I’m reading Peter Turchin’s “War & Peace & War” (the sequel to “Porgy & Bess & Porgy”) currently. Some of you might jump in at the mention of cliodynamics with cracks about Hari Seldon & comparisons to earthquake prediction, but Turchin has already beat you to the punch there and accordingly proposes more modest ambitions for the field. What instead stuck out to me was his claim in the intro setting up his asabiyah-based theory that rational choice & the “selfish gene” have been debunked by experimental economics and multilevel selection, and that the previously mentioned theories cannot explain cooperation. This seemed wrong to me. Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” is full of explanations of how purely self-interested genes can give rise to cooperative behavior. In a foreword he even says the book could have been titled “The Cooperative Gene”. Turchin’s background is in evolutionary biology, so I’d expect he knows all this and perhaps has an argument contra Dawkins, but I can’t accept his claim as is on face value. Elsewhere I happen to be involved in a discussion of collective action problems, where I take the position that they do exist but surprisingly often people can come up with solutions to deal with them.
Turchin isn’t the first Russian evolutionary biologist to pooh-pooh the individual organism in favor of the group. The anarcho-communist prince Pyotr Kropotkin wrote “Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution”, which I admit to not having read yet despite owning it (and seeing the endorsements of Gould & Montagu on the back), which argues among other things that competition within a species does not serve to give a Malthusian bound to population growth because animals by their nature avoid competing with one another. The less scientifically inclined Russian anarchist Bakunin was the leader of a group known as the “collectivists” in the First International. More conservative Russians aren’t keen on individualism either. Anatoly Karlin explains the ideal state for Russia being one of “sobornost”, in which Russians are united in a confident patriotism, vs “poshlost” or self-satisfied vulgarity, exemplified by Weimar Germany & 1990s Russia. Russians are always afraid of chaos and hence more willing to accept a “white rider” such as Putin today or Ivan the Terrible before. Like most in the “liberty loop” of Anglo civilization, I am more afraid of the tyranny of the ruler of the central state.
Before picking up the book I was taking part in an argument over whether an analysis at the individual level wasn’t fine-grained enough. Inspired by Derekt Parfit, behavioral economics or perhaps both, Adam Ozimek suggested that an individual at different times might be thought of as distinct persons and this framing undermines the right of a past self to commit suicide, thus depriving the future self of life. I responded that “if suicide is murder, then spending in the present is theft from a future self, sex is rape and a boxing match is battery” but that the shared genes of our past-and-future selves prevent much conflict of interests. Sister Y, as might be expected, disagrees on suicide but does seem more favorable toward the truth of the “successive selves” lens. She just thinks that “possible” entities don’t have the right to come into existence. Karl Smith frames it in terms of an “experiencing self” who wants “good friends and good laughs” while the “remembering self” wants “money, status, fame, power, etc”. I bet nobody likes him. In this discussion I should have referenced Katja Grace’s post arguing that because of the temporally divided nature of the individual, libertarianism should give way to paternalism on matters like smoking. But I forgot to do so until now.
The Austrians are known (at least among the people who know about them at all) for their methodological individualism. The Austrian-inspired libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once asked why they don’t dig even deeper to use the neuron as their unit of analysis. In his ongoing quest to alienate his old Austrian friends, Gene Callahan has pronounced methodological individualism to be alright for its time but wanting in comparison to newer goods on the shelf.
Entitled to an Opinion 
April 5, 2010 at 1:59 am
I think this is really just a clever demonstration of how mixing/mashups can apply to thoughts as well as songs–even better, as there is no IP.
FWIW, Razib had an interview with Turchin where he said:
Yes, I think that my Russian background was a strong contributing factor, but no, not because of Marxism. You have to realize that before I started my historical project I had completely rejected Marxism, because of my upbrining (my father was a human rights activist in the Soviet Union and was exiled abroad in late 1970s). Only recently, as a result of becoming a social scientist, I learned to appreciate certain insights of Marx and incorporate them into my theories, although I am not a Marxist by any stretch of imagination. The Russian factor, I believe, comes into play because Russians tend to be very broad thinkers. As I think Dostoyevsky once said, the Russian is very broad, I would narrow him down, or something like that. So Russians have a tendency to produce cosmic theories (there is even a philosophical current called Russian Cosmism). In my work I attempt to integrate this Russian tendency with the Anglo-Saxon practicality and empiricism.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2010/02/10-questions-for-peter-turchin.php
I think Turchin’s theory can also help clear up the Russian angle. Russia is close to the steppes; so like China it is forced to come up with a strong state capable of holding back the nomads on one hand; and expanding Swedes/Poles/Germans on the other. It’s not a coincidence that all the libertarian/Anglo paradises are islands or otherwise isolated.
