Authenticity, Status and SCA Culture

[This post refers to the Society for Creative Anachronism, a  historical recreation group with which I have long been active. I suspect problems similar to the one I discuss here exist in many other contexts.]

I recently put  a post on one of the SCA Facebook groups asking whether "authenticity police," people who go up to a stranger to upbraid her for the supposed lack of authenticity of her garb, were mythical. I asked because, although stories of such incidents are common in the Society, neither I, my wife, nor my daughter have ever seen one—and the three of us have been in the Society for a combined span of about a century. Reading the long thread that post spawned, I reached the following conclusions:

1. They are not mythical—such incidents sometimes occur.

2. I am not the only long time SCA participant who has never observed one.

3. Often the attack is bogus—the critic’s claim about what is or is not authentic is false.

4. A lot of people enjoy hearing and telling such stories, making them more common than the frequency of such incidents would explain.

All of which, I think, fits an unfortunate pattern.

The only required authenticity for an SCA event is some attempt at pre-17th century garb, a very low standard. But events frequently have contests in which entries are judged in part on how historically authentic they are, and the Order of the Laurel, a high status rank in the Society, is awarded primarily for researching, demonstrating, and teaching period arts. The result is to associate the knowledge and practice of historical authenticity with status, which I think explains my four points.

The aggressor in an authenticity police story is simultaneously putting down his victim and pretending to expert knowledge. If he actually had that knowledge he would not need to claim status in that way; if he had it for reasons of interest rather than status he would not want to. He chooses vulnerable targets, avoiding individuals who appear experienced and self confident and circles in which historical authenticity is taken seriously, which helps explain why some of us have never observed such an incident.

The SCA contains a minority of people who find it fun and interesting to try to figure out how things were done in our period and do them—make armor, cook from medieval recipes, compose music and poetry in period styles. It contains a larger number whose interest in authenticity is an attempt to do things the way they believe they are supposed to do them, a reflection of perceived social pressure. Which brings me to my point 4.

Suppose I am an active and productive participant who does not happen to have any interest in researching historical arts or using more of such research than necessary. I would like to defend my status against the feeling that I am failing at an important part of what the SCA is about. One way to do so is to convince myself that people who act interested in such things are only doing it as an excuse to put other people down or to gain rank. Repeating and elaborating authenticity police stories is one way of doing so. I can tell myself that people who are doing what I half feel I ought to be doing only do it to curry favor or as an excuse to push other people around—and I would not want to be a person like that.

Another consequence of a culture that views the study and practice of authentic arts as primarily a status game is that to encourage people to pretend to an interest they do not have in the hope of being rewarded with status. Having gotten it in the form of a peerage, they are likely to reduce or terminate  activities that have now served their purpose.

How might one reduce the problem? One way is to replace contests with displays and classes. Arts contests treat period arts as a competitive game, encouraging the idea that historical authenticity only matters for contests. That point struck me long ago reading an SCA publication on a particular art that devoted a couple of pages to what was or was not period—preceded by the comment that this information would be needed by those entering contests, with the clear implication that it would otherwise not matter. And arts contests make little sense except as a competitive game. How, in principle, does one decide whether one entrant's sonnet is better or worse than another entrant's dress?

[This is a revised version of a post with the same title that I recently made to one of the SCA groups on Facebook.]

Pachauri Confuses Levels With Rates of Change

"I don’t think there is a slowdown (in the rate of temperature increase). I would like to draw your attention to the World Meteorological Organization which clearly stated on the basis of observations that the first decade of this century has been the warmest in recorded history."

(Quote from Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, in a BBC story)

Judging by this quote, the chairman of the IPCC is either innumerate or being deliberately dishonest. The fact that the first decade was the warmest in recorded history, if true, is not evidence that the rate of temperature increase has not slowed down, only that it is above zero.

A Belated Reply to Brad DeLong

I recently, courtesy of Google, came across a piece by Brad DeLong critical of my views. It argued that there were good reasons why anarcho-capitalist ideas did not appear until the nineteenth century, reasons illustrated by how badly a stateless society had worked in the Highlands of Scotland in the 17th century. I wrote a response and posted it to his blog, then waited for it to appear.

Today I discovered what I should have realized earlier—that his post was made nine years ago. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that my comment did not appear. The issues are no less interesting now than they were then and his argument is still up to be read, so here is my response:

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Your initial argument rejecting a stateless order on the evidence of the Scottish Highlands is no more convincing than would be a similar argument claiming that Nazi Germany or Pol Pot's Cambodia shows how bad a society where law is enforced by the state must be. The existence of societies without state law enforcement that work badly—I do not know enough about the Scottish Highlands to judge how accurate your account is—is no more evidence against anarchy than the existence of societies with state law enforcement that work badly is against the alternative to anarchy.

To make your case, you have to show that societies without state law enforcement have consistently worked worse than otherwise similar societies with it. For a little evidence against that claim I offer the contrast between Iceland and Norway in the tenth and eleventh centuries or northern Somalia pre-1960 when, despite some intervention by the British, it was in essence a stateless society, and the situation in the same areas after the British and Italians set up the nation of Somalia, imposing a nation state on a stateless society. You can find short accounts of both those cases, as well as references and a more general discussion of historical feud societies, in the webbed draft of Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, a book I'm currently working on; comments welcome.

So far as the claim that the idea of societies where law enforcement is private are a recent invention, that is almost the opposite of the truth. The nation state as we know it today is a relatively recent development. For historical evidence, I recommend Seeing Like a State, whose author goes to some lengths to make it clear that he is not a libertarian while giving a perceptive account of the ways in which societies had to be changed in order that states could rule them. 

As best I can tell, most existing legal systems developed out of systems where law enforcement was private—whether, as you would presumably argue, improving on those systems or not is hard to tell. That is clearly true of, at least, Anglo-American common law, Jewish law and Islamic law, and I think of Roman law as well. For details see my draft.

In which context, I am curious as to whether you regard yourself as a believer in the Whig theory of history, which views it as a story of continual  progress, implying that "institutions A were replaced by institutions B" can be taken as clear evidence of the superiority of the latter.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

I recently decided to get active on Facebook. The groups dealing with economics or politics appeared to have a higher ratio of hostility to content than I was comfortable with, so I have mostly been posting in the SCA groups. I encountered interesting conversations there but also a pattern that I found disturbing—and suspect is not limited to that particular context.

One version takes the form of "it's all a matter of opinion" or similar statements, offered in response to a question about different ways of playing the game. When pushed, the poster seems to be saying that opinions are entirely arbitrary, that there are no reasons relevant to whether (for example) it is better to specialize in things associated with your persona's culture or to ignore that and do whatever in the SCA period seems interesting. 

A different version of what I suspect is the same pattern appears if I offer an argument for doing something—for example, for trying to do things as they were done in period even when the failure to do so will not be obvious to others and so will not interfere with their experience (discussed in an earlier post). Some people respond with arguments agreeing or disagreeing with me. But others respond with some version of "stop attacking me for not doing things your way" or "nobody should try to shove his views down anyone else's throat." It is as if offering reasons for doing something is merely a disguised way of trying to force people to do it, a form of aggression.

These responses suggest an unstated assumption that reason is irrelevant to much of what we do, that there are no good reasons for or against, that decisions such as how to play the SCA game are as arbitrary as opinions about the relevant merits of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Taken seriously, that seems to imply both that there is no point in conversation about these topics—why should you care what my opinion is if opinions have no basis—and that we might as well make our decisions by flipping coins. I suspect it goes along with a culture that regards "judgmental" as a pejorative term—as if there is no reason for people to make judgements.

The title of this post is a slogan used in fund raising for black colleges, but I think its application is wider than that. There is little point to having a mind if you do not believe it is of any use.

Humans are Better Than Computers at ...

Pretending to be humans.

Which is the reason for MMORGs such as World of Warcraft. Why hire a computer when you can get humans to offer a superior service for free?

(Inspired by xkcd1263)

Who are the Alawites?

As I expect a fair number of people now know, the Alawites are a religious sect, mostly in Syria. Assad is Alawi and they are a major part of his support. But, religiously speaking, who are they?

My vague memory was that they had a long history of keeping their doctrines secret, making it unclear just where they did or didn't fit into the general pattern of Muslim sects, that in recent years they had chosen to identify themselves as a form of Shia but that it was not clear whether that was an accurate description of their beliefs or merely one that they found politically convenient. A comment on a recent post here got me interested, so I did some online research.

The Wikipedia page says that they "follow a branch of the Twelver school of Shia Islam," and goes on to add that "Alawite beliefs are kept secret for outsiders, even for non initiated Alawites. Therefore many rumours about their religious beliefs have arisen," but says nothing about what those beliefs are. 

With a little searching, however, I found quite a detailed account on another web page. I do not know  if it is accurate, although my guess on internal evidence is that it probably is. If so, it sounds as though their beliefs deviate from Islamic orthodoxy as much as Muslim beliefs deviate from Christianity and probably more than Muslim beliefs deviate from Judaism. They apparently believe that Ali was some sort of incarnation of God, reject the Koran, and believe in reincarnation for males but not females.

Which makes me wonder whether the absence of information in the Wikipedia page reflects a successful attempt to defend the identification of Alawites as Shia in support of Assad's alliance with (twelver Shia) Iran.

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P.S. A commenter point out a detailed and scholarly account of Alawites consistent with the one I earlier linked to. It supports my suspicion that their identification as twelver Shia was a matter of politics rather than theology.

Economics: Ideas vs Politics

I was recently corresponding with a fellow economist, a friend and ex-student, and he mentioned having organized a session at some meetings in honor of the late Earl Thompson of UCLA. I responded by commenting that I too was an admirer of Thompson's and remembered James Buchanan having once said something to the effect that Earl had the highest IQ of anyone he knew. My friend described having spent very many hours as a graduate student arguing with Earl Thompson, to their mutual enjoyment.

The reason I think the exchange is interesting is that I, my friend, and Buchanan were all pretty far on the pro-market side of the economics profession. Earl was  not. The first time I encountered him, he was giving a talk (at the public choice center at VPI sometime in the 1970's) offering clever arguments in favor of things that I and most of his audience were against. He did not, ultimately, convince me, but his ideas changed how I thought about certain theoretical issues in an important way, in particular convinced me of the importance of taking account of commitment strategies.

To me, this is a story about how the academic world is supposed to work. What was important about Earl, to all three of us, was not whether he agreed with us but whether he had intelligent and interesting ideas. Which he did. He will be missed.