Primitive man's sex life was free of perversions and hang-ups (studies show)

The comments in an earlier post about the lack of breast modesty before around 500 B.C. brought up the lack of lurid sexuality in general before then.

Julian Jaynes said that only after people became self-aware around that time -- exercising introspection -- did they become aware of their drives and urges, now viewing them as things that needed relief. If they weren't relieved, tension built up; hence the birth of anxieties about unmet urges. And once you think about how to relieve tension, our rational capacities generate a list of many solutions -- not just intercourse, but sodomy, oral sex, masturbation, getting jerked off, as well as those practices but with someone of the same sex.

These and other forms of deviance were condemned in the Old Testament, most notably in the stories about Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, written during the 6th century B.C. or shortly after. Yet in the Code of Hammurabi, written around 1780 B.C., proscriptions about sex only relate to rape, marriage, divorce, adultery, and slander -- weird things like sodomy, homosexuality, bestiality, etc. just did not occur to people back then.

Our best guess about what life was like far back into pre-history is what contemporary hunter-gatherers look like. They're not the exact same, but they are our best guess. Archaeology and history provide another guess, and I'll get to those in another post. This paper by Hewlett & Hewlett (2010) is the first to quantitatively study sexuality in "pre-state" (= primitive) societies, one a group of Pygmy hunter-gatherers (the Aka) and the other a group of slash-and-burn farmers (the Ngandu), both in central Africa. It also includes a review of other cross-cultural studies of sexuality.

It won't surprise readers here to learn that homosexuality is absent among both groups. However, you might not have suspected that masturbation is not only absent but unheard of.

Like homosexuality, it was difficult to explain self-stimulation to the Aka. They found it unusual and said it may happen far away in Congo, but they did not know it. A specific word did not exist for it. We asked men, in particular, about masturbating before they were married or during the post-partum sex taboo and all indicated this did not occur.

So it's not just that men are married and getting frequent sex -- even before they enjoy regular conjugal benefits, they do not masturbate, or know what it is to begin with. And it's not limited to the people in this study alone:

We asked Robert Bailey (personal communication) about his experiences of trying collect semen for fertility studies from Lese men in the Ituri forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He indicated it was very difficult to explain to men how to self-stimulate to obtain semen samples. He said that despite explicit and lengthy instructions three of four semen specimens came to him mixed with vaginal secretions.

They quote an earlier cross-cultural review by Ford & Beach (1951) of 190 societies of various types. The original:

Despite societal disapproval, there is evidence that adult males masturbate, at least occasionally, in a few societies other than our own, although this behavior is apparently rare. . . some women in a few societies other than our own occasionally masturbate, although the practice generally meets with social disapproval.

So that's why in Vacation, Cousin Eddie's son had to explain to Russ how to "bop your baloney." How to move during intercourse comes natural enough, but practices that were never a part of our evolutionary past need to be explained overtly (hopefully not demonstrated, in this case). They persist through cultural rather than genetic evolution.

Moving on:

Oral and anal sexual activies were unknown or very rare. Ngandu men who traveled to the capital city were familiar with oral sex and said they liked it, but said women in the village did not do it. One Aka woman said that a “man never puts the clitoris in his mouth; if he does he will vomit.”

And who said there's no such thing as the noble savage?

As for other societies, they don't mention oral sex in their cross-cultural review section. The first item I hit on from googling is the book Our Sexuality by Crooks & Baur, which mentions that outside of the modern world, only in the South Pacific islands do they practice oral sex; in sub-Saharan Africa it's unnatural or disgusting. There's no citation, but allowing it in for the sake of argument, primitive peoples still rarely or never practice oral sex. Here is an article mentioning that the Inuit (= Eskimos) don't practice oral sex either; they are historically hunter-gatherers.

That book also cites Ford & Beach (1951) to the effect that even kissing mouth-to-mouth is pretty rare -- only acknowledged in 21 of 190 societies (11%), and as something before or during intercourse in just 13 (7%). Kissing was therefore not part of our species' evolution. This explains why it's more common for a girl to be awkward/bad at kissing or giving oral than at actually getting it on. (I assume girls would say the same about us.)

Well, with so little awareness of kinky practices, they must be prudes who rarely get any action, or feel shy and ashamed when they do, don't reach orgasm, etc. In fact, the Pygmy hunter-gatherers have sex around 7 to 8 times a week on average, compared to 1 to 2 nights for contemporary Americans, with the Ngandu farmers being in between at 4 nights.

As for shame:

About half of the Aka men and all Aka women said either the man or woman can initiate sex, while among the Ngandu about half the men and women said either can initiate sex. Most Ngandu women said they were shy about initiating sex and complained about their husband’s advances. Aka women were not shy about initiating sex and did not complain about their husband’s advances.

I wonder if the Ngandu women are as shy/awkward as modern women are about initiating sex within a relationship, where generally the man takes the lead. Or if they complain as much as modern women do about their husbands asking for sex. Slash-and-burn farming is a good step away from hunting and gathering, though not as far away as settled large-scale agriculture and industry.

