Even when focusing on the simplest building blocks of its very beginnings, we can see how more than anything, subtle emphases – differences between well-intentioned observers – matters.

Because of this, I’ve carefully selected three main sources, and drawn on others. The first, and one I recommend the most, is a very readable textbook called Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East. It’s by three scholars: Abdel Monem Said Ally, Shai Feldman, and Khalil Shikaki, and it pays careful attention to different historical narratives before analysing them as even-handedly as possible.

Then, Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi’s, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is from a Palestinian perspective, while Israeli writer Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land is from an Israeli one.

Of course, even referring to a perspective as ‘Israeli’ or ‘Palestinian’ is an enormous oversimplification, ignoring the vast differences there always are within and between groups. I’ve also drawn on a few historians who’ve been labelled Israeli ‘new historians’ – this loose group have challenged a traditional historical narrative in Israel, something we’ll come to. The literature on this is vast, intellectual humility is required, and so I will focus only on the origins. I’ll also return to a note on how and why I’ve approached this in the way I have at the end.

Towards the end of the 19th century, outbreaks of violence against Jews called pogroms increased across Eastern Europe.

In most countries, Jews were second class citizens. They couldn’t own land, vote, had different and varying legal rights, and were marginalised, lived in ghettos, and often randomly blamed for problems and were targeted and murdered.

This was coming to a head in the last two decades of the 19th century.

In 1881, in the Russian Empire, Jewish communities were attacked after Tsar Alexander II was assassinated and one of the conspirators had incidentally had Jewish ancestry. A wave of pogroms resulted. But this was just one of many instances. In modern day Moldova in 1903, 49 were killed, and many more injured, raped, and homes were attacked.

It’s important to remember that this is relatively borderless period. Palestine had been administered by the decaying Ottoman Empire for centuries. It was home to a small number of Jews already who lived peacefully with a majority of Arabs, mainly Muslims, with a few Christians.

This was a period very different from today. Empires were the norm, borders were always changing, but the idea of ‘nation-states’, that peoples had the right to self-determine, to govern themselves, was on the rise. In 1800 the population of Palestine was 2% Jewish – some 6700 Jews. By 1890, 42,000 Jews had moved there, while the Arab population was around 500,000. By 1922, the Jewish population had doubled to 83,000.

Towards the end of the 19th century, Jewish settlers started buying land from absent urban Arab landlords, leading to the displacement of the Arab peasants who had worked the land. 500 Arabs signed a letter of complaint to the Ottomans about this in 1891.

In My Promised Land, Ari Shavit describes the complex and sometimes contradictory motivations of the young Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century. For some, fleeing violence, it was a matter of life and death, for others, like his own British great-grandfather, it was a complex choice, one comprised of solidarity with those fleeing persecution, a romantic idea of the Holy Land, and a modern idea of it too – that a new thriving modern future could be built in a land that was widely and falsely seen as empty.

Judaic Studies professor David Novak has written: ‘The modern Zionism that emerged in the late nineteenth century was clearly a secular nationalist movement’. However it had deep religious and historical roots to draw on as well – that Palestine was the Jewish ancestral homeland, the Exodus from Egypt to the promised land, and later exiles from the region, and returns. But Zionism was never unified – many, many disagreed, religious and secular alike, and those who agreed or became Zionists did so for many reasons. Shavit points out that travellers from places like Britain didn’t see Palestine for what it was. They saw empty desert. They saw a few Bedouin tribes. They saw possibility. They didn’t see the Palestinian villages and towns, or maybe, he says, they chose to ignore them?

They also saw poverty – dirt huts and tiny villages. They believed, or said they believed – as many colonists also claim, it’s important to note – that the indigenous population would benefit from Jewish capital, education, technology, and ideas, and it’s true that many did.

Drawing on his grandfather’s diaries, Shavit asks why his grandfather ‘did not see’. After all, he was served by Arab stevedores, Arab staff at hotels, Arab villagers carried his carriages, was led by Arab guides and horseman, was shown Arab cities.

He uses a word: blindness. They were too focused on a romantic ideal of the area and the tragic oppression they were fleeing from. Shavit writes: ‘Between memory and dream there is no here and now.’

Not everyone was blind, though. At the beginning of the 20th century one Zionist author, Israel Zangwill, gave a speech in New York that reported that Palestine was not empty. That they would have to ‘drive out by sword the tribes in possession, as our forefathers did.’

This was heresy. No one wanted to hear it. He was ignored.

So between 1890 and 1913, around 80,000 Zionists emigrated. In the short period between WWI and WWII the same number again. But this snowballed with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Between 1933-1940, 250,000 fled Germany. In 1935 alone, 60,000 moved to Palestine. More than the entire Jewish population in 1917.

With this came millions in capital and investment, and successful settlements, villages, and towns began growing.

This huge demographic movement coincided with the most important shift of power in the region. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire during WWI and the subsequent British takeover of control.

During WWI, Zionists in Palestine provided valuable information to Britain, formed spy networks, and volunteered to fight.

At the same time, a coalition of Arabs supported Britain by rising up against the Ottomans in the Great Arab Revolt. In return they were promised an independent Arab state by the British.

But Britain made several contradictory promises in quick succession.

In 1917, the Balfour Declaration – a memo between Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour and Lord Rothschild – committed the British Government to a home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

The Balfour declaration neglected to mention the word Arab, who comprised 94% of the population. It read: ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

Here lies the root of the conflict; the contradictory promise: ‘when the promised land became twice promised’, in the words of historian Avi Shlaim.

Reporting this news in Palestine was banned by the British.

Instead, after the defeat of the Ottomans, the British and French divided the area into spheres of influence under the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, leaving Palestine as a British mandate under British control. This was the famous ‘line in the sand’, made by people who had little knowledge of the area.

In a private 1919 memo only published 30 years later, Lord Balfour admitted: ‘In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’

The British Mandate gave the Jewish Agency in Palestine status as a public body to help run the country. Jewish communities and leaders formed institutions for self-defence and governance, which the British slowly recognised, essentially becoming a government in waiting.

As a result, outbreaks of violence began to increase in the 1920s, getting progressively worse. In 1929, hundreds of Jews and Arabs were killed and hundreds more wounded at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Tensions rose, resulting in a series of massacres of Jews by Arabs, one of which in Hebron resulted in the death of almost 70 Jews and the injuring of many more. In response to the violence, the British declared a state of emergency. They proposed a legislative council that would be comprised of six nominated British and four nominated Jewish members, and twelve elected members, including two Christians, two Jews, and eight Muslims.

Seeing themselves as outnumbered on a governing panel in a country in which they were the clear majority, Palestinians rejected the proposal. Another was proposed that was slightly fairer to the Palestinians, but this time it was rejected by the Zionists and British parliament.

During the largest wave of immigration as the Nazis came to power, Palestinians called for a general strike demanding an end to Jewish migration and the sale of land to Zionists by absentee urban landlords, which continued to dispossess peasants working the land.

In 1936, an Arab revolt started when gunmen shot three Jews, setting off a series of attacks and counterattacks, leading to the deaths of around 415 Jews and 101 British. The British response was swift and brutal. 5000 Arabs were killed by the British, violence continued into 1937, and many were imprisoned and exiled. 10% of the Arab population were killed, injured, exiled, or imprisoned.

Kahlidi puts the figure higher, writing: ‘The bloody war waged against the country’s majority, which left 14 to 17 percent of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.’

Said Ally, Feldman, and Shikaki write that it was ‘disastrous for the Palestinians.’

In one instance an 81-year-old rebel leader was executed after being found with a single bullet. The British tied Palestinian prisoners to the front of their cars to prevent ambushes. Homes were destroyed. Many were tortured and beaten, including at least one woman.

However as a result of the unrest, in 1937 a British government report recommends two states for the first time. The Arab state, though, would not be Palestinian. It was to be merged with Transjordan.

In 1939, British government policy, put forward in a white paper, decided to call for a single jointly administered Palestine, and limited Jewish immigration and land sales.

The Holocaust changed all this. And even more disastrous for the Palestinians was the leadership’s decisions to side with Hitler in 1941, as he had told them that the Nazis had no plans to occupy Arab lands.

As the true extent of the Holocaust became clearer, the plight of European Jews became more urgent in the eyes of European and US policymakers. It’s crucial to remember the extent of the horror – six million Jews industrially murdered. After the war, there were 250,000 Jews living in refugee camps in Germany alone. Britain was bankrupt and was pulling out of many of its former colonies. Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt gained their independence, and they formed the Arab League.

More plans were proposed, including the Morrison-Grady Plan in 1946 calling for two separate autonomous Arab and Israeli regions under British defence, which was again rejected by both Zionists and Palestinians.

A UN plan in 1947 proposed 43% of the area going to Palestinians, despite them comprising two thirds of the population. It was rejected by the Arab Higher Committee who called for a three-day general strike.

The newly independent (or quasi-independent, at least) surrounding Arab states were becoming increasingly hostile to Zionism and the plight of the Palestinians. But they also saw potential to either increase their own territory or to gain power in the region. Egypt saw itself as a new Ottoman Empire. King Abdullah of Transjordan saw Palestine as part of Transjordan. He thought that victory in the war against Israel would be secured in ‘no more than ten days.’

The USSR, seeing the potential of a state of Israel as a socialist ally, provided weapons to the Zionists. Seeing themselves as decisively outnumbered and outgunned, with no tanks, navy, or aircraft (the Arab countries, to varying degrees, did have this equipment), Ben-Gurion secured a deal with Czechoslovakia for $28m worth of weapons and ammunition, increasing their supply by 25% and ammunition by 1000%. In 1968, Ben-Gurion remembered, ‘the Czech weapons truly saved the state of Israel. Without these weapons we would not have remained alive’.

By now the Palestinians and Zionists were in a state of civil war, with continued attacks and counterattacks.

In early 1948, knowing the British would leave, Arab countries were preparing to invade and Jewish state institutions-in-waiting prepared a plan of defence. And there were already Jewish settlements outside of the proposed UN partition boundaries, and of course, many Palestinian areas within.

Zionist leadership prepared what was referred to as Plan D, which included, ‘self-defense against invasion by regular or semi-regular forces’, and ‘freedom of military and economic activity within the borders of the [Hebrew] state and in Jewish settlements outside its borders’.

All of this was made worse by British bankruptcy and a hard-line Zionist militant group called Irgun, who bombed the British Mandate headquarters, killing 92 people, and were involved in skirmishes with Palestinians. In one attack in April of 1948, Irgun killed 115-250 men, women, and children in a village near Jerusalem, despite a non-aggression pact.

So on 15 May 1948, the British left. The day before, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the new state of Israel. The day after, a coalition of Arab forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

For the most part, Israel captured and defended the areas allotted to them by the 1947 UN plan, as well as areas outside of it.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes. Palestinians call it the Nakba – the Catastrophe.

The result of the war was the Gaza strip coming under Egypt’s control, the West Bank contested but under the control of Jordan’s forces, to be annexed in 1950, and anywhere between 400,000 and a million Palestinians displaced.

There is complexity, and this is only a small fraction of this story, but it’s impossible to ignore that the Nakba was a catastrophe – power differentials, foreign influence, empire, failures to compromise, perpetration of atrocities, the loss of homes and land that would never be returned to. The Palestinians were divided, outnumbered, and kept weak by Britain, Zionists, the US, the USSR and their surrounding Arab neighbours.

Journalist Arthur Koestler famously said that, ‘One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.

While British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had tried to limit immigration to Palestine, he was replaced by Winston Churchill, one of the biggest supporters of Zionism in British public life. In 1937 Churchill said of Palestine that: ‘I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place’.

In response to the UN planning to partition Palestine in 1947, several Arab countries warned, or even threatened, violence against Jews in their own countries and expulsion. In 1950 and 51 Iraq withdrew Jews of their Iraqi nationality and property rights. Antisemitism in Yemen led to the migration of 50,000 Jews between 1949-1950. There were attacks on Jews in Tripoli before the war in 1945. Whether punitive policies and attitudes began before the war or as a result of it is a matter of debate.

What becomes clear, though, is that moral questions depend on the minutiae of often unanswerable questions; ones that historians are still, often acrimoniously, debating.

Who, which groups and subgroups, were most responsible for violence in ‘47? Were 19th century Zionists ‘blind’, ‘altruistic’, in existential danger? Are they colonisers in the usual sense? Or victims fleeing from violence in Europe?

Shavit writes that, ‘these pilgrims do not represent Europe. On the contrary. They are Europe’s victims. And they are here on behalf of Europe’s ultimate victims.’

Anyone who tells you that answers are easy to come by are wrong. Antisemitism was at its height in the 1940s. The Holocaust had just happened. Jewish immigrants had purchased land and settled in Palestine peacefully for decades. But amongst these difficulties, there are some indisputable facts. The UN partition plan offered Palestinians 43% of the land despite them comprising 68% of the population. And around 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

Shavit cites a letter written from an Israeli he knew who fought the 1947-48 war. He wrote about the time: ‘when I think of the thefts, the looting, the robberies and recklessness, I realize that these are not merely separate incidents. Together they add up to a period of corruption. The question is earnest and deep, really of historic dimensions. We will all be held accountable for this era. We shall face judgment. And I fear that justice will not be on our side’.

And this is one report from an Israeli military governor, reporting a conversation with Palestinian dignitaries when Palestinians were forced from the small city of Lydda in 1948:

DIGNITARIES: What will become of the prisoners detained in the mosque?

GOVERNOR: We shall do to the prisoners what you would do had you imprisoned us.

DIGNITARIES: No, no, please don’t do that.

GOVERNOR: Why, what did I say? All I said is that we will do to you what you would do to us.

DIGNITARIES: Please no, master. We beg you not to do such a thing.

GOVERNOR: No, we shall not do that. Ten minutes from now the prisoners will be free to leave the mosque and leave their homes and leave Lydda along with all of you and the entire population of Lydda.

DIGNITARIES: Thank you, master. God bless you.

And in many cases, people left before the war broke out. In one case, the Israeli mayor even begged the Palestinians to stay. Although this was the only case.

For many years, the ‘Israeli’ narrative – although to call it that is far too simplistic, ignoring the disagreements, differences, and dissent within the conversation – was that the surrounding Arab states called upon the Arabs in Palestine to leave so that they could invade.

School books in Israel taught that Israelis wanted peace, but they were surrounded by enemies who wanted their destruction; that the Arabs fled to safety as a natural process of war.

This was challenged in the 1980s as official archives were opened, and a generation of ‘new’ Israeli historians looked differently at the period.

Benny Morris, one of those new historians, argued that there was no master plan of expulsion. However, it was understood that it was in the leadership’s interests to establish a Jewish state with as small of a minority of Palestinian Arabs as possible.

Most say the order came from Ben-Gurion himself. Those saying this include the later Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who reported in his autobiography that Ben-Gurion had given him the order to expel the Palestinian Arabs in Lydda. When Rabin tried to publish this in 1979 it was censored.

What’s clear is that there was an overwhelming atmosphere – of fear, of exodus, of violence and beatings, of many massacres, of war in general – that led to 700,000 Palestinians leaving their homes, never to return.

Sources:

Understanding Israel and Palestine: A Reading List

The post The Origins of the Israel/Palestine Conflict appeared first on Then & Now.

All of this happened at dizzying speed. This was the moment the modern world crashed together and dragged people from the fields to the factory floor.

Within a generation, the entire consciousness of life had changed.

Science challenged deeply-held views of the world.

Darwin published On the Origins of Species in 1859.

He pulled the Gods down from the sky and transformed humans into just another animal.

This, of course, was shocking, traumatising, existentially threatening.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote in 1844 that, ‘Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked by the millions and millions in this enormous household’.

Nietzsche, famously proclaiming the death of God, argued that men would become nihilistic, lose their grounding, forsake their morals, if a new ethics of man did not come.

Darwin, the death of God, the prosperity of industry, science, all pointed towards something that could be terrifying: freedom.

Kierkegaard went on: ‘Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’.

Freedom was the expansion of options – of ways to live life personally, of political options, with commercial options.

Warfare was changing: swords and rifles, of which there were only a few, were being replaced by stuttering guns and spat bullets at an incomprehensible rate, artillery and bombs that sent shrapnel shredding in a cacophony of unbearable noise.

The word ‘panic’ was used for the first time in 1879 by the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley to describe extreme agitation, trembling, and terror.

People were nervous, literally – a new diagnosis became popular amongst America’s elites:  neurasthenia.

It was a contemporary form of stress, characterised by symptoms like fatigue, headache, and irritability.

Neurasthenia, according to physician Charles Beard, was the result of a depletion of nervous energy, but was becoming more common as a reaction to the anxieties of the modern world and of the demands of American exceptionalism. Neurasthenia was almost a fashion. Adverts appeared selling ‘nerve tonics’, self help books dominated the shelves, even breakfast cereals claimed to be able to cure ‘americanitus’.

Beard argued that there were five main causes of neurasthenia: steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women.

He argued that these phenomena contributed to the competitiveness and speed of the modern world.

Even time itself was to blame.

He wrote, ‘the perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments. Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments. We are under constant strain, mostly unconscious, often times in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere or do something at some definite moment’.

The recently laid telegraphs also meant that prices and information could be sent around the world at a moment’s notice, piling the pressure on merchants to keep up with the latest news from all around the world.

According to the pre-psychological way of understanding the human mind, all of these phenomena hit the nerve endings, draining the life force.

Unnatural modern noises did this too.

Beard wrote: ‘Nature – the moans and road of the wind, the rustling and trembling of the leaves, and swaying of the branches, the roar of the sea and of waterfalls, he singing of birds, and even the cries of some wild animals – are mostly rhythmical to a greater or less degree, and always varying if not intermittent’.

As with Kierkegaard’s anxieties over freedom, for Beard, politics and religion also added to the drain: ‘The experiment attempted on this continent of making every man, every child, and every woman an expert in politics and theology is one of the costliest of experiments with living human beings’.

‘A factor in producing American nervousness is, beyond dispute, the liberty allowed, and the stimulus given, to Americans to rise out of the possibilities in which they were born’.

Excitement and disappointment were a drain on nerve-force.

But one innovation was so emblematic of the shock of modernity, of the distortion of time, of the inability of man to adapt to his surroundings, that it’s mentioned almost everywhere the topic is discussed:

The railway.

Historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues that the railways didn’t just change travel, but changed the very notion of time itself.

Before the railways, cities, towns, and villages had local times, which had to be standardised for train timetables. ‘London time ran four minutes ahead of time in Reading, seven minutes and thirty seconds ahead of Cirencester time, fourteen minutes ahead of Bridgwater time’. People could imagine being in other places much more easily, changing the very way they think.

It was such a part of the cultural zeitgeist of the time that on the third of October 1868, Illustrated London News reported that five theatres were all performing the same incident: someone tied to or unconscious on a track while a train came hurtling towards them.

These productions made use of modern special effects using lights and smoke, and The Times described them as a ‘perfect fever of excitement’.

The theatres performing these spectacles were open to people outside of the centre of London for the first time, who could travel in on the omnibuses or trains. The same transport they were about to be thrilled by their fear of.

Railway accidents were common. One in 1868 killed 33 people.

One passenger wrote, ‘We were startled by a collision and a shock. [. . .] I immediately jumped out of the carriage, when a fearful sight met my view. Already the three passenger carriages in front of ours, the vans and the engine were enveloped in dense sheets of flame and smoke, rising fully 20 feet. [. ..] [I] t was the work of an instant. No words can convey the instantaneous nature of the explosion and conflagration. I had actually got out almost before the shock of the collision was over, and this was the spectacle which already presented itself. Not a sound, not a scream, not a struggle to escape, or a movement of any sort was apparent in the doomed carriages. It was as though an electric flash had at once paralysed and stricken every one of their occupants. So complete was the absence of any presence of living or struggling life in them that it was imagined that the burning carriages were destitute of passenger’.

