#i think in our modern society perhaps one of the best visions of a diverse and welcoming culture can be found in costco

[bancaishi]

i feel like if it were not for the fact that the people there are all busy shopping and often likely cannot afford to stop to be easily drawn, costco would be a gold mine for references if you wanted to practice drawing a wide variety of people

[ashotofpeace-blog]

“Never in the course of human events has so much been named after a man who spent so little time in a place”. Jim Baker That man is Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. His influence on the Malay Peninsula is not confined to Singapore, however. At the turn of the 19th century, France had taken control of the Netherlands, forcing the Dutch King to seek asylum in Britain. Fearful that France was about to go on a maniacal rampage in search for world domination, Britain struck a deal with the exiled monarch of Holland to temporarily occupy all of their colonial territories in order to stave of any provocations from the increasingly dangerous French. Britain and the East India Company had promised to return all the colonies to the Dutch once the war was over. For the formerly Dutch-occupied city of Malacca, the East India Company, in their typical pedantic and ruthless style, planned to honour this agreement but first wanted to burn it to the ground and force all of its inhabitants - at gunpoint if necessary - to emigrate to Penang, rendering it worthless to the Dutch. Luckily for the Dutch, but more importantly the residents of Malacca, Raffles vehemently argued against this plan. Raffles was an East India Company officer stationed in Penang, but had visited Malacca in 1808. Throughout the imperialist epoch, the British establishment peddled a false narrative of the positive moral impact of British colonialism on the native people in order to justify the true reason behind their foreign policy: to increase the Crown’s capital and power. ‘We are here to civilise you. Please ignore our ships full of your tea and gold.’ Raffles argument for not annihilating Malacca abstractly embodied this sophisticated doctrine of soft-power used by the British. Raffles put forward the case that forcing the citizens of Malacca to up sticks or die was immoral - such a policy would make the British no better than the ‘savages’ they were attempting to civilise. However, the fundamental reason why he argued against torching the city was his belief that returning the Dutch their territories was against the interest of British hegemony. Raffles wanted to keep Malacca as part of a larger strategy to expel the Dutch from the archipelago altogether. Arguing against both the Crown and the East India Company at that time took a level of bravery and self-righteousness that not many men possess. He eloquently convinced the establishment to leave Malacca in one piece. Had he not done so, Malacca might have forever been a city confined to history.   Perhaps spurred on by this victory, Raffles went from arguing against the Establishment to downright mutiny in order to create Singapore. After the Napoleonic War ended the British returned the Dutch their settlements in the south of the Malacca Strait, despite Raffles’ objection. In his mind, such an act was a precursor to complete Dutch domination in the region. Consequently, he set out to establish a new colony south of Penang in order to prevent his prophecy. It is important to note that the British establishment did not want to return the Dutch their territories for the sake of fairness, but rather thought that a strong Netherlands would act as a counterbalance to any future French aggression in Europe. Both Raffles and the Crown were pursuing expansions to British power, they just disagreed on how to do so. Raffles got permission to search for a naval base in the Strait, but was under strict orders to in no way provoke the Dutch or encroach on their authority. What he did next was an act of a true maverick that would shape the history of the region. Prior to his arrival, Singapore was sparsely inhabited and was loosely ruled over by the Kingdom of Johor, which was in the Dutch’s sphere of influence. When Sultan Mahmud of Johor died in 1812, it was his second eldest who succeeded him, as his oldest was not residing in Johor at the time. Regardless, the Dutch and British Crown recognised the authority of the new Sultan. Raffles, in conjunction with other local powers, found the firstborn of Sultan Mahmud and agreed to recognise him as the true Sultan of Johor if he granted Singapore to the British. At no point did Raffles seek ratification of this plan from his superiors, and many were fuming when they found out as they feared he had risked ruining Anglo-Dutch relations. However, before any decision on Raffles’ action could be agreed upon, Singapore’s free trade philosophy began to make stupid amounts of money for the East India Company, quickly convincing the Establishment to keep the new colony and not return it to Dutch quasi-controlled Johor. Although instrumental in its founding, Raffles was only there for 10 months. Much of Singapore's success should be attributed to the man charged with putting Raffles’ vision of a free trade haven into action - Lord Farquhar. Farquhar’s name is nonexistence in Singapore, but nearly every building or road has either ‘Stamford’ or ‘Raffles’ in its title. Prior to arriving here, I had already decided I hated this city-state as I had to bin my vaping kit and supplies before arriving. To be caught with it would lead to a S$5,000 fine and 6 months in prison, or both. Purportedly this ban is for health reasons, although cigarettes are freely sold everywhere. The Singapore justice system is not to be fucked with - there is little grey area or leniency for rule breaking. Perhaps this rigid strictness is an attempt to atone for their vice-filled past, when anarchy and organised crime ruled the city. Prior to being under the British government's rule, the colony was overseen by the East India Company, who did not really care for the social society of Singapore as long as it was making money. The East India Company had only bothered to put twelve policemen in the territory, all of which were Bengali, none of whom could speak the language of the population which consisted solely of Malay and Chinese immigrants. Alas, it is hard to stay bemused at a city of this wonderment for very long. Singapore is the third largest financial centre in the world. Unlike London and New York, it doesn't have a rural population to support. Combined with their fascist approach to litter and mess, the end result is a city like no other I have ever seen. Despite its reputation as a city for the wealthy, there is a surprising amount to do for free. Each evening, Gardens by the Bay - an eco-park near the city centre - put on a free lights show, where artificial tree-like structures glow in unison to music. Each light show has a theme and when we attended it was ‘A Journey Through Asia’. I'm not sure how the history of the world's most diverse continent can be explained through lights, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable experience. A short ride on the MRT (their underground) is Chinatown and Little India. In every city, the Chinese get their own town whereas the Indians have to make do with the diminutive title of ‘Little’. Although obviously not free, getting food in either of these places is cheap - a hearty meal can be purchased for a pound. However, it is back downtown where the best attraction of all is found. The Sky Bar at Marina Bay Sands Hotel. Marina Sands is a marvel of modern architecture. Three towers elegantly shoot into the skyline, all connected at the top by a Sky Park. If you are a guest of the hotel, you can use the infinity pool in this park. If you are not, you can visit the Sky Park for around $20. But, if you go to Tower 1, you can go all the way up to the top for free and drink at the Sky Bar. Here you get the same view of Singapore and only have to pay for the drinks you order. You'd be forgiven for thinking the bar is a members only club due to their professional level of service, but no - they let scum like you in too, even if you are donning flip flops and a Liverpool shirt. Drinks are reasonably priced to pay for the awe-inducing view you are treated to. What seems like an infinite amount of cargo ships are dotted throughout the bay. Directly below is the Gardens by the Bay park, which was once so captivating but now seems like an irrelevant attraction when compared to view from the Sky Bar. Many people in the bar were conducting business meetings and why wouldn't you choose to do business here; just being here makes you feel important. I know it made me feel like I'm a man of great standing even though my only current inherent value to mankind is this blog which no one is reading. Looking down onto the horizon from this gorgeous, innovative, and luxurious piece of architecture, the impact of Raffles' vision and Faruqah’s action is astonishing. Had Raffles followed his brief not to disturb the Dutch, none of this would be here. Or perhaps it would, but the Sky Park would instead be called ‘Hemel Tuin’ or whatever Sky Garden is in Dutch.

[benchgenderstudies]

The mind control angle of shootings.

The Homicide Rate : Finely Tuned Classism of a Deaf Congress  

The Airport shooting committed by Esteban Santiago distantly following an interview by FBI to his statements about mind control is not a new premise. People have accused commercials of using subliminal messaging that the usgovernment would deny anyway. They denied the roll of tobacco in cancer. I am going to enlighten the topic on very real and very parallel definitions that Santiago may or may not be witnessing and be distressed about. The problem is toxic social pressure.

To explain toxic social pressure I am going to reference film screenplay format writer Syd Field's “Screenplay” 2005 revision,  the health care debate, effective frequency as a political maneuver and the VALS/PRIZM segment identity by Nielsen. Starting with politics and healthcare,  we have two rival political parties that privatize the dogmatic media spectrum. That clash of identities which offer statements of direction but seldom solutions its toxic in and of itself. Republicans offered managed care and they will again try to repackage it as the replacement of the ACA. If they concede at all , then they are liable to the public for charges of negligence back in the Clinton Era. We're detailing the first point of existing political cultism by eliminating the dissent of a governments resident lack of concern for the public's preexisting mental health issues.  

Managed care says the system can self regulate and it regulates for the role of profit. There said, cost control will never happen by self regulation so then healthcare will not be afforable until disintermediation of insurances self expense is handled.  Healthcare will likely have cost rises but the cost rise of insurance for-profit existence means that 'managed care' as a forthput plan of action to the problem of healthcare cost was fraudulent offer.  This is case one: not a solution.

