International trade yields several benefits for the U.S. economy. Trade increases competition between foreign and domestic producers. That increase in competition causes the least productive U.S. businesses and industries to shrink; it also enables the most productive businesses and industries in the United States to expand to take advantage of profitable new opportunities to sell abroad and obtain cost savings from greater economies of scale. As a result, trade encourages a more efficient allocation of resources in the economy and raises the average productivity of businesses and industries in the United States. Through that increase in productivity, trade can boost economic output and workers’ average real (inflation-adjusted) wage. In addition, U.S. consumers and businesses benefit because trade lowers prices for some goods and services and increases the variety of products available for purchase.
Not everyone benefits from trade expansion, however. Although increases in trade probably do not significantly affect total employment, trade can affect different workers in different ways. Workers in occupations, businesses, and industries that expand because of trade may make more money, whereas workers in occupations, businesses, and industries that shrink may make less money or experience longer-than-average unemployment. Such losses can be temporary or permanent. Nevertheless, economic theory and historical evidence suggest that the diffuse and long-term benefits of international trade have outweighed the concentrated short-termcosts. That conclusion has consistently received strong support from the economics profession.
Last week, I made the unfortunate decision to engage in a political/economic debate on Facebook. I rarely do this because (1) it makes friends into enemies, (2) it sucks up a lot of time with continual responses, and (3) it slowly turns me into a hostile person. Nonetheless, one of the topics discussed was immigration. The concerns expressed by my debate opponent were that new immigrants may not be assimilating and could very well undermine the values and culture that make America work. Having already explained what the economic literature says about immigration, I reminded him that there has been surprisingly little research on the effects immigrants have on institutions. But the research we do have suggests that immigrants not only have no negative effects on institutions, but may even have positive effects on institutional quality.
A brand new study published this August could lend support to the findings above. From the abstract:
Using several measures of diversity, we find that higher levels of ethno-linguistic and cultural fractionalization are conditioned positively on higher economic growth by an index of economic freedom, which is often heralded as a good measure of sound economic management. High diversity in turn is associated with higher levels of economic freedom. We do not find any evidence to suggest that high diversity hampers change towards greater economic freedom and institutions supporting liberal policies. The effect of diversity, moreover, is conditioned positively by higher democracy. Our results raise serious doubt about the centrality of social diversity for explaining economic failure, nor is there evidence to suggest that autocratic measures are required under conditions of social diversity to implement growth-promoting policies. This is good news because history and culture seem to matter less than rational agency for ensuring sound economic management.
While this is mainly discussing development economics, I think the correlation between high diversity and high economic freedom is important. Barring members of other ethno-linguistic groups and cultures from entering the country may actually be holding back higher-quality institutions.
You can see an older, ungated version of the paper here.
Philosopher Joseph M. Spencer has already made some incrediblyimpressivecontributions to Mormon Studies, including Book of Mormonresearch. For example, his An Other Testament is one of the most engaging and enlightening books on the Book of Mormon I have ever read. And yet, his latest from Greg Kofford Books–The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record–surpasses it. Spencer is one of the most careful readers of scripture in Mormon Studies and this book puts his skill on full display. While a stellar combination of close textual analysis, biblical scholarship, and theology, Spencer nonetheless makes the subject(s) accessible to a wider audience by writing in lecture format rather than a line-by-line commentary (which he believes “gets dull fast and alienates most readers”). Spencer spends multiple chapters dissecting the sections of Isaiah quoted in the Book of Mormon and follows them up with how various prophetic voices within the Book of Mormon–namely Nephi, Lehi, and Jacob–interact with Isaiah’s text. One of the major strengths of Spencer’s analysis is his willingness to let the different voices (and textual variants thanks to Royal Skousen’s work) speak independently, even if they are sometimes in conflict. He also allows Isaiah to speak for Isaiah, placing his writings in their proper historical context (he mentions the problem of Deutero-Isaiah, though he doesn’t necessarily seek to resolve it).
“[T]he whole point of Nephi’s record,” according to Spencer, “is to get us to read Isaiah carefully” (pg. 47). But why? Spencer beautifully summarizes:
The purpose of the Book of Mormon, according to Nephi’s vision, is to refocus Christianity on its Abrahamic foundations, to restore to Christianity the idea that the Gentiles aren’t a kind of replacement Israel, but that they’re to be grafted into the everlasting covenant that’s still vouchsafed to Jacob’s children…Take a look at what the very title page of the Book of Mormon has to say about its primary purpose. It’s “to show unto the remnant of the house of Israel how great things the Lord hath done for their fathers, and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever.” …It’s this vision of the Book of Mormon’s purpose (to save Christianity from itself!) that drew Nephi’s attention to Isaiah. Nephi found…the most brilliant available biblical explanation of the complex relationship between covenantal Israel and non-covenantal Gentiles. The book that bears Isaiah’s name is nothing if it isn’t a kind of systematic attempt to make sense of Abraham’s covenant in the richest way possible (pg. 11).
