"Borat" and the witch hunt for inappropriate remarks

From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:

"Borat," we are advised by film critics, is an Important Message Movie because it portrays Kazakhs -- and Red State Americans -- as anti-Semites... Manohla Dargis, movie critic for the New York Times, assures us the semi-scripted movie "will freeze your blood," exposing hidden anti-Semitism when Borat says something casually anti-Semitic to an American Southerner who fails to gasp with appropriate horror or to immediately perform a citizen's arrest and bundle the visitor off to a cultural sensitivity re-education camp. In truth, Borat must have struck most Americans not in on the joke as a harmless boob or a dangerous lunatic. In either case, humoring him would be the sanest strategy for getting him to go away.

And here's an essay that methodically works through just about every incident in the movie where Borat interacts with (presumably) real Americans:

Movie Review: Borat Makes America Look Good

Written by Al Barger

Here, I want to zero in on just one specific aspect: How the unwitting Americans came out. What I saw on the screen doesn't seem to quite jibe with what I'm reading in many stories about it. I keep reading that Cohen made fools of the Americans, setting them up to expose their dark sides, their racism and homophobia, etc. For example, Entertainment Weekly says "the people Borat talks to become the symbolic heart of America - a place where intolerance is worn, increasingly, with pride." But that's mostly not what actually showed up on the screen, by my best instant analysis...

But in the actual practice, the Americans he tricked into being in his film mostly acquitted themselves very well. None of these Americans seemed malicious or vicious, or even hateful. They were all pretty nice, and very open hearted. [More]

Sacha Baron Cohen's film crew shot so many hours of footage as they traveled across America that they even got a clip of a rodeo horse with a rider carrying an American flag falling down by accident (how often does that happen?), yet they weren't able to come up with much in the way of the red meat bigotry that so many film critics were so desperately hoping to see that they simply imagined it was there.

As for the most notorious Borat segment from the old Ali G show, when he gets some members of an audience in a country-western bar to sing along with the purported Kazakh song "Throw the Jew Down the Well," a clip which has been the subject of countless thumbsucking essays about the Meaning of It All, such as this one by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, a participant in the Slate "Fray" responded:

Regarding the enthusiastic redneck responses to Borat's Jew-well-throwing songs--don't read too much into it. It's at least partly a product of editing. This is not to so that the sing-along barflies were not racist--hell, they probably were--but part of the genius of the Borat character originates in the editing room. It's not like he just walked out there, launched into a Jew-hating song out of nowhere, and the latently anti-semitic crowds joined right in. There's an article from the local AZ paper floating around the interweb somewhere, interviewing one of the bar patrons caught on camera singing along, who explained that, contrary to the way it looks in the edited clip, Borat had warmed the crowd up for some time, was pretty clearly doing a comedy routine, and had sung a number of pre-Jew verses about throwing your mother down the well, throwing your sister down the well, etc.

I haven't been able to find the original article to confirm this, but it certainly sounds more plausible than the conventional wisdom about the clip.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The coolest thing about real Kazakhs

While lots of people hunt with falcons, Kazakhs also hunt with huge golden eagles. Stephen Bodio wrote about it in The Atlantic, and here's his book Eagle Dreams. By the way, here's what he has to say about the capital of Kazakhstan:

Sometimes it is very hard to convey the realities of Central Asia. People can just about get the idea of what remote parts of Mongolia are like-- they like the idea of "primitive".

But what about Almaty? It is a huge modern city with tree-lined boulevards and excellent restaurants and cyber-cafes, situated in the green foothills beween 14,000 foot peaks and steppes like the plains of Wyoming. It is inhabited by Kazakhs and Russians living in enviable harmony (and often intermarrying), Germans, Moslems, Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Jews. What's more, as a Russian friend says, "you can take public transport to snow leopards".

And the town is inhabited, thronged, by incredibly beautiful and stylish women. Everyone in the US seems to think Central Asian women look like East German Athletes or Stalinist WW II vets-- it ain't so! Renato Sala, an irreverent Italian archaeologist based in Almaty, once said to us through clouds of Gauloise smoke that " Kazakhstan has the MOST beautiful women-- Stalin or Chingizz or somebody must have killed all the ugly ones!" Only an Italian.

Dress is interesting too. Libby thought to bring "Cover Up" clothes in deference to both what we thought were local mores and to the season, but it was still hot (early September) and the local women were dressed in bare midriffs and slit skirts and very high heels.

And, if you want to know what Kazakhstan's models look like, here are photos from Fashion Week in Almaty. But I suspect women don't really dress like that in Kazakhstan.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Borat"

From my upcoming movie review in The American Conservative:

... Baron Cohen, who wrote his thesis at Cambridge on Jewish participation in the American civil rights movement, modeled Borat on an unintentionally funny Russian he had met. His character started out Moldovan and then became Albanian. There are plenty of scary Albanian gangsters in Western Europe who might have taken active offense, however, and Borat was relocated to far-off Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

In reality, Kazakhstan is an arid land of mostly Asian-looking people, but in Baron Cohen's imagination, it's a travesty of old stereotypes about Eastern Europe. The vulgar yet somehow innocent journalist's home was filmed 2500 miles away in an impoverished Romanian village so that Baron Cohen can indulge in traditional Ashkenazi anti-gentilism, the clever townsman's disdain for the slower-witted peasant.

"Borat" is a 21st Century version of the Polish jokes that Borscht Belt comedians like Henny Youngman once helped popularize. While Baron Cohen's Ali G was a milestone in contemporary social satire, the anti-Slavic depiction of Borat as the ultimate goyishe kop (he carries a chicken in his suitcase and has no idea what a toilet is for) is old-fashioned and purposeless.

Still, the film is awfully funny in its intentionally lowbrow way. ...

Fox's masterful hyping of "Borat" is in ironic contrast to how in September the studio drowned like an unwanted kitten the similarly crude and hilarious, but much smarter and more politically daring, "Idiocracy," the sci-fi black comedy about America's dysgenic future by the dazzling but diffident Mike Judge

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Average IQ of enlisted men

Following the latest John Kerry brouhaha, a reader asked what the average IQ of U.S. military personnel is. From table 2.8 of the is Department of Defense document, I estimate that the average for new enlisted men in 1998 was about 105.

This would be in the 60th to 65th percentile compared to all the young people in America when the Armed Forces Qualification Test was normalized in 1980 on the National Longitudinal Study of Youth's sample of 13,000 people ages 15-23. (This is the same enormous study that provides the data in Section 2 of The Bell Curve.)

Female enlistees would be similar.

The Air Force has the highest AFQT test score enlistees, with the Navy slightly ahead of the Army and Marines for second place.

This 105 estimate would be representative of the years 1992 through about 2004, from the downsizing of the military after victory in the Cold War, when it virtually stopped taking enlistees with IQs below the 30th percentile, until the war in Iraq made recruiting more difficult over the last couple of years. Some of the branches of the military have recently increased the percentage of "Category IV" recruits (between 11th and 30th percentiles), but I doubt if the overall average has changed all that much.

Officers, of course, average higher than enlisted men, although I suspect that the IQ gap between officers and men is a little narrower now than in the past. (Another thing that has improved relations between the ranks is that military men drink a lot less now than in days gone by, partly due to the spread of evangelical Christianity, partly due to modern health consciouness. Officers and men are not allowed to drink in the same bars, so they spend more time together now.)

So, what is the average IQ of officers? I don't know much about today, but a military psychometrician told me that in the 1975-1985 period, the average SAT score (under the old, tougher scoring system) was 1001 in the Army, 1018 Marines, 1051 Air Force, and 1103 Navy. Under the "recentered" scoring system adopted in 1995, those would be: 1098 Army, 1113 Marines, 1132 Air Force, and 1198 Navy.

Converting SAT scores to IQs is a shaky process, but that would suggest about, oh, 113 to 121 for the average officer in the various services back in 1975-1985. (Don't take that as the final word.)

If you want to read all about officers' IQs, you can see my 2004 article comparing the IQs of Bush and Kerry based on how they did on officer qualification tests. (Bottomline: quite similar, with Bush doing a little better. That fits with their GPA during their overlapping careers at Yale where both were C+ students, with Bush's GPA a tiny bit higher. You might think that a country of 300 million could come up with two Presidential candidates who were, you know, B+ students, but I guess not ...)

The average for enlistees (male and female) in 1998 across all services would be about 107 for white enlistees, 102 for blacks, and 103 for Hispanics. (That shows the impressive patriotism of minorities who possess more options in life than the average. A little known fact is that the average black enlistee comes from a home with an income above the national average for blacks.)

In comparison, according to data kindly provided to me by Charles Murray, when the military renormalized the AFQT on a new nationally representative sample in 1997, white males averaged 102.7 and black males 88.4. The race gap was 1.5 points smaller among women. This 14.3 point race gap is down from the anomalously large 18.6 point gap seen in the 1980 normalization, which was due in part to some problems with the 1980 AFQT test methodology. It's also likely that the underlying white-black IQ gap has narrowed in recent decades. Flynn and Dickens recently argued for a large narrowing, while Jensen and Rushton argued in response for about a 2 point narrowing.

Here's something you won't read elsewhere.

It's widely assumed that American minority soldiers are suffering a disproportionate number of deaths in the current war. Yet, according to iCasualites, 74% of all American fatal casualties in the Iraq war have been suffered by non-Hispanic whites. In 2004, non-Hispanic whites only made up 67% of the total population, and, more relevantly, only 61% of the 25-year-olds, which might be about the representative age of the fatalities.

So, young whites are dying in Iraq at a per capita rate more than 80% higher than young minorities. If you are wondering about how I calculated that, it's:

(74% / 61%) / (26% / 39%)

What you definitely won't see elsewhere is an explanation of the most likely reason for this racial imbalance: IQ. To be allowed to enlist, you have to score 92 or higher on the military's IQ test, the Armed Forces Qualification Test (the same one used throughout The Bell Curve.) Since 1992, only 1% of new military enlistees have had IQs below the 30th percentile nationally.

This requirement disqualifies about half of all Hispanics and over 60% of all blacks from joining up, versus less than a quarter of all whites.

People such as Harvard Professor Robert D. "Bowling Alone" Putnam like to talk about how the rest of society can attain the friendly racial relations found in the U.S. military:

“I think we can do a lot to push change along more rapidly. The US military is one example. There was a lot of racial tension around the time of the Vietnam war. Now, polls show that US military personnel have many more friendships across ethnic lines than civilians. And that was deliberate. If officers were told they wouldn’t make colonel if they were seen to discriminate, they changed.”

Okay, but even if we followed Dr. Putnam's implicit advice and imposed martial law on America, we still wouldn't be able to follow what is the secret to the military's success: artificially eliminate the majority of the racial IQ gap by using an IQ-based admissions test.

It's crucial to remember that, until very recently due to Iraq, three out of ten American youths, and a higher proportion of minority youths, were ineligible for service in the military due to low IQs. This means that the benefits of military acculturation are unavailable to those who presumably need them the most. Last year I proposed an alternative to military service for kids who think they could benefit from military discipline but aren't smart enough to pass the AFQT.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Kerry-Bush Flap

I know I'm late to the party, but the controversy over Kerry's remarks about not studying and Iraq remind me again of how awful the candidates were in the 2004 Presidential election. Those two guys were the best America could come up with?

Apparently, the prepared text that Kerry was supposed to read said:

"Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you are intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."

Okay, well, not bad, although a little strange coming from a guy who voted to let Bush get us stuck in Iraq. And who had a slightly lower GPA than Bush during their overlapping careers at Yale. And who did a little worse than Bush on their military officer qualification tests.

But, Kerry didn't read what his staff prepared for him. Kerry never reads his speeches the way they are written. Kerry always riffs and improvises on his text. Why? Because John F. Kerry is the most vain man in America. He knows he can make up something better off the top of his head than what his professional speechwriters labored over. Chris Suellentrop wrote in Slate in 2004:

Kerry's health-care speech Monday in Tampa was a classic of the form. The written text contained a little more than 2,500 words. By the time he was finished, Kerry had spoken nearly 5,300 words—not including his introductory remarks and thank-yous to local politicians—more than doubling the verbiage. Pity his speechwriters when you read the highlights below. It's not their fault.

Kerry's Script: Most of all, I will always level with the American people.

Actual Kerry: Most of all, my fellow Americans, I pledge to you that I will always level with the American people, because it's only by leveling and telling the truth that you build the legitimacy and gain the consent of the people who ultimately we are accountable to. I will level with the American people.

Kerry's Script: I will work with Republicans and Democrats on this health care plan, and we will pass it.

Actual Kerry: I will work with Republicans and Democrats across the aisle, openly, not with an ideological, driven, fixed, rigid concept, but much like Franklin Roosevelt said, I don't care whether a good idea is a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. I just care whether or not it's gonna work for Americans and help make our country stronger. And we will pass this bill. I'll tell you a little bit about it in a minute, and I'll tell you why we'll pass it, because it's different from anything we've ever done before, despite what the Republicans want to try to tell you. [More]

So, what came out of Kerry's mouth?

You know, education, if you make the most of it, and you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Not surprisingly, the troops in Iraq didn't take well to this. As I've been pointing out for a long time, American enlisted personnel are pretty smart. From 1992-2004, virtually nobody was allowed to enlist who didn't have a high school diploma and who scored below the 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification IQ test. Indeed, the typical enlistee had a 3 digit IQ, above average. They've been scraping a little closer to the bottom of the barrel recently, due to Iraq, but volunteers remain pretty strong. I don't think many in the media know this. You are supposed to say that IQ is a discredited concept, and the fact that the military is utterly devoted to IQ testing (and, in fact, most of the middle section of The Bell Curve came from data provided to Charles Murray by the U.S. military) is something you aren't supposed to think about.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Internet and satellite television mean that "metaethnic frontiers" are everywhere

When new high-speed printing presses became available in the 1890s, the cost of a New York City newspaper fell from a nickel to a penny, vastly increasing readership. Press barons Pulitzer and Hearst, looking for some controversy to keep readers excited enough to keep plunking down their pennies day after day, seized upon Spain's brutal repression of the rebellion in its colony of Cuba.

Previously, Americans hadn't given a damn about the welfare of Cubans, seeing them as foreigners, and hadn't paid much attention to Spain, seeing it as colorful but over-the-hill European minor power. The urbane, well-informed readers who had previously paid a nickel for newspapers had realized that the world is a large place, with many instances of cruelty here and there. But the new readers of newspapers were horrified to discover that Bad Things Were Happening.

In effect, this media technology innovation allowed entrepreneurs to quickly (if briefly) redefine Cubans as Our Fellow New Worlders Suffering at the Hands of the Cruel and Corrupt Old World.

And soon we were at war with Spain.

To adapt biologist Peter Turchin's high-falutin' terminology, Pulitzer and Hearst were able to concoct a new "metaethnic frontier," one with Cubans and Americans on this side of it and Spaniards on the other.

Now, Turchin concentrates on how physical ethnic frontiers between traditional agrarian societies, such as between the Spaniards and the Moors or between North Vietnam and China, led to the creation of unified warrior states on the frontiers. (To withstand China's might, northern Vietnamese developed a bellicose sense of national unity, while southern Vietnamese, far from China, did not, as the U.S. discovered to its misfortune in the 1960s.)

In the pre-industrial world, since the dawn of agriculture, if your population was growing faster than your food output per acre, your calories per capita would decline, unless you conquered more acres. So, wars over lebensraum were common. Big states tended to coalesce near major ethnic borders since having a common enemy would cause people of only modest ethnic differences to overlook their dissimilarities in the interests of beating the much more different folks on the other side of the frontier.

Fortunately, in the industrial world, wars to add farm land don't make much sense. (Unfortunately, Hitler didn't get the memo.)

But in the modern world, an ethnic frontier can be created in newspaper readers' heads. (This could be done before modern media, too, most notably in the Crusades, but everybody recognizes the Crusades were extraordinary.)

And in the postmodern world of the Internet, Al-Jazeera, and FoxNews, it's hard to get the various ethnic frontiers out of your head.

The peculiarly agitated feel of this decade has a lot to do with the new information technologies. There have always been people doing things that would intensely annoy other people, but, mostly, those annoying people have been far off over the horizon and the potentially annoyed only heard about the terrible things they were up to in vague terms. But now bloggers like Little Green Footballs scan the world for us finding examples of the awfulness of people on the other side of the world. And now we can turn on the TV 24 hours per day and see those bastards doing the intolerable things they do ,and laughing at us while they do them.

And it drives us crazy.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

America and Israel:

A reader writes:

it seems to me both neocons (esp. Jewish neocons) and leftists (esp. Jewish leftists) put themselves in ridiculous positions by equating Israel and America.

Neocons think America should run around invading Arab countries because they think America is in the same position as Israel (i.e. surrounded by a billion implacably hostile Arabs). They like (maybe liked) Bush because they equated him with Sharon (well, today Netanyahu).

Leftists think Israel should appease Arabs because they think Israel is in the same position as America (i.e. Israel can AVOID being surrounded by a billion implacably hostile Arabs). So they think Israel should be as dovish as America, and loathed Sharon because they equated him with Bush.

The flaw in both views is, of course, that America is not Israel, and vice versa.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Diversity's next frontier

A big corporation recently hired several cannibals in the interest of cultural diversity.

"You are all part of our team now," said the HR rep during the welcoming briefing. "You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the cafeteria for something to eat, but please don't eat any of the employees."

The cannibals promised they would not. Four weeks later, their boss remarked, "You're all working very hard and I'm satisfied with you. However, one of our shipping clerks disappeared yesterday! Do any of you know what happened to him?"

The cannibals all shook their heads no.

After the boss left, the leader of the cannibals said to the others, "Which one of you idiots ate the shipping clerk?"

A hand rose hesitantly, to which the leader of the cannibals continued, "You fool --- for 4 weeks we've been eating managers and no one noticed anything. But Noooooo, you had to go and eat someone who actually does something!"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Levitt is skeptical of the pornography-cuts-rape theory, too

On his Freakonomics blog, Steven D. Levitt writes:

Everybody and their brother is sending me links to Steven Landsburg’s most recent Slate column that reports on studies by economists that suggest internet porn reduces rape and the release of blockbuster violent movies reduces violence.

While the idea might strike non-economists as crazy, the theory makes sense. When you lower the price of a good that is a substitute for a second good, the quantity of the second good should fall. It is not obvious that internet porn and rape are substitutes (they may very well be the opposite, what economists call complements), but it is not impossible.

I have to confess that Halloween with four young kids (a fairy, a witch, batman, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz) has been a full time job for the last week. So I haven’t read the academic articles. The paper or porn and rape was actually written by my former student Todd Kendall, now at Clemson. It is not really fair (especially to your former student) to be skeptical without reading the paper, but I have to say I am skeptical of the empirical result. The kind of variation in the data that gives the result is that states that are quicker to adopt the internet saw bigger declines in rape. He then does a nice thing in the paper, going beyond just this one prediction to test other hypotheses, like do crimes other than rape fall with the internet (he says no) and does other sexual behavior change with the internet (he says yes). The concern is always, with this kind of approach, that there are other factors that might be driving both the adoption of the internet and the decline in rape. The challenge to those who want to refute Todd Kendall’s argument is to identify those variables. The challenge for Todd is to find other kinds of “natural experiments” that support his hypothesis.

The most obvious other natural experiment was the huge increase in pornography in late 1960s and early 1970s that coincided with a big increase in the rape rate.

It's just like how the abortion-cuts-crime theory was popular a priori in the 1970s and 1980s, but then faded out of discussion in the early 1990s when the first generation born after legalization of abortion went on a murder spree. Then, after the crime rate dropped in the mid and late 1990s, Levitt and Donohue revived the theory in 1999, and by then, most of the chattering classes couldn't remember why it had dropped out of favor earlier, so they found it immediately convincing. Similarly, nobody remembers today that four decades ago pornography and rape increased together, so this popular old a priori theory is ready for relaunch by a naive young professor into an intellectual world that doesn't remember much of anything.

The chattering class especially tries to forget everything it learned about crime, since that is so inextricably linked with race. Everybody is supposed to forget everything they know about crime and race from thinking about their own real estate decisions when it comes time to discuss public affairs. And remembering the race-rape connection is one of the worst thought crimes possible.

P.S. I just got a very nice email from Dr. Kendall saying that he hoped his study shed some new light on the topic, but he definitely didn't think his study should be the last word on the subject.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Foundation of Empire

With Hari Seldon-like ambition, biologist Peter Turchin, in his book War and Peace and War, offers a theory for the rise and fall of empires in agrarian societies. He points out that large scale political power often emerges far out on the "meta-ethnic frontier." Having a common enemy unifies people.

Here's Turchin's version of his basic theory:

Ethnicity is the group use of any aspect of culture in order to create internal cohesion and differentiation from other groups. There is an imaginary boundary separating the members of the ethnic group from the rest of humanity. For example, Greeks drew a boundary between themselves and barbarians, non-Greek speakers. The ethnic boundary can use a variety of symbolic markers—language and dialect, religion and ritualistic behaviors, race, clothing, behavioral mannerisms, hair styles, ornaments, and tattoos. The important thing is not which markers are used, but the distinction between in-group and outgroup members, between Us and Them.

People usually have multiple ethnic identities nested within each other. An inhabitant of Dallas can be simultaneously a Texan, an American, and a participant in the Western Civilization. The broadest groupings of people that unite many nations are usually called civilizations, but I prefer to call such entities metaethnic communities (from the Greek meta—beyond and ethnos— ethnic group, nation). My definition includes not only usual civilizations—the Western, Islamic, or Sinic—but also such broad cultural groupings as the Celts or Turco-Mongolian steppe nomads. Typically, cultural difference is greatest between people belonging to different metaethnic communities; sometimes this gap is so extreme that people deny the very humanity of those who are on the other side of the metaethnic fault line.

Historical dynamics can be understood as a result of competition and conflict between groups, some of which dominate others. Domination, however, is made possible only because groups are integrated at the micro level by cooperation among their members. Within-group cooperation is the basis of intergroup conflict, including its extreme versions such as war and even genocide. Different groups are characterized by different degrees of cooperation among its members, and therefore different degree of cohesiveness or solidarity. Following the fourteenth century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, I call this property of groups asabiya. Asabiya is the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. Asabiya is a dynamic quantity; it can increase or decrease with time.

Each empire has at its core an imperial nation (some empires had more than one imperial nation for a time, but this structure appears to be unstable). The ability of an empire to expand territory and to defend itself against external and internal enemies is determined largely by the characteristics of its imperial nation, especially its asabiya. Because only groups possessing high levels of asabiya can construct large empires, the question is how do they gain it, and why do they eventually lose it?

Groups with high asabiya arise on metaethnic frontiers. A metaethnic frontier is an area where an imperial boundary coincides with a fault line between two metaethnic communities. Metaethnic frontiers are places where between-group competition is very intense. Expansionist empires exert enormous military pressure on the peoples beyond their boundaries. But the frontier populations are also attracted to the imperial wealth, which they attempt to obtain by trading or raiding. Both the external threat and the prospect of gain are powerful integrative forces that nurture asabiya. In the pressure cooker of a metaethnic frontier poorly integrated groups crumble and disappear, while groups based on strong cooperation thrive and expand. In order to match the power of the old empire, a frontier group with high asabiya—an incipient imperial nation—needs to expand by incorporating other groups.

On a metaethnic frontier integration of ethnically similar groups on the same side of the fault line is made easier by the presence of a very different Other—the metaethnic community on the other side. The huge cultural gap across the frontier dwarfs the relatively minor differences between ethnic groups on the same side.

Is it true? Hard to say. The most famous empire of them all, the Roman, doesn't seem to fit all that well, but the Macedonian Empire of Alexander and the far western Ch'in (or Qin) state that ended the Warring States period and unified China under the first emperor do fit.

In his technical book, Historical Dynamics, Turchin attempts to quantify his theory. I haven't read either one, so I can't judge how well he has succeeded. His theoretical model seems appropriately relativistic, but that can make data hard to nail down quantitatively, since the theorist can be tempted to redefine history to fit his theory. The fairest test of a theory like this is if it works for a database assembled by somebody else for some other purpose.

Turchin is not the first to notice this tendency of empires to arise on the margins. This is sometimes known as the "marcher lord" theory. A "march" is a margin, a border land. The term "marcher lord" is the English version of what the Germans call a "margrave," and marcher lords are the tough guys who who rule out on the frontier, like the Tudors on the Welsh border in the 15th Century, keeping the outsiders out and often bullying their way to take over central power themselves.

Greg Cochran points out that the Marcher Lord dynamic worked on a huge scale to eventuate in the superpower confrontation of 1945-1991, with the U.S. and Russia as the marcher lords of Europe. That's because another advantage of being out at the fringe of an advanced culture's geographical expanse is that your enemies, being from technologically more backward areas, are weaker, so you can easily expand territorially at their expense. If you are, say, France, you are hemmed in by similarly tough countries like England, Germany, and Spain. But if you are the United States or Russia, you can conquer vast amounts of land owned by Indians or Siberians.

As an example of a country notoriously lacking in asabiya, Italians had a hard time getting themselves organized into a large powerful state over the last 1000 years because the ethnic variations within Italy were so minor and so "clinal" as they varied from south to north that people tended to organize around family and undermine larger polities through backstabbing each other. Lacking a frontier with a common enemy, they lacked incentives to unite, much to the dismay of Italian patriots like Machiavelli. (Italy was ultimately unified under the House of Savoy from the French border.)

Germany had somewhat similar problems getting organized, except out in Prussia in the far northeast, where Germans fought Slavs and Balts, and in Austria in the southeast, where Germans fought Magyars and Slavs. There, the Germans learned to subordinate their differences and cooperate with their fellow Germans to whomp their non-German neighbors. Eventually, the Prussians took over all of Germany, with mostly disastrous consequences for Germans and the whole world.

The U.S. has the decided advantage of being located with oceans to the east and west, so since the defeat of the Indians, we haven't had much of a march. Yet, in recent decades we've developed a cohesively unified group of influential intellectuals and apparatchiks who devote much of their energies to trying to persuade the rest of America, with much success, that Israel is America's march with the whole nefarious Arab or Muslim or whatever world. As Francis Fukuymama pointed out after Charles Krauthammer tried to smear him as an anti-Semite, the neocon worldview is one that has largely tried to apply lessons appropriate to tiny, frontier Israel to huge, continental America.

Of course, while a handful of neocons actually have been in the Israeli military, most of them are purely pretend marcher lords, sofa samurai. But, they possess much of the cohesion characteristic of the breed. As Mearsheimer and Walt have discovered, they all work together to ruin their enemies.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer