More evidence that increasing ethnic diversity leads to more individualism and less community feeling.
Archaeologists may have found the tiltyard where Henry VIII fell off his horse during a joust, a very serious accident which may have changed his personality and led to all sorts of bad things. On the other hand, maybe he was always a monstrosity and just stopped covering it up with smiles.
In the Jim Crow era, "We find that lynchings decrease with greater Black firearms access."
Centrist Democratic Congressmen lash out at progressives, saying their radical positions cost the Democrats the Senate and many seats in the House (Washington Post)
To celebrate Guy Fawkes' Day, the UK National Archives is displaying the invisible ink letters, written with orange juice, which the plotters sent to each other, the seizure of which exposed the plot.
I have a Concave Disposition.
Alex Tabarrok on how economic setbacks (losing a job or graduating in a recession) impact our psyches and lives.
The key role of drones in the recent fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh (Washington Post)
Kevin Drum reports that compared to the citizens of other democracies, Americans score high on hating the other political party but very low on liking their own.
The mayor of Amacuzac, Mexico, has been jailed for corrupt dealings with drug cartels, but he won reelection from his jail cell. (Washington Post)
Long NY Times article on the work of Joseph Tainter and other scholars interested in the collapse of civilizations; turns out many of them worry that they are living through such a collapse themselves.
Excavations at the tiny Greek islet of Vyrokastraki have revealed a small city occupied from Archaic to Byzantine times, including an inscription about a famous Hellenistic pirate.
In China online retailers celebrate 11/11 as "Singles Day," a sort of anti-Valentine's Day devoted to those who live alone, and indeed the day typically sets sales records.
Turkmenistan's dictator has erected a 19-foot-tall, gilded statue of his favorite dog breed. (Washington Post)
Bold, risky, path-breaking claims in science: asked why Neolithic Indonesians removed the long bones from some buries, an archaeologists said, "We don't know why long bone removal was practiced, but it's likely some aspect of the belief system of the people who lived at this time."
2 comments:
That finding that "increasing ethnic diversity leads to more individualism and less community feeling" is interesting, but it desperately needs a qualification. The connection may well be true in contemporary western-style societies, especially where the ethnic diversity is the result of immigration. But plenty of historical societies lived with both extreme ethnic diversity and extreme community consciousness, indeed exclusiveness. Iraq in, say, 960 or 1860 or even 1940, was by any definition an ethnically diverse society. But all those ethnicities maintained strong community separateness and strong distinct identities and traditions, often especially because of fairly rigidly enforced rules on marriage within the community. I think the same could be said across much of South Asia and North Africa until the last eighty years or so, and across Eastern and Central Europe until perhaps 1850.
Modern western society and especially uprooting and immigration act strongly to reduce the power of those customs and community authorities (all those mean old men) that kept communities separate. Ultra-orthodox Jews are among the few groups who have rather successfully withstood this tendency, in large part by dint of absolutely obsessive training of their youngsters in the rules and concepts that promote separation. One suspects that other uprooted groups (such as the Yazidis, Mandaeans, and Assyrian Christians now largely driven out of Iraq) will be less successful in this.
Bold, risky, path-breaking claims in science: asked why Neolithic Indonesians removed the long bones from some buries, an archaeologists said, "We don't know why long bone removal was practiced, but it's likely some aspect of the belief system of the people who lived at this time."
Archaeologists never fail to disappoint - if they don't understand why people did something, they chalk it up to ritual and religion.
Of course, the way this is phrased is even more ridiculous: "some aspect of the belief system of the people who lived at this time". As if they would practice something for reasons they DIDN'T believe in! Or as if the practice was based on the beliefs of people who DIDN'T live at that time! *eyeroll*
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