The Vision of All is easily one of the best books in the genre. Not only is it top-notch scholarship, but it’s also a profound and enriching theological treatise on the role of the Restoration in covenantal history as well as an implicit call to the responsibilities associated with this role. In short, it is a reminder of why we study the scriptures in the first place.
I recently penned a more detailed review of the book over at Worlds Without End (I pretty much borrowed everything above from it). Check it out and be sure to pick up Spencer’s book, which came out today.
UPDATE: You can listen to a podcast with Spencer discussing Isaiah at LDS Perspectives.
One of the most memorable of the talks I’ve read so far was Lost Battalions, which I read near the start of the General Conference Odyssey. The talk was by (then) Elder Thomas Monson. He has been serving as an apostle since 1963, when he was just 36 years old. That’s longer than I’ve been alive by almost two full decades. And yet because (to be perfectly honest) I haven’t paid such close attention to GC talks in the past, I’m only now beginning to get a real feel for his voice. And there’s more to it than just “tells stories.”
His talk for this week was called The Paths Jesus Walked, and it was filled with a lot of the same pathos as his earlier talk about the Lost Battalion. He described how Jesus walked the paths of disappointment, temptation, and pain. Not exactly cheery stuff, but definitely uplifting and encouraging when we feel our own paths are not all sunshine and roses:
Yes, each of us will walk the path of disappointment, perhaps due to an opportunity lost, a power misused, or a loved one not taught. The path of temptation, too, will be the path of each. . . Likewise shall we walk the path of pain. We cannot go to heaven in a feather bed. The Savior of the world entered after great pain and suffering. We, as servants, can expect no more than the Master. Before Easter there must be a cross.
I think I have heard somewhere—and I wish I could remember it—that because the Savior suffered, he made suffering sacred. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes we or others make choices that inflict needless pain. And so not all the pain that we experience in life is necessary. But all of it can be made meaningful.
President Monson also laid out the paths we can walk, as disciples, to find that meaning. We can walk the paths of obedience, of service, and of prayer. Obedience and service make sense; they cover a lot of ground. Walking the path of prayer seems more interesting, but I like that it is included. “It is by walking the path of prayer that we commune with the Father.”
I was struck by two more things from the talk. First:
Jesus changed men. He changed their habits, their opinions, their ambitions. He changed their tempers, their dispositions, their natures. He changed men’s hearts.
And so we have to ask the question: in what ways is our discipleship changing us? Are our habits, opinions, or ambitions changing? Our tempers, disposition, and natures? Can you look inside at your own life and point to the specific ways in which your heart has been changed? If not: why not? After all, “The passage of time has not altered the capacity of the Redeemer to change men’s lives. As he said to the dead Lazarus, so he says to you and me: ‘… come forth.’”
Second, speaking of Paul (then Saul) in the time just before his conversion, he said of the Old Testament that “For some reason, these writings did not reach Paul’s need.” This struck me as an unusually penetrating and frank insight to make. We almost always hear that the scriptures are powerful. And they are, nothing here contradicts that. But they are not always—by themselves—sufficient. It’s a reminder of the limitations of men and of the limitations of any one aspect of the Gospel. It implies that discipleship has to be full spectrum or there is no guarantee that it works. We have to strive to be well-rounded saints, or we won’t be saints at all.
Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that “[o]ne of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.” In other words, those opposing immigration the most live in areas with very few immigrants (similar to Brexit voters). A new Gallup study supports these findings. The Washington Post reports, “According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.” However, while
Trump voters tend to be the most skeptical about immigration, they are also the least likely to actually encounter an immigrant in their neighborhood.
Rothwell finds that people who live in places with many Hispanic residents or places close to the Mexican border, tend not to favor Trump — relative to otherwise similar Americans and to otherwise similar white Republicans.
Among those who are similar in terms of income, education and other factors, those who view Trump favorably are more likely to be found in white enclaves — racially isolated Zip codes where the amount of diversity is lower than in surrounding areas.
These places have not been affected much by immigration, and Rothwell believes that is no coincidence. He argues that when people have more personal experience of people from other countries, they develop friendlier attitudes toward immigrants.
All this makes yesterday’s outstanding article in The Washington Post all the more important. “For many economists,” the author writes, “it’s the simplest and most effective way to make the world richer and reduce poverty. For those in government, it’s a political landmine.” She goes on to present the case in favor of loosening immigration restrictions:
Some economists have suggested that allowing people to work where their labor is most highly valued — something that is hardly realistic, given the political environment in the developed world— could double the size of the global economy. More than a dozen studies reviewed by economist Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the pro-immigration Center for Global Development, suggested that eliminating barriers to global mobility would increase world gross domestic product by between 67 and 147 percent.
Clemens says the benefits are huge even for a more modest loosening of restrictions on immigration. His research suggests that allowing just 5 percent of the people now living in poor countries to work temporarily or permanently in richer countries would add trillions of dollars to the global economy. The economic gains would be greater than those from dismantling every remaining barrier to trade and investment around the world.