The Affordable care act again failed to disintermediate the healthcare system. As long as republicans and democrats are in government , a single payer system can't be expected to be managed efficiently. Democrats moreso  failed at making 'being the niceguy” a dimwit gullibility to allow republicans any place at the table of the healthcare debate. This is case two.  Case three is for the segment of Americans that continue to demand Single payer system that are entirely correct and yet smeared by a stray Weiner probably intentionally stunting the angle with bad press. A fourth case piggie backs on the single payer pundits except by the term raw truth. Single payer is the only answer as long as the people managing it are loyal to its successful management and not current supporters of either political party's limbs that produced the Affordable care act.

There are more gaps in executive cabinets that allow for the ongoing illness of Citizens by choosing not to regulate an industry.  Summarized: For the Citizen who feels without representation for segment identity of race or ethnicity, they are also frustrated by a political social pressure where effort toward a solution in good faith is civil voice unwilling to join the shouting match of democrats and republicans lest it stoop to their level and produce a baseball bat with barbed wire to effectively bash each party's skull to bits for the sheer decency of ending the vitriol. How it relates to Santiago: he opts to make an apolitical spectacle since opting to shoot a Senator or President would create a partisan gain somewhere. He might be frustrated in the notion of effective blood spill so he does something random.

If cops will assemble in riot gear for peaceful protests there is no doubt they acknowledge the summation of people becomes greater than bad government can handle. So assemble the idea that if conservatives pen themselves arch enemies of liberals and liberals pen themselves of racism ; ever favored a slant of repubicans, that they clash as groups with an escalation that can cause serious sideeffects elsewhere. Random shootings elsewhere. Santiago might be one of these also.

Lets move to the screenplay book and politics. Syd Field has an educational book for a career that oozes blood. He makes his screenplay examples through analysis of “Chinatown”,” Thelma and Louise”, Terminator 2”, “ Lord of the Rings” ,”American Beauty”, Shawshank Redemption,”, “Collateral”,”Bourne Supremacy”, and “Basic Instinct”. More often than not the screenplay that Field references or puts verbatim into his text has somebody getting killed. In one angle is the reality that he is exciting and giving aspiring screenwriters the format to follow so people like him reading scripts can efficiently browse an offering of millions of submissions. That part's ok. What I realized in this book is the action movies are really murder movies and the plots have been so saturated with exciting homicide that sometimes it doesn't even wait for the opening credits to start killing people. Hollywood is also a fiend for sex stories at inappropriate moments and so binary in sex roles; polarization; as well.

A new Jennifer Lawrence movie shows a duo of male and female exploring a ship in calamitous situation of dethawing people early and decide to get shaggadelic instead of focus on the outcome of the many. Transformers movies are guilty of it also. There's no room for sex here even as appealing as wetting the bone maybe for keeping … apparently; hollywood producers attention on the script. Or perhaps thats the fault of the script writer relying on cheap innuendo to fuel their own writing. You'll realize in reading the Screenplay book that Field (who is dead) thinks that the Screenplay is where the best creativity comes from. I disagree. I feel the writer must first write the story as a novel, read it, then transfer it to screenplay themselves. They're told to write write write anyway so they might as well blabber all the blubber of details out first and cut it down into the screen play format. Until chapter 13 he insists a good screenplay is 120 pages or less but neglect to admit that  first drafts are typically 180-200pages.

Also in Fields book , he has a writer who wants to convey his story in news format rather than screenplay format. Fields decides to bite his tongue and let the writer struggle to transfer the story when its done.  He should've had the writer first convert to cards and novel format  instead of direct to screenplay. He gives the guy support but his error is he doesn't support an intellectual path away from the screenplay being his best medium of creativity. People like him make their money being the format converters and don't want the secret out too quickly.  The writer writes and writing starts at the essay, short story , and poem. Thats where the screenplay should start once the research is done. A writer not knowing characters is his pet peeve. In Parallel, the government doesn't know its people. It doesn't name its people by the cultures of their own identity. The two party system irons on their label with the media.

There was a well established point in Syd Fields Screenplay book that he repeated. For being such an honored person in Hollywood, the movie industry took no time of their own accord to address the Citizens United vs FEC opinion directly. Austin v Michigan Chamber of Commerce stands for the corrupting influence of money is a fact.  Its a fact. And its echoed as a fixture of Hollywood:

“Gittes responds: “Ill tell you the unwritten law ,you dumb son of a bitch,you gotta be rich to kill somebody,anybody, and get away with it.You think you got that kinda dough? You think you got that kinda class?”

At the site/sight of dead bodies the repeated second quote is “ Forget it , its China town”. Over and over. Each line.  We have a Hollywood that acknowledges or defines being wealthy as the right to assert the godlike power of ending mortality ; perhaps being the definition of “power”; reduces the value of life in the disposal of life to entertainment; calls it guy movie entertainment  and then twists its face to suggest art is the act of showing people how to see truth. Santiago has a Caucasian euro masculinity definition to contend with in assimilation messages. As anorexia is itself a socialized classist message of uppity eurotrash wealth-ahead-of health sizing, the aggression and ambivalence toward humanity is a message made throughout Modern action film media.  I didn't ever see Hollywood get bothered when scotus decided Citizens United was the opportunity to overturn the limitations of money. There is a balance in society and when hollywood can make wealth equate to the freedom to murder, then they have either tilted the scale or become unbalanced by banker friendly republicans offsetting that balance of overturn Austin V Michigan Chamber of Commerce. Since Hollywood is slow on cultural diversity, I 'd say they are partisanly and ambiguously guilty of negative social influence. The loss Schwarzenegger faced in taking on video gaming was a toy gun in a munitions chest that Arnold would not point at the industry that made him and yet corrupted society in the recession of life value. Bum Wars internet video followed.  

The entertainment media example is foundational. Daily, the announcements of political party agendas are instead appointments of that classism. The classism that affords movies, smears awareness of sexuality types and gender, abuses people on and off screen, ignores the common good. If these are qualities that set the sane to rampage with fury , then the mentally unstable are surely hesitant to want to be cured so they don't face the social messages of identity directly. America's sickness starts at what is defining classism , class roles and why money is important to defend immorality. If wealth is the excuse for irrational debate , purposeless congressional clashing , and tunnel vision elections.. then money is most certainly the illness of our country and our psyche. Money is misused to create a reality of ambivalence toward life , toward accounting ourselves ( poor through wealthy) to a common humanity  and to account politicians to an ethics code we now clearly see they intend to refuse.... especially by the wealthy's overtly favored republicans. The Business of ambiguity predates the department of labor and workers protection now damns the very politicians for ambivalence toward a democratic public expecting standards of care that must not and cannot be partisanly parsed for election fodder.

This is the disease of our country: Undisputable human rights of government service being unfounded for plutoquisquilocracy.  The death rate is a result of people making exhibition of themselves as a reaction to a belief that when government is not receptive to their needs, demonstrates ambivalence toward human needs and creates policy absent of factual conclusion that government and thus law does not exist. So they will then behave in ways ambivalent to the lives of others in the political structure by presumption of no consequence deterring them.

The Neilsen PRIZM Survey and VALS must now be addressed. At first marketers wanted to know who they were selling to. Then they became effective at catering to said segments and eventually their target marketing was so effective it pinned down the segments into their socio economic identities with very little chance to move upward. Because of marketing there are segment castes that remain locked in place. Racism can be said really a form of classism except that sexism likewise is caste'ism. If we agree the creationist 'white appearing male' is the top of the food chain, then the pollution of religious segmentation identifies all others, pinned down in their segments, as sinful and unworthy creations. Women are paid less as a reason of being a caste for while the republic might pretend itself only segregated in classes, the male privilege in patriarchy operates on CASTES. Ergo, Black women and Black males and Latinos and Latinas will not rise by values that support creationist zionist-anglo privileges.

 The Segments have become the 'mindcontrol' of consumer identity under the constant pressure of target audience.  If you disagree , then at least understand that marketing companies themselves identify the different generations in terms of the traumatic political deaths that happened in their time.   “The first Boomer segment  is bounded by the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the CivilRights movements and the Vietnam War” . I want WJ Schroer and other marketing firms that name generations to understand “ shut up, firstly we are not the victim of blood spilled and we'll name ourselves if violence is the only thing you can focus on. Your impact of prioritizing political strife is obvious”.  I take Generation X as an identity I would name myself to refute the two party system who designs politics around money . Thats why money is politics. Political failure.

Michael Bench, MEP GCERT

Exercise Physiologist

Womens and Gender Studies.

[mastcomm]

Ancient DNA from West Africa Adds to Picture of Humans’ Rise

In October 2015, scientists reconstructed the genome of a 4,500-year-old man who lived in Ethiopia. It was the first time that anyone had created a complete genetic snapshot of an African from an ancient skeleton.

Since then, other researchers have recovered DNA from skeletons unearthed in other regions of the continent. Now researchers have found the first genetic material from West Africa. On Wednesday a team reported that they had recovered DNA from four individuals in Cameroon, dating back as far as 8,000 years.

These ancient genomes contain vital clues to the history of the continent that have largely disappeared in the past few thousand years. Taken together, they are giving scientists a new vision of our species since it arose in Africa.