Finally:

We did not investigate how often men or women had orgasm during coitus. Ngandu and Aka had terms for male ejaculation, but not for female orgasm. All informants clearly understood female orgasm as they described women shaking and trembling during coitus. Aka and Ngandu men indicated they climaxed each time they had intercourse during the night, while women generally reported experiencing orgasm, but not necessarily each time.

These two sets of findings are a real wake-up call to modern people -- a lack of hang-ups about sex comes bundled with a lack of awareness of, interest in, or practice of non-reproductive sexuality, i.e. recreational sex or sex primarily for pleasure. Oral, anal, masturbation, and homos are all clear signs of a frustrated society, unable or unwilling or whatever to met their basic needs in a natural way and using their rational and rationalizing skills to met them in more unwholesome ways.

That comes through in the reasons that primitive peoples give for having sex. As the article mentions about the two focus groups, as well as others in the cross-cultural survey, their main concern is with making new children, not private or mutual pleasure. Although they do get some enjoyment out of it, they also stress that it can be hard work sometimes.

So, the sex lives of primitive or pre-conscious or "bicameral" people are, to put it bluntly, more like those of animals. Even your house cat, let alone a wild beast, doesn't masturbate, doesn't give or receive oral, or anal, doesn't act queer, doesn't get neurotic over his unmet sexual urges, has sex for procreative purposes only, and although they may do it frequently, it's less of an attempted endurance run and more a series of "wham, bam, thank you ma'am."

Dogs are more domesticated and likely screwed up in similar ways that modern human beings are. They do hump your leg, the furniture, etc. -- the doggie version of doing a blow-up doll. Dogs also whine a lot more than other animals, wild or tame, and make those pathetic, "look how pained I am" kind of eyes, that they might be capable of anxiety or neurosis like we are.

Religions are often assumed,  both by their adherents and their enemies, to be attempts to lift man up above his base animal nature. But the more you look at them, the more they look like cultural gadgets that we've invented to try to restore us to our more natural state -- hence all of that stuff about mankind before The Fall -- and away from the degradation, corruption, and perversion of civilized progress. The emphasis on sex as a primarily (though not exclusively) procreative act is just one case. That behavior is more animalistic than going down on someone or whacking off, which your cat would regard as proof #47 of why you're an inferior species.

It's the civilizing, liberalizing, progressive track that leads us toward becoming more humanoid than human. Suddenly the encouragement to try anything leads us into studying and memorizing some nerdy manual on kink techniques like the Kama Sutra, preoccupying ourselves with whether we're executing the instructions properly during the act, and worrying afterward about whether our customer ratings will be high or low.

Those things cause us to become self-conscious because our evolutionary history did not mean for us to go there, so we'll have to figure it out and monitor its progress consciously, when sex should be a case of "Let your mind go and your body will follow."

Blondes, Polacks, dead babies, and screwing in lightbulbs

Continuing in the same vein as the post below, let's have a look at the rise and fall of joke-telling in general. In a post about the decline of oral culture, I threw in a few references to joke types that you don't hear anymore. And more importantly, that have not been replaced by anything new.

It's not ideal to use the (American) books in Google's digitized library as a source for studying an orally transmitted phenomenon like jokes, but it's the best we can do from the armchair. At least a few authors write about the jokes themselves, and popular joke types tend to work their way into mediated culture like movies, TV shows, and books. The graphs below show the prevalence over time for references to "Polack jokes," "screw in a lightbulb" jokes, "dead baby jokes," and "blonde jokes."

Polack jokes began in the late '60s and plateaued through the late '80s, declining afterward. I don't remember hearing any Polack jokes in middle or high school ('92 to '99), though we used to tell these all the time in elementary school (later '80s, perhaps early '90s).

How do you make a one-armed Polack fall off a flagpole?

Wave.

Lightbulb jokes got going in the early '70s and show an apparent peak in the early 2000s, declining since. The peak in actually telling these jokes is earlier, probably the late '80s or early '90s, judging from this mega-collection put together in 1988. But it became so popular that writers continued to use it in a self-aware, ironic way even after they'd begun declining within oral culture, or as a generic way of saying a certain group is really stupid, without providing an actual punchline. ("They're raising taxes again? Jeez, how many politicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?")

How many queers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Two. One to screw it in and the other to say "Fabulousss!"

Dead baby jokes show the quickest rise and fall, taking off in the later '70s and plummeting by the early '90s. I didn't hear these when they were most popular, probably because schoolchildren couldn't appreciate them. But I vividly remember them from high school, later '90s, when we could get black humor. I think we were in a clear minority by that time, since only a handful of us took part. We could stand around outside telling dead baby jokes for the better part of an hour, off-and-on, a good amount of that time just laughing our asses off, and re-hashing them multiple times until the cathartic effect had run its course...