This idea of instantaneous death mixed with machinery was so new and so shocking, that it dominated the culture.

Charles Dickens himself was involved in a train crash and wrote the ghost story The Signal Man afterwards. According to his children, he was never the same again.

All of this – industry, commercialism, fear, anxiety, thrill, trains – culminated in an emphasis on sensation and the birth of sensationalism. The point was the senses. The modern world could trigger them, play on them, manipulate them, and sell to them, all at a tremendous speed.

The Irish playwright Dion Boucicault made sensation the centre of his plays. He intended to ‘electrify’ the audience.

A review of one of his plays illustrates this emphasis on the senses: ‘The house is gradually enveloped in fire [and] [. ..] bells of engines are heard. Enter a crowd of persons. [. . .] Badger [.. .] seizes a bar of iron, dashes in the ground-floor window, the interior is seen in flames. [. . .] Badger leaps in and disappears. Shouts from the mob. [. . .] [T]he shutters of the garret fall and reveal Badger in the upper floor. [. . .] Badger disappears as if falling with the inside of the building. The shutters of the window fall away, and the inside of the house is seen, gutted by the fire; a cry of horror is uttered by the mob. Badger drags himself from the ruins’.

Drama of such speed and excitement had rarely been seen before.

In the early 1860s, sensation novels suddenly became popular.

In 1866, an article in the Westminster Gazette lamented that all minor novelists were now sensationalists.

Literary critic D. A. Miller describes it like this: ‘The genre offers us one of the first instances of modern literature to address itself primarily to the sympathetic nervous system, where it grounds its characteristic adrenaline effects: accelerated heart rate and respiration, increased blood pressure, the pallor resulting from vasoconstriction, and so on.” H.L. Mansel wrote that ‘There are novels of the warming-pan type, and others of the galvanic battery type-some which gently stimulate a particular feeling, and others which carry the whole nervous system by steam’.

So, what was lost in these tumultuous years? I think Charles Beard and Kierkegaard, in many ways, hit it on the head. The idea of freedom, anxiety of choice, the cacophony of noise, the pressure of time all becomes demanding. A type of demand that didn’t exist in agricultural societies. Yes, life also became better, more prosperous – more options – but remembering what was lost is also important.

So, if modernity is still a shock to you then slow down, take some time, turn off your phone, stop thinking. Relax.

Sources

Allan V. Horwitz, Anxiety: A Short History

Nicholas Daly, Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face of Modernity

Beard, American Nervousness

Mark Jackson, The Age of Stress

David G. Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869-1920

Nicholas Daly, Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses

The post The Shock of Modernity appeared first on Then & Now.

The policeman’s doctor decided to try a brand new drug, penicillin. He was the first person in the world to receive it.

Around ten years before, Alexander Fleming returned to his lab from holiday and found one of his petri dishes contaminated with mould. He noticed, though, that the mould inhibited the growth of the bacteria, so he took it and added it to other dishes, finding the same result.

After four days of treatment the policeman was making what his doctor described as a striking recovery. His temperature returned to normal and he was eating well. On the fifth day, though, the supply ran out. A month later, he died.

It’s been estimated that since, penicillin has saved the lives of maybe two hundred million people and saved countless others from excruciating pain. It is probably the most important life-saving discovery in human history.

But it also points to a paradox in thinking about ‘progress’ in history. Not only was it discovered by accident, the mould had floated up through a window accidently left open onto a petri dish left accidently out on a bench, rather than in an incubator, while the exceptionally cool weather for the time of year encouraged growth.

If such a lifesaving drug is the result of chance, how can we think about progress? What drives it? Is it guaranteed? Is it a myth?

Of course, it wasn’t just chance. Fleming was a practicing scientist embedded in the context of institutions, aims, methods, a particular culture, and so on.

And compare this story to what was going on at precisely the same time only a few hundred miles away, in Germany and Poland – millions were being systematically murdered while the innovations of science and technology were being put to good use by Europeans slaughtering each other on battlefields.

How do we make sense of this paradox – that the most important innovation in history, like other medical and scientific advances, was happening at the same time as the most devastating catastrophe?

The historian Will Durant said that, ‘Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river’.

Is Durant right? Do we ignore the good in history? Are we all pessimists? How do we even begin to understand the good in history – how it unfolds, what drives it, what could promote, what we could learn from? There are countless difficulties. The first is, what does good even mean? What’s the measure? The criteria?

Some say health, others happiness, others wealth. Stability? Community? Equality? A postmodern critique that it’s impossible to rank values, to compare and classify, or to place any hope in grand narratives? What is a long life if it’s lived under tyranny? What is a wealthy life if those around you live in poverty?

However, if we were to begin with a loose meta-criterion that I think most would agree with while nevertheless disagreeing on precisely what it means, we’d land on something like liberty.

Liberty, broadly speaking, is the freedom to think, to speak, to do, to act, to be oneself, to go where one chooses, to strive in the way one wants to strive. To have as many of the ‘primary goods’ of life as possible in order to do so – food, shelter, transport, even things like good relationships, friendships, opportunities, and so on. Most, I think, would agree that generally, more of these things is better than less.

Liberty in this sense is neutral between competing ideological beliefs or political systems. It begins from a simple premise, that more possibility is better than less; the society that has better access to penicillin is better than the one where you’re more likely to be sent to a gas chamber.

The historical question then is to understand which historical conditions – institutional, political, cultural, philosophical – lead to an increase in liberty and which diminish it. What ideas about liberty seem to work? Where did they come from? Who built on them? Improved them? What diminished or restricted them? The historical question is to search for the causes of liberty so they can be identified and built upon today.

Hegel argued that history was the unfolding of reason through time. Martin Luther King, who read Hegel, argued that the moral arc of history bends towards justice. Marx argued that economic contradictions resolve through history, leading to a more equal society. And more recently some have claimed liberal capitalism as the end of history.

All of these claims are in some sense Hegelian, and the philosopher Terry Pinkard has recently argued in a work on Hegel that the end at work in history is the securing of justice as freedom.

Freedom is the relationship between desire, reasoning, acting on your desires, and recognition and authority. In other words, our desires don’t exist in a vacuum – we are in constant negotiation with others and their desires, with figures and systems of authority that act upon and direct our desires, and so on. Freedom is intersubjective. Social consciousness, culture, and institutions arise out of the interplay of our desires.

With this in mind, Pinkard asks if history makes sense. Is there logic in the way the interplay of desires plays out? Is history comprehensible? Or is it contingent? Random? Messy?

Hegel was a figure of the Enlightenment. Like Kant before him, he believed in a scientific approach to the world – and that included history. He argued that science was bringing the phenomena of the world around us – in nature, in humans, in everything – under ‘the concept’.

What he meant by this was that we have ideas of things – we have ideas of ourselves, our desires, of others, of history. We categorise things – we look at the qualities of things, the causes of things. The historian looks at the causes of World War II, for example.

Importantly, it’s this ability to go about the messy work of building up ideas that makes us human and provides the possibility of even having a history in the first place.

A mouse has a past, but it has no real history. We have ideas of how we acted, why we acted, how we’ve changed since. A mouse may have a drive to eat which it acts on but a human has a concept of eating under which reasons for eating, what to eat, when to eat, what’s healthy, how to farm, where to shop are categorised under the idea or concept of eating.

What Hegel is showing is how we make sense of the world – that from our ideas and concepts we make judgements about how to act. Once we understand this we can understand that the idea of salad is a historical one. We’ve brought more understanding under the concept of salad – its chemical composition, its effects, the best ways of growing, distributing, eating it, and so on.

Humans develop conceptions over time – at times ideas fall apart and are discarded and at other times they develop and are adopted. The biblical idea that the sun went around the earth fell apart as it was observed that the opposite was true, so the idea that the bible was the guide to wisdom was slowly superseded by an emphasis on observation and empiricism.

Pinkard writes that, ‘the components of the “Idea” arise in history, but as humans reflect on those concepts, put them to use, and modify them in the course of their collective lives, they refashion them into overall schemes of intelligibility’.

Hegel was expanding on Spinoza’s point that modern scientific enquiry expands outwards towards the ‘perspective of infinity’, by looking at the causes and qualities of the things that help us expand upon our desires and interests.

Pinkard writes that, ‘Hegel concludes that freedom is the capacity to make what truly matters effective in one’s life, and, in modern times, that more or less comes down to acting on our own reasons rather than on vague feelings of guidance from nature, the gods, or those who claim to rule us by natural right’.

This is obviously not just an individual process. Our own ideas and desires come into conflict with others. There are disagreements that play out in culture, institutions, norms, practices, political decisions, etc.

Pinkard writes: ‘history is an arena in which people seek and have sought reconciliation — that is, a kind of justification of their lives — in their social worlds, and they have sought this both individually and collectively’.

When it comes to the meta-criterion of liberty, denouncing fascism is thought of as the same as trying to eat more salad. An individual, directed by education, cultural context, social information, makes a judgement that the former had the effect of reducing liberty in the past and the latter has the effect of increasing energy and lifespan.

Hegel says that we emerge from a ‘realm of shadows’ and move towards the light of the ‘space of reasons’.

If this is true, we should be able to establish some points of historical progress. Which ‘shapes of consciousness’, to use Hegel’s term, which ideas, practices, institutions in history promote liberty?

For Hegel, the process developed as history unfolded from one being free – a king or emperor, free to make their own decisions – to many being free – i.e. an aristocracy – to all, in principle at least, being free.

Hegel argued that pre-Greek societies were paternalistic and authoritarian, that they were ‘rule-followers’ that didn’t interrogate the reasons for following or abandoning certain rules. And that the Persians, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese civilisations that preceded the Greeks didn’t approach the world and people as ideas to be studied but instead were absorbed in the world. They didn’t have reflective critical distance. Without these mechanisms for self-criticism there can be no movement in history.

It’s important to note his interpretation of ancient history has been criticised a lot since, but for our purposes, the important point is less where it started, but the idea of reflective distance on the world being important – the questioning of why some ideas or rules are adopted. The Greeks, he thinks, were ‘self’-conscious – they had a particularly acute idea of the self and asked questions about it.

It’s under these conditions that the question is more forcefully asked: who are ‘the people’? What does ‘freedom’ mean? Who rules?

Pinkard writes, ‘The Greek miracle, as it were, was its creation of the polis, a new form of social and political organization in history in which the ability to defend the community united with an ancient conception of justice into a new kind of unity that broke with the past and thereby combined the advantages of the emotional closeness and solidarity of traditional tribal life with the reflective and economic advantages of an urban life’.

What we have developing is an idea of freedom.

For the Greeks, what made someone free was self-sufficiency – that they weren’t under the sway of others, that they had the means to make decisions and live by their own means, own desires, and that, in Aristotle’s phrase, a person was a ‘law unto himself’. He continued that, ‘it is the mark of a free man not to live at another’s beck and call’. Freedom meant not being compelled, it meant to be self-directing, and crucially, it meant not being a slave.

But women and slaves were excluded. The community had ultimate authority over the individual. The Greek polis and its face-to-face direct democracy struggled to grow.

Benjamin Constant wrote, ‘if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community’.

In some ways, Rome expanded on Greece’s idea and managed to grow by granting citizenship to many of the areas it conquered, but ultimately ruling was left to the aristocracy, senate, and emperor.

However, Pinkard writes that, ‘Once the Greeks had put freedom on the map as a way of thinking about justice, there was a push toward justice as equality and as the mutual recognition of the freedom of all, an actualization of the ideal of each being “his or her own person”’.

If we acknowledge that political liberty – the right to contribute to and be part of the political process, to have rights – is an important part of liberty, then it must be true to say that the so-called ‘dark ages’ – between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the Renaissance in the 15th, are a regression.

Historians broadly no longer use the term ‘dark ages’, using the Middle Ages instead, with many pointing to achievements in architecture, agriculture, mining, and more.

Nevertheless, monarchism, absolutism, even the Catholicism of the period, don’t fit well under our broad idea of liberty.

In forms of organisation like monarchy and the medieval church, the right to act, move, worship freely, to contribute towards the decisions that affect your life, are quite clearly restricted in important ways. Social positions are carefully orchestrated from above. Different rights, powers, and privileges are distributed depending on one’s standing and social position. Economic activity, religious freedom, education, and so on, is, or least can always in principle be, commanded from above.

We should look briefly then at four interrelated moments: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, an influx of migrants into Europe led to the discovery of many ancient Greek texts on everything from music and art to politics and philosophy. The resulting Renaissance – impossible without the printing press, invented in 1436 – led to a flourishing of commentary on old ideas and new ideas across the continent.

The ‘discovery’ of America by Europeans in 1492 also revolutionised attitudes of many Europeans – that the world was bigger than assumed, there were more peoples, ideas, possibilities than had been long assumed. It also proved the usefulness of technology – the compass and ship building, in particular.

The Reformation would not have been the same without the Renaissance. The German priest Martin Luther’s rejection of the Pope’s supreme authority set off the reformation across Europe in 1517, encouraging Christians to read the Bible themselves, despite the church forbidding it. No single person or group should have a monopoly on interpreting god’s will.

Protestantism was important because it began to democratise the interpretation of morals and ethics and spirituality. Similarly, the Treaty of Westphalia, signed after the fighting between Catholics and Protestants during the Thirty Years’ War, contained the seeds of the modern idea of the sovereignty of nations, that each nation has the right to determine its own laws, its own course of action. That each, to go back to Aristotle’s phrase, was a ‘law unto himself’.

The Scientific Revolution was happening at around the same time, and by 1700 the world looked very different to how it did in 1400.

Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around expanded the universe in people’s minds, made the earth just another celestial body, refuted biblical texts, and legitimised the further study of the physical universe. Galileo and Newton revolutionised and formalised the laws of motion and physics, and many began proving that these principles could be applied to innovation through projects like navigational instruments, canal building, architecture, and road improvement. Francis Bacon argued that an inductive method should be used – the careful observation of the world.

All of this led to an interest in and improvement of instruments like the barometer, the telescope, the microscope, the compass, cartography, medical instruments, and on to the steam engine, electricity, and modern engineering.

Paul Hazard places the Enlightenment’s focus on reason as central: ‘Its essence was to examine; and its first charge was to take on the mysterious, the unexplained, the obscure, in order to project its light out into the world. The world was full of errors, created by the deceitful powers of the soul, vouchsafed by authorities beyond control, spread by preference for credulity and laziness, accumulated and strengthened through the force of time’.

Pinkard says that, ‘the major turning point in world history has to do with the advantages gained by modern Europeans who have come to comprehend the “eternal justice” of their world as consisting in a kind of commitment to the equal freedom of all’.

 The Enlightenment, according to many, may have been contradictory, inadequate, misguided – the idea of equal freedom of all conveniently not being applied to colonies, slaves, women, the proletariat – but the question is, despite it taking a painfully slow amount of time, how the nascent animating principles of freedom, justice, equal freedom, that slowly unfolded, complexified, became more forceful, more convincing, more nuanced, from the ancient Greeks, through to the reformation, the scientific revolution, and the enlightenment, and on to things like Marxism, anarchism, decolonisation, human rights, and the debates about freedom and justice today? Is it ideas? Is it economics? Is it innovation? Or is it something else?

I think it’s worth pausing here to reflect on a problem, though. This a common Eurocentric story. And, as we discussed in the Dark Side of History, the expansion of liberties for some led to the domination of others.

I’m not suggesting a simple triumphalist narrative, and there is much to include that traditionally isn’t – the Islamic Golden Age, the prosperity of the Mughal Empire, science leading to pollution as much as new tools.

Furthermore, it is much easier to measure something as distinct as deathrates and violence than it is to measure liberty – what someone sees as liberty varies so much across the world. As we move into the modern era, everywhere, the different methods, technologies, political solutions, languages we have developed for choosing freely to do things has expanded exponentially. So let’s return to our initial question: what is liberty?

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes described some places as having ‘more’ or ‘less’ liberty. Friedrich Hayek said that the ‘poor in a competitive society’ are ‘much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society’. John Somerville said during the Cold War that in the communist world there was more freedom from the power of private money and periodic unemployment.

A brief look at the history of the concept shows the difficulty in agreeing on what liberty means – whether it can be measured like height or weight.

In his book A Measure of Freedom, philosopher Ian Carter writes that, ‘freedom is the absence of preventing conditions on agents’ possible actions’.

Those ‘preventing conditions’ can be many –  we might be physically prevented, coerced or threatened, unable because of a lack of education or resources – but the broad point is that a measure of freedom is the availability of choices.

You might not be free to climb a mountain if you are incapable, but a better society, I’d argue, is the one that, if that is your choice out of many, you’ll have easier access to the resources, education, time, and energy to do so.

The same can be applied to jobs, health, innovation, cooking, art, religion, travel, politics – a good measure of freedom is one that should be applicable to anything. One that has broad access to scientific research is an improvement on one that doesn’t, one that has the widest availability of ingredients is an improvement on the one that doesn’t, the easiest access to healthcare, etc.

Moving into the 19th century, the new scientific, enlightenment, liberal, rights-based order was becoming dominant throughout Europe. But especially towards the end of the century contradictions began to appear. Was it really capitalism that was responsible for progress? Could capitalism be made more ethical? Could rational state organisation better direct the innovations of science and industry? Could empires be overthrown?

The problem, then and now, is the difficulty in agreeing on the causes of liberty. If we say science – or at least some if it, like medicine, tools, architecture – has been fundamental in improving the lives of most people, then the focus should be to discover, protect, and augment the conditions that led to its rise and proliferation.

Historians of the Scientific Revolution emphasise the activity of academies, collaboration, empiricism, on new ways of reporting experiments as if the reader could witness them – the start of ‘peer review’, the printing press, the availability of information – but the precise conditions are always difficult to agree on.

Another example of this problem comes from the study of the decline of violence. It’s mostly agreed now that there was a decline in homicide and violent crime from the end of the Middle Ages through, roughly speaking, to today. Some – like historian Pieter Spierenburg argue that the cause of this was the monopolisation of state power. As monarchs became more secure and consolidated their authority, the royal court became a politer and more ‘civilised’ place as lords had to jostle for favour, and the monarch was able to capitalise on their power by being more intolerant of volatility. Others have pointed to the rise of commerce and the need for more ‘civil’ interaction between people to make one’s way in life.

On the other hand, the historian Mark Mazower argues that this state monopolisation of power led to the death toll of the two world wars, the Holocaust, and nuclear bombs in the twentieth century, contradicting the story of civil progress.

The point, again, is that the causes of any type of progress are always difficult to identify: just because a monarch imposed order where elite violence would have previously gone unpunished, say, that doesn’t necessarily mean the premise, ‘absolute monarchy causes less violence’, is universally true and so we should support absolute monarchy. This is an error in attribution.

Steven Pinker, who relies heavily on these sorts of arguments in his The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, falls into this trap.

Historian Gregory Hanlon notes that while Pinker is correct to ‘underline the vertiginous drop in violence since the end of the middle ages’, he is also prone to ‘wild exaggeration, hyperbole, junk statistics and reference to fiction as if it were fact’, and that he has, ‘exaggerated, often outrageously, the contrast between then and now’.

