A book very well worth reading. Morris is an excellent historian and a great story teller. He weaves the exploding body of empirical evidence about human history into an easily followed story line culminating in the emergence of the contemporary “world order.” However, as a theorist of history he has a long way to go.

Morris attempts to begin this intellectual journey with the origins of humans ca. 2 million years ago. But evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology are not his forte and this early part of the book is a little shallow and unsatisfying. However, as he reaches the eras where his specialties, archaeology and history, get traction, the story gains powerful substance and narrative force.

This strong tour of the archaeology of the first Eurasian states, the ensuing development of the great later states (like the Roman and Han Empires) and the formation of the enormous contemporary states (England, China, Japan, Russia, India, the US, France, Germany, etc) occupies the majority of 622 pages. Morris’ exploration of this rich landscape gives even the expert reader new opportunity to assimilate this truly massive and illuminating body of evidence. Some details of the Western component will be familiar, but the Eastern elements (especially Chinese archaeology) are sufficiently new that there is a great deal to be learned from Morris’ quick witted story telling. All this empirical insight more than justifies the time to read this long book.

However, Morris’ particular concern is to construct a theory of history that will explain why the West (Western Europe and its derivatives, like North America) has become so economically dominant – and the related question of whether the East (especially fast-growing China) will catch up, or even take over global economic primacy.

In attempting this larger theoretical task Morris has produced yet another 20th Century history but we need is a 21st Century version, a fundamentally new kind of effort. Specifically, the author pursues the earlier professional historian’s tradition of telling a superficially, intuitively plausible story – and then calling this story a science of history. It is no such thing. Rather, the author does brilliant “natural history” (as it would be called in the physical and biological sciences). Natural history (in this sense) consists of the early and vital endeavor of gathering bodies of empirical insight that can form the basis on which a real science of a subject (history, in this case) can subsequently be built. Our evolved human minds lead us to organize such raw evidence into plausible “stories.” These stories help us see and remember the data, but they are not explanations of those data. Only science can give us actual explanations.

An analogy helps here. In the 18th Century, Linnaeus organized his enormous systematic analysis of the properties of organisms into an orderly “phylogeny.” However, all this organized information could be just as readily explained as the product of a divine plan as of purposeless, material processes. Only with the coming of Darwin’s’ scientific theory of evolution by natural selection did Linnaeus’ efforts become science rather than natural history.

More specifically, for claims to be scientific they must be “falsifiable.” This term of art has a simple and exact meaning. A claim is scientific if and only if it is strongly vulnerable to being shown to be false by a skeptical second party acting in public on the basis of empirical evidence that everyone has access to. History as “natural history” – still in its scholarly adolescence – has developed the opposite tradition. Professional historians have learned (mostly unconsciously) to tell rich “just so” stories that are inherently invulnerable to falsification. This imperviousness to test allows historians to build reputations based solely on their empirical work and their esteem within a fraternity/sorority of fellow story tellers. This tiny sisterhood/brotherhood of professional academic story tellers is well served by this practice – the larger global community (urgently in need of a real science of history) is most emphatically not well served.

Let us illustrate this criticism by analyzing one of the many just so stories masquerading as theory in this book. Morris seeks to explain the origins of the first agriculture in Southwest Asia. He suggests that combinations of local climate and unusually high availability of domesticatable species did the trick. In this form, this claim is not falsifiable. After all, we cannot rerun history after having given East Asia more domesticatable plants, for example.

However, we can restate this claim in forms that are falsifiable. For example, all the supposed consequences of agriculture should follow plant domestication, on this theory. This prediction turns out to be wrong. The coming of plant domestication to Southwest Asia apparently follows an earlier social revolution in which relatively large permanent settlements supported by wild food harvesting appear first (the archaeologically recognizable Natufian culture). Plant domestication looks like an effect of a preceding social cause, not a cause in its own right.

Another falsifiable version of this specific just so story states that the availability of domesticated plants should drive the rapid formation of the relatively large permanent villages associated with agriculture – available domesticated plants should behave like a cause. The prehistoric (pre-colonial contact) record from North America falsifies this form of the story/theory. Specifically, the Mesoamerican Triad of domesticates (maize/corn, beans and squash) are imported into North America more than 1000 years before the great agricultural societies of the continent are formed (including the Mississippians and Anasazi). Moreover, these North American agricultural societies arise quite abruptly, even explosively, when they finally do come. These empirical observations, again, falsify Morris’ theory that plant domesticates cause agriculture revolutions. Something else, possibly something social, is apparently afoot here.