In the new study, published in Nature, the researchers reported that modern humans diverged into four major populations between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago. One of those populations is new to scientists; few traces of it remain in the DNA of living Africans.

The vanished population may have consisted of bands of hunter-gatherers who lived south of the Sahara from Mali to Sudan until just a few thousand years ago.

“We are so limited by the information we can get from living people,” said Jessica Thompson, an archaeologist at Yale University who was not involved in the new study. “It’s pretty clear that there’s been a huge transformation in the genetic landscape in Africa just recently.”

Scientists have been studying the genetic diversity of living Africans since the 1970s. As it became possible to sequence more DNA, the additional data revealed that the genetic variation among living Africans was much greater than that among the rest of the world combined.

This insight made it clear that our species arose in Africa and stayed there for most of its history. Small groups of people expanded out to give rise to non-African populations.

But scientists have struggled to draw the older branches of the human family tree with much precision. Looking for fresh clues, they tried drilling into ancient bones.

The odds seemed low. Many researchers assumed that ancient, fragile DNA molecules would not have survived the hot climate across much of Africa.

The discovery in 2015 of Mota, an Ethiopian skeleton with DNA to offer, proved otherwise. Geneticists and archaeologists began investigating other skeletons from across Africa, and found a few that still contained genetic material.

Mary Prendergast, an archaeologist at Saint Louis University in Madrid, considered the skeletons found at Shum Laka, a rock shelter in Cameroon, among the top candidates to test for DNA. “People working all over the continent are aware of this site,” she said.

Archaeologists have dug into the floor of Shum Laka since the 1980s, and have found layers of human remains as old as 30,000 years. The surrounding region has long been viewed as the origin of one of the most important expansions in African history. About 4,000 years ago, the Bantu people started farming oil palm and grains. They later expanded for thousands of miles to the east and south, across a vast swath of Africa.

Dr. Prendergast wondered if DNA from Shum Laka would show a kinship with living Bantu people. But finding that genetic material would be a long shot, she knew: Shum Laka is close to the Equator and has a heavy rainy season each year.

“My hopes were not high at all,” she said. “I went into this project thinking, ‘Will this work?’”

In the end, it did. The researchers recovered abundant DNA from four individuals, two of whom were buried in the rock shelter 8,000 years ago, and another pair 3,000 years ago.

One of the 8,000-year-old skeletons was especially rich with human DNA. “It’s of a quality of a modern medical genome,” said David Reich, a Harvard Medical School geneticist and a co-author with Dr. Prendergast.

To Dr. Prendergast’s surprise, none of the people at Shum Laka were closely related to Bantu speakers at all. In fact, they had a strong kinship to the Aka, a group of hunter-gatherers with a pygmy body type who live today in rain forests 1,000 miles to the east.

To make sense of this paradox, the researchers carried out a large-scale comparison of all the ancient African DNA gathered so far, along with living people from across Africa and beyond. The team found a scenario that best explains how different groups of Africans ended up with their particular combinations of DNA.

Dr. Reich and his colleagues can trace the major lineages of people back to common ancestors who lived in Africa between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago.

“It seems we have four lineages splitting at the same time,” said Mark Lipson, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard and an author of the new study.

One lineage passed down their DNA to living hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. A second group were ancestors of the Aka and other central African hunter-gatherers.

A third group became hunter-gatherers in East Africa, as evidenced by the fact that many living Africans in that region have inherited some of that DNA.

The fourth group, which Dr. Reich and his colleagues call “Ghost Modern,” is far more mysterious.

The ancient Shum Laka people have a substantial amount of Ghost Modern ancestry. So does the ancient Mota man from Ethiopia. But ancient remains from Morocco and South Africa had none. Today some people in Sierra Leone have a tiny trace of Ghost Modern ancestry, the researchers found.

It’s possible that the Ghost Moderns were hunter-gatherers who lived across the southern edge of the Sahara. They remained isolated from other Africans for tens of thousands of years. Later, they bred with people from other groups at the eastern and western edges of their range.

Most people in Africa — and the rest of the planet — can trace much of their ancestry to the East African hunter-gatherers. Less than 100,000 years ago, this group split into new lineages.

One group gave rise to many of today’s East African tribes. Another group included the Mota man. They were closely related to the people who expanded east out of East Africa and into the rest of the world.

A separate group of East Africans moved west, encountering and mixing with Central African hunter-gatherers and eventually becoming the first West Africans. The people of Shum Laka may be the descendants of this group.

Many thousands of years passed before a different group of the West Africans gave rise to the Bantu people. Their population discovered agriculture, grew and took over larger areas of land.

But the Bantu farmers didn’t swiftly drive hunter-gatherers to oblivion. The Shum Laka people survived for at least 1,000 years in the heart of Bantu country.

But after a couple thousand years, the society reached a tipping point, and the hunter-gatherers were marginalized. East African tribes that also began farming and grazing livestock applied additional pressure.

It’s possible that this pressure brought an end to many groups of hunter-gatherers, including the Mota and the Shum Laka — perhaps even the ancient Ghost Modern people.

The surviving hunter-gatherers interbred with neighboring farmers. The new study finds that the Aka, for instance, can trace 59 percent of their ancestry to the Bantu.

“Their results have some big implications for us archaeologists,” Dr. Thompson said.

It’s conceivable that researchers could find skeletons of Ghost Modern individual in areas those people once lived. The bones might even hold some DNA that could confirm the hypothesis.

“If we could get really old samples from there, that would be amazing,” Dr. Lipson said.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/event/ancient-dna-from-west-africa-adds-to-picture-of-humans-rise/

[theoptimisticpatriot]

Beyond the Brexit divide

I was invited to contribute to a new publication by the Tribune Group of Labour MPs. Below are my opening remarks and my article.

As someone who joined the Tribune Group when I was elected in 1992, I’m flattered still to be invited to take part in this crucial debate.

We are divided. And, in England, one of those divisions is reflected in our national identities, and particularly the weight and emphasis we give to our Britishness and our Englishness.

And it’s amongst the ‘more English’ that Labour and progressives has been losing out.

English identifiers were far more likely to vote Leave than British identifiers.

Labour would be in power now if English identifiers had voted Labour as strongly as British identifiers in 2017.

The next  election will be decided in constituencies that are not only in England, but more English.

The important thing to understand is that national identities are not about flags and football.

They are about the stories we tell, 

to make sense of the world as we see it

To explain what has happened to us

To describe who people like us are and what we share in common.

And to simplify horribly, over the past 20 Englishness has emerged as the identity particularly of those who feel that the economic and social change has gone against them. For whom the factories shut while we were in the EU, who are strongly rooted where they live, but have seen town centre closed and communities changed by migration; people who perhaps in just one generation have seen work - male work at least - go from high pay high status to precarious.

British sits more easily on those comfortable with the modern world; partly because by class and education they are better suited to succeed in it.

This is Labour’s problem:

Our membership is far more British than England’s population as a whole.

We never talk about England even when our policy documents and party broadcasts are only about England. 

We say we are for the many not the few, but, by being dismissive of patriotism and sneering about Englishness,  we give the impression we don’t like a lot of the many.

Engaging with English identity is not just about language and branding, though that would help. It’s about being serious that we want to represent those voters. After all, many  of those voters are on the left economically even if they are more socially conservative than metro liberals.

Labour can only win, and only has a purpose, if it can unite all those who want bend the economy to the common good. 

Beyond the Brexit divide: the English question

This is the paradox: England and the English are ever-present in our culture and politics, yet England – as England – is barely mentioned in national political debate. If English identity is discussed, it is to be disparaged and abused.

The cost of ignoring England and the English has been high. To Remainers, the cost was the overwhelmingly English decision to Leave (with most support from England and from English-identifying voters). Labour has paid the price of lost votes in places and amongst English people once proud to be Labour. Those who want an inclusive society see the persistence - albeit amongst a minority – of an ethnicised and racist national identity.

National identities are much more than flags and football. They offer a ‘world view’; a narrative that explains why ‘people like us’ are the people that we are, why things happen in the way they do, and what we share in common. In a multiple identity society, different national identities have evolved to tell different stories about the experience of different groups of people.

England is diverse, and deep divisions of age, geography, wealth, education and values are reflected in different understandings of national identity. Put crudely, ‘Britishness’ sits more lightly on those for who the modern world – including the EU – works best. ‘Englishness’ has emerged most strongly for those at the rough end of economic and social change.  They were as likely to blame the EU than welcome its influence.

Most people say they are English and British, but the emphasis they give to each is significant. The ‘more English’ are also more likely to be rooted in a community, town, county or region, and less likely to see themselves as European. They are more patriotic, and more socially conservative. Less confident about change, their resistance to rapid migration is a reaction to the disruption of established communities more than simple racism. English identity is also strongly linked to powerlessness. They are most likely to want English laws made by English MPs, to resent the Barnet formula and to over-estimate the power of the EU.

They are not, though, ‘English nationalists’, the fantasy promoted by liberal commentators. There is very little English nationalism. Leave was certainly led by Anglo-centric Brits like Johnson and Rees-Mogg, but there is no evidence that English Leavers shared visions of ‘Empire 2.0’. Indeed, they tend to give the union itself low priority. The appeal of ‘take back control’ was the desire to be listened to for once, not a resurrection of past glories.

