Review: Group Chat Meme

tl;dr: To endorse the concept that European borders are to blame for developing world conflict is to endorse problematic concepts of nationalism, to ignore millenia long legacies, and to ultimately delegitimize BIPOC as controllers of their own destiny. 

 A friend recently shared the following /r/historymemes meme in a groupchat:

I think it’s a fundamentally problematic concept. The people on /r/historymemes straightforwardly agree, with many of the top comments pointing out that it isn’t very true. I’d go a step forward: it’s actually very problematic.

National-determinism is Genocidal Ideology

I should be clear I don't want to not blame the Europeans. As an American, I’m anti-imperialist by birth. I just don't think their maps are the primary cause of continued post-imperialism violence in the Middle East (or even more broadly the developing world). 

To focus on whether or not a country captures a nationality is to fall into the post-World War One trap: nation-states are real things that should contain their "f/volks".  This is a pretty repudiated concept! It led to the rise of the Nazis, and is the powering propaganda force behind Russian revanchism. Nations, ethnicities, languages... these are not the fundamental units of political activity, and we shouldn't encourage them to be political units of activity.

"European maps are the problem!" has a solution- only one!- global ethnic cleansing. Borders have always been extremely messy, with different population variations tending to be spaced out like a spotty spectrum. To say, "The British should've made a Christian Nigeria and a Muslim Nigeria" or "Iraq should be split into a Shia and a Sunni section" is to say "Lets take the Partition of the British Raj, and apply it to the entire planet."

I feel like there are a many million people with the trauma that points in the other direction!

Borders are made up, but its even worse than you think

You see a lot of maps like these of Africa and North America and Australia, which kind of engage in this alt-timeline idea of "What would these continents look like if the Europeans didn't touch them? Wouldn't it have been fantastic if these countries had been allowed to develop and grow?"

Of course, if I show you the Indian or European equivalent, you balk:

India ~1500AD

Europa Universalis 4 starting map

We balk because tiny political state with little governmental capacity does not make a desirable modern state! (maybe!) Would it be great to go back in time and make sure that Europe never formed its nation-states? Would it be fantastic for the various Indian princely states to develop and grow without the federal government? Maybe! If we’re okay with high levels of local violence and local poverty. 

Border-Theory centers European agency, and treats BIPOCs like NPCs

Looking at specific borders can help us make sense of this: Reidar Visser points out that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was not just an imposed agreement, but a response to on-the-ground realities:

 Sometimes Sykes-Picot is being construed as a complete armchair project by willful European strategists. What is often not realized is the extent to which the agreement merely put on the map patterns of special administrative arrangements that had been in the making under the Ottomans for decades, if not longer. Thus, special Ottoman arrangements for Palestine and Lebanon date back to the nineteenth century: the special administrative district of Lebanon dating to 1861 and the special district of Jerusalem established in the 1870s. As for Iraq, it had been separated entirely from Syria in administrative terms almost since the beginning of Islam – and had for long periods been ruled from Baghdad as a single charge. Again, the only real exception pertains to the Raqqa-Ana borderlands which in brief intervals had gravitated towards Baghdad rather than Damascus.

Emphasis mine.

This pattern of Europeans lazily following local existing administrative differences or going along with whatever locals wanted repeats itself time and time again. India and Pakistan were driven by local differences between people that wanted a Muslim state and people that wanted a Hindu state. African states accepted European borders because they wanted to avoid these conflicts. 

Note:! African states accepted these borders. India and Pakistan wanted a division. Yet, if you accept the "Euro line drawers did it" theory of conflict, you completely ignore the volition of these BIPOC leaders. Razib Khan points this out,

a postcolonial narrative that foregrounds the agency and action of Europeans may not be fully informative. The period between 1400 and 1800 is one where Europe became progressively more dynamic and powerful vis-a-vis other regions of the oikoumene, but until the very end of this period European powers were often marginal players except in their own imaginations.

After 1800 European hegemony truly took hold, as the Eurasian “gunpowder empires” collapsed, and the interior of Africa was finally opened up to colonization due to quinone. The question then becomes: does this century or so allow us to understand by and large the course of future history?

Emphasis his.