Having falsified the “available domesticates” theory of agricultural revolutions, we must go back to the drawing board and try again. We keep constructing new falsifiable theories and destroying them on the evidence until we finally come upon one that we cannot destroy/falsify. This surviving story/theory is the answer we seek. In a mature science we “fail our way to success.” There is just no other way to move forward.

The natural history of history is now wonderfully mature – and Morris has made his own formidable contributions here. Learning to transform just so stories into falsifiable claims is a professional craft that can be mastered – allowing rich natural history to metamorphose into legitimate science. Members of Morris’ generation have a unique opportunity to midwife this transition, creating entirely new professional reputations for themselves. It would be tragic for this author’s generation if their students made this revolution instead – while Morris and his contemporaries stayed behind.

On the last page of his book Morris suggests that a real theory of history is vital to a humane, survivable future. We could not agree more. It’s time to take the step.

Reviewed by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Coauthors of “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”

Why the West Rules – For Now:
The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future

Ian Morris
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2010)

Stop everything and read this book – not tomorrow, today! Taibbi is the latest and, by far (so far), the best of the army of scholars and journalists illuminating the horror of the recent financial crisis and the malfeasance of major players. His directness and candor is refreshing and informative. He lays out the real significance of the AIG bailout, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the taxpayer-subsidized super-profitability of Goldman Sachs, Greenspan’s insane shenanigans at the Fed, the authentic toxicity of the health care bill (not the brainless critique from the radical right) among other things. You will emerge from this book understanding your world and its mortal perils with astonishing new lucidity. Another outstanding book, Winner Take All Politics (Pierson and Hacher, 2010), gives you the 30 year strategic history of the most recent seizure of our country by financial elites. Taibbi gives you the tactical implications of this seizure. If we are to take back our political and economic systems, this kind of clear-eyed understanding is the crucial first step.

Reviewed by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Coauthors of “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”

Griftopia:
Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Matt Taibbi
Spiegel & Grau (2010)

This documentary does an outstanding job of bringing home the details of how a series of truly bad financial actors catalyzed the current (and still ongoing) financial crisis. Many of the specifics of this story will not be new to readers of the outstanding books on the financial crisis. However, to see all the threads of this story pulled together with such clarity and dramatic power is extremely bracing. Equally importantly, this documentary brings home another crucial point, which has previously been little understood. Some segments of academic “economics” have been bought by elite financial interests (through donations, speaking fess, rich consulting contracts, etc). The professional academy is supported by all of us (through massive tax-payer-funded government support of both public and private universities). Thus, this breach of trust is especially egregious. We have, tragically, come to expect our politicians to be prostitutes, but we should never tolerate whores in the academy. It will be of the greatest interest to see how (or, sadly, if) the economics profession moves to clean up its house. We should all see this documentary and have its message ever in mind as we listen to the dubious pronouncements of politicians and bought economists. Those who have criticized this important piece as “socialists” are either clueless or have some very narrow interests to protect – interests not confluent with most of the American electorate. If you want to be a part of taking back the American economy for most Americans (rather than the hyper-rich) this film is a must-see.

Reviewed by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Coauthors of “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”

Inside Job

Starring Matt Damon, Directed by Charles Ferguson
Representational Pictures (2010)

Huffington uses her vantage at The Huffington Post to gain access to the best thought on the financial crisis. She capitalizes on this perspective to add to our understanding of how millions of American lives have been damaged or destroyed by the narcissistic behavior of some truly bad actors in our financial and political communities. This individual, personal perspective is the greatest value of this book, allowing us to see exactly how so many of us have been brutally harmed by parasites on our system of democratic capitalism. The individual accounts here are heart breaking. This evocative perspective arms us to move forward (as we must) to ostracize corrupt or incompetent politicians and reassert common control of the economic system that, after all, belongs to all of us. Huffington also adds to our empirical ammunition against bad actors – she names names, specific acts, individual politicians, particular financiers. This detail is a useful addition to the insight we also get from powerful recent accounts by professional scholars (see, especially, “Winner Take All Politics” by Pierson and Hacker and “Predator State” by Galbraith). Policing bad actors on the basis of the information we share as members of the pan-human wise crowd is our ancient strategy for dealing with all adaptive challenges. Huffington makes a powerful addition to our mutual use of this ancient human strategy as we proceed to recapture our society and our economy.

