Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Luke Ford

From this 2021 book by Robin Dunbar:

* we tend to underestimate the significance of psychological wellbeing as the bedrock on which our success in life is founded. If our sense of wellbeing is significantly diminished for any length of time, we are likely to slide into depression, and that leads to a downward spiral into ill health. If our mood is positive and everything is upbeat, we are not only more willing to engage with others socially but we approach everything we do with optimism and enthusiasm. We’ll work harder to get even the most boring tasks done. It isn’t hard to see how happiness, a sense of positivity and a ‘can do’ attitude can spread rapidly through a population…

* So important is it to be part of a social group, that when we find ourselves alone or an outsider we typically feel lonely, even agitated, and will actively work to try and remedy the situation. Few of us could cope with living completely isolated on a desert island with no prospect of rescue. Even the rather disagreeable Scottish seaman Alexander Selkirk (the original on whom the Robinson Crusoe story was based) was overjoyed to be rescued after spending four years alone on what is now officially known as Robinson Crusoe Island. Loneliness takes its toll on us, and we do our best to look for opportunities to meet people. Being part of a group makes us feel properly human. We feel more relaxed when we know we belong. We feel more satisfied with life when we know we are wanted.

* loneliness is actually an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong – a prompt that you need to do something about your life, and fast. Even just the perception of being socially isolated can be enough to disrupt your physiology, with adverse consequences for your immune system as well as your psychological wellbeing that, if unchecked, lead to a downward spiral and early death.

* neural connectivity and neural plasticity in rats if they are isolated when young. In particular, it can irretrievably alter the function of the prefrontal cortex (the front part of the brain where all the clever stuff, and especially the clever social stuff, is done), as well as its myelinisation (the laying down of the fatty sheaths around neurons that enable them to transmit signals faster and more efficiently). Once the damage is done, it’s done. In humans, short periods of loneliness rarely have any long-term adverse effects, but persistent loneliness is correlated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, depression and dementia, as well as poor sleeping habits (which in turn often have adverse psychological consequences).

* The important thing about friends is that you need to have them before disaster befalls you. One reason is that, as we shall see later, people are only likely to make the effort to help you if they are already your friend. We are all much less likely to help strangers or people we know only slightly – despite what we sometimes claim. Making friends, however, requires a great deal of effort and time. It is not something you can just magic up over a cup of coffee – not least because everyone else is already embedded in friendship networks of their own, and to make time and room for you as a new friend means that they will have to sacrifice a friendship with someone else.

* younger adults behave like careful shoppers: they are trying to sample as widely as they can among the pool of potential friends available to them in order to find the best set of life partners and friends. As a result, they distribute their time more widely – after all, they have much more time available in which to do so than older adults – and they ought to be happy to sacrifice relationship quality for quantity if it means they can sample a larger proportion of the available population. Into their thirties, people become more selective as they identify the best choices. In part, this is probably forced on them by the demands of parenthood. As every new parent knows, free time is decimated by the early years of childcare, and this in turn impacts on the time (and energy!) available for socialising. We shed our more casual friendships and concentrate what time and mental effort we have on the handful of really important friends.

* The final phase in the human life cycle seems to kick in around the sixties, when we start to lose friends through death. If we lose friends when we are younger, perhaps because they moved away, we simply make a renewed social effort and replace them with new friends. In older age, however, we lack the energy and the motivation (and are less mobile as well) to seek and build new friendships. Moreover, the kinds of places where we found friends when we were younger are now no longer quite so appropriate as places to go. We don’t quite know the right codes of behaviour for the context, are not even sure how to start a conversation with a stranger any more. So we become less inclined to go out in order to replace old friends. As a result, we gradually shed friends – and family – until in very old age we are confined to our house and seldom see anyone from one day’s end to the next. The fact is that we start life with one or two close carers and, if we live long enough, we end life that way too.

* It is as though we all have the same amount of emotional capital (think of this as the time you have for spending with people), but introverts choose to spread this thickly among just a few people whereas extraverts choose to spread it thinly among many people. As a result, extraverts have friendships that, on average, are much weaker than those of introverts. Given that someone’s willingness to support you is directly related to the time you spend socialising with them (and hence their perceived emotional closeness to you), one consequence of this may be that extraverts are less likely to be supported by their friends. It’s as though introverts feel less secure about the social world, so they prefer to invest more heavily in a few people whom they know really well and whom they can really rely on.

* people who had few kin listed in their network had more non-kin friends, and vice versa. I remember someone telling me after a lecture I had given at a science festival that she and her husband were the archetypal examples of just this. She came from a very big family, and all her time was taken up with her many cousins, aunts and uncles, so she actually had very few real friends; in contrast, her husband, who came from a very small family, had a large number of friends…

This seems to be a consequence of the fact that our networks are limited to around 150 slots, and we first slot all our family members in and then, if we have any spare slots left, we set about filling them with unrelated friends. It seems likely that friends in this sense are a relatively recent phenomenon, and are a consequence of the dramatic reduction in family size that has occurred over the last two centuries, especially in Europe and North America.

* none of the six main kinship-naming systems in the world have terms for anyone who is less closely related than cousins. It is as though this is the natural limit for human communities, and everyone beyond that magic circle of cousins is a stranger of no particular importance. In most traditional ethnographic societies, anyone joining the community has to be assigned some kind of fictive (or fictional) kinship, usually by being adopted as a son, or perhaps a brother, by someone; until that happens, they have no place in the community. All their adopter’s kin then become their kin, with the same rights and obligations as real kin. We do much the same with adopted children, and of course we do it with very close friends when we teach our children to address them as ‘Aunty Mary’ or ‘Uncle Jim’ even though they are not biological aunts and uncles. Kinship is so central to small-scale societies that it might legitimately be regarded as one of the main organising principles of the human social world.

* One reflection of this is that, all things being equal, we are much more willing to help relatives than we are friends. This is sometimes known as the kinship premium . Think about what happens if someone contacts you out of the blue and explains that they are your long-lost third cousin, and that you share a great-great-grandmother. You might just ask a few questions to check that this really is so, but once you accept the evidence, you’ll offer them a bed for the night – and would they like to stay longer? But if the person says that they are a friend of a friend of a friend, your response is likely to be very different: after the usual pleasantries, you might suggest they try the Day’s Inn down the road to see if there’s a room available – and perhaps they might like to pop round some time for a cup of tea . . .
The kinship premium seems to derive from one of the most fundamental principles in evolutionary biology, the theory of kin selection – that we are more likely to behave altruistically, and less likely to behave selfishly, towards close relatives than distant relatives, and towards distant relatives than to unrelated folk.

* Another respect in which family and friend relationships differ is that friendships are more costly to maintain than family relationships. Our women’s network data illustrate the general principle: people typically devoted more time to their close family than to their close friends, but they devoted much more time to their less close friends than to their less close family. Distant family relationships need only the occasional reminder to be kept ticking over, but friendships die fast if they are not maintained at the appropriate level of contact for any length of time. The consequences of this were evident in our longitudinal study of high-schoolers going away to university. We found that friends very quickly (within months) slipped down through the list of friends once they weren’t being seen so regularly. It takes only a couple of years for a friend to become just an acquaintance – someone I once knew. Family members, in contrast, required much less work to maintain, and emotional closeness to them hardly budged an inch over the eighteen months of the study. If anything, it actually increased a little – absence really does make the heart grow fonder (but only for family). We can go many years without seeing them, and they still welcome us with open arms, will still come to our aid like the cavalry coming over the hill when we really need it.
One category of people who sit uncomfortably between family and friends are in-laws (otherwise known technically in anthropology as affines, or relatives by marriage).

