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Power and Politics

Saturday, August 8th, 2015

POWER AND POLITICS:

Weberian Musings

E.  N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology

University of California, Riverside

gene@ucr.edu

www.krazykioti.com

 

“There are two wolves within you, a good one that causes you to help others and do well, and a bad one that causes you to be savage and hurtful.  The one that wins out is the one you feed.”    Native American saying

 

Az ‘enyim’ s a ‘tied’ mennyi lármát szüle,

Miolta a ‘miénk’ nevezet elüle.

(“All this talk of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’—

That old word ‘ours’ is out of style.”)

–Mihaly Csokonai Vitéz (1996:158; from the poem “Evening,” Hungarian orig. ca. 1800)

 

“He must be of a strange, and unusual Constitution, who can content himself, to live in constant Disgrace and Disrepute with his own particular Society.  Solitude many Men have sought, and been reconciled to: But no Body, that has the least Thought, or Sense of a Man about him, can live in society, under the constant Dislike, and ill Opinion of his Familiars, and those he converses with.  This is a Burthen too heavy for humane Sufferance” (Locke 1979 [1697]:  An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.  P. 357.  “Man” means “any human” here.)

 

 

General Considerations

 

POWER

 

 

“All politics is local,” and all is now global.

“Politics” has been defined as “who gets what, how, when.”  This seems more like economics than like most people’s understanding of “politics.”  In any case, politics is about cooperation and defense as well as about competition over resources.  Aristotle defined politics as regulation of the public side of life, as opposed to ethics, which, for him, was the regulation of the personal side.

We may provisionally use “politics” to refer to the rules of society and the negotiation, competition, and practice that lead to institutionalization of particular rules.

Politics is variously defined as the result of competition for power or as the way society manages itself and organizes to deal with problems and opportunities.  The latter predicts more accurately the actual working of political systems.

Either way, politics is about power; it is the specific social macroinstitution that manages power over people.  A basic world problem is abuse of power, which is inevitable when there is a disproportionate amount of it concentrated in the hands of one person or group.  Unfortunately, there is no way to tell what is a “disproportionate” amount, but,in general, the more unequal the access to power, the more problems of all kinds occur.

Once power is concentrated, the tendency for people to get into more and more vicious rat-fights, to win more power, is irresistable.  Egalitarian society and civil behavior are cures, but can never be total.  Bottom-up organization is necessary to balance the power at the top, but somebody has to keep order and set standards, also.  We are back to the problem identified by Shen Buhai 2300 years ago: how to assign the right level of decision-making power to the right levels in an organizational hierarchy.  Top-down meddling and power-tripping and bottom-up irresponsibility and violence are all dangerous.  At present, in most of the world, top-down violence is more frightening, but the situations in Syria and elsewhere remind us that chaotic rebellion is not a very good remedy.

This, however, begs the question of what “power” is.  The standard definition in social science is the ability to make someone else do what you want and they don’t.

“Power” in society as ability to make others do what you want.  Some add that they themselves should not want to do it, in which case direct physical force, or the threat of it, must be invoked.  However, far more often, power is exercised through manipulating wants.  Charismatic and persuasive individuals, or simply outright liars and con artists, can convince people to “want” things they would not want if they were left to themselves and were being rational.  The whole advertising and public relations industry depeneds on this.

Another authoritative work defines power as “the ability to control resources, own and others’” (Lammers and Stapel 2009:280).  The latter is what most of us would call “control of life” or “control over resources.”  Being able to shovel up dirt in my garden or get my dogs to chase sticks is not what I want to study.  I will continue to use the word to mean the ability to make people do things.

However, that is still broad enough.  It covers brute force, persuasion, charisma, manipulative spending of money, sex appeal, and all sorts of other things that give Person A an edge over Person B.  Most important of all, it covers Weber’s “rational-bureaucratic power,” the legal and structural power to make people do what they do not want:  flunk courses, pay taxes, abstain from pork, be satisfied with the same low wage as lazier workers on the same job.  People in power, thus, can be (respectively) teachers, government servants, religious rulegivers, or employers in large bureaucratized firms.  In all these cases, the victim could do something about it (study and learn, go to jail like Thoreau, eat “white meat” (pork—in Israel) and pretend it’s chicken, find another job), but this would entail costs, and structural power is real.

Max Weber developed the serious social theory of power.  He defined power as individuals’ ability to “realize their own will…even over the resistance of others.”  Power is the ability to make people do what they don’t want to do.

Power has also been divided into coercion (basically, my “brute force” extended a bit), social constraint, more broadly social-structural backup, and consent production (Raik et al 2008).  These grade into each other; progressively less force and more social embedding and legitimacy are involved.  Further theorizing about power added more radical dimensions, via such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and their many followers.

Michel Foucault is particularly identified with an extension of the last of these.  It is really yet another kind of power, long recognized but not well explored before Foucault’s day (see e.g. Foucault 1965, 1980).  This is the power to define knowledge and set the terms of debate on it.  Societies, especially their ruling elites, decide what is “knowledge,” what is “truth,” what is “important,” what is “salient,” what is “valuable,” what is “debatable” versus what is settled or outside debate.  Foucault differentiates actual truth (hopefully reachable, via independent, critical research) from imposed or official “truths”—what we now call “truthiness” in the United States.

Foucault’s starter definition is more dour than Weber’s, as befits Foucault’s anarchist leanings:  “power is essentially that which represses” (Foucault 1980:89-90).  Foucault does, however, admit that power can also produce goods and help people achieve goals.

In politics, “power” means the ability to accomplish something—defend the country, take people’s land, raise more food, enforce the law, or save scarce resources.  We are talking about society’s power over things and over institutions, as well as individuals’ power over each other.  People want control over their lives, and over enough of the rest of their world to provide them with security.  They use any means at their disposal to insure this.  The result is “power,” in some general sense.

Mao Zidong said “power grows from the barrel of a gun,” but also that “one spark can start a prairie fire”—the spark in this case being a call to action, not a gunshot.  I prefer to separate, analytically, a persuasive tongue from a semiautomatic rifle.  Each can sometimes command the other, but they are not the same.

Brute force is the most obvious and undeniable sort of power.  The only way you can really force people to do what they don’t want is to force them by brute strength.  Traditional warfare worked this way.  Soldiers raped, murdered, seized captives.  Today, street gangs and prisons use this kind of power.

However, one cannot really make people do anything positive or constructive this way.  Slaves can always run away, resist, or die.  To make them work, slavers have to make the punishments so horrific that even the worst work is preferable; John Stedman (1988 [1806-1813]) gave the classic account of this.

Much more usual is the sort of coercion immortalized in the Latin American drug dealers’ phrase plata o plomo, “silver or lead.”  Druglords corrupt officials by offering them a choice of a great deal of money (silver) or a lead slug in the head.  This is a convincing argument, but a surprising number of officials resist, and risk their lives. Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes used the same technique on a massive scale:  join us and fight and get lots of loot, or resist us and die.  Slightly more subtle versions of the same argument are found in corporations that promote the cooperative and fire the uncooperative.  The plata o plomo method, however, is expensive and risky.  It depends on a loyal, cohesive institution—a drug gang, horde, or corporation that can accumulate not only force, but also wealth, and deploy these systematically.

Eventually, politicians usually have to find cheaper ways.  Fortunately, human sociability allows them to succeed in this.  If they can persuade or cajole their followers into acting, the unified group can accomplish a great deal.  If leaders can take advantage of institutions or simply of habits, they can get followers to act even without much persuading or cajoling.  Setting up such institutions is one main function of politics.

How comparable is the power of Genghis Khan and his army with the power of an advertisement for Napa Valley wine?  How comparable is the power of a sumo wrestler with the power of a girl using perfume to attract a boyfriend?  Obviously, any analysis of human behavior that treats “power” as a single, simple thing is going to be hopelessly wrong.

This deconstructs the Nietzschean concept of a “drive for power.”  Of course people want control over their lives, and that sometimes means having influence over the lives of people close to them.  But the girl’s drive to get the boy’s attention is extremely different from Genghis Khan’s drive to conquer the world.  Nietzscheans write as if all desire to influence others were of the Genghis Khan sort.  Some, including Nietzsche himself, idealize that.  Others, notably Michel Foucault, abominate it.  Foucault was a genuine philosphical anarchist, one of the last, and for him the world’s problem was the Nietzschean power drive.  He took it for granted and lived only to find ways to block it.

In fact, most people do not want to be Genghis Khan.  The vast majority of human power plays are more like the perfumed girl’s.  We want to persuade people around us to notice us in a favorable way.  We may, further, want them to do things for us, and we know that persuading them or giving them fair return is a far more effective way to accomplish this than is brute force.  Even when we want to get rid of them, we are aware that killing them is at best difficult and dangerous and at worst downright illegal, so we find ways to avoid them, instead.

People most certainly want social place.  The strongest human desire, in fact, is to have a secure place in a supportive community.  Lack of this is scary, producing great anxiety.  People inevitably compete for good places, and this can get serious and bitter if the good places are few and hard-to-reach.  Genghis Khan’s ambition to be world emperor is the limiting case.

A confounding variable here, however, is that people simply enjoy competition for its own sake, whether in chess or in racing or in basketball.  Usually they do not think anything serious about it.  “It’s just a game,” and does not make for anger unless someone cheats or unless there is a lot of money and attention riding on the victory.  Even then, sportsmanship generally takes over.  When people get really and massively bitter over competition, as they do in politics, one can be sure that the real concern is social place—security over one’s place, or desire for one that is better and harder to reach.  The search for social place thus leads people to deploy all their wiles, from army tactics in the search for world rule to persuasive verbiage and pictures in the wine advertisement.

This makes the Nietzsche-Foucault position even less tenable.  Brute force is not the commonest or most effective form of power.  One may condemn, with Foucault, the oppressive and cruel forms of power without condemning all attempts by one person to influence another.  In fact, Foucault certainly used his full persuasive power to influence people.  He would answer that he was opposing institutionalized power, not all interpersonal influence.  He does not, however, resolve the problem of determining where the one starts and the other stops.

On the other hand, Foucault can also define power structurally, in a far more believable way:  “Power is not a substance.  Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into.  Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals….  The characteristic feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct…. [but] there is no power without potential refusal or revolt”  (Foucault 2006).  The question is whether people have a drive to achieve such dictatorial force over others.  Probably most parents want it over their young children, but otherwise most people simply do not want this (in the extreme form of entirely determining others’ conduct).  Wanting it is clearly pathological in humans.

Power is most directly exerted by brute force, but in actual social life force is rarely used for the purpose.  For one thing, the victim fights back.  For another, leaders must usually rely on soldiers, police or the like to do the forcing, and soldiers are not always loyal; in fact, historically, changes of government are probably more often from military coups than from any other cause.  One has to do something to insure their loyalty, and an endless regress of police forces does not do the job.  Thus leaders rely on loyalty, created by various means.  Leaders also rely on laws, but this too rrequires both enforcement mechanisms and some degree of credibility in the laws.  Laws that are not respected are broken so often that no amount of enforcement works; this happened with the 55-mile speed limit, with litter laws in many areas, and with “blue laws” in most places that have them.

 

Social Power

Leaders also deploy persuasion and charisma, and try to use blandishments to make their followers loyal.  Most common of all, however, is power through manipulation of reciprocity and exchange.  Leaders provide services and stabilize and protect markets.  Their subjects or citizens are grateful for the services and depend on the markets.  In everyday life, people work constantly to maintain webs of mutual favors.  This sort of wide-flung reciprocity is the real cement of society—in fact, one could almost say it is society.

Finally, people seem programmed, biologically or by sheer habit, to respect social leaders and institutions.  They follow laws and customs without thinking, just because those are the laws and customs.  The usual rationalization is:  What if everybody just did as they please?  Some dreadful chaos would ensue.  The easiest path is to follow the general rules.  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  David Hume fell back on this mindless convenience as the only real reason to follow any customs or believe even the most obvious and straightforward things.  Might as well call a dog a dog in England and a chien in France.  And maybe somewhere else it wouldn’t even look like a dog; maybe seeing a “dog” is merely a convention.

In any case, people get amazingly attached to their rules and customs, perhaps especially to the most irrational and unprovable ones.  This gives rulemakers and custom-setters amazing power.  Whoever starts a teenage fad has millions of young people at her command.  (A horrible effect of this is seen in the epidemic of suicides that frequently follow a star’s self-murder.)  The mindless adulation of “celebrities” is similar.  Movie stars have striking power over people’s minds, for no better reason than that everybody knows who they are.

 

Power of Conformity

Even more common—in fact the overwhelmingly most important way power is exercised in society—is use of social pressure to make people conform, go along, or bear.  They may not actively want to do what they are doing, but they are convinced it’s “right” or that they have to go along with “everyone else.”  The various ways of convincing them to do this have been explored in detail by Weber, Foucault, Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, and many others.  They range from religious teaching to school-playground peer pressure, and from taste in literature to group hate.  People normally want to do what their reference group does, think as others in it think, feel as they feel, and like what they like. In a free and complex society, individuals can more or less choose what reference group to join, but throughout most of history, few had that choice.  Even within my lifetime, religion has gone from something that one was born into and died in, and which governed one’s behavior, to something barely noticed by many and chosen by others from a smorgasbord of cults and teachings.

In short, power in society is largely exercised by society itself, and enforced by censure, criticism, rejection, and ostracism.  People fear this above all else, as we know from the willingness of most people to die for a cause or to avoid shame.

The fear is not just of being rejected.  More deadly and agonizing is the fear of being genuinely despicable—of being rejected and held in contempt for good reasons.  Of course the “good reasons” are socially learned, to a large extent.  People need to be accepted, but they need even more to be (or at least feel they are) acceptable.

All this makes “power” look more like social agency and social control.  Individuals want to control themselves and their own lives, but they also want to or have to give up control to the group.  Formal institutions have high “legitimacy,” meaning people decide they are there for good reason or at least are inescapable, and do as they are told.  At the other extreme, popular and grassroots pressure makes most people like (or pretend to like) the offerings of popular culture.  Also, humans evidently have an innate tendency to respect their elders, and it generalizes today to all authority figures.

Social power also makes people very susceptible to emotional blackmail: bullying, guilt-tripping, passive-aggressive manipulation, and all the other devices of those who use social power for their own ends.

This naturally bridges to the active use and manipulation of hatred to sell policies and politicians.  Politicians everywhere whip up class, ethnic, racial, religious, and political rivalries and hatreds in order to win popular support for themselves and their policies.  Then, reference groups become highly important.  One follows one’s chosen reference group in hating its perceived enemies or rivals. An extreme form is found in the writings of Hobbes, Freud and many others: an across-the-board judgment that basic human nature is profoundly hateful, or at least torn by angry, hateful, or lustful emotions.

Another pathology is the use of being “with it” as proof of social good or social belonging.  Those who are not up on the latest fad are not only out of the loop; they are evil, contrary, mean, repulsive, spoiled, inadequate, and every other name that can be thrown at them.  This is as common among academics as among others; we all know the fate of social scientists who do not keep up on the latest French philosophe hyped by the New York Review of Books.  Teenage peer groups are usually even more direct and savage, and thus affect people profoundly at the most vulnerable and decisive stage in their lives.

People are seriously afraid of power.  They are terrified of superior force and of deadly force.  They are, if anything, even more terrified of social rejection.

Therefore, the commonest and most effective way to exercise power is by social pressure.  Threats of disrespect and ostracization and promises of respect and honor animate suicide bombers, even though their moment of honor is short-lived indeed.  Soldiers on suicide missions, persons who kill themselves for honor or shame, and persons who devote their whole lives to a cause also work for motives stronger than deadly force.  Routinely, people die rather than face humiliation.

Shunning and ostracism to discipline the unsocial is probably by far the most common method of asserting power, worldwide, and in many societies it is about the only way of enforcing the rules.  Simple kin-level societies usually have no other recourse.  Neither do informal groups and children’s play-packs in complex societies.  Yet, since humans are so compulsively social, ostracism remains the most terrifying threat and the most effective way of disciplining people.  In some societies it means death—an Inuit exiled from the group has no chance—but even when it means nothing but inconvenience, it is a terrifying threat.  Conversely, of course, praise and acceptance are powerful motivators, and the power to praise is real power.  Good words from much-higher-status people are important everywhere.

Power can be the ability to call up legitimate force; this is the classic definition of the state, or of its ruling class.  It can also be the ability to call up illegitimate force; this is the imperium in imperio, the capomafiosi equivalent of the state.  It can be simply a function of hierarchic position, in societies where hierarchies are so entrenched that people willingly act (violently if necessary) to maintain hierarchic privilege.  Most societies are so organized.  Power of this sort grades off into mere social status, and this can range from the truly high status of a divine king to the precarious status of a low-ranking male in a patriarchal society.

This makes it more difficult to separate the persuasive tongue from the rifle.  The tongue may be the more dangerous, from the point of view of the victim.

The differentiation of force and persuasion is a false dichotomy, following from the even more false separation of body and mind (Lyons 2005 provides a wonderful discussion of this, crediting Timothy Mitchell for the original insight).  A whole continuum from brute force to silver tongue exists, and the two are not infrequently combined in the same person, each reinforcing the other.  In any case, a silver-tongued orator can exert an almost hypnotic power on people.

However, more important are the phenomena of the middle ground—the ground that the body-mind dichotomy erases.  As Weber pointed out, if people see power is “legitimate,” they will do what is expected of them.  They may have actually agreed to a Hobbesian social contract, but more likely they were raised in a society ruled by law, and accept it or see no good alternatives to it.  If they accept it solely through coercion and fear, we are back with power through brute force, and all its limitations.  Everyone will resist and foot-drag whenever they can (Scott 1985), and rebel the minute they get a chance.  However, most people in most societies see their formal and informal legal codes as legitimate enough to be worth following most of the time.

 

Power as a Bad Want

Of the several kinds of goods one might want in the world, power is the worst to want.  If you want food, drink, and sex, you are relatively easily satisfied.  (Pathological cravings are another matter; they are, most often, not really about food or sex.)  If you want money, you can get a lot without really diminishing others’ wealth, since the economy can always expand at least a little, in the short term.  But if you want status or power, you must compete directly with others for them.  These goods are limited.  Thus “position goods” become markers: items that are intrinsically limited, like genuine Van Gogh paintings, or items that are at least somewhat limited in number, like Ferrari cars. They thus come to mark status, and get correspondingly bid up in price. More to the point, though, positions of power are very limited indeed, and often the only way to get them is to fight for them—violently or through Machiavellian dealings.

One can always invent new status markers, and expand the system to provide more powerful positions, thus partially neutralizing this particular set of problems, but in the end the competition is often seen as a fight for the top.

Thus need for power is deadly to society.  Only one person can be ruler.  Only a few can be in Congress.  Only a few can be CEO’s of giant corporations, and with corporate mergers, that number is actually shrinking, in spite of the rise of more and more small firms.  Competition is deadly, and there is no way to make win-win games out of it.  Thus, a group losing power in a declining economy is particularly likely to hate other groups and to try to make them go down even faster.

Actual violent conflict is even worse.  The conflict between Jews and Palestinians in Israel shows with horrible clarity how the worst win out by taking advantage of a situation.  Israel’s initial idealism and the Palestinians’ hope, hard work, and initial peaceful resistance slowly gave way to today’s antagonistic and brutal behaviors.

Power is basically the social construction of managing the control need.  Charisma, suavity, good communication ability, brokering, humor and other soft powers grade into real badgering, bullying, etc., and then into actual force.  Persuasion, rewards (mostly monetary), force, and institutional power are basic, but social ostracization is probably by far the most usual way to exert it.

In a meritocratic society, the ones who wind up on the bottom are the meek or passive or disorganized ones; the midrange is the smart, hard-working ones; the top layer is the ruthless, merciless, cruel ones.  One can see that in accounts of old-time military kingships, which were arguably more meritocratic than the modern US in spite of social ascriptions.  (The kings and courtiers had to fight, or at least make life-and-death political calculations, and thus had more skin in the game than modern elites, who are often born to money and never had to work.)

Adam Smith saw (but his modern followers rarely do) that the real advantage of private property and free enterprise is that the costs are specified on the beneficiaries, forcing them to do something about said costs.  That is the measure of any ownership system.  Modern giant corporations, however, capture the benefits partly from subsidies and government preferences rather than earnings, and export the costs to the public as “externalities.”  Thus, there is no incentive to improve or fix anything.  They neither depend for benefits on doing well, nor do they have any incentive to minimize costs (extensive documentation of this can be found in Anderson 2010).  “Competition” does not make people “do it better” unless the costs of production are specified on the producers.  With costs “externalized” and production subsidized, as in the modern US, there is every incentive for producers to act as irresponsibly as possible.  They are rewarded not for fixing their problems, but for lobbying for even more subsidies and even more relief from laws that control “externality” production.

 

Applications of Theories of Social Power

When the king makes the subject swear by divine kingship, or when the rich convince the poor that riches are divine gifts while poverty is divine punishment, the motivations are crudely obvious, and were pointed out long before Foucault.  When America’s ruling elites, under George W. Bush, decide that industry’s freedom to pollute the environment is true freedom, but freedom to vote and speak one’s conscience are trivial and dispensable,  the motives are again clear.  Foucault showed that more subtle “power-knowledge” is commoner and probably more pernicious:  sexual disciplines, beliefs about “crime” and techniques for managing it, even the very classification systems for plants and animals (Foucault 1970).  Elites have not obviously sold these to the masses, and the masses do not see them as clearly maintaining privilege, but these knowledges often do act to discipline the subjects.  The ordering and bureaucratic behavior and rhetoric of government creates not only civil order but also what Foucault called “governmentality”; it creates subjects by disciplining them at every stage of life.  Every piece of official paper from the birth certificate to the death certificate is an exercise of power (cf. Scott 1998).  People learn to be patriotic, giving their willing consent.  Arun Agrawal has developed the concept of “environmentality” (Agrawal 2005) in parallel:  people in modern states become “environmental subjects,” learning, debating, and following official policies toward the environment.  Of course, “the environment” in this sense is itself a Foucaultian concept; the idea is a social and political construct.  The environment of a plant in the mountains is not the same sort of concept as the policy-defined, law-defined, media-defined thing called “the environment.”

This puts us all in the scary position of wondering how much of our daily beliefs are con jobs propagated by evil elites.  Extreme Foucaultians appear to believe that when we say the sky is blue and water is wet, we merely parrot evil lies propagated by evil conspirators.  Granted that reality is far less sinister, we must still wonder whether less obvious “facts” are really true.  Worse: we must wonder how many of the undeniable facts we know are subtly contexted and foregrounded (or backgrounded) to maintain power systems.  The American media today consign global warming to back-page science sections, while giving the front page to the latest murder or sports win.  This certainly confirms a certain priority ranking as the “proper” one, and it just happens to be a very useful priority ranking to the right-wing elites of the nation.

Actual working knowledge turns out to be a complex accommodation between such imposed “power-knowledge” and the actual needs for usual, factual, grounded knowledge among real-world people who have to do things.

Cultural knowledge develops through a long and almost always untraceable sequence of dialogues, negotiations, and subtle power plays.  Is there a sinister reason behind our tendency to focus on movie stars instead of scrutinizing political leaders?  Do politicians deliberately promote this to keep us from examining them?  And how did our sexual morality change from the puritanical 1950s to the roaring 1990s?  There was no one person or moment that decided it.  Was it a sinister way of increasing elite power, or a liberation therefrom?

Cultural knowledges are always pluralist.  Some accept, some reject.  The king may try to behead anyone who questions divine monarchy, but, as Sancho Panza said, “under my cloak, a fig for the king.”  Deviants from other, more diffuse knowledge systems are legion.  Again, we return to the ultimate need of force or of powerful, immediate social sanctions to maintain power.  But conformity and ostracization do, indeed, operate to make people accede in their own repression.

Money is power, and genuinely coercive if the receiver depends on the money.  However, individual greed gives money far more “power” than it really has.  Many people in this world could do with less money and suffer less abuse accordingly.  Money-grubbers do not so much suffer from power as trap themselves.

Simple respect for position or for a competent or politically able person gives that person some power, but only by consent and on sufferance.  Sociologists contrast deference with actual effective power.  Collins notes:  “The divergence between [deference] and [effective] power is particularly sharp in the case of…women administrative assistants who defer to (usually male) line authority but wield most of the invisible power…in a bureaucratic organization” (Collins 2001:286).  I can vouch for that, since I worked down the hall from Randy Collins for many years, and know some of the people he is talking about.  He goes on to quote Francis Bacon:  “Men in great place are thrice servants:  servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.  So as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times” (Collins 2001:288, quoting Bacon’s writings from 1625).

Charisma—the socially negotiated ability of some people to get the public on their side—is a similar trap.  Nietzsche confused power with heroism; worshiping the romantic hero, he idolized power too.  Yet, few heroes are really powerful (a fact which is a subtheme of the Iliad), and, conversely, the vast majority of genuinely powerful people are merely ordinary weak men and women who happen to be high up in a hierarchy.  A charismatic politician may get elected, but most of the world’s powerful people have worked their way up hierarchies by Machiavellian game-playing, not by charisma or any other personal ability.  Many of them, indeed, are utterly contemptible worms by Nietzschean standards—gray Organization Men rather than Nietzschean Supermen.

It is not surprising that people differ enormously in their desire for power, and in the kind they want.  The majority of us do not want more control than we need.  However, we all know people who live only to push other people around.  The psychological roots of this are usually fairly evident.  These are the people who are compulsively active in politics, and often become the rulers and leaders.  Since at least the days of the ancient Greeks, sages have made the point that this often ensures that society is run by its worst members.  The ancient Greeks already knew, also, that democracy is the only cure for this, but is only a partial cure.

Good leaders are always rare, and require a good society to form them, approve them, allow their “charisma” to flourish, and eventually back them and fight for them.  Most good leaders are rather limited in scope.  Supermen, Nietzschean or otherwise, are a fantasy.  Yet, societies somehow find saviors at the right time.  The United States found Abraham Lincoln in 1860; Britain found or created Winston Churchill in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s; a riven China was reunited by the amazing genius of the founders of the Sui and Tang Dynasties at the end of the 6th century AD.

In direct proportion to how hierarchic a society is, and how conservative and repressive the hierarchy is, violent and dishonest souls fight for power.  They often become the majority of the elite.  In societies that are truly top-down hierarchies, the violent and dishonest usually become completely dominant, since ruthless power-gaming is the only real way to success.

Most people remain surprisingly indifferent to the lure of upward mobility, or, if they want upward mobility, they want to get it by other means, from economic entrepreneurship to scholarly expertise.  An extreme Nietzschean drive for power is a rare and derivative trait.  Generally, it turns out to derive from simple bullying.  The power-mad are those who are scared, weak, insecure, and prone to shore up their egos by bullying weaker people or animals.  Aggression—always a response to a threat, not an autonomous inborn need—is marshalled in the service of maintaining dominance among the abject.  Nietzsche got it exactly wrong:  the power-seekers are not the supermen but the frailest.

From the ancient Greeks onward, almost every observer of politics has noted a tendency for most people to look up to leaders more because of style than because of substance.  We adulate those who master rotund rhetoric, or have a grave, parental, in-charge demeanor (whether or not they can deliver).  We look down on would-be leaders who lack such authoritative presentations of self.  The brash, outspoken, and spontaneous do not get far in politics—unless they channel their outspokenness into group hate, in which case they succeed, but by base means.  The meek and retiring do not lead.

In difficult times, people go more directly for leaders who seem strong, as opposed to those who can be perceived as weak or vacillating.  The Bush-Kerry election of 2004 turned on the Republicans’ success at playing the contest that way.  In even worse times, openly violent and destructive leaders are adulated:  Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin.  Fear drives respect.

Another sort of power is an emotional hold over someone.  A million novels remind us that the less loving member of a couple has real power over the more loving one.  And consider shame yet again:  if I can expose someone to public shame, I can blackmail said person.  But by this time were are close to mere persuasive ability, which I personally cannot see as power.  Persuasion, by definition, cannot make people do what they do not want to do.  It can only make them want to do it—if the persuader is really good.  Blandishments, compliments, and flattery are frequently effective, but not coercive.

Many grave authorities on politics give more place to high and noble ideals than do the above passages.  Goals of religion, philosophy, or poetry may indeed motivate a few—perhaps more than are motivated by power-madness.  But the sorry record of humanity proves that most politics is vicious and negative.  We will probably never know the relative importances of all these motives, because of the phenomenon of multiple reasons for action.

So power is a complex thing.  A power-hungry person will try to get several kinds:  formal power to invoke force, informal power to call up still more force, wealth, charisma, emotional hold, blackmail, anything.  One kind is never enough.  Portfolio diversification is valuable in maintaining wealth, but absolutely necessary for maintaining power.

One reason is that these different kinds of power can do different things.  Some people can resist any given type of power, and the types of resistance effective against brute force are obviously different from those effective against hierarchic control of knowledge, and these again differ from resistance to social pressure.  The powerful must cope with all kinds of resistance.  Also, powerless but ambitious individuals who see an elite monopolizing one form of power but not another will naturally gravitate to that other form.  A group lacking status and use of force but not wealth may try to get wealth and use it strategically to get power.  This is what the rise of capitalism was all about.  It is also a strategy classically used by politically weak minorities who are in a position to become urban mercantile successes.

Resistance can be startlingly effective (cf. Scott 1985, 1990, 1998).  If most people do not want to obey a law, no one can enforce it.  The 55-mph speed limit in the United States was a dead letter.  Game and hunting laws in Mexico are strict and would be wonderful if enforced, but I never met a Mexican who knew what they were.  Few even knew they existed.  Anti-drug and anti-corruption laws, all over the world, have limited effect.  The most extreme cases of dead-letter laws are the old “blue laws”; in some places, it was (until very recently) illegal to whistle on Sunday, or hold hands with your spouse in public.  No one even remembered these laws except when local historians brought them up for laughs.  Scott, a good Marxist in his early work, saw power as held by an elite and resistance as the tool of the masses.  Others see hierarchies and networks rather than dialectics.  Once again, a particularly good discussion, with extensive ethnography, is provided by Barry Lyons (2005).  He notes how power can lie at state, regional, community, and family levels, and be hierarchical at each.  Working with Quechua indigenous people in Ecuador, he found that they often saw abusive “white” power as illegitimate and intrusive, but its forms and teachings—politeness, discipline, respect, authority—as necessary or desirable, to be reproduced in more legitimate surroundings, meaning especially the Quechua community itself.  I have heard similar views among the Maya of Mexico.

Again, elites must use different forms of power and persuasion to get around this.  Enough people must be convinced that the laws are worth following and will be enforced.  Usually, a large majority must be so convinced, though a draconian regime can get along with support from local elites and dependents thereof.

In short, power is not easy to understand, nor to gain or hold.  Bourdieu speaks of a “field of power,” which is “a field of forces structurally determined by the state of the relations of power among forms of power, or different forms of capital….The different forms of capital are specific forms of power that are active in one or another of the fields…” (Bourdieu 1998:264-165).  This allows Bourdieu to mix social connections, ideological authority, rhetorical persuasiveness, money, guns, sophistication (“cultural capital”), and anything else he chooses.  He claims he can provide us with rules for converting these currencies; not surprisingly, he doesn’t do any such thing.

However, Bourdieu can, and does, look at political arenas.  The political nexus, rather than Marx’ “money nexus,” is the locus of social action.  Politics is meant here in the broad sense:  direct control of or management of people.  It can be dictatorship by brute force, or people getting together and discussing until they come to a collective decision about managing something, and implementing that decision through some sort of social agency that can act or enforce.

Hobbes wrote of a social contract that establishes peace by instituting autocratic government and securing property.  Hobbes was wrong about the mechanism, including the need for a king, but he was right about the need for an organized social system to guarantee peace.  People may want to do some antisocial things, like snitching Baby Sister’s candy or fighting the neighbors or dumping trash in the river, but they want society more.  They will give up a lot for it.  In fact, as suicide bombers remind us, they will give up their lives for it.

Hobbes is also wrong for the opposite reason.  Setting up a social system does not stop conflicts.  In fact, a sociologist—or an anarchist—would say that, in fact, society creates such things; intolerance and factionalism are social facts, not products of individuals in a state of nature.

So a social contract must do much more than uplift a Hobbesian autocrat.  It must deal not only with basic economics and politics, but with aesthetics, emotions, and indeed total personal involvement in the interactive networks that constitute society-on-the-ground.  Even the rules of language are a part of the social contract.  People contract with each other to talk in a certain way, such that mutual understanding is facilitated.  Schizophrenics and autistic persons break those rules and are, to that extent, outside society.

It has become rather traditional, even among non-Marxists, to analyze society in Marx’ terms:  an economic foundation, concerned with producing and distributing subsistence goods; a social order erected on top of this; and an ideological order that justifies the social order.  Over the long term, and in some aspects of society, this seems to be often true.  However, I am by no means sure that material production is so critical.  Nor do I see that it entails the others.  The ideological system of Islam is astonishingly uniform across societies whose technologies range from the simplest to the most complex.  Moreover, Islam’s main variants (Sunni and Shi’a, the four legal schools of Sunni, and others) have been stable for centuries; few new currents have come with the rise of modern economies.  Conversely, similar modern technological and legal ownership systems flourish widely today, in Islamic lands and Maya and Chinese villages as in New York.  This happens even when ideological “modernization” (in the sense of emulation of American ways) is a cost, not a benefit.  Social systems spread by imitation more than because of real systemic need.  We need more objective studies of this issue.

 

Lack of a Will to Power

One-down anger is the most dangerous of all emotions, states or conditions of humanity, with equal or one-up anger next.  One effect of this is the success of people who have nothing but meekness to offer the world.

This breaks up the imaginary “will to power.”  People want power for evil reasons (to bully others), for good reasons (to defend themselves or help others), and for neutral reasons (just to feel good about themselves, or jut to satisfy the human need to feel in control of one’s personal life).  All three types of reasons may be mixed in one individual.  The extreme abundance of sociable failures, rich hermits and misers, and voluntarily simple-living persons shows that Nietzsche was quite wrong about people naturally wanting power.  Most of those who could easily get it avoid it.

Henry Kissinger’s reputed remark that “power is the best aphrodisiac” is somewhat wrong—social approbation and success is what matters.  Power helps, but a powerful thug gets women through their fear, not their desire.  Conversely, nothing is commoner than the charming but powerless ne’er-do-well who gets women to support him. Social success sometimes leads to power, but far from always.  With women, and in many other social situations, wealth is almost worthless by itself; ask any ugly, socially inept miser.

Thus it is not easy to contact human good on any deep level.  Saints and sages can do it, and most of us can manage it with a spouse or children or closest friends.  Otherwise, we are reduced to reading poetry, listening to great music, and looking at fine art.  Those voices from the past who could express their deepest emotions may at times be our only contacts with the deep inner good that, in the end, animates us all.

Trying to fix anything by channeling evil into “better” channels does not help. Marx tried to get people to hate upward in the social scale, rather than downward; the result was Stalin.  Sports fans have claimed sports provides an outlet for competition; the result has been the strife of Blues and Greens in Byzantium, modern soccer hooliganism, the “soccer war” between El Salvador and Honduras, and countless other such problems, with no reduction in other kinds of conflict.  Indeed, sports is a fascinating case:  few things are more harmlessly fun than sandlot baseball, informal track-and-field, or the like, yet few things are more gratuitously repulsive than the world of professional sports, with its rampant drug abuse, soccer hooliganism, and hatreds whipped up over trivial games.  One wonders what happened to sportsmanship.  It seems not even a concept today.

The result of all this is a society in which many people are very rough customers.  The more violent and unruly the society, the more of such people there are, the range being—approximately—from small Quaker towns to the tribal border zones of Pakistan.  Even Quaker towns have their problems.  No society can be as good as its best members, though some can be as bad as their worst.  The wise person will thus stay somewhat outside society—at least far enough to keep clear eyes and a clear head.

Society is inevitably dominated or preempted by the need to avoid or deal with threat.  Thus resistance is basic, and social rejection and hate inevitable.  “Preemptive capitulation” in the form of self-imposed barriers of conformity, passivity, excessive “niceness” (the doormat syndrome), and the like becomes common.  These lead to failure to act, thus often to irresponsibility, thus often to deserved negative judgment.  In that case, the sufferer has shot herself in the foot by being too nice, and is doubly angry because of a feeling of betrayal.  This may lead to the worst social hatreds, because people in this position feel (quite reasonably) that they are wronged, and act accordingly.  Alternatively, individuals may rebel or resist, and shoot themselves in the foot again by being too prickly and defensive.  Either way, the game goes on.  Few can cope rationally, by taking social troubles in stride and moving on.

 

POLITICS

 

Politics and Interaction

Politics is about defining groups, and making some salient at the expense of others.  It is about organizing morality, and practicing it via laws and administration of justice (or injustice, as the case may be).  It is about organizing society for defense against external and internal enemies.  It is about organizing the economy, the communications network, and even the arts.  In short, it is about keeping society running smoothly enough to accomplish necessary social tasks.

Since getting people to agree on a course of action is, notoriously, “like herding cats,” this is not an easy job.  Shirking, irresponsibility, foot-dragging, and outright betrayal are inevitable, and politicians have to keep these at a bearable level.

Anyone jockeying for power, or trying to use power, has to pay at least lip service to these social goals.  I have known sociopathic politicians who were quite open about being in it for money or power, but they knew they had to deliver the goods, at least to those who had bribed them.  “An honest politician is one that stays bought,” and corrupt politicians learn quickly.

This has led to the vulgar materialist belief that politics is simply economic greed.  However, economics does not explain politics.  Politicians invoke too many things that are clearly irrational in economic terms:  ill-considered wars (Tuchman 1984), genocide, megalomaniac projects like big dams and new capital cities.  Political choice and public choice theorists assume that personal political power is the end for which politicians work.  These theories have an even less impressive prediction record than the economic theories.

Marx saw politics as produced by class struggle, itself the product of tensions between those who controlled the means of production and those who worked for said controllers.  Ultimately, economics—specifically, the means of producing basic subsistence goods, and above all the control of those means—determined the power system.  Capitalists, and capitalist-world theorists, may not go with “class struggle,” but they agree that material goods, producing them, and jockeying for control of them are determinative—the real wellsprings of politics.

This leads the thoughtful social scientist to another observation on rationality.  To Mancur Olson’s cynicism about the possibility of avoiding the destruction of collective institutions by free riders (Olson 1965), we can oppose an even more incontrovertible principle: if, in a world of Olsonian individuals, two “irrational” people band together, they can take over the world in short order.  They can simply conquer all the “rational” individuals, one by one.  In practice, of course, “rational” individuals would flock to join the two.  Even when many of those “rational” individuals fell away to free-ride, a nucleus of less “rational” retainers would surely remain.  They could force others to join them, even on highly prejudicial terms, since it would be so obvious that individual holdouts could not prevail against a united force.  This, roughly, was Hobbes’ argument about the origin of kingship, and it is not unknown in the real world.  Something very much like this occurred when Genghis Khan united the warring Mongol tribes into a world-conquering strike force (Ratchnevsky 1991).  Olsonian rationality broke the empire down again eventually, but the Mongols managed to rule most of the known world for a number of generations.

Solidarity, then, always wins over rational individualism.  Only a highly committed, ideologically dedicated force can overcome another committed and united force.  If Olson’s definition of “rationality” is used, society will always be ruled by the “irrational.”

We can rely on such irrationality maintaining itself, because parents (even rational ones) usually train their children to be “irrationally” helpful, supportive, and altruistic, at least toward said parents!  Indeed, to function in society, parents have to train children to provide at least the appearance of helpful altruism toward the community at large.

In the modern world, where Olsonian rationality has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, environmentalists and any other dedicated individuals have one reason to hope: they can prevail if even a few of them can act as a united force.

Most politicians have powerful ideological commitments and group biases, and are frequently more apt to work against their ideological and ethnic enemies than to work for any personal goal.  The “public choice” theories, in contrast, assume politicians work solely for their own personal power.  This body of theory specifically equates the political behavior of Gandhi and Stalin, Lincoln and Hitler, reducing all to mere power jockeying.  Obviously, such a theory may have its uses, but does not really apply to real-world considerations.  We must specify somewhat more about the actual means and ends of human action.

 

Politics and Solidarity

Political dealing, not money, makes the world go round; how many misers made history?  In the political arena, the persuasive tongue can beat the rifle.  Pace the proverb, God is not on the side of the heaviest artillery.  Victory goes to the side with more solidarity.  The United States learned this in Vietnam and again in Iraq.  Often, one can assume roughly equal loyalty commitments by rival armies, and then artillery is decisive; but history is full of cases of absurdly lopsided wins by tiny but solidary minorities.  The Greek victories at Marathon and Salamis are famous, but the most extreme cases may be the frequent victories by small nomad forces over huge Chinese armies in old central Asia.

Politics is often about divisiveness, but when it actually creates solidarity, some real things get accomplished.  Ideally, politics should be the art of holding a society together by balancing and accommodating different interests and bringing bearers of those interests to the negotiating table.  A good politician or administrator can persuade these various stakeholders to work together for the common good, bringing all their different skills, abilities, and interests to the task.  More often, keeping them from each others’ throats is a full-time job.

As we would expect, peaceable mutual accommodation is more likely in hopeful times, while increasing trouble or threat leads to increasing fear and conflict.  Culture and social solidarity obviously affect this.  Hopeful politics assumes the best in people.  There is a range here from the extremely idealist to the coldly cynical.  Kropotkin’s anarchism is extreme in one direction; Pyotr Kropotkin assumed that people would be good if only oppression and force were eliminated from their worlds.  This did not work.  At the other extreme is the folk-Hobbesian view of people as simply out for what they can get, and the Nietzschean view of people as violent competitors restrained only by superior force.  If these views were correct, social life could not exist.  People are good and bad, and one has to treat them accordingly.

Time and energy are limited, and the bads need immediate attention or at least top priority.  Caution and care come first.  Thus, the Founding Fathers of the United States were right in leaving people largely free to pursue their “happiness,” and directing government toward assuring enough security to let them do it.  This, in turn, requires the “checks and balances” the Founding Fathers planned—and, today, quite a few new checks and balances, to deal with such things as multinational corporations and organizations.  Bertolt Brecht’s “first feeding, then morality” (erst das Fressen, dann die Moral) can be modified:  First protection, then feeding, then the rest.

This being the case, politics is normally focused heavily on such military and defensive functions.  Until recently, the real task of rulers was war—protecting their subjects and conquering enemies.  Today, that is still the major thrust of politics.  War and armaments are by far the biggest budgetary item for governments worldwide, consuming several orders of magnitude more wealth than feeding the hungry or protecting the environment.  Conflict is the biggest issue for governments.  This may have some biological grounding; perhaps above-the-family social action in early human evolution was largely about organizing for war.

Failing a war, politics tends toward conflict with structural opponents—groups defined as radically different groups within one’s own social universe.  A drawback of civilization is that it allows people to segregate along moral, political, ethnic, and other lines.  Simpler societies have more control and balance; a village contains its saints, who provide balance, and its violent two or three, who can be restrained or sent off to war.  In the modern United States, the violent people of a whole city or state can gather in gangs in one small area.  The saints tend to separate off, retreating into churches or academies or “nice neighborhoods.”  Such societies have lost the flywheel.  They can spin out of control very rapidly if war or natural catastrophe gives the violent gangs a chance to take over.

Closely related is the bloody-minded attitude found in much of politicking.  Many people vote from a nasty, in-your-face antagonism to everyone—big government, big business, neighbors, property owners.  Fights over rights to bear arms, restrictions on personal damages, restrictions on private property, even the most basic and reasonable public health laws, become terribly bitter, with many voters openly voting to hurt others even if they hurt themselves as much or more—as in the case of anti-public-health and anti-environmental campaigns.  Fights over educational policy often pit those who favor actual education over those who favor discipline, dragooning, and indoctrination as the only goal of schooling.

And yet, amazingly, government does succeed in doing some good.  Even the early states of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia at least protected their people (sometimes) and delivered some water.  Today we have public health campaigns, art museums, street repairs.

The major problems come when a society is truly on a downward cycle.  As people lose hope, and lose trust in government, they are less willing to pay taxes, cooperate with groups they fear, or even vote.  The decline of civic participation and civic feelings in the United States (Putnam 2000), like other ills, tracks the rise of giant, out-of-control, faceless corporations.  Governments become corrupt and lazy.

Given all the above, grave authorities have tried to limit or abolish power since early times.  Most early societies tried to restrain it by tight rules; Islam’s Shari’a rules are the most extensive and specific case, but China’s less extreme “legalistic” philosophies (there were several) developed effective strategies.  Confucians tried to restrain it by moral training of the leaders.  The Taoists, like anarchists from Bakunin to Foucault, tried to abolish power and politics outright.  Over time, many anarchist utopian communities have been founded, but all, unsurprisingly, fell apart.  The Founding Fathers of the United States relied on voting and on balance of powers.  Adam Smith tried to spread power as widely as possible, through economic and moral individualism.  We now try all these measures, and still do not manage the job.

Many, including the Founding Fathers of the United States (especially Thomas Paine), have held that hierarchies make for bad people.  The ancient Greeks already contrasted democracy with tyranny (and saw them evolving into each other), and most of the relevant theory was already being spelled out by Herodotus and Thucydides.  Lord Acton’s Law—“all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely”—is one of the most quoted lines on earth, and most people strengthen it by leaving out the “tends to.”  Theoretically, the more top-down, rigid, and power-concentrating a hierarchy is, the more bullying people are at the top, the more craven and treacherous at the bottom.  But, also, bullies in power may not be corrupted by the power; they may have been bullies already.  In many situations, bullies and competitively amoral people are attracted to power games.  So power might not so much corrupt people as attract the already corrupted. Either way, the prudent society will minimize power hierarchies and power disproportions of all kinds.

Conversely, received wisdom teaches that equality produces responsibility and civic virtues.  Once again, the Founding Fathers thought so, and European aristocrats like de Tocqueville rather grudgingly agreed.  This has worked for the United States, but the jury is still out on its worldwide applications.  After all, the Huns, Mongol hordes, and other old-time warrior nomads were a fairly egalitarian lot, at least compared to their enemies.  Open opportunity for peaceful advancement may be (or may have been) more important than equality.

People are constantly reacting against control.  Yet they know they need it: if not a Hobbesian absolute monarchy, at least a Lockean state.  Since no society can survive without some leaders and followers, and since no contemporary society can survive without complex multilayered structures of command, the best we can hope for is constant push for egalitarianism and open opportunity combined with channels of accountability and recourse for the weaker.

 

Politics and Public Morality

People are variously good or bad, but all require some kind of social morality.  Common experience suggests that it does not win over a society unless it is accepted by 80-90% of the body politic.  This leaves about 10-20% as “criminals,” or at least “immoral.”  Usually, these are the violent, unpredictable persons, or the ones who simply cannot keep faith and be trusted.  In some societies, however, they are the saints—victims of the 80% becoming racist, fascist, or religiously bigoted.  We all know that majority rule does not guarantee the good.

Public campaigns may change morality very strikingly.  When I was young, a good 80% of Americans were litterbugs, and most American adults smoked in public.  Littering dropped dramatically, and later so did public smoking, because of constant public campaigns and some enforcement of laws.  With less enforcement of litter laws but more concern about smoking, littering has climbed again but smoking continues to retreat.

Less serious issues than basic social morality may thrive on a bare majority.  As soon as nonsmokers made up more than 50% of the adult population of the United States, laws began to change, rapidly reversing from always favoring smokers to banning smoking in any enclosed space.  This occurred in spite of the intensive lobbying by the tobacco industry, which was extremely successful for years in blocking legislation or elimination of tobacco subsidies, especially at the federal level.

The need for politics to get at least 50% support for anything, and at least 80% for anything major, stands in dramatic contrast to the situation in ordinary consumership and in arts and sciences, where a very few people can at least preserve their own tastes or findings, and can, at best, eventually convince everyone.  Politics requires 50% or more for an idea to survive at all.  In a totalitarian climate, of course, it requires much more.

Some moral campaigns never catch fire.  “Drugs, sex and rock’n’roll” have been the targets of intensive campaigns in the United States and elsewhere, but seem to persist.  Sexual mores have changed dramatically, but in the opposite direction from that advocated by the campaigns.  More and more repressive criminalization of drugs has served to fill the jails, but makes no visible dent in drug abuse rates (as shown by the lack of difference between repressive and tolerant nations).  Rock’n’roll…  Well, only Singapore seems to have succeeded in enforcing strict controls on all three.

Only very rarely can a major moral point begin as a tiny minority view, stay that way for years, and eventually take over.  The most spectacular example in history is the sudden shift away from slavery in the early 19th century.  The idea that slavery was bad—absolutely morally wrong to the point of requiring abolition—seems not to have existed anywhere in the world until the Quakers and a few other religious figures so concluded in the 18th century.  They began to convince many others after the revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s.  By the 1820s England had abolished slavery, and the rest of the world followed over the next 60 years.  Slavery survives today in many areas, but at least it is illegal and condemned everywhere, however lax enforcement is in many countries.  Similar campaigns against war, genocide, environmental destruction, corruption, and other evils have not advanced significantly over the decades; indeed, the ancients did as well with these problems as we do.

A quite different thing is the effect of power on morals.  Lord Acton’s Law holds that “all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Maybe, but more certain is that power—especially the bureaucratic sort—makes people more rule-based and less outcome-based in their thinking (Lammers and Stapel 2009).  We all know people who were reasonable, flexible and accommodating until they got some authority within an organization, and then turned more and more to following the letter of the law.  This makes sense, may even be necessary, but it has a huge effect on public morality.

 

Politics and Norms

A factor in change and stability is the solidarity of conservatives.  Definitions of “conservative” normally include, in fact center on, the conservatives’ loyalty to their group, its hierarchy, and its mystical central ideas.  Conservatives stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of religious dogma, national symbols, political ideals, and other abstractions.  They normally define themselves through defense of these against all comers, and they thus define themselves further by militance and often by armed violence.  There is a range from moderate, sensible, loyal folk to the reactionary fanatics who become suicide bombers in the defense of a faith they often do not understand.

Liberals, by contrast, are usually defined in terms of individualism.  They are critics, individualists, rebels, or people motivated by rational self-interest.  (Libertarians have recently sorted with conservatives, but should really be liberals, being the heirs of the 19th-century “liberal” political economists; the reasons they are not “liberal” today are historical and contingent.)

Conservatism often takes a negative view of humanity.  It is, classically, a position for those who think people are innately selfish, greedy, violent, or foolish, and have to be restrained by law.  Pervasive fear comes from, and leads to, this idea of people as basically bad.  However, many conservatives—especially religious ones—strongly disagree.  Religious conservatives with the courage of their convictions see humans as divinely created and protected, made in the image of God, and thus innately good, or at least having good potential.  Conversely, liberalism is supposedly more optimistic about people and about caring, but a surprising number of liberals are cynical, assuming rational self-interest of the narrowest form.

Caring goes with an assumption that people are basically good, or at least worth caring for.  Thus optimistic liberals and religious conservatives are more apt to care than the pessimists on both sides.  On the other hand, pessimists are often frustrated idealists, and these sometimes have very high standards for caring.

This simple opposition of “people are good” and “people are bad” predicts some of political theory.  Those who believe people are bad, from Hobbes to Stalin to Han Feizi, agree that the only sensible form of government is tyranny:  the baddest dude rules the rest through terror.  They may differ on how this is achieved and maintained—from Hobbes’ contract by the ruled, and thus (at least implicitly) consent of the governed, to Stalin’s outright terror.  But they agree on the basics.

Those who think people are not so bad run a range.  At one extreme is Pyotr Kropotkin’s dream that people are so good that they need no government at all.  This is, in some ways, simply a restatement of Jesus’ mission; Jesus hoped that people could so live in love that they would form a communal society where each would help all for sweet love’s sake.  (Ironically, the Christian churches and their kept rulers have been among the most viciously amoral bloodshedders in human history—just like the militant atheists such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pol; dogmatic religion is the same whether belief in God or denial of God is the axiom.)  Anarchist regimes, when they have briefly succeeded, have been no better than the rest.  The undeniable success of small-scale societies without formal government is a function of their face-to-face social reality, not of the innate overall goodness Kropotkin dreamed.

Another vision of the good came from humanistic psychology in the mid-20th century.  We were to be saved by ending sexual repression, being open with one another, and “sharing and caring.”  The resounding failure of even the mildest forms of this vision have been extremely sobering.  It had essentially no success, though it was part of the grounding of political thought in the United States and several European countries in the tragicomic 1960s.

Visions of people as less altruistic but as at least concerned with their own self-interest may be considered on the “good” side, since they hold that people are at least rational and sensible.  Except for the narrowly economistic ones, these views have a better track record than the extremist views.  So far, the nearest to a successful political view—in the sense of a popular, widely-shared set of understandings, not a coherent political philosophy—is the broadly Enlightenent-based consensus of the “free world” in the 20th century.  This is based on freedom (notably of speech and of conscience), mutual support, representative democracy, and parliamentary or presidential systems of government.  Several variants of this have worked very well, and changes from the basic Enlightenment model have led to rapid and dramatic social decline.  The farther from the model the states fell, the more they declined.  Notable examples of this process include Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the post-2000 United States.

The basic Enlightenment model takes humans as equal—if not totally equal, at least equal enough in their natural capacities to deserve equality before the law.  This obviously has to be qualified for children and the mentally incompetent, and has been qualified much more in usual practice.

Enlightenment philosophers saw humans as naturally wanting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (earlier, Lockean versions of that trio had “the pursuit of property”).  In short, people are dominated not only by a need for self-preservation but also by love of liberty and rational desire for happiness, material wealth, or “utility.”  The importance and basicness of liberty as a human psychological need is widely asserted in post-Enlightenment discourse, from Paine and Jefferson through Kant and Mill to modern civil libertarians.  “Liberty” meant to them not “license to do anything you want” but “freedom to do what you want as long as it doesn’t interfere excessively with others doing what they want.”  It is a political construction of the human need to control one’s life.

Freedom is supposedly desired not just as an instrumental matter (freedom solely in the sense of freedom to go after what one wants) but as a basic desired good in itself.  This remains a highly contentious assumption.  Genuine libertarians are few.  The ease and casualness with which westerners give up freedom is sobering.  Most of Europe cheerfully ditched freedom for the promises of fascism in the early 20th century or communism in the later, and the United States has seen majorities opposed to the most basic and minimal civil liberties in the McCarthy and G. W. Bush eras.  Many other nations too have, at one time or another, given up all civil rights for even the shakiest and most dubious promise of “security,” or in exchange for state repression or extermination of unpopular minorities.  However, the need for freedom soon resurfaces.  European societies that experimented with abnegating it did not do well.  More recently, Asian and African societies that turn totalitarian have done even worse.  Their economies and societies declined and crashed (or, in some cases, such as China, are clearly about to do so).  Freedom seems to work as an instrumental good, even when devalued as an ultimate good.

 

Political Philosophy:  Hierarchies; Leaders

However, humans seem to have a fondness for social hierarchies.  This perception animates bureaucracies and Hobbesian tyrannies, but the political philosophy that has done most with this is a much more hopeful one:  Confucianism.  (Confucianism was originally a political philosophy, not a religion or general world-view.)  Confucianism builds from the natural hierarchic order of the family, in which older protect and rear younger members, and younger naturally defer to older.

Confucianism structures this in a way unacceptable to most modern westerners:  superiors can be condign, subordinates have few rights, and women are emphatically below men.  However, Confucianism lays out strict guidelines for the morality of the system:  no tyranny, no brutality, no bullying; mutual aid and respect throughout.  These rules are often broken, but at least people know the rules are there.  Rulebreakers get considerable negative sanction.

Confucianism explicitly assumes that humans want harmonious social relations more than anything else—certainly more than material possessions.  Rational pursuit of material interests is recognized in Confucianism as a human trait, but is regarded as a low one—ranging from a necessary but lower urge to a downright unqualified evil, depending on which Confucian philosopher one is reading.  Social harmony—interpersonal goodness, mutual support, warmth, trust, and caring—is not only considered far higher in value, but also far deeper in psychological grounding.  The highest ideal is ren, “humanity” or “humaneness.”  Originally this was simply the word for a human being, liberated to stand for the basic human moral qualities.  It was later qualified, in writing, but adding the character for “two.”  It is the way two humans should act toward each other.

Confucian societies advocate liberty to varying degrees.  Mencius, the greatest Confucian philosopher, championed some freedoms that might shock a western Enlightenment figure.  For instance, he insisted on the right of the people to rebel against and throw out an unjust ruler.  From Confucius through Mencius and onward, Confucians have advocated de facto freedom of religion, though sometimes insisting that the people pay at least lip service to imperial cults.  China had its religious repressions—largely under not-very-Confucian rulers—but they never approached the insane religious wars of the west.

Also, Confucianism insists strongly on the duty of superiors to care for and listen to subordinates.  Still, Confucian societies are not free in the western Enlightenment sense.  They tend to be one-party states (if not outright imperial regimes) and they typically censor the press and other media.

Like the Enlightenment-based western societies, the Confucian-based eastern ones do very well indeed in the modern world.  Compared to modern societies of Europe and North America, women and subordinates in Confucian realms are relatively less well off, but not always much worse off; certainly not as badly off as women in many “Christian” parts of the west.

Other political philosophies have taken the hierarchy-basic, society-basic view.  The dominant political forms of Islam in the early middle ages were of this sort.  The great legal schools of Sunni are particularly striking in this regard.  They are now largely in abeyance, having been replaced either by European-influenced systems or by viciously repressive pseudo-Islamic systems miscalled “fundamentalist” by westerners, but they worked very well for centuries.

So running with the human tendency toward hierarchy and control, but trying to structure it for good rather than for ill, seems to be a workable strategy.  Indeed, it has generally been brought back into Enlightenment-derived regimes, most of which have de facto hierarchies that are often difficult to square with ideals of equality.  The United States today exemplifies a problem:  de facto hierarchy and lack of equality before the law (or anywhere else) combined with a rhetoric of equality that allows the rich and powerful to dodge any sense of responsibility or accountability.  If a multibillionaire who owns a stateful of legislators is really just an ordinary guy doing his job in a free society, he owes nothing to his neighbors or to the system.  Even if he inherited every cent of his wealth and every link of his power, he may say that other people would be where he is if they weren’t lazy; their subordinate status is their own fault, and no concern of his.  This would not be a believable—let alone a morally tolerable—position in a Confucian or traditional-Islamic society.

People who emerge as “natural leaders” are an interesting subset of humanity.  They can be good or evil; Lincoln and Hitler were about equally successful.  Saints and demons seem equally well represented in church leadership over the ages.  What unites them is a set of personal characteristics:  apparent self-confidence (not always genuine), good networking and social skills, empathy, “instinctive” ability to organize, and some form of personal charm or charisma.  The good ones are generally warm, even-tempered, and generous.  The bad tend to be experts at uniting people against a common enemy, especially a weaker scapegoat.  Some are con men, who perfect an exaggerated show of warmth, confidence, positive regard, and suavity; the success of this tactic speaks well for human goodness, but not so well for human ability to detect phoniness.  Humans are famously good at “cheater detection,” but a dedicated con man can fool many or most.

 

Politics and Change

Cultures change.  The French and English did their best for centuries to exterminate each other, but now have been at peace since Napoleon’s fall.  The incredibly savage Norsemen became the peaceful, welfare-statist Scandinavians.  The violent Native American groups of the Upper Amazon were mercifully talked down by missionaries, though sporadic violence persists.

Chinese, Near Eastern, and many other dynasties rose and fell with almost clock-like regularity.  A strong conqueror would institute a regime that would grow gradually more corrupt and bureaucratized, and tax more and more highly an increasingly dense and impoverished populace.  Finally the people would rebel, and the cycle would start again (Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005; Ibn Khaldun 1957).  People in power would pile their blocks of domination higher and higher till the tower fell of its own weight, and everything lay scattered and equal again.

A critical tilt-point in past societies has been the point at which massive sectors of the population had all their social concerns vested in local systems rather than in the empire or nation.  Barbarians may have brought down the Roman Empire (Heather 2006), but it was torn already by rivalries, and had broken into two from internal strains long before the barbarians could really prevail.  The Chinese dynasties almost all collapsed because bandits and warlords got more and more out of control; this in turn was because the national government simply did not seem to be delivering adequate peace, security, and economic management.  America’s own brush with collapse in 1861-65 had similar roots:  the country could not survive “half slave, half free,” and the slave half considered its local system worth rebelling for.  At present, for about half the United States, fundamentalist religion and giant-corporation greed have more appeal than national unity or even national survival.  The survival of the country is not assured.

Bosses’ salaries in the 1940s and 1950s were about 10 times those of their workers.  Today we no longer have “bosses,” but “CEO’s,” and their salaries in the US average about 400 times their workers’ salaries.  In the infamous oil industry, the average CEO makes over 500 times as much as the average worker.

Concentration of wealth and power tends to lead to worse conflicts.  For many reasons, such concentration tends to get worse over time in any society, leading eventually to collapse of the system (Ibn Khaldun 1957; see Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005).  The direct cause of collapse may be rebellion or invasion, but such attacks succeed only when the system under attack is weak; in large, hierarchic states, such weakness comes from internal stress caused by widening gaps between powerful and powerless.  Even a simple rise in population forces more social control and fine-tuning, leading to more and more problems with power.  Such regimes corrupt every aspect of society, even language.  The language of freedom, for example, changes (Lakoff 2006): in the United States, “freedom” once meant individual opportunity to act on one’s conscience and in one’s self-interest.  Now–at least in political rhetoric—it frequently means the freedom of the strong to do what they want to the weak.

Constant jockeying over power and control, even more than economic and military issues, makes societies change with incredible speed.  The rise of Germany and Italy in the 19th century, the creation and collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the 20th, and the enormous moral and lifestyle changes in the United States and elsewhere in the late 20th are recent examples of a pattern that has gone on since time began.  Longer and slower changes (Braudel’s longue durée) take their own course, rather independent of such sudden rises and collapses.

 

Politics and Society

Attempts to fix the political mess by fixing individuals are hopelessly doomed.  They are unrealistic; people are social animals.  Also, the “emergent” nature of social life means that aggregating individual wills cannot produce a social system.  People are too variable.  “Saving the world one person at a time” is not only too slow (with seven billion people and counting), it neglects the need to integrate all those personal fixes into a single viable social system.  Each individual differs so much that if she “follows her bliss” or even “acts so that her every action could be universal law,” the world would be total chaos.  Do I really want it to be a universal law that everybody spends the day thinking and writing about political theory?  Or would I rather do it myself, while other people raise food, make wine, keep the power grid going, and develop new software?

Arts also fail.  As the inimitable Terry Gross commented on NPR when she learned that Stalin loved classical music and had quite good taste in it, “so much for the ennobling power of the arts.”  Individual spirituality and mysticism fail; they may, and often do, profoundly transform individuals for the better, but they cannot create a political system or even inform one.  People’s spiritualities are too different.

Individual transformation is neceessary in politics, and certainly in environmental politics, but it cannot be the whole story.  There has to be an institutional framework that can mobilize people, coordinate them, and get their individual transformations synchronized enough to have some social effect.  Human conformity is such that once there is a moral center to emulate, most will emulate it; but without some institutionalization of that center, no coordination can be expected.

What matters in politics, as Aristotle saw 2400 years ago, is creating a system..  Above face-to-face level, this can only be an organized polity (a state or at least a chiefdom) or a religion.  While religion has a far better record at creating and teaching good morality, organized religion—recall, here, that I include militantly atheistic religions like Stalinism and Maoism—has a notoriously appalling record at governing.

A key requirement here is setting up institutions that create a game in which people compete at being good.  Aristotle’s Athens was drifting away from that ideal—the old order in which the citizens (alas, only about 1/10 of the people) had to serve, and had to stand for election, in a city that valued performance.  Shabby performers won often enough to give us the word “demagogue.”   Still, Athenian democracy not only brought reasonably competent people to the fore, but also—more importantly—forced even the mediocre to do better.  By contrast, what Aristotle called a tyranny has all the rewards in the other direction; a tyrant does better the more bloody, cruel, merciless, and intimidating he is.

So competition needs to be structured such that evil people are forced to be reasonably good.  This may be called the “Nixon paradox,” from the success of the virtually sociopathic Richard Nixon at winding down the Vietnam war, recognizing China, and signing most of the major environmental-protection legislation of the last 70 years.   (It was on his watch that the Clean Air Bill, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act became law.)   No one has succeeded to find the perfect formula for this, but most now agree with Aristotle that democracy is a necessary precondition.  Accountability and transparency are also necessary.

America’s Founding Fathers were acutely aware of this, and devoted much attention to figuring out how to tweak institutions accordingly.  They succeeded reasonably well; the current drift toward sadistic dictatorship in the United States has come about only through continued open defiance of the Constitution.

Marx made more explicit another teaching the Founding Fathers knew:  developing such institutions is best done through working together in a revolution.  Revolutions are, however, dangerously bloody today, when any serious fighting escalates into horrific bombing and potentially even nuclear war.  Moreover, in environmental politics, revolutions are neither conceivable (people simply don’t care enough) nor desirable, since violence on any large scale is the worst environmental destroyer of them all.  We will have to work to transform or propagate existing institutions.  This involves working together long enough and hard enough to develop a core of people who have been able to synchronize their ideas and practices.

Some specific political ideas have worked particularly well, and without revolutions, at that.  Among these are civil and human rights; all measures for maintaining equality of opportunity; public education; and democratic management of renewable resources.  Public aesthetics have worked surprisingly well; we forget how important art museums, parks, and similar amenities are to society.  Labor unions have successfully won protection for workers in most advanced societies.

Creaky and inefficient, but at least functional, are most mail services, road networks, ports, and the medical care systems of virtually every government except that of the United States (and even the US has a functioning system for military veterans).

Conversely, in a world where competition is amoral and destructive, good people are forced to do evil.  One can easily think of all too many examples without looking hard.  At best, good people simply escape the game.  Classically, they go off to the mountains to become monks and hermits and mystics.  Today, they merely retire into a private lifestyle.

 

Bureaucrats in Power

Bureaucrats and middle-managers live in a world where almost all their job is dealing with personal conflicts and social problems rather than substantive issues.  They are usually more involved with soothing tempers and resolving staff fights than with saving the environment or reducing pollution.  Often, they do nothing but “manage” these micro-social ills.  This creates a mind-set in which nothing but trivial slights, disrespect, whining, and pettiness matter.  It is indeed a heroic or saintly person that can stand this for long without either leaving the job or joining in the pettiness.

Every society has to cope with the distribution of tasks and risks in the group (Durkheim 1933; Elster 1993).  Every society has to hold itself together. Powers-that-be inevitably take advantage of these issues.  The ordinary people in any group feel a need to conform, if only to ensure social acceptance.  Anyone in control of the media can manipulate beliefs and attitudes accordingly.  There always comes a point, however, at which people refuse to take the line any more.  It would be wonderful if we social scientists could predict that point.  Unfortunately, it remains the most profoundly mysterious of all social facts.

Key here is realizing that there are two kinds of hierarchies, or at least two ends of a continuum.  Some hierarchies are designed to do a job that requires centralized decision-making.  Such hierarchies exist in well-run companies and even armies.  Other hierarchies exist only to keep some people on top and others down.  The autocratic Old Regimes of Europe and Asia were typical.  In these hierarchies, power serves no one’s interest except the elites’, and the elites therefore must use brutality and treachery to keep the system going.  (The government does provide security, but only against other equally evil rival governments.)  Companies constantly harm themselves by mixing the two; all textbooks and how-to books agree that a well-run company will nurture employees and see the whole firm as a mutually-supportive partnership, but a vast number of companies and organizations suffer or fail because the bosses think otherwise.  Typically, they feel that they could not maintain power without terrorizing the workers.  This is sometimes correct, but only when the bosses in question have little else to offer.

The patriarchal family is a similar case, and no doubt the original one, the model for the others.  (How many languages use “elder”—signior, seigneur, and so on—to mean “lord”?)  In a well-run family, adults have power and children have less, but the family maximizes everyone’s benefits.  In too many families (especially, perhaps, today, in spite of local successes of women’s movements), patriarchal authority feeds on itself, and women and children suffer.  Puritanical religion grows from this, and more generally an ideology in which sin and immorality must be controlled by brutal repression of the weak.  “Structural violence”—devastation of peoples’ lives simply by the operation of a hierarchic system, with its laws and bureaucracies—is an ultimate result.

Also, hierarchies with definite, stable lines of power act differently from rat-fights in which people try to claw their way to the top.  The former may become almost beneficial, with reliable patron-client relationships based on mutual expectations.  The latter are always destructive.  Obviously, they minimize feelings of control of life.  No one on the bottom of a rat-fight hierarchy can feel safe or secure.  Inevitably, the vast majority of people in such a social system are on the bottom, or near it.  Slavery, too, is hierarchy gone mad; it corrupts owners as well as slaves, as de Tocqueville pointed out long ago (Elster 1993; de Tocqueville was probably depending, indirectly, on such accounts as Stedman 1988 [orig. 18th C], which makes the point from personal observation).

The heads of “bad” hierarchies are not free from insecurity; quite the reverse.  “Uneasy is the head that wears the crown,” as Shakespeare knew, and the current leadership of the United States is even less well rested than Shakespeare’s kings.

One might expect the “good” hierarchies to flourish in upbeat times, the “bad” periods of decline.  This may be true; no one seems to have studied it.  If this is indeed the case, a downbound time becomes self-feeding.  As things get worse, people lose hope, get scared, and fall more and more into power hierarchies.

More clear is the relationship of “bad” hierarchies to regions of chronic violence, especially zones that have long been on the borders of great civilizations.  Much of the Middle East falls into this category.  Obviously, chronic violence over centuries is going to produce a need for permanent organization for defense.  Able-bodied males simply have to run life with a strong hand.  Also, paranoia becomes a fact of life.

Obviously, the more confusing the goals of the organization are, the easier it is for this to happen.  First, without clear and simple goals, evaluation is more difficult.  Second, the more different things the organization does, the more need there is for administrators who simply coordinate and people-work—i.e., who simply “administer.”  This is one of the causes of the nightmarish managerial revolution that has crippled (and sometimes nearly destroyed) many areas of enterprise in recent decades.

Since ancient Greece, almost every commentator on politics has recognized that top-down systems of this sort crush enterprise and progress.  They do it partly by open repression, but more by keeping labor docile.  This makes exploitation pay better than development.  (“Exploitation” here means coercively redistributing a fixed or declining social product from workers to bosses; “development” means increasing social product per capita.  Exploitation is a negative-sum game, development positive-sum.)  Egalitarian systems, by contrast, tend to maximize individual feelings of self-efficacy, and to allow workers to unite to better their condition.  This makes labor more expensive, forcing the bosses to use higher technology—substituting expensive progress for even more expensive workers.  The high technology, in turn, creates a demand for innovation, and displaced workers find jobs developing even higher tech.  Theoretically, this can go on indefinitely.  It does necessarily not lead to a resource crunch, since higher technology can be made more efficient than lower.

In a well-run voluntary organization, the system goals are clear enough, and good enough, that people can be evaluated by how much they foster those, rather than by what “good administrators” they are.  Recourse and peer review are substantial and immediate, and measurable standards exist.  Every administration textbook says this, as well as describing the necessity of full transparency for it, but the problems of implementing it are such that few organizations even approximate the ideal.

 

Politics: Conclusions

This exercise in political theory is adequate to send two messages.

First, basic assumptions about human nature are the foundations of political theory.  A political system is only as good as its human science.

Second, assumptions that work are those that give pride of place to human social needs, especially desire for social harmony and social order, but also for freedom and opportunity.  Systems based on assumptions that people are generically good or bad fail dismally.

One may suggest that the serious need in politics today is to look much more seriously at basic human nature.

 

 

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The Environment and China’s Future

Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

The Environment and China’s Future

  1. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology

University of California, Riverside

 

 

ROUGH DRAFT; comments and corrections urgently desired!

 

This paper is a very modest effort at bringing together quotes and facts from leading scientists on the environmental problems of modern China.  Interpretation and commentary is kept to a minimum, mostly obvious conclusions based narrowly on the facts presented.  I am hoping that some readers will be able to use the information here to help in reaching more significant conclusions.

 

Portions of this paper were given as presentations at the California Sociological Association annual meetings, 2012 and 2014, Riverside, CA

 

Abstract

After 5000 years of trying to live in some degree of “harmony” (he or heping) with the environment, China under Mao turned toward “struggling against nature” (in Mao Zedong’s phrase).  The result of this conflict is, inevitably, that both people and nature lose.  China now suffers massive deforestation, pollution, soil erosion, desertification, urban sprawl onto prime farmland, and building of huge uneconomic projects that destroy the environment (statistics supplied in this paper).  This in turn has led to ill health among the citizenry.  Now, China has turned to other countries, as it seeks resources to make up for those it has lost.

 

“When you’re thirsty it’s too late to dig a well.”

Chinese proverb

 

1

Many commentators have seen China’s economic rise as a promise of triumph, with China perhaps being the world leader or “hegemonic power” of the 21st century.  This, however, is impossible, unless China greatly changes its environmental policies.  Failing that, shortages of food, water, breathable air, and sheer space for construction, among other things, will limit China’s ability to dominate the world, economically or politically.

Communist China’s economic success is due to a number of things.  Some of these are commendable, at least in general principles if not always in detail.  China now has mass education, scientific research, generally available health care, a vastly improved infrastructure, and law and order.

However, some other features of China’s economy have caught the eyes of foreign observers.  Many American observers ascribe China’s success to four things.  First is keeping wages low and preventing workers from grassroots organizing.  Second is massive government support for primary production.  Third is an autocratic government that suppresses dissent and free speech.  Fourth is the concern of the present paper:  the relative lack of meaningful environmental regulations or protection.  China has decided that environmental protection is in conflict with economic growth.

In this, Communist China has reversed China’s 5000-year history of trying to live and work with the environment.  Imperial China often failed in the execution, but at least had a reasonably consistent belief that a well-managed environment is necessary to the survival of agriculture and civilization.  The Chinese Communist under Mao Zedong reversed this policy, and adopted the Marxist-Leninist idea of “struggle against nature”—a favorite phrase of Mao’s.  Marx shared the 19th-century European belief in progress through destroying nature and substituting an industrial landscape.  Marx himself was quite moderate about this, and had some sense of a need for environmental management (Foster 2000), but Lenin and Stalin opted for heavy industrialization at all costs.

In China, after 1948, things went well for about ten years.  It did not bring in extreme collectivization measures until 1958.  Instead, it began ambitious and stunningly successful measures of flood control, erosion prevention, reforestation, and public relief.  Capital was freed by expropriating landlords.  Workers were more efficiently mobilized.  Cooperatives, successful locally even before communism, spread and flourished.  Food production soared.

Most successful of all in saving the environment has been the policies on birth.  A two-child policy changed to one child only for most Han Chinese; minorities and some rural populations get better dispensations.  China still has 22% of the world’s population on only 7% of the land.

However, Communist China has been harsher on the environment than was dynastic China (on dynastic management, see Anderson 2014; Elvin 2004, but Elvin considerably too harsh on the traditional system; Marks 1998, 2009, 2012; Menzies 1994).  The Communists substituted a mentality of “struggling against nature” for the older tradition of going with nature.  This increased production in the short run, but major policy errors—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, “taking grain as the key link,” and others—led to massive famines.

The Great Leap Forward in 1958-1961 caused what was almost certainly the greatest famine in all Chinese history.  A history of this event has finally come forth:  Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter  (2010; see also Smil 2004; Dikötter’s work has been criticized, largely for maintaining it was deliberate genocide; it was more a matter of mistaken policy; see Eberlein 2012.  However, the death toll is what matters here).  Further famines during the Great Cultural Revolution (due more to the confusion of that time) continued to erode Communist successes.

Li (2007:359) cites an estimate of 23 million dead in the 1958-61 famine, but her figures for the areas she knows are relatively higher, and so are mine (very incomplete but revealing) from interviews with refugees in Hong Kong.  I would estimate at least twice her figure, and many other estimates are higher (Dikötter 2010).  After long and detailed review of the evidence, Li breaks her usual objective stance to say that “the Mao famine…stands alone…an ‘error’ of an individual human being.  Some Qing emperors were exemplary leaders,…others were lacking in ability….  But none could be said to have actually caused a famine to occur….  The spirit of the country was high…. The government was fully functional….  For the Mao famine, there is no record, no acknowledgment, no acceptance of …responsibility” (Li 2007:364).  The Qing officials did their best and made reports on any failures.  Not only Mao, but even the post-Mao governments of China, have never done that.  Secrecy was and is maintained.  The story remains untold, the dead not only unacknowledged in public but uncounted.

In retrospect, we can see Mao’s policies as, in some ways, typical of the world of the 1950s.  It was a unique period, characterized everywhere by a rush to privilege the artificial over the natural.  This was the age when processed food was better than unprocessed, bottle feeding better than breastfeeding, episiotomies and anaesthetics and Caesarian sections better than natural childbirth, leafblowers better than lighter and faster brooms, and any and all “labor-saving” devices better than the old ways even when the latter actually involved less effort and expense.  Research on biocontrol would have saved the world from pesticides.  Often, as in China, the results were irreversible.  As Rachel Carson predicted in Silent Spring (1962), pesticides have exterminated the biocontrol agents—the birds, bugs and bacteria that used to control pests.  In China, active and deliberate extermination of small birds, believed to eat grain (wrongly in all cases except for one or two species), was added to that mix.  Bees are so completely exterminated that apple and pear farmers are pollinating flowers by hand (Goulson 2012).

Policy was substantially changed after Mao Zedong’s passing, leading to several environmental reforms, and to dramatic production increases.  These, however, came at increasing environmental cost.  Massive pollution by extreme overuse of fertilizers and insecticides (up to 10 times the recommended rates) has accompanied massive loss of farmland to urbanization, erosion, desertification, and pollution.

The result of China’s policies has been deforestation, desertification, pollution, and waste of resources.  Many books document this (Abe and Nickum 2009; Day 2005; Economy 2005; He 1991; Marks 2012; Shapiro 2001; Smil 1984, 2004; Tilt 2009; Watts 2010; for thorough and general recent reviews of environmental-economic prospects for China, see Song and Woo 2008).  Richard Smith has recently written on why “China’s environmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse than “normal” capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries” (Smith 2015:1).  And this in spite of Smith’s acceptance of China’s economic growth figures, which, as will appear below, are far from realistic.

Even more serious for the future is the fact that much of the damage is essentially irreversible.  Lester Brown (1995), Richard Edmonds (1998), Robert Marks (2012), Vaclav Smil (1984, 2004), and Judith Shapiro (2001) have been particularly sharp and insightful recorders.  Smil (2004) criticizes Brown’s negativity, but can only agree with the facts.  Smil differs from Brown only in the projections.  Brown adopts a worst-case scenario in which China keeps going downhill.  Smil, on the basis of hindsight, sees much more hope.  Indeed, after the massive floods in 1998 (see below), China’s leadership recognized that something had to be done.  Thus, not only Smil, but other observers of the Chinese environmental scene (Day 2005; Economy 2005), saw considerable hope for the future, as of the early 2000’s.  A major report on the environment by the World Bank (2007) noted in enormous detail the horrific levels of air and water pollution.  They estimated that damage to human health and lifespan and to structures and crops by air pollution cost the country 6.5% of GDP, while water pollution caused damage to human health that cost 1.9%, with crop damage and other damage on top of that.  They also noted that many major changes for the better had occurred; China was using energy resources more efficiently, cleaning the air, supplying better water.  Since then, however, the situation has widely deteriorated.

 

2

Unfortunately, since these books appeared, the rate of urbanization and ruin of farmland and the levels of pollution have increased, and the government seems to have backed away from its sensible policies (cf. Hyde and Xu 2009), though reforestation continues and is notably successful in some places.  My observations and my students’ make it clear that Smil is too optimistic.  Brown was closer to the truth.  Things are not going well.

Yonglong Lu et al. have summarized the problems in a recent article in Science Advances (2015).  They find that more and more intensive food production, to improve the quality of food for China’s increasing population, is on a collision course with environmental survival (let alone sustainability).  Area of lakes seriously eutrophied by fertilizer has gone from 135 sq km in 1967 to 8700 in 2007 and still more now.  Nitrogen in the air (and precipitating from it) has almost tripled since 1980.  Air pollution of all sorts is reducing crop yields.  Use of pesticides is twice the world average.  More than 40% of China’s land is affected by erosion (which has been going on for millennia, but much more rapidly since 1958).  They make the obvious broad and general recommendations, but offer no help with the specific measures needed in order to make the government enact them.  So far, it has made hopeful but inadequate moves in that direction.

China’s usable farmland is down to 120 million ha, an enormous decline from the peak in the 1960s.  China had 7% of the world’s arable land; this would drop it to 5-6%.  The country lost more than 15% of its agricultural land from 1957 to 1990 (Smil 2004:124)—probably quite a lot more—and it has lost at least as much since.  Reported losses from 1997 to 2008 were 12.31 million hectares (Moyo 2012), and the truth is certainly higher.  As recently as the early 1990s, China had 140-145 million ha or more (Smil 2004:128), and that was after enormous prior declines; the greatest extent of China’s agriculture came in the 1960s, when over 160 million ha may have been cultivated.  (“May have been” because China’s official figures in earlier decades were often too low [see Smil 2004:125-127], and satellite imagery, now used to correct them, was not adequately available in the 1960s.)  Taking 160 million ha as base, and using a figure from 2007 of 122 million ha now (Shi 2010:4), we have around a 25% decline.  The steady loss of farmland and of local rights is working increasing hardship on the poor and middle class (Fenby 2014; Zhao 2013).

The decline is currently at 860,000 ha a year from urbanization alone (Larson 2013b), not counting the even greater amount of land lost to erosion.  Seto et al (2012) point out that China may triple or quadruple its urbanized land area by 2030, from about 80,525 square km in 2000 to perhaps 300,000 in 2030.  This would require spending $100 billion a year simply to keep up with infrastructure.  At this rate, China’s last farm will disappear around 2200.  (At least this is better than California; before the housing crash of 2008, California was urbanizing at a rate that would have eliminated its last farm around 2050.)  Meanwhile, global warming is seriously impacting crops; rice pollen dies when the temperature passes 37 degrees C, which is now happening in southern China (Larson 2013b).

Agricultural policies are devastating.  China’s farmers are not making money; rural incomes are stagnating, and more and more people are moving to the city (Johnson 2014 gives a recent update).  Rents are high, profits low, and government still constrains and controls what can be produced.  Grain is particularly unprofitable.  Banks are understandably less than willing to advance capital for farming.  Recent attempts to free up farmers’ land use decisions have so far had little effect, but may improve the situation (Johnson 2014).

Three leading Chinese academics have recently published in Nature, the world’s leading scientific journal, a scathing indictment of urbanization policy.  One can do no better than quote the highlights of their article:  “In the past decade, the urban built-up land area in China has grown by 78.5%….  About half of urban growth has been at the expense of arable land, raising concerns about food security.  To curb the loss of agricultural land, the central government has introduced strict regulations….  These policies have had…adverse consequences.  In a desperate search for non-agricultural land to develop, cities have reclaimed wetlands and lakes and converted pristine mountains.  At the same time, developed land is not being used efficiently—attention quickly shifts ot the next development project….  Illegal discharge of industrial waste-water, which contains heavy metals and other pollutants, around cities is blamed by some for more than 400 ‘cancer villages,’ in which cancer diagnoses and deaths are sometimes 20-30 times higher than the national average….” (Bai et al. 2014:158-159; on cancer villages see Smith 2015).  The authors note that Wuhan has lost 70% of its lake area.  They also deal in detail with the problems of rural-urban migrants, forced urbanization, and policy already inadequate  and made more so by corruption.  They outline a number of remedies, some being tried, some visionary; the process of urbanization could be controlled (though not reversed), but it would take a political reversal that seems most unlikely at this time.

A measure of China’s land use planning, and of its method of executing those plans, is provided by the summary expulsion of less affluent people from their land to make way for development that profits local businesspeople and government officials (the latter often through corruption; Bai et al. 2014).  This is often a measure of desperation; local governments are overextended and poorly funded, and must do this if they are to meet operating costs, according to Jonathan Fenby (2014:65-66).  Another reason for driving people off the land is the dream of “large-scale, modernized farming” (Bai et al. 2014:158)—in other words, the industrial farming that is proving disastrous worldwide; as in its drive to provide private cars, China is copying western foolishness instead of building on its own sound experience.  Summary expulsion from land and houses, without appropriate compensation, has affected an estimated 43% of villages and cities.  Gangs of thugs are sent to beat residents who object.  A revealing case involved a gang of seven attacked the home of Shen Jianzhang in a small village; unfortunately for them, he was a gongfu master, and he and his son quickly reduced the seven to a crumpled mass on the floor.  The result, though, was that he had to flee the town and his son was jailed (Hannon 2012).  His wife had videoed the episode, however, and the video has now been seen all over China, inspiring some concerted action.

Poor economic and ecological conditions in the rural areas are driving people, especially men, to work in the cities—often illegally in terms of China’s strict controls on residence (Bai et al. 2014 give a good up-to-date account of the magnitude of the problem).  A result is that 58 million children were effectively fatherless in 2010, and 40 million women and 47 million aging parents were also deserted.  This exodus has also led to poorer land care; some land has gone out of cultivation, while composting is reduced and overuse of chemicals increases (Yang 2013).

Brown pointed out that China’s aggressive campaign to modernize transportation is sacrificing vast areas of farmland to roads, parking lots, airports, and the like.  I found his claims and figures hard to believe until I visited China in 1999; in a short visit, I personally observed tens of thousands of acres of prime rice land being converted to these uses.  The situation has gotten much worse since.  On the other hand, transportation has moved rapidly toward fast rail, subway, good buses, and other more environmentally friendly means.  Yet the drive to increase the number of cars is continuing.  Farmland paved over for cars is out of production for a very long time.

The remainder is acidifying, and the more heavily fertilized parts are degrading seriously because of this (Guo et al. 2010).  The BBC News website (in a posting on 23 April 2007) related that China’s farmland is so seriously polluted that more than 10% is out of production or nearly so.  Pollution took out of production some 307,000 ha of arable land in the first 10 months of 2006 alone.  A Chinese governmental estimate, from 2013, says that some 3.3 million hectares (8 million acres) of farmland are too polluted to use (Atkin 2013).  The Chinese government wants to keep at least 120 million hectares in farmland; it has 135 million as of 2013, but only 120 million are usable, because of desertification and erosion as well as pollution.  (For the record, China had 80 million under cultivation in 1600 [Parker 2013:619]).

More recent figures indicate that, as of early 2014, “6.1% of China’s soil was polluted, including 19.4% of farmlnd, 10.0% of forest land, 10.4% of grassland, and 11.4% of unused land” (Chen et al. 2014)  82% of these lands contaned heavy metals and other non-organic, long-lasting toxics.  “China consumes nearly one-third of the world’s fertiloizer, and the pesticide usage per unit area is 2.5 times the world average” (Chen et al. 2014).  Meanwhile, over 5000 urban brownfields are adding to the problem (Yang et al. 2014).

However, it was excessive fertilizing, polluted water, heavy metals, and solid wastes that did most of the damage to China’s farmland acreage.  Heavy metals are especially bad, since they persist essentially forever; they caused losses of $2.6 billion in 2006.  China’s government now admits, on the basis of surveys between 2005 and 2009, that 16.1% of China’s soil, including 19.4% of China’s arable land is contaminated, largely with heavy metals including the deadly lead and cadmium (BBC News 2014b).  Hunan has had particular problems with this, due to illegal releases from a lead smelter, and there have been deaths (Liu 2014).  But even ordinary nitrogen, which has increased from 9 teragrams overall to 56 from 1910 to 2010, is getting out of hand and creating huge problems of eutrophication and environmental pollution (Cui et al. 2013).  “Approximately 8.3% of the country’s…arable land…is contaminated buy unbridled mining, trash dumping, and long-term use of pesticides” (Liu et al. 2013).  By 2014, the percentage of farmland seriously contaminated was up to 20%, and 40% of farmland was degraded by pollution, erosion, and desertification (Smith 2015:16).

 

THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL ON WATER HAS NOW BEEN ELECTRONICALLY PUBLISHED IN REVISED FORM:

2015  China’s Water Problems.  Nottingham University, China Policy Institute, Policy Paper Series, issue 6.  http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cpi/chinaanalysis/policy-papers/index.aspx.  7 pp.

IF USING THIS MATERIAL, PLEASE CITE TO THAT SOURCE.

China has faced local droughts and floods throughout history, and was a leader in irrigated agriculture from early imperial times.  The Communist government since 1949 has made enormous strides in making water available, in developing irrigation and hydropower, and in regulating and rationalizing water use.  However, today, China faces a full-scale water crisis, excellently surveyed in a major report by Debra Tan and associates (2015), who examine policy choices ahead. The history of water in China has also been told by David Pietz in The Yellow River (2015).

China has only 6% of the world’s fresh water (Pietz 2015:10), for 7% of the world’s area and 20% of the world’s population.  Agriculture uses 65% of water in China, as opposed to 59% worldwide (and 80% in comparably water-short California).

Most of China is exceedingly dry.  This makes vast areas of Xinjiang and Tibet uninhabitable, but of more immediate concern is the rapid depletion of water in 34% of China’s cropland (Tan et al. 2015:16).  As elsewhere, agriculture offers the highest potential for saving, but China’s world of small to tiny farms makes saving difficult.  Water transfers from the wet southeast to the north are ongoing, but will soon reach a limit.

The energy/power tradeoff is serious.  Desalinating seawater requires enormous power inputs, recycling and reclamation only somewhat less.  The more water is conserved, the more energy is used (Tan et al. 2015:30-32; their report explores this contradiction).  Obviously, efficiency is needed, but can go only so far.  Meanwhile, coal and fracking for gas and oil continue to be live options. Shale-gas extraction by fracking is now contaminating more of the groundwater.  Wind, solar, and even hydroelectric power are better for water resources than fossil fuels when both water use and pollution are taken into account (Tan et al. 50-51).  Coal remains basic, but mining and processing it consumes much water, and burning it causes much pollution (Tan et al.2015).  It cannot be China’s long-range future.  Some alternatives, such as biofuel, use even more water.  China must convert toward wind and solar, and is slowly doing so.  China is now the world’s largest maker of solar panels (though this industry too pollutes the water; Smith 2015).

Science magazine reports: “Fully 90% of China’s shallow groundwater is polluted…and an alarming 37% is so foul that it cannot be treated for use as drinking water….  The toll is significant:  Every year, an estimated 190 million Chinese fall ill and 60,000 die because of water pollution.  According to the World Bank, such illnesses cost the government $23 billion a year, or 1% of China’s gross domestic product” (Qiu 2011b; see also Smith 2015; Tan 2015).  Some 60% of groundwater is severely polluted; surface waters are comparably problematic, but can be renewed naturally, whereas groundwater pollution is impossible to remove and will remain for centuries or millennia (Smith 2015:15).

Ma Jun, a Chinese water expert, says that “the 300-odd rivers that drain the North China Plain ‘are open sewers if they are not completely dry’” (cited Smith 2015:14).

Polluted groundwater used to irrigate crops is causing the crops to become toxic.  Some “36% of rice grown in Hunan province…was found to have cadmium levels above those specified by China’s food standards regulation” (Yang et al. 2013); Hunan is one of the rice bowls of China, and cadmium causes horrible pathologies.  Food contamination, from polluted water or deliberate adulteration, is now rampant (Smith 2015 provides summaries).