What's red, bloated, and gets stopped at the Mexican border?

A dead baby stuffed full of coke.

As for blonde jokes, Ngram shows the right timing for the rise -- early '90s -- but shows another case like the lightbulb jokes for what should be their decline. The other graphs show data smoothed over 3 years, while this one shows unsmoothed data from each year, to highlight their initial peak in the mid-'90s, and then taking on a second life as a generic phrase for "sexist behavior" in social commentary, not as jokes themselves, let alone ones told face-to-face. For example, a 2004 NYT article about Augusta National Golf Club refers to "the club's inner circle of big business and blonde jokes."

If you search Google for "blonde jokes," those with dates under the title are all from the second half of the '90s, including the first result which is a Tripod page from 1997. Even by then it was a largely curatorial effort, with one example bearing a clear time-stamp from the mid-'90s:

What do you call a dead blonde in a closet?

The 1995 Hide and Seek World Champion.

The academic field of folklore studies has dried up over the past 20 years, as the oral culture has evaporated. Back in 1987, Alan Dundes wrote an entire book called Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes, using many then-current examples. ("Cycle" here means a type, like "dead baby joke," not a rising/falling time course.) But what would his 21st-century counterpart have to discuss, now that people don't tell jokes anymore?

As I said in the medical slang post, we've been through these ups and downs before, the most recent low point in oral culture being the mid-century. But that was followed by an explosion of face-to-face culture, and there's no reason to think we won't see a mass phenomenon like Polack jokes within the next couple decades, as we start leaving our cocoons and hanging out with each other again.

The rise and fall of black humor in medical slang

Via Steve Sailer, here is a very long list of black humor medical slang, such as "TF BUNDY" -- totally fucked, but unfortunately not dead yet -- or "Double whopper with cheese" -- obese female with genital thrush.

All forms of slang, in fact oral culture generally has been declining from sometime in the '90s onward, after their re-birth in the '60s and peak in the '80s. (An earlier cycle saw a peak in the '20s, and a lull during the mid-century.) Medical slang must fit that pattern too, and sure enough it does. Here's how common the spelling variants on "medical slang" have been in the American books in Google's digitized library (Ngram):

Considering all three variants, it looks like it reliably gets going during the '60s. The main growth is the '70s, '80s, and first half of the '90s, and a decline afterward. As for specific slang terms, the only one that appears to show up in Google's library is "get out of my emergency room" ("GOMER"):

That one got going during the late '70s and fell during the early '90s. It's unusual for any word to stay at a nearly constant level, the way this one does after 1990, so I'm guessing it's being kept on life-support, as it were, by new works referring to slang no longer in use (medical TV dramas perform the same function). The term was popularized by a 1978 satirical novel, The House of God.

The NYT has only four articles in its entire history with the phrase "medical slang" -- from 1968, 1973, 1991, and 2009. However, the last one is a retrospective on The House of God, not an article that casually uses contemporary medical slang, with a parenthetical remark like "that's medical slang for..."

Many of the entries in the list can be dated, at least what they're referring to, although the term referring to it may not have started right away. Still, people try to be somewhat topical in their pop culture references. Here are the ones I could date from the A-D entries (there are too many to look through the whole list right now):

4H -- AIDS ref from the '80s.
404 moment -- mid/late '90s internet ref.
Airwolf -- mid-'80s TV ref.
AOB -- mid/late '80s, after the "Baby On Board" fad.
APD -- Prozac ref, from '90s or after.
Blinky the Fish -- early '90s Simpsons ref.
Bunny Boiler -- late '80s ref to Fatal Attraction.
Captain Kangaroo -- mid-'50s through mid-'80s TV ref.
Caveman -- mid-2000s ref to Geico ad.
CCFCCP -- '80s or '90s? Ref to Cocoa Puffs slogan.
Code Pink -- sounds '80s or early '90s, pre-Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
Crackerjack referral -- mid-'50s to mid-'80s TV ref.
Crispy Critter -- '60s or late '80s cereal ref.
Death Star -- late '70s or '80s Star Wars ref.
DILF -- late '90s / early 2000s ref to "MILF."
Disco biscuit -- '80s drug ref, recycled in early 2000s.
DPS -- late '90s / 2000s Viagra ref.

Again the '80s and first half of the '90s seem to be the peak, confirming the Ngram and NYT results. Other major hints that this list reflects older usage are all the swear words, whereas younger people these days (who are the most likely to coin words) prefer "gosh" to "god," "effing" or "fricking" to "fucking," and so on. And of course all of the politically incorrect terms like "HONDA" -- hypertensive, obese, non-compliant diabetic African-American -- and "HMS" -- hysterical Mexican syndrome.

The decline of medical slang has been written about for some time now. Adam Fox, a British doctor, wrote an academic article about it back in 2003, which I have not read. In that year his views also made it into a BBC article, and later still in a 2011 Daily Mail article.

