Ultimate Recycling: Composting Humans

 Lisa Wells provides us with an intriguing new option for dealing with our remains after we pass away.  She produced the article To Be a Field of Poppies: The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost for Harper’s Magazine to acquaint us with this new development.

Wells is someone who has thought a lot about what should be done with her body after she is gone.

“As a child, I desperately wanted a Viking burial, an idea inspired by the 1988 Macaulay Culkin film Rocket Gibraltar, in which a group of kids boost their grandpa’s corpse, load it onto a boat, push it out to sea, and light it on fire with a flaming arrow. If the sky glowed red, the narrator explained, it meant the dead Viking had ‘led a good life’.”

“By my twenties, I had settled on the more realistic option of cremation. I wanted my ashes scattered on the banks of my favorite river, or cast from a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, or fired into the atmosphere from a cannon. (I was in a Hunter S. Thompson phase.) But after a friend’s ashes were lost in the mail, I reconsidered. I explored sky burial, in which a corpse is left out in the open to be fed upon by raptors; and alkaline hydrolysis, a process in which flesh is liquefied in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide. More recently, I planned to follow the example of Nineties heartthrob Luke Perry and purchase an Infinity Burial Suit: a shroud containing fungi that would consume my corpse and bioremediate its toxins.”

She suggests that such focusing on exiting the world is healthy and useful: we owe the world some consideration as to how to dispose of ourselves, it saves those who remain any uncertainty as to what to do with us, and consideration of our inevitable death should produce a greater appreciation for the life we have left.

“A willingness to face life’s nonnegotiable realities seems to me one mark of psychological maturation. But it comes at a price—the discovery that the world is not as simple as we once believed.”

“The Viking burial, for example, is apocryphal; the Vikings were known to burn their dead in boats, but kept them parked on land. What’s more, their funerals sometimes involved human sacrifice, in which a female slave was raped by the dead man’s clan, then ritually stabbed and strangled. Other, less sinister realities: both sky burial and the firing of heavy artillery are frowned upon in the city of Seattle, where I live. And even if cannons were permitted, cremation releases about 540 pounds of carbon per incinerated corpse. The carbon output from a year’s worth of cremations in the United States is roughly equivalent to that from burning 400 million pounds of coal. Alkaline hydrolysis has less ecological impact, but like cremation, it wastes the body’s energy; instead of going up in smoke, nutrients are flushed down the drain. Even the mushroom suit, according to critics, adds nothing to the decomposition process that soil itself can’t provide.”

In that spirit, our traditional burial six feet under can be considered as just a brutal mechanism to inject a carcinogen into mother earth.

“By the 1950s, embalming had become standard in the United States, but I wonder if this would have been the case had people understood the violence involved. There is no single method, but in a typical scenario, fluid containing formaldehyde is pumped into the carotid artery, which forces blood and other fluids in the corpse out of a tube in the jugular or femoral vein. An aspirating device resembling a meat thermometer is then repeatedly pushed into the abdomen and chest, where it punctures the organs. The organs are then filled with concentrated ‘cavity chemicals.’ No wonder embalming is considered desecration in some traditions, including among Muslims and Jews, who bury their dead in shrouds or simple coffins, sometimes without nails or fasteners, to avoid obstructing the decomposition process.” 

Wells centers her article around Amigo Bob Cantisano and his end-of-life decision.

“Amigo Bob didn’t know what should be done with his body. To bury toxic embalming fluid in the earth was out of the question—he was a lifelong environmentalist.”

“A few months earlier, in May 2020, a Washington State bill legalizing the conversion of human remains into soil, known as natural organic reduction (NOR), had gone into effect. A company called Recompose was due to open the world’s first NOR facility that December in Kent, a city just south of Seattle. They named it the Greenhouse. It seemed perfect for Amigo Bob, who had revolutionized the field of organic agriculture—first as a farmer, then as an advocate and consultant—and spent his life building soil and protecting it from the ‘pesticide mafia’.”

“When he began to accept that the end was near, Amigo Bob called the founder of Recompose, Katrina Spade. He wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. Compost is the basis of organic farming, so he knew a lot about it—he’d even served as an adviser for a few large composting operations. Katrina explained their process, and he seemed to find her account convincing, but it wasn’t until his final moments that he told Jenifer [his wife] definitively: ‘This is what I want’.”

Amigo Bob would be one of the ten people who would become the first legally composted humans.  Proper composting requires a bit of technology.

“Composting isn’t rocket science, but the process requires a precise amount of sustained heat to eliminate pathogens and quickly convert decaying organic matter to soil.”

“Each of their bodies was placed inside an eight-foot-long steel cylinder called a ‘vessel,’ along with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Over the next thirty days, the Recompose staff monitored the moisture, heat, and pH levels inside the vessels, occasionally rotating them, until the bodies transformed into soil. The soil was then transferred to curing bins, where it remained for two weeks before being tested for toxins and cleared for pickup.”

“Half of the NOR soil would wind up in a forest on Bells Mountain, in southwestern Washington, near the Oregon border. A composted body produces approximately one cubic yard of soil, which can fill a truck bed and weigh upwards of 1,500 pounds. For many surviving relatives—apartment dwellers, for example—taking home such a large quantity of soil is unrealistic, so Recompose offers them the option to donate it to the mountain, where it’s used to fertilize trees and repair land degraded by logging.”

“But Amigo Bob was a farmer, so Jenifer rented a U-Haul and brought the whole cubic yard of him home. She turned the trip into a kind of pilgrimage, stopping to visit loved ones and the headwaters of their favorite rivers. Over the next few months, their farmer friends came by and filled small containers with the soil to use on their own land. Jenifer used some to plant a cherry tree.”

It is not clear what the future of human composting will be.  It will seem an attractive option for the environmentally concerned.

“Recompose claims that each person who chooses composting over conventional burial or cremation will prevent an average of one metric ton of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. According to the EPA’s calculator, that is a modest carbon payback, equal to the consumption of about ten tanks of gas. On the other hand, this is preferable to adding to the debt.”

“To my mind, it’s the perceptual shift that bears the greatest promise. If we begin to imagine ourselves as beneficial contributors to the earth in death, rather than as agents of sickness and damage, maybe we can start to see that possibility for our lives.”

Wells quotes one of the Recompose participants, Elliot Rasenick.

“’The climate crisis is fundamentally a soil crisis,’ Elliot mused. ‘There is a poetry in the possibility that the death of one generation can make possible the life of the next’.”

Interest in this procedure extends beyond Washington state.

“…similar bills have been introduced in California, Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Colorado. The latter two have already passed.”

The reader who did not find this topic thought provoking might yet benefit from the time spent by considering who in our political firmament might better serve humanity as a cubic yard of dirt.

 

How Societies Fail: Cultures of Honor, Patriarchy, Women’s Rights, and Social Stability

 A recent issue of The Economist provided a fascinating article detailing the costs a country pays when its culture demands the subjugation of females: Societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable.  The author uses research into the correlation between the fragility of societies and their oppression of women to make the point that when women suffer, the men, and greater society, suffer as well.

The article turns on the work of Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University and Donna Lee Bowen and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen of Brigham Young University.

“In ‘The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide’, Ms Hudson, Ms Bowen and Ms Nielsen rank 176 countries on a scale of 0 to 16 for what they call the ‘patrilineal/fraternal syndrome’. This is a composite of such things as unequal treatment of women in family law and property rights, early marriage for girls, patrilocal marriage, polygamy, bride price, son preference, violence against women and social attitudes towards it (for example, is rape seen as a property crime against men?).”

The term fraternal syndrome arises from the tendency in many countries to form strong clan bonds within an extended family in which the clan as a whole acts to protect the interests of each male member.  Patrilocal refers to the female as the one who must move on when a marriage agreement is made.  Patrilineal refers to the family name and assets passing down through the male descendants.  The term “bride price” refers to the common practice of a father charging a fee to a prospective groom in order to close a marriage deal.  This certainly represents the fact that women are considered economic commodities and their “honor” and market value must be protected.  The accumulated data is plotted on the y-axis versus a measure of the degree of disorder and uncontrolled violence in a nation.

Cultures of honor require individuals to be willing to resort to violence, or the threat of violence, as a response to any affront to their honor.  These features tend to develop in societies where there is no recourse to external assistance in protecting property; the threat of theft is common with only the potential victim able to protect himself and his assets.  This situation will encourage strong family bonds as a means of protection and extend this familial response as far as possible, forming a clan—and perhaps a tribe.  However, the potential thieves will also have developed a clan.  A conflict between two individuals can lead to conflict between a large number of people and extend over generations.  The author uses Iraq as an example of a nation where clannishness leads to dysfunction. 

“The Iraqi police are reluctant to intervene in tribal murders. The culprit is probably armed. If he dies resisting arrest, his male relatives will feel a moral duty to kill the officer who fired the shot or, failing that, one of his colleagues. Few cops want to pick such a fight. It is far easier to let the tribes sort out their own disputes.”

“The upshot is that old codes of honour often trump Iraqi law (and also, whisper it, Islamic scripture, which is usually milder). Cycles of vengeance can spiral out of control.”

Situations in which allegiances to family or clan are stronger than that to the nation predictably produce corruption.

“Clan loyalties can cripple the state. When a clan member gets a job in the health ministry, he may feel a stronger duty to hire his unqualified cousins and steer contracts to his kin than to improve the nation’s health. This helps explain why Iraqi ministries are so corrupt.

Male dominance in a society leads to adverse trends that produce dysfunction.  Nature, wisely, produces male and female babies in equal numbers.  Humans, foolishly, often tend to favor males over females.

“The obstacles females face begin in the womb. Families that prefer sons may abort daughters. This has been especially common in China, India and the post-Soviet Caucasus region. Thanks to sex-selective abortion and the neglect of girl children, at least 130m girls are missing from the world’s population, by one estimate.”

“That means many men are doomed to remain single; and frustrated single men can be dangerous. Lena Edlund of Columbia University and her co-authors found that in China, for every 1% rise in the ratio of men to women, violent and property crime rose by 3.7%. Parts of India with more surplus men also have more violence against women. The insurgency in Kashmir has political roots, but it cannot help that the state has one of most skewed sex ratios in India.”

There is a more efficient way to limit the number of women available for marriage: polygamy (or more precisely, polygyny).  The number of women in polygynous marriages worldwide is small, but it happens to be quite large in some of the most violent regions of the world.

“Only about 2% of people live in polygamous households. But in the most unstable places it is rife. In war-racked Mali, Burkina Faso and South Sudan, the figure is more than a third. In the north-east of Nigeria, where the jihadists of Boko Haram control large swathes of territory, 44% of women aged 15-49 are in polygynous unions.”

“If the richest 10% of men have four wives each, the bottom 30% will have none. This gives them a powerful incentive to kill other men and steal their goods. They can either form groups of bandits with their cousins, as in north-western Nigeria, or join rebel armies, as in the Sahel. In Guinea, where soldiers carried out a coup on September 5th, 42% of married women aged 15-49 have co-wives.”

“Insurgent groups exploit male frustration to recruit. Islamic State gave its fighters sex slaves. Boko Haram offers its troops the chance to kidnap girls. Some Taliban are reportedly knocking on doors and demanding that families surrender single women to ‘wed’ them.”

The custom of bride price turns girls into marketable commodities.  In a situation where females are in short supply, the price can soar producing an unstable situation.

“Bride price, a more widespread practice, is also destabilising. In half of countries, marriage commonly entails money or goods changing hands. Most patrilineal cultures insist on it. Usually the resources pass from the groom’s family to the bride’s, though in South Asia it is typically the other way round (known as dowry).”

“The sums involved are often large. In Tororo district in Uganda, a groom is expected to pay his bride’s family five cows, five goats and a bit of cash, which are shared out among her male relatives. As a consequence, “some men will say: ‘you are my property, so I have the right to beat you,’” says Mary Asili, who runs a local branch of Mifumi, a women’s group.”

“Bride price encourages early marriage for girls, and later marriage for men. If a man’s daughters marry at 15 and his sons at 25, he has on average ten years to milk and breed the cows he receives for his daughters before he must pay up for his sons’ nuptials. In Uganda, 34% of women are married before the age of 18 and 7% before the age of 15. Early marriage means girls are more likely to drop out of school, and less able to stand up to an abusive husband.”

If bride price becomes unaffordable, crime can be the only path to marriage.

“Bride price can make marriage unaffordable for men. Mr Manshad in Iraq complains: ‘Many young men can’t get married. It can cost $10,000.’ Asked if his tribe’s recent lethal disputes over sand and vehicles might have been motivated by the desire to raise such a sum, he shrugs: ‘It is a basic necessity in life to get married’.”

The author introduces his article with a quote from the just mentioned Mr. Manshad of Iraq.

“’A woman who drives a car will be killed,’ says Sheikh Hazim Muhammad al-Manshad. He says it matter-of-factly, without raising his voice. The unwritten rules of his tribe, the al-Ghazi of southern Iraq, are clear. A woman who drives a car might meet a man. The very possibility is ‘a violation of her honour’. So her male relatives will kill her, with a knife or a bullet, and bury the body in a sand dune.”

These types of attitudes, and the desire to conceal females from public view by encasing them in clothing from head to foot, are common in Islamic countries, but they do not seem to be driven by the precepts of Islam itself.  Death for driving a car is a choice that particular society has made.  The Quran merely requires both men and women to dress modestly, a not unreasonable demand.  The culture of honor described above is derived not from an attempt to protect the car-driving woman’s honor but that of the men who own her.  That cultural tradition developed well before even the culture of the ancient Hebrews.  It is associated with the development of patriarchy in what we today refer to as the Middle East.

Gerda Lerner was one of the many Jews driven from Europe by Hitler who went on to make the lives of the rest of us more interesting.  She is credited with producing the first formal class on women’s history at any university in 1963 while she was still an undergraduate.  It would be her efforts that were critical in establishing the history of women as a formal topic for academic research.  She is best known for her book The Creation of Patriarchy (1986).  It covers the origins of patriarchy, its effects on society, its incorporation into religion and history, and its effects on women up to our current time.

As humans progressed from a hunter-gatherer existence to a more sedentary agricultural-based economy, the division of responsibilities between the genders changed.  This period would begin the introduction of features of economics and capitalism that encouraged the accumulation of wealth by individuals, the industrialization of production, and the waging of war for conquest or defense.  All of these advantaged a division of labor in which men took the lead while women focused on the female responsibilities of breeding and caring for children.  Writing and the production of historically useful documents date back to about 3000 B.C.  At that time, evidence existed that women played a substantial, though not equal, role to that of men in society.  Over the next 1000 years or so such references disappeared from historical documents and the dominance of men was expressed in the patriarchal family structure.  At its worst, patriarchy provided these characteristics.

“The father had the power of life and death over his children.  He had the power to commit infanticide by exposure or abandonment.  He could give his daughters in marriage in exchange for receiving a bride price even during their childhood, or he could consecrate them to a life of virginity in the temple service.  He could arrange marriages for children of both sexes.  A man could pledge his wife, his concubines and their children as pawns for his debt; if he failed to pay back the debt, these pledges would be turned into debt slaves.”

“The class difference between a wife living under the patriarchal dominance/protection of her husband and a slave living under the dominance/protection of the master was mainly that the wife could own a slave…”

The fate of girls from poor families was worse.

“By the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were sold into marriage or prostitution in order to advance the economic interests of their families.”

Women became valuable commodities that could be bought or sold, but men would do the buying and selling.  It became very important to a man of wealth that he have some means of demonstrating that the women of his family were not available for sale and were safely held under his protection.  From this grew the practice of veiling “honorable” women so they could be distinguished from “dishonored” women who were forbidden the veil.  It is not difficult to imagine veiling by the wealthy becoming an aspirational goal for all.  And if a face covering contributes to family honor, why would not some try to outdo others by covering ever more of the body.  Consequently, the dress requirements for women vary wildly, depending on the particular culture. 

It would be the Hebrews, in assembling their sacred documents, who would establish then current cultural treatment of women as a subordinate species to one ordained as being according to God’s will.  Christianity and Islam would then follow along and evolve from this same starting point.

The Biblical narratives are not kind to women.  The tale of Adam being created by a presumed male God by a means not requiring a birth process, eliminates any female role in creation.  Woman, in the form of Eve, is subsequently created from a rib of Adam, suggesting a lower status or rank relative to Adam and thus to God himself.  Eve then becomes the temptress that causes the fall from grace and the expulsion from Eden.  What clearer message could there be suggesting that women and their sexuality are dangerous to men and must be strictly controlled by men.  The basis of the Hebrew religion would be the covenant God was said to have made with Abraham.

“He asks acceptance that He will be the God of Israel, He alone and no other.  And He demands that His people which worship Him will be set apart from other people by a bodily sign, a clearly identifiable token…”

The token will be the required circumcision of males.

“We must take note of the fact that Yahweh makes the covenant with Abraham alone, not including [his wife] Sarah, and that in so doing He gives divine sanction to the leadership of the patriarch over his family and tribe…the covenant relationship is only with males—first with Abraham, then explicitly with Abraham and Sarah’s son, Isaac, who is referred to only as Abraham’s son.  Moreover, the community of the covenant is divinely defined as a male community, as can be seen by the selection of the symbol chosen as ‘token of the covenant’.”

“For females, the Book of Genesis represented their definition as creatures essentially different from males; a redefinition of their sexuality as beneficial and redemptive only within the boundaries of patriarchal dominance; and finally the recognition that they were excluded from directly being able to represent the divine principle.  The weight of the Biblical narrative seemed to decree that by the will of God women were included in His covenant only through the mediation of men.”

The tyranny of the religions men created in order to propagate their dominance held women back for many centuries—and still does in some regions and cultures.

“…All males, whether enslaved or economically or racially oppressed, could still identify with those like them—other males—who represented mastery of the symbol system.  No matter how degraded, each male slave or peasant was like to the master in his relationship to God.  This was not the case for women.  Up to the time of the Protestant Reformation the vast majority of women could not confirm and strengthen their humanity by reference to other females in positions of intellectual authority and religious leadership.”

“Where there is no precedent, one cannot imagine alternatives to existing conditions.  It is this feature of male hegemony which has been the most damaging to women and has ensured their subordinate status for millennia.  The denial to women of their history has reinforced their acceptance of the ideology of patriarchy and has undermined the individual woman’s sense of self-worth.”

No matter how counterproductive they may be, cultural attributes can be propagated for millennia, long after the conditions that generated them have disappeared.  Revolutions, wars, plagues, they come and go, but all too often the culture persists.

 

 

Cultures of Honor and Their Persistence: The Scots-Irish

 The term “culture of honor” can be misleading to the unfamiliar.  It does not imply a society wherein honorable intentions and actions are the standard.  Let us turn to this source for an appropriate definition provided by psychologists. 

“A culture of honor is a culture in which a person (usually a man) feels obliged to protect his or her reputation by answering insults, affronts, and threats, oftentimes through the use of violence. Cultures of honor have been independently invented many times across the world. Three well-known examples of cultures of honor include cultures of honor in parts of the Middle East, the southern United States, and inner-city neighborhoods (of the United States and elsewhere) that are controlled by gangs.”

“Cultures of honor can vary in many ways. Some stress female chastity to an extreme degree, whereas others do not. Some have strong norms for hospitality and politeness toward strangers, whereas others actively encourage aggression against outsiders. What all cultures of honor share, however, is the central importance placed on insult and threat and the necessity of responding to them with violence or the threat of violence.” 

Cultures develop over time.  The sociology of inner-city gangs seems more a business model than a culture.  The cultural attributes referred to in the Middle East developed over millennia and have persisted over millennia up to the present day.  Referring to a “southern” culture of honor is not incorrect, but the term can be misleading and provide little in gaining an understanding of the culture. 

It is universally understood that the roots of this southern behavior pattern are derived from the immigration of what are referred to as the Scots-Irish (alternately as the Scotch-Irish).  We will recognize that the term “scotch” is more appropriately associated with a delightful alcoholic beverage.  Malcolm Gladwell included a chapter on the Scots-Irish in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.  He attributes the best historical account of the southern culture to David Hacker Fischer. 

“David Hacker Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America is the most definitive and convincing treatment of the idea that cultural legacies cast a long historical shadow…In Albion’s Seed, Fischer argues that there were four distinct British migrations to America in its first 150 years: first the Puritans, in the 1630s, who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts; then the Cavaliers and indentured servants, who came from southern England to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century; then the Quakers from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and finally the people of the borderlands to the Appalachian interior in the eighteenth century.  Fischer argues brilliantly that these four cultures—each profoundly different—characterize those four regions of the United States even to this day.”

These people of the borderlands are the Scots-Irish.  The borderlands are the inhospitable and long-contested regions where England and Scotland collide.  These people would acquire the “Irish” label because they would move to Northern Ireland to escape the English only to find more mistreatment by the English in Ulster before finally seeking relief in America.

“The so-called American backcountry states—from the Pennsylvania border south and west through Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina, and the northern end of Alabama and Georgia—were settled overwhelmingly by immigrants from one of the world’s most ferocious cultures of honor.  They were the ‘Scotch-Irish’—that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern counties of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland.”

Former Senator for Virginia Jim Webb, a man proud of his Scots-Irish heritage, heaped praise on these people (and a little criticism) in his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.  He sees much to be admired in the characteristics imported into the US.  We will follow his book for a moment.

His description begins in Roman times when Celtic peoples were driven to what is now Scotland and made a stand in defense of their freedom.  Their social development, or lack thereof, was determined by the centuries of warfare, by the inhospitable environment they found in Scotland, and by the version of Christianity they adopted.

“...while Scotland’s rough topography made it difficult to conquer, it made it equally difficult to rule.....Not unlike Appalachia, Scotland is a land of difficult water barriers, sharp mountains and deep hollows, soggy moors and rough pastures, and of thin, uncultivable soil that lies like a blanket over wide reaches of granite....the settlements of ancient Scotland grew haphazardly and emphasized a rugged form of survival that had links neither to commerce nor to the developing world.  Again we find a cultural evolution and a fundamental lifestyle very much like those that would emerge later in the Appalachian Mountains.”

This is a theme that Webb returns to several times.  These people did not pass through the stages of cultural and political development that have been common to most nations.  The Scots of interest to us left before Scotland became a stable political entity with renowned universities.  By the time they migrated to Northern Ireland they had endured many generations of political turmoil at the national level.  That and their isolated and harsh environment formed character traits and social responses that Webb argues persist to this day.

“Such turbulence at the center of national government not only empowered the local clan leaders, it also demanded that they be strong, both for their own survival and also for the well-being of their extended families.  And again a familiar pattern reinforced itself in what would become the Scots-Irish character: the mistrust of central authority, the reliance on strong tribal rather than national leaders, and the willingness to take the law into one’s own hands rather than waiting for a solution to come down from above.”

Of great significance in understanding these people is the development of their religious beliefs.  The Scots were the beneficiaries of what Webb describes as the most corrupt version of the Catholic Church to be found anywhere.  It seems only natural that they would respond by accepting the most harsh and demanding form of Protestantism based on the teachings of John Calvin. 

“But Scotland ‘developed the Calvinistic doctrine that civil government, though regarded as a necessity, was to be recognized only when it was conducted according to the word of God.’  This meant not only that the Kirk would have the power to organize religious power at the local level, but also that Scots had reserved the right to judge their central government according to the standards they themselves would set from below.” 

Note that at this point you have a people who have never accepted the notion of allegiance to a central government and have lived with the belief that loyalty is to be extended as far as their local clans and churches.  You have a culture whose highest educational goal is to be able to read the Bible.

More on Webb’s book can be found in Born Fighting by Jim Webb.

The Scots-Irish culture would spread from its Appalachian roots and become dominant in the southern states.  It would also undergo one last migration.  It and its effects are described by James N. Gregory, a history professor, in his book The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America.  The migration of Blacks from the South to the cities of the North and West has been referred to as “The Great Migration.”  The migration of whites from the South over the same period was much larger, but much less studied.  Gregory provides this summary of what his investigations demonstrated.

“This book is about what may be the most momentous internal population movement of the twentieth century, the relocation of black and white Americans from the farms and towns of the South to the cities and suburbs of the North and West.  In the decades before the South became the Sun Belt, 20 million southerners left the region.  In doing so, they changed America.  They transformed American religion, spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating evangelical Protestantism, both black and white versions.  They transformed American popular culture, especially music.  The development of blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, and hillbilly and country music all depended on the southern migrants.  The Southern Diaspora transformed American racial hierarchies, as black migrants in the great cities of the North and West developed institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement.  The Southern Diaspora also helped reshape American conservatism, contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics.  Indeed, most of the great political realignments of the second half of the twentieth century had something to do with the population movements out of the South.” 

More on Gregory’s work can be found in The Southern Diaspora and the Southernization of America. 

The notion that cultures persist across generations and centuries has been claimed several times.  We return to Gladwell who attempts to provide proof.  He begins with an assessment of backwoods honor culture at work.  A description is made of a dispute between the Howard and Turner families in nineteenth century Harlan County, Kentucky.  An argument began between one member of each family over a poker game.  Before it was resolved many people had to die. 

“The first critical fact about Harlan is that at the same time that the Howards and Turners were killing one another, there were almost identical clashes in other small towns up and down the Appalachians.  In the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud on the West Virginia-Kentucky border not far from Harlan, several dozen people were killed in a cycle of violence that stretched over twenty years.  In the French-Eversole feud in Perry County, Kentucky, twelve died…The Martin-Tolliver feud, in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the mid-1880s featured three gunfights, three ambushes, and two house attacks, and ended in a two-hour gun battle involving one hundred armed men.  The Baker-Howard feud in Clay County, Kentucky, began in 1806, with an elk-hunting party gone bad, and didn’t end until the 1930s, when a couple of Howards killed three Bakers in an ambush…And these were just the well-known feuds.” 

“The triumph of a culture of honor explains why the pattern of criminality in the American South has always been so distinctive.  Murder rates are higher there than in the rest of the country.  But crimes of property and ‘stranger’ crimes—like muggings—are lower.  As the sociologist John Shelton Reed has written, ‘The homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is being killed by someone he (or often she) knows, for reasons both killer and victim understand.’  Reed adds: ‘The statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer.’  In the backcountry, violence was not for economic gain.  It was personal.  You fought over your honor.”

Gladwell describes experiments by psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan.  They set up a situation where a group of male students were asked to fill out a form and then drop it off at the end of a long hallway.  For half the students that was all.  For the other half, it was arranged for the student be bumped into by research associate and called an “asshole.”  In order to assess the effect of having that word directed at them the researchers visually sensed the level of anger, measured strength of handshake, and took saliva tests both before and after to measure cortisol and testosterone levels. 

“The results were unequivocal.  There were clear differences in how the young men responded to being called a bad name.  For some, the insult changed their behavior.  For some it didn’t.  The deciding factor in how they reacted wasn’t how emotionally secure they were, or whether they were intellectuals or jocks, or whether they were physically imposing or not.  What mattered—and I think you can guess where this is headed—was where they were from.  Most of the men from the northern part of the United States treated the incident with amusement.  They laughed it off.  Their handshakes were unchanged.  Their levels of cortisol actually went down as if they were unconsciously trying to diffuse their own anger.”

“But the southerners?  Oh,my.  They were angry.  Their cortisol and testosterone jumped.  Their handshakes got firm.” 

“This study is strange isn’t it?  It is one thing to conclude that groups of people living in circumstances pretty similar to their ancestors’ act a lot like their ancestors.  But those southerners in the hallway study weren’t living in circumstances similar to their British ancestors.  They didn’t necessarily have British ancestors.  They just happened to have grown up in the South….They were living in the late twentieth century not the late nineteenth century.  They were students at the University of Michigan, in one of the northernmost states in America, which meant they were sufficiently cosmopolitan to travel hundreds of miles from the south to go to college.  And none of that mattered.  They still acted like they were living in nineteenth-century Harlan, Kentucky.”

“’Your median student in those studies comes from a family making over a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s in nineteen ninety dollars,’ Cohen says.  ‘The southerners we see this effect with aren’t kids who come from the hills of Appalachia.  They are more likely to be the sons of upper-middle management Coca-Cola executives in Atlanta.”

No matter how counterproductive they may be, cultural attributes can be propagated for centuries—even millennia— long after the conditions that generated them have disappeared.  And cultural attributes matter.  Here the focus was on violent tendencies.  But Webb’s description touches on other cultural factors that are perhaps even more important in our era. They certainly matter in politics.  We cannot deal with political adversaries if we don’t understand why they think and act as they do.  We should also try to consider what cultural legacies are driving us to believe and act as we do.

 

US Afghanistan Policy: Promote Women’s Rights, Allow Rape of Young Boys

 Retrospective articles covering the US role in Afghanistan will be plentiful.  Fintan O’Toole provided a thought-provoking one for the New York Review of Books: The Lie of Nation Building.  His task is to review two well-timed books on the war: The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock, and The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian.  O’Toole is not so much a reviewer of books as a clever and effective purveyor of his opinions.  He always delivers a good read.  His basic theme is that the US went into Afghanistan with a limited goal, but an unlimited mandate for action.  We went in without understanding the nature of the conflict between the Taliban and other armed parties.  Instead of eliminating Osama bin Laden and leaving we defeated the ruling Taliban because they had harbored bin Laden, necessitating some sort of effort to control the chaos that would follow. 