The Yellow River no longer reaches the sea (Moyo 2012:41; Smith 2015), and tens of millions of people along its former lower course suffer desperate shortages of water.  The Yangtze is also drying slowly in its lower course, and is so compromised that its signature animal, the white-flag dolphin, has become extinct (Smith 2015).  The Yangtze sturgeon is down to perhaps 100 as of 2014, and they are not reproducing (BBC News 2014a).  This should have more symbolic significance than it seems to have.  The sturgeon was traditionally believed—by many, at least—to be a dragon rather than a fish, or at least a fish-dragon, and the barbels around its mouth may be the original for the tendrils around the dragon’s mouth in Chinese artistic representations.  The other inspiration for the dragon, the Yangtze alligator, is also on the verge of disappearing in the wild.  So China’s signature animal, in the form of the two real animals that inspired it, may be gone soon—a terrible symbol of China’s suicidal environmental mismanagement.

China’s lowland lakes, such as the famous Dongting and Poyang Lakes, are rapidly filling up with sediment, and their water is too polluted to be usable.  Attempts to clean up groundwater are more notable for the pollution they document than for their success (Qiu 2011b).  Science further reports:  “Two-thirds of China’s 669 cities have water shortages, more than 49% of its rivers are severely polluted, 80% of its lakes suffer from eutrophication, and about 300 million rural residents lack access to safe drinking water….”; waste and outdated technology increase water use while conferring no benefits.  “More than 46,000 of the 87,000 dams and reservoirs built since the 1950s have surpassed their life spans, or will within 10 years”; they are silting up or wearing out.  “Many water projects…were rushed without following the national law of environmental impact assessments and have caused enormous environmental and socioeconomic impacts” (Liu and Yang 2012).

Even the projects that did pass environmental review are turning out to have costs higher than their benefits.  Jiao Li (2013) reports that the Chinese are finally waking up to the problem, recognizing groundwater contamination.  Factories in Weifang and elsewhere had been discharging pollutant wastes into groundwater.

Zhiwei Wang, of Tonji University in Shanghai, writes in Science:  “In 2011, China generated 65.21 billion tons of wastewater”; this may reach 784 billion tons by 2015.  China has ambitious plans to increase treatment, now rudimentary in rural areas and far from perfect in cities.  Amazing progress has been made since 1949, but keeping up with economic growth is difficult.  Goals will be hard to meet (Wang 2012).

Jonathan Fenby reports further tragedies:  “A 2012 report by the Land Ministry found that of 4,929 goundwater monitoring sites across the country, 41 per cent had extremely poor water quality…. The resulting annual human toll is put at 60,000 premature deaths” (Fenby 2014:87).  And this is the official figure.  The truth is almost surely worse.

A Science headline summarizes another problem:  “China’s Lakes of Pig Manure Spawn Antibiotic Resistance” (Larson 2015).  Half the antibiotics in China go into pigs, to make them grow faster, and the antibiotics get into the water.  At least one antibiotic producer has been caught dumping excess production into water, also.  Raw sewage, untreated, is standardly released into China’s lakes and rivers, and bacteria are being selected for antibiotic resistance accordingly.

A vast project to transfer water from the wet south to the dry north has come on stream (literally), but many cities are not buying into it; the water is, of course, extremely polluted, it costs an appreciable amount, and cities would have to change their systems.  Thus they continue to overpump groundwater (Chen 2015).

Excellent plans for improving water quality are coming out of China, e.g. Tao Tao and Kunliun Xin’s sustainable plan (Tao and Xin 2014), but these plans are more significant for the disasters they reveal than for the proposals they advance, because under the current political regime there is no chance of the plans being implemented.  Tao and Xin report that “nearly half of 634 Chinese rivers, lakes and reservoirs tested in 2011 failed to meet drinking standards,” already rather minimal.  The cities consumed 44 billion tonnes of water that year.  Their plan involves treating water, but also continuing to advocate that households boil water for human consumption (Tao and Xin 2014:5328).

In water as in other things, China has gone for short-term benefits that occasion later but far greater costs.  The huge water transfer plan to provision Beijing with water by bringing it from the south has been criticized on that basis.  Critics point out that hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced to make room for the canals and pipelines, but Beijing’s water problem is still not solved, partly because no one is addressing the demand problem—there is little interest in efficiency of use, and very little interest (understandably) in raising the low price of water (Agence France-Presse and Stephen Chen 2014).  Britt Crowe-Miller, water expert at Portland State University, comments that dealing with supply alone is inadequate, and that “China’s current development model is very short-sighted” (ibid.).  Water is now being put ahead of energy by China’s planners (Tan et al. 2015), since the crisis is more critical and immediate.

The costs of environmental ruin are now beginning to come out.  China thus displays an acute form of a worldwide problem:  the benefits of environmental wreckage have largely been reaped, and often squandered, by the super-rich, while the costs are now coming due, and will be paid by the entire human race—especially the poor.

Not quite in China, but showing problems China is beginning to feel, is the sinking of the Mekong River delta in Vietnam (Schmidt 2015).  This, the world’s third largest delta (55,000 square km), is rapidly sinking because of groundwater withdrawal for aquaculture.  Water is pumped from the ground for shrimp and fish, then drained out through the river channels.  The delta, averaging 2 m above sea level, could sink a meter by 2050.  Meanwhile, world sea levels are rising.  Nothing seems to be done about this, and the cost of fixing it (e.g. poldering) would be enormous.  China is already facing sinking land in the north, and will no doubt soon face sinking deltas.

 

Dams present another concern.  As Brian Tilt (2012, 2014) points out, dams generate many benefits.  They produce a great deal of power that would otherwise be generated by coal; regulate flooding; and regularize supply of irrigation water.  They also help interior transportation—easily navigable reservoirs cover what once were rapids.  Whether they are cost-effective in the long term is the real issue.

However, they come with costs.  Dai Qing (1998), Deirdre Chetham (2002), Richard Stone (2010), Peter Gleick (2012), and others have documented the disasters caused by big dams, which, in China as elsewhere, are often planned with inadequate attention to cost/benefit ratios.  Landslides, siltation, damage to downstream fisheries, loss of villages to rising waters, and many other problems have occurred.  Protesters have been ruthlessly suppressed, though dam-protest movements are building in spite of this (Forney 2005).  Coggins (2003) has recorded the problems and trials of conservation in one mountain village.  Ideally, dams provide power, thus preventing the use of coal, and store water.  In fact, worldwide, poorly planned dams always have poor cost/benefit ratios and rarely pay for themselves (William Partridge, pers. comm.; Scudder 2005).

Meanwhile, China has refused to enter into international agreements on water and river management, partly because they are upstream of several countries and want the full benefits of that position (Gleick 2012).  Being downstream in China itself is bad enough; being downstream from China is looking disastrous.  China is, for instance, aiding with dams on the lower Mekong, which threaten to wipe out that river’s ecology and devastate Cambodia’s agriculture.  Similar plans for the Irrawaddy, Salween, and Bhramaputra are frightening Burma and India. China is also funding big and ecologically irresponsible dams in Africa and elsewhere (Gleick 2012).

China’s big dams are largely for hydropower.  Even here, however, it appears that poor planning has limited the value of development.  David Stanway, reporting for Reuters (Stanway 2015), finds that “dozens” of dams on the Dadu River of Sichuan were built without planning for coordinating and transmitting power.  Overall, China has the potential to produce 2.2 trillion KwH of hydroelectricity, but produces only one trillion that actually reaches consumers.  Leakage, poor grid coordination, waste of water due to lack of grid capacity, and other problems lead to wastage greater than the combined total electric power use of Germany and France (Stanway 2015).  China promises to address the overall issue, but doing so will require massive development of the national grid (Smith 2015).

Other considerations, including the rights and livelihoods of the less affluent, receive little attention in planning dams.  Brutal political repression faces those who protest.  Huge dams, climaxing in the Three Gorges Dam (Dai 1997; Yan and Potter 2009), have led to massive displacement of people, ruin of downstream fisheries and other water benefits, and geological instability—yet siltation is filling these dams much faster than expected, and they will be useless in a few decades.  On recent visits to China I have seen up to half the reservoirs in some areas ruined by silt infill.  The rapid siltation, in turn, is the result of deforestation and poor farming practices, both of which are the results of specific Communist policies that reversed previous good care.

The Three Gorges Dam was so obviously a disaster for the Yangtze River’s endemic fish that a reserve was declared upstream, a 500-km stretch of river (350 km on the Yangtze, the rest on main tributaries).  However, as is typical of Communist conservation, this was deceptive.  The reserve lasted only as long as it took the engineers to plan and commence new dams.  It is now giving way to more and more high dams.  These will turn the Yangtze and its main tributaries to slack water—until the dams silt up.

Meanwhile, pollution, low and unreliable water levels, and loss of valuable fisheries are the lot of the Yangtze downstream from Three Gorges (Fenby 2014: 87; Qiu 2012).  In 2011 “China’s cabinet, the State Council, admitted that the dam is plagued by pollution, silt accumulation and ecologtical deterioration nearby, and has affected irrigation, water supply and shipping in downstream regions” (Nature 487:144, news item “Three Gorges Dam Reaches Full Power”).  Cultural damage is occurring in Tibet, where whole communities are displaced.  More dangerous still is the potential for devastating the economies of downriver countries, particularly the Mekong-dependent nations of Laos and Cambodia, as well as southern Vietnam.

China’s obsession with huge, uneconomical or hard-to-sustain dams (Schmitt and Tilt 2012; Tilt 2014) is an extreme form of a world pathology (Scudder 2005; see Quarternary International, vol. 304, passim, 2013, for many articles on China’s water management).  China now has or is planning over 25,000 big dams, more than the rest of the world now has; even North America, dam-crazed for decades and now forced to take out many old ones, has only 8,000 (Tilt 2012, 2014).  Moreover, the damage is of a really tragic nature—ruining the poor, destroying prime farmland, exterminating countless species, displacing whole indigenous groups—while the benefits are banal: more power and more irrigation control—invariably benefiting rich businessmen more than the poor majority.

Even more irrational than megadam projects are the artificial ornamental and recreational lakes now appearing everywhere in China.  They are being created even in the deserts of Ningxia and the drought-afflicted basins of Shaanxi (Liu and He 2012).  They get their water from the major rivers, including the Yellow River, whose flow is now so reduced that it does not even come close to reaching the sea.  Local governments, unaccountable to the people in general but under constant pressure to deliver quick economic benefits, seem largely responsible.  The increasing irrationality of maximizing short-term benefits at the expense of medium-term and long-term ones increases apace.

A final threat is a plan for a seawall all along the coast.  This would probably do little in the long run to deal with sea level rises or storms, but would destroy or devastate coastal wetlands, which are critically important for all the east Siberian shorebirds and many other bird species, some acutely endangered (such as the Spoon-billed Sandpiper).  The plans are proceeding with little attention to ecology or enviornmental concerns (Ma et al. 2014).

Water could be most easily saved by giving up irrigation in areas better used for pasture, such as Inner Mongolia, and in urban drylands such as around Beijing, where groundwater is depleting fast.  Inner Mongolia loses much of its water in the form of agricultural products sent to the rest of China (see also Dalin et al. 2015).

China’s centralized, authoritarian leadership could quickly implement reforms.  Excellent proposals to conserve water, reduce pollution, and control water use have been made.  There are, however, major structural barriers, especially the rush for production at all costs, and the entrenched and often corrupt bureaucracy (Anderson 2014; Smith 2015).  China’s imports of beef, soybeans, and similar products from other countries increase its water use by 30%–the costs of that water being borne by the exporters (Dalin et al. 2015).

END OF WATER SECTION PUBLISHED BY NOTTINGHAM

China’s most recent fad in earth moving is flattening mountains to create more level land for urbanization.  Of course, one cannot level a high rocky mountain; the ones leveled appear to be largely the steep loess hills of interior north China (see Li et al. 2014).  But leveling they are, and Peiyue Li and coauthors—professors of environmental science in China—warn: “Until we know more about the consequences, we urge governments to seek scientific advice and prceed with caution” (Li et al. 2014:31).

The Three Gorges Dam produced a 500-mile-long reservoir into which garbage and sewage are pouring from surrounding cities; the reservoir is not only filling in rapidly, but it is filling in with toxic or dangerous substances (see e.g. Smith 2015:15).

Dams, water abuse, and other environmental problems have led people to attempt to flee the land to better land or to the city.  This was met with state violence:  “… in the 1970s and 1980s, several thousands of the Miao [minority] moved spontaneously from northeast Yunnan and northwest Guizhou, and reclaimed wasteland and took up farming in the mountainous areas of Anning City near Kunming….  In response, their newly-built houses were burned down and they were sent by force back to their original villages….” (Cang 2009:80-81).

But then, the state, realizing the need, completely reversed itself and began a policy of forced migration that took millions of people from their homes and scattered them far away (Cang 2009 and other chapters in Abe and Nickum 2009).  Often, these were minority-group people, and they were settled among Han.  Anyone aware of China’s recent policies, which have not infrequently been virulently anti-minority, will suspect that the plan was to destroy these minority groups’ cultures and political bases rather than to help them economically.  China’s minority policies have differed considerably from place to place; the much-publicized situation in Tibet and Xinjiang is rather balanced by the more benign policies in Guangxi, Yunnan, Sichuan and elsewhere (see e.g. Harrell 2001; Harrell ed., 1995, 2001).  Still, China is, at best, committed to acculturating its minorities to Han culture.  At worst, it simply displaces or represses minorities to make way for Han Chinese.

Development projects are now firmly entrenched at the provincial level, requiring centralized government to fix—but the centralization is a problem also.  At present, provincial and local officials are in various forms of collaboration with developers, using construction and mass transit as plums and moneymakers.  Overuse of power in all these projects leads to constant power failures, and use of yet more coal, though solar is building fast (Dylan Kirk, personal communication, email of Sept. 29, 2013).  An extremely thorough and detailed assessment of China’s megaprojects and construction booms is provided by Richard Smith (2015).

Local authorities are short of cash—and want more for themselves—with results that can be hard on farmland and environment:  “local authorities are short of cash to meet spoending obligations; to fill the gap, they requisition farm land, classify it for development and sell it to developers” (Fenby 2014:57).  This is one of the major reasons that China’s agricultural land is shrinking fast.

China’s air pollution, the worst in the world, is causing enormous damage to crops and forests not only in China itself but in Korea, Japan, Russia, and elsewhere.  The World Health Organization estimates that some 700,000 people die from air pollution every year.  The World Bank estimated that in 2009 China lost $100 billion from ill health (Pierson 2013).  The truth may be worse; the Harvard School of Public Health estimates that 83 million Chinese will die of lung problems in the next 25 years (from 2008; “Chinese Lung Disease ‘To Kill 83m’”; BBC News Online, Oct. 4, 2008; Fagin 2008; see also Smith 2015:8).  Worse estimates are reported by Fenby:   “outdoor air pollution is estimated to contributre to 1.2 million premature deaths a year…. Cigarette smoking…kills 2,000 people a day”; diesel trucks and coal plants add to the mix (Fenby 2014:86).  An eight-year-old girl recently contracted lung cancer—the youngest in China’s history to do so—due to air pollution (Kessler 2014).

Air pollution, including massive amounts of pesticides and polycyclic hydrocarbons, may be responsible for some of the very high level of birth defects, including spina bifida, in China.  Christina Larson (2013a) reports that there are 140 babies with neural tube defects for every 10,000 births in Shanxi, as opposed to 7.5 in the United States.  Several studies have shown correlations of birth defects and high pollution levels. On the other hand, as Clayton Dube of the UCLA Political Science faculty points out (posting to Chinapol listserve, Jan. 7, 2015), neural tube defects are typically due to folic acid deficiency in the early months of pregnancy, so one can suspect that the high defect rates are due to poor nutrition and to smoking (which interferes with folic acid metabolism) and other such problems.

India has recently learned that air pollution is reducing grain production by up to 50% locally and by substantial amounts nationally (Ghorayshi 2014).  Black carbon (soot) and ozone are the principal causes.  China is much more polluted than India, and the diminution of grain yield can only be imagined.

Cigarette smoking is the government’s fault, to a significant extent, because the Chinese government owns the tobacco company (the blessings of Communism) and thus has done everything possible to promote smoking, including circulating dishonest claims about the health effects of smoking and deliberately suppressing the truth on the matter.

Current estimates indicate that over 300,000,000 people are sick from air pollution.  This is more than the entire population of the United States.  Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, “an incurable respiratory disorder that can cause severe breathing difficulties,” is now extremely common, affecting “roughly 8% [of] people who are 40 or older”; it is caused by smoking and air pollution (Hughes 2012:818).  One recalls that the Chinese government owns tobacco companies and sells cigarettes, and thus has a vested interest in maximizing smoking.  Women rarely smoke but most men do, and the women are affected by secondhand smoke.

In 2014, one village finally won a legal victory: a toxic waste disposal firm was forced to pay some compensation to some 400 villagers for drenching their environment in toxic fumes.  It was too late for many who had died of cancer.  This is one of approximately 245 admitted “cancer villages,” in which toxic wastes and pollutants have caused skyrocketing rates of cancer.  As noted above, outside estimates run over 400 cancer villages.  Their existence was admitted only in 2013 (Phillips 2014).  Manufacturing, including textiles (Smith 2015:5-6), produces ever more substances of ever more dangerous nature, and these are very often simply dumped into water and air.

At the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013, cold stagnant air led to the buildup of pollution over China.  Some 33 cities recorded hazardous readings, with Beijing’s air being extremely hazardous for days.  Enormous and unprecedented health costs were registered (Pierson 2013).  Dai Qing noted that this was “dangerous” for civil unrest as well as for health; people might protest environmental damage more than other ills.  The pollution followed years of replacing air quality experts with bureaucrats unwilling to criticize government in the relevant bureaus.  On the other hand, 75 cities were reporting pollution levels, and the trend is toward better reporting and publicity (Demick 2013).  The initial pollutants are bad enough, but in the air they may chemically change, creating new and different dangers; such secondary aerosols are common in Chinese haze (Huang et al. 2014).

Life expectancy in China is 75 years (as of 2012; Google; the US is 79, India 66).  But in North China, is 5.5 years less (and in Beijing perhaps 16 years less) than in the south, because of Mao’s policy to have coal-fired boilers heating interiors everywhere.  He denied this to the south.  The 500 million north Chinese lost, collectively, 2.5 billion years (Chen et al. 2013).  This study showed that particulate pollution from coal is much more dangerous than was thought previously.  One wonders at the damage to other life-forms.  Many, probably most, animals are more susceptible to air pollution than humans are.  On the other hand, much or most of the pollution was indoors.

Even more frightening is the permanent brain damage caused by pollution.  Hundreds of millions of people are now affected by heavy metals, plastic-making chemicals, and air pollutants that are known to damage the brains of growing embryos and children.  This is giving China a legacy that will last; some of the pollutants actually affect not only the children, but even their future children.

As of 2006, about 36% of anthropogenic sulfur dioxide, 27% of nitrogen oxides, 22% of carbon monoxide, and 17% of black carbon in China’s air pollution was the result of production for export.  The United States, as China’s major buyer, was responsible for 21% of China’s air pollution (across categories: 21% of each category above).  Much of this blew right across the Pacific, contributing, for example, 12-24% of the sulfur dioxide pollution in the United States (Lin et al. 2014).  Proportions have not changed much since.  The United States thus pays some of the price for allowing firms to dodge environmental restrictions by exporting production to countries without rules.

Qiang Wang (2014), a Chinese expert on air quality, notes the seriousness of the situation, advocates a “total cap on emissions,” and quickly converting to nuclear and natural gas for power generation as bridges until solar and other really clean power can come on stream.  China is now by far the main injector of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and most of this comes from coal burning, with damage to health as a by-product.

Solid wastes, many of them toxic, are also increasing:  “China has surpassed the US to become the world’s largest trash producer, churning out more than 260 million tons a year” (Makinen 2012).  Where China will put all this is a real problem.  Richard Smith (2015) discusses at length the coming of the West’s throw-away economy to China,  Copying especially the United States—largely because American firms exported manufacturing to China and led the way—China has taken up the use-once-only mentality with a vengeance; this is a country that, within living memory (including mine), recycled and reused everything possible, even shredding and composting worn-out ropes and sandals.  Today, Richard Smith cynically summarizes the situation as “cooking the planet to produce junk no one needs” (Smith 2015:8).

Serious malnutrition has declined dramatically; it was, of course, rampant in pre-Communist China and again after 1958.  Stunting from malnutrition still affected 33.1% of Chinese in 1990, but was down to 9.9% by 2010.  However, “nearly 6.5 million children under age 5 in China are stunted” (Stone 2012).  Of course this is a very small percentage of Chinese children, but it is a lot of people.

Even government scientists admit serious problems.  In 2011 the minister for the environment, Zhou Shengxian, said that “the depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the deterioration of the environment have become serious bottlenecks constraining economic and social development” (Moyo 2012:27).  Xu Jun of the Ministry of Science and Technology says that China’s “ecological situation is terrible” (Qiu 2011a).  Bojie Fu, a Chinese scientist writing in Science (2008), admits:  “Over the past 20 years, the total cost from environmental pollution and ecological deterioration is estimated to have been 7 to 20% of the annual gross domestic product….”  This means that China’s vaunted 10% growth per year is indeed neutralized, as Brown feared.  Moreover, “40% of urban wastewater was discharged into neighborhood water bodies without treatment.  In 2007, water quality at half of the 197 monitored rivers of China was rated as heavily polluted…” as were 60% of lakes.  Air quality was equally bad, and “excess erosion from wind and water has deteriorated about 37.1% of China’s total land mass.”  Recall that this is the government’s official statistics; the truth is certainly worse, but we shall probably never know how much worse.

Charles Parton noted in an email on the Chinapol listserv, Dec. 12, 2014, that the Chinese news agency Caijing had reported that the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area is down to 286 cubic metres of water per person, ¼ of the FAO figure for water shortage.  Some places go without water for months.  He also noted that he had asked three prominent economists, recently, about how they took account of environmental costs in their studies of China, and they said they had not considered the question.  I have had the same experience, with David Harvey among others.

China now has passed the United States to become the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, thus contributing mightily to global warming, which itself is drying up west China and producing more typhoons in the south.  Yet China not only refuses to do much (the vaunted “clean energy” China produces is actually a drop in their bucket; see Moyo 2012), but joins the United States in actively working against international agreements to curb greenhouse gas emissions.  China’s energy production and transmission is extremely inefficient (Smith 2015), and the Chinese government does not seriously address improving emissions to control global warming (see Song and Woo for reviews).  China is, however, moving rapidly into clean energy; it is by far the biggest producer of solar panels, and has moved into wind energy and other cleaner sources.  All these have their own problems, but they are certainly preferable to coal, the major current source of China’s energy.  China’s current problem in this area is a nice kind of problem: they have moved so fast into clean energy that they are suffering from overcapacity and overproduction (Nature, 4 Oct. 2012).  This may yet brighten China’s environmental record, in future.

China once had 14% of the world’s grassland, but half of that is now lost to farming and mining and 90% of the rest is severely degraded by overuse and erosion (Qiu 2011a).  Inner Mongolia suffered dreadfully, as Mongol land-sparing patterns of herding were replaced by environmentally disastrous farming and overgrazing (Sneath 1998, on Russia vs. Mongolia; Normile 2007 and Williams 1996a, 1996b, 2000 on China’s ruin of Inner Mongolia).  Superb management by traditional methods was replaced by complete disaster, leading to massive desertification and economic ruin (Abe and Nickum 2009; Williams 1996a, 1996b, 2000, 2002).  Desertification there is being dealt with in some areas by mass poisoning of rodents and other small animals, a measure so ecologically insane that it is certain to backfire (Hao Xin 2008).

This was not the only area where plowing fragile desert grasslands led to total desertification.

China enters the 21st century almost completely deforested, with rather little reforestation.  Reforestation began in the 1950s, but has had a very up-and-down career—mostly down.  Extreme programs of grain-growing and timber-cutting in the 1960s and 1970s led to massive deforestation.  Meanwhile, planted trees died of neglect.

However, as of the early 21st century, the most intensively managed and long-reforested parts of China actually have appreciable tree cover—at least in the south, where forests flourish much more than in the north.  The areas north of Hong Kong, which I could see from my research areas in the 1960s and 1970s, were utterly barren as of 1966.  They were showing a faint green haze of pathetically spindly saplings by 1975.  They are now well forested with pines, except where housing has replaced all natural cover.  Some other areas of the south have done well too (personal observation, eked out by careful study of satellite photographs).  Unfortunately, in the north, the deep interior, and many other areas, reforestation has not done well.  However, there is still hope; the Great Wall, which when I saw it in 1978 was surrounded by a moonscape, is now surrounded by a healthy woodland, and it has been interesting to follow the progress of this growth through photographs and satellite imagery.

China has some 62 million ha of forest, about 4% of the world’s forests—by some measure the most forested area of any country in the world (Peng et all. 2014; I do not believe the last claim—Russia and Brazil must be well ahead).  Almost all this forest is seriously degraded.  Devastating policies of deforestation caused massive erosion and land ruin in much of China from 1958 to 1980.  “Before 1980, China long promoted a grain-focused agricultural policy called ‘taking grain as the key link,’ which produced large areas of deforestation in the name of opening up uncultivated ‘wasteland.’  For example…felling all trees was executed in Nujiang Prefecture, which destroyed a lot of forest reserves and finally led to…disastrous mud-rock flows….”  (Cang 2009:81).  Forests have collapsed, and China’s search for wood has devastated southeast Asia.

Deforestation increased dramatically in the 20th century, especially after 1950, and reforestation campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s failed, for various reasons.  So have many since (Marks 2012), though many have worked well (personal observation).   Incalculable damage has been done, though forests are left and reforestation is better now (see Richardson 1990 for more on forests).  One result has been massive soil erosion, filling reservoirs and swamping fields with mud.  In 1998, disastrous floods swept central and south China, and the Chinese government finally put an end to forest clearing, whether for logging or agriculture.  This has not proved totally enforceable, but has stopped the worst of deforestation.

In this and many other ways, China has made great strides in environmental management, as acknowledged by e.g. Vaclav Smil, who did the best job of documenting China’s environmental destruction in the 1980s (Smil 1984).  Smil has applauded the partial turnaround (Smil 2000, 2004).  Plant conservation has recently been improved (Huang et al. 2002; my personal observation, especially in 1999, confirms this), but may now be going downhill again.  Observation on the ground in 2013 in Guangdong showed a healthy regrowth of trees and forest wherever people allowed it, but a rampant spread of urbanization that destroyed forests and farms alike.  Satellite photographs confirm both impressions on a large scale.  Forces of conservation and destruction are both actively at work; conservation in China has a long and complex history which needs unpacking.

Mara Hvistendahl (2012) reports that China has now turned many forests over to local communities or individuals, in a belated, rather desperate attempt to counteract the disadvantages of Communism—summed up by one villager as “What was everyone’s was really no one’s” (Hvistendahl 2012:27).  Unfortunately, the problems of private ownership immediately surfaced.  These are the same problems that smallholder forest owners face in the United States, such as incentives to deforest rapidly for ready cash, to replace mixed forest with commercial monocrop, to sell out to predatory big interests because of high offers or because of threats and bullying.  Both public and private forests have suffered from the worst curse of forestry worldwide: the temptation to replace mixed, sustainably-harvested stands with quick-growing commercial monocrops such as pine, eucalyptus, and rubber (Hvistendahl 2012, and my own observations).

Other privatization schemes have suffered similarly.  Yunnan’s forests, virgin till recently because carefully protected by local people, have given way to monocrop rubber plantations (Qiu 2009; Yin 2001, 2009; Ziegler et al. 2009).  This was first pushed by the government; the government is now trying to slow the pace, but the local people have been converted, and continue to replace forest with rubber (Ayoe Wang, 2008 and personal communication of ongoing research; see also Abe and Nickum 2009), to the detriment of wildlife, water supply, biodiversity, tourism, and sustainability.  Thus, China’s claims of enormous reforestation, for example, are disingenuous; most of the “reforestation” consists of rubber and eucalyptus plantations and other environmentally devastating commercial planting, rather than actual regrowth or replacement of real working forests that could supply timber, forest products, or environmental services (Xu 2011; Xu is a leading forester in China, so this can hardly be dismissed as outsider grousing).

China once had 10% of the world’s wetlands, but China’s wetlands are now also degraded and mostly now gone.  China has also lost 73% of its mangroves and 80% of its coral reefs as of 2011 (Qiu 2011a).

Biodiversity has been devastated by overhunting, overfishing, medicine collecting, and, above all, habitat destruction (see e.g. Harris 2008; Marks 2012).  Overfishing and pollution have decimated or completely eliminated most wild fish resources.  The zone of death in the seas is spreading rapidly from the China coasts throughout the west Pacific region (see e.g. Fabinyi 2012; Fabinyi et al. 2012).  Overfishing for the Chinese and Japanese market is simply wiping out the oceans.  Even sea cucumbers, one of the least vulnerable of marine organisms, are now disappearing fast (Schenkman 2011).  Sea cucumbers are being wiped out even in Canadian and Alaskan waters, to feed the Chinese demand.

China’s wonderful heritage of rare and unique crop varieties is severely threatened.  One story from my own research is sufficient.  Hong Kong used to produce salt-tolerant rice that was extremely flavorful.  But it did not yield high quantities, and Hong Kong urbanized, so the rice—and other salt-tolerant rices—are gone, to the permanent and serious loss of the world in this age of rising sea levels and salination of cropland.

One of the stranger threats to biodiversity was the anti-pest campaign under Mao Zedong in the middle 1950s.  This led to some elimination of rats and flies—probably not effective—but it led to mass extermination of small birds, held to be “sparrows” and to eat vast quantities of grain.  In 1958, the Chinese press reported that 1,650,000,000 sparrows were killed (Taylor 2005:117, citing the Chinese Medical Journal).  The grain consumption by these birds is inconsequential, but their insect consumption is phenomenal.  The result of this campaign was massive outbreaks of insect pests.  The campaign was halted, but China’s small bird populations were permanently decimated.  Between this campaign and habitat destruction, as well as hunting for food by desperate people, China’s bird life is almost nonexistent today except in remote reserves.

Wildlife conservation is increasingly troubled by poaching, inadequacy of reserves, inadequate enforcement of laws in reserves, excessive tourist development in some of them, and other typical problems of crowded lands with shaky governmental legitimacy (Harris 2008).

China has 2538 nature reserves covering 15% of the country, as of 2011, but this extremely impressive total is less than it appears; many are “paper parks,” there on paper to impress outsiders, but unenforced and unenforceable locally.  Most of these reserves are in fact subject to extraction, and many are suffering from unregulated mass tourism.  As many as ten million tourists a year now visit Lijiang, and other sites have comparable masses (Huang 2012).  The government often cannot resist the Yosemite Valley model of putting a flashy, revenue-generating tourist center on fragile habitat that was supposed to be protected.  China now has 400 endangered species, and many more species have probably gone extinct without anyone noting it (Marks 2012).

At the same time, pests from around the world are swarming to take advantage of monocrop cultivation and of destruction of natural predators.  Familiar plagues such as the whitefly Bemisia tabaci (a notorious vector of plant diseases) and the pine bark beetle have reached China and are causing devastation there (Qiu 2013a).  Once, China’s healthy ecosystem could absorb such creatures, with hosts of birds and other insectivores destroying them.  No longer.

Moreover, China is exporting its mismanagement.   Rabinowitz (1998) documents the virtually complete extermination of wildlife in Laos by hunting for the Chinese market (I have personally observed the striking emptiness of Laotian forests).  Most of them go for medicine; Chinese folk medicine uses almost everything.  Food, however, is also an end product of overhunting.  Smil (2004) points out the devastation of wildlife, noting that a huge percentage of China’s animals are endangered, yet are still sold in restaurants—26% of animals sold in restaurants are from endangered species (Smil 2004:108).  Ten tons of snake meat are sold daily in Shenzhen, a thousand tons annually in Shanghai (Smil 2004:109).  Edible birds’ nests, once sustainably harvested, are now disappearing as fast as thieves and overharvesters can take them (Kong et al. 1990).  In the “bad” old days, China tried and Laos succeeded in sustainable management of animals, using religious taboos and conscious government and local policies.  All this “feudal superstition” was abolished by the Communists in both countries, leading to unqualified onslaught (in spite of some recent, and mostly toothless, laws).

Meanwhile, China is buying or leasing land throughout the tropics, and appropriating the product.  Africa is a major target; Africa’s starving millions now have to compete with relatively well-to-do Chinese for the products of African agriculture (see e.g. Moyo 2012).  In Australia, eucalypts have been replaced by wheat for China, which has led to massive salinization and loss of millions of acres of land (personal research and observation, southwest Australia; simply looking at the area on Google’s satellite photographs is revealing).

Brazil’s rainforest and cerrado forest are the latest casualties; they are being destroyed to produce soybeans and other foods for the Chinese market.  Legal protection for these forests was greatly relaxed in 2012 under Chinese pressure. China is already buying enough food to impact world markets.  Lester Brown (1995) was right: China was destroying its agricultural potential and would soon be forced to raid the rest of the world for imports.  This has now begun to have the effect of raising world food prices, as Brown feared it would.  Even the United States is facing squeeze on agriculture, and consequent high prices, because of direct and indirect effects of the China market.

This is not a problem confined to food.  China’s deforestation is giving it an appetite for trees and other imports that destroy forests, grasslands, and fisheries worldwide (Aldhous 2005; Beech 2005; Lu and Diamond 2005, 2008; Moyo 2012; Smith 2015).  China is now the world’s biggest importer of forest products, and has bought massively from other countries; one result has been increases in unsustainable logging in most of southeast Asia and in some other tropical areas (Smith 2015:4).  Elephant and rhinoceros poaching in Africa, sea cucumber overharvests in Maine, and illegal rosewood extraction in Madagascar all occur for the Chinese market (not entirely within China; the ethnic Chinese market in southeast Asia is large).

Meanwhile, China is increasingly stressing its neighbors by taking water from cross-border rivers.  Kazakhstan is particularly endangered, since essentially all the water in the eastern part of the country flows out of China.  China is taking much of this and refuses even to discuss fair deals; its position is that it has the right to the water and need not consider Kazakhstan (Stone 2012).  This could lead to catastrophic agricultural failure and the near-drying of Lake Balkhash.  Kazakhstan has reason to worry, since in USSR days water diversion almost completely dried up the Aral Sea, leading to an environmental catastrophe; Kazakhstan has been desperately trying, with fair success, to restore its part of the Aral, but Uzbekistan—which controls most of it—remains intransigent (see Anderson 2010 for this and much other relevant data).

China became a modest exporter of oil by 1993, but is now a major importer, in spite of considerable reserves and production of its own, and it is moving toward fracking in the homeland (Smith 2015:4).  It also imports iron ore and many other commodities.

China is consuming more animal protein, and using many of the imported soybeans to feed the animals (Du Bois et al 2008).  Meat consumption soared from 8 million tons in 1978 to 71 million in 2012 (Larson 2013b).  Smil (2004), and all other recent observers, are struck by the rapid increase in obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, and other food-related health problems in China. China will have to limit its consumption of red meat, fats and oils, and sugars—either voluntarily or through morbidity and death.  The picture is not pretty.  At least the Communist leadership does not have “face” invested in this, as they do in their suicidal big-dam and automobile-development projects (on which see Smith 2015, in extenso).  One can be cautiously optimistic about the chances for limiting “junk food” consumption.

Still, the new China is too successful at providing bulk calories, too unsuccessful at providing vitamins and minerals.  One-fourth of Chinese are obese (BBC News, July 8, 2008), and the proportion is rapidly rising.  This is due to more bulk calories and less exercise, but I suspect a further factor, one that certainly operates in the west:  unsatisfied hunger due to insufficient nutrients.  “Man does not live by bread alone,” and sugar, oil and white flour do not satisfy, even in excessive amounts.  Not surprisingly, rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease are rising rapidly.  Diabetes, often blamed on sugar, is actually exacerbated more by polished rice than by sucrose; polished rice eaters have up to 25% higher risk than eaters of more varied foods of lower glycemic index.  Again, an unbalanced diet short of vitamins and minerals is also a factor.  Eating more meat, fat, and sugar, and less vegetables, bean curd, and unprocessed grain, has led to the rise in rates of obesity and diabetes.  Longevity has increased with modern medicine, but heart attacks are commoner than simple life extension can explain.

Moreover, the Chinese government has turned away from its spectacular early successes in medical care, which more than doubled life expectancy from the 1940s to the 1980s.  Health spending as a part of total government spending declined “from 28% to 14% between 1981 and 1993, allocation to the rural ‘cooperative medical-insurance system’ decreased from 20% to 2%,” while rampant corruption and price-gouging have denied care to the poor (Dong, Hoven and Rosenfeld 2005:573-574).  Public health care is declining seriously in rural areas (Arif Dirlik, talk of May 26, 2005, UCR), threatening the future.  Given the epidemics of SARS and AIDS as well as the drastic decline in healthy eating, China is in trouble.  Problems for the future include not only obesity and diabetes (Normile 2010), but specific deficiencies, such as anemia (chronic in China for millennia) and folic acid deficiency (an emergent danger with the decline in eating vegetables and whole grains).  Folic acid deficiency is probably the major cause of birth defects round the world, and is probably increasing in China.  (The double “probably” reflects the dismal state of knowledge of this insidious problem.)

Through the 1970s, all Chinese had free health care.  By 2000, only 15% of the population had medical insurance, and the rest had to pay full cost; “the World Health Organization ranked China 144th out of 191 national health care systems” (Hvistendahl 2013c).

Since then, things have turned around.  Life expectancy continues to increase (so far), and Chinese now live almost as long as Westerners.  In Taiwan, and parts of south China, they live as long as do the inhabitants of well-off European nations.  Food and medical care continue to be reasonably adequate, and the scale of differences from two generations ago are almost unparalleled in world history.  China plans to triple its medical spending.  Better hospitals are being built.  Mental health care is improving after earlier neglect.  But the rapid growth of heart and circulatory diseases, and other consequences of modernization and accompanying changes, has caught the system in a serious squeeze (Hvistendahl 2013b).

Far more dangerous is China’s extremely shaky control over epidemics.  The SARS outbreak and subsequent flu epidemics were wake-up calls, heeded but not adequately heeded.  China faces a situation in which an extremely dense, homogeneous population is packed into increasingly close quarters, with pigs, ducks, chickens, and other disease-vectoring animals numbering in the hundreds of millions very close to major cities.  The corruption and poor supervision endemic China’s bureaucracy have proved hard to fight in making China more ready for epidemics.  If the future involves economic and social decline, or more health damage from pollution, the chances of major epidemics will greatly increase.

Life satisfaction in China has been stagnant for decades, in spite of the huge (alleged) increases in economic well-being (Easterlin et al. 2013).  This stagnation tracks social, economic, and medical insecurity, declining real standards of living, and paper growth that is more growth in pollution than in welfare.  The stagnation or even reduction in living standards of the hundreds of millions of poor, in particular, leads to widespread unsatisfaction.

China’s economy is also shaky, in spite of growth, and Timothy Beardsley (2013) has contexted the environmental problem within a study of China’s troubled economic future.  However, the World Bank, in a report of 2015, provides a rosy picture of China’s economy and its future without mentioning the environment at all.  Its own dismal report of 2007 has been forgotten.

In short, through “modernization,” China has made great strides in food production.  However, this has often involved adopting poor ideas from the rest of the world, from excessive use of chemicals to feeding meat animals on grain that humans could eat.  Flooding, biodiversity loss, water shortages, and paving of cropland have yet to show their full effects; they will be more deadly in future (see also Marks 2012).  Unless something truly revolutionary is done, China will face in 20 years a food, pollution, and environment crisis unprecedented in the history of humanity.  This will have global effects (Brown 1995; Liu and Diamond 2005, 2008).

 

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There are signs of improvement.  In 2014, China passed an environmental law, taking effect at the beginning of 2015.  It protects whistle-blowers, penalizes falsifying data, makes local governments more accountable, and tries to harmonize enterprise and economic growth with the environment.

More important still, in 2015 China announced details of plans to cut air pollution, especially greenhouse gas emissions.  They hope to cut these 15% by 2020 and as much as 60-65% by 2030 (BBC online, June 30, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33317451).  These are incredibly ambitious goals, but could be achieved by massive shifts to renewable power sources.  China’s authoritarian government has the power to accomplish this, which may put it in a better position than many democracies.

However, Bo Zhang of China’s environmental agency and Cong Cao of Nottingham University note four problems with the 2014 law (Zhang and Cao 2015).  It can be “trumped” by other laws, for example those relating to forests and grasslands.  It is hampered by unclear and overlapping jurisdictions and enforcement agencies.  It “fails to acknowledge citizens’ basic right to an environment fit for life” (p. 434), unlike similar laws in most countries.  And it does not address adequately the conflicts of interest and problems with enforcement that bedevil China’s laws in general.  Similar problems could hamstring the 2015 policies.

In regard to farmland, Chinese scientists have made major strides in winning more grain from less land; at present, if all their findings were put in practice (sadly unlikely), China could feed itself again from its shrunken land base (Chen et al. 2014).  Best of all, as of September 2014, China has just set up markets for carbon release and otherwise gotten really serious about reducing its carbon footprint—currently by far the largest in the world (West 2014).  And Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, reports that the Ministry of Agriculture has set a limit of “1.56 billion mu (about 104 million ha) of arable land” to be saved as basic farmland, from 1.8 billion mu as agriculturally designated land.  Also, water efficiency and agricultural waste disposal are targeted for improvement (Xinhua, May 27, http%3a%2f%2fnews.xinhuanet.com%2fenglish%2f2015-05%2f27%2fc_134275861.htm).

At the same time, China is finally moving on the air pollution front.  “China has set up more than 130 local environmental courts; this summer, the Supreme Court estalished an Environmental and Resources Tribunal” and also recognized about 300 nongovernmental organizations that can sue polluters (Makinen 2014b:6).  Much more stringent regulation and enforcement is promised.  On the other hand, local developers are still hard to control; big state-owned and state-sponsored firms are still too big to have much to fear; and independent protest is still done at risk of life and freedom.

Air pollution could be substantially reduced by setting regional emissions targets, increasing transparency of monitoring and reporting, expanding carbon trading, and bringing minority and remote areas up to speed, among other things (Liu et al. 2015).  There is some serious effort in these directions, but far from enough.  The usual problems, especially corruption and local-level foot-dragging, have surfaced.  At least the direction is clear, and China’s top-down, autocratic governance could rapidly turn things aro0und if the government had the will.

Conservation, especially reforestation, is on the government’s program now, and awareness of the devastating effects of pollution is now quite high.  Forest product use is efficient, a really bright spot (Ajani 2011).  Reforestation of many lands ravaged in Mao’s day has led to cooling of the lands reforested, and since this is fast-growing forest it is blotting up greenhouse gases at a dramatic rate (Peng et al. 2014).  This is very, very good news for the planet.  Cutting of old-growth forests is generally prohibited, with fluctuating effectiveness, since 1998.  Steep slopes are returned to natural cover.  Forest management is encouraged, and households and villages that return land to forests are subsidized (Xu 2014), though information from friends with experience in relevant areas suggests that this program is often inadequate.

China has taken a strong lead in some aspects of clean energy, notably the mass production of solar panels, but also water, wind, and other sources (most recent update at this writing is Mathews and Tan 2014), and is using more and more of the solar panels originally designed mostly for export.  China even has a desalination plant powered by wind under contruction; world desalination costs are down to 1 cent per 5 gallons, and this should lower it further (Bird 2014).  China has in 2014-15 leveled off on coal-burning, and is trying to move away from the coal-intensive power generation that has made it the leading country in release of greenhouse gases.

The call for better environmental management now comes from Chinese at all levels, but very often from expatriate Chinese, since protest in China itself is suppressed; thus a particularly direct recent call for action comes from a Chinese scientist now working in Norway (Yang 2014).

Public transportation is another bright spot (Edwin Schmitt, pers. comm.)  In degraded grasslands, experiments with market-based but environmentally sensitive bottom-up planning led to great improvement and some grassland recovery (Kemp et al. 2013).  Tian Shi’s solid review of the problems and prospects of “sustainable ecological agriculture in China” (2010) begins with a long treatise on what that agriculture is, then moves into a consideration of China’s problems and prospects, including a case study of one fairly successful experiment.  Tian Shi is well aware of the Marxist ideology of refusing to acknowledge ecological problems (see esp. p. 95), but recognizes that there is some hope.

Individuals are doing great things, ranging from criticizing the current paradigms to doing direct hands-on work with local people.  A recent article (Zheng and Wang 2014) chronicles the lifetime of work by Shixiong Cao to help local people restore what they can of the damage done by megaprojects and other policy-driven destruction.  China has a relatively high number of self-sacrificing, responsible citizens, and they have their effect.

Methods of appeal matter too.  Bing Xue oif China’s Institute of Applied Ecology found that Chinese officials would not give high priority to far-future problems from global climate change, but that when he spoke of immediate problems with economic development, and the opportunities for economic growth in climate-change-related areas, they listened seriously.  They also were sensible to the immediate advantages of reducing pollution (Xue 2015).

A recent documentary, “Under the Dome,” made by Ms. Chai Jing, is 103 minutes long yet had almost 100 million viewings in its first few days.  It reportedly tells many of the stories above, and focuses espeically on PetroChina (I have not seen it).  It apparently has government approval, or at least acceptance, indicating that the problem is now recognized at high levels.  It attracted an enormous amount of attention in China, from public to highest levels, partly because of the intensely personal quality of the film (Yawei Liu, email posting to Chinapol listserv, March 1, 2015).

Unfortunately, they are subject to beatings, torture, jail, and “disappearance” if they cut too close to local party interests.  Repression of political dissent has now spread to repression of all grassroots civic organizations, even those advocating things like tolerance for HIV and Hepatitis B sufferers.  Not all civic organizations have been shut down, but rapid increase of arbitrary, unpredictable, and widely targeted arrests and closures have intimidated the social network, and made the country very much less free than it was even a year or two ago (Jacobs and Buckley 2015).

Moreover, faced with overwhelming popular challenge, polluters can simply move to “greener” pastures.  They have recently been moving to the savagely repressed province of Xinjiang, where local dissent is met with deadly force, and to Inner Mongolia (Miao et al. 2015).  They thus escape highly-placed, well-to-do opponents and find themselves in regions where jobs are sought at any cost and where protest is dangerous.

China has finally made some strides toward changing its policies, but progress is incremental and slow.  Minor improvements to China’s Environmental Protection Law were recommended by the National People’s Congress in 2011, adopted (watered down) in 2012, and rejected in 2013 (He et al. 2013).  A plan for lowering carbon release into the air, and saving energy, has been developed, and China is working seriously on this issue (Liu et al. 2013).  Meanwhile the Communist Party adopted genuinely radical (for them) new stance:  adding to their constitution the idea of “ecological civilization,” meaning a civilization based on “man-nature, production-consumption harmony” (He et al. 2013).  In early 2014, the government renewed their commitment to cleaning the air, dedicated resources to this, and took a no-nonsense fast-track position with allowable levels set (Qiu 2014b).

A group from the Chinese Academy of Science Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences recommended that the law reaffirm commitment to environmental protection, provide “a strong legal basis…for independent strategic environmental assessment and performance-based auditing,” improve law enforcement, and “shift from regulation to governance,” meaning that the government should work with NGO’s, local groups, local polities, and education and voluntary agreements (He et al. 2013).  These are all worthy goals, and the United States could well learn from this assessment, but the fact that an outside group needs to call for them speaks volumes about what the Communist Party is not considering.

Unfortunately, at current rates of change, China will collapse before much can be done.  Repairing ecological damage is a slow process.  Economic lock-ins and rampant corruption are holding back implementation of even the gradualist plans devised so far.

One major reason for China’s failure is the extremely rapid growth of income inequality.

As Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou report:  “By now, China’s income inequality not only surpasses that of the United States by a large margin but also ranks among the highest in the world, especially among countries with comparable or higher standards of living” (Xie and Zhou 2014:6928).  The Gini coefficient is above .5, versus .45 in the United States.  Much of this is due to regional and rural/urban differences.  The Gini coefficient in China bottomed out at less than .3 around 1980, but since then has been rising much more rapidly than that of the United States (where it is rising very fast).  China’s upward line crossed that of the US just after 2000, and continues to move upward.  This level of inequality means that rich people have more and more political power, especially in a society as corrupt as modern China’s.  Worldwide, those who benefit from pollution and environmental destruction get disproportionately rich by reaping the benefits of these practices while passing the costs on to the poor as “externalities” (Anderson 2010).  The more inequality and the greater the power of the rich, the more environmental damage occurs.

Another problem is China’s insane pursuit of a form of “modernization” that has long been recognized elsewhere as a hopeless failure: government-driven, top-down forcing of heavy industry and extractive enterprise at any cost.  The old-fashioned western idea that any and all destruction of nature is good has surfaced in China and refuses to go away.  Even traditional culture—including its love and sensitivity in regard to the environment—is condemned in the worst of all terms, i.e. that it is not modern.  A recent indicator is documented by Erik Mueggler (2014): the destruction of the beautiful, poetic, moving funeral laments of the Yi people (and, I can add, other groups too) because they are not “modern,” i.e. are not like the worst and most embarrassingly shallow of western culture—the definition of the “modern” in China for a century or more now.  These are marginally concerned with the environment, but interesting here more to show the mindset of today’s China.  It is a world in which the most insane and anti-human policies can and do sell, simply because they are what the worst of the west did a generation ago.  (I can match this story with plenty of my own; I am not overstating or exaggerating.)

Another problem is that the Communist government has increasingly repressed its non-Han inhabitants.  For example, the Tibetans, who conserved animal life because of their Buddhist faith, have lost control of their land, which has been settled by vast numbers of Han Chinese who have hunted the animals into extinction (Buckley 2014).  There are the problems with Mongolian grasslands noted above.  Similar stories come from all parts of China that have local minority groups (including Han groups that are not officially “minorities” but are local identifiable groups under cultural attack).

Indigenous peoples are usually good managers.  Indeed, some are model resource managers—among the best in the world at sustainable landscape use.  Invaders and new settlers are not usually so aware of the land.  They usually do not know enough to manage it so well. But instead of learning from traditional people, China’s government has chosen to repress them savagely.  The dominant Han Chinese have considered the minorities to be trapped in “backward,”  “superstitious,” “feudal” or even “slave society” stages of cultural evolution—Marxism used to justify racism.  Thus, for example, Edwin Schmitt  documents in detail the way “scientific” agriculture was forced on the swidden-cultivating Ersu people of Sichuan, with resulting destruction of both environment and culture (Schmitt 2014).  The “scientific” agriculture was standard Chinese industrial agriculture; actual application of science would have preserved the swiddening and prevented industrial agriculture from spreading in the Ersu’s fragile mountain environment.  The minorities are supposed to acculturate to Han norms in the name of “progress.”   Blanket condemnation of their behavior as “backward” is particularly troubling.  Imperial Chinese attitudes seem to have been better, or at least no worse.

Since these are small, weak groups subjected to often intense discrimination, they are in a very weak position in regard to protecting their resources.  Typically, a frontier mentality (the sort described in the western United States as “rape, ruin and run”) has developed.  In many areas this has greatly improved, as the frontier fills up, but the improvement is too late to save the resources.  (This is based on my own wide observation and on the work of many students, but the latter are largely Chinese and would be endangered by being named here.)

All this has caused a problem for modern environmental researchers trying to understand traditional China.  They often back-project the disastrous mismanagement of the 20th century on earlier periods.  This is inaccurate and misleading.

Meanwhile, Tibet suffered as Chinese hunters exterminated wildlife long protected by Buddhism.  (Tibetans have now reportedly taken, locally, to poaching as well.)  Tibet’s fragile environment is under attack by uncontrolled mining (Buckley 2014; Qiu 2014a), roadbuilding, shooting, pollution, mining, and overgrazing.  Many Tibetans and Mongols have charged that Han Chinese are stripping resources not only to get the wealth but also to oppress the indigenous people.  China boasts of heavy investment in Tibet, but Tibetan refugees maintain that this investment goes to Han individuals.  The Han Chinese deny this.  Proof, however, emerges from the systematic destruction of the Tibetan way of life (Buckley 2014) and the relentless campaigns against the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan refugee community, and Tibetan Buddhism.   But the disasters are real, and they match Communist China’s deliberate destruction of its own cultural traditions (Leys 1985) all too closely.  Unlike the Great Cultural Revolution, which soon ended, the repression of Tibetan and Uighur culture is ongoing.

An example in microcosm is the fate of the reindeer-herding Evenki, a Tungus people of far northeast China (Wang et al. 2015).  They are a tiny group—only abouyt 100 still herd—but environmental mismanagement, including privatization of herds and deforestation of the region, is driving them to abandon their lifestyle, an ecologically very successful one.  With the loss of such sustainable and efficient practices, China moves farther and farther toward self-destruction.

An emerging pattern, especially in Xinjiang, is uncomfortably close to the familiar pattern of settler/invader cultures such as the Europeans in the Western Hemisphere:  Take local land and resources; provoke the local people to resist; then use their resistance as an excuse to massacre them.

The question of how China treats its minorities is a somewhat vexed one.  There are many charges on all sides.  Certainly China’s current stated policies are highly fair and civil.  Behavior on the ground does not always match ideals.  Nor are stated policies necessarily the real policies.

China’s current leadership is beginning to play a deadly game—one that is played to the hilt in other countries, including the United States:  retaining power by whipping up hatred of minorities and “enemies.”  The Uighurs and Tibetans have been the minority victims, the Japanese the primary foreign nation targeted.  On recent visits to China, I have detected an ugly racism that was hard to find before.  The Chinese have always had a lively sense of their own qualities, and have been prone to make less than tactful remarks about other cultures, but that is quite different from “The (fill in the blank) are bad people; they are terrorists, they are evil, they have nothing to offer.”  If China’s leadership succeeds in demonizing whole groups this way, they will have a legacy that will not soon end and that will threaten the nation as nothing else can do—not even ecocide.

 

In short, after early success, and in spite of many hopeful developments today, China’s environmental practices have gone downhill, though with many hopeful reversals.  Old China had a goal of getting maximum benefit through minimal cost, usually by striving for harmony with environmental forces.  The Communists introduced the Marxian idea of “struggle against nature” (see Shapiro 2001).  “Nature,” in this thoroughly western and Marxist sense, was quite a new concept to China—and, for that matter, “struggle” in the Marxist sense was also a rather new concept.  Mao said that “if people living in nature want to be free, they will have to use natural sciences to understand nature, to overcome nature and to change nature” and “to struggle against the heavens is endless joy; to struggle against the earth is endless joy; to struggle against people is endless joy” (Tilt 2009:136).  Even by western standards this is rather strong stuff, and to Chinese raised on Daoism, Confucianism, and solid rural experience in working with nature, it was appalling.

In what must be the most stunning non sequitur in history, the Communist apologist Jiang Zemin commented—as summarized by Lillian Li—“that China had the task of feeding 22 percent of the world’s population on only 7 percent of its arable land; therefore, political dissent and democratization had to take second place” (Li 2007:5; on this sort of political Newspeak in general, see Leys 1985; Smil 2004:144-145).  Of course, the experience of the rest of the world is that democracy and freedom translate into better management and more productivity in agriculture.  There is, in fact, an almost perfect correlation.  China has indeed greatly opened its political and economic system over the last few decades in order to keep producing food, but it has not opened enough to prevent loss of farming capacity.  China must depend increasingly on imports.

Another Orwellian claim is that China will become “first rich, then clean,” as the Chinese government mistakenly believed the west had done.  However, the non-Communist west was never even remotely close to being as polluted and eroded as China is today.  The west never had the population density or the technology until long after conservation was a major political force.  Environmentalism arose in the west before 1900, and was already stunningly successful, especially in forest and wildlife protection, under Theodore Roosevelt and his European equivalents.  The Germans, for instance, were already model forest managers in the 1880s.  At that time, and indeed until the 1920s, the United States was a poor and overwhelmingly rural country.  Pollution control began as early, and climaxed with the many laws of the early 1970s.  Only in Communist East Europe was there ever anything like China’s current devastation without an opposite reaction from political conservation.

In any case, “first rich, then green” does not work.  Even if the government could reverse its policies of 70 years, those 83 million people would not be brought back to life, nor would the farmland ruined by urbanization and heavy metal pollution be restored.  Moreover, China has developed an extreme case of “lock-in.”  It is trapped in a dirty economy that is now beyond major change unless there are enormous governmental changes at all levels—changes that are impossible so long as the government is in the hands of the notoriously corrupt Communist Party.  Even if national policy were to shift, local corruption would make major change impossible.  My students have documented the ways that local officials persist in devastating policies even after the national government has suffered a genuine change of heart and of laws (see also Tilt 2009).

More serious is the fact that China will never be rich if it does not become clean soon.  China’s vaunted economic growth rate is actually half or less what is claimed (Smil 2004; Tilt 2009), because the official figures do not take into account the costs of the pollution and erosion.  The World Bank has said that environmental pollution costs China 9% of its GDP (Fenby 2014:21).  The official figures are inflated by an uncertain amount too, so the actual growth rate is in fact close to zero.  This is not even to mention the point that the world does not have enough resources to allow China to consume at current western levels.

It is highly relevant to observe that China’s human rights record is also notorious.  Correlation of human rights abuse and environmental mismanagement is typical, not only in China but worldwide.

China represses those who protest environmental mismangement; this was reported in regard to the floods in Beijing in 2012 (Yahoo! News Online, July 24), but Edwin Schmitt, who was there at the time, says there was no repression and the 77 dead were all acknowledged (Schmitt, pers. comm., in writing, email of Sept. 21, 2012).  Political protest is often fatal in China.  Nature reports “Green protests on the rise in China” (Gilbert 2012), but they appear to have little chance of making a difference.  Meanwhile, China has recently imprisoned and tortured activists (including the artist Ai Weiwei) for protesting shoddy school construction that led to hundreds of child deaths in earthquakes.  Wu Lihong, who has spent years exposing polluters who are destroying Lake Tai, has been jailed, hounded, threatened, subjected to character assassination, and harassed (Jacobs 2014), although he is protecting an increasingly polluted lake that supplies millions of people with drinking water.  The firms violate the pollution laws because even if they are caught and charged, the fines and other costs are less than the benefits they get from externalizing their pollution problems—a story very familiar in the United States, of course.  Protesters have often been executed, their bodies then parted out like used cars—China harvests the organs of its executed “criminals” (BBC News Online, Aug. 16, 2013: “China Announces End Date for Taking Prisoners’ Organs”—note that an end date is announced but no end to the practice has actually occurred so far; Geng and Burkitt 2014 update this with news of yet another announcement of the projected end…).  A government that stifles criticism and “shoots the messenger” in cases of such flagrant abuse clearly has problems.

The government has not always been able to crush or coopt protest.  Usually, however, the government can prevail, stifling dissent or answering it with purely cosmetic changes (see e.g. Dirlik and Prazniak 2012; Economy 2005; Fenby 2014; Watts 2010).  The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 still casts a shadow over Chinese science and environmental politics, leading people to stay silent or leave the country (Hvistendahl 2014b).  On the other hand, popular and scientific opinion killed a major section of the huge and environmentally dreadful South to North Water Transfer project (Mufson 2010).  Popular protest, led by a few environmental activists at serious risk of their lives, is slowly forcing the government to wake up; it is a bottom-up movement, with the government driven to act only when pressure is great.  Carbon limits are being set and the worst cities are now the subjects of serious plans (Qiu 2013b).

A new and even more stringent crackdown in 2014 has occurred. As the Los Angeles Times reports:  “Journalists are banned from writing ‘critical reports’ without approval from their employers the State Administration of Press, Piublication, Radio, Film and Televsion warned…. Censors lay a heavy hand on China’s media, and state-run outlets serve as a channel for party propaganda” (Makinen 2014a).  Interviews are strictly controlled.  This means not only that protest is suppressed, but that vitally facts about environmental problems will not be reported.  The government, even if it wanted to act, will not have the information.

Crackdowns on social media, education, politics in Hong Kong, and all other openings quickly followed.  (See Chang Ping 2014 on education and “brainwashing”—the Chinese original of this English term is a bit less forceful than the English).  In a particularly revealing episode, China expressed major anxieties about students studying in America being exposed to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and other democratic documents and historical narratives (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 31, A2, and much internet coverage).  This would seem a true measure of desperation.  The Chinese Communist hierarchy is clearly terrified of losing control.  An excellent, in-depth article by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone (2014) quoted a high official on what would happen if anyone organized a mass protest over environmental issues:  “’You don’t even want to think about it,’ [he] answers, fear flashing in his eyes” (Goodell 2014).

A study in 2014, using real and planted emails, found that China’s censors are fairly tolerant of individual complaints and rants, but crack down absolutely and condignly on anything remotely related to public protest.  They immediately purge from the Internet and local networks any reference to public protests in the past, let alone anything that could be construed as organizing them now (Hvistendahl 2014a; King et al. 2014). Censorship is uneven—much of it is local, not coordinated well with national norms—but this particular tendency is China-wide.

China is riding a tiger.  The more it needs to change, the more the old men who rule it fear that change, since changes are more and more threatening to their power.  They thus crack down more and more condignly on dissent or innovation.  This is rather reminiscent of the Qianlong Emperor’s similar behavior in the last decades of his rule, but the situation is far more extreme today than in his 18th-century time.  As Jonathan Fenby says, “China finds itself at a watershed in which it needs to change but knows that change will face it with the biggest test since Deng Xiaoping…” (Fenby 2014:122-123).  Or perhaps since the fall of the Qing Dynasty.

 

4

China is beginning to face the consequences of its folly, but its government has locked in much of the pollution by heavy subsidizing of power plants and polluting industries, as well as by pro-car policies.  (Though, recall, public fast transit is also being furthered.)  Above all, a combination of corruption and extreme repression of public opinion has rendered the polluting interests not only above the law but above all criticism.  The usual dynamic has appeared:  an industry heavily subsidized becomes wealthy and politically connected, and thus is too powerful to be controlled effectively.  Pollution is far worse than the government’s statistics admit (Abe and Nickum 2010; Cyranoski 2007).

Subsidies include the release of China’s firms—especially the state firms that still dominate the economy—from having to pay the costs of production.  In a free market, ideally, the cotss of production—including pollution, waste, loss of farmland, and loss of ecosystem services—would be paid by the producers.  This may or may not be true, but we will never know; capitalist societies always involve governments that subsidize giant firms and protect them from lawsuits and other restraints on externalizing (Anderson 2010).  The farther a society gets from a free market, other things being equal, the more the government protects firms from such costs by “externalizing” them—passing them on to the public.  Marx and Engels saw this problem clearly, and tried to escape it by envisioning comprehensive planning (see e.g. Engels’ Anti-Duhring, 1966, one of the last works written by the founding fathers and thus particularly revealing on such matters).  In practice, the Marxian drive for production at all costs led to externalizing costs far beyond anything permitted in democratic countries.

In the last analysis, Communism is a philosophy of production. Its goal was always to maximize production of useful goods, as readers of Marx and Engels know.  It is not set up to moderate production to maintain ecosystem goods.

It is also a totalitarian and absolutist philosophy, with no place for upward feedback.  The Chinese Communist system remains a top-down one, autocratic and savagely repressive of criticism.  The resulting political sclerosis has been well documented by Jonathanb Fenby (2014), among others.  Change is difficult.  Even if the leaders want it, they have to overcome the vast inertia of the local bosses, middle managers, and bureaucrats. Unlike leaders in democracies, they cannot use support from ordinary people.

One sad result of all this has been the creation of socialist people.  Westerners sometimes say that Communism “fails” because it does not create selfless people.  The fact is that it never tried, at least in the USSR and China.  In those countries, Communism took the form of classic tyranny, which, as the ancient Greeks (e.g. Plato and Aristotle) pointed out, makes people passive, deceitful, and weak, rather than cooperative and enterprising.  Particularly dramatic has been the rise of reluctance to help in accidents, reportedly because of fear of getting into trouble with the police.  Bystanders in a position to help, sometimes even when asked, have let children die and allowed old, handicapped people suffer (Demick 2011).  Another indicator of the effect of totalitarianism on morality and rule of law is provided by the state banks’ support of counterfeiters (Associated Press 2015)—the masses of businesses that produce cheap imitations of Gucci, Vuitton, Tiffany and other name brands and sell them as the real thing.  These firms are probably mostly in China, and certainly do their banking there.  The banks have stonewalled all attempts to get information about the counterfeiters or to freeze their funds or accounts; in fact, the banks have protested that any such attempts (which are perfectly normal under international law and have been for decades) are themselves wrong, immoral, disrespectful, and anti-China.  With this solidarity among state institutions in protecting flagrant lawbreaking, there is little hope for enforcement of more arcane and controversial matters like environmental protection.

The government sometimes blames Chinese traditions, but of course Chinese traditions advised helping all, in no uncertain terms:  “between the four seas all are siblings,” and much more.  There were reports of callousness in traditional times also, but always in the same circumstances:  tyranny and corrupt police.  Except in such situations, I saw only the opposite—extremely helpful, prosocial behavior—in my many years in Chinese communities.  But when my wife and I have been in police-ridden communities (including mainland China itself) we have sometimes seen the passive avoidance of help.  Perhaps Demick and others are exaggerating the situation, but they are clearly not inventing it.  Opening China post-Mao has slowly and steadily changed this for the better, and it is impossible to break the Chinese spirit in any case—but there seems to have been a genuine change here, however much Demick’s case may be exaggerated.

My assessment is that China has done more damage to its environment in the last 60 years than in the entire 3500-year history of Imperial China.  I cannot prove this from figures.  However, certainly the damage before 1900 was substantial, but I do know that since 1966 when I first saw Hong Kong, and even since 1978 when I traveled throughout China, the country’s environment and health have declined at a dizzying pace.

Considerable pressure for change and improvement has built up in recent years (Smil 2004; Tilt 2009).  The horrific floods of 1998 forced the Communist leadership to recognize that deforestation was having devastating consequences on downstream areas.  The Olympic Games of 2008 led to some significant cleanup of the Beijing area, which showed in turn how much improvement could be done for relatively little money.  Water shortages are forcing major reforms of water management in north China.  Recent forest policies are far from new or adequate, but they are not bad and may be improving.  An important review by Julia Strauss (2009) offers hope, but only if China does a number of things, notably streamlining policy and involving local people in all ways at all levels.  These seem, at this writing, unlikely.

More hopeful, however, are the rapidly increasing protests against environmental ruin (Wang et al. 2012).  The public is seriously fed up, and the government is having more and more trouble balancing their tendency to crack down on dissent with the need to appear at least somewhat aware of the problem and also to appear somewhat less draconian.  International investors as well as the public have to be considered.

Also hopeful is a government plan to move toward a national circular economy—one in which material and energy flows are made as efficient as possible, with maximal recycling, minimal waste, and maximal sustainability using renewable materials (Geng et al. 2013).  It remains to be seen whether this policy will be implemented, but it represents a stunning turnaround in rhetoric, and may well transform practice.  One can only hope so.

Finally, this comes within a much broader phenomenon: the number of well-educated middle class people in China is rapidly increasing.  Such people always bring pressure for forward and progressive change.  It may be that they will yet force the issue, and make China’s dinosauric Communist Party wake up.

Thus, some observers have been led to hopeful assessments of the future (e.g. Hyde and Xu 2009).  Unfortunately, these assessments are based on acceptance of official statistics known to be massaged or fabricated outright to fit national goals, and on policy statements that are not necessarily taken seriously at the local level.  Studies by local scholars show a very different reality indeed (Abe and Nickum 2009; also Ayoe (Jianhua) Wang 2013; Yu Huang, Bryan Tilt, Stevan Harrell, and others, personal communication about ongoing research). The Chinese say “numbers make leaders and leaders make numbers” (Liu and Yang 2009): fabricating statistics gets one promoted, and then one fabricates more (see e.g. Hvistendahl 2013b).

Tilt (2009), among others, thinks that China’s totalitarian government could as easily impose conservation as it imposed devastation.  This is, unfortunately, quite wrong (Ayoe Wang, pers. comm.; and see e.g. Fenby 2014, Marks 2012, Watts 2010, and the entire history of the Soviet Union, East Europe, and Cuba).  To begin with, there is the matter of changes that are difficult to reverse.

Most obviously, it takes 50 years to regrow a tree cut in 10 seconds, perhaps a thousand years to restore soil eroded in one storm, and thousands of years for urbanized land to become arable again.  Extinct species will never come back.  Surviving ones may be so depleted, and their habitat so altered, that they can never even begin to recover their original populations.  This is true of fish like the yellow croaker, as well as essentially all wild land animals in China.  And policies once set are very hard to reverse overnight, even for a totalitarian state.  The “lock-in” is a well-recognized economic phenomenon.

But, also, people have now irrevocably lost the old ideology of working (however imperfectly) with nature, and are slow to change from the newly-learned but now thoroughly-learned ethic of resource drawdown.

The old ritual links to the land are long broken.  Mao’s devastating campaign against popular religion eliminated the fengshui groves and other land-sparing religious and magical institutions.  It also eliminated the ritual and religious instantiations of community that held people together and made them responsible (see e.g. David Johnson, 2009, a stunning picture of lost folk plays in interior China; for the general case, Leys 1985).

In a particularly bitter irony, China’s new premier Xi Jinping has now called, in a rather pathetic plea, for a revival of traditional religions to fill China’s moral void (Kim and Blanchard 2013).  Belatedly, the Communist rulers realize that over 60 years of repression, involving millions of murders in which repression of religion and traditional philosophy were part of the justification, was a mistake, costing Chinese society very dearly indeed (Kim and Blanchard detail the continuing repression).

Some of the problems are systemic.  Anne Stevenson-Yang, an expert on Chinese politics and economics, has summarized one such:  “This is a system that excels at organizing around campaigns:  building the Grand Canal, completing the Long March, overtaking the West at steel production.  If something can be accomplished via vertical integration of people and capital, it shall be done.  If something requires lateral coordination and feedback and adjustment, this is not your system” (from a posting to Chinapol listserve, July 4, 2015, quoted by her kind permission via email of July 4).  The traditional Chinese agricultural system, especially the wet-rice irrigated form, survived by lateral integration.  That kept it in ecological balance.  Abandoning this for top-down control has, fortunately, not been total, but it has been serious enough to break down ecological controls.

Minorities suffered in particular, from Mongolia in the north (see Williams references below) to Xishuangbanna in the far south (Wang 2008, 2013).  Communists systematically destroyed these practices, seeing them as backward, superstitious, wasteful, and otherwise bad.  The reality, on the ground, was a combination of extreme and vicious racism and short-sighted attention to immediate profit at the expense of the future and of sustainability (Wang 2013 documents this at exhaustive length for Yunnan; there are comparable if sometimes less sophisticated studies for almost all minority areas).

Violently anti-environmental and anti-environmentalist rhetoric, harking back to the early Communist period, is still highly visible; Robert Marks quotes some of it (2012:325).  It is cited to government officials, but may be idiosyncratic rather than policy.  Ironically, it sounds very much like the right-wing anti-environmentalism of the Koch brothers and their ilk in the United States.  There actually seems to be some copying of specific slurs.  Also, China’s government is now so honeycombed with corruption that enforcing any regulations that run counter to local economic interests is difficult.  Local authorities are in league with and dependent on developers, and any American knows what that means.  A Chinese observer, Xiaolu Wang, puts it:  “Income inequality…is likely to be even greater [than reported] because unreported income (including illegal income) is huge, and is concentrated to a small proportion of high-income earners….  Rent-seeking behavior and corruption in the public sector are increasing; there is evidence of unjustified distribution of returns from land, natural resources and financial resources” (X. Wang 2008:167).

Possibly even more threatening are rapidly tightening restrictions on research that could throw light on China’s environmental management and mismanagement (Hvistendahl 2013a).  Outsiders are not allowed to map or photograph in much of China, and China is trying to get satellite photographs to be shot at low resolution; this is claimed as necessary to protect security of military sites and the like, but it is enforced in oil drilling areas and other environmentally—but not militarily—sensitive sites.  Thus, one can assume that there is an agenda of hiding environmental damage.  Foreigners taking photographs—even without having been warned, or ever notified of new rules—have been fined; Chinese have been jailed and tortured.

It should be emphasized that China is a Communist country, not a capitalist one, in spite of claims in the media.  The government plans, manages, and controls the economy and the labor force (Fenby 2014; Moyo 2012).  Market reforms have opened much of the economy, but these reforms, and their effects, are still under the control of the government.  It should be remembered that Communism does not necessarily mean total direct control of every economic enterprise by government; it means planning by government such that the economy is subservient to government policy.  (On Chinese government, some particularly thoughtful and interesting studies by Andrew Kipnis are particularly good at problematizing simple narratives of “Communism,” “capitalism,” and state power; Kipnis 1997, 2007, 2008.)

The worst problem for such a regime is that, with government and production equated or at least totally interlocked, criticizing pollution is criticizing the government, which, in China, means it is criticizing the Communist Party.  Individual protests are tolerated to some extent, but any mass protest is inevitably seen as treason.  The protestors are not just complaining about smoke; they have launched an attack on the State.  They are treated accordingly.

China has become something of a fantasyland for westerners, who either demonize it or praise it on the basis of very poor information (Palmer 2015).  The reality is neither demonic nor wonderful: it is the reality of a huge, autocratic government trying to develop and modernize a huge, complex country.  Corruption and lock-in of mistakes are inevitable under the circumstances.  The question is whether those will bring the whole system down.

This reminds us of the theoretical point that simple greed is not necessarily exclusive.  Lots of people can succeed.  Political power, however, is exclusive.  You have it or you don’t.  And any challenge to it is seen as a fight to the death by those who have it, to the extent that they have total command.  A city councilman may lose a seat and not complain; a governor will scheme and play games; a dictator will kill any number of people, by any terrifying means possible, to prevent even a small challenge.  (It should be noted that the United States, with its tiny handful of extremely powerful oil, coal, chemical, and defense firms, is very close to China now.  It is no longer a free-market, competitive system; it is essentially a socialist one.)

China now has one of the most unequal income patterns in the world, rivaling the United States—with the difference that China’s largest category is the poor, not the middle class (on this and other aspects of Chinese governance see Dirlik and Prazniak 2012; Dirlik is coming out with further overviews).  Distributional equality is not helped by the current pattern of local governments using eminent domain to force farmers to give up their lands (with purely nominal compensation), which the local governments then sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars an acre to urban developers.  The officials pocket the money (Orlik 2013).

The result of this—and perhaps the most critically important observation one can make—is that China now has the worst of Communism: commandism, top-down planning, fabrication of statistics, and the like, and also savage repression of dissent and independent thought.  It also has the worst of capitalism:  obsession with short-term profit by the powerful at the expense of everyone else.  The best of Communism—overall planning for the long term and roughly equal access to key resources—has been abandoned.  The best of capitalism—relative freedom of speech and action, resulting in real enterprise and improvement of production—has never been permitted.

One effect of this is an extreme form of the well-known problem with big government in general, and government subsidies in particular: they lock in inefficiency and waste, by making it profitable to pass on costs of production to the public, and by making it difficult and expensive to change and innovate.  Also, as noted, such centralized planning guarantees cooked figures and invented statistics (as Chinese dynastic planners already knew thousands of years ago!).  Also, Communism teaches that industry, short-term economic gains, and “development” of resources should always take precedence, and privileging of short-term gains over long-term considerations is locked into the Chinese system.  As the Chinese environmental scientists Tian Shi reports:  “abandoning or even compromising growth for the sake of environmental protection or resource conservation is regarded as a heretical concept.

Even when environmental problems are acknowledged, the Chinese government generally denies the reality of the limits to growth.  This perspective is based on the Marxist axiom that the problems of mankind have their origin in the structure of social relationships, especially those surrounding the means of production; nature presents no obstacles that cannot be overcome by the appropriate social arrangements and the wonders of scientific-technological productivity” (Shi 2010; see also p. 62).  All environmentalists who have tried to deal with western Marxists know too much about this, and many of China’s communists are more extreme than most western devotees.

Centralized economies have always been successful at resource drawdown, but conservation and sustainable development is generally best organized at the grassroots level, as conservationists have learned through thousands of cases worldwide.  Grassroots citizen action has, in fact, been the only real force motivating change for the better in China (Economy 2005; Tilt 2009).

Things could be worse.  Nature reserves (around 1800 now), reforestation, water management, conversion away from coal, and other hopeful programs are growing and improving apace.  Unfortunately, these continue to be outbalanced by rapid degradation.  China’s vaunted economic growth appears to be a myth.  The real costs of environmental decline are already serious.  They will increase exponentially in the near future, threatening or dooming China’s chances of being a world economic leader.

 

5

Jared Diamond’s famous book Collapse (2005) found several societies that collapsed from wrecking their local ecosystems, or ignoring ecological changes that threatened them.  The most interesting point about the book, to me, is that Diamond found so few cases.

Why aren’t there more?  Humans tend to be careless and take little thought of the future when planning for the environment (Anderson 2010).  So there should be more collapse stories, and Diamond was evidently rather surprised to find there were very few—all highly local and either on islands or in special zones that were ecologically island-like such as Mesa Verde.

From my research, I believe that the reason is that the beginnings of an ecological crisis cause so much political chaos, so rapidly, that there is no time for a genuine Malthusian crisis to occur.  As Malthusian pressures build, people become so desperate to preserve their own lives, and the lives of their immediate families or friends or clients, that they work against the wider system and against all sacrifice for the future.  If one is confident that one is going to be ruined in the short term, the long term is no longer meaningful.  In fact, even the slightest downturn is apt to bring rapid political dissention and conflict, as we are seeing in the United States today.  Worse downturns bring worse troubles, as Europe saw in the Great Depression.  (The United States was spared the worst of that depression, but still had its tensions.)  Then the social system melts down even before the ecological system fails.  The resulting economic and demographic decline takes the pressure off resources.  Thus, when China’s ecological disasters catch up with the economy, we can confidently expect political trouble and a regression toward a Hobbesian social world.

In fact, it is quite possible that China’s environmental crisis will combine with a political crisis in about 15-20 years.  China is almost three generations away from the revolution of 1948-1950 that put the Communist Party in power.  Three or four generations are critical in Ibn Khaldun’s quite successfully predictive theory of the evolution of a polity (Ibn Khaldun 1958; cf. Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005).  Ibn Khaldun observed that, for a generation, a new government is held together by bonds of loyalty, mutual support, and sharing the loot.  They had to stand together to win the country, and this carried them through while the conqueror generation was in charge.  The second generation relaxes the military discipline and ideological solidarity of the winners, but achieves wealth, power and glory, more or less through momentum.  The third and fourth decline into luxury, corruption, and a general attitude of every-man-for-himself or every-group-for-itself.  Power blocs can grow over the years until they challenge the center.  It may be assumed that there are always people wanting to take power.  If the government is strong, the challengers cannot prevail.  As the Ibn Khaldun cycle works its way along, certain blocs of people can accumulate more and more power, while the government weakens.  This leads to collapse.

In a situation where many people become selfish while others fall back on loyalty to a group, the groups in question tend to become fanatical and violent.  They thus often win, since a highly motivated group can easily conquer a vast number of disunited individuals, one at a time.  However, this rarely happened in China’s long history; what usually happened was that either the leading general or some similar powerful individual simply took over the country in a coup, or else a semiperipheral marcher state invaded and took over.

The cycle takes about a hundred years, in Ibn Khaldun’s theory, and by and large in Chinese history, though cross-cultural statistics show it typically taking about 75 in many other areas (including the United States:  Independence to Civil War to Depression to current economic woes).  My own study of Chinese crises show that they did occur at roughly 75-year intervals since the unification of China in 221 BCE.  However, the range was great.  It ran from a mere 14 years (the dismally short reign of China’s very first dynasty) to 228 (the amazingly long run of peace in the later Ming Dynasty [1368-1644], from Yongle’s bloody coup in 1402 to the beginning of the violent end in 1630).  So the figure is hardly predictive.  However, there is every reason to believe that China’s next crisis will indeed come around 2025.

At this point the future becomes unclear.  China resolved many crises by a sort of coup by the government against itself:  a more or less legitimate but undesignated or displaced member of the imperial family seizing full power, eliminating rivals, and reinventing the government.  At other times, an army general would stage a coup, usually with bloody but limited fighting.  Total collapse occurred only when the government was completely nonfunctional due to selfish behavior by all parties.  The major collapses involved long periods of dynastic weakness, during which it the government lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people—“lost the mandate of Heaven,” as the Chinese put it.  This led to the rise of competing groups: bandits,” local armies, and “barbarians.”  These got into fiercer and fiercer spirals of violence, often creating local kingdoms or warlord fiefs, until some one powerful armed group rolled up the whole of China.  This happened most recently at the fall of Qing in 1911; China was not again united till the Communist victory under Mao Zedong in 1948-1950.

China’s many dynasties all fit the Ibn Khaldun model, but with one major difference:  Almost all of them lasted about 300 years—three or four Khaldun cycles.  This was, however, not as far from Ibn Khaldun’s theory as it looks.  Every one of them had crises at roughly 75-year intervals, sometimes involving actual overthrow of the dynasty by a coup and its recovery in a countercoup.  (This happened twice in the Han Dynasty.  China was ruled, historically, by eight major dynasties.  Of these, three involved conquest by semiperipheral marcher states, two of which were non-Chinese; four involved takeover by leading generals serving the previous regimes; and one was an actual popular revolution.  The Communist revolution marked the second takeover in China’s history by a popular movement. There were, in addition, several dynasties that conquered large parts of China but not the whole; five involved conquest of north China by non-Chinese semiperipheral marcher states, or perhaps in one case a truly peripheral state.  It may be worth noting that two major dynasties, Sui and Tang, had founders who were allegedly part “barbarian,” having Xiongnu, Xianbei or Turkic ancestry.  But they were culturally Han Chinese themselves.)

China’s current government is rapidly losing legitimacy through rampant corruption and brutal repression.  The environment is a major part of the action, since mass protests over displacement of millions by big-dam projects, groundwater pollution, and so on are building, and since soil erosion, deforestation, and pollution are wrecking the livelihoods of literally hundreds of millions of rural residents.  Meanwhile, political crises are surfacing, due to more ordinary competition for power.  Also, the rest of the world is going through a long, unstable, economically parlous period, that will probably not end before some currently wealthy countries are leveled down.  The United States in particular seems poised to collapse, with fascist dictatorship a possible outcome.  This would have repercussions that would be serious for China, as for everyone else worldwide.

By 2025—75 years from the triumph of the Revolution—China will be in a parlous situation.

Major environmental and consequent economic crises at this point in an Ibn Khaldun cycle will weaken or bring down the government.  China’s history suggests that anything could happen, from an internal coup to a complete meltdown into total chaos and violence.

We may get a bit farther in predicting which.  On the one hand, China’s history suggests that the first 75-year crisis in a regime is usually handled well; the regime reforms or revitalizes, and carries on.  (This occurred in Han, Tang, Sung, Ming, Qing, and several minor dynasties, but not in Qin, Sui or Yuan among the majors.)  This suggests that the present governmental system, with its gray apparatchik leaders, might collapse, but the Communist Party or the Red Army would produce dynamic leadership to replace them.

On the other hand, historical China never had anything like the present resource crisis, except at the fall of the Qing Dynasty when population had overshot food production and the food supply base was threatened by erosion, floods, and droughts.  Moreover, the current Chinese ideology is communist, as opposed to the traditional eclectic mix of various philosophies.

Communism under Mao, as under Stalin, often behaved like an extreme religion, comparable to extremist Islam and right-wing Christianity.  After Mao, China’s government greatly relaxed its hold, but under Xi Jinping the noose has tightened again, to almost Maoist levels.  The Internet is censored.  Political bloggers, from important to barely visible, have been ruthlessly suppressed (Grigg 2015).  The government promptly propped up the stock market after a run in June 2015, eliominating the possibility that anything resembling a free market would exist to teach investors about risk and actual costs.  The government is rapidly reasserting control of the economy via reinvigorated state enterprises.

Given current environmental conditions, all this essentially guarantees government failure.  China has shot all the messengers, from market forces to civilian watchdogs, who could tell the government about environmental crises or urge action on ones already known.  China has meanwhile invested heavily in urban construction, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing, fossil fuel extraction, and other environmentally devastating but currently profitable channels.  The government has maximal incentive to do more damage, and no democratic mechanisms for allowing advocacy of alternative futures.

In this case, it is possible that China will suffer one of its periodic collapses into violence and chaos, such as occurred at the end of each of the great dynasties.  On the other hand, it is also possible that present hopeful trends continue.  The government is in facft aware of the environmental problems, and imminent crisis might shock the leadership into taking charge, forcing temporary austerity on the people, and working to clean up the environment.  China might still save itself at the last moment.

Doing so will require a well-known set of conditions (Anderson 2010).  First, serious cost-benefit accounting will be necessary; the real costs of dams, air pollution, loss of farmland, and the like must be factored into budgets rather than being concealed and passed on to the poor.  Second, a system of accountability and recourse must be established; officials and local firms must be held accountable for damages, and ordinary people must have the right to protest (peacefully) and to sue in court.  Third, corruption must be fought.  This does not mean simply making pious statements about amoral officials; it means that powerful firms and local interests must be absolutely prevented from using covert means or unequal power to get their way.  (This is not always called “corruption”; in the United States, giant firms can legally do essentially anything they want to get their way politically, including the use of measures that are considered “corruption” in virtually every other nation, China included.  Conversely, the trivial “corruption” involved in inviting a cadre to a feast in exchange for getting some ordinary government service would not make much difference.)

Fourth, however, there is a serious need to end, totally and completely, Mao’s “struggle against nature.”  There is a need to return to the long-standing Chinese tradition of working in some degree or type of harmony and balance (heping) with the environment.  The idea that people had to live in the world and deal with its realities, and thus had to conserve things like forests, soil, and water, was basic to Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Legalism, and indeed all the traditional Chinese ways of thought.  It has been abandoned in favor of a thoroughly western concept that has proved disastrous in the west.  China’s ideology, and above all its education system, needs to abandon the equation of “modernization” with destroying nature.  Wholesale mindless imitation of the worst of the west (from “struggling against nature” to fast junk foods) is very far from the Marxian goals that China once had, and even farther from Chinese tradition.  It is also far from the current thinking in the west itself.  A major reform of the educational system would be a focal place to start.

In the near and middle term, the world is not likely to recover from its present economic doldrums.  China is not the only country dealing with environmental crises.  Also, many countries are dealing with hard times by cutting expenses and programs—in other words, by decimating consumption and spending, not a very good way to grow the economy.  All this suggests that China will have a very hard landing indeed, and will, at best, not be a great economic driver of the future world economy.

The world needs to learn from China’s investments in education, science, technology, and infrastructure.  China has made incredible strides in health, food production, and industrialization.  At first, in the 1950s and 1960s, China made enormous gains in dealing with water pollution.  These should all inspire world efforts.  The world should, however, not follow China over the cliff into autocratic government, repression of the public, and environmental ruin.

 

6

Will China collapse?  Not just yet.  Xi Jinping has launched a terrific crackdown.  Dissent and difference of opinion are savagely cut down.  On the other hand, Xi is no fool, and has made some fairly major steps to slow down environmental ruin.

This may, however, simply make things worse.  Environmental decline continues.  Repressing dissent means less chance to deal with problems.  Whistleblowers and bearers of bad news are in special trouble, which does not bode well for dealing with crises before they get out of hand.  Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is allegedly targeting his political rivals rather than corrupt officials in general.  This is a rumor, but a believable one, since that is the pattern of anti-corruption campaigns in most authoritarian states, including China in the past.

Collapse, however, will probably not come on Xi’s watch. He is too ruthless and wily.  Also, environmental decline is not yet to the point at which mass deaths can be expected.

Once Xi is gone, however, the situation will deteriorate.  Leaving aside possible succession conflicts, many events will be outside China’s control.  Global warming, continued shrinking of the land base, and continued pollution will squeeze China in a vice.  China’s desperate attempts to insure food by buying up land abroad, and by getting agreements and sweet deals with exporters in other countries, will increasingly fail.  Other countries in question are reaching their own limits.  Brazil, for instance, has skyrocketed its exports to China by turning its formerly vast forests into cropland.  This will end very soon, since Brazil is not only running out of forests (its last tree will fall in a very few decades) but is also facing a Malthusian squeeze as its population, mostly poor and frequently desperate for food, soars.  Australia’s farmland has been declining due to factors including salt buildup and global warming with consequent drought.  African countries that have contracted with China for land for farming are facing very rapidly increasing populations.  Most other supplier countries have similar problems.

When collapse comes, it will probably take the form of increasing repression, leading eventually to the country snapping as that repression comes into more and more conflict with increasing misery.  In previous centuries, this situation always led to one conclusion: massive civil breakdown.  Anarchic violence, banditry, and warlordism quickly reduced the population to sustainable levels.  There was plenty of direct killing, but the real problems were starvation and disease, following from social breakdown.  Major failures of life support systems force people to take the law into their own hands, and when that happens, fear and hate take over.  Irrational killing and system-smashing occurs.

This may be part of a worldwide collapse.  The United States is currently drifting into fascism.  A Republican win of all three branches of government in 2016 is quite likely, following which a fascist dictatorship and resulting war and genocide would be possible, based on my studies of the rise of fascism in many countries (I will present these elsewhere!).  This would lead to economic collapse of the United States, and that collapse would probably bring down China as well, along with much of the world economy.

The current world situation is not even remotely close to being sustainable.  When the crunch comes, the results will certainly involve mass violence and social breakdown.  China, the country currently most rapidly destroying its life support system, will be among the first to go.

 

 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alex Alvarez and Christopher Chase-Dunn for help and encouragement, and thanks in particular to Rob Efird and Edwin Schmitt for very careful readings and analysis that led me to modify many statements.

 

 

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Love: A New Model

Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

Love: a new model

 

Unpacking “Love” and Loves

Positive emotions tend to get lumped as “love” in English and many other languages.  The great cognitive psychologist Jerome Kagan (2006) admonishes us to unpack simple cover terms for psychological states, and see their full complexity.  If we do this with the English word “love,” we realize that we are talking about many quite different feelings.  There is a common emotional ground:  intense affection for and interest in a specific person or thing.

Still, the emotions associated with that enthusiasm and intensity can be very different indeed.   I love my wife, mixed green salad, and early medieval poetry.  Obviously, these three kinds of love are phenomenologically different.  Even love for the same individual may mean different emotions at different times.  My love for my oldest daughter, now 45, is certainly a different set of feeling from my love for her when she was newborn.

There is a delightful Spanish Renaissance song about a peasant who loves three things:  Inés, ham, and eggplants with cheese (which Inés obligingly cooks for him).  The poet assumes that his sophisticated readers will laugh indulgently at the foolish young swain who can’t tell a noble passion from a satisfied stomach (Alcázar 1961:167; my translation and discussion of it have been incorporated by David Kronenfeld into his book on cognition: 2008:212-213).

One can distinguish, within the space covered by the word “love,” at least the following quite different emotions or feeling-states.  (Various other minds have animadverted to this sort of listing.  A somewhat different list with some other possibilities is found in Kenrick et al. 2010; Hatfield et al. 2007 give a whole list of types of erotic love.):

Erotic infatuation

Familial love:  parents and children, siblings, relatives

Friendship and companionship

Dependency (loving someone solely because one depends on the person; a major part, though by no means all, of an infant’s love for parents; common in erotic relationships also)

Enjoying good food and other physical comforts

Familiarity love:  love for a pair of old shoes, or an old bathrobe, just because they are so familiar

Love for wild nature: flowers, mountains, deer, flowing water

Aesthetic love for great art, music, literature

Love for all humanity, or even all beings, as taught by world religions

Love for knowledge and wisdom:  philosophy, social theory, baseball statistics

Spiritual love (for God or functional equivalents, for natural wonders, and so on)

Love for principles:  justice, truth, helping

Patriotic love:  a strange emotion.  It seems to be basically passionate loyalty to leaders transferred to an abstract concept (the nation, state, or flag).