And in a particularly damning critique in the introduction to a special issue of History & Theory looking at Pinker’s work, the authors write: ‘the overall verdict is that Pinker’s thesis, for all the stimulus it may have given to discussions around violence, is seriously, if not fatally, flawed. The problems that come up time and again are: the failure to genuinely engage with historical methodologies; the unquestioning use of dubious sources; the tendency to exaggerate the violence of the past in order to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the modern era; the creation of a number of straw men, which Pinker then goes on to debunk; and its extraordinarily Western-centric, not to say Whiggish, view of the world’.

Any attempt to make sense of history requires understanding multiple disciplines, has unavoidable ideological biases, and quickly gets very complicated.

That doesn’t mean we should give up – to discern a drop in violence and to roughly identify some causes, to know what encourages scientific discovery, to discern the conditions that have led to  increases in democracy, to know what protects against totalitarianism, to be able to understand, however imperfectly, many other questions like these, is pretty good progress enough, but history is obviously not a story of easy-to-understand simple progress. We try things, get things wrong, give power to the wrong people, go down wrong turnings, we’re prone to accidents and the misuse of ideas, we forget or lose things, new problems develop, freedoms for some lead to catastrophe for others.

This is why Hegel said that the owl Minerva flies at dusk – only in retrospect, as we try and make some sense out of what’s happened.

In 1854 the physician John Snow mapped the houses hit by a cholera outbreak in London. He discovered that the cases centred around one water pump. Snow’s discovery was a huge breakthrough in the prevention of communicable diseases, proving that cholera was not airborne as people thought, but was caught from contaminated water. It led to an unprecedented move towards a focus on sanitation, sewage works, clean water and toilets, and in doing saved countless lives.

Snow looked at the causes of something in the past to make conclusions about how to prevent it in the future. It was this tradition that Alexander Fleming was working in, and one that led to a vast range of advances in health.

History is a scientific discipline. It’s different to, say, physics, but it’s still the study of objects – diaries, letters, newspapers, memos, images – to create an accurate picture of the past – it can be as close as possible to object-ive. And it can still be an attempt to make generalisable patterns from a set of observations. It’s much more open to interpretation than many other disciplines – to find the causes of poverty, the causes of affluence, of happiness – and it’s much more difficult to apply, because we’re not germs or rocks – we respond. But historians have avoided making strong claims about the use of history for policy, politics, thinking about the future, and I think that’s a mistake. We should still use history to understand the likely outcome of scenarios and conditions, to be able to predict what works and what doesn’t.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust many argued it was grotesque to talk about progress, about Hegel, about the cunning of reason. It wasn’t to be made sense of – the unpredictable evil of it disproved progress, disproved an interested benevolent god, disproved the natural goodness of man, disproved a lot things. It left a hole in our human nature.

But if Hegel was right about progress, the idea of the ‘cunning of reason’ is not that the Holocaust was some cunning way of enticing progress, but a horrific veering off from reason that demands instead a reasonable response – how might we avoid something like it happening again?

And since then, there has been a lot of good research on why genocide happens – I’ve explored some of it in this video – research that helps us see the causes and try to institutionalise and culturalise their avoidance, to create inoculations against them in the same way we avoid cholera.

As our ability to influence the world around us as a species grows, the tripwires that we lay become all the more threatening, the stakes are higher; as we become more powerful we become more dangerous to each other. With AI, the Anthropocene, nuclear weapons, the large levers of state power, big capital, we live in a crucial moment, and we must protect against our worse impulses and incentivise our best, or we could, quite easily, trip up and wipe ourselves out. I think all of those threats are not hyperbole, they are very real.

But if we look to how people in the past have capitalised on the possibility for liberty, we have to be cautiously but actively optimistic. I think when we look at the Dark Side and the Progress in history, the word that comes to mind is bittersweet.

Bibliography

Terry Pinkard , Does History Make Sense,

Matthew White, Great Big Book of Horrible Things

Justin Smith, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

Beard, American Nervousness

Mark Jackson, the Age of Stress

Allan V Horwitz, Anxiety: A Short History

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England: 1750-1900, 3rd ed., Harlow: Pearson, 2005

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V.A.C. Gatrell, Crime, Authority and the Policeman State

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David Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body

Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics

David Wooton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

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Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts

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Philip Dwyer, Violence & Its Histories: Meanings, Methods, Problems

LINKLATER, ANDREW, and STEPHEN MENNELL. “NORBERT ELIAS, THE CIVILIZING PROCESS: SOCIOGENETIC AND PSYCHOGENETIC INVESTIGATIONS—AN OVERVIEW AND ASSESSMENT.” History and Theory

Gregory Hanlon, The Decline of Violence in the West: From Cultural to Post-Cultural History

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https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/

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Ian Carter, A Measure of Freedom

The post The Light Side of History appeared first on Then & Now.

It’s a history that attempts to pin people down, categorise and classify them, hold them in place, bar and banish them, despite what science is increasingly showing us: migration is the norm. Immobility is abnormal.

Liberalism – the assumptions of which many of us live under – prioritises individual freedom, of thought, of expression, of movement.

But at the same time we think of migration – which is free movement – as abnormal.

We even mythologise a sedentary past – of villages, farmers, peasants, ‘tied to the land’, living and dying in the place where they’re from.

Yet in the 17th century, around 65% left their home parish at some point in their lives.

We have what philosopher Alex Sager calls a ‘sedentary bias’.

The migrant is presented as a problem, alien, outsider, yet we move around our own countries – commuting, deciding to live elsewhere, holidaying, visiting relatives, making work trips – without thinking it’s in any way strange.

We are, as a species, mobile, nomadic, built to move.

In 2020, you could count 280 million migrants and each year around a billion tourists. And the numbers are increasing.

But so are the objects, ideas, and phenomenon – borders, passports, guards, barbed wire, nationalist rhetoric – that attempt to pin us in our place.

Can we find a genealogy of our attitudes? A history of our present problem? To do so, we might start with the 18th century biologist Carl Linnaeus.

Linnaeus was born in Sweden in 1707 during a period when Europeans had been exploring the globe and returning with stories of strange places, peoples, and creatures. Some – like Arnoldus Montanus – wrote and illustrated books about these bizarre alien lands without ever leaving the comfort of home. Zoos, museums, galleries, and menageries exhibited these incredible new foreign curiosities.

Linnaeus – always fascinated by the natural world – wanted to contribute to scientific understanding of the planet’s great biodiversity.

He came up with a system of simple categorisation – a taxonomy.

He’d give each species two names in Latin. The first a general category, the second a specific one.

Linnaeus divided species into classes, genus, species, depending on a number of characteristics including where they were found.

He published his revolutionary book Systema Naturae in 1735.

But when it came to humans, Linnaeus faced a problem. How would the different races of humans fit into his taxonomy?

The Bible told us that all humans were created by God and descended from Adam and Eve. They must be the same.

But the prevailing consensus at the time was that non-European peoples were primitive, savage, and biologically different.

Voltaire had written that, ‘the Negro race is a species of men as different to ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds’.

Linnaeus had a rival.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was also a naturalist.

In opposition to Linnaeus, though, De Buffon believed that instead of adhering to strict categories, nature was dynamic, changing, in flux.

He thought humans had migrated and adapted to local conditions as they moved around the planet.

Like almost everyone at the time, De Buffon still believed in a hierarchy. The farther from the Garden of Eden humans had moved, he thought, the more their biology degenerated.

He published his own book Histoire Naturelle in 1749. It was a Europe-wide success.

But Linnaeus’ celebrity grew.

Species couldn’t degenerate that much, he retorted to de Buffon. It was blasphemy. Species – including humans – were born, lived, existed, precisely where god had intended them to.

‘It is impossible’, Linnaeus wrote, ‘that anything which has ever been established by the all-wise Creator can ever disappear’.

By the 10th edition of Systema Naturae Linnaeus would classify 8000 plants and 4000 animals, including several races of humans:

Homo troglodytes, from the Antartic, can eat raw flesh.

Homo caudatus, of Borneo and Nicobar, had tails.

Homo monstrosus, from lapland, included giants and dwarfs.

Homo sapiens europaeus were ‘white, serious, and strong’, ‘active, very smart, inventive’.

Homo apeins asiaticus were ‘yellow, melancholy, greedy’.

Homo sapiens americanus were ‘ill-tempered’ and ‘obstinate’.

And homo sapiens afer, from Africa, were impassive, lazy, crafty. Slow, foolish, and ruled by caprice.

The idea of these biological distinctions between races dominated European science, developing across the 19th century into a new field: race science.

This 10th edition of Systema Naturae was a triumph and became accepted over de Buffon’s interpretation of nature. Louis XV ordered it official.

Rousseau said he knew of no greater man on earth.

After Darwin published On the Origin of Species, he argued that environmental differences had resulted in adaptions seen in humans.

But race scientists argued that there were clear fundamental biological difference. Darwin quickly became side-lined and descended into despair. He had episodes of hysterical crying. As he lost his influence many scientists who adopted the subspecies view believed him to be crazy and ignorant.

How could single species travel so far around the planet? How could ancient Israelites have reached the Pacific Islands?

These were clearly separate biological races.

Darwin performed experiments submerging seeds in water to see if they could survive long journeys, and getting fish and birds to eat them, retrieving them from their droppings, and seeing if they still germinated.

But the human subspecies view won the day. The Natural History Museum in London displayed models of different human species. The Bronx Zoo had a similar display on the ‘Races of Man’. They kept a man from Congo – Ota Benga – in the monkey house where visitors watched him play. He was only released in 1906.

It was clear to all that god and science had intended a separate, distinct, biological hierarchy of man.

The separation of humans into a hierarchy of  species almost logically and naturally led to a global – or at least Western – concern: degeneration, the mixing of genes, the dilution of hereditary superiority.

Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, led a new movement: eugenics. Policy makers, he argued, should focus not on education or investment but on breeding good, pure citizens.

Through the Galton Society, scientists warned of the impact of mass-migration, of racial contamination.

Many US states banned interracial sex and marriage in the late nineteenth century.

Biologist Charles Davenport warned that Americans could ‘rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art’,  and ‘more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality’, if races mixed.

President Coolidge wrote about the ‘biological laws’ that ‘tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend’. America, he declared after signing a bill to restrict immigration, must be kept American.

University courses on eugenics skyrocketed. Passports and identification documents became more common.

The US closed its borders to migrants for the first time in its history. Immigrants had to take intelligence tests at Ellis Island.

Immigration into the States declined from around 800,000 a year in 1921 to 100,000 after 1929. Ellis Island closed in 1954.

Even ships of refugees fleeing from the Nazis were turned back. One ship – the St Louis – reached Florida and was sent back to Europe. 254 of its passengers died in the Holocaust.

Nazis, most obsessed with purity, even advocated for the destruction of foreign plants in Germans’ gardens. Himmler issued landscaping rules that banned any non-native species.

A popular BBC series and 1958 book The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants warned about protecting domestic species against invading alien ones.

The foundation of all of this – the belief in biological distinction – would persist for centuries. When, after the Holocaust, the UN released a statement that condemned racial distinctions, leading scientists protested.

Leading British scientist, W.C. Osman Hill wrote, ‘I need but mention the well-known musical attributes of the Negroids and the mathematical ability of some Indian races’.

Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley also pointed to the ‘rhythm-loving Negro temperament’.

83 of 106 anthropologists refused to sign the UN statement.

In 2018 the US Citizenship and Immigration Services changed its mission statement from ‘Fulfilling America’s promise as a nation of immigrants’ to ‘securing the homeland’.

The twentieth century might be looked back on as the century we rediscovered movement. Advances in technology led to an almost unbelievable expansion of railways, roads, airports, and even space travel.

In art, the impressionists like van Gogh had already tried to bring back movement into still images.

Film and radio developed.

Philosophers like Deleuze brought the idea of change, movement, dynamism back into a field he thought had become too static, too representational.

But Linnaeus’ belief that species were native to specific locations continued throughout the twentieth century. No-one believed that humans – let alone many animals – could have dispersed so far and wide across the globe. Creatures couldn’t migrate from Africa to the Pacific Islands. They couldn’t swim thousands of miles. Species had to have evolved separately.

It took technology only invented in the late twentieth century – GPS and modern DNA analysis in particular – to discover a fact that shocked scientists: around half of all species aren’t sedentary, they’re on the move.

And it’s only in the last couple of decades that the real extent of this discovery is becoming clearer.

Animals migrations are incredibly difficult to study. Even harder to understand is our prehistoric past. Tracking technology was heavy, expensive, and unable to be used at long distances. Solar-powered GPS tags changed this.

Suddenly, researchers have been tracking migrations on a scale no one ever suspected. 70,000 km migrations of terns. Zebras walking over 500km, crocodiles swimming 200 miles out to sea, dragonflies flying hundreds of kilometres a day. Everything from sharks to wolves migrating thousands of miles.

A new field of study – movement ecology – rapidly developed.

This video from Movebank logs the movement of 8000 animals fitted with GPS tags: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUKh0fr1Od8&ab_channel=Movebank

Linnaeus’s ideas about using the geographic location in a species’ name has become, for the first time, unreliable. The natural world is much more fluid than we ever realised.

Only in the 1980s did modern DNA analysis finally prove that homo sapiens were one species with a common ancestor. In 2000, the Human Genome Project found that differences between us accounted for about 0.1% of our gene sequence.

As journalist Sonia Shah points out, migration is so common that it’s pointless asking why people migrate, but rather, we should ask why anyone stays in the same place.

She writes ‘migration is encoded in our bodies, just as it is in wild species’. It’s a force of nature, a fact of life, built into biology itself.

Yet despite this, we’re increasingly trying to stop it, thinking of humans as naturally sedentary rather than biologically dynamic.

In 1945 there were just five border walls in the world.

By 1991, there were still only 19.

In 2016 there were 70.

North Korea encages its people. India fences itself off from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Tunisia has built trenches filled with water along its border with Libya. In Hungary, prisoners were used to build a fence along its border with Croatia. Israel uses razor wire, sensors, and infrared cameras. Britain and France have increased the fencing at the channel tunnel. And Trump’s border wall lengthened the US-Mexico barrier by almost 500 miles.

However, walls, as Wendy Brown has argued, are more effective as political theatre and rhetoric than preventing the flow of migration. Instead, they just send migrants through different routes, they create an underground smuggler economy which increases crime, and ultimately make migrant routes more dangerous.

And, of course, they impose an artificial order on what – as we’ve seen – is a natural global phenomenon found in every species.

Our nationalist bias, our sedentary bias, makes these things appear natural, the way the world is, the way it has to be, while often obscuring the complexity of borders as a phenomenon.

They separate families, cut off jobs, and always imply the violence needed to defend them.

For a rich person, borders often signify excitement, adventure, holiday, vacation. For poor countries a border means something entirely different: a prison, a limit, an obstacle.

Jonathan Moses has argued that we could even draw an analogy between international borders and apartheid.  Moses asks, ‘Why is the Dane’s advantage over the Somalian legitimate (and protected by international law), while the Afrikaner’s advantage over the Xosi was not?’

For millennia, migration was a part of human life, all life. Slow but steady. Science and technology have had a strange effect on that history. Inductive science – the careful study of the world – has tended, historically, to collect evidence in a snapshot, at a specific point in time, and then announces that it has found a universal truth. It finds people where they are, and presumes that’s where they belong. And just as scientific racism pinned everyone down, technology sped everyone up, leading to a contradiction that both builds walls and encourages more movement.

And this contradiction is only going to become more pronounced.

Between 2008 and 2014, floods, storms, earthquakes, and other disasters displaced 26 million people around the world. In 2015 alone, 15 million people were forced to flee wars. In that year, a million of them migrated across the Mediterranean.

When we look at these people, we tend to take the ‘states’ that they are moving between, moving through, as the natural unit of analysis. That those people are misfits or aliens, in or out of a container.

We tend to take the state as the natural unit of analysis.

But as Ulrich Beck has noted, as we become more global, as the world becomes quicker and more connected, ‘the unity of national state and national society comes unstuck; new relations of power and competition, conflict and intersection, take shape between, on the one hand, national states and actors, and on the other hand, transnational actors, identities, social spaces, situations and processes’.

Scientific racism, human taxonomy, the state, border walls, guards, passports, global inequality, all hide the fact that not only are we all migrants in our bones, but that increasingly, we are globalised ones, with many more options and desires than ever before. It’s not only the possibility of more global displacement from disasters, wars, poverty, or climate change, but more as we all become more mobile, dynamic, international.

We should focus on ways not just to facilitate this, but to encourage it, to make it more efficient, easier, more dynamic.

The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, for example, encourages international support to do just this.

We all know that we want to move around the world as we wish – for work, for vacation, to see family – but we rarely reflect on the contradiction and injustice that makes this possible for many of us but impossible for many others.

As centuries of naïve and crude pseudoscience get refuted, as we rediscover movement, mobility, and our migrant impulse, should we not be trying not to build walls, but to realise that we’re all on the move.

Sources

Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration

Alex Sager, Towards a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/dec/18/tucker-carlson-immigrants-poorer-dirtier-advertisers-pull-out

The post How Immigrants Became ‘Bad’ appeared first on Then & Now.

Because, in an increasingly globalised world, an increasingly unequal world, a world that could become even more inhospitable in parts, a world getting closer to rather than farther from World War Three, understanding this issue is integral to being able to have a progressive plan to tackle a likely-to-continue increase in global migration. In 2015, at the height of the ‘migrant crisis’ during the Syrian civil war, over a million asylum- seekers came to Europe. In 2013 almost 400 died in one incident, when a boat sank off the Italian coast.

And it’s clear – from the election of Trump on the promise of a border wall – or Britain leaving the EU, or Marine le Pen continuing to do well in France, Orban in Hungary, it’s clear from poll after poll – that the public wants these numbers reduced, and that we don’t have a very good progressive narrative that grapples with the topic. I think we need one.

We can see evidence of this in polling. In Britain, 77% are in favour of reducing immigration by a lot or a little. Most think the costs of immigration outweigh the benefits. 50-70% of respondents across most Western countries report being concerned about illegal immigration.

Canadians are outliers, most having a positive view on immigration – the Canadian government has pursued a policy of multiculturalism for decades.

So, I want to try and understand where we are, what the data says, and be honest about the evidence. I’ll keep it simple but there’s a link to the sources below, organised into categories. I’ll likely continue expanding on it in the future. And in this case, I tried to favour empirical studies and polling over theory, philosophy, and so on, although I have included some.

Even looking at at least a hundred studies I can only scratch the surface, and we have to bear in mind the vast contextual differences between countries. The US, with a long border with Mexico, is of course going to be different to the UK – an island nation – or Greece – on the southern EU border – or Hungary – a country landlocked and surrounded by other countries. I’ll try and draw on a cross-section. So with that in mind, let’s get started and see what we can learn.

You often see the claim that because there’s an increase in the supply of labour and therefore more competition for jobs, immigration lowers the wages of natives.

Here’s what I found. It’s true that immigration, sometimes, has a very ‘small impact’ on wages of low wage workers or those who didn’t complete high school. But the evidence is minimal and many studies don’t find this at all.

For example, this study of the UK concluded that, ‘we find that immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution, but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution. The overall wage effect of immigration is slightly positive’. This study finds roughly the same. And this study found that the effect of that wage decrease was actually mostly on immigrants already in the country and that there was no effect on ‘native-born’ workers.

This study in Australia finds that, ‘While sparse, the evidence generally indicates that Australians’ wages are not adversely affected by immigration on average’.

And one study of OECD countries – that’s higher income countries – in the 1990s found that, ‘immigration had a positive effect on the wages of less educated natives and it increased or left unchanged the average native wages’. And a 2018 meta-analysis of 12 studies found that ‘immigration has little or no impact on average employment or unemployment of existing workers. Second, that where an impact is found it tends to be concentrated among certain groups – i.e. a negative effect for those with lower education and a positive effect for those with higher levels of education’.