Reviewed by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Coauthors of “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”

Third World America:
How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream

Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
Crown (2010)

Galbraith does a masterful job of educating us in some illuminating ways. Though the book starts a little slowly, the reader who stays with it will be richly rewarded. If we are to assert our mutual control over our economic system, we must first become much more knowledgeable about how it works. Most of us (including a shocking number of politicians and business people) are blithely ignorant in these matters. As Galbraith compellingly argues, our system of democratic capitalism is not, even in principle, a “free market,” for example. Rather, our economics and politics emerge from the clashing (often) or cooperating (occasionally) of interest groups who mostly seek to manipulate our larger society in pursuit of their own narrow goals. Worst of all, these interest groups concoct “ideologies” (belief systems) justifying their actions – dressing up what otherwise would be transparently naked self-interest. “Free-market capitalism” is one of these ideologies. This belief system is like fundamentalist religion, serving the common interests of its elite adherents with no need for facts or empirical support. From this bracing perspective, Galbraith gives us an insider’s tour of how our economic system came to its present, grossly distorted state. No one who is looking to reclaim control of our financial system in the interests of all of us should miss this potent book. All activities (financial or otherwise) not monitored and managed by the people for the people through regulation are predicted to become predatory on the people. And they have.

Reviewed by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Coauthors of “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”

The Predator State:
How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too
James Galbraith
Free Press (2008)

]]> http://www.deathfromadistance.com/posts/book-reviews/2010/12/the-predator-state-review/feed/ 0 http://www.deathfromadistance.com/posts/book-reviews/2010/12/winner-take-all-politics-review/ http://www.deathfromadistance.com/posts/book-reviews/2010/12/winner-take-all-politics-review/#comments Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:05:38 +0000 The Authors http://www.deathfromadistance.com/posts/?p=76

As professional scholars we are in awe of the powerful economy of this masterful book. In this tour de force, Pierson and Hacker systematically unfold the story of the gradual construction of our now failing political and economic system over the last three decades. All of us old enough to have the appropriate perspective are very well aware that we have been sinking into a condition where our economic systems bleed us dry and gives us no security (or even adequate education or health care), while demanding ever greater sacrifices and brutally demanding work from us – at ever lower wages. For example,the American economy has continuously grown more productive over the last three decades; however, unlike earlier eras, virtually all the material benefit from this increased productivity has gone to a tiny group of individuals at the top of the wealth/income pyramid. [Not coincidentally, the last time wealth was this concentrated in elite hands was during the run up to the Great Depression of the 1930’s.] Moreover, these hyper-wealthy interests have increasingly purchased our political system (we no longer own our own country). As Pierson and Hacker carefully (and very readably) document, this ownership has allowed the hyper-rich to skew the rules of the game in their interests, more extremely every day. The recent financial crisis is just the latest rupturing of this political pustule – and it will not be the last or, horrifyingly, the worst. For those who seek to take back democratic ownership of our county (and the economy that is supposed to nurture us), this book is absolutely indispensable.

Reviewed by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Coauthors of “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”

Winner-Take-All Politics:
How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker
Simon & Schuster (2010)

Fortunately for Americans (Texans and otherwise) we do not work for our political entrepreneurs, they work for us. When any public political figures try to feed us a particular view of history, we are free to engage in one of democracy’s greatest birthrights, the open and public application of skepticism and doubt.

If these new textbook standards are successfully implemented, you will be ostensibly encouraged to question many different issues. You should do just exactly that – but on your own broad terms, not their narrow ones. Here are some examples.

First, you might be asked to question the separation of church and state. Do not settle for the deceptive little queries your politicized textbooks would attempt to limit you to making. Be skeptical for real. For example, did the doctrine of church/state separation evolve during the era of the Founders, in part, in recognition of a real threat to democracy? Were some of the Founders and great American political entrepreneurs more like agnostics and atheists than like traditional Christians (look into Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln, especially)? Might contemporary advocates of closer association of religion with the state be precisely the kinds of political actors the Founders feared? Might the message of these contemporary advocates of religion in government have more in common with the program of the mullahs of Iran’s police state than with the hopes of the American Founders – struggling to create a state that served its citizens (rather than vice versa)?

Second, for example, you might be encouraged to question the importance of slavery to early American history. Do so. But consider including the following questions. Was the pre-Civil War American South a slavocracy selectively serving the narrow interests of a tiny group of wealthy planters and their hangers-on rather than a democracy for all? Did the post-Civil War Jim Crow American South systematically flaunt the American Constitution (see especially the 13-15th Amendments)? Did many, many innocent people die inhumanly treated and in shackles as part of the “triangle trade”?