While some critics like Harvard’s George Borjas reject this kind of optimism, the evidence leans in favor of those pushing for fewer restrictions:
First, the same worker can create more economic value in some places than in others, because of differences in factors that affect the productivity of businesses, such as natural resources, infrastructure, technologies and laws…Differences in productivity are reflected in the vastly different wages people can earn for similar types of work across the world. According to estimates by Clemens, Claudio Montenegro and Lant Pritchett, who examined a data set of more than 2 million workers, the average Peruvian can make 2.6 times as much in the United States as in Peru, while a Haitian can make seven times more.
Second, many economists say that an influx of immigrants can expand an economy, potentially even raising wages for the native born…An expansive study released by the National Academies of Sciences in September found that immigration has mostly helped the U.S. economy in recent decades and had little effect on the wages or employment of native-born Americans. According to the study, the main group negatively affected by newly arriving immigrants was actually earlier waves of immigrants with similar language skills. To a lesser extent, new immigrants also competed for work with the lowest-skilled Americans, such as high-school dropouts. But in general, immigration left the native population slightly better off.
The article concludes:
While Clemens says he is troubled by the idea of discriminating against people based on where they are born, he doesn’t advocate “openborders,” a term that is oftenused as a synonym for anarchy — no background checks, no deportation and no restrictions on immigration. In reality, few politicians are advocating even moderately higher levels of immigration, and the world won’t see anything like open borders anytime soon. But he says people still should recognize the substantial trade-offs of the current system.
Clemens draws an analogy with the rights of women. In the United States, laws prevented women from owning property, inheriting wealth and entering many professions until the late 1800s. Although some male workers may have suffered from the entry of women into the workforce during the 20th century, no one would deny that it has provided enormous benefits to the country and the economy. Yet restrictions on women had still persisted for millennia.
As if we didn’t feel small and insignificant already, The Guardian reports,
There are a dizzying 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, up to 20 times more than previously thought, astronomers reported on Thursday. The surprising finding, based on 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, was published in the Astronomical Journal.
Scientists have puzzled over how many galaxies the cosmos harbors at least since US astronomer Edwin Hubble showed in 1924 that Andromeda, a neighboring galaxy, was not part of our own Milky Way. But even in the era of modern astronomy, getting an accurate tally has proven difficult.
To begin with, there is only part of the cosmos where light given off by distant objects has had time to reach Earth. The rest is effectively beyond our reach. And even within this “observable universe”, current technology only allows us to glimpse 10% of what is out there, according to the new findings.
“Using deep space images from Hubble,” the article continues, “Conselice and his team painstakingly converted them into 3D to measure the number of galaxies at different times in the history of the universe. The analysis reached back more than 13bn years – very near the time of the “Big Bang” thought to have given birth to the universe.” These findings have some astounding implications:
The results have clear implications for galaxy formation, and also helps shed light on an ancient astronomical paradox — why is the sky dark at night?
In analyzing the data, a team led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham, U.K., found that 10 times as many galaxies were packed into a given volume of space in the early universe than found today. Most of these galaxies were relatively small and faint, with masses similar to those of the satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. As they merged to form larger galaxies the population density of galaxies in space dwindled. This means that galaxies are not evenly distributed throughout the universe’s history, the research team reports in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“These results are powerful evidence that a significant galaxy evolution has taken place throughout the universe’s history, which dramatically reduced the number of galaxies through mergers between them — thus reducing their total number. This gives us a verification of the so-called top-down formation of structure in the universe,” explained Conselice.
So why is the sky so dark at night if it is populated with galaxies?:
The team came to the conclusion that indeed there actually is such an abundance of galaxies that, in principle, every patch in the sky contains part of a galaxy. However, starlight from the galaxies is invisible to the human eye and most modern telescopes due to other known factors that reduce visible and ultraviolet light in the universe. Those factors are the reddening of light due to the expansion of space, the universe’s dynamic nature, and the absorption of light by intergalactic dust and gas. All combined, this keeps the night sky dark to our vision.
In the nearly half-century history of Foreign Policy, the editors of this publication have never endorsed a candidate for political office. We cherish and fiercely protect this publication’s independence and its reputation for objectivity, and we deeply value our relationship with all of our readers, regardless of political orientation.
It is for all these reasons that FP’s editors are now breaking with tradition to endorse Hillary Clinton for the next president of the United States.
Our readers depend on FP for insight and analysis into issues of national security and foreign policy. We feel that our obligation to our readers thus extends now to making clear the great magnitude of the threat that a Donald Trump presidency would pose to the United States. The dangers Trump presents as president stretch beyond the United States to the international economy, to global security, to America’s allies, as well as to countless innocents everywhere who would be the victims of his inexperience, his perverse policy views, and the profound unsuitability of his temperament for the office he seeks.
The litany of reasons Trump poses such a threat is so long that it is, in fact, shocking that he is a major party’s candidate for the presidency. The recent furor over his vile behavior with women illustrates the extraordinary nature of his unsuitability, as does his repudiation by so many members of his own party — who have so many reasons to reflexively support their nominee.
This endorsement made me want to look at the state of newspaper and magazine endorsements thus far. As of now, there isnot a single newspaper or magazine that has endorsed Trump. None. Zero. And the following have more-or-less broken tradition:
New York Daily News: pro-Clinton. Typically centrist; endorsed George Bush in 2004 and Mitt Romney in 2012 (Barack Obama in 2008).
Houston Chronicle: pro-Clinton. Third time in 64 years to endorse a Democratic candidate.
Tulsa World: No endorsement. Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 was the last Democratic candidate they endorsed.
Richmond Times-Dispatch: pro-Johnson. Have endorsed every Republican nominee since 1980. First endorsement of a Libertarian.
Dallas Morning News: pro-Clinton. First endorsement of a Democratic nominee since Roosevelt in 1944.
New Hampshire Union Leader: pro-Johnson. First Libertarian endorsement and non-Republican in over 100 years.
Cincinnati Enquirer: pro-Clinton. First Democratic endorsement since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
Arizona Republic: pro-Clinton. First Democratic endorsement in its 126-year history.
Detroit News: pro-Johnson. First non-Republican endorsement in its 143-year history.
USA Today: not Trump. First time to take a position on the presidential election in its 34-year history.
San Diego Union-Tribune: pro-Clinton. First Democratic endorsement in its 148-year history.
Desert Sun: pro-Clinton. First Democratic endorsement in 90-year history.
Foreign Policy: pro-Clinton. See above.
Wired: pro-Clinton. Magazine’s first presidential endorsement.
Deseret News: not Trump. Has not endorsed a candidate in 80 years, but wrote an editorial saying Trump should drop out.
I enjoyed taking a break to cover the October 2016 General Conference last week, but now we’re back on to our usually scheduled General Conference Odyssey posts, which means we’re writing about the Friday afternoon session of the April 1974 GC.
I didn’t really catch a theme in this session, and there wasn’t one talk that really grabbed me. Instead, I just want to go through a couple of lines that stuck me from several different talks.
True love is not earthbound. It is as eternal as our spirits, which never die.
There is no coincidence that two of Mormonism’s most unique beliefs are (1) marriage for time and all eternity and (2) the immortality of the human soul both forwards and backwards in time. There is a part of our soul that is ageless, because not only does it have no end but it also has beginning. For souls like these, nothing but eternal relationships could possibly do.
In Hanging On, Elder Loren C. Dunn told a story about a pampered tree that toppled in a storm and contrasted it with a neglected tree—that, because it was forced to drive down deep roots for water—outlasted the gale.
I see in many people this same kind of beauty. Adversity and trial have driven the roots of faith and testimony deep in order to tap the reservoir of spiritual strength that comes from such experiences. By nature they know how to stand and fight and hang on.
Elder H. Burke Peterson spoke with frankness and directness about the role of mothers in Mother, Catch the Vision of Your Call. His call for women to not work outside the home was unapologetic, but it was not unqualified. He not only indicated that single mothers had to work—and deserved our respect and help—but went farther, writing:
Fathers and mothers, before you decide you need a second income and that mother must go to work out of the home, may I plead with you: first go to the Lord in prayer and receive his divine approbation. Be sure he says yes.
This is one of those interesting verses that complicates simplistic stereotypes and reaffirm that the teachings of the Gospel are not as amenable to caricatures as some might think. What he’s saying here is a teaching that has been reiterated more plainly in more recent years: that the guidance of General Authorities in General Conference is just that: general. It is up to us to, in humility and a spirit of obedience, figure out how to apply those teachings to our individual lives. And, as a corollary, that means that we ought to get a little bit better at minding our own business when we see folks who are departing from the general course. Maybe they’re lazy, or disobedient, or apathetic. Or maybe they’re just as righteous, obedient, and passionate as we are but walking a slightly different path.
Then we have Elder William H. Bennett, in Inertia, describing some the primary reasons that people fail to live up to their potential:
some of the more important [reasons we do not reach our potential] are failure to do adequate realistic planning; lack of desire, commitment, and dedication; failure to use time effectively; and failure to correct one’s mistakes.
It’s a very practical list, and one that I think is entirely applicable to most or our lives. I also like how it fit with Elder Kazuhiko Yamashita’s call (in the most recent GC) to “be ambitious for Christ.” If you want to realize your ambitions, then you should pay attention to Elder Bennett’s cautions.
And last but not least, two more short quotes, this time from Elder Marvin J. Ashton in A Time of Urgency:
Midnight is so far and yet so close to those who have procrastinated.
and
God listens to humble prayer. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t ask us to pray.
Wikipedia: “Symphony of the Stones carved by the Goght River at Garni Gorge in Armenia is an example of an emergent natural structure.” Released by WOWARMENIA for Wikimedia under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license
I didn’t get a chance to make that pithy observation in a Facebook exchange this morning because my interlocutor gave me the boot. That’s OK, I may have been blocked from somebody’s Facebook feed for thinking bad thoughts, but I can’t get blocked from my own blog! You can’t stop this signal, baby.