When we imagine a future utopian world, we don't -and shouldn't- imagine a world where borders are affixed to the random chances of population flux from five hundred years ago. We should hope that the future's locus of control is strictly in their present and not lodged with us, or worse, with our white, racist grandparents. 

(Epistemic status: Continues my anti-Eurocentrism approach to histrionics)

Review: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

After reading about the Dark Ages, I wanted to go back and find out: how did the lights go out? The answer is war and economic collapse and war.

If you were there during the fall of Rome, you would feel it. Your armies are scattered by peoples without training. Your Container Stores are sitting languishing with your productive capacities sent overseas and destroyed by the hordes. The ships that brought food and oil and wine have stopped coming and those that are here sit in the harbor riding the waves like logs. Building great buildings is impossible. Your children will know your home by holes in the ground where you put wooden logs.

If you were in Roman Britain, you would have felt like you were a lunar colony and Earth had gone dark: a complete and total dearth of material production and economic complexity, such that your people are relegated to memes for weird city names and being sheep shaggers.

If you were in Roman Italy, you would have felt like a disposed Mughal elite living in the British Raj: “Wow, this empire was so splendid and neat and of course you can keep your own traditions which I respect but if you insult me I will take everything you own.”

Between Britain and Rome, the scaling goes somewhat linearly along “complete destruction” to “subjugation.”

The economy of the Roman Empire was, no doubt, a complex graph of interactions, but Ward-Perkins identifies a general shape: 1) a South agricultural basket in Africa, 2) a pre-industrial, agricultural, productive interior, and 3) a Northern/Eastern frontier manned by hundreds of thousands of soldiers that maintained breathing space for law and order.

The invasions of the Goths, Vandals and Visigoths and other Germanic tribes broke down and through the third, disturbted the second, and eventually extinguished the first. Indeed, the answer to “Why did Byzantium thrive and Rome unalive?” is that Egypt wasn’t lost to the Byzantines and that North Africa _was_ lost to the Romans.

As these regions of specialization became disconnected, the regions themselves could not generalize fast enough to maintain trade, productivity or stop the onslaught of Germanics. Iberian cities didn’t have standing armies- why would they need an army when the biggest threat was hundreds of miles to the north west? Rome didn’t need to farm enough to feed itself- why would it when it had an entire coastal range on a giant lake it controlled? America doesn’t need to build anything- why would it when it has an entire offshore workforce controlled by its only threat?

It’s a good question, and the answer is usually- it doesn’t! Specialization is fantastic and good for everyone, as long as everyone is pulling their part and not getting invaded. But how are the invasions possible?

Three answers, all of them related: The first is that the Barbarians, for the first time, were united. Most of Roman history, like most imperial histories, is picking off divided enemies one at a time until becoming a hegemon. The Germanics never united in a threatening way- until they were required to by the pressure cooker of Hunnic onslaught and Roman shield walls.

The second is the opposite side of the coin- Roman elite disunity. The Romans had gotten close to self-extinction before during the Crisis of the 3rd century, but the civil warring had been waning. Now, by the 5th century -the critical moment- it was waxing again. Who cares about the people destroying the cities of France- they can be used to destroy your Roman enemies!

The final component was the vastly unequal Roman system. Rome was a slave society, and these slaves fed the armies of its enemies and rebelled against their masters. The masters themselves were unbelievably rich and owned lands from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.

Enemy unity. Domestic division. Inequality. These led to a retreating army, an unending economic supply shock, and the end of a civilization.

Review: Ancient Civilizations of North America

 We erased the “Native Americans” in more ways than one: The United States of America, Canada, and Spanish perpetrated countless sins against the First Peoples of North America. Mass slaughter, reeducation camps and the purposeful destruction of their economies and technologies are all the ones that come to mind. Yet, both the Pro-First Peoples Whites and self-centered Expansionists erase them through diabolical compression.

There are two common cultural caricatures: the rough riding anti-cowboy who attacks the colonial village at night to scalp the innocent religious refugees. This caricature now mostly sits in the heads of the Silent Generation and Boomers. It is passing to a boring, undeveloped dispassion for the poverty of modern FPs. Its adversary is now racing through Twitter, tumblr, TikTok via easily consumed feel-bad memes: the innocent native who lived at absolute peace with the land and was aligned with feminist and trans rights- oh, and they were socialists, too.

This simplification of First Peoples is disgusting. Imagine if the Turkish _did_ admit to genocide, but instead of distinguishing between Armenians and Kurds they just said “East Anatolians”. We would roll our eyes. That’s what we do when we say “We committed genocide on the Native Americans.”

From a one time immigration event, the FPs spread across the entire Continent. Without even bringing the South American civilizations into the picture, they encompassed every conceivable niche available to humans without a readily domesticatable animal. Yet, this wide diversity of niches meant that they had a wide diversity of political, economic, and social dynamics. 

We can list of counterexamples to the Expanionist Caricature easily. The vast majority of the time First Peoples were not “rough riders” because they had no horses at all. In fact, it’s likely that the original Clovis people contributed to the extinction of the original North American horses which were only reintroduced by the Spanish. The Tunic peoples of Quizquiz were peaceful and the Chumash of South California were considered peaceful.

Yet, the Pro-FP Whites Caricature collapses on examination of peoples as well. The vast majority of First Peoples engaged in war. The Russians saw the Tlingit go to war over songs. They went to war for slaves! The Cahokia had war in their art and sport. This violence ranged from conflicts between local family units to conflicts between nations- as you can see in the expansionist policies of the Iroquois Confederacy. They were not “peaceful”.

The civilizations the Pueblo peoples and the Missippians built are comparable to the centers of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, the Indus River Valley, China, or South America. They, like many iterations of the Old World’s civilizations, fought against the environment and drained it of its resources until they collapsed. Even before sedentary life, the Folsom people were killing huge amounts of wildlife in bison jumps. 

The tendency for Pro-FP Whites to center themselves creates an infantilized story wrapped in mood affiliation. It says, “You baby; I protec baby.” It is bad allyship and commits a sort of ad hominem fallacy. It seeks to portray First People as morally good, as if an entire peoples could be good, or is required for justice to be enacted. Guess what? Even if the First Peoples were, collectively and uniformly,  war fighting anti-environmentalists a thousand years ago (*cough* the Mayans *cough*) they would still deserve justice today. 

You don’t need to caricaturize First Peoples or valorize them, but when you do want to bring up their best values and practice or stand by them, it’s important to Say Their Names: Omàmiwinini, Haudenosaunee, Puebloans, Navajo, Ute… The list is long.

Review: Inheritance of Rome

Here’s my epistemological trespassing graffiti: the Dark Ages were dark. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was not a side quest on the road to modernism. There was no torch carried by the Byzantines and the Arab Caliphates. It was a disastrous detour. Inheritance of Rome desires the reader to not think that, and to not think in terms of grand narratives. Chris Wicham specifically doesn’t want people to attempt to tie contemporary nations to the pre-feudal regimes of post-collapse Rome. His conclusive chapter goes to great lengths to spell out what few trends existed in any real way across the entire continent. The history is jarring, however. A complete shutdown in interregional trade? The caging of the peasantry? A radical simplification of any and all intellectual institutions? The ideal Roman diet- varied and tasteful- eliminated by meat eating…? Local politics wasn’t spared: local elites went from being incentived to participate and donate to their towns and villages, to being required to ruthlessly tax and collect rent. While many of these economic and social facts were not entirely true in the Eastern Empire, it was still poor for a shockingly long time- hundreds of years! And it never achieved the same economic diversification as its united predecessor. Even calling it an Empire seems sort of suspicious after the Caliphate got through with it. The first Orthodox Kingdom led by a King-Pope? That seems more correct. One preconception fought by this book: what did the Caliphate take and from whom? When Westerners consider them now, they are treated as kind of springing up out of nowhere and taking over terra nullius. Maybe they’re taking over some infighting kingdoms? No! The Arabian empires were Roman Empires that latched themselves on and then emulated Roman institutions. Did they evolve in their own way? Absolutely, but only slowly and eventually. Institutional capture (and recapture) were the name of the Eastern Mediterranean game. Inheritance of Rome is (I would learn later) pointillist history. Every page is filled with stories and facts and anecdotes in more or less chronological/regional order. This has two effects: if you listen to it by audiobook while driving for hours at a time between DC and NYC, you get bathed in history and stories. The trends Wicham eventually mentions are subconsciously embedded in your head before he tells you what they are. It also, probably, makes for lousy physical book reading. When Empires fall, it means suffering for all.

Review: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the fall of 2017, immediately bought a motorcycle, and then after much heartache, crying, and gnashing of teeth got rid of it. Pirsig makes the motorcycle seem like a holy object.

Yet, finishing it in 2021 makes me feel a bit unaffected. I’ve seen this all before.

If you’ve ever watched Blade Runner, you’ll feel like it’s a boring movie. Not only is it slow, but the scenes and questions and technologies seem trite. The flying car is overplayed. The replicant drama is well-trodden territory. A city always in the dark full of depressing buildings isn’t new.

When Blade Runner came out, these ideas were new. It’s just that almost forty years later, we’ve seen it all bigger, better, bolder with more CGI. The Star Wars prequels stole flying cars and giant haunted cities. Firefly carried forward the synthetic hybridization of Eastern and Western culture. Hell, I was chastised by a high school creative writing teacher for having penned an existential robot story. 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had the same problem: it was so vastly influential, so capturing of the zeitgeist of the counterculture revolution, that its themes have leaked into everyday reading. The themes that crop up- how to deal with the seeming conflict between nature and technology, how to truly care and why to care, how the university system is kind of a scam- these are all well-known to anybody that has used their eyeballs. 

I did something a lot like the road trip Pirsig describes in 2015. My brother and I set out (by car, unfortunately) a bit south of his route, but the plains and mountains we passed had the same bones as those where the chautauqua take place. I think if I had read it then, it would have gripped me. Instead, I read All is Quiet on the Western Front.

Venkatehs Rao tweeted while I finished that ZAMM is a “sophomore portal”, or a type of book that has a profound effect on people in their late high school or early college years. I think that is accurate. If you haven’t read a lot, I can see ZAMM being a mental bootloader, installing an (old) operating system that you can use to see the world around you correctly. 

For that reason, I can’t recommend it to my peers (if they think they have well-functioning worldviews), but I think I can recommend it to people in their younger years. It installs things that young adults need- a glorification of conscientiousness, a passing vibe (a taste really) of Zen, and is a good test of one’s ability to read complicated shit. The first is something one needs to cultivate to do good in the world, and the second is what all adults need to have any sense of spirituality that isn’t nihilistic or wrong.

The last one improves ones Quality. 

Review: CFAR: Participant Handbook

 I am intimately aware of the errors in my thoughts and the sins of my soul. I can hear the Type-A asshole screaming like a stolen mind in the Sunken Place when I am in my fifth hour of streaming a Netflix TV show I don't care about. A plethora of self-help authors' voices ring out when I spend another day not implementing any of their advice at all. 

The CFAR Participant Handbook, amazingly, does not me feel shitty for being a human being. The genre imperative, "I need to become productive achieve my dreams" is reconfigured as "Wait what are my dreams?"

Note: CFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality, is a consultant group that goes to Silicon Valley corps and organizations or otherwise accepts students, and teaches a bunch of "rationality" techniques. These are day/weeklong classes that I, being an East Coaster, have had to consume via blog posts and regurgitated efforts of graduates from the program. This actual participant handbook, released in 2020, was new to me in its _systemization_ of the random things I have been reading.

The handbook itself is a list of techniques, meant to be used by students after their classes as a reference guide. I have found it to be a useful without ever attending the classes at all. 

As a handbook, they never really lay out an explicit framework for how the different techniques work together. They're presented as a rather separate concepts that solve specific genres of problems. Goal factoring, for example, solves cases when you have an action whose end state might be achievable by other means. The Hamming Technique is used for figuring out the importance and prioritization of what you're working on. These two may seem different, but I think ultimately most of these techniques come to specialized answers to three broad questions:

1. How do I program my Pet Human to be the happiest it can be? 2. How do I really talk to and engage with what my feelings of happiness would be? 3. How do I improve my ability to think about Problems?

There is a last category of question, maybe described as "Why the fuck aren't you doing this?"