There are also studies of unemployment. One study of OECD countries found that, ‘While no significant long-run impact is found in any case, we find that immigration may have a temporary impact on natives’ unemployment’. But the amount was a ‘negligible’: 0.02%.

One point of interest for studies is the Mariel Boatlift, which I mentioned in the last video on Tucker Carlson. It’s useful because, while a singular event and not representative of migration in general, it does provide the data for an experiment as to what happens when a large group of migrants – in this 125,000 – settle quickly in one area, in this case Miami. Initially, several studies concluded that the effect was negligible or none.

However, recently Harvard economist George Borjas has argued that through the 1980s, wages in Miami for those who did not complete high school was 10-30% lower than elsewhere. But it’s important to note that while Borjas is a respected economist, this finding has been controversial and disputed by many others.

Looking at the boatlift, this 2017 study concludes that ‘As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small, and fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high school’.

Now, Borjas is well-known for making the case that immigration benefits some natives while hurting others – particularly benefiting higher earners while hurting lower. But in one review of his central books, Immigration Economics, the reviewers say, ‘After reading Immigration Economics, one begins to wonder why countries ever decide to have any immigrants, and why many countries continue to allow relatively large inflows of immigrants. Are immigration policies manipulated by an elite who benefit from these policies at the expense of others? Or is the balance of benefits versus costs ‐‐ even for native workers who are most directly in competition with immigrants ‐‐ more positive than one might be led to believe from reading Borjas’ latest book? We, and many other economists, come down on the latter side’.

So it seems like the evidence is ambiguous, but it seems at least very possible that migration in large numbers could effect the wages of lower earners but likely by a very small amount. Rather than reject immigration, the question should become, what could be done about it? But this is a question I didn’t see raised much in the literature. Okay, what about the economy more broadly?

This study found that between 1980 and 2000, each immigrant added 1.2 jobs to the economy. That’s because each new person needs more food, housing, goods, and services, and so increases demand and jobs.

But one common claim is that immigrants are a burden on welfare states. Some studies say non-EU immigrants to the UK cost more in spending than they contribute in taxes – i.e. they have taken more from the state in welfare, tax credits, and other cost and so on than they’ve paid in taxes. Although this 2014 UCL study looked at immigrants who had lived in the UK since 2000 and found they put in 3% more than they took out. And overall, migrants from all countries taken together put in much more than they take out, and one Warwick university study found migrants in the top 1% of earners contributed 8% of total income tax.

On top of that, the Office for Budget Responsibility in the UK has forecasted that more migration leads to more tax receipts over time.

Studies like this vary wildly from country to country. This meta-analysis, for example, is all over the place – it says the evidence is mixed and dependent on context. And when it comes to non-EU migrants the UK is an outlier. The evidence that migrants pay in more than they take out is stronger in other countries, including Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

Another study looked at several Western European countries between 1985 and 2015 and found that, ‘inflows of asylum seekers do not deteriorate host countries’ economic performance or fiscal balance because the increase in public spending induced by asylum seekers is more than compensated for by an increase in tax revenues net of transfers. As asylum seekers become permanent residents, their macroeconomic impacts become positive’.

And this 2021 study looked at 28,000 Ugandan Asians who came to the UK in the late 1960s. They say there is little research on medium term outcomes of refugees, and that, ‘We show that their outcomes are at least as good as the population average, with the younger cohort performing better, and better than for economic migrants of the same ethnicity’.

So again, overall the data is mixed, but I’d say on balance migration is likely a net positive. But we could also look at more the social and cultural economic impact – like entrepreneurship and qualifications.

How do immigrants fair on the more sociocultural end? Well, in the US immigrants are less likely to have finished high school than their native born counterparts, but are also more likely to have a degree. Immigrants are also over-represented in management and research positions of top companies. One survey of fifty of the top companies in the US found that half of them were founded by an immigrants and three quarters had immigrants in top management and research positions.

Many studies find that migrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than natives. One study found they were almost twice as likely than natives to be entrepreneurs in the US. Another study concluded that ‘7.25 percent of immigrants were entrepreneurs, compared with about 4 percent of native-born individuals’. 30% of new entrepreneurs in the US are immigrants. 76% of the top new patents had an author that was foreign born. This study found that ‘immigrants patent at double the native rate, due to their disproportionately holding science and engineering degrees’.

So it seems that immigrants are more entrepreneurial, innovate more, tend towards science and engineering, are represented in top management positions, and on a net basis it’s likely that they add to the economy and the government balance. What’s next?

Okay, we’ll breeze through crime because the evidence is pretty clear. This study concludes that in England and Wales, ‘Although there is a public sentiment that immigrants are more involved in criminal activities than natives, the empirical results of this paper lead to different conclusions’.

This meta-study found that ‘Immigrants facing poor labor market opportunities are more likely to commit property crimes’, however, ‘There is no evidence that immigration has caused a crime problem across countries’, and, ‘Immigrants with good labor market opportunities appear no more likely to commit crime than similar natives’. It also found legalising the status of immigration reduces the likelihood of crime.

This review of 20th century studies in the US context found that, ‘Contrary to the predictions of classic criminological theories and popular stereotypes, immigration generally does not increase crime and often suppresses it’.

This study of Texas finds that, ‘contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years’.

In France, Muslims are disproportionately represented in the prison population – 40-50% of the prison population when about 10% of the population are Muslim. But with large scale migration from post-colonial Algeria this is likely to be a result of Muslim men being disproportionately raised in poverty and so a socioeconomic fact rather than a cultural one.

But this shouldn’t be ignored. Neither should the issues around religious fundamentalist terrorism – although statistically you’re more likely to be crushed by your furniture or die in car crash, I just don’t want anyone to accuse me of sidestepping the issue.

What’s clear, though, is that property crime is more likely to be committed by desperate people, no matter where they’re from, and is actually less likely to be committed by immigrants. So moving on…

Definitions of multiculturalism are difficult to agree upon. One researcher calls the literature ‘decidedly messy’. Multicultural can mean a simple demographic fact – multiple cultures in one country – it can mean a philosophy about equality of cultures, or a philosophy of separate cultures living next to one another.

In 2010, Angela Merkel famously remarked that multiculturalism had ‘utterly failed’. And one report of 47 countries in the EU declared that, ‘what had until recently been a preferred policy approach, conveyed in shorthand as ‘multiculturalism’, has been found inadequate’.

Does multiculturism mean we should be blind to cultural differences or make allowances for cultural differences? Does it mean accepting different legal or cultural standards?  Much of the literature revolves around whether multiculturalism can exist as what the British philosopher Lord Parekh called in Britain a “community of communities”, or whether this vision has led to what UK prime minister David Cameron called ‘parallel lives’.

In the UK, for example, Jewish and Islamic communities are exempt from the requirement to stun animals before slaughtering them, Sikhs don’t have to wear helmets and are exempt from the ban on carrying knives in public.

In some parts of London, around 70% of primary school kids speak English as a second language.

One question that arises is whether multiculturalism is at odds with social cohesion. What level of integration is appropriate or desirable? There are several ways you can study this: residential segregation, overrepresentation in the prison population, identification with national identity, studying friendship circles, office socialising, and so on.

For example, 90% of first generation immigrants in UK have spouses of the same ethnicity. Membership of the same clubs, in-group friendships, and in-group places of worship are also high.

Many Asian groups – particularly Pakistani and Bangladeshi – continue to have high levels of in-group marriage and friendship in the second generation.

But one study found that at least half of immigrants’ acquaintances ‘come from members of the majority population, a finding which supports the existence of these important ‘bridging’ relationships’. But its also true that, ‘Muslims who follow religious rules and practices tend to have fewer majority acquaintances’.

In Canada and the US, it’s been found that self-reported importance of ethnicity decreases in second generation immigrants, while identification with nation increases.

One consistent finding is that minorities ‘overwhelmingly support maintenance of their own ethnic customs and traditions alongside equally striking support for mixing and integrating’.

Another interesting finding is the benefit of being bicultural. This study finds that, ‘Bicultural individuals show better psychological adjustment, as measured by higher life satisfaction and self-esteem, and lower alienation, anxiety, depression, and loneliness’.

And a meta study of 51 other studies found that biculturalism is ‘positively correlated with a range of behavioral outcomes, such as academic achievement, career success, and reduced delinquency’.

Another meta-analysis of 83 studies finds bicultural individuals are better adjusted than their monocultural neighbours.

‘cultural hybridity’ in the US also seems to correlate with socioeconomic success.

One move in the literature is from multiculturalism to the idea of interculturalism. The difference being that interculturalism promotes the idea of dialogue, mutual progress, and policies that try to counter segregation. For example, in Canada, research suggests that policies can help immigrants secure jobs, learn the language, can lead to higher incomes, and encourage paths to citizenship.

In all, though, there is little solid evidence that multiculturalism has ‘failed’.

As this review concludes, ‘the most important rationale for the political backlash against multicultural policies that they impede or hurt socio-political integration appears unfounded empirically’.

One area of research looks at Islam and multiculturalism in particular.

A 2016 poll, for example, revealed more than half of British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal. 39% said wives should always obey their husbands, compared to 5% of the whole population. 86% though have a strong sense of belonging to Britain.

24% want Sharia law, according to one poll, although it varies what sharia means. Another poll says 40% want sharia and only 22% oppose sharia.  One study says there are roughly 30-85 so-called Sharia councils in the UK that resolve disagreements, usually around marriage. One government review said, ‘From those who gave evidence to the review panel, no one disputed that sharia councils engage in practices which are discriminatory to women’.

Another poll found that only 37% of Muslims in the UK want to integrate ‘on most things’ but 40% wanted gender segregation in education.

It’s also true that in this context, ‘higher levels of education leads to higher support for democratic values’.

So to put it mildly, if you believe in gender and sexuality equality, freedom of speech, equality under the law, it’s certainly true there are challenges here. Let’s look at undocumented immigration.

Okay, the literature on this is vast so I’ll just touch on a few things that surprised me. It’s no revelation, for example that in many places we’re seeing an increase in illegal immigration and most countries the trend is towards stopping illegal immigration.

When it comes to illegal immigration, most people would probably have images of migrants crossing waterways on dinghies or climbing border fences. But almost half of undocumented migrants in the US came in legally then overstayed visas. Many were brought in as young children and don’t even find out they’re undocumented until they go to get jobs.

But the effect of increasing border patrol funding seems negligible – migrants just find other ways in. For example this study finds that, ‘From 1986 to 2008 the undocumented population of the United States grew from three million to 12 million persons, despite a five-fold increase in Border Patrol officers, a four-fold increase in hours spent patrolling the border, and a 20-fold increase in nominal funding’.

We also forget that being undocumented isn’t particularly appealing and so many don’t stay that long. In one study in Thailand, researchers found that in 61 out of 63 surveyed villages, ‘the proportion of overseas workers who voluntarily returned to Thailand was 95% or more’.

Another study in the Netherlands looked at the ‘psychological burden’ of being away from home – the more undocumented migrants stay, the more this increases.

According to one study, ‘more vigorous deportation policy advances the date of voluntary return’, which explains the motivation for the hostile environment policy here in the UK.

In fact, if you look at numbers from the UK, the majority seem to leave voluntarily, suggesting they only intend to stay for a short amount of time.

Undocumented migrants obviously find it more difficult to find jobs and contribute taxes. One study in the US found that, ‘Providing a pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. would increase their wages and spending power and, over 10 years, boost U.S. GDP by $1.2 trillion’.

And many empirical studies have also found that wages of legalised migrants improved after amnesty.

One impression I get from reading policy papers and editorial suggestions is that left wing parties have, to quote one paper, ‘struggled to convince the public that they had a grip on the issue’.

In the UK, it’s been empirically verified that many voters have changed political allegiances because of immigration, especially from Labour to Conservative.

Progressives, liberals, and left-wingers need to address what the John Smith Institute calls the public trust deficit. We need to use the facts presented above to craft a positive narrative that doesn’t shy away from the difficulties.

As we’ve seen, immigration, like all political topics, clearly has its challenges, but they all seem negligible, and part of the problems the host country already experiences. Governments that pursue multicultural policies and are proactive in making the positive case for immigration – particularly Canada, Australia, and Scotland – do much better when it comes to public support for immigration.

Scots, for example, tend to be more tolerant of asylum seekers in part because leadership prioritises PR campaigns that inform people of the benefits and takes control of the narrative. In the England, on the other hand, the narrative is dominated by the right wing tabloids.

Media exposure to negative narratives, have, of course, been found to affect voters’ preferences.

In the UK, when polled, people always think migration is much higher than it is. Immigrants make up 10% of France’s population and the number hasn’t increased in recent years – but respondents to polls continue to believe immigration is too high.

In the UK, there were 50,000 asylum applications in 2021 and 15,000 were granted.

700,000 are born in the UK each year. In 2021, 23,000 crossed the channel illegally in boats. 37 died.

I think, when looking at the evidence, these numbers should be easily accommodated – but rather than take up France’s offer of a UK asylum processing centre in France that would likely reduce the numbers crossing illegally, the British government refuses to take up the offer.

The UK has a labour shortage, an aging population, and a shortage of National Health Service workers, and 23% of doctors and almost half of nurses were born outside the UK. We should be welcoming people. There are also plenty of creative policy ideas that get overlooked.

Several studies look at ‘heartland’ visas for asylum seekers who are willing to settle in deprived areas or areas that are depopulating. Canada and Australia both do this.

Initiatives such as the United Nations’ Global Compact 5 for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration suggests a possible framework. The compact calls for countries to create more legal pathways for migrants in search of new livelihoods.

Canada receives around 250,000 immigrants a year and does very well. Australia’s economy is booming as it accepts more migrants – more than 30% of the population were born abroad.

So what do you think? Is there anything you think I’ve missed or left out? Let me know in the comments, take a look at the sources in the description yourself, and let’s work towards a progressive narrative for the future.

Sources

Wages & Unemployment

How immigrants affect jobs and wages, https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-labour-market-effects-of-immigration/

The Effect of Immigration along the Distribution of Wages, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/Cpapers/CDP_03_08.pdf

The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Wages: Evidence from Britain, https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-working-paper/2008/the-impact-of-immigration-on-occupational-wages-evidence-from-britain.aspx

THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION ON THE STRUCTURE OF WAGES: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM BRITAIN, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2011.01049.x

The unemployment impact of immigration in OECD countries, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0176268010000765

Immigration and Wage Growth: The Case of Australia, https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/confs/2019/pdf/christian-dustmann.pdf

The Labour Market Effects of Immigration and Emigration in OECD Countries, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12077

(12 study meta-analysis) EEA migration in the UK: Final report, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/741926/Final_EEA_report.PDF

The Enclave and the Entrants: Patterns of Ethnic Enterprise in Miami before and after Mariel , https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095716?origin=crossref

Mariel Boatlife, a Reappraisal, https://www.nber.org/papers/w21588

The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market , https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp016h440s46f

The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results, https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/170790

On the Macroeconomic and Welfare Effects of Illegal Immigration, https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15469/

Overall Economy

Are Immigrants a Shot in the Arm for the Local Economy?, https://www.nber.org/papers/w21123

Immigrants to the U.S. Create More Jobs than They Take, https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/immigrants-to-the-u-s-create-more-jobs-than-they-take

Immigration Economics: A Review, https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/card-peri-jel-april-6-2016.pdf

THE EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION ON THE UNITED STATES’ ECONOMY, The Effects of Immigration on the United States’ Economy — Penn Wharton Budget Model (upenn.edu)

Macroeconomic evidence suggests that asylum seekers are not a “burden” for Western European countries, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaq0883

Immigration Facts: The Positive Economic Impact of Immigration, https://www.fwd.us/news/immigration-facts-the-positive-economic-impact-of-immigration/

Immigrants Keep an Iowa Meatpacking Town Alive and Growing

, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/business/economy/storm-lake-iowa-immigrant-workers.html

Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 34, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 1967–1998, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaa078

The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the UK, https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-fiscal-impact-of-immigration-in-the-uk/

How immigrants affect public finances, https://fullfact.org/immigration/how-immigrants-affect-public-finances/

The fiscal impact of immigration A review of the evidence, https://odi.org/en/publications/the-fiscal-impact-of-immigration-a-review-of-the-evidence/

Christian Dustmann and Tommaso Frattini, “The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK”, Economic Journal, Vol.124, Issue 580, pages F593–F643, 2014.

Migrants responsible for UK’s growth of top incomes and taxes, https://www.ft.com/content/0e7aafcf-4e69-4124-9a43-027177d8a4b9

Cultural Impact

Pew Research Center, “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065: Views of Immigration’s Impact on U.S. Society Mixed,” September 2015, available at: http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2015/09/2015-09-28_modern-immigration-wave_REPORT.pdf.

Stuart Anderson, “Immigrant Founders and Key Personnel in America’s 50 Top Venture-Funded Companies,” NFAP Policy Brief (December 2011)

“Patent Pending: How Immigrants are Re-inventing the American Economy,” Report of the Partnership for a New American Economy, June 2012, available at: http://www.renewoureconomy.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/07/patent-pending.p

Hunt, Jennifer, and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle. 2010. “How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2 (2): 31-56.

Around the World, More Say Immigrants Are a Strength Than a Burden, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/03/14/around-the-world-more-say-immigrants-are-a-strength-than-a-burden/

Four in 10 Americans Still Highly Concerned About Illegal Immigration, https://news.gallup.com/poll/391820/four-americans-highly-concerned-illegal-immigration.aspx

National Trends in Startup Activity, 2017_Startup_Activity_National_Report_Final.indd (kauffman.org)

Papademetriou, DG, Somerville, W and Sumption, M Observations on the Social Mobility of Immigrants in the UK and the US (Sutton Trust, 2009)

Multiculturalism/Integration

Research on multiculturalism in Canada, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2013.09.005

John Biles, Meyer Burstein, and James Frideres, eds., Immigration and Integration in Canada in the Twenty-½rst Century

The Failure of British Multiculturalism: Lessons for Europe, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41274986

WRIGHT, M. and BLOEMRAAD, I. 2012 ‘Is there a trade-off between multiculturalism and socio-political integration? Policy regimes and immigrant incorporation in comparative perspective’, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 7795

Anthony Heath & Neli Demireva (2014) Has multiculturalism failed in Britain?, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37:1, 161-180, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.808754

The Environics Institute, “Survey of Muslims in Canada”, 2016, p. 9.

Saltanat Liebert , Mona H. Siddiqui & Carolin Goerzig (2020): Integration of Muslim Immigrants in Europe and North America: A Transatlantic Comparison, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, DOI: 10.1080/13602004.2020.1777663

Paul Statham & Jean Tillie (2016) Muslims in their European societies of settlement: a comparative agenda for empirical research on socio-cultural integration across countries and groups, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42:2, 177-196, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2015.1127637

Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence & Anecdote, https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2015/09/22/multiculturalism-in-canada-evidence-and-anecdote/#:~:text=Canada%20is%20one%20of%20the,immigration%20in%20the%20coming%20years.

Multiculturalism & Belonging, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/multiculturalism-immigration-support-white-population/

Intercultural dialogue: Living together as equals in dignity, https://www.coe.int/t/dg4/intercultural/source/white%20paper_final_revised_en.pdf

Berry, J. W. 2005 “Acculturation: Living Successfully in two Cultures.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 29(6):697–712

Bloemraad I, Wright M. “Utter Failure” or Unity out of Diversity? Debating and Evaluating Policies of Multiculturalism. International Migration Review. 2014;48(1_suppl):292-334. doi:10.1111/imre.12135

Policy and Politics

Scheve, K. F. and M. J. Slaughter (2001), “Labor Market Competition and Individual Preferences Over Immigration Policy”, Review of Economics and Statistics 83, 133–145.

