy_, Andreas Hillgruber (1965).
No offensive occurred, of course. The Germans moved their army back West and embarked on a crash training and armaments program, and in 1940 they conquered France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hitler was given a free hand for Barbarossa and, in the fullness of time, the Holocaust. If you want to blame Britain (and France) -- don't! The blame lies with the aggressors, not the people who had to deal with their aggression. But if you insist on blaming Britain (and France), the place to look is not the Rhineland or the Polish guarantee. It's the failure to invade Germany at the beginning of the war.
Incidentally, a very good book on the whole period from the occupation of the Rhineland to Hitler's invasion of France is _Strange Victory_ by Ernest May. Its particular excellence is not judging everything by hindsight but fairly portraying everything that people were experiencing, feeling, and saying at the relevant times.
Buchanan blames Churchill for not making a compromise peace in 1940, suggesting that war in the East could have been averted. We can't rerun history and check, but I think that war in the East would have come anyway, and Hitler would have been much more likely to win it. Based on his "Second Book," his table talk, and his conversations with the military, we pretty much know that genocidal expansion in the East, making the Volga "Germany's Mississippi" was always the long-term plan. And if the Germans had conquered the USSR...
1. He planned to starve the cities of Western Russia in order to seize the Soviet grain surplus. Thirty million people would starved or fled (or likely fled, then starved) if he had succeeded.
2. The next thing that would have happened would have been German resettlement of the East, i.e. Poland and the western USSR. There was a plan for this, Generalplan Ost. About ten million Germans would have been resettled in the conquered territories. In the short term, the Slavs would be reduced to the status of slaves or near-slaves. But a permanent, large Slav population was inconsistent with longer-term German plans, pursuant to which there would be a further massive depopulation in the former USSR and Poland. 80-85% of the population of Poland, 75% of White Russia, 62% of people in the Ukraine. The area around Leningrad would have been completely emptied.
3. The Holocaust would have been much more total than it was.
However you calculate it, a massive share of the people in Poland and the USSR, perhaps 100 million people or more (the prewar population of just the USSR was 170 million, most of them in the western part of the country) would have been wiped out.
One of your arguments is that nothing could have been worse than what actually happened. I don't think that is true.
Besides, apart from a brief panic immediately after the fall of France, British public and elite opinion was solidly in favor of continuing the war. If Churchill had tried to make peace he would have been thrown out of office.
"Would not leaving Germany to squabble with the Soviets to her east and France and her allies to the west been better, in line with Britain’s role in centuries past?"
This is disingenuous to the point of outright lying. It had been British policy since the days of Louis XIV not to permit the European continent to be dominated by any single power. It's why Britain was at war with Napoleon for a dozen years, and repeatedly financed coalitions against him. Britain's actions in 1939 may or may not have been wise, but they were completely in keeping with British policy over centuries.
I'm not going to address World War I, because this comment is far too long already, but another good book is _The Sleepwalkers_, by Christopher Clark. One moral is that a whole lot of people, in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Serbia, and Russia, as well as Britain, all had agency, and they all used it in very unfortunate ways.
TLDR: addressing an era that featured Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, and Mussolini, Buchanan wrote a silly dishonest book arguing that the real villains were Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Buchanan did this, as far as I know, because he hated Brits and Jews. What's your excuse?