CFAR really buys into the Kahneman view of the human brain, which is the split between System 1 and System 2. The former, famously, is quick and general and cheap, while the latter is slow, thoughtful, and energy depleting. I prefer a similar but different main model: the Pet Human and the Human. The Pet Human, is like my cats, incredibly automatic and babylike. It needs to have a schedule and its hand held and it goes crazy over treats. 

One goal of CFAR's techniques is to figure out how to make the Pet Human happy. Concepts like "Trigger, Action, Planning" and "Taste & Shaping" are ways to train the Pet Human to be more aligned with its higher goals. Indeed, these techniques might be described as "meta" classical and "meta" operant conditioning, because the conditioning happens to a large degree in the mind.

However, before you can even begin programming the Pet Human, you have to know what it wants. That is where the real heart of the CFAR techniques comes. "Goal Factoring", "Aversion Factoring" and "Focusing" are all different ways of saying, "Hey, Pet Human, what is it you actually want?" It is similar to me when I'm trying to figure out why my cat is screaming from the top of the couch. I have to watch her, check her food and litter and water, and intentionally see how she is behaving.

The fact is, while we probably do intentionally observe and interrogate our cats, we do not intentionally interrogate ourselves. 

Once you know what your Pet Human wants, you then need to actually go about solving their problems. Formulating and solving them requires concepts like the "Unit of Exchange" and the "Area Under the Curve". Basically, you need techniques that fight against innate human errors that we are prone to make. You can also externalize the decision process through "Systemization" or internalize improvement through "Deliberate Performance".

The optional question, "Why the fuck aren't you doing this?" is pretty straightforward: lots of CFAR advice comes down to you're not solving things because your Pet Human is in a feedback loop of procrastination, confusion,  and guilt. Break that out by _just doing it_. Literally! just Shia LaBeouf it. "Resolve Cycles" are periods of time that you simply solve a problem without planning on it. It's how I solved a tax dispute, and, by golly, it worked despite me procrastinating on it for literally half a year. A generalized problem version is the "Eat Dirt" technique, where you just do things semi-intentionally, until you feel out what you're actually intending to do. 

The answer to these four questions, which are described in 13-35 concepts, creates a useful framework to approaching a wide range of problems. What I found interesting is that many of these techniques are not new; they're systematized versions of things that we naturally do. By applying them coherently and together, they should amplify our natural self-help tendencies. 

Review: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

 Fungi are weird parts of the natural world because I don't think we evolved any mental units for them. Like, we definitely know what fruits are and vegetables to a certain extent. We like bright things in trees. We have a theory of mind that we built for other humans, and we seem to be able to extend it and generalize it to other mammals and then birds and then maybe the other living things. Yet, mushrooms are these weird things that can kill you or taste really good. Yeast can make your piss hurt like a fire or make the best liquids we can engineer. 

We are not evolved enough for the fungi.

Sheldrake attempts to get us there by a circuitous route: a mix of anecdote, review of materials, and only a little bit of explanation.

Fungi are trashmen, taking out and recycling the natural worlds' shit. They're the day traders, moving nutrients from one tree to another. They're VCs, investing in the future canopies of tomorrow. They're also hippie communes, bringing in many species until they merge into one. They're also literally at hippie communes, being what may be considered the best drug of all time. They're tiny microengineers, converting sugar into fun-poison. 

If this is elucidating, great! If it isn't, yeah, that makes sense. Sheldrake constantly has to approach the fungi with metaphors of human society, and points out how the popular scientific literature uses the same metaphors. Fish fins at least look a little like legs, and humans can be said to have the heart of a lion, but a glowing green slime on a map of the United States made out of sugar? Yeah okay uhm thats like the ... the... interstate? Cool okay cool.

This alienness of a kingdom of life is kind of cool, but also problematic: it means that we haven't funded or learned enough about it. It'd be like studying the ocean and not the atmosphere. Sure, you need the first one to live, but the second one is invisible, so why look into it too hard? Sheldrake talks about how this is very interesting because it opens up a huge door for Citizen Science^TM, and because we'll likely need to know more about fungi in order to make our agricultural system not planet-burning. Of course, this knowledge also exists in indigenous spaces and by remergently contextualizing it, we can bring it to bear on world problems

Oh, and the biggest take away is that magic mushrooms are probably okay to eat.