Many of those lost English voters are older, or poorer, or more working class, and are less likely to have been to university. They are economically precarious and least likely to think it is worth voting at all. If Labour does not exist to work with those people to change the world, it’s not clear what we are for. The good news is that many are on the left on economic issues. But these voters are also English: they are proud to be English (and British too). If Labour is not palpably proud to be an English party and proud to be a British party then we send a clear message: ‘we are not people like you’. Many will not even listen to our policies because most voters look for a party they can identify with before they will listen to policy.

In England more people emphasise their English than British identity, but Labour members tend to be British rather than English and to place little value on national identity or patriotism. Activists prefer to talk about policy and not identity but are often trying to avoid difficult conversations with people who are more socially conservative. We say we are ‘For the many not the few’ but it too often sound as though we don’t like a lot of the many.

We can build a majority to reform capitalism and make it work for the common good, but only if we can unite those who are on the left economically, including those English voters.  To do that we have to find common ground across cultural divides. Bringing England and the English into our politics is an important place to start.

To start with, the left must signal that it wants to represent those voters, and that we are willing to have the difficult discussions on issues like migration they want to talk about. We should work to end the marginalisation of England and the English in our political life. Why, for example, does Labour talk about Rebuilding British in England, but Rebuilding Scotland north of the border? Education and social care are devolved, so our national education and national care services are only for England. Why don’t we call them English national services? Labour should publish a manifesto for England, as proposed by the English Labour Network.

We should be at ease with celebrating an inclusive patriotic English identity. Shadow Communities Secretary Andrew Gwynne recently backed calls for CLPs to celebrate St George’s Day and support Labour’s plans for four new national bank holidays.

In turn, the left must challenge England’s double democratic deficit to make England’s nationhood and political identity a reality.  It is the only part of the UK where voters cannot elect representatives to make national laws, nor is there any forum for national political debate. The UK government has made England the most centralised state in Europe and given disproportionate investment to London at the expense of England’s regions. England needs both national democratic institutions and entrenched statutory devolution of financial and executive power to elected local leadership. Labour’s promised constitutional convention could bring this about, but it needs preparing now and to start with urgency.

Crucially, the left must learn to frame its radical ambitions for economic changes in the language of progressive patriotism, something that earlier Labour figures (including Attlee and Benn) took for granted. Challenging, for example, who owns companies, land, utilities and resources are national and democratic questions, not just socialist.

Brexit happened, in part, because no one wanted to listen to the English. Can Labour learn the lesson?

Prof John Denham, former Labour Cabinet Minister and Director of the English Labour Network.

[republicstandard]

Can Multiculturalism Work? Part III: The View from 5,000 Feet

Can diverse people of all cultures get along? Yes, but only if there is One Culture to Rule Them All.

Also, leftist compassion is naïve and unconcerned with outcomes. It’s been a minute, but that’s about where we left off last time and the time before. Since then, the forces of the Left have lost their minds over the recrudescence of the Third Reich in the person of Orange-Hitler, whose stormtrooper battalions are putting immigrant children in concentration camps, or something.

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Okay, perhaps a lot has happened in the month or so since our last installment. But the idea behind this column has always been the big picture, the wide-angle lens. Now that we’ve heard the case for hegemonism and taken a stab at unmasking liberal compassion, let’s take a look at the view from 5,000 feet—the reactionary view.

The reactionary view is conditioned by the idea that power exists, and power is reducible to force. Of course, the whole point of force is violence, which is equivalent, by some lights, to conflict plus uncertainty.

“But wait,” you say, “I’m a ‘90s-to-early-2000’s kid, and I distinctly remember all those girls screaming for the Backstreet Boys. Why, I’ll bet you if Howie had told them to, they would have fought to the death for the chance to become impregnated with his child—and that would have made for a much better music video.” You’re right, dear reader, it would have made for a much better video, not least because the idea of a Backstreet Boys groupie going full Red Sonja is really, really funny.

No matter what, in the end cultural power means some degree of control over physical power, and physical power is always the final argument.

This is easy to prove if you take a moment to think about it. If you hop in a time machine and try to fight Mike Tyson at his peak, you are going to lose because Peak-Quality-Mike-Tyson has a greater capacity to project physical, muscular force in a violent fashion. On the other hand, even Peak Mike Tyson is going to lose to a grizzly bear or a gorilla.

The point of this silly digression is that we can step around moral questions about who should win or who we want to win in order to see who will win. Not that anyone is particularly interested in dressing up a Tyson-fights-grizzly match in morality—but it is a good frame to keep in mind.

The more power you have, the more force you can bring to bear (pardon the pun) to solve a violent problem, which is simply a matter of conflict and uncertainty. Got it? Great. Now strap in, because we’re rocketing 5,000 feet up and hundreds of thousands of years into the past.

We’ll be taking a ‘Martian’ view of history, in the Dan Carlin sense: trying to make sense of history through a wide-angle lens, as if we were Martians—or trying to explain it to Martians, take your pick.

Five thousand feet is almost a mile high (it’s pithier to say than ‘The View from 5,280 Feet’), and that still leaves us in the troposphere, the lowest level of the atmosphere of the planet Earth, the third planet around the star called Sol, in the galaxy Milky Way—but 5,000 feet is high enough, and 300,000 years is far back enough.

As it so happens, 300,000 years, or a bit more, is how far back Homo sapiens seems to have been a going concern. Without going into our hominin ancestors’ much older and extremely fascinating history in the African continent (we weren’t always Homo sapiens, after all), we all lived in hunter-gather societies until the much later advent of agriculture about 12,000 years ago—and then only in a select grouping of societies in a part of the Middle East.

Self-control became an important feature for individuals who were reproductively successful. And self-control translates into conscience.

According to one incredibly intriguing theory, modern Homo sapiens evolved morality in the context of hunter-gather bands hunting for ungulates, hooved mammals. This early morality was rather concerned with the sharing of meat with a mentality of equity. It made sense for every hunter and his family to get a more-or-less equal share of the meat for every kill, because that kept everyone happy, healthy, and (one presumes) motivated for the next big kill.

Besides, in an era before refrigeration, the best possible larder for all-that-aurochs-steak-you-can’t-eat-in-two-days was your band members. If you feed them today, then they’ll feed you tomorrow, and the day after, and probably the day after that—however long it takes, until it’s your lucky day and you kill the aurochs again.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s entire theory about the origins of conscience and altruism is utterly absorbing and very well-argued. Here is the extremely short form, in his own words:

“People started hunting large ungulates, or hoofed mammals. They were very dedicated to hunting, and it was an important part of their subsistence. But my theory is that you cannot have alpha males if you are going to have a hunting team that shares the meat fairly evenhandedly, so that the entire team stays nourished. In order to get meat divided within a band of people who are by nature pretty hierarchical, you have to basically stomp on hierarchy and get it out of the way. I think that is the process.

“My hypothesis is that when they started large game hunting, they had to start really punishing alpha males and holding them down. That set up a selection pressure in the sense that, if you couldn’t control your alpha tendencies, you were going to get killed or run out of the group, which was about the same as getting killed. Therefore, self-control became an important feature for individuals who were reproductively successful. And self-control translates into conscience.”

Where did power lie in these hunter-gatherer bands—which, to be clear, were the default setting of human social organization for most of the time Homo sapiens have been around on this planet? Who had power?

If we follow Boehm’s ideas, power resided in the band. The members of the band united in a kin-based grouping, a grouping which probably would have happened anyway—primates do tend to be social creatures, after all—but a grouping which gained added and special importance as a result of human culture, language, and big-game hunting.

The greatest social threat these people would have faced was bullying alphas, the worse of these being prehistoric psychopaths who were capable of murder. On that note, we should probably acknowledge Steven Pinker’s magisterial work The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which establishes in no uncertain terms that primitive societies were far more violent than modern civilized societies, and various civilized societies have undergone massive declines in violence in more than one context and time period.

The rest is easy to summarize. Humans invented agriculture, not once but on several different occasions in staggeringly different parts of the world, and that in turn allowed different agricultural societies at different times on different continents to evolve into advanced civilizations, with hierarchical class structures, priesthoods, and occupational specialization.

Those civilizations also set about trying to conquer the world, or at least their various parts of it, by military conquest and, with time, through religions that attempted to go beyond the purely local, the particular, and reach for a more universal vision.

(This book is good, and so is this one, and this one).

We’ll use our time machine to barrel through thousands of years, taking snapshots of historical tableaux as they pass.

Alexander the Great battles Darius III at Gaugamela.

Roman legions and ships swarm across the Mediterranean and much of Western Europe.

Norse longboats up the Seine. Mongol horsemen thunder out of the Eurasian steppe and conquer practically everything. And something about Buddha and Christ and Muhammad.

Also, we learned to make bread out of air (we’ll come back to that).

Where did the power of an Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Genghis Khan come from? From their armies, to be sure, but also from the societies those armies were drawn from.