All these loves have subdivisions.  Erotic love, for instance, varies from wild passion—considered a major medical problem in olden times (Wack 1990)—to calm, quiet bliss (Hatfield et al. 2007).  In a lasting marriage, erotic infatuation generally gives way to companionate love.  There are many whole books on how to revive the infatuation, indicating a pent-up demand for that.  A love affair or marriage, if it’s any good, involves a range of loves:  erotic attraction, friendship, trust, mutual dependence, familiarity, and so on.  We get used to thinking that way, and have trouble unpacking “love.”

Familiarity love typically increases with time, but sometimes we get to hate familiar things more and more, and sometimes a worn shoe is just a worn shoe.  Usually this depends on whether the shoe has been worn in pleasant or unpleasant contexts (hiking shoes may be loved, formal ones just thrown away when a bit frayed) but sometimes the logic of familiarity love escapes us.  Children are particularly unpredictable in this regard.  Contemplate any young child’s choice of favorite stuffed animal, and the way such choice may change suddenly for no apparent reason.   “Loving” things like a familiar pair of old shoes, or a favorite food, involves awfully minimal interest.  Boundary phenomena define a category, so we cannot neglect the old shoes.

Aesthetic love is so vague as to be almost a “garbage-can category.”  Love for Bach’s harpsichord music seems pretty far from love for Tolstoi’s novels or Navaho rugs.  Even within music, love for Chinese opera seems hard to square with love for Chinese classical music (which is slow, soft, and mostly solo), but Chinese music aficionados adore both.

Patriotic love involves loving an abstraction, in an oddly impersonal yet passionate way.  This seems a very human thing; one can imagine a dog trained to die for a flag, but not to understand the abstract concept of “the nation” behind it.

In English, and in many other languages, the word “love,” by itself, is always understood to mean boy-girl.  It does not even include parent-child love, let alone a gourmet’s love for poule de Bresse.  One particularly benighted recent article on Darwin and psychology, for instance, restricts “love” to reproduction, listing only love for mate (singular) and kids (Nesse and Ellsworth 2009).  Psychologists of romance also restrict “love” to couples (Sternberg and Sternberg 2008; Sternberg and Weis 2006).  Some are even more extreme, considering teenage crushes as “infatuation,” not love.  All these limitations are truly culture-bound.  They exclude not only the hapless teenagers, but also temporary affairs, polygamous relationships (which can be deeply loving in China, Korea, and elsewhere), polyamory in general, and indeed everything except middle-class Anglo-American ideal mating.  One would think that no one ever has positive emotions outside of erotic passion and, perhaps, mothers’ love for babies.  There is very little on fathering, and, to my knowledge, not a single study of grandparental love (as opposed to the evolutionary significance of grandparenting).

Even romantic love has only recently been studied beyond the level of simplistic boy-girl mating (Sternberg and Weis 2006).  Rusbult et al. (2009) have recently shown that couples flourish in proportion to how much each member thinks the other brings out his or her “ideal self.”  This not only presents a relatively new subject for scientific research (novelists have long noted it, of course) but meshes with Viktor Frankl’s writings and other works that speak of the deeper desires of the human animal for ideals, life commitments, and true personal meaning in life.  We are most different from other animals when we are most involved with lifetime visions and projects.

This, however, somewhat ignores the fact that each love is different.  It often occurs that one passionately loves a person for reasons A, B, and C, then in the next affair passionately loves a person for reasons X, Y, and Z, then in yet a third affair loves a person in a quiet, gentle, non-“passionate” way.

The western world has had a positive, romantic idea of erotic love since the Greeks and Ovid.  Others have different ideas of it, and their knowledge might well be taken into account by modern psychologists.  In the Middle Ages, romantic love, at least if it became “severe” enough to interfere with ordinary life, was often considered a form of melancholia or other mental trouble, and treated by doctors—or sometimes philosophers (Burton 1932).  This was especially true in the Near East.  Here is the Arab physician ‘Ali ben ‘Abbās (c. 994) on dealing with this vexing illness: “On the Treatment of Love…. Such patients should undergo a moistening regime….  They should take baths, moderate horse exercise and anoint themselves with oil of violets.  They should look upon gardens, fields, meadows, and flowers, listen to sweet and low sounds as of the lute or lyre, and their minds should be occupied by stories or pleasant and interesting news.  But they must also have some work or business, so as to keep them from ideness, and from thoughts of the loved ones, and it is good to excite them to quarrel and argument that their minds may be yet further distracted” (Kamal 1975:421).

Perhaps the best balance is found in another Arab work, The Ring of the Dove by ibn Hazm (1953).  Ibn Hazm was a sober, serious judge and a leading authority on Islamic law.  That did not stop him from writing perhaps the most urbane, tolerant and wise book ever written on romance—one which, incidentally, gives equal place to homosexual and heterosexual love, without making an issue of it.  The book is a useful corrective to the extremist concepts of Islam now all too visible in the media.  Ibn Hazm covers everything from happy lifelong mating to obsessive and dangerous infatuation, with appropriate notes on treating the latter.

A vast amount of ink has been spilled on how love “evolved”—usually, I fear, by people who do not know much Darwinian theory.  This literature is inadequate even for boy-girl love, and ignores every other sort.  We all know now that fairly big breasts and a small waist attract men because they show reproductive fitness, and that men and women everywhere want someone who will listen to them and be sympathetic and kind, but we know surprisingly little more about even this best-studied of types of love.  We know a good deal about parent-infant bonding and early love, but there are mysteries here and many ridiculous claims in the literature (see Anderson 2007).  We have no clue—beyond the obvious facts known to the ancients—about how human family bonding with older children and grandchildren is maintained.  The family dog’s love for us is rather better studied than our love for him (Serpell 1995).  “Lord, help me be the person my dog thinks I am,” says a bumper sticker.  Showing how humans and mice are alike does not tell us how love evolved; we want an account of how humans and mice are different.  One doubts if a mouse wants someone who brings out his or her ideal self.

The literature on romance reaches amazing heights of of ridiculousness.  Great effort has been expended on a quest to find human body scents that attract the opposite sex.  This quest remains futile, yet biologists claim that love must be a chemical process.  The BBC (Murphy 2009) reported one Tim Jacobs as saying of love scent-chemistry:  “Unfortunately all this doesn’t seem to leave much room for romance.”  Well, yes, if it were true.  But we have plenty of hard evidence that love is about listening, caring, sharing ideal selves, living together and accommodating, and much else that is romantic—and no evidence that natural body smells are involved except in the well-known negative way.  An expert on the matter, Tristram Wyatt, writes:  “[S]o far, no [human] pheromones have been conclusively identified, despite stories in the popular press” (Wyatt 2009:263).  The human animal is wired to like natural-disinfectant smells on skin, hence the popularity of perfumes, most of which are based on disinfectant chemicals like lavender, jasmine, and rose oils.  Musk is an exception—an animal sex attractant—so one cannot rule out human sex attractant chemicals.  Certainly people are more sensitive to natural scents than we used to think.  Studies show people recognize their children’s and loves’ odors.  But romance survives.

David Buss, once the champion of extreme simplicity in regard to male-female attractions (women want wealth, men want reproductive vigor), now admits that men have many disparate strategies for attracting women (Buss 2009:143-144).  The insights of evolutionary psychology, cutting through common sense to the real core of things, have ended with a lame admission that common sense was right all the time.

 

Many languages are sharply different, focusing their words equivalent to “love” on the parent-child bond.  This too involves a range of emotionalities.  Some parents live for their children; others dutifully love their children without being much interested in them as people—especially once they have left home.  Cultures that focus on parent-child love (as in Polynesia, and on the island of Chuuk; see below) sometimes have different words for the other emotions in the “love” camp.  Ancient Greek unpacked “love” into eros for the obvious, agape for ideal selfless (nonsexual) love, caritas for compassionate love, and the verb philein for general strong positive affect.  The latter in turn had derivatives like philadelphia for “brotherly love” (a quality rather rare these days in the city named for it…).  There is also storge “friendship,” and still other words for mothering.  Already in the 18th century, Johann Herder, a major ancestor of anthropology, discussed various German loves and love-words in the late 18th century (Herder 1993:115-6).

All this means that “love” is a very difficult concept to use as “a motive.” Jesus clearly meant for people to “love one another” in the familial and companionate senses—a broad spirit of warm, accepting sociability.  Yet countless millions of Christians over time have interpreted it as meaning that their prime duty was to kill anyone who disagreed with them, or even anyone who looked different.

Real love for particular persons leads to caring and responsibility, unless one is fearfully disempowered, but obviously some kinds of love lead more directly and seriously to this than others do.  Family love (not erotic love) stands out as by far the most important motivator of care.  Companionate love is a strong second.  Caring for the environment is a lower priority (if it is a priority at all) compared to taking care of one’s family.  If my family was starving and I had to catch the last members of an endangered fish species to keep them alive, I would do it, though I realize that, to the world, the survival of my family may matter less than the survival of the fish.  Worldwide, millions of people are faced with essentially this choice.  Poverty forces them to catch fish, or cut down forests, to feed their families, though they may know that the end result of overuse is starvation for all.

Love, friendship, and respect are more based on morals than psychologists thought.  A recent study by Goodwin et al (2014) finds that morals beat warmth, pleasantness, and sociability in the long run, in evaluating persons.  More research is needed, but at the least, having shared morals makes for better relationships of any kind.  Conversely, McClure and Lydon (2014) found that people with high attachment anxiety are considered very undesirable as mates or partners.  Attachment anxiety typically follows from an approach-avoidance upbringing (often by an attachment-anxious mother).  It is a major handicap for anyone seeking a mate, and thus one of those things that ought to be addressed on a wide scale.

Love and caring may lead to active warm interest, but often we are interested in something we don’t really love—as I am interested in social theory without exactly “loving” either the theory or society itself.   In fact, most of us are interested in murder (at least to the point of reading mystery novels), and we certainly do not love that.  Conversely, the dependency love noted above usually goes with relatively little interest in the recipient, or with a very special kind of interest.  A newborn baby loves its mother and is intensely interested in her, in immediate personal ways, but obviously is not prepared to ask about her life story and hobbies.  Most of us know loving, long-standing married couples that have no intellectual interest in each other’s lives or thoughts.  Such couples are notoriously prone to break up when the kids leave home—they have nothing left to talk about.

Mystical experience is a part of intense erotic love for some (many?) people, but need not be, and mystical experience without love is common.

The development of love in humans can be roughly divided into stages, following Freud and Erik Erikson (1950) but without their specific theory commitments.  Babies and young children love without much understanding of those they love, or even knowing enough to seek understanding; they love from dependence and because of nurturing, care, and contact.  Teenagers tend to have brief, intense infatuations based on often rather superficial reasons, such as the conventional attractiveness or the popularity of their loves.  Their friendships are often similarly based and similarly transient.  Adults love from sharing, mutual friendship, longstanding commitment, trust, and the like.  Finally, a highest stage of erotic love, reserved for a fortunate few (or more—no one seems to know, involves a real mutual interest—seeking for knowledge of what will really please the other, seeking for knowledge of the other’s life and interests, but holding one’s own and expecting a return.  This sort of lifelong-learning love also plays across other attachments:  to friends, career, landscapes, art, even machines.

 

Hedonia and eudaimonia

Following Aristotle and his time, psychologists now distinguish between two very different kinds of happiness (Waterman 2007).  Hedonia is just good immediate fun.  Eudaimonia is the happiness, or satisfaction, that comes from having a deep life commitment.  Evolutionarily, this would have been one’s genetic destiny—children, and in a long-mated species like ours, normally also the other parent of said children.  By extension, humans have come to see life careers as meaningful.  Probably this evolved, and long ago:  hunter-gatherers had to feel eudaimonia for hunting and gathering, to motivate them to go out and get food for their families.

The obvious difference between hedonia and eudaimonia is that eudaimonia often isn’t much fun, but in the end is a lot more satisfying.  Parents, not only human ones but even higher animals, find young children are often an appalling trial, but more wonderful and delightful than all the “fun” in the world.  Many of us find our careers to be like that too.  I am perpetually being told to stop working and have some fun for a change; I can’t get it through people’s heads that I enjoy my work more than “fun.”

Some people seem wired for hedonia, some for eudaimonia.  Many people maintain a balance, but some seem interested only in immediate fun and unable to sustain commitments, others live for long-term goals and find transient pleasures quite unsatisfying.  Personality theories have sometimes noted this difference, but we do not really understand it.

Simply being interested is an extremely important, and extremely undervalued, mood-state.  Normal people are overwhelmingly interested in their social world, as we have seen.  Many are not very interested in anything else, though most people seem to expand their interest to take into account their work and work environments.  Some few, but reliably one or two in every group, displace much interest onto nature.  This becomes institutionalized as “science” when rapid expansion of a trade-and-commerce economy leads to floods of new information, as in Athens, early Islam, medieval China, and the western world since 1400.

 

 

 

Alcázar, Baltasar del.  1961 [orig. 16th century].  “Preso de Amores.”  In:  Ocho Siglos de Poesía en lengua Castellana, Fancisco Montes de Oca, ed. Mexico City:  Porrua.  P. 167.

 

Anderson, E. N.  2007.  Floating World Lost. New Orleans:  University Press of the South.

 

Burton, Robert.  1932.  The Anatomy of Melancholy. New York:  E. P. Dutton.  Orig. London, E. Cripps, 1651.

 

Buss, David.  2003.  The Evolution of Desire. New York:  Basic Books.

 

Erikson, Erik.  1950.  Childhood and Society.  New York:  W. W. Norton.

 

Goodwin, Geoffrey P.; Jared Piazza; Paul Rozin.  2014.  “Moral Character Predominates in Person Perception and Evaluation.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106:148-168.

 

Hatfield, Elaine; Richard L. Rapson; Lise D. Martel.  2007.  “Passionate Love and Sexual Desire.”  In Handbook of Cultural Psychology, Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen, eds.  New York:  Guilford.  Pp. 760-779.

 

Herder, Johann Gottfried.  1993.  Against Pure Reason:  Writings on Religion, Language, and History.  Tr./ed. Marcia Bunge.  Eugene, OR:  Wipf and Stock.

 

Ibn Hazm.  1953.  The Ring of the Dove.  Tr. A. J. Arberry. London:  Luzac.

 

Kamal, Hassan.  1975.  Encyclopedia of Islamic Medicine with a Greco-Roman Background. Cairo:  General Egyptian Book Corporation.

 

Kenrick, Douglas; Vladas Griskevicius; Steven L. Neuberg; Mark Schaller.  2010.  “Renovating the Pyramid of Needs:  Contemporary Extensions Built upon Ancient Foundations.”  Perspectives on Psychological Science 5:292-314.

 

Kronenfeld, David B.  2008. Culture, Society, and Cognition:  Collective Goals, Values, Action, and Knowledge.  Hague:  Mouton.

 

Murphy, Clare.  2009.  “The Human Smell:  A Powerful Force?”  BBC News Online, Jan. 15.

 

McClure, M. Joy, and John E. Lydon.  2014.  “Anxiety Doesn’t Become You: How Attachment Anxiety Compromises Relational Opportunities.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106:89-111.

 

Nesse, Randolph M., and Phoebe C. Ellsworth.  2009.  “Evolution, Emotions, and Emotional Disorders.”  American Psychologist 129-139.

 

Rusbult, Caryl E.; Madoka Kumashiro; Kaska E. Kubacka; Eli J. Finkel.  2009.  “’The Part of Me That you Bring Out’:  Ideal Similarity and the Michelangelo Phenomenon.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96:61-82.

 

Serpell, James (ed.).  1995.  The Domestic Dog:  Its Evolution, Behaviour, and Interactions with People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Sternberg, Robert J., and Karin Sternberg.  2008.  The Nature of Hate. New York: Cambridge University Press.

 

Sternberg, Robert J., and Karin Weis (eds.).  2006.  The New Psychology of Love. New Haven: Yale University Press.

 

Wack, Mary Frances.  1990.  Lovesickness in the Middle Ages:  The Viaticum and Its Commentaies.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press.

 

Waterman, Alan S.  2007.  “On the Importance of distinguishing Hedonia and Eudaimonia When Comtemplating the Hedonic Treadmill.”  American Psychologist 62:612-613.

 

Wyatt, Tristram D.  2009.  “Fifty Years of Pheromones.”  Nature 457:22-263.

 

 

 

Basic Human Nature: needs and individuals

Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

Theory 1:  Needs and Wants

 

Basic Biology of Knowledge

“[T]he economy, social structure, and beliefs of a historical era, like the fence restraining a baboon troop at a zoo, limit each person’s understanding of the world to a small space in which each day is lived”  (Jerome Kagan 2006:253; cf. pp. 195-196).  The simile is closer than Kagan ever thought:  baboons too have their social metaphysics (Cheney and Seyfarth 2007).

Recent findings have firmly grounded our hypersocial life, our cultural learning abilities, and our unique language skills in evolutionary biology.  The “killer ape,” and the “savage” in a permanent “state of warre” (Hobbes 1950/1651) are long dead.  Instead, biologists have found much inborn mental equipment, including innate sociability.  This includes some interesting parallels with birds as well as mammals.  Humans are animals with a complex evolutionary history.  (Only 40% of Americans accept evolution; 40% reject it totally; Miller et al 2006.)

Our behavior is, ultimately, the product of genes.  These specify very few rigid instincts:  dilating our pupils in the dark; closing our eyes when we sneeze; breathing even when asleep (and even that instinct fails in sleep apnea and sudden infant death syndrome).  More often, our genes specify ability to learn.  We learn some things much more easily than others, and which things are easy to learn is usually readily explained by our social needs and our former needs as hunter-gatherers in varied or savannah-like landscapes (Barkow et al. 1992).  We have a genetic mechanism to learn language, but we can learn—with equal ease—any of the 6800 or more natural languages and any number of computer languages and artificial codes.  We are genetically programmed to recognize blood kin, but we humans go beyond that:  we have elaborated thousands of different kinship systems, and we adopt, foster, and otherwise create artificial kinship links with great enthusiasm.  Biology produces general contours of thinking and feeling, while environment—notably including culture—fine-tunes these.  Biological templates, grounds, or modules are shaped by learning.  Jerome Kagan (2006, esp. pp. 234-245), who has done much of the relevant research, points out that the sorting is poor, the interplay complex.

The idea that humans are “blank slates,” without genetic programming, is long dead (Pinker 2003).  John Locke usually gets blamed for the tabula rasa view, and indeed he used the phrase, but he was quite aware of, and indeed had a quite modern view of, innate information-processing capabilities.  (Among other things, he draws interesting contrasts between normal individuals and “changelings”:  autistic persons, thought by countryfolk to have been fairy-children “changed” for real children that the fairies stole.6knew they were not fairy-children but ordinary humans who were simply born different.  See Locke 1979 [1697]).

As one would expect from animals evolved as hunters and gatherers, we notice animals more than objects.  Experimenters claim that children notice animals even more than internal-combustion-engine vans.  (See Holden 2007—but they obviously weren’t testing my sons!)  We also notice anything strongly patterned in nature.  It is pattern sense that lets us pick out the snake from the grass, the fruit from the foliage.  We notice flowers, guides to food for a primate.  A walk with a dog reminds one of how much inborn preferences matter.  Dogs care little about flowers, much about rotten bones that humans try to ignore.

 

Needs

Humans act to satisfy needs, and not only physical ones.  Critical was the discovery in the 1950s and 1960s that all mammals would work for chances to explore, chances to see new and interesting stimuli, and even for chances to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain via electric currents.  This discovery can be accommodated in an extended theory of “needs,” but only if one remembers that the old “drive-reduction” view is wrong (Anderson 1996; Baumeister 2005).

Humans have several broad classes of needs.  Abraham Maslow constructed a classic needs pyramid in 1970; the lowest but most basic needs must be fulfilled first in order to survive.  The others can be delayed progressively longer.  Maslow’s original list (as summarized in Kenrick et al. 2010) was:  Immediate physiological needs; safety; love; esteem; self-actualization.  (The last was never well formulated and has tended to drop out; see Kenrick et al. 2010.)

In order of immediacy—how long it takes to die from lack of need satisfaction—we may expand the classic list a bit:  breathing (oxygen); water; food; temperature regulation (fire, shelter, clothing…); health and physical safety; sleep and arousal; control over life situation; and social life from acceptance to social place (“esteem”) to love and belonging.  In addition, reproduction is a need for society, though not for individual survival.

People have to prioritize getting air, water and food.  Making a living, and coping with ordinary life, have to take first place.  But social, control, and reproductive needs are more important to people.  Thus people have to balance immediate, urgent, but less psychologically deep needs with things that can be put off but are more deeply significant.

These needs are not simple.  “Food” is a complex of needs for protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.  We have genetic programs telling us to eat, but no two human groups eat quite the same foods.  Silk moths live only on mulberry trees, pinyon jays live on pine seeds in pinyon groves, but humans live anywhere, and, as we used to say in Texas, “will eat anything that won’t eat back faster.”  Genes specify how our bodies lay down fat, but obesity incidence has skyrocketed in recent years.  Faced with floods of fast-food, some overeat, others exercise and eat wisely and stay thin.  All this makes nonsense of the claim for “fat genes.”  Where were those genes in 1900, when Americans ate much more than now, but were almost all thin?

Sleep and arousal are not simple states; sleep ranges from deep sleep to highly creative dreaming, and arousal varies from doziness to passionate interest, wild excitement, and manic enthusiasm.

Reproduction is not just sex;  it involves a few minutes of sex followed by nine months of pregnancy and 20 years of child-rearing.  Human birth and child-rearing require assistance (see Hrdy 1998).  Biologists, especially male ones, often write as if human reproduction was all “mate selection” and the sex act.  Darwinian selection has operated on the entire process, including the whole social program associated with birth, development, and education (Hrdy 1998; Zuk 2002).  Humans are programmed to learn from peers, elders, and indeed almost anyone, as well as from parents (see Harris 1998).  Unlike many animals, we learn throughout life, and in a multiplicity of ways.

In the face of this, Douglas Kenrick and associates have recently redone Maslow’s classic table (Kenrick et al. 2010).  Acknowledging the huge amount of attention to mating and parenting needs in recent years, they now see the list as: Immediate physiological needs, self-protection, affiliation, status/esteem, mate acquisition, mate retention, parenting.  They provide a very thorough discussion of the recent Darwinian theorizing on all these.  Oddly, they miss the control needs.

 

 

Control

We return now to human higher-order needs.  People everywhere clearly have a primary need to feel in control of their lives and situations (Anderson 1996; Heckhausen and Schulz 1995, 1999).  The control needs presumably derive from primal fear and the basic animal need for security and safety.  Humans need more:  we need not only to feel secure, but also to feel we have autonomy, that we know enough to exercise it effectively, and that we have the physical and mental ability to execute the plans so constructed.

These needs for various aspects of control are the biological bases of the human need for feelings of self-efficacy.  Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy (Bandura 1982, 1986) is foundational to much of social science.  Humans have to feel that they are able to manage enough of their lives, critically including their social lives, to give them what they need in the world, including social position.  To the extent we feel out of control, we first fight against whatever is restraining us; even a newborn will struggle against restraint of motion.  If that fails, people fall into despond, depression, and inaction.

What matters is perceived self-efficacy, not some objective “reality.”  Most people are fairly realistic about it, but many give up in spite of obvious opportunity, and others keep fighting long after all is lost.  Those who give up generally turn out to have had some major and unmanageable problem in childhood, such as alcoholic or abusive parents.  Even certain success is foregone by self-handicappers (Bandura 1986).  The perseverers turn out to have had the opposite experience:  a background of fighting through, somehow, against long odds.

All this leads to some imperfections in the human condition, dashing the optimism that comes from belief in human rationality.  People insecure in their self-efficacy are defensive.  This most obviously takes the form of open aggression, but most children are disciplined for that.  They learn to be passive-aggressive, treacherous, or at worst vengefully self-destructive.

Control needs may add to the normal animal need for security.  Notoriously, people will do anything to feel secure.  But the opposite can happen too:  teenagers show control by seeing how fast the family car will go.  Indian ascetics strive for control over their bodies.  Insecure, aggressive people strive for control over other people.

Few data exist on the different phenomenology of being at the mercy of natural forces as opposed to being controlled by other people.  My Chinese and Maya rural friends, and the rural Americans among whom I spent my youth, lived very much at the mercy of nature:  hurricanes, typhoons, floods, droughts, crop failures.  Yet they felt fairly well in control of their lives.  They shrugged off the disasters as “fate” and went on coping.  Modern urban Americans are not subjected to such disasters, but their worlds are dominated by bosses, politicians, and giant corporations.  Even their entertainment and diversion is canned in Hollywood.  They seem to feel a quite different kind of stress from those who must create their own lives in the face of often-hostile nature.  Facing the latter often breeds independence and self-reliance.  Facing the urban social world is much more prone to create feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and alienation.  In China I encountered a saying:  “Better sink in water than among people; if you sink in water you can swim, but if you sink among people you can do nothing.”

This is the “learned helplessness” of Martin Seligman, who has emphasized that people can also learn optimism and get out of the despond trap (Seligman 1990).  But helplessness in the face of control loss is not just learned.  It is a natural response.  The natural animal response to threat is to flee or fight, but if those fail, the animal cowers down and tries to stay as invisible as possible.  It hides in a den or hole, or just crouches in the grass.  (This is probably a main biological root of depression, though grief and loss are also important in that condition.)  This is the passivity of people whose horizons are restricted and whose options are limited.  Recently, Seligman’s coworker Steven Maier has learned that the response is mediated through the dorsal raphe nucleus (in rats and presumably all mammals; see Dingfelder 2009).  This is a rather primitive and general emotional processor within the brain.  Getting control and coping involves activity in the more recently evolved ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a structure highly developed in humans.

The control needs involve not only physical control of surroundings, but also understanding them.  Like security, knowledge is a much wider and more basic need; every animal has to know enough to find food.  But humans go much farther.  We want simply to know.  We enjoy learning facts simply because they may come in useful some day.  We need to know what will happen.  This is not just a want but a literal life-and-death need (Anderson 1996; Baumeister 2005). The desire to know and understand seems somewhat a separate system in the mind, though psychological studies show that it too grows from the control need.  The need for knowledge is different from the need for outright social power.  Enjoyment of learning appears to arise, ultimately, from the value of understanding the world for one’s control of one’s life.  There may be two separate systems here; or, perhaps, we are merely judging components of one system by their different results.

The need for security can be sated in normal individuals.  When they feel safe and accepted, they go on to something else.  But the wider, derived control needs are somewhat open-ended; unlike (normal) thirst, hunger, or desire for sex, they do not get automatically satiated by gratification.  Some people wind up constantly needing control:  they are “control freaks,” “power junkies,” or “rigid personalities.”  Some individuals, driven perhaps by deep insecurity, seem literally mad for power.  Their need, like the fire in Ecclesiastes, is never filled, and the result has been a world history of disasters.  Except for such people, Nietzsche’s claim that humans have a basic desire for “power” is simply wrong.

Fortunate those whose need for control is channeled into a need for understanding!  They have the best of all worlds, a life spent in learning and in enjoying it.  Possibly we can work at rechanneling the needs of the “control freaks” into healthy desire to accumulate more knowledge.

Finally, a dramatic recent finding by Brandon Schmeichel and Kahleen Vohs (2009) shows that one’s values are critical to maintaining this sense of control.  In a wide range of experiments, they showed that loss of self-efficacy was repaired by simply listing and explaining one’s core values.  A sharp and thought-provoking contrast with pleasant words and reassurance emerged from these studies:  reaffirming core values made people feel not only a lot better about themselves, but back in control, confident of their personhood.  Nice words reassured them about their social situation and disarmed anger and sulking, but did not fix the low sense of self.  This reminds us of the advice of the stoic philosophers, especially Marcus Aurelius: keep your principles and you can endure the world’s harms.  Easy for him to say—he was Emperor of Rome!—but it seems to work even for those of us who have much less real control of our world.

 

Social Needs

 

“One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabelled.  The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.”  –T. H. Huxley (Gross 1983:58)

 

Randall Collins (2001) postulates an “emotional energy,” not really either emotion or energy, but the inner state produced by rewards and recognition in social interactions.  Every interaction produces some if this commodity.  Positive energy accrues to those who get approval and approbation.  Common English recognizes many kinds of emotional flow in interactions.  Approbation, status, warmth, affection, liking, and other good things contrast with criticism, censure, annoyance, and disapproval.  Worse are rejection, anger, fury, and hate.

Warm and close sociability is the highest pleasure.  The naïve may think “sex” is the highest; the experienced will recall the difference between sex-without-love and sex-with-love.  The social needs include needs for love, recognition, sense of a “place” in society, and just plain ordinary socializing.  We humans love gossip (Dunbar 2004).  Our favorite recreation is hearing about (and, often, interfering with) the lives of other people.  This finds modern expression in reading novels, watching movies and TV, or obsessively following the lives of “celebrities.”

How much of a typical human’s enjoyment is solitary?  How much is simply the enjoyment of social contact?  Good sex is more about personal intimacy than about twitching.  Conversation and most artistic activities are social.  Good food and drink are more than doubly good when shared.  Of all pleasures, perhaps only meditation and the enjoyment of nature are better when done solo.  Art, dance, and sports have an ultimately rewarding and pleasant aspect quite apart from their social side, but they are more fun with others.  An Arab proverb says that “God does not count against your life the time spent in good company,” and modern medicine agrees.  It is literally true that the more good sociability one has, the longer one lives.

We need social life so much that people will endure any abuse, oppression, and cruelty to avoid ostracism or life in a bleak companionless setting.  Women endure abusive relationships.  Children removed from unspeakable family situations cry to “go home,” especially if they are put in a cold, impersonal shelter.  The abject conformity of much of 20th century life, with its mass media, uniform clothing styles, and monotonously identical shopping centers with the same chain franchises, is apparently preferable to loneliness.  Isolation and anomie are frightening, and people do anything to conform to what they see as social expectations.  Those who do not observe the conventions are enemies, or at least untrustworthy.  This was even more true in the 1940s and 1950s than now, so the best analyses come from that period:  Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (Riesman et al. 1950).

Incidentally, to anticipate a later section on “individualism” versus “collectivism,” the almost insanely abject conformists of Fromm’s and Riesman’s all-too-accurate accounts were precisely the people who talked most about “American Individualism.”  The same is true today; those who claim to idealize “individualism” are those who are most paranoid about immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, and so on and on.  They endlessly agitate to outlaw all such deviant behaviors.  They have even idealized junk food, simply because it is American, and denounce critics of junk food as “food Nazis.”  The left-wing equivalents talk of “personal liberty” but enforce political correctness.  All this proves once again the general principle that people idealize what they want for themselves, not what they actually have, and—conversely—tend to hate most in others what they secretly hate most in themselves (in this case, mindless followership).

All studies show that people are happy in proportion to their warm, supportive social group.  Loners, rich or poor, are less happy than warmly social people.  Change in social status makes the most difference in happiness.  Loss of a loved one is the cause of the deepest grief, and that grief does not go away soon. Many people will not eat to live unless they are socializing.  Meals on Wheels, an organization that brings meals to elderly or invalid shut-ins, has its workers stay to share mealtimes, knowing that people will often starve to death if they have no one to eat with.

Social place, social acceptance, social validation are all-important.  Banishment and ostracism are the worst punishments short of death, and sometimes death is preferred; suicide is often the result of loss of social position, whether by shame (as in Japanese seppuku) or loneliness and isolation (as in many American and European suicides, especially of older people).

Humans have a powerful compulsion to establish, maintain, and when possible improve one’s social place.  People live for social approbation.  The American individualist or independent self-made entrepreneur reacts with fury and despair to the least threat or challenge to his or her social standing.  This is not merely “belonging” and is not confined to “love.”  It is a matter of having a defined, stable, secure place in a social group.  One needs to have a secure position, with status, role, group recognition, reciprocity, authority, and nurturance more or less reliably assured.  Conversely, a chance word can ruin a lifetime friendship.

All societies have countless rules and visible signs to tell who is “in” and who is “out.”  Membership in the group is shown by everything from skin color and language to tattoos and ritual scarification.  Status in the group is shown by the same:  the higher-ups speak a different way (as Shaw’s Pygmalion reminded the world).  Every society must have painful, unpleasant, or at least foolishly arbitrary markers of belonging.  They are “costly signaling,” in psychological jargon:  they are hard to fake, and no one would do them for individual satisfaction.  These markers range from scars to uncomfortable clothing to rigid body postures to endless boring ceremonies.  The obsessive watching of awful films and TV programs in the United States is arguably the same thing.  One watches them to show that one will undergo any suffering, even watching Hollywood TV, in order to be “with it.”

Individual nonconformists  (even those that cannot help themselves, like the mentally ill) and highly visible minority groups are united in a category of “foldbreakers.”  Such people are not only hated and despised; they are “unacceptable,” “inappropriate,” “disapproved,” “sinful,” “shameful,” and so on and on.  Social rejection is a quite different matter from ordinary personal hatred.  Individual hatred can be controlled, but social rejection leads to genocide.

Failure of mutual aid and support follow lack of personal closeness, or accumulation of minor hurts and threats.  These weaken social bonds and make cooperation difficult.  Businesses are torn by rivalries and bickering.  Academic departments are almost always riven by petty jealousies and lack of close bonding.  This is devastating to work, but it always seems to happen, and very rarely is anything done about it.  The world at large is ruined by lack of solidarity, lack of responsibility, and petty annoyances.  Religion and morality exist largely to minimize this, but often make it worse.  They bond the members of a group together, but often interfere with bridging to other groups.

Many, perhaps all, of us stay alive only because of some goal beyond ourselves—helping our families, for instance, or living for an ideal.  Viktor Frankl, surviving a Nazi death camp, found his fellow survivors to be those animated by such higher callings (Frankl 1959, 1978).  Those who had nothing to live for did not live.  The higher callings were family or social group or a life-project relating to improving the human world.  Thus, these wider goals seem to be the highest level of the social need (see also Seligman 2006; cf. “self-actualization,” Maslow 1970).  The degree to which this need for meaning is inborn is controversial, but unquestionably these concerns tap something very deep in the human mind.  Franklian meaning therefore seems to come from—though not to end with—doing  something for one’s group, and from having a real place in that group based on this self-sacrificing action.  Even very young children feel terribly proud and pleased when they do something for others, and more so if they get some recognition for it.  Franklian meaning is important enough to have become a very effective component of therapy for depression and other cognitive problems (Seligman 2006).

So people do “not live by bread alone.”  They do not live for bread at all.  For the human animal, life is about maintaining family relationships, social place, and overall social security.  Bread is merely a means of staying alive for that end.

 

Control and Social Needs in Conflict

The needs for control and sociability lie behind the notorious cross-pull between autonomy and affiliation that defines the human condition.  People desperately want and need freedom.  But humans also desperately want and need support, social acceptance, and warm social life.  These needs are always getting in each other’s way, since living in society involves checking one’s more disruptive individual desires (Bandura 1986).  Only the most sensitive of families or communities can give people a reasonable balance.  Failure is deadly; a job with high demands but low levels of control over one’s work greatly increases the chance of heart disease.

Humans need society, but they find social stimuli to be daunting, and strong emotion to be downright threatening.  Any strong emotion, even love, can seem invasive or aggressive.  It brings the affiliation vs. autonomy conflict to the fore.

This leads to social codes that enjoin low-key, gentle social behavior, and discourage open expression of emotions.  Politeness and civility codes always stress the need to seem tolerant and calm.  Almost all that are known to me strongly discourage open expression of emotion, especially negative and aggressive emotion.  One exception—the idealization of “talking about feelings” in America in the 1960s and 1970s—withered with amazing rapidity.  People learned that they not only did not want to hear about others’ feelings, they were actually stressed and frightened by them.  Even positive emotions were stressful, let alone negative ones.  By 2000, people were back to status quo ante: idealizing the strong silent male and the warm but tactfully reserved female.  Stephen Pinker (2007) argues convincingly that human sociability requires indirection, exaggerated gentleness, and pulling emotional punches.  Humans simply cannot handle bluntly direct communication.

A better resolution is empowerment.  This concept has languished long in the realm of dreams—a high-sounding word that somehow says what we all know we need, but lacks much real definition.  Finally the team of Lauren Cattaneo and Aliya Chapman have given it a working definition (see Cattaneo and Chapman 2010).  They see it as an iterative process in the direction of “personally meaningful and power-oriented goals” (Cattaneo and Chapman 2010:646).  These are a problem; one normally has to fiigure out what one’s long-term and short-term goals really are.  Most of us go through life without thinking enough about that.  Then, to achieve said goals, we need “self-efficacy [Bandura again], knowledge, [and] competence” (Cattaneo and Chapman 2010:646).  One then has to act, and then think about how well the actions work—what impact they have.  Ideally, this gives one mastery over one’s life and ability to deal with social situations (the article goes on to make clear how one can actually do all this).

All societies have some degree of hierarchy; the most egalitarian hunter-gatherer group recognizes its elders, its best hunters, and its best group leaders.  Yet when real status hierarchies emerge, few like them, and all too many amoral power-seekers take

advantage of them.

In all societies, the irreducible need for autonomy and control plays against the social system.  All social systems find ways of managing it, but the ways differ greatly according to local circumstances.  The social construction of resistance, power, and autonomy is a compromise between the strong and the weak, as well as between control needs and social needs.

Social-place jockeying often takes the form conspicuous consumption, often miscalled “greed” but really a major sacrifice of wealth in the name of social showing off.  Alternatively, social-place jockeying involves the most unpleasant and infuriating of all social games:  the endless worries about slights and imagined slights, cutting remarks, and so on.  These are managed, with varying degrees of success, by ignoring them, attacking the perpetrators, displacing anger onto weaker people (especially minority groups), joining a monastery, or trying to talk things out civilly.  The last is the only one with much hope of success, but is rarely used, because it can cause major fights.  “Honor” (and its violent consequences; Baumeister 1997, 2005) is notoriously a socially damaging coping mechanism.  The drive for “power” in the Nietzschean sense, and the oppression of minority groups, both stem largely from this general social insecurity.  Real co-work is actually the best cure; people who have to depend on each other will work things out eventually.

This has parallels in other social animals.  Gorillas drum their chests. Nightingales try to outsing each other; their night song is for the females, their dawn song for rival males.

 

Religions address group solidarity—even urging love or compassion—and attack the most notoriously bad coping strategies:  selfishness, greed, and insensate drive for power.  They also urge communicants to accept each other, and often to close ranks against everyone else.  This is one more proof that religion is about social life, not about explaining origins or about managing “altered states.”  Religion gets most of its traction from providing social place, support, and empowerment.  At least, it should stop the cycle of social cuts and responses.  Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism, and other fanatical secular movements have replaced religion in these areas in the last hundred years, but afford no improvement.

In short, social science in the last 200 years has stood Hobbes on his head.  Instead of society forming from the “warre of each against all,” the “warre” forms from society gone wrong.  Humans are naturally social; they fall into civil war when social hate and rejection get out of control and economic problems exacerbate the conflict.  When a human society actually approximates Hobbesian “warre,” it has often gotten there through social rivalries and perceived slights (Baumeister 1997).

Reformers often want to improve material conditions, since those are most concrete, most easily fixable, and most immediate.  But, pace the economists, it is the social and control needs that actually motivate people.  Material conditions are created through politics.  Improving material conditions is certainly desirable, but must wait on dealing with political problems:  solidarity versus hatred,active helping versus passive conforming.  Improving material conditions would help more people faster, but governments, businesses, and organizations will not help unless political and social forces make them do it.  Politics is about regulating social life.  In spite of Marx and the “public choice” writers, it is not primarily about material interests or individual amoral power-maximizing.  It is about social place and group competition.  Politics and other conflicts, especially in hierarchy situations, are more about group hate than about rationality.  Public choice theorists who think that political behavior is rational live in a dream-world.

If people have a fair, responsive government, they will solve their own material problems unless they are utterly destitute of resources.  If they do not have a decent government, nothing helps much; they government rips off anything donated and the people sink into despair.

 

Individual Differences

Ashley Montagu, many years ago, wrote a book called The Biosocial Nature of Man (1973; of course he meant to include women; “man” was the general term then).  He stressed the biological grounding of human sociability.  Indeed, we are the heirs of millions of years of evolution as a social species.

One of the more thought-provoking findings of biology is that people are individuals all the way down.  No two people, not even identical twins, are identical in anatomy and physiology.  The differences in nutritional needs, psychological predispositions, and even functional anatomy between unrelated individuals can be very striking indeed.  As early as 1956, Roger Williams, in his book Biochemical Individuality (1956), emphasized this point, on the basis of his pioneering studies of nutrition.  He found that, among armadillos, even identical quadruplets had slightly different nutritional requirements.  He was also the discoverer of several of the B-complex vitamins.

People differ considerably within even very narrow compass.  My identical-twin nieces, raised together and doing everything together all their lives, have startlingly different personalities and interests.  Genes make them broadly similar, but growth and experience have had effects.  Those media stories of identical twins reared apart who gave their daughters the same name, liked the same pickles, and so on, are highly suspect.  Take any two people from similar cultural backgrounds and you will discover a lot of surprising resemblances.  Add tabloid exaggeration and even downright invention, and you get those stories.

There is still room for a lot of thought about why genetics “allows” so much free variation.  Even dogs and horses vary.  Humans have increased the range of variation by selecting fierce and meek strains of dogs, “hot-blooded” and “cold-blooded” horses, and so on.  Humans are about as genetically homogeneous an organism as the world affords.  We, like cheetahs, seem to have passed through a narrow genetic bottleneck not long ago, probaby at the dawn of modern humanity some 100,000-200,000 years ago.  Yet we have not only a great deal of physical variation, but also—cross-cutting it—a great deal of variation in basic personality.  Both of these cross-cut cultural variation, ensuring that everyone is truly unique.  We have the full range from introverts to extraverts, neat to sloppy people, leaders to followers, scoundrels to saints, happy-go-luckies to perpetually terrified neurotics, wild thrill-seekers and adventurers to stay-at-homes who never try a different restaurant.  Not a few sibling sets show almost the full range.

Brain chemistry and physiology differ between individuals (Damasio 1994).  Differences in experience—so obvious to us all—thus work on differences already “wired in” (Harris 1998, 2006).  The differences are subtle—matters of secretion of a bit more or less neurotransmitter, or numbers of neurons in some part of the brain—but they may have profound effects.  It is worth reflecting, when one reads about the pathological cases reported by Damasio, that these cases do not contrast to some uniform “normal” which can stand as the one “healthy” brain.  Normalcy is a matter of approximation and degree.

Over time, also, individuals change, for reasons not well understood.  Basic personality is remarkably stable over the life course—the shy baby will probably grow up to be shy at 90 (Kagan 1998; Kagan and Snidman 2004)—but much else can change somewhat.  Everyone with much time on this planet knows many who have “shaped up” and many others who unexpectedly “went wrong.”  The clichés tell us that the former “had internal strength” or “were saved by love,” the latter “had a fatal flaw” or “fell in with bad company.”  Actually, we don’t know much about it.  In the one good long-term study I have seen, Emmy Werner and collaborators (Werner 1989; Werner and Smith 1982) found that a strong family with solid values predicts success even after early troubles, while a dysfunctional family or upbringing can lead to disaster even after a good start.  Werner and her group also found that the military or the community colleges turned around many kids who were headed down a dubious path.  Studies of responses to illness or to loss of a loved one show similar variation.

Religious conversion often does not seem to have much effect, contrary to stereotypes.  One of my students, Jean Bartlett, studied religious conversion in California (Bartlett 1984), and found that people usually stuck with the faith of their parents or some extremely similar faith.  Failing that, they shopped around until they found a sect that was congenial to their lifestyle.  Theology had little to do with it.  Practical rules, such as avoiding meat or alcohol, mattered much more.  Seekers eventually sorted with people of similar educational background, class status, emotional makeup, everyday habits, and even musical taste. Few of these seekers even understood the theology of the sects they joined—let alone cared about such abstruse matters.  To the credit of religion, some converts did kick drug and alcohol habits and turn their lives around.  Most, however, sought a religion that let them do what they were doing anyway.

When the liberals of the 18th century fought and died for freedom of religion, many of them no doubt did so in the fond belief that, once people had a free choice, everyone would naturally see that the particular faith these 18th-century sages espoused was the “right” one.  Things did not work out that way.  Left to themselves, people opted for everything from Seventh-Day Adventism to Wiccan, depending on personal variables.  The chef Louis Ude described the English as having “a hundred religions and only one sauce” (Anderson 2014) because religious uniformity was imposed—violently—on France.  (Who imposed sauce uniformity on England?)  In the modern United States, we have far more than a hundred, if we do as Ude did and count each sect separately.

Individuals differ so much that, when a market offers only one or two choices, one can safely infer that there is something very wrong with the market.  People seem to want choices even when the differences are insignificant, as between commodities and brands that are tightly regulated.

These subtle differences between people may not make the obvious differences that cultural differences do.  However, they provide a substrate for cultural interpretation.  Even if two people were exposed to exactly the same cultural influences, they would come out with slight differences in behavior, because they would interpret and respond differently to the same stimuli.  In practice, of course, they are never given the same experiences.  Brilliant approximators that we are, we can always find common ground, and describe our culture in generally accurate ways.  We all know that no two people speak English or Navaho in exactly the same way, or have exactly the same religious beliefs or personal habits.  But we can communicate perfectly well and share understanding to a great extent.

These facts are rather devastating to much of social theory.  Traditional anthropology, sociology, and related fields were usually based on the assumption of uniformity or near-uniformity among people in the group in question.  Even the postmodern age, with its much more sensitive awareness of multivocality and diversity, has not really coped with the full implications of individual variation.  We continue to talk about and relentlessly essentialize “blacks” and “whites” and even “Asians/Pacific Islanders” as if these were homogeneous populations.

 

Personality Shapes Knowledge

Innate personality characteristics, in the good old Hippocratic-Galenic medical tradition, were known as “temperament.”  Originally, the humors—blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile—were supposed to be in balance.  Relative excess of one or another caused disorders of thought.  The balance was the “temperament” in question.  We still use the Hippocratic-Galenic language today, to describe personality, though we have abandoned (only in the last two centuries!) the explanation.  In Galenic thought, having too much bile (choler) resulted in what we still call a “bad temper” or being “choleric.”  Phlegm makes one “phlegmatic.”  Having a lot of blood makes one “sanguine,” but real excess of blood makes one manic.  Having a lot of these humors (especially blood) made one “humorous.”  Black bile, melancholia in Greek, is the dead blood that clogs the bile duct and neighboring intestine in serious cases of malaria or liver disease.  Having too much of it was thought to produce melancholy.  Indeed, having malaria or hepatitis is not great for one’s mood.

Several modern theorists have worked on issues of temperament and of inborn personality dispositions.  We have come surprisingly close to the old Galenic ideas.  Carl Jung (1969) recognized that their value as emotional classification outlived the inferred mechanism via body fluids.  Building on Jung, modern four-factor theories of temperament (Keirsey and Bates 1978; Myers 1980) recapitulated some of the old ideas.  Jerome Kagan’s more free-floating theory of temperament has also continued the tradition (Kagan 1998).

Modern five-dimension theories of personality drew yet again on this system, and independently rediscovered more of it (McCrae and Costa 1989; Wiggins 1996).  Today, the basic factors of personality in the standard system are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (McCrae and Costa 1989).  Liberals, or perhaps more accurately moderates, are higher in openness than conservatives; thugs are lower in agreeableness than most of us; procrastinators are low in conscientiousness.

These five seem all real traits, but their opposites are not always such.  In particular, a person may be less than conscientious because of born laziness, or because of defiant hate of authority, or because of inability to get her life together, or because of disease.  A person who is lacking openness may be defensive, or just raised in a very traditional community.

In terms of this theory, the sanguine personality is, in general, extraverted, agreeable, not very conscientious, open, and not neurotic—though manic when carried to extremes. The choleric is extraverted, not usually agreeable, not very conscientious, not very open, somewhat neurotic in that cholerics are sensitive and easily angered.  The phlegmatic is introverted, somewhat agreeable, not very conscientious, not open, and not particularly neurotic.  Phlegmatics are the slow, lazy, easy-going but serious ones among us.  The melancholic is introverted, not usually very agreeable, quite conscientious, usually open, and generally rather neurotic—more to the point, the melancholic is depressed, even to the point of mental illness (see Robert Burton’s classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1932 [1651]).

Those particular five are not necessarily cast in stone.  There are several other systems, with three to seven basic factors.  Cross-culturally, everybody seems to recognize extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, but not MacRae and Costa’s other two; conversely, many recognize honesty as a basic trait (De Raad et al. 2010).

A properly complex social life should provide lots of opportunities for different personality types to flourish.  Another trait theory of personality, the Briggs-Myers theory (Myers 1980; McCrae and Costa 1989), is explicitly based on the assumption that personality polymorphy is desirable.  Different personality types fit together to produce a successful society (Keirsey and Bates 1978 provide a superb discussion of this.  Incidentally, the most sexist comment I have ever seen in a learned journal was a dismissal of the Briggs-Myers theory because it was developed by “a housewife.”  In fact, Katherine Briggs (the developer of the Briggs-Myers theory) was a trained psychologist.  In her day, the misfortune of being born female doomed her to “housewife” status).

The five-factor evaluative dimensions are all judgmental terms.  The older Briggs-Myers test carefully avoided this, and did not assess for highly negative traits, but this fact rather narrows its application.  We often want to test for evil.  On the other hand, telling a testee that he is at the bottom on agreeableness and conscientiousness will not win his confidence.  This is not helped by the vagueness of these factors; one can be disagreeable either by being a general curmudgeon or by loving some and hating others, and one can be conscientious either by being honest and above-board or by being highly loyal.  A mafioso might test very high in conscientiousness.  A sorry commentary on the human race is that a person at the 50th percentile on the OCEAN test is not a particularly pleasant or likable sort.  Humans are sociable, but perhaps more because they are scared of aloneness than because they like people.

Fortunately, today, personality psychologists are escaping the tyranny of the “normal.”  Increasing numbers argue that various innate and early-learned predispositions create quite different types of personality, all of which are equally valid and valuable (Keirsey and Bates 1978; McCrae and Costa 1989, 1997; Myers 1980; Ozer and Benet-Martínez 2006).  These psychologists glory in difference.  They argue that a well-run enterprise should have people of several different types, mutually supporting each other.

Differences in Big Five traits correlate with everything from success in business to crime and addiction (Ozer and Benet-Martínez 2006; Wiggins 1996).  Business successes are extraverted and agreeable, criminals are high in openness (e.g. to lawbreaking) and neuroticism.

In the human career, there has been a singular lack of convergence on a single personality type.  I sometimes debate with my old friend, personality psychologist Dan Ozer, whether individual variation was random fluctuation about a middle point (his position) or actively selected for by disruptive selection (my hunch).  In fact, natural selection has selected for a range of skills, personality types, and inclinations, among animals as among people.  Max Wolf and collaborators (Wolf et al. 2007) have provided an explanation for some of this.  They point out that animals differ in behavioral commitment to a long future.  Some, like mice, follow a live-fast-die-young strategy; others, like elephants, follow a careful strategy to insure a long life.  Now, if these differences may be expected to occur within a species, we would see personality differences, at least in risk-taking and in risky behaviors like aggression and combat.  Wolf et al. provide mathematical models of how this could easily happen.

Some striking evidence for the value of personality differences comes from the fact that even bees show them, and there is a clear advantage for the bees.  Some bees, when foraging, are much more prone to seek out new sites.  These have more catecholamine, glutamate, and gamma-aminobutryric acid in their brains, pretty much like novelty-seeking humans—people who score high in openness.  The neurotransmitters involved in this seem highly conserved from the common ancestor of insects and people.

Daniel Nettle has argued that natural selection has operated to maintain a large amount of variation along these dimensions (Nettle 2009).  Even animals display personality differences (Ley and Bennett 2007).  Nettle argues from the differential successes of human types in mating and social life.  Extraverts get more sexual partners but introverts tend to be steadier at staying with a mate.  Agreeable people obviously do better than disagreeable ones in ordinary social life, but disagreeable ones may protect themselves better in bad situations or when conformity backfires.

We can see the advantages to hunter-gatherers of having different types of people in the group.  Extraverts organize hunts, but introverts are better at lone searches.  Agreeable people cooperate in the search, but disagreeable ones fight off raiders and enemies.  Neurotics stay home and have visions, and may become curers.  Openness leads to more exploration, but its opposite leads to patiently working over the same old root-and-seed patch, day after day.  Conscientious people take care of others, but off-the-wall types and ADHD youths take chances on new hunting grounds, wander about spotting game trails, and imagine new possibilities for toolmaking.

Personality traits seem generally distributed in a vaguely “normal” way, in the statistical sense:  they produce bell curves.  So do the traits to be discussed below, like intelligence.  But we usually have little knowledge of why this is so.

An interesting, but tentative, study by Aurelio Figuerdo and colleagues (2007) found evidence that the “good” ends of the Big Five scale (agreeableness, conscientiousness, etc.) correlate with health, good self-care, stable marriage, good care for children, and stable social life; this is not surprising (it fits with Big Five theorists’ findings).  The investigators go on to see this as all produced by selection for stable family caretaking.  Investing a great deal in a few children, rather than a very little in a very large number of young, used to be called “K selection” in biology, and Figuerdo et al. hypothesize a new genetic style of “Super-K.”  Humans are very K-selected relative to, say, codfish or sponges, or even monkeys.  Some humans appear to be more K-selected than others—though any genetic differences are blanked, in practice, by the horribly damaging effects on family life of chronic poverty and social instability.  Poor people in traditional village settings tend to act K, or Super-K, but the slum-dwelling poor, homeless poor, and others in unstable contexts may become less K (or more “r,” to use the old jargon).

However, obviously, the “bad” ends of the Big Five would have been selected out of the human species long ago if they didn’t have value in raising children.  Less conscientious parents may be more fun and rewarding.  Less agreeable and open ones will discipline their children more, which may be necessary in many contexts.  Neurotic parents will make sure their children take no chances.  The group that prospers is the one that has enough variation that it is prepared for anything.

A long literature on Big Five traits as adaptive has now developed, especially since even the biologists have admitted that animals clearly show them.  Every dog owner knows that some dogs are more extraverted, some more neurotic, and certainly some more agreeable, and finally some attention has been devoted to evolutionary aspects of this.  Moreover, personality traits have various adaptive values in humans (Alvergne et al. 2010—a source which reviews the literature, including the animals studies).  Extraverted males leave more children in polygamous societies, as one might expect.  In one case, neurotic women had more children but took less good care of them; however, in this study it is possible that the women became “neurotic” because of having many children and inadequate resources, rather than the other way round (Barbara Anderson, personal communication).

Jerome Kagan (Kagan 2006; Kagan and Snidman 2004) adds concern about “high arousal” and “low arousal” types of people.  The former are more nervous, excitable, and easily scared under some circumstances; “low arousal” ones are more relaxed, outgoing, and able to cope with stress.  Kagan, however, wisely emphasizes the problems of simple categories such as “fear” or “arousal.”  He points out that we are betrayed by such vague, general words.  A stimulus may produce fear in one situation, not in another.  Fear in a fish probably doesn’t feel like fear in a human.  Also, there are different types of fear; a sudden encounter with a rattlesnake on a narrow trail is not the same as brooding over rising sea levels caused by global warming.  Kagan also unpacks “self-esteem,” noting that an extremely ambiguous, complex set of concepts is measured in standard psychological studies by a ten-minute test (Kagan 2006:232).

All this leads to a conclusion rather astonishing to anyone of my generation:  personality cross-cuts culture, rather than being caused or formed by it (see below under Culture).

Moreover, there are still many areas of personality left unsampled by the Briggs-Myers and Big Five measures.  Courage is left out, to say nothing of the distinction between courage, bravery, and foolhardiness.  Aesthetics is left out.  It is a complex diminesion; some peole are highly competent, apparently “naturally” (whatever that may mean), at music or painting or other arts, but show no inclination to follow up and work at it; others are inept, but live by art anyway.  I am one of the latter; untalented at music, I love it to the point of being utterly unable to live without it, and thus sing and play guitar a good deal of the time, in spite of the fact that no one but my wife can stand the result.  Of those who are gifted, they take different tracks.  My son the artist designs sophisticated computer websites, interfaces, and systems instead of painting.

People also differ in levels of awe, reverence, devotion, and other spiritual emotions.  Psychologists rarely want to touch this, though there are some studies of mysticism.  Sociological studies routinely confuse religiosity in the sense of going to church (the ones I have seen were done on American and European Christians) with emotional spirituality.  Going to church may measure nothing more than conformity, or boredom on Sunday, or peer pressure.  It does not necessarily measure anything deeply religious or spiritual. (I am writing a book on religion, and defer further discussion and citation to it.)

Motivation is also, broadly speaking, left out, though the received personality types do somewhat track it.  Particular ambitions are left out.  Above all, interest is left out.  Why are some people interested in everything (like Leonardo da Vinci) while others are content to watch sports on TV forever?  Why are some interested in philosophy, some in Civil War history, some in birdwatching, and some in sleeping in the shade?   We can trace interest to influence—people usually pick up their interests from older peers, or parents, or sometimes from books—but we do not really understand more than that.

As a professor, I found the most maddening, disappointing, and draining of my tasks was dealing with student disinterest.  It is simply impossible for an ordinary professor, given the short contact times we usually have, to get most students interested in a subject.  Many students are interested only in parties.  A few gifted and charismatic professors can really whip up student interest, but this really is a rare skill and hard to learn.  Yet, in spite of obvious need, there are—to my knowledge—no studies of why people differ in levels of interest in general, and precious few on why they differ in their hobbies and obsessions.

The same is true of differences in intelligence. I have purposely left “intelligence” out of this book, because the literature on it is a nest of nightmares.  But the point must be made here that there is still no believable evidence for significant differences in intelligence—however defined—between ethnic groups or any other large segments of the human race.  Conversely, there are obvious and huge differences in both the level and the type of intelligence between individuals even within one family.  Specific types of intelligence crosscut culture, bringing people close together across cultural lines.

The much-vaunted “g” factor that measures “intelligence” and is hereditary remains awfully hard to pin down.  Being quite verbal and utterly inept at math, I am living proof that there is no “g factor” that makes one good at both.  I know many mathematicians who are not especially verbal.  The hereditary component of “g” remains refractory when socioeconomic status is ignored (in spite of claims to the contrary in the more extreme literature).

Instead, people seem to show different interests, abilities, and energies.  My university has math geniuses from China, Russia, America, and India, communicating perfectly with each other (but not with me). On the other hand, I am in blissfully perfect communication with Maya woodsmen and Chinese fishermen over plants, animals, and weather; we share a mentality highly attuned to natural kinds.  Indeed, intelligences, personality types, culture, and genetic background totally crosscut each other, with absolute abandon.   The horribly vexed questions concerning “intelligence” have prevented social scientists from looking at this astonishing fact.  It requires explanation.  Why do we have math geniuses occurring at about the same rate everywhere?  Why do we have verbal artists in all climes and places?  Why do we have poor simple souls, unable to learn even ordinary facts, in all cultures and communities?

 

Personality Gets Serious:  Culture and Mental Problems

Recently, controversy has swirled around such terms as “autism,” “Asperger’s syndrome,” and “ADHD.”  These show diagnosis creep:  they are diagnosed more and more often, for less and less cause.  When I was young, autism meant complete shutdown:  a child who was unable to speak or interact and who banged his (more rarely, her) head on the wall.  Now, via “Asperger’s syndrome” (“mild autism”), it is used to label anyone slightly unsocial, thus creating a “false epidemic” (Frances 2010; see also Grinker 2008).  ADHD has similarly crept up on us (Frances 2010); suffice it to say it is diagnosed ten to twenty times as often in the United States as in European countries (Dennis 2006).  Some have cynically commented that it is sometimes merely an excuse for drugging “uppity” children, usually minority members, into calm, or for saving taxpayers’ money by eliminating recess and playgrounds (Dennis 2006).

People have always recognized mental illness—a strange, often incurable inability to manage life emotionally and intellectually.  Traditional cultures generally regard it as some sort of supernatural condition; the mentally ill are “fools of God” or faery-children or victims of demons.  Modern psychology has not always done better.  Heredity has long been known to be a factor, but environment is also certainly involved, since identical twin studies show only about 50% or less congruence.  Now it appears that extreme malnutrition can be involved in causing schizophrenia.  Famines double the incidence (Reedy 2006).

Social theory has undertheorized the role of personal differences.  The fall of the Great Man theory, so popular in the 19th century, led to an overreaction.  So did the failures of early psychology to produce good personality theories.  This led to a social-science assumption that all people are the same, or have to be treated by theorists as if they were.  Moreover, Max Weber and others showed that situations—especially, the nature and number of followers—greatly influence leaders.  This led to an idea that any reasonably competent person could be a leader; all that was needed was available followers (see Vroom and Jago 2007).  Good leaders—not only successful, but morally good—appear in all societies, and really differ, to varying degrees, from us ordinary folk (Zaccaro 2007, and related articles in that issue of American Psychologist).  Unfortunately, poor leaders are also universal (Kellerman 2004), and truly evil leaders are not only universal but common and successful (Lipman-Blumen 2006).  Particularly interesting are the leaders who start out reasonably tolerable, or even good, and progressively decline into horrific evil.  Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a recent example.  Did he go mad, or senile, or did he simply get caught up in his own power?  Other leaders seem in hindsight to have had fatal flaws that led in the end to apparently insane behavior.  Zhu Yuanzhang, the brilliant founder of the Ming Dynasty and one of the most fascinating characters in history, was clearly paranoid-schizophrenic.  He declined from erratic but spectacularly successful youth into mad old age. The same could be said of Emperor Theodore (Tewodros) of Ethiopia in the 19th century.  Mao Zidong became more extreme and murderous throughout life.

In every culture, evil leaders can appeal to group hate.  This always attracts vast numbers of people, especially young men willing to die for the cause.  By contrast, leaders who want to do good have to depend on skilled and reflective secondary leaders who have the knowledge to carry out the mission.  Whether the campaign is public health, economic development, organized military effort, or education, a leader-for-good has to rely on a pyramid of other leaders.  Public health requires highly trained, highly motivated, independent, self-reliant medical personnel.  Education requires similar ranks of teachers.  This is notoriously rare, providing yet another reason why evil triumphs in the world.  Institutions theoretically help the situation, providing platforms and training possibilities.  Unfortunately, institutions become corrupted easily, by bad leaders or simply by ordinary foot-dragging and corner-cutting.  Hierarchy, too, has its costs.

 

Age Shapes Personhood

Finally, age, life status, and other developmental factors shape the way culture plays out in individuals.  The Big Five personality traits change over the life track; people get better (thank goodness), becoming more agreeable, open, conscientious, and and less extraverted and neurotic.  However, all the first four of those decline dramatically from 10 to 13, picking up slowly after 14 or 15.  Neuroticism rises during the same period, but only in young women; in men it just steadily and slowly declines, as it does in women after 15.  Parents of teenagers will not be surprised by these findings (Soto et al. 2011).

The developmental cycle in individuals and in families changes all the ways culture is experienced.  Children have their own subcultures.  Youths have theirs, and are maximally open to learning about wider cultural matters—theirs and others’—but are also at the most headstrong stage of life.  Aging brings wider life experience, and theoretically brings “wisdom.”  However, it notoriously makes most people more rigid and defensive—“crotchety,” we used to say.  Few indeed are those who can keep open minds and keep learning after 60.  This should make worrisome the increasing dominance of world politics by the very old.  (The average US Senator is now around 70).  Older people often identify more and more tightly with a reference group that often is shrinking, or folding back on itself; they may return to the group of their childhood, or become more caught up in the micropolitics of their work or neighborhood.  Rare, but not unknown and certainly valuable beyond all wealth, is the elder who can keep broadening his or her perspective and humanity throughout life.

 

Simple Pleasures

Sudden successful fulfillment of an urgent need is one main source of human pleasure.  We all know this about sex and about cold beer on a hot day, and practically every culture seems to have a proverb equivalent to “hunger is the best sauce.”

Arousal—whether by stimulants or by dangerous sports—can be a pleasure in its own right.  The pleasures of sex seem usually to involve more effort in heightening desire than in satisfying it.

Feeling in control is a good feeling; pushing one’s sense of control to or beyond the limit (as on a roller coaster or in extreme sports) is exciting, and not just because of the physiology of “adrenaline rushes.”  Learning and understanding satisfy a need and are truly enjoyable.  We humans like to whip up curiosity and then satisfy it; consider the pleasure of mystery tales.  Almost everyone seems to have a hobby:  some one thing they want to learn about just because they enjoy learning.

Normally, however, such curiosity is structured by immediate need.  People, like all other mammals, are usually interested in things only to the degree that they have a material or social reason to be interested. Throughout history, the vast majority of people, when faced with the need to know about anything beyond their social group, have simply accepted conventional wisdom or ancient book-learning.  Always there is some interest, explaining the slow but steady progress of knowledge in all societies, but only in the west since 1500 has the drive to accumulate new knowledge become a major industry.  The origins of this remain obscure, but correlations with the expansion of trade, business, and religious enquiry are obvious.

Among academics, learning is often a goal in itself—a pure pleasure, not just a way of knowing enough to cope.  Academics forget that this is unusual, and make sour remarks about students who have a normal, instrumental attitude toward knowledge.

A professor who has built her life on analyzing the proteins in the fur of the two-toed sloth can never understand how students can fail to be absolutely fascinated, and can be hurt and angry when students persist in being bored with sloth proteins.  What is astonishing is how many students do become interested in them if the teacher is inspiring.  Truly, social charisma can do anything.

Some of us even have made a hobby of understanding everything!  If only life were long enough….  Yet, worldwide, even among academics, the most interesting thing is always one’s social group, and gossip remains the major topic of conversation (Dunbar 2004).

Throughout history, hedonists have lived for their key pleasure, puritans have lived to stop them.  The hedonist lives to eat.  The puritan eats to live, and lives to blame the hedonist for immorality.  Some people have sex only to produce children, others only for pleasure, others only as part of a love relationship.  Such “revealed preferences”—the things people actually do, or spend their money on—keep surprising us.

Happiness in an activity can come from many sources, only one of which is the intrinsic pleasure of the activity.  More often, the happiness or pleasure comes from social approbation.  Something intrinsically unenjoyable seems pleasurable because “everybody does it,” or because we get respected for doing it.  In fact, the whole point of many activities is that they are so unpleasant, difficult, and demanding that others are impressed by our ability to do them at all.  Just as believing the preposterous is a great way of proving one is truly religious (Atran 2002, 2010), so torturing oneself to follow the latest media fad is a great way of proving one is part of the group.  (The technical term for this is “costly signaling,” and it is almost universal among animals.)

Extreme sports are an example.  Some people climb mountains just because they enjoy the activity and the view.  Most of us who have this persuasion climb rather small mountains.  Others want to triumph over nature, or over themselves.  The most serious climbers, though, usually seem to have social approbation on their minds, however much they may also enjoy the peaks.  They want the respect that comes from doing a “hairy” climb, especially if they can be the first to solo up south face in winter, or something of that nature.

Once a need is satisfied, further satisfaction is not usually pleasant.  Our bodies tell us when we have had enough to eat, enough to drink, enough sex.  They err less than you might think; eating 100 calories more than you burn up, every day, will make you gain a pound a month.  Very few people do that.

The major exception here is the control need.  It has no obvious satiation point.  This is fine when one asserts control by knowing.  It is less fine when one feels the need to control everyone and everything in the vicinity.

Money does indeed fail to buy happiness; it can buy “life satisfaction”—relative content with one’s life—but real positive feelings depend on  “fulfillment of pscyhological needs: learning, autonomy, using ones skills, respect, and the ability to count on others” (Diener et al. 2010).  In other words, on social and control need satisfaction.  Even the “life satisfaction” seems to be more about keeping up with the Joneses than about the pleasures of wealth, for rising incomes do not cause notable rises in it, unless one moves from genuine want to genuine comfort.

On the whole, most of us are content to hold even, but people find real meaning in more demanding activities.  The old German formula for a good life, made famous by Sigmund Freud, is “work and love.”  Most people who seem deeply satisfied with life do indeed get their satisfaction from these two things (see Frankl 1959, 1978).  They also get their real social place from those two, and social place is far more basic and deeply important than happiness or satisfaction.  Thus, even correcting someone at a task is often taken as a deadly rejection, and produces anger that often seems highly disproportionate to the scale of the correction.  This is one of the reasons administrators often burn out.

 

 

Explanations

One might note how progressive restriction of level of explanation can operate in analyzing foodways (see Anderson 2014):

At the most basic biological level, we need the calories, protein, fats, vitamins, minerals.

We then need to avoid poisons and stay healthy.

We then need to figure out how to get all that for minimum effort or expense—to do “optimal foraging,” in the jargon.

This means, in an agricultural society, looking at crop ecology and other agricultural issues.

In a civilization, one has to worry about money and prices.

Then, that done, food always gets involved in social bonding: sharing, reciprocity, generosity.  It marks religious and ethnic affiliation.  It diffuses among neighbors.

It marks class, region, occupation, gender, age, and so on.

On a still smaller and more restricted level, it marks occasion: birthday, Christmas, business deal.

It allows individuals to show off and jockey for status.

It reveals social knowledge via ordinary etiquette.

Then, at all levels, it is affected by contingent histories and just plain accidents, including personal taste.

Social scientists have explained social systems in dozens of ways, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.  We will find it useful to classify these, very roughly and crudely, into four types.

Mode 1 consists of rational need-satisfaction theories.  Most of them are broadly materialist.  These include straightforward biological functionalism:  society seen as a way of getting food, shelter, and reproduction.  It includes more complex materialist theories like Adam Smith’s cultural evolutionary dynamics, Marxism and other political economies, “rational choice theory,” and modern enviromental and ecological theories.

Mode 2 consists of explanations resorting largely to human instincts or innate tendencies.  People clearly have inborn behavior.  A smile is a smile everywhere, even if the Mona Lisa had her own brand.

Mode 3 consists of explanations that are broadly idealist—not in the sense of having high ideals, but in the sense of living according to ideas rather than material needs or evil wants.  Most religious leaders thought, and think, this way.  In western social science it was the view of Immanuel Kant, and since he essentially created most of modern social science, he had a truly profound influence on us all.  His straight-line intellectual descendents included Dilthey, Boas, Parsons, Lévi-Strauss, and most of the other makers of modern sociology and anthropology.

Social functionalism, from Marx to Durkheim and the later functionalists, is a Kantian offshoot with considerable cross-fertilization from Mode 1.  Social functionalists see that a society needs communication systems, a law code, a calendar, a leadership and power system, allocated roles, status and prestige, morals, festivals, and so on.  These emergents cannot be predicted directly from physical needs; they have a social and interactive history.

Mode 4 is a broadly empirical tradition.  Pure empiricists hold that one can simply observe and count behaviors, and get along by inferring minimal thought-processes behind the actions.   Pure empiricists form a grand chain, from John Locke to B. F. Skinner.  Locke was the least extreme, and in fact is really more an ancestor to Kant—an early scholar of cognitive processes.  Since Kant, empiricists have been less and less able to resist taking account of thought processes.  The pure-empiricist trend in social science ended with Skinner’s attempts to equate pigeon behavior in the lab with language learning (see Skinner 1957, 1959).  This was so patently hopeless, and so memorably demolished by a famous review by Noam Chomsky (1959), that the pure empiricist program could not survive.  However, modern experimental psychology, especially the heavily biological forms like neuropsychology, are derived from this lineage.  They now take explicit account of ideas and mental phenomena, however (Damasio 1994; LeDoux 1996).

All four of the above have merit.  Theories, as Michel Foucault (2007) reminds us, are a tool kit, not a religion.  Every worker needs a whole set of tools.  Unity comes in the result—fixing the house or the world—rather than in the means.  You can’t fix even a simple toy with only one tool, and social theorists might reflect on that.

Theorists find their favorite level to explain.  Biologists like the whole-species level.  They prefer to explain the things that all people do everywhere.  Human ecologists and political scientists are more restrictive, but still prefer the big picture:  variations and history dynamics on a world scale.  Interpretivists and cultural anthropologists like to look at cultures.  Psychologists (except those who are basically biologists) like to look at individuals.  To get the whole picture, one has to integrate all these.

 

 

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Chickens and Millet: Early Agriculture in China

Saturday, May 9th, 2015

Paper delivered at Society of Ethnobiology annual conference, Santa Barbara, CA, May 2015

 

Chickens and Millet:  The Significance of New Findings in Chinese Food Archaeology

Recent findings in archaeology have considerably pushed back the dates for domestication of chickens, millets, rice, pigs, and other domestic life forms of eastern Asia.  North China has taken a lead over south China, though this may change with further investigation.  Early evidence of milking and stockraising in central Asia is relevant. To a cultural anthropologist working with modern uses of plants and animals, the new findings confirm my models and suppositions about the origins and development of agriculture: it happened when environmental conditions improved and food got more abundant, not during periods of scarcity; it probably involved trade and certainly contact with other groups; it took place in favorable locations at probable trade crossroads.  Early items grown were those either storable or highly valued or both.  Uses of many items tended to shift over time as more efficient systems were discovered.  The development of food systems has to be understood in a context of induced biological development: changes were most likely when they removed bottlenecks that inhibited trade, contact, and efficiency.

 

A number of recent excavation projects in China have shown that agriculture there is much older than we once thought.  When I was a student, agriculture was known back to about 4000-5000 BCE.  It now appears to go back at least to 8000 BCE (for excellent recent reviews of Chinese archaeology, see Li 2013; Liu 2005; Liu and Chen 2012; see also Anderson 2014).

Pottery is even earlier, and those who still believes in the “Neolithic Revolution” will be delighted to learn that pottery goes back to 20,000 years ago or more in China (Wu Xiaohong et al. 2012).  It was soon quite widely spread, from the Pearl River at 15,000 BCE (Pearson 2006) to the Amur River on China before 11,000 BCE (Zhushchikovskaya 1997).  It is in Japan by 13,000 or earlier.  This pottery is probably ancestral to that of Europe, since one sees a slow spread of similar wares across Siberia.  Ground stone appears early in the form of milling stones (metates).

The first agriculture known in China involves two species of millet, foxtail (Setaria italica) and broomcorn or panic millet (Panicum miliaceum). Several sites report them around that date, but the most interesting currently at Nanzhuangtou, somewhat south of Beijing.  Here not only early millets but the earliest domestic chickens in the world are found, at 8000 BCE (Xiang et al. 2014, 2015).  The earliest dog in China is also there, and is even earlier, at 10,000 BCE (Liu and Chen 2012:64).  Very early pigs and dogs are found at nearby sites.

The Nanzhuangtou site got its domesticates during the rise of warm wet weather around 8000 BCE.  There and elsewhere, rise and spread of domestication tracks warming and wetting trends, with dramatic improvement of growing conditions.  Around Dadiwan, for instance, there were forests of oak, birch, maple, hazelnut, cherry, chestnut, hophornbeam, sorbus, persimmon, hornbeam, elm, Toxicodendron (I didn’t know China had that), locally even liquidambar, eucommia, and other warm-weather trees.  Spruce occurred locally, with sharp decline after 2600 BCE (Li et al. 2013).  Most of these must have been on the mountains above the site, not in the dry, desolate plains where the site is, but trees evidently moved down the valleys.  It is worth noting that the mountains support a forest today, though not such a subtropical one.  The high Qinling Mountains to the south also had a warm-temperate forest (Zhao et al. 2014).

Several sites in the Yellow River drainage report millets back to 7000 BCE.  Millet agriculture had reached Dadiwan, far out into west China and almost in the Central Asian desert, by 6000 BCE (Bettinger et al. 2010).  It had also reached Inner Mongolia by this time (Shelach et al. 2011).  Millets are C4 plants, almost everything else in China is C3 (including rice), so where C4 shows up in bone signatures one can be sure that millet is being devoured.  This allows us to find transitions to agriculture in the record, with C4 dominating by 6000 BCE.  Rice occurs at Jiahu, one of the millet-agricultural sites from around 5000 BCE (Zhang and Hung 2013).  Also at Jiahu were residues of millet beer brewed with honey, hawthorn fruit, and grapes (Liu and Chen 2012:120; McGovern 2009).  Patrick McGovern, who analyzed this residue, worked with Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware to reconstruct it, and you can now buy “Chateau Jiahu” beer if you can find it.  It is possibly a bit less than the finest brew, and thus is rarely stocked by liquor stores.

Millet agriculture, complete with chickens, pigs, and dogs, spread from north-central China throughout what is now China by 4000 BCE.  Its expansion could very well have coincided with, and been responsible for, the spread of the Tibeto-Burman (a.k.a. Sino-Tibetan) language phylum.  The timing, location, and motivation all seem right.  This phylum may have started in high west China, judging from surviving origin myths, or from central north China.  Its more recent radiation, giving us the Tibetan, Burman, Qiang, and other branches and probably the Chinese too, is generally thought to have been in Sichuan; there are many good grounds for this (van Driem 1999, 2002).  If so, that was probably after the spread of millet agriculture into that mountainous region, which is perfect for differentiation and migration of groups.

Meanwhile, rice (Oryza sativa) was domesticated by 7000 BCE in the Yangzi area (Liu and Chen 2012:76)  The Peiligang culture, flourishing 7000-5000 BCE, had a lot of it, as well as millet (Liu 2012).  At Hemudu by 5000 BCE rice was common, with large containers of it having been found.  (Rice then probably yielded 500 kg/ha; it now yields over ten tons per ha, thanks to the masterful breeding programs of Yuan Longping [2002] and others.)

A great deal of controversy surrounds rice.  All evidence points to the Yangzi drainage, except for some recent genetics work that pinpoints the Pearl River drainage, far to the south (Huang et al. 2012).  But they sampled wild rice (Oryza rufipogon) largely from that area, and the plant is mostly gone in the Yangzi area, so this is probably an artifact.  Jeanmarie Molina et al. (2011) found that their genetic data pointed to a single origin in the Yangzi area for rice, but more recent work

There are two major divisions of rice, japonica (short grain) and indica (long grain).  These are very separate and hard to cross (Yang et al. 2012), indicating a very long period of divergence; they were very likely different in the wild long before humans came on the scene, and thus must have been domesticated separately.  They may both be native to the Yangzi area. Reports of indica in early Chinese sites are common but controversial.  However, recent work suggests that indica may have arisen in India from hybridization of introduced japonica with local Indian strains (Callaway 2014).  Rice is not found in south China till about 4000 BCE (Lu 2011).

It was in Taiwan, along with millets, in the Daben’geng culture, which represents Austronesians migrating from southern China to that island around 3000 BCE (Hung and Carson 2014).  The Austronesians, specifically the Malayo-Polynesian branch thereof, apparently radiated later from Taiwan throughout Oceania (Bellwood 2009; Bellwood and Renfrew 2002).  Many agricultural words reconstruct to proto-Austronesian or at least proto-Malayo-Polynesian, including words for grains, root crops, chickens, and pigs.

Rice may have been spread by the ancestors of the Thai-Kadai language phylum.  It in turn may be related to Austronesian and even other relevant groups (Sagart et al. 2005).  The Austroasiatic phylum is generally believed to have arisen in India, but now some think that it arose in China and spread rice there; there are many words associated with rice cultivation in its reconstructed original vocabulary (Sagart et al 2005).  In any case, it is hard to deny that the various phyla in south China—Thai-Kadai, Yao-Mian, Miao-Hmong, Austronesian, Austroasiatic—may all have been involved from a quite early time.  The Austronesian word for unhusked rice may even have invaded Tibeto-Burman: Bahasa Malaysia beras, Tibetan mbras (Sagart et al 2005), but the similarity of the words—if it is not purely accidental, which I think it is—would imply a very recent borrowing.

Returning to the chicken, a very interesting point is that the word for “chicken” all over east Asia and widely in the rest of the world derives from the Thai-Kadai root kai (Cantonese kai, surely the Thai word; Mandarin ji from *kai; and so on; Blench 2007).  This indicates to me that the ancestors of the Thai-Kadai, who were almost certainly in the Yangzi valley, domesticated the bird, in which case it spread north after domestication to Nanzhuangtou.

Along with rice came peaches.  Possibly domesticated peaches occur by 6000-5000 BCE in the lower Yangzi and are certainly domesticated by 3000 (Zheng et al. 2014).  It can be safely assumed that if people were domesticating peaches they must have domesticated a range of other fruits, as well as vegetables and other plants.  I also strongly suspect that China had long been managing wild trees, as Native Americans did (and locally still do), to maximize nut tree production; oaks and various nut trees abounded.   Elsewhere in China, buckwheat was being domesticated about this time (Ohnishi 1998).

By 4000 BCE, then, millets, rice, and the commoner domestic animals, as well as fruits and other foods, were all over what is now China, except for the remote mountain and desert areas.  (Tibet in particular remained long unsettled.)  Large villages developed, and beautiful, exquisitely made pottery was common.  Dairying was evidently beginning in central Asia; not long after, residues of kefir and other milk products appear on pots (Yang et al. 2014).

Before 3000 BCE, settlements grew large, implying rich chiefdoms (Drennan and Dai 2010).  Some settlements grew to near urban size, such as the mysterious towns of the Hongshan culture in far north China.  This culture goes back as far as 4500 BCE (Shelach et al. 2011; Zhang et al 2013).  By 3000 it was producing sizable towns that seem like capitals and have associated ceremonial and ritual items (Allan 2002).  It remained at a chiefdom level, with only about 1000 people in these large towns (Peterson et al 2010).  But then it declined and fell,  It had depended on C4 food entirely, but now regressed to getting 15% of its food from C3 plants (Liu and Chen 2012:177), indicating a return to foraging on wild foods or eating coarse grains and vegetables.

 

What lies behind this certainly includes climate.  China’s last and harshest ice age gave way, as elsewhere, betweem about 15,000 and11,000 years ago.  Then a warm and quite wet period came, between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, with a maximum warmth around 8,000 to 5,000 years ago.  This is exactly the period when agriculture developed and flourished most, and when large settlements arose.  The period from 3000 to 2000 BCE was one of decline.  Cultures like Hongshan sank back to small village levels.  Significantly, the area at the great bend of the Yellow River, at the focus of the great logical trade routes of northern China, was countercyclic: it grew and flourished in population in the late 2000s BCE.

Around 2000 it broke over into full civilization, with bronze work, intensive agriculture, and massive architecture.  Soon after that, the city at what is now the village of Erlitou reached a population between 18,000 and 30,000 (Liu 2009; Liu and Chen 2003).  Nothing remotely close to that size existed elsewhere in China.  It has been awfully hard for people to resist equating this statelet with the legendary Xia Dynasty, China’s first dynasty, known only from reports in much later history works.  The only problem is that the Erlitou culture had no writing (though some marks on pots point toward it).  We can only guess.  Many, I think most, Chinese archaeologists, however, now simply assume that Erlitou was Xia.

There may have been some climatic improvement, but it seems more likely that Erlitou flourished because times were hard.  It was strategically placed to dominate trade, communication, and military adventuring in the Yellow River drainage.  Competition over scarce resources might well have driven a race to build bigger, more defensible settlements.  Ceramics and other stylistic markers show that Erlitou exerted at least cultural and possibly political dominance over a local area about the size of a typical early state or large chiefdom.  (See Liu and Chen 2003, 2012, esp. 2012:258-259.)

 

Significantly, through all of this, China lost almost no wild species.  Some megafauna went extinct at the end of the ice age, but China kept most of its megafauna.  Elephants, rhinoceri, and other large animals still existed well into historic times, and of course China still has pandas, tigers, bears, gibbons, and even a few elephants in the far south.  Hunting was a major source of food in the Neolithic, as was fishing.  China’s fantastic botanical diversity flourished.  During cold dry periods, animals and plants retreated southward.  In warm wet ones, they moved north again.

 

So the record is one of agriculture expanding rapidly along with the improvement of the climate for plant growth, and the continuing flourishing of megafauna.  This goes totally against the received wisdom in studies of agricultural origins, which usually assume that agriculture was invented because people needed food.  Either they killed off the megafauna, or they grew rapidly in population or they just plain starved.  (For a summary of theories of agricultural origin, with full references, see Graeme Barker 2006.)  Yet, in China, it was not only the richest and most food-abundant areas that developed agriculture, but specifically the areas that were most rapidly getting richer still.

But it does dramatically confirm one theory:  Carl Sauer’s, from his book Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (1952).  Sauer understood that developing agriculture is a very long, slow process that does not pay off immediately.  It requires people who are playing around with plants, using them, letting them seed themselves.  He guessed that agriculture was invented by settled people who lived by fishing and gathering in southeast Asia.

The earliest agriculture in the world is in the Near East, and the earliest agriculture elsewhere is in northern China, but Sauer is close to right.  The communities in north China were relatively settled, plant-dependent, and above all on a climatic roll. Moreover, agriculture began in exactly the area that was turned from a cold, harsh steppe into a lush, warm-temperate paradise.  It spread first to other areas with that history, then south and out into other areas that were also improving, but less rapidly.

This being determined, what was the motive?  If wild food was rapidly increasing, why farm?  Sauer thought people might start with fibre crops instead of food, but this was not the case.  Brian Hayden and his associates (2001) hypothesized that the motive might be producing food for feasts.  Indeed, there is evidence of some feasting, but largely later in time.

For over 40 years, I have been arguing that agriculture developed because of trade.  People wanted trade goods to be around the settlement—both to have them on hand to trade and to be able to protect them from raid.  It so happens that the early Chinese sites are in good areas for trading.  However, there is not much evidence for trade on any scale until agriculture was well developed.  I suspect it was there, but it certainly was not overwhelmingly obvious.

Storage is another concern.  Grain can be stored easily.  Domestic animals are a form of storage: one controls them and their reproduction, in contrast to the situation with wild animals.  They are always around the house.  The larger and more settled a group is, the more useful storage is to them.  However, what we often find is a replacement of wild nut crops—acorns, chestnuts, walnuts—by grain (Liu 2012).  This happens quite dramatically in much of the north around 7000-5000 BCE.  Grain is much more controllable.  It grows fast, yields reliably, and can be spatially manipulated—you can plant it anywhere.  Tree crops, in contrast, bear erratically, cannot be moved around easily, and cannot regrow fast after a fire, flood or disease episode.  It would make a great deal of sense for people to take control of their destinies by growing their animals and quick-maturing plant foods, instead of depending on uncertain nature.

However, I do not believe that storage and control are adequate motives.  I still think the trade and protection theory is the only one that can explain existing patterns of early agriculture.  Only it, for instance, explains the persistent correlation of development and progress with areas that are central to trade.  The early sites are near trade routes, and the strategic location of Erlitou and other larger, later sites is unquestionable.  There is also the issue of those early chickens: they probably came from farther south—chickens are not native anywhere near Nanzhuangtou.  If they were traded up from a domestication farther south, as I think they were, we have good evidence of important trade in domesticated food items.  I await further research, in hopes it will provide more evidence. Meanwhile, at the very least, the theories that assume agriculture developed because people needed food do not fit the Chinese case, or any other case known to me.

 

 

References

 

Allan, Sarah (ed.).  2002.  The Formation of Chinese Civilization:  An Archaeological Perspective.  New Haven: Yale Unversity Press.

 

Anderson, E. N.  2014.  Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

 

Bellwood, Peter.  2009.  “The Dispersals of Established Food-Producing Populations.”  Current Anthropology 50:621-626.

 

Bellwood, Peter, and Colin Renfrew.  2002.  Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis. Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology.

 

Bettinger, Robert; Loukas Barton; Christopher Morgan; Fahu Chen; Hui Wang; Thomas P. Guilderson; Duxue Ji; Dongju Zhang.  2010.  “The Transition to Agriculture at Dadiwan, People’s Republic of China.”  Current Anthropology 51:703-714.

 

Blench, Roger.  2007.  “Using Linguistics to Reconstruct African Subsistence Systems:  Comparing Crop Names to Trees and Livestock.”  In:  Denham, Tim; José Iriarte; Luc Vrydaghs (eds.).  2007.  Rethinking Agriculture:  Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.  Pp. 408-438.

 

Callaway, Ewen.  2014.  “The Birth of Rice.”  Nature 514:S58-S59.

 

Drennan, Robert, and Xiangming Dai.  2010.  “Chiefdoms and States in the Yuncheng Basin and the Chifeng Region: A Comparative Analysis of Settlement Systems in North China.”  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29:455-468.

 

Hayden, Brian (ed.).  2001.  Feasts:  Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives on Food, Politics and Power.  Washington, DC:  Smithsonian Insitution Press.

 

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Liu Li and Xingcan Chen.  2003.  State Formation in Early China.  London:  Duckworth.

 

Liu Li and Xingcan Chen. 2012.  The Archaeology of China: From the Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

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—  2002.  “Tibeto-Burman Phylogeny and Prehistory:  Languages, Material Culture and Genes.”  In Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis, ed. by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew. Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology.  Pp. 233-249.

 

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Anthropology and the Arts

Friday, March 6th, 2015

Anthropology and the Arts

With Special Attention to Music

 

  1. N. Anderson

 

“[T]o take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature…is always a mark of a good soul…it at least indicates a frame of mind favorable to the moral feeling…He who by himself…regards the beautiful figure of a wild flower, a bird, an insect, etc., with admiration and love…who still less wants any advantage from it—he takes an immediate and also an intellectual interest in the beauty of nature” (Kant 1951:141).

 

Foreword

 

These stray and very preliminary notes are intended to get anthropologists more interested in the arts, and to lay down a bit of a framework for cross-cultural study thereof.  A great deal of work has been done, over the decades, on the ethnography and ethnology of music, dance (Anawalt 2007), visual art (R. Anderson 1989, 1990; Armstrong 1971, 1981), traditional literature (Hymes 1981, 2003), vernacular architecture (Moholy-Nagy 1957, 1968; Rapoport 1969; Rudofsky 1965), and even food and scent (Anderson 2014).  I have no intention of reviewing this enormous body of frequently excellent work.  Two things stand out, however.  First, the vast majority of it concerns arts in one culture, often with the claim that the music/art/food of the So-and-so is completely unique, distinctive, and special.  This is never the case; their arts always look a lot like their neighbors’.  Second, when comparative studies are done—and there are many very fine ones—they rarely dig deeply or widely into the deep origins of arts in biology and psychology.  Thus, what follows is devoted largely to general questions of the biology, psychology, and comparative sociology of the arts.  I am staying at a strictly introductory level, except perhaps on the relationship of bird song to music.  I provide references for further exploration.  I am hopeful that comparative ethnology of arts will emerge.  Arts are far more important than social scientists have generally realized.

 

Part I.  Arts in Anthropology

 

Anthropologists Discover Art

 

Many people, worldwide, are uncomfortable putting their emotions into ordinary words.  Emotion is often highly disruptive socially, and can be pure dynamite.  People in small communities and face-to-face societies are very chary about expressing it openly, especially to relative strangers such as visiting ethnographers.

In such societies, people “mount the rider of their thought on the horse of song,” as the Arabs say.  To understand these communities’ emotionalities, one must look to their arts rather than to what individuals may say in ordinary everyday speech.  All societies thus use music, literature, visual arts, dance, and other art forms to communicate social messages.  Typically, especially in traditional societies, arts become “collective representations of community,” like religion (Durkheim 1995/1912).