Recently, you have the Jewish influence. As outlined in The Jewish Century; part of Russian universalism comes from the Jewish cosmopolitan urge. OTOH Israel has the greatest density of game theorists in the world.
April 5, 2010 at 4:52 am
geographically superior positions allowing for a certain aloofness from surrounding squabbles seems to be a prime component of proto-capitalism in the venetian republic. this fits in well with the idea that for the merchant class to be reasonably free, defense must be cheaper than offense. basic security is cheap and thus robs the state of its main source of justification for excessive interference.
April 10, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Peter Turchin’s father Valentin Turchin was quite interesting. He wrote political samizdat from the perspective of systems theory, arguing that the western tendency of negotiation between labor and capital was superior to the marxist notion of labor overthrowing capital, and that Soviet reform should start with intra-party democracy. He died just a few days ago.
April 5, 2010 at 4:49 am
I think the successive selves view holds for major periods of value upheaval. the individual before and after such events may very well find the values of the person on the other side abhorrent.
April 5, 2010 at 12:43 pm
> I responded that “if suicide is murder, then spending in the present is theft from a future self, sex is rape and a boxing match is battery” but that the shared genes of our past-and-future selves prevent much conflict of interests.
You say that as if it were so odd. But it’s exactly correct.
Suppose a woman w0 at t0 agrees to sex with a man. Some time later, after many fumbled movements and whispered apologies, w5 at t5 chooses to not have sex and says ‘no’. If the man continues, isn’t that rape? At t0 he had consent and the sex wasn’t rape; at t5, he did not have consent and so the sex was rape.
Even marriage doesn’t make one consent in the past cover all instances; marital rape is now a crime.
If anything, the kind of commercial or debt contract you’re likely thinking of, where one consent covers all instances of a person, is the vast minority of all human interactions.
April 5, 2010 at 2:35 pm
In this discussion I should have referenced Katja Grace’s post arguing that because of the temporally divided nature of the individual, libertarianism should give way to paternalism on matters like smoking.
Grace writes:
The simple way to make this argument is to say that the ‘individual’ is temporally too big a unit to be best ruled over by one part in a (temporal) position of power.
But there is no way out of the fact that at any given time the point of view of those acting in the present will be in a position of power over any subsequent selves. It doesn’t matter if the present self is taking into account the future self, or, in Grace’s case, a third party is acting on behalf of a future self. This is still informed by all present knowledge and inclinations of the present self about the knowledge and inclinations of a future self, which are by no means certain.
It seems to me the attempt to somehow balance the interests of all selves on a temporal plane is doomed to submit to the the continuum that is one present self after another, and whatever it prioritizes.
April 5, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Thorfinn: I think the “connectionist” theory of neurology involves all our memories being connected, so that remembering one thing helps you to remember related things. Or something like that, I haven’t actually given it much study.
Yeah, the “Russian soul” archetype goes way back. Turchin even references something similar for the Byzantines in his book. I didn’t pick up on much of a Marxist aspect, but I haven’t gotten too far and I might have just absorbed too much quasi-Marxism too notice.
Yes, as an Anglo-American I tend to think of “ship empires” which have the advantage of a watery barrier, rather than the “meta-ethnic frontier” of marcher lands. I don’t quite buy his example of Rome as having such frontier origins. He acknowledges that the Latin-Etruscan frontier was not as sever as most “meta-ethnic” ones, and the Etruscans were closer to the northern lands of Gauls, so it should have been they who formed the new empire. Perhaps its expecting too much to ask for a demonstration of statistical significance in a popular text when he’s got more technical publications, but I would have liked a more thorough demonstration of empires arising on such frontiers after the collapse of Rome. Is it possible that there are just more distinct ethnic groups near the frontier, any of whom are candidates for forming the next empire? And shouldn’t we expect a large empire to split geographically with more distant areas becoming separate polities, each of which can now be associated with the old “frontier”?
nazgulnarsil, I would expect an individual who previously held some views might find them understandable. I think it is succeeding generations who never inculcated such ideas who find them more abhorrent.
gwern, there are two different scenarios we might talk about. There is one where a woman requests that a man cease and he refuses, which can more easily fit under the rape heading. And then there is the scenario “men’s rights advocates” often complain about in which a woman gives no such indication but decides the next day (or later) that it was rape. This isn’t a complete strawman, the blogger at I Blame the Patriarchy proposes to abolish the concept of “consent” for sex and allow women to call the cops at any time, where no procedure followed by a man can constitute any form of defense against the charge. My hypothetical runs toward legitimizing that notion, which I don’t think many people will agree is “exactly correct”.
