CapitalistImperialistPig

S OMETHING  there is that doesn't love a wall,   That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,   And spills the upper boulders in the sun;   And makes gaps even two can pass abreast............................Robert Frost, Mending Wall   For the scientifically inclined, that something is entropy. But walls are everywhere the signature of life, so there are also things that do love walls. Cell walls, skins, snail shells, termite mounds, farmers fences and the Great Wall of China are all fashioned to keep order inside and disorder out. An Anthropology professor once told me that every culture draws a wall around itself. Culture walls are fashioned not from stone or chitin, but from elements of culture: language, religion, endogamy rules, shared myths and prejudices, taboos, tattoos, and tribal insignia. Did I mention that this post is about Donald Trump? I think the heart of his appeal is the culture war currently underway in the US and elsewhere. The...

It's a well established principle of evolution that members of a species don't just compete against other species but, more importantly, against other members of the same species. At some point, humans managed to transfer much of this competition from individual versus individual to group against group. It's not a peculiarly human invention - Chimpanzees do the same thing. Male Chimps are stuck in the band they were born in. Transfer to the neighboring band is not an option. Transferring competition from the individual level to the group level requires some kinds of walls to be drawn around the group. In our own culture we see echoes of that in style, uniforms, "colors" and gang signs. In a more primordial setting there are all the marks of culture that distinguish one society from another: language, territory, dress, adornment, family organization and so on. Human cultures appear to be much more different from each other than purely accidental choices wou...

When I was an archaeology student 600 or so moons ago, it was a bit of a standing joke that if one unearthed an artifact of no obvious utilitarian purpose it was classified as "of religious significance." Of course that really only meant that nobody had figured out what it was good for, since generally the excavated didn't leave any clues as to their actual religious views, if any. A more subtle point is that it's not generally possible to clearly fence off any part of culture cleanly and call it religion, so that even if the artifact in question did turn out to be used for scrambling quail eggs or something, it might still be an item of religious and mythical consequence. Perhaps that point has something to do with the (to me largely incomprehensible) protestations that the Hindu have no religion. Our present culture goes a long way towards making that separation. The separation has fairly deep roots in Christianity ("render therefore onto Caesar..."), bu...

Schumpeter seems to have popularized the notion of creative destruction in economics, but the concept has an ancient pedigree. Ancient cultures often symbolized it through human sacrifice and other sacrificial ceremonies. The process itself is everywhere evident in the universe, in life and death and in the sometimes gradual but frequently catastrophic processes of geology and astrophysics. The Maya took the concept literally enough that they more or less destroyed most of their possessions, including buildings, every fifty-two years. Smaller sacrificial acts, including human sacrifice were annual or even more frequent. The Permian-Triassic extinction event, the most dramatic in the fossil record, killed off something like 90% of all species, and probably all but a tiny fraction of individual animals. It took at least ten million years for species diversity to recover, but when it did its composition was quite unlike that of the previous history of animal life on the planet. The c...