Saturday, July 09, 2011

Gun Control: Failure of the state

Gun control is the most obvious failure of the state in modern America, right?

From the 1960s to the 1990s, America, especially in its cities, experienced a dramatic rise in violent crime. The violent and deadly nature of this crime was accompanied by the wide availability of firearms.

The best response to this sort of thing is to stop people from engaging in crime; it's possible that the rise was driven by lead, or many other factors, but finding and identifying those sort of origin aspects of this are difficult.

Another thing to do, and what most other countries did, would have been to get rid of all the guns -- even if people were going to be crazy, if you take away the ability, the desire doesn't matter.

But we couldn't do that either. The American political system was so broken that individuals didn't trust the government enough to deal with the problem. Instead, it created a backlash that created a desire to increase the availability of firearms.

It's a pretty clear example of a failure of state legitimacy. And now, even though the crime crisis has passed, I still have to deal with a bunch of crazy people who now use the issue of gun control to validate their "fear" of the state.

(I know that they don't have a real fear of the state, because they don't care about other "Civil Liberties" at all.)

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Origins of Political Order: Mistaken About Evolution

I just finished Part 1 of Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order. First off, I like the book. He’s an evolutionist, and a Hobbesian, which is to say that he understands human nature, and he bases his theory of the state upon that foundation.

Now, a mistake: Fukuyama’s description of human evolution is wrong. It’s only a little bit wrong, but it’s totally wrong. Fukuyama tells the familiar “one tribe out of Africa” story. We now know this is wrong, because we have genetic evidence of interbreeding with Neandertals, not to mention Denisovians, and presumably dozens of biologically modern Homo Sapien tribes that left Africa at different times.

Of course, Fukuyama’s book was published a month before that paper came out, and presumably written a while before.

On the other hand…

For a genetic example of what happens when one people conquers another, we need look no further than the high frequency of European Y chromosomes in the Americas. I would expect most pre-historic genetic exchanges to follow similar models. When an anthropologist says “population displacement,” we should interpret that to mean “they killed all the men and raped and married the women.” This means that conquerors not only take their enemies’ land, they also absorb genetic information, which is then selected for.

Fukuyama is exactly the sort of person who ought to have doubted the old story. Rome claimed to have founded itself upon a crime of mass rape. And the old testament doesn’t shy away from what to do with conquered people. Fukuyama actually quotes Genghis Khan and notes his massive offspring.

So, while one can hardly blame Fukuyama for making this error, since it was the conventional scientific view, if he had been following his own method of science+anthropology+historical analysis more rigorously, he might not have.