* in bonded social groups, your friends keep an eye on you and make sure they stay with you even if you decide to wander off. We found that primates and pair-bonded antelope are constantly checking on the whereabouts of their closest friends, whereas herd-forming species (such as the wild goats I studied) hardly ever do.

* loneliness was associated with difficulty in processing social cues, as might be expected, as well as confirming that other psychological factors such as a small social network size, high anxiety and low empathy independently contribute to loneliness.

* The orbitofrontal neocortex is involved in interpreting emotional cues, and it seems that it can act to suppress the amygdala’s panicky responses when it thinks these are misplaced. Since all relationships, and especially those with strangers, are potentially risky (we don’t know quite how they are going to behave), the initial instinct will always be to run away. The orbitofrontal cortex is able to dampen down this tendency when there isn’t any need to run away – something that may be especially important during courtship and mating, for example. This is an important reminder that the different brain regions interact to create a fine-tuned balance that allows us to function effectively in complex situations.

* MaryAnne Noonan, one of my colleagues at Oxford University. She looked at the brain’s white matter and showed that its volume was also correlated with the size of the friendship circle.

* One of the things we had noticed in our various studies of social networks was that women always had slightly more friends than men.

* He found that women who lived in households with more people had a larger amygdala than women who lived with fewer individuals, whereas there was no effect of household size on amygdala size for males. In contrast, men in larger households had larger orbitofrontal cortices, whereas women exhibited no consistent pattern. The reverse was the case for those who had more opportunity to engage with emotionally close relationships. Women who expressed greater satisfaction with their relationships and who said they had more opportunities to confide in others had larger volumes in these two areas than women who did not.

* There is a poignant moment in a BBC television documentary on autism where an eleven-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome turns to his mother and asks: ‘What is a friend, mummy? Can I have one?’ and then, after a pause playing with his toys: ‘How do I get a friend?’ He understood that the children he mixed with called each other friends. But there seemed to be some mysterious process involved that he did not quite fully understand. Just how do you set about getting a friend? He has already tried asking other children to be his friend, but it didn’t seem to work, and he doesn’t really know why. And now he is genuinely stumped.
His perplexity is a reminder that we all have moments of puzzlement when our overtures of friendship are rejected, or a friend lets us down and we don’t understand why. These moments of social anguish are a reminder of an important aspect of friendship: friends are not, in reality, all that easy to acquire and maintain. We have to work at them, and it can take months, sometimes even years, for a real friendship to blossom. More importantly, we all vary in our ability to manage the social world. At one end is the young boy who is completely defeated by the very concept of friendship; at the other is the perfect host who seems to know by effortless intuition what to say to enliven a social occasion, how to bring the best out in everyone, who would hit it off with whom. Most of us lie somewhere in between these two extremes, lurching from one social minefield to another relationship catastrophe, while just about managing to keep ourselves afloat. And then there are the times when circumstances leave us stranded on a social desert island, watching enviously as everyone else seems to be having the social time of their lives.
The human social world is possibly the most complex phenomenon in the observed universe – far more complex than the mysterious processes that create stars and engineer the orbits of the planets. The social skills that make this world possible are astonishingly sophisticated, and the cognitive mechanisms that underpin these skills are a miracle of evolutionary engineering. Yet we take them for granted and hardly ever give them a second thought.

* If you want to know what someone really thinks of you, check out how they touch you. There is an honesty about touch that cannot be matched by any other sense, and certainly a great deal more honesty than can be inferred from the words they may speak to you. A touch is worth a thousand words. That’s because touch is intensely intimate in a way that no other sense is. Words are slippery things. Not only are we good at saying one thing when we really mean another, but even the words we use change their meaning according to how we say them. We are extraordinarily skilled at lying when it suits us, sometimes with the best of intentions (as when we don’t want to offend someone with a brutally honest opinion) and sometimes deliberately for personal gain. In contrast, the way someone puts their hand on your shoulder or strokes your arm says a great deal more about how they view their relationship with you than anything else ever could. In part, that is because there is an intimacy to touch that the other senses lack. Taste and smell, the other two intimate senses, can tell me who you are, but they cannot tell me how you feel about me .
Touch is what makes the world of relationships go round. The very intimacy of touch means that we are very sensitive to who touches us, and how they do it. Being stroked or rocked is calming, creating a sense of both pleasure and relaxation. The cares of the world drop slowly from your shoulders. It’s the business of the masseur in the everyday world. It is why we rock babies, and why rocking calms them. But at the same time, there is an ambivalence about touch, perhaps precisely because it is so intimate. We want to be touched by some people, but shrink from being touched by others. This ambivalence is the bane of our lives, not least because it sometimes makes it difficult for those with whom we interact to know which category they belong to. I am willing to stroke you affectionately, but you are not willing to allow me to do it. So we have to develop rules that help smooth that particular pathway. A handshake is fine between strangers, a stroke on the back or a kiss is not. Learning these rules takes most of our childhood and adolescence, and even then we make mistakes. A yearning to be touched goes unfulfilled; or we blunder in where we are not welcome.

* how emotionally close we feel to someone is directly related to how much time we invest in them.

* we are more likely to laugh at something when we are in a group than when we are alone.

* The more energetic the dance moves and the more synchronised the members of the group were, the greater the change in pain threshold and the more bonded they felt to the group.

* What these two studies revealed is that the number of close friends you have is closely correlated with how engaged you are with your local community, the level of trust you have in those among whom you live, your sense of how worthwhile your life is and how happy you feel. Most of the relationships between these variables work both ways: increase the sense of community engagement and it increases your sense that life is worthwhile; but, equally, increase your sense that life is worthwhile, and it increases how engaged you become with the rest of the community. These are, however, influenced in slightly different ways by whether we eat or drink with other people. Social eating tends to influence the number of close friends we have and our sense of life satisfaction most directly, and then through these the other components, whereas drinking socially influences our sense of engagement with the community and our trust in its members most directly, and then through these the other components. The net outcome, however, is much the same in either case: engaging in these activities with others strengthens our membership of the wider community and elevates our general sense of wellbeing and satisfaction with life – and, through these, our health…

* If there is one behaviour without which both a conversation and a relationship would be deathly dull it is surely a smile. Everyone smiles in the same language, as the saying goes. Smiles express interest, grant permission to continue a conversation, provide encouragement that the interaction is welcome, express apology and sympathy, and a dozen other emotions. Most people assume that smiles and laughter are one and the same thing, that a smile is a laugh that never quite got out. In fact, there is an important difference between laughing and smiling. While laughter, as we have seen, derives from the monkey play face, smiling derives from the monkey submission face. In monkeys, the ‘bared teeth face’ (or snarl) is associated with submission or appeasement. In contrast to the ROM face of a laugh, a smile, like a snarl, has the teeth firmly clamped together and the lips drawn apart to show the teeth. Even though both are about friendship, one is about bonding, the other about subordination. That’s why we smile so much when we are nervous or embarrassed, or when we are introduced to people whom we don’t know or perceive as being superior.

* The limit of four for a conversation is a remarkably robust effect. If a fifth person joins, it will split into two separate conversations within as little as half a minute.

* the evening seems to enhance our social interactions in a very special way, and that the origins of this are probably very ancient.

* You are twice as likely to share genes with a friend as you are with any random person from your local neighbourhood. …friends were more likely to share the same DRD2 dopamine receptor gene (one of the two neurochemicals that allow you to maintain your friendships), and less likely to share the same CYP2A6 gene (a gene that regulates the enzyme responsible for the oxidation of nicotine – an enzyme that, useful as it might be in other contexts, is of no real use for maintaining friendships).

* The seven pillars of friendship:
• having the same language (or dialect)
• growing up in the same location
• having had the same educational and career experiences (notoriously, medical people gravitate together, and lawyers do the same)
• having the same hobbies and interests
• having the same world view (an amalgam of moral views, religious views, and political views)
• having the same sense of humour
• having the same musical tastes

* The more of these boxes you tick with someone, the more time you will be prepared to invest in them, the more emotionally close you will feel towards them, the closer they will lie to you in the layers of your social network, and the more willing you will be to help them out when they need it. And the more likely they are to help you. Birds of a feather really do flock together. You tend to gravitate towards people with whom you have more things in common. You tend to like the people who are most like you. In fact, each layer of your social network is equivalent to a particular number of ‘pillars’ shared – six or seven for the innermost 5-layer, just one or two for the outer 150-layer. It doesn’t seem to matter which ones you actually share in common. These pillars are, as economists put it, substitutable – that is, any one is as good as another, there is no hierarchy of preference. A three-pillar friend is a three-pillar friend irrespective of which three pillars you have in common.

* When you first meet someone new you invest a lot of time in them (in effect, catapult them into one of the innermost circles) so that you can evaluate where they lie on the Seven Pillars. That takes time, but once you know where they stand, you then reduce the time you devote to them to a level appropriate to the number of pillars you have in common. As a result, they quietly slide back down through the layers to settle out in the layer appropriate to that number. In other words, friendships are born and not made. You just have to find them. It may take several goes before you find the right person to be your best friend, or even in your top five friends list, but if you keep searching you will find them eventually.

* Knowing how to recognise a member of your community cuts through the long-winded process of getting to know someone by having to spend half a lifetime with them. I know you are a member of my community because I instantly recognise your dialect the moment you speak. You know the same streets and pubs that I know. You know the same jokes that we used to tell over a pint of beer. You belong to the same religion as I do. Any one of these is a rough and ready guide to a shared history, and any one of them will do to mark you out as someone I can trust – because I know how you think. They point to the fact that we grew up in the same place, we absorbed the same mores, the same attitudes to life and the wider world. I don’t have to explain my joke to you because you get it straight away. In fact, I don’t even have to finish the punch line because you know the same jokes as me, or even just the way a joke is constructed. This harking back to the community we grew up in seems to explain the extraordinary attachment many people feel to ‘home’ – the place where they grew up – even decades after they moved away.

* In fact, we can tell a massive amount about a person from just the first sentence they say. We can identify where they come from, and, at least in Britain, which social class they belong to. Social linguists reckoned that, in the 1970s, you could place a native English-speaker to within 35 km (20 miles) of their birthplace just by their accent and the words they used, so fine-scale were these differences in dialect.

* In societies that are essentially social contracts (as all human societies are), freeloaders who take the benefits of the contract but avoid paying all the costs erode trust in other members of the community and quickly lead to the collapse of society. When that happens, it causes communities to fragment, and we retreat into the little clusters of people we really trust. The question that motivated this model was whether dialect might provide a quick-and-dirty guide to membership of your community, and hence of whether you could trust someone.
We can think of a dialect as a supermarket barcode exhibited on your forehead. Each individual checks out the barcodes of the people they meet, but only agrees to form relationships if their respective barcodes match. Over time, freeloaders can learn to mimic the local dialect, pretending to be good citizens but all the time exploiting those with whom they interact. Left to their own devices, freeloaders will very quickly overwhelm the population, driving the collaborators to extinction in as few as a dozen generations. The interesting finding was that if the population changed its dialect regularly from one generation to the next, it held freeloaders in check because they couldn’t track the changes fast enough.

* Meeting people we don’t know – strangers – is a fact of life. That is how we make new friends. But we don’t really want to waste time checking out how they sit on each of the Seven Pillars of Friendship. If we did that for every new person we met, there wouldn’t be enough time in the day. Ideally, we want some simple rubric for deciding whether it is worth investing further time and effort in getting to know them better. So what’s the best criterion to use when deciding whether someone might be worth investing time in so as to check them out in more detail? Jacques Launay explored this by examining how strangers are judged on the Seven Pillars. The traits that people selected significantly more often than expected were ethnicity, religion, political views, moral views and, strongest of all, musical tastes.

* Kinship probably remains the single best cue for trustworthiness because it is reinforced by the family community, especially in traditional small-scale societies.

* Karl Grammer, perhaps the leading human ethologist, has made a career out of studying human mate-choice behaviour. He suggested that courtship can best be understood as a process of punctuated evaluation: there are a series of decision points, separated by periods of stasis, where we pause to decide whether to move on to the next more intimate level or to pull out now before we have overcommitted ourselves. We begin with distance signals, and slowly but surely circle into ever closer and more intimate forms of evaluation. It begins with what does he/she look like? How well do they move . . . dance . . . play? If they pass this initial test, we arrange to spend more time with them, successively evaluating cues based on speech, smell and taste until, eventually, we commit ourselves to the full monty. At each stage, we pause to evaluate whether we should proceed to the next level.

* Risk-taking and sportiness are other cues to which women seem to pay more than just casual attention. Young males, in particular, are risk-takers: adolescent boys take so many risks (driving too fast, taking drugs, playing dangerous sports) that they have much higher mortality rates in their late teens than girls do. What risk-taking seems to be signalling is gene quality. In effect, they are saying: watch me – I can afford to take risks because my genes are so good I’ll get away with it.

* She found that women much preferred brave, risk-prone males compared with altruistic, risk-averse ones as short-term mating partners. However, they preferred altruistic males as long-term partners… get your genes from males who have proven quality and then rely on a safe pair of hands to see you through the long haul of childcare. The tricky bit, of course, is persuading the second kind of male to take the risk of being cuckolded.

* homophily underpins successful romantic relationships as much as it does successful friendships.

* men dropped their standards of mate choice as the sex ratio became increasingly male-biased (more men than women, so creating more competition for women) and raised their standards (at least for long-term mates) when the sex ratio became more female-biased (i.e. when men were in short supply). More important, it seemed that men switched to more casual sex when they were in the minority – when women were forced to compete for men and, as a result, could exert less power over them. When there were fewer women available and men were forced to compete for women, men became more willing to accept committed relationships.
Although wealth and status tend to place men at an advantage compared with their competitors in the mating market, the decision on whom to choose actually lies with the women. Some surprising evidence of this came from our national mobile phone database. Vasyl Palchykov, a young Ukrainian graduate student in Kimmo Kaski’s statistical physics group at Aalto University, looked at how the two sexes allocate their phone calls to the two people they called most often. He was interested in how likely the best ‘friend’ (the person they phoned most often) was to be male or female at any given age – in effect an index of the relative preference for one sex over the other. The data showed that, in early adolescence, a woman’s best friend (the person she calls most often) is likely to be another female; but after about age eighteen, it switches to become increasingly male, reaching a peak in the early twenties that remains relatively stable until age forty, after which it falls rapidly to become female again at around age fifty-five, remaining consistently female-biased into old age. Males follow a reciprocal, but slightly different pattern: after a male-biased preference during adolescence, a male’s main call partner becomes increasingly female-biased up to the age of thirty, after which it peaks briefly and then declines steadily towards a low level of female bias roughly similar to that exhibited by females.
Two things stood out in these data. One was the fact that the female curve hits its peak about seven years earlier than the male’s does (at age twenty-three versus age thirty). The other was that it remains at this peak for much longer (until age forty-five versus age thirty-five in males). In other words, women maintain a focus on their partner/spouse for about three times longer than men do – for about twenty-one years compared to at most seven years for men. This tells us two things about romantic relationships. One is that women typically make a very early decision on which male to go for and they stick with it, constantly contacting him until even the dullest male finally realises and caves in. It looks like it takes the male around five years to wake up – or, at least, respond reciprocally – to this. This suggests that female choice is the norm in humans, as it is in many other mammals. Whatever men may do by way of display to attract the attention and interest of women, it is the women that ultimately decide whom to go with. Once a relationship has been established, it seems that the men lose interest long before the women do: their focus on the female partner lasts only a few years and then declines steadily down to a token level by middle age.

