It has been won­der­ful to see the pub­lic protests against the 1936 Berlin Olympics soon to be held in Bei­jing. For once, an instinc­tive revul­sion against total­i­tar­i­an­ism is dri­ving a glob­al move­ment of protest. But every legit­i­mate protest move­ment attracts slimy ele­ments, who seek to cash in on a human rights issue to cov­er up their anti-human-rights agen­da. Both the Civ­il Rights move­ment and the Anti-War move­ments in the 1950s and 1960s were infil­trat­ed by total­i­tar­i­ans, seek­ing to exploit a just cause for their own nefar­i­ous pur­pos­es. Read more »

A friend of mine has been com­plain­ing about a much-pub­li­cized legal case, where a Sikh employ­ee at a lum­ber yard is demand­ing that he be exempt­ed from new safe­ty laws, which require a hard hel­met when work­ing with lum­ber. There is no ques­tion of the employ­er using the law to fur­ther prej­u­dice or racism. Sikhs are high­ly respect­ed in the com­mu­ni­ty. The employ­ee has been there for years, and the com­pa­ny want­ed to solve the prob­lem by shift­ing him to an indoor posi­tion, where there would be no con­flict. In the dis­tant past, there have been sev­er­al legal squab­bles where it was obvi­ous that reg­u­la­tions were being used to fur­ther intol­er­ant agen­das. How­ev­er, there have been none of those kind of things, to my knowl­edge, for decades, and this cer­tain­ly is not one. Is this a “human rights” issue, as many claim? No, it is not. Read more »

I just saw an old movie from the ear­ly 1980’s called Tes­ta­ment. It was an attempt to show the lives of the peo­ple of a small Amer­i­can town after a nuclear war. It’s a very sim­ple film. In it, the nuclear war hap­pens off-stage. It por­trays a Cal­i­for­nia town, far from tar­gets. As it grad­u­al­ly los­es con­tact with the rest of the world, its cit­i­zens do the best they can to main­tain their fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ty, while radi­a­tion sucks away their lives. The film was made with respect for its audi­ence. The peo­ple in it seem to come from anoth­er Amer­i­ca, one where you would expect that peo­ple would do their best, even in the most hope­less con­ceiv­able sit­u­a­tion. A few exploiters, a few look-out-for-num­ber-one ass­holes turn up, to be sure, but most peo­ple are ready and will­ing to behave like free and civ­i­lized men and women, even when faced with this ulti­mate test.

I rec­og­nized the film’s basic truth, because I knew those peo­ple. Decent, hard-work­ing Amer­i­cans, who gen­er­al­ly treat­ed each oth­er with mutu­al respect. There were mil­lions of them, across the coun­try. The film was set in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, a place I had lived, and knew well. A few years lat­er, there was a dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake, there. Those same kind of peo­ple were every­where, behav­ing with both com­pe­tence and decen­cy. Read more »

There is an inter­est­ing tele­vi­sion con­test here in Cana­da. It’s called Canada’s Next Great Prime Min­is­ter. Peo­ple between the ages of 18 and 25 are asked to sub­mit a five-minute Youtube pre­sen­ta­tion in which they address one cur­rent polit­i­cal issue. Ten final­ists are cho­sen, and brought to a “polit­i­cal boot camp”. From these, four are select­ed to be vot­ed on by the audi­ence. They not only present their views, but are sub­ject­ed to an intense grilling from a pan­el of three for­mer Cana­di­an Prime Min­is­ters and one Provin­cial Pre­mier (yes, in Cana­da, Prime Min­is­ters appear on game shows, and even on com­e­dy skit shows). There is a $50,000 prize. Read more »

Read any his­to­ry book, and chances are you’ll encounter pre­sump­tions, explic­it or implic­it, about some­thing called “cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion”. His­to­ri­ans have long felt that his­tor­i­cal events were tak­ing place with­in the frame­work of some kind of process or process­es which should be described using ter­mi­nol­o­gy bor­rowed from the bio­log­i­cal sci­ences. Soci­eties, we are told, “evolve” in the same sense that equ­us “evolved’ from eohip­pus. 

But soci­eties are not bio­log­i­cal organ­isms, and they are not species. More­over, the term “soci­ety” does not cor­re­spond to any real thing with which either organ­ism or species form cred­i­ble analo­gies. Organ­ic evo­lu­tion is not an apt, or rel­e­vant anal­o­gy to apply to human cul­tures. Those who seek to describe human his­to­ry as a par­al­lel to bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion are pro­found­ly mis­un­der­stand­ing both.

A species is defined, bio­log­i­cal­ly, as the sum total of indi­vid­ual organ­isms which are suf­fi­cient­ly close, genet­i­cal­ly, to be able to suc­cess­ful­ly repro­duce. While there may be prac­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties in deter­min­ing how and where this lim­it­ing fac­tor applies in giv­en cas­es (these are called “species prob­lems” in biol­o­gy), all cas­es are ulti­mate­ly sup­posed to be deter­mined by the same test, in the same frame of ref­er­ence. In this sense, “species” is a rea­son­ably objec­tive and con­sis­tent con­cept in biol­o­gy. When we say that Odobe­nus ros­marus [Wal­rus] is a species and that Acer sac­cha­rum [Sug­ar Maple] is a species, we are defin­ing each by the same standards.