Let’s simplify: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and every other conqueror, king, and princeling had power because of the rules governing power in their societies—rules that included inheritance, office, and personal achievement.

Our snapshots capture a few more images—the Albigensian Crusade, the Ottomans taking Constantinople, the Tokugawa establishing their bakufu in Japan, Louis XIV building Versailles, seizing Strasbourg, and expelling the Huguenots, his contemporary the Kangxi Emperor suppressing the Revolt of the Three Feudatories…

We note the ascendancy of faith in so many of these societies, and how it has changed the ways in which they organize religious activity. This seems significant, but as Martians observing it from 5,000 feet, we are detached from the elaborate thought-worlds of deities, saints, martyrs, and miracles, and the social, cultural, and political systems they permeate.

We skip over a few centuries, confident in our ability to make sense of what we are seeing with only a few snapshots.

A world in which the most powerful nation on earth is gripped with guilt over its racist past—oh wait, we landed in a New York Times series.

Or maybe MTV Decoded.

Or Huffington Post.

Or maybe even NowThis Politics.

Hey, Waka Waka (This Time for Africa).

Clearly something has gone wrong. We have somehow become stuck in a cultural milieu in which deconstructing whiteness is an actual thing, and Tim Wise has a career lecturing his fellow whites on their Whiteness and ‘White privilege.’

We descend from our 5,000-foot height to try to make sense of it all.

Through numerous conversations and some Martian mind-reading technology that allows us to abstract patterns of thinking into major themes, we make some interesting discoveries that only leave us more confused than ever.

There seems to be a conviction, among many but not all inhabitants of this strangely self-hating civilization, that the past until recently was more or less irredeemably evil. The nature of the putative evils seems to reflect patterns of gender and family organization, ethnic conflict, nation- and empire-building, invasion, and enslavement which we have been observing around the world to a greater or lesser degree.

And yet, not only do the denizens of this strange new world believe that their past is particularly to be reviled, in seeming ignorance of the rest of history, they insist on putting the blame on one particular group which has been historically dominant.

Monuments are toppled because they represent too offensive a reminder of said group’s historical domination. Business owners bend over backward to appease the demands of individuals belonging to particular groups that can claim ‘victim’ status. It even infects fringe movements ostensibly devoted to liberty.

We recall something about religious guilt and wonder if there is a connection. Or—we go back a few frames, a few decades—perhaps China’s Cultural Revolution?

All of this is incredibly baffling. How can a civilization be so gripped by the desire for abnegation and effacement?

The more we look and analyze and reflect, the more baffling it gets.

These societies seem to be possessed by a kind of Cultural Revolution against their own cultures, against the peoples that made them possible in the first place. This is, apparently, social justice and multiculturalism.

How can we get un-stuck from this frame? Let us scan our archives, spin the globe, and choose a non-Western country; and then construct a computer simulation of an alternate version of that country, in our Ship of the Imagination.

Our alternate version of that country will be an anti-country, in which the Cathedral, which is to say the mass media and higher education forces of Good and Correct Opinion-Making, will be turned against the dominant culture.

Flick-flick-flick-flick.

Our choice is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Drawing on our archives, we quickly realize this country has historically been known as Persia. It also has a rich and distinct cultural and historical heritage, and is very ethnically diverse.

Perfect.

We program our simulation, sifting through centuries and then millennia of information about history, culture, and everything else, and then we put on our VR glasses, push the button, and poof—we’re in Anti-Persia.

Since our purposes are rather specific, we’ll zero in on Anti-Persia’s Cathedral, the mass media and institutes of higher education that function as its organs of Correct Opinion-Making.

The first thing we notice is that the Anti-Persian Cathedral does an awful lot of complaining about ethnic Persians and ‘Persianness.’

Major newspapers amplify the grievances of middle-class college students from the Azeri, Gilaki, Kurd, Arab, Lur, Baloch, and Turkmen minorities. These ‘Persons of Anti-Persianness’ (PAPs) complain about how Persian everything is in historic Persia.

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There are college courses about Persian privilege, many of which seek to ‘deconstruct’ Persianness as a myth.

“There’s no such thing as a real Persian,” the line goes. “Persian identity was a weapon created by the shahs to marginalize PAPs.”

Professional Anti-Persian activists rail against Persian identity, ‘Persian supremacy,’ ‘Persian privilege,’ and Persian historical figures.

The history of Anti-Persia reads as one long history of unending, unrelenting horror, persecution, and suffering, all of it meted out by Persians on a dizzying array of Babylonians, Lydians, Egyptians, Greeks, and other victims.

The Achaemenid Empire, the greatest Persian imperial state and one of the greatest empires in world history, is demonized and reviled for its imperial conquests.

Indeed, the movie 300 is practically required watching in college history courses across Anti-Persia, and is received not as a mythologized action movie but rather a heroic and stirring tale of anti-Persian resistance (‘anti-Persian’ with a small a, not to be confused with Anti-Persia the anti-Persian Persia). It is treated perhaps something like the TV miniseries Roots.

Persepolis in Shiraz, Iran. Ninara – Flickr

And on and on it goes. The Sassanids are reviled like the Achaemenids, but the conquering Muslim Arabs and the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid dynasties are actually talked up as a way to help Arab minority students feel affirmed and empowered beneath the suffocating weight of Persian privilege and Persian supremacy they must endure every day in Anti-Persia.

Worse, the peerless verse of Firdawsi is denigrated and attacked for its anti-Arab, Persian supremacist bent:

But for the Persians I will weep, and for The House of Sasan ruined by this war: Alas for their great crown and throne, for all The royal splendor destined now to fall, To be fragmented by the Arabs’ might; The stars decree for us defeat and flight. Four hundred years will pass in which our name Will be forgotten and devoid of fame.

Firdawsi, writing in the late 10th to very early 11th century, wrote the above verses from the perspective of a Sassanid Persian general in the 7th century (think of it as historical fiction) facing an invading army of early Muslim Arabs. In Anti-Persia, they are deemed hate-speech, and trigger warnings are placed on literature courses teaching this most venerable classic of Persian literature.

Even this is not enough for the cultural Vandals, and a coalition of them organize to demand the complete removal of Firdawsi from literature courses.

In all of this, we notice a curious thing: Persians are not allowed to organize on the basis of ethnic Persian identity. The slightest whiff of Persian identitarianism produces screaming calls about ‘neo-Sassanids’ and ‘neo-Safavids.’

The Cathedral, of course, reinforces this at every opportunity. Not only are pro-Persian nationalists and activists labeled ‘neo-Sassanids’ and ‘neo-Safavids,’ they are branded as ‘hate groups.’

Scanning the brains of every person in Anti-Persia, we have to admit that we do find flickers of ethnic in-group preference, much of it subconscious, in the Persian population. However, they are not exceptional in this, and other groups appear, if anything, to have stronger in-group preferences—or at least to be far more vocal about them.

These preferences are certainly associated with some antipathy toward other groups, but the curious thing is that despite the Persians being demonized, they are not particularly given to antipathy toward Arabs, Azeris, Balochis, and the rest—on the contrary, they are desperate to ensure that they do not say anything that might smack of pro-Persian bias, or of prejudice against other groups.

They use a curious word for such prejudice, aryism, which we eventually untangle to mean ‘preferring one’s own people’ and also ‘disfavoring other peoples.’

Can other groups be aryist, either to each other or to Persians? Opinion is divided, with some claiming there can be a sort of ‘reverse aryism,’ but many others—and certainly the most respectable—all agree that aryism is particularly a sin of Persians against everyone else in Anti-Persia, because Persians, and Persians alone, possess power and systemic advantage, which connects to the structural and systemic aryism under which PAPs suffer.

The third thing we notice is that despite all the demonization and complaints hurled at them, the Persians seem to be necessary for keeping Anti-Persia running. They are well-represented in political life, even in the media and higher education (the Anti-Persian Cathedral), business, the skilled trades, all of it.

They also foot a disproportionate share of taxes—yes, even though they are the largest group—consume less welfare than many other groups and have relatively high rates of law-abidingness.

Yes, Persian guilt is quite the phenomenon, but what’s the logic behind it? Why are so many Persians gripped with this overpowering need to feel guilty for the (putative, arguable) ‘evils’ of their forefathers?

After all, as some brave Persians point out, it is hardly as if Anti-Persia has a uniquely brutal history—have you heard of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the conquest of Mexico, and the American Civil War? Other countries and cultures have done great evil too!

If we want to explain why Anti-Persia is Anti-Persia instead of Persia, we need to really look at the ruling ideology and see how it benefits the power structure.

Of course, we’ll also want to try to understand why Anti-Persian society accepts this narrative and goes along with it.

True, people do not like to incur the anger and displeasure of their peers, but why do their peers believe it? Ultimately we have to come up with some kind of answer for why this set of ideas, instead of some other, more pro-Persian set of ideas, rules Anti-Persia.

The declaration of Shi'ism as the state religion of Iran in 1501 by Shah Ismail - Safavid dynasty

When we look at the politics of Anti-Persia, we notice that there are two major political parties, each of which uses quite distinctive language. True, Anti-Persian citizens often grumble that they are too much alike, but everyone knows they are playing two different games.