* the more someone idealised their partner (i.e. switched off their reality check) at the outset of the relationship, the longer they continued to be satisfied with the relationship. And the more this was reciprocated, the more likely the relationship was to last. The moment reality strikes, and you begin to see your partner for what he or she really is, there is a slow but steady erosion in relationship satisfaction that can only ever have one outcome.

* men are more prone to using violence in aggression, are more object-oriented and consistently more sexually oriented than women, women invariably perform better on tests of language competence, are more prosocial and empathic, and are more focused on making careful mate choices. Women are also better at inhibitory and effortful control, especially early in life.

* Friendships die when we do not see the people concerned often enough to maintain the relationship at its former level of emotional intimacy – and especially so when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. So the tendency is for such relationships to fade quietly, almost by accident rather than design. The road to friendship is paved with good intentions to meet up again, and no doubt a good bit of guilt – we must get together sometime . . . but somehow sometime never comes because too many other priorities intervene. In contrast, family relationships can weather the social equivalent of being becalmed in mid-Atlantic, in part because of the pull of family (the Kinship Premium) and in part because the closely integrated network of family relationships means that people don’t lose track of you completely. The kin-keepers bridge the divide by keeping everyone up to date with everyone else’s doings. You can never quite escape – unless you completely cut yourself off.
Family are more forgiving than friends – not just of those repeated failures to contact them, but also of the trickle of small breaches of trust that inevitably occur along the way.

* They identified six key rules which were essential for maintaining a stable relationship. These were: standing up for the friend in their absence, sharing important news with the friend, providing emotional support when it is needed, trusting and confiding in each other, volunteering help when it is required, and making an effort to make the other person happy. Breaking any of these rules, they suggested, was likely to weaken the relationship, and breaking many was likely to lead to complete relationship breakdown.
They noticed that, when recalling lapsed relationships, people were more likely to attribute negative behaviours to the other person and positive ones to themselves, a classic form of psychological deflection of blame known as the Attribution Error (‘It can’t be me that is wrong, so it must be you’). They also noticed that younger people (i.e. those under twenty years of age) attached more significance to public criticism than older people did, and that women placed most importance on failure to apportion time equally and give positive regard and emotional support, whereas men placed a greater emphasis on negative events like being the target of jokes or public displays of teasing. Men seem to be less able to cope with this kind of taunting than women, perhaps because reputations mean more to them.

* Because women are socially more proactive than men, men often end up with a social network dominated by their wives’ friends simply because the wives arrange the social events and the husbands just go along with it. Wives often try to encourage their husbands to contact old male friends, only to be greeted by a frustrating shrug of the shoulders. Irrespective of the cause, men risk ending up with no social network other than their own family after a divorce or the death of a spouse.

* There was a strong tendency for women’s break-ups to remain unreconciled longer than men’s… It seems that women are less forgiving than men.

* women’s relationships are more fragile than men’s, perhaps because they are much more intimate and emotionally charged

* Sociologists have been aware for some considerable time that social networks decline progressively as we enter old age. At the same time, they have been conscious of the fact that each of us has a core of relationships that remain surprisingly stable across much of the lifespan. These are those very close family and friends that provide us with emotional and social support and who, as it were, accompany us through life rather like a group of devoted servants – always at hand when we need them, always anxious to tend to our needs. There have been two rather different theories about this group of key friends: the socio-emotional theory of friendship (which suggests that we become more and more selective as we grow older to focus on those few emotionally valuable friendships) and the convoy theory (that we are accompanied through life by a relatively stable group of supportive friends).

* Old age brings on a downward spiral in which all the odds are stacked against you. You find it hard to make new friends as your old ones die or move away because you have less in common with the younger folk who now make up the bulk of the population; your declining energy makes you less willing to get out as often, and less able to take part in physical activities; your failing cognition makes it harder to respond so wittily or so engagingly as you once did in conversation, making you less interesting as a social companion; you are not so familiar with the topics that interest people now because you have not kept up with social and political developments – or the jokes of the latest stand-ups. Having an impoverished social life has adverse consequences for your cognitive wellbeing as well as your physical health, increasing the risk of dementia as well as physical illnesses that require hospitalisation. The prospect is not inviting. These are not conditions that physical medicine can cure, but nor are they psychiatric issues. They fall into an in-between limbo where conventional medicine offers few solutions. It makes the provision of social clubs and activities for the elderly all the more important as a way of maintaining their mental and physical health.
It is physical mobility that, as much as anything, causes our withdrawal from social interaction in older age. We just find it harder to get to places where people gather socially. In the limit, of course, we eventually become housebound. In that respect, the arrival of the internet has offered the possibility of a solution unique to our times. So, in the final chapter of this story of friendship, let’s turn to see what opportunities the digital world and social media have to offer, both for the current older generation and for the future prospects of the younger generations that have grown up with the internet.

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Historian Matthew Ghobrial On Russia Vs Ukraine (3-29-22)

Posted on March 29, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:00 PhD student Matthew Ghobrial, https://twitter.com/GhobrialMatthew
01:00 Matt’s Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9z6CwgycPjUbOLElkLuHjQ
02:00 What are Russia’s legitimate interests in Ukraine?
04:00 Why did Putin invade Ukraine?
06:00 What would a peace agreement look like?
08:00 Hyperbolic rhetoric about Putin
09:00 When Russia was pro-Western (1990s)
11:20 Why is Biden uninterested in peace in Ukraine?
12:00 The case against sanctions against Russia
13:30 Stephen Colbert’s anti-Russian attitude
15:00 Turkey, Russia, Ukraine
18:00 Will Turkey join the EU?
19:40 The death of Madeline Albright and Bill Clinton’s foreign policy
26:30 Why are chemical weapons worse than regular weapons?
28:00 Per capita (nominal) GDP, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
36:00 Why does the Alt Right like Putin?
42:00 Surprises from the war
48:30 Charles Bausman – U.S. White Nationalist Group Linked to Pro-Kremlin Propagandist, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/10/06/us-white-nationalist-group-linked-pro-kremlin-propagandist
45:00 Russia Today
1:02:00 History was political history until the 1920s, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Ranke
1:04:30 When did history cease to be a tool to promote ethno-nationalism?
1:06:10 Epistemology and history
1:07:30 In Defense of History by Richard Evans, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143040
1:13:00 Does history have general laws?
1:15:30 Historians rarely make predictions
1:19:00 Paul Kennedy’s 1987 best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Great-Powers/dp/0679720197
1:28:00 The Hitler Diaries, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
1:35:00 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason

Posted in History, Russia, Ukraine | Comments Off on Historian Matthew Ghobrial On Russia Vs Ukraine (3-29-22)

Will Smith, Chris Rock and the downward spiral of the dissidents (3-28-22)

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Luke Ford

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In Defense Of History

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Luke Ford

Richard Evans writes in this 1999 book:

* Virtually all historians, for example, assumed that the nation-state was the primary object of historical study. The emerging historical profession was dominated by the view that the historian’s task lay principally in the study of the origins and development of states and in their relations with one another.

* The Prussian school of historians, led by such figures as J. G. Droysen, was happy to proclaim that “the German nation has outstripped all others” in its application of the critical method to historical sources, but it was just as critical as Trevelyan was of the notion that this was sufficient to constitute history in itself. “History,” declared Droysen, “is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art.” He complained that because the German middle classes had for so long considered “the German method in history pedantic, exclusive, unenjoyable,” they all read Macaulay instead, or turned to the great French historian and statesman Thiers, so that “German historical judgment” and even “German political judgment” were “formed and guided . . . by the rhetorical superiority of other nations.” The German middle classes did indeed look to the examples of English liberalism and the principles of the French Revolution for much of the nineteenth century. The Prussian school of historians set themselves the task of demonstrating through a mixture of scientific method, historical intuition, and literary skill the superiority of Prussian values and their inevitable triumph in the unification of Germany in 1871. They could claim at least some credit for the drift of middle-class opinion in Germany from a liberal to a more authoritarian form of nationalism in the last three decades leading up to the First World War.

* Already before 1914, therefore, the ability of the scientific method to deliver a neutral and value-free history was under some doubt. Its credibility was even more severely shaken by the events of 1914–18 and their aftermath. Professional historians in every country rushed into print with elaborate defenses of the war aims of their own governments and denunciations of other Great Powers for having begun the conflict. Substantial collections of documents on the origins of the war were produced with all the usual scholarly paraphernalia and edited by reputable professionals, but on principles of selection that seemed manifestly biased to colleagues in other countries. The rigorous scientific training which they had undergone seemed to have had no effect at all in inculcating a properly neutral and “objective” attitude to the recent past, a view that was underlined as the 1920s progressed by the continuing violent controversies between extremely learned and scholarly historians about the origins of the war. 22 Moreover, among British, French, and American historians, the support for the war of the overwhelming majority of the “scientific” German colleagues whose work they so admired came as a further blow. 23 Many historians who had studied in Germany now rushed to denounce German scholarship as pedantic and antidemocratic. “The age of German footnotes,” as one of them declared in 1915, “is on the wane.” 24 And for G. M. Trevelyan, the defeat of the Germans also represented the defeat of “German ‘scientific history,’ ” a mirage which had “led the nation that looked to it for political prophesy and guidance” about as far astray as it was possible to go. 25
The war also revealed previous, apparently neutral scholarly histories of, for example, Germany or nineteenth-century Europe to have been deeply flawed in their interpretations. Events such as the Russian Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles, the triumph of modernism in art, music, and literature increased this sense of disorientation among historians. Reflective historians of the older generation realized that their faith in objectivity had accompanied their sense of living in an ordered and predictable world.

* The idea of the relativity of observer and fact was applied to history by a number of interwar philosophers…

* In making moral judgments on the past, historians have far more powerful rhetorical and stylistic weapons at their disposal than mere denunciation: sarcasm, irony, the juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality, the factual exposure of hypocrisy, self-interest, and greed, the uncommented recounting of courageous acts of rebellion and defiance, the description of terrible acts of hatred and violence. All this can be achieved without the direct application of the transient moral vocabulary of the society the historian is living in.

* Most historians have always believed the establishment of general laws to be alien to the enterprise in which they are engaged. This clearly differentiates them very sharply from natural scientists.

* Nor does history enable one to predict revolutions, however they are defined. Historians notoriously failed to predict, for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91. 25 In any case, although Carr argued repeatedly that the historian’s role was to use an understanding of the past in order to gain control of the future, very few historians indeed have shared this concept of their function in the sense of using the past as the basis for concrete predictions. The fact is that while a chemist, for instance, knows in advance the result of mixing two elements in a crucible, the historian has no such advance knowledge of anything, nor is trying to gain such knowledge really central to the business in which historians are engaged.

* An instructive recent example has been that of the Yale historian Paul M. Kennedy, whose profoundly researched and carefully argued study of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers argued that there was a pattern in modern history according to which wealthy states created empires but eventually overstretched their resources and declined. Illustrated with wealth of historical detail, the book attracted attention not because of its learned demonstration of the reasons for the failure of the Habsburg Empire to achieve European domination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but because of its conclusion that the United States would be unable to sustain its global hegemony far into the twenty-first century. At a time when U.S. President Ronald Reagan was about to ride off into the sunset, this gloomy prophecy struck a deep vein of anxiety in the American people. The book became a best seller overnight. Written in 1987, the book also made a point of arguing that the Soviet Union was not close to collapse, so that the situation situation seemed to many American readers to be ominous indeed. 26 Within a few years these prophecies had been confounded. The Soviet Union had indeed collapsed, not in the international war which Kennedy had argued was the invariable and inevitable trigger for such processes, but in a process of internal transformation and disintegration. The world hegemony of the United States seemed more assured than ever and in the economic boom of the 1990s showed few signs of suffering from the “imperial overstretch” which Kennedy had prophesied. In the first seven chapters of his book, in other words, Kennedy, writing as a historian, had produced some instructive and workable generalizations about the rise and fall of international superpowers and the relationship of economic and military strength. These chapters also incidentally demonstrated the continuing vitality and viability of “grand narrative” in history. Had Kennedy stopped here, his book would not have attracted the attention it did and would not have sold so many copies. But it would also have been better history. As soon as he turned his generalizations into laws and used them, in his final chapter, to prophesy the future, he ran into trouble. It is always a mistake for a historian to try to predict the future. Life, unlike science, is simply too full of surprises.

* Mommsen’s skepticism about the necessity of even a very modest degree of training in the making of a good historian was echoed a century later by the Oxford specialist in modern French history, Theodore Zeldin, who argued in 1976 that “the ideals or models that historians have set before their pupils have always been rapidly forgotten.”

I have no wish to urge anyone to write history in any particular way. I believe that the history you write is the expression of your individuality; I agree with Mommsen that one cannot teach people to write history; I believe that much more can be gained by encouraging young historians to develop their own personality, their own vision, their own eccentricities, than by setting them examples to follow. Original history is the reflection of an original mind, and there is no prescription which will produce that.

* As three American historians have recently pointed out in their reflections on the current state of the debate, “history is much more than a branch of letters to be judged only in terms of its literary merit.” …Few historians write competently; fewer still display any real mastery of the language in which they publish their work. Most history books are hopelessly unreadable. For this situation, the dominance in the past thirty years of social science models bears a lot of responsibility. Professional historians publish works that no sane person would attempt to read from beginning to end, works that are designed explicitly for reference rather than for reading. They usually lack the kind of literary ability that would make their work rival that of major poets or novelists. If they had it, no doubt most of them would be writing poems or novels. …The historians who can be read for literary pleasure are few indeed, and most of them, such as Gibbon, Michelet, Tocqueville, and Carlyle, wrote in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, which is no doubt why literary analysts have concentrated their attentions on this period rather than applying their techniques to historians of the twentieth, when the desire to be scientific has increasingly driven literary qualities out of their texts.

* “The techniques of deconstruction or discourse analysis,” declares Professor Arthur Marwick of Britain’s Open University, for example, “have little value compared with the sophisticated methods historians have been developing over the years.” 44 In view of his stout championing of the historians superior sophistication, it seems legitimate to ask how Marwick has deployed these “sophisticated methods” in his own work. Here is one sample, taken from Marwick’s discussion of the popular novels of Jeffrey Archer in his book Culture in Britain since 1945 : “I have read only one of these novels: I found my attention firmly held while reading, but, the book finished, I had only the feeling of deepest nullity: no perceptions broadened, nothing to think about, just nothing—the classic outcome of empty entertainment, the opposite pole from serious art.” 45 Does this kind of judgment really reflect the “sophisticated methods historians have been developing over the years”?

* History, in the end, may for the most part be seen as a science in the weak sense of the German term Wissenschaft, an organized body of knowledge acquired through research carried out according to generally agreed methods, presented in published reports, and subject to peer review. It is not a science in the strong sense that it can frame general laws or predict the future. But there are sciences, such as geology, which cannot predict the future either.