Dustmann, C. and I. Preston (2007), “Racial and Economic Factors in Attitudes to Immigration”, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy 7, Article 62

Ford, R and Somerville, W Immigration and the 2010 Election (Prospect/Institute of Public Policy Research, 2010)

Understanding public attitudes to asylum seekers in Scotland, https://www.ippr.org/files/images/media/files/publication/2011/05/warm_welcome_1518.pdf

Migration: where next? Developing a new progressive immigration policy, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/migration-where-next-developing-a-new-progressive-immigration-policy

Don Flynn and Zoe Williams, Towards a Progressive Immigration Policy, https://barrowcadbury.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Full-Report-Towards-a-progressive-immigration-policy.pdf

The positions mainstream left parties adopt on immigration: A cross-cutting cleavage? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354068818780533?journalCode=ppqa

Philosophy/Theory

Helbling M (2014) Framing immigration in Western Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(1): 21–41.

Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration

Andreas Onnerfors & Andre Krouwel, Europe: Continent of Conspiracies

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Alex Sager, Towards a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility

Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc…, op. cit., p. 107.

David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst…, op. cit., pp. 38-56

Gwilym David Blunt, « Illegal Immigration as Resistance to Global Poverty », Raisons politiques 2018/1 (N° 69), p. 83-99. DOI 10.3917/rai.069.0083

Crime

Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Contentious Issue, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092026

Papadopoulos, G. Immigration status and property crime: an application of estimators for underreported outcomes. IZA J Migration 3, 12 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2193-9039-3-12

Crime & Immigration, https://wol.iza.org/articles/crime-and-immigration

Immigration reduces crime: An emerging scholarly consensus, http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Lee%20Immigration%20and%20Crime.pdf

Light MT, Miller TY. DOES UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRATION INCREASE VIOLENT CRIME? Criminology. 2017 May;56(2):370-401. doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12175. Epub 2018 Mar 25. PMID: 30464356; PMCID: PMC6241529.

Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

Illegal Immigration/Asylum Seekers

How the Danish Left Adopted a Far-Right Immigration Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/12/denmark-refugees-frederiksen-danish-left-adopted-a-far-right-immigration-policy/

France Reckons with Immigration Amid Reality of Rising Far Right, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/france-immigration-rising-far-right#:~:text=According%20to%20estimates%20from%20the,in%20France%20under%20local%20contracts.

The Economic Effects of Granting Legal Status and Citizenship to Undocumented Immigrants, The Economic Effects of Granting Legal Status and Citizenship to Undocumented Immigrants – Center for American Progress

Modes of Entry for the Unauthorized Migrant Population (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Hispanic Center, 2006)

ego, “Legal Consciousness of Undocumented Latinos”; and Roberto G. Gonzales, “Learning to Be Illegal: Undocumented Youth and Shifting Legal Contexts in the Transition to Adulthood,” American Sociological Review 76 (4) (2011): 602–619.

The Illegality Trap: The Politics of Immigration & the Lens of Illegality, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43297259

Gathmann, C. (2008), “Effects of Enforcement on Illegal Markets: Evidence from Migrant Smuggling at the Southwestern Border”, Journal of Public Economics 92, 1926–1941.

Kossoudji, S. A. and D. Cobb–Clark (2002), “Coming out of the Shadows: Learning about Legal Status and Wages from the Legalized Population”, Journal of Labor Economics 20, 598–628.

Casarico, A., Facchini, G., & Frattini, T. (2015). Illegal immigration: policy perspectives and challenges. CESifo Economic Studies, 61(3-4), doi:10.1093/cesifo/ifv004

Global Envision (2006) Hard Work, Furtive Living – Illegal Immigrants in Japan, available at http://www. globalenvision.org/library/3/986

Jones H, Pardthaisong T (1999) The impact of overseas labor migration on rural Thailand: regional, community and individual dimensions. J Rural Stud 15(1):35–47

Eurelings-Bontekoe EHM, Brouwers EPM, Verschucommodities at lower prices than in the host countryur MJ (2000) Homesickness among foreign employees of a multinational high-tech company in The Netherlands. Environ Behav 32:443–456

Vinogradova, A. (2016). Illegal immigration, deportation policy, and the optimal timing of return. Journal of Population Economics, 29(3), 781–816. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44280414

Deportation and Voluntary Departure from the UK, https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/deportation-and-voluntary-departure-from-the-uk/

How many people do we grant asylum or protection to?, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statistics-year-ending-december-2021/how-many-people-do-we-grant-asylum-or-protection-to#:~:text=There%20were%2048%2C540%20asylum%20applications,number%20for%20almost%20two%20decades.

Number of migrants crossing Channel to UK tops 1,000 in new daily record, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59257107

Should the Military Patrol the English Channel? https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/08/13/support-RAF-Navy-English-Channel-migrant-crossing

Media

‘Facchini, G., A. M. Mayda and R. Puglisi (2011b), Illegal Immigration and Media Exposure: Evidence on Individual Attitudes, Mimeo, University of Nottingham

Polling

UK Public Opinion toward Immigration: Overall Attitudes and Level of Concern, https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Briefing-Public_Opinion_Immigration_Attitudes_Concern.pdf

What Is Canada’s Immigration Policy?, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-canadas-immigration-policy

Islam in Britain

Half of all British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal, poll finds, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-muslims-strong-sense-of-belonging-poll-homosexuality-sharia-law

The independent review into the application of sharia law in England and Wales, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/678478/6.4152_HO_CPFG_Report_into_Sharia_Law_in_the_UK_WEB.pdf

Unsettled Belonging: A survey of Britain’s Muslim communities, https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/PEXJ5037_Muslim_Communities_FINAL.pdf

Progressive Policy

From Managing Decline to Building the Future: Could a Heartland Visa Help Struggling Regions?, https://www.immigrationresearch.org/node/2697

Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World, Paul Collier &  Alexander Betts

Racism

‘Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2’

The post I Read 100 Studies on Immigration appeared first on Then & Now.

In 1991, two tourists were hiking in the German Alps when they discovered a body which they presumed was a recently deceased mountaineer.

It turns out Otzi, as he came to be known, was a mountaineer of sorts – just a 5200-year-old one.

He was so well-preserved in the ice that scientists know how old he was when he died, what he had for lunch, that he wore a backpack, had an axe and a dagger, a bow, a quiver of arrows, and snowshoes. He had a cut hand and an arrowhead imbedded in his back.

In Stephen Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he writes that Otzi ‘had not fallen in a crevasse and frozen to death, as scientists had originally surmised; he had been murdered’.

Pinker declares that Otzi had belonged to a raiding party clashing with a neighbouring tribe.

Let’s put Otzi on ice for sec.

Pinker uses him as one piece of evidence in a broader argument; that human violence has declined across history. The Better Angels of Our Nature is a monumental and impressive book, clocking it at around 800 pages of graphs, statistics, anecdotes, and literary references.

Today, I want to look specifically at a part of Pinker’s and Thomas Hobbes’ argument: that life in a state of nature – before civilisation – was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Amongst other things, Pinker argues that hunter-gatherers, tribal societies, were – and are – much more violent than later more civilised societies. Both Pinker and Hobbes argue that the state and its monopolisation on force and authority have pacified our darker human instincts.

Consequently, human nature is pretty bad, human civilisation pretty good.

This fits with another claim that is often made: that war is part of human nature.

In the 1996 book War Before Civilization, for example, archaeologist Lawrence Keeley argues that prehistoric violent deaths probably ranged from around 7-40% of all deaths.

He says: ‘there is nothing inherently peaceful about hunting-gathering or band society’.

In 2003, Steve LeBlanc and Katherine Register claimed in their book Constant Battles that ‘everyone had warfare in all time periods’.

Biologist Edward Wilson asked, ‘Are human beings innately aggressive?’ Yes. Coalitional warfare is ‘pervasive across cultures worldwide’.

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides declare that ‘Wherever in the archaeological record there is sufficient evidence to make a judgment, there traces of war are to be found. It is found across all forms of social organization—in bands, chiefdoms, and states’.

The book Demonic Males argues that ‘neither in history nor around the globe today is there evidence of a truly peaceful society’.

And Steven Pinker has written that ‘Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong’.

So that’s the charge: violent, warmongering, innately aggressive.

But just on an intuitive level these statements seem curious. One the one hand, yes, war is everywhere. We turn on our televisions, go to the movies, read the newspapers and hardly a day goes by without seeing or hearing about it in some way. On the other hand, the vast majority of us wake up every morning and go about our lives without managing to get a brawl or stumbling into a military conflict.

Surely we can’t be inherently warlike and innately peaceful? Surely peace is the norm and violence the exception, not the other way around?

So was it Hobbes or Rousseau who was right? Has violence declined because of the state? What does this tell us about human nature? Were we noble savages or nasty beasts? Let’s find out.

A few different types of evidence have been drawn upon to make arguments about the peacefulness or violence inherent in human nature.

We’ve often been compared to our closest living animal relatives: chimpanzees, who spend quite a lot of time fighting, murdering, and eating their own kind.

And millions of years old fossils found in one site of our ape-like ancestors Australopithecus seemed to show that 80% had their heads bashed in.

We are, many have argued, just another killer ape.

But bonobos and gorillas are much more peaceful than chimpanzees.

Primatologist Frans de Waal has written that if we focused on bonobos ‘reconstructions of human evolution might have emphasized sexual relations, equality between males and females, and the origin of the family, instead of war, hunting, tool technology, and other masculine fortes’.

And those bashed in Australopithecus heads. It was later that skull damage was from leopard bites and ecological pressure during fossilisation.

Ultimately, comparing us to completely different species has very little to say about human nature. To understand that, we need to dig into humans.

Let’s return to Otzi.

It turns out though that the bow was unfinished, the dagger a third a length of a kitchen knife – good for skinning probably. The arrows were useless.

In other words, Otzi was not a warrior or raider but a hunter.

Here’s an alternative to Pinker’s scenario that he was murdered.

He was hunting – as he and every other human did every day – dressed in fur, in low visibility blizzard conditions, and got hit by a stray arrow.

Consider this: even today around 1000 hunters are accidently shot in the US every year. If you’re a hunter today, you’re more likely to be killed by accident than be murdered.

But the point is this: it’s anecdotal. Arbitrary. We don’t know. So let’s look at Pinker’s more substantive evidence.

Let’s have a quick look at this graph from the beginning of Pinker’s book. It’s a graph that depicts violence declining over time, like this. Actually, let’s look at the actual graph.

At the bottom here, Pinker says that the average rate of violent death today is around 1%. Across the 20th century it was around 2% – that’s including the world wars.

Then there’s the earliest states like Ancient Mexico which he clocks in at 5%.

Then he says he’s ‘lumped together’ – his words not mine – horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers – 24.5%.

Then the average for just hunter-gatherers – 14%,

And finally, at the top, hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists found by archaeologists – 15%.

‘We started off nasty,’ Pinker concludes. We’re pacified by civilisation.

Actually, this was pretty accurate. Conclusive? Case-closed? Let’s dive in.

We’ll start with the modern-day hunter-gatherers. How violent are they? Remember, Pinker claims that 14% died violently. That’s quite a lot.

Anthropologists Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry argue the data Pinker uses is cherry picked and inaccurate. For a start, all eight are from a single study published in 2009. A small sample.

Take the Ache of Paraguay – by far the highest violent death rate in the list at around 30%. Except, when you look at the original study you find that all the deaths involved frontiersmen and ranchers. The Ache, the original study says, were being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’ while apparently desiring a peaceful relationship with their neighbours.

The same applies to the Hiwi of Venezuela and Columbia. Every single death involved colonists and ranchers, including a massacre.

How about the Casiguran Agta of the Philippines? That 5% figure is based on an anthropologist’s account of nine deaths that happened, quote, ‘in the context of an influx of immigrant colonists into the area, and the resulting cutting back of the forest and decline of game and fish’, which led to fighting. Two of those deaths were carried out by immigrant farmers.

Okay, the Ayoreo of Bolivia and Paraguay. Oh hang on, they’re horticulturalists not hunter-gatherers so they should be struck off the list. As should the Modoc of America.

If we account for these changes, Fry shows, Pinker’s 14% should be reduced down at least to 7%, assuming the rest is correct. A big if. So far the section is looking a bit of a mess.

Fry says, ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages of war deaths for “hunter-gatherers” convey an air of scientific objectivity and validity. But in this case, it is all an illusion’.

This is one common problem with studying modern hunter-gatherers – they’ve often been ‘contaminated’ by colonists, imperialists, slave-traders, globalisation, or simple farming. So this has nothing to do with what they’d have been like thousands of years ago.

Another problem is that anthropologists studying violence are also more likely to study – guess what – more violent societies. Twenty percent of Pinker’ data here comes from a guy called Napoleon Chagnon who seems like a bit of a character. His studies have been roundly criticised by other anthropologists and he annoyed tribes so much he was banished from one.

Taking a different approach, Fry looks at a cross-sample of 186 cultures studied by anthropologists. 21 are described as nomadic foragers and in only eight of them was more mentioned. In seven homicide was reported as rare, very rare, low or never mentioned. He also looked through the anthropological literature for mentions of cultures that lacked war, looking for statements like these: ‘[The Veddahs] live so peacefully together that one seldom hears of quarrels among them and never of war’.

‘Warfare in the sense of organized intertribal struggle is unknown [among the Arunta]. What fighting there is, is better understood as an aspect of juridical procedure than as war’.

He found 70. Seventy. Compared to this. Let’s move on. What does the archaeological record say? Surely there we can find a real state of nature?

Evidence for prehistoric warfare usually comes from four categories: Art – depictions of violence. Tools and weapons. Ditches, walls, and fortifications. And more importantly, skeletal remains. Cuts, shattered bones, or embedded projectile points.

Let’s have another look at Pinker’s average – 15% died violently based on 21 archaeological sites around the world.

Jebel Sahaba, for example, in Sudan from at least 10,000BC clocks in at a whopping 40%. This is our earliest clearest evidence for war. 24 out of 59 bodies were found with projectiles like arrowheads. But as some have argued, these could have buried with them – they were lifelong hunters after all. I’d certainly like to buried with my treasured hunting mace. But this is a high figure, nonetheless.

Then there’s the oldest graveyard in the Sahara, though – Gobero, Niger – from around the same time, where 0% show signs of violent death.

Voloshkoe and Vasilkyevka in Europe from around the same time do show a high proportion of remains with fractures and signs of violence. This is the earliest evidence of warfare in Europe.

Then there’s two out of 60 that look violent from Calumnata in Algeria – one has a projectile but when we look at the original source the other death is described as likely a collision with a rock, not violence. Come on, Steven.

Now the Pacific northwest coast of America was very violent and had defendable sites with walls etc.

But let’s pause a minute. Notwithstanding the problems already alluded to, like with our friend Otzi, surely hunting accidents were more common? Surely people were hunted by predators more? Surely lithics – arrowheads – tools and weapons could be buried with the person as ceremonial. And what if war deaths were simply respected more, buried more ceremonially. All of this would distort the record.

And look at those top two sites from South Dakota in 1325 and Nubia in 10,000BC – they’re doing a lot of heavy lifting on this very small data set.

Can we not to better?

Anthropologist Brian Ferguson takes a closer look at the evidence. One survey of 2000-3000 remains found in France showed 48 with projectile wounds. That’s 1.9%. Not on Pinker’s list. One site in Britain of 350 individuals showed about 2%. Not on Pinker’s list. 418 individuals in Serbia and Romania – 2.3%. Not on Pinker’s list. Another study looks at Japan between 13000 and 800BC and of 2500 adults finds 2% died potentially violently. Not on Pinker’s list. Anthropologist Ivana Radovanovic has looked at 1107 remains from Europe, including all of the cases on Pinker’s list, and concludes that you could average out at 3.7% for a low estimate and 5.5% for a high estimate. Not 15%!

Now, I don’t think you can accurately gauge this, but for Pinker’s sake we’ll take the high estimate – 5.5%. That’s more than fair.

But let’s pause again. There’s another problem here. All of the examples on Pinker’s list come from after the invention of farming. They’re all after about 10,000 BC. These people aren’t hunter-gatherers at all. A quick history lesson.

The Homo genus – that’s humans – evolved from Australopithicus around 200,000 years ago. The first humans were homo habilus, homo erectus, home neantherderthalis and several others. But modern homo sapiens first arrived on the scene around 200,000 years ago.

All of Pinker’s examples are from around 12,000 years ago and later. Okay, hang on, I’m gonna need a bigger piece of paper. He’s left 95% of our existence unaccounted for. What happened around 12,000 years ago? The Neolithic revolution, otherwise known as the agricultural revolution, the advent of civilisation, the emergence of sedentary societies.

What anthropologists call complex hunter-gatherers emerged around this time. They used a mix of hunting, gathering, and farming, the domestication of animals. Their societies had higher population densities, were more permanent, they stored resources, and had more inequality – high status individuals are more commonly found buried with rare artifacts.

All of Pinker’s evidence is from after this point – after agriculture, after the start of civilisation.

So, hang on Steven, what happened before here?!

The oldest suggestion of war in Europe that’s often cited comes from over 750,000 years ago. An excavation in Spain shows signs of cannibalism. But this was a different species – Homo Antecessor – with a completely different brain. So we can scrap that. Some Neanderthals have shown signs of skull fractures that could be violence but as we’ve seen could also be leopard bites, and again, they’re a different species. So scrap that.

Cave art like this has often been cited as evidence of warfare. But, why are the lines wavy? And, like our own culture, art could be a warning against rare and dangerous war, not evidence for its ubiquity.

This period is called the Palaeolithic – the old stone age – so let’s concentrate on this. What does the evidence say?

One study looked at 103 remains found across Europe and found a violent death rate of 1%. Another looked at 209 remains in France and found five fractures. Although none were on the left side of the head, which you’d expect if they were the result of human violence. Even so, let’s say 2%. And, well, that’s about it.

In one overview of the evidence from Eastern Europe, Archaeologist Pavel Dolukhanov wrote that ‘in no cases could one find any evidence of inter-group conflict’.

Commenting on the total record, Henry de Lumley has written that ‘the first Homo sapiens do not seem to have led the warrior’s life so often attributed to them, for their pathology is not marked by a traumatology other than that caused by the accidents of everyday life’.

Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel has written that that, ‘during the hunter-gatherer stage of cultural evolution, which dominated 99 percent of human existence on the planet… lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory’.

So that 15%, for this period, so far, on scant evidence, we could it bring it down to around 2%.

So now we have 2% for hunter-gathers, up to 5% for post agricultural revolution, 7% for modern hunter-gatherers, 5% for early states, and 3% for the 20th century.

Fry writes that, ‘the idea that 15 percent of prehistoric populations died in war is not just false, it is absurd’.

So what happened? War likely emerged at the end of the Ice Age and the advent of farming around 10000BC with a change in socioeconomic conditions like:

– A shift to sedentary existence

– Settlements become bigger, denser

– Growing population

– Resource concentration (harvests stored)

– Excess resources

– Hierarchy

– Enclosures show signs of social segmentation

– Clear inequality

– Use of salt, seashells, and obsidian to trade with

It seems like the first wars and increases in violence were associated not with ‘savages’, hunter-gatherers or nomadic tribes, but with civilisation. One anthropologist has described this as the ‘formative period of warfare’. After the Neolithic revolution, Ferguson says, ‘war had become a cultural obsession across Europe’.