What accounts for the rise and fall? Once again we see the rising-crime vs. falling-crime pattern -- no pervasive use of black humor medical slang during the mid-century, followed by a rise from the '60s through the early or mid 1990s, and a decline since then. That's also the pattern for black humor in movies, really beginning with Dr. Strangelove, going through Network, and peaking with Heathers and Total Recall.

Falling-crime times are also periods of social isolation, and elements of oral culture such as slang require frequent face-to-face interaction, especially in unsupervised and unmanaged settings. If doctors used to see each other as peers who they could joke around with, they now see each other more as co-workers who need to maintain an appropriate social distance in the workplace. Rising-crime times reverse this, with a greater desire to connect with others, and more jocular peer interactions.

Perhaps rising-crime times also increase our need for ways to cope with a topsy-turvy world. Doctors are probably like the rest of us these days in not seeing a bigger picture behind everyday violence and death, even though they're exposed to it more than we are. But back when the crime rate was a lot higher, they must've felt like something strange was affecting the whole society, just like we did.

Black humor helps most when it seems like there's nothing we can do in a waving-the-magic-wand kind of way. Hence the term "gallows humor." Falling-crime times give us a sense of greater and greater safety, so violence, gore, and death are seen as unfortunate, but not as harbingers of a possible apocalypse. Not being very portentous, they don't require black humor to help doctors cope with them.

It's not that falling-crime times deliver fewer victims of violence to doctors. If it were only that, medical slang would be qualitatively the same, only less frequently spoken. From all signs, though, the change is not that doctors don't have occasion to make use of those terms as much as they used to. It's that the whole tradition is CTD -- circling the drain.

But I have hope that when the crime rate begins rising again, and people start interacting more face-to-face and as trusted equals, the oral culture will revive like it did starting in the '60s, black humor and medical slang along with the rest of it.

Movie trailers constantly fading in and out, and fading to black

Check out how many times the trailer for Iron Man 3 fades to black. I lost count, but a couple dozen. Not to mention how many fade in / fade outs there are. A trailer that's supposed to get me excited for a kickass summer action movie makes me feel like I'm nodding off instead. Eyes opening, eyes closing... eyes opening, eyes closing...

Iron Man 3, 2013



This is one of those subliminal things that's kept me out of the movie theater on a regular basis since the mid-1990s. I didn't even notice it consciously until I read other people complaining about it. How far back does this annoying style go anyways? I'm not going to exhaustively sample all action flick trailers, but here's one that's just as awful from 7 years ago --

X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006



I just knew I'd find this pretentious gimmick in a trailer for the most over-rated sci-fi / action flick ever made. Although under way by the late '90s, the fading in/out and fading to black don't continually interrupt the trailer. It's more confined to the early part.

The Matrix, 1999



If it was present during the mid-'90s, it was only getting started in a trial-and-error way. Otherwise you'd see it in the trailer for the defining action movie of the time, but you don't --

Speed, 1994



Someone else can waste away a half-hour checking the trailers for The Fugitive, Jurassic Park, Batman Forever, etc.

The kickass summer action genre only goes back to about the mid-'80s. Looking at two blockbuster examples, you don't see fading cuts there at all.

Rambo: First Blood Part II, 1985



Die Hard, 1988



Man, whatever happened to trailers with quotable tag-lines? -- "What most people call hell, he calls home." More adrenaline-pumping music too, not that plodding orchestral bombast from the 21st century.

All examples show fast-paced editing since they're supposed to get your heart racing in anticipation for lots and lots of ass-kicking. But why is there such a sharp difference between the good action movies, whose trailers do not use fading cuts, and the boring ones whose trailers fade in and out constantly?

I think it all comes back to that unhelpable "eyes opening, eyes closing" feeling you get when you're drowsy. Audiences these days are afraid of getting excited -- it makes OCD control freaks feel uneasy when something or someone else has control or influence over their body. Responding too viscerally = creepy.

This shows up across all forms of culture and entertainment. Dance music today doesn't get your body moving, slang words don't pack any punch, and nobody makes bonfires during the summer celebrations anymore.

People still feel somewhat of an urge to let their primitive side take over, so they'll still watch action movies, but only if the studios can assure them that they won't actually get too excited. Plodding music, flat inflection in the characters' voices, abuse of slow-motion sequences -- whatever will interrupt any excitement before it gets going. The nodding-off editing style of the trailers fits right in with the rest of the tranquilizing techniques of pseudo-action movies.

Few or many artists among #1 song-makers? 1941 to 2012

Listening to any compilation of '80s hits, you're struck by the breadth of the performers. It's possible but uncommon to see the same group take up a lot of space, whereas lately it seems like there are only a few acts who dominate.

Because each group tends to have a somewhat unique style, that translates into stylistic variety as well -- hits of the '80s included smooth jazz, blues rock, R&B, rap, folk, world, new age, new wave, synth / dance / disco pop, and a million types of rock-influenced music. Now there are only a handful of distinct sound styles -- awkward singer-songwriters; girl you so fine / uh-huh I know I'm so fine R&B; hip-hop for retards; and bombastic minimalism (Katy Perry, Kesha, etc.).