Third, for example, you might be encouraged to question whether international organizations (the UN, the IMF and others) threaten American sovereignty. This is actually a great question. Conflicts of interest exist in the international arena just as surely as they do everywhere else, including in local Texas politics. As citizens of planet Earth we should be just as skeptical of the dubious shenanigans of global political entrepreneurs as we are of local ones – members of our school boards, say.

You are still free citizens of one the world’s great democracies. There is nothing to stop you from confronting these questions on their real merits. In so doing, you will be defending the form of political government we all cherish – at least the large majority of us not aspiring to be elite oligarchs. In the end, these attempts by conservative members of your state board to tweak the textbooks you read in school are more pathetic than dangerous. You have free access to vast resources – for example, Google might be censored in China, but not (yet) in Texas.

Being educated is not about what you know, it’s a lifestyle. This lifestyle has only two fundamental elements.

First, hold everything you think you know in perpetual doubt. Retain as true only those things that survive your relentless doubting. These doubt-resistant insights are the only real knowledge, the only reliable belief.

Second, always defend your right to question, publicly and often. Anyone who tries to indoctrinate you or force you to adopt a particular, narrow point of view – right or left, theist or secular – is looking to enslave you. Anyone who honestly invites you to question everything, even their own views, is a fellow citizen. The right to question – together in public, loudly and remorselessly – is our common birthright as citizens of a democracy. All other rights we have can persist only as long as we preserve this one.

These are the truths we hold to be self-evident.

Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza
Authors of Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe

Our theory makes a very strong prediction about the ascendency of the behaviorally modern humans that are ancestral to all of us alive today (Chapter 11 in Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe or DfaD). Our specific claim is that the behaviorally modern human revolution was a social revolution, not a genetic revolution. One of the symptoms of this dramatic process was that the populations of our modern ancestors began to grow and expand out of Africa, thereby driving all other non-modern humans, including the Neandertals of Eurasia, to apparent extinction. Thus, our theory implies that the behaviorally modern displacement of Neandertals was unlikely to reflect some genetic superiority of our “modern” ancestors over other human groups, like Neandertals, traditionally classified as “archaic.”

Rather, our theory requires that modern ascendency was an accident of our modern ancestors having invented a fundamentally new coercive technology (the atlatl or spear-thrower) before the Neandertals had access to any analogous new coercive technology.  This single social/technological innovation allowed our modern ancestors to apply the ancient, uniquely human adaptive trick with new ecological power. This fundamental trick is kinship-independent social cooperation coercively enforced by the self-interested projection of coercive threat. We expect the scale of this cooperation to be dramatically increased in moderns in comparison to the smaller social groups characteristic of both Neandertals and the “anatomically modern” humans who were the immediate ancestors of behaviorally moderns.

This particular prediction of our theory is especially useful because the traditional views of the behaviorally modern displacement of Neandertals often propose (or implicitly assume) that modern human ascendency was the result of some significant difference in the genetic endowment of these two species. Thus, several conclusions from this week’s new Neandertal genome sequence are of particular relevance.

First, many of the distinct characteristics of the modern human genome are also present in Neandertals – consistent with their being fully “human.” [This pattern had been observed earlier for the protein coding sequence of the FOXP2 putative "language" gene.] For example, the “human accelerated regions” (HARs) are short genomic segments that appear to have evolved very rapidly in the human lineage after its divergence from the chimp lineage – in spite of these segments being strongly conserved (showing little evolutionary change) throughout the tens of millions of years of vertebrate evolution before the chimp/human divergence. HARs are, thus, good candidates for some of the information central to the genetic redesign supporting the evolution of humanness. From the new Neandertal sequence, we learn that most of the human-specific changes in these HAR regions are shared with Neandertals, as predicted by our theory.

Second, similarly, approximately 90% of the human-specific small changes in our genomes (inferred from comparison with a reconstructed proxy for the genome of our last common ancestor with chimps) are shared with Neandertals. Especially striking is the finding of only 78 or 88 (depending on measurement approach) genome changes producing amino acid substitution differences between moderns and Neandertals, with only five genes (out of ca. 23,000) containing more than one amino acid substitution. In view of the well-known fact that many amino acid substitutions are actually nearly neutral (without much adaptive effect), these observations are consistent with extensive biological/genetic similarity between us and Neandertals. Likewise, there are less than 200 substitutions in non-coding (potential regulatory) segments of mRNAs, some or most of which could also be neutral.