Often wars and violence could have been the result of competition over favourable locations or responses to climactic shocks. ‘War does not extend forever backwards’, Ferguson writes. ‘It has identifiable beginnings’.

The increase in warfare across this period is clear in case after case. After the 6th millennium BC we have signs of war becoming an enduring phenomenon.

Take Bulgaria. Neolithic stone settlements began in the sixth millennium BC, then slowly in the fifth millennium we see more defendable locations with fortifications, then in 4500BC we find more weapons, arrows, maces, axes.

Or take the northwest coast of North America. About 5000 years ago, the evidence suggests, non-lethal injuries were dominant, maybe pointing to some kind of juridical interpersonal violence, maybe contests. Warfare comes later, with evidence of the first large-scale war appearing just 1700 years go.

In the Middle East a similar time sequence shows villages without walls or ditches being replaced by an increase in defensive structures and fortifications around 7000 years ago.

Or take Anasazi of the American Southwest. From 700 to 1200 AD – that’s FIVE HUNDRED YEARS – there are ZERO signs of warfare. Then the climate changed and by 1250 we see signs of war.

John Carman and ‎Anthony Harding write that the Anasazi co-existed peacefully for more than a thousand years. ‘The violence markers of raiding, killing, and burning appear only very late in Anasazi culture, as a complex response to changing demographic patterns and a prolonged period of severe environmental stress’.

Ferguson says that, ‘war sprang out of warless world’.

Ultimately, complex hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists might make war, but the majority of simple hunter-gatherers don’t.

Fry argues that war should not be depicted by a curve like this, but by an n-type curve, like this.

He laments that, ‘Pinker constructs his account of steadily more peaceful human existence starting not at the raising of the curtain, and not even in the middle of the play, but only in the final act’.

So what can we learn from this? Let’s return to Pinker briefly. One estimate for the rate of violent death in the first half of the 20th century is 3%. Including the second half, this drops to as much as 1%. In 2007 0.04% died violently worldwide. And most agree that there has been a decline in violence over time. Whether the state and its monopolisation on force is the cause of that is a different question. Pinker does, of course, talk about other motivators for later periods, but that’s a different video. The central point for us is that if we’re serious about what people were like in a state of nature then surely nomadic hunter-gatherers are the most central to ‘human nature’.

And ultimately, historically, they’re relatively peaceful and have nothing like what we’d call war.

As Fry argues, what we see is not a decline, but an n-type curve. And if we take the 20th century as a whole at 2%, the hunter-gatherers figure – on very limited evidence – could be 2%, too. And there’s one big woolly mammoth in the room: those hunter-gatherers didn’t have the access to medicine, healthcare, and technology that modern societies have. How much does this distort the numbers?

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers tells its readers that, ‘Hunter-gatherers are generally peoples who have lived until recently without the overarching discipline imposed by the state… The evidence indicates that they have lived together surprisingly well, solving their problems among themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular propensity for violence. It was not the situation that Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, described in a famous phrase as “the war of all against all.”‘

You could say then that Rousseau was right, Hobbes was wrong.

Ultimately, though, Human nature is elastic, context dependent, varies across societies and cultures.

You might say that it’s within human nature to have a capacity for warfare. But you could also say it’s within human nature to have a capacity to make balloon animals or play the oboe. What’s more interesting is the context, what motivates war and what stimulates peace and cooperation. That’s a question I’ll return to next time, but for now I’ll leave you with this quote from Rousseau:

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!

Sources

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0002995

Douglas Fry, Introduction, ‘War Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views’

Douglas Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace

Brian Ferguson, Pinker’s List in War Peace and Human Nature

Brian Ferguson, The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East

Rutger Bregman, Humankind

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1266108/

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0028

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-is-not-part-of-human-nature/

Stephen Corry, The Case of the Brutal Savage, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/case-of-brutal-savage-poirot-or-clouseau-why-steven-pinker-like-jared-diamond-is-wro/

https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-a-look-at-the-data-5af708f47fba

The post Steven Pinker is WRONG About the Decline of Violence appeared first on Then & Now.

Moreover, other minds extend outwards, trying to escape from their bodies. Those minds, like ghosts in a machine, burrow into your mind, affecting your actions, desires, and beliefs; moving you, manipulating you, controlling you, predicting what you’ll do next.

Automation is not what it seems. And it’s here now.

Agriculture is being revolutionised. Across the 20th century the proportion of people working in agriculture in the West declined from 50% to 2%. Now, robots traverse fields zapping weeds, detecting whether strawberries are ripe before picking them, while drones scan the fields for fertility, transmitting data back to farmers’ computers and up to the cloud. Robots build cars, Flippy makes fast-food workers increasingly obsolete, Amazon has filed a patent for a blimp that deploys delivery drones.

In 2018, Dallas police used a robot to kill a gunman with explosives. This was likely the first time a state has used a robot to kill one of its own citizens.

Many commentators and economists have blamed stagnant wages and the decline of the labour-share (that’s the fraction of income going to workers) on the rise of automation.

Human beings are going out of fashion.

Author and technologist Wes Kussmaul has bemoaned of the human body that ‘protein is not an ideal material. It is stable only in a narrow temperature and pressure range, is very sensitive to radiation, and rules out many construction techniques and components … Only in the eyes of human chauvinists would it have an advantage’.

The robotic landscape, the rise of automation, and our wider understanding of the universe in the modern era, the death of god, has ushered in what some have called the post-human period; an era when our importance in the world is diminished, our capacity to act, to understand, to control depreciated, and our centrality in the universe devalued. We are, on the one hand, just another species, a blip, a cosmic speck, while on the hand, we’ve become more powerful than ever, extending our capabilities outwards, breaching our fragile limits, augmenting the reach of our minds. We are witnessing man’s attempt to escape from himself.

A period when maybe, as Michel Foucault predicted, ‘man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.

How can we understand this new robotic era? How might we theorise the politics and philosophy of automation and its consequences? How can we all make ourselves bodies without organs?

Our bodies have an urge to extend outwards, to escape from the limits of our skin. Most simply, that’s what technology does.

Marshall McLuhan described the electric lightbulb as ‘pure information’. The medium extends the perception of the human eye. Brain surgery and night sports are impossible without it.

The first machines – lathes and sharp tools – extended the capacity of our limbs to affect the world. To sharpen, quicken, strengthen our abilities. To adapt the stone into the image of our idea.

The industrial revolution extended the self into an automated machine. It was a revolution of extension – extending limbs, hands, feet, eyes into metal. To add pressure, scale, or to make smaller, more precise, to repeat, repeat, repeat quicker than a finger could.

The information revolution, the digital revolution, does the same for mental life. It extends our cognition.

In the same way machines are better than humans at certain physical tasks, AI will become better than humans at cognitive tasks. Newsweek wrote, ‘AI and automation will replace most human workers because they don’t have to be perfect – just better than you’.

But what’s often forgotten is that AI and automation is never neutral. It’s always doing things for someone. It’s always an extension of someone.

And it’s that for and of someone that I want to focus on.

As Robert Belk argued in an influential 1988 article, we’ve always had an extended-self.

The isolated self, cut off from the world, is an illusion. We get, have, and possess things, ideas, places, even people, because we are dependent organisms. We are part of a larger world that we try to integrate, in various ways, into our sense of self.

We view things as part of the self when we are able to understand them, or can predict how they’re going to act, or decide whether we like or dislike it, and when we learn how to control things in the same way we control our body.

As Belk pointed out, many thinkers, from Enlightenment philosophers Hegel and Locke to modern psychologists and sociologists, have commented on how we have a desire to assimilate the external material world with our inside ideational experience so as to understand, comprehend, and have confidence in our ability to interact with the world, to trust that we can control it, in some way, rather than it controlling us.

In short, we think of the exterior landscape as part of our sense of self.

We also think of properties or characteristics like our age, job, name, favourite food, clothes, where we live as a part of ourselves.

When we create something, we often think of it as an extension of ourselves, using the pronoun my.

My work of art, my invention, my song.

When we’re cycling or driving we think of the machine as an extension of ourselves.

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre saw three reasons we might see an external object as part of our selves.

To control it for personal use. To increase our power of acting. But we also conquer or master things: mountains, difficult instruments, new skills, as a test of our capabilities, of our mastery over the world.

When we master, comprehend, and control, we integrate the world into our own psychologies.

We might master, comprehend, and so have control over, a transport network, for example, when we move to a new city. It becomes a part of our psychological landscape, literally part of our schema of the world.

The things that we extend ourselves into also can take on our own traits, characteristics, and properties, extending our personality out into the world.

A farmer’s land has had their energy invested in it, say. Something we draw takes on our emotional state. A dog takes on some of our rhythms, our commands, even our personalities.

Machines have never just been mechanical, geometric, predictable structures; machines are an extension of us and can take on our creativity. Machines can be novel, random, dynamic, too.

As Spinoza said, ‘We do not even know what a body is capable of…’

What makes our new extended world different from the previous ones? What makes the robotics revolution different from the industrial revolution?

As all the tech giants now know, the aim of the algorithmic game is prediction.

Those robots that pick strawberries need to be able to predict when they’re ripe. The simple automated vacuum predicts where furniture is.

This is how the information society comes together; where big tech, social media, and robots collide.

Because they’re all ultimately about the same thing: data-collection for better prediction.

Social media platforms seek, vacuum and hoard as much data as possible so they can predict which advertisers to sell your attention to and at which times.

And it’s why we see big tech expanding into areas that, at first, don’t seem logical. Google into self-driving cars, Facebook into VR, Amazon into movies.

The more data they have, the better their bottom line. And we’ll see more of this in the future.

Smart speakers that collect every minute detail; chairs scraping, the frequency of your coughing, when you’re typing or washing up, when your dog’s barking.

All so they can know when to advertise cough sweets, when to play a certain song, when you’ve gotten up for a break and when you’re busy working.

Tesla cars – with their cameras and sensors picking up data from wherever their drivers goes – will know a neighbourhood better than its residents.

A company called ZeroEyes uses ‘Artificial Intelligence to actively monitor camera feeds to detect weapons and people who could be potential threats’.

Athena – backed by Peter Thiel – develops security software that can recognise ‘suspicious’ behaviours.

The so-called ‘internet of things’ turns every device in your home into an information collector: a washing machine that knows what clothes you wear and when, a dishwasher that can detect what you’ve eaten?

We will be surrounded by devices acting as corporate private detectives, scanning, tailing, interpreting our every move.

As theorist Mark Andrejevic notes, the ultimate goal is to understand the world as broadly and as specifically as possible.

He calls it pre-emption. These companies want to pre-empt what we’ll do, what we’ll need, and what we’ll most desire.

He cites Foucault’s concept of the panopticon – the prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in which prisoners are unaware if they were being watched by the guards or not. Foucault says the ‘major effect’ is to induce in the inmate ‘a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’.

We live in a world where, increasingly, automation knows what you want better than you do. The strawberry picking machine knows better and quicker than the farmer when fruit is ripe, a dating app knows better and quicker who you’re likely to go on a date with, and Amazon knows better and quicker than you do what product you’re likely to buy.

Professor of marketing Praveen Kopalle writes, ‘think of the feelings you get when you see that an Amazon package has arrived at your door – it’s delightful and exciting, even though you know what it is. I bet those feelings amplify when you don’t know what’s in the box… We like getting things in the mail, even if we didn’t ask for them’.

This is a real patent filed by Amazon. It’s called anticipatory shipping.

Such vast treasure troves of data, used to predict what you’ll do, what the world will do, picking up information on such a minute scale and such a broad scale all the time leads to the digital landscape becoming incomprehensible.

There’s so much data, so much information, that it escapes any single person’s comprehension, it becomes impossible to understand in a single, universal way.

This has led air taxi CEO and science writer Chris Anderson to predict the End of Theory. He writes: ‘Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity’.

So many data points are collected that any hope of understanding that data disappears. Whatever the algorithm says goes.

He points to Google’s page rank: it collects data about which webpage is best, but no-one can say why one page is better than the other, only that it’s statistically likely that it is.

If you’re most likely to give a $5 tip to your Uber driver that’s what it suggests. There’s no need to understand why.

One Google project let loose an AI on Youtube to see what it would do. It learned to detect cats but the engineer admitted they had no idea why that happened.

HunchLab looks at data to predict crime. It’s found that assaults happens less on windy days and cars get stolen nearer schools. Doesn’t matter why, security firms can just adapt in response.

This organisation takes mega billion pixel photos of cities like Shanghai and The Vatican. You can zoom right in and out and in again: https://www.indy100.com/viral/one-of-the-world-s-biggest-ever-photographs-has-a-hilarious-secret-7292226 Someone found this naked man.

Posthumanism, in its cynical form, is a dizzying vertigo.

Kierkegaard wrote of the modern age that: ‘Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss… Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’.

There’s so much data that it’s impossible to frame it in a single understandable universal efficient way.

Jane Bennett calls this vibrant materialism. ‘Interpretations and framings are so diverse that it’s impossible to make sense of anything. A city blackout can be said to be caused by deregulation, wildfires, the weather, the price of gas, an ill employee, a historical event, a sociological problem’. Meaning fractures and explodes.

Yet despite this, we must retain some sense of responsibility.

Framing robotics and automation through the idea of an extended-self brings something often missed back into focus: there’s always someone doing the automating.

The question when we look at a robot should always be not what’s it doing, but who is it doing it for?

Take the illustrative example of the dangers of autonomous weapons. An open letter with signatories including Steven Hawking and Noam Chomsky warns: ‘It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity’.

This is a cogent example because, while the dangers are obvious with weapons, the same dangers apply to any type of automation. Weapons can be a powerful metaphor for ideas.

A website that decides who you should vote for? Who is funding it? A police robot that keeps you safe? What happens when tyrannical laws are enforced? A script that gets the news for you? What happens when prioritising anger increases engagement?

These are not problems of the future: they are here. We are nudged by algorithms in ways we’re not always aware of. Opaque algorithms are as dangerous as laws you’re not allowed to see.

The real lesson of Orwell’s 1984 is much more than oppression. The power that has information doesn’t crudely blackmail, but manipulates you without you knowing. As the protagonist Winston tells us, ‘If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself’.

Cass Sunstein has written that, ‘due to recent advances in AI and machine learning, algorithmic nudging is much more powerful than its non-algorithmic counterpart. With so much data about workers’ behavioral patterns at their fingertips, companies can now develop personalized strategies for changing individuals’ decisions and behaviors at large scale’.

The purpose of all these systems is to get as close to the desire as possible.

The goal is to know you better than you. To pre-empt what you want, what you need, what you desire. Some might say fine – what’s wrong with AI predicting what I need? What’s wrong with automated convenience?

The problem lies in algorithms not pre-empting what you want and need, but what you’re most likely to want and desire that aligns with what advertisers, corporations, and the powerful want and desire. Automation is not coded for need but coded for what you’re most likely to respond to. We have triggers, needs, addictions, weaknesses that can be capitalised on but that aren’t what’s really good for us.

We need to be coded to respond passionately to threats. But do we need to see more threatening Facebook posts more often? Obviously not. We’re built to want thrill, sugar, sex, to respond to scandal, but we don’t want a world that uses that to sell us things we don’t need.

Pre-emption is a melting pot of trickery and base desire driven by profit and control.

Thaler and Sunstein write that, ‘It is no coincidence that the enthusiasm for so called “nudge” approaches, which act indirectly on people through intervening in the choice “environment,” has coincided with the rise of online marketing and advertising’.

We become shaped by the Gorgon – the mythical creature that turned those under its stare to stone. In fact, take the Gorgon Stare, a new military drone that captures video of entire cities. As if naming military equipment after ancient monsters sends the message that we’re definitely the good guys.

Author Arthur Michel, who spends his life studying drones, wrote that ‘nothing kept me up at night the way Gorgon Stare did’.

They fly at 25,000 feet and capture the city below with a telescopic high resolution camera.

The most powerful flying eye on the planet has been flown above sports stadiums and American cities, solved murders with no witnesses, followed terrorists, spied on Baltimore, and are probably in the air domestically over the United States right now. In short, you have no idea if one’s capturing your movement.

In this video, an operator shows you a murder captured by the drone and how they followed the getaway car. I urge you to watch. The link’s below.

Michel writes that the Gorgon Stare is ‘a way of seeing everybody all the time. Fundamental to liberal democracy is the ability to have sacrosanct private spaces. That is where the life of civil society exists. It is where our own personal lives exist, where we are able to pursue our dreams and passions. And it is often where we hold power to account. When you uncover those spaces, you fundamentally put all of those things at risk’.

Of course, with all of this the question is what happens when we’re all turned to stone by the Gorgon Stare, our movements and data captured so efficiently and totally that we’re petrified into immobility.

What happens when something I’ll call ‘ethical escape’ cannot happen. When you cannot do what you believe you have to do or should do because your future desires, ideas, and movements are being manipulated, nudged, or pre-empted by someone else. When the ethical thing to do cannot escape the domination of the totalising stare of the status quo?

Tools that affect someone’s behaviour without them knowing are the instruments of tyrants, monopolists, manipulators, and puppet-masters.

The philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had a concept that seems apt: a body without organs.

It’s based on the fact that we aren’t only made up of our bodies. We are extended-selves, comprised of assemblages of objects, ideas, events, and other people; it’s the idea that all organisms are more than simply themselves. The bee and the pollen and the flower and the hive make an assemblage. Jeff Bezos, Amazon robotics, and the mail system make an assemblage.

The assemblage is a structured structure.

But the body without organs is a call for an assemblage to overcome the structure, to overcome its limits, to break out of that which structures it, to free itself from the hierarchy that external powers impose on it.

It is the idea of a metaphysical and ethical potential: what something could do if it was freed from limitations:

They write: ‘Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly?’

The body without organs, they declare, is the essence of freedom:

‘the body without organs howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!’

‘Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says, “Stop, find your self again,” we should say instead, “Let’s go further still, we haven’t found our body without organs yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self.”

I think we live in an age of bodies without organs. Automation and robotics extends our powers outwards into the world, but this phenomenon is also reversed, as other people extend their own powers out into the world they’re extending it towards you; robotic tentacles wrapping themselves around your desires, trying to shape your beliefs, your actions, your identity.

You must make yourself a body without organs. It’s why we need to teach all kids to code, to be engineers, to all have Youtube channels and podcasts – anything that extends the self. These are all bodies without organs.

Deleuze and Guattari write enigmatically: ‘This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a body without organs’.

There are age-old debates about whether technology will free us from the burden of labour. Marx said the appeal of communism would be ‘to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, philosophize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’.

The problem is that there is no such thing as pure automation. Its always someone’s automation. If you’re not controlling or contributing to it then you’re being controlled. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15 hour work week by 2030. Others suggest a universal basic income.

These are important questions, but I think they neglect an important point. Automation is always someone’s automation. Automation is always control. Universal basic income is no good if you must surrender your control over the economy, over culture and ethics to people like Jeff Bezos.

Andrejevic writes: ‘There is an element of surrender in the appeal of automation: a willingness to concede that the complexity of social life under current technological conditions is beyond the reach of human comprehension and thus irrevocably alienated. Why not leave the administration of public life to the companies that simultaneously provide us with the endless stream of digital content that helps fill the void left by public life? This is a disturbing perversion of the hope that the widespread access to information made possible by the Internet would enhance democracy by creating a universally informed citizenry’.