How can we quantify these changes? There are a couple ways at least. In this post I'll look at how many artists are represented among those who scored a #1 hit on the Billboard charts within a given year. At one extreme, there could be nearly 50 different groups in a year, a new one every week. At the other, there's only one group, regardless of how many songs they put out.

Here are the lists of #1 hits. I start with the first full year and go through the last, 1941 to 2012. See the footnote for boring methodology remarks.* Here is the graph:

Several interesting things pop out. First, indeed there was a lot more variety back in the good old days than in the past 20 years. However, that doesn't go back into the old, old days -- in fact, we've returned to mid-century levels of homogeneity in pop music.

Variety levels were low and hardly changed from the early '40s through the mid-'50s. The somewhat lower level then compared to the late '50s and after may have to do with the slightly different chart methods used, though not by much, judging from years when both the best-sellers and the Top / Hot 100 allow comparisons. What is clear is that the variety levels weren't rising or falling during those early years -- they're all judged by the same chart method then. Variety was bottoming out during the mid-century.

I wouldn't make much of the huge spike in 1974 alone; when you smooth the data, the mid-'70s peak and the later '80s peak are about the same. The key swing upward began in the late '50s / early '60s, crested in the late '80s / early '90s, and fell off a cliff during the single year of 1992. This of course tracks the rising-crime vs. falling-crime pattern, for reasons I've partially discussed elsewhere and won't get sidetracked with here.

Second, there are shorter cycles on top of the larger rise-and-fall. They differ in spacing, but are roughly 10 years apart, peak from peak. This is closer to the standard fashion cycle / psychological habituation story, where we crave more and more variety until it's information overload, then we swing back toward less and less variety, which gets too boring, repeating the cycle all over again.

I don't buy the habituation explanation because it seems like we shouldn't move for roughly 6 years in one direction, then 6 years in another. Does it really take that long to get tired of the trend toward, or away from, variety? Whatever the mechanism is, though, there is a shorter-term cycle in taste for variety.

Third and finally, what appears to be the optimal level of variety? Well, we'll just apply the trusty rule-of-thumb and look at the years 1983 and '84, the two greatest in the history of popular music since the early 1930s. They had 16 and 19 artists, respectively, or roughly 1 new chart-topping artist every 3 weeks. The extreme churning of the mid-'70s seems a little too dizzying: in 1974 there were 35 artists in all, or a new #1 group every 1.5 weeks. That makes hit songs harder to grab onto and enjoy their popularity for awhile before ditching them and moving on to something else. That may explain why people who were tuning in at the time don't remember a whole lot of the music (aside from drugs).

The low points during the mid-century and Millennial periods had about 7 or 8 artists total, meaning you'd have to wait about 7 weeks for the next big group to arrive. That's a bit too risk-averse, holding on so long more out of insecurity, comfort, and familiarity than because it still sounds so cool after nearly 2 months at #1. Kids these days sure do have long attention spans -- regular 4-hour library sessions, 3-hour movies, 60-hour video games... ("Not gonna lie bro, it's boring as shit for the first 30 hours, but after that it gets effin' epic.")

Does iTunes give similar statistics for how often you play songs by a certain artist over a given time period? I've never used it, but you could repeat this approach for recent years, or however long it saves your usage data. I'm guessing most mp3 listeners take nearly 2 months before their most-played artist is replaced by another. This is separate from what the Billboard charts show, which is all new music. I mean even if a college kid listens to somewhat older music, their mindset and preferences are probably still in the "stick with it too long" direction.

I don't know about my own rhythm, though a new main artist every 3 or 4 weeks sounds about right. It was Howard Jones for about a month, and I've been on a Human League kick for several weeks now.

At the further, spastic extreme, you find those music blog dorks who never get attached to anything, and are burning through new groups just cuz. "I'm honestly so over Miniature Portraits of Proust's Cat. I mean, I played the hell out of them for like 20 minutes this morning, but sometimes you just have to know when to say when, y'know?"

* Through 1955, these are the best sellers in stores, '56 and '57 are the Top 100 (a precursor to the Hot 100), '58 is the Top 100 and beginning of the Hot 100, and from '59 onward is the Hot 100. For collaborations, I used the first-listed name. For example, in 1945 "Don't Fence Me In" by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters was counted only for Bing Crosby. Thus, the Andrews Sisters counted as a new act with their later hit "Rum and Coca-Cola," while Bing Crosby and the Les Paul Trio was not counted as a new act for their later hit "It's Been a Long, Long Time."

"Racism" as witchcraft: Insights from anthropology

[It looks like fleshing out the idea will take three separate posts -- this introductory one, one for the main argument, and a final one with a contrasting case.]