Rationalist social scientists often write as if emotion did not exist, then go home and listen to blues or Beethoven like the rest of us.  This lack of attention to expression of emotion through art has been remarked on in anthropology (Rosaldo 1989) and the best ethnographies are often those that go directly against this grain (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1989; Feld 1982).

Arts often communicate the deepest and most important parts of a culture, just as they communicate the deepest and most important feelings of an individual.  For instance, most traditional cultures express their environmental philosophies and attitudes through myth, poetry, song, visual arts, dance, and ceremony more than through ordinary language.  Of course, arts can also communicate any other feelings and values, up to the most transient and evanescent.  They can serve evil as easily as good, as Nazi artists like Leni Riefenstahl knew all too well.  One cannot assume that arts ennoble or improve.  They do whatever their creators and consumers want them to do.  The point is that they do it very effectively indeed.  Anyone concerned with cultures and environments cannot neglect either arts or the emotions they communicate.

Early anthropology was deeply concerned with the arts.  This was especially true during the peak period of neo-Kantian anthropology (Patterson 2001), the era of Franz Boas and his students and colleagues.  Neo-Kantianism, especially through the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1985), was concerned above all with interpersonal interaction, and thus with communication.  Hence Boas focused on language (Boas 1917), but not only on that; he was deeply concerned with all the ways people communicate, especially the symbolic and aesthetic forms by which they communicate emotion.  Most of his work in this area was on folktales, but his most famous work on aesthetics was on visual art (Boas 1908, 1955 [1927], 1995).

As Boas saw, folk and traditional arts are the ones that most directly communicate cultural norms and are most clearly culturally structured.  Elite and popular arts are more narrow; they communicate the feelings of the elites or of the professional entertainers.  Inevitably they communicate more widely shared cultural matters, but they are specialized to varying degrees, reaching an extreme in some contemporary art forms that appeal to audiences of only a few people.  Folk and traditional arts usually (but not always) speak more directly for their communities.  Boas was influenced by volksgeist views that exaggerated this point, and tended to see folk arts as the authentic voice of the Folk, but he later learned better as studies of diffusion and creation convinced him that people more agency and independent creativity than that, and that one way they show it is by borrowing far beyond their cultures’ limits.

Boas was also profoundly influenced by the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803; see Herder 1993, 2002, 2004).  Herder, a Kant student, was the first person to theorize at length and explicitly about the role of arts in different cultures.  He introduced the idea that the arts of a given volk—a “people” or “nation”—develop naturally from that people’s experience and life.  Taking from Kant the idea of perception developing through interaction, Herder theorized that a given people would have artistic and emotional expressive forms that followed from their unique and distinctive experience of interacting with each other and with their surroundings.

Thus every poetic and artistic tradition was unique and valuable, a new and valid expression of human experience and creativity.  As he said of poetry:  “Poetry…changes its form in accordance with a people’s language, morals, habits, temperament, climate, and even with their accent.  Nations migrate; languages mix with other languages and change; human beings come into contact with new things; their tendencies assume different directions, their strivings take on different purposes…even that tiny part of the body, the tongue, moves differently, and the ear becomes accustomed to new sounds” (Herder 1993:141).

Herder was the first to argue explicitly and in detail that we should experience, value, and appreciate the cultural productions of all humanity.  He argued against both intolerance of others’ productions and shame about one’s own.  He also argued that studying a culture’s arts and ethics shows it at its best, whereas normal history—the story of wars and intrigues—shows it at its worst.  This obviously influenced anthropology; we of the trade like to show our subjects of study in the best possible light, and we follow Herder.

Herder was also an uncompromising monogenist, convinced that all humans were one, rather than being separately evolved races.  Culture, not heredity, was responsible for the important differences between nations.  This view too was adopted by Boas, who became the leader in the struggle against racism in the early 20th century.  Yet another view eventually adopted by anthropology was that each culture is the end of a long process of evolution, rather than being something to classify on a scale from “primitive” to “we moderns.”  The latter—the unilineal position—still has its followers, but was so devastated by the critical research of Boas and his students that it is practically extinct.  Herder still held a form of it, and Boas in his very earliest writings shows some of it, but he rapidly came to realize that no surviving culture is primitive in any meaningful sense.  Obviously, civilizations evolved from smaller-scale societies, and this is an interesting process, but we now realize that today’s small-scale societies are as far from the “primitive” condition as the civilizations are.  They have specialized in their way, just as larger-scale societies have.  They have changed along with—and often through the direct

influence of—the civilizations.  They bear some key resemblances to humans of 100,000 years ago, but so do modern industrial folk.

This thinking (and similar, if less elaborated, thinking by others) led to the rise of “folklore” studies and eventually to cultural anthropology with its emphasis on communication, national character, and expressive forms.

Herder’s theory of arts, and of appreciation for each culture’s unique contributions, was to be Boas’ guiding principle.  Boas devoted his life to saving what seemed to be (and often were) disappearing languages, arts, myths, and other cultural forms.  For him, each one was supremely valuable as an expression of the human spirit.

Herder’s ideas influenced his friend Goethe, and later was influential across the political spectrum from Marx to the exteme nationalists.  Herder literally invented nationalism—the word and the concept (Herder 2004).  The Marxian interpretation exalted “the folk” above commercial bourgeois culture, eventually leading to the radical but romantic idealization of folklore by reformers in the 20th century.  In the United States, this led via the Lomax and Seeger families of ethnomusicologists (see e.g. Lomax and Seeger 1975) to the folklore movement and the “folk song revivial” of the 1950s and 1960s.  This in turn produced a great deal of modern music culture.  It was also the virtually universal ideology of folklore studies in academia.

However, the extreme right could play this game as well.  By the early 19th century, hypernationalism was exploiting the idea of a folk spirit (volksgeist).  This eventually climaxed in the mad Aryanism and Germanism of the Nazis.  Nothing could have been farther from Herder’s tolerant mind (see Herder 2004).

 

Not only the Boasians, but other anthropologists of the time, diligently recorded myths and tales, obtained art objects for study and curation, and described dances and ceremonies.  In studying music, technology was a limit at first, but Jesse Walter Fewkes was recording Algonkian and Hopi music on Edison’s cylinders as early as 1890.  Major ethnomusicological recording began as soon as really portable cylinder-recording equipment was invented.

Anthropologists of the time have recently been attacked for “stealing” artifacts, or at best taking them out of cultural context.  Boas and most other serious scholars paid fair prices to willing sellers, and virtually all the items they bought would otherwise have been destroyed by time or by overzealous missionaries.  The only early record we have of most ethnic arts in the world is from these collections. Many unscrupulous persons, some with legitimate scholarly posts, did indeed steal artifacts and rob graves, giving this field a bad name, but that should not blind moderns to the incredible value of responsible collecting.

 

Arts fell from grace as anthropology turned toward more “scientific,” or at least scientistic, descriptions of culture.  By the mid-century most anthropologists were interested in narrow social dynamics (especially kinship systems) or in even more narrowly materialist studies of culture.  However, some kept the focus on art, especially Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964-1971), a Kantian inspired by Boas.  Lévi-Strauss differed from Boas in being a traditional Kantian, concerned with knowledge and its structure, rather than a neo-Kantian concerned with interaction and communication.  Thus Lévi-Strauss was more concerned with the ways myth and art reflected cultural structuring of knowledge than with emotional communication.  He joined with linguists and literary critics in the movement known as structuralism.

Again the wheel turned, and structuralism fell from favor, to be replaced by interpretivism.  This view, most explicitly and famously advocated by Clifford Geertz (1972), put the burden of interpretation on the anthropologist, rather than making the anthropologist seek out “native” understandings and leave analysis to them.  Unfortunately, this doomed the interpretivist paradigm to being mere opinion.  Very often (if not always), that opinion was promptly challenged by the “natives” when they got their turn (as in the devastatingly revealing material buried in footnotes in Geertz 1980).  Especially prominent in challenging outsider anthropologists’ interpretations was the Lakota writer Vine Deloria (1969), who had a formidable knowledge of anthropology, partly because his aunt Ella Deloria was an anthropologist who studied with Boas (she was one of many Native American anthropologists that Boas and Powell trained).

One is reminded of the countless times that authors have rounded on literary critics who “interpreted” their works.  Interpretation is valuable, even a necessary part of a good ethnographer’s job, and it can and often should go beyond the data.  But it is of no anthropological value unless it is supported in at least some way by the testimony of the actual producers and local users of the material in question.

Fortunately, vocal “natives” like Vine Deloria had the effect of forcing anthropology back on track.  Recent works on indigenous art, ethnomusicology, and other interactive communication forms do not shirk the task of providing ethnographers’ insights, but pay proper attention to “native” interpretations (see e.g. Feld 1982 for music; Hymes 1981, 2003 for myths and texts; Myers 2002 for visual art; Ness 1992, 2003 for dance and performance).  Some recent studies have returned not only to the Boas agenda but to Boas himself, as in the work of Aldona Jonaitis (1988, and see also her edited collection of Boas’ work, 1995).

What matters here is the fact that arts are major forms of communication in every culture known to anthropology, and that they usually have the role of communicating emotions and feelings, though they very often communicate specific cognitive meanings as well.  Unfortunately, far too many social scientists neglect them or to relegate them to “mere ornament” status.  Most social scientists are post-Enlightenment academics, trained to idealize Reason and distrust emotion.  Even scholars of emotion are loath to look deeply at its expression and communication in artistic forms.  The otherwise authoritative and definitive Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions  (Stets and Turner 2006) has nothing on the arts.

 

 

Origins of Art

 

The origins of the arts remain obscure.  Arts were once supposed to be confined to Homo sapiens, but now a mussel shell engraved with a whole pattern of hatch marks has turned up in a Homo erectus deposit half a million years old, at Trinil, Java (Joordens et al. 2015).  Painted and perforated shells and pigment containers 50,000 years old have turned up on the Iberian Peninsula when only Neanderthals were there (Branan 2010).  Some Neanderthal burials include red ochre, and one famous one at Shanidar had flower pollen, though the flowers seem to have been weeds and possibly medicines rather than beautiful blooms.  Homo sapiens groups in Africa were beads and other minor ornaments 80,000 years ago.  Art may be much older; the beauty and symmetry of early hand axes and other tools seems beyond mere utility.  (For a quick review of the latest finds of earliest art, see Balter 2009).

Rock art in Australia dates to perhaps 50,000 years ago.  The great cave paintings of Europe date back to 35,000 years ago and earlier.  The earliest of the spectacular and brilliant cave art of Europe is that old (Clottes 2008).  A 35,000-year-old sculpture of a woman with exaggerated sexual characteristics has recently been found in Germany (Conard 2009).  These various forms show that visual art was already developed.  The paintings in Chauvet Cave in France, for instance, are often as good as any animal paintings since (see e.g. Clottes 2008, perhaps especially pp. 38-39.)  Music and literature leave no archaeological traces except the bone flutes that turn up in sites a few tens of thousands of years old.  Over ¾ of the hand prints associated with these sites, in many caves all over western Europe and over the whole Upper Paleolithic period, are of the hands of women (Snow 2013)—raising some critical questions about who created this art, and why.

 

Representational art is often said to derive from magic.  The early cave paintings are deep in the darkest holes of the earth, and represent game animals and large predators.  Their association with religion or magic seems impossible to deny, but we have no idea what the actual cults were like.  Countless grave authorities have developed conflicting scenarios, but no one has any way of determining which ones are right.

Visual art, unlike technology, does not seem to progress much. Lascaux and Chauvet caves have art as beautiful as any created recently.  Yet they seem to be at the very beginning of art; we have little that is older.  Musical complexity has progressed with technology, but beauty is another matter; folk songs can be as lovely as symphonies, and probably go back to the dawn of modern humanity.  Written literature can be more elaborate and diverse than oral, but in sheer literary power no one has surpassed Homer or the great Native American and Australian myth cycles.

Changes in arts track major changes in culture.  Arts express emotional qualities of life.  They catch the mood of the age.

Oral poetry and epic would seem naturally to follow from this as well.  Traditional nonliterate peoples sing or chant their verbal art.  Non-sung poetry is surely a modern invention, probably a result of writing and literacy.

 

 

Evolution and Art

 

There is no question that the aesthetic senses are biologically grounded, and thus must have evolved through natural selection over thousands or millions of years.  In part, they developed as part of the evolution of communication.  Music in particular is inseparable from language, as pointed out by the ancient Greeks.  However, the aesthetic senses are grounded in deeper and more basic psychological processes.  The arts have biological primes—inborn tendencies that prime us to like certain things.

This is most obvious in the universal appeal of healthy young members of the (usually) opposite sex, and representations thereof.  The nude is a stock theme, and paintings of nudes rarely show aged or unhealthy specimens of Homo sapiens.  One does not have to be a Darwinian to understand, though the Darwinians have naturally had a field day with these data.  David Buss (2003) points out that cross-culturally, people desire youith and symmetry in possible mates.  In particular, one notes the striking gender difference:  straight men find nothing more beautiful than a nubile, well-proportioned young woman, while finding good-looking men totally boring and uninteresting.  Straight women and gay men usually have the reverse assessment.  This certainly proves that beauty is not just a purely idiosyncratic thing.  “There’s no accounting for tastes” is not an opinion that gets any traction with Darwinians considering sexual attraction.

More subtle and interesting biological primes exist.  As pointed out by E. H. Gombrich (1960, 1979), visual art has everything to do with the pleasure of rhythm and pattern.  (The same is true of music.)  Visual art seems to get much of its appeal from the need to recognize pattern in nature, so that we can spot the fruit in the trees and the snake in the grass.  We take great pleasure in recognizing patterns; even the snake is beautiful, however frightening.  Humans get a tremendous pleasure out of simply engaging with patterns—geometical art, rhythmic music and dance, regular prosody.  No one seems to have studied this, or even decided whether it is an “emotion,” a “mood,” a “feeling,” or what.  Yet it is one of the most pervasive, evident, and important human tastes.  Apes also show it, and indeed most higher mammals seem to fall into rhythm when communicating.  Rhythms of walking, chewing, breathing, sex, and other normal activities are clearly involved somehow, but no one seems to have determined exactly how.

The enormous importance of pattern in all this has rarely been appreciated except in the case of music (see below), but E. H. Gombrich (1979) discusses it for art, and Bakhtin (esp. 1984) for literature.  The structuralists (notably Lévi-Strauss 1964-71) analyzed structure in all the arts, but somewhat skipped over the lower-level phenomena described by Gombrich and the very high-level ones best evoked by Bakhtin.

An innate attraction to proper environment is a necessary bit of mental equipment for any animal.  A red-winged blackbird has to seek out cattail marshes.  A porcupine has to look for dense forests.  It is always striking to watch a migrating bird turn sharply aside and downward when it sees the right kind of tree or lake for its species.  Humans show a cross-cultural attraction to waterways, mountains, and scattered groves of trees, among other things.  Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen (1992) speculated that humans evolved to recognize and seek out landscapes like the savannahs on which we presumably evolved in east Africa.  Evidence includes the way we create such landscapes—scattered trees in open grasslands, with small streams here and there— in farms, gardens, parks, cemeteries, and other spaces where we can do what we want.  Lndscape paintings typically show landscapes of this kind, when they do not trade on fear and awe by showing dramatic mountains.  Even when arguing against inborn tastes, psychologists admit this (Gardner 2011:42-43).  Proof is, in the nature of things, impossible, but the idea is almost certainly correct as far as it goes.

Other inborn tendencies in visual art are harder to pin down, but most higher animals are attentive to motion, bright colors, flashing lights, and other visual cues that could be important.  Higher primates are more attentive to colors than most other mammals, because of the need to pick out ripe fruit.  They can see more colors than most mammals (though fewer than many birds).  Clearly, we have evolved with a strong color sense.  The sheer pleasure of playing with color and form is biologically grounded, as we know from watching human children and young monkeys and apes play with paints.  Young chimps, especially, produce paintings very pleasing to the human eye.  They work quite hard at it—they do not merely make random daubs (Morris 1962).

The anti-evolutionary arguments that rely on the admittedly wide cultural and social judgments of art (e.g. Gardner 2011) are flawed by confusing judgments of beauty with judgments of cultural familiarity and appropriateness.  People like what they are used to—another clearly evolved biological tendency—and judge art accordingly.

Thus, for instance, Howard Gardner and other relativists greatly exaggerate the initial rejection of Impressionism and use it to “prove” that good art can be hated.  In fact, many art-lovers liked Impressionism from the start.  The attackers were largely older critics who opposed “the new” rather than “the ugly”—however they may have phrased it.  Gardner’s main problem is that he thinks art is mainly about beauty; he neglects the fact that it is a general communications medium, which can just as easily be about the ugly as about the beautiful.  Antiwar posters, the “ash can school” of socially conscious art in the United States, and many other art forms deliberately portray the ugly.  Art is also used for social solidarity, snobbism (see below), motivating workers, advertising cars, scaring people, or any other social purpose.  Gardner is surprised to find that most contemporary art is more about being “with it” than about being beautiful; no one familiar with the history of art is very surprised.

In fact, what culture and individuality show is not that art is not biologically grounded, but that we are biologically flexible.  We can satisfy love of beauty in an infinite number of ways, though there are some constraints and some tendencies.  This is clearer in food:  we absolutely must have protein, carbohydrates, fats, and certain vitamins and minerals, but we can devise an infinite number of superb and subtle dishes that provide them.  The clearest case in visual beauty is the female form: cultures differ widely in what they idealize, but they all wind up idealizing symmetrical young adults (whatever their skin color, fat level, and so forth may be).  Other taste areas are less constrained.

As with music—but in fewer cases—birds provide a fascinating case of convergent evolution.  Male bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea construct complex, elaborate, beautiful structures to lure females.  Those of the satin bowerbirds of Australia are painted with little brushlike wads of material, and decorated with blue objects that set off the birds’ blue-highlighted plumage (Johnsgard 1994).  Blue plastic clothespins are a favorite.  Males compete to produce better bowers, and it takes years of experience to create one that lures females really successfully.  This allows females to pick a smart, experienced, survival-type male, a good genetic bet.  Such a male lures many females into his bower, and thus leaves many genes, so building better bowers is strongly selected for.  Note that this is selection for better creating of a new and different bower, not just an instinctive, never-changing one.  These birds both learn and innovate.  The various motions are based on nest-building, but the result is very different from a nest, and is largely a male activity, whereas females do the nestbuilding in this as in many bird species.

Evolutionarily, bower-building results from the higher genetic success of better builders, and is thus tightly linked with polygamy.  Humans are not usually polygamous, however.  (Most human societies allow polygamy, but few in those societies actually practice it.)  Some other reason must explain our use of arts.  In fact, almost all art is directed at large social groups, not at a prospective mate.  Paintings of nudes are for public display, not seduction.  Love songs may be all over the radio, but few actually sing them to loved ones; they are mass entertainment.  Most listeners seem to relate to the singer’s experience as a lover, not to the lovee.

 

 

Taste: How Universal?

 

In humans, local social and cultural standards for the arts tend to dominate, making the inborn preferences in form, pattern, color, rhythm, harmony, melody, and so on recede into a background.  However, the panhuman nature of basic aesthetic taste is shown by the general worldwide agreement on the greatness of at least some paintings, literary works, and musical compositions.  Great art is hard to define, but usually recognized by thoughtful people.  There is surprising agreement across cultures about the greatness of Shakespeare and Tu Fu, Mozart and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Ni Zan.  Their work is extremely well-done technically, extremely deep emotionally, and often significant on many levels.  Great poetry and art often use small things to show great truths: Robert Frost’s snowy woods, Rainer Maria Rilke’s panther, Edward Thomas’ fields.  Great art is often a complex but organized development of a simple theme, like the many variations on the story of Dr. Faustus, or a very simple form with extreme complexity, subtlety and evocation packed into it, as in haiku.

Thus, some sort of panhuman mechanism seems to be operating.  Some artistic creations, including Beethoven’s music, Shakespeare’s plays, and Chinese black-ink art seem to succeed everywhere.  Chinese food and Andean popular music have astonishingly universal appeal.  Other arts do not travel:  Chinese popular music and Andean food, for instance.  The exact dynamics of this remain profoundly mysterious, but the phenomenon proves that some fraction of “taste” is universal, though much or most is culture-centric.

Significantly, great art can be created for fun, or money, or personal glory as easily as for passionate self-expression.  Rembrandt and Rubens were businessmen running large studios.  We like to think of Van Gogh’s lonely and unappreciated passion, but at the same time Monet was driving hard bargains—downright skinflint deals in many cases—for his art.  Art was a commercial proposition, however emotional the artists may have been.

Worldwide evidence proves conclusively that people everywhere gravitate toward similar, and fairly high, standards of art, music, literature (or oral “literature”), and performance.  Quality is real, though easily subverted or directed into cultural channels.  Individual taste is real, but often takes the form of idiosyncratic limitations.  I love Monet and Van Gogh but have a blind spot for Renoir and Degas; almost everyone who likes painting finds this problematic, which convinces me that this is something lacking in my personal eye, not a proof that taste is purely an individual matter.  Probably everyone has similar blind spots in appreciating art, music and literature.  Individual taste matters more with second-rate (or tenth-rate) painters and musicians, but even there the existence of consensus is usually strong enough to show that there is something going on here beyond pure arbitrary individuality.  There is, for instance, certainly a universal agreement that genuinely bad drawing and awkwardly proportioned space is unattractive.  No one would ever confuse the typical Sunday painter’s efforts, or my drawings for my childrren, with passable (let alone good) art.

On the other hand, it is equally clear that people do differ, and that no two people have exactly the same preference patterns.  Evolutionarily, this might have allowed everyone to find a mate, back when personal beauty and accomplishment mattered more than they do now (that is, back before religion, wealth and political views became so important).  The point is that there is variation around a vague, general, but real central tendency or template—a very vague humanity-wide one, and a set of much more specific ones associated with each culture and subculture.

Within broad limits, artistic taste is socially conditioned.  People overwhelmingly like what their peers like.  This is notably true when it is very different from what their parents like (Harris 1998).  Good art prevails when an elite or an artistically sophisticated group dominates tastemaking and is regarded as worthy of emulation.  This group can as easily be a set of tribal shamans or folk craftspeople as a museum curatorship or university department—in fact, the shamans and folk craftspeople generally have better taste, in my experience.  The point is that somebody who knows and cares about the art needs to have a voice.

Otherwise, a “lowest common denominator” effect prevails, with the most mass-appeal material adulated and regarded as “best” and standard.   These sociocultural truths lead to a widespread feeling that all artistic taste is mere snobbism.  This belief reached serious sociology, as in Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction (1984).  This book was devastatingly reviewed for its reductionism by Jon Elster [1981] and others.  Bourdieu, presumably at least partially in consequence, massively revised his position in The Rules of Art (1996.)

Societies, or more usually their elites, find ways of manipulating taste.  George Orwell, in 1984 and many essays, wrote the definitive material on how fascism, Stalinism, and top-down bossist capitalism systematically force the worst, vilest, most soul-hurting art on the public, specifically to deaden their souls and corrupt their minds.  At the other extreme, no major religion has missed the use of the greatest art, music, dance, ritual, and even food and scent to hook people emotionally.  This is as true of Australian Aboriginal and Native American religions as of the world faiths.

 

Artists in many cultures are considered rather wild and deviant.  This is not true in most small-scale societies and folk communities, where anyone may create and perform.  It is most true in complex civilizations.  Among these, it is actually a rather widespread stereotype, though far from universal.  In the west, it received a major boost in the Renaissance, when artists were supposed to be real “characters”—a stereotype that owes much to the artist-writer Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists (1991, orig. 16th century) gleefully protrayed the great Italian artists—many of whom were his personal friends—as larger and wilder than life.  It received another huge boost in the Romantic period, when the idea of the “artistic temperament” became firmly established in the public mind.

Musicians, in particular, are so regularly considered deviant that music is assigned to despised or feared minorities in much of the world.  Popular music in particular was a task for Roma in Europe, blacks in the American South, and similarly outcasted groups in old China and Japan.  In fact, throughout the world, the stereotype of the “inferior race” includes the line “they are very musical.”  Americans have heard this all too often about Blacks, and I heard the same about the fishermen I worked with in Hong Kong.  I have heard or seen this stereotype applied to Roma, Irish, burakumin (in Japan), and so on—everywhere I go, the racists assure me that the people they most fear and abhor are the most musical.  Today in America, with racism somewhat less overt, “rock musicians” and “rap musicians” have become a despised class of their own.  This intolerance of musicians always seems strange to me.  It sometimes extends even to elite performers; in parts of the old Near East and Africa, even eminent and well-to-do musicians were considered low.  Similar ideas were once held by some individuals in Europe and the United States.

 

Most art communicates emotion by using pattern and structure to carry it.  At best, the artist creates the desired mood in the hearer or viewer.  At worst, the artist at least says what she feels in a way evocative enough to give the audience some idea of it.

As Gombrich noted (see above), many art forms are really nothing but pattern:  Islamic tiling, Elizabethan lute and keyboard music, some Russian romantic poetry, and so on.  The pleasure of experiencing them comes purely from unfolding delight at the more and more complex and intricate patterns created.  At best, this is quite capable of putting the prepared viewer into a mystic state.  This is explicitly intended in Islamic mosque decoration, for instance.  In music, the mystical dances of the Sufis and the more intense ragas of India are explicitly intended to produce mystical states.  Elizabethan musicians seem to have planned similarly; John Dowland and William Byrd can certainly send the sensitive listener into an abstracted state, and Byrd’s religious music is intended to do that.  Pattern sense is an emotional ground, or mood-state, and a very underappreciated and understudied one.

At a higher level of structuring, Greek tragedy mastered the technique of so perfectly designing a work that the inexorable logic of the system drives the audience deeper and deeper into the tragic action.  Every word of Sophocles’ plays is calculated to drive the structure, and the structure drives the message.  Even a long episodic novel like Cao Xueqin’s Story of the Stone (18th century) can do this.

Notable is the cross-cultural appeal of a particular kind of art:  that which operates by persuading the reader to construct her own work, prompted by the artist.  This is best studied for visual art.  E. H. Gombrich (1960) documented how artists found out by trial and error how to use brushstrokes to make the human eye and brain fill in the painting, rather than to make a “realistic” picture.  The Dutch landscapists brought this to a high pitch, Constable followed and improved on them, and Turner went on beyond him.  Finally, the Impressionists could benefit from actual visual psychology—a new science at the time—to manipulate points (Seurat), brush strokes (Monet), color fields (Gauguin), and so on, to make the viewer construct her own scene from rich-textured foundations.  This makes the paintings more real and vibrant.

The same thing operates in poetry, most obviously in Japanese haiku.  Consider Issa’s great poem on his mother, who died giving birth to him:

“Mother I never knew:

Every time I see the ocean,

Every time….”

This makes the reader fill in all the associations and emotions, which then are necessarily the reader’s own real emotions.  By contrast, the trite, cliché-ridden grief poetry all of us know so well leaves nothing to the imagination, and is, in consequence, poetic garbage.

Equivalents in music and dance will easily occur to mind.  Even food has its subtle and suggestive flavors as opposed to the crude, basic flavors of fast food.

 

From these and related observations we may conclude that great art may be either an extremely complex but organized run-up of a simple theme (as in the Iliad), or an extremely simple form that evokes extreme complexity, subtlety and emotion, as in haiku.

 

Another universal tendency in art is complex, multilayered symbolism (on symbols in anthropology, see Turner 1967).  Few widespread, long-lasting creations have only one meaning.  Consider the number of meanings attached to the rose in the western world.  Medieval and Renaissance artists in Europe systematized this, such that a serious painting would frequently have four levels of meaning:  literal, symbolic, metaphoric, and allegorical. One common realization of this was to have a literal motif, which serves as a symbol of a Christian moral value, a metaphor for perfecting one’s life with a view toward its end, and an allegory of God and His works or message (Schneider 1992:17).  Another possible mix was seen in medieval accounts of Jerusalem as a historic city, an allegory of heavenly urbanity, an anagogical diagram of what such a city could be and how to get there, and a tropological metaphor for the soul.  We see this fourfold symbolism in more recent times, including some blues lyrics.  John Hurt in his stunning performances of “Slidin’ Delta Blues” made the Slidin’ Delta—a train—into a symbol of parting, a metaphor of death, and an allegory of mystic absorption in God.  (This is clearest on the record “Worried Blues,” Piedmont Records 1963.)  All these were standard symbolic uses of railroads in American folksong, and are quite transparent to a listener used to that genre.

 

 

Art in Society

 

Arts, and religion, at their best, privilege individuals and make them seem important.  Human beings are infinitely important, at least to other humans, as Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1998) pointed out.  We create each other and maintain each other; the importance of the “other” to each person is literally boundless.  Real art notes this, and real religion is founded partly on the perception.  Mass culture does the opposite, reducing individuals to stereotypes or caricatures.  Religion that does not privilege the individual, as divinely created and thus deserving of respect and honor, should be suspect.

Art once brought people face to face with the natural world.  People could see the wild through the eyes of great artists, from Lascaux Cave to modern Northwest Coast Native creators.

 

Arts today are dismissed as “frills” and “luxuries,” and banished from schools, economic stimulus and development packages, and other “serious” venues.  Many arts have declined sadly.  This is sometimes blamed on European rationalism, but Europe at the peak of the rational Enlightenment movement was obsessed with art.

The failure of arts in the contemporary world has much to do with the fractionation of society.  If arts typically represent the community, and often (not always!) represent its deepest moral and spiritual principles, then breakup of community naturally breaks up the arts.  Also, the world today is going through a cyclic decline in society, comparable to the Hellenistic period, the late Roman Empire (both east and west), the Near East after the devastation of the Mongols and the bubonic plague, and China in the late Ming Dynasty.  These were periods of sterile repetition or mindless innovation—change for change’s sake—rather than of creativity put to the purpose of transmitting human messages.  We see something of the same today, especially in elite music and visual arts.  Literature, more broadly based, continues to flourish, as do the less elite visual arts, including film and photography.

Globalization and dominance by giant multinational firms, including ones that promote the lowest sort of arts, is the most obvious reason for the general decline.  The equivalent of the Roman and Mongol Empires is the empire of Fox News, ExxonMobil, Hollywood, and the World Bank.  One cannot expect greatness to flow from giant corporations motivated solely by cost-cutting and market-share-expanding imperatives.  They will create on the cheap and appeal to the “lowest common denominator.”

One reason they cannot appeal beyond that is that they cannot afford to do much development of individuality or character.  Persons, being different and distinctive, have the value that such uniqueness can give.  The old tragic vision, from Greek plays to Scottish ballads, recognized this; the protagonist of a tragedy became a unique individual, and the most important person in the world as long as the drama lasted.  Today, movies treat humans in the mass. Hollywood thrillers kill legions of people every few seconds.  These persons have no individuality, no importance–no humanity.  Even the hero is a cardboard figure with no character or individuality.

Such movies teach indifference to human life, and thus deaden us to the horrors of the news.  They are ideal for pushing totalitarian agendas.  Fusion of Hollywood and Washington has been a major part of the corruption and decline of American politics.  Ronald Reagan, the quintessential cardboard hero, began it, and Arnold Schwartzenegger continued the tradition.  George W. Bush appeared to be desperately attempting to imitate John Wayne. Both Democrats and Republicans appeal to stars and try to get their public support.

This has moved into wider realms.  Decline in concern about the resource base and about endangered species may well be merely a reflection of declining concern about the human species.

Thus, arts can often debase people and ruin their humanity.  Again, this is not new: it characterized some other periods of world-system decline, including the dying days of the Roman Empire.

This raises the wider question of whether arts can improve people.  I was taught by my parents and other elders that appreciating the arts was a moral necessity, since it widened and deepened one’s awareness and emotionality and thus one’s sympathy and caring.  Well, yes, and I still believe this to some extent, but often it does not work that way.  There is what we may call Terry Gross’ Paradox.  Terry Gross, the delightful host of National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” show, was once interviewing a biographer of Joseph Stalin.  The biographer reported that Stalin had good taste in music, loving the classic Russian composers among others.  The inimitable Terry commented: “So much for the ennobling power of art!”

Artists themselves, especially musicians, are famously tortured souls, so we need not expect conventionally virtuous behavior of them, but what of art lovers?  Alas, knowing college professors of literature and arts does not help one believe my parents’ teachings.  Humanities professors may not be Stalin, but they are certainly no better than the rest of us.  One can take comfort from knowing that ethics professors are not particularly ethical—not just in my experience, but according to a study done by my colleague Eric Schwitzgebel (pers. comm.).  I think I understand:  the ones who are less than ennobled by art and philosophy are those for whom these are very much a “snob fields.”  They go with the most “in” views, generally the pontifications of incomprehensible writers at the French academies, or, failing that, the elite private universities of England and America.  Literary criticism in particular is a field driven by fads started in these institutions.

Arts can improve people if the people in question meditate deeply on what they are reading or watching or hearing, think deeply about it, and let it widen and deepen their emotional and intellectual experience.  This tends to produce sympathy and caring.  On the other hand, evil arts (think of the Nazi artists and the whole BDSM industry), or any arts attended to for shallow or snobbish reasons, simply debase people.

 

Arts, at best, allow a person to break through the barriers of hate, dullness, and everyday culture, and come to direct unbarriered experience of nature, love, and basic humanity—the beautiful human mind and body uncluttered by our usual blindnesses.  Vermeer can make you see a peasant girl’s intense humanity so perfectly that a sensitive viewer is moved to tears, as in his painting “The Milkmaid” (ca. 1658).  His use of color and shading was so perfect at bringing out the girl’s humanity that it is almost impossible to reproduce; I had seen countless book-illustrations, but was totally unprepared for the shattering impact of seeing the actual painting.

Michelangelo’s religious art makes one see the vast power and unity inherent in all things—the hand of God directly touching us.  Monet’s landscapes have a literally shamanic power.  As noted above, Gombrich showed how good painters trick us, the viewers, into constructing the scene ourselves rather than seeing it literally copied in the painting.  Monet’s genius was to see how to strip a scene of all but the most intense, powerful, and direct elements, making us construct not just a scene but an incredibly powerful emotional effect of the scene.  If I went to the gorge of the Creuse, I would probably see it in dull midday light with all sorts of distractions.  If I look at Monet’s paintings of it, however, my eye turns the subtle brushstrokes into a scene that is not only savagely beautiful but that seems to come right inside me and tear my heart.  No other landscape painter accomplishes this for me, though some come close.  We know enough about Monet to know that this is not some weird quirk of mine; Monet was quite deliberately trying for this, by portraying only what will make the viewer construct the scene in the most compelling way possible. In fact, in his paintings of the gorge of the Creuse, he trimmed the tree that usually centered those paintings, to prevent it leafing out in spring and to maintain it stark and bare.  Similar careful work lies behind Vermeer’s and Rembrandt’s humans, Michelangelo’s and Luca Signorelli’s religious art, and the great Chinese mountains-and-water paintings; artists learned how to create intense effects by very complex and subtle means.

Great music drives deeper and deeper into our emotions till it wrings out the entire mind and soul—everything we have becomes concentrated in the experience of Beethoven’s Ninth or John Hurt’s blues.  Again, an incredible amount of effort and understanding, both conscious and intuitive, goes into this.

By contrast, a poor artist gives us at best a stale, flat view, and at worst merely heightens and thickens the barriers that prevent our seeing.  Bad music in particular does this.  It is the art of those who seek for wealth, power, and status—the opposites of nature, humanity, and love.  Wealth means treating the world as “resources,” not wonders to revere and respect.  Power means treating humans as enemies.  Status means treating humans as means to self-gratification, not ends, and status-seeking is thus incompatible with love, though people often manage to have both by compartmentalizing.  If one wants those, one will naturally produce either the cheapest, dullest music possible, or the most bombastic and overdone.

 

 

Authentic Tradition?

 

Two red herrings in talking about ethnic art are “authentic” and “traditional.”  “Authentic” can be an invidious label, used to put down contemporary artists.  “Traditional” can imply “rigid” or “stagnant.”  It is best to unpack these and see what we are really talking about.  Being no philosopher, I can do that most easily through examples.  I will draw on Northwest Coast Native American art, a highly distinctive and easily recognizable style much analyzed by Franz Boas.

One confusion is about the authenticity of the artist as a Northwest Coast native and the authenticity of the art as an example of the style.  The wonderful art historian and ethnographer Bill Holm worked out the rules of the traditional arts, and made exquisite pieces in impeccable classic Northwest Coast style—yet he was entirely European by background.  Conversely, some Native people have done fine European-style artworks; they are Northwest Coast Native artists but are not creating Northwest Coast art.

There are, inevitably, some people who are part Northwest Coast and part White.  They often become perfectly good Northwest Coast artists, and can create Northwest Coast art, but they merge into truly borderline cases.

Because of problems like this, I generally avoid the word “authentic.”  There is a large literature on the matter, but it seems somewhat extraneous to my charge in the present work.

As far as tradition goes, modern Northwest Coast Native people who create art following the rules of the grand style—the classic style of the period from around 500 AD to 2000 AD—are obviously traditional.  Then there are artists like Preston Singletary or Susan Point, who are Northwest Coast Native people creating art in brilliant and original modern transformations of classic themes and motifs.  They are traditional, but less so in some ways.  Yet, perhaps in other ways they are more traditional, since it was praiseworthy in the old days to innovate and freely vary interpretations and executions of the themes.  Innovation is traditional.

Turning to folk music, we find Scottish folk music and American country music being composed today; the rules and styling are traditional.  The “sound” is more or less what it has been for at least two centuries.  Anyone can compose a tune, following those traditions, and though new it will be a traditional-style tune.  It may become a “traditional tune” in due course.  It appears to take about three generations to make something fully traditional in the eyes of its usual audience.  If Grandpa did it when he was young, amd we’ve done it since, it’s traditional now. Many traditions are even younger, especially if they are only small variants of older theme (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).

Traditions change, develop, and add or subtract stylistic elements all the time.  English is English though it is not Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s English.  Tradition has disappeared only when there is nothing left of the canonical forms and styles.

 

 

Summary

 

In sum, arts communicate emotions and moods.  Arts are intensely social, yet intensely individual.  They are, at best, about an individual sharing his or her full, unbarriered, unchecked selfhood with the wide world.  At their greatest, arts communicate the most intense, powerful, and dramatic emotional states.  But they must do this in a tightly controlled, stylistically guided way.  The more perfect the artist’s control of his or her medium, the more intensely the emotion can be communicated.  Most of us wrote awful poems or sang awful songs in our teenage years, getting our raw emotions out for our friends.  Maturity brought either silence or much better control and much more effective communication.  The brilliance of John Hurt’s “Slidin’ Delta” depends on his matchless control of blues guitar; he could thoughtlessly and effortlessly make perfect music, using all his conscious mind to drive the intensity of the message.  In poetry, Creide’s lament for Cael at his death seems all the more intense, spontaneous, and heartrending because it is written in the most elaborately complex and stylized medieval Irish Gaelic; somehow we forget the improbability of such high style under such circumstances.  Shakespeare’s love sonnets seem spontaneous and personal, not least because Shakespeare was such a master of English poetry that his exquisitely crafted poems flow without apparent difficulties.

Of course, such control and stylistic overlearning has its dangers.  If form becomes an end in itself, technical brilliance can, and very often does, smother the message under layers of mannerism. It can even replace the message entirely with mere style.  Some traditions, like the blues, Renaissance masses, early Gaelic poetry, and Baroque Spanish religious painting, try to avoid this by deliberately seeking to drive emotion as intensely as possible, and design the whole art form to communicate it as intensely as possible.  Other traditions, however, follow an all too familiar path downward into sterility.  This has notoriously been the bane of poetic forms, from sonnets to haiku.  Even more extreme is the decline of impressionist painting from Monet to the “plein air” painters and on down to today’s Sunday artists painting-by-the-numbers.

 

 

Part II:  Music as Example

 

Music:  Biology and Evolution

 

Of all the neglected realms of social science, the most neglected may be music.  A major problem is the lack of interest in music in the puritanical Protestant culture that gave rise to so much modern science, especially social science.  Music is at best a frill, at worst a sin, to many or most traditional Protestants.  Any familiarity with almost any culture outside northwest Europe and its colonial offshoots destroys the idea that music is a frill.  A few other cultures seem indifferent, but the vast majority see music as an essential part of life and communication.

Music is not only universal, but is highly developed in all cultures.  Many of the world’s cultures have rather rudimentary visual art, but none lacks a highly developed musical tradition.  Moreover, music is important in almost every human life.  People love it.  In this electronic age, few are out of earshot of it for very long.  Even in traditional societies not blessed with ever-present noisemakers, people sing frequently.  Work songs, dance songs, love songs, lullabyes, and play songs seem not only universal in all cultures, but important in virtually everyone’s life.  Humans have considerable brain wiring for music, and by some accounts reading and playing music is the most complex mental act we perform.

It appears that people playing music together synchronize their brain waves (Sänger et al. 2014; the study involved guitar players, but surely applies to all musicians).  They seem almost telepathic; deep brain structures as well as (presumably) mirror cells are involved.  The ability seems wired in, though developed by practice.

This implies that music is exceedingly important to humans.  The Greek theorist Polybius was already well aware of this, maintaining that the people of his native Arcady—an impoverished montane region in Greece—centered their institutions around music, to soften and (literally) harmonize the minds of the people there (Glacken 1967:95).  He proved his point by noting that one area within Arcady did not take to music.  They did little except fight and cause trouble, and Polybius drew his conclusions. If he was right, this seems to be the first known case in history of a group consciously changing its culture to improve its adaptation.  Even if he was wrong, it is an interesting point, because he would have been the first to discuss the possibility with such self-conscious interest.

Durkheim’s ideas of religion building solidarity within community were anticipated by the early Chinese, and they gave music a prime place in this. Xunzi wrote:  “Music unites that which is the same; rites distinguish that which is different; and through the combination rites and music the human heart is governed” (Tr. Burton Watson 1963:117).  In other words, music unites everyone involved in the worship rites and ceremonies; rites distinguish the different groups that participate, keeping them separate and reminding them of their different tasks.  This was criticially necessary in Xunzi’s society, where bureaucratic systems were part of ritual.  From a different world but a similar psychology, the Spanish proverb tells us donde musica hubiere, cosa mala no existiere (“where music is, nothing bad can exist”).

Yet, until recently, music received very little attention from psychological and social theorists (though see Feld 1982; Rouget 1985; and a tradition of ethnomusicology going back to Curt Sachs).  “Primitive” music was thought to be miserable, which drew a recent blast from the great archaeologist Martin Carver:  “…why does every attempt to represent Paleolithic music have to resemble a dying duck in a thunderstorm?…  Paleolithic persons had an ear for nature’s noises, a good sense of pitch and rhythm, flutes with pentatonic notes, rattles with pebbles.  There is no evidence that they were permanently trapped in the seventh level of hell, gnawed by angry aardvarks.  Why is it so improbable that they might express a sense of harmony, excitement and joy—like their paintings in fact?”  (Carver 2011:329.)  Of course he is correct, and we can safely assume that good (if simple) music existed tens of thousands of years ago—indeed, song may well have preceded speech (Mithen 2006; Vico 1999).

Recently, however, some good work on the social science of music has appeared (Jourdain 1997; Levitin 2007; Patel 2008; Raffman 1993; Sacks 2007; Seeger 2004).  Ethnomusicology and music history are small fields, largely devoted to description.  Evolutionary studies of music have been largely confined to bird song (reviewed in Marler and Slabbekoorn 2004).  Darwinian essays on human music have been rather tentative and preliminary (see e.g. Wallin et al 2000, in which the best articles are on nonhumans).  This is changing fast, with the work of scholars such as Aniruddh Patel (2008).  Darwin himself suggested that music might have evolved partly for courting, and indeed we all know that successful musicians can succeed notably well in finding mates (for long or short time periods).  Music may indeed have evolved partly as a mechanism for mate choice.

Animal song is useful as a source of simple models, or at least simple ideas.  Crickets sing to attract females, and, other things being equal, the one who sings most gets the females and actually leaves more descendents.  Thus a small cricket with a good steady song can leave more offspring than a big tough bruiser who doesn’t sing much (Rodríguez-Muñoz et al. 2010).  Song in crickets is generally thought to show superior health, and the females judge that a constantly singing male is probably a good bet, reproductively.  Successful human musicians may not be such a good health bet, but they are probably drawing on an ancient ploy.

Bird song is strikingly similar to human music, except that it is much simpler (Marler and Slabbekoorn 2004; Patel 2008; Slater 2000).  Biologists, however, underestimate its complexity.  Patel, who as a sociobiologist should know better, even says it is used only for “territorial warning and sexual advertisement” (2008:244).  Even his own book mentions other uses:  individual and descent-group recognition, local-population recognition, and physical state.  Many species recognize their close neighbors’ songs, and also the song-dialects of their geographical areas.

Bird song is known to signal health, reproductive state, energy level, seasonality, and quite a few other things.  Better singers are, other things being equal, healthier and more “fit,” and members of the opposite sex preferentially seek them out (Zuk 2002).  Whether the bird is “conscious” of all this or not is another question, one that cannot be answered with present experimental protocols.)  Simple calls work fine for announcing territory and for mating; song would not have evolved if that had been the only game.  Incidentally, birds often share human tastes, flocking to the opposite-sex individual that we humans would call the “best singer.”  There are spectacular exceptions—the male Yellow-headed Blackbird charms his mate with a sound reminiscent of the screech of a rusted gate, and the more awful it sounds to humans, the more the females seem to be attracted.

Bird song is always at least partly learned, in the advanced songbirds.  It is concentrated in the left brain, as is human speech, but human music is largely a right-brain activity.  This might imply that bird song is more about communication, less about emotion, than human music, or it might be mere chance.

Many birds sing different types of songs for different occasions, often a simple song for general social note (and possibly amusement?) and a more complex one for territorial display or courting (Slater 2000).  As long ago as 1963, Edward Armstrong showed that simplistic accounts of bird song (as mere “instinct” or for simple reasons like courting and territoriality) were hopelessly inadequate.  Birds improvise, and clearly sing for pleasure (in the sense of self-reinforcing activity).

Parrots, moreover, actually can understand and use human language semantically, to a very limited but very real degree (Pepperberg 1999; there has been much further work, but no easily available synthesis, since that book).

Why do they learn rather than merely giving instinctive calls?  Flycatchers, woodpeckers, and other highly evolved and intelligent birds do perfectly well with the latter.  Several possibilities exist and some are proved.  Recognizing one’s neighbors is the best-studied (see Marler and Slabbekoorn 2004, and other sources above).  If one knows one’s neighbors and is in one’s proper community, one is safe, and can avoid major fights.  Territories are already worked out within the ‘hood, and a stranger who needs to be fought can be recognized.  Also well demonstrated is the preference of females for better singers; a good singer is generally more experienced, more clever, and more good at social matters, as well as healthier.  Another possible benefit is confusing predators, but this seems dubious.  Every birdwatcher with good hearing soon learns to recognize a Bewick wren’s song by its tonal quality, in spite of the notorious extreme variation of pattern from wren to wren.  Even the dumbest predator should be able to do as much.

There are certainly more reasons than the above.  Bird societies are much more complex than we thought even 10 years ago, and song must be used to negotiate much of the complexity.

One thus wonders whether mockingbirds are really just wasting their time and energy with their endless and brilliantly original songs.  They can sing for 12 hours at a stretch, as every sleepless southern Californian knows.  They not only imitate; they modify imitated sounds to weave them into their own songs, and then improvise highly original phrases.  If this were mere “biologically mediated reproductive behavior” (Patel 2008:356) they could get away with a few squeaks, as most bird species do.  Obviously something more is afoot.  It would be truer to say that my singing when I was courting my wife was mere “biologically mediated reproductive behavior”; I didn’t write my own songs, and I most certainly didn’t sing as well as a mockingbird.  Patel seems to think that birds only sing in mating time, but of course mockingbirds sing all year.  So do many other good singers among birds.  Mockingbirds are monogamous and apparently mate for life, so their singing is not usually to lure a mate.  It does, however, keep longterm mates in touch.  Among nightingales, and thus very possibly among mockingbirds too, constant original song keeps females duly impressed with their mates and less prone to stray into “extrapair copulation” (Birkhead 2008).  Song lets adults keep track of their young as well.  Thus it can happen any time.  Mockingbirds sing partly to hold territory, against not only other mockingbirds but also other invaders of the turf, and this coupled with their fearlessness gives them an incentive to sing a lot.  But it does not explain the improvisation.

Mockingbirds that are healthy, safe, and secure sing more, louder, and more creatively.  Probably, much else is communicated: perhaps level of sexual arousal, level of fondness for mate, level of excitement at life in general, level of peace with the world.  Mockingbirds sing ardently on moonlit nights, a fact which must have a reason—especially since their arch-enemies, the cats, are out, and can see better in the dark than the mockers do.

A major study by Carlos Botero et al. (2009) of mockingbirds and their relatives (the family Mimidae) shows that there is a strong correlation between song diversity and climate—the more drastic the variation from summer to winter, the more song types.  The range is from the Caribbean islands’ pearly-eyed thrasher, singing rather monotonously in an idyllic climate, to eastern North America’s brown thrasher, which ranges far north and must deal with terrific cold even in freaky summer weather.  The extremely good singers are all highly migratory, a pattern found also in related families like the thrushes.  It turns out, on analysis, that the higher the need for intelligent, adaptive behavior, the more varied the song.  Females apparently pick the best singer, having evolved to assume he is the smartest adapter.

This does not explain the imitation, however; it does not correlate.  Californian gardeners know how mockingbirds deliberately scare other birds by imitating hawks, jays, and cats—apparently purely for fun, though sometimes they seem to be scaring nest-predators off.  Is there more going on?  Is this the only time they actually refer to the things they imitate?  Mockers frequently imitate killdeers and roosters.  Do they think of those birds as they imitate them?  Do they really enjoy this, as they seem to do?  Does a good imitation make the singer’s mate think of killdeers or roosters?  Does he feel pride in his ability?  We just don’t know.

 

One thing we do know is that birds, even mockingbirds, appear to have nothing beyond a simple “phrase structure grammar” (in the linguistic sense; Chomsky 1957).  They do not seem to plan utterances beyond the short-phrase level, and phrases seem pretty stereotyped and simple, even in mockingbird song.  The only indication that there is a “more” is that mockers and other good imitators often work at a given imitation to make it fit better with their overall song pattern.

Productive, creative song is confined to one group of birds, the advanced Oscines branch of the Passeriformes.  Otherwise, real song is limited to two other groups:  Many hummingbirds have simple songs, and some learn a bit of their songs.  Parrots, closely related to Passeriformes, have evolved their own form of productivity, more transferable to verbal learning.  Apparently song evolved to give the smaller passeriforms a better way of communicating fairly complex messages over long distances.

Simpler singers are instinctively wired to sing in a particular way, but may need some learning or practice.  Zebra finches raised in isolation sing formless, disorganized songs, but their descendents, if raised together, gradually move back to the normal song—they have a genetic template somewhere in their brains (Fehér et al. 2009).  By contrast, flycatchers, even raised in isolation, sing pretty much the same old song; they are instinct-driven and do not learn their songs.  Mockingbirds, on the other hand, might never work out the right sound.

Significantly, the birds with extremely elaborate songs, like mockers and nightingales, are often dull-colored inhabitants of dense brush.  They also tend to be either aggressive, or fast, elusive flyers, or—like mockingbirds—both.  They have to be, since their songs are a neon billboard as far as hawks and cats are concerned!  Birds often get so caught up in their songs that they seem almost in a trance state.  I once sneaked to within three feet of a singing nightingale, and I have been almost as close to many a mockingbird.  A romantic legend has it that the nightingale presses his breast against a thorn to make himself sing more plaintively.  Nightingales do indeed hide in thorn bushes to sing, but the reason is sheer self-protection.

The California towhee shares the mockingbird’s suburban habitat and is aggressive and successful, but has a feeble song given only at the height of the breeding season.  The difference is that towhees spend their lives on the ground, where they are susceptible to cats and other ground predators; thus they have evolved to avoid attracting attention to their whereabouts.  Significantly, the only time they get far above ground is to sing from a high perch.

Bird communication, especially its functions, remains understudied.  It is a sure bet that birds are not even reaching the lowly level of “I’m here!”—birds have nothing like the incredibly complicated human concepts of “I,” “am,” and “here.”  But it is an equally sure bet that the birds are doing more than merely marking territory and calling mates.  One point often missed is that “calling mates” includes both finding mates and maintaining pair-bonds with one’s long-term mate.

Many birds, especially migrants, sing only in the breeding season because the song center of the brain actually shrinks after that time, and regrows only the following spring.  This is apparently to lighten the bird’s wing loading.  Birds, like humans, are highly encephalized.  The song center is a large part of that relatively big brain.  The song center weighs only one or two grams, but that is significant to a bird weighing at most a few ounces that has to fly hundreds of miles.

Social mammals and birds have many different sounds for different purposes.  Coyotes (another animal with which I have a great deal of field experience) howl to maintain pack contact, bark to attract attention, whine on a level pitch to show pain, whine on a descending scale to beg, growl to show fear and vigilance, snarl to show outright aggression, and also yap, yowl, make purring sounds, and so on; the young have their own sounds.  Coyote families sing extremely complex, long-lasting choruses, with each individual contributing a different type of note; the father may howl while his mate yodels and the pups bark, whine and yap.

Wolves are probably even more complicated.  Coyotes and wolves will communicate with humans.  They answer if I howl.  Once when I was singing and playing my guitar on my balcony, the local coyotes joined me, in the same key.  Movie buffs will recall the film Never Cry Wolf, in which the hero plays his bassoon to the wolves and they howl back.  I was once camped out in a remote part of Canada.  At the next campsite was a saxophonist—clearly a professional; he was a superb player—who had obviously seen the film.  He spent half the night playing riffs for the local wolves.  They howled back, in key, with a similar riff, every time.  Human and canine alternated every five minutes or so, and kept it up for hours.

There is a You-tube video of a woman, “Krissy,” playing a saw and getting coyotes to answer it, in the Angeles National Forest near my home (“Duet for Saw and Coyotes,” circulating on the Internet, 2014).  Of course coyotes routinely answer dogs, and join in with ambulances and fire trucks.  More interesting is my dog Kangal’s fondness for playing his squeaky-toys along with my records.  He once accompanied Andres Segovia in a marvelous duet, Kangal on the squeaky-toy perfectly matching Segovia’s pitch and timing for quite a while.  Segovia is probably turning in his grave, but the sheer ability of Kangal to follow recorded music is impressive.  I had not known or heard of a dog doing this, but my wolf and coyote experiences alerted me to the possibility.

 

Among primates, music seems unique to humans.  Most other primates’ calls are instinctive—hybrids even give hybrid calls (Wallin 2000).  Chimpanzees dance and whoop, but their sound repertoire is instinctive and simple, whereas music is largely learned and is very complex.  Rhesus monkeys have no musical taste; they prefer silence to any music, and dislike harmonious music as much as dissonant (Holden 2007).  Presumably, however, they enjoy their own calls, which sound horribly raucous and uncouth to human ears; they spend a great deal of time calling.  Some primates apparently learn some of their calls, and all can learn when to call and when not, but at best the nonhuman primates are far behind songbirds.

Music evidently evolved in the human lineage, like language.  Music probably evolved along with language as part of one communication system.  In modern humans, music communicates primarily emotion, while language communicates specific cognitive information (as well as a good deal of emotion).  The neglect of music by scientists is presumably related to the role of music as primarily a mood-communicator; science has tended to shy away from emotion (Damasio 1994).  Some grave souls have even denied that music has an important role, even claiming it is a sort of accidental by-product of evolution (Schrock 2009).  Oliver Sacks (2007) and Robin Dunbar (2010) refute this view.  Darwinian theory renders impossible the view that such an enormously important, universal human trait, involving more of the brain than any other activity, could be a mere trivial accident.  Darwin himself noted this, writing of it as an important evolved capability of humans.

 

 

Music in Humans:  Society and Communication

 

The enormous importance and appeal of music was well stated around 400 A.D. by St. John Chrysostom (a nickname, “golden mouth,” in recognition of his ability with words):  “By nature we take such delight in song that even infants clinging at the breast, if they are crying and perturbed, can be put to sleep by singing….  So too journeymen, driving their yoked oxen in the nonday, often sing as they go…wine-growers, treading the winepress, or gathering grapes, or dressing the vines, or doing any other piece of work, often do it to a song.  And the sailors likewise, as they pull the oars.  Again, women who are weaving…often sing…” (quoted Dronke 1969:14).

In the 18th century, Giambattista Vico (2000) speculated that people originally sang to communicate; music and speech diverged late in human history.  The idea that music and speech slowly diverging from a common source deserves, and has received, further consideration (see e.g. Mithen 2006; Patel 2008; Sacks 2007).  Music and language share hierarchic planning; just as phonemes combine into morphemes, which combine into sentences, which combine into texts, so notes combine into lines which become tunes which can be parts of much larger rituals or masses or concerts.

Many good theories of music origin have been proposed (Schrock 2009), but none seems adequate to me.  The commonest one has been noted above: music evolved for sexual display and selection—basically, for courting.  Indeed, men and sometimes women court by singing, and many songs are about love, but the vast majority of human song is in the service of dance, work, religion, and children’s activities.  Even love songs are more often produced for group entertainment, often including group dance, than for actual courtship.  Music for courtship seems rather rare except in societies where actual talking would be considered risqué or worse.  Moreover, among humans, both sexes sing.  In striking contrast to almost all songbirds, humans do not have a male bias in their singing activity.  Dunbar (2010:72) thinks music may simply be a general social communication device, later adapted to more specific messages like courting.

Ellen Dissanayake has argued that music arises from mother-infant interactions (that should have been parent-infant).  This certainly explains some of the action.  But it is, again, inadequate to explain the use of music in so many venues.

However, all these theories seem to me to be too specific.  Recall that higher mammals all have different noises for different purposes.  It is effectively certain that the immediate ancestors of humans had separate classes of noises for baby-care, mating, coordinating co-work, coordinating dances, inspiring warriors to fight, lamenting tragedies, and all the other purposes to which music is routinely put.  In fact, we still have nonmusical, and at least partly instinctive, noises for baby-care (lulling, soothing sounds), war (angry yells and screams), lamenting (weeping, sobbing), and so on.

As human communication became more and more a matter of learning, less and less instinctive, the sounds all came to be  incorporated into the new media.  They inspired or developed into songs.  These culturally-learned descendents of instinctive noises merged into one vast cultural soundscape.

If Vico and his modern followers are right, as seems increasingly likely, music and language developed from one original system—a chantlike or murmuring sound (as Vico described it), rather like the babbling of babies when they are at the threshold of talking.  If you slow down and computer-analyze a baby’s babbling at that time—around 7 or 8 months old—you will find that she is trying to say actual words.  Cleaning up the tape reveals “mama,” “papa,” and other deep thoughts, expressed as well as practice permits.  I suspect that songlike babbling is expressive of emotion, as adult song is.

As communication became more and more complex, more a matter of cultural learning, language and music forked off—language to communicate cognitive data, music to communicate emotion.  Language always nested in the left brain (in most people), but music is distributed over the whole brain.  Language differs from bird song in that it can communicate nested ideas:  “He said that she thought that I said that the President acted stupidly.”  Humans can easily handle up to five levels of this (Dunbar 2010) and, if necessary, even more.  Music is similarly “recursive”:  tunes and themes nest in longer compositions, with up to five levels of recursion in ordinary music and many more in Brahms or Beethoven.  Bird song is recursive only up to one or two levels, so far as we can determine.

 

Music obviously evolved from biological primes.  Simplest of all is rhythm:  it builds on heartbeat, breathing, walking, working, sex, and other body rhythms.  Humans are a rhythmic animal.  Very often, music is explicitly used to coordinate work or enhance sex, and of course it is virtually inseparable from dance.

People everywhere chant to coordinate dancing and working, and grieve in a characteristic high-falling cadence.  They speak in characteristic, language-specific rhythms and tonalities.  Many local musics correspond well to the local language (Huron 2006:188).

One rarely-mentioned proof that music is basic and important to humans is the worldwide phenomenon of the “earworm”—getting a song stuck in one’s head, particularly a song one is learning.  Mark Twain wrote a famous story about being driven nearly mad because he could not get the popular song “Punch, Brothers” out of his mind—till he taught it to someone else, and passed on the obsession!  Somehow, many or most of us are driven, almost or quite instinctively, to repeat a new song till we have it down.  Birds seem to share this; a mockingbird or nightingale will practice a newly-learned imitation for hours, all too often just outside the window of a human trying to sleep.  I recently heard a local thrasher work for hours on perfecting his imitation of a Bell’s vireo song, not an easy song to copy.  This cannot be explained except by assuming that songs are fundamentally important to the life of the singer, and that an attraction, or even compulsion, to learn them has been built into the brain.

In fact, learning to perform music, in childhood, leads to brain growth in several areas, including the connections between right and left brain.  Maximal effects require learning by the age of seven.  Children trained extremely early by the Suzuki method turn out to have more developed brains than controls (Healy 2010). Children with early musical-instrument training have more cortical thickness in regions associated with executive function (Barnes 2015a).  Working memory, attention, self-control, and organizational abilities are involved.  Music training also has the enormous value of teaching children that competence in an area comes slowly, from hard work, rather than being inborn or coming easily.

Biology also gives a wider range of patterned sounds:  speech rhythms, work sounds, natural sounds.  Our ancestors presumably responded to sound patterns in nature because they needed to tell a game animal’s noises from the wind in the trees, a lion’s roar from thunder, a mate’s call from a random bird noise.

Humans have built on this to create far more complex layers of patterning.  Biology gives us the basics, but only human ingenuity can build it into blues cross-rhythms or Balkan dance beats.  Some musics, notably in West Africa as well as the Balkans, specialize in rhythmic complexity.  By contrast, Laurel Trainor, one of the people who has found that children’s brains benefit from music, points out that western classical music is astonishingly simple rhymically compared to many folk forms.  The west has specialized on complex harmonic systems instead (Trainor 2008).  It is hard to do both.  Jazz manages to do it, but is a specialized, sophisticated form.

The emotional moods of music apparently have biological roots also.  Sad songs convey benefits by stimulating peacefulness, nostalgia, tenderness, and wonder, and may stimulate release of prolactin, the hormone associated with breastfeeding and other pleasuarable physical representations of tenderness (Sciencealert Staff 2014).  Happy songs more obviously connect with plesaant emotions.  Military music, lullabyes, and mourning chants all sound appropriate to their occasions, stimulating the mind accordingly.

It would seem, then, that music exists to allow emotion and mood to be socially shared, through being patterned in such a way that a large group can coordinate their musical performance and thus make easier the sharing.  More:  Music exists to allow a social group to coordinate action—work and dance in particular—and at the same time to get them in the proper mood for that action.  Music and dance bring people together and allow them to share culturally appropriate moods.  We in the modern west think of dance as “fun,” but other cultures have dances for ritual, for mourning, for communication of important messages, for war, and for almost every other conceivable purpose.

An occasional claim that music evolved for courtship is based on analogy to the old, discredited belief about  bird song.  In fact, courtship is one of the important functions of music in humans, but is much less important than are several other functions.  Music is far more important in large-group settings, from Australian Aboriginal rituals and Inuit shaman sessions to New York concert halls and Los Angeles dance floors.  Even in intimate contexts, courtship is surpassed in frequency by lulling babies, singing to and with children, and playing tranquil music to relax.

 

In short, music is to mood what language is to concrete meaning.  Music gives a hierarchical and recursive patterning to the communication of mood, just as language gives it (through phonemics and grammar) to communication of cognitive and specific messages.

 

 

Psychological Functionality and Music

 

Music has been widely used in psychotherapy.  Music therapy is not especially popular now, but was a hugely important part of treatment, especially for the mentally ill but also for the physically ill, in the medieval and early-modern Near East (Dols 1992:166-173).  Hospitals had live music, designed to cure the mad and soothe those in pain.  Apparently it worked well, because it remained popular and had the weight of medical authority behind it.  (It had the opposite effect on one French traveler in the 17th century, though; he described the music as “wretched” [Dols 1992:172].  Possibly it was as bad as modern medical-office music, which so often elicits the same opinion.)

We are now a long way from medieval Islam in this regard, but music therapy is still done.  A recent review of music therapy by William Thompson and Gottfried Schlaug (2015) picks out an amazing range of ways music is now used.  One notable way is in retraining people who have had left-brain strokes.  Science has known for decades that people who have lost the use of ordinary language, due to strokes to the left temporal lobes where language is processed, often retain the ability to sing.  Often, they can even sing what they want to say, even though they cannot say it in ordinary speech.  Building on this by mental bootstrapping allows stroke victims to develop linguistic ability in the right half of the brain.  The brain is perfectly capable of retraining in this way, but it has to have something to build on, and song is the foundation.

Music also coordinates and entrains body rhythms, and thus is used in helping disabled people to learn or regain abilities, and in helping ordinary people to coordinate better and exercise more effectively.  Use of music to set the rhythm for exercising is almost universal.  Music also engages people socially, entraining emotions, as Durkheim said ritual does; it was the music and dancing in the rituals that really did the work.  Of course, secular sociability builds on this too.  Music has helped people with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s cope with deteriorating functionality.  It is also extremely valuable in helping people on the autism spectrum (as I can attest; I have some Asperger’s condition, and music has made an enormous difference for me).  Autistic persons can be calmed, socially integrated, and socially coordinated with the help of music.  Music identifiably changes the brain—physically.

Training in playing a musical instrument helps language learning and overall ability to learn, partly by providing discipline.  One extremely valuable side of musical-instrument learning is not related to the music, however: musical instrument training inevitably starts from scratch and is a slow, incremental process, but one in which every week brings material improvement (if the learner does what he or she is told).  This has saved many a child who was expected to perfect at first try, or at least very soon, by overly driving parents and peers, and who thus developed a huge fear of trying (since nothing worth doing is easy at first attempt).  It has also saved many who were put down savagely and told they could do nothing.

Finally, singing during childbirth makes labor more bearable.  It appears that many women sing at this time.  They may start only to prevent themselves crying out in pain, but, from accounts, they find the singing actually helps the whole process.  (This from personal communications, largely from my midwife spouse Barbara Anderson.)

Given the enormous benefits of music, it is tragic that Americans have so greatly reduced their singing and playing in recent decades.  Most Americans now say they “can’t sing” or “can’t learn an instrument” or “don’t have time,” and thus miss it.  Things were very different when I was young.  We were always singing: in school (all schools had music then), in church, on camping trips, on the road, during parties, during drunken get-togethers (when I got old enough for that), and just around the house and around the town.  All that is gone.  Our loss is incalculable.  Even the sheer physical loss in brain development is profound; the social losses are much greater.

 

 

Structure in Music:  Some Psychological Considerations

 

Music creates a world of steady rhythms, pure tones, neat and simple harmonies, and exciting micro-variations.  (Elite music in the 20th century often violated all these rules, but almost no other music ever has.)  People are remarkably sensitive to the building blocks of each other’s musics, in spite of cultural differences that often make them insensitive to the total package (see below).

Patel (2008) emphasizes the differences of music and speech.  Speech rhythms are very different from the carefully counted, more or less equal and regular beats usual in music.  Speech contours, including the tones of tonal languages, are not set to absolute pitches, and differ a lot even in the same utterance, let alone between different speakers.  On the other hand, Patel and others have found that people do process grammar and musical sequences in similar ways; there is commonality in the overall processes that allow us to construct and interpret sentences, on the one hand, and long musical pieces on the other.

Sentences differ from phrases (as in bird song) in that sentences are more complex, and can be transformed grammatically.  “The boy hit the ball” is already beyond a bird’s (known) ability, but the grammatical sense necessary to turn it into “the ball was hit by the boy” and “did the boy hit the ball?” are truly beyond any animal’s comprehension (Chomsky 1957—confirmed by every bit of evidence since).  Similarly, birds may string phrases together indefinitely, but they cannot create a even a simple song that integrates several phrases into a composition.  Some can make up a simple, consistent song of four or five phrases strung together, but this is as good as it gets.  Still less can they parallel a blues song or a concerto or anything else requiring overall planning.

Many scholars strongly suspect that this is simply one aspect of a wider human ability to do hierarchic planning.  Animals cannot seem to do any sort of multilevel, hierarchic, recursive planning.  Humans do it not only in language and music, but also in hunting and gathering, farming, war, and indeed every activity we take on.  We are born to plan.

Patel gives enormous technical detail about the small-scale building blocks that we process subconsciously and usually do not think about.  Most people do not even realize they are doing all these complex things until linguists point it out.  This was brought home to me by his comment that “there are tone languages with stress (e.g. Mandarin) and without it (e.g. Cantonese)” (Patel 2008:119).  I speak both, or used to, and had indeed been properly using stress in the one and not in the other, but I never realized it.  I learned it and processed it preattentively.  (Actually, Cantonese has slight stress patterns, but not enough to make the contrast invalid.)  He finds plenty of similarities and differences between language and music.

John Sloboda reports that “a fifth of adults believe they are ‘tone deaf,’ so they don’t see music as something they do; rather, they experience music as something that is done to them” (Sloboda 2008:32).  He suspects that this part of a “disconnection” that arose “in the past 50 years” because we consume music rather than producing it.

Certainly, as noted above, there has been a profound change in American life in my time.  When I was a child, everybody sang, most people played musical instruments, music was taught in schools, and folk music was a living tradition rather than a record genre.  Today, few make music any more, and music is out of the schools.  However, most teenagers do at least something (be it church choir or rock band), and more people sing than admit it.  Watch individuals alone in cars at any stoplight; you will soon see several who are obviously singing.  Most would probably never do it in public.  Sloboda, and Patel (2008), suspect that few people are really tone-deaf.  Most are simply too ashamed of their purely imaginary lack of ability to let themselves develop their musicality.

Group bonding is certainly involved in the uses of music (Dunbar 2004; Patel 2008:370).  It cannot be the only factor; primates bond into big groups without it, while humans perform music alone for their own amusement, as well as in or for groups (Patel 2008:370-371).  Still, the universal use of music and chant as group phenomena tells us a very clear story.

Chris Loersch and Nathan Arbuckle, in an excellent study that is the first actual test of theories, proved conclusively that music engages and entrains social linking.  They quote Darwin on the mysterious nature of music. They found that music is “intimately tied to the other core social phenomena that bind us together into groups” (Loesch and Arbuckle 2013:777).  Those phenomena included general sociability as well as language, personal traits like extraversion, and group activities.

Music does not display many of the features that prove we have evolved for language (Patel 2008:379f.).  Patel rather surprisingly concludes that music was invented rather than evolved (Patel 2008:400-401), though building blocks such as rhythm sense might be genetic.

I find this unsatisfactory.  I can live with a theory in which only the building blocks—rhythm, pure tone, harmony, recursive tune compostion—are evolved, but only if a need to express emotion and mood state through composed song is also involved.  Music is universal.  It grades into speech via chant, word-music, tonal languages, rhythmic speech, and the like.  Thus it is clearly a part of the evolved human communication system.  Recent findings disprove the old idea that speech is located in the left brain, music in the right; in fact they are both distributed widely, music in particular being a total-brain activity, though some key components are right-brain-processed (see e.g. Deutsch 2010).  Babies respond to their parents’ voices and speech rhythms, and even young infants’ crying is in those rhythms; people (especially women) with more “musical” speech tend to be more socially adept (Deutsch 2010).

Individuals create music alone to put themselves in particular moods, or get themselves out of same.  I find I have to play and sing music to settle and harmonize myself during exciting moments, and to wake myself up during dull ones.  Almost all children sing for sheer pleasure; they seem to have an almost physical need of it during joyful times.  So both manipulation and communication of mood states is involved.  This gives us the beginning of a theory, but only the beginning.

 

 

Music:  Some New Findings and Speculations

 

A recent study of music by several psychologists (Bonneville-Roussy et al. 2013) deserves to be quoted in extenso.  They found that people in the modern world—their study was in the United States and the UK—are intensely engaged with music.  This varies with age.  The peak was among teenagers; 18-year-olds topped the list with 25 hours a week of listening.  The low point was 58; people that age averaged 12 hours.  The range, over all ages, was dramatic—from zero to 96 hours a week!

Once retired, past 65, people renewed musicality, typically considering it more important than at any previous time.  Adults often did much of their music listening while working around the house (Bonneville-Roussy et al. 2013:706).

No one will be surprised to learn that teens were much more prone than others to listen to music as a part of active socializing.  It is well known that teenagers are especially influenced by music; that tastes picked up from teenage peers tend to be permanent; and that teenagers’ and early twenty-somethings’ favorite songs tend to be beloved throughout their whole lives.  Even songs that one did not much like at the time often remain deeply embedded in consciousness, not displaced by other far better songs learned later.  It appears that the growing brain reaches a point at this time when music gets deeply encoded in the neurons (Stern 2014), apparently as part of the formation of a stable self.  It is also a part of the rapid expansion of the social circle that takes place at that age; after all, the self is defined socially (G.H. Mead 1964).  It is also relevant that we reminisce about childhood and teen years more than about other times (Stern 2014).  (For the record, my most deeply felt songs were largely learned or heard from 18 to 24, but many date from my 6-to-14 years, and many from 35-45.  This fits the social-universe theory: the 35-45 period was the time of the breakup of my first marriage and my slow re-forming of a new social universe.)

The study follows recent literature in dividing music into mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, and contemporary.  There was some stereotypy according to music preferred: lovers of heavy metal and punk were supposedly bad dudes, listeners to classical were supposedly affluent and educated.  This reminds us of the African-American psychologist Claude Steele and his use of whistling Vivaldi to disarm fears of him as a “black male.”  I suppose that would work only among people who could tell Vivaldi from Snoop Doggy Dogg.  Most of the people who might attack a black psychologist probably cannot do that.  Still, Dr. Steele felt safer when whistling the former (Steele 2010).

Tastes changed across the life track.  Mellow music was popular with teens and older people.  Sophisticated music (classical music, modern jazz, and the like) grew steadily over time.  So did unpretentious music (folk, country, conventional religious).  Intense (heavy metal, punk) and contemporary (other current forms) declined steadily.  The investigators did not find a cohort effect.  This proves they were not going far enough back; the change in taste from unpretentious or sophisticated in the cohorts born before 1940 to intense and contemporary in later cohorts would have stood out clearly.  Personality somewhat influenced preference, with lovers of intense music being a bit low on conscientiousness, and openness to experience being associated with liking for most musical styles.  No surprises there.

 

Music can be described in terms of schemas (basic structures of knowledge).  One can speak of a very simple schema for 2/4 rhythm, or a very complex one representing a whole symphony.  Arturo Toscanini, the legendary conductor, must have had a set of schemas not only for all Beethoven’s works, but for all the ways to play them—every note (microvariations and all) of the first violin, every bang of the cymbals, every sort and level of performance.

Patel (2008; see esp. p. 290) compares these patterns with syntax in language, finding, as usual, similarities and differences.  Both are created by generative grammars, but of course music does not have nouns, verbs and so on; it has notes, themes, ornamentation, and the like.  The point is that generative rules work for both, organizing an infinite range of possible sentences and compositions.

 

 

Findings on Musical Taste

 

Patterns are basic; suddenly varying the pattern, therefore, keeps the music interesting.

One poorly explored musical type is the theme-and-variations pattern found worldwide, especially in cultures with sophisticated stringed and keyboard instruments.  Middle Eastern ‘ud and santur music, Indian ragas, Chinese qin and zheng performances, Elizabethan lute music, Baroque harpsichord music, and West African kora and bania music (and its descendent, American country blues) follow a general pattern:  they take a theme and subject it to more and more complex variations over a period ranging from a few minutes to several hours.  Often, the intensity of the music builds up, as in Indian ragas, but equally often it remains at a calm, cool, crystalline level, as in Chinese qin playing.  (Chinese performers have told me there are over a hundred ways to strike a single note on the qin.)  No one seems to have analyzed the reasons why this generally cool, low-volume music is so universally popular.  It looks very much as if the theme-and-variations piece is a larger, more consciously processed equivalent of the patterned microvariations discussed below.

David Huron (2006) and Philip Ball (2008, 2010) have dealt with the role of predictability and surprise in music.  Much of this is related to such pattern variations.  Huron points out that major surprise provokes a fight-flight-freeze response in an animal.  In humans, mild surprise provokes a kind of relievedly unserious shadow of these.  Mild fight response, provoked by scary music, is frisson—the prickling you feel at horror-movie music.  Mild flight becomes laughter, and musicians (notably Peter Schickele, whose music Huron analyzes) provoke it by sudden outrageous violations of musical norms.  Mild freeze-response becomes awe, and is evoked by the more bombastic romantic composers.  Surprise may be based on subconsciously processed or consciously known factors.  Huron distinguishes several kinds of surprise, based on what sorts of expectation we have:  for rhythm, tone, sequence, melody, and so on.  A sudden fortissimo at an odd spot in a quiet passage, as in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, is the most basic level of surprise.  Even an infant gets that.  At the most complex level, we have wild jazz variations on well-known themes, and even on well-known previous variations of the themes.  To get the surprise, you have to know the themes and their usual variations.  Huron, who knows his ethnomusicology thoroughly, sees this throughout the world.  He discusses the total assault of the high modernists, Schoenberg and Stravinsky in particular; they lived to devastate people’s expectations.  Huron laments the disappearance of the world’s small musical traditions—those of indigenous and local communities—not only because we lose their wonderful music, but because we have no comparative material left to study (Huron 2008.)

This being said, musical surprise—to the point of frisson, laughter, and awe—is actually quite rare in actual performances.  Ball’s contribution is to point out that we want expectations that are played with, not devastated.  We build expectations about particular genres, composers, tune types, and so on.  Then variations are most striking when just subtle enough to take some attention.

Especially important is microvariation:  tiny, almost imperceptible variations in pitch, timing, attack, dynamics, rhythm, and everything else.  These are controlled with exquisite perfection by a great performer.  A naïve audience is usually quite unaware of them at a conscious level, but still shows subconscious awareness by responding dramatically to good performance in this area.  Even sophisticated listeners may be aware to only varying degrees.  I had long realized the importance of these tiny details, but did not realize how self-consciously they are cultivated until, many years ago, I heard Mischa Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet working with a young string quartet whose cellist was a close friend of mine.  My friend played the cello marvelously, but Schneider showed him some tricks that made a real qualitative difference—the performance went from excellent to sublime.  Yet the tricks were incredibly subtle—tiny differences in sharpness of attack, slur in pitch, dynamics, and motion of the fingers on the strings.

Ordinary unsophisticated listeners who have no intellectual knowledge of these fine points can most certainly appreciate them in practice.  A few years later, at a folk festival, I listened to fiddle music by some of the famous names in fiddling—some of the best fiddlers I have heard.  The crowd applauded politely.  Then an unknown teenage kid named Alison Krauss took the stage and blew them all away.  The crowd simply went wild—screaming, jumping up, dancing.  As many readers will know, Alison Krauss has gone on to fulfill the promise of that long-ago summer day.  The point here, however, is the audience response.  This listeners were local residents out for a day in the park.  Most had little or no musical training, and could not have picked out the extremely subtle microvariations that Krauss so exquisitely controlled.  They most certainly could hear them, though; they were picking up on them subconsciously.  They could fully react to what they heard.

A fascinating study shows this is true of rhythm too.  Many of us know all too well the mindless bump, bump, bump of the drum machine, driving any sensitive listener crazy by its utter sameness.  Some programs try to save it by injecting small random variations.  Now a study by Holger Hennig et al. (2011) shows that people find these meaningless variations unsatisfying, but respond to, and enjoy, the patterned, systematic variations that good human drummers inject into their drumming.  Of course, the better the drummer, the more control he or she has over this, and the better the result.

Singing is similarly variable in ways easy to hear but almost impossible to describe.  Tango singer Carlos Gardel rose from the slums of Buenos Aires’ port to world fame on the strength of a voice so heavenly that women who had never seen him committed suicide when he died.  The Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum had men literally swooning when she was in her 70s.  People across cultural and musical boundaries responded more or less the same to these singers; their vocal appeal was not culture-bound.  People everywhere respond more or less the same to awful singers, too (trust me…I speak from experience).  Cultural differences in singing style are dramatic, but have not prevented Tuvan throat singers and Peruvian mountaineers from hitting world best-seller charts, simply by doing a stellar job with their distinctive cultural traditions.  One pair of Bulgarian singers simply happened to be picked up in a rather random collection of local folklore; they were just a couple of village teenagers.  But they were good enough to get on the world music circuit on the basis of a cut on an obscure folklore record.

Culture is real, and as an anthropologist I am hardly about to underplay it, but some things cross cultural lines with ease and grace.

One wide implication of all this is that knowledge and culture are improvisational, not stereotypic.  People learn from each other.  They do not mindlessly absorb; they learn what they expect, want, and need to learn.  Then each person adapts, transforms, personalizes, and applies that knowledge.

This stands in extreme contrast to the views of learning and culture as mindless absorption, from Leslie White’s “culturology” to Dawkins’ “memes” (the latter concept vies with racism for the title of most ridiculous thing to pass for science in the 20th century).

The examples of Alison Krauss and Carlos Gardel, among many others, show that listeners, including those with no musical background to speak of, do discriminate musical quality when they listen to it.  When they are not carefully attending, though, they may miss it very widely indeed.  The Washington Post recently placed a famous violinist, Joshua Bell, in the subway to play for pennies.  He performed great classical violin pieces in the Washington metro for a morning.  “Only 27 out of 1,097 (2.5 percent) put money into Bell’s open Stradivarius violin case and only 7 (0.5 percent) stopped to listen for more than a minute” (Ariely 2009:218), and, of these 7, one recognized him and another was a professional violinist.  Most passers-by stopped and interviewed by the Post had not even noticed Bell.  I must say that this is not usually my experience of street musicians; many people do listen.  I certainly do, and, if they are better than I am, I give them money.  Since I am no musician, this means that almost all of them get their buck.  Even in the Washington Metro I would probably pick out a Krauss or a Bell.  But I might not; those subways have awful acoustics.

 

Types of Music and What Is Communicated

 

Music has rather consistent functions and structures across cultures.

Lullabyes are, for obvious reasons, usually the simplest kind of music.  Humans everywhere lull babies to sleep with soft crooning noises, and so do at least some primates.  Lullabye songs are simple cultural constructions from this shushing noise.

Culture makes little difference at this level.  Lullabyes are pretty much the same everywhere, but symphonies aren’t.

Lullabyes construct up to the bland, syrupy music infamously infesting elevators and stores today.  Dentists routinely use such music to soothe their clients.  Music psychologist Laurel Trainor discusses the lullabye issue, and adds that a more active, playful music for the young is also widely similar:  “Across cultures, songs sung while playing with babies are fast, high and contain exaggerated rhythmic accents;…  Talking to people of all ages, we use falling pitches [notes going down the scale, not falling cadences] to express comfort; relatively flat, high pitches to express fear; and large bell-shaped pitch contours to express joy and surprise” (Trainor 2008:598).  She believes these basics of music are hardwired into the brain.  This explains our persistent failure to like atonal music much.

Funeral laments everywhere are very similar to weeping from intense grief, and are obviously culturally constructed from that.  This is quite explicit in many cultures, from the Kaluli of Papua-New Guinea (Feld 1982) to the Hupa and their neighbors in California (Keeling 1992).  It is also obvious in the great requiem masses of Victoria, Duarte Lobo, and Mozart.

Sad music from blues to rembetika also builds on laments, with high falling cadences, drawn-out notes, minor-third intervals, and so on.

Work songs drive the rhythm of the task.  They may have been among the earliest songs in the world.  They tend to be simple, for obvious reasons.  Humorous songs, welcoming songs, farewell songs, birthday songs, and similar minor-occasion songs also tend to be rather simple.  Narrative songs such as ballads may be simple, or they may be elaborated extensively.

An interesting worldwide finding is that the bass instrument of an ensemble, or the bass strings on a single instrument, almost invariably give the rhythm; this is because the human brain is better at detecting timing and rhythm at low pitches than at high ones (Hove et al. 2014).

Romantic music related to love—probably the most universal and common of the categories—is naturally soft, with swooping glissandos and simple but mellifluous harmonies.  It may sound happy or sad, depending on whether it celebrates true love or laments loss and loneliness.  It can be a vehicle for the most deep and complex musicality, but usually is less ambitious, and thus it provides most of the ear-candy all too familiar as auditory tranquilizers in supermarkets and dental offices.

Popular music—the music of mass entertainment—is normally simple and uncomplicated, not so much because it has to appeal to the unsophisticated as because it has to be fairly cheap to produce and because it naturally expresses the relatively shallow, simple interactive relationships of public places.  As specialized audiences build up for particular forms of popular music, the music quickly grows more complex, sophisticated, and elaborate.  This is an evolution visible very widely.  Some scattered examples include this progression in Neapolitan songs of the 19th and 20th centuries, in Chinese popular songs of the middle ages, in dance music from Argentine tango to American rock, and in medieval French popular tunes from early times to the complex dances recorded by Thoinot Arbeau in the 16th century.

War music often builds on defiant cries or on coordinated march rhythms.  Throughout the world, especially in the old and warlike civilizations, it evolved into a great deal of court music, outdoor music, entertainment music, and popular music.  Chinese opera, Indian street music, Near Eastern public music, and European brass band music all have roots in martial music, and all have a loud, strident, far-carrying sound and a driving heavy beat.  (Some of these forms have been rather sourly compared to the sounds of a man trying to get rid of squalling cats by yelling and throwing kitchen pans at them.)  Martial music may also lie somewhere behind contemporary world pop.   No one can miss the extreme anger of much rap music and other modern pop forms.  Many of the lyrics glorify random and criminal violence in the same way that old-time war songs glorified the structured military equivalent.

In short, public music tends to be loud, strident, simple, monotonous, and raucous.  The shawms and nackers of old Europe and the modern Near East and India, the music of Chinese operas and street fairs, the brasses of the military, and the dramatic drumming of Africa find a natural descendent, and apotheosis, in the popular music of the world today.  It outdoes them all in strident, obtrusive noisiness.  It forces the public will on everyone.  We should remember that it does have an ancestry, and is not really a solely modern phenomenon—let alone a plot to corrupt the morals of the young, as it is often alleged to be.

Even so, modern corporate callousness has taken pop music to new lows.  The music is marketed at the least sophisticated audiences—typically, young teenagers.  The corporations have found that simplicity sells and that certain tune and rhythm combinations sell particularly well, so they produce these same things over and over (Barnes 2015b).  Virtually identical songs sung by virtually identical singers are the result.  As corporations get more entrenched, this only gets worse (Barnes 2015b).  Niche markets preserve some originality, but with the pop material setting the bar, standards cannot be very high anywhere.  Thus, a combination of public noise, giant corporations, and angry moods among today’s young people produce a music of simple tunes and harmonies but highly expressive of loud, angry emotions.

By contrast, folk and classical music are for narrower but more sophisticated audiences and for more enclosed spaces, so they are usually softer and more subtle—unless they are going for a broad-scope audience.  Literature, a more private art form by nature, shows similar contrasts; public declamations are usually sorry stuff.  Great literature and folk literature are both for small and special audiences.

Biology also gives us emotions, and apparently a great deal of the music-emotion correspondence, but culture does the real work.  For example, the old idea that driving rhythm automatically led to trance is incorrect; culture has to teach what rhythms lead to what mental states (Rouget 1985).  Even more arbitrary is the identification of minor key with sadness (most of the authors discuss this, including Patel 2008).  This well-known association is found in western European music of the last couple of centuries, but not in Asian music, or even in early European music.  I remember having to learn it, as a child.  It is certainly cultural, not a natural linkage.

Sometimes, the links with specific meaning are quite clear if one has any cultural knowledge at all.  Evocations of cuckoo calls and nightingale song are common throughout western musical history.  Even more evocative, and well-known from the Middle Ages until today, are musical versions of hunting. Often these involve barking dogs, running horses, blowing horns, and shouting men—all imitated by a choir, or even a harmonica.  They are often hilariously funny, partly because they gently satirize a frequently silly pastime.  More common today are train imitations.  Usually these too are playful.  On the other hand, the use of the train as a stock blues image of parting, grief, and death makes some of them extremely serious indeed.

Readers raised in American suburbs in the 1950s will recall the imbecilic “program music” considered suitable for “the kiddies” in that benighted age, and the even more imbecilic explanations that teachers provided:  “Now, children, in this passage you can hear how the squirrel runs up the tree….”  Apart from giving us a lifelong hatred of that kind of music, this proved to us young people that music’s “meanings” are learned, not innate in the sound.  The composers had done their damnedest to make the music transparent to people supposed to have exceedingly limited intelligence, but explanation was still necessary.

This must all be sorted out from the actual effects of the music by itself.  A Japanese or Australian Aboriginal listener to, say, a cuckoo imitation might enjoy the sound, and might even know it was a cuckoo, but would be unable to place the cuckoo in western culture, and unable to get any sense of the connotations of the bird.  Anyone ignorant of blues traditions and American cultural symbols would fail to pick up the powerful significance of the imitations of railroad sounds.

Patel points out that all these cultural emotionalities prove a general point shows that music cannot have precise “meaning” the way a normal, declarative sentence does.  Culture has to give it specific meaning, and even then the meaning is rarely as specific as a sentence’s.  Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is a musical equivalent of Theocritus’ Idylls, but does not fill quite the same cognitive niche.

Patel wisely notes that many musical feelings are not among the “emotions” we normally list, and indeed may be specific to music.  In my experience, and I think in others’, the theme-and-variations music described above sets up a unique feeling.  This is particularly true of pieces that do nothing but work out more and more elaborate patterns, on a single instrument, from a very simple theme, like William Byrd’s variations on “John Come Kiss Me” or Giles Farnaby’s on “Woodycock” or Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s ragas.  I get a sense of increasing involvement in the pattern, until the pattern becomes my whole life, and every cell of my body seems to depend on it.  The resolution can be shattering.

This is a pure pattern sense.  It is an intellectual passion; it does not arouse any fear, awe, anger, love, or joy.  It is pure delight in pattern.  I get something similar, though weaker, from looking at Islamic decorative art.  I have never seen this feeling described, but the universal appeal of such music (it is often used, in many cultures, to heighten sex) seems to indicate that I am far from alone.  Also, I can get it equally easily from closely equivalent pieces in Chinese classical music, Andean folk music, and West African kora music.  So it is certainly not a culture-bound or culturally learned feeling, at least in my case.

From this and many other examples—dance music, laments, lullabyes, and so on—we may conclude that human vocal communication has a built-in ability to stimulate mood.  On the other hand, specific meanings have to be culturally assigned.  If a person is screaming “Help!” a hearer ignorant of English will probably get the message.  But a quiet, matter-of-fact statement, “I’m afraid it’s terminal, Ms. Rogers,” will cause overwhelming fear and grief only if hearer knows English.

 

In most (perhaps all) premodern musical cultures, including early classical European music, ritual and religious music is the most complex and involved, from Australian corroborees to Baroque masses.  Love music is usually second in importance and complexity, and devotes itself to celebrating the beloved or lamenting his or her departure.  Complicated “mood music” has, of course, been cultivated deliberately since the Romantic period.  Beethoven, Wagner, and later composers developed all manner of musical tropes that came to be associated with specific emotions.  Today, movies and television build on this; we know what music is supposed to accompany scary situations, romantic situations, and so forth, and can almost work out the whole plot of a movie from hearing the music track.  Most, if not all, of this is culturally learned; little of it transferred across cultures until Hollywood became the world.

Indian ragas are coupled with mystical meditation—one gets deeper and more intensely into the meditative mood as the raga develops.  On a perhaps baser level, ragas—like similar musical forms around the world—are often used to enhance sex.  The slow increase of intensity and complexity in a rhythmic performance is of obvious use in this regard.  Whole genres of music are sometimes identified with such; “jazz” is an old term for semen, and “jazz music” was originally the music of the “jazz houses” of old New Orleans.  Nor was New Orleans the only place in which houses of prostitution had their own musical traditions.  It is interesting that grave authors like Huron and Patel never mention the universally-known use of music in sexual encounters.