So, just as two wrongs don’t make a right, let’s use this Columbus Day to talk about two stupids that don’t make a smart.
Bad Idea 1: The Noble Savage
There’s a school of thought which holds, essentially, that everything was fine and dandy in the Americas until the Europeans came along and ruined it. The idea, seen in Disney and plenty of other places, is that “native” peoples lived at harmony with the Earth, appreciating the fragile balance of their precious ecosystems and proactively maintaining it. This idea is bunk. The reality is that in almost all cases the only limit on the extent to which any culture restricts its exploitation of natural resources is technological. Specifically, humanity has an unambiguous track record of killing everything edible in sight as they spread across the globe, leading to widespread extinctions from Australia to the Americas and upending entire ecosystems. If our ancient ancestor didn’t wipe a species out, the reason was either that it didn’t taste good or they couldn’t. As Yuval Noah Harari put it Sapiens:
Don’t believe the tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.
Harari specifically describes how the first humans to discover Australia not only wiped out species after species, but–in so doing–converted the entire continent into (pretty much) the desert it is today:
The settlers of Australia–or, more accurately, its conquerors–didn’t just adapt, they transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition. The first human footprint on a sandy Australian beach was immediately washed away by the waves, yet, when the invaders advanced inland, they left behind a different footprint. One that would never be expunged.
Matt Ridley, in The Origins of Virtue, lists some of the animals that no longer exist thanks to hungry humans:
Soon after the arrival of the first people in Australia, possibly 60,000 years ago, a whole guild of large beasts vanished — marsupial rhinos, giant diprotodons, tree fellers, marsupial lions, five kinds of giant wombat, seven kinds of short-faced kangaroos, eight kinds of giant kangaroo, a two-hundred-kilogram flightless bird. Even the kangaroo species that survived shrank dramatically in size, a classic evolutionary response to heavy predation.
And that pattern was repeated again and again. Harari again:
Mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia whenever people settled another part of the outer world.
Have you ever wondered why the Americas don’t have the biodiversity of large animals that Africa does? We’ve got some deer and bison, but nothing like the hippos, giraffes, elephants, and other African megafauna. Why not? Because the first humans to get here killed and ate them all, that’s why not. There’s even a name for what happened: the Pleistocene overkill. Back to Ridley:
Coincident with the first certain arrival of people in North America, 11,500 years ago, 73% of the large mammal genera quickly died out… By 8000 years ago, 80% of the large mammal genera in south America were also extinct — giant sloths, giant armadillos, giant guanacos, giant capybaras, anteaters the size of horses.
In Madagascar, he notes that “at least 17 species of lemurs (all the diurnal one is larger than 10 kg in weight, one as big as a gorilla), and the remarkable elephant birds — the biggest of which weighs 1000 pounds — were dead within a few centuries of the islands first colonization by people in about 500 A.D.” In New Zealand, “the first Maoris sat down and ate their way through all 12 species of the giant moa birds. . . Half of all new Zealand’s indigenous land birds are extinct.” The same thing happened in Hawaii, where at least half of the 100 unique Hawaiian birds were extinct shortly after humans arrived. “In all, as the Polynesians colonized the Pacific, they extinguished 20% of all the bird species on earth.”
Ridley’s myth-busting doesn’t end there. He cites four different studies of Amazon Indians “that have directly tested their conservation ethic.” The results? “All four rejected the hypothesis [that the tribes had a conservation ethic].” Moving up to North America, he writes that “There is no evidence that the ‘thank-you-dead-animal’ ritual was a part of Indian folklore before the 20th century,” and cites Nicanor Gonsalez, “At no time have indigenous groups included the concepts of conservation and ecology in their traditional vocabulary.”
This might all sound a little bit harsh, but it’s important to be realistic. Why? Because these myths–no matter how good the intentions behind them–are corrosive. The idea of the Noble Savage is intrinsically patronizing. It says that “primitive” or “native” cultures are valuable to the extent that they are also virtuous. That’s not how human rights should work. We are valuable–all of us–intrinsically. Not “contingent on passing some test of ecological virtue” (as Ridley puts it.)