We no longer need to put quote marks around witchcraft because nobody takes it seriously anymore, so there's no need to signal our skepticism or dismissal of the idea. But the concept of "racism" is still entrenched enough that we need to. Well, I've already signaled my dismissal twice, so I don't need to make the text unreadable by continuing to put it in quotes.

Too often conservative thinkers (if they can be called that) would rather score yuk-yuk points in a nerd pissing contest than understand what's really going on. It doesn't matter if clouded thinking leads us into oblivion because, hey, I really showed that son-of-a-bitch who's boss, didn't I? A recent example was the spread of the term "Islamofascism," when the main ethnic groups within Islam -- Semites and Indo-Aryans -- are more lawless than law-and-order, small not large in their organization.

Still, even a misguided approach will hit close to the mark every now and then. The closest we've gotten is in describing mass hysteria about racists as modern-day witch hunts. That analogy actually goes much deeper than is suggested by the casual use of the term to describe any form of mass hysteria directed at identifiable groups.

The insights come from anthropology, another shameful blind spot for a group that considers itself more aware of human nature than the social engineers. This continues to leave conservatives utterly impotent to respond to liberal retards promoting this or that policy, or pushing one or another ideological point, on the basis of "In non-Western cultures..." Typically the conservative does nothing more than plop out a canned zinger -- "Yeah well if the jungle's so great, why don't you go live there?" Nobody following the debate ever took the liberal to be promoting such an extreme action, so they ignore the har-dee-har-har rejoinder and shift their views mildly more toward the liberal than the conservative.

Having concluded the opening motivational speech, this series of posts will go into point-by-point detail drawing parallels between beliefs and practices about witchcraft and about racism. In the second post, I'll focus on racism against American blacks and witchcraft in sub-Saharan Africa because those are the two prototypical cases of each.

The common factor of Africa is no accident -- in the final post, I'll contrast those cases with the way that (primarily Arab) Muslims conceive of and express their grievances with a hegemonic culture. They do not invoke anything like the concept of racism and do not show the features of witchcraft hysteria. Instead, they show the pastoralist's vigilance for slights against his honor, and his thirst for vengeance.

Hence, aggrieved minorities deal with the dominant culture in ways deriving from their own traditions, and it pays us to recognize these differences, the better to deal with them as reactionaries. "How to" would take us too far afield, apart from being more speculative; the purpose here is simply to illuminate crucial unseen patterns.

The basis for discussing African witchcraft systems will be E.E. Evans-Pritchard's classic ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937). Of course, I don't expect you to read even the abridged version, so here is a Word-file summary of the main ideas to chew over in the meantime. Evans-Pritchard was a seminal figure in mid-century social anthropology, and the work is neutral and sympathetic toward their beliefs and practices. He wished for them to adopt more rational systems, and believed that understanding what made their existing system tick was the first step.

In this way, he fits into the larger project of mid-century liberal social science, exemplified in America (to take the most relevant example) by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (1965), which sought to understand how poverty kept on going within the American black community, and concluded that it was their lower rates of forming nuclear families.

The point is that the basis for what follows is not a caricature from either a dismissive or romanticizing field worker. The mid-century faith was that if experts could figure out how something worked, they could change it for the greater good. But, that required them to take a cold, hard honest look at the thing to begin with.

Food culture and cocooning

From a comment I left at a recent post at Uncouth Reflections, which asked why the food scene appears to be thriving compared to other cultural fields:

Seems like food isn't as social as the other art & entertainment forms, both on the production and consumption sides. Think of how much trust and team-mindedness you need to pull off a great movie or pop song. The musicians, sound engineers, actors, and film crew seem to go way far out there in opening up and giving more to one another.

Food isn't as collaborative, so when social cohesion begins to loosen, it isn't struck as hard as movies and music are. There’s the lone mad genius thinking up / experimenting with the recipes, and a more rigidly hierarchical pyramid of workers to carry out his vision. That operates more on authority than collaboration.

Same thing on the audience’s side. Hearing great music in a social setting (live performance or in a dance club), or seeing a great movie in a crowded theater, makes it a thousand times better than if you’re alone. Everyone is feeding off of everyone else’s energy, and you feel more closely bound together.

Eating the same meal at a popular restaurant makes it more enjoyable than eating it at home — but not by a thousand times. Restaurants aren't as interactive or group-gluing as dance clubs or movie theaters. When you see a fellow patron tear into something and close their eyes in ecstasy, does that pump you up even a little bit? Not really. You’re not sharing the same gustatory and olfactory experience as your fellow patrons. Even if you coincidentally order the same meal as someone else, your actions and reactions are not synchronized. You’re each eating at your own separate rhythms.

At the dance club, everyone’s moving their bodies to the same rhythm, or splitting their sides laughing at the same scene in the movie theater.

So, when the society starts getting more anti-social, restaurants won’t be hit as hard as dance clubs, concerts, and movie theaters. You don’t need to be that sociable when you eat out.

Yearning songs and bittersweet songs

You don't hear either type anymore, now that everyone's so afraid to take risks, particularly in social settings. That does seem to be the major reason for the disappearance of those emotions, in real life or in pop culture.

Yearning songs are not mopey, like "wah-wah, why don't you notice me or want me?" It's meant to galvanize you into action, and it does so by tugging at your heart-strings. That way, you feel like you're no longer in control of yourself, and can just go on auto-pilot. It really is a huge risk to go after the type of person they're singing about, requiring an almost blind leap of faith to make a move. But it's a lot easier when you get pumped up and shoved out onto the dance floor. Good music can spur you on like that.

The genre got going as people became comfortable leaving their mid-century risk-averse cocoons, starting with "All I Have to Do Is Dream" by the Everly Brothers and "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison. It doesn't really get going until the mid-'60s, though, with "Needles and Pins" by the Searchers and "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" by the Byrds (yearning for the girlfriend you thought she'd be, and feeling emboldened to move on). This earlier stage of pure pining reached its peak in the mid-to-late 1970s with "September Gurls" by Big Star and "American Girl" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, with an honorable mention to "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" by Joe Jackson.

And it wasn't just guys longing for girls. The '70s style pining song carried over into the early '80s among boy-crazy female singers -- "He's So Shy" by the Pointer Sisters, "Goodbye to You" by Patty Smyth / Scandal, and "Johnny Are You Queer" by Josie Cotton.

There don't seem to be as many pining songs in the '80s overall, though, and the ones that were made sound less inexperienced, for lack of a better word, compared to the ones from the '70s, whose uninhibited eagerness makes them sound more like the singers are anticipating courtship rather than having been through it many times already. The ones from the '80s aren't jaded or cynical, just a little more restrained or even reluctant -- not out of a fear of putting yourself out there, but simply from having experienced the eagerness-and-let-down cycle too many times before.

"Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)" by Squeeze bridges the gap between the earlier and later styles, while from the same year "I Got You" by Split Enz has that distinctly, subtly ominous undercurrent of so much '80s music. "In Between Days" by the Cure is part throwback to the exuberant '70s style, yet just gloomy enough for the experienced Eighties. By far the best example of this later style is "Tenderness" by General Public. In contrast to the uniformly eager songs of the '60s and '70s, this one heightens the tension and ultimate sense of release by swinging back and forth (effortlessly) between caution and abandon. So totally new wave.

Also in that vein, albeit in a more straightforward rock style, is "Hey Jealousy" by Gin Blossoms, one of the few, perhaps the only one worth mentioning from the early '90s, before the genre died off completely.

Where the yearning song looks forward to potential relationships, the bittersweet song also looks forward, but after the relationship has run its course. That's the down-side of taking a big risk -- most of them fall far short of what you'd hoped for -- and you just have to move on, while still acknowledging rather than denying what you shared.

And while some song forms may accomplish that, bittersweet songs do even better by creating an uplifting feeling -- beyond acknowledging the past, they treasure it, without getting so sappy that they remain stuck there. It's a sign of greater maturity of both the artist and the audience when they become a hit -- not pouting after a risk turned out less than perfect, even expressing joy at having had the chance to share the experience at all. When they vanish, it is a sure sign of our emotional stuntedness.

Because of its greater demands on maturity, I think this form takes longer to develop. From what little I've read about the early history of jazz, the bittersweet songs are from the 1920s and early '30s, not during its beginnings in rag-time. That seems to be the case with the last wave of great music: while they might be there, it's hard for me to immediately think of examples from the late '50s and '60s that are both sad and cheerful. I'm drawing a blank on examples from the '70s as well. It's not that they're not there, just not as ubiquitous as they became during the '80s.

There are two sub-types here -- where the sadness comes from the end of a relationship, and where it comes from the uncertainty that this great thing we've got going may not last forever. But hey, nothing risked, nothing gained, right?

The greatest example from the "current relationship" type has to be "Waiting for a Star to Fall" by Boy Meets Girl, nothing else comes close to its uplifting power and sincere tinges of sadness. Most of these are in the new wave / synth-pop styles, but this one is pure pop, complete with a kickass sax solo. Another stylistic outlier is a smooth jazz hit, "Your Love Is King" by Sade.

Before Madonna began slutting and butching up her image in the '90s, she released the vulnerable yet upbeat "Borderline". And if that's too adolescent for you, check out the similar but more mature song "Point of No Return" by Nu Shooz, better known for their new wave / disco hit "I Can't Wait". Also in that vein is "Secret" by OMD, which enjoys a restraint and cheerfulness that's a little lacking in their more famous "If You Leave". Roxy Music's "More Than This" is a great mellow dance tune in the genre, although if you're looking for something more bouncy, nothing beats "Temptation" by New Order (the 1987 re-recording for their Substance compilation album).

As for the "ended relationships" type, "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits and "Don't Look Back" by Fine Young Cannibals may not be like the others lyrically, but it's the overall feeling that counts. For that matter, the bittersweet loss song doesn't even have to be about a romantic partner. One of the most touching and uplifting is "Nightshift" by the Commodores, about two beloved singers who had recently died (Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson).