I wanted to link by a post from Stefan Kinsella (or maybe it was Rothbard’s argument) claiming that we can’t alienate our labor but we can be punished for failing to fulfill a contract. The corrollary to this is that your labor may not be seized in order to fulfill a contract. Unfortunately, I can’t find it.
Dain: The point about having power over others is part of my ass-kicking theory of moral personhood.
April 6, 2010 at 12:56 am
A definition of poshlost:
“Poshlust,or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol,if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in
all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature- these are
obvious examples. Now,if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over-concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.
Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name- that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays.
Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet, and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel,zen stereos, polystyrene stink-birds, objects trouves in latrines, cannon balls, canned balls.”
– Vladimir Nabokov, The Paris Review, interview 1967
April 7, 2010 at 12:24 am
TGGP,
The whole notion of “barbarian” needs to be revised when looking that far back. Etruscans brought superior Middle Eastern genetics/cattle, and the Romans were exactly between this frontier and the Italics–at that point barbarians. Rome was able to reach hegemony by mixing Italic notions of representative kingship with Greek and Etruscan culture. At the core of their success was the ability to assimilate outsiders and mobilize manpower; their hybrid culture forced them to be open about accepting new people and technology. The maniple organization of their army came from other Italians; their swords from the Gauls. Romans themselves came up with virtually nothing.
They were also operating within a very harsh world of multipolar Hobbesian anarchy. See “Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome” for an excellent take on this.
What’s most interesting about Rome is how little contingency was involved. As Krugman has pointed out; there were tons of bad Roman generals, and few characters on the order of Alexander. Rome’s success did not hinge on any one battle (even early on, they lost a few). Yet it evolved under conditions of extreme Anarchy and near constant war a highly optimal system of centralized control. Rome’s elites had a greater fraction of wealth than in just about any other period.
There are a number of parallels, by the way, with the Aztecs. Mayans::Aztecs as Greeks::Romans.
April 7, 2010 at 1:35 am
Turchin emphasized the point that succesful empires shrug off repeated losses, then go on to win lasting victories. As part of my quasi-Marxism, I am on the anti-contingent side of macro-scale history.
Turchin says that wasn’t a meta-ethnic barrier, the two saw themselves as quite similar in comparison to barbarian (that was really their perception) Gauls, so they could easily unite against the northern threat. I’ll try to dig up the quote tomorrow, but now it’s late.
April 7, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Turchin on the Roman-Etruscan border:
“As frontiers go, it was fairly local in character, and thus a mighty empire would not, according to the theory arise out of it. (The Roman Empire grew on the second [Celtic/Gaullic] frontier)” p. 142
“[…] the Etruscan-Latin frontier does not qualify as a true metaethnic fault line.” p. 144
A dissapointing quote from the last chapter:
“AIDS had the potential to be another Black Death, if not for the advances in molecular biology and medicine”. Outside of Africa, AIDS was never a big threat to those who don’t participate in homosexual sex or intravenous drug use. Fumento was right, WHO was wrong. Furthermore, the unusual prevalence of AIDS in Africa may be due to the medicine Turchin praises.
A more minor quibble is that he then proceeds to discuss the rise in crime & inflation starting with the 60s, without mentioning that those trends reversed (inflation didn’t literally give way to deflation, but the back of inflationary acceleration was broken) later on in the century.
On finishing the book, I give Turchin kudos for acknowledging counter-examples (unification of Italy) and limitations (chaos theory, end of Malthusian era) to his theory. Not many authors pushing bold theories take such pains to do so. One thing indicated near the beginning that may surprise some is that he is a believer in free-will. He declares that the existence of suicide is the best proof of it.
April 8, 2010 at 8:56 pm
TGGP,
I think Turchin is mistaken about the Latin/Etruscan barrier.
With respect to AIDS in Africa: check out Emily Oster. She shows how gays in America responded to AIDS by picking up condoms, while Africans did not. Plausibly, she shows how this is because income (and the value of life in a Becker framework) is much higher in America. She also shows how the Uganda ABC program was only successful because a collapse in coffee prices shut down truck drivers, who were the main vectors. That’s why Uganda has never been replicated.
The probability of getting AIDS through unprotected vaginal intercourse is ~1200/1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aids#Prevention
I have never understood how that implies an AIDS infection rate of ~40 percent in certain African countries.
April 8, 2010 at 11:10 pm
In this 2005 article, Fumento cites ethnographic and forensic evidence suggesting that African populations are significantly (behaviorally) bisexual and that African AIDS is primarily transmitted through anal sex. The subject is difficult to investigate due to cultural taboos, but it’s interesting how it sort of lines up with the sensational media depictions of the “Downlow” subculture where whatever percentage of westernized black men are reported to have casual sex with other men while not self-identifying as gay or even bisexual.
April 9, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Thanks for linking. Incidentally, I’ve also recently read W&P&W by Turchin and my thoughts on it are here. Turchin’s theory is a good explanation of the roots of Russian collectivism.
April 10, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Robin Hanson discusses the “perverts” theory of African AIDS here, finding it wanting in comparison to the “bad meds” one. In the process he mentions that polygamy should reduce infections (though the less exclusive form found in Africa is another story), and closes with “We often think of anti-racism as core to our culture, but when our choice is to think of blacks as sex perverts or to think of med as deadly, we clearly choose the former over the later. This suggests heroic med is far more central to our culture than anti-racism.”
That very low probability would seem to support the bad meds theory.
The Becker-descended theory is interesting. It reminds me of Greg Clark’s theory that the Industrial Revolution was the result of people gradually becoming more patient & less violent, though in that case it is risk-aversion which is causing wealth rather than the other way around.
Did gays react to AIDS by engaging in safer behavior? I haven’t actually read books like “And the Band Played On”, but the version I heard is that they heavily resisted attempts to clamp down on stuff like bathhouses because they viewed it as a reactionary response to gay liberation. I don’t think we find “bugchaser” subcultures among Africans or other undeveloped regions. Hans Herman Hoppe notoriously theorized that they have high time preference because they don’t start families (and also have shorter lives, but that’s an effect of risk-tasking itself). Time preference (also high among the poor) is conceivably a mechanism by which Becker’s theory of risk-taking could work.
In the linked Fumento article he quotes Stuart Brody as saying that bad meds are probably a bigger source.
In thinking about Turchin’s book, I don’t think the parallels between America & Russia are that strong. The Khanates east of Russia were once powerful and dominated them. Just as the ancestors of native Americans crossed over to find animals not adapted to the threat of humans and promptly wiped them out, Europeans outclassed native Americans (who were still in the stone age and were often hunter-gatherers) from the start. The colonies only came together to throw off the English yoke, not to protect themselves against indians. It was the threat posed by Shay’s rebellion rather than indians that caused them to form a national government. Indians only posed real threats to small settlements, beyond that stage they were pests. Turchin refers to Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Cherokee, but what’s interesting about Jackson is the paternal attitude he had toward the indians. I don’t think Russian leaders had the same attitude toward Muslim raiders (who I doubt would have such a judicial ruling to protect them from expropriation in the first place!).
April 10, 2010 at 6:48 pm
> The Khanates east of Russia were once powerful and dominated them.
I believe even the Poles made their incursions, way back in time.
April 10, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Yes, the Russians had to withstand invasions on both sides. The U.S is more like England the “happy isle” protected by bodies of water.
April 30, 2010 at 10:13 pm
England is not an island. Its land borders are comparable to those of Italy and longer than those of Denmark (after the Swedes conquered Scania). Granted, it hegemonised the lands beyond, but until then that made a material difference to events as late as the ’45 (and, as a potential threat to be warded off and prevented from eventuating, even later).
May 2, 2010 at 9:58 pm
“The ’45”?
A number of Englishmen have referred to it as an isle, even if that is not technically the case.
May 3, 2010 at 2:38 am
The ’45 was the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
Any Englishman who claimed England for an island – Shakespeare not excluded – either lied or knew not whereof he spoke, much like Zionists claiming their particular corner of the world to be Jewish. The British Isles consist of two large islands, Great Britain and Ireland, and a number of lesser ones. Some two thirds of Great Britain by area is England, and some four fifths of its population are English, but the rest of us (myself included) are neither to be discounted nor to be insultingly and offensively subsumed among the English – particularly considering our material consequences both past and present, from our role in ending the Wars of the Roses, through the ’45, to the Midlothian Question of today. England is no island, and that fact has continuing direct as well as indirect effects. Neither can we say that greater effects do not lie before us.
April 10, 2010 at 8:33 pm
History’s a fucking bitch. Geo-history hasn’t been kind to us Europeans lately. We might have been way better off without the massive gun/grain-fueled expansions to the west and east alike, that helped make selfish/nationalist persons in the center feel more geostrategically threatened. We might have been better off if America and trans-Ural Russia had not existed.
Hey history: what have you done for me – LATELY?
April 11, 2010 at 9:38 pm
I never thought of that.
April 10, 2010 at 8:57 pm
> arguing that the western tendency of negotiation between labor and capital was superior to the marxist notion of labor overthrowing capital
If only the Germans had taken an analogous lesson from that sort of talk, instead of doing their 1933 thing.
April 11, 2010 at 4:12 am
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