The terms “soci­ety” and “cul­ture”, how­ev­er, are not defined by any reg­u­lar and con­sis­tent prin­ci­ple. They do not refer to any­thing that is agreed upon by his­to­ri­ans, and when his­to­ri­ans talk about “cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion”, they could be refer­ring to almost any arbi­trary con­glom­er­a­tion of indi­vid­ual human beings, rei­fied into a hypo­thet­i­cal iden­ti­ty. They may be apply­ing their hypo­thet­i­cal tem­plate to who­ev­er hap­pens to be in some arbi­trar­i­ly defined geo­graph­i­cal area, or to some peo­ple who speak the same lan­guage, or to peo­ple who are sub­ject to a par­tic­u­lar set of laws, or to peo­ple who are relat­ed by puta­tive kin­ship, or who are mobile but trav­el­ing togeth­er, or any neb­u­lous assem­bly of these ele­ments. There is no agreed upon prin­ci­ple defin­ing a soci­ety or a cul­ture. The sub­di­vi­sions of the human race being dis­cussed are not made by any coher­ent prin­ci­ple, and there is no con­sis­tent test or val­ue involved. This alone makes talk­ing about “cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion” noth­ing more than a vague anal­o­gy to bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, and a dubi­ous one, at that. Read more »

I’ve been asked to explain exact­ly what I think hap­pened dur­ing the peri­od when agri­cul­ture was intro­duced to Europe, and how it dif­fers from the cur­rent con­sen­sus among pre­his­to­ri­ans. First of all, let me make it clear that I’m propos­ing a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of that con­sen­sus, not a rad­i­cal alter­ation of it. I think that the cur­rent­ly most accept­ed views are ham­pered by a num­ber of fac­tors: 1) an over-reac­tion to the pre­vi­ous generation’s reliance on hypo­thet­i­cal migra­tions, result­ing in a pref­er­ence for sta­t­ic mod­els of human behav­iour, 2) a fail­ure to prof­it from use­ful com­par­isons with the his­to­ry and anthro­pol­o­gy of the New World, 3) the per­va­sive influ­ence of invalid notions of eco­nom­ics and social evo­lu­tion, inher­it­ed and uncrit­i­cal­ly absorbed from 19th cen­tu­ry thinkers.

The dom­i­nant school, today, of inter­pret­ing the Neolith­ic arose in reac­tion to ear­li­er schools of thought, which viewed pre­his­to­ry as a series of migra­tions and inva­sions of eth­nic groups, each one held to account for some dif­fer­ence in mate­r­i­al cul­ture. Lan­guage and eth­nic­i­ty were, with only per­func­to­ry reser­va­tions, assumed to be con­gru­ent. The spread of agri­cul­ture in Europe and the spread of Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages were assumed to be dif­fer­ent events, tak­ing place at dif­fer­ent times. It was assumed that agri­cul­ture spread into Europe, from its ori­gins in the Mid­dle East, start­ing some­time around the sixth mil­len­ni­um BC. Much lat­er, Indo-Euro­pean tribes of con­querors, empow­ered by their domes­ti­ca­tion of the horse, swept across Europe (as well as Iran, Cen­tral Asia, and India) impos­ing their lan­guage, reli­gion, and social struc­ture on every­one in their path. The “orig­i­nal home­land” of the Indo-Euro­peans, these puta­tive con­querors, was thought to be some­where in the present Ukraine, and much effort was made to deter­mine this loca­tion by exam­in­ing the var­i­ous Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages. Thus, the orig­i­nal farm­ers of Europe were held to be non-Indo-Euro­pean-speak­ing natives, sub­se­quent­ly over­pow­ered by an Indo-Euro­pean élite, who imposed their lan­guage on all but a few iso­lat­ed groups — the Basques, the Finno-Ugri­an peo­ples of the North, and the Etr­uscans. The most elo­quent cham­pi­on of this mod­el was the Lithuan­ian-Amer­i­can archae­ol­o­gist Mar­i­ja Gimbu­tas (1901–1994). Gimbu­tas envi­sioned a pre-Indo-Euro­pean agri­cul­tur­al soci­ety in Europe which was matris­tic and “God­dess-cen­tered”, and peace­ful, while the con­quer­ing Indo-Euro­peans were patris­tic and vio­lent. These Indo-Euro­peans were iden­ti­fied as specif­i­cal­ly being the Kur­gan cul­ture of the west­ern Eurasian steppes. This rather car­toon­ish view of the Neolith­ic, which relied on cul­tur­al­ly com­fort­able notions of gen­der dual­i­ty and also on tra­di­tion­al, but bio­log­i­cal­ly naive, ideas of race and eth­nic­i­ty, had a tremen­dous influ­ence, not only on his­to­ri­ans, but on pop­u­lar cul­ture. Read more »