In more romantic contexts, "What Have I Done to Deserve This" by Pet Shop Boys succeeds more from its instrumentals and Dusty Springfield's singing than from the emotionally flatter main vocals. It's down enough and upbeat enough to work, if in a bipolar kind of way. More light-hearted is "Always Something There to Remind Me" by Naked Eyes. More aggressive is "Modern Love" by David Bowie. There's almost a resignation in "Everytime You Go Away" by Paul Young, whereas Whitney Houston's resolve carries her through "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)".

I haven't provided any links to YouTube since everyone knows how to use it. But just for fun, here are a couple that not everybody would recognize from those above. (Hard to find a clip of the second one that wasn't harshly loud or maxed out on bass, but that's why we should hear music on CD rather than YouTube.)

Why do people rely more on intuition in periods of rising crime?

The various social, cultural, and biological changes that accompany rising crime rates -- and their opposites that accompany falling crime rates -- come as a big bunch. * Some of their links can get complicated, such as a rising crime rate and an optimal level of ornamentation in the arts, neither minimalist nor overly encrusted.

However, for the greater reliance on intuition, the effect appears directly tied to the rising crime rate itself. You might think that when people sense a greater and greater threat to their security, especially from active agents like human beings rather than random flukes like natural disasters, they should go into rational-analytical mode. That might help them to better assess the threat, generate a list of possible responses, evaluate them according to some criteria, and execute the one that wins out in the ranking.

But then, why don't any animals other than us have such rational-analytical skills, when they're far more shaped by the struggle for survival against violence and predation than we are? While they may not simply be following blind instinct or reflex, they are operating mostly on a gut level.

Intuition serves us well in situations that our ancestors faced over and over. Whatever worked becomes more built-in through the "Baldwin Effect". Even within our own lifetimes, intuition works better when we've had lots of experience in that kind of situation, and the right response comes more automatically. Reason and analysis are more for highly unfamiliar obstacles, like estimating the circumference of the Earth, deciding whether to set the marginal tax rate at X percent vs. Y percent, and so on. None of our ancestors faced those problems, and most of us have no experience dealing with them within our own lifetimes.

Where does the threat of crime come from? Well, it's not from industry, hi-tech, big government, or other unfamiliar modern threats. It's the weirdo down the street who's been peeping and may escalate to rape. Or the teenage thrill-seekers who'd rather break in and rip off some stuff than work for a living. Or troops of low-status males looking for something fun to do that would earn them respect -- like, say, ambushing some random pedestrian. All familiar threats to the ancestors of those living today.

So, when one of the main national issues becomes the soaring crime rate, we shouldn't over-think things, just like we shouldn't be able to consciously control our heartbeat or breathing patterns -- too important at the most fundamental level of survival. It's better to trust your instincts, not only for how you ought to respond individually but also in your relationships with others, since striving for greater security in such a topsy-turvy world will require group effort and mutual aid.

There are indirect effects too. For example, one of the strongest intuitions that people have about dealing with the threat of crime and predation is that you shouldn't go out alone, you should hang out with others instead. That makes you a harder target to isolate. Now that you're spending more time socially connected to others, you rely even more on intuition because people and social interactions are part of our evolutionary heritage. It's artifacts, civilization, etc., that is so wholly unfamiliar and in need of a rational-analytical approach.

Even in areas that don't seem to require an intuitive style to deal with, I think you see "spill-over" effects from the pressure to be intuitive when dealing with crime and social relationships. Your brain doesn't want to be pulled in opposite directions all day long, every day of your life. So it picks one general direction to go in, and tries to cope with the demands made on it when it "should have" gone in the other. Personality traits are like that, where a person is generally introverted or extraverted, although somewhat flexible according to the situation.

When different domains make opposite demands of your personality, you go toward whichever one seems to satisfy the most pressing issues. Crime, security, and social relationships within a rising-crime context (relying on others for support after and as a deterrent beforehand) -- those are way more important than being able to think your way through your math homework, optimize your family's finances, and so on. So despite opposing demands toward reason, intuition wins out in a rising-crime environment.

I should look into whether rising or falling-crime periods produce more technological innovation, after accounting for the overall rapid rise since the industrial revolution. Falling-crime periods are nerdier and more rational, but rising-crime periods are more risk-taking and team-oriented. It'll be interesting to see if the social-cultural zeitgeist makes any difference in the material domain of inventing technology.

* Periods of rising homicide rates -- ca. 1580 to 1630, ca. 1780 to 1830, ca. 1900 to early '30s, and ca. 1960 to 1990. Elizabethan-Jacobean, Romantic-Gothic, the Jazz Age, and the New Wave Age.

Periods of falling homicide rates -- the remainder. The Age of Reason-Enlightenment, Victorian, Mid-20th century, and Millennial.