We could never quite decide if we were waging a war against the Taliban or trying to create a democratic state in Afghanistan.  Those two competing goals often demanded contradictory means and led to success with neither.  We will not wade deep into O’Toole’s thoughts here.  Rather, we will discuss an astonishing revelation of how our muddled approach allowed us to wage a noble campaign for the rights of women as we tried to build a stable nation, while at the same time allowing an equally horrible abuse of human rights to occur as being justified by the war being waged.

“Equally shaky was the American commitment to the principle underlying its insistence on equal dignity for Afghan women. That principle had to be instituted against the traditions of the rural Pashtun heartlands: men could not do what they pleased to women merely because that was part of an established way of life. But organized pedophilia was also a traditional practice, and the Americans tolerated and enabled it.”

“It is striking that in his history of the war, Malkasian mentions this issue in passing as one of the reasons why many Afghans welcomed Taliban rule, but returns to it as a post-2001 problem only in a single footnote, explaining local hostility to Dad Mohammed Khan, the warlord who was appointed chief of police in the town of Sangin: ‘The police chief and his men were also rumored to kidnap little boys out of the bazaar.’ In fact, as The Afghanistan Papers confirms, the kidnapping and rape of boys by senior Afghan army and police officers was not a rumor. It was well known to American officials as an institutionalized practice. Whitlock summarizes the evidence from the official records:

Afghan military officers, warlords and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as “man-love Thursday” because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the Afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn’t want to alienate allies in the fight against the Taliban.”

“In 2015 Joseph Goldstein reported in The New York Times that US soldiers were instructed not to intervene in the kidnapping and rape of boys, even when the crimes were being committed on their own military bases. He interviewed a former Special Forces captain, Dan Quinn, who beat up a US-backed militia commander who had a boy chained to his bed. Quinn was relieved of his own command and sent home from Afghanistan. In response to the story, an army spokesman blithely confirmed that ‘there would be no express requirement that US military personnel in Afghanistan report’ child sexual abuse by allied forces.” 

So, the US was trying to build a sustainable democracy by allying itself with people who were even more disliked than the Taliban, and who had no interest in democracy, in order to defeat the Taliban.  O’Toole is a master of the snide remark. 

“As early as 2002, Jon Lee Anderson, in The Lion’s Grave, perhaps the most widely read American book about the US-led invasion, wrote that ‘one of the first things the Taliban did—a popular move—was to punish mujahideen commanders who were accused of rape or pederasty.’ If this was known to be a popular move by the Taliban, did it not occur to American policymakers that taking the opposite approach might be unpopular and indeed alienating?” 

“More broadly, the arbitrariness of the decision to disregard child rape undermined the principle of the universality of human rights on which US support for female equality was based. One US officer is recorded in The Afghanistan Papers explaining American tolerance of child abuse by saying, ‘You have to accept what they do and don’t interject your personal feelings about their culture.’ But if this was so, why object to the Taliban’s confining women to their homes or banning music or destroying ancient images? The US, which has never managed to consistently apply human rights and the rule of law to its own citizens, could not do so for Afghans either.” 

Hannah Arendt wrote of the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem and created the phrase “the banality of evil.”  A quote from her is perhaps appropriate.

“Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” 

There will always be Eichmanns among us.  They are everywhere. 

O’Toole always says things worth noting, and he always says them well.  We finish not with his concluding words, but with his opening statement.

“The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application of human rights, a clear understanding of what policies are trying to achieve, the prevention of corrupt financial influence over political decisions, and the fundamental truthfulness of public utterances. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the American republic was fighting, and often losing, a domestic battle to uphold those values for its own citizens.” 

“It is grimly unsurprising that the US could not infuse them into a very foreign country. While the political system of the US was approaching the crisis that culminated in the presidency of Donald Trump and the Capitol riots, its most enduring external adventure could not avoid moving in tandem toward the grim climax of the flight from Kabul. Afghanistan became a dark mirror held up to the travails of American democracy. It reflected back, sometimes in exaggerated forms, the weaknesses of the homeland’s political culture. Critics of the war argued that the US could not create a polity in its own image on the far side of the world. The tragic truth is that in many ways it did exactly that.”