The cooler, sharper musics of the Elizabethans or Chinese or of Arab ‘ud playing seem less adapted to such roles.  One must fall back, once again, on personal experience:  these pieces arouse a general good feeling of being in harmony with the world, and then deepen it, till one loses oneself in a generic sense of goodness, rightness, and moral value.  One comes out a significantly better person, at least for a few minutes.  This is presumably why music (or some music) has often been considered a moral enterprise.  Both Plato and Confucius recommended slow, restrained music as moral, and condemned as immoral certain other forms—probably fast dances associated with erotic agendas.

Another area that needs exploration is why much European religious music has the effect it has.  Is it only learned association that makes many of us feel spiritual when Mozart’s Requiem or Sweelinck’s organ pieces are played?  Why do Palestrina’s and Victoria’s masses have the effect they do?  Why does Black gospel music have its quite different but equally passionate spiritual impact?  There is evidently more than culturally learned response here.  Just-any-religious-music has, if anything, the opposite effect.  When Rimbaud wrote of the “vingt gueules gueulant les hymnes pieux” (“twenty snouts snouting the pious hymns”) he was clearly moved away from, not toward, spirituality by that particular church choir.

The rich, complex variation within the tightly constrained structure of a Baroque mass is important.  The great range of pitch and volume must also matter.  At least in my case, when a Victoria passage climaxes in a full-throated open chord, I feel that every cell in my body shatters and reassembles in a better way.  (And I am not a Catholic like Victoria—though his involvement in the liberal-humanist movement of his time makes us perhaps closer than dogma would suggest.)  I have never felt the same after discovering Victoria more than half a century ago.  Music is life-changing.

Individuals everywhere love to make music alone, often to soothe themselves or ease work, but music is essentially a communicative activity.  It communicates and usually synchronizes mood, feeling, motion, bodily state, and effort.  It is inseparably linked with social practice.  Frequently, a given culture’s most elaborate music is part of an even more elaborate performance:  religious ceremony, social dance, festive party, grieving funeral, court ritual.  Music is almost always involved in dance and ritual, and these hold societies together (Durkheim 1995).  It is also invariably a part of religion.  Frequently, it is used to help the faithful achieve intense emotional and mystical states.  Mystic ecstasy over music is not confined to religion; concert-goers know it well (Jourdain 1997).

 

Sometimes people like new and different traditions.  Recently, Celtic, Andean, North Indian, and even Australian aboriginal music have gone global, performed by street musicians or concert professionals from Vienna to Singapore.  Not only have they survived; they have “swum upstream” against the vast outpourings of American pop. One hears them in the very streets and shopping malls of Hollywood itself.

However, people are not necessarily fond of each other’s music.  A Jewish traveler in the 10th century described German singing:  “There is no uglier song than the groans that come out of their throats.  It is like the baying of hounds, only worse” (Ibrāhim ibn Ya‘qub, in Ibn Fadlān 2012:163; in another translation, a“’quite horrible sound, resembling the barking of dogs but more beast-like’”; Lewis 2001:136).  Evidently he had been hearing the ancestors of Wagner’s music, which, as Ambrose Bierce tactfully noted, “is better than it sounds” (Bierce 2000:305).  One could find many similar quotes by Europeans about Chinese music, by Chinese about European music, and indeed by almost everyone about strangers’ musics.  Even familiar music can be cordially hated.  I have friends today who abhor country music, others who abhor rap, and others who abhor “easy listening.”  This can get socially constructed in striking ways (see below, “Music History”).

Recall (from above) that musical tastes are apparently most significantly shaped by the peer group in teenage or immediate preteen years (Harris 1998, confirmed by my own wide experiences with children, students, and fieldwork).  We like what our teen peers liked, and often hate music associated with bad experiences at that time.  Parents and teachers can have a major role too.  Musical abilities and tastes probably have a genetic component, but this remains little known (cf. Patel 2008:358).

This makes Patel (2008:301) a bit more unusual than he thinks, in his ability to appreciate music from different cultures.  For a trained, widely-experienced listener like Patel, it is very much easier to understand another culture’s music than its language.  But our Arab friend must also have been highly sophisticated in music.  It was part of any literate Spanish Arab’s training at the time.  Yet German music was as incomprehensible to him as the German language.  I have talked with many ethnomusicologists about this issue (the general one, not the Arab case); some agreed with Patel, others thought music is hard to reach across cultures.

A rather unfortunate problem for anyone interested in the biology of music is the narrowness of some of the writers; this is why I rely on Patel so much.  Jourdain seems not to know much besides late Classical and pop, and Levitin (2007, 2008) little beyond pop.  Without serious comparison of other radically different traditions, such as Patel makes, little understanding is really possible.  Many of Jourdain’s statements are invalidated by common folk traditions of his own culture!  Even Patel seems unaware of how extremely different music is in certain remote parts of Indonesia, Aboriginal Australia, and highland Southeast Asia.  However, the many ethnomusicologists I know who are familiar with this entire range are understandably unwilling to generalize.

In general, however, Patel seems broadly correct.  Music is, if not a “universal language” (as it used to be called), at least easier for most people than actual languages are.  People everywhere can relate to pure sounds, harmonies, and rhythms.  This seems wired in the human animal.  In many years of teaching survey courses in ethnomusicology, I found—and colleagues also found—that students with reasonably open minds soon learned to relate to almost any music we would play.  Only very rigid students failed in this.  Some musics, however, seem much more accessible than others, as witness the globalization of those mentioned above.

Patel reviews several brief studies testing how cross-cultural music understanding and appreciation are, but they are limited.  They are usually carried out with Western late-classical music, which is to some extent familiar to almost everyone worldwide, thanks to Hollywood film music.  The studies remain inconclusive.

 

 

Music and Culture

 

One reason music delights us, even across cultural borders, is that it is a simple model of life.  Life is often a matter of improvising endlessly on a few themes.  Often, the themes are very simple, the improvisations extremely original and complex, as in blues or jazz or Baroque pieces.  The degree to which improvisation follows rules then becomes important.  Jazz riffs are infinitely variable, but they follow certain broad rules, and standard riffs are well known.  Jazz musicians know what Bix Biederbecke, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk did with a tune.  Any decent jazz musician has a vast mental library of well-known variations for every note in every theme in every tune in the standard repertoire.  The musician will be able to build from those to create new variations.

This is how we ordinary mortals deal with culture.  Culture gives us general rules.  Some, like the more ordinary grammatical rules, are quite cut-and-dried and generally known.  Others, like the rules for courtship, are more complex and variable, and call forth more original riffs.

Music, in fact, is a very good model for culture in general.  The various elements of music build on biological groundings, and go on to more and more complex realms (see e.g. Jourdain 1997).

 

 

Music History

 

Music seems to have evolved from very simple rhythmic crooning to melody, harmony, themes and variations, and finally full symphonic complexities with many layers of meaning.  All societies on earth have basic rhythms and simple songs.  Only civilizations have complex harmony and multi-theme composed pieces.  Only the more recent civilizations (possibly starting in China or in India) came up with such spectacular bits of complexity as operatic performances with multiple themes played by full orchestras.  (Jourdain argues that Wagner is some sort of high point because he went the farthest in this direction.  If so, never was more effort expended to less worth; see Bierce above).

Music clearly tracks public emotional needs.  American popular music was cheerful and assertive in the early 20th century.  This gave way to lullabye music (crooners and big bands) when the Depression and World War II traumatized the west.  Peace and prosperity led to youth preferring simple and driving music in the ambitious 1960s.  The break when the rising post-World War II generation rejected crooners for rock’n’roll, around 1955, was extremely dramatic, and led to real generational tensions; many venues banned the new, disruptive music entirely.  Some Americans blamed it on Communism, at the same time the USSR was banning it as capitalist!  Rock’n’roll in turn gave way to savagely angry rap in the greedy, selfish 1990s, and again society was convulsed by controversy.  Many middle-class Blacks (and others) held that rap was a deliberate ploy by white racists to keep African-Americans down by steering them into anger and crime.

Music also has the advantage of showing clearly how different individuals can be in the same culture.  Almost all members of standard American culture know about major and minor scales; they can tell the difference even if they don’t know the names.  Most Americans know “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a few children’s tunes.  Virtually all know something about the latest popular music.  Here consensus ends.  Individuals select differently from the vast smorgasbord of musics available.  Some are musical, some not.  Some are expert in their favorite line of music, some barely know the major names.  Some play instruments or sing at virtuoso level, some fool around with an instrument, some only listen.  Blues, jazz, rock’n’roll, campfire songs, Charles Ives, John Cage, rap, and Sacred Harp hymn-singing are all part of American musical culture, and all in some sense equally typical of it, but one would be hard put to find anyone knowledgeable about all of them—or even able to stand all of them.

Thus, observing the vicissitudes of music in human society can tell us a great deal about human mentality.

In the Renaissance and Baroque, musicians delighted in exploring the possibilities of ever more complicated and elaborate patterns of rhythm, melody, and harmony.  The last developed from unison singing to melody over ground bass, chordal harmony, and finally the complex polyphonic music of Palestrina and Victoria.  Cross-rhythms made a brief but spectacular appearance in Elizabethan music; they may have been introduced by lute players from the Mediterranean world (notably Alfonso Ferrabosco, from Italy via Spain).  The rhythms would have come ultimately from the Near East and Africa.  Intensity in the music of the time derived from piling more and more subtle, complex, and dynamic variations on relatively simple themes.  The excitement lay in this development of patterns.  This was the extreme opposite of later “mood music,” which evokes gross audience emotions and images rather than pure musical intensity.

Much of modern folk culture perserves elements of Medieval and Renaissance European culture.  Folk music, for instance, continues those forms in the few places where it survives.  The typical folk dance piece, in the more conservative parts of the European world and as far afield as Afghanistan, is a four-line, sixteen-bar tune with two somewhat differing melodies.  These are usually “major key” (Ionian mode in Medieval terminology, referring to the places where half-notes occur in the scale), sometimes “melodic minor” (basically, the old Aeolian mode), rarely Dorian or some other mode.  These are alternated:  one is played and repeated, then the other is played and repeated, then the first is played and repeated again, and so on.  This very characteristic way of making music has been constant since the late Middle Ages at the latest.  It usually goes with a lyric, a poem rhyming the second and fourth lines.  This form appears rather suddenly in Europe, in the hymns of Venantius Fortunatus in the 6th century.  I assume an ancestor of the two-part folk tune must have gone with this poetic form.  The form is surely not native to Europe, and may come from East Asia, where such poems were universal and had been for centuries.

Other folk dance music of a newer form flourishes and grows in Latin America and elsewhere, but retains much of the same spirit:  complex, rhymically sophisticated, musically rather simple but carefully constructed.  It speaks to a self-reliant, hard-living rural world.  In Latin America and elsewhere, African influences have long been known.  The first cumbia (or “cumba”) piece to be written down was recorded in the mid-18th century by a Spanish composer, Sebastián de Murcia, who was fascinated by the amazing new musics he met in Mexico when he traveled there(he also recorded Native American-derived pieces).  Cumbia is a West African dance form, fused in the Caribbean with 18th-century Spanish music.  It survives very robustly today.

Somewhat less archaic is the folk choral music now surviving in shape-note hymnal singing and a few other choral traditions that hang on today, many of them on the Mediterranean islands.  These reflect Renaissance and Baroque norms, as well as later innovations.  The open chords and wildly stark harmonies of Victoria, and the fuguing of Bach, survive there, though long abandoned in concert music.  Some shape-note singing groups have faithfully copied their forebears since the early 19th century, and their music was archaic even then, so we have a rare insight into older musics.  One thing such relictive musics show is that open, unornamented singing was essentially universal in early times.  The constriction, operatic style, downslurring, and weird variations that modern singers feel called upon to add to Medieval and even Renaissance music are purely modern.

Perhaps this goes with a continuation of the Renaissance world in isolated folk circles.  Clearly, the world has changed greatly since then, and folk societies are far from conservative; they have picked up modern technology and many modern art forms and themes.  Where they preserve old forms, they must have an ongoing, functional reason.  They do not preserve anything out of mindless conservatism.  It seems more likely that the music reflects a world of sober, rational, hopeful, self-sufficient people who have to know a wide range of things to get along in the world.  Non-affluent rural people still have to be “Renaissance” men and women—able to play music, fix cars, raise food, manage without gas and electricity, and keep hoping for better times through it all.

Folk music, by definition, is performed by musicians who are not professionally trained or licensed.  Normally, however, their local audiences demand that they be highly skilled.  The best are at least as skilled at what they do as the finest concert musicians.  Their audiences, consisting (again by definition) of family and neighbors, are highly knowledgeable about the traditions involved, and are exceedingly demanding.  Standards in good folk music are high.

This is often true when the audience breaks out of purely “folk” bounds and becomes wider and more anonymous.  The golden age of blues was not in its folk days but in its early urban period in the 1920s through 1940s.  The golden age of country music in the United States and Canada was the 1920s and 1930s, with records and radio driving the phenomenon.  Celtic folk music had a slightly later golden age, from the 1930s onward.  (I will not dare to set an ending date, since many would say the golden age is still with us.)  Folk music tends to evolve eventually into popular music, defined as folk-like music performed by full professionals for anonymous mass audiences.  Old-time country music was folk; bluegrass was popular, not only in the sense that millions liked it, but also in the sense that it was performed by professionals for huge anonymous audiences rather than by neighbors for neighbors.  Old-time blues were folk; after the early years, urban “Chicago”-style blues were for wider audiences.  Rock’n’roll began as a black folk form, but went popular very fast.

Folk music also drifts off into elite music.  Elite composers (from medieval choristers to Beethoven to Aaron Copeland) constantly adopt folk tunes and styles.  The music is radically transformed—regularized, complexly harmonized, and so on—in the process.  And elite music trickles down to the folk, changing as it goes to fit folk forms.  It may happen that a tune starts as a folksong, becomes a pop tune, gets elite treatment, and sinks down to folk level again.  This happened to “Greensleeves,” which has been a widely-known tune for almost 500 years now.  Thus, folk, popular, and elite musics never actually separate.  They are best thought of as corners of a triangle.  The folk corner would be represented by an old farmer of a century ago, fiddling for his neighbors; the elite corner by Mozart; the pop by modern radio music.  Most music is somewhere in the space within the triangle.

None of this is a new phenomenon; it is not confined to modern times.  All was anticipated by the evolution of lute and guitar music in the 16th through 17th centuries, harp music in 18th-century Spain, and many other musics in history.  More recently, not only did Copeland use folk songs in classical-style compositions, but the neo-“folk” music of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and other songwriters is a continuation of the process; these singers extracted some styles from folk music and injected them into the pop-music world.

The slow development from Renaissance and Baroque music to Romantic has been equated by some historians with the rise of the “bourgeoisie”—the urban class divorced from actual production, living by trade, commerce, management, and intellectual endeavors.  As it get farther from primary production and independent living, it came to need more shallow but violent emotional stimulus.  Also, music got farther and farther from a small, highly trained circle of performers and sophsticated audiences, and became more and more a mass phenomenon, attempting to rouse at least some emotion (however shallow) from the sleepers and bored husbands in a concert hall.  The bored bourgeois, especially the women (living empty, confined lives in the 19th century), needed Wagner and Tchaikovsky to keep from emotional freeze-up.

Admittedly, this brief picture of 19th-century music history has become such a cliché that revisionists have duly taken it apart, but there is surely something to the idea. Obviously there is much more to it, but further exploration of the issue is outside our concerns here.  What matters is watching the evolution of music from something performed for a tiny sophsticated audience to something performed for a huge but unsophisticated one.  The consequent progression from subtle skill to “lowest common denominator” is hard to miss.

In any case, in the early 20th century, late romantic music forked off in two directions.  Among the musical elite, it gave way in self-consciously “modern” circles to the clean, cool, rationally calculated, sometimes arcane music of Bartok, Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern.  Among the ordinary listeners, it gave rise to film music, which is derived from late romantic music.  At the same time, popular music, also highly romantic, was suddenly and dramatically confronted by African-derived forms:  blues, jazz, Caribbean music.  This led to an incredible musical ferment in the 1920s and 1930s.  Depression and World War II, however, not only ruined many small recording companies, but made people seek a calm, simple music.  By the late 1940s, the most popular music was extremely simple (three chords maximum!), almost always major key, slow-paced, dynamically limited, and, in short, exactly the type of music used as lullabyes in all times and places.  Then, as noted above, rock’n’roll broke the mold, and popular music followed changing culture into the 21st century.

 

 

Music Grades into Speech

 

Patel explicitly exempts poetry and chant from consideration, thus ruling boundary phenomena off the turf.  This is wise for his purposes, but impossible for mine.  I have to look at the boundary.

His contrast of music and speech slurs over a vast range of intermediate forms.  We have chant, prayer, ritual incantation, and above all sound-poetry and word-music, in which poets deliberately “problematize” the boundary.  One reason he can do this is that English-language poetry is rather indifferent to word-music.  Russian and Welsh, among many other languages, do far more with it.

Dylan Thomas imported Welsh word-music styles into English poetry, influencing a whole generation.  His readings were legendary, and deservedly so.  I dare say that listeners completely ignorant of English would have appreciated them thoroughly.  I find the word-music of Russian poetry shatteringly beautiful, though I know very little Russian, and thus have no idea what the meaning is.  Following a translation actually detracts from the experience.  Reading translations of lyrics by Afanasy Foeth or Fyodor Tyuchev or even Pushkin, you may wonder what anyone ever saw in such efforts.  Then you hear a native speaker read them in the original…and when you have picked yourself up off the floor, all you can say is “Oh.”  English simply has nothing comparable to the Russian sacrifice of meaning to sound.  Some Russian poems are almost literally meaningless; the whole game is the word-music.

Middle English poetry paid much attention to sound; lyrics like “Lenten is come with love to toune…” (Luria and Hoffman 1974:6) are as pyrotechnic in their displays of internal rhyme, alliteration, vowel harmony, assonance, and so on as is Celtic literature.  The Great Vowel Shift and the roughly concurrent fashion for continental literature, often in translation, combined to dilute this in the 16th century.  Of course sound never went out entirely.  Swinburne tried to reintroduce it, partly at least from ancient Greek, but did not succeed.  Readers will, of course, point also to obvious passages of Keats, Eliot, Stevens, and many other poets.  The point is that even they never got off anything like “Lenten…” or like Foeth’s other-worldly lyrics.

Of course, early modernists pushed the boundary as far as they could.  The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters wrote a “poem” consisting of the letter W, pronounced “v” in Schwitters’ native German; the poem consisted of his making a v sound for 15 minutes, playing with pitch and dynamics, ending with a shriek (Moholy-Nagy 1956:325).  He has not been widely imitated.

There is also the question of lyrics and melodies.  It is rare to find a happy theme set to a slow, monotonous melody, or vice versa.  Good songwriters try to fit text with tune, according to whatever cultural rules apply.  A songwriter has to know the rules for her culture, genre, and audience.

Both linguists like Chomsky and Hauser and musicologists like Patel and Jourdain ignore these intermediate formations.  This costs them far more than they realize.  The most important intermediate form—chant and chant-like song—is absolutely basic to almost every religious tradition of every one of the 6800-odd cultures of the world.  Relevant religious forms range from African-American sermons to Gregorian chants, and from Temiar dream songs of Malaysia to Yuma creation-myth chants of Native California.  Praying and chanting in unison is at the core of religious services from the Church of England to the deserts of Australia and the stone temples of Polynesia.

Exceptions are largely confined to rare hyper-puritanical sects that ban all music, and they usually have some kind of rhythmic speech.  (There are, of course, those legendary tribes in the Amazon that “lack music,” the way they “lack numbers” and “lack religion” and “lack color terms” and “lack general nouns,” but we await serious studies of them.  They appear to be as real as the Yeti, the Loch Ness monster, and the Madagascar man-eating tree.)

Even greeting rituals can be musical chants.  Formal greetings in the Wolof language of Senegal can go on for many minutes.  The words are purely formulaic; the art is in the deliverery, which follows Wolof musical style (my observation, based on tapes collected by Dr. Sabina Perrino, heard Mar. 2, 2015).  Speeches, sermons, and other language forms around the world often dissolve into rhythmic speech and then sometimes into actual song.  This is true, for instance, of African-American sermons, which are partly based on Wolof forms.

Obviously, someone should be studying these neglected vocal forms.  There is clearly something about chanting together that creates social solidarity in a way nothing else quite accomplishes.  Add the sharing of food—be it a sacrificial bull or only a wafer and a sip of grape juice—and you have communitas.

 

 

Music into Words:  Song Lyrics and Their Diffusion

 

Ideally, lyrics are fitted to the music.  Tunes may go down or up in pitch along with the speech rhythms one would hear if the texts were spoken (Patel 2008:342-343).  Usually, the fit is looser.  The same lyrics may be sung to different tunes, and the same tunes used for wildly different sets of words—as will appear.

The best-studied case of diffusion is the spread of folktales and folksongs.

Probably the best-studied of the folksongs that got around are the great tragic and romantic ballads collected by Francis James Child (Bronson 1976; Child 1882-1898) and a host of later workers.  These include some of the deepest and most intense statements of the human condition in all world literature.  Yet many of them spread throughout Europe and often beyond, and were appreciated everywhere.  Several things emerge from this research.  (The following account draws on hundreds of records, plus field work, singing experience, and scattered published sources, but most of the essential information is in Bronson and Child.)

Child found 305 ballads that had entered oral tradition and been collected from folk sources.  “Folk” in this case meant relatively unlettered working-class people who sang these songs because their parents and elders had.  No one knew who wrote them or where they came from.  Further collection has disclosed countless more folk ballads, including many written since Child’s time.  Rarely is an author’s name known.

Beyond the 305 ballads, there are thousands of English folksongs, and every other culture on earth has countless songs.  Singing is the most universal of arts, being highly developed, complex, self-conscious, and diverse in every single cultural group on earth, even those that almost totally lack visual art, instrumental music, or crafts.

To the anonymous folk songs may be added a large number of songs of known authorship that have entered folk tradition so completely that they are passed on orally and without general knowledge of whence they came.  I was surprised, on reaching adulthood, to learn that many songs I had “always known”—some of them from my father’s singing—traced back to well-known poets like Robert Burns and Thomas Moore.

Most European songs are made up of four-line stanzas, with four beats per line, and with the second and fourth lines rhyming.  Most often, the last words in these two lines are dragged out over two beats:

“Fair Margaret sat at her high chamber,

Combing out her long brown hair,

When who should she see but her own true love

Ride by with a lady fair.”  (From a version of the Ballad of Margaret and William, Childe 74.)

The general rhythm patterns go back to the Roman Empire; the first example of the pattern seen in the first two lines above is in a chant for Caesar (Waddell 1955:16).  The four-line stanza emerged by the 4th or 5th century A.D., and became popular for hymns.  The same pattern existed earlier in China—it is typical of the rhymes in the Book of Songs, ca 500 BC—and almost certainly is earlier in southeast Asia as well.  I find no evidence that it spread from east to west, and it seems to come naturally from Roman prosody, but one wonders.  In China, Malaysia, and Europe, in lyric folksongs, the first two lines often provide a natural image used in the next two as symbol for a social one, often erotic:

“The higher up the cherry tree,

The riper grow the cherries;

The more you hug and kiss the girls

The sooner they get married.”  (From the folksong “Shady Grove”)

 

“Brown-pepper plant fruits

Spread far, grow large;

The gentleman over there,

He is great without peer.”  (Book of Songs, Song 116, my translation.)

Most readers will know the symbolism of “cherry” in folk English, but will not know that the Chinese pepper plant’s fruits look exactly like tiny male genitalia, inspiring a euphemistic image that was used for centuries.

Among European traditional songs, the ballads are most interesting, because they tell actual circumstantial stories.  (That is the definition of a “ballad”:  A song that tells a coherent story.  A “lyric,” by contrast, simply poses a scene or tells a brief, generalized tale—usually of love successful or love unsuccessful.)  Thousands of ballads have appeared over the last few centuries.  Many survive in chapbook and handbill collections.  Any event of interest could be memorialized.  Some survived, some did not.  Sheer chance must have something to do with this, but most of the songs are clearly more memorable than the average throwaway handbill.

Since the memory research of F. Bartlett, considerable effort has gone into the characteristics that make them so (Dundes 1965).  The stories are memorable in themselves, but especially so because they follow canonical plots of endless fascination to ordinary audiences.  Often they incorporate permanently fascinating themes such as love, sex, violence, ghosts, unexpected meetings (often with failure of recognition), deception, betrayal.

Particularly important is that most of them highlight, clearly and dramatically, major tension points in society.  Many of them turn on the age-old plot of the marriage forbidden by parents.  In the tragic ballads, this leads to suicide, fighting, or other violence.  In the happy ones, it is resolved by the lovers’ persistence or cleverness or luck.  This brings out and highlights the broader conflict between agnates and affines—to use the classic anthropological jargon for blood kin and marital kin.  In “The Douglas Tragedy” (Child 7; ballads in Child’s collection are always referred to by their numbers in that work), the hero abducts the girl, is pursued by her father and seven brothers, kills the brothers and wounds the father, and subsequently dies of his own wounds—leaving his lady to die of grief.   In one version, roses grow from their graves and twine in a “true lover’s knot,” but her father—the sole survivor—tears up the one growing from the hero’s grave, and throws it in St. Mary’s Loch, a huge, dark, brooding, cold lake in Scotland.

Other ballads turn on forbidden love, which raises the same tension:  follow parents’ will or heart’s desire?  In one of the most popular ballads, “Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor” (Child 73), Lord Thomas’ mother orders him to marry “the brown girl” instead of his love Fair Eleanor; the lord, his love Eleanor, and his unloved bride all end up dead.  “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” (Child 74) has an even more sinister ending:  Fair Margaret kills herself so that her ghost will haunt and kill Sweet William, who has married another, though it is not stated that his parents made him take her.  I encountered this same belief in the avenging ghost of a wronged woman in China; it seems nearly worldwide.

This theme in turn is part of a wider concern with conflicting loyalties.  In feudal and folk societies, personal loyalty is life and death.  Thus, when a person is caught between two irreconcilable and unshakable loyalties, death is the expected result.  Loyalty to love versus loyalty to parents is the most immediate, comprehensible, and telling.  It involves sex and desire as well as simply loyalty.

Loyalty by itself, though, produces epic conflicts.  Other ballads deal with these.  Possibly the most dramatically powerful ballad in English, the very old Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens (Child 58), is a simple story of a ship captain and his noble passengers sent out in winter on the north sea in a storm.  This meant certain death, given the frail sailing craft of the Scottish Middle Ages.  Tradition tells that the king wanted to get rid of Sir Patrick and the others, and had figured out this underhanded way to do it.  Sir Patrick could have rebelled, or fled, but he stayed loyal and went unflinchingly to his fate.

Interesting is that these ballads were effective enough at evoking timeless themes to carry on in oral tradition not only in their native Scotland but in the United States, where immigrants (presumably Scottish) brought them.  They, and all the more popular Child ballads, have been collected from Appalachian-region singers.  Some of these were far removed from Scottish medieval life.  Thus, singers converted “I have six galleons a-sailing on the sea” to “I have six gallons a-sailing on a ship” (in “The House Carpenter” [Child 243, under the name “The Daemon Lover”—comparing the Child versions with Appalachian versions as sung by Jean Ritchie among others).  But the basic plots were preserved faithfully except in very fragmentary versions.  Ballad singing is far from extinct even today in the Appalachians, though since the early 20th century it has benefited from books, records, and radio, and is no longer a strictly oral, person-to-person matter.

The long-lasting ballads songs have much more going for them than good stories, however.  To summarize a large literature, they are more tightly organized and structured than the average throwaway song.  Language is simple and direct.  They have few superfluous words.  When they do have duplication or repeating, it is in contexts that are particularly helpful to memory, but also such repeats usually occur at transition points in the song.  The first statement introduces a theme; the repetition introduces a sharp change, a new development in the plot.  Thus helping memory and marking transition combine usefully in one rhetorical device.

The ballads are tightly structured, with clear rhythm and rhyme, but enough variation to avoid monotony.  They build to a climax instead of wandering over the rhetorical map (as the nonmemorable ballads almost invariably do).  The only problem with basing too much on this is that we have the original, or nearly original, forms of some of the ballads, and they were wordy and poorly organized at first (“The House Carpenter” is a case in point); folk transmission has cleaned them up and streamlined them.  This throws us back on plot issues as basic to their initial popularity.  Even so, clear, tightly structured, spare songs do better and get into oral tradition more easily.

Many ballads treat of themes that were not polite subjects for ordinary speech:  sex, treachery, conflicts with parents.  This is a universal subject for song; everywhere in the world, people sing what they do not dare say (see e.g. Abu-Lughod 1989 for Egypt; Anderson 2006 for China).  They also sing out themes so passionate that speech is inadequate (Anderson 2006; Feld 1982; Seeger 2004).  Usually love and death are the themes of such songs, which are very often laments (Anderson 2006; Feld 1982).  Steven Feld’s classic study of Kaluli singing in Papua-New Guinea, which is the best study of traditional song known to me, turns on this theme; Kaluli song reaches its highest point in the agonizingly beautiful laments for the dead.  Feld’s recordings of these are heartbreaking even to Anglo-American listeners (Feld n.d.).

Not only the themes, but many of the symbols and images, are the sort that Carl Jung called “archetypes” (Jung 1964) and Mary Douglas called “natural symbols” (Douglas 1966).  One need not share Jung’s mystical approach or Douglas’ social-functional one to realize that birds, trees, flowers, rivers, sea, and the sun and moon are going to crop up in folk poetry, and that British Isles rural society will add horses, grain, and weaponry to the mix.  The songs make the most evocative and effective use of this, often making one symbol stand as metaphor for two or three meanings.  Some of them, possibly influenced at some remove by medieval religious poetry, use its four-layered symbolism (image, symbol, metaphor, allegory—in one scholastic formulation).

Like ballads, folksongs, and epics everywhere, stock phrases and repetitions make stories and songs more memorable.  The classic studies of this phenomenon were done by Milman Parry (1930) and Albert Lord (1960) on Homer and on Slavic folk epics, but the same has been found for ballads and songs everywhere.  Stock phrases, lines, and images carry over.  Countless Child ballads have their “milk-white steed,” the maiden “sewing her silken seam” (note the alliteration—a standard memory aid), and the rose growing from the grave of the lover.  These images and lines, however, have to be selectively deployed, or they overwhelm the song, and ruin rather than aid memory.  The monotonous repetition of the same religious clichés in hymns makes them almost impossible to remember; one never recalls which set is found in Hymn 103 as opposed to 104.

It has been noted many times that catchy tunes make good ballads.  Child commented, and almost everyone agrees with him, that “Lord Lovel” owes its existence to a very simple, hard-to-forget tune; the words are not anyone’s idea of excitement.  Some tunes have jumped around rather freely from song to song.  I found one Appalachian ballad tune used by a Kwakwala-speaking Native American in British Columbia for a Kwakwala hymn!  Presumably he had learned the tune from a missionary, likely one from Appalachia.  (Thanks to his granddaughter, Mabel James, for making the tune and story available.)   A tune picked up by a missionary in India became (with some changes) the old religious song “There Is a Happy Land Far, Far Away,” and that tune was then “liberated” to serve for the riotously obscene drinking song “Poor Bugger Jagger.”  Martin Luther is said to have set his hymns to current dance tunes “so that the devil would not have all the good tunes.”  Certainly, hymns, ballads, and lyric songs have been swapping tunes since, and some popular tunes become vehicles for several different unrelated songs in folk usage.

Stories can go on and on as well.  Many children still sing “The Fox” (“The fox went out on a starry night, And he prayed for the moon for to give him light…”).  This children’s song is attested in two 15th-century versions (Luria and Hoffman 1974:125-127).  These are already divergent enough, and sophisticated enough, to prove a fairly long history even then.  Some of the classic tragic ballads, including “Margaret and William,” have versions all over Europe.  Indeed, some of the stock phrases and poetic devices go back to Proto-Indo-European.  Calvert Watkins finds many formulas, taglines, and stock themes distributed over Indo-European languages at very early dates, and hypothesizes that most, if not all, of them go back to Proto-Indo-European (Watkins 1995).  This may not always be the case, since some are found in non-IE languages too, but at any rate they diffused very widely and very early.

On the other hand, Child’s belief that all ballads had to be old, and that none was being written now, was wildly wrong.  Collectors soon found that ballad-making was as common as groundhogs in the Appalachians, and was common also in isolated, traditional parts of Europe.  Even the radio did not end it; dozens of new ballads were written for the new medium.  Only TV, which privileges visual impact over long narrative, ended the ballad worldwide.

Folktales have a similar fate: some stories are good enough to spread worldwide, some stay local, some die at birth.  Variants of the Orpheus and Swan Maiden stories, far too similar to be independent of each other, have been recorded all over the Northern Hemisphere.  Flood myth stories are worldwide, but in this case the stories are different enough that no one can tell whether they come from one source or were independently devised.  In any case, retelling prunes excess words, but the constraints of folktales are much looser than those of classic ballads and lyrics; rhyme is not needed, for instance.  Folktales thus turn on good, adaptable plots, and on dramatic, evocative, easily-understood symbolism.

Beyond these simple literary criteria, there is the question of what gets accepted where.  The Child ballads died out in North America everywhere except Appalachia.  (A few lasted into the early 20th century in New England and neighboring Canada.)  Folktales are not told often any more, except for very brief or very unprintable ones.  Mass media have usurped the role of ballads and folktales in entertainment.

The rural world of these forms—a world of lords and ladies, horses and swords, barren moors, peasants tilling tiny miserable plots—is simply too far from modern experience.  Rap and rock’n’roll replace the old songs.  Even the aforementioned literary songs of Robert Burns and Thomas Moore have died out of ordinary life (except in Scotland and Ireland respectively!).

So the songs and tales spread far and last long, and the best of them can get very far from their social and cultural origins (“Sir Patrick Spens” in Tennessee, for instance), but they cannot escape change forever.  Sooner or later, the world is so different that they cannot survive.

Yet a very few literary pieces that started in oral transmission go on forever.  Homer, the first known bit of European literature, is more popular than ever.  So is the Spanish poem of the Cid.  Beowulf keeps getting retranslated and retold.  To be sure, they have been book-learning for centuries, having long died out in oral transmission, but the point here is that they are so dramatic, so deathless in theme, and so compellingly told that they simply never die.  The Orpheus story—having shown up as ballad, myth, folktale, and Native American religious legend—continues to inspire.  Rainer Maria Rilke’s incomparable telling of it in the poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” is strikingly close to the Nez Perce traditional version from the mountains of Oregon (Ramsey 1981).  Its tale of love, loss, and yearning is so powerful and so universally human that the sophisticated imagist poet and the remote horse nomads of the Wallowa Mountains not only loved it, they developed it thematically and emotionally in the same ways.

In short, some things spread more easily than others.  Those that spread speak to universal human social and psychological tension points, and use universally appealing symbols to talk about those.  They tell their stories in spare, direct, clear, but beautifully structured language.  They hold up a bright mirror to our deepest concerns.

Many good stories do not spread far; they are narrowly tied to one lifestyle or culture, or they are not tense and dramatic enough.  Many poor, sorry stories and songs spread, for various reasons.  In all cases, some historical analysis will find both general and contingent reasons why fate has been so.  (For one contingent reason, it certainly helps to have one’s tales written down early; Homer would have been forgotten if the Greeks hadn’t done that.   The tales picked up by the brothers Grimm have lasted longer than other German stories, in their rather bowdlerized and cleaned-up Grimm forms.)

One could go on to discuss the appeal of literary productions—the plays, novels, and poems that never were in oral transmission but have spread anyway.  Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and Goethe are part of every educated person’s knowledge, worldwide, and the great Chinese philosophers and poets are rapidly becoming so.  Cultural gaps have not proved barriers to their spread.  Some cultures have been almost overwhelmed by borrowings, and, of course, countless cultures have succumbed to others and have disappeared, as Gaulish civilization melted away under Roman and German impacts.  (A few Celtic influences survived in France, but mostly through the Bretons, not because the Gauls kept the flame.)

In short, people borrow some literary productions all over the world, because they speak to common human concerns in a compelling way.  They state the concerns clearly, use evocative symbols, and come out with clear, sharp ideas on the matter.

Productions are appealing in proportion to how well they fit with—or can be fitted to—local society and culture.  Epics and ballads were products of feudal society.  Symphonies and operas were notoriously associated with the concert-going bourgeoisie, who wished to be impressed by vast assemblages of musicians and by spectacular effects.  Chinese solo stringed-instrumental music has been associated for almost three millennia with the scholar, alone or with close company, playing for meditation.  Rock music spreads with the rise and dominance of the machine, because it involves fancy electronics and the associated machine noises.

In general, feudal cultures and early agrarian civilizations valued individual skill highly, because it was rare and tended to be economically limited.  The rulers thus loved to show off the amount of skilled workpersons they could control, by having the finest quality of ornaments, music, and food around them.  The bourgeois and socialist cultures that followed depended on mechanical mass production, and thus their status consumption has always been sheer mass.  Clothes were works of art in the Renaissance; they now are made by children in Third World sweatshops. to be sold worldwide, and are worn a very few times before being thrown away.  (Anyone who thinks I am unfairly comparing early elites with modern masses is invited to visit the Benaki Museum in Athens, examine the exquisite clothing of even quite poor people in the old-time Balkans, and compare that with what rich Americans wear today.  Or one can listen to old folk recordings and compare them with modern pop music.)

Here and elsewhere, it should be noted that almost no songs, tales, or other fairly complex knowledges, are universally distributed in a culture.  Almost all Americans share knowledge of two or three songs (“Happy Birthday…”), but few share many more than that.  The view of culture as knowledge universally shared in a culture is quite inadequate.  Most cultural knowledge is distributed, not universally known.  Assessment of cultural consensus (Romney et al. 1986) is very valuable, but precisely because consensus is the unusual case.

 

Knowledge diffuses rapidly.  Not only useful knowledge, but folktales and even children’s songs (Dundes 1965; Opie and Opie 1961), can diffuse around the world in a matter of weeks.  This was true even before mass media appeared.  Lewis and Clark ran into French folktales among Native Americans previously uncontacted by whites.  Folktales, like diseases, ran well ahead of settlers.

Significantly, the very first sustained participant-observation fieldwork ever done, Frank Cushing’s research in Zuni Pueblo, established the fact that folktales change to suit local needs.  Cushing found that the Zuni had drastically reconfigured Spanish folktales to reflect Zuni rather than Spanish society and morals (Cushing 1931).

 

High aesthetic levels emerge in most societies that have leisure and enough material wealth to give them a settled life with some comforts.  Aboriginal northeastern North America, the nomadic societies of eastern and southern Africa, and many hunting-gathering societies in really harsh environments produce relatively few large and complex works of visual art; they simply don’t have the spare material and time.  But societies with onliy a little more wealth in northwestern America, west and central Africa, and northern Australia have produced a great deal of the world’s finest art. Some areas are anomalously thin.  Aboriginal southeastern North America left us very few items of art, but this may be because most of the art was done in wood and other perishable materials.  The late Roman Empire had little beyond dully repetitive statuary and columns.  The modern United States reveals its puritanical tradition through low level of spending on arts.  There is, today, an incredible contrast between the stale and emotionally thin pop and elite mainstream art and the genuinely great and superb art of contemporary Native peoples, Chicano artists of the American Southwest, and other minorities kept out of the artistic mainstream.

 

 

 

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Methodology

Sunday, January 11th, 2015

Methodology

  1. N. Anderson, 2014

 

Introduction

Anthropology has developed some excellent methods over time, and so have other social sciences.  Not using these is comparable to an astronomer using a spyglass instead of computer-integrated information from modern telescopes, or an anatomist using a paleolithic handaxe instead of a scalpel and microscope.  There is simply no excuse for doing poor work, especially on a genuinely valuable project, because of failure to learn a few simple methods.

 

  1. General Background

 

Technically, a methodology is a suite of methods entailed by a particular theory.  One uses these methods because they are the proper or best way to test hypotheses generated by the theory.

A theory, in turn, is a general assumption (or set of interconnected assumptions) about how things work.  (The best account of such matters is Kitcher 1993).  The theory may be just guesses, like string theory, or may be very obvious statements that need formalization and extension, like the theory of gravity. Newton did not discover that things fall down instead of up; his genius was to explain why they did, as well as could be done at the time, and to state it mathematically.

A theory should lead to hypotheses (predictions or similar bets) that can be tested; otherwise it’s too vague to count.  Many theories get along without making clear testatble statements, though, in spite of positivism.  Still, if the theory doesn’t make you formulate some sort of testable hypotheses, it’s a waste of time.  Marxism and capitalist economics are both famously untestable bodies of theory, but do lead to testable statements.  The failures of the USSR and Mao’s China show that, whatever Marxism-in-general has to offer, some orthodox Marxisms don’t work.  The Great Depression and the world recession of 2008 show that capitalism doesn’t always work, either.  Many do not count Marxism as a body of theory, however.

Some theories are disproved and are essentially dead.  The most famous of these is Galen’s theory of humoral medicine, which guided medical science throughout the Old World for centuries.  Usually, however, a theory does not totally die; it generates a few useful formulations that go on and on.  And even a bad theory can generate useful hypotheses and conclusions.  Galen’s ideas about moderation in diet and exercise are still with us, since he was perfectly right about them, though for the wrong theoretical reasons.

A theory differs from several theory-like formulations, all of which can be useful but are not really theories.  Orienting statements are one type.  An orienting statement gives you a general way of looking at things, but is too general and abstract to test or to suggest testable statements.  Recent “theories” about globalization, for instance, direct us to look at global-scale phenomena, but usually do not make testable claims about those.  Often an orienting statement is a moral claim, and therefore untestable because it is about what we should do, rather than what we do.

Another shaky type of “theory” is the banal, trivial sort of statement for which certain branches of sociology are infamous (Mills 1959).  Saying that humans are social, that society requires organization, and that organization requires leadership is too bland to be worthy of the name “theory.”  Theory begins when we make claims about how organizations form, how leaders come on board, and what form leadership structures take under given social circumstances.

Another, and much worthier, alternative to true theory is interpretation (Geertz 1973).  Interpretation is, by definition, unprovable.  It can range from my idiosyncratic take on something to a generally accepted understanding, but it is not provable in the scientific sense.  We find it most frequently in literary studies.  Science cannot prove that one or another understanding of the Bible or Hamlet is the “right” one, or that Beethoven’s Ninth is noble and imposing, or that Dutch still-life paintings were comments on the transience of life.  We do not have the creators of these works around to ask.  Yet, it is well worth while to talk of such matters and speculate about them, and anthropology would be immeasurably poorer without such discourse.

One goal of theory and interpretation is to “tell the story behind the story”—i.e., to figure out what is actually causing the events we see.  In social science, theories often divide into broad categories according to what is assumed to be the main cause of action.  Economists tend to assume people want money or material goods.  Sociologists often assume social solidarity or social position are especially important.  Political theorists, including “critical” thinkers like Foucault, often assume power is the most basic thing (though they often have a hard time defining it).  There are other possibilities.  The wise social scientist will keep an open mind, and see how all factors play in a given situation.

Finally, we have philosophy, classically defined by Plato as the study of “the true, the good and the beautiful.”  Neither science nor interpretation will ever tell us what those are, but the human race cannot stop speculating and arguing about them.  We are better and nobler for doing so, in spite of the ultimate hopelessness of the task.

Hopefully, all this will save readers from the all-too-common tendency in anthropology to write a fun story about one’s field work, and then—after the fact—hang some sort of “theory” on it because an editor demanded same.  A decent anthropologist goes to the field with a body of theories, or interpretive ideas, or philosophic concepts, and expects to test them, or at least learn something important about them.

 

Methodology comes in as a way of testing the hypotheses and examining the theory.  It can also greatly sharpen, expand, and improve the quality of interpretation and philosophy.

Usually, we in anthropology do not follow the rigorous positivist rule that a given theory must call forth a specific methodology and a given method-set must be theory-driven.  (Some anthropologists, especially in archaeology, do follow the positivist rules on this.)  We use the term “methodology” to refer to methods in general.  Moreover, all the methods I describe below can be used with almost any theory, though a particular mix of them may be appropriate to only one body of theory.  However, it is well to remember the connection with theory.  Most current cultural anthropology is weakly theorized; at worst, it is mere travel writing.  So-called “theory” is often no more than a positive attitude toward the people studied and a negative attitude toward outsiders that have an effect on their lives.  This is bias, not theory.

Physical anthropology uses Darwinian theory, archaeology often uses ecological or processual or post-processual theories, but cultural anthropology currently uses actual theory rather sporadically.  Theories of the past (Boasian, Durkheimian, Marxian, etc.) are now used only in a rather loose or general way.  Some ecological, linguistic, and economic theories are still used, but are often dated by now.  The theories of mid-20th-century writers like Michel Foucault remain valuable, but often used vaguely or loosely.  This has produced a situation in which much of anthropology reads like poor-quality journalism—a situation in serious need of correction.

 

It is extremely valuable to go into the field with a full tool kit of theories and methods.  No theory is adequate by itself.  Even the most comprehensive social-science theories need major supplementation.  The more you reject theories, the more limited and hard to use your results will be.  Both the “postmodern” anthropology that rejected science or even systematic data collecting and the hyper-“scientific” work of the early optimal-foraging-theory days have turned out to be too limited to use for any purpose except stimulating others to go beyond them.  A simple theory is always a good starting point, but anthropology by 100 years ago had reached a stage where truly simplistic theories were known to be inadequate (see e.g. Lowie 1937).

Many anthropologists over the years have found great consolation in T. C. Chamberlin’s classic essay “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses,” originally published in Science in 1890 (republished 1965) and now available online on many websites—just search the title.  Chamberlin, a geologist, learned to go into the field with multiple theories and hypotheses available for every observed event.  His explanation of how and why to do this has never been surpassed.  I have actually found this method the most valuable I have ever used.  It means you have to be familiar with the widest possible range of high-level and mid-range theories, from functionalism and structuralism to Foucaultian ideas and Darwinian biology.

Thus, you might think of using some or all of the methods below, so as to get at least some real control on data.

 

Anthropology is based on a methodology consisting of three fundamental approaches:

–Extended field work, usually lasting at least a year, with a particular community.  The preferred method is “participant observation,” in which one lives as much as possible in the way the local people do.  Of course, really living as the locals do is possible only if one is a local; many anthropologists study their homelands, but most go to some less familiar group, which involves adjustment and makes participant observation a rather qualified matter.

–A holistic approach, which involves taking into account ecological, economic, technological, social, psychological, and political factors.

–Cross-cultural comparison, which involves comparing as many different cultures as possible, to establish or disprove generalizations about people.

This methodology was devised by Lewis Henry Morgan, the father of American anthropology, in the 1850s and 1860s.  I think of it as the three stones that hold up the cooking pot— a metaphor used for social categories (rather than anthropological methods!) by indigenous peoples from the Toba Batak of Sumatera to the Maya of Quintana Roo.

 

The leading methods book for anthropology is Russell Bernard’s classic Research Methods in Anthropology (now in its 4th edition, 2006).  This is a genuinely great work, a real Bible, and must be kept at hand in field work and analysis.

The only other work I consider indispensable for all ethnographers is Charles Frake’s Language and Cultural Description (1980), which contains several essays on methods that are vitally important.  These essays include especially the classic descriptions of frame elicitation (see below)

There are specialized journals devoted to field work and methods.

 

  1. The Question of Interpretation and Reality

 

The key thing anthropologists can do is find out about the local culture.  This does not mean “getting inside the heads” of the locals or “finding out what they think”; it means finding out about what they share.  As an outsider, you will not have the level of access to that shared knowledge and behavior that an insider has, but by using specialized anthropological techniques you can get very close.  You can learn just as well as any immigrant and almost as well as any child.  Frake gives excellent discussions of what the ethnographer can and cannot do.  You can’t read the local minds, but neither can the locals; they have to infer rules, structures, and understandings, just as you do.

The goal of the field worker should be what Frake (1980) calls “appropriate anticipation”—be able to predict, more or less as well as the locals do, what will happen in a given situation.  The goals of the ethnographer, again following Frake, should include telling the reader enough that the reader could act appropriately if s/he were there.  Think of a language textbook:  it should, at the very least, tell you what to say in given situations.  Similarly, an ethnography of local religion should at least tell you how to act and what to expect if you go there and are asked to a ceremony.  (Of course, a work on general theory, or on comparative mythology, or on demographic history, will probably not have such instructions.  We are discussing ethnography, specifically, in this case.)

On the one hand, this means you can learn the culture, and claims that the locals have some mystic telepathic sharing denied to you are just silly.  On the other hand, it means you should be exceedingly modest about “interpretation”—even if you are a local!  Geertzian “interpretive anthropology” (Geertz 1973) and its ancestors (“national character” studies, etc.) have a dubious record.  Unless you are a cultural insider, you will not normally share individual or collective experiences of war, genocide, bias, or for that matter the joys of good harvests or religious ceremonies.  It is wise to simply quote the locals, extensively, on such matters.  Let them do the sophisticated interpreting.

In short, you should do everything possible to find out shared knowledge and shared behavior, but you should be appropriately modest about your ability to understand personal experiences of particularly intense, evocative states and situations.

There was a major debate within anthropology in the 1960s over whether we can get at “what people think.”  Marvin Harris (1968) took an extreme view on the “no” side.  He maintained that we can record only behavior, and cannot trust what people say, let alone our interpretations.  People lie, misrepresent, misunderstand their own motives, etc.  At the other end of the scale, interpretivists like Geertz and cultural psychologists like Rick Shweder (1991), without making a huge point of it (as Harris did), took relatively strong “yes” positions.  Geertz and Shweder implied that understanding what is in people’s heads is relatively unproblematic, at least if one uses modern methods of finding out.   Geertz is modest about his interpretations, leaving the possibility of other interpretations quite open.  Shweder, and  others, have been more assertive.

The field basically solved the problem by voting with their feet for the latter position.  I do not know of anyone maintaining Harris’ position today.  All anthropologists now infer, to varying degrees, “what people think.”  All anthropologists admit that people do sometimes say what they think, and that by careful cross-verification and other techniques (see below) one can get at, or at least approximate, truth.  Even archaeologists are increasingly confident in their ability to infer at least some simple, straightforward ideas from material remains and ethnographic parallels, though this is a tricky game.

There is, however, a huge range.  Some extremely careful anthropologists use a whole armamentarium of techniques to establish meticulously a few rather simple understandings; this would include many cognitivists, who work hard to find the meanings of “simple” plant and animal names, food lore, kinterms, landscape terms, and other straightforward terms that can be grounded in visible reality.  (I am in this category.)  Others make really quite wild assumptions about their ability to understand in depth the most arcane and abstruse religious and philosophical ideas.  This is obviously a dangerous game, since even the locals may not share abstruse ideas very widely.

One necessary part of this is getting a thorough sense of what words mean.  You don’t have to be totally fluent in the local language, though it helps.  Systematic questioning, coupled with lots of listening and observation of how words are used in actual conversations, is necessary.  (See Frake, again.)  Using the words yourself is obviously desirable—you’re sure to misuse them in interesting ways, thus producing innnocent amusement for your subjects as well as a learning experience for yourself.  (Every ethnographer has a favorite story.  Mine is:  when first in Hong Kong I had to buy water from a local standpipe.  People would give me the standard greeting, “Where are you going?”  I would answer “I’m going to buy water.”  After a couple of shocked looks, I realized something was wrong, and found out that the phrase “buy water” is used only when you are getting water to wash the corpse of a family member!  Just one of those idioms….)

 

Finally, it is abundantly clear that anthropologists have been far too dismissive of local interpretations, theories, and wisdom generally.  The interpretive or functionalist anthropologist, the optimal-foraging or economic theorist, often assumes his or her interpretations and theories are better, truer, more privileged, and more insightful.  Comment should be unnecessary; you come for ONE year and you know more about these people than they know about themselves from thousands of years of interaction?  Right.  But traditional and local people are not used to verbalizing their philosophies and social theories.  You have to be sensitive and keep asking.  Also, as an outsider (if you are one), you CAN see things that the locals don’t notice because they are so used to them.  Proper humility is needed, but is not self-abnegation!

There is the notorious risk, though, that if you do that you will get into a dialogue with a local thinker and wind up with something marvelous and original but outside normal local thinking.  The type case is Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemmeli (1965), a wonderful and classic book by a larger-than-life French adventurer-ethnographer and the brilliant (if illiterate) Dogon sage Ogotemmeli, in Mali, Africa.  This book is a philosophical classic that you should read, but it is the philosophical speculation of Ogotemmeli as prompted and encouraged by Griaule, not the traditional Dogon view.  Of course, in the world I usually work in (China), traditional philosophy is more well known, and the fact that individuals have different philosophies is also well known, but very few non-Chinese ethnographers have used Chinese social theories to explain anything.  Fortunately, Chinese ethnographers do, so we have that benefit.

Now that there are many Native American and other ethnographers, we have many books explaining traditional philosophy from within, such as Richard Atleo’s Tsawalk (2004) and Traditions of Tsawalk (2011; Richard is Nuu-chah-nulth, from Vancouver Island, Canada, and like several other Nuu-chah-nulth he has an anthropology Ph.D.).

 

  1. Techniques

 

Field work by cultural anthropologists usually involves participant observation (DeWalt and DeWalt 2001; Spradley 1980), lasting at least six months and usually a year or more.  Serious comprehensive ethnographic research requires this.  However, for many reasons, we also do quick visits, long-distance studies (using other people’s findings), straight interviews, visual studies, library and documentary research, and cross-cultural comparative studies, among other things.  Limited projects (e.g. to find out about one narrow subject—say, fish names or vegetable marketing) can be completed in a few weeks, especially if one is familiar with the area and people.

One valuable technique is rapid rural assessment (RRA), which is a specialized interview-and-observation technique that allows very rapid discovery of a lot of data (Gladwin 1989 covers it; there are more up-to-date, complete sources).  Related is participatory rural assessment, which involves organizing local people to do their own fact-finding and synthesis.  In participatory rural assessment, local people set their own goals, map their communities, figure out what they need by way of development or problem-solving, figure out what resources they have, and so on; the anthropologist guides the approach and sets the tasks.

 

Getting started:  Every community has somebody who knows everybody.  Frequently, this individual is a minor government functionary in a “helping” role (as opposed to a person keeping the place in line).  The local postmaster filled the role in American small towns.   So did the waitresses at the local coffee shop.  Sometimes the village storekeeper is a contact person, but sometimes he is seen as the village skinflint.  Check around!

Then, wander around the community being very nice to everyone, greeting them, learning their names, introducing and explaining yourself.  Become a local fixture to the point where you are semi-invisible—just the local foreigner.

A census is a good way to start serious work and get to know everyone.  Ask very nonthreatening questions on an initial census!  See below on finding out about local question etiquette.

There is a whole literature on field notes (Canfield 2011 provides perspectives from all field sciences, not just anthropology).  Suffice it to say that recording everything is impossible, but getting as near as you can is a good idea at first, till you figure out what is really important.

 

Interviewing is the basic technique in ethnography.  This can mean anything from applying a set questionnaire (closed-ended interviewing) to free-ranging questions and discussion (open-ended interviewing).  I get best results with a semi-structured questionnaire, one that you memorize thoroughly before the interview and then apply in a rather improvisational manner—not letting the interviewee escape without getting all the questions answered, but letting some free play happen, so the interviewee can get clear about meanings, discuss points, clear up ambiguities, etc.  See any good book on social interviewing, as well as Bernard.

Keep working on the language—we could all use better fluency.  I am a terrible linguist, but I try.

The whole issue of how to interview and ask questions is the first thing to address when you get to the field.  Cultures differ dramatically as to what types of question are acceptable.  Many Americans are astonishingly open about sex but hate to disclose their income.  Chinese (at least the ones I worked with) are the reverse.  Americans also hate to admit they are racist.  A colleague of mine was amazed at how little racism his students found in our city of residence.  I asked him if it had occurred to him that having bright young university students doing the interviewing might possibly bias the responses.  “Why, no….”  Another colleague was similarly surprised by how carefully people were shopping in the supermarket—I was less surprised, since he and his co-worker had followed shoppers around with a videocamera.  Having (again) bright young university students watch every move would make anyone more careful!  Such examples are so obvious as to be funny, but the danger is in far more subtle matters, especially when one is translating a perfectly innocent question in English into what may be a subtly leading question in Spanish or Chinese.

See also The Long Interview (McCracken 1988) and James Spradley’s The Ethnographic Interview (1979)Others recommend (but I have not seen) a book by Charles Briggs called Learning How to Ask (1986), one by Meyer and Booker (1991) on interpreting interview data, and a book on “active interviewing” by Holstein and Gubrium (1995).  It is also very worthwhile to spend a while with reporters finding out about journalistic methods of interviewing and getting data.

One absolutely critical interviewing technique that nobody covers well is depth interviewing.  This is a 2- to 4-hour interview in which the ethnographer probes deeper and deeper into the interviewee’s emotions, feelings, and personal stories.  A good interviewer tries to keep questions down to a minimum, and usually just makes encouraging noises (“and then…?”  “mm-hm?”).  The interviewer must appear relaxed but thoroughly engaged—completely present, interested, and supportive.  A good interviewer will appear not to “pry” or “apply pressure” but will be sympathetic and concerned and genuinely interested.  This involves being comfortable with silences—Native American informants in particular often remain silent for a minute or even several minutes during such conversations.  On the other hand, very gentle questioning of the type “How did you feel about that?” and “are you comfortable talking with me about that?” is necessary.  In such cases, DO take “no” for an answer; be comfortable with letting the interviewee set limits.

Almost anyone loves to talk about almost any subject, if they are given this level of genuine concern.  (Be prepared for tears and other emotional releases.)  Such interviewing is an art form, though it is basically developed from what close and empathetic friends and family members do for each other all the time.  It is also so intensely personal that unless you are genuinely concerned and caring about the interviewee, YOU SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT IT.

Depth interviewing is necessary in many, many ethnographic cases, especially in interviewing about tragedy and major stress.  It is astonishingly rarely taught or used.  Psychotherapists are supposed to learn it but often do not.  The literature that alleges lack of mother love and lack of regret for dead infants in certain societies is evidently based on lack of familiarity with this interviewing technique.  I know this not only from the literature but more directly from my own field work in at least one society where such lack was widely alleged by superficial ethnographers, but instantly disappeared under depth interviewing, when grief could come out openly.

 

Finally, never underestimate the value of “deep hanging out”—an excellent phrase used by Clifford Geertz to describe everyday ethnography.  Just hanging around keeping your eyes and ears open remains the best of all field techniques.  I have found I talk less and look more every time I do field work.

 

Etics and emics:  Kenneth Pike liberated the linguistic endings from “phonetic” and “phonemic.”  He meant something really creative:  Etics involve studying a system by applying a universal metric or analytic system—in the case of phonetics, the international methods of studying sounds, via the sonagram and other mechanical/impersonal techniques.  Emics involves studying a system by finding its internal structure and the units that make that up—in the case of phonemics, the sounds recognized by speakers of the language as making meaningful contrasts.

Etics does not mean “outsider’s view” and emics does not mean “insider’s view,” contra the sloppy usage in many anthro books (including Conrad Kottak’s widely-used textbooks).  Using the terms this way loses all their value.  Both emics and etics can be done by either outsiders or insiders, but only when trained in structural analysis. In language, for example, any trained insider can use a sonagram as well as any outsider; conversely, most people cannot provide a phonemic analysis of their own language—only trained linguists do that.

A good ethnographer, whether outsider or insider, will study both etics and emics, just as any decent linguist will record both the phonetics and the phonemics of a language.  Consider food:  a good ethnographer will do a nutritional analysis and some kind of optimal foraging model or Bayesian-optimizing model (all these are etic), but will also find out what the locals call their foods, how they classify them, how they structure them in terms of nutrition and social use, and other emic matters.  Neither of these has anything to do with outsider vs insider per se.  (The typical outsider’s view of local foodways is “yuck!”  The typical insider’s view is “yum!”  This does not get us far analytically.)

 

Stories and texts:   These were the bread-and-butter of old-time ethnographers, and often is to this day.  Nothing beats collecting stories—personal stories, stories about the community, about the origin of the world, about the economy, anything.  People love telling stories.  In most cultures, stories are teaching devices; people teach their children and each other through this medium.  Any and all texts and accounts are valuable.  Record them and transcribe them.  A particularly good authority on working with stories is Julie Cruikshank (1998, 2005).

A specialized, extremely important story to collect is the life story. Since the brilliant and innovative work of Paul Radin in the early 20th century, collecting detailed life stories from interviewees is a key part of many anthropologists’ work.  Most, however, do not do it; it tends to be rather a specialized thing to do.  I have collected brief life stories in Hong Kong and a long, detailed one in Mexico (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005).

There is now, in psychology rather than anthropology, a valuable and widely-used interview prompt for this work:  The McAdams Life Story Interview (1995; Google it; it is available to download).

One standard thing to do with life stories is textual analysis.  This often begins with, but does not end with, analysis of words.  Psychologists have developed a terrific software for scanning a document for important words (Pennebaker et al. 2007).  From words, one often progresses to themes, and here McAdams has developed some key themes to look for in the life stories he collects (McAdams et al. 1996, 2001).

 

Decision-making is also a very important, basic approach, best introduced in Christina Gladwin’s little booklet Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling (1989, Sage) is basic.  A classic study, with methodological reflections (especially in the 2nd edn., 1994) is James Young and Linda Garro: Medical Choice in a Mexican Village.  Shankar Aswani has done some good work on decision-making in fisheries, and thoughtfully related that to more purely economic and biological methods (e.g. Aswani and Weiant 2004).  Basically, the idea is to ask people in detail about the steps that they went through to make a particular decision—what crop to plant (Gladwin), what to do when someone in the family is sick (Young and Garro), what to do about fishing and fish conservation (Aswani), and so on.  This technique assumes that decisions can be broken down into ordered sequences of yes/no answers:  Can I get the seed for this crop?  Can I get fertilizer for it? Can I get enough water for it?  And so on.  People usually do decide that way, at least in clear-cut matters like crop choice, and even if they don’t you can break down decisions into yes/no or more-versus-less choices.  But sometimes people decide on impulse, or subconsciously integrate several factors at once.  Careful questioning allows you to deal with such cases, and continue to use decision tree analysis.  It is a particularly powerful technique, especially for decisions that are important but that involve well-known, rather routine choices, like agricultural decisions.  A farmer or gardener normally knows exactly what crops she can plant and how to grow them, and how to get information if she does not know enough about something.  Decisions about what to do in an unforeseen new emergency are less clear-cut and consequently harder to analyze, but in principle can be covered the same way.

Decision-making studies have led to looking at cultural models, but so far little methodology has been developed for this; for a major exception that gets us fairly far in doing comparable analyses of this difficult realm, see Victor de Munck (2011) on romantic love.

 

Another absolutely essential technique is the focus group, in which the interviewer recruits 4-6 people or so and gets them to talk about the specific subject under investigation.  This has turned out to be a major winner as a research method for political researchers and marketers as well as for anthropologists.  See David Morgan (1996).

 

Another universally used technique is the Likert scale, that little scale where you get to rank things from “agree strongly” to “disagree strongly” or “most liked” to “most disliked,” as on student evaluations, political surveys, etc.   It works well only if you use 5 or 7 cells.  5 is generally better.

 

A large range of personality tests and other psychological tests is available.  In general, I advise against using these, because they rarely work in local conditions—the local worldview and language are probably too different from the testmakers’.  But they may be useful where this does not apply and where you can get a psychologist to help administer them.

 

Other formal techniques include frame elicitation.  This is best explained by Frake (see above), but basically it consists of looking around and asking everyone “what’s that?”  When you have names, you sit down with a consultant and ask “what kinds of X are there?” till there are no more divisions.  Then you can work up:  “Is X a kind of…?”  Beware, though; this can force a spurious level of systematization on your consultants.  Better to do all this informally in the field, one question at a time, and to use focus groups to get people talking about how they conceptualize things.  Carefully used—with much asking, pointing, and walking around, rather than mechanical frame interviewing in a house—this is the most valuable of all the analytic or specialized techniques.

Related are card-sorts and pile-sorts, in which names of things are written on cards and sorted into piles according to whatever criteria you want to study.

On all these formal methods, and on basic statistics, see, in addition to Bernard’s book, the superb article by W. Penn Handwerker in A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology (2011).  Handwerker manages to get into a few pages more solid advice and reference material on methodology than many authors get into whole books.  On statistics, however, be sure to read Darrell Huff’s classic How to Lie with Statistics (1954).  “Figures don’t lie but liars figure,” as the proverb says, and Huff warns you of a lot of ways they do it.

 

Walking around in the fields and woods, asking about everything, remains the best of all techniques for finding out about names, categories, and ethnobiological knowledge.  A formalization is a “nature trail,” in which the investigator lays out a short set course with known plants along it.  Then the investigator can walk this trail with different subjects, seeing how many plants they can name.  This is particularly useful with children—one can see how much they know at what age.  (Brian Stross, Gene Hunn, Rebecca Zarger, and J. R. Stepp, studying children in the south Mexican highlands, have worked particularly with this technique.)

Child-following is used to advantage in such situations, and in nutrition research.  You just follow a child around, seeing what she does.  It’s the only way to find out what children actually eat, as memorably shown by the late Christine Wilson in her field work.

For that matter, following adults is necessary too, but has to be done with more circumspection.

 

There are also censusing, surveying, survey design, optimal foraging study and modeling, GIS and GPS, statistics, economic data management, and other formal techniques; Bernard covers all of them adequately, though if seriously interested in optimal foraging or in economics you will need supplementary reading on these (they have a large, specialized literature).

Surveys often involve poorly designed questions that lead to misleading results.  Most people agree with both “Individuals are more to blame than social conditions for crime” and “Social conditions are more to blame than individuals for crime”—depending on which one you ask (Radwin 2009:B9).  In other words, people love to agree with any old statement.  It’s all in the way you phrase it.  Question order, bias words, and so forth all influence the result.  Some questions are so poorly worded that a large percentage of the respondents cannot figure out what is being asked.  This is particularly common when a questionnaire is translated from one language to another, as very often happens in anthropological research, so watch out; pre-test questionnaires for comprehensibility.

Remember to avoid leading questions (now often called “push questions”):  questions that imply you want a certain answer.  Indeed, avoid everything that might be taken as implying you want to hear a particular kind of answer.  Find out what counts as leading questions in the culture you are studying.  Many questions that are perfectly innocent and non-leading in English turn out to be strongly leading when translated into Chinese.  I found out the hard way—but at least I learned it fast—that “how are you?” was interpreted as “you look sick, what’s wrong?”  Similar pitfalls occur in other languages.

Response bias can enter quite dramatically.  Surveys of food consumption in the United States correlate very well with sales figures at stores, but sales figures of liquor consumption can be up to five times what the surveys show!  People may understate consumption, but more important here is the fact that an extremely high percentage of liquor is drunk by relatively few people, and those few are rarely in any condition to answer a survey.

Finally, people lie, almost always to give the socially “correct” response.  Many more people say they voted in the last election than could actually have done so (Radwin 2009:B9).  And almost no racists exist in the United States—if you believe the survey results!

Anthropologists also do a great deal of visual anthropology: photography, recording, film and videotape work, and other methods of making a permanent and more-or-less-objective record of what we find.  There is also ethnomusicological recording to worry about.  There are specialized works on this.   My experience is that it is difficult to do quality visual work and quality interviewing or other talking-ethnography at the same time.  One can work as a team, or do the interviewing first and visuals later.  Some geniuses can do both at the same time, but I am far from this level.

I’m not an expert, and will not push this one, but a useful tip from Douglas Medin (presentation at Society for Anthropological Sciences, 2010) is that there are four general ways to do a picture:  directly on (the usual approach—“voyeur”), embodied (shows hands working, from the viewpoint of the worker—as if you and the camera are doing the work with your hands), over the shoulder (of your main subject—so you are standing behind her and seeing what she sees), and “fourth wall” or “breaking the wall,” in which case the people in the photo are all looking at you (as in a standard group shot).  Doug showed that Native American children’s book illustrations (drawings, not photos) have much more of the last three types of pictures than Anglo ones, a culturally very interesting observation.

This brings home the point that interpreting others’ photos and pictures is a major part of visual anthro.  Both interpreting cultural representations (pictures, etc.) and getting your subjects to take photos for you are standard techniques and very effective if well done.

 

Another under-taught topic is historical research–documentary, archival, and text work.  Historians learn as a kind of second nature how to evaluate a document—how much to trust it, how to cross-check, how to allow for biases, etc.  The best way to find out about this is to ask a historian.  They have their own books, but an hour with a seasoned historian will give you a good enough start.

At the very least, read the major anthropological and historical works on your area!  I am appalled at the illiteracy of some graduate students.  What were their professors thinking?  Egregious mistakes even get into the published literature.  This is inexcusable.  Much more common is the field worker who misses a great deal for lack of knowing the questions to ask, the deeper matters to look for, and the contexts to use in interpretation.

 

How to take and keep field notes is the subject of Roger Sanjek’s Fieldnotes and a lot of journal articles.  Some other useful lore is in Tony Robben’s Ethnographic Fieldwork:  An Anthropological Reader; Joseph Casagrande’s marvelous and far too neglected anthology, In the Company of Man; and Michael Agar’s classic The Professional Stranger.  See also LeCompte and Schensul, Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research (2nd edn. 2010).

 

Multi-sited ethnography:  this has been advocated by George Marcus and many others.  Obviously it’s appropriate if you’re studying mobile, transnational, or migrant populations.  It isn’t if you’re studying people who stay put, unless you want to do systematic or controlled comparisons (very valuable, but a different issue).  Use common sense and don’t feel compelled to do it just because it was a buzz word for a while.  If you have only a year, as most of us do, it’s better to stay put.  Finding out much about even a very small community in a year is already challenging enough.  The great transnational studies, like Michael Kearney’s (see Kearney 1996—a “must read” if you’re working with this), were 30-year or 40-year projects.

 

Teamwork:  The day of the lone field worker who found out “everything” about the Trobriands or the Nuer is most emphatically gone.  Do what you do best, and collaborate with other people who do what they do best.

Work with biologists, political scientists, photographers, anyone that has expertise you need.  Many ethnographers go in as part of a team.  I find it more useful to work with people on the ground.  Local scholars generally need and appreciate the opportunities.  (On the other hand, many see outside scholars as a threat to their monopoly and their status.  Be careful about this.)

One type of “teamwork” is working as a family.  Fortunate is the anthropologist who has a spouse who can work with him or her.  Alas, field work is not always the easiest posting, and some spouses do not adjust well.  Most valuable of all is working as a family with children.  Children disarm suspicion, attract friendly and solicitous attention, evoke stories, and allow study of child-training practices.  Also, when they are old enough, they are born ethnographers.  They are curious about everything and are amazingly quick with social cues and social learning. (They are wired for it.  The human animal evolved as a social creature, and social learning is a child’s main occupation.)  However, working with children is reasonable only if you are near a good hospital.  Children have died in remote field situations.

 

“Studying up”:  Laura Nader and others have advocated studying the rich and powerful.  Unfortunately, I could never get a million-dollar grant for subsistence.  More seriously, most anthropologists don’t have the tools and training to do this effectively.  If you want to study up, work with and learn from political scientists and sociologists!  They have the methods and tools!  When faced with the need to find out what the powerful were up to, I have worked with political scientists, and have also picked the brains of anthropologists who had done that type of work and had learned the techniques and methods.

There are lots of political scientists, sociologists, historians, and others studying elites, but only anthropologists study the people low on the political hierarchy.  We thus best use our talents and training in the latter cause.  We are generally the only people that can bring their words and concerns to a wide audience.  Now and then we get the chance to help them bring their own voices or causes to the wide arena—a blessed and wonderful chance if carefully done.  I thus strongly recommend studying ordinary people and especially neglected and oppressed ones.

 

  1. General Philosophical Concerns

 

Completeness and comparability are major concerns, and major problems with many field projects.  Be sure to get all the data possible on the subjects under study.  Be sure that interviews, forms, and data recording makes findings strictly comparable between subjects and situations.  The same information has to be collected in the same way.

 

One word of philosophical guidance about culture in general:  Only real people (or animals) do things.  This should be obvious, but anthropologists all too often fall into the social science trap of saying that Capitalism, or The State, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster did such-and-such a thing.  No.  They didn’t.  People did.  Capitalism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster don’t exist (the former is an analytical abstraction that bears only some resemblance to any current real-world referent).  The State exists, but if you think it acts or is real by itself, look at Somalia, DR Congo, or Afghanistan.  The State functions because the people in it have decided that preserving it and working for it will best accomplish their human goals.  It becomes a true emergent, like a kinship system or a myth, and thus has a genuine reality (unlike capitalism).  However—again like a kinship system—it exists only as long as a lot of people buy into it and don’t question it too strongly.  Always study emergents and recognize their reality, but remember they don’t really act by themselves.  The ability of people to believe in such things, and to believe they act on their own, is fascinating, and related to the belief in supernatural beings.

 

As Andrew “Pete” Vayda has been insisting for years (Vayda 2008), some background in the philosophy and history of science (specifically, epistemology) is absolutely essential.  This would include, at least, Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Philip Kitcher’s The Advancement of Science (1993).  See also Ian Hacking (1999), Bruno Latour’s work (esp. 2004, 2005), Alison Wylie’s work (2002, 2004), and Pete Vayda’s and others’ relevant writings.  Some background in the history of anthropology is essential (see many books by Adam Kuper and by George Stocking).  Theory and history are not covered adequately in many anthro graduate programs, so read these on your own.

Perhaps the most valuable thing one learns from these works is how to avoid mindless use of current buzzwords.  Buzzwords usually start out as useful concepts, but lose it all when they become too widely used.  Go back to the original source and read the full, properly qualified story.  Those of us who have checked are always astonished at how wrong even the best secondary sources get the classic writers, to say nothing of slapdash textbooks.  Reading Durkheim, for example, is a real revelation if you knew him only from even the best histories of anthropology.

 

Ethics:  Here again, one can start with Bernard, but an excellent practical guide to working ethics has now appeared (Whiteford and Trotter 2004)  Many ethical questions have been treated in detail in Anthropology News over many decades.  The American Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics is easily available online from the Association, and is basic.

Always be meticulous about touching bases in the field area.  Contact local scholars, and promise to help and work with them if possible.  Go through all the bureaucratic hoops uncomplainingly.  Find people you can work with, institutes you can collaborate with, and universities you can hang out at.  Be humble; First World investigators are threatening to many Third World bureaucrats and scholars.  Many—if not all—Third World and indigenous scholars have encountered arrogant, overbearing, and inconsiderate First Worlders.  These were not usually anthropologists, but you will pay the price even if it was a diplomat or an agricultural advisor that dissed the local scholars.  Bear it and be genuinely polite.  Save your hate for the diplomat or advisor, not the locals.

In your community, similarly, get the official cooperation of the local authorities—complete with signed permission to workShare your results, in so far as possible, when you do any writing up.

Questions that permanently concern anthropologists include:  Are we really somehow ripping off the “natives” by finding out things?  How does one collaborate?  Coauthor?  How does one “represent the other” without being a mental colonialist?  How to get honest responses and publish them?  How much can one publish the local dirt—corruption, conflict, sordid tales?  (My recommendation is simple:  don’t unless you have to.)   How to be tactful?  How much to get involved in local matters?  How to avoid factions?  How to avoid local entanglements? One would, for instance, think it unnecessary to warn people NOT EVER to get sexually involved with people one is doing field work with!  But I hear that some people do this—a good way to get killed.

Err on the side of caution.  Remember the first clause in the AAA’s Code is that your most immediate duty is to the people you are working with.  It is not acceptable to put them at serious risk.  It is not acceptable to exploit them for money, e.g. by selling photos or writing a bestseller without cutting them in on the profits.  It is not acceptable to use their words and information without giving full credit, including coauthorship if their input is really significant.  It is not acceptable to refrain from helping them with medicines, etc., if you have the knowledge or connections; if it messes up your medical anthro research a bit, too bad; their lives are more important than any dreams of intellectual purity.  Do not let yourself be exploited or “used,” but be as helpful as possible when help is needed.

Avoid involvement with local factions, no matter how right your favorite one seems to be.  Involvement ruins your field work, endangers your safety, and inevitably makes local politics worse.  Let them sort it out.

The wider question of advocacy is more serious.  Anthropologists almost always find that their groups are getting a raw deal, because we usually study small, less-than-affluent communities who are low on the political hierarchy.  Serious advocacy is often desirable, but should take the form of “speaking truth to power” as the phrase goes.  It is not usually appropriate to get off into strong statements or political action in the field site  On the other hand, it sometimes is appropriate, e.g. in cases of outright genocide.  Generally, the very best thing is to carry local voices to the wide world—if you can do it without endangering your subjects.  For example, giving quotes that can be traced to an individual is not a good idea in a state that is persecuting that community.  Confidential reports to trusted government people who can really help your community are sometimes desirable.  The best thing is usually to do the best job you can at getting the facts right and producing a scholarly book.  Do what is morally right, but in the most cautious and least overstated way.

Think seriously about who can hear your message and use it.  I did one substantial piece of field work in a really dangerous situation.  I never published or disclosed the worst and most hidden material.  I got the rest of the really touchy material to people in the government whom I knew I could trust and whom I knew would use the information wisely.  I kept everything else on ice for years, until the situation changed and I could safely publish the less touchy chunks of it.

Anthropologists are driven almost mad by the steadily increasing obsessiveness of institutional review boards (IRB’s, a.k.a. Human Subjects Review Committees).  They exist to prevent lawsuits over problems arising in sensitive, invasive, or dangerous medical and psychological research.  Thus they are often inappropriately restrictive for anthropological field work.  We cannot always get signed, detailed protocols proving that our subjects know every possible risk they are incurring.  And we may have to take photographs and films of large ritual or market situations where we cannot possibly get signed permissions from every man, woman and child.

And we rarely do anything that puts subjects at any real risk.  The main exception, and it is an important one, is research in or on military, criminal, or other genuinely dangerous matters.  For these, the investigator does need to worry about the full IRB panoply of concerns.  For the full story, see the fall 2007 issue of American Ethnologist, which has a whole excellent section on IRB’s.

 

Applied anthropology is a whole separate area that I do not want to cover here; suffice it to say that the same general moral rules apply.  Do what will actually help and what will actually not be undercut by someone else.

Collaboration with local communities in getting particular projects done is another enormously complex and involved topic, beyond my range here.  See the journal Human Organization—just search back through it.

 

The question of objectivity always surfaces.  No, you aren’t totally objective; you’re involved with your subjects.  But, as one anthropologist wrote, “just because you can’t maintain pure asepsis doesn’t mean you can do surgical operations in a sewer” (Geertz 1973).  Be solidly grounded in facts and establish everything as solidly as possible.  I once worked with an anthropologist, a superb field worker, who collected over 50 detailed stories of the same event—and stayed perfectly neutral and calm through it all, properly writing down everything, though the stories wildly disagreed about basic details!  Then we sat down to analyze why the stories were so different.

The idea is to be as factual, or objective, as possible, but be open about your biases, too.  Self-awareness is important.

 

  1. Final Tips

 

Field work is lots of fun, but one thing we face is culture shock, a useful term coined by the Finnish-Canadian anthropologist Kalervo Oberg.  This condition is not confined to anthropologists.  What typically happens, when Person A goes to live in Society B, is that the first 3 to 6 months are a sort of honeymoon period.  After that, Reality hits, and it can hit pretty hard.  A period of painful adjustment follows—the 6th month is usually the hardest!  It’s good to plan a brief vacation from your field work at that time.  After the 6th month, things get easier.  Students are familiar with a mild form of this from adjusting to college (dorms, roommates, classes…).  Adjusting to marriage or any other life-and-residence change is comparable.  There is a honeymoon period, a let-down period, and then adjustment, hopefully peaceful and contented.

Once you have adjusted to a new community, adjusting back to your own home typically involves some “reverse culture shock.”  Do not be surprised at this; it’s normal.

 

Field work is normally one of the least dangerous activities on earth.  I have always been healthier in the field than at home.  Forget the poisonous snakes and scorpions of the travel books—you won’t see any, or if you do they will be the least of your worries.  (I have had to kill more than one cobra in my field dwellings.  They don’t usually strike.)

However, don’t take insane chances.  Take a first-aid kit and standard first-aid medications, notably general antibiotics that will quickly knock out skin infections, traveler’s diarrhea and food poisoning (Salmonella, Shigella, etc.), and the like.  Be sure to take the proper anti-malarial medicine in malarial areas; the medicine of choice varies from region to region.

Use tough, sturdy shoes or boots if in a literal “field” situation.  Today, the “field” is often an urban neighborhood, but some of us still work in actual fields.  You are far more likely to come to grief from wearing inadequate shoes than from all those poisonous critters put together.  Take sunblock and suchlike things as appropriate.  DO ask people who have been in the area you are going, and DO read the Lonely Planet guides, or similar guides for active and enterprising travelers.

Don’t worry about the local food, including “street food.”  It’s safe enough if cooked at high heat.  Any fruit or veg with a tough peel (bananas, mangoes…) is safe if the peel isn’t broken.  In most of the tropics, the water is still dubious, however, and so is raw seafood.  The only time I got really sick in 2 years of field work in Mexico was from eating undercooked oysters in a fancy restaurant.

 

The fad for “reflexive” ethnography a few years ago gives you lots of accounts to learn from.  Many are far from exemplary.  One particularly candid account of a particularly intelligent, sensitive researcher’s first taste of the field is found in Eric Mueggler’s The Age of Wild Ghosts (2001).  I could name many others.  A nice balance of self-revelation with consultant’s own stories is Zapotec Women by Lynn Stephen (1991).  She has her opinions and experiences; she also gives the facts; and she gives the women’s own testimonies, which often disagree with her interpretation.  Stephen makes their lot sound very bleak, but the women she quotes sound decidedly more happy.  I visited her field site and did some field work myself to understand this.  It turned out that Stephen emphasizes the hardship which is indeed the lot of most Zapotec women, but the women she quoted in the book were a relatively more successful group who were generally more upbeat on their situation.  Also, Mexican women are taught to aguantar—bear uncomplainingly.  They don’t expect as much from life as an elite American academic does.

 

This shows the advantages of field-checking anything one reads, if one possibly can.  More:  it shows how much perspective and outlook matter, and how they can color analysis by even the best anthropologists.  Always double-check.  Always look for alternative views.  Always try to find someone else from a different perspective and training who can study your area and hopefully validate your work.

 

 

Thanks to many people, notably Russ Bernard, Nick Colby, Victor De Munck, Norie Huddle, Eugene Hunn, Dell Hymes, Michael Kearney, Tara McCoy, Evelyn Pinkerton, and above all David Kronenfeld for discussions that taught me what I know about these matters.

 

 

References

 

Agar, Michael.  1985.  Speaking of Ethnography.   Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

 

—   1996.  The Professional Stranger:  An Informal Introduction to Ethnography.  2nd edn.  New York:  Academic Press.

 

Anderson, E. N., and Felix Medina Tzuc.  2005.  Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

 

Atleo, E. Richard.  2004.  Tsawalk:  A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview.  Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press.

 

—  2011.  Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis.  Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press.

 

Aswani, Shankar, and Pam Weiant.  2004.  “Scientific Evaluation in Women’s Participatory Management:  Monitoring Marine Invertebrate Refugia in the Solomon Islands.”  Human Organization 63:301-319.

 

Bernard, H. Russell.  2006.  Research Methods in Anthropology.  Lanham, MD:  AltaMira (Rowman and Littlefield).

 

Bernard, H. Russell (ed.).  2000.  Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology.  Walnut Creek, CA:  AltaMira.

 

Briggs, Charles.  1986.  Learning How to Ask.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Canfield, Michael (ed.).  2011.  Field Notes on Science and Nature.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

 

Casagrande, Joseph (ed.).  1960.  In the Company of Man:  Twenty Portraits by Anthropologists.  New York:  Harper.

 

Chamberlin, T. C.  1965 (orig. in Science, 7 Feb. 1890).  “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses.”  Science 148:748-759.

 

Cruikshank, Julie.  1998.  The Social Life of Stories:  Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

 

Cruikshank, Julie.  2005.  Do Glaciers Listen?  Local Knowledge, Colonial Encouinters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

 

De Munck, Victor C.  2011.  “Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Romantic Love:  Semantic, Cross-Cultural, and as a Process.”  In  A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology, David Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor de Munck, and Michael D. Fischer, eds.  Chichester, West Sussex:  Wiley-Blackwell.  Pp. 513-530.

 

De Munck, Victor C., and Elisa J. Sobo (eds.).  1998.  Using Methods in the Field:  A Practical Introduction and Casebook. AltaMira.

 

Denzin, Norman, and Yvonna Lincoln (eds.).  2005.  The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research.  Sage.

 

DeWalt, Kathleen, and Billie DeWalt.  2001.  Participant Observation:  A Guide for Fieldworkers.  Walnut Creek, CA:  AltaMira.

 

Frake, Charles.  1980.  Language and Cultural Description.  Ed. Anwar S. Dil.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

 

Geertz, Clifford.  1973.  The Interpretation of Cultures.  New York: Basic Books.

 

Gladwin, Christina.  1989.  Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling. Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

 

Griaule, Marcel.  1965.  Conversations with Ogotemmeli.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Hacking, Ian.  1999.  The Social Construction of What?  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Handwerker, W. Penn.  2011.  “How to Collect data that Warrant Analysis.” In  A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology, David Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor de Munck, and Michael D. Fischer, eds.  Chichester, West Sussex:  Wiley-Blackwell.  Pp. 117-130. Holstein, J., and J. Gubrium.  1995.   The Active Interview.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

 

Huff, Darrell.  1954.  How to Lie with Statistics.  New York:  Norton.

 

Kearney, Michael.  1996.  Reconceptualizing the Peasantry:  Anthropology in Global Perspective.  Boulder, CO:  Westview.

 

Kitcher, Philip.  1993.  The Advancement of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Kuhn, Thomas.  1962.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

 

Latour, Bruno.  2004.  Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.  Tr. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 

Latour, Bruno.  2005.  Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Adctor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

LeCompte, Margaret, and Jean J. Schensul.  2010.  Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research.  Lanham, MD:  AltaMira.

 

Lowie, Robert.  1937.  The History of Ethnological Theory. New York: Rinehart.

 

McAdams, Dan P.; Barry J. Hoffman; Elizabeth D. Mansfield; Rodney Day.  1996.  “Themes of Agency and Communion in Significant Autobiographical Scenes.”  (Can’t find ref; sent by a student.)

 

McAdams, Dan P.; Jeffrey Reynolds; Martha Lewis; Alison Patten; Phillip Bowman. 2001.  “When Bad Things Turn Good and Good Things Turn Bad: Sequences of Redemption and Contamination in Life Narrative and Their Relation to Psychosocial Adaptation in Midlife Adults and Students.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27:474-485.

 

McCracken, Grant.  1988.  The Long Interview.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

Meyer, Mary A. and Jane M. Booker. 1991. Eliciting and Analyzing Expert Judgement: a Practical Guide.  London: Academic Press.

 

Mills, C. Wright.  1959.  The Sociological Imagination. New York:  Grove Press.

 

Morgan, David.  1996.  Focus Groups as Qualitative Research.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

 

Mueggler, Erik.  2001.  The Age of Wild Ghosts:  Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Pennebaker, James W.; Cindy Chung; Molly Ireland; Amy Gonzalez; Roger Booth.  2007.  The Development and Psychometric Properties of LIWC2007.  LIWC2007, available online from first author.

 

Radwin, David.  2009.  “High Response Rates Don’t Ensure Survey Accuracy.”  Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Oct. 9, pp. B8-B9.

 

Robben, Antonius C.  2006.  Ethnographic Fieldwork:  An Anthropological Reader.  New York:  Wiley-Blackwell.

 

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scientific name usage

Saturday, December 6th, 2014

Scientific Name Usage

 

Non-biologists, including highly trained scientists in other fields, often get confused by scientific names and their usage.  This posting is intended to help.

Take a familiar plant, the tomato.  The name you usually see is Lycopersicon esculentum Miller.  This means that the genus—the general category of similar, very closely related plants, is Lycopersicon, which means “wolf peach,” probably in honor of the once-believed toxic qualities of the plant.  The species name, esculentum, means “good to eat.”  Miller was the guy who gave it that name.

You may also see it as Lycopersicon lycopersicum (L.) Karsten ex Farwell.  This is a synonym, abbreviated syn.  The L. stands for Linnaeus—everybody knows about him so nobody spells his name out.  But he put the plant in a different genus (Solanum, I think) and Karsten, with Farwell, gave it the new genus name.  Then at some point people found something wrong with this name—I don’t know what—and Miller renamed it.  But some people still use the old name, so the synonymy must be recorded.

Zoologists never cite the authorities (the name authors) unless they are doing formal taxonomic writing, but botanists usually cite them.  Trained more in zoology, I find it maddening to have to worry about the authorities, so I just leave them out.

Some species may have subspecies: very slightly different forms that can still all breed with each other and produce perfectly viable offspring.  One of these, the source subspecies of the first individual to be scientifically described, gets the species name doubled:  Passerella iliaca iliaca, eastern fox sparrow.  Others get different names: Passerella iliaca megarhyncha, large-billed (or Sierra Nevada) fox sparrow.  This can be abbreviated P. i. megarhyncha if you are talking about fox sparrows already, and have given the full name.

Varieties are abbreviated var., as in Beta vulgaris var. cicla L, Swiss chard, and Beta vulgaris var. rapa Dumont, sugar beet.  (Since these are plants, I have to cite the authorities.)  Hybrids are designated by x: Triticum x aestivum L., bread wheat, usually without the x but is a known hybrid of several species.  If you know the species you can have Calypte costae x Calypte anna for the hybrid Costa’s with Anna’s hummingbird that we sometimes see in California.

The actual scientific name is always italicized, but the authorities are not.  The authorities are not part of the actual name, and thus have to be in ordinary type font.  The genus name is always capitalized, even in the middle of a sentence.  The species name is never capitalized in zoology, but in botany the species name is capitalized if it’s derived from the name of a person or of a specific place.  Very general place names like americanum are not capitalized.

Scientific names have to be in Latin, or Latinized versions of words in other languages—Lycopersicon is actually Greek but Latin borrowed Greek words all the time, so no one cares.  Much more exotic names get into usage—many Native American, Australian aboriginal, and other  plant and animal names have been Latinized, as in Puma concolor (“puma” is Quechua) or Felis yaguaroundi for the jaguarundi (a Tupi-Guarani name).  And then there is the recent Confuciusornis for a genus of fossil birds from China….

Originally, scientific descriptions had to be in Latin too, and a plant, animal or fungus was not recognized by international science till a Latin description was published.  Some nostalgic scientists still publish in Latin, but English and other international languages are now accepted.

The modern scientific naming system was developed by Linnaeus in the 18th century, but he consciously followed a long line of forebears, from the great ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus (4th century BCE) down to John Ray and others in the 17th century.  Linnaeus sensibly conserved the old names whenever he could; many go right back to Theophrastus, who was an excellent botanist.  Linnaeus set up the formal binomial system described above, and the hierarchy of Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species—note the way it follows the “Old Regime” social system!  (There are also suborders, superfamilies, subgenera, etc., etc.)  Traditional naming systems—including the ancient Greek one Theophrastus used—tend to fall into a very similar pattern: a folk genus with folk species and sometimes folk subspecies and varieties, subsumed under broader categories like “bird” and “snake.”

Humans are Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Cordata (animals with spinal cords), Class Mammalia, Order Primates, Family Hominidae, Genus Homo, species sapiens.  Modern humans should probably be subspecies H. s. sapiens, with Neanderthals and other extinct forms as other subspecies, but many writers keep these various forms as separate species.  There is a huge controversy about just what a “species” is when you’re talking about fossil forms.  Some, “splitters,” would give new names to every vaguely-different-looking skull.  Others, “lumpers,” infer relationships from basic similarities, and use names much more widely.  Even in living species there is constant disagreement about exact species boundaries, usually when two populations hybridize a bit but not regularly.  Splitters then separate them, lumpers lump them into one species.  Splitting and lumping tend to run in cycles; the Baltimore oriole has been lumped with the Bullock’s oriole about half my life, and split the other half (when I was young and again when I got old).  This is a pretty common story.

Modern genetics, especially population genetics and genomics, has tremendously improved our understanding of species, genus, and higher-level boundaries!  This (with some old-fashioned anatomical study) explains the many changes in scientific names that you will have seen if you work with such materials. Plant lovers in particular have had to deal with this.  For one example, the old lily family has been broken up into many small families—the plants in the new families look sort of alike but are quite different genetically.  Onions and garlic, for instance, were formerly lilies, but now have a family of their own, distinguished by the chemicals that give them their scent.  Much remains to be done as more genomic information comes out.

Sometimes, habit is so strong that an invalid scientific name persists.  The dog is usually still Canis familiaris (as named by Linnaeus), but it is really just a domesticated wolf, and thus is really Canis lupus.  Maybe it should be “var. familiaris.

 

The plural of “genus” is “genera.”  The singular and plural of “species” are both “species.”  (“Specie” is an unrelated word; it means money.)  Both of these plurals are quite unusual forms for Latin, which causes yet more confusion.  It may be useful to know that the usual Latin masculine ending is –us, feminine –a, neuter –um; corresponding Greek endings are –os, -a, -on; plural of the neuter in both languages is –a (as in genera), which can be confusing.  Tree species names are usually in the feminine, because the Latins believed trees had female spirits living in them.  So, e.g., Pinus ponderosa, though Pinus has the masculine ending.

 

Scientific names follow a rule of priority: the name given when the species was first described must be used forever.  There are very few exceptions.  These occur mostly when the description was too poor to be regarded as adequate, and no type specimen was saved.  Even the sacred Linnaeus was prone to this—his name Achras sapota for the chicozapote was considered so bad that it was renamed (with a new, split genus) Manilkara achras (Mill) Fosberg.  However, most botanists are enough in awe of Linnaeus to keep calling it Manilkara sapota (L.) Van Royen.   Note, again, Linnaeus’ and others’ fondness for local names; sapota is from Nahuatl tzapotl, meaning any soft fruit.

If the original description was so bad that nobody can figure out what it applied to, the name can become a nomen nudum—a “naked name,” without a real application.  Usually, though, there is another name available for the species in question.  Sometimes a very obscure earlier name and description are discovered in some old tome.  This should mean that the long-established name should be killed, but the international nomenclature commissions can be charitable, and spare a long-established name.

 

For every scientific name, there has to be a “type specimen”: An actual example of the species (or genus or subspecies), preserved in a museum, herbarium, or similar archive.  This should, and almost always is, be the individual on which the original Latin description was based.  This applies to fossils as well as to living species.  This allows checking back.  If geneticists determine that a species has to be split into two or three, for instance, you want to know which of those two or three the original type was, so you go back and look at it.  I’m not sure what the type specimen for Homo sapiens is!  If there is no surviving type specimen (as there usually is not for those 18th-century names), a type specimen will have been picked out “by subsequent designation,” as we say in the trade.

Ideally, type specimens, and all other specimens for that matter, are filed away in their storage cases with labels that provide the exact location of collection, with information such as what kind of vegetation was around, what date the item was collected, and other useful data.  We ethnobiologists pray for some indication of how the plant or animal was used!  Some labels do have that!  Always remember to put as much data on a label as you can fit on it, and keep a backup record with even more data (labels do get lost).  If you are doing field work in zoology you probably aren’t collecting much, but if you’re studying ethnobotany, or ethnoentomology or ethnomycology, you have to collect specimens and get them properly identified and archived at local institutions.

 

Old-fashioned drug names were in Latin too, and can look confusingly like scientific names, e.g. oleum olivarum, olive oil.  The Chinese have most unfortunately revived this custom and given Chinese drugs modern Latin names, e.g. fructus Lycii for goji berries (the fruit of Lycium chinense or L. barbarum).  People, especially Chinese writers, now confuse these with scientific names, creating total chaos, e.g. by mixing up the usage of  fructus Lycii and Lycium chinense as if they were somehow the same thing.  I wish these Chinese drugs had kept their Chinese names.

 

The Historical Context of the Huihui Yaofang

Saturday, November 15th, 2014

The Historical Context of the Huihui Yaofang, a Yuan Medical Encyclopedia

 

 

“A table without vegetables is like an old man devoid of wisdom.”

–Medieval Arab proverb, quoted Ahsan 1979:13

 

Some general reflections

Medical practice is part of culture, and thus influenced by all the factors that influence culture.  Everyone knows this now, but evaluating the relative influences is difficult.

The general view taken in the present work is that medicine is the result of a great number of people trying their best to fix perceived individual, personal, and demographic problems of living and functioning.

One question concerns “normal” versus pathological or “abnormal” (Canguilhem 1991).  A given culture, or its medical establishment, establishes ideas of what is normal, what is healthy, what is acceptable, and what curing is possible.  These may define, or may be defined by, the “pathological” and the “abnormal.”  Statistical norms may be quite different from health goals.  We generally accept the fact that the average life expectancy is below the potential life expectancy.  In preindustrial societies, the average life expectancy was around 30.  Human potential life expectancy is over 80 (possibly 90-100).  Which is normal?  What, therefore, is pathological?  Obviously a person dying at 80 in a preindustrial society would be far from “normal” for that society, but would be less “pathological” than the normal!

Statistical norms are not health.  All cultures realize that there are deeper issues here.  Let us briefly consider universal human experience.  All persons, at some time, rather suddenly begins to feel awful in one way or another, and to find they have trouble doing what they usually do with ease.  They then usually recover after a few days, weeks, or months; sometimes they never recover; often they decline and die.  Among the commonest problems, worldwide, are respiratory difficulties; digestive and eliminative problems; sudden pains; rashes; sores; disabled limbs; wounds and other traumas; and bites, stings, and poisonings.  The causes of many of these are obvious; an arrow in the leg, a dog bite, or a bruise from a fallen rock are easy to explain.  (The victim may add a belief that someone bewitched the rock to fall on her, but that is a different question.)  Genetic conditions were less easy to spot, but following family genealogies for any length of time demonstrated the existence thereof.  The causes of respiratory and digestive upsets and sudden internal pains are less obvious.  Psychologists have shown that humans feel a need to understand and explain what is happening to them (it gives some sense of control, or at least some hope), and thus it is no surprise that most cultures have theories of illness.  No one imagined anything like bacteria or protozoa before Leeuwenhoek, and even then it was not till centuries later that people imagined such organisms could cause disease, so cultural theories in the days before laboratory science had to do without such causal agents.  The obvioius suspects included, in the classic Hippocratic formulation, “airs, waters, places”; as well as witchcraft, invisible miasmas and contagions, obscure poisons and things that potentiated poisons, and similar abstract entities.  Humans have been astonishingly creative in explaining disease, because they were desperate to find cures, and one reasonable way to find a cure for something is to figure out what causes it and then block that cause.  Unfortunately, this led to treatments based on logical deduction from inevitably flawed premises.  The history of medieval coping with bubonic plague epidemics is instructive: usually the first recourse was to kill unpopular minorities (they must have been performing evil magic), followed by prayer and ritual.  Then came various herbal and spice cures, some of which actually had some effect.  Finally, truly effective methods—notably quarantine—were invented.  Plague was quite well controlled long before Pasteur and Yersin identified the true causative agent (the bacterium Yersinia pestis).

The main alternative—trying all kinds of plants, animals, minerals, and manipulations in hopes that something might do some good—is what actually worked, and so a wide range of highly effective biological and mineral drugs were known many millennia before science could explain why these worked.  Thus traditional medicine had its causal theories, usually far from biomedical findings, but also had a vast range of empirical remedies, usually founded on something related to biomedical realities.

In talking about illness and health, we are talking about set-points culturally defined, and not always agreed on even within one culture.  My idea of health may be less ambitious than my wife’s.  Some humanistic psychologists of the 1960s had serious goals for mental health beyond the wildest dreams of the psychiatrists of today.  We have greatly tempered our expectations as experience has taught us that we cannot fix everything.

This line of thought is most relevant to the HHYF when we consider what was meant, in those days, by “treating” or “curing” a condition.  With the medicines available then, few illnesses could be “cured” in the modern biomedical sense.  People had to be satisfied with symptomatic relief, or even with nothing beyond counterirritation to make them forget their initial problem.  (Acupuncture may do no more than that.)  Many herbal drugs of medieval times work well, but most are greatly inferior to modern drugs in actual healing power.  Persons of that time might then say they were “cured” when a biomedical doctor of today would say only that they had had symptomatic relief, or that their condition was improved enough to let nature do the rest.

The “normal” would have included a good deal more grief than we think is normal today.  On the other hand, the many folk and traditional remedies for things we now find very difficult to treat—from cancer to infertility—show that hope was very much alive.  People did not give in.  They refused to bow to the repeated failure of their remedies, and they refused to regard such conditions as too “normal” to be treated.

My experience with traditional Chinese and Maya medicine is that many or most common remedies work appreciably, in biomedical terms, but are usually less effective than biomedical drugs.  The Maya learned to use large quantities of many herbals, knowing that sooner or later something would probably help.  In the small area I study, some 350 species of plants and animals are used medicinally.  The common ones have almost all been shown to work, at least a tiny bit, in biomedical terms (Anderson 2003).  This medicine was far less effective than modern biomedicine, but was a great deal better than nothing.  To give some figures (see Anderson 2003, 2005), infant mortality in rural Quintana Roo in the 1930s ranged up to 50% in remote communities.  It is now around 5-10% and falling fast.  Without even Maya medicine, it would almost certainly have been well over 50%.  So traditional medicine brought it down to 50% or a bit less, and certainly did better than that, before the Spanish brought in new diseases (notably malaria) against which the Maya had no defense.  Modern medicine has almost eliminated the other 50%.  Traditional Maya medicine for adults was more effective than for infants.

The medieval Chinese and Near Eastern cases were probably comparable.  One remembers a cautionary note:  many observations in the Middle Ages suggested that prayer worked better than doctors’ medicines.  This is less a comment on the power of God than on the kind of medicine purveyed.

Christianity, Islam, and Daoism alike taught that one should endure suffering as nature’s or God’s way, but practically no one seems to have lived by that fatalistic rule if they could avoid it.  The Muslim medical books in particular are full of justifications for treating what some might consider to be Allah’s will.  Muhammad himself, according to reliable traditions, advised practicing medicine.  He or his followers pointed out that God may have made the illnesses but He made the remedies too, and they were presumably made to be used.

A fascinating insight into how people viewed traditional Galenic medicine and its rivals is found in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1932, orig. 1651).  Burton compares Galenic cures of all sorts with philosophy, religion, and other disciplines, admitting that none cured his lifelong depression.  Some helped more than others.  He maintained an open but rather skeptical mind.  He discusses at length not only these treatment modalities but the ways they were viewed at the time.  One suspects that Near Eastern and Chinese patients had similar thoughts.

 

In this book and all my work in medical anthropology, I use the term “western medicine” correctly:  to cover the medicine of the western world, including the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition and its relatives, often blended with magic and faith-healing, that have dominated the west for almost all of history.

The use of the phrase “western medicine” to mean modern laboratory-based biomedicine is a serious mistake.  Western medicine is, by all standards of linguistic usage, the medicine of the west—i.e., the above.  Biomedicine was international from the beginning.  It resulted from the confrontation of European medicine—itself largely derived from the Near East—with the different but obviously valuable traditions of Native America, East Asia, South Asia, and Africa in the Age of Discovery and later.  It developed largely in France and Germany, but with international teams.  Both Pasteur and Koch had Asian students.  Europeans based in or widely experienced in overseas colonial locations were also important from the beginning, and they drew on local expertise wherever they were.  It was and is a truly international field.  There is nothing particularly “western” about it, except for the unthinking tendency within it to propagate western ideas of “man vs. nature” and “man the machine.”  These two attitudes are not really part of biomedicine in the way that laboratories and chemistry are; rather, they are pathologies that it has had to overcome (and it has a way to go).  The rather authoritarian doctor-patient relations characteristic of biomedical practice, and sometimes blamed on “the west,” are actually fairly characteristic of all medicine everywhere, including shamanic healing in ancient North America.

This being the case, calling biomedicine “western” is obviously an outrageous bit of racism and colonialism.

 

Going Back in Time:  Early history of the medical traditions in the HHYF

The history of Near Eastern medicine begins in Sumer and Egypt.  What little is known of early Mesopotamian medicine consists largely of religious formulas and texts, including magical spells, though contagion was recognized and many herbal and other remedies—some at least effective—were known (Bottéro 2001; Potts 1997).  Many of the foods later used in healing were already known (see Potts 1997:56-90), and at least some were used medicinally. Egypt is better known, through about a dozen detailed and important papyri ranging from over 1500 BC to around 200 AD.  Unfortunately, major problems with understanding the disease and drug names prevent full incorporation of these very ancient traditions in medical history.  Egyptian herbal drugs, however, can often be identified (Manniche 1989; Nunn 1996).

Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian medicine has been accused of being largely magical.  This seems broadly true for the former.  Most of what we have from Mesopotamia is prayers and spells.  We have some herbal lore, and excellent editions of rather late culinary texts (Bottéro 1995).  All these are empirical enough.  Several Babylonian and even Sumerian drug names carry over into Arabic (Sumerian TAR.MUSH for lupine, Arabic turmus; Sum. A.BAR  for lead, Arabic abār; Akkadian bis.ru, Arabic bas.al for “onion,” and so on; Levey and Al-Khaledy 1967:29).  Wormwood was already used in Akkadian medicine, plantain in ancient India and Egypt, and of course cannabis has been used for various reasons since time immemorial in India and Central Asia (Levey and Al-Khaledy 1967:43).

One of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time was Henry Layard’s 19th-century find of the library of the Assyrian kings at Nineveh (see Van De Mieroop 2007:261-265).  Thousands of cuneiform tablets were neatly ranked on shelves, arranged by topic, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to religious texts to economic documents.  This is the earliest true archive and the earliest true library that is well known (although certainly far from the first in history).  The importance of the invention of archiving cannot be exaggerated; archives and libraries made civilization possible (Posner 1972).  But the medicine reflected in the vast Nineveh library is of the magical kind.

The dominance of magic in Egypt has been exaggerated.  Many medical papryi exist, and reveal an extensive and generally pragmatic pharmacopoeia (Manniche 1989; Nunn 1996).  Minerals and herbs were important, and many of the identifiable ones are medically significant, usually being carried over into later practice.  Most are effective for the stated purposes.

These problems of interpretation also make it impossible to calculate the influence of Mespotamian and Egyptian medicine on the development of Greek medicine.  Estimates of influence range from overwhelming to near zero.  In regard to Egypt, it is probably best to trust Herodotus, who was there and knew what he was talking about.  He saw major influences on practice, especially pharmacopoiea and (proto-)epidemiology, but does not seem to have detected much influence on theory per se.  This may be an accident of preservation, however, for there is no surviving evidence for Egyptian medical theory; the medical papyri are practical manuals or magical spells.  Theophrastus also tells us a great deal about Egyptian plant use, and surely the Greeks—always quick learners—adopted whatever knowledge they found useful (cf. Craik 1998:6).

No Greek stepped forward to provide a similar account of dependence on Babylonia.  Major influence surely occurred, but we have little idea what it was, beyond knowledge of herbal drugs, magical spells, and general considerations of pathogenic entities.  Influences from these ancient realms did not clearly shape the Hippocratic-Galenic medicine that appears in the HHYF, and thus need not be addressed in detail here.

Ancient Greek medicine achieved highly sophisticated scientific status at a quite early time (Phillips 1973).  Most of our knowledge is, naturally, of the Hippocratic tradition (Craik 1998; Hippocrates et al. 1978) which eventually triumphed over all competitors, but we are aware of many other related traditions that vied for place.  (For some of these, in relation to Chinese medicine, with possibility of mutual influence not totally ruled out, see Unschuld 2009.)  Medicine seems to have been especially developed on the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea.  Hippocrates came from Cos, an island otherwise noted largely for its superior variety of lettuce, which he no doubt enjoyed.  (Now called “Romaine,” it is said to be the oldest variety of vegetable in the western world, having been good enough to hold its own against all later comers.)

Hippocrates, and, in general, the doctors of his time, worked with “regimen”:  diet and lifestyle.  They advised on food, exercise, rest, exposure to airs and places, and the like.  They used drugs only when necessary.  Surgery was left to specialists; ordinary doctors did not do it.  The original Hippocratic oath included a clause that the doctor should not poach on the surgeon’s territory by attempting to operate.  We will meet this emphasis on regimen again.  It is very clearly shown even as far afield as the Mongol Empire (see Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000).

We do not know how much of the humoral tradition is owed to Hippocrates, but by very early times the Greek medical system became based on the wider idea—found in Aristotle and elsewhere—that there were four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, and four qualities:  hot, cold, wet and dry.   Earth is cold and dry, fire hot and dry, water cold and wet, air hot and wet.  This was to be applied to medicine, the final synthesis being effected by Galen (see below).

Among competitors to the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, Soranus stands out.  He was a methodist, meaning that he preferred to stick to meticulous observation rather than to received wisdom or to the theoretical speculations that were becoming dominant in the Hippocratic school and would soon triumph in the work of Galen. Soranus used lower-level hypotheses and midrange theory, but sedulously avoided grand theorizing.

Soranus’ work on gynecology survives (Soranus 1956), and is an amazing document.  Most of the descriptions and recommendations would do credit to a modern text.  Received wisdom falls to observation in almost every section of the book.  Soranus disproves folklore about how to tell if an unborn child will be male or female, if a freckled woman is an unfit mother, and on and on.  Only a few wrong-headed ideas get grudging provisional acceptance.  One was the belief that a baby can be marked by what the woman sees or eats at conception, or during pregnancy.  It is still worldwide; Soranus reported it without enthusiasm but without denial.  One can only wonder what would have happened if methodism had triumphed.  We would have been spared a vast amount of nonsense.  On the other hand, it seems that the human mind needs theories and explanatory models as surely as the eye needs light.  In any case, Soranus’ meticulous attention to observation of detail and recording of fact clearly influenced the future course of medicine, not least in the Near East.

Another, less medical, tradition that died from Galen’s attacks was Asclepides of Bithynia’s corpuscular theory (Unschuld 2009; Vallance 1990).  This held that the particles of being were not indivisible, but could be subdivided, presumably indefinitely (like space or distance).  Atomic theories tended to prevail instead.

Greek medicine was imperfect enough to lead Cato the Censor to claim it was “a Greek conspiracy to murder foreigners,” and Pliny to quote a common epitaph “He died of a crowd of doctors” (Parsons 2007:178).  Medieval observations that praying over a sick person was more effective than doctors’ medicine were probably all too true.  One could survive the prayers, but the medical treatments were often enough to kill the healthiest and strongest.

The problem was not so much the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition itself, with its sensible directions about food and exercise.  The problem was the increasing elaboration of toxic drug mixes, bleeding, cupping, and other damaging therapies. Europe, with its tradition of driving devils from the sick, was worse served, and one wonders today how anyone survived premodern doctoring there.  However, the Near Eastern world was spared the worst of this by the Arab and Persian medical emphasis on comfort and enjoyment.  Thus the medicine transmitted to China in the HHYF was a fairly “heroic” sort, but not downright deadly.

 

Greece to Near East

We sometimes forget that much of Greek medical research and development took place in what we would now call the “Middle East,” specifically Asia Minor.  Both the two physicians who most influenced Near Eastern medicine came from there.  Rufus—by far the less important of the two, but still a presence seen in the HHYF—came from Ephesus.  Galen (130-200), the overwhelmingly dominant, hailed from Pergamon (modern Bergama), where for a time he served in a huge medical academy.  Much of it still stands.  The skyline of Bergama is dominated by the enormous marble columns of the Aesculapius temple, which became the core of what would even today be an impressively large medical school.  Photographs are found in Susan Mattern’s excellent biography of Galen (2013, following p. 168).   It lies downslope from the old Roman hilltop town, but above the modern town, which developed around the market.  One can imagine Galen walking down the hill to that huge, raucous market at the hill’s foot, and revelling in the incredible variety of foods and herbs there.  (Alas, he would not have found the unexcelled tomatoes, green beans, chiles, and squash that abound there now; they came long after his time, from a continent unimaginable to him.)

Galen was a contentious, intensely proud man, but also a caring and  responsible doctor, who apparently healed effectively (Mattern provides a wonderful picture of the man).  He upheld his view of Hippocratic medicine against rival schools, notably the Methodists and Empiricists, who were much less theory-conscious.  (He was also aware of Christianity, interestingly; he thought its ideas rather silly but its lifestyle commendable; Mattern 2013: 171-172).  He was a superb anatomist, used to dissecting animals (even live ones) and also defunct humans; he may have once vivisected a human criminal.  However, he is notorious for having assumed that humans had certain features we now know to be restricted to pigs; the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius caught him out in several mistakes of this sort (Mattern 2013).

Though Galen spent most of his life in Rome and other Italian venues, he remains a link to the East.  Later figures often came from or lived in what is now Turkey and Syria.  So to a large extent the transfer from “Greece” to “Islam” consisted of Islamic takeover of formerly Greek lands.  Teachings were still alive.  Moreover, ancient manuscripts (possibly forgotten by the Greeks) often turned up as buildings were redeveloped.  North Africa, specifically Alexandria, was also a great center of medicine. Egypt’s very extensive medical knowledge had already influenced Greek learning for centuries (as Herodotus noted in the 5th century BC). Euclid wrote his Elements in Alexandria, with the benefit of Egyptian surveying knowledge.

Under the later Roman Empire the traditions essentially fused.  The famous library contained at least 400,000 books at peak around 48 B.C., after which the wars of Caesar and then Octavian versus Mark Antony began to take a toll.  Roman wars destroyed the library, and the famous Arab destruction in the 600s A.D. merely finished off a small remnant (see e.g. Kamal 1975:37-38).  The role of Egypt in Greek knowledge, and of southward parts of Africa in Egyptian knowledge, is still extremely controversial.  Suffice it to say that the Greeks themselves admitted freely to learning much from Egypt, and that Egypt’s southward connections are thoroughly proved by archaeology.  The extreme Eurocentric theories of Greek knowledge are wrong.  Exaggerated claims for Egypt’s centrality (going back to Grafton Elliott Smith’s [in]famous “heliocentrism” and more recently exemplified by Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, 1987), however, do not stand up, nor do W. Perry’s claims for Mesopotamia as origin of everything (Lowie 1937).

Galen is most famous for his thorough systematization of the theory that the most basic need in the body is balance between heat, cold, wetness, and dryness.  He argues for this in terms similar to those I have heard today from folk practitioners of traditional humoral medicine.  Excessive sun or fire damage the body, so similar illnesses (fevers, rashes, sores) seem to be from excessive heat.  Moreover, putrefaction generates heat, as in piles of “seeds [presumably, decaying fruit is meant] or faeces” (Galen 2006:160), and of course in infected wounds.  And of course “passion [is] a seething of the heat around the heart” (Galen 2006:161).  Excessive cold damages the body—Galen describes hypothermia well (Galen 2006:165).  So illnesses that look like the effects of hypothermia seem to be from excessive cold; such things would be weakness, pallor, inaction, failure to move actively, and low body temperature.  Similarly for wet and dry.

His theory of humors has influenced medicine for almost 2000 years, and thus is worth quoting in his original formulation:  “…yellow bile is hot and dry in capacity, black bile is dry and cold, blood is moist and hot, and phlegm is cold and moist.  And sometimes each of these humours flows unmixed, but sometimes mixed with others, and the conditions of swollen, indurated and inflamed parts, in consequence, vary still more” (Galen 2006:169).  Cooking or burning could change one humor to another:  phlegm to blood, blood to yellow bile, yellow bile to black bile (a final endpoint, like black charcoal from wood; see Dols 1992:19).  Black bile was added late to the system—early texts have only three—but black bile was needed to fill the cells in the grid (Mattern 2013:53).

Yellow bile is ordinary bile or choler, and excess of it leads to the physical and behavioral signs we still call “choleric.”  Black bile is the foul mess of dead blood and other such effluvia that collects in the bile duct and nearby intestine in severe cases of malaria, hepatitis, and similar conditions.  Contrary to some claims in the literature, it is not imaginary.  It was all too common and visible in the malarial old days.  Excess of it made one melancholy, a term used more widely than today.  A melancholy person was thin, pale, weak, sad or even mentally disturbed, and despondent about activity.  This would certainly be true of anyone with such severe hepatitis or malaria that they accumulated black “bile,” and it could also cover the effects of chronic tuberculosis or viral infection just as well as simple mental illness.

Excess of blood made one “sanguine,” and in greater excess downright manic.  Phlegm—which was not only mucus but, at least in later times, any watery discharge—made one, of course, phlegmatic.  Carl Jung correctly pointed out that these conditions may be bad physiology, but they are pretty good psychology.  Galen and his followers knew personalities well.  Not for nothing do we still talk about sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholy personalities.

Galen’s medicine was by no means limited to hot, cold, wet and dry.  He saw any imbalance as important.  He was, of course, acutely aware of simple physical accidents—broken bones, bruises, cut-wounds, and so on.  He was an expert on digestion, and was fully aware of the relative digestibility of many foods and the obvious inadequacy of the hot-cold-wet-dry model to explain this fully (Galen 2000, 2003).  His experience, as well as older theories, taught him that excess or deficiency of flow or openness was as bad.  Overdilation and overconstriction could come from humoral imbalance, but could come from physical damage or other factors.  Overgrowth or undergrowth of tissues was also of obvious etiological significance.

Like Hippocrates, he recognized contagion, but gave it a minor place, apparently seeing it as occurring only when corrupted airs affected a susceptible body.  He saw, or at least Muslim Galenists thought he saw, the spirit as divided into a hot dry vital spirit; a cold and wet psychic spirit; and a hot and wet natural spirit, as well as animal, vegetable, and rational components to the intellect (Nasr 1976:161).  He also recognized “semitertian” and tertian fevers, i.e. malaria—identifiable by their climaxes every second or third day.  Tuberculosis and leprosy also are fairly clearly described in his writings (Mattern 2013:119-121).  He fled from—but described—the horrific plague of 168, which may have been smallpox (Mattern 2013:200).  He recognized that the womb did not wander around the body (as in classical ideas of “hysteria”) but did give it a certain mind of its own, as well as recognizing it could become inflamed and infected (Mattern 2013:233); later Arabic medicine, following Galenic tradition, used effective treatments for these conditions.

In general, his theory was one of balance along many dimensions.  This idea may have come from the ideas of the mysterious Alcmaeon of Croton (Johnston in Galen 2006:15), and, even farther back, from ancient Egyptian ideas of superfluity and corruption (Dols 1984).  Later ages simplified it, often cutting out all but the hot/cold dimension.

It is important to note that this was a theory based on the total body, and on a global imbalance of its normal components (Canguilhem 1991:40)—as opposed to, for example, a theory of medicine based on alien “germs” that invade the body and secrete poisons there.  Galen’s “normal” is a perfectly balanced set-point—the set-point differs for individuals according to their humoral consistency, the climate and land they inhabit, and their immediate environment.  It is a personal ecology.  Today’s“germ theory” normal is a body without alien invaders.  We now see normality as defined in a whole community ecosystem.

Galen’s enormously extensive writings cover common foods and their values, all common symptoms of bodily problems of any sort, anatomy, physiology, illness classification, and everything else a working doctor might need in the 2nd century.  He also spent a great deal of effort attacking other schools for their oversimplification, naivete, and failure to speculate about causes.  He himself was fascinated (almost obsessed) with cause, following Aristotle in differentiating various meanings of the word (Galen 2006, including Johnston’s introductory and concluding materials).  In particular, he concerned himself with ultimate causes and proximate ones.  Just as a sword cut was caused immediately by the sword but ultimately by the anger of the sword-wielder, so an illness could be the result of a whole chain of causation.  Galen’s thinking on this was incisive, wide-ranging, and fascinating (Galen 1997, 2006).

George Foster distinguished between “naturalistic” and “personalistic” theories of medicine.  The former ascribe illness to natural, impersonal forces.  The latter blame it on persons:  often human sorcerers, but more often on supernatural persons.  Biblical medicine, and thus much of the medical lore in the Judeo-Christian world, notoriously blamed illness on devils or unclean spirits, or saw it as God’s punishment for sin.  Devils and witchcraft rose in popularity in the European Medieval period; the peak of belief in these was in the 15th and 16th centuries, not in the middle ages.

To all these, Galen’s eminently naturalistic medicine was a wonderful counterfoil (see e.g. Dols 1984:23), saving the Near East (and, to a much lesser extent, Europe) from the full horrors of a medicine that led only to judgmental attitudes toward the sick, beating the “possessed,” and praying over the “punished.”  Galenic medicine was never eclipsed by personalistic theories, even at the folk level, though it was almost eclipsed by religious healing in Europe and had to compete with it in the East (Nutton 1985).  Significantly, some medieval European commentators actually compared prayer with doctors and found prayer more effective—a telling comment on the level of doctoring.  It is also significant that recovery from illness was often seen as a “miracle” in that age, and that many were sainted simply because patients sometimes failed to die under their care.

Paul Unschuld (2009) has stressed the scientific nature of ancient Greek medicine, notably the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition.  This medicine early rejected supernatural explanations, especially the idea that sickenss was due to the arbitrary will of a god or spirit.  Instead, the Hippocratics, climaxing with Galen, developed a medicine based on actual natural laws or principles, thought to be unchanging and all-prevailing.  This contrasted with both supernatural healing and the mere empiricism of many (if not most) of Galen’s rivals.  Unschuld (like many others) sees systematization and lawfulness as the true definition of science, including medical science.  One might argue that even assembling empirically tested remedies is a bsic activity, and usually implies some knowledge of medical science, but certainly the development of a systematic medicine based on fundamental principles is a major achievement.  It had influence in proportion.

Another advantage of Hippocratic-Galenic medicine was put in direct form by the Arab Galenist al-Rāzī (d. 925):  “If the physician is able to treat with foodstuffs, not medication, then he has succeeded.  If, however, he must use medication, then it should [as much as possible] be simple remedies and not compound ones” (cited Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:115).  This was excellent advice then.  It is excellent advice now.  Indeed, advice to this effect is very common today, and is demonstrably continuous with Hippocrates’ advice as transmitted through Galen and the Near East.

Unfortunately for medicine over the succeeding centuries, Galen was systematically wrong.  Galen’s conclusions about ultimate causes are best typified by his speculations about balance of hot, cold, wet, and dry.  He did the best he could with the material at hand.  Faced with the formidable task of explaining physiology (and psychology) without microscopes, chemical analyses, or any other modern technologies, he made the best guesses possible.  Indeed, rashes, burns, sores, and irritated membranes do look like burns, and so for the rest.  Alas, all that was proved is that, in the words of H. L. Mencken, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong” (Mencken 1920:158).

Galen’s other causal speculations are closer to truth, because closer to direct observation.  Inference, especially the most seductively plausible, is a necessary step but a dangerous guide.  Galen was also so dogmatic that he helped give the word its modern meaning; he called himself a Dogmatist, meaning a theorist as opposed to a mere empiric, but he was indeed dogmatic about his positions.

Yet, reading his works on causes (Galen 2006), one is extremely impressed by their scientific spirit.  He tried to build on existing theory and test it against his enormously rich and thorough clinical and experimental observations.  He tested and rejected most of the theories of his time.  He did not mindlessly accept even the work of his idealized forebear Hippocrates.  His work on lovesickness also seems rather modern (Wack 1990); it was carried forward and augmented, with the rest of his medical lore, through succeeding nations and centuries, and influences us still. (Lovesickness continued to be important in Arabic medicine, and thence to Europe; Vilanova 2011; Wack 1990.  But it never reached China, where similar ideas of excessive romantic passion existed but were conceptualized and treated quite differently.)

Galenic medicine is the greatest proof of Thomas Kuhn’s point (Kuhn 1962) that a theory never dies until superseded by a better theory.  Galenic medicine was seen to be shakier and shakier as centuries rolled on, but nothing better offered itself.  Galen had provided a comprehensive, rational, naturalistic, thorough, and beautifully organized system, extremely valuable for organizing, remembering, and systematizing medical knowledge of all kinds.  No one could do without it until Koch and Pasteur in the 19th century radically changed the medical world for all time.

One may wonder, today, what would have happened without Galen.  Western medicine would not have had comprehensive theories; it would have been left largely to religion, secondarily to the “methodics” and “empirics” who tied together systematically-recorded observations with a minimum of theorizing.  Asian medical traditions would have developed without the powerful Greek influence.  Only recently has the full impact of Galen’s medicine on Asia become clear.  I have noted the fact that  the court doctor to the king of Tibet in the 8th century was a doctor from “Rom” (i.e., the Byzantine empire) calling himself “Galenos” (Garrett 2007)!   Galenic medicine continued to flourish in the Indian subcontinent, and still does today, under the name “Unani” (from Arabic and Persian yūnānī, “Ionian,” i.e. Greek).  It is officially recognized in India and Pakistan, and has a large literature, including many of the medicinals added long after Galen’s time.

So Galen’s naturalism survived, and eventually had much to do with the triumph of a scientific medicine in and after the 17th century.  It saved Europe from falling into personalistic religious theories.  In fact, and somewhat ironically, modern biomedicine is actually more personalistic, since it puts so much emphasis on contagion—allowing people to blame friends for colds, lovers for STD’s, and enemies for biowarfare.  Biomedicine also finds place for “stress,” typically blamed on spouses or coworkers or “modern life,” although the actual scientific evidence for social stress as illness-causer is, to say the least, equivocal.  Later Galenic medicine also had a place for imbalance brought on by stressful interpersonal situations.

Galenic medicine spread throughout Asia and eventually throughout Europe, Latin America, and most of the world (Anderson 1987, 1996; Foster 1993).  Cold (sardi), hot (garmi), wet and dry continue in modern Iranian folk medicine (see e.g. Benham 1986), as they do in Mexico, China, and almost everywhere between.  It even influenced music.  In the European Renaissance, melancholy was identified with the bass voice, phlegm with tenor, sanguine humor with alto, and choleric with soprano.  Masses were written accordingly—the sad parts in bass, for example (Boccadoro 2005).

Many Galenic ideas persist today even in biomedicine-drenched Western society.  Most of us, worldwide (literally!), were told in childhood not to get our feet wet, because we would get a cold, or a headache if the cold in the feet drove heat upwards to the head.   Most of us learned not to go out with wet hair, so as not to “catch our death of cold.”  Also, Galenic medicine led to the belief that seafood and dairy products cannot be eaten together, both being very cold.  This belief existed by the time of Jahiz in the 9th century and was propagated by Avicenna (Avicenna 1999:404-405).  He notes that “Indian observers and others” taught us also to avoid milk with sour foods and sour milk-rice following barley meal.  The belief about dairy and sea foods was taken very seriously by my school friends in Nebraska in the 1950s, and in Italy in 1988 a waiter refused—with dramatic gestures—to bring cheese for my wife to put on her seafood pasta.  Others have had this experience too.

Even today, psychology continues the Galenic tradition.  The current personality theories (four-factor or five-factor) are straight out of Galen’s four temperaments.  The “pathological” is a set of extremes derived from ordinary brain functioning, just as Galen said, and we still use his words for some of them.  Depression, for instance, is now popularly seen as “melancholy” gone out of control due to oversecretion, not of black bile, but of serotonin, with undersecretion of dopamine.  And we still call them “neurohumors”!  Truly, Galen has a long reach.

 

Herbals

The other great tradition in Greek medicine was herbal pharmacology.  The first herbal we know is that of Aristotle’s student Theophrastus (1926, orig. 4th century BC).  It is concerned mostly with food and wood, but has a long section on medicinal plants.  More serious was the work of Dioscorides (Dioscorides 1937; Pavord 2005; Riddle 1985).  Pedianos Dioskurides, said to come from Anazarba in Cilicia, was a soldier who saw service widely in the Roman Empire.  During his soldiering career in the 1st century AD, much of it apparently as a medic, he collected herbal lore.  Eventually he wrote it up, producing one of the most amazing botanical achievements in history.

Galen had also been a fine herbalist, good at identifying counterfeits as well as at identifying and using real medicines (Mattern 2013, esp p. 100).  He advises doctors to know rural and village remedies thoroughly, and to know what to do on a sea voyage, in case they were caught far from home without medicines and needed to treat someone (Mattern 2013:110).  He used theriac, which already included dozens of ingredients, ranging from vipers to opium.

Dioscorides classified the plants by form, within that by general use, and within that tended to put obviously similar plants (e.g. Ferula and relatives) together.  He also classified plants by function—by the particular healing qualities they exhibited—as pointed out some years ago by John Riddle (1985).  Thus plants that look and taste very different, and are far apart in Linnaean taxonomy, were placed together if they had similar action on the body.  It was an Aristotelian mode, echoing and drawing on Theophrastus—useful and folk-like rather than formal or theory-driven.  Dioscorides remained the standard herbal for centuries, and is the ultimate fons et origo for the herbalism of the HHYF, as Galen is for much for its medical theory.  Surely few, if any, men have influenced humanity more than these two.  Their systems reached beyond bounds of religion, ethnicity, time, and geography; virtually everyone on the planet today has been at least indirectly influenced by their collections of medical knowledge.

Unlike early Chinese herbals, his herbal is soloidly empirical, with clear, demonstrable, well-grounded effects specified for the plants.  In many—possibly most—cases, he was right, or at least plausible, in his recommendations.  In many, he was wrong, but his mistakes can often be explained by the resemblance of the plant to a more effective one, or by simple, plausible assumptions, such as the idea (nearly universal in the world) that yellow-flowering or yellow-leaved plants cure jaundice.  He uses Galenic humoral classification, but only occasionally does he fall back on deducing from it the presumable curative value of a plant.  By contrast, Chinese herbals routinely classified plants according to yang and yin, fivefold correspondences, and magical qualities, and tended to deduce curative value from these.

Many of Dioscorides’ remedies remained officinal well into the 20th century, and are still used in folk and household medicine—as in my household and millions of others.

A rather dramatic example of the closeness Greek and Chinese medicine is the argument between Dioscorides and Galen about coriander.  Dioscorides, active around 40-80 CE, argued that it is cooling, being a bit astringent.  Galen, however, later held that it is warming, because it feels warming in the mouth and is carminative and digestive—spicy, in fact.  Galen certainly has the best of this argument, but mouthfeel standards.  In any case, the Chinese had exactly the same argument over time—and I have heard it myself, when I asked Chinese consultants about the plant!  Both the fruits and the leaves are up for discussion.  Most Chinese herbals follow Galen and use the same arguments.  It is extremely hard to believe this is not direct influence; the medical uses surely spread with the plant.

Galen also wrote much about pharmacology, and did not indulge in Dioscorides’ flights of taxonomic speculation; Galen therefore proved more useful in immediately succeeding centuries, though Dioscorides triumphed hands down in the Arab centuries.  Galen classified plants by qualities, and indicated the strength.  Plants ranged from hot, cold, wet, or dry to the first degree—barely perceptible in effect—to the fourth, dangerous to all but the strongest constitutions.

Another early source, differing considerably in detail from Dioscorides and Galen but covering plants found in those books, is the Alphabet of Galen.  In spite of the name, it has nothing to do with Galen, and may actually be earlier or at least draw from earlier traditions.  It is highly empirical, including even less magic than Dioscorides.  The entries are very brief, and many of them say the plant or drug in question is “known to everyone,” so it is evidently a memory-prompt for practitioners, not a useful general field manual like Dioscorides’ book.  There are no detailed recipes.  This book has now been issued in a superb modern bilingual edition by Nicholas Everett (2012), and it is actually a cheap paperback.  An affordable first scholarly edition of a medieval text is an amazing innovation in medical literature!  Unfortunately it is of little use to us here, since the entries are too brief for much comparison with the HHYF.

Herbal wisdom shows lukewarm Byzantine and Syriac interest followed by very active Islamic interest.  Byzantine pharmacology, like its medicine, was fairly stagnant.  At least the great Greek sources, and their scientific attitude, were preserved and even somewhat supplemented (Scarborough 1985a).  Its best was exemplified by Oribasius (325-403; like Galen, from Pergamon, and naturally a total Galenist), Alexander of Tralles (525-605), and especially Paul of Aegina (625-690)

Dioscorides’ herbal (Greek, 1st century CE) contained a few hundred plants—over 1000 substances in the expanded edition of the early middle ages.  Oribasius took about 600 from Galen (largely On the Powers of Simple Drugs) and added a few more.  Arab versions eventually included thousands.  Near and Middle Eastern folk medicine, based largely on Greek in recent centuries, contains thousands more.

Around 854 AD, Dioscorides was translated into Arabic, supposedly by a Christian Syrian named Stephanos working under the great translator Hunayn ib Ishāq (Pavord 2005:94).  (There were already herbals in Arabic, recording more indigenous traditions; see Nasr 1976:187.)  In 948 A.D. the Byzantine emperor presented a beautiful Dioscorides edition to the caliph in Cordova, and later a Greek monk, Nicholas, came to help translate it into Arabic; this allowed translation of plant names not familiar to Stephanos.  Derivative works from this were made by Ibn Juljul of Cordova in 982 and ca. 987 A.D. and Ibn al-Nadim of Baghdad, also around 987 A.D. (Sadek 1983).  Both built on the Stephanos-Ishāq version.  Further translation efforts were made from time to time (see Sadek 1983).  Countless books were made based on these; virtually every medical writer in Islam seems to have felt it necessary to do yet another offtake.  Many of these added local herbs.

Such important medicines as camphor, musk, senna (cassia, the laxative), myrobalan (from India), and sal ammoniac entered the pharmacopoeia (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:120). Greek narcotics such as opium and henbane remained in use (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:128-129).

Antiseptics included wine and later—probably—distilled alcohol; rose oil (a surprisingly effective antiseptic); herbal preparations including many members of the laurel and mint families; and resins like frankincense and myrrh.  All these are quite effective, if not usually up to modern levels of effectiveness.  Some, such as thyme, are still with us; thyme oil has been used recently in some hospitals where staphylococcus and streptococcus strains resist everything else.  Note their common use in food, which clearly had at least as much to do with preventing spoilage as with adding good flavors.  (The ridiculous myth that spices were added to cover up the taste of spoiled food has it exactly wrong; spices were added to prevent the spoilage of food, and worked very well indeed.  They also improve nutrition; see Anderson 2005).

The herbal tradition climaxed in the enormous section on materia medica in Ibn Sīnā’s Canon, and in “the manual by Ibn al-Bayt.ār, which ws an alphabetical guide to over 1,400 medicaments in 2,324 separate entries, taken from his own observations as well as over 260 written sources which he quotes” (Savage-Smith et al. 2011:214).

Longer and more impressive than herbals were actual guides for compounding drugs; herbals listed simples.  The books on compounding, aimed at physicians and pharmacists, were known in Greek as graphidia, “little pieces of writing.”  The word graphidion became aqrābādhīn in Arabic.  The HHYF is basically a giant aqrābādhīn, but nothing could be farther from a “little” piece of writing.  The three chapters we have fill 500 pages (in the Chinese), and they are only 1/12 of the total.  Thus the original may well have run 6000 pages.

Kamal’s dictionary of traditional Islamic medicine (1975) cites a number of relevant items.  Kamal cites Avicenna on fattening foods, for instance:  Almonds, hazelnuts, nigella, camphor, pistachios, cannabis (presumably the seeds), and pine seeds.  Make into pills and take with wine.  These are not only fattening but aphrodisiac!  (Kamal 1975:117).  Conversely, slimming can be aided by centaury, birthwort, gentian, germander, parsley, sumac, and other herbs (p. 118).  He gives a whole section on compounds (pp. 164-189), as well as sections on diseases, cauterization, and other relevant matters.

 

The Near Eastern Connection

During the western “Dark Ages,” the Near East was anything but dark.  Of the medieval Near East, Strohmaier (1998:148) says:  “It is significant that the many-faceted scholars who took up medicine never seem to have done so in a superficial manner.”  Philosophers, statesmen, theologians like Moses Maimonides, and even slave girls (if we are to trust the Arabian Nights), knew medicine in detail.

Galenic medicine naturally centered from the beginning in Alexandria and the Greek east.  Alexandria was home to Paul of Aegina, the 7th-century doctor who was most important in preserving the Galenic legacy in Byzantine times.  But Alexandria declined after Christianity entered the area and eventually was eclipsed.  Byzantium and Syria continued to be pivotal.  The Byzantines were less than innovative, and preserved Galenic medicine virtually unchanged.  Never has such a powerful and mighty civilization contributed less to humanity, especially in the areas of medicine and similar sciences (on this and related points, Gibbon 1995 [1776-1788] is still the best).  The few studies of Byzantine medicine turn up little that is new.  The one good comprehensive volume in English is a collection of papers edited by John Scarborough (ed., 1985); some of the papers attempted a revisionist critique of the classic Gibbonian position, but the data in the book are all too clearly in accord with Gibbon.  Medicine continued to be practised, and in some areas (notably veterinary; Scarborough 1985b) it flourished and advanced.  But Galen and his forebears still reigned supreme.

Worse, Christianity influenced by Neo-Platonism taught stoical acceptance of disease and reliance on God rather than medicine (Nutton 1985), leading to a relative decline of medicine in much of the western world.  Islam, in spite of its counsel of “surrender” (islām) to God’s will, was to provide a contrast that could not have been more dramatic.  Muhammad and his followers made it clear that surrendering to God’s will meant making use of His provisions for us, including curative ones.  It did not mean giving up.  This led the caliph Al-Ma’mūn in the 8th? Century to stress the cultural superiority of the Arabs to the Byzantines, credit it to religion, and hold—not without reason—that “the Byzantines had turned their back to ancient science because of Christianity, while the Muslims had welcomed it because of Islam” (Gutas 2011:204).

Galenic medicine thus became the established medicine in Syria, a major center of Byzantine life and thought.  Galenic texts were translated into Syriac, and Syriac doctors became the elite practitioners all over the Semitic Near East.

Greek penetration in the Near East was very long and deep.  With the decline of the Roman Empire, Galenic medicine nested in Syria, Anatolia, and Arabia.  Greek was always the core language, since Galen himself was Greek and wrote largely in that medium, but by the 6th century Syriac was important.  Syriac is close to Arabic, and thus translations could easily be made when the rise of Islam made Arabic the chief language of the Near East.  Greek and Syriac civilizations slowly interpenetrated after Alexander the Great’s time.  Eventually they fused.  Greek science, philosophy, and theology was translated into Syriac.  From at least the mid-6th century onward, Greek medicine was transferred eastward to Arabia and Iran via Syrian practitioners (Nasr 1976:173 lists some of these).  Syriac was the initial language of transfer, but Greek, Iranian, and Arabic became common.

Hospitals evolved in the Byzantine world after 200 or 300 AD.  Called nosocomia, “sick-houses” (whence our term “nosocomial infections”), they were the first true hospitals in the world.  It was this which the Arabs discovered when they conquered northward from the desert.  (Syriac medicine is little known and less translated; see Budge 1976 [1913]—it is revealing that a source from 1913 is still standard.)  The Arabs adopted this tradition, including the hospital, and greatly added to it; “it is evident that the medieval Islamic hospital was a more elaborate institution with a wider range of functions” (Savage-Smith et al. 2011:212).

Rufus of Ephesus, Soranus, and even obscure Greek magic-and-charm doctors were well known.  The great Byzantine encyclopedist Paul of Aegina lived long enough to hear of the rise of Islam—assuming he was well posted on the news.  His work was to exert a major influence on Near Eastern medicine and thence on the world.

After Nestorianism was condemned as heresy in 431 AD, Nestorians moved from Constantinople and Syria to Iran, and were instrumental in founding the Jundishapur (Gundeshapor; “beautiful garden”) medical university near what is now the Iraq-Iran border (Elgood 1951:45-50; Foster 1993).  This medical university had Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian and other faculty, and of course Islamic ones after Islam rose to power in the 7th century.  Teaching was through lectures, readings, and clinical sessions, with apprenticeships similar to modern internships.

This has often been claimed as one of the greatest medical schools in the history of the world, but it seems actually to have been a minor station; it owes its subsequent fame to legends, reinforced by the Bukhtīshū’, a Nestorian family who came from there to Baghdad and became leading medical writers and practitioners.  It now appears that Gondeshapor was only one center among many, and that hospitals, medical schools, and translation activities were widespread in the Greek and Syriac east (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:20).  However, it was clearly important; Pormann and Savage-Smith (2007:80) quote a ninth-century book and other sources that speak of it as the most prestigious source of physicians.  Supposedly Muhammad’s own personal physician was trained there (Isaacs 1990:342).  Besides the Bukhtīshū’, the great doctor al-Masawayh had roots there.

From this time on, odd bits of Greek lore drifted into Near Eastern languages and sources, as what Ullman (1978:24) called “erratic blocks.”  (We use this concept to deal with the same phenomenon in medieval China; see Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000.)  Often these were incomprehensible, because the Greek terms were not understood, or useless, because the Near Easterners lacked Greek items or institutions; instructions for how to exercise in the gymnasium, for instance, were wasted.  This did not mean there was no exercise; the Iranian “house of strength,” a comparable institution, probably had its ancestral forms by this time, and the Arabs had their field exercises.  More useful were Greek works on wine and its value, which managed to get translated in spite of Islamic rules!

Repeating the many good histories of Near Eastern science and medicine is unnecessary here (see Campbell 1926; Elgood 1951, 1970; Freely 2009; Goodman 1990; Iqbal 2007; Isaacs 1990; Meyerhof 1984; Nasr 1976; Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007; Ullmann 1978).  We need only pick out themes, including the spectacular internationalization of Near Eastern medicine after 600 A.D., which obviously set the stage for the Mongol transfers of medical knowledge.

Arab medicine before the rise of the Islamic caliphates was a rather chancy affair, if one is to believe Manfred Ullman (1978).  Ullman records such remedies as camel urine, and says that “a woman who has only produced still-births” should trample “the naked corpse of a noble man killed either by treachery or the result of a blood feud” (Ullman 1978:2).  One sees why the Arabs were so quick to adopt state-of-the-art medicine, i.e. Greek medicine, when they met it in Syria during their imperial expansion.  Some of the depressing folk cures were later fathered on Muhammad, but, very fortunately for humanity, Muhammad was actually of a quite scientific and inquiring turn of mind, and established high standards of cleanliness, sanitation, empirical medical practice, and above all the direction to “seek knowledge even as far as China.”  (This hadīth is not the best attested, but fits the character of the man, and I see no reason to doubt it.)  The Arabs had a large body of excellent instructions on hygeine from the Quran and from the traditions (hadīth) of Muhammad (see e.g. Moinuddin 1985:54-55).

The Prophet was an astonishingly health-aware man for his time and place, and his words provided a solid framework for medical science.  His direction about China opened the door for Greek, Iranian, and, of course, Chinese medical knowledge.  (A sidelight on him, and on Islam, is his hadith “In the sight of Allah, the best food is food shared by many.  To eat…alone is to eat with Satan; to eat with one other person is to eat with a tyrant; to eat with two other persons is to eat with the prophets (peace be upon them all)” (Moinuddin 1985:54).  A related proverb, “when you sit in good company, sit long, for Allah does not count against your life the time spent in good company,” has recently been essentially confirmed by medical science; people live longer if they have enjoyed warm sociability, and the life extension actually is proportional to the time spent involved in pleasant socializing.  This accurate observation, along with the Arab realization that pleasing tastes and sensations aided healing, should be remembered in all that follows.

Pre-Islamic Persian medicine was apparently a good deal more organized and developed.  Zoroastrianism involved many purification rituals, some more pragmatically useful than others.  Filth and putrefaction were banned from human presence.  Hospitals and medical schools apparently existed (Elgood 1951:12).  On the other hand, washing with urine was typical (Elgood 1951:15).  Dogs were considered pure, and contact with them could cleanse defiled humans (Boyce 1979; Elgood 1951:9), but the danger of rabies was well recognized.

Fortunately, Muhammad had spoken favorably of medical practice, so the Near East was generally—but not always—spared from the Christian advice not to go against God’s will by treating illness (see Nutton 1985).  Nor did Muhammad look favorably on the wonderful wandering community of gyrovagues, holy fools, divine madmen, drifting magicians and charm-dealers, qalandars, and other roving and demented healers who seem to have populated the Greek and post-Greek East in uniquely large numbers (Caner 2002; Dols 1985, 1992; both give delightful anecdotes).  They continued in Islamic times, fusing with the Sufi movement, but were never viewed with enthusiasm.  Medicine was serious, scientific business.  After the Mongol period, magic and religious healing increased at the expense of scientific medicine in the Islamic world, but Muhammad’s relatively high standards still held in much of Islam.

On the other hand, in the Near East, as in the Roman Empire, Galenism had to compete with the fatalistic belief that God sent illness and was the only one who could properly cure it.

Serious appropriation of Greek science, including medicine, into the Islamic world began when the Ummayad caliphate consolidated control with a capital in Damascus.  Contrary to some accounts, a major interest in science developed by the early 700s in the Ummayad realms (Dallal 2010:14).  Individuals began to sponsor translations from Greek, usually via Syriac.  The Syriac-speaking population of greater Syria had absorbed Greek civilization from long centuries of Byzantine rule.  Doctors were highly literate and sophisticated—apparently fully integrated into the Greek cultural world.  They soon found that the job of translatiing from Syriac to Arabic was easy compared to going from Greek to Syriac, and set to work.  Multilingual scholars included at least some who also knew the Persian languages (Dallal 2010:15; Gutas 1998).

With the triumph of the Abbasids and their establishment of a capital in Baghdad, medical activity centered thither. Baghdad was a central location.  It was founded around 760 A.D. by Caliph Al-Mansur.  The famous Harun al-Rashid ruled there 786-809.  He founded a great hospital, with live music to soothe the inmates and even—wonder of wonders—carefully prepared and supposedly excellent food.  Good food was believed to be medically important, since soothing and delighting the senses was held to be curative—a point confirmed by modern medical research, if to a lesser extent than the Arabs believed.  Modern hospitals should certainly take note.  (On the sophisticated and excellent cuisine of the age, see Ahsan 1979; Rodinson et al. 2001.)

Music, too, was properly seen as therapeutic.  One medical work—supposedly a Greek one, but probably a Syriac or Arab creation—is known from an Arab version in 815 AD.  It recommends music for mental conditions (and evidently others), for reasons that go back to Pythagorean ideas:  “…music…convey[s] to the soul…the harmonious souinds…of the heavenly spheres in their natural motion….  [W]hen the harmony of earthly music is perfect or, in other words, approaches the nearest to the harmony of the spheres, the human soul is stirred up and becomes joyful and strong” (Dols 1992:168-169).  This reached to our Central Asian focal area of interest.  By the 10th century, music was seen as part of metaphysics and important at cosmic, physical, and spiritual scales.  “Here, the Greek notion of the harmony of the spheres meets the Iranian concept of the influence of the celestial bodies and the impact of sound on the individual” (Lawergren et al. 2000:598).  Musicians were among the craftspersons moved all over the empire by the Mongols, and popular musical styles and usages must have diffused widely.

Hospitals—which abounded by the 900s and 1000s and were excellently appointed—continued to have high-quality live music at least into the 17th century, where the Turkish writer Evliya Chelebi observed it along with flowers used for visual relief and aromatherapy (Dols 1992:173).  While not mentioned in the HHYF, this strong tradition of sensory therapy is vitally important to understanding Near Eastern medicine, and is echoed in at least the taste values of the HHYF.  While the medical theories go back to Pythagoras, the development of a full sensory-therapy medicine seems to be an Arab and Persian creation.

Also noteworthy is the singular lack of blaming the victim in Islamic tradition and medicine.  Illness is a test by God, often to challenge the strongest and most faithful to display their faith.  It is not usually a punishment for sin or a result of foolish personal choices—though the results of excessive eating and drinking were all too well known, and inevitably led to some victim-blaming.   (Both sensory therapy and “innocent until proven guilty” attitudes deserve more serious consideration today.  Western medicine is heavily influenced by the belief that medicine was punishment by devils for sin, and had to be as unpleasant as possible, to punish the sinner and/or drive devils out of the body.  This has carried over, far too often, into contemporary biomedicine and psychotherapy.)

Valuable in the rise of medical knowledge was Islam’s adoption of paper, said to have been learned from Chinese prisoners of war taken at the Battle of the Talas River in 751 (Hill 2000:273).  This famous Arab victory stopped China’s expansion in Central Asia and contributed to the decline of the Tang Dynasty.  By around 1000 A.D., water mills were being used for papermaking (as noted by Al-Bīrūnī, of whom more below; Hill 2000:273-274).  This was the first known use of watermills for any purpose other than grain-milling.

Much of the transfer of Greek knowledge into Near Eastern civilization took place under the Abbasid dynasty (Al-Khalili 2010; Freely 2009; Goodman 1990; Kennedy 2004:253-260).  The Abbasids were of Iranic origin, and thoroughly eclectic in their learning, wanting to counter the dominance of Arab culture as advocated by stern traditionalists (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007).

Jabir ibn Hayyan (fl. 721-776) developed alchemy from Greek roots, and we trace modern terms like “alkali,” “antimony,” “alembic” and “aludel” (the last two being the upper and lower parts of a simple laborator still, respectively) to his usage.

A Christian Baghdadi, Yuhannā ibn Māsawayh, was instrumental in founding the Arab tradition.  He was famous in Europe in later times as Mesue (from the Spanish Arabic pronunciation of his patronym; alternatively Mesue Senior, to distinguish him from a somewhat less eminent descendent).  His father had been trained at Gundeshapor and emigrated to Baghdad.  Mesue wrote original books as well as translating from Greek.

One who studied with Mesue was Hunayn ibn Ishāq, another Christian (Nestorian) Arab.  He became a major translator of Greek texts in the early 9th century (Goodman 1990; ibn Ishāq 1980).  He translated through Syriac, because it had a long history of developing scientific terms based on Greek; one assumes that his influence led, in turn, to development of scientific Arabic.  Most of his translations were into Syriac alone, but he translated many into Arabic, with extreme care and detail (Isaacs 1990); his students, and eventually other medical writers eventually finished the latter task.  He also wrote introductory texts in a question-and-answer framework to introduce Greek ideas to the Arab world.  These have a certain amount of information about herbals and compounds, including the famous theriac, a mysterious and hotly debated Greek compound.

The philosopher Al-Kindī (9th century) had much to do with this, translating and writing treatises on much of the Greek learning, which led to his title “the Arab Philosopher.”  (To the Arabs of that time, the Philosopher, par excellence, was Aristotle, so the phrase means “the Arab Aristotle.”).  He supposedly produced 265 works.  The Hippocratic-Galenic view was harmonious enough with Islamic cosmology and worldview to be accepted enthusiastically (Nasr 1976:159).  Most of the translators were apparently Christian or Jewish (Lewis 1982).

Translation continued on a large scale, and the results were distributed widely.  Many works from the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, as well as other Greek scientific traditions, survive only in Arabic.  (Many, but not all, exist in modern editions; several were published by Cambridge University in the 1970s).

Local medical works soon followed, such as the famous medical formulary of Al-Kindī (800-870; Levey 1966).

Baghdad was a truly international city, not least in its intellectual reach.  Thus, many other medical traditions fed into the stream.  Many scholars summarized classical Indian medicine (Al-Khalili 2010; Hamarneh 1973; Ullman 1978:20), as well as other Indian influences coming via Persia.  Native medicine of the northern and northwestern Near East, including that of the Nabataeans (Hamarneh 1973:104), was also incorporated into the growing tradition.  None of these displaced Greek thinking from primacy, but they progressively added to it and reshaped it.  The role of Indian thinking, in particular, needs reassessment. Africa played into the mix in ways as yet hardly touched by historians.

Outlying areas were not neglected.  An early “where there is no doctor” work was that of the Christian physician Qust.ā ibn Lūqā (820-912; Bos 1992), whose medical guide for pilgrims to Mecca indicates how well-integrated Christians and Muslims were in that time.  In proper Hippocratic-Galenic fashion, he provides diet and regimen instructions, including directions for sexual health.  Meal, barley, biscuits, sugar, and fruit are recommended, as well as easily-digested protein foods.  Oils such as rose oil are valuable for the body (indeed they are, in the desert).  The traveler is directed to be careful to avoid fatigue, which could compromise resistance to illness.  The book is famous for providing an early discussion of the guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis), then identified with Madina, now with Africa, where it is being rapidly eliminated today.  Bos provides comparsions with Greek sources that show the author often simply carried the Greek straight over into Arabic.

Popular works made medicine widely available; such things generally disappear from the record and we never know they existed, but we have the keepers of the amazing Cairo Genizah to thank for saving a few scraps of Hebrew popular medicine along with the tens of thousands of other documents there (see below, and Isaacs 1990:348-351).  The Thousand and One Nights tales also include popular medical lore along with so much else from the popular urban world of medieval Islam.

After this, however, translation of medical or any other materials from the Greek (and, indeed, all foreign languages) almost stopped.  There are few major translations of scholarly lore into Arabic from 1000, and virtually none after 1200, until post-medieval centuries (Goodman 1990; Lewis 1982:76).  Al-Ghazälī gets too much of the credit for checking the progress of Arab rationalism through his conversion to mysticism and traditionism and his consequent argument against rational philosophy (see e.g. Diyäb 1990; Goodman 1990); he merely happened to be the greatest thinker of the last great period of medieval Islamic thought.

The flow reversed; a trickle through Moorish Spain and Sicily quickly became a flood, and Arab works—including Arab translations of Greek texts—swept into Europe, reshaping its culture dramatically.  The Muslim world, however, isolated itself for some time, with translations rare and translators mostly of Christian or Jewish background—often immigrants or captives (Lewis 1982).

 

The High Tradition in the Near East and Central Asia

All this led to a spectacular period of medical activity from 800 to 1300.  It was overwhelmingly Greek in background, but Syriac, Arab, Persian, Indian, and even more remote influences were incorporated. Baghdad gradually lost leadership; Egypt, Iran, and Central Asia became important.  A grand and unified tradition arose.  After 1200 it declined, with little new being added. Europe took over the mantle of leadership, as the region reeled under the blows of invasion, war, plague, and other factors.

Iran rapidly grew as a medical source area, though Iranian medical men often had to go west to flourish. Haly Abbas—Ali ibnul-Abbas al-Majusi “the Magus,” 10th century—was one such.  He wrote a huge treatise on medicine that remained standard until Avicenna’s Canon appeared; Haly Abbas’ work was still considered valuable enough to be translated into Latin, and it had much influence on Europe.

Central Asia for a while was actually the leading intellectual center of the entire world (Beckwith 2013; Starr 2012).  A center of Buddhist thought and science, its conversion to Islam led to an intellectual explosion, as Greco-Arab science from the west met Indian, Chinese and indigenous science in Central Asia.  From Buddhism came the organized, rigorous recursive arguments that later became standard scholastic method in the western world, and also the idea of the college—the Buddhist vīhāra became the Islamic madrasa (sometimes a building was simply converted from one to the other) and eventually reached Europe as the college, an institution first seen in the late 1100s after intense Islamic contacts (Beckwith 2013).  Indian science entered in several forms, including translations of major Indian astronomical and mathematical works (see Beckwith 2013:81-85).  Among worldwide benefits from this, perhaps the most important and well-known is the borrowing of the Indian numbering system, including zero, and the conversion of Indian written numbers into Arabic and then modern numerals.  More to our task in the present book is the translation of several Indian medical works, including the great and basic Caraka-samhitā and Suśruta samhitā, into Arabic in the eighth century (Beckwith 2013:82). The epochal mathematician Al-Khwārizmi had much to do with this; as his name suggest, he came from Khwārazm, roughly modern Uzbekistan.

Through these central Asian contacts, the Arabs drew on Indian civilization with enthusiasm, picking up everything from the concept of zero to medical treatises on, for example, the “404 diseases” recognized by Mahayana Buddhism (Martin 2006).  Indian and Chinese medicine somewhat influenced Near Eastern, but remained almost invisible compared to the Greek heritage.

Central Asia  is of obvious special concern to us in this work.  Its great doctors generally went to Baghdad, or at least to the Near East, in early times; thus ‘Ali b. Sahl Rabbān al-Tabarī (d. ca. 864), author of the Paradise of Wisdom (a notably early medical text), went west to seek his career.   After the glory days of the Abbasid peak, medicine flourished in Central Asia with such leaders as Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (865-925). Al-Rāzī (Rhazes, 850-923) stands out as a judicious critic, who wrote on everything medical or related thereto.  His work on measles and smallpox was still read in Europe in the 19th century, having been translated early (Turner 1995:135-136).  The great polymath Al-Kindī also wrote on medicine (Beckwith 2013:86). A large number of other medical writers flourished under the Samanid dynasty in the region (Richter-Bernburg and Said 2000).  Medical writings were appearing in the New Persian language by 980 (Richter-Bernburg and Said 2000:303).

Most famous of Central Asian medical writers was the polymath Avicenna (Abū ‘Ali Ibn Sīnā), the “Prince of Physicians” (980-1037; see Avicenna 1999, 2012, 2013).  He was probably the greatest of all medieval medical and philosophical synthesists.  He was also responsible for propagating the Buddhist recursive argument form in the Islamic world (Beckwith 2013).  He was so revered that one of his personal copies of Galen (in Arabic) has been preserved (see illustration, Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:42).  His enormous literary corpus includes the Canon of Medicine (1999), which defined medicine not only in the Islamic world but, later, in Europe also, for centuries.  It was a straightforward reworking of Galen, Paul of Aegina, and their tradition.  He considerably extended the humoral medical tradition, mostly from logical extension; the book is notably lacking in case studies, and there is little evidence of his having been a working physician on any scale; he was a scholar and theorist (Álvarez Millán 2010; though for a less negative take see Starr 2012).  The book is in five parts, dealing with general principles and definitions; simple drugs; illnesses; other conditions (from fevers and tumors to wounds, fractures, and poisons); and compound drugs.  It will be noted that this organization is not dissimilar to that of the HHYF.  We have, for instance, the HHYF section on wounds and fractures.

Relevant to the HHYF are passages on the differences of constitution and temperament caused by different climes; people of damp countries are “obese and have a soft and smooth complexion” and are easily tired (Avicenna 1999:210), mountaineers are “brave, strong, and have a long life” (Avicenna 1999:211).  He contributed importantly to the theory of sulphur and mercury as basic chemicals, and he saw that transmutation of base metals into gold did not work (Abdurazakov and Haidav 2000:235).  More specifically, his directions for treating ulcers (Avicenna 1999:537-540) are related to those in the HHYF, but quite different in detail; the HHYF is not drawing directly on him.  He treated 590 medicinal plant substances involving 400 species, essentially the same as Dioscorides’ total (Abdurazakov and Haidav 2000:236) and with a very similar list of plants.  Some are Chinese or Indian in origin (Richter-Bernburg and Said 2000:318); he was quite willing to add to the Greek pharmacopoeia.

Avicenna shows concern especially over food.  A theoretical question concerns how food is digested and converted into human form (Avicenna 1999:220).  This question exercised many great minds in ancient times; it was not obvious how a growing young person changed bread, meat and wine into bone, muscles and nerves.  Avicenna did not pretend to know, but thought that the abstract qualities and character of the food were what mattered, allowing direct translation of the mere material substance.  He classified foods not only as hot, cold, wet, and dry, but—following Galen—as rich or poor, light or heavy, wholesome and unwholesome.  Interesting is his focus on wine; he discusses its values, qualities, and uses at enormous length in many parts of the book.  This, of course, is purely Greek; Muslims in those days drank a great deal of wine, but were not supposed to admit it, let alone to talk about the many virtues of the drink!  (It is true that Iranians like Avicenna had the Zoroastrian wine-loving tradition to draw on, and that is probably relevant here, but the specific instructions in the Canon are, as usual, Galenic.)  Avicenna knew a good deal about anaesthetics such as opium (Avicenna 2013:403-404), and other effective herbal remedies, and had good advice on regimen, including regimen for travelers under harsh circumstances.  He seems to have been more theorist than clinician, but well aware of clinical realities.

Al-Bīrūnī (Abū Rayhān Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Bīrūnī, 973-1048), another Central Asian polymath (from Khwarazm, his original language being the Iranic Khwarazmi), produced a medical formulary with 1116 drugs discussed; 880 were medicinal plants, 117 minerals, 101 animals, and 30 compound remedies (Abdurazakov and Haidav 2000:236).  It was in alphabetic order by drug name in Arabic, and provided synonyms in Syriac, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Persian, Soghdian and sometimes other tongues, as well as description, literary references, uses, and varieties (Saliba 1990:420).  He is much better known for his works on mathematics and geography (Al-Khalili 2010), but his work on medicine was influential and important (see also Beckwith 2013; Starr 2012).

Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039), another Central Asian, contributed to optics, understanding that vision depends on emanations from objects that define the form of the latter (rather than emanations from the eye, reflected from the object, as Aristotle and his followers thought).  This understanding led to considerable development of scientific optics, including understanding of the rainbow, and was eventually influential in medieval Europe, where Roger Bacon and others knew Ibn al-Haytham’s work at some remove (Al-Khalili 2010; Hill 2000:260).

The Bakhtishu’ family of physicians contributed much to herbals.  Ibn Bakhtishu’ (d. 1058) wrote a book “on the usefulness of animals,” following Aristotle’s zoology.  It survives in a beautifully illustrated 13th century edition of a Persian translation (see Komaroff and Carboni 2002:142, 244).  The illustrations, like other art of the time, were greatly influenced by Chinese art; this was the period of the Mongol information superhighway, and art styles flowed even more readily than medical knowledge.

Among the many later medical writers in the area, we may single out Zayn al-Dīn Ismā’īl b. al-Husayn al-Juzjānī (c. 1042-c. 1140).  He has been called “Ibn Sina’s most influential follower” (Freely 2009:90).  Writing in both Persian and Arabic, he made Khwarazm a center of medicine after 1100.  His work was highly influential on medicine in Europe and the west as well as central Asia.  He compiled an encyclopedia, the Treasury Dedicated to the King of Khwarazm, based on Ibn Sina’s Canon (Freely 2009:90).  This work may very well be particularly important as an ancestor to the HHYF.

Related to medicine in that it shows a major knowledge of biological technology is the early use of oils in painting in Central Asia; the earliest use of oil paints in that area is at Bamiyan.  European use of oil paint (not counting animal marrow in prehistoric cave art) came later (Holden 2008).

Unfortunately, Central Asia, world leader for half a millennium in almost all intellectual pursuits, declined in the 1100s and was utterly devastated by war and disease in the 1200s and 1300s.  The Turks and then the Mongols did a thorough job of ravaging a land that had never been very well governed.  The rulers of Central Asia were rarely equal to their philosophers and scientists, and in any case a realm consisting of far-scattered oases in a vast desert is not easy to hold together.

After the 1200s, the Little Ice Age hit the formerly flourishing economy very hard, and the Silk Road—already declining after the fall of Tang in 907—was eclipsed by the steady rise in sea trade, of which the Portuguese explosion in the 1400s was only the final culmination, not the origin.  Central Asia was never to rise again, and remains, of all places on earth, the one that has fallen farthest.  Afghanistan, once one of the most brilliant regions, now ranks at or near the top on lists of the world’s most troubled nations.

Frederick Starr (2012) and Christopher Beckwith (2013) agree that much of this was due to resurgent puritanical right-wing Islam, especially as advocated by the brilliant and troubled Central Asian theologial Al-Ghazālī (1058-1111).  I find it hard to believe that an ideology, and especially a single ideologist, can devastate a region for centuries—though we have the baneful effect of Marxism in Russia and China as modern exemplars.  I would respectfully point to the other factors, especially the decline in Silk Road trade as China and India went through waves of war and conquest (often—ironically—by Central Asians).  The brilliant ferment that came from Greco-Arab and Buddhist civilizations meeting was lost forever.  In Europe, however, it began at the same time Central Asia fell; Beckwith (2013) rightly compares the effect of Arabic and Islamic civilization on Europe with the effect that western culture had on Japan after the Meiji Restoration.  But that is largely outside our purview here.

 

Moving back from Central Asia to the Near East, among many important works by Muslim Arabs we may single out Ibn al-Jazzār’s Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment for the Sedentary (10th c?), because it is now well-known in English thanks to the exemplary work of Gerrit Bos (e.g. 1997, 2000).

Abd al-Latīf al Baghdādī (1162-1231) traveled from Baghdad to Egypt, observing it in 1200-1202, during a time of plenty followed by a low Nile flood that led to massive famine.  Perhaps a third of the population died.  His great book The Eastern Key (1964) describes the enormous feasts of the good years, when a recipe for a light picnic lunch requires four whole sheep baked into three pies.  It then describes the horrific deaths of the year of Nile failure in what is still one of the best descriptions of famine in all literature.  The mass death allowed al-Latīf to observe that the jawbone is one bone, not made up on two bones as Galen held.  This was a rare triumph of observation over dogma in Arab medicine.

Ibn Rid.wān also wrote of Egypt, noting, among other things, that wheat and other grains grew quickly there but also quickly rotted in storage.  He correctly realized that this was due to the hot, damp climate, and assumed that humans would do the same, since they not only lived in the same climate but lived on the grain and thus absorbed its nature (Mikhail 2011:204).  The principle of “early ripe, early rot” was well established in medicine of the time.  He and other doctors were also aware, in spite of the Islamic dubiety about “contagion” (see below), that Nile water could carry disease if dead animals and sewage were thrown in it (Mikhail 2011:204-212). Ibn Rid.wān also anticipated modern good sense in advising peopple to “choose foods that were new, fresh, firm, and solid,” including “the most recently caught fish” and meat from “young animals that had been allowed to graze freely on fresh grass” (Mikhail 2011:213).

Other triumphs included clear descriptions of diseases.  Hippocrates and Galen were still struggling to figure out which symptoms were significant and which were not, leaving us puzzled today at their descriptions of epidemics.  The Arabic literature thus gives us the first identifiable descriptions of smallpox, measles, hemophilia, and other clinical entities (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:56).

Syriac Christian medicine continued to flourish and developed as part of the same stream.  Oddly, our only complete translation of an encyclopedic medieval Near Eastern medical work is Wallis Budge’s translation, now over 100 years old, of an anonymous and obscure Syriac manuscript he found in Mosul (Budge 1913).  He thought it was from the 12th century, but the medicine seems more similar to that of the 13th and 14th—at least the prescriptions are very similar to those of the HHYF and its Near Eastern contemporaries.  The manuscript consists mostly of an excellent, thorough summary of medieval Galenic medicine, to which was added a long astrological and meteorological treatise and a short section of folk cures.  The latter are strikingly different from the first section.  The first section is typical of the elite Galenic tradition of the time.  The last section runs heavily to outright magic and to brief cures based on dung, carcasses, urine, menstrual fluid, and other classic ingredients of magical folkloric healing.  Descriptions of conditions and cures are very brief.  We are evidently dealing with an uneducated, unlettered tradition transmitted largely by word of mouth, and rarely reflected in writings.

Islamic medicine had shunned the concept of contagion (Stearns 2011), because Muhammad said in a famous hadith that contagion, ghouls, evil omens, and similar magical things do not exist.  This makes it appear that Muhammad was speaking of something like sympathetic magic or magical pollution, especially since he also gave a great deal of good public-health advice, ranging from hand-washing and other personal sanitation issues to saying that one should not water sick camels with healthy ones.  The ambiguity allowed the more liberal and medically-experienced Muslim, such as ibn Rushd, to bring in contagion through the back door (so to speak; see Stearns 2011).  And of course pragmatic administrators acted as if contagion were real, not worrying too much about the official position (see e.g. Mikhail 2011:215-217).  In hospitals, for instance, “special sections were reserved for the treatment of contagious diseases” (Dallal 2010:22).  In general, however, even after the great plague of 1346-48, Islamic medicine did not allow much exploration of the idea; the plague was ascribed to jinns piercing people with darts.  Christians were much more receptive to the contagion idea, but tended to think of it more as a metaphor for sin and heresy than as a scientific way to deal with disease; however, their openness allowed them to invent and invoke quarantines and other ways of dealing with the plague, as well as leprosy and other matters (Stearns 2011).  Plague returned often—every nine years, on the average, in Egypt (Mikhail 2011:215)—and had much to do with keeping the Near East from developing along with the western Mediterranean (Dols 1977).

The plague itself spread west with the Mongol armies, and supposedly it was transmitted to Europe via Mongol-held Kaffa (near modern Odessa), where the Mongols used defunct plague victims as missiles to hurl into the city while besieging it (May 2012:200ff.).  Genoese ships then carried it to Europe. The Mongols had lived with it in central Asia, where it is endemic among rodents.  It spread to black rats, and with them it spread throughout the world; as is well known, fleas, especially the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis, transmit it to humans.  In China, it never became epidemic in the way it did in the west, for several reasons: different strains of plague, different rat ecologies (Benedict `1996), long exposure and thus adaptation, and probably other factors (Buell 2012).

 

Spain and North Africa soon followed Baghdad into scholarship and the arts.  They soon took on central roles (see e.g. Álvarez Millán 2010).  Spanish Islam produced its first medical works in the mid-tenth century.  These were rather ordinary Galenic offerings.  also a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides became available then, and was translated (not fully; Castells 1998; Fierro and Samsó 1998:xliv).  In the latter half of the 10th century, medicine developed fast, climaxing in the work of Abulcasis—Abū l-Qasim al-Zahrāwī (936-1013)—who produced a huge encyclopedia of medicine that remained standard in the west for centuries and is still a basic source on Arab medicine (Fierro and Samsó 1998).  Medicine continued to flourish, with further herbal work, influences from astrology, and local influences from the Christian realms of Spain.  Again, this marginal region produced one of the truly great figures:  ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198), from Cordova.  An Aristotelian, he influenced medieval European thought profoundly (Leaman 1988). He discovered the fact that “the retina rather than the lens is the sensitive element in the eye” (Freely 2009:117).  Many of the Spanish doctors, unlike Avicenna, were active clinicians (Álvarez Millán 2010).

Sicily and south Italy also became major players (see e.g. Skinner 1997), especially as the tolerant Normans conquered the area and enthusiastically propagated Arab learning in the 11th through 13th centuries.  The most durable example of this has been the Taqwin, an Arab health manual written by the Christian physician ibn Butlān (d. 1066, just as the Normans were conquering England).  It was translated, as the Tacuinum Sanitatis, at the court of King Manfred of Sicily (r. 1257-1266).  A more complete version and a shorter but well-illustrated version eventually circulated (Sotres 1998); eventually there were six major Latin translations.  An excellent introduction to the work, by Loren Mendelsohn (2013), shows that several differences between the Arab and the Latin versions appeared.  Most of these involved leaving out rare and complex Arab foods and adding common European ones.

Versions of the Tacuinum are still in print.  It became enshrined as almost sacred writ when a great school of Arab-Italian medicine developed at Salerno, just south of Naples.  The School of Salerno remained the center of medicine for Europee through the medieval period.  Legend has it that the school was founded by an Italian, a Greek, an Arab, and a Jew.  It circulated the Tacuinum, which in turn evolved into the Salernitan rule, or Regimen sanitatis salernitanum, which appears actually too recent to have been written at Salerno.  The Salernitan rule was famously translated by Sir John Harington in Elizabethan times.  He set it in doggerel, and some of his lines are still famous, especially

“Use three Physicions still; first Doctor Quiet,

Next Doctor Merryman, and Doctor Dyet.”  (Harington 1966:22.)

Still the best medical advice.  The Tacuinum and its offshoots also advised moderation in all things and regular, vigorous, but not excessive exercise.  These counsels are still with us, delivered by almost every health care provider.  The Tacuinum remains influential.

Another thing that has not changed is the university student: “as the contemporary saying went, [students learned] liberal arts at Paris, law at Orleans, medicine at Salerno, magic at Toledo, and manners and morals nowhere” (Whicher 1949:3).  This proverb gives a good concise guide to the top universities in medieval Europe.

 

Jews contributed greatly to medieval medicine throughout the western world.  The Cairo Genizah, a vast collection of papers from a largely Palestinian Jewish congregation, has thousands of medical lists, books and scraps (Lev and Amar 2008).  It reveals an incredibly rich and full medieval world (far more sophisticated and complex than the history books had previously allowed with their stereotypes of simple faith, dirt, and backwardness).  This applies with full force to medicine.  There were countless Jewish doctors, and they were well aware of materia medica.  The Genizah held remnants of 35 medical books, to say nothing of countless letters, lists, deeds, and so on; the books break out about a third Greek (translated; Galen and Hippocrates feature heavily), a third Arabic, and a third medieval Jewish (Lev and Amar 2008:16).

Greatest of them all was Mūsā ibn Maymūn, Maimonides (1135-1204), was born in Cordova, but had to flee the Almohads, settling in Egypt as physician to the ruler.  Here he wrote some of the greatest medical works of the entire medieval period, as well as some of the greatest philosophical works of all time.  Joel Kraemer (2008) has provided an excellent summary of his life, drawing heavily on actual surviving letters, rulings, and other texts, often in Maimonides’ own hand, that survived in the Cairo Genizah.  Unlike the other writers discussed here, Maimonides has not been relegated to “history”; his medicine is largely out of date, but his works on Judaism and Jewish law are still used as authoritative sources, and his philosophical writings are still read with great profit.

Even his medicine is inspiring (Rosner 1998); its common sense, reasonable advice on regimen, and thoroughly enlightened attitude toward practice are still useful.  Most of it is available in English, thanks especially to the intrepid Jewish medical doctor and translator Fred Rosner, and Maimonides’ drug glossary has been especially useful in the present work (Maimonides 1979; see also Maimonides 1970-1971, Maimonides 1997).  His advice on wine is worth quoting.  Finding it the best of medicine but banned by Islam, he told Muslim rulers:  “The legislators have known, as have the physicians, that wine is beneficial to mankind….  [T]he law [shari‘a] commands what is beneficial and prohibits what is harmful in the next world, whereas the physician gives counsel about what benefits the body and warns against what harms it in this world” (as translated by Joel Kraemer, 2008:455).

 

Contrary to the general case of Islamic science’s decline after 1200, medicine continued to flourish, grow, and incorporate more traditions in Islamic lands, perhaps most especially in the Indian subcontinent, where Hippocratic-Galenic traditions interfaced with Ayurvedic ones.  The more Galenic (and thus more Islamic) side of the resultant fusion became known as Yunani, from “Ionian”; the Ayurvedic remained more Indian.

However, the Mongol invasions, the bubonic plague epidemics from 1346 on, and the expansion of Turkish and Persian imperial power all devastated the old Islamic core areas of Central Asia, Egypt, Syria, the Levant, and Mesopotamia—the areas where science had most flourished.  This, as well as the slow shift of economic and political dynamism to Europe, led to a relative stagnation of Islamic science after 1350.  However, one should emphasize the word relative here.  Islamic regions fell farther and farther behind Europe after 1600, but, as with China (at least through Ming; see below), this is a matter of relatively slower advance in research activity, not of actual Dark Ages.  Many medical works continued to appear.

 

Medical practice ran largely to regimen management, with foods blending into drugs via what we would now call nutraceuticals:  poppy seed, nuts, honey, rose petals, and other things that were foods but were often (or even largely) eaten for medical effects.  Bleeding and cupping were common, but the obsessive bleeding that characterized European medicine in the 18th century was not found.  Surgery was frequent, but avoided when possible; in those pre-antiseptic days, it was highly dangerous.  Some doctors, such as al-Rāzī, kept careful records and even experimented, resulting in important innovations in knowledge.  Others did not, and in general the Galenic tradition persisted.  Knowledge was added—slowly—but dramatic changes were few.

Infant rearing was quite enlightened by modern standards.  Islamic law directs breastfeeding for two years, and interestingly equates milk kinship with blood kinship, a point strongly developed by Muhammad (Gilani 1999).  Otherwise unrelated children nursed by a woman are siblings for life, and the woman remains a mother to them.  Drawing from Galen and Soranus, medieval doctors gave good instructions on nursing babies, choosing wet-nurses, weaning, and regimen in general (Gilani 1999).  As so often, Ibn al-Jazzār was notable for particularly sensible directions.  The instructions for choosing a wet-nurse remain quite similar over time and space.

Islam has a strong and significant environmental ethic; the Quran and hadith both emphasize taking care of animals, plants, and nature (Dien 2000; Foltz et al. 2003).  Relations with medicine are indirect but significant; the Muslims took care to preserve their environments, including medicinal herbs.  However, playing against this went the imperative and immediate needs of herders, who inevitably overgrazed their pastures and overcut firewood whenever populations expanded or were limited by threat or harsh conditions.  With modern times, traditional controls have weakened while popoulations have exploded, leading to rapidly worsening ecological situations in most of the Middle East.  This should not be taken as a failing of traditional cultural patterns.

The Galenist Ibn Ridwān wrote in Egypt in the Fatimid period (that rare period when Egypt ruled the west).  He believed in miasmas affecting variously susceptible bodies.  He followed the classical view in discussing six conditions to examine:  “ (1) air…;(2) food and drink; (3) movement and rest; (4) sleep and waking; (4) retention and evacuation; and (6) psychic events [mental states]” (Dols 1984:89).  He evaluated Egypt in all these ways, and found it rather wanting in many respects; food spoils incredibly fast, imported animals get sick, and Nile water is good but polluted with sweage (still true today).  Egyptians themselves are “feeble, quick to change, and lacking patience and endurance” and even prone to “timidity and cowardice, discouragement and doubt, impatience, lack of desire for knowledge and decisiveness, envy and calumny,” and so on (Dols 1984:93).  He admits that there are exceptions, but even claims that the land is so coward-making that “lions do not live in this country; if lions are brought to Egypt, they become meek” (ibid.).

He has startlingly modern-sounding strictures on water and air pollution.  He provided enormously detailed instructions for counteracting these by heavy use of herbs, scents, and other environmental amendments; many of the herbs rrecommended are strongly antiseptic, and would, in a word, work.  Each season and each type of personal temperament required a different amendment, but, for instance, most of the amendments to the dirty Nile water actually involved cleansing and antibiotic agents.  He also provides many complex remedies for illnesses.

For instance, irascible (choleric) people should use tabashir (a chalky substance), Armenian (red) clay, red earth, jujube, hawthorn, and vinegar.  Placid (presumably phlegmatic) people should use bitter almonds and apricot pits with thyme and dill (Dols 1984:135).  The former mix seems more heavy and sour, the latter more bitter and astringent.  Evidently this was necessary to accommodate the different humoral makeups in question.

He also sounds quite modern in his long section telling the doctor to examine the environment and the patient, taking into account every aspect of the latter and his or her condition.  It is worth giving the whole list (Dols 1984:120-121):  “(1) the temperament of the country; (2) the indigenous illnesses; (3) the current season; (4) the temperament of this season; (5) the epidemic illnesses; (6) the diseases existing in the body and in what limb; (7) the cause of the illness; (8) the degree of strength of the illness; (9) the symptoms of the illness; (10) the intensity of the symptoms; (11) the strength of the patient; (12) the temperament of the patient; (13) the age of the patient; (14) the temperament of the limb affected by the illness and the limb’s functioning, form, and position; (15) the external appearance of the patient; (16) the nature of the patient, whether male or female; (17) his habits in times of health; (18) the nature of the foods and medicines; (19) his usage of them in times of health and illness; (20) the foods and medicines that are desirable for the doctor to select at times of health and illness; (21) what the treatment should be ;(22) what is the proper time for treatment; (23) what is the porpoer limb for administering treatment; (24) the patient and whoever cares for him should follow the instructions of the doctor; and (25) the cirucmstances of the patient should be conducive to recovery.”  That should do it!  The patient of a doctor conscientious enough to do all that was in good shape, even given the awful realities of medieval Egypt.  Alas, some doctors were more concerned with looking distinguished—growing long gray beards and having fine steeds—than with medical care; again, the world can still well heed Ibn Ridwān’s advice about that.

Hospitals, public health, medical examinations and certification, care of the mentally ill, women doctors, and many other modern phenomena all had their start or reached high levels of development in the Muslim Near East (see Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007 for accounts).

 

Especially now, when Islam is accused of all manner of innate flaws and sins, it is well to remember that Islamic medicine was a world leader for centuries, while Europe stagnated, and that Islam spread a broadly scientific, naturalistic, and rational medicine throughout millions of square miles and thousands of diverse peoples.

Noteworthy was the relatively high level of secularism and religious tolerance of the age.  Christians, Jews, and others, as well as Muslims, practiced medicine, shared in scholarship, and taught each other.  People from all regions of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa met and worked together harmoniously.  The famous “convivencia” of Moorish Spain was only the best-known example of a widespread tolerance.  That tolerance was never perfect, but it was comparable to the west today, and far different from so much of the modern Middle East.

Admittedly, the basis, including the basic scientific and rational spirit, was Greek, so one might speak of Greco-Islamicate medicine.  But the influence, development, and propagation of the tradition belong to the Islamic world, especially the Arab and Iranic authorities.  One recalls that not only did the Islamic world follow this path; it spread far beyond Islam in India, as the “Yunani” (=”Ionian”) tradition, and also swept almost all before it in Europe in the Renaissance.  Thence it was carried to the New World, where hundreds of millions of ordinary people still live in some measure by the teachings of Galen and Hippocrates as reflected through Avicenna and his peers and followers.  No religion, no political philosophy, no body of belief, no modern scientific teaching has influenced so many people so much.

Along with Greek medicine came vast amounts of local traditions (including herbal ones), magic, faith-healing, and other folk-medical forms (Dols 1992).  These remain poorly studied and documented, but are not particularly relevant to our purposes herein.

A good idea of the closeness with which the HHYF followed Near Eastern practice comes from its recommendations for treating wounds in which the intestines have partially come out of the body.  They are to be replaced and the wound sewn up, of course, but the HHYF goes further in recommending use of black grape liquor (juan 34, p. 18), as does Maimonides (Bos and Langermann 2012:247), though both the HHYF and Maimonides are confused enough to make it hard ot know exactly what is being done.  As nearly as I can understand, the liquor—possibly distilled—is being used to wipe and clean the wound.  Maimonides says it is “to alleviate pain,” but it is unclear whether it is drunk as an anaesthetic, used in a clyster (discussed just previously), or used on the wound, as the HHYF states.

Near Eastern medicine was incorporated in European medicine progressively after 1000, and especially after 1200.  By 1300, Europe had caught up, using both translations of Arabic sources and translations of the actual original Greek ones.  Use of cadavers in teaching came back into vogue about that time (Siraisi 1997:188).  However, Europe simply followed the greats of the past until around 1500, when the dramatic breakthroughs that gave us modern science began.  Andreas Vesalius questioned antiquity and developed modern anatomical research; Ambroise Paré found that treating wounds with boiling oil was a bad idea, and started using ordinary salves; and Paracelsus (1493-1541) threw out the whole Greco-Arabic system, from the Four Elements to traditional medicine, and invented a whole new system—itself far from perfect, but the start of a trend that was not to stop (Siraisi 1997:193).

Most interesting of all was the realization that diseases were actual entities with their own characteristics—they were not just various forms of humoral imbalance.  Paracelsus realized this, but the major credit for changing the paradigm is generally given to the English doctor Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689).  This is stunningly late for such a major breakthrough.  The bubonic plague of 1346-50 (on which see Buell 2012) had been a disease so new and unique that no one could fail to see it as an utterly alien and incomprehensible force that could not be easily accommodated in Galenic medicine.  An even bigger shock to the Galenic system was the explosion of epidemic syphilis after 1492.  Columbus’ men almost certainly introduced it from the New World.  In any case, it was not only a new disease, but was transmitted by an unusual route; in spite of gonorrhea (apparently not common), sexually transmitted diseases were not salient in European medical thought.  Girolamo Fracastoro described and named it in 1530, and thus made it clear that a new and distinctive disease could appear; everyone should have realized that the old paradigms were dead.  It is more than interesting that this did not happen.  The time was simply not ripe to question the ancients.

All this coincided in time with China’s stagnation (and later decline) in learning, innovation, exploration, and other early scientific activity.  China’s greatest herbal, Li Shizhen’s Bencao Gangmu, was to be its last truly innovative and brilliant one; ironically, it appeared at almost exactly the same time as the first great European herbals, by Rembert Dodoens, John Gerard, and others.  Similarly, Paracelsus’ new system, aggressively and self-consciously grounded in new materialist and experimental views of the world, coincided with Wang Yangming’s definitive retreat into mysticism and meditation—Confucianism’s final flight from the real world.  Late Ming was the last flowering of Chinese science; the Qing Dynasty ran on momentum for a while, then declined into the tradition-bound obscurantism that European observers of the Qing world wrongly thought typical of all Chinese history.

Finally, “an example of knowledge flow from the Near East to Europe may be of interest.  The idea of circulation of the blood seems to have started in Islamic lands.  Bernard Lewis (2001:79-80) records that “a thirteenth-century Syrian physician called Ibn al-Nafīs” (d. 1288) worked out the concept (see also Kamal 1975:154).  His knowledge spread to Europe, via “a Renaissance scholar called Andrea Alpago (died ca. 1520) who spent many years in Syria collecting and translating Arabic medical manuscripts” (Lewis 2001:80).  Michael Servetus picked up the idea, including Ibn al-Nafīs’ demonstration of the circulation from the heart to the lungs and back. William Harvey (1578-1657) learned of this, and worked out—with stunning innovative brilliance—the whole circulation pattern, publishing the discovery of circulation in 1628 (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:47).  Claims that al Nafīs’ observation was a mere lucky accident, and that Harvey’s discovery was quite independent of it, have been disproved (Dallal 2010:179).  Galen and the Arabs thought the blood was entirely consumed by the body, and renewed constantly in the liver.  They did not realize that the veins held a return flow; they thought the arteries carried pneuma, the veins carried nutrients. Harvey’s genius was to see that blood actually circulates continually, ferrying nutrients to and from the whole body in a closed circuit.” (quoted from my paper “Science and Ethnoscience,” posted on my website, www.krazykioti.com).

 

Herbal medicine

Simples, as noted above, followed Dioscorides.  The path of transmission went from Greece to Rome to Byzantium, where Princess Juliana Anicia was gifted with a spectacularly beautiful illustrated one, a real work of art, around 512.  It is now the oldest surviving illustrated herbal in the world (Collins 2000:39).

The thread then went to the Muslims, as the Byzantine Empire began to decline.  Compound formulations were recorded in aqrābādhīn works (the word is Greek, graphidion, “prescription,” as transliterated into Arabic).  The first was that of Sābūr ibn Sahl, written in the 850s under the Abbasids (Hamarneh 1973:56), but the most important early one was by “the Philosopher” al-Kindī (ca. 800-870); it has been translated by Martin Levey (1966).  Levey finds that in it “31 per cent of the materia medica comes from Persian-Indian soiurces, 33 per cent from Mesopotamia, 25 per cent from Greek origins, 5 per cent from Arabic, and 3 per cent from ancient Egyptian origins” (Levey and al-Khaledy 1967:28), so the Arabs did not slavishly follow the Greeks—though one must point out that many of the drugs from other regions reached the Arabs via Greek sources.  After that, formularies flourished throughout the Islamic world, and of course Rhazes, Avicenna, and other famous medical writers had a hand in compiling them.  They display a considerable sophistication in chemistry; for instance, experts knew the differentiation of milk into water, butter, and protein (known as the “cheese forming” fraction of the milk; Hamarneh 1973:78).

Perhaps the greatest was produced by al-Bīrūnī (973-1048), of Khwarizm, famous also for his great work on India (Alberuni 1973).  His pharmacology lists 850 drugs, with names in several languages.  Amazingly, this incredible work has been edited and translated (al-Bīrūnī 1973), with identifications of biota—a job rivaling the compilation of the original!  Thus it can be drawn on for our purposes here.  It is important to observe how many leading scientists and medical persons of this period were Central Asians: al-Bīrūnī, Jūzjānī, al-Samarqāndī, and many others, including of course the greatest of all, Avicenna. Central Asia had a real leadership position in the world at this time.  This point has not been made often enough in explaining the rise and success of the Mongols.  It is obviously critical to the HHYF and similar cultural exchanges.

Ibn Jazlah, whose work we draw on below, followed a century later.

That of ibn al-Tilmidh (of Baghdad; d. 1165) is representative of the best of the aqrābādhīn tradition (Hamarneh 1973:57-64).  It had 20 chapters, covering troches (tablets; 42 recipes), pills and cough medicines (27), powders (28), confections with spices and flavors (26), electuaries (20), lohocks (from the Arabic for “lick”; 21); syrups (from the Arabic root shrb, “drink”; 27); robs (rubb, thick syrups; 10); medicated food decoctions (20), ophthalmic medicine (10), anointing oils (10), ointments (12), dressings (13), enemas and suppositories (15), oral medications including dentifrices (15); fattening aids (11); sternatatories, gargles, fumigators (5); bleeding-stoppers (5); emetics (5); sudorifics and antisudorifics (3+).

A good example of a remedy is one from Ibn al-Jazzār (d. 980):

“A recipe for a pastille which I have composed that will increase sexual desire, refresh the soul, warm the body, expel gas from the stomach, put and end to coldness of the kidneys and bladder, and incrase memory:  Taken in the winter, it will warm the limbs.  Its uses are many, and it is one of the ‘royal electuaries,’ and I have named it ‘reliable against calamities’….  Take seven mithqāls each of chinese cinnamon, sweet cost, Indian spikenard, saffron, fennel seeds, ginger, dried mint leaves, wild mountain thyme, mountain mint, cinnamon bark; of Indian’malabathron,’ long pepper, white peopper, black pepper, asarabacca, plum seeds, cultivated caraway, cloves, galingale, and wild carrot, four mithqāls each; and of hulled sesame, shelled walnuts, shelled pistachios, shelled fresh almonds, pinenuts, and sugar candy, eleven mithqāls each.  Pulverise the ingredients, sieve vigorously, combine, and knead with honey of wild thyme, from which the froth has been skimmed, until the remedy is well mixed.  Store in a vessel that is smooth on the inside, fumigated with Indian aloes [a standard fumigant to sterilise the jar as much as possible].  An amount the size of a walnut is to be taken before and after meals.  And it will be efficacious, God willing” (quoted Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:51).  This combines all the common warming and nourishing agents that were also pleasant-tasting.  Recall that the latter quality was considered very important in curing.  The recipe would produce a candy rather like those still used throughout the region for exactly the same purposes, such as Turkish delight, Moroccan argan-almond-honey paste, and the more elaborate halvah mixes.

To some extent, this is medicine for the rich.  Only a very rich man (this recipe is for the male) could afford to accumulate all these drugs, some exotic and expensive.  Only a rich man could comfort himself with the fountains, aromatics, and live music prescribed in other books.  On the other hand, almost anyone could get at least some of the medicinals listed.  One assumes that buyers were quite aware that even a few of these would make a perfectly acceptable product.

A golden age of botany climaxed in the 12th and early 13th centuries (Idrisi 2005), informing the Mongols but paradoxically being impacted negatively by their conquests.  Several books appeared, including one on the sex of plants, long before the European “discovery” thereof around 1700.

Again, Spain was a leader, and its pharmacology influenced the Near East (Meyerhof 1984).  The Byzantine emperor presented the Ummayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Rahmän III with an edition of Dioscorides around 950, and this was translated from the Greek, introducing it to the western Arab world (Goodman 1990:494; Lewis 2008:331).  The Spanish Arab Ibn al-Baytār (d. 1248; lived in Malaga) produced a Comprehensive Book on Simple Drugs and Foodstuffs with over 1400 medicaments in 2324 entries, reviewing almost everything in the literature (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:53).  Of course, Spanish pharmacognosy influenced Europe; transmission through Spain and Italy were the routes by which all this material reached Europe in the medieval and Renaissance periods.  The Reconquista led to a lapse, however, with plants like bananas, sugar cane and eggplants going into relative oblivion for a while (Idrisi 2005).

Following Galen, doctors designed drug and diet regimes for specific persons, according to individual temperament and environment.  Nasr wisely remarks:  “It is paradoxical that in the highly individualistic modern civilization there is a crass uniformity in medicine which assumes that the reaction of all bodies to a drug is the same or nearly so, whereas in traditional medicine belonging to a civilization in which the individual order is always subservient to the universal order each patient is treated invidiually and his temperament taken to be a unique blend of the humours never to be fouind in exactly the esame balance in another individual” (Nasr 1976:162).  This is as true of China as of the Near East.

Unlike the main Galenic works and the great medical encyclopedias, these pharmacological works did not travel.  They never made it to Europe, until very late, when they became part of the Dioscorides-related material that entered with the Renaissance.  Even today, very few Arab or Persian pharmacologies, folk-medical works (e.g. Moinuddin 1985), or other pharmacognostic materials are known in the western world.

The tradition climaxed soon after, in time to be available for the Mongols.  Contemporary, and close to their homeland in origin, were the Central Asian herbalists Badr al-Dīn Muhammad b. Bahrām al-Qalānisī, author of a huge aqrābādhīn (c. 1194; see Richter-Bernburg and Said 2000:310), and Najīb al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (d. 1222).  The latter was author of many medical works including an aqrābādhīn that has been translated and studied by Martin Levey and Noury al-Khaledy (1967).  It incorporates substantially more Indian remedies than earlier works, showing that the HHYF’s strong Indian influence was not unique.  More specifically, Al-Samarqandī and the HHYF make heavy use of myrobalans, turpeth, Persian and Indian minerals, and other Perso-Indian remedies.

Levey and al-Khaledy note a number of Indian loanwords in the medicinal vocabulary, contrasting with the almost purely Greek and Arabic language of early works.  (Levey and al-Khaledy exaggerate the Indian presence, however, by including many herbs known to Greek medicine and transmitted by Greek texts to the Arabs; sometimes, as perhaps with kinnamon and certainly with kardamon, the original reference was probably to a Greek plant and only later came to refer to an Asian one.)  It seems almost certain that this herbal directly influenced the HHYF.  None of the recipes seems exactly the same, but many are extremely similar.  Both share a constant recursion to the same few herbs:  dodder, turpeth, myrobalans, saffron, sarcocol, pomegranate rind, myrrh and frankincense, and others.  (They also share a fondness for mint, thyme, and rose, but so did most other herbals in the Old World, so this is not significant.)

From the 1200s, Europe overtook and quickly passed the Arabs, and the great herbal tradition of European art and medicine grew rapidly (Collins 2000).  By the early 1600s, it was far ahead of anything else in the world—but that is another story.

This makes the HHYF a truly key text, since it embodies so much sophisticated pharmacology.  It too seems to have owed more to encyclopedias than to any specific pharmacological work, however.

 

A Comparison Case:  Astronomy

Medicine spread along with other sciences, and it is instructive to look at another well-documented case, because it is suggestive in this context.  Scott Montgomery (2000) and John Steele (2008) have chronicled the transfer of astronomic knowledge from ancient Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome and the Near East.  It was a long and fascinating process.  Mesopotamia perfected an amazing range of astronomical observations and plans, and developed astrology, a high science until its slow fall from grace after the Renaissance in Europe.  Greece quickly learned from Babylon and Syria, and added both scientific astronomy and detailed, carefully calculated, extremely extensive astrology to its scientific repertoire (Steele 2008).

The transfer to Rome was fairly automatic; Rome took over first Magna Graeca and then Greece itself, enslaved many Greek scholars, and learned assiduously from the Greeks and their books.  It remains ever fascinating that the Romans, almost alone in world history, were not only willing but eager to learn from people they had conquered and enslaved.

Those other empire-builders the Arabs were the only other group to do this on a large scale.  Quickly realizing the value of such learning, they propagated it, especially under the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates.  The Arabs showed more interest than the Syriac or even Byzantine scholars had (Saliba 2007).  In fact, very little astronomical or other learned lore survives from those cultures (except, fortunately, in medicine; Scarborough 1984; note in particular that the Byzantines preserved the Dioscorides pharmacopoeia).  Much more survives from the Islamic world.  In the 9th century, the Abbasids caliphs supported astronomy based on Ptolemy but improving his observations; meanwhile, mathematics flourished, as translations of the foundational work of Diophantos stimulated the work of al-Kwārizmī and many others (Herrin 2008:126).

The Greek astronomers’ observations were supplemented more and more by Arab observations.  Instrumentation steadily improved (Montgomery 2000; Nasr 1976; Steele 2008).  Alhasan ibn al-Haitham (Alhazen), for instance, discovered that light rays reflect from objects and return to the eye, where they project an inverted image.  He devised the camera obscura to study this (Covington 2007:6).  Astrology, then still considered a science, spread with astronomy (Nasr 1976).  Only since the Renaissance in Europe did astrology fail so obviously that it lost its scientific standing.

It is, incidentally, important to note that Nasr’s writings and his publication venue would both be unthinkable today.  Islam has changed.  It is clear from history that the keepers of genuine Islamic tradition are Nasr and his colleagues, not today’s lunatic bigots and killers.

Knowledge spread onward to Persia, Central Asia, and India.  Contrary to some conventional wisdom, Islamic astronomy did not die in the Middle Ages.  Al-Ghazālī’s famous conversion to mysticism and consequent attacks on science and philosophy, in the early 12th century, did have some deadening effect, though it has been greatly exaggerated in many book.  More seriouis were later, similar attacks by less-known but important scholars.  Their Ash’arite creed fell to an increasingly sour and reactionary anti-rationalism, in contrast to the liberal, enlightened views previously characteristic of Central Asian Islam (see Bosworth and Asimov 2000, passim, notably Paket-Chy and Gilliot 2000:129-131).  However, Al-Ghazālī advocated science and rationalism to the last, and did not see it as incompatible with Islam (Dallal 2010:142-143).  Thus science continued to flourish after his time.  It should be noted that Islam never saw science as an enemy of religion; indeed, the whole idea of “science vs. religion” is a product of 19th-century Europe, and is very much a recent hothouse flower in the Islamic world, propagated largely via Christian missionary colleges (Dallal 2010:149-176).

Astronomy (and other sciences) continued to flourish and develop, albeit slowly and sporadically (Saliba 2007).  The great polymath Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tusī, for instance, served the Mongols, getting a reputation for shaky loyalty to his ancestral homeland and his Assassin patrons, but giving himself an unrivalled platform for research and writing; his work included not only astronomy but the brilliant “Nasirean Ethics” (Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tusī 1964).  He commuted regularly between Syria and Khorasan in northeast Iran, showing how peaceful and integrated his world was.  Producing some 100 books, he also established the great astronomical observatory at Marāghā, one of the leading observatories of the pre-telescope age, and there he and his colleagues made observations that later would be used by Copernicus and Galileo in establishing modern cosmology.  (On this and other matters, see the rather breathless introduction to Islamic science by Covington, 2007, which manages to cram an encyclopedic history into 16 pages; also Dallal 2010:23-26.)

Tusī thus influenced not only the Near East and China, but Europe too, quite profoundly.  (This connection is annoyingly neglected; Eurocentric historians hate to admit anything valuable came from Islam, and Islamicists have until recently asserted that nothing happened after Tusī, or even after al-Ghazaālī, thus writing off the later science that bridged from them to Copernicus.  Dallal 2010 has demolished these delusions.)  He is overdue for a biography.  His Ethics may still be read with great profit, however out-of-date his science may be.

Even after his time, with all its Mongol disturbances, Islamic science cranked along, continuing to develop locally (Saliba 2007), as Chinese science did.  (We have long abandoned the delusion that Chinese science stagnated; it simply grew more slowly than European science did after 1400.  See e.g. Elman 2003.)  The Mongol conquest, however, began a decline greatly exacerbated by the bubonic plague in the 14th century.  Then the Little Ice Age sorely affected the steppes and the Silk Road, and thus gave an advantage to sea trade and its European leaders.  Finally, the rise of the “gunpowder empires” in the Near East and of predatory European expansion worldwide put an end to a separate Islamic science.

However, even then, theoretical, practical, and instrumental progress in astronomy continued, although in isolation from Europe, and falling sadly farther behind Europe as time went on.  The final glory of premodern astronomy was the 18th-century Delhi observatory that may still be visited today.

 

The Indian connection

Much of Indian medicine is explicitly Greek in origin:  the yūnanī (“Ionian,” i.e. Greek) tradition. This is our familiar Near Eastern development from Galenic and Dioscoridean roots. India’s own tradition, ayurveda, is at least 2500 years old—though not similar to the medicine in the earlier vedas (Wujastyk 2003; for a vast survey of Indian medicine, see Meulenbeld 1999-2002).  It emphasizes balance and moderation, like the Greek traditions and also like Buddhism.  It is based on three dosas:  vāta “wind,” pitta “bile,” and kapha “phlegm.”  These are related to the abstract qualities sattva, rajas, and tamas—respectively, the intellectual and bright aspect of life; the militant and emotional side; and the sleepy or sluggish side.  These two triads correspond vaguely to the sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic (plus melancholic) humors of Galenic medicine, and might have influenced those, but the influence—if any—is indirect and hard to trace.  Several authorities have pointed out that this means the simple, neat balance called for in folk Galenic medicine (in both the Near East and China) is emphatically not a part of Indian medicine (Wujastyk 2003:xviii ff; Mark Nichter, Kenneth Zysk, pers. comm.).  Rather, a dynamic equilibrium or accommodation must be maintained.

On the other hand, Vāghbhata’s standard ayurvedic compilation says:  “The under-use, wrong use, or overuse of time, the objects of sense,and action, are known to be the one and only cause of illness.  Their proper use is the one and only cause of health.” (Wujastyk 2003:207.  Wujastyk correctly points out that the older Hippocratic texts are also a good deal more subtle; conversely, ENA can testify from much experience that Chinese folk medicine does make a major issue of bing “balanced, level,” as well as of ho “harmonized,” with bingho or hobing being a frequently-stated goal of medication.  An apparently more dynamic and complex relationship between yin and yang in early medicine has been replaced by a somewhat complex, but basically fairly simple, notion of balance in much folk practice.  The issue of balance in the HHYF is complex and requires further attention.)

Ayurveda is conservative; it relies on very old documents and traditions.  Innovation, however, clearly occurred and was apparently very important.  Much of it was influence from the Near East, presumably via yunani medicine.  Opium and its use was first mentioned in the late Middle Ages, and the narcotic effects of marijuana did not make it into the medical books till around 1300 (Wujastyk 2003:256-257), though they were obviously known before.  The extent of innovation remains to be determined.  There seems to be no volume comparable to the collection of studies of innovation in Chinese medicine edited by Elisabeth Hsu (2001).

As in other ancient medical traditions, treatment is largely herbal.  Poisons are a significant concern, indicating an elite patronage; a world of courts with poison-wielding assassins is implied (see e.g. Wujastyk 2003:78ff.).  As in Hippocratic and Near Eastern medicine, there are explicit directions for regimen season by season, with diet, exercise, sex, and health care appropriate to the seasonal conditions.

Influence of ayurvedic medicine on the HHYF seems to have been mediated through the Persian world (including Iranic Central Asia) and possibly—to a lesser extent—through Tibet.  Very significant is the fact that a large number of major ayurvedic works were discovered in Chinese Central Asia (Kucha, Dunhuang) or are known only from Chinese translations.  Thus, the astonishing paean of praise for garlic written by the Buddhist monk Yaśomitra in the early 6th century AD (Wujastyk 2003:154-160) was discovered in Kucha.  A gynecological work attributed to Kaśyapa is known only from a Chinese translation by a Buddhist monk in the late 10th century.

Relationships of ayurvedic medicine to the HHYF include a number of herbal drugs that are surely from India, and in some cases are barely even mentioned in the medieval Near Eastern sources.  Also, there are early passages that seem to lie behind some HHYF material, such as passages from Suśruta (before 250 BC) concerning removal of splinters and arrows (Wujastyk 2003:107 ff.)  Suśruta also describes tetanus, stroke, and what appears to be beriberi (Wujastyk 2003:121-122) in terms that seem broadly similar to those in the HHYF, allowing for the difference in medical rhetoric.

Yunani medicine and Ayurvedic medicine influenced each other throughout their careers in India (see Alter 2008), and of course Chinese and Tibetan medicine influenced them over the centuries.

 

The Tibetan connection

Then and earlier, Tibetan medicine in the Middle Ages seems to have been incredibly eclectic and comprehensive—one of the great medical traditions of the world (Clifford 1984).  In the 8th century, when the Tibetan kingdom was first taking shape as a major regional power, physicians from all over the old world—nine regions are reported—gathered at the court.  Histories relate that there were three especially prominent royal physicians, one from China, one from India, and one from the Byzantine Empire (Hrom, i.e. Rome).  This last became head royal physician, under the name of Galen (Ga Le Nos)!  (See Garrett 2007.)  One suspects that this tradition is true, and that the wandering Roman had taken this prominent pseudonym in the same spirit that led Dr. E. Schoenfeld to byline his newspaper medical column “Dr. Hip Pocrates” in San Francisco in the 1960s.  Unfortunately, we know little of what “Galen” brought from the Eastern Rome, but we know that Tibetan medicine remained an eclectic mixture enriched by Byzantine, Arab, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and other traditions as well as by its own formidable base of pragmatic and herbal lore. Its three humors (hii “wind,” shar “fire/bile” and badkan “phlegm”; Abdurazakov and Haidav 2000:243-248) are the sattva, rajas and tamas of Ayurveda.  Its five elements (earth, water, fire, air and space) owe much to China, and indeed the Chinese five are sometimes used.  Medicines derive in large part from Ayurvedic practice, but the Tibetans added a great deal, both from Chinese and Central Asian practice and from their own enormous resources (Dash 1994; Glover 2005). Tibet partakes, at the margins, of the fantastic diversity of plants and animals found in west China and northern Southeast Asia—by far the most biodiverse of the warm temperate and subtropical parts of the world.

Naturally, Tibetan tantrism was incorporated in the medicine.  The medicine goddess known as the Nectar Mother has a wrathful form as the Diamond Sow, Vajravarahi.  This female deity is shown in a wild and terrifying sexual embrace (standing, usually on a corpse) with the Black Horse-headed Demon, one of the demonlike beings converted to good in Tibetan Buddhism.  Their sexual embrace symbolizes “the union of wisdom and skilful means,” which among other things is used to quell disease (Clifford 1984:51).  A huge amount of healing ritual exists.  This is totally absent from the HHYF, which is as rational as most Near Eastern medicine.

Tibetan medicine today is still eclectic, as shown in Denise Glover’s brilliant, comprehensive, and pathbreaking study (2005).  Tibetan doctors know something of their culturally mixed heritage.  In the PRC they are quite familiar with the Chinese five-phase system. Tibet’s Buddhist element appears in ascribing illness to desire or illusion. Tibet’s influence on China is still locally visible in the spread of medicinal herbs into Chinese practice (Glover 2005 and personal communication; Jan Salick, personal communication over several years).  Tibetan medicine had been established as early as the 700s (Garrett 2007) but was significantly written down in manuscripts from around 1200 (Dash 1994; Martin 2007).

Presumably, a great deal of the Ayurvedic medicine (on which see Dash and Laliteshkashyap 1980; Nadkarny 1976)  in the HHYF came via Tibet (cf. Dash 1976).  We have no other indications of direct links to India.

The great Ayurvedic Yogaśataka was translated early into Tibetan (supposedly by Bu-ston).  Vaidya Bhagwan Dash (1976) reproduced and studied the translation, assembling a number of mistaken or shaky word-equivalencies (this would help get a sense of whether Ayurveda was filtered through Tibet, but the differences are not great enough to allow a decision). He provides an English translation, with drug and disease names left in Sanskrit but explained in a glossary.   The Yogaśataka derived from a time before there was much Near Eastern influence on India, so the plants in it are basically Indian.  (Only cumin and saffron seem unequivocally Near Eastern; they spread very early to India as cultivated plants.)  The commonly used ones get into the HHYF, but the specialized ones do not.  Diseases follow the dosa theory.  Unfortunately, most of them are ones not treated in surviving parts of the HHYF.

On the other hand, the lack of Tibetan influence on HHYF materia medica is rather astonishing, when one compares Dash (1976, 1994) and Glover (2005) with the HHYF materia.  They share almost nothing except for the universal or very widespread ayurvedic remedies, especially those derived from the Near East.  Most of Tibet’s local medicinal flora derives from the south and east of the country and does not grow in Mongolia.

 

Chinese Medicine

Chinese medicine, meanwhile, had not been standing still.  (On Chinese medical history, Unschuld 1985 and 1986 remain the best sources, and are followed broadly below; useful for further details and sources are the various chapters in Hinrichs and Barnes 2012.)

The first direct evidence we have for Chinese medicine comes from questions and answers on Shang oracle bones.  These largely refer to illnesses supposedly caused by royal ancestors; the questions inscribed on the bones and shells ask which ancestor has been neglected in recent sacrifices and is therefore visiting illness on the survivors.  I found exactly the same idea current in the New Territories of Hong Kong in the 1960s. It also survives among the Akha minority in south China and Thailand:  “a man who had a stroke made the connection that his stroke was caused by not offering the correctly colored chicken at his ancestral offerings” (Tooker 2012:38).

In the late Warring States period, evidence for herbal medicine and other more secular approaches begins to appear in tomb texts.  In early Han, many tomb texts exist, covering many of the later branches of medicine: pharmacopoeia, sexual medicine, surgery, needling (probably not true “acupuncture” but more pragmatic lancing of boils), etc. (see Harper 1998).  From the very beginning, we can recognize the cardinal principle of Chinese medicine:  strengthening the patient is more important than fighting the illness.  Above all, nutrition was vital.  Dealing with foods was always the first recourse.  The highest in prestige of court physicians was the court nutritionist (at least according to a Han reconstruction of the Rites of Zhou).  This was still true when Hu Sihui, Court Nutritionist to the Yuan, compiled the Mongol court nutrition manual in the 14th century (Buell et al. 2010).

Though contagion was always recognized (and even the dangers of “insects… crawling over food,” Needham 2004:38), Chinese medicine always focused on strengthening the person, not fighting the disease.  This was known as yang sheng “strengthening inborn nature,” bu shen “supplementing the body [and its natural strength],” and similar phrases.  Foods that built blood, for instance, were bu xue “supplementing the blood.”  Many of these were indeed iron-rich and thus cured the anemia so sadly pervasive in old China (as I know from much personal observation).  Orhers, like port wine (adopted in modern times), simply looked like blood, and were thought to work because of the the “doctrine of signatures” (a belief system very likely transmitted to China very early, if not independently invented).

Having lived for three years in traditional Chinese households and shared their problems and more than a few of their illnesses, I can understand how this developed.  China’s biggest medical problem, throughout history, has been lack of nutrients—absolute lack of food, or, when food was available, frequent reduction of the diet to bulk starch.  Desperate shortages of vitamins and minerals was the rule, not the exception.  Moreover, the worst contagious disease problem—in recent centuries at least—has been tuberculosis, which tends to be chronic and to respond to better food and sunlight.  The Chinese had no other way to treat it.  Many other conditions were also chronic and also relieved by better regimen.

By contrast, infectious disease other than TB was less a problem in China than in early Europe, partly because the Chinese were more careful about sanitation, cooking food, boiling water, and so on.  There was thus every reason to concentrate on strengthening the patient, especially through food, and little hope of doing much more about infectious disease until Koch and Pasteur began to train East Asian students (as they did from early on).  All medical systems are accommodations between the prevailing illnesses and the available treatment methods.  People deal as best they can with their worst problems.  Native Americans dealt best with psychological ailments, having good psychological concepts but little hope of developing medical science; early 20th-century Americans dealt superbly with infectious disease but failed totally with psychological problems.  The Chinese, like the ancient Greeks, dealt best with regimen, worst with epidemics.

Paul Unschuld (2009) traces scientific medicine to the early Han dynasty or just before.  At this time a number of treads came together (Lo and Li 2010).  Yin-yang theory was well established.  Early needling—not the same as modern acupuncture, but probably ancestral—was already present, as shown by the Mawangdui tomb finds.  Herbal medicine began to be codified.  Surgery was supposedly well-developed, but we have only legendary accounts.  Sexual hygeine and medicine were well established, as shown, again, by the Mawangdui finds.  An important and sophisticated ecological science, focused on landscape and agriculture, also developed in Han, and is clearly related via the yang-yin and correspondence theories.  We are handicapped in this and in all subsequent periods by the secrecy of the medical profession; they kept their trade secrets very close to their chests (Lo and Li 2010; I can attest to the persistence of this view into the late 20th century).  However, people apparently felt they would need medical knowledge in the other world, so texts were buried with them.  Tomb finds are thus important.

Most interesting was the rise of cosmological and “correspondence” theories.  These depended on the concept of ganying, literally “stimulus and response.”  This sounds like Pavlovian psychology, but referrred to cosmic resonances, sometimes exemplified by the sounding of a suspended lute when a lute tuned to it is played (see e.g. Salguero 2014:26).  Humanity resonated to the rhythms and music of the cosmos.  (This is why music has always been such an extremely important part of Chinese governance—seen most recently in Mao’s and Lee Kuan Yew’s insistence on proper, narrow ranges of music in their realms.)  Flow of qi created music, as seen in the sounds of the wind, of waves on rocks, and of the earth ringing or sounding in earthquakes.

The correspondence theory that dominated, and emerged as the sole survivor of what was once a diverse set (Nylan 2010), was the  fivefold correspondence system.  This system involved an elaborate and highly schematized analysis of virtually everything in the world into sets of fives, the wu xing, “five phases.”  Xing literally means “going” or “street,” and implies a dynamic, transformative view of the world.  Apparently the Han thinkers understood the world as made up of subtle transformative processes or forces that appear in the fivefold nature of things—rather as modern physics sees an elaborate system of quarks and other forms of energy as basic to existence.

The fivefold classification apparently began with the five planets and five directions (the center being a direction).  Then colors were assigned to the directions, then flavors and scents, and at some point the major bodily organs were added to the mix:  Heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, and brain.  Then five minor organs came into the picture (which involved regarding the metabolism as a virtual organ system).  There were also five staple grains, five major trees, and so on (and on and on).  This system was elaborated in Han, though it has earlier antecedents in the thinking of Cao Yin and others in the Warring States period.

This cosmology was very old at the time, going back to the Zhou Dynasty.  It was put in shape during the glory days of the Former Han dynasty, especially by Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BCE) and the scholars clustered around Liu An, King of Huainan (179-122 BCE; see Liu 2010).  It had been considerably extended and updated according to the best current science by Zhang Zai in the 11th century, and then built on in the moral philosophy of Zhu Xi (see Schäfer 2010).

Applied to medicine, this cosmology of correspondences led to a theory that has been so well stated by Pierce Salguedo (2014:27-28) that I can do better than quote him:

“Medicine, like governance, was about discovering the natural order of the univrse and adjusting one’s behavior to accord with it.  Illness meant nott hat the gods or spirits had been offended by one’s moral failing, but that the natural cycles had been interrupted, impeded, or disturbed by an external agent or by one’s own improper regimen.  Healing involved the restoration of systemic balance through the manipulation of the body’s qi….  Even more important than cure, however, was prevention.”  Salguedo points out that the beliefs in gods and spirits did not die out.  In practice, people combined those beliefs with rational correspondence medicine, to varying degrees (see below).  As official religions were merely the tip of a vast iceberg of popular and folk religion, so official medicine—whether Daoist charms or rationalist drugs and exercise—rose from a vast range of folk practices (Salguedo 2014:28-29).  This was still perfectly  true in rural Hong Kong when I lived there in the 1960s.

Its major early medical statement of it is the famous Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.  This great medical classic defined Chinese medical theory, and does so to this day.  Marta Hanson summarizes it:  “Incisive scholars now concur that the three extant recensions of the Inner Canon were from the beginning a collection of interrelated short essays form different lineages at different times, compiled most likely from sourcew written no more than a century before the first century BCE when it was made into a two-part book” (Hanson 2011:12).  A theoretically final text was finished around 100 CE (Unschuld 2003), but has been variously revised since.  Elisabeth Hsu calls the Yellow Emperor physiology the “body ecologic” (see below).  How much this medicine influenced the Mongols is unclear, but the qi-based cosmology developed in Han and perfected in Song was most definitely in the head of Hu Sihui.

This fivefold path served the same systematizing function that Greek (especially Hippocratic-Galenic) medicine did in the west, and Unschuld is inclined to see these as the only two original scientific medicines in the world.  (One might well add Ayurvedic, in spite of some supernatural elements.)  Only these two absolutely eliminated supernaturals and their arbitrary will.  Only these two based their teachings on a few simple basic principles.  Only these two (plus Ayurvedic) led to serious medical science in the future.  Unschuld refers only to the two traditions as “medicine,” other medical traditions being “healing”; this is an idiosyncratic usage that will not be followed here.  I might want to add Native American traditions, such as the Maya one I studied, because these do have basic principles of a scientific nature, but even the highly pragmatic Maya system includes a great deal of supernatural and magical healing, not systematically separated from the strongly empirical and systematic herbal tradition.

However, it now appears that China had a serious nonmagical medical system before the fivefold correspondences took over.  The brilliant medical anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu (2009, 2010b) has recently analyzed early documents, including ones newly discovered through archaeology.  She finds that the “body ecologic” was preceded by a general notion of the body as produced by or influenced by yin and yang, and by being seriously affected by its natural emotions and emotionality.  The body (xing) was animated by qi, which involved “feelings and emotions” (2010b:349; see also 357ff.).  This she calls a “sentimental body.”  Its upper and outer zones were more yang, lower and inner more yin.  Joy and anger were particularly important and influential emotions.  (I would assume that this is because of their very obvious effects on one’s physical sensations.)  She finds that “early Han physicians paid [attention] to…feelings and emotions…they took individual psychology seriously, and in their view it affected visceral processes” (2010b:109).  This view of life carried over into the Yellow Emperor’s Classic:

“Grief and worry harms the heart;

A double coldness harms the lungs;

Rage and anger harm the liver;

Drunkenness and sexual indulgence, and encountering the winds while sweating, harm the spleen;

If one uses force excessiveliy, such as after sexual intercourse, when sweat is exuded such that one can bathe in it, then one harms the kidneys” (Hsu 2009:108-109).  Again, the feelings of heart palpitation from grief, and the dehydration and weakness and cold (from electrolyte imbalance) following excessive sweating (which really can harm the kidneys), are the actual clinical signs attended to.  Hsu correctly emphasizes the strong difference between this psychologized medicine and the absolute separation of bodily medicine from psychological medicine that characterized much of western biomedicine until recently (and still does in some quarters).  She also notes the awareness that early thinkers had of the value of music and ritual for “modulation of emotion and morality” (p. 358) or at least the Durkheimian function of getting people’s emotional lives coordinated and engaged with state morals.  In general, over the centuries, Chinese have often tended to somatize what most westerners would consider psychological problems, but also to see the emotional roots of what westerners would tend to consider physical problems. Of course, readers of medical literature from Osler to Oliver Sacks will know the separation is not so absolute in the west either.  In any case, we are well advised to recall that one cannot project the western separation of “body” and “mind” on Chinese medicine.

Hsu has also analyzed a text transmitted by Sima Qian in his great Han Dynasty history, Shi Ji (Hsu 2010b).  This is a document purportedly written by one Chunyu Yi, who lived in the earliest part of Han but would have composed the book in the 150s BCE.  The transmitted text, consisting largely of 25 case studies, is so augmented and overedited (by Sima and probably others) that it is impossible to tell if Yi even existed, but at least it shows that extremely sophisticated pulse analysis was done at that time.  Pulse in Chinese medicine refers to a much more complex, subtle, and multiply tested process than the simple pulse of western medicine.  It is an early example of featuring qi as all-important, and specifically dealing with the qi of each internal organ-field.

Many of his cases were made ill by overindulgence in women and wine.  One woman got sick “because she desired a man and could not get one” (p., 84).  One individual was noted as being unable to urinate because he had been overactive, after heavy drinking, in the “inner quarters,” which may suggest gonorrhea.  It was cured with a succession of herbal teas, presumably diuretic and antibiotic.  Hsu thinks several cases that do not refer explicitly to sex are actually about it, Yi being a delicate speaker when discussing the nobility.  If she (and other commentators) are right, most of Yi’s main cases involved overindulgence in sex with either drinking before or cooling too fast afterward.

More interesting, however, are the many who got sick from falling in cold water and then getting overheated, or became sweaty and then got chilled or stressed by wind or other influences while drying out.  This belief is exactly the same among the Maya of Mexico that I have lived with, and indeed my wife and I were raised with versions of it in the midwestern United States.  It seems to be worldwide.  Yi treated one case by making him drink 60 litres of medicated ale—quite a heroic measure but probably pleasant enough (Hsu 2010b:78).  Another patient (p. 83) got sick from washing his hair and then going to sleep before it dried.  My wife remembers being counseled not to go out or do anything with wet hair, and so do my Maya friends.  In their cases, we can trace the idea back to Galen, but Yi was writing well before Galen—evidently this idea occurs to doctors worldwide.

In general, a large percentage of the problems were caused by or associated with “wind,” meaning not only literal wind but also intangible disruptive airs or influences in general (again, just as in Maya medicine).  The leading authority Shigehisu Kitayama sees wind as “the unregulated and irregular,” leading to madness and seizures (Hsu 2010b:213).  It remains important in Chinese medicine today.

Another individual strained his back lifting a heavy stone, and was cured with a softening decoction (p. 84).  He also had difficulty urinating (Yi thought kidneys were involved; a biomedical doctor would probably think “muscular spasm”).  This is a straightforward case.  Another straightforward case (19, p. 84) involved diagnosis of intestinal worms by symptoms immediately recognizable to a medically experienced writer today, and they were treated with daphne, a convulsive systemic poison that would indeed clean out the worms (though an overdose would have killed the patient too).  Another was clearly cystitis (p. 204), and treated accordingly, with a medicinal tea that was presumably diuretic, astringent and antibiotic.

The Chinese were already well aware of all these qualities, and knew effective herbs.  Yet another ate horse liver, considered poisonous in old China (possibly because horses ate plants poisonous to humans and the toxins concentrated in the liver).  Several other cases are less clear, but all cases seem to involve diseases that start from a specific causal event or event sequence.

Hsu contrasts the Chinese approach, focusing on the ongoing physical condition that appears as illness, with the western focus on a defined cause leading to a subsequent effect.  However, Yi’s cases actually read exactly like biomedical cases:  a specific event leads to an illness, which then produces symptoms and sometimes death.  Hsu lists these specific causal events (p. 114).  Chill aftrer overheating can create ongoing symptoms in both Chinese and western traditions.  When it comes to death from overindulgence in alcohol, there is literally no difference in approach or causal theory between Yi and a modern doctor, except that the modern doctor would have more accurate knowledge of the physiology involved—and even there Yi knew that damage to internal organs was involved.  Hsu is attending not to a real difference in causal theory so much as to a difference in the intervening variables assumed to be operating.  Of course there are differences in the causal theories too, with the Chinese indeed attending more to ongoing states than some western researchers do, but the contrast is not a simple open-and-shut one.

Westerners may prefer to look at those very cause-effect relationships.  Chinese do not ignore them.  However, Hsu finds that Chinese may prefer to look at intervening variables, and finds great differences between east and west.  Indeed, cultures tend to differ more in the black-box variables they infer than in observed relationships.  It is easier to see that overindulgence in alcohol causes problems, or that catching a chill is bad for health, than to understand why (in physiological terms).

Acupuncture, so famous now in the west, suddenly appears in the Han Dynasty.  Earlier references to needling seem to be merely lancing boils and other things for which needles are used worldwide.  Acupuncture is totally different.  It involves needling at strategic points of the body, where flows of blood and qi can be stimulated, blocked, cleaned, dispersed, drained, or corrected; hollowness is solidified, overflowing drained, stagnation removed, and so on (see Wu 1993:16).  Several different types of needles are used.  Most are very fine; the bigger ones tend to be the ones used for lancing boils and other less arcane purposes.

The earliest major treatise on acupuncture is the Ling Shu, “Spiritual Pivot,” the second part of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic (following the Su Wen, “Basic Questions”).  The Ling Shu certainly confirms Elisabeth Hsu’s choice of “the body ecologic” for the body described in the Yellow Emperor medical tradition.  A great deal of the book is a discussion and extension of the parallels between the individual body, the body politic, and the cosmos.  In fact, the book makes it obvious that a great deal of acupuncture treatment is specifically derived from assuming “resonance” between these.  The Ling Shu explains resonance about as clearly as anyone could:  “The sun resonates with the moon, the water with mirrors, the durm with drumming sounds.  For the sun and moon are bright…water and mirrors reflect…drums and drumming sounds resonate in time [i.e. rhythm],” and so on (p. 158).  We are talking about real similarities in basic qualities here, and even about resonance in the most literal sense of the (English) word, in drumming.  The extension of this to the resonance of Heaven, Earth and Humanity, and of cosmos, politics, and individual, is a natural logical step, however wildly overextended by Han thinkers.

Han cosmology and philosophy were based to a great extent on actual essential uniformities; the human body is a microcosm not just metaphorically or symbolically, but quite literally.

Note, for instance, that the above list of things to do to manage the qi channels bears no resemblace to anything biomedically effective, but an uncanny and very clear resemblance to the management of water in irrigation. Similar water and irrigation metaphors, or rather essential identities, occur throughout the book (e.g. p. 139).

Qi received from food is muddy or turbulent; clear qi comes from the air.  The clear qi flows upward and into yin organs, the muddy goes down and into yang organs.  They can get into opposition, a disordered state (see p. 148). “Debauched qi swirls and flows” (154), resulting in imbalances, which show themselves in ominous dreams.

Also, “The protective qi and the sun travel in the yang during the day.  At midnight, the travel is in the yin…” (p. 119).  The valley qi and other geographical qi’s are described.  As to the body politic, “To cure the state is to cure the household,” followed by a repetition of the ancient Chinese proverb: “Enter a country and [ask about] the customs.  Enter a household and [ask about household rules]” (p. 123).  Rebellions in a country make medical treatment difficult; rebellions within the body are the same.  Lustful and unregulated behavior of elites ruins not only their health but the realm’s; and much more.  Some of the parallelism is directly mediated through good government making it possible for people to have adequate food and clothing, but some is clearly resonance again (see p. 124).

Finally, in a stunning passage, the entire macrocosm/microcosm is laid out in concise and comprehensive terms.  This passage bears quoting in extenso, because it seems to be one true distillate of all Han thinking.  (I am leaving out, however, several resonances so forced or so purely abstract that they add little.)

“Heaven is round.  Earth is flat.  Man’s head is round and his feet are flat, making the correspondences and resonances.  Heaven has the sun and moon.  Man has two eyes.  Earth has the nine regions.  Man has the nine orifices.  Heaven has wind and rain.  Man has joy and anger.  Heaven has thunder and lightning.  Man has tones and sounds.  Heaven has the four seasons.  Man has the four limbs….  Heaven has winter and summer.  Man has chills and fevers.  Heaven has the ten days of the celestial stems.  Man’s hands have ten figers.  The earthly branches are twelve.  Man’s feet have ten toes, plus the penis and testicles make the correspondence. Women lack these latter two sections but can enwomb the human body [i.e., the female genitalia correspond to the male and thus make up twelve].  Heaven has yin and yang.  Man has male and female. …Earth has high mountains.  Man has shoulder and knee caps.  Earth has deep valleys.  Man has armpits and the crease of the knee….  Earth has grass and greens.  Man has fine hairs.  Heaven has day and night.  Man has sleeping and waking….  Earth in the fourth month cannot produce grass.  Man in later years does not produce children….”  (227).  “Man” here is ren, “person of either sex”; note that women are specifically mentioned.  As if this were not enough, a great deal more listing of resonances occurs throughout the book, with a glorious finale at the climax (pp. 249-257).  Seasonal directions and warnings throughout the book show that the Han obsession with seansonality and proper seasonal activities was fully present in acupuncture; other texts, such as the Guanzi and Huainanzi, ground these in agriculture and forestry, where they are largely practical and rational.  Their extension to medicine is not without some justice—everyone in the world seems to have figured out that we get fevers in summer and colds in winter—but the Yellow Emperor’s medical tradition took it far beyond pragmatics (see e.g. p. 267, which bears comparison with Hippocrates on airs).

The fivefold set of phases seen in the Su Wen are, naturally, present here too, with the Five Viscera—heart, lungs, stomach, spleen and kidneys—emphasized.  They have their proper colors,flavors, musical tones, and so on (pp. 156-157). The five wei, flavors, are extremely important, and remained so.  They are still vitally imporant in Chinese medicine today.

Heat and cold are major causative entities, and their effects must be dealt with in countless ways (see e.g. many kinds of hot illnesses, and treatments, pp. 105 ff.).  The book tells the student about conditions beyond treatment, when death is certain; these as seen on p. 107 are a good description of acute terminal phases of more or less typical infectious diseases in general; and on p. 111 are warnings about the frequent inability of acupuncture to deal with intestinal worms.  There are also many of the warnings that every medical book in history, especially in China, must have in it somewhere:  treat the illness as soon as possible—even before it arises if you can catch the prodromal signs.

Elisabeth Hsu’s emotional body survives in the book, too, and emotions cause illness.  So do the other problems noted above in the Shi Ji text.  “Worry and fear can strain the heart.  Chilling the body and cold drinks can injure the lungs….  When there is great anger, the qi ascends and does not descend….  When one is struck or hit, or has sexual intercourse while drunk, or is exposed to wind while sweating, it can injure the spleen.When one uses effort in lifting heavy objects, or has unlimited sexual intercourse, or bathes while sweating, it can injure the kidneys” (p. 20).  Similar warnings about excessive emotion and emotion-bearing activities (drinking, sex, fighting) occur throughout the book.  In more general terms, “all [illnesses] are born in wind, rain, winter’s cold, summer’s heat, clearness and humidity, or joy and anger.  When joy and anger cannot be controlled, it causes injury to the viscera.  Wind and rain cause injury to the top.  Clearness and humidity cause injury to the bottom…” and much more on causation (p. 216).

Several entire classifications of people according to their qi weaknesses and strengths occur in the book (pp. 161f-162; 205-211; 251 ff.).  One classification of human types involves resonance with the winds: each human physiotype is particularly endangered by the wind of a particular season (177).

Closely related to the work Hsu analyzes, but several centuries later, is the Mai Jing, “Pulse Classic.”  This amazing work, which runs to almost 400 pages in translation, was written by Wang Shuhe around 300 CE, during the Jin Dynasty.  Thanks to careful collating and editing not too many centuries later, it survives as a fairly coherent work, though it is surely not quite the way Wang Shuhe left it.  It describes many types of pulse and the countless medical indications that are provided by different pulse patterns in combination with other symptoms.  The illness picture given in this book is incredibly rich, detailed, systematic, and scientific  The science has not stood up well under modern biomedicine, but is still under investigation; clearly the end is not yet, and valuable insights may yet emerge.  Chinese doctors still believe firmly in the significance of qi and blood flow, cold and heat, and pulse diagnosis.

The point, though, is that this is a fully scientific text: it is based on the very best objective observation and recording Wang could muster, the theories are free from supernatural beliefs, and the work is systematized according to the theories.  These theories are those of the medicine of the time, basically those of the Yellow Emperor. As with the earlier works, much of the science involves cautious, controlled inference on the basis of the axiom that the human body is a microcosm of the world.  Thus, observations of earthly conditions can be generalized—but only if carefully tested against clinical observation.  Whether the results hold up to modern investigation or not, they were arrived at by the scientific method of the time.

Illness is due to the problems with qi and blood as stressed by heat, cold, wet, dry, and related environmental conditions.  Illness progresses from exterior to interior, affecting progressively the organ systems once it strikes deeply into the interior and nests there.  Different types of pulse correlate with different conditions in different organ fields.  One can tell whether and when a person is going to die, from the pulse and other signs.

Seasonality matters, and so does food.  The most important aspect of food in modern Chinese folk medicine, and important throughout the past as well, is the positioning in the Hippocratic-Galenic hot-cold-wet-dry quadrilateral.  Rice is neutral; wheat is cool and wet; shrimps are hot and wet; and so on through the thousands of foods and drugs in Chinese herbals. Sweets are wetting, hence their damage to the body (see e.g. Flaws 1995:10).

The fivefold system is also important—much more so at times in the past than the hot/cold system was.  Liver disease can occur in autumn from eating chicken; eating pheasant or hare can make spleen disease start in spring; the heart needs care abvout eating pork or fish, and winter is its danger season; lungs suffer from horse or deep meat, and summer; kidney disease follows from carelessness about beef in late summer (Wang 1997:26-27).  Even specific times of day are part of this fivefold correlation scheme (p. 62).  The microcosm/macrocosm resonances are invoked.  Spleen, for instance, is associated with earth.  “Earth is bountiful and rich by nature.  It breeds and nourishes the tens of thousands of living things” (71).  Thus the spleen is a beneficent, richly yielding organ, and associated with the stomach.  The lungs, on the other hand, are asssociated with metal, and are with the large intestine.  And so it goes, for the other organs.  Pulses have to be appropriate to all this.

Pathogens are familiar conditions: wind, wind dampness, summerheat, excessive heat of any kind, and the various deficiencies, blockages, and overflows of qi and other humors.

Long sections tell when sweating is desirable (and should be induced) and when sweating must be avoided, and so for other treatments including acupuncture and moxibustion.

Some diseases involve major mental inolvement, including lily disease and fox disease (p. 272).  These are both physical and mental in symptomatology, and seem to involve fevers that lead to mental confusion.  Stroke is described, a point to which we will return (p. 274).

Herbal medicine began, so far as we have records, with the Shen Nong Bencao of the later Han.  Bencao means “basic herbal.”  (It was, originally, probably a deliberate pun, since it can also be translated “roots and herbs.”  Ben still had its “root” meaning at the time; it was evolving into its more usual later meaning of “basic” or “origin,” with gen taking up the function of describing a botanical root.)  Shen Nong was the god of agriculture, supposedly living around 2737 B.C., but the herbal is pure Han in its theories, and the name was evidently used in about the same spirit that made Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld name his medical column for young people “Dr. Hip Pocrates.”   The herbal does not survive in its Han form; it was edited and put in definitive form by the great polymath of the 6th century, Tao Hongjing (452-536).  Even his edition survives only in various quoted and abstracted forms, though it has been ably reconstructed, and we can be fairly confident we have something like his work.  Sun Simiao reproduced large parts of it, and is an especially valuable source.  What survives has been translated by Yang Shou-zhong (Yang 1998). Tao wrote his own augmented herbal with 730 (365 x 2) simples.

The Shen Nong Bencao contains treatments of 365 simples (one for each day of the year), listed as Ruler, Minister, and Servant drugs, i.e. basic major drugs, adjunct drugs that help or balance or mollify the effects of the master drugs, and adjuvants that merely add soothing or other minor qualities.  In general, ruler drugs strengthen the patient—they are tonics and supplements. They are not toxic (or only trivially so).  Minister drugs fight the illness, and thus may be toxic at times.  Servant drugs add or balance. This political classification tended to disappear over time, as more and more “minor” drugs grew into major ones.  In the Song Dynasty, the government herbal reports:  “It is difficult to meticulously categorize the newly supplemented drugs” (Goldschmidt 2009) according to this system, so they downgraded it.  It is absent from what survives of the HHYF.  Evidently the flood of new drugs from both China and the outside world caused the system to break down.  (On bencao history, see Needham 1986; Unschuld 1986; Goldschmidt 2009 provides some useful additional notes.)

Drugs are also coded according to the five-flavors system and the heating-cooling-balanced system.  The latter may be already influenced by Greek medicine, but it is impossible to tell, because almost all the drugs are strictly Chinese and thus were not coded by early Western physicians or druggists.  The few foods treated are largely coded as balanced; most of them would be today too.  Sesame is balanced; authorities later have disagreed considerably on its position.  Red beans are balanced too; they are now warm (in modern Chinese practice), but were still balanced in the medieval texts.

Drugs are noted as treating the “three worms,” identified by Yang Shou-zhong, following Chao Yuan-fang of the 5th-6th century, as pinworms, roundworms and “red worms” (1998:3).  The “five evils” are also mentioned, and variously interpreted (p. 17); there are several lists of evils in the literature.  Marijuana is described as acrid and balanced.  In a very oft-quoted line, the Shen Nong says: “Taking much of it may make one behold ghosts and frenetidcally run about.  Protracted taking may enable one to communicate with the spirit light and make the body light [in weight]” (p. 148).

In an early supplement to this work, a vast number of incompatibilities are noted; we shall meet such things again.

However, there may have been some earlier western influence.  The term huoluan in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic (ca. 100 AD) may be from Greek cholera (Unschuld 2003).  This would put a major Greek borrowing as early as the late Han Dynasty.

Late in Han, Zhang Zhongjing (a.k.a. Zhang Ji; 150-219 CE) wrote the now-lost original edition of the Shang-Han Lun (“Discourse on Damaging Cold,” i.e. coldness that damages the person).   Zhang was from Changsha, not far from the Mawangdui tombs or from the court of Huainan, where Liu An and his staff had edited many major philosophic works a few centuries earlier.  Long lost, the Discourse on Damaging Cold was re-edited from Tang reconstructions (Goldschmidt 2009:99-100).  The rather modern cast to its medicine—it describes beriberi and oral rehydration for diarrhea—may therefore be Tang or even Song interpellations.  Zhong’s theory was that coldness was damaging the patients.  This referred to humoral cold, not literal cold wind, and thus it would seem possible that Hippocratic-Galenic ideas had become part of the basic medical axiom set, though it could equally well be parallel evolution; every culture realizes that physical coldness can be a problem, and many have independently extended it to something like a humoral theory.  Marta Hanson contrasts this book with the Inner Canon:  “The Inner Canon offered yin-yang and Five Phases doctrines, macro-microcosm models, and a type of correlative thought that related multiple registers of experience in a system of correspondences.  Zhang…is non-theoretical by comparison and deeply clinical in focus.  Zhang…described symptoms during the courses of disease, gave their underlying physiological and temporal patterns, and listed formulas iuseful as disease patterns changed” (Hanson 2011:12).

Shang-han was a general term for serious forms of diseases caused by or characterized by imbalance of yang and yin.  These came in six general varieties, referred to as jing “warps,” i.e. “basic strands.”  First was tai yang “greater yang” illness.  The other five were sunlight yang, lesser yang, and three types of yin disease.  The last of the yin diseases is the above-mentioned huo luan, and the symptoms described are exactly those of cholera (there is a theory that huo luan is actually a transcription of the Greek word).  In general, yin diseases are characterized by more weakness and less fever than yang diseases.  All descriptions are circumstantial and concise; someone was a very good clinical observer and recorder.  Unfortunately, it is usually impossible to correlate symptom lists with modern disease categories (though see below).  The problem is that so many infectious diseases call forth the same set of human defenses and vulnerabilities (deranged temperature control, vomiting, diarrhea, weakness, etc.).

Shang-han came in many forms, each form corresponding to a whole class of conditions.   (One wonders whether Zhang saw all these as separate illnesses, or simply as severe, cold-worsened forms of the yang and yin conditions.)  It was not necessarily febrile but involved severe coldness, general aching, vomiting, and hiccoughs (Zhang 1981).  Related conditions or variant forms involve sweating, stiffness, chills, congestion, difficulty in urination, and cramps.  In biomedical terms, the symptoms are basically those of flu, but could also apply to almost any infectious disease.  Some forms involve alternating fever and cold, which can only apply to malaria.  Some types include diarrhea, some do not.  (It is denied for the condition in paragraph 20, which seems to refer to stomach flu and similar conditions; but present in the condition in paragraph 21, which appears to be acute salmonellosis including typhoid, but could also be any kind of dysentery, or even cholera; also in paragraph 25, which seems like a protozoan dysentery.  And so throughout the book.)  Zhang saw warm (febrile) disorders as transformations of cold damage, and did not explore them in detail, though he gave many recipes.  The Shang-Han Lun focuses on what we now recognize as infectious disease, lacks discussion of stroke or the other conditions discussed in juan 12 of the HHYF, nor does it cover wounds and bites (HHYF’s juan 34).

Zhang’s book was the major fount of drug formulas.  He gave concise but often effective recipes for every condition.  These survive today, and indeed fully a fourth of the medical recipes in the great modern collection Chinese Herbal Medicine: Formulas and Strategies (Scheid et al. 2009) are from the work.  Zhang and/or his editors were quite aware that diarrhea should be treated by teas with sweetness and with nutrient-rich and mineral-rich herbs.  He anticipated modern oral rehydration therapy by 1800 years or so, if the material is truly Han; at the very least, by the 900 years since the Song editions.  He also has a good description of beriberi, which was successfully cured with fresh herbs.  The book mentions about 90 herbs, many of which are in the HHYF but many of which are not.

Extremely notable is the almost total lack of discussion of organ systems (as opposed to actual organs), fivefold taxonomies, or any of the other theories so vitally important in much of Chinese medicine.  As Michael Nylan (2013) points out, fivefold correspondence theory was still under heavy debate in Han times, and there was not general agreement on it.  Qi plays an important role, but only as the source of the damaging cold.  This lack of connection with other theories did not escape Song medical writers:  “Zhongjing’s book’s meaning is deep and it principles are profound.  It does not [however] clarify the [role of the] circulation tracts, it does not explain the transformation of qi…” (Wang Wei—not the poet, but a Song doctor—quoted in Goldschmidt 2009:170).

Not long after Han, in the 3rd century CE, the alchemist and herbalist Ge Hong recorded in his book Emergency Prepararations Held Up One’s Sleeve that extract of qinghao (Artemisia annua) cured malaria (Marks 2012:111).  It has, of course, recently gone worldwide for that purpose, and is the drug of choice in many areas of the world today.  Meanwhile, plant exploration increased, marked by—among other things—what may be the world’s first true ethnobotany: the Nanfang Caomu Juan of 304 CE (updated since; see H. Li 1979, and cf. H. Li 1977 for other early medicinal plants).  This book described useful plants of southeast Asia, including what is now south China.

Early in the Tang Dynasty, the great doctor Sun Simiao wrote Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold (651), a major work of synthesis and organization.  He consciously interfaced Hippocratic-Galenic ideas with the Five Phases and yin-yang concepts of earlier Chinese tradition (Sun 2007).  His work was influenced by Buddhism, not only in its western cast but in its argument for purity of mind in the physician (Scheid 2007:41).  Sun was one of the geniuses of Chinese culture, and was duly elevated to the position of God of Medicine and Longevity.

At this time, foreign plants, especially those that came with Buddhist medicine and medical missionaries, started to appear in numbers in Chinese herbals (Laufer 1919; Salguero 2014).  Sun has many, including eight common medicinal foods newly come from the west.  The Newly Revised materia Medica (Xinxiu bencao) and the Supplement to the Materia Medica (Bencao shiyi) written in 739…both included largte numbers of new foreign drugs” (Salguero 2014:40).

Soon after, the Tang Bencao appeared under the editorship of Su Jing, with 984 simples.  A Hu Bencao (“Iranian Herbal”) was compiled by one Zheng Qian around 740.  The story of exotics in Chinese medicine has been told by Berthold Laufer (1919) and Shiu Ying Hu (1990, reprinted in the 1996 Huihui Yaofang edition).

A Persian who settled in China in the 9th-10th centuries and used the Chinese name Li Xun wrote a book in Chinese on western medicine, the Haiyao Bencao, “Basic Herbs from the Ocean Route” around 756 (Hu 1990; Kong et al. 1996; Liu and Shaffer 2007:217; Savage-Smith et al. 2011:217; Salguero 2014:40 thinks it was “ninth or tenth century”).  Arab and Persian traders were well established in China by then; in the 9th century there was an Arab quarter with 200,000 residents (probably mostly locals, but many Near Eastern merchants) in Canton and with major establishments and trade at Quanzhou in Fujian (the main port in the next couple of dynasties).  They brought foods and herbs as well as other products.  Frankincense and myrrh entered Chinese practice.

Buddhist medicine brought in the Greek four-element theory, with earth, wind, fire and water as the elements; Chinese accepted these in Buddhist contexts (Salguero 2014).  The Buddhist tridoṣa—Three Humors—of wind, bile and phlegm proved very hard to deal with.  Wind was important in Chinese medicine, but the understanding of it was quite different from the Indian.  Choler (bile) is almost unmentioned and melancholia was not a concept in China.  The Chinese tried to deal with bile by invoking “hot” and “yellow” medical concepts (Salguero 2014:80), but clearly these remained alien to Chinese traditions, and are notably absent in the HHYF, where “hot” (re) has its usual Chinese meanings.

Chinese medicine also makes no obvious use of the four Greek humors—blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile—as such, but it does attach great importance to blood, and it also makes a major issue of phlegm (see Scheid et al. 2009, esp. 773ff. for phlegm).

Commentaries on the Sutra of Golden Light recommend against eating too much or little, waiting too long or not long enough; forbidden foods; and eating meat with milk.  They also cautioned Southern people not to eat jiang (whatever that was), and northerners to avoid milk  honey (obviously a hopeless counsel).  Buddhist works taught that eating bitter vegetables with honey prevents conceiving a male child, and that consuming alcohol, wheat or raw meat when one has a Fire Illness would lead to blindness or worse.  White heron fried in lard causes leprosy (lai).  Oily Flavor (ni) can treat various conditions (Salguero 2014:99).  The Chinese were disgusted by some aspects of Indian medicine (drinking cow urine…) and conversely the Indians found nothing to praise in similar Chinese practices, and, on a more important doctrinal level, traditional and Confucian Chinese were horrified by the Buddhist emphasis on loathing the body and abhorring it and all its products.  The strong affirmation of the body and of physical life and activity in Chinese tradition certainly stands in dramatic and marked contrast to the hatred of the flesh that is central not only to Buddhist but also to traditional Christian (see e.g. Romans 7-8) and certain other western religions and philosophies. Chinese may have many traditional disciplines of the body, but they did not oppose flesh and spirit as savagely as the west, at least until Buddhism taught them to; even then, Chinese ascetics seem much less prone to excesses of “enthusiasm” than western ones.

Both Chinese and western medicine focused heavily on hot, cold, wet, and dry, but the question of whether the Chinese obsession with hot, warm, balanced, cool and cold is of Western origin is too simple.  All major medical traditions in the world recognize that getting overheated or chilled is not a good thing.  Chinese knew this long before they knew of western medicine.  However, the Galenic tradition obviously influenced codings and beliefs; working with folk medicine in many Chinese communities, I found very few differences from what I know from Mediterranean and Latin American experience.

The Song Dynasty deserves major consideration here, because it profoundly changed Chinese medicine and set the stage for the HHYF.  In Song, bencao literature grew, with up to 1748 simples described in the Zhenghe Bencao (“regulating harmony” or “regulation and harmony” bencao) of 1116 (Goldschmidt 2009; Hsu 2010a, 2010b; Hsu and Harris 2010; Unschuld 1986). In 1076, the Song government started an imperial pharmacy to standardize drugs and enforce quality and honesty (Goldscmidt 2009:124ff).  Printing became common, greatly increasing the number of medical books and making nonscholarly sources widely available for the first time.  More herbs from the west are recorded in the Song Hui Yao (Historical Records of the Song Dynasty; Savage-Smith et al. 2011:217).  New classifications of herbal drugs appeared (see e.g. Scheid et al. 2009:xx).

Volker Scheid (2007) reports that “Song…was a time of rapid economic and social change based on the development of new technologies of agricultural production.  Commoners were released from quasiserfdom and became independent landholders.  Commercializaation of life and urbanization increased.  The hereditary aristocracy…was replaced by a more fluid gentry elite…book printing facilitated intellectual exchange….  This stimulated scholars to systematize knowledge, which had previously circulated in smaller social networks, on a grander scale” (Scheid 2007:37).  These trends all began in Tang and continued through Ming (see Mote 1999), but certainly they were prominent in Song.  Population grew, leading to economic growth but also more disease. Foreign contacts increased, and presumably some diseases came with them.

Scholars, partly because there were too many of them for the imperial bureaucracies, turned to medicine in large numbers (Scheid 2007:42).  They tended to displace downward the traditional professionals, who often followed local family traditions.  Song philosophers and moralists argued that medicine was an ideal way for a scholar to use his knowledge if he could not manage to fulfill his ideal role as government servant.

The rise of scholarly medicine was so rapidly and strikingly effective that the emperors themselves became involved.  The brilliant (if feckless; Kuhn 2009; Mote 1999) polymath emperor Huizong contributed a preface to the official medical encyclopedia and then went on to write a major theoretical work on medicine (see Goldschmidt 2009:183-6).

In contrast to earlier body-respecting medicine, Song medicine introduced autopsies, largely for forensic reasons (McKnight 1981; McKnight and Liu 1999).  Dissection became acceptable, though still not common.

However, the rapid rise of the scholarly physicians led to more arcane and textual medicine (Scheid 2007).  Meanwhile, the Five Circuit Phases (wuyun) and Six Qi’s (liuqi) added themselves to the picture.  This new theory was called yunqi, and it had a long reach, affecting the leading medical writers of the time.  We are not totally clear what these five and six entities were, but they apparently added a dynamic, environmentally grounded quality to the medicine.  The five circuit phases—not the same as the classic Five Phases (wu xing)—seem to have been terrestrial, the six qi atmospheric (Leung 2003; cf. Goldschmidt 2009:183ff).

The doctor Lu Wansu concentrated on cooling; Zhang Congzheng on purging; Li Dongyuan on bu tu (lit. “supplementing the earth”), and Zhu Danxi on enriching yin (Scheid et al. 2009:xx-xxi).

Colder or warmer environments and personal temperaments were taken into account, no doubt partly inspired by Galenic influences.  Older ideas of the five phases and flavors, “poison” (du, which means “poison-potentiating” as well as poisonous), and strengthening or supplementing (bu), were key concepts already (as they are to this day).  After this, herbals continued to increase in coverage, climaxing in the great Bencao Gangmu, finished in 1593 and published in 1596, probably the greatest herbal in the world in its time (cf. Nappi 2009; Needham 2004:142).  The west soon had fuller and better herbals, though actual theoretic advances in botany had to wait until John Ray in the mid-17th century, or—Needham thinks—even Tournefort in the late 18th century (Needham 2004:144.)

One major influence was a revival of a text from the past. In Song, many works derivative of the Shang-Han Lun were created.  Song doctors made a major industry out of trying to square Zhang’s cold-focused medicine with the new emphasis on warm or heat problems (Goldschmidt 2009:157ff).  Song doctors, and doctors in later dynasties, focused increasingly on these warm disorders (Scheid 2007), perhaps because fevers increased over time in the polluted Chinese environment.  In Ming and Qing, heat disorders were to become even more prominent.

Combining Zhang’s medicine with other traditions may have cost China a chance to develop a scientific medicine, because Zhang’s sober clinical eye was an invaluable corrective to the arid, unrealistic logical paradigm of the correspondence school.  The more the Song scholars integrated it with the latter, the more they diluted its value.  All too predictable was the Song emperor Huizong’s espousal of the correspondence theory, which fits so well with the bureaucratic mind and so poorly with the mind of a real-world medical agent.

The same spirit animated too much of the government encyclopedia, which, for instance, spun the old story (known in the west too) that the body has 365 bones, corresponding to the number of days in the year.  Just as Song’s so-called “sprouts of capitalism” withered over time (Mote 1999), the hard-science tradition from Zhang to Sun to the Song forensic investigators could easily have developed into a scientific empirical medicine, but failed to do so.  The situation is a perfect reversal of that which took place in western Europe, where beginnings of observational medicine at the same time went on growing, eventually to culminate in the 17th century, with Sydenham, Harvey, and others replacing book-driven schemes by observation and experiment.

Zhang, Sun Simiao, and other books established a canonical set of prescriptions for any and all disorders.  These could be varied, often by adding more and more drugs to balance out the original set.  Doctors came to rely on published formularies as opposed to earlier, more individualized or familial, practices (Scheid 2007:39).

Many of the Song doctors, however, acquired a sense of clinical practice and awareness from their own practice and from Zhang.  They could develop or modify their own formulas.  They reported good descriptions of actual symptoms in actual patients.  Shen Gua, who among his other achievements wrote a medical work, began it by pointing out that a good doctor will examine everything—the symptoms stressed by Zhang and those stressed by the correspondence school (Goldschmidt 2009:175 quotes him extensively).  If history had been only slightly different, the Chinese would have anticipated the west in realizing that the old idea that illness is a weakness in the patient—caused by cold and heat, or by diet, or by environmental trauma, or by fear or other emotions—had to be supplemented by serious attention to the different kinds of diseases.  (Of course, ironically, we are now learning that biomedicine’s focus on diseases has to be supplemented by concern for environment and emotion!)

Li Dong-yuan, a leading Song doctor, emphasized the importance of the spleen and stomach, and the ease of damage to the spleen by fire (medical, not literal) and other environmental influences.  This seems to me a response to the southward movement of Chinese culture and the consequent familiarity to malaria.  Chronic malaria enlarges the spleen and makes it tender and easily injured; I heard on the Hong Kong waterfront in the 1960s that one way of killing a person was to hit him hard in the spleen, which would rupture and lead to death.  This assumes that the person was extremely malarious, an all too safe assumption in the old days.  In any case, the spleen remains important in Chinese medicine out of all proportion to its biomedical role.

Li Dong-yuan was the first to describe and stress yin fire, “upward heat associated with damp heat below…[that] causes chaos…in the clear and turbid qi” (Flaws 1995:12).  This in connection with the spleen is a fair description of the feeling of chronic malaria.  (Clear qi should rise and energize the body; turbid qi remain below, partly in the form of the digestive process that separates nutrients from wastes.)  Bob Flaws (1995) also points out—from his practice, and certainly correctly—that in milder forms it is a fine description of the results on the stomach and associated organs of the modern junk-food diet.   (He follows Chinese folk and traditional practice in recommending a qing dan, “purifying and blanding,” diet, i.e. one high in neutral foods like grains and beans and low in high-calorie, hard-to-digest, and pungent foods.  This makes perfect sense biomedically as well as Sinologically.)  Once again, we have to recall that these doctors are talking about real conditions, however strange their language and classification system may be to biomedically-trained readers.

In spite of all this, epidemics swept China, especially in the 1040s.  The government responded by publishing more manuals as well as through the hospital program.  In 1057, the government established a Bureau for Revising Medical Texts (Scheid 2007:38).  In 1089, when prefect of Hangzhou, the great poet Su Shi founded China’s first charity hospital.  This inspired state hospitals on a large scale, beginning around 1100; these were independent from reief homes.  Under Huizong, the empire soon followed, beginning a program of hospital and poorhouse building in 1102.  It soon ran out of money, but not before innovating isolation wards to prevent contagion—a new idea in China, where strengthening the patient always took precedence over worrying about the illness.  It seems more than possible that the idea of the hospital and above all the ideas on contagion and isolation came from the Near East.  Wards were separated to reduce contagion—showing it was well recognized—and “salaried physicians were awarded bonuses on the basis of positive treatment outcomes” (Levine 2009:597).  This brings us closer to the ancient goal of paying the doctor when one is healthy, and not when one is sick (a Zhou or Han Dynasty idea that anticipated medical insurance by a couple of millennia).

In connection with all this, Song, under Huizong, estabished a medical school (Yixue) in 1103, “designed to raise the stats of imperially licensed physicians to parallel that of Imperial University graduates” (Levine 2009:588).  This involved clinical experience as well as learning texts.  It was under the Directorate of Education, which also ran a mathematical school (founded 1104) and other technical enterprises (Levine 2009).

Acupuncture and moxibustion flourished, but largely among the nonscholarly practitioners (Leung 2003).  The separation of working physicians and healers from scholarly practitioners—theoretically, scholars who practised medicine on the side, for families and friends, rather than for profit—was established strongly in this period.  Such enlightened amateurs raised the status of medicine greatly.  Professional doctors were, and remained, low in the social hierarchy.

A fascinating insight into Song medical thinking is provided in a brilliant essay by Cong Ellen Zhang (2011; could she be a descendant of Zhang Zhongqing?).  She studied the belief in a miasma called zhang (a totally different character from her name, of course).  This illness-causing and pervasive problem existed in the deep south, especially lowland tropical Lingnan (Guangdong and Guangxi).  It was a product of the heat, wetness, intense sun, and possibly the lush vegetation (or, alternatively, the lush vegetation and the miasma were both produced by the wet heat).  It was a general term for the sicknesses and misery provoked in northern Chinese in that climate.  It seems especially to have targeted the many exiles sent down to that dismal and remote location, there to suffer boredom, isolation, humiliation, and fear.  At least one account of the time explicitly differentiates it from malaria.  Song accounts of it are strikingly reminiscent of 19th-century English accounts of the horrors and dangers of the tropics.

There were green-grass miasma in spring, yellow-plum ones in summer, new grain ones in late summer, and yellow-flossgrass ones in fall, the last being the worst (Zhang 2011:200, from Fan Chengda).  Su Shi, who died of it (i.e., probably of some tropical-acquired chronic disease), treated it with ginger, onion and fermented black beans (Zhang 2011:215); others used Pinellia, Atractylodes and Agastache (Zhang 2011:216), herbal curealls that probably did little to help.  It was a medically recognized regional miasma, a general aerial force or condition, dangerous or outright deadly.

What emerges from the Song texts is the critically important point that the doctors were genuinely interested in clinical treatment, not primarily in abstract theory.  However much they may have diligently labored to theorize their practice, they were more interested in the patients’ recovery.  This goes against the received wisdom in western studies of Chinese medical history, which is heavily reliant on theoretical texts and thus tends to see Chinese medicine solely in terms of theory.  The result is the claim that Chinese medicine is incommensurable with Western, and could not relate to it.  This is the claim we disprove in our work on the HHYF, and the disproof rests on the perception that Yuan doctors were interested in curing patients rather than in keeping their theories pure, and therefore could adopt Near Eastern medicine and make some sense of it.  However wrong—in biomedical terms—were the accommodations of shang-han and correspondence medicine, they prove that Chinese doctors were more than willing to mix and blend paradigms if they thought it could help suffering clients.

With the Jin Dynasty, stronger medications, such as purges, became common also (Leung 2003:378).  New ideas and practices were established widely.  As in agriculture and other realms, new ideas and practices arose dramatically in the Song Dynasty (Unschuld 1985, 1986) but were developed more in later dynasties than in Song itself.

An important later Song work is Wang Zhi Zhong’s work Zhen Jiu Zi Sheng Jing (2011), a 12th-century manual of acupuncture and moxibustion. It is incredibly detailed, with names, treatments, and often descriptions of hundreds of illnesses.  These range from clear-cut, straightforward conditions to arcane and complex ones.  Perhaps the most clear-cut is back pain, blamed on too much physical work or activity and treated by simple needling and moxibustion (p. 221).  At the other extreme are diseases due towinds, which tend to have complicated, detailed, and highly overlapping symptomatologies.  One wonders how the Song Dynasty doctors figured out which was which.  The book gives treatments for conditions ranging from nightmares and madness to deafness and lumbago.  Male and female problems are detailed.  Relating to what we have left of the HHYF are brief sections on hemiplegia (partial paralysis usually due to stroke), which is blamed on winds (171-172, 279). It is worse if on the left side in males, on the right in females.  Tendon spasms (159) described in terms similar to the HHYF description, but much more simply.  They are due to winds.

Overall, causes are usually attacks or influences by winds.  These may strike the whole body or particular organs or body parts.  Often disturbances of qi are the problem. At other times—but surprisingly rarely for a Chinese doctor—he blames overdoing alcohol, hot food, and sex.  Following Zhang Zhongjing in looking at shang han and han re (“cold-and-heat”), he sees excessive cold and heat as often causative.  At other times, as with the back pains, overexertion is the problem; he blames eye troubles on the classic causes, such reading in dim light, standing in smoke, going outdoors in the wind, and doing too much fine detail work, but also drinking too much alcohol and eating too much hot food.

Even for a Chinese doctor, Wang is notable for clear, systematic, naturalistic presentation.  There is nothing mystical about his work—no demons, no obsessive fivefold correlations, no incomprehensible references to different sorts of qi.  He seems to have a definite affinity for Sun Simiao, whom he cites frequently.  His only fault is not distinguishing clearly between wind conditions, or between these and other illnesses due to cold, heat, and other factors.  He seems to have simply summarized earlier descriptions; he was, after all, interested in the acupuncture and moxibustion treatments, not in the causation.

In contrast with the HHYF, his descriptions are clear, simple, and comprehensible.  He seems typical of the Song period’s emphasis on getting rid of excessively complex and aridly schematic medicine and focusing on wind, qi, heat, cold, pathogenic energy, and physical causes (weakness, overexertion).

Overall, this is broadly similar to the HHYF, which is equally concerned with those variables.  The details, however, are very different, making it appear that the HHYF does indeed draw heavily on Near Eastern tradition.

By the time of the HHYF, Chinese medicine was based firmly on a conceptual framework of considerable subtlety and elaboeration.  It was based on:

The fivefold correspondences, including organ-fields, viscera, flavors, seasons, and much more;

The five degrees of hot and cold;

The vital importance of qi and blood as the circulatory systems of the body, and their dynamics, including stagnation, depletion, turbidity, overflow, and other irrigation-paralleling dynamics;

The yang and yin, and their complicated dynamics—they could be depleted, weakened, overproduced, and otherwise disarranged;

Related, but variously conceptualized, internal forces such as “fire”; yang and yin fires exist and can be damaging.

The dangers of external conditions including wind (both real and inferred) and heat, cold, wet (or damp) and dryness;

Personal problems that weaken the body, from worry and anxiety to fear, anger, excessive sex, and excessive eating and drinking (especially alcohol);

And miscellaneous other, less theoretical, conditions such as childbirth, injuries and traumas of all kinds, poisons, bites, stings, and the like.

Finally, a vast amount of magical, folk-religious, and folkloric practice continued, though it had no excuse in terms of the above system of medicine.  Charms, exorcisms, taboos, credulous beliefs in longevity, and other such practices continue today.  “A massive encyclopedia of medicine compiled at imperial behest at the height of the Song dynasty contains three fascicles (juan) cataloging talismans, rituals, and other interdictions, an indication of the continiuing high value placed on spirit-based medicine in the loftier echelons of society” (Salguero 2014:26; the work is the Zhenghe shengji zonglu of 1122).  A stunning compilation of this bizarre and arcane lore has recently appeared in Shih-Shan Susan Huang’s study of Daoist art, Picturing the True Form (2012).  It contains a vast number of medieval pictures of real and imagined parasites, real and imagined anatomy, charms, gods and spirits of the human body, and other strange medical apparitions (see esp. pp. 52-85).

It is likely that a few Chinese of the time made a distinction between the more scientific, theory-grounded, realistic medicine and this lore of spirits and demons, but one suspects that the vast majority of the people saw them all as equally true—just as medieval Europeans did.  The more rational theories and therapies were, after all, far from biomedical reality, and probably gave no better cure rates than the magical ones did.  And there was a vast space in between where the traditions fused, as I saw in east Asia 50 years ago, when spirit-mediums wrote herbal prescriptions or even told patients to buy aspirins and antibiotics medicines at the drug store.  Huang’s illustrations include plates that have imaginary demons posed next to fairly accurate renderings of internal parasites (pp. 53, 62; Ming Dynasty pictures but from older sources).

Perfectly empirical methods for lengthening life (meditation, good diet, moderate drinking) were combined with fantastic measures that depended on placating a vast horde of spirits and beings within the body.  The ancient idea of the body as microcosm was alive and well, informing physiology in sometimes useful, sometimes misleading analogical ways.

 

All these medical traditions melded into an extremely elaborate and complex framework.  It allowed for classification of conditions and thus for planning treatment.  Such nosology required yet another whole system of diagnostic observations:  pulse, countenance, tongue appearance, reported aches and pains and other symptoms, observed lumps and swellings, evidence of weakness or unnatural activity, insomnia, excessive hunger and thirst, aversion to food, vomiting, diarrhea, and all the other medical signs known to the world.

A very complex system of nosological entities was identified, with formulas for medicines to treat each one of them (see Scheid et al. 2009).

This system had almost no points of contact with modern biomedicine beyond the obvious matters of trauma, and unmistakable medical conditions like hemiplegia and insanity.  On a borderline were conditions like beriberi and malaria, recognized and described but understood so differently from biomedical understandings that they  emerged as rather different clinical entities.  The core meanings of terms we translate as “beriberi” and so on might be similar in Chinese medicine and modern biomedicine, but the extensions of these terms would be different from those of biomedicine.

Of course in all cases the explanations and treatments were very different indeed from those of biomedicine.  Jaundice, for instance, was impossible to miss, and some connection with the liver was realized, but the condition was considered to be usually due to dampness affecting the organs, and was thus treated with warming and drying herbs that had no biomedically notable effect.

The resemblances to Hippocratic-Galenic medicine were much greater.  There were the obvious matters of hot/cold, blood, phlegm, many illness categories, many medicines, and the like.  There were similarities in blaming stroke on wind, insanity on anxiety or overindulgence in pleasures, and others that will be noted below.  In spite of the differences in these systems, there was clearly some influence from west to east throughout history, and probably some the other way as well.

Chinese herbal medicine involved a vast number of herbal remedies that did have some effect, by biomedical as well as traditional Chinese standards.  Empirical observation had made hundreds of connections between herb and cure.  Oral rehydration therapy, use of qinghaosu for malaria, use of stimulant and carminative drugs, use of digestives like mint, use of antibiotic salves and washes on skin infections, and many other successful treatments were known; these were explained in Chinese terms, but can now be explained in biomedical terms.  It may not matter much whether the stimulant and carminative action of cinnamon is explained by human adaptation to volatile oils or by activation of the qi and the yang energy.  It does matter, however, when people extrapolate according to their beliefs:  looking for other stimulant volatile oils, or trying other herbs that seem somehow to be linked to qi action.   A great deal of Chinese medical practice was based on logical deduction or quasi-empirical reapplication.  Such deduction, in any medical system, has to be rigorously tested against experience.  This was not always the case in China (or today in biomedicine, for that matter).  Errors resulted.

A quite different factor that feeds into all this was the rise in status of doctors.  Partly because other avenues of advancement were rather thin under Yuan (Brook 2010:152), but partly also to take care of their families and neighbors without any concern for economic rewards, many literati took to doctoring (Leung 2013).  An expectation arose that a Confucian should know enough about medicine to take care of his family—at least to be an informed consumer.  Medicine became an appropriate thing to study.  Thus a tradition of educated writers on medicine—something already known in Tang—grew steadily in Song and Yuan.  This had mixed effects.  As proper Confucian gentlemen, these scholars were not about to sully their hands in autopsies and visits to public hospitals.  (Amazingly, several actually did.)   Usually, they focused on intuitive understandings of the most ancient classics, such as the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine.  They would also deal with empirical reality to the point of assessing the success of remedies they and their friends tried, but generally at an anecdotal level, not at a statistically significant one.

Yuan and Ming medicine have found an excellent historian in Angela Ki Che Leung (2003, 2013, and sources cited therein).  She has discussed in detail the rise of literati doctors, the expansion of medical work, the coming of western and Central Asian ideas, and especially the rise of an extremely elaborate and specialized medical world in Ming.  Much of this is beyond our focus here, but her work on Yuan is valuable for understanding the world of the HHYF.

Another question is medical technology.  Distilling was well known to both Mongols and Chinese, with various sophisticated though small stills surviving (and excellently analyzed by Luo Feng, 2012).  They were used mostly for liquor, but for medicine as well.  Dissection, bonesetting, and surgery had their full instrument kits.  Medical technology of the period, however, largely awaits further research.

With all these trends, medical science advanced significantly in Song and Yuan, but did not develop anything like the breakthrough that happened in Europe after 1600.  They began to make the final step of forthrightly going with experimental results, confirmed by others.  But the ancient books still dominated too much of thought and practice.  They stopped just short of the outright defiance of tradition that characterized Harvey and Sydenham and Boyle in the later west.

A digression into later times is necessary at this point, because it reveals much about Chinese medicine.  The Song fascination with cold disorders led to a rise in fascination with warm illnesses, wenbing, in Ming and later; recently, SARS was included in this category when it appeared in China (Hanson 2011).  Warm illnesses were naturally typical of the south, especially the far south, so infamous for its miasmas, contagions, witches who created gu poisons, and generally sick conditions (Hanson 2011:69-73).  Snakes, notably hot animals especially if poisonous, abound in the south, spitting venom and corrupting the environment (Hanson 2011:71).  Syphilis also abounded in the south, and men were warned to avoid loose women there (Hanson 2011:76-78).  In addition to gu, even today often considered a specialty of the Miao/Hmong, there were deadly herbs such as “intestine-splitting herb” and “rat grass” (Hanson 2011:82-83).

Hanson stresses the rise of geography in Chinese medical thinking.  China slants from west to east, a basic bit of cosmology in early times, and of course grows warmer from north to south; thus the illnesses are different in the southeast, a zone of hot, weak, lowland conditions.    Chinese doctors also discovered class.  In an oft-quoted passage, Li Zhongzi of Ming noted that “The wealthy and noble feed themselves rich foods and grains; the poor and lowly fill their bellies with sprouts and beans….  Those who labor with their minds [the wealthy] have a depleted center, weak sinews, and brittle bones.  Those who labor with their bodies have full centers, strong bones, and powerful sinews” (Hanson 2011:63).  Galen described exactly the same contrast in almost exactly the same terms—one would suspect borrowing except that the resemblance is too close!  Li would have had to have Galen before him (and a Latin dictionary).  Great minds really do run in the same channels.

 

Chinese Medicine and Chinese Science

“Medicine” is a contested term in the world, and its application to Chinese traditions reveals many of the complexities.

Paul Unschuld, the leading expert on the history of Chinese medicine, has recently proposed restricting the term to scientific healing—healing based entirely, or fundamentally, on inferred natural laws that transcend the whims of supernatural beings, spirits, witches, and other troublemakers.  By that standard, medicine has been invented twice in the history of the world:  by the Greeks in the 6th-7th centuries BCE and by the Chinese in the 2nd-3rd and after (Unschuld 2009).  One might question the dates slightly, and one might feel a need to add ayurvedic medicine as a third contender, but otherwise it does seem that true scientific medicine is sharply and narrowly confined to those two (or three) cases.

The word “medicine,” however, is almost universally used to include the healing practices of all the world’s peoples, and I will continue to use the word in that wider sense.  Moreover, all medical traditions, everywhere, are a mix of empirical knowledge, inferred general principles, and agentive claims.  Chinese medicine before the Han Dynasty had its protoscience, including ideas of yang and yin.  It was by no means totally committed to explaining all by the whims of gods and ancestors—though indeed serious illnesses of royal personages seem to have been explained that way, from what records we have.  And the separation of scientific medicine from supernaturalism and purely empirical pharmacology was never as thorough in later years as Unschuld sometimes implies.  But Unschuld has a point, and a very important one.  The highly rational, deductive, scientific medicine of Han is a quite amazing accomplishment, even though the science is wrong by modern biomedical standards.

Unschuld argues that the need arose with society.  We know that Chinese political society during the Warring States Period was undergoing a rapid and forced rationalization.  Unschuld points out that laws and managerial systems were coming in, serving as models for scientific laws.  I would add that states that did not rationalize their militaries, bureaucracies and economies (in Max Weber’s sense) could not compete with those that did.  Either way, people came to feel that laws (fa in Chinese, a broader term than English “law”) transcended, or should transcend, whims—whether the whim of a sovereign in regard to justice or the whim of a god or ancestor in regard to medicine.  Unschuld assumes that something similar happened in Greece:  the development of the polis and of methods for administering it was contemporary with the development of scientific medicine by Hippocrates and others.  He sees key proof in the fact that Greek medicine seems to treat organs as separate, independent, self-correcting items, like citizens in a democracy, while Chinese medicine sees organs as having designated roles in a single harmonious system, like people in a Confucian family or polity.  I leave to experts the task of evaluating this theory.

Unschuld is aware that Chinese medicine, by the start of Han, already had a highly developed and effective pharmacopoeia.  He is interested not in such pragmatics but in the development of a self-conscious system of principles and rules—a true theoretical medical science.

 

The greatest expert of his time on Chinese science and its history was Joseph Needham.  A biologist and biochemist, Needham explored Chinese medicine with the help of his longterm partner Lu Gwei-djen.  Needham also worked with the younger scholar Nathan Sivin, beginning with collaboration on a volume covering alchemy and Daoist medicine (Needham 1976).  To Sivin, thus, fell the task of editing Needham’s work (with Lu Gwei-djen) on Chinese medicine (Needham 2000; Sivin 2000). Needham died in 1991, leaving Sivin the task of completing the “Medicine” volume for the monumental project Science and Civilisation in China that had become Needham’s life work.  Sivin is a leading authority on Chinese medicine, and his introduction to this book provides a superb guide to the state of the art—brief yet extremely clear, informed, and authoritative.

However, he and Needham differed on a key point. Needham saw Chinese medicine as part of a world medical science, though developing in some isolation from other emerging medical traditions:  “Throughout this series of volumes it has been assumed all along that there is only one unitary science of Nature, approached more or less closely, built up more or less successfully and continuously, by various groups of mankind from time to time.” (Needham 1976:xxiii).  He goes on, however, to note that “there is another one which I may associate with the name of Oswald Spengler….  According to him, the sciences produced by different civilisations were like separate and irreconcilable works of art, valid only within their own frames of reference, and not subsumable into a single history and a single ever-growing structure” (ibid.).  This was a point to make in the 1976 work because in it Needham was collaborating with Nathan Sivin, at that time a young medical historian, now the senior historian of Chinese medicine in the United States.  Sivin adopted the Spenglerian view.  Sivin points out that almost all contemporary scholars of Chinese medicine now see it strictly in its own terms, as a unique tradition that cannot be discussed in connection with others except to show how different it was.  Needham warned of “falling into the other extreme, and of denying the frundamental continuity and universality of all science….  Such a view might be used as the cloak of some historical racialist doctrine, the sciences ofd pre-modern times and the non-European cultures being thought of as wholly conditioned ethnically….  Moreover it would leave little room for those actions and reactions that we are constantly encountering, deep-seated influences which one civilisation had upon another” (Needham 1976:xxiv-xxv).

Both have reason to say what they say.  Chinese medical science is based on concepts so totally different from modern biomedical ones that they do indeed seem incommensurable.  Chinese speak of qi (a word hardly even translatable), which flows in conduits that do not exist in biomedical theory.  Chinese (like the Maya and the ancient Greeks) see mysterious heating and cooling influences.  Chinese medicine deals with nonexistent “organs” like the “triple burner” (a “virtual” triple organ corresponding loosely to metabolic function), and even of ghosts and demons as sources of sickness (pace Needham’s overstated claims for rationality).  Chinese medicine is so completely incommensurable with other medical traditions that some have even suggested that it not be called “medicine” at all (Paul Unschuld, personal communication).  Unschuld takes a middle position, seeing Chinese medicine as fully comparable to Greek but not part of the same tradition—though he leaves significantly open the possibility of actual contact between the two civilizations and their medical traditions.

Needham was aware of the problem, pointing out that “the concepts with which it works—the yin and the yang, and the Five Elements…are unquantifiable…” (Needham 2000:65) and that, to be usable in biomedicine, Chinese medicine must be stated in terms of “the universality of modern mathematised natural science.  Everything that the Asian civilisations can contribute must and will, in due course, be translated into these absolutely international terms” (Needham 2000:66).

To Sivin, Chinese medicine is utterly different from biomedicine; Sivin is fixing his gaze on the underlying principles, the philosophy of the system.  Indeed, Chinese medicine includes such statements as this:  “Au[c]klandia [an herb] harmonizes the stomach qi, frees the heart qi, downbears the lung qi, dredges the liver qi, quickens the spleen qi, warms the kidney qi, disperses accumulated qi, warms cold qi, normalizes conterflow qi, reaches exterior qi, and frees interior qi” (Ni Zhu-mo, Ming Dynasty, quoted Yang 1998:31).  Biomedicine can make nothing of this.

To Needham, however, the difference is real, but can be overcome; Needham is fixing his attention on practices and remedies rather than on underlying principles, so to him the difference is merely a minor roadblock rather than a total barrier. Sivin cares that the Chinese did not mathematize the system; Needham cared that they could have. 

Sivin as basically interested in cosmological principles, especially the most exotic ones, like the fivefold correspondence theory.  Needham was much more interested in practical matters, where Chinese medicine is much closer to western—if only because one cannot ignore the reality of sprains, broken bones, effective herbal medicines, dietary regimens, and so on.  Whether you believe in fivefold correspondence or biochemistry, willow-bark tea works for fevers and oral rehydration therapy treats diarrhea.  Since practice is more apt than theory to be based on actual working experience, it is more apt to be commensurable across cultures.

Sivin correctly emphasizes throughout his Introduction that Chinese medicine is itself incredibly diverse; by his own logic, we should not really be talking about Chinese medicine, but about several different medicines.  Some might be incommensurable with biomedicine.  Certainly the dragons-and-demons material is.  So, I think, is the fivefold theoretic that is basic to Han medical writing.  But the practical lore that actually mattered in daily medical behavior is perfectly translatable.

Can Needham’s view be salvaged?  There are two ways to salvage it; I believe Needham would have invoked them both had he lived.  First, we can point out that the Chinese of the great dynasties were under no illusions of “incommensurability” between East and West.  They imported vast amounts of western medical learning.  Indian medicine came with Buddhism; many Buddhist missionaries had learned the trick of attracting converts through medical care.  Indian drugs, practices, and concepts saturated Chinese medicine from about 300 to 800 CE, and left a residue that is still vitally important.  Hippocratic medicine reached China well before the 6th century (Anderson 1988), perhaps by the 1st or 2nd centuries.  Chinese doctors had not the slightest problem combining it with traditional Chinese medicine, proving that it was not at all “incommensurable” to them.  Sun Simiao’s great book Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold consciously fuses both traditions.

Under the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty, massive transfers from west to east took place climaxed in the Huihui Yaofang.  How much influence it had on China remains to be seen, but we know that veterinary medicine entering at the same time completely remade Chinese veterinary practice (Paul Buell ms.).  Chinese medicine also borrowed remedies (and probably theories) from southeast Asia and elsewhere.  The Chinese physicians themselves would evidently side with Needham rather than Sivin, since they borrowed continually from any source available.  They knew perfectly well there was no incommensurability.

This is because medical science is not an example of philosophers spinning beautiful dreams in isolation.  It is about maintaining health.  It is tested against results.  To be sure, most Chinese physicians, like western ones, rarely question their systems when they fail in curing—they usually blame the unique situation at hand.  But, in the end, the system has to deliver.  All medical systems are kept on course (and occasionally even forced to change) by being tested against results.  Biomedicine has found a somewhat better way to test (though be it noted that the Chinese invented case-control experimentation—for agriculture, around 150 BCE; Anderson 1988).  So much the better for biomedicine; we can now test traditional Chinese remedies, and prove that many of them work.  Ginseng, artemisinin, chaulmoogra oil, ephedrine, and many others have entered world medicine.  This proves the systems are commensurable.  Survival rates are the common measure, and a very fine measure they are, too.  Biochemistry has now also entered the picture, and it proves that many Chinese herbs work because they contain chemicals bioactive by anyone’s standards.

Yet the classical tradition of Chinese medicine was profoundly different in concept from modern biomedicine.  I believe that the conceptual framework that so strikes Sivin and others was worked out because it fit with other Chinese explanatory models, and seemed to make sense of actual clinical reality, as observed by medical personnel (Anderson 1996).  Medicine was interpreted in the light of wider understandings of world, person, and cosmos.

We can see Chinese medicine in its own terms, appreciating the intellectual excitement of dragons and qi channels, whether they exist or not.  We can also see them as part of the vast human healing enterprise—a part that has contributed substantially to modern biomedicine and will surely contribute more in future.

Sivin’s position would relegate Chinese medicine to complete irrelevance.  It appears as a now-superseded way of thought—a quaint, old-fashioned thing for specialist scholars to pursue.

The problem is rather like that faced in reading Chaucer.  No one would deny that Chaucer’s English has to be understood in its own terms, as a basically different language from anything today.  On the other hand, no one would deny that Chaucer’s English is ancestral to modern English; not only is Middle English the direct ancestor of the modern tongue, but Chaucer’s writings had a more than trivial influence on the development.  It is perfectly possible to understand Chaucer in his own terms without denying the latter links.  It is impossible to give a full account of the development of English from Middle to Modern without taking Chaucer into account, and that means doing so on our terms.

Fortunately, a new generation of scholars, many of them trained in the Needham Institute at Cambridge, has gone beyond this outdated opposition and are analyzing Chinese medicine with the same rigor and sensitivity that historians now devote to early European medicine (see major review by T J Hinrichs, 1999, and books by Elisabeth Hsu 1999; Hsu ed. 2001).

More purely scientific in the modern sense was folk nutrition (Anderson 1987, 1988, 1996).  From earliest times, this was explained by assumed natural variables.  These were unobserved, but were not regarded as entities with agency that could be placated with incense.  They were regarded as purely natural qualities.  The five tastes—sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and piquant, all recognized by modern bioscience—had to be kept in balance.  So did yang and yin.  Foods that were strengthening to the body were rapidly recognized (they are easily digestible, low-fat protein foods).  “Cleansing” foods—usually herbal and low-calories—were important.  Western views of hot and cold were soon integrated with yang-yin theories, since its emphasis on heating and cooling humors were directly “commensurable,” and drying and wetting could be easily folded in and largely forgotten.  Integration with the five-flavor theory was less easy, and the two remained somewhat separate.  The resulting folk and elite nutrition theories were perfectly naturalistic and allowed individuals a very high degree of perceived control over their health and lives.  A great deal of empirical, factual observation could be integrated sensibly by these theories.  The fact that the theories were deeply incorrect was less important than the fact that they were the best people could do before modern laboratories.  Early recognition of the value of fresh foods for beriberi, of sea salt for goitre, and of oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea were among the useful findings incorporated into tradition.  One need not know about iodine to know that sea foods alleviate goitre.

Thus, pragmatic, observable data were explained by inferring nonobservable but plausible intervening variables, and constructing simple and reasonable theories.  This is what science does everywhere.  It makes perfect sense.  The only problem in China was that innovation sputtered after 1400, for reasons to be considered in due course.

Working through Scheid et al.’s great encyclopedia of Chinese formulas (2009), one soon realizes that clinical entities were recognized, explained, and treated with great systematization and thorough scientific order.  The ones of obvious cause and cure—worms, traumas, and the like—were effectively treated.  The vast majority of conditions were defined by symptomatology in ways that were quite meaningful and reasonable in a world where explanations were based on qi, blood, yin, yang, external and internal heat and cold, and striking winds.  The suites of symptoms do not define modern biomedical entities largely because actual infectious diseases typically cause a maddening variety of symptoms.  No two cases of tuberculosis are quite alike; one person can display fever, flushing, and unnatural energy while another is hypothermic, pale and weak.  Ordinary influenza occurs in dozens of strains, each with different symptoms.  Cholera, plague, and other once-common diseases had numerous biovars with different syndromes.  Conversely, minor respiratory illnesses all look alike, no matter what the causation; all sorts of things can cause similar skin rashes; and undifferentiated fever and “general malaise” can be associated with almost any disease.  Before the full development of microscopy, laboratory tests, and epidemiological record-keeping, no one could possibly have made sense of this.

The Chinese did the best they could.  Blood, the internal organs, fever and chills, and other internal matters were obvious and were obviously related to illness.  Among external forces, hot and cold, wind, shocks, trauma-causing items, and the like were equally obvious.  Requiring more thought was the recognition of the human body as a system—a bounded entity, made up of different organ subsystems, held together by flow of energy, nutrients, and information.  Even more insightful was the recognition that the world is the same:  a giant system, unified by energy flows.  The Chinese extrapolated from breath and vapors to postulate qi as the great unifier in all this.  They extrapolated the roles of heat, cold, winds, and fluids.  They plausibly and logically, but often incorrectly, inferred that the human body is a microcosm of the wider cosmos.  This may have been the best way they had to make sense of resemblances.  Their invocation of the idea of “resonance” was a natural corollary.

Coding foods as heating and cooling, according to their observed effect on the body, was another perfectly logical step—probably the most reasonable way to make sense of observed nutritional realities.  No one before 1900 had any better idea to offer; discovering vitamins and mineral nutrients was a huge 20th-century breakthrough, and one in which Chinese scientists were involved.

Because of all this, trying to understand Chinese medicine strictly as a system of ideas, unrelated to experience or real-world pragmatics, is a hopeless exercise, doomed to failure and irrelevance.  Chinese medicine was a brilliant attempt to make sense of clinical reality.  It was inevitably flawed, because the equipment to go beyond energy flows, hot and cold essences, and organ systems was yet to be invented.  But it made countless discoveries that are still basic to world biomedical science, and it probably had at least as good a cure record as western medicine until the late 19th century.

China failed notably in inferring dragons and tigers in the hills and skies; in sorting everything into compulsive five-fold categories; in attributing all manner of diseases and other matters to winds; and in postulating disembodied forces that do not exist, from qi and ling to fate, evil influences, ghosts, and devils.

The west’s corresponding failures, to stick purely to “science,” include:  The geocentric universe, the indivisibility of atoms, phlogiston, static continents, ether, animals as mere machines, simplistic learning theories, and many more.

Most of these involved inferring black-box mechanisms or intermediates that connect cause and effect.

 

The Mongols and the HHYF

The Huihui Yaofang was a huge encyclopedia of Near Eastern medicine, written in Chinese for Chinese users.  We have about 500 pages left of what once must have been a 3500 to 4000 page work.  It has been reissued in two modern editions.  One was edited by Y. C. Kong  and published in Hong Kong in1996, with a number of articles in English and Chinese that identify the plants and provide correct Arabic names and other data.  The other was edited by Song Xian and published by the Chinese Arts Press in Beijing in 2000, and includes a version in modern Chinese with the Arabic transliterated in Roman script and a long and thorough listing of the medicinals and diseases.  (This last would be more helpful if the authors had more consistently used scientific terms rather than often falling back on the idiosyncratic and annoying pseudo-Latin affected by Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners.)  One interesting thing about this project is that it shows that the medieval Chinese and Near Easterners had no doubts that medicine was basically one thing; they did not share the belief in some modern quarters that Chinese medicine is so utterly different from Western that there can be no point of contact or mutual understanding.  On the contrary, they thought only of enriching both medical traditions by mutual exchange.

There are about 416 distinct drug categories in the surviving parts of the book.  Several of these are known only from being listed in the Index.  Many of these latter cannot be identified.  About 398 are identifiable.  Leaving out probable misidentifications and other doubtful cases, we have 381 taxa: 287 plants, 68 animals, and 26 minerals.   Other items are either unidentified or represent multiple products from some species.

Evidence for the source of this herbal material is the fact that 226 of the identifiable items are discussed by Avicenna in the second volume of his Canon of Medicine (Bakhtiar 2012).  These include 182 plants, 32 animals, and 12 minerals.  The closest runner-up is Li Shizhen, with 203 taxa, but of course Li was writing later—with the benefit of the HHYF and other guides to western lore.  Sometimes, it is fairly clear that the reason Avicenna is not scored as mentioning a taxon is that it is a Chinese substitute for a western one.  I have indicated this where the equivalency is clear, but many examples must go unidentified or uncertain.

Most of the major, important taxa were discussed by Dioscorides and Galen; I have indicated this where I have knowledge, but many more would be disclosed by thorough search of the Greek and Latin materials.

Contrary to Allsen’s assessment (Allsen 2001:156), the Chinese, over centuries, picked up a good deal of Near Eastern theory, including Galenic material.  The revolutionary changes in Chinese medicine in Song and Yuan are only now beginning to be appreciated.  Much more is to be learned about this.  Suffice it to say that the Chinese did not ignore Near Eastern lessons.  However, this may be truer for animals than for people; Buell and coworkers have shown that Chinese veterinary medicine is largely a Yuan import.  Near Eastern and Central Asian veterinary learning was so far ahead of Chinese that the Chinese simply engaged in mass replacement (Buell et al. 2006).

Previous studies of the HHYF have emphasized its relationship with the great Qānūn fi al-tibbi of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), a standard medical encyclopedia in the Islamic world.  The relationship is close, but the HHYF was clearly compiled from a variety of sources.  Al-Bīrūnī is one source, at one or two removes (see Al-Bīrūnī 1973).  Al-Samarqandī seems surprisingly unrelated (see Levey and Al-Khaledy 1967).  I suspect that especially important was Sayyid  Isma’il Juzjānī’s Zakhīra-i-Khwārazmshāhī, “Thesaurus of the Khwārzamshāhs,” a monumental 12-century Persian work known to have been very important in Central Asia (Elgood 1951, 1970), where it was apparently written. Unfortunately, no translation of this work exists; copies are hard to find; little scholarship has been expended on it.  Proof that one of these Central Asian Persian epitomes of Near Eastern medicine was a source is found in juan 30, p. 357:  “I saw a person in Balkh” who used a particular medicine, and “was cured, I believe.”  Arabs were unlikely in Balkh at the time, and Chinese doctors nonexistent there.

Buell summarizes:  “The majority of the sources for the HHYF appear to have been written in the Persian language rather than in Arabic, since Persian is clearly the working language of the text. Arabic script entries are, more often than not, Persian grammatically. The characters chosen for Chinese translation indicate, again, Persian readings of the words. But not all sections were from Persian sources. The listings of materia medica, appear largely Arabic, but such sound shifts as use of “j” sound for ﻕ may indicate passage through Turkic hands (the sound shift is probably a Turkic palatalization, and the same change is found in the YSZY, where there is pervasive Turkic influence). This has been noticed by the Y.C. Kong team. They strongly suggest that the HHYF was compiled primarily by Turkic speakers, probably Uighurs. This might be expected, given the known influence of Turkic-speakers at the Mongol court. Thus the HHYF may be one more expression of a Turkistani tradition of Arabic medicine that is otherwise largely unknown and unstudied but which must have been major and highly creative in Mongol times. There appears to be a substantial Syrian-Nestorian presence in the work and in association with it as well.

“Although primarily documenting the Islamic medicine of the time and reflecting contemporary Persian and probably Turkic usage, the HHYF is also an important document for the Chinese culture of the time. It is, for example, written in a type of colloquial Chinese known from other Yuan-era documents with considerable internal evidence that the Chinese language of the text is a specialized, technical language with considerable apparent historical depth. The text, in fact, is by no means a literal rendering of its Persian and Arabic sources but reveals considerable effort not only to express and translate Islamic ideas but also to assimilate them to the concepts of the Chinese medicine of the time, including the key concept of qi, the “life force” making traditional Chinese physiology work.  Qi seems often to translate the western concept of “humor.”  Sometimes, however, it is clearly the traditional Chinese qi. Since the Mongol period, along with late Song (Southern Song, 1125-1279) and Jin (1125-1234) times, was a high point in the development of traditional Chinese medical theory, a close study of the Chinese language of the HHYF can expand our understanding of it considerably.

“The possibility is now being entertained of major Tibetan influence on its composition (Buell, forthcoming). This has been an entirely unexpected outcome. Tibet had its own Persian medicine that was, in many respects, quite close to that of the HHYF but showing significant adaptations to other systems (Dash 1994; Garrett 2007; Glover 2005). This includes Indian medicine, whose humoral system, more than the Islamic one, may be the system in use in the HHYF….

“The window of opportunity for the original HHYF to be written and for the Mongols to get all the medicinals easily was 1290 to 1340, when the Indian Ocean was wide open. The Genoese were running the whole show.   After that there was an extended period when the Indian Ocean was not so open, until the Zheng He voyages, and then it closed up again. So the present version of the HHYF, with all the crazy substitutions, must be from post-Zheng He times, ergo, late 15th century. The important thing is that the medicinal evidence completely corresponds to the actual economic history….  The Mongols gave up attempts to directly conquer the maritime world because they didn’t need to make the effort. After 1290 the Indian Ocean was completely open and the Mongols had mounted a huge diplomatic effort to set up contacts. Ergo, they did not need to spend money on conquest to get what they needed. It all fits.  And the Portuguese restored the era of direct contacts. They did do something different.  Ming probably had the largest economy in the world but they voluntarily cut themselves off and that, more than anything else, put the east into decline” (P. Buell, personal communication).

Many remedies of the HHYF involve enormously long lists of drugs.  This may be related to the tendency of Near Eastern working physicians to use almost anything for almost any condition, obviously in the hopes that if they tried enough drugs something would work.  This is shown by the Cairo Genizah material (Lev and Amar 2008), in which this pattern is clear.  The HHYF also uses theriac.  Endless recipes for theriac existed in Europe; one attributed to Nicholas of Salerno had 58 ingredients (Wallis 2010:177).  This sort of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach would be familiar to Chinese, but they never (to my knowledge) achieved that level of combining, outside of the HHYF.  One is reminded of the Chinese tendency to supplicate enormously long lists of gods (Johnson 2009; see esp. 39-51) in the hopes that one might actually help, or at least that the supplicator would not offend any god by leaving him or her out.

The HHYF was apparently prepared in the hopes of improving Chinese medical practice, at least for the court, as well as serving as a basis for medical education. This was not a work of pure theory or speculation, but a working manual. As such, it should be studied to understand how it appeared to its Yuan compilers. One assumes they thought it was full of important knowledge—that Near Eastern medicine worked well for what ailed the dynastic elite. Rarely has a culture attempted to graft another culture’s medical science onto its own stock in this comprehensive, systematic way. (Significantly, one of the few other cases was Europe’s transfer of Near Eastern medicine into their own realm in the medieval period.) Moreover, the Yuan writers were apparently quite selective about what they copied and how they systematized it. How they determined what would work, how they evaluated medical knowledge, and how they decided what to include, are major goals of our project.

 

The first section of the HHYF that survives is juan 12, dealing with stroke and wind illnesses.  The section on stroke is particularly revealing, since we have a condition that was very well recognized and described in both the Near East and China, with surviving texts from both.  This section mentions an impressive 265 medicinal taxa, most of them occurring in Avicenna.

The Huihui Yaofang explains stroke thus:  “If a person indulges frequently in sex, or overexerts himself, or suffers a fright, or climbs to a high place, or is overwhelmed by joy, the heart main artery [jing] strongly starts and the body struggles…. heavy inebriation, overconsumption of chill liquids, and food that is not dissipated, will…give rise to turbid [corrupt] illnesses. If the root is obstructed, the strength of the qi [1] does not go through and cannot reach the body.”  (Dr. Buell’s translation, p. 10.)  If corrupt moisture “is full within, the main arteries expand or contract” and moisture goes down from the brain to the body” (p. 29).  Wind conditions occur.  “Much of this is a consequence of urgent heat” (29-30).  There will be dryness, and/or “moisture is roasting and cooking the brain cavity and the nostril cavity” (30) and arteries become obstructed.  So it appears that the Near Easterners and Chinese, at least the ones reading this literature, were aware that obstruction of the arteries is the cause of stroke.  They also anticipated the modern opinion that excessive emotion, or effort, or drunkenness can precipitate this condition.  All these precipitating factors are well known in the Arabic medical literature.

This may be compared with the very different traditional view, as seen in the Pulse Classic:  “The disease of wind ought to develop [i.e, normally leads to] hemiplegia….  Headache with a slippery pulse is wind stroke.  The pulse of wind is vacuous and weak….   When vacuity and cold are contending with one another, the evil is in the skin (and flesh)…. Since the vessel networks are empty and vacuous, the murderous evil is impossible to drain away.  Therefore, it lodges either in the left or right side.  The evil qi slackens (the affected part), while the righteous [normal, proper] qi makes (the opposite part) tense.  The righteous qi tries to draw the evil. Thus there arises deviation (of the eyes aned mouth) and hemiplegia.  When the evil lies in the vessel networks, there is insensitivity of the muscles and skin.  When the evil is in the channels, there is unsurmountable heaviness (of the limbs).  If the evil enters the bowels, (the sick person) will be unable to recognize people.  If the evil enters the viscera, (the sick person) will suffer form difficult tonge in speaking and drooling at the mouth” (Wang 1997:274-275).

In other words, wind has caused coldness, and if there is vacuity or emptiness of the vessels, stroke results.  I am not clear what causes the vacuity.

Chinese formulas for dealing with hemiplegia generally assume that it is wind stroke (zhong feng, lit. “centering wind”).  Originally this was taken to be a literal strike by a wind, but over time more and more ideas of internal involvement of such interior problems as “fire, phlegm, yin deficiency, and ascendant yang” (Scheid et al. 2009:620).  Various forms and degrees are now recognized.  Volker Scheid and his associates give several classic formulas for treating it.  These use drugs that are, in biomedical terms, stimulant or soothing; apparently the stimulant drugs are the more important ones.  The idea is to stimulate qi flow, regulate blood flow, and augment qi—preventing stagnation.  With the exception of one formula that includes myrrh (p. 631), none of the formulas in Scheid’s book involves western drugs or bears any resemblance to formulas in the HHYF.  On the other hand, the basic idea is the same: stimulation and warming.  Some of the drugs—ones that were known everywhere—are the same, notably cinnamon, ginger, liquorice, and myrrh.

A recipe specifically credited to Galen treats excess of phlegm and thus polluted body, stroke hemiplegia, and wind disease (p. 47 of current translation ms.).  Several following recipes also stress excess of phlegm, as do recipes for other types of wind illness, later in the book.

As it happens, at almost the same time that the Huihui Yaofang was being compiled, one Isaac Todros was writing on the very same condition—facial paralysis due to stroke—in medieval Spain (Bos 2010).  Todros was a Jewish doctor, trained in the finest Galenic tradition, a state of the art practitioner of the very tradition the Huihui Yaofang was trying to transmit to China.  His explanation of facial paresis was that it was “obstruction of the pneuma in its course” (p. 192), which is so close to the Huihui Yaofang as to sound downright spooky.  (I know there are philosophic differences between the concepts of pneuma and qi, but the fine points would be lost on Isaac Todros and the Huihui Yaofang authors alike.)  He thought this was in turn due to “phlegm…in most cases” (p. 193), and could be treated with lavender, oxymel infused with squill, sage, sweetflag, hyssop and fennel, to concoct the humors, and then if this is successful to go deeper with ash of fig, myrobalans, turpeth, ginger, lavender, dodder-of-thyme, salt, and gum Arabic, with fennel juice and wormwood syrup.  The treatment goes on, including rubbing the area with a complicated rub, putting boiled meat of a hare on the area, drinking honey water and old wine, and many more items, mostly involving the same herbs or closely related ones including pepper, galingale and rosemary.  With the exception of purely soothing items in rubs and washes, these are all fairly mild warming and stimulant drugs, i.e. targeted against phlegmatic humor.  Of these, only sage and fig ash are lacking from the Huihui Yaofang lists.  One of the Huihui Yaofang recipes even lists using game meats as a poultice (p. 30), though hare is not among them.

A great deal of herbal and food lore about treating strokes is found in “A Case of Paralysis,” by a student observing Guillaume Boucher and Pierre d’Ausson in early 15th-century Paris (Wallis 2010:396-399).  The herb and food lists somewhat overlap those in the HHYF.  The main difference is that in Paris the herbs were those found in Europe or regularly imported; the Indian and Chinese herbs are, unsurprisingly, lacking, and only a few common ones from the Near East are used.  Castoreum, mustard, iris, wormwood, mint, lavender, rose, euphorbia, and many other herbal drugs are shared.  Recommendations for a light diet are also shared.

In short, as far as stroke goes, we really are dealing with a single medical tradition here.  The description is essentially the same, the cause is the same, and the treatment is the same:  recipes involving a variety of stimulant and warming drugs.  In modern biomedical terms, these would not be a good idea, since all they would do is make the blood flow faster and harder, potentially making things worse.  You would want to use a blood thinner.  But apparently nobody in medieval Eurasia knew about blood thinning.  Isaac Todros does mention bleeding, but the Chinese sources do not, bleeding being abhorrent to Chinese.

For stroke, Wallis Budge’s Syriac manuscript recommended fennel, jackal fat, bitument, mint, peppers, camel urine, amber, camphor, castoreum, myrrh, and other ingredients (Budge 1913:vol. 2, 58ff, 145ff).  Most of the herbal medicines he recommended are strongly warming.  The anonymous Syriac author had an incredibly good knowledge of anatomy for the time, and has an amazingly good description of which spinal nerves cause paralysis of which organs, as well as a good general understanding of stroke (cerebrovascular accident—he did not understand its cause but did realize it was the result of brain damage, and he kept it separate from paralysis caused by damage to the spinal cord or to spinal nerves; 1913:vol. 2, 120ff).  Rather little of this is reflected in the HHYF.

As to insanity, the Huihui Yaofang again blames it on phlegm and strong emotionality and drinking, which is presumably why it was put next to stroke in the book.  Some recipes in the HHYF mention hellebore, a strong heart stimulant.  Medieval Islam used it too (Dols 1984:53).  Budge’s Syriac work explains it in terms of phlegm, yellow bile, yellow-red bile (associated with rage), but especially black bile (1913:vol. 2, 20ff).  Serious madness, as well as epilepsy, is due to it.  The author had duly examined livers (at least of domestic livestock).  He has a good description of the liver and its functions and pathologies (1913:vol. 2, 379ff).  He evidently well knew the black substance that forms with liver disease, and its association with severe depression and other conditions.

Similar attribution of insanity to excessive worry and anxiety and to overindulgence in alcohol, food and sex is common in Chinese medical literature.  Chinese texts and formularies tend to use either cureall drugs—the things they list for every condition, mostly mild diuretics and things of that nature—or magical remedies.  None mentions psychedelic drugs, though these were well known.   Most mention soothing and mild stimulant drugs; some use a variety of minerals (see e.g. Scheid et al. 2009:639), and one classic formula depends simply on wheat grains assisted by liquorice and jujube (Scheid et al. 2009:471).  Insanity and stroke are closely linked in Chinese medicine, both being caused by attacks of wind affecting a body weakened by substance abuse, worry, or qi and blood problems.

A sovereign remedy in the Islamic world that is a cureall in the Huihui Yaofang was dodder-of-thyme (Cuscuta epithymum; see Dols 1984:53-54), a plant singularly lacking in any demonstrable value.  Medieval Arab sources also noted wormwood, frankincense, polypody, myrobalans, agaric, lavender, colocynth, yellowish thyme, turpeth, oxymel, hyacinth bean, euphorbia, mustard, safflower, beets, and Armenian stone and salt (Dols 1984:54; most of these plants have demonstrable and obvious physiological effect).  Of these, polypody, myrobalans, agaric, lavender, turpeth, wormwood, Armenian stone, salt, and colocynth are in the Huihui Yaofang recipes.  Most of the other plants mentioned in the Huihui Yaofang are mere soothing items.  All the other items occur in the Huihui Yaofang as drugs, though not for this condition specifically.

In later Islam, aromatherapy was used for madness (Dols 1984:173), but we have no indication of that in Chinese sources.  In fact, medieval Near Eastern medicine featured all kinds of soothing, cheering, and diverting treatments for madness:  Music, horse-riding, outings, good food, rest, calm, fresh air, flowers, and even lovely girls for cases of lovestricken noblemen (Dols 1984:173 and many other places).  None of this is found in any Chinse sources, to my knowledge.  In so far as the mentally ill were treated at all in old China, it was generally by religious or magical means; certainly in my experience in rural Hong Kong and Malaysia half a century ago, serious mental illness was considered hopeless.  Miild forms were treated by spirit mediums or Daoist priests.  Some minor mental problems, from blanking on exams to excessive fear, were due to loss of a component of the soul.  The medium would go through a ceremony to call it back.  Other, more serious, conditions were due to haunting, and the medium or—more often—Daoist would drive the gui from the patient.  Yet another cause was a curse by a witch or magic-worker, in which case the curse had to be neutralized.  In all cases, mediums and priests often provided charms to be ashed and then drunk in herbal tea, but this was the only physical intervention.

Juan 30 is a collection of cureall recipes, beginning with one supposedly invented by Rufus of Ephesus.  Perhaps he started it; it has been added to since.  It is recommended for practically everything, including hair falling out “like the moulting of a fox”—a translation via Arabic of the Greek word alopecia, balding, literally “fox condition.”  (P. 282 of Dr. Buell’s current translation ms.  Many other recipes treat fox condition too.)  Alas, a recipe that cures everything is informative about nothing.

Juan 30 mentions only 39 medicinals.  However, they are combined in amazing complexity.  Many of the formulas in juan 30 are incredibly long, apparently on the idea that combining all possible active ingredients could not fail to help.  Alas, the writers did not follow the excellent advice of Al-Samarqandī:  “physicians in the hospital…of Baghdad…reject the more complex electuaries….  They agree…’We did not find them of value because of the coreruption of the compounding and the use of substitutes for drugs which were difficult to locate” (Levey and Al-Khaledy 1967:54).  Also, “[t]he strength of most drugs does not remain after two or three” months (p. 55), so the tiny amounts of each item found in a reasonable dose of a highly compounded medicine could not possibly have much effect.

Interesting is the lack of Chinese ingredients; this really is a western book.  On page 369 the directions for “sending down” a medicine (taking it so that it will be effective) include a number of Chinese medicinal soups, calling for standard Chinese remedies like ginseng, mandarin orange peel, and apricot kernels—items conspicuously absent in most of the rest of the HHYF.  Here they appear to be mere adjuvants.

A revealing comment on pp. 376-377 lists “urgent” medicines as including ephedra, euphorbia, scammony, colocynth, and agaric.  With the exception of agaric—which may be a misidentification—these are all medicines with clear and dramatic effects (ephedra clears up some allergies, euphorbia is a violent spasmodic, scammony and colocynth are quite dramatic purges).  The passage goes on to contrast “middle category medicines” including opopanax, castoreum, gum ammoniac, and asafoetida.  These indeed have mild soothing and other qualities but are not obvious strong medicines.  So our writer—whoever is translated here—knew what he was about.

Juan 34 deals with treatments of wounds, obviously a major concern in the Mongol Empire.  These are mostly arrow wounds and other matters expected in battle, but also include bites, including human bites as well as rabid dog bites.  Ulcerated wounds, wounds with bits of weapon material within, broken bones, and other damage are all dealt with.  Surgical procedures are treated in great detail, are generally sophisticated and thorough, and make harrowing reading.

The herbal cures are often extremely long recipes involving everything medicinal that could be imagined.  Most, naturally, are poultices and ointments involving protective material (gums and resins), desiccants (powdered shell, minerals), emollients (oils and salves).  They would seal the wounds and have a soothing effect, but would rarely provide the antiseptic action that we would today consider necessary. About 298 medicinals are mentioned, and most of are noted in Avicenna (2012) as being used for external treatment—wounds, sores, skin problems.  Many, however, are magical or dreckmedizin, useless items that clustered around medicinal treatment in the middle ages.  Some of these are in Avicenna, including use of human excrement on human bites, but many are obviously folk practice.

Several antibiotics and antiseptics are used, including frankincense, myrrh, saffron, and rose oil.  So are astringents such as oak galls, willow leaves, and pomegranate skin paste or tea.  However, they are often in quantities too small to do anything.  This is more than strange, since both the Chinese and the Near Easterners knew that things like rose oil and thyme would treat skin infections.  The Maya Indians I work with in southern Mexico know the local antibiotic plants that treat wounds, skin infections, and fungus; they regard the power as due to the spirits or to God, rather than to chemicals, but they know perfectly well what works.  Actual pragmatic experience does matter in things of this sort, and it is surprising to see the lack of use of it here.

A section on burns is more hopeful; it is based on poultices of egg white, with litharge, copper salts, and rose oil or mint or other antibiotic herbs.  These mixes would work, though it is conceivable that the copper could further damage the skin and that the lead from the litharge might get absorbed and poison the victim.

In a general account of burns and treating them—a very sensible account—we have a particularly clear example of Galenic heating and cooling concepts:  “Also, the medicines that are used at first to prevent burn lesions from forming are uniformly ones with cold natures and are not heating and drying; for example, such as egg white combined with rose oil brushed onto the burn with a chicken plume” (Buell tr., p 76. of juan 34).  There are many other less clear references to this Hippocratic-Galenic system scattered through the book.  Of course the system had been known since at least the days of Tao Hongjing and Sun Simiao (Anderson 1988; Engelhardt 2001), but the Huihui Yaofang used it more systematically and in a less Sinicized way.  Trauma was treated quite differently in China, with, for example, erythrina wash (a very effective soothing and rash-combatting medication) being used (Scheid et al. 2009:902).

 

 

And After…Final thoughts on Chinese medicine, and some new directions

 

The practical side of medicine continued in later times.  In Ming, when a royal prince oversaw the compilation of a famine herbal.  That level of involvement died out, but readers of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone will recall the gap between elite men and women who knew a great deal about medicine and the ragged healers who hung out in the streets and markets.  The family happily consulted any and all of these.  The family doctor, however, was a salaried professional intermediate in status, showing that by Qing a mid-level had come to importance.

A measure of how little the HHYF changed Chinese medicine is found in the great encyclopedia of Chinese herbal formulas, Chinese Herbal Medicine Formulas and Strategies (CHMFS), compiled by Volker Scheid and associates (2009).  The lack of much similarity in stroke cures has been noted.  More general is the observation that there are very few western drugs in the CHMFS, and those few are of very old lineage in China.  Wheat and barley are often used, but no one in old China would have thought of them as foreign.  Apricot kernels are very common in the formulas, but if the apricot is not native to China it certainly got there early.  Of drugs, only areca nut, benzoin, catechu, fennel, fenugreek, garlic, myrrh, natron, and safflower stand out as foreign.  All these were very early (and of course areca was from southeast Asia).  A single reference  to Sinapis (western mustard) may be a mistaken identification.  Saiga antelope horn, often used, would have had to be brought from central Asian territories that China rarely held.

The hundreds of other drugs in the book are all native to China.  If anything, the flow was the other way, with Chinese cinnamon (cassia), citrus, ginger, liquorice, rhubarb, and other drugs moving west.  Of course, widespread plants whose medicinal action is too obvious for anyone to miss were used in both areas; this includes artemisia, mint, onions, and several other items.  The only real question involves a few cases in which a Chinese plant is used but its use may have been inspired by western use of related species, as with angelica, dodder, and thistles.  The species and the uses are quite different at the opposite ends of the Eurasian land mass, and it would be hard to maintain that influence was very deep in these cases.

Moreover, there is no increase of western drugs after the Yuan Dynasty.  Formulas from later dynasties are just as

 

Since Pillsbury’s classic article (1978) there have been several studies of “doing the month”—recovering from childbirth.  Women still stay warm and quiet and eat high-protein, high-iron foods; the custom, so valuable if restricting, has not changed as much as most traditions in this modern world.  Pork liver is a favorite for this and for building blood—it works, being the richest in iron and vitamin B12 of any common food.  Also useful are eggs and greens. Red foods such as red jujubes, peanuts (Chinese peanuts have red skins), and red wine are used for buillding blood, but with less excuse—they have some value, but their color is the main draw.  By similar magical thinking, black foods—black jujubes, black chickens, black dog meat, Guinness Stout (called “black dog” in colloquial Chinese)—are used to build body.  Their saturated color is thought to indicate their strength.  Variants of “doing the month” occur widely in Eurasia, from Bangladesh to Spain and thence to the New World, so it may be a part of the Greek humoral medical tradition that shares that distribution.

Infant feeding methods in old times were studied by B. S. Platt and S. Y. Gin (undated separate from Archives of Disease in Childhood, 1938).  In the 1930s, Chinese (largely Yangzi Delta people) breastfeeding was almost universal.  Thirty-six families had used a wet nurse; otherwise, mothers nursed their infants, though six mothers used powdered milk (having been apparently unable to nurse) and one claimed, unbelievably, to have used only rice powder.  Rice powder was used as supplement from very early.  From five or six months, soft rice supplemented the milk, and from about eight months, soup, eggs, and the like.  Chinese jujubes often came in at this point to promote blood and body; the jujubes do have iron and vitamin C.  Mothers ate pork, dry beans, cuttlefish, chicken, shrimp, sea cucumber, Chinese wine, wheat cakes, and millet to produce more milk.  They were aware of the nutritional value of silkworms, which are indeed very rich in vitamins and minerals.  Interestingly, soymilk was not used for feeding babies.

 

The myths die hard.  I heard in Taiwan in the 1970s that certain rich and powerful individuals abstained from rice noodles, humorally dry foods (such as peanuts), etc., eating instead a good deal of easily digested, nutritious food like chicken and vegetables and fruits.  They drink honey and use little oil.  This enables them to enjoy many lovers, which in turn built more vigor, since they could absorb yin energy from them.  They even eat ground pearls to supplement yang force.

Of course, some plants really are nutritionally superior.  In addition to the pine seeds noted above (and now threatened by overharvesting; Allen 1989), the berries and leaves of Chinese wolfthorn (Lycium chinense; go qi zi and go qi zai respectively) are so rich in vitamins and minerals that they have served as de facto vitamin pills for millennia.

The dietary combinations (shiwu xiangfan or shiwu xiangke—“food things that mutually dominate”) so feared in Chinese tradition have received some further attention since my coverage in The Food of China; see Lo (2005).  Incompatibilities between medicine and food have a different name, fuyao shiji.

Tea is proving itself; green tea, in particular, turns out to be preventive of cancer,  heart disease, and other degenerative conditions.  This confirms the long-maligned enthusiasm of the famous Dutch “tea doctor,” Bontekoe, who was long ridiculed for insightfully making these claims in the 17th century.  This is apparently because of the tannins and other bioflavinoids and polyphenols that tea contains. “White tea”—tea leaves steamed at picking and then dried, so that they retain more of their chemical compounds—is better still.  It slows bacterial growth and kills fungi (Conis 2005).

Then there are other medicinal matters….  Cockroaches, boiled to treat colds and pimples, found a more subtle yet direct use in the Castle Peak Bay community where I lived for two years.  When a child was “shamming sick” to get out of going to school, his or her mother would quickly brew up some cockroaches and say, “All right, here, take this.”  The usual response was, “No, no, I’m fine, I’m going to school!”

Several hallucinogenic plants were known to Chinese traditional medicine, including henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), datura (Datura spp.), marijuana (Cannabis sativa), and toxic mushrooms including Amanita and a “laughing mushroom” that may have been a Panaeolus (Li 1977).  These plants made people see ghosts or “devils.”  Some plants that are toxic but not really hallucinogenic were classed with them; Phytolacca and Ranunculus, for instance.

Moving from historical research to China today (see e.g. Farquhar 1993, 1994, 2002; Kleinman et al. 1975):  A brilliant new group of experts on Chinese medicine has arisen, many forming a network based around the Needham Institute at Cambridge.  Their research has focused largely on clinical treatment practice (Hsu 1999, 2001), but food cannot be neglected in any study of Chinese medicine, and they do not neglect it (see esp. Engelhardt 2001; Engelhardt and Hempen 1997).  Livia Kohn has reviewed much practice in a new book (Kohn 2005).  Newman and Halporn (2004) has several articles on food and medicine, including one by myself (Anderson 2004).  Chinese traditionally focused on trying to maximize longevity—not a surprising concern in a country whose traditional life expectancy was in the 25-30 range.  Equally unsurprising, given China’s history of famine, was the fact that they were most concerned with nutrition.

Chinese food is indeed very healthy, or once was.  Ironically, much of the health value comes not from the foods believed to be good for you, but from the humble, often-despised everyday grains and greens.  Studies by Cornell University in the 1980s and 1990s showed that Chinese under traditional rural conditions had incredibly low levels of cholesterol (average 127—vs. over 200 in the contemporary USA), were lean and in good shape, and had very low rates of heart disease, many cancers, and other circulatory and degenerative ailments (Campbell and Campbell 2005; Campbell and Chen 1994; Chen et al 1990; Lang 1989).  Some areas, at least, had rather high rates of cancer.  Cancer incidence can increase from having too low a cholesterol level (Barbara Anderson, personal communication).  But, in general, traditional Chinese food was healthful.  Some “long-life villages” in south China—often Thai-speaking villages—have especially long life expectancies (as do villages in parts of southern Japan, notably Okinawa).  The secret seems to be mountain air and water, mountain exercise, and a diet of whole or nearly-whole grains, vegetables, some fish, and little meat.

Chinese women traditionally breastfed for a long time, sometimes three years (but usually half of that).  Frequent pregnancy and long lactation, and frequent spells of malnutrition, meant that women rather rarely menstruated, which may explain Chinese beliefs about menstruation as a rather strange and dangerous state (Harrell 1981).  A large number of fascinating medical beliefs about breasts, breastfeeding, and breast health went—in general—to support breastfeeding in traditional China, but some were complex medical beliefs with obscure origins (see Wu 2011).

On the other hand, liver flukes abounded of old, thanks largely to eating raw or undercooked carp and similar fish.  Opisthorchis viverrini is particularly common today.  “Many still believe that the O. viverrini parasite can be killed through fermentation, preparation of raw fish with chilies or lime, or consumption with alcohol” (Ziegler et al 2011).  No, and even freezing, salting and drying do not kill it.  There is no solution except thorough cooking.

Meanwhile, Chinese medicinal food has spread to the western world, not only via books but also via such restaurants as the TT Chinese Imperial Cuisine of San Gabriel, CA—a restaurant serving medicinal foods to the local Chinese community.  In China itself, restaurants serving yaoshan—“medical dining,” traditional medicinal dishes—have been growing in number and elaborateness since their beginning around 1980 in Sichuan.  They use variously-updated recipes from the medical-nutrition classics.

And the classic four tastes—salt, sweet, sour, and bitter—have been increased to five:  the human tongue has receptors for glutamate, giving us the taste known in Japanese (and now in English) as umami.  This gives the spark to MSG and many Asian ferments.

 

 

Some of the research for this ms was supported by NSF grant 0527720, gratefully acknowledged.

 

 

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[1] In the HHYF, qi most commonly means simply “breath.” Here the meaning is unclear but the context would be perfectly comprehensible in terms of Chinese medicine, thus the translation. An alternative translation would be “vital force.”  (P. Buell’s note)

Origins of Chinese Food

Saturday, May 24th, 2014

Talk, Confucius Institute, University of California, Davis, May 22, 2014

 

Origins of Chinese Food:  Neolithic Innovations and Early Dynasties

 

E. N. Anderson
Dept. of Anthropology

University of California, Riverside

 

Abstract

 

Chinese food today is the product of thousands of years of development, involving, among other things, borrowing hundreds of crops from western Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and most recently the New World.  Even things like Maya cactus fruit have appeared on the Chinese market.  But before all this, there was a long period of development, involving the independent invention of agriculture, the domestication of millets and rice, the coming of ancient Near Eastern crops, and the development of an agrarian civilization based on highly innovative Chinese technology.  Many important new findings on this early period have appeared recently.

 

Otherwise uncited statements below are summarized from my new book Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China, University of Pennsylvania Press.

 

 

“One adept at learning is like the king of Qi who, when eating chicken, was satisfied only after he had eaten a thousand feet: if he were still unsatisfied, there would always be another chicken foot to eat”  (Lü 2000:129).

 

 

Origins: Before Civilization

 

            There is an old joke about a history PhD thesis titled “the history of British trade before there was any.”  I am doing something like that now, in the first part of this paper:  I am talking about Chinese food before there was any.

            That is, I am going to talk about what people ate in the days long before the Qin Dynasty unified and gave its name to the core of what we now know as China.  For the first part of this paper, then, I am using the word “China” in a purely geographical way. 

China in that sense began a very long time ago.  Interior south China is a very ancient part of the earth’s surface, one of the older continental land masses.  Over time, it has stayed more or less the same while all around it has gone through dramatic changes.  The most dramatic change of all may have been the slow-motion crash of India into Asia.  Moving north after the breakup of Gondwanaland, India ran into Asia a few million years ago.  India is being progressively pushed under Asia.  The result is the Himalayan and west Chinese ranges and the Tibetan Plateau, the highest places on earth.  Another result is the huge and horrific earthquakes that affect China.  They are produced by the stress of the collision. They include the most destructive natural disasters in history.  From quite early times, Chinese science correctly saw these earthquakes as due to flows of energy within the earth, and correctly located many major fault zones as lines of the flow of qi.  The more folk-type explanation of the earthquakes was that dragons in the earth were squirming around.  Observation showed that the dragons were given to squirming at particular places, which we now know to have been active earthquake fault sites.  So even this belief was useful in helping people avoid building on such places.

            Another effect of the collision is the proverbial west-to-east flow of water in China.  Early Chinese writers saw it as a natural fact of life, almost a geographical rule. 

Humans of some sort have been in the area for a long time.  Among the earliest and most famous Homo erectus finds were the many skulls and limb bones from the Zhokoudian site near Beijing.  These became known as “Peking man” and date to around 500,000-750,000 years ago.  There are indications that the individuals in question ate local game and fruit, but the finds are from caves where animals and Peking men may have fallen in by accident or been dragged in as prey of hyenas.  One or more of the skulls shows marks that are sometimes described as due to cannibalism, but are very likely due to hyenas instead.  There are also indications of fire, but again this may mean that Peking men cooked their food or that a wildfire got into the cave material.  We really don’t know.

            After this come a series of skulls about which almost nothing is known because the Chinese are currently not allowing much access.  There were early humans, probably of several types, but we know little until the appearance of fully modern humans by 20,000-40,000 years ago (possibly earlier).  By 30,000-40,000 years ago there were different stone tool traditions in north China, showing advanced cultures with local adaptation and diversity (Li et al. 2014).  By 15,000 years ago, people were hunting game and gathering plant foods throughout Asia, including what is now China.

            At that time, the Ice Age was in full swing.  Glaciation peaked 18,000 years ago, with vast ice sheets covering much of the world.  East Asia had nothing comparable to the European and North American ice sheets, but large ice sheets did cover the mountains of Siberia and Tibet, while glaciers and local ice sheets decorated the mountains of China down to fairly low latitudes and altitudes.  The Qinling range, for instance, was glaciated, and below the glacier level it sported a fine boreal spruce forest like those of southern Siberia today (Zhao et al 2014).  Much of north China was dry, cold, and windblown, like the Gobi (which itself was even drier and colder than it is now).  South China was forested, but with a cool-weather forest, much of it coniferous. 

One result of the dry windy climate was the buildup of enormous amounts of windblown dirt in north China.  (On this and the next couple of paragraphs, the best books are still the old veterans:  Land of the 500 Million by George Cressey, 1955, and China by Yi-fu Tuan, 1969.  Updates must be scavenged from arcane scientific journals.)  This became the loess that is now so basic to agriculture there.  It is fertile, easy to work, and good at holding water; it is, however, easily eroded.  This erosion contributes to floods, landslides, and soil loss.  In the meantime, the rainy climate was progressively breaking down the igneous and sedimentary rocks of south China into soils that are usually fairly fertile and at best extremely so.  Lush forest cover led to buildup of leafmold and development of soil profiles well suited to agriculture.  The stage was set for the intensive agriculture that was to develop.

With the end of the Ice Age, the glaciers disappeared, and the core—the “eighteen provinces”—of China rapidly became covered by dense, rich forests, except on the loess plains of the northwest, which were shrub steppe or grassland.  The forests were apparently dominated in the north by oaks and similar trees, in the south by an incredible variety of plants of all sorts.  Nitrogen was fixed by leguminous plants, algae, and other life forms, rapidly enriching the soils.  Southwest China is by far the most biodiverse area of the temperate zone.  South China and northern southeast Asia also have the distinction of being among the most productive region on the planet in terms of sheer growth—primary production of biomass.  The forests produce fully 8% of the natural growth in the world (Yu et al. 2014).

The Qinling Range, on the border of north and south, had a forest of oak, alder, and other warm-temperate trees.  After 2000-1000 BCE it cooled down somewhat, with more firs, hemlocks, and other evergreens (Zhao et al. 2014).  Today, global warming is rapidly changing the vegetation through hotter, drier conditions.

Throughout lowland China, vast wetlands were among the most bioproductive areas on the planet.  The vast lakes, sloughs, marshes, swamps, salt marshes, and slow winding rivers were extremely nutrient-rich, and were vast incubators of life, from water plants and algae to fish, turtles, and alligators.  They have largely turned into ricefields now, but unfortunately they are even more recently turning into pollution sinks, with consequent loss of production (Anderson 2012). 

In short, what is now China was, shortly after the end of the Ice Age, something close to paradise on earth for the hunting and gathering population.  In fall, the oaks and chestnuts literally covered the ground with highly nutritious food.  Fruit trees, game, and fish abounded.  Resources were varied; China’s hilly, river-dissected land produced countless ecological niches, each with its own communities of plants and animals.

This rapid expansion of food should have satisfied everyone, but instead it led to the beginnings of agriculture.  Many people assume that agriculture must have been invented because people needed the food (see esp. Barker 2006 for a review of theories of agriculture).  Not so.  Agriculture requires a long period of experimentation, during which time it is unlikely to produce much; therefore, it is most likely to be invented by people who are reasonably well fed and have time to play around with plants.  Carl Sauer (1952) thus thought it was probably invented by settled people, with good plant and fish resources, somewhere in southeast Asia.  In fact agriculture was first in the Near East, but China was a close second, and indeed the people were sedentary and were rich in a wide variety of resources. 

However, there is one more thing to add: the incentive to cultivate in the first place.  Brian Hayden (2001) has proposed that this may have been feasting; one needs resources for that.  However, some of us with China experience think it was trade (McNeish 1991).  The smoking gun is a map of where agriculture was invented, worldwide and in eastern Asia: it is always first seen at major trade nodes—places where trade routes cross.  People in plant-rich areas had to trade seeds and roots for salt, stone tools, and animal products, and must have found it convenient to raise the seeds and roots near their homes.

In China, that meant the central parts of the Yellow and Yangzi river valleys.  Agriculture seems to have first come about when millets were domesticated in the hills and bottomlands around the great bend of the Yellow River.  Two species of millets were involved:  Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum).  This was an area where people were happily eating acorns, and also wild seeds, fruit, and game (Liu 2012).  They gradually came to sow millet, and then to depend more and more on it.  Oak trees grow too slowly; if you want a quick return, millet gives it—maturing a large crop under almost any circumstances and in just a couple of months.  These millets are C4 plants, which means that they are adapted to high heat, growing and flourishing under tropical and subtropical conditions.  They were domesticated by 7000-8000 BCE, among the earliest domesticated foods in the world.

Rice was soon domesticated, but in a separate area: the lower and middle Yangzi valley (Gross and Zhao 2014).  In contrast to millets, is a C3 plant, better adapted to cooler regimes, but to make up for this and make it the staple of the tropics it has a uniquely active form of chlorophyll, enabling it to fix more carbon with less sunlight.  This gives it the distinctive golden-green color so loved by southeast Asian peoples and by photographers.  More to the point, it makes it the most productive grain of them all, especially under the cloudy conditions of the summer monsoon. 

Rice may have been independently domesticated in India, and a different species of it was independently domesticated in Africa, but so far the earliest domesticated rice in the world is from the Yangzi drainage around 6000 BCE (Gross and Zhao 2014).  (Some even earlier rice, back to 10,000 BCE or more [see Li 2013:24], may not be domesticated.)  By 5000 it was a fairly widely grown crop; large stores of seeds have been found.  Both the common forms, short-grain (japonica) and long-grain, were domesticated by then; they may go back to different wild forms.  (True indica rice, the modern long-grain, was apparently developed in India at a later time through hybridization of Chinese domesticated rice with native Indian rice, which may have been independently domesticated around 4000 BCE; Gross and Zhao 2014.)

Peter Bellwood has developed a theory, based partly on Chinese data, that the widespread language families and language phyla of today reflect early spreads of agriculture.  According to this theory, the speakers of a given language built up large populations and radiated out, taking their crops with them, and overwhelming and assimilating other people they met on their travels.  This theory was developed from Bellwood’s studies of the Austronesian peoples, who started from southeast China about 3000-4000 BCE, colonized Taiwan, and spread from there throughout Oceania.  Austronesian languages are extinct on the mainland, but the Taiwan aborigines still speak very ancient branches of that language phylum.  Language and archaeology studies show that the Austronesians spread south into the Philippines and thence throughout Oceania.  Most of the languages of Indonesia, and all the languages of the Philippines, Micronesia, and Polynesia, belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian.  It seems clear that they did indeed radiate along with agriculture.  They met a quite separate agricultural world in New Guinea, however.  The New Guinea peoples had invented agriculture independently.  Naturally, the Austronesians and the Papuans merged as peoples, and merged their agricultural systems too, so that—for example—the agriculture of Polynesia reflects Papuan patterns as well as southeast Asian.  (See Bellwood 2002, 2005, 2009; Bellwood and Renfrew 2002.) 

It was thus tempting to see the spread of Chinese agriculture on the mainland in similar terms.  The fit of millet agriculture and the spread of the Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman) phylum is so perfect, in terms of time, extent, inferred migration patterns, and everything else, that it could not escape attention , and G. Van Driem (1999, 2002) has hypothesized that the Tibeto-Burman phylum spread along with millet agriculture.  I rather cautiously concur.  Less clear is the spread of rice agriculture, which in time and geography seems to be associated with not only the Austronesian peoples but also the Thai, Hmong (Miao), and Mian (Yao).  My own personal feeling is that the Thai (technically, the Thai-Kadai phylum) were the major players.  They were in the right place at the right time, and they radiated with spectacular success along with agricultural spreads in south China and southeast Asia.  Of course the Hmong, Mian and Austronesians may have been involved too.  However, Hmong traditions put them far to the north, where they were more plausibly associated with early millet; Van Driem (2002) cautiously maintained that the Tibeto-Burmans differentiated in what is now Sichuan and the Hmong were closer to the millet origin area.  Parenthetically, claims that the initial spread of agriculture in the Near East and Europe was via Indo-European and Semitic languages are false.  Agriculture spread there long before these groups emerged. 

As of about 6000 BCE, then, we have two centers of agriculture in China:  a millet-growing area in the Yellow River valley and a rice-growing one in the Yangzi (the best current introductions to these matters are Li 2013 and Liu and Chen 2012).  We do not know if these were connected or in touch with each other.  Very possibly the idea of agriculture spread from one to the other, or even was created jointly.  At present, the evidence seems to favor, very slightly, two independent inventions.

A fermented beverage made of rice, honey, and grape and/or hawthorn fruit left residues in a pot dating to 7000-6600 BC at Jiahu, a Neolithic site in central China.  Patrick McGovern has examined and analyzed the residue (McGovern 2009 and pers. comm.; Zhang and Hong 2013).  This is as early as any cultivated rice in the world.  Perhaps the drinkers were already writing songs to the moon and the flowers.  The drink was reconstructed by Dr. McGovern, working with Dogfish Head Brewery, under the name of “Chateau Jiahu.”  It is now occasionally available for sale, after almost 9000 years.  I cannot say it is the best beer I ever tasted, but it is by far the oldest brew in the world. 

 

From this time on, the record demonstrates a slow, steady intensification of agriculture in central and north-central China, and a similarly slow and steady spread of agriculture throughout eastern Asia.  Agriculture spread from its initial centers, and was soon found in all parts of what would later be the Eighteen Provinces by about 4000 years ago.  It spread onward to Korea and southeast Asia, at a rate similar to that seen in the western world, very roughly one kilometer per year.  That is what you would expect if villages grew slowly and steadily, and established daughter communities nearby. 

This slow, steady spread is now well documented archaeologically.  It is now quite definitively established that agriculture spread and intensified through millions of small steps: a village would first adopt the idea of sowing some grain, then slowly get more dependent on it, then perhaps begin to experiment with domesticating a favorite local food.  There were no great breakthroughs, no revolutions, but no periods of stasis and resting on one’s accomplishments, either.  This is a really key point about human beings as well as about agriculture:  given the chance, people will work to improve their lot gradually, and will make countless small innovations to do that.  Change and progress are not dramatic.  They do not come by revolution, or by the leadership of “great men.”  They come through the efforts of millions of unsung hard-working humans, who humbly labor to make the world better for their families and neighbors. 

Intensification involved growing more crops, growing the main crops on a much larger scale, developing more productive varieties of them, and taming animals.  This last involved domesticating pigs, over a wide front, and domesticating chickens in the core rice-growing area.  The fact that almost everybody in eastern Asia uses some form of the Thai word for “chicken,” kai  (Blench 2007), is reasonably conclusive evidence that we owe the domestic chicken to Thai efforts.   Dogs had long been domesticated, from European and/or Siberian wolves, many thousand years earlier. 

We have absolutely no record of when particular plants were domesticated, and archaeology is usually silent too.  One of the things that always saddens me is realizing that the greatest benefactors of humanity are totally unknown to us.  We do not know their names, or where they lived, or when they worked (see below).  All we know is that somebody domesticated millets, rice, and all the other foods we depend on.  In China, those slowly became a truly vast number of domesticates.  These included roots such as taro and Chinese yam, berries such as the now-famous goji berry, fruits including peach and jujube, vegetable crops such as Chinese cabbages and snake gourds, and many herbs and spices including Chinese brown pepper, smartweed, and southernwood (sagebrush).  Animals domesticated in China may include the water buffalo, but India has a very strong claim there.  More certainly Chinese are the various carps found in Chinese pond culture.  The Chinese in early times even domesticated insects: not only the silkworm, but the lac insect and others.  The Chinese bee is different from the western species, but beekeeping is probably an early western introduction, since the word for “honey” is Indo-European, mi from the Indo-European root that survives in our familiar miel. 

One interesting observation is that many plants were independently domesticated in east and west.  (For a definitive, encyclopedic study of Chinese food plants, see Hu 2005.)  For example, the western cherry was domesticated in Turkey or nearby, but the Chinese separately domesticated a number of other cherry species.  (The Native Americans of Mexico domesticated still another.)  Chinese apples, quinces, pears, plums, and chestnuts are also different species from western equivalents.  Among domestic animals, west and east domesticated different species of geese.

With rising agricultural productivity, settlements got larger and more differentiated.  Early Neolithic cemeteries show that everyone was buried with more or less similar goods—a few pots and beads.  Over time, more and more people are buried with less and less, while fewer and fewer are buried with more and more.  This is, of course, the same story that we read in the newspapers today; over time, other things being equal, the rich get richer and the rest get poorer. 

By 3000 BCE, large towns existed, and complex religion is attested by appearance of such historically important symbols as the dragon and tiger.  These appear, traced out in shells, in the grave of an individual who may have been a shaman.  Shamanism involves sending one’s soul on long and often dangerous journeys to other worlds, to talk with spirit beings there and thus find cures for illness and bad luck.  It is endemic to Siberia and is known to have flourished in ancient China.  It still thrives among several minority nationalities.

The next major event was the coming of west Asian plants and animals.  Wheat and barley reached China some 4000 to 4500 years ago.  Sheep and goats appeared at about the same time—sheep rather earlier.  All four had been spreading from the Near East through central Asia at the usual rate, but there is a lot of ground to cross.  Wheat may have been involved in the world’s first noodles: a well-preserved knot of them from a Neolithic village 4000 years old.  Usually reported as millet, they may be wheat (Li 2013:38); it holds together better and makes better noodles.  Noodles did not appear in the west till about 400-600 CE (well before Marco Polo, note). 

Far more momentous was the rise by 2000 BCE of genuinely complex cultures—plausibly considered true civilization, though without writing (so far as we know).  The most impressive is the Erlitou culture, which overlaps the last Neolithic cultural phases in the area of the great bend of the Yellow River.  The site of Erlitou is a genuine city, holding perhaps 24,000 people at its maximum size.  It had impressive walls and a diversified economy with evidence of trade and manufacturing specialization.  Its cultural influence extended over a large area.  All indications are that we are dealing with a genuine state with a real capital city—the first in eastern Asia.  The temptation is irresistible to equate it with the legendary Xia Dynasty, especially since there is archaeological evidence that it was conquered by the Shang Dynasty, who founded their own regional capital nearby.  China’s earliest history works record the Shang conquest of Xia, and the records fit the story of Erlitou so perfectly that it seems pedantic to question the equation.

With the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600-1050 BCE), Chinese society enters the light of written history.  There are early history books, but they date from the following Zhou Dynasty and may contain a good deal of legend.  Less debatable are the written records of the Shang themselves.  They wrote down questions for oracles to solve, and often recorded the answers.  Another source consists of inscriptions on bronze vessels.  When a king or high official gave a major donation or promotion, the lucky recipient was supposed to commission a beautiful bronze vessel to commemorate the event.  The vessel would have an inscription recording the donation.  Several important generalizations can be made about Shang Dynasty food, as revealed by comparing archaeological evidence with this considerable written record.

By Shang times, the agricultural regions of China had been more or less integrated into one system.  Millets, especially foxtail millet, were all over the south, while rice had moved north into the Yellow River drainage.  Vegetables and fruits had been domesticated.  Wheat and sheep were common (though not barley or goats), and had become accepted as true Chinese foods.  Pigs were by far the commonest domestic animal, making up about 90% of the meat.  Wheat was apparently a rather elite food; millet was the common dish of everyone.  Greens such as mallow leaves were cultivated.  Wild nuts, fruits, greens, and roots continued to be important.  Fish and turtles were major articles of diet, indicating China’s dependence on riverine habitats.  The oracles were usually taken by carving a question on an animal’s shoulderbone or a turtle shell; the animals in question were evidently eaten first, so we know from this as well as from archaeological residues that pigs, sheep, cattle, and turtles were common food items. 

Shang gave way to Zhou (1050-221 BCE), a dynasty that lasted a long time but held real power only until the conquest of its heartland in 771 by the Rong peoples, a non-Chinese group.  At this point, we have actual food residues in the bronze vessels.  These residues show that vessel types traditionally called stewpots did indeed contain stews—rich ones with meat and vegetables.  Vessels traditionally called wine jars and wine-serving pitchers did indeed contain Chinese wine, which is technically ale—fermented grain mash—not wine. 

A very revealing bronze inscription from around 800 BCE was cast to thank the king for giving the following proclamation:  “I order you to assist Rong Dui in comprehensively managing the Inspectors of the Forest of the four directions so that the temple-palaces be supplied” (von Falkenhausen 2011:243; his translation).  The individual ordered to assist Rong Dui cast the vessel in gratitude for this promotion.  What matters to us today is that forest conservation had reached such a high point that there was a whole bureaucracy overseeing it, and getting enough pay to afford the casting of expensive bronze items.  This indicates a level of environmental responsibility that was rare in the world at the time—though similarly brief but revealing passages in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and elsewhere show that the cedars of Lebanon and other rare Near Eastern groves were being managed.

  For Zhou, however, we have much more than this.  The Book of Songs (Shi Jing), China’s great collection of early folk and court songs, was supposedly edited by Confucius himself around 500 BCE.  It mentions 55 food plants, 31 of them cultivated or probably so.  Millets are by far the most important ones; six varieties are named often.  Three of these are probably foxtail and three broomcorn.  93 animal species are mentioned, but most were not for food; in fact three were imaginary (dragon, phoenix and unicorn).  Food animals were largely pig, cattle, sheep and horse, as well as deer, dog, hare, turtles, and many minor items.  Of the 35 birds mentioned, most were probably available as food (not the phoenix, however).  This is an impressive record of natural history; the far longer Hebrew Bible mentions a comparable number.  A much later poetry collection, the Songs of the South (Chu Ci), adds many more food and ornamental plants to the list.  It also records a number of dishes, including feast dishes made from dog and other less usual animals.

A final interesting source is ritual text.  Several ritual manuals from Zhou survive, but were heavily edited—if not reconstructed outright—in the following Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE).  They provide recipes for stews, fried foods, and barbecues.  Roel Sterckx has provided noble service in describing these texts (Sterckx 2005, 2011).  As Stercks points out, the ancestors, gods, spirits, royalty, nobles, elders, and indeed everyone had to have their proper dishes—in graduated scales of fineness and richness.  Offending custom in this regard could get you in serious trouble.  Gods punished rulers who did not sacrifice enough, often sending plagues.  On a more mundane scale, Liu Xiang (2014), a member of the Han royal family, recounts that a noble throwing a dinnner party gave each guest a turtle, but one got a very small one.  That guest sarcastically commented “I will wait till this turtle is grown up to eat it.”  The host’s wife had to bail him out, by telling him how to fix the social situation, as countless billions of wives have done with socially slow husbands throughout the world since the beginning of time. 

 

The Han Dynasty seems to have added several items to China’s food universe.  Not only did grapes and alfalfa enter China from the west, but the wok appears at this time, possibly a borrowing from India, but possibly a local invention.  Cast iron had been invented and popularized in Zhou, and woks are really best when made from that metal, though pottery ones are common in the record.  It seems highly likely that stir-frying was invented after the wok became widespread.  We certainly have no indication of it from pre-Han times, but, actually, we have none from Han either; it seems implied in recipes in the Qi Min Yao Shu from around 550 CE.  Bean curd was apparently invented in Han, and probably distillation as well, though apparently only for small-scale medicinal purposes (Huang 2000).

A far more important innovation in Han was genuine agricultural and medical science.  The most impressive thing is the development of systematic government-run case/control experimentation, the first by far to be documented in the world (except perhaps for Daniel 1:8-16).  It involved tests of drylands agricultural innovations; alternate strips were managed as experiments and as controls.  Fan Shengzhi recorded this in another world milestone: the world’s first agricultural extension manual, from the first century BCE (Shih 1973). 

Closely related is the rise of medical science, as seen in the Shang Han Lun of Zhang Zhongjing (1981), the Yellow Emperor’s Classic (Unschuld 2003; Veith 2002) and in the first well-known comprehensive herbals  (bencao).  Medical science is directly relevant to my talk, because at least since the early Zhou Dynasty, the Chinese have recognized that nutrition is the first and most important line of medicine.  Zhou texts (or at least their Han recensions) indicate that the court dietitian was the most important and eminent medical practitioner of the realm—of which more below.  This is still true.  One of the most consistent findings of modern research on Chinese medicine is that Chinese everywhere usually resort to food and dietetics first, not only to treat illness but to stay healthy.  Modern bioscience confirms them in this approach, and has found that many of the classic “nutraceuticals” are indeed filled with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.  Moreover, Zhang Zhongjing describes vitamin B1 deficiency and its cure through fresh foods, and also oral rehydration for diarrhea. 

Evidently medicine had a prior history, known only from Han sources, but it seems fairly clear to me that it was during Han that this field reached a level we can call science; earlier medicine was too full of demons, spirits, and magic to count (see Unschuld 1985).  The books cited above are completely different.  Not a word about demons.  The theories seem quaint and exotic to modern biomedical researchers, but the theories were as good as anyone could come up with 2000 years ago; they fit the observed facts and allowed deduction as well as systematization of recorded knowledge.  Chinese Traditional Medicine practitioners still use these old theories, in modernized forms, with apparent success.  

The Ling Shu section of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic is particularly impressive in its scientific approach (see Wu 1993).  Intriguingly, western medicine was undergoing the same development at the same time: Galen systematized and theorized medical knowledge and practice in a fully scientific way, while Dioscorides collected and systematized herbal medicine.  The parallels are striking.  Direct contact between the Mediterranean world and Han did not exist (see Hansen 2012), so we are forced to conclude that the progress of science had created one of its astonishing cases of parallel invention. 

The Han Dynasty also saw the development, or culmination, of a fascinating science of environment, climate and soil, but I have no time today to explore this (see my new book Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China). 

Once again, I must emphasize that most of the developments I am describing were done by individuals whose names have been forgotten.    We do not even know the names of the people who compiled the Yellow Emperor’s Classic; they hid behind an ascription to a purely mythical individual.  I am sure they knew he was a myth.  (This was, after all, the age of the arch-skeptic Wang Chong and many like him.)  They wanted a sacralized title, not personal glory.  The early bencao and sexual medicine texts, known from Han tomb finds, are all anonymous.  As is too usual in history, we know the names of every murderous general, every treacherous rebel, every court scoundrel, and every lying betrayer of the country, but hardly a single name of the people who benefited the empire through development of agriculture and medicine.  As Heinrich Heine so beautifully put it, “The tree of humanity forgets the labour of the silent gardeners who sheltered it from the cold, watered it in time of drought, shielded it against wild animals; but it preserves faithfully the names mercilessly cut into its bark.”  Heinrich Heine, 1833 (as quoted in Gross 1983:323)

 

Also in Han, true tea as we know it today seems to have appeared for the first time.  Its early history is an almost complete mystery, because the Chinese word cha evidently referred to any and every herbal tea in ancient times.  Camellia sinensis (a.k.a. Thea sinensis) is native to what is now southwest China, as well as northeastern India and northern Burma, but that part of China was acquired long after Han.  Tea appears to have slowly but surely gained popularity, finally breaking through as an elite drink with a cult following in the Tang Dynasty (620-907 CE).  A factor in this was the Chinese fondness for very early morning court sessions, which were made much more bearable by the existence of a caffeine-rich drink.

The connoisseur Lu Yü wrote a Classic of Tea (1974, Chinese orig. ca 800 CE) that established tea as a drink that not only kept one awake, it was exquisite and refined, worthy of serious cultivation.  He recommended procedures to bring out the best in it.  The stage was set for the development of tea-drinking as an art form with its own rituals and ceremonies (see Anderson 2003; Blofeld 1985; Hohenegger 2009); this led ultimately to the Tea Ceremony (cha no yu) of Japan, so famous in literature and culture.  In China, tea quickly became a specialty of the southeastern and southwestern mountains, where it finds ideal growing conditions.  It spread to Japan very early, but in India—though it is native there—its popularity and wide growth is of very recent origin, largely a function of the death of coffee trees from blight in the late 19th century; tea was a good replacement.  By Song, tea was counted a necessity, and was so abundant that the Song court sent 20,000 catties of it a year to the Xi Xia as part of a peace deal (Ebrey 2014:375).

Parenthetically, it is rather interesting to trace the word for “tea” around the world.  It has been borrowed worldwide in three forms, each one betraying a particular route of migration.  Tea is cha in most of China, and that is the form found in Korea, Japan, and other nearby countries.  The southern Fujian pronunciation, however, is te, and since Fujian is a center of tea production and trade, this was the form first encountered by western Europeans when they came to China.  Tea is te, or a derivative of it, in all western European languages.  (“Tea” was pronounced “tay” originally, as it still is in parts of Ireland.)  Finally, tea in Central Asia was picked up by Iranic speakers, and acquired an Iranian nominative ending, –i, thus giving us chai. That pronunciation is a sure indication that tea reached the area in question through the Central Asian route.  It is the pronunciation found from Mongolia throughout all Central and West Asia and on into Russia and India.  The whole history of the tea trade makes a fascinating study in itself, but is outside the scope of the present paper (see Anderson 2003).

The fall of the Han Dynasty, after a 400-year run (interrupted by a few coups), led to disunion that lasted almost another 400 years.  During this period, China changed radically in one important way: it opened up to the rest of the world.  It was no longer a united realm under a powerful ruling family.  Outsiders could and did take over vast tracts, as the Toba Turks did in creating the Wei Dynasty, which ruled the north for most of the period of disunion.  Many of China’s other local rulers also had Central Asian roots.  Moreover, when China was finally reunited (with reduced boundaries), the conquerors who founded the Sui and later the Tang Dynasties (581-620, 620-907, respectively) had Central Asian backgrounds; they were generals serving on the northwest frontiers, and they had Central Asian blood—some say they were largely Turkic by descent, but this is uncertain.

Meanwhile, from Han times onward, the famous Silk Road was becoming a major corridor linking the great civilizations of east and west.  The term “silk road” was coined by the German geographer von Richtofen in the 19th century (Hansen 2012), but it is appropriate, although there were actually many parallel routes and silk was only one commodity. 

Among the other commodities were foods.  How much Chinese food went west is still unclear, but the coming of western foods to medieval China was monographed in detail as early as 1919, by Berthold Laufer.  He drew on herbals and encyclopedias from the time.  He described some 53 foods and medicines, ranging from grapes and Persian walnuts (which came early) to carrots and watermelons (which came late—or at least were not recorded until around 1300).  Many familiar Chinese spices, such as coriander, cumin, and fenugreek, came at this time.  Sun Simiao, in his great medical works of the 7th century CE, already recognized the medicinal value of many of these, and incorporated at least eight of them into his cures; he also incorporated more than a little western medical theory (Engelhardt 2001).  About the only western herbs not borrowed by 1300 were the ones such as lavender and rosemary that are hard to grow away from the Mediterranean and its distinctive climate. 

In addition to these products, Central Asian and Indian milk consumption habits flooded into China, largely with the Turkic and part-Turkic conquerors.  In Wei and Tang, milk was important, and north China became famous for milk product consumption.  Liquid milk was little used, because of lactose intolerance, but yogurt, butter, ghee, kumiss, qaymaq (the skin from boiled milk and cream), and other products abounded (Sabban 2011; Schafer 1977).  Most of this was Central Asian in origin, but Tibetan habits spread in the west and southwest, and China probably also received some of the influences of Indian milk culture that spread with Hinduism and Buddhism in southeast Asia (Wheatley 1965).

Valerie Hansen (2012) has recently maintained that the Silk Road was actually very little traveled, being used only by a few caravans a year.  Her work reminds me of Charles Wesley’s cynical description of the road of wisdom as “a narrow path with here and there a traveler” (from Wesley’s 18th-century hymn “Broad Is the Road that Leads to Death”).  Hansen is clearly wrong.  The enormous influence of west and east Asia on each other between 500 and 1400 BC speaks for itself.

China was also learning from southeast Asia.  The Nanfang Caomu Zhuang (Li 1979) of 304 CE records a large number of plants China acquired from there.  Many actually were native to what is now China, and were new only because the Han Dynasty had captured their homelands.  Others were truly exotic, like the areca palm, known then and today by its Malaysian name pinang (borrowed through southern Fujianese as pinnang, now variously pronounced in modern China). 

By the time the Mongols first united west and east, both ends of the Silk Road had hundreds of domesticates.  The west was, and is today, much slower to pick up Chinese crops than China was at picking up western ones.  Europe has always been rather conservative about foodways.  Only with massive immigration from eastern Asia have Americans learned the delights of Chinese cabbage, Chinese pears, goji berries, smartweed (rau ram of Vietnamese markets), and many others, and even these are little known away from cities with large Asian-American communities.  All or most citrus fruit are Chinese or southeast Asian.  Otherwise, outside of rice, there really are very few common western foods that come from China.  China is much better at learning these things than Europe has been.

 

My own work in Chinese food history has for many years been as a sort of back-up to Paul Buell’s work on the Mongol Empire and its Chinese manifestation the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368).  Together we translated the Yinshan Zhengyao, the court nutrition and food manual of the Yuan Dynasty, compiled by the court nutritionist (or dietitian) Hu Sihui (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2010).  It is a particularly revealing work, because most of the recipes (except for very simple ones for herbal tea) are Near Eastern or Central Asian.  The silk road had done its work.  Recipes traceable to Baghdad, Kashmir, and the Persian Gulf area, as well as to Mongolia and Turkestan, are found, as well as Chinese recipes.  Most interesting are some unusual recipes that seem to be blends of various traditions.  There are some cases of mere substitution of Chinese ingredients for hard-to-get Near Eastern ones, but I refer to more complicated recipes.  Those Silk Road cooks were learning from each other.  The “Strange Delicacies of Exotic Flavors” section—the main recipe section—contains some 21 Near Eastern recipes, another 21 Central Asian, 11 Chinese, and 42 that represent blended traditions.

Dr. Buell and I are now working on the Huihui Yaofang, “Muslim Remedies,” a vast medical encyclopedia of Near Eastern medicine compiled under the Yuan Dynasty.  About 500 pages survive of an original 3500 or 4000 (in a Ming reprint).  The medicine is state-of-the-art Mediterranean-area medicine of the time, as we have found through comparing cures with documented cures from the same period in France, Egypt, and elsewhere.  Fortunately, one part that survives is the table of contents of the section on foods and health—alas, the section itself is lost.  It, and the material that survives, allows us to count 148 food items are mentioned in this work.  These are extracted from a full herbal list involving about 287 plant taxa, 68 animals, and 26 minerals. There are actually more species of plants represented, because the terms in the Huihui Yaofang often lump two or three similar species into one category.  This can be confusing, as when quinces are simply “quinces,” and we can only guess that the Chinese quince was used in place of the similar Mediterranean one.  The compilers were strikingly good scientists, though; they rarely combine species, even very similar ones, if the medicinal indications were different.  A few serious mistranslations did occur, when Chinese names were ambiguous.

The book is apparently a translation or compilation of Central Asian medical works.  It is not always appreciated that the “Arab” medicine of the medieval world, so influential on European practice, was more Central Asian Iranic than Arab.  Many of the greatest exponents—al-Bīrūnī, Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), Al-Samarqandī, and others—were from that origin (for them, and for the glory days of Central Asia, see Beckwith 2013; Starr 2013).  Avicenna’s work in particular became the defining medicine of the medieval and Renaissance West.  But it also influenced China, via the Huihui Yaofang. 

Food as medicine is less featured in this work than in Chinese sources, because western medicine did not feature food as much as the Chinese traditions did.  However, food and diet therapy are by no means lacking.  This awaits further study.

Unfortunately, the Huihui Yaofang was too identifried with the hated Mongols to last as an influence.  The Ming Dynasty did reprint it, early on, but then it and most other recent Near Eastern influences simply disappeared.  They were lost and forgotten.  Late Ming medicinal and dietary works like the writings of Gao Lian (which we are now studying; see Anderson 2013) have a few random Central Asian recipes, but nothing like the influence seen in Yuan works.

We close this rather breathless survey with some notes on the Ming Dynasty.  Ming is sadly notorious for its authoritarian rule and its increasing censorship, a censorship that the Qing Dynasty initially relaxed but later tightened again.  For decades, many Sinologists have maintained that China’s achievements in science, medicine, and technology were as impressive, rapid, and genuinely scientific as those of the west—until Yuan and Ming, when increasingly authoritarian rule slowed progress.  Various versions of this idea are widespread in the literature, from Joseph Needham (1958) to today (and including my own writings; Anderson 1988, etc.).  The main counter-theories have been that China always progressed slowly and steadily, with no special inflection after 1400; or that China was so trapped in mystical and other-worldly dogma that it could never be scientific (Needham somewhat accommodated this view, but for an extreme version, see Wolpert 1993).  The great historian of the world, Geoffrey Parker, is the latest to weigh in unequivocally in favor of a serious shutdown of Chinese progress through late Ming and Qing autocracy (Parker 2013:660, 666-667), rather than just a steady slow progress.

As I read the evidence (and I admit others do not agree) China progressed with considerable speed in all areas of science during Han, Tang and Song and on into Yuan, and continued to progress somewhat in Ming, but that after mid-Ming, China really did not keep up the momentum.  One clear case that concerns us here is botany.  Li Shizhen’s Bencao Gangmu, when it appeared in 1593,was comparable to the greatest herbals in the west at that time.  It even anticipated many later developments in western science.  But then the West forged ahead, while China remained faithful to Li’s magistral but increasingly obsolete text.  Li mentions 67 western plants that had been introduced to China, but most had been in China since Tang and Song.  He does not deal with the New World plants that were flooding into China at that time.  China’s countless borrowings from the rest of the world continued, but unsung and rarely incorporated into medical tradition.  Chinese medicine did not quite freeze in place, but it did tend to close ranks around Li’s herbal and the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, though western medicine and then international bioscientific medicine came in due course (Unschuld 1985).  Biomedicine revolutionized Chinese practice, but Chinese study of herbal medicine and other indigenous traditions has only recently revived, and still struggles with ancient dogma.  Agriculture hit similar snags.  Development was not spectacular during Qing, in spite of the rapid advance of the New World food crops and other introductions.

Over the long term, China’s agriculture was and is characterized by what Yujiro Hayami and Vernon Ruttan (1985) called “biological” development.  Higher and higher yield crops were developed.  More and more fertilizer and compost were used.  More and more productive agricultural practices were deployed.  More and more labor was poured into the fields. Akira Hayami (2009; I wonder if he is related to Yujiro) called this an “industrious revolution,” a term now widely borrowed in western historical literature for other cases (Parker 2013:487; Parker notes Hayami invented the term in 1977).  Biological development and harder work led to Chinese agriculture in 1900 being about five times as productive per acre as American agriculture (cf. King 1911).  Unfortunately, increased production merely kept pace with population increase.  Thus, people worked harder and harder, but did not get any more food per capita.  This produced a situation that Philip Huang (1990) called “agricultural involution,” using a term coined by Clifford Geertz (1963) to describe Java.

Today, with productive land shrinking worldwide, we have to borrow China’s biological development concepts.  This has been done most conspicuously in Bill Mollison’s concept of permaculture, which is based on Chinese farming principles.  It involves the development of highly efficient, biologically intensive cropping methods for all world systems.

China managed, through intensification, to feed its hundreds of millions of people over thousands of years.  By the late Qing Dynasty, China had 400 million people but was self-sufficient in food.  However, enormous famines were regular occurrences by then.  Normal weather fluctuations were catastrophic in a country desperately overcrowded and depending on traditional agriculture.  It is not true to say that China at that time was “backward” or “underdeveloped”; it actually had a far more productive agriculture and food economy, in terms of supporting many people on little land, than the western world did (see esp. King 1911; also Anderson 1990). 

Progress in agricultural change stalled in the Republican period, and resumed after 1949.  However, erratic policies and too-rapid change led eventually to the great famine of 1958-62 (Dikotter  2010; Yang 2012).  After that, progress resumed—still erratic, but fairly steady until recently.

 

Unfortunately, progress is now checked by the catastrophic decline of the Chinese environment (Anderson 2012, updated as of May 2014 on my website).  This impacts food production through the damage to soil, water, and air.  The Chinese government has recently become aware of the seriousness of the problem, and promised to improve.  However, the situation is dire. 

The worst problem is the degradation of farmland by pollution, erosion, and desertification.  China has lost a quarter or more of its farmland in the last 50 years.  In the last couple of decades, at least 12 million hectares have become too polluted to be farmed safely.  Much of this pollution is heavy metals—arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, etc.—that make the land unusable for geologic time spans.  Desertification has lost China millions of acres, much of it in Inner Mongolia; traditional grazing preserved the grasslands, but ill-advised farming schemes led to rapid soil loss.  Deforestation, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, led to massive erosion.  An equally massive reforestation campaign, and banning of much logging from 1998 onward, has restored huge areas to healthy forest, but even more land has become too degraded to be easily restored; trees die or grow very poorly (personal observation supplemented by poring over Google Maps and by conversations with Nicholas Menzies, an expert on China’s forestry).   

Urbanization is another problem.  China is developing rapidly, with resulting expansion of suburbs, airports, roads, factories, shopping centers, and other uses at the expense of farmland.  China is currently losing about 860,000 hectares a year to these.  Since China’s cities were, quite naturally, located in the midst of the best farmland, the resulting costs to agriculture are disproportionately high.  There is no hope of making this up by bringing further land under cultivation; China’s agriculture is already overextended onto unsuitable soils.  Traditional Chinese culture frowned on urbanizing farmland (though it happened anyway), but today there are no controls enforced, though recent concern has been expressed. 

Irrigation is affected by overdraft of rivers.  The Yellow River no longer comes even close to the sea.  Water pollution makes many waterways dangerous to use, even if water is available.

In addition to impacts on agriculture, China’s combination between rapid economic expansion and rapid pollution increase has led to decimation or even destruction of fisheries.  Worst hit are inland fisheries, but nearshore fisheries are devastated and even deep-sea ones within reasonable sailing range are severely stressed. 

To counter this, China is taking a lead in clean energy development, including solar panel production.  Attempts to lower China’s huge release of greenhouse gases are well under way (see e.g. Liu et al. 2013).  China is also investing in mass transit, including state-of-the-art rapid trains.  Improvements to China’s Environmental Protection Law have been recommended by the National People’s Congress in 2011, but were rejected in 2013 (He et al. 2013).  The Communist Party has adopted the idea of “ecological civilization,” a civilization based on “man-nature, production-consumption harmony” (He et al. 2013).  In early 2014, the government renewed a commitment to cleaner air, taking a no-nonsense position with allowable levels set (Qiu 2014). 

It remains to be seen whether all this will work.  China’s government has great power, but foot-dragging by local officials, often corrupted by local development interests, has been a major problem for implementing environmental protection.

One place they might be well advised to turn is to the accumulated wisdom of the Chinese people, including the minority nationalities.  Doing so was once a priority of the Communist regime, but such is apparently no longer the case.  Given the extreme population density over centuries, the various nationalities of China had to work out ways to live with nature and with an intensively managed agricultural environment. 

Han Chinese have traditions, going back more than two thousand years, of conserving game, protecting forests, and protecting agricultural land from too much alienation for buildings and other purposes.  Some of these traditions were embodied in the folk science of site planning known as fengshui.  Others stem from Confucian and Daoist thinking or from the imperial practices of the Zhou and Han Dynasties.  (I have described these in some detail in my recent book, Anderson 2014.)  Later, Buddhism added to existing beliefs in the sacredness of old and venerable trees.  Temple groves and fengshui groves became the major way of conserving forests in the more crowded areas of China.  They were extremely effective, protecting millions of hectares of woodland—most of it adjacent to villages, temples, and towns, where it was most needed for shade, fuelwood, forage, forest products, and timber (trees were harvested sustainably).  I saw Chinese conservation at work in the New Territories of Hong Kong 50 years ago, when they were under Qing Dynasty law and custom.  Resources were not ideally managed, but there were still large groves, abundant wildlife, abundant wild herbs, and many other goods from the land.  Villages did not sprawl onto good agricultural land.  Construction and clearing were done conservatively.  The major environmental problem was wildfire, set for various reasons and devastating to grass and brush resources.  Organic pollution was also a serious concern.

Many of the minority nationalities have even more stringent conservation rules.  I had long read accounts of the good conservation practices of the Mongol peoples, specifically in regard to grassland and forest (Metzo 2005; Williams 1996a,1996b, 2000).  Experience traveling widely in Mongolia showed me that this extends to animals, minor plant resources, and even rocks; a young nomad girl told me she likes to collect pretty rocks, but does not do it because it would be disrespectful to the rocks to move them around for so minor a reason.  The concept of respect (shuteekh or other words) is the basis of environmental protection in the Mongolian world.  One must respect people and their needs, but also the trees, mountains, rocks, animals, and spirit powers that constitute the environment.  This is often shown by wrapping a sacred blue silk scarf round the venerated item—usually an old tree, a small grove of trees, or a sacred cairn (ovoo or oboo—thought to bring luck and protection).  Away from the exploding metropolis of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia is incredibly well-managed.

The Koreans share China’s ancient cults of sacred mountains and trees, as well as the fengshui system; these beliefs persist in Korea apparently better than in China (see e.g. Zozayong 1975).  Tibet has a long tradition of nonviolence, due to Buddhist influences.  Soil and water were protected, and forests where they occur.  Mountains were sacred, and the most revered ones served as natural wildlife and forest sanctuaries (Huber 1999).  Animals were not hunted traditionally, or at least not hunted unsustainably.  With modernization, this is no longer the case.  Both Han and Tibetan hunters have impacted the game. 

The Gold Tungus of the China-Russia border were memorably described by Arseniev (1996, Russian orig. ca. 1900).  Arseniev’s account is romanticised, but his descriptions of Gold environmental practice jibe perfectly with more sober recent accounts of Mongol and Tungus practice, as well as with my own experiences in Mongolia.  The Gold have the same general beliefs in environmental spirits, the need for respect, and the personhood of animals, plants and winds.

Other groups are poorly known, at least as far as their presence in China goes.  There is apparently no description of environmental beliefs and practices in Xinjiang or for most of the Sichuan minorities.  Research is ongoing into several minorities in Sichuan and Yunnan, however, and one example may stand for the whole.

The Akha of far southern Yunnan have been described in a brilliant Ph.D. thesis by my student Jianhua “Ayoe” Wang (2013).  They share with other south Chinese and Southeast Asian peoples a belief that the world is divided into the realm of humans—the villages and fields—and the realm of spirits, the forests and mountains.  People and spirits move freely in each other’s domains, but must be careful and respectful.  Again, the concept of respect—taqheeq-e in Akha—is basic.  Since the Akha stem ultimately from northwest China, this is probably an ancient belief system shared with the Mongols.  On the other hand, the same concept exists among North American Indians, so independent invention seems to happen

The spirits punish those who harm forests, landscapes, or the very large number of species of plants and animals that are sacred.  In practice, these religious and ritual rules made it impossible to use the land and its resources unsustainably.  Of course there were always scofflaws who broke the rules, but they were judged negatively by their neighbors, and any misfortune they suffered might be blamed on their conduct.  So they could not be too disruptive.  Again, modernization has led to abandoning much of this ancient body of rules.  The fact that it is justified by religion should not be held against it; it is equally justified by common sense and obvious pragmatic success.  It joins the vast number of sensible rules—from helping your neighbor to washing your hands—that human beings everywhere elevate to the level of religious teaching but that are followed by any reasonable human in any case.  

We may contrast these ancient but pragmatic and reasonable teachings with the western ideas of dominating or “struggling against” nature that have informed Chinese practice in more recent decades.  Far from being progressive or economically sound, these beliefs are based on the Biblical charge to exert “dominion” over the earth (Genesis 1:26).  This passage and other domination beliefs in the west go back to the slave-run or serf-run estates of ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome.  It is ironic to see them held up as progress.  Westernization does not equal progress. 

Also, for those who might oppose “spiritual” teachings to “modern rational economics,” one can only respond that modern economic policies are based on neoclassical economic theory, which assumes humans are totally rational, interested solely in maximizing immediate returns, have perfect information, and make decisions on the basis of errorless calculus of maximizing utility.  These assumptions are patently false and lead to policies that can only be described as insane.  Belief in tree spirits at least leads to saving trees.  China must take into account the pragmatic wisdom of these minority traditions if it is to continue to feed its people.

In short, China’s success in feeding its hundreds of millions of people over thousands of years was due to policies that may have been far from perfect and far from scientifically well-informed, but at least were successful and intelligent enough to keep the system functioning.  China’s success at economic growth today is based on measures that are devastating China’s food production system.  This is unsustainable and will soon end.  What will happen then depends on choices that China is making today.

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

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