As we saw from the extended-self, we all want to have some comprehension, some understanding, some mastery and control of our environment, of the things that affect us. Even the hermit desires control over the land, the kettle, the seed he sows.

Even the hermit desires control.

Tinder CEO Sean Rad has said that, ‘So imagine you open Tinder one day and, you know, the Tinder assistant says, “You know, Sean, there’s a beautiful girl, someone that you’re going to find very attractive down the street. You have a lot of things in common and your common friend is Justin and you’re both free Thursday night and there’s this great concert that you both want to go to and can I set up a date? And here is a little bit more info about her’.

Is there not something uncomfortable about this vision? The idea that something so profound can be outsourced and off-shored? Once we factor in Tinder’s two fundamental goals – keeping you engaged and increasing profits – we have to ask Sean Rad how much that influences the partners they suggest, the gigs, bars and experiences they recommend, the neighbourhoods and patterns of speech they emphasise.

When the interiors of stuffy old houses were being transformed in the 19th century, the textile designed William Morris recommended a golden rule: ‘have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’.

As robotics run by big tech algorithms creep slowly into our homes, cars, workplaces, schools, hospitals, parliaments, skies, shops, media platforms, well, everywhere, this might be a good rule to keep in mind.

There’s a simple principle I return to often. It’s novel, but it’s called democracy. It means by the people. I understand it like this: people should have a say in the things that affect their lives.

We should not outsource the directing of desire to Silicon Valley, surrender our human impulse to choose to the biases of an opaque AI, abdicate control over our data in return for the cheap thrills of consumer advertising, and forgo and sign away our right to see the things that are seeing us.

In this way, questions about transparency and privacy online keeping coming up because they’re really about who gets to extend their reach and in what ways.

The politics of robotics, AI, data, pre-emption, framelessness – this strange new post-human landscape – should be defined by four things: transparency, democracy, privacy, and control.

The post Fear & Robotics appeared first on Then & Now.

You can look up any fact, instantly. You can communicate, instantly. Anyone can become informed about anything, instantly. Workers, dissidents under dictators, ordinary people, neighbours, can organise, share, discuss simply, quickly, easily.

Book after book, scholar after scholar, and article after article celebrate the techno-utopian potential of this new democratic technology.

Fast forward 25 years and comedian and Youtuber Ethan Klein has started a trending Twitter spat storm by tweeting about podcaster, comedian, MMA person and most likely one of the most influential people on the planet Joe Rogan:

Joe Rogan, who lives on elk meat, egg yolk, and human growth hormone, with lungs full of tar, thinks he’s healthier than everyone. This mfer is such a bitch that when he got covid he threw “the kitchen sink at it” – if youre so healthy just ride it out like you say a man should

Media companies like the Independent, The Washington Examiner, NBC, and commentators like Vaush & Tim Pool all discuss the tweet. Joe Rogan hasn’t even responded. Will he? What will he say? The drama. NBC have already called it a ‘dispute between Rogan and Klein’ but most importantly, between Rogan who has been ‘embraced by conservative figures’, and Klein whose ‘fan base is largely progressive’.

It’s like Vidal vs Buckley, Burke vs Paine, Freud vs Jung all over again.

I wonder if you asked a 90s techno-optimist for an example of what a political discussion might look like on the internet in twenty years time, they’d predict something like this.

Anyway, I want to use this trivial moment to try to answer an important question: why Hasn’t the Internet Fixed Democracy?

Okay, to dive in, we should begin by asking hypothetically and tentatively – what was the case for the internet fixing democracy?

The first thing that’s been pointed to by followers of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas is that the public sphere – where our political discussion, debate, and agenda-setting is happening – would have to be a rational place – a place where we can come to mutual agreement about what the best thing to do is.

Rationality is (ironically) an ambiguous concept, but Habermas pointed to several features of rational decision-making:

He said that:

Discussion is about verifying certain claims
People need to be reflexive about their own beliefs
People need to be able to put themselves in others’ positions so as to be ‘impartial’

People need to be sincere – mean what they say

Each participant should have equal say, and their voices have equal weight
The discussion should be autonomous from state and corporate power

I’ll throw in a few more.

Data needs to be verifiable.

Institutions, organisations, governments, business need to be transparent, information needs to be available.

And those involved in this process should be competent – i.e. be able to understand all of these conditions.

This list isn’t exhaustive but I think it’s a good start. Now let’s look at what Klein is saying about Rogan.

First, he’s saying that Rogan is a hypocrite. He’s also claiming he was more afraid of Covid than he suggested. The wider implication is about Rogan’s claim that no-one is talking about fitness as a preventative measure, which itself is a claim about the focus on and efficacy of vaccines and lockdowns.

There’s also a few other direct implications thrown in – responsibility, fat-shaming, fitness in general. But we could look at some of the wider discussion, too. Like this from Tim Pool and co.

According to this philosopher king, for example, its about socio-sexual hierarchy, gamma, alpha. I mean, just say ‘resentment’ – I guess that’s what you mean? I feel like if you have to say something like this you must think you’re an ‘alpha’ but be deeply insecure about it.

Anyway, this is beside the point I’m trying to make: there are a lot of claims going on in this one very dumb moment.

Let’s look at what they say about the thesis here: why the internet hasn’t saved democracy. We’ll look at the clash of incommensurable values, a bit of Wittgenstein, agenda-setting, Sartre, personality, being triggered, cats, emotion, before finally returning to the question: could the internet save democracy?

First, we have a clear clash of what philosophers call incommensurable values. Two positions that are irreconcilable. Liberty and equality are the frequently used examples – someone might argue that you can’t have them both.

But more importantly, often it’s impossible to rationally calculate which value is more important to pursue because there’s no ‘common measure’, no ‘universal yardstick’ for working out which one is better, which one is more rational.

How do you decide between a career as a lawyer and a career as an artist? Do the pros and cons tally along the same axis? How can you compare preferences for money or creativity, say?

A claim related to Klein’s point might be that ‘getting fit is not a reasonable response to a pandemic’.

And a Rogan claim might look something like: ‘personal responsibility is more important than restricting liberty’.

Now, you can use data to back either of these up, you can argue about the history of liberty as a philosophical concept, or the benefits of a healthy diet for fighting disease, but, ultimately, these claims could be incommensurable, at least for some people.

Now, I could make the argument that while of course being healthy is important to fight Covid, there’s a limit to its efficacy because – 1) it’s difficult, 2) it’s a difficult time to do it 3) there’s not enough time to do it 4) the people dying of Covid often are unhealthy because they’re older, or they’re poorer… etc etc. There are rational points to be made. However, there’s no absolute proof that is going to convince someone that holds ‘absolute libertarian freedom’ as their highest value, no matter what. Again, there is no standard measure, no ruler, we can use to discover which one of these claims trumps the other.

Moral dilemmas are a similar concept.

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre used the example about the young man’s choice between going to England during the Second World War to join the Free French Forces or staying in France to take care of his ageing mother.

Which choice is better? Is better even the appropriate term? Whichever the young man chooses he’s lost something.

And most of the time, before we even get to a discussion or choice, we’ve assigned importance to the values and beliefs we hold that weight them differently. That might be diet, lockdowns, vaccines, equality, freedom, whatever – the conceptual ranking we have affects the weight we place on the corresponding data, studies, or arguments we utilise.

But okay, we know this, but I think it points to another phenomenon – the order of things.

If we tried to turn this into a rational, verifiable political discussion – turn it into an academic study say – it might look something like: ‘The efficacy of encouraging improvements to health as public healthy policy during a pandemic’.

But is it just about efficacy? Is it just about the validity of a statement? It’s also about people’s lifestyles – what they’re doing, what they value.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed to this problem in his famous idea of language games.

He argued that language cannot understood scientificality because language is not just descriptive – its not a 1-1 correspondence of the world that’s verifiable: tree means tree.

He used the example of water. We cannot rationally and verifiably decide what ‘water’ means at all times and set it down in a dictionary because the meaning of any thing is inseparable from our daily lived experience.

The word means something different depending on the context – whether it’s describing the ocean, a drink. Whether it’s a label on a bottle or a demand, an order, the answer to what would you like to drink, sir. In answering ‘water!’ the request is not just describing the fluid ‘water’, but is also an order to do something, and might mean something different depending on whether it’s a sick man begging for a drink, a child asking their mother, or a king demanding something of an aide. Later philosophers like J.L. Austin pointed out that some language does things – like ‘I do’ at a wedding, ‘I promise’ to a friend, or ‘I name the ship…’. They perform acts that change the world.

So – and this is clear on Twitter – conversation is not about verifying some fact, it’s about the flow of things – it’s about the conversation itself. And language games create options for responses, rules about what might or could or should happen next, after you’ve said a certain thing.

Imagine two Marxists having a discussion about elections: there’s the outline of a pathway that conversation is likely to go down.

But – and here’s the big but – the development of a conversation depends, of course, on the values of those interlocutors. The different values of each person dictate where the conversation goes next.

The question becomes not what the evidence is, but what the next move in the game is. The more likely move for someone like Rogan might be towards fitness. What’s the more likely move for a scientist working on the vaccine?

The moves we make are wonderfully and beautifully diverse, and a platform like Twitter has thrown them all together, making the direction of conversations unpredictable and often chaotic, in a way that wouldn’t happen in the news room of the Washington Post, say.

Take any disagreement on Twitter. Person A holds a position on a topic. Person B points out that Fact X supporting the position is false. Person A responds that Person B has missed the point. Person C says that it’s about that, not that.

There are an infinity of values backing up values, and claims backing up claims. And each one demands different counterpoints, different deconstructions, different types of evidence. The list goes on.

All of these moves set an agenda which used to be set by elites, newspaper editors, and television studios. In the offices of old media there was much tighter control over the agenda, over how long to discuss an issue, over how important it was, over what the priorities were. This has now been democratised, to an extent, but is much more subject to the whims of all of our different approaches to different issues.

But the moves we make online aren’t quite as free as it may appear. An early techno-utopian, John Perry Barlow, wrote in his ‘declaration of the independence of cyberspace’ in 1996 that, ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather’.

But it turns out that cyberspace is not some otherly realm independent of the pre-existing material conditions of the real world. The pre-existing offline power blocs have sovereignty over the places servers are held, over the citizens that log on, over who has contacts with who. The EU and US governments can enforce cookie policy, corporations have massive advertising budgets, special interests still buy politicians expensive lunches. And this all translates over to online behaviour.

And as it turns out, we all like to gather in a handful of places online rather than lots of interconnecting forums or blogs, so the tech giants have power over those places.

Clay Shirky, another early techno-optimist, has said that one thing he underestimated was the ‘social graph’, or how connections on social media maps onto offline friends, friends of friends, or contacts, onto business and organisational networks, onto NGOs and governments and media.

On other words, the structure of the offline world is largely replicated online. Look at how Youtube prioritises videos from the late night chat shows.

Right, here’s a question that I think holds the key to the meaning of life. If we can work this out, we can solve everything, achieve world peace, and build utopia on earth.

Why Cats?

What is it about the internet and cats? Internet cats even have their own Wikipedia page.

You might say, they’re just cute. They’re nice to look at. We have a universal urge to care for something, etc. But then why did we not have cat pages in newspapers before the internet? Why weren’t there cats on page 3 of the Sun instead of topless women? Why wasn’t everyone reading ‘The Weekly Cat’ magazine and carrying around photos of their cat in their wallet to show people?

Of course, we all have emotional triggers – the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza called them affects – but they’re things that we’ve been evolutionarily coded to trigger a brain state change, to say this is important.

And they’re largely out of our control. Cuteness is of course one. We like to care for fragile things. But, as Facebook found in a study, anger is the most evolutionarily powerful. Anger is more likely to grab our attention because we’ve registered something as dangerous – an attack – and we need to ramp up our blood, get more oxygen going, ready to be on the counterattack. We’re more likely to stop scrolling and click on an angry post.

Spinoza’s list included things like desire, wonder, love, aversion, mockery, fear, pity, envy, and lust – they wash over you, change the state you’re in, draw you into thinking in a particular way, seeing the world through a particular lens.

They are trigger points.

And as the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown, emotions are a part of how we make rational decisions.

He has argued, based on neuroscientific research, that we don’t feel angry, for example, and then pre-select objectively from our knowledge about what to do in that angry state.

Feeling angry pre-selects relevant information from our memories for us involuntarily and gives it to the conscious part of the brain to do the final part of the decision making.

The classic example is the bear attack.

When you encounter a bear, you’re not scared, then think through all the things you know about surviving a bear attack. Being scared is part of the process that triggers the parts of the brain that are relevant and pre-selects the time you read about not running and the other time you saw a bear attack on Youtube. We don’t flick through our memories like filing cabinets – we’re set off emotionally by encounters.

But the wider point here is that using the internet means more trigger points, more emotional encounters. On the internet we’re thrown together in such a way that we’re constantly exposed to these triggers. We’re like children thrown together in playground and left to our own devices. The internet has, quite clearly, made us more emotionally charged.

Walking down the street twenty years ago there wasn’t much chance of getting triggered over Bernie Sander’s mittens or because someone shouts Let’s Go Brandon at you.

Weight, health, image, hypocrisy – they’re great emotional triggers.

You might be thinking, so what? Isn’t all of this obvious? Of course we have values that clash, of course what we talk about depends on our daily lives, of course the internet has changed how the agenda is set, of course we’re emotional as well as rational.

But the important point is this: what’s become important is not what’s being said, but how, with what emphasis, with whose backing, it’s said. And that has consequences for how we should design our social platforms. The political conversation is not about rational fact selection from an objective body of knowledge. The political conversation is about process: who gets to say what, when, and what and when algorithms amplify or quieten something.

This escaped the early techno-utopians. They forgot that knowledge is not just about static objects and facts, but is about people in motion, it’s about process. Watch this, it fascinates me. The TimCast crew have been moved into a position where it’s reasonable for them to talk about how great Joe Rogan looks as evidence for a particular political view they hold.

Klein was making a comment about Rogan’s character. His trustworthiness. Whether he should be listened to.

Character is important because it determines the language games, the values, the agenda, and emotional resonance that’s going to influence the direction of conversation. But it also means that we get drawn towards, guess what: the drama.

Of course, these platforms are going to reward drama, clickbait, anger, conflict – because that’s what we’ve evolved to focus on. But our institutions, rules, cultures and norms are meant to be designed to help us engineer better societies, better ways of living, help us come together.

Take just one example: the institution of due process or the idea of a trial by jury – these are institutions and norms that are meant to balance the impulse of anger, of retribution and revenge, and they’ve done a good job at that. We have lots of institutional norms that do things like this. Some trivial, like taking your shoes off in a friend’s house, bringing a bottle of wine to dinner, please and thank you – etiquette – and some political or social, like having a certified qualification to prove you’re good at something, libel law to protect against malicious lying, the right-to-reply if you’re criticised in print.

The list here is endless, but the point is, I think we need to approach algorithms in the same way – encouraging that which brings the best out of the process of online political communication, not the worst, so that we’re focusing on the things that matter.

In their book Ethical Algorithms, for example, Aaron Roth and Micheal Kearns talk about some key domains that we should focus on like privacy, fairness, accountability, and morality.

What we want to do is select the trending conversations we’re having based not on drama, but on importance. And I actually think Facebook’s decision to use more reactions than just like is a good step towards this. They realised people were drawn towards the topics that people had responded to angrily and then chose to show those posts more. What if we had an ‘important’ response, or an ‘empathise’, or a way of more accurately gauging what the triggering response means. In short, we need a way of highlighting real issues not drama, of pivoting the process of online political conversation away from triggers and more towards justice.

The post Why the Internet Hasn’t Fixed Democracy appeared first on Then & Now.

They’ve burned god’s churches, tortured Christians, desecrated religious icons, and furthermore Europe is too small for us, doesn’t have enough farmland, is bound by mountains and sea, and so we squabble amongst ourselves. ‘Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre’, he said, ‘wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves’.

Urban II and the priesthood raised an army of 100,000 men from all walks of life – from nobles to peasants – to march on Jerusalem, led by a monk called Peter the Hermit.

What resulted was unimaginable. Muslims and Christians on both sides hung the slain enemies to rot along walls, skewered their heads on spears, catapulted those heads over each other’s defences, raped, burned and terrorised cities, killed children, amputated limbs and left each other to die slowly in agony. There were reports of soldiers wading through pools of blood up to their ankles. When winter came and the soldiers began to starve they ate the dead, and rumours spread that the coming Christians were cannibalistic savages. Terror set in.

One crusader wrote, ‘some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others tortured for a long time and burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets… they were stabbing women who had fled into palaces and dwellings; seizing infants by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or cradles and dashing them against the walls and breaking their necks; they were slaughtering some with weapons, or striking them down with stones’.

When the Pope heard all of this, he expressed some doubt about ordinary Christians’ motives for joining the crusade. But he drew on a doctrine that he was helping to develop – what we’d now called just war theory – stemming from Christian thought back to Saint Augustine – that some wars are necessary. God needed defending. Yes, Jesus had told Saint Peter to sheathe his sword, but he had not told him to discard it altogether. Urban II told Christendom that the ‘soldiers of Christ’ would receive eternal reward in the afterlife.

Millions died in the Crusades. A few centuries before, in China, somewhere between ten million and thirty million died during the An Lushan Rebellion, one of the worst recorded catastrophes in history. But the deaths weren’t directly from the violent civil war. They were from the resulting collapse of canals and irrigation systems that peasants relied on for food. Similar famines happened in Bengal under British colonial rule.

During the Holocaust the murders were more deliberate, but even then, as Hannah Arendt famously observed, it was often banal – bureaucrats doing their job, checking off lists, running the trains, ordering gas, following orders, being told ‘we’re at war’, it’s a necessary evil.

From Aristotle to the Atlantic slave trade, the justification was the same: a necessary evil – look how incapable these captive men and women are, if they weren’t under our care, like animals, they wouldn’t survive.

These few examples illustrate the diversity of ways evil, murder, warfare, catastrophe, torture, genocide have been rationalised throughout history, and the differences in how they were caused. And this leads to a question: how do we make sense of this diversity?

‘dark side of history’ suggests violence, death, destruction, sadism, slavery, famine – in short, human pain. But it also includes unintended consequences – like the famine during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or maybe psychological darkness, prisons of the mind as much as the body, depression, anxiety, fear – a variable much more difficult to measure.

There’s also the matter of perspective. Death and illness that’s the result of a life of poverty is rarely placed in the same category as murder, but why? If pain is the criteria, then pain is pain.

Is a long life of boredom any better than a short life of war? Is a long torturous life in a Victorian factory worse than a quick death? What distinguishes deaths from pollution from deaths from war? Any attempt to judge history assumes certain biases, criteria, ideological perspectives.

In a pioneering French study, for example, Jean-Claude Chesnais looked at historical trends in violent death in France and realised that things like suicides and car accidents had to be included alongside violence and war. The former are today among the leading causes of death worldwide, but it’s unlikely that we’d call them evil.

I think then that it’s useful to start from a common assumption. That the world has got better, that violence and pain have declined, and that freedom, wealth, and comfort have all increased. This is what’s often referred to as whiggish history – a ‘civilising thesis’.

It’s a narrative, in historian Philip Dwyer’s words, that’s ‘wrapped in a constant, triumphalist, linear march across history toward a better, less violent future’.

We’ve evolved – biologically, socially, culturally, psychologically – from savages to the civilised, from grunting cavemen to polite ladies and gentlemen, from superstitious pagans to enlightened scientists, from callous torturers to empathetic teachers.

