ribbonfarm

I ran across the alarming phrase intellectual menopause a few months ago in John Gall’s Systemantics, and it naturally stuck in my brain given I’m pushing 50 and getting predictably angsty about it. The phrase conjures up visions of a phenomenon much more profound and unfunny than the more familiar one we know as midlife crises. It sounds much worse than merely buying a sports car and chasing younger women. And if you chase down the idea, it turns out it is worse. And sadder. And unfunnier.

Anyway I got curious, and started digging. Turns out this was rather hard to do since this rather obvious turn of phrase surprisingly has no usable footprint in either Google Trends or ngrams. Some tedious wading through the shitty Google search results turned up the earliest usage I could find in H. L. Mencken’s 1917 book A Book of Prefaces. The phrase occurs within a merciless evisceration of a semi-autobiographical novel called The “Genius” by a writer I’ve never heard of, Theodore Dreiser (emphasis mine):

“The ‘Genius,'” which interrupted the “trilogy of desire,” marks the nadir of Dreiser’s accomplishment, as “The Titan” marks its apogee. The plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, at his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he is trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of every man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and the desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity…“The Titan” is the history of a strong man. “The ‘Genius'” is the history of a man essentially weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his route in life. He goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease to the end of the chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever between two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at the close, he sinks into a whining sort of resignation,…he is always a bit despicable in his pathos. …As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well adapted to the Dreiserian pen. But it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless and shapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. It is as if Dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the high passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit.

…It is almost as if he deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. The book is an endless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to light up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages of small type; its reading is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. Mingled with all the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. Certain chapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the fervid luminosity of “Jennie Gerhardt”; there are character sketches that deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that the thing is the work of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lumbers and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of ponderous imbecility gets into it. Both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposing demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advanced thinking of Greenwich Village. I suspect, indeed, that the vin rouge was in Dreiser’s arteries as he concocted it. He was at the intellectual menopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizingly toward the goatish days that were no more.

My reaction to this passage was, for the most part, OUCH. And “attitudinizingly” is a solid word.

I asked ChatGPT, and it was wrong about the origins of the phrase, but did find me an interesting usage from 1944, in The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolley, another book and author I’ve never heard of:

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Those whom the public criticizes most, usually end up as full-blown mediocrities. A writer who has produced a respectable body of work and still writes on may be past his prime. He may go into a decline of intellectual menopause, producing more and more of what he does best with less and less feeling until the mechanical becomes habitual and the habit becomes invincible.

Fortunately, these don’t resonate at all. While I occasionally experience the temptation of “donkeyish solemnity,” I rarely surrender to it. I don’t feel much of a need to “attitudinize.” And mechanical refinement of technique is definitely not me. But I felt there was a germ of something real here, so unwisely, I continued drilling for my own nerve.

***

I stumbled across the most useful sense of the idea (and simultaneously hit a nerve in myself), in a 2019 article, John Ransom: The Cycle of Commitment, by Michael O’Brien, about a minor 1920s poet named John Ransom, who was apparently a founding figure in a rather sadsack 1930s literary-political movement called Southern Agrarians. This gang of a dozen odd writers produced a manifesto in the form of a collection of essays called I’ll Take My Stand, which leads off with Ransom’s contribution, an essay called Regenerate but Unrepentant. Ransom also apparently also drafted the Statement of Principles which was the basis for the discussion that led to the volume. The only name I recognize among the contributors is Robert Penn Warren, who is not an author I’ve read much of, or particularly admire.

But if intellectual menopause is a thing, John Ransom was probably the clearest case of it.

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I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.

I’ve been playing with Legos in open-play mode lately to try and develop better intuitions about both. I’m limiting myself to a set of rectangular blocks on a base plate for now. I’m afraid so far the results are terrible.

I can follow fairly complex instructions to build models from a kit pretty easily, but faced with a pile of bricks and no plans or goals, I come up with dull designs to build, exhibiting very little imagination and near-zero creativity. Nothing in this collage gets even a passing grade on creativity. The most imaginative thing in the collage below is the model of a FinFET — a nano-scale feature of semiconductor chips — at the bottom left. I give it a D+ on imagination because it took a minor leap of imagination to recognize that Legos can be used to model things at scales besides the familiar range of scales covered by Lego models (typically coffee-cup scale to cityscape scale). I had to let go the “habit” of only seeing normal-scale-range design possibilities. But even that minor, barely passing-grade leap felt exciting. I plan to pull out my copy of Open Circuits and model more tiny electronics parts and features.

Just to give you a sense of how pedestrian these are, consider this dragon model with 6500-7000 parts by an expert Lego builder, Donny Chen (who also designed a playable grand piano that became an official kit).

This dragon, unlike the far simpler dragon kits sold by Lego itself, uses a 2×4 oval tile for scales and a set of other parts for creating the curving spine, all from mostly unrelated kits. It’s very hard to get Lego parts to do static curves, since the grammar has a strong orthonormal bias due to the mating technique. Chen managed to pull it off:

“The dragon I promised for the Year of the Dragon—maybe a bit bigger than a bunny, LOL! I kicked off this project about a year back, right after Brickvention2023, and I’ve been working at it on and off. Started building it about a month ago, and I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. No strings, no wires, not a drop of glue, not even a flexible tube, all solid connections. It stretches a solid 2 meters when fully spread out, around 1300 scales and made up of 6500-7000 pieces.” 

Chen’s design exhibits way more of both imagination and creativity than anything I’ve ever made up in any physical construction medium. He has clearly mastered Lego to the point where working forwards from the possibilities of a set of parts, and backwards from the constraints of a vision, are part of a near-unconscious fluency in the medium. But I can dimly see radically advanced versions of my own primitive pidgin Lego compositions in Chen’s process as described in the linked video. I’m at least at conscious incompetence in the Lego medium and language. I’m aware of my own decided lack of creativity and imagination. Chen is clearly at some advanced level of unconscious competence on the shuhari developmental curve that I’ll never come close to.

Keeping Lego in mind as a reference example, what can we say about imagination versus creativity? Here’s my theory.

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Ever since I got a bout of Covid a couple of years ago (late 2022), I’ve noticed memory problems of a very specific sort: Difficulty remembering names. Especially people names, but also other sorts of proper nouns. This is especially marked when it comes to remembering names of actors or authors, or not-too-close friends and family.

Interestingly, there has been little to no effect on my ability to remember the names of characters in TV shows, but I frequently forget actor names, even famous ones I should remember. For example, I’ve blanked several times on Steve Carrell, which is odd given that my whole career is based on writing about The Office.

I wasn’t sure this was just some personal aging thing, or something to do with the tumultuous times we’ve been living through, versus a Covid effect, but now I’m fairly certain it’s a Covid after-effect. I asked on Bluesky and Farcaster, and several people reported similar symptoms. It’s very specific. Other kinds of memory don’t seem to be affected. I don’t think it’s aging because 49 is not that old, and this is rather specific and sharply defined. And tumultuous times have been going on since a few years before Covid, and I didn’t notice any such effect before 2021.

For the first couple of months after the Covid bout (which was itself mild), I also had the commonly reported brain fog and fatigue effects, but those dissipated about 4-6 months in. But this noun-memory effect has persisted. Someone on Farcaster shared a link suggesting it might have something to do with Lithium, but it’s beyond my competence to parse the literature on that.

I thought of taking this concern to my doctor, but it’s more annoying (more weird googlings to do, and more note-taking required in meetings) than crippling or debilitating, plus I don’t even have the right concepts to describe this. So I thought I’d blog it and see who else has been experiencing this, and whether you can add any more color/evidence/ideas to this thing. And of course, if you’ve found any easy fixes, please do share.

My current working hypothesis at the cognitive level (I don’t understand the neurochemistry level) is that the ability to keep long-term narrative memories well-maintained through recall triggers, for low emotional-salience narratives, has sharply eroded. I care about TV stories, but not so much about the lives of the actors who play the characters. Distant friends and family aren’t an integral part of my personal narrative. Proper nouns in particular are affected more because unlike verbs or meaningful phrases (like titles of books), they have no real correlation to the content you’re trying to recall. For example, I just blanked on “A. O. Hirschman,” but the name has nothing to do with the “Exit, Loyalty, and Voice” book title, which I have no trouble recalling at all. It’s weirdly appropriate in a way, that names of people are getting stripped from my memory even as human authorship in general is getting stripped out of the world’s knowledge by AI.

I’d have to go back and check, but I think this has affected my writing style. I used to pride myself on my strong memory, and ability to quickly link abstractions to specific examples — which requires recall of proper nouns from low-emotional-salience stories — but as this has gotten harder, I’ve defaulted to writing more in vague generalities. I’d bet my use of proper nouns in my writing has dropped (and/or narrowed) since September 2022 if anyone wants to attempt a data-mining project.

One wild possibility — if this is indeed a general effect of Covid, maybe it explains the shift from memes (a sharp format that requires recall of proper nouns, both verbally and visually) to vibes, which are nonspecific.

Did a ribbonfarm meetup in Bangalore last night, the first ever in India. Thanks to Abhishek Agarwal for organizing. I think this is the first meetup I’ve done since the last Refactor Camp in 2019. It was kinda last minute, which is why I only posted on Substack rather than here (some sort of signal there 🤔).

We had a nice mix of people show up: local startup people, corporate tech people (including a transplant from the US and another visiting), and a couple of older people. And rather refreshingly, we spent the entire evening talking about everything except the election. It was the sort of cosmopolitan conversation that might have happened anywhere else in the world, which kinda surprised me, since the India I left in 1997 was a sort of insular world unto itself.

While I’ve been visiting regularly over the last 28 years, it’s been almost exclusively to see family, and I hadn’t really been plugged in to anything else in India, or traveled much beyond the provincial town of Coimbatore where my parents have retired. In a way, this is the first time I’ve done something other than just hang out and travel with family since around 2003, when my parents moved from Bombay to the rather provincial town of Coimbatore to retire. To the extent I have friends left in India, they tend to be in places, like Bombay, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Delhi. I suspect, to the extent I have readers in India, they’re in the same places. One of the reasons I haven’t connected much with readers outside of the US is that I typically only do meetups and things if they happen to line up with business travel or conferences/events. For whatever reasons, I haven’t been able to manufacture these opportunities in India (possibly