Let me take a very brief tangent. Ridley’s argument here (as it relates to conservation) is exactly parallel to John McWhorters linguistic arguments and Steven Pinker’s psychological arguments. In The Language Hoax, John McWhorter takes down the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is the trendy linguistic theory that what you think is determined by the language you think it in. Just like the Noble Savage, this idea was originally invented by Westerners on behalf of well, everybody else. The idea is that “primitive” people were more in contact with the timeless mysteries of the cosmos because (for example) they spoke in a language that didn’t use tense. Not only did this turn out to be factually incorrect (they just marked tense differently, or implied it in other cases, as many European languages also do), but it’s an intrinsically bad idea. McWhorter:
In the quest to dissuade the public from cultural myopia, this kind of thinking has veered into exotification. The starting point is, without a doubt, I respect that you are not like me. However, in a socio-cultural context in which that respect is processed as intellectually and morally enlightened, inevitably, to harbor that respect comes to be associated with what it is to do right and to be right as a person. An ideological mission creep thus sets in. Respect will magnify into something more active and passionate. The new watchcry becomes, “I like that you are not like me,” or alternately, “What I like about you is that you are not like me.” That watchcry signifies, “What’s good about you is that you are not like me.” Note however, the object of that encomium, has little reason to feel genuinely praised. His being not like a Westerner is neither what he feels as his personhood or self-worth, nor what we should consider it to be, either explicitly or implicitly.
The cute stories about the languages primitive peoples speak and the ways that enables them to see the world in unique and special ways end up being nothing but a particularly subtle form of cultural imperialism: our values are being used to determine the value of their culture. All we did was change up the values by which we pass judgement on others. Thus: “our characterization of indigenous people in this fashion is more for our own benefit than theirs.”
The underlying premise of Harrari, Ridley, and McWhorter is what Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate tackles directly: the universality of human nature. We can best avoid the bigotry and discrimination that has marred our history not by a counter-bigotry that holds up other cultures as special or superior (either because they’re in magical harmony with nature or possess unique linguistic insights) but by reaffirming the fact that there is such a thing as an universal, underlying human nature that unites all cultures.
Universal human nature is not a byproduct of political wishful thinking, by the way. Steven Pinker includes as an appendix to The Blank Slate a long List of Human Universals compiled by Donald E. Brown in 1989. It is a long list, organized alphabetically. To give a glimpse of the sorts of things behaviors and attributes common to all human cultures, here are the first and last items from the list:
abstraction in speech and thought
actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control
aesthetics
affection expressed and felt
age grades
age statuses
age terms
…
vowel contrasts
weaning
weapons
weather control (attempts to)
white (color term)
world view
The list also includes lots of stuff about binary gender which is exactly why you haven’t heard of the list and why Steven Pinker is considered a rogue iconoclast. These days, one does not simply claim that gender is binary.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the idea of the Noble Savage as it relates to ecology, but of course it’s a broader concept than that. I was once yelled at quite forcibly by a presenter trying to teach us kids that warfare did not exist among pre-Columbian Native Americans. I was only 11 or 12 at the time, but I knew that was bs and said so.
The point is that the whole notion of a mosaic of Native Americans living in peace and prosperity until the evil Christopher Columbus showed up and ruined everything is a bad idea. It’s stupid number 1.
Bad Idea 2: Christopher Columbus is Just Misunderstood
So, this is the claim that started the discussion that got me blocked by somebody on Facebook today. The argument, such as it was, goes something like this: Columbus looks very bad from our 21st century viewpoint, but that’s an unfair, anachronistic standard. By the standards of his day, he was just fine, and those are the standards by which he should be measured.
The problem with this idea is that, like the first, it’s simply not true. One of the best, popular accounts of why comes from The Oatmeal. In this comic, Matthew Inman contrasts Columbus with a contemporary: Bartolomé de las Casas. While Columbus and his ilk were off getting to various hijinks including (but not limited to) child sex slavery and using dismemberment to motivate slaves to gather more gold, de las Casas was busy arguing that indigenous people deserved rights and that slavery should be abolished. Yes, at the time of Columbus.
The argument that if we judge Columbus by the standards of his day he comes out OK does not hold up. We can find plenty of people at that time–not just de las Casas–who were abolitionists or (if they didn’t go that far) were critical of the excessive cruelty of Columbus and many like him. Keep in mind that slavery had been a thing in Europe for thousands of years until the Catholics finally stamped it out around the 10th century. So it’s not like opposition to slavery is a modern invention. When slavery was restarted in Africa and then the Americas many in the Catholic clergy opposed it once again, but were unable to stop it. So the idea that–by the standards of his day–Columbus was just fine and dandy doesn’t work. He’s a pretty bad guy in any century.
Two Stupids Don’t Make a Smart
I understand the temptation to respond to Noble Savage-type denunciations of Christopher Columbus by trying to defend the guy. You see somebody making a bad argument, and you want to argue that they’re wrong.
But that isn’t how logic actually works. A broken clock really is right twice a day, and a bad argument can still have a true conclusion. If I tell you that 2+2 = 4 because Mars is in the House of the Platypus my argument is totally wrong, but my conclusion is still true.
The Noble Savage is a bad bit of cultural luggage we really should jettison, but Columbus is still a bad guy no matter how you slice it. Using one stupid idea to combat another stupid idea doesn’t actually enlighten anyyone.
The Bell Curve of Extremism
There are basically two kinds of moderates / independents: the ignorant and the wise. It really is a sad twist of fate to stick the two together, but nobody honest every said life was fair.
To illustrate, let me introduce you to a concept I’ll call the Bell Curve of Extremism:
To flesh this out, I’ll use some examples from voting.
A person on the left doesn’t know who they’re going to vote for because they don’t know much of anything at all. They may not even know who’s running or who’s already in office. This doesn’t mean they’re stupid, necessarily. They could be brilliant, but just pay no attention to politics.
A person in the left knows exactly who they’re voting for, and it’s never really been in question. What’s more, they can give you a very long list of the reasons they are voting for that person and–what’s more–all the terrible, horrible things about the leading contender that make him or her totally unfit for office and a threat to truth, justice, and the American Way. This is the kind of person who consumes a lot of news, but probably from a narrow range of sources, like DailyKos or RedState. They’re not bad people, but they high motivation tends to lead to an awful lot of research that is heavily skewed by confirmation bias.
A person on the right may also be unsure of how they’re going to cast their vote, but it’s not because they don’t know what’s going on. The problem is they do, and this knowledge has led them (as often as not) to fall right off the traditional left/right axis. I called myself a radical moderate when I was in high-school. At the time, it was mostly because I was on the far left but I wanted to sound cool. Later on in life I found myself near the peak of the bell-curve, a die-hard conservative with all the answers who was half-convinced that liberals were undermining the country. But then I went to graduate school to study economics (one of the areas where I was staunchly conservative) and lo and behold: things got complicated. I fell off the peak and I’ve been sliding down the slope ever since. And what do you know, but I found out recently that radical moderates are actually a thing. They even include some of my very favorite thinkers, like John McWhorter (cited above) and Jonathan Haidt (cited in a lot of my posts). I’ve come full circle, from know-nothing moderate to know-that-I-know-nothing radical moderate.
It’s kind of lonely and depressing over here, to be honest, and we don’t often find an awful lot to shout about. Which is why the conversation tends to be dedicated by peak-extremists who know just enough to be dangerous. About the only banner you’ll see us waving is the banner of epistemic humility. And really, how big of a parade can you expect to line up behind, “People probably don’t know as much as they think they do? (Including us!)”
But one thing that I can share with some conviction is this post, and the idea that–when it comes to ideas–fighting fire with fire just burns the whole house down. There is validity to the idea that things were better before Christopher Columbus showed up. There was a helpful lack of measles and small pox, for example. But blaming the transmission of those diseases (except in the rare cases when it was important) and the resulting humanitarian catastrophe on Columbus doesn’t make any sense. He did a lot of really evil things, but intentional germ warfare was not among them. Relying on it because the numbers are so big is lazy. There is also validity to the idea that Columbus lived in a different time. Many of the most compassionate Westerners were motivated not by a modern sense of equal rights but by a more feudal-tinged idea of noblesse oblige. De la Casa himself, for example, first suggested making things easier on Caribbean slaves by importing more African slaves before later deciding that all slavery was a bad idea. And if you fast-forward to the 19th century abolitionist movements, you’ll find plenty of what counts as racism in the 21st century among the abolitionists who were motivated (in some cases) by ideas of civilizing the savages. Racial politics are complicated enough in the 21st century alone, of course we can’t bring in perspectives from six centuries ago and expect all the good guys to neatly align on bullet point of focus-group vetted talking points!
So yes: I see validity to both sides of the fight. If your goal is to win in the short term, then the most useful thing to do is double-down on your strongest arguments and cherry-pick the other side’s weakest points. This is the strategy of two stupids making a smart, and it doesn’t work.
If your goal is to win in the long term, then you have to undergo a fundamental transformation of perspective. The short-term model isn’t just short-term. It’s ego-centric. The fundamental conceit of the idea of winning is the idea of being right, as an individual. Your view is the correct one, and the idea is to have your idea colonize other people’s brains. It is unavoidably an ego-trip.
The long-term model isn’t just about the long-term. It’s also about seeing the whole that is more than the sum of the parts. In this view, the likeliest scenario is that nobody is right because, on any particular suitably complex question, we are like the world before Newton and the world before Einstein: waiting for a new solution no one has thought of. And, even if somebody does have the right solution to the problem we face now, that will almost certainly not be the right answer to the problem we will face tomorrow. In that case, it’s not about having the right ideas in the heads of the read people, it’s about having a culture and a society that is capable of supporting a robust ecosystem of idea-creation. The focus begins to shift away from the “I” and towards the “we.”
In this model, your job is not to be the one, singular, heroic Messiah who tells everyone the answer to their problem. Your job is to play your part in a larger collective. Maybe that means you should be the lone voice calling from the wilderness, the revolutionary prophet like Newton or Einstein. But more probably it means your job is to simply be one more ant carrying one more grain of sand to build the collective pile of human knowledge and maybe–through conversations with friends and family–shift the center of gravity infinitesimally in a better direction.
I’m not a relativist. I’m a staunch realist in the sense that I believe in an objective, underlying reality that is not dependent on social construction or individual interpretation. But I’m also a realist in the sense of acknowledging that the last living human being to have ever understood the entire domain of mathematics was Carl Friedrich Gauss and he died in 1865. No living person today understands all mathematical theory. And that’s just math. What about physics and history and chemistry and psychology? And that’s just human knowledge. What about the things nobody knows or has thought of yet? An individual is tiny, and so is their sphere of knowledge. The idea that the answers to really big questions fall within that itty-bitty radius seems correspondingly remote. In short: the truth is out there, but you probably don’t have it and you probably can’t find it. It may very well be, keeping this metaphor going, that the answer to some of our questions are too complex for any one person to hold in their brain, even if they could discover one.
I’m not giving up on truth. I am giving up on atomic individualism, on the idea that the end of our consideration with regards to truth is the question of how much of it we can fit into our individual skulls. That seems very small minded, if you’ll pardon the pun. Instead, I’m much more interested in ways in which individuals can do their part to contribute to building a society that may understand more than its constituent individuals do or (since that seems a bit speculative, even to me) at a minimum provides ample opportunity for individuals to create, express, and compare ideas in the hope of discovering something new.
Two stupids can’t make a smart. The oversimplification and prejudice necessary to play that strategy is not worth the cost. Winning debates is not the ultimate goal. We can aim for something higher, but we have to be willing to lay down our own egos in the process and contribute to something bigger.
So says a thought-provoking article in Christianity Today. According to the author, engaging “the culture” simply “causes us to stab blindly in the dark” and “miss our actual cultural responsibility and opportunity”:
A nation of 300 million people, especially one as gloriously diverse as the United States, does not have one monolithic “culture.” It has neighborhoods and cities, ethnic groups and affinity groups, political parties and religious denominations. There is a shared national ethos, to be sure. But that ethos is constantly being contested, challenged, and reimagined by different groups within the nation, and ignored or actively resisted by others.
Even the idea of “the culture,” in the way we now use the phrase, is fairly new. The New Testament, especially the Gospel of John, prefers the term “the world” (cosmos in Greek) for what we might call “the culture,” especially systems of ideology and influence that operate independent of God. But it also speaks of “nations” or “peoples” (ethne in Greek—today we might call them “ethnolinguistic groups”). We are called to resist being “conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2, ESV), and to make disciples of all ethne, in the hope that they all will join in the multinational, multilingual, multicultural chorus around the throne of the Lamb (Rev. 7:9).
In short,
Instead of preoccupying ourselves with the cosmos, we are called to the ethne. Rather than engaging in largely imaginary relationships with the world system…we are called to real people in a real place. With those real people, we reflect on the concrete possibilities and limitations of the time and place we share (including, to be sure, the ways the world system presses in on us). We learn to care for what is lasting and valuable in our particular time and place, and begin to create alternatives to things that are inadequate and broken.
The more we do this—the more fully human we become, entwined in relationships of empowering mutual dependence—the less bound and tempted we will be by “the culture.” And the less bound we are by “the culture,” the more we are able to actually influence culture around us, even sometimes up to very large scales—because we are creating and sustaining real alternatives to it.
We are to be like Paul, who didn’t seek to “engage “Rome,”” but instead “wrote a letter to actual Romans.” Similarly, “our mission is not primarily to “engage the culture” but to “love our neighbor.” Our neighbor is not an abstract collective noun, but a real person in a real place.”
Philosopher Joseph M. Spencer has already made some 
In the nearly half-century history of 
There’s a school of thought which holds, essentially, that everything was fine and dandy in the Americas until the Europeans came along and ruined it. The idea, seen in Disney and plenty of other places, is that “native” peoples lived at harmony with the Earth, appreciating the fragile balance of their precious ecosystems and proactively maintaining it. This idea is bunk. The reality is that in almost all cases the only limit on the extent to which any culture restricts its exploitation of natural resources is technological. Specifically, humanity has an unambiguous track record of killing everything edible in sight as they spread across the globe, leading to widespread extinctions from Australia to the Americas and upending entire ecosystems. If our ancient ancestor didn’t wipe a species out, the reason was either that it didn’t taste good or they couldn’t. As Yuval Noah Harari put it 
In Madagascar, he notes that “at least 17 species of lemurs (all the diurnal one is larger than 10 kg in weight, one as big as a gorilla), and the remarkable elephant birds — the biggest of which weighs 1000 pounds — were dead within a few centuries of the islands first colonization by people in about 500 A.D.” In New Zealand, “the first Maoris sat down and ate their way through all 12 species of the giant moa birds. . . Half of all new Zealand’s indigenous land birds are extinct.” The same thing happened in Hawaii, where at least half of the 100 unique Hawaiian birds were extinct shortly after humans arrived. “In all, as the Polynesians colonized the Pacific, they extinguished 20% of all the bird species on earth.”
Let me take a very brief tangent. Ridley’s argument here (as it relates to conservation) is exactly parallel to John McWhorters linguistic arguments and Steven Pinker’s psychological arguments. In 
The underlying premise of Harrari, Ridley, and McWhorter is what Steven Pinker’s 