The first major party claims to champion the average person, no matter who they are or where they come from. They believe in something called hamsar, a concept we might translate, in our questionable Anti-Persian, as “everyone should receive what everyone else receives.”

We’ll refer to them as Party H for now.

The second major party (also) claims to champion the average person, no matter who they are or where they come from. However, they believe in a couple of different things. While they pay lip service to the Hamsar Doctrine, they’re more concerned with something called taarof. While this might be more literally translated as “manners,” for this party—Party T—it essentially means “doing things the way they have long been done."

This belief in taarof intersects to a degree with a belief in something called azadi, a peculiar idea that means “acting in a manner one has willed to act.”

How do Party H and Party T manage to run Anti-Persia between them? How do they engage with the dominant ideology of Anti-Persianness, and what is their stake in it?

For Party H, the doctrine of hamsar is politically important because all Anti-Persian citizens should receive what everyone else receives, but they do not. Again, Persians generally do better than other groups, although of course not all Persians manage to do as well as for themselves as other Persians, economically speaking.

Best of all, Party H has held enough power—sometimes overwhelming power—at high enough levels in the past in order to put into place a set of arrangements in which the government takes some money from everyone who earns money and redistributes it to those who do not earn above a certain level, or at all.

Party H sells this set of policies to the voters as mehr, meaning “strong positive affection.”

As a consequence, Party H’s voting base includes most of the non-Persian groups in Anti-Persia, who usually vote overwhelmingly for H candidates. However, it also includes many Persians. These Persians tend to see Persianness as an elitist concept, one they associate with the departed shah and the traditional landowners and tribal chieftains who composed much of the pre-Anti-Persian elite—and with the heads of the major businesses who, in effect, replaced them.

As for Party T, a big part of their game is playing off of Party H. They claim allegiance to some form of hamsar, but also claim Party H has gone too far and neglected taarof, doing things the way they have always been done.

Something struggles to reassert itself in our memories.

To be sure, Party T also believes in azadi, “acting in a manner one has willed to act,” but even this seems to be almost a reaction to hamsar, since after all, “everyone should receive what everyone else receives” rather conflicts with the notion that everyone should be able to act in a manner they have willed to act.

What in the world is going on here?

We dig into our archives, our thoughts flickering through hundreds of years of historical events and personages. Entire centuries dissolve and are abstracted into historical patterns and narratives in the blink of an eye.

In passing we note the Axial Age of 800-200 BCE, the great transformation of belief from the particular to the transcendent across so much of the ancient world, including Persia. Interesting, but not quite what we are looking for.

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We note the great revolutions of the period sometimes called ‘modernity,’ and realize that a major theme here is the involvement of the people—conceptualized as a super-organismic whole—in political life.

We note the Industrial Revolution, and note in particular the leveling effect of moving from a world in which 19 out of 20 people on Earth lived on less than $2.00/day to a world in which fewer than 1 in 10 do so.

We note in particular the spectacular development of the Haber-Bosch process for converting atmospheric nitrogen to fertilizer. Thanks to this process, without which about 40% of the world’s population would starve to death, obesity is a growing global public health problem.

Something struggles to reassert itself in our memories.

Social levelling… hierarchy… food…

Christopher Boehm’s words: “In order to get meat divided within a band of people who are by nature pretty hierarchical, you have to basically stomp on hierarchy and get it out of the way. I think that is the process.”

Have we solved the riddle of Anti-Persia? Let’s see if we can construct a reasonable narrative. Traditionally, Persian society was hierarchical and built on taarof, “doing things the way they have long been done.”

But then a revolution, or a series of them, turned Persia into Anti-Persia. The older revolutionary rhetoric centered on the idea of azadi, “acting in a manner one has willed to act,” but with time the Hamsar Doctrine, “everyone should receive what everyone else receives,” took root and has grown and grown ever since.

All of this was fundamentally possible because of the changes in economic organization and technology which resulted in large concentrations of people gathered into the cities, where they could put pressure on the nerve centers of power to a degree unprecedented in traditional society.

With the throne vacant and the altars toppled, Anti-Persia became a mess of ethnic and class tensions. Over time, the tyranny of rising expectations meant that the focus of revolutionary efforts moved from ‘merely’ abolishing class distinctions and establishing reasonable working conditions in Anti-Persian rug factories to abolishing Persianness itself.

Anti-Persianness and anti-aryism caught on as a power-strategy because it could weaponize ethnic, class, and gender grievances against the old Persian elite and the businessmen who effectively replaced them, and Party H was born. This power-strategy now operates as a feedback loop between Cathedral and populace, who agitate for ever more hamsar and claim to be ever more oppressed, even as the industrial technology and the alchemy of air allow poor people to become fat.

Party H has not been able to dominate political life entirely, however, and the result is a never-ending tug-of-war between the party of more-or-less permanent revolution and the party of putative resistance to said permanent revolution. The tug-of-war provides some measure of stability, but over time Party H has moved the dial of Anti-Persia decidedly toward the Hamsar Doctrine of “everyone should receive what everyone else receives.”

As Anti-Persia becomes ever more anti-Persian, it also becomes ever more multicultural. After all, if Persia was an oppressive historical monstrosity, and if hamsar should replace Persianness, why not import people from foreign lands beyond Anti-Persia, the better to dilute Persianness?

On the basis of this logic, Party H colludes with big business interests—despite its officially anti-business rhetoric—to import large numbers of Hephthalites as cheap labor. The Hephthalites vote for Party H to give them ever-more lavish benefits paid for by the Persians, justifying this as reparations for past Sassanid aggression.

One may choose to believe that Anti-Persia will progress toward a multicultural utopia. Another possibility is a socially fractured country, paralyzed by ethnic and class conflict and a wave of uncontrolled Hephthalite crime it cannot bring itself to be honest about. (After all, to call out Hephthalite crime would be aryism).

The world dissolves around us, and the simulation ends.

What is the great lesson of Anti-Persia? Is there a lesson, or is it simply an incredibly silly exercise?

Anti-Persia may well be preposterously silly—surely no society could be that self-effacing, after all—but as silly and unrealistic as it is, it points us toward an important truth. If the people hold power through the Party H-Party T system, that power-strategy is every bit as much a question of control over force, over conflict plus uncertainty, as all the other historical scenarios we have engaged with.

It is the nature of all revolutions to denounce the past. Anti-Persia poses as a new dispensation, aggressively brandishing its curious revolutionary doctrine of hamsar and its anti-Persian culture of critique, but it is nothing more than a power grab. History has not ended, only turned over a new leaf.

From this perspective, multiculturalism is simply a part of an anti-hegemonist power-strategy. It provides cheap Hephthalite labor to big businesses, and discourages ethnic tensions and in-group preferences, particularly on the part of the slim Persian majority, which could conceivably get in the way of anti-Persian ethnic tensions and tolerance of non-Persian/PAP in-group preference.

Multiculturalism, and the broader complex of Omni-Compassionism, relies on division and lends itself quite readily to animosity. It pits poor against rich, women against men, and non-Persians against Persians. It also pits everyone against Persian nativists and identitarians who want to revive Persian identity, take pride in Persian history and culture, and end the mass migration of Hephthalites.

Opposition is dangerous for Omni-Compassionism, because it requires so many people to make so many sacrifices. From the vantage point of 5,000 feet and 300,000 years, it is easy to see that in-group preference and between-group conflict, whether at the level of the band, tribe, kingdom, ethnic group, or religion, constitutes a much more common and easy to understand pattern than universalism.

The fact that Omni-Compassionism and its Hamsar Doctrine creates winners and losers means that there will always be an incentive to reject it.

Perhaps Omni-Compassionism will yet triumph over those who would reject it, girdling the globe with a monoculture that is equal parts secular humanism and “social justice.”

Perhaps the intellectual history of the 21st century will be told as a sort of dialog between Steven Pinker and the various causes funded by George Soros.

Perhaps… but perhaps not.

In the end, the greatest weakness of Omni-Compassionism may be the way that it encourages identity when it is against the hegemonic identity of any given country. Not only does this ultimately incentivize some Persians to fight back against anti-Persianness and the Great Hephthalite Replacement, it also requires Omni-Compassionism to keep pushing, long after it has worn out its welcome.

Omni-Compassionism has gotten much mileage out of branding the Persian resistance, the nativists, nationalists, and identitarians, as “hate groups.” It is likely, however, that if Omni-Compassionism ever managed to eliminate all Persianness in Anti-Persia, it would immediately run into challenges keeping its diverse coalition together.

Meanwhile, endless Omni-Compassionate demands—for Persian gold, for Persian culture, for Persian identity itself—are breeding a new generation of awakened Persians.

Perhaps the future of our imagined Anti-Persia is not yet written. Perhaps it will defeat Omni-Compassionism and reclaim its identity, culture, and sense of self-determination and destiny.

