Skip to main content

Threat Index


Science magazine has an article that tries to understand what lies behind national differences.  It is not economic, political,or religious differences.  


The real difference, the study suggests, has to do with whether the nation, in its history, has had to deal with threats:  threats to its territory, a persistent threat of disease, a population threat, and the like.  Nations that live with threats have to be disciplined, coordinated, learn obedience, and take collective action.  


Other nations have an easier time.  Food might be abundant, the land rich, perhaps well-away from major enemies, rich in resources, and with room for expansion.  There is no enduring history of living under threat.  


Gareth Cook says the study call the first type of nation, "tight", and the latter, "loose".  Pakistan and India and China and Korea are "tight".  Greece and Australia and Brazil are "loose".  


On a scale, Brazil scored 3.5.  Pakistan scored 12.3.  The average was 6.5.  The USA was a bit "loose", at 5.1.  Cook suggests we are "loose", but the scores don't really suggest that; only that we are pretty loose  compared to Pakistan or India or China and, I suspect, Afghanistan and Iran and Russia.  


Aside from the relationship to other nations, finding ourselves a little on the loose side of most nations seems to clarify something about our internal divisions; even stalemate.  


We clearly have a large number of people who feel threatened.  They speak as if we face life-threats.  They want discipline, rules about marriage and abortion and what language we can speak.  They want an official, national religion, and a fixed definition of marriage, and maybe even rules about wearing veils.  


On the other hand, perhaps even more people want to ride easy on most of those issues.  They tolerate diversity, and dislike obedience, and prefer to leave people alone.  They wear their shirt tails out, and caps at lunch, and don't feel like going to church.  


Some of us see new immigrants as a threat; others think not.  Some of us think we are too quick to see overseas threats; others think we have to do something.  Some squirm at all the "homeland security"; others say we need stricter measures.  Technological change is a threat to some; opportunity to others.  


Maybe it does boil down to how threatened history has taught us to be, or how easy we feel about our chances.  Is marriage threatened, or just changing?  Is our Constitution under threat?  Is our security threatened by Iran, or by DNA research?  By universal health care, or by the lack of it?


Maybe we need to talk about those things, if for no reason other than to understand why we feel as we do, and to understand each other.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more