Is it really true? If so, why? If not, why does it seem so? The idea that history improves over time has taken many forms. In 1931, the historian, Herbert Butterfield published a book criticising what he called the ‘Whiggish’ interpretation of history – named after the progressive party in Britain at the time – describing it as ‘the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.

We can see the tendency in many thinkers before and since – Hegel, Marx, Kant, the idea of the End of History, Steven Pinker’s work on the decline of violence, and many more.

For them, in varying ways, history has progressed through the unfolding of reason, economic development, the overcoming of logical or social contradictions, through the triumph of liberal ideas, through innovation, scientific and technological progress.

So where the hell do we start? There’s quite a history to choose from.

The Crusades were ironically justified by a Christian ideology of turning the other cheek, a set of ideas that were themselves responding to a world of Roman violence. Crucifixion was so common in the Roman Empire that 6000 slaves were crucified along an 120 mile stretch of road after Spartacus’s revolt. Each with nails through the wrists and feet, the weight of the body pulling the wretched bodies down, making it difficult to breath, the legs sometimes broken, each death taking somewhere between a few hours and a few days.

I think it’s safe to say we’re unlikely to see something like this today, and that’s the progressive’s point – that we have, in some ways, improved. But I think it does no good to look so far back. The more interesting historical moments are the ones where, despite supposed progress, we seem to have degenerated in some way.

Like how science, technology, and modern methods of bureaucracy were necessary for the Holocaust to take place in the way that it did, or how nuclear fission led to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. These are Frankenstein moments, when progress becomes Faustian, when Enlightenment reverts to mythology, when innovation trips itself up, when Prometheus gives us fire and gets punished for it by having his liver pecked out by an eagle for eternity.

These moments are where wisdom lies. These are the moments when we’re caught out as a species by tripwires of our own hubris.

After all, what is the first technological innovation? The first use of fire by our ancestors around 400,000 years ago could have been the first step on a path of historical development – it gave us the ability to unlock energy by cooking and warming, lengthened the hours of light, lead to metalwork, and more – but fire also burns, it kills, it led to violence and death and the destruction of ecosystems.

It seems that each innovation – from agriculture to nuclear energy – contains both the seeds of liberation and the possibility of destruction. The neutral release of energy can be used for both good and ill. Discoveries can used to emancipate and dominate.

Powers at the heart of matter, powers

We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake,

Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath

And speak new formulae of megadeath.

– James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover

Darkness has long been associated with the irrational – with demons, monsters, dread and fear – and light with the reasonable – angels, vision, clarity. Many Enlightenment philosophers and scientists were interested in optics, sight, and light – many like Goethe and Descartes experimenting with colour and rainbows – and the image of light and vision as a symbol for reason was, and is, common.

Reason, thinking rationally about causes and effects and the qualities of things, leads to understanding, that if I understand the physical around me I can invent lightbulbs, heat my house, construct better buildings, ships, technology – modernity. So is it the sleep of reason that produces monsters?

Well it’s not that simple. Mathematics, geometry, engineering can of course be used and misused. It can lead to lightbulbs but also guns, bombs, poisons, war.

You can also make ‘rational’ arguments to pursue selfish or evil ends – the art of perverse persuasion. Cicero complained of those who ‘make contorted conclusions, to speak filthily, to use petty little arguments’.

A powerful critique of rationalism was made by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who argued that reason could only ever be the slave of the passions.

What he meant was that thinking logically can tell us how to do something but it cannot tell us what to do in the first place. We feel we want to something then reason how to do it. Reason is a means to end – it might tell us how to cook a meal, but ultimately we’re cooking it because we feel hungry.

Reason might aid us in designing a new car but then I can jump in that car and use it to run someone over on purpose.

But let’s not abandon reason as something that can lead us from the darkness too quickly. Reason tells us that witchcraft is superstition, that alchemy is a misguided pursuit, it tells us how to perform surgery and understand weather systems. It helps us understand the causes of things.

And so the light of the Enlightenment was to be shone in all dark corners. Immanuel Kant wrote, ‘The land of shadows is the paradise of dreamers. Here they find an unlimited country where they may build their houses as they please. Hypochondriac vapors, nursery tales, and monastic miracles provide them with ample building materials’.

He argued that the ‘spirit-seers’ who claimed to have access to divine revelation were, ‘like a sick man’s dream, creating vain phantasms’.

Kant said, in one of his wittier moments, ‘If a hypochondriac wind clamors in the gut, it all comes down to the direction it takes: if it goes downward, it becomes a fart, but if it goes upwards, it is an apparition or a holy inspiration’.

So if reason is the simple mechanism we use to pursue goals, surely we want more of it – while also being wary that it can be used for both good and ill.

And we must be careful to remember that those things that fall outside of logic and reason are not automatically dangers lurking in the darkness.

As the philosopher Justin Smith writes: ‘At the individual level irrationality manifests itself as dreams, emotion, passion, desire, affect, enhanced by drugs, alcohol, meditation; at the social level it is expressed as religion, mysticism, storytelling, conspiracy theory, sports fandom, rioting, rhetoric, mass demonstrations, sexuality when it bursts out of its prescribed roles, music when it breaks away from the notes on the sheet and takes on a life of its own’.

Dreams are irrational but can inspire, religion can be a force for good and bad, emotion is at the core of our lives. So if the irrational can be both good and bad, maybe we have to dig deeper to understand the dark side of history.

Do we have insatiable appetites? Do our desires go beyond having just enough? Do we crave wealth, prestige, and power?

We are all hungry, thirsty, in search of safety, guarantees, and comforts. Empire and colonisation was not an exercise in the pursuit of essential goods but luxury tastes – sugar, tobacco, silk, spices. As Smith says, ‘commodities Europeans naturally did not know they needed until they knew they existed’.

We seem to be a species that wants to push at the limits.

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment rationalised and mathematised the world, but this new way of looking at the natural world and ourselves replaced an older set of values – virtues, religious beliefs, traditional norms.

For many Europeans – including a group of ambitious Brits setting up the new East India Company in a dusty office in London – older ethical guidelines were replaced by the pursuit of profit and self-interest.

This unleashing of energy was something new. The Bible had said, ‘Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions’.

But the early Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes instead argued that all of our actions are in the pursuit of power. As one periodical claimed in 1730, ‘The love of power is natural; it is insatiable‘.

Thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith made the case that private vices and the pursuit of self-interest led to public good.

In the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham argued that all of our actions are in the pursuit of pleasure and happiness. In 1817 he had to invent a new word to describe it – maximise.

Seeing the world mathematically and as humans as just calculating machines acting on their own interests naturally led to a new force – greed has always existed, but profit, this was new. Human desire could become superhuman – we are capable of more than we knew.

It started laying the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, in building new innovations, but like rationality more broadly, our insatiable desires can have a dark side.

Explorers, colonists and capitalists used ships, guns, technology to bring comforts and luxuries home, while on the other hand, as one commentator of the British in India wrote, ‘permit themselves all sorts of liberties in the pursuit of private profit or in the hope of impunity. I have seen some so far forget their duty, that they beat to death unfortunate Indians to extract money not owed to them. The country lies groaning under the Anarchy, laws have no power of sanction, morals are corrupt to the ultimate degree, the people groan under a multitude of vexations, all caused by the decay and confusion into which this once-great empire has fallen’.

Mir Qasim, the nawab of Bengal, complaining to a Company official, wrote that the English ‘forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the merchants for a fourth part of their value; and by way of violence and oppression they oblige the farmers to give five rupees for goods that are worth but one’.

Private gains for the British led to India’s GDP stagnating for almost two hundred years. Gains for some led to apartheid for others, to the deaths of native Americans, to the systematic enslavement of millions.

India was conquered by an unregulated private corporation with profit as their sole motive, underwritten by the desires of millions of Europeans. In 1830, parliamentarian James Buckingham said in a speech that, ‘the idea of consigning over to a joint stock association the political administration of an Empire people with 100 million souls were so preposterous that if it were now for the first time proposed it would be deemed not merely an absurdity, but an insult to the meanest understanding of the realm’.

Historian William Dalrymple called it ‘the supreme act of corporate violence in world history’.

If you look to some of the worst periods in history, the events with the largest death tolls, you’ll see that, like the An Lushan Rebellion against the Tang Emperor, many of the deaths were the result not of direct war or domination, but of famine.

Another of the worst famines in history happened in China in the 19th century during the Taiping Rebellion. Around sixty million died.

In India in 1770, a famine hit East Indian Company ruled Bengal. A third of the Bengalese population perished – around a million people. Bodies floated down rivers, parents sold children to protect others, and one observer wrote that, ‘dogs, jackals, vultures and every bird and beast of prey grey fat and unwieldy on the flesh of man’.

Traditionally, the rulers of India – used to dealing with bad harvests, droughts, or flooding – had managed crises with reserve grain systems and public relief measures. The ruling East India Company provided no such support to the population, and continued to enforce tax collection during famines, hanging many who resisted.

In the worst famine year, £100 million worth of goods in today’s money was transferred from India to London. The governor of the East India Company, Robert Clive, became one of the richest self-made men to have ever lived.

Fast forward to the middle of the twentieth century and Mao is embarking on a campaign of communist reform in China. He wanted to transform agriculture in China and modernise the country, and he wanted to do it as quickly as possible.

The goal of Mao’s Great Leap Forward was to industrialise and urbanise the country and he ordered 90 million peasants to move from the countryside to factories. Grain production dropped by a quarter, pig farming by around 50% in a few years, and as a result around 40 million died of starvation.

So here’s a question: does this make Mao as bad as Hitler? Is it as bad to kill intentionally as it is to kill through gross negligence?

Historian Maurice Meisner writes: ‘Mao Zedong, the main author of the Great Leap, obviously bears the greatest moral and social responsibility for the human disaster from the adventure. But this does not make Mao a mass murderer on the order of Hitler and Stalin, as it is now the fashion to portray him… There is a vast moral difference between unintended and unforeseen consequences of political actions… and deliberate and wilful genocide’.

A similar famine had happened in the thirties in the Soviet Union where around 7-10 million perished as grain was seized by Stalin.

But it wasn’t just gross negligence. Stalin and Mao both sent millions to labour camps. The Khmer Rouge murdered between 1.5-2 million. And while the numbers aren’t as high, the Jacobins made good use of the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Stalin’s head of the NKVD – the secret police – led the Great Purge of around seven million arrests, a million executions, and two million deaths in the Gulag.

Stalin, Mao, Pot, Robespierre and many others were all caught in a spiral of suspicion, paranoia, blame and, like Urban II, used the ‘just war’ theory that the violence was necessary to secure their revolution. One new ideology tries to entrench itself against the ghosts – sometimes very real and often very imagined – of the past.

Here we have two different measures of darkness. One was rationalisation – that new ideologies have to be protected – another of negligence or even, in the case of some famines, just the horrific accident of unintended consequences. Abrupt and violent changes in governance, ideology, ideas, can often lead to catastrophe.

In 1768, the German poet and philosopher Johann Herder urged his fellow countrymen to stop speaking French. He said, ‘spew out … the ugly slime of the Seine / Speak German, O you Germans’. In Geneva, many argued that the city was being corrupted by Francisation. The Russian nobility spoke French, across Europe French culture stood for elegance and luxury, speaking French meant one was cultured, enlightened. But Herder thought it was a way of imposing so called ‘universal values’ on German distinctness – and that one’s local culture, beliefs, arts, and ideas were fundamental to a nation’s character. Herder is now known as the father of nationalism.

Throughout history, in endless places, we see a question about the relationship between a dominant culture and a dependent one, high and low culture, master and servant, invader and invaded.

Voltaire – the prototypical Enlightenment man of reason, science, and progress – told the Empress Catherine of Russia that she was justified in conquering the Poles because they were a backward people – that Enlightenment should be forced upon them for their own good.

The combination of using reason, technology, and the pursuit of interest for one person or group at the expense of another has always resulted in the production of an ideology to justify the actions of the dominant group.

In both Jim Crow America and the British Raj, for example, the ideological justification was that African Americans and Indians needed looking after, that they were incapable of self-government, and needed guiding like children – magazines and cartoons often caricatured African Americans as childlike, easily frightened, dirty, and lazy. Take on the white man’s burden, Kipling urged America.

In his 1867 state of the union address Andrew Johnson said that: ‘It must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism’.

The philosophers Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued in the wake of the Second World War that, ‘Domination is in effect whenever the individual’s goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him… Domination can be exercised by men, by nature, by things – it can also be internal, exercised by the individual on himself, and appear in the form of autonomy’.

They saw the roots of reason’s powers to dominate in the simple domination of man over nature – of humans bending the natural world to our own ends.

Adorno and Horkheimer wrote: ‘reason constitutes the court of judgement of calculation, which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation’.

In that, they provocatively claim that Enlightenment becomes totalitarian. It becomes about standardisation, about commanding and controlling, about dictating and one way of doing things.

They write: ‘The more dominant the complex social organism becomes, the less it tolerates interruptions of the ordinary course of life. Today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, everything must follow the same course’.

In searching for universal rules of nature, ‘Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings’.

Other thinkers have made similar claims. The philosopher turned Nazi Martin Heidegger argued that technology entraps us, frames us, pushes us, calls us. He argued that we become trapped in psychological cages of our own making, with some suffering more than others.

The ideology of reason and domination can insidiously seep into the mentalities of both oppressors and oppressed. The dark side of history might be measured in death, war, slavery, pain but it begins in ideology and discipline – in the excited soldier marching off joyously to war, in subtle cultural jingoism, in the deep-rooted entrenchment of the status quo that limits protest and stops change.

The most obvious way the status quo at home and abroad is maintained is through the creation, expansion, and militarisation of the modern police force. Humans lived without being policed for millennia, and police forces seem so normal to us now that it’s useful to remember how controversial they were when they were introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Much of the media and many of the politicians of the time protested vehemently.

The Gazette newspaper in Britain called it, ‘a base attempt upon the liberty of the subject’, and warned that the purpose of the police state was, ‘to drill, discipline and dragoon us all into virtue’.

A parliament enquiry concluded that ‘such a system would of necessity be odious and repulsive, and one which no government would be able to carry into execution… the very proposal would be rejected with abhorrence’.

In 1867 the commentator Walter Bagehot wrote that, ‘The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked; I know people, old people I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of freedom. If the original policeman had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order’.

In the US, the police force grew out of slave patrols.

The justification for the introduction of a modern police force was that murder and crime was on the rise. But research has shown the opposite to be the case, and that most crime was petty theft associated the poverty.

Much more interesting is the rationalisation, bureaucratisation, and consolidation of state power, the regulation of efficient order and the protection against radical change in the wake of the French Revolution. Governments across Europe increasingly turned their attention to maintaining order. The streets became the site of surveillance, political radicals were spied on and infiltrated, street fairs were supressed.

The introduction of criminal records, photography, fingerprinting, police vehicles, and radios expanded the surveillance state.

Once statistical data and a focus on abnormality in one’s own citizenry is introduced we see a new form of subjectifying power: discipline, punishment, routinisation, burgeoning bureaucracy; a quantitative population with an average, the normal citizen.

The abnormal category could then be normalised or eradicated – the unclean, the unfit, the undesirable, the immigrant, eugenics.

Sterilizing the unfit and the criminal was explored to varying degrees in America and Europe but reached its zenith in the Nazi regime, which passed a law in 1933 that declared that, ‘anyone with hereditary diseases may be rendered sterile by surgical means, when, according to medical experience, it is highly probable that the offspring of such person will suffer from severe inherited mental or bodily disorders’.

At least 400,000 compulsory sterilisations were carried out during Nazi rule on those with anything from alcoholism to blindness, epilepsy to ‘feeble-mindedness’ and homosexuality.

300,000 were killed in what came to be known as Action T4, as doctors were given permission to kill those deemed ‘incurable’.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had warned that, ‘To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so’.

Each year millions try to commit suicide, countless millions more report depression, millions are subject to abuse, mental and physical Any exploration of the dark side of history has to shine a light in the dark corners of the human mind.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard commented on the changing world around him and the freedoms and possibilities it brought and argued that, ‘deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked by the millions and millions in this enormous household’.

It was a period of crisis. Darwin showed that humans were just another animal, Nietzsche commented on the decline of religiosity, Romantics rallied against industrialisation and urbanisation. People moved in droves from the predictability of rural life to cramped and dirty cities.

Kierkegaard said, ‘Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss… Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’.

The word panic was coined at around the same time by the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley who used it to describe the increasing cases he was seeing of extreme agitation, trembling, and terror.

Doctors were diagnosing a new condition – neurasthenia, a precursor to what we’d now call stress or anxiety. The term stress wouldn’t be used until the middle of the twentieth century, borrowed from the idea of a physical object being stressed – metal in factories, train tracks, alloys, tools, pushed and pulled, hammered, bashed, and formed.

Neurasthenia, the doctor Charles Beard wrote, was characterised by nervousness, and there were five main causes: steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women.

In short, the noise and speed of the modern world was too much for some people.

Beard wrote, for example, that, ‘the perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments. Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments. We are under constant strain, mostly unconscious, often times in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere or do something at some definite moment’.

There was simply too much going on. The demands of democratic politics, of business, of family life, of your own salvation, of keeping up with the latest news and innovations.

Beard wrote that, ‘The experiment attempted on this continent of making every man, every child, and every woman an expert in politics and theology is one of the costliest of experiments with living human beings’.

Some of the observations may seem strange and outdated now but Beard had a point: fast changes have fast demands. Modern ideas, progress, technology could have a mental dark side.

Let’s return to that whiggish belief in progress and end with maybe the biggest challenge to that thesis – the Holocaust.

Hegel, one of the most well-known proponents of the march of reason and progress, said, ‘the finest and noblest individuals were likely to be immolated on the altar of history’, that the contradictions, wars, and violence of history was the cost paid, the lessons to learn from, the battle of ideas.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt responded, ‘who would dare to reconcile himself with the reality of extermination camps, or play the game of synthesis-antithesis-synthesis until his dialectics have discovered ‘meaning’ in slave labor?’

And the philosopher Hans Jonas wrote, ‘The disgrace of Auschwitz is not to be charged to some all-powerful providence or to some dialectically wise necessity, as if it were an antithesis demanding a synthesis or a step on the road to salvation… It remains on our account, and it is we who must again wash away the disgrace from our own disfigured faces, indeed from the very countenance of God. Don’t talk to me here about the cunning of reason’.

In other words, we cannot be complacent. The Holocaust was an expression of so much of what we’ve looked at here – that the Jewry of Germany were engaged in a plot to destroy the nation, that Germans had enemies on all sides, was used as the rationalisation for the just war. The ideology that dehumanised Jews that was built upon that rationalisation, the bureaucratisation, technologisation, militarisation of state power, the unquestioned power of a group of men – these are all problems not for history, but for all of us, we are all responsible for understanding them.

The tripwires laid down by innovation, technology, our capacity for reason have grown, the stakes have gotten higher. History now makes demands of all of us to take an interest in our own survival. The postmodern world has challenged our faith in progress. We’ve discovered that primates are naturally more violent than any other mammal. We’ve come to terms with the death of god and find ourselves scrambling around in the dark for meaning. We live in an age of anxiety, depression, drug use, screen addiction, the shadow of great wars, and apocalypses of climate change, the AI singularity, and nuclear war.

This history has of course not been anywhere near exhaustive, but what I’ve tried to sketch, in outline, are periods where innovations and progress uncovered their opposites – darkness, depression, slavery, famine. What they sometimes show is something we’ve always known – that things that seem good can lead to excess, pride, gluttony, sloth – the positive uncovers its own negative.

If we don’t learn from our dark past, the next dark spot could be the darkest of all.

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