The larger point here is that many regions of the Neandertal genome fall within the range of variation expected among contemporary people (“modern” descendents). There is no compelling evidence from these data for a genetic revolution underlying the rise of modern humans.

Third, the authors were also able to infer which regions of the genomes of some modern humans might have been acquired from Neandertals as a result of interbreeding at or immediately after the first expansion of our modern ancestors out of Africa 40,000-60,000 years ago. Two observations are especially striking. Roughly, 1-4% of modern Eurasian and Eurasian-derived human genomes (that is, non-African genomes) are apparently inherited from Neandertals. This indicates a modest, but significant level of interbreeding between Neandertals and the first members of the behaviorally modern African disapora ancestral to all contemporary non-African moderns. Thus, Neandertals were not a different species in the biologist’s literal sense of that term. It will be of interest to determine if any Eurasian traits (lighter skin tones or protuberant noses, for example) prove to be of Neandertal origin.

Fourth, against this background of very little difference suggesting a common genetic heritage it is possible to look for rare genes or genome segments that might have experienced strong genetic selection at or after the divergence of the primary modern lineages from the Neandertals. These measurements detect 212 possible candidates for such selectively significant modern regions.

Of course, this last observation could be taken to support traditional genetic revolution hypotheses for modern ascendency. However, it is important to note that such selective sweeps continue in modern human sub-populations without creating the basis of global displacement. For example, some local human populations have recently undergone strong selection for genetic resistance to malaria or adult tolerance of lactose (milk sugar). Some or all the putative selective sweeps occurring at or since our divergence from Neandertals could easily be of this general form.

It is illuminating to consider a more recent potential analogy to the takeover of the Neandertal’s domain by our modern ancestors. The Afroeurasian displacement of Native Americans in North America produced a number of genetic signatures – replacement of Native American genetic variants and configurations with Afroeurasian ones. However, we are not required to believe that the current human population of North America reflects the product of a genetic revolution rather than a social one. Indeed, the genetic hypothesis Afroeurasian ascendency in North America is widely viewed as implausible. Our theory argues that any residual genetic after-effects of the behaviorally modern human displacement of Neandertals are equally likely to be superfluous and secondary to the social revolution that bestowed possession of the human realm on our modern ancestors.

Of course, it follows from our theory’s view of the modern/Neandertal divergence that the study of the differences between Neandertals and moderns will notinform us about the genetic/biological bases of what is means to be human. Rather, on our approach, the greatest power of this comparison will lie in identifying what Neandertals and moderns share. The evolution of these common properties is what should most capture our attention. The Neandertal sequence is equally useful to both approaches. The question is how we can best employ this rich new burst of information.

Before leaving the Neandertals, their analysis has one more important insight for us and allows us to recognize one crucial new question. First the insight. Many contemporary modern humans are the recent descendents of successful imperialists. This is obviously true of the Western Eurasian colonial diasporas (of which the authors are both members). However, it is also true, for example, of Han Chinese, Bantu Africans, non-Ainu Japanese and Aryan South Asians, among many others. The cultures and social structures perpetrating such imperialism are especially prone to produce racist (and sexist) explanations of coercive dominance (see Chapters 10 and 13, DfaD). We, their recent descendents, are extremely vulnerable to this culturally inherited preconception. As we study Neandertal and their relation to us we are well advised to be mindful of this potential bias in our underlying thought processes.

Now we can turn to the new question the Neandertal results lets us recognize. If Neandertals and moderns were fellow human species members why was there not more extensive gene flow between Neandertal Eurasia and anatomically modern Africa long before the behaviorally modern human revolution? Our theory predicts one candidate for the answer. Members of individual human social units are extremely xenophobic toward members of other units with whom they have conflicts of interest beyond their capacities for cost-effective management (Chapter 10 and Third Interlude; DfaD). These effects might have been especially intense for the small cooperative social groups sustained only by the coercion supported by elite human throwing in pre-modern humans (Chapters 5 and 7; DfaD) – blocking potential mechanisms of effective mate exchange/migration between culturally distinct lineages. The substantial expansion of the scale of social cooperation in behaviorally modern humans (Chapter 11, DfaD) might have created new avenues (“commercial”?) for such exchanges. This is an issue that will reward substantial new investigation.

Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Authors: Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe