Cultural Polarization and the Future of the United States: Schismogenesis

 It is a wondrous day when one encounters a book that provides a new and totally refreshing outlook on we human beings and our history.  Such is the impact of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.  The authors argue that the conventional wisdom on human history has been based mostly on assumptions and guesswork, but now recent archeological research has allowed a more defendable picture of what humans have been up to over the last twenty or thirty thousand years.  As a result, we can congratulate ourselves on having been a much more interesting and clever species than previously thought.  Here we will focus not on the overall findings in the authors’ work, but on one particular type of social interaction between societies that was identified as being part of our historical past. 

We are introduced to the concept of schismogenesis,

“Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another.  Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide—even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points.”

We know this can happen with individuals.  What is of greater interest is the notion that the same sort of response can take place between societies.

“Bateson was interested in psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happens between societies as well.  People come to define themselves against their neighbours.  Urbanites thus become more urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous.  If ‘national character’ can really be said to exist, it can only be as a result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on.  If nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.”

The historical record suggests that this response is innate.

“…what is it that causes human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbors?  Recall how, after the end of the last Ice Age, the archeological record is increasingly characterized by ‘culture areas’; that is, localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe, rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth.  Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbors.” 

It seems our ancestors were quite willing and capable of traveling great distances.  They would be aware of what was going on in nearby regions.  Differences between neighboring societies would not be due to isolation, but rather, develop by choice.  Information and technology might propagate, but culture, much less so.  In fact, cultural comparisons yield the conclusion that societies are best understood by observing the cultural attributes they reject.  The authors attribute this viewpoint to Marcel Mauss.

“For if everyone was broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to, and knowledge of foreign customs, arts and technologies was widespread, or at least easily available, then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t.  The answer, Mauss felt, is that this precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbors.  Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal.”

The authors provided much material to support this critical aspect of human history.  For our purposes, the characteristics of the ancient city-states of Sparta and Athens provide the most accessible example.

‘Schismogenesis, you’ll recall, describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another.  Perhaps the classic historical example (in both senses of the term ‘classic’) would be the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, in the fifth century BC.  As Marshall Sahlins puts it:

“Dynamically interconnected, they are then reciprocally constituted…Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to villageois, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic: one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies…Athens and Sparta were antitypes.”

“Each society performs a mirror image of the other.  In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ego, the necessary and ever-present example of what one should never wish to be.” 

Can one think of a present example of two interacting societies that seem to be defining themselves according to the belief the other represents an “ever-present example of what one should never wish to be?”  Unfortunately, the example that comes to mind is the polarization that has occurred between red and blue regions in the United States. The color designation of these regions represents broad differences that go far beyond politics.  In the spirit of the above comparison of Athens and Sparta, here are a series of questions about the United States to which both sides consistently provide different answers. 

Were we created as a secular nation or as a Christian nation? 

Do we have a duty to aid the least among us or are the least among us deserving of their fate?

Is education a fundamental right for all or is it a commodity to be determined by market forces? 

Is healthcare a fundamental right for all or is it a commodity to be determined by market forces? 

Do people of color suffer from discrimination or do whites suffer from discrimination?

Should global warming be addressed, or should it be ignored?

Is abortion a woman’s right or should it be forbidden?

Is our governance based on majority rule, or is it not?

To use the phrasing of Marshal Sahlins, “one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies.”  Each side views the other as an “ever-present example of what one should never wish to be.”  Schismogenesis seems to be at work as each side, when in power, goads the other by promoting policies the other deems highly offensive.  At least one side is arming for and threatening violence and throwing around the “secession” term.  And the divide continues to grow.  Will it reach a point of no return?  If so, what comes next?  We have had one bloody Civil War already.  History provides no encouragement.  Athens and Sparta waged war on each other.  Nations with irreconcilable mixed populations such as India subdivided and separated, but only after millions were murdered.  If it is believed there is no path to reconciliation, then each side will strive to become the victor in whatever form of conflict follows.

Somehow the escalating polarization must be moderated.  People have often claimed that a serious threat to our nation would force us to come together and collaborate.  We now have two serious threats: the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.  Neither have helped because neither is generally viewed as sufficiently serious—yet.  The pandemic could get much worse; climate change will get much worse.  How bad must it get before the pain suppresses the animosity?  Will that happen before the nation comes unglued?

Health Sciences and the Accuracy Crisis

 A recent issue of the London Review of Books provided an article by John Whitfield titled Replication Crisis.  It reviewed the book Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science by Stuart Ritchie.  In this pandemic/climate change era when we are constantly demanding that people “follow the science,” we should be concerned about a book with such a title.

The replication crisis in Whitfield’s title refers to the fact that scientists in critical fields are churning out papers reporting scientific findings that other researchers are unable to reproduce.  If the results are not reproducible, how can they be considered accurate?  And what if public or medical care policy is based on a result later found to be incorrect?

Most of these studies are carried out by academics and funded by government agencies.  “Publish or perish” is the order of the day.  The pressure begins as soon as a graduate student enters a doctoral track.  The student must demonstrate the ability to produce publishable research to obtain a doctoral degree, and his/her professor must demonstrate the ability to produce students capable of producing such work.  Getting results published in a prestigious journal is how academics gain tenure at a university and is key in obtaining funding to continue to perform research.  The new post-graduate student is under continuing pressure as he/she navigates the academic world looking for employment which will hopefully lead to a permanent position somewhere.  Note that professors can produce many doctoral students over their careers, many more than the system can absorb.  The competition is intense and never really ends.   

“In Science Fictions, Stuart Ritchie explores the problems with this system. The book is a useful account of ten years or more of debate, mostly in specialist circles, about reproducibility: the principle that one purpose of a scientific paper is to make it possible for others to carry out the same work, and that one test of its reliability is whether they get the same result.”

“In recent decades there have been large-scale efforts at replication in several fields, but if an experiment can’t be repeated, it doesn’t necessarily mean the original work was incompetent. Work at the frontier of a discipline is difficult, and skilled hands are an underacknowledged factor in scientific success… Even so, the findings of these large-scale replication studies have helped to fuel a widespread sense that science is failing on its own terms: in cancer biology, one effort managed to replicate just six out of 53 studies; in psychology about 50 per cent of studies cannot be replicated; in economics, about 40 per cent. In 2016 Nature surveyed researchers across the natural sciences and found that more than half the respondents had been unable to repeat their own work, though less than a third regarded the failure as a sure sign that a study was wrong.”

This system demanding continual proof of accomplishment via journal publications provides dangerously perverse incentives at numerous points.

“At one end of the replication crisis, as it has become known, there are spectacular frauds. In the early 2000s the South Korean biologist Hwang Woo-suk became a national hero for cloning human stem cells; just a few years earlier, the materials scientist Jan Hendrik Schön was being tipped for a Nobel Prize for papers describing molecular-scale electronic components. Both had made up their results. In surveys, about 2 per cent of researchers admit to fabricating data, though many more suspect their colleagues of doing so. But deliberate malpractice probably accounts for only a small portion of unreliable science. The greater concern is that the rush to publish and the pressure to make a splash pushes researchers to take short cuts and dodges: low-level fiddles that stop short of fraud but undermine reliability.”

“The worry is that scientific processes have been undermined by perverse incentives to the point that it’s difficult to know what to believe. The crisis has hit psychology, Ritchie’s own discipline, and biomedicine especially hard. These are crowded, competitive fields, in which research groups around the world are racing one another to publish on the hottest topics. In these circumstances, haste can win out over care. The data in these fields tends to be noisy, leaving room for interpretation and manipulation in presentation and analysis, and psychologists and biologists tend to be less mathematically expert than their colleagues in the physical sciences.”

There are also financial incentives driving the need to publish.  Professors’ salaries are generally merit based with the proof of merit demonstrated by their publication lists.  In addition, there are opportunities for more direct forms of compensation.

“There can be financial incentives too…many Chinese universities were giving cash bonuses for publications, with higher-impact journals securing bigger rewards for researchers. In a survey of Chinese university policy in 2016, the average bonus for the lead author of a paper in Nature or Science was calculated at $44,000, five times the average professorial salary.”

In no medical arena is the opportunity for and the realization of false results more egregious than in the pharmaceutical industry where biased research and unethical and illegal activities have become common business practices.  These activities are not new developments.  About ten years ago they were discussed in the articles Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science, Medical Science and the Vanishing Truth, and Drug Companies: Even More Corrupt Than Financial Institutions?.  A recent article by Brian Buntz, GSK, Pfizer and J&J among the most-fined drug companies, according to study, indicates that these practices continue.  Rather than send criminals to jail, large, powerful drug companies get their hands slapped by merely assessing them negligible fines (compared to the profits gained) if they promise to behave better in the future. 

“GlaxoSmithKline (LON: GSK) paid nearly $10 billion in inflation-adjusted financial penalties between January 2003 and December 2016, the highest tally for any drug company, according to research published in JAMA.”

“Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) was next in line with almost $3 billion in fines.”

“Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) came in the third slot with $2.7 billion in penalties.”

“In all, the 26 pharmaceutical companies paid some $33 billion in fines during the 13-year period. The top 11 alone accounted for $28.8 billion, or 88%, of the total.”

“’The pharmaceutical industry is unique in that all large pharmaceutical firms explicitly state that they are focused on promoting patient welfare, yet the majority of large pharmaceutical firms engage in illegal activities that harm patient welfare,’ said Denis G. Arnold, a coauthor of the study and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.”

It is interesting, and perhaps a bit scary, that two of the companies on which we have depended for Covid vaccines are among the worst offenders.

Scientific research can produce extraordinary results, but shoddy and inaccurate findings can undermine the general trust in science.  Between Covid and climate change, we are in a position where we must follow the science and the science must be correct.