Can multiculturalism work? This was our original query. From the vantage point of 5,000 feet and 300,000 years, we have to admit that we cannot claim, with perfect knowledge, whether multiculturalism of the anti-hegemonist sort can work. Perhaps it can be made to work.

However, we know that Omni-Compassionism, including multiculturalism, is not the first effort at a universal unification of humanity. The great universalizing religions of Christianity and Islam constitute two of the more successful attempts from the premodern world. The histories of both faiths are riddled with sectarian fighting and bloody wars even between nations of the same sect.

Looking down from our lofty height, our eyes piercing the veil of time and taking in three hundred millennia, we admit we cannot know for sure—and yet, we can see the many fault-lines and fractures, the many aspects of human nature and human social nature that Omni-Compassionism must paper over in order to be made to work.

On the other hand, we have any number of examples of societies with a dominant culture and identity of some kind working very well. Some of them, such as the Achaemenids, Romans, and Ottomans, were sprawling hegemonist multicultural empires.

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The wager the multiculturalist must make, then, is that the ideology of Omni-Compassionism will be able to outweigh the many forces that oppose it—conservatism, tradition, nationalism, patriotism, and simple in-group preference. It must continue to do this even in the teeth of a demographic situation which is projected to be increasingly unfavorable to it.

A utopian ideology versus the weight of three hundred thousand years… now that is an interesting bet on the future of a civilization.

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35 Books To Build Your Character: The Definitive Reading List on Humility and Ego

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Last week I got an email from a young man who asked me for a reading list of books about humility. Since it would have been absurdly hypocritical to answer with my own book, Ego is the Enemy (even if it was to point him to the bibliography I was much indebted to at the back), I decided to put together this list.

In my reading, I’ve found that books on this topic fall into a few distinct categories. First are books of advice. These are books that give us strategies and insights about how to stay balanced, clear-headed and humble. The next are what might be called cautionary tales—biographies that chart the fall of egomaniacs or stories from history about the costs of letting things go to your head. Conversely, there is also inspiration of remarkably successful people who resisted the tug of ego and stayed sane and sober despite it all.

This battle against ego is essential and one we find across cultures, schools and generations. In fact, it would be hard to find any wise or successful person who didn’t warn against ego. From Genghis Khan’s saying, “If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead” to Cyril Connolly’s “Ego sucks us down like the law of gravity” to Marina Abramovic’s line, “Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.”

So fight it. A lot depends on whether you win the battle. Hopefully these books will help.

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Advice

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life by Russ Roberts — Russ Roberts did the world an amazing service by reintroducing Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and making it accessible to modern readers. One of the best parts is “The Indifferent Spectator,” a wonderful exercise to evaluate potential behavior. It forces you to ask: What would a completely indifferent human being think about what I am about to do? Would I be embarrassed? Would I try to rationalize this to them? Would they respect it? The exercise will bring you a much needed dose of objectivity into your own behavior—it will be the strongest antidote you can bring in your fight with ego and pride.

The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams by Sam Walker  — This book from the founding editor of The Wall Street Journal’s sports section aims at answering one question: What did the most dominant sports teams of all time have in common? The answer that emerges is that each had the same type of captain—a leader who led the team to historic greatness. But here’s the crazy thing about those leaders: It’s rarely the person you think. For instance, the Chicago Bulls were led to success not by Jordan but by Bill Cartwright. Or the US Women’s Soccer team, which won the World Cup, was actually led by Carla Overbeck (and her secret? She would unload the bus for her teammates at each stop). There is a wonderful chapter in this book about how captains “carry water” for the team—how they are strong yet humble enough to do the things other people aren’t willing to do.

The Road To Character by David Brooks — When General Stanley McChrystal was asked on the Tim Ferriss podcast what was a recent purchase that had most positively impacted his life, he pointed to this book. I agree. It can be a bit stilted and dense at times, but it should be assigned reading to any young person today (a little challenge is a good thing). Illustrating with diverse examples and stories from great men and women, from Dorothy Day to Dwight Eisenhower, Brooks admonishes the reader to undertake their own journey of character perfection. In my own book, I explore the same topic (humility) from a different angle using similar stories—I’m attacking ego, he’s building up character. Brooks’s meditation on the difference between the eulogy virtues, the ones that are talked about at your funeral, versus the resume virtues, the skills you bring on the market, is also great.

A Fighter’s Mind by Sam Sheridan — Sam Sheridan’s work first turned me onto the paradoxical humility of the men who practice such an aggressive and dangerous trade. Through interviews with some of the most remarkable fighters today, like champions Randy Couture, Frank Shamrock, Dan Gable, Greg Jackson and others, the book illustrates how lack of ego and humility are the bedrocks of success in one of the most unforgiving sports. As Frank Shamrock would say in the book: “Ego is an evil thing. Confidence is important but ego is something false. Humility is the way to build confidence, and ego is hugely dangerous in this sport…It’s all garbage, the ego is garbage.”

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport — Unlike other modern advice, Cal takes a different tack when it comes to your career: It’s not about marketing and promoting yourself, it’s about pouring that energy into the work. It’s not about how much you love what you’re doing, it’s about the value you create for other people. Cal’s book also does a great job at explaining why “follow your passion” is bad advice when it comes to what to do as your career.

Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership by John Dickson — This is a short book by historian John Dickson who shows how humility was the most critical virtue for the great men and women in history. The book illustrates how humility is not low self-esteem and self-loathing but it recognizes our inherent worth and seeks to use whatever power we have at our disposal on behalf of others.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson — This book has secured a foothold in every imaginable bestseller list for a good reason. Even if you only read the “You Are Not Special” chapter, it will be well worth your money and time. Mark writes against the grandiosity, entitlement and superiority that has come to define our times—that what we need is objectivity and humility to accept reality on reality’s terms. As he writes, “The knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.”

Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi —In interviewing essentially an entire generation of brilliant creative minds from every discipline, Mihaly was able to present the most accurate and relatable picture of what it means to be an artist or a creative. As you’ll see, it’s not ego that these people have in common but humility and a love of craft. It’s not tortured angst either, but a desire to express themselves and do work that matters (and in many cases, to also have happy lives and families). In a way, it makes it clear that the Kanye West’s or the Kurt Cobain’s of the world are the exceptions that prove the rule—not models for aspiring creatives to base their careers on.

The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam / The Winner Within by Pat Riley / The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh  — These three “coach” books are classics for a reason. A coach after all is fighting multiple battles daily: How do you keep one player from becoming complacent? How do you build another one up without fanning the flames of ego? How do you keep them all humble and hardworking? Each book offers timeless lessons in one of the most challenging professions. Pat Riley’s concept of “the disease of me” is a great articulation of what happens to individuals and to teams as they begin to achieve success. Halberstam’s line that Bill Belichick is “not only in the steak business, but he has contempt for sizzle” is brilliant. It’s why the man has been able to build one of the greatest franchises in the history of sports. Bill Walsh’s “Standards of Excellence” are absolutely worth reading about, but most of all I was deeply inspired by the way that Walsh, decades after his Super Bowls, resisted the urge to take credit for it all or to claim that it was all part of some sweeping vision or plan.

The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse — This is a thoughtful, non-partisan, and constructive book written by the Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. It shows you what it means to be an adult, a citizen, and a mature contributing member of society. Senator Sasse’s book is a manifesto on the virtues of hard work, humility, compassion, and duty as well as the perils of modern entitlement and forever-childhood that have messed with the millennial generation. For anyone on the fence about the book I would suggest you at least listen to or read his conversation with Tyler Cowen. It’s just as valuable as the book.

But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About The Present As If It Were The Past by Chuck Klosterman — It’s always good to remind ourselves that almost everything we’re certain about will probably be eventually proven wrong. Klosterman’s subtitle—Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past—is a brilliant exercise for getting some perspective and humility. Whether you think, say 2018 is going to be a year of radical change for the better or a horrible year of excesses of dangerous precedent, you’re probably wrong. You’re probably not even in the ballpark. This book shows you why, not with lectures about politics, but with a bunch of awesome thought experiments about music, books, movies and science.

Inspiration

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius — I would call this the greatest book ever written. It is the definitive text on self-discipline, personal ethics, humility, self-actualization, and strength. Meditations is perhaps the only document of its kind ever made. It is the private thoughts of the world’s most powerful man giving advice to himself on how to make good on the responsibilities and obligations of his positions. To remain humble and avoid the trappings of his position. Trained in Stoic philosophy, Emperor Marcus Aurelius stopped almost every night to practice a series of spiritual exercises—reminders designed to make him humble, patient, empathetic, generous, and strong in the face of whatever he was dealing with.

Marshall: Hero for Our Times by Leonard Mosley and General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman by Ed Cray — For every Douglas MacArthur or George McClellan (see his bio below), brilliant but laughably convinced of their own greatness and power, there is someone like George Marshall, a general who accomplished far more (far more quietly) and coveted far less credit along the way. For instance, during World War II he was practically offered the command of the troops on D-Day. Yet he told President Roosevelt: “The decision is yours, Mr. President; my wishes have nothing to do with the matter.” It came to be that Eisenhower led the invasion and performed with excellence. Marshall put the mission and purpose above himself—an act of selflessness and lack of ego we need to remind ourselves of. To learn more about George Marshall, read Dean Acheson’s homage to the great man as well as the lecture “A Case Study in Principled Leadership: General George C. Marshall’s Core Beliefs.” Matthew

Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball by Sadaharu Oh — Sadaharu Oh is the legendary Japanese hitter who holds the world lifetime home run record, having hit 868 home runs during his professional career and was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994. This rare book is out of print but is an incredible autobiography and meditation on the humility necessary in reaching the heights in one’s craft. It’s a memoir more than it is a book about baseball so even if you don’t like sports, you will get a lot out of it.

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell — The book is spectacular. It was a bestseller in the UK and was featured in a 6 part series in The Guardian. The format of the book is a bit unusual, instead of chapters it is made up of 20 Montaigne style essays that discuss the man from a variety of different perspectives. Montaigne was a man obsessed with figuring himself out—why he thought the way he did, how he could find happiness, his fetishes, his near-death experiences. His epistemological humility is admirable, and it is why philosopher Nassim Taleb has said that Montaigne is “worthy of respect because he’s intensely introspective, with the courage of resisting his own knowledge.”   

Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American by B.H Liddell Hart  — There is a stunningly profound quote from the author in this biography that defines Sherman’s genius, a Civil War hero who, as a quiet, unglamorous realist, has been forgotten, or worse, vilified. “Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable— those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious…It is poise, not pose.”

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow — Despite his reputation as a robber baron, Rockefeller is stoic, incredibly resilient, humble and compassionate. Most people get worse as they get successful, many more get worse as they age. In fact, Rockefeller began tithing his money with his first job and gave more of it away as he became successful. He grew more open-minded the older he became, more generous, more pious, more dedicated to making a difference. In fact, Rockefeller would admonish himself daily with thoughts like this one: “Because you have got a start, you think you are quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head — go steady. Are you going to let this money puff you up? Keep your eyes open. Don’t lose your balance.”

Personal History by Katharine Graham  — After the tragic suicide of her husband, who ran The Washington Post and which they both owned, Katharine Graham, at age 46 and a mother of three, with no work experience to speak of, found herself overseeing the Post through its most tumultuous and difficult years (think Watergate and the Pentagon papers). Eventually, she became one of the best CEOs of the 20th century, period. It wasn’t ego that drove her success. Because it wasn’t about her. It was about preserving her family’s legacy. Protecting the paper. Doing her job. She pulled through and endured with a strong sense of purpose, fortitude, and humility that we can all learn from.

The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader by Fred I. Greenstein — When the author began his research on leadership and how presidents actually get things done, he had a quick stop at the Eisenhower Library to confirm Ike was as hands-off as possible, playing golf and letting his lieutenants run the country. In fact, this was all a brilliant act because Eisenhower was a master of behind the scenes power. Eisenhower didn’t need feel the need to go around pretending to be presidential, giving big speeches or fighting with opponents in the other party. He preferred to work behind the scenes, avoiding open conflict and quietly getting things done. This book is a masterclass on in his technique: it’s not through talking, it’s not through looking tough, it’s through organization, delegation and through behind the scenes influence.

Cautionary Tales

What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg — Sammy is the all-American heel. He’s your Ari Gold without the slightest bit of human decency. He rises through the ranks of Hollywood without ever writing a word. He is shadows and illusions, and the ultimate power-player. Sadly, as Schulberg mentions in his introduction, the message has been perverted. Our society tends to see Sammy as a hero instead of a villain—or at least someone to pity. What Makes Sammy Run? is a novel that reminds us that even with egotists “win,” they lose.

Ask the Dust, Dreams from Bunker Hill, Wait Until Spring, Bandini and The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante — In John Fante’s Ask the Dust (part of a series known as The Bandini Quartet, included in this section), the protagonist is the young Arturo Bandini who alienates every person he meets as he tries to become a famous writer. The young writer doesn’t experience the life he is living, he sees it all “across a page in a typewriter,” wondering if nearly every second of his life is a poem, a play, a story, a news article with him as its main character. It feels good— so much better than those feelings of doubt and fear and normalness— and so we similarly stay stuck inside our heads instead of participating in the world around us. That’s ego, baby. Get out of your own head.

Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness by Donald L. Barlett — Howard Hughes is the archetypal example of someone who was made worse by success—in fact, I’d argue he was probably one of the worst businessmen of the entire 20th century. Stripped of the marketing and the Hollywood glamour, Hughes’ story is unbelievably sad (and worse, mostly self-inflicted). As he said to one of his aides, as he neared death, “If you had ever swapped places in life with me, I would be willing to bet that you would have demanded to swap back before the passage of the first week.” Which is why we ought to learn from his example before we find ourselves in a similar position.

The Young Napoleon: George McClellan by Stephen W. Sears  — In Union General George McClellan, you have a delusional egotist who fought poorly for a good cause. It’s interesting because McClellan was such a smart and talented man yet he nearly lost the war on several occasions (and also lost chances to win the war). The title of the book comes from the nickname his friends gave him due to his outsized ego, and the book really stands as an important, cautionary tale. Related, I also recommend Tides of War by Steven Pressfield (Alcibiades’ monstrous ego—fictionalized here—is a similar cautionary tale).

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro — The 1,165 pages chronicle the rise of Robert Moses who built just about every other major modern construction project in New York City. The public couldn’t stop him, the mayor couldn’t stop him, the governor couldn’t stop him, and only once could the President of the United States stop him. But ultimately, you know where the cliché must take us. Robert Moses was an asshole. He may have had more brain, more drive, more strategy than other men, but he did not have more compassion. And ultimately power turned him into something monstrous. If you like this, read Caro’s four-part series on Lyndon Johnson which is a similar meditation on ego and power.

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan — There are lots of books on aspiring to something. Very little are from actual people who aspired, achieved, and lost it. With each and every successful move that he made, Jim Paul, who made it to Governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, was convinced that he was special, different, and exempt from the rules. Once the markets turned against his trades, he lost it all — his fortune, job, and reputation. That’s what makes this book a critical part in understanding how letting arrogance and pride get to your head is the beginning of your unraveling. Learn from stories like this instead of by your own trial and error. Think about that next time you believe you have it all figured out.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand — Why Atlas Shrugged? Because the entire premise of the book, “You guys don’t appreciate me so I’m taking my ball and going home,” is an exercise in ego and petulence. There is something deeply appealing to an egotistical teenager about leaving the world behind to selfishly pursue your craft. The question is: Would you want everyone else to do that? Of course not. At the end of the day Plato’s allegory of the cave is a far better way to live your life than Galt’s Gulch ever will be.

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette — Right before he destroyed his own billion-dollar company, Ty Warner, creator of Beanie Babies, overrode the objections of one of his employees and bragged, “I could put the Ty heart on manure and they’d buy it!” This book is a study of ego and entitlement but also fascinating from a variety of perspectives: psychology, economics, popular culture, leadership, creativity. It intersects all of them as the story of a financial bubble, a cultural fad, a poorly run company and an eccentric creative. It is one of the best narrative business books out there.

Grand Delusions: The Cosmic Career of John DeLorean by Hillel Levin — Just like Ty Warner, John DeLorean, the brilliant engineer and car designer followed a similar trajectory. He was brilliant creatively, but no amount of brilliance could compensate for the destructiveness of his ego. It was ego and his inability to work well with others that drove him out of General Motors. His ego mired his new company in chaos and dysfunction. Ultimately, instead of being able to reflect on these failures and resolve them, he hatched a plan to save his company from insolvency with a $60 million dollar cocaine deal instead of, you know, anything but that.

Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll — Most business books are about what went right. This one isn’t. It’s about painful failures. The ones that get repeated over and over and over. This book will humble future CEOs and keep them conservative—which is an important balance for any ambitious person.

Articles/Misc.

Here are some other quicker reads I recommend:

Read Dr. Reverend Sam Wells’ speech “Outrageous Humility.” George Packer’s epic New Yorker piece on Angela Merkel, “The Quiet German,” is fascinating. There is also a fantastic and equally epic profile on her in Vanity Fair by Maureen Orth. This piece about the fall of Uber’s Travis Kalanick basically follows the exact plot of Ego is the Enemy and is an important cautionary tale. A great essay from the investor Paul Graham is “Keep Your Identity Small.” Cheryl Strayed’s essay, “Write Like a Motherfucker,” is a classic. I wrote last year about how the David vs. Goliath story illustrates the difference between ego, confidence and humility. Arnold’s essay on Marcus Aurelius is a must read. You might also like this piece from me: “The Fascinating and Ego-Killing Existence of Human Wormholes.”  

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And of course it would be egotistical to actually believe my own headline. There’s no way this list is actually definitive, but it is a start. If you have any other recommendations or additions, please let me know!

Like to Read? I’ve created a list of 15 books you’ve never heard of that will alter your worldview and help you excel at your career. Get the secret book list here!

Read more: https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2018/02/35-books-to-build-your-character-the-definitive-reading-list-on-humility-and-ego/

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