* The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes has leveled the charge that historians in the United States “seem to have forgotten—if they ever properly learned—the simple truth that what one may call progress in their endeavors comes not merely through the discovery of new materials but at least as much through a new reading of materials already available.” 27 Hughes of course has a strong vested interest in asserting this “simple truth,” since he has never discovered any new material himself in any of his publications but has devoted his entire career to going over old ground. His view is shared by William H. McNeill, of the University of Chicago, who used the occasion of his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1986 to castigate his colleagues for practicing a “historiography that aspires to get closer and closer to the documents— all the documents and nothing but the documents”—because this meant “merely moving closer and closer to incoherence, chaos, and meaninglessness ,” 28 Coming from a historian whose lifelong specialism had been in the history of the whole world from the beginnings of humanity to the present, and whose acquaintance with original documents was correspondingly limited, this view was perhaps unsurprising, if somewhat tactlessly expressed.

* “Documents cannot be viewed as simple manifestations of a creator’s intentions; the social institutions and material practices which were involved in their production played a significant part in shaping what was said and how it was said.”

* “The whole modern method of historical research is founded on the distinction between original and derivative authorities. By original authorities we mean statements by eye witnesses, or documents and other material remains that are contemporary with the event they attest. By derivative authorities we mean historians and chroniclers who relate and discuss events which they have not witnessed, but which they have heard of or inferred directly or indirectly from original authorities.”

* follows a prominent vein in postmodernist thinking, in which the secondary rather than the primary becomes paramount; rather than study Shakespeare, it is often argued, we should study what critics have written about him, because one reading of Shakespeare is as good as another, and the text itself has no particular priority above interpretations of it, since all are forms of discourse, and it is wrong to “privilege” one discourse over another.

* Language and grammar are in fact not completely arbitrary signifiers, but have evolved through contact with the real world in an attempt to name real things. In a similar way, historical discourse or interpretation has also evolved through contact with the real historical world in an attempt to reconstruct it. …Language is not in the end purely self-reflective. Experience tells us that it mediates between human consciousness and the world it occupies…

* “The work of historians in analysing and unmasking forgeries … is a paradoxical and ironic way of reasserting the capacity of history to establish true knowledge. Thanks to its unique techniques, the discipline of history is skilled at recognizing fakes for what they are and, by that token, at denouncing forgers. It is by returning to its own deviations and perversions that history demonstrates that the discrete knowledge it produces is inscribed within the order of a confirmable, verifiable knowledge.”
In this sense, genuine historical documents do have an integrity of their own; they do indeed “speak for themselves.”

* THESE issues, and others besides, were made painfully concrete in the American historical profession in the 1980s by the so-called Abraham affair. When the young American historian David Abraham’s book The Collapse of the Weimar Republic was published by Princeton University Press in 1981, many reviewers (including myself) hailed it for its originality, while at the same time finding its structural Marxism rather too schematic. Indeed I thought that its central arguments were at such a high level of abstraction that they could not really be empirically validated at all and that the book was best regarded as a work of political science rather than history, conforming therefore to a set of rules and conventions that were not strictly historical. 29 Other, more specialist reviewers were critical in a very different way. In particular, the conservative and avowedly anti-Marxist American historian Henry Ashby Turner, who had himself worked on the same source material, went on record accusing Abraham of deliberately inventing and falsifying archival material in order to discredit German capitalism and blame it for the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Appalled at these allegations, Abraham went back to the archives to check his sources and replied to Turner, admitting some minor errors but rejecting the main charges leveled against him. 30
At this point another American specialist in the history of big business in the Weimar Republic, Gerald Feldman, entered the fray with a further string of accusations. Feldman had originally recommended the book for publication by Princeton University Press, despite numerous errors which he had said should be corrected. But he then discovered that one of his former graduate students, Ulrich Nocken, was checking over every reference and every quotation in Abraham’s book. Nocken reported that there were hundreds of egregious mistakes, including the printing of inaccurate paraphrases as if they were direct quotations from the documents, wrongly attributed letters and documents, mistranslations, misconstruals, inventions, and falsifications of the sources.This persuaded Feldman that he had been wrong to assume that because Abraham had been awarded a Ph.D., his scholarly integrity could be trusted. As if to atone for his earlier gullibility in passing the manuscript for publication, Feldman now unleashed a ferocious campaign of denunciation, in which a large number of specialists in modern German history, including myself, were sent circulars exposing the errors in Abraham’s work and declaring him unfit to be a member of the scholarly community. Abraham replied with a vigorous self-defense, lobbying the German history community on both sides of the Atlantic in his turn. But in the face of Feldman’s campaign, which included denunciatory letters and phone calls to universities considering Abraham for an assistant professorship, this was in the end to no avail. As a result of Feldman’s untiring hostility, Abraham was hounded out of the profession and went to law school, where he graduated with distinction and duly reentered university employment, this time as a lawyer rather than as a historian and therefore in a subject which is perhaps more comfortable with the manipulation and tendentious interpretation of evidence than history is.

* Lawrence Stone, for instance, said:
When you work in the archives you’re far from home, you’re bored, you’re in a hurry, you’re scribbling like crazy. You’re bound to make mistakes. I don’t believe any scholar in the Western world has impeccable footnotes. Archival research is a special case of the general messiness of life.” 42
But this, too, was a debatable point.
Stone should know about “the general messiness of life” in the archives. He was far from being an unimpeachable witness on this issue. When he was Abraham’s age, in 1951, his own work had been subjected to a series of devastating and merciless attacks by his Oxford colleagues Hugh Trevor-Roper and J. P. Cooper in the Economic History Review , which had shown a similar catalog of gross error to that discovered in Abraham’s work. Stone had published an article arguing that English aristocratic landowners in the early seventeenth century were extravagant, financially inept, and declining in economic power. The conclusion was that this hastened the “rise of the gentry,” which was regarded by left-wing historians like R. H. Tawney as one of the main causes of the English Civil War. Trevor-Roper, however, pointed out that Stone had confused different generations of aristocrats with the same title, got many, if not most, of his sums wrong, and altogether misunderstood the nature of landownership at the time. In arguing that aristocratic ownership of manors had declined, for instance, Stone took county samples without realizing that aristocrats owned land in many different counties, and would readily sell their holdings in one to build up their estates in another; moreover, manors differed substantially in size, a factor Stone ignored completely, so that his figures showing a decline in the number of manors held by aristocratic landowners in some cases concealed an actual growth in the acreage and quality of land they possessed overall.
Trevor-Roper’s critique was described variously as “terrifying,” “brutal,” and “one of the most vitriolic attacks ever made by one historian on another.” Stone himself was forced to admit that there were “very serious mistakes” in his article and confessed to his “unscholar-ly treatment” of much of the evidence. 43 When I was an undergraduate in Oxford, indeed, the dons, sniffy as ever about American universities, even Princeton, where Stone had gone to teach, were wont to sneer that he had been forced to seek employment in the United States because his position in Oxford had become untenable as a result of the controversy. Although he in fact subsequently went on to a highly successful career, publishing a series of major (though never less than controversial) works in the process, his mauling at the hands of Trevor-Roper clearly rankled even more than thirty years afterward, and his defense of Abraham, with whom he evidently had a certain fellow-feeling, has to be regarded with suspicion. More to the point, however, was the fact that Stone had recovered from this early débâcle and during his later career had exercised a major and undeniably significant influence on the study of early modern English history and, through his perceptive and readable review articles, the study of history in general. To deny Abraham the same chance of making amends, as Feldman ultimately did, was surely wrong.

* THE Abraham affair was taken up into the debate on postmodernism not least because it touched on the issue which was proving the crucial test of the claim that history was incapable of establishing any real facts about the past. Nazi Germany seemed to postmodernism’s critics to be the point at which an end to hyperrelativism was called for. Postmodernists realized this. In replying to critics, Hayden White pointed out (in a footnote to one of the essays in The Content of the Form) that the Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz had attacked all previous writers on Nazism for misrepresenting, neglecting, or trivializing the “Holocaust,” thereby implying that they, too, were writing more in literary than in factual terms and that the Third Reich was no different from any other historical subject in this respect. But Dawidowicz’s book The Holocaust and the Historians has rightly been generally viewed as distorted, exaggerated, overpolemical, and grossly inaccurate in its account of the subject. There is in fact a massive, carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, or unreal, or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the “revisionists” who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen as either a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of Auschwitz, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well. What then are the implications of this for postmodernism?

* In a conference devoted to this subject, published in Probing the Limits of Representation , edited by Saul Friedländer, a number of postmodernists and their critics sought to address this problem. Hayden White in particular retreated from his earlier position in order to defend himself against the accusation that his hyperrelativism gave countenance to the “revisionist” enterprise of “Holocaust denial.” He conceded that the facts of the “Holocaust” closed off the possibility of using certain types of “emplotment” to describe it. But in making this concession, he implicitly acknowledged the primacy of past reality in shaping the way historians write about it, thus abandoning his central theoretical tenet. The past turned out not to be completely at the mercy of historical “narrativity” and “emplotment” after all.
White himself summed up his change of position by saying that in his early writings he was more concerned to point out the ways in which historians used literary methods in their work and, in so doing, inevitably imported a “fictive” element into it, because their written style did not simply report what they had found but actually constructed the subject of their writing. In his later work he came to draw a sharper distinction between fiction, on the one hand, and history, on the other. Rather than imagine the object first, then write about it in a manner that was therefore mainly subjective, history existed only in the action of writing, involving a kind of simultaneous production or identification of the author of the discourse and the referent or thing about which he or she was writing. White made this shift of position in response to the debate on postmodernism and “Holocaust denial,” and it seems to me to sum up more realistically than his earlier arguments the way in which historians actually go about their business. Historical imagination, he says, calls for the imagining of “both the real world from which one has launched one’s inquiry into the past and the world that comprises one’s object of interest.”

* The distinction between primary and secondary sources on the whole has survived the withering theoretical hail rained down upon it by the postmodernists. The past does speak through the sources and is recoverable through them. There is a qualitative difference between documents written in the past, by living people, for their own purposes, and interpretations advanced about the past by historians living at a later date.

* Long ago, Sir Herbert Butterfield pointed out in his little essay The Whig Interpretation of History that many of the greatest and most important developments in modern history were the unintended consequences of actions whose originators had had something entirely different in mind. The Protestant Reformation, for instance, and its Catholic counterpart in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe had intended to make people more godly, but the religious upheaval and conflict which followed eventually produced such widespread disillusion that the secular rationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was the result.

* Take E. H. Carr’s claim, for instance, that while millions of people have crossed the river Rubicon, the historian is interested only in Caesar’s crossing of the river because it affected the course of history.

* Hugh Trevor-Roper, too, writing as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford in 1965, declared that Africa had no history, merely “the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.” 33 As late as the 1990s John Vincent was still writing off Asian history as an impossibility (“we do not understand Asia and will not need to”), 34 surely a rather unwise statement in an age when the global influence of the new Asian economies was already exerting a major impact on the advanced industrial economies of the West.

* The cosmopolitanism of the historical profession in Britain and America contrasts starkly with the insularity of the profession on the European continent…

* THE argument that each group in society creates its own history as a means of building its own identity has worrying implications. As the American historian Laura Lee Downs has noted,
The politics of identity, feminist and otherwise, rests on a disturbing epistemological ground, in which the group’s fragile unity, rooted in an emergent sense of identity as an oppressed other, is shielded from white male colonization by asserting the inaccessibility of one’s experience. Only those who share the group identity and have lived its experience, whether seen as biologically given or socially constructed, can know what it means to be black, a woman, blue-collar, or ethnic, in an America constructed as white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.” 38
One might of course argue that it follows that none of these oppressed groups can possibly write the history of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males since they in turn have not shared the experience which makes the writing of such a history possible. The ultimate implication indeed is that no one can know anything beyond his or her own bodily identity. Experience is the sole arbiter of truth. There is no universal truth; there are only truths particular to specific groups of people.
Thus white male historians can write only about dead white males, and that, in the opinion of many postmodernists, is why the dominant perspective on the past purveyed by the historical profession has written so many other groups out of the story.

* Does postmodernism therefore give a license to anyone who wants to suppress, distort, or cover up the past? Where do you draw the line between all this and legitimate reinterpretation?
THESE issues, and some even more serious, were raised in 1987, when a young Belgian scholar discovered that one of the leading postmodernists, Paul de Man, a professor at Yale University who had been born and grew up in Belgium, emigrated to the United States after the war, and died in 1983, had written some 180 articles for a Nazicontrolled newspaper in Brussels during the German occupation from 1940 to 1942. Their focus was cultural, but they included encomiums of collaborationist writers in France and—most controversially of all—attacks on the Jewish contribution to European culture in the twentieth century, which de Man decried as mediocre and without great value. At a time when Jews were being rounded up in Belgium and deported to Auschwitz, de Man wrote an article arguing that if the Jews were deported to a Jewish colony outside Europe, European culture would suffer no great loss. After his emigration to the United States, de Man never mentioned this to any of his colleagues or pupils and indeed always denied any kind of collaborationist involvement in Belgium during the war. Like the Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, he had rewritten his own past without reference to the evidence. On this basis he built a successful career in American academia and became an extremely influential literary theorist, leading the “Yale school” of literary “deconstructionists” who argued for the irrelevance of authorial intentions and the multiple, indeed virtually infinite possibilities of textual interpretation. 19 The point of these revelations about his wartime writings was quickly grasped by deconstruction’s critics. Literary criticism, for de Man, seemed to be a way of denying his own past.

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One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway – and Its Aftermath

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2015 book:

* We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doktor Glas , 1905

* In October 1981, weekend respite care was approved for Anders twice a month. Anders was allocated to a newly married couple in their twenties. When Wenche [mother] brought the boy to them for the first time, they found her rather odd. The second time, they thought she was nuts. She asked if Anders could occasionally touch his weekend dad’s penis. It was important for the boy’s sexuality. He had no father figure in his life and Wenche wanted the young man to assume that role. Anders had no one to identify with in terms of his appearance, Wenche stressed, because ‘he only saw girls’ crotches’ and did not know how the male body worked.
The young couple were speechless. But they were too embarrassed to report what she had said.

* The month before, Wenche had gone to the foster-home section at the child welfare office. She was looking into the possibility of having both children fostered. She wanted them to ‘go to the devil’, she told the child welfare office.
Autumn arrived and life got even darker. In October, Wenche called in to the Frogner Medical Centre. ‘Mother seemed severely depressed,’ they noted. ‘Thinking of just walking out on the children and leaving them to society, to live her own life.’

* The neighbours called him ‘Meccano Boy’ because he was like something made out of a construction set, stiff and angular.

* The ants in the wall had a permanent path from the grass, across the tarmac, along the edge of the footpath, across a grating and up the steps. Anders would sit there waiting.
‘You’re going to die!’
‘Got you!’
He picked them up one by one and squashed them. Sometimes with his thumb, sometimes his index finger. ‘You and you and you and you!’ he decided, there on the steps, master of life and death.
The little girls found him disgusting. He was so intense, and he was cruel to animals. For a while he had some rats in a cage and would poke them with pens and pencils. Eva said she thought he was hurting them, but he took no notice. Anders caught bumblebees, dropped them in water and then brought them up to the surface in a sieve so he could watch them drown. Pet owners at Silkestrå made it clear to their children that Anders was not to come anywhere near their cats or dogs. Anders was often the only one not invited to come and stroke other children’s new puppies or kittens.

* In the fifteen years of Anders’s lifetime, the number of non-Western immigrants in Norway had risen almost fivefold. In Oslo, the change was even more marked. By about the mid-1990s, a third of those living in the eastern areas of Oslo city centre were from immigrant backgrounds. The largest group was the Pakistani community, who had come to Norway for work in the 1970s.

* He called himself metrosexual; he dressed up, wore make-up and used vitamin-enriched hair products. He had ordered Regaine from America, which promised to stop hair loss and trigger the follicles into new growth. He could still conceal his incipient bald patch with a good cut but his hairline was definitely receding. There was a great deal about his appearance that grieved him and he spent a long time in front of the mirror. Too long, thought his friends, who would laugh whenever he overdid the make-up. When he started wearing foundation, they teased him even more. It’s concealer, he objected. In summer he applied bronzing powder, and he kept a whole row of aftershaves in the bathroom.
His nose was new. An experienced surgeon had made a small incision, removed some bone and cartilage from below the bridge and sewn the skin tautly back in place. When the bandage was removed, his nose was just as he wanted it, as it ought to be: a straight profile, quite simply, an Aryan nose.

* Norway should learn from the US, where the key to success was: 1. You’re the best. 2. You can make all your dreams come true. 3. The only limits are those you set yourself.

* Anders had been exempted from military service because he was registered as his mother’s carer. After a serious herpes infection she had had a drain inserted in her head and she needed nursing for an extended period.

* It sounded familiar. He was behaving like a king, but he was only a toy.

* Anders’s posts on the forum grew more negative. ‘The sad thing about the political system in Norway is that it often isn’t the most competent who get political power, but those who are best at networking.’

* ‘Come out of the closet, Anders!’
Anders gave a strained laugh and pushed his friend away. Kristian refused to be shaken off, not wanting to drop the subject.
‘You’ve got to come out, we’re living in the twenty-first century, for God’s sake!’
Anders twisted free. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong person.’
Kristian had always thought Anders was gay, but it was the first time he had dared bring it up. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ said a mutual friend who had himself just come out. Kristian’s girlfriend thought the same. ‘Definitely gay,’ had always been her view of Anders. ‘He plainly isn’t interested in women. He just pretends,’ she said.
Anders’s friends also jeered at him for looking like a pansy. Anders and his make-up, Anders and his giggling, Anders and his affected voice. Anders who always had to do a few quick push-ups as a prelude to a night on the town, who never had a girlfriend but talked enthusiastically about prostitutes and the legalisation of brothels.

* When he sat down at the computer, what he liked best was to escape from reality.

* Anders avoided his friends. The computer screen attracted him more and more. He swiftly typed in the addresses of the computer games he was involved in and could play for hours. If anyone called round or telephoned, they often had to wait until he had finished the level he was playing.
He could not be bothered to work out any more, his diet was poor, he no longer made the effort to dress up and go out into town; he’d had enough of partying with friends in that damn cattle market, as he called the social scene.

* World of Warcraft is one of the most addictive games ever created, precisely because it is constructed on social lines. Players develop bonds with each other through their avatars, and the sense of solidarity can be strong. Every minute you spend away from the game means setting the others back slightly.
It allows you to enter a system that seems easy to grasp. If you can think strategically, success is achieved. You can measure your achievement in the minutest detail. Your goals are concrete. You get a virtual pat on the shoulder every time you log in, and your status is gradually enhanced as a result of time spent there. Everyone can succeed. Such is the online world.
Anders, who had wanted to be part of the power elite, was now one of the soldiers of World of Warcraft . From having been excited by the Freemasons’ stately props, he was now fascinated by computer-generated suits of armour. From having been obsessed with making money, he was now a collector of WoW gold. From having been concerned with his appearance, he now lurked in his room, grubby and unkempt.
Anders, once so keen to build networks, no longer needed anybody but himself.

* After two years in his room, in the summer of 2008, he suddenly felt like being sociable and rang his friends. Andersnordic logged off from the games; so did the other avatars he had created, like Conservatism and Conservative . All at once he was out and about, ordering the sweet drinks he preferred. ‘Ladies’ drinks,’ his friends teased. But he didn’t care. He had never liked beer.
Anders had changed. He had developed a one-track mind.
From always having countless irons in the fire, he had turned into someone engrossed in just one thing. Having launched so many business ideas, he was now monothematic.
‘He’s in a tunnel,’ said Magnus. Hoping he would soon see the light at the other end.
That summer, Anders delivered long lectures on the Islamisation of Europe.
‘The Muslims are waging demographic war,’ he said. ‘We’re living in dhimmitude and being conned by al-Taqiyya .’
‘Eh?’ said his friends.
‘The Muslims will take power in Europe because they have so many bloody children,’ Anders explained. ‘They pretend to be subordinating themselves, but they’ll soon be in the majority. Look at the statistics…’
The words poured out of him.
‘The Labour Party has ruined our country. It’s feminised the state and made it into a matriarchy,’ he told his mates. ‘And more than anything, it’s made it a place where it’s impossible to get rich. The Labour Party’s let the Muslims occupy…’
He started repeating himself. They generally let him go on for a while before they asked him to change the subject. His friends glossed over his peculiarities, the strange behaviour and extreme topics of conversation, because it was good that he was at least getting out. It surely wouldn’t be long before he was back to his old self.
When his friends finally told him to shut up, he generally stopped talking. He could not cope with the transition from didactic monologuing to ordinary chatting. He could only talk about what his friends called his ‘gloomy outlook on the world’.

* In the evening he relaxed with the vampire series True Blood or an episode of Dexter , the show about a serial killer. It annoyed him that all these series he watched were so keen to promote multiculturalism…

* To judge by the way the Oslo police was behaving, little indicated that Norway had just been the target of an act of terror, with an acute risk of secondary attacks. When other districts offered support, their offers were largely declined, even though many potential targets around Oslo remained unsecured. The Parliament requested reinforcements as there were no armed officers outside the main building. You will have to make do with your own guards, the head of the Oslo operational centre informed them. Just close off some of your buildings, the head of security at the Parliament was told. The Labour Party offices at Youngstorget asked for police guards; the House of the People asked for police guards. Their requests were turned down, with the advice to evacuate their premises.
Norway owns a single police helicopter. And in July, the helicopter service was on holiday. As a consequence of new savings measures, there was no emergency crew cover at the height of the summer. The first pilot nonetheless reported for duty right after hearing about the bomb on the news. He was told he was not needed.
Yet the emergency response unit requested use of the helicopter twice in the hour that followed. The squad was informed that the helicopter was unavailable, even though it was on the tarmac, fully operational and ready to fly. Nor did the police take any steps to mobilise military helicopters or make use of civilian helicopter companies.
After the bomb in Oslo, no immediate nationwide alert was sent out. A nationwide alert is issued to communicate information considered important to all the police districts in the country. When such an alert goes out, all police stations follow a standard procedure. In Asker and Bærum, this would have involved setting up a police roadblock on the E16 at Sollihøgda, towards which Anders Behring Breivik was currently heading…
The information provided by witnesses was not read out over any general communication wavelength, nor was it passed on to the media so that alerts could go out on radio and television. The Public Roads Authority in Oslo, which has a comprehensive network of cameras, was not alerted either. Despite the fact that the government quarter – Norway’s most important seat of power – had been blown to smithereens by a bomb, the terror-response plan was not implemented.

* ‘If there really is a person shooting, then somebody’s got to talk to him,’ said one of them. ‘We’ve got to ask him to stop,’ said the other.
As AUF members they had grown up in a culture of words. The debate must be won. It is the strength of your argument that gives you power. The young people on Utøya this Friday were used to being heard.

* He stressed that they were not Nazis, and that they supported Israel. They were not racists, but they wanted political Islam out of Europe. It could be called a conservative revolution. ‘But I’ve written a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto on this, I can’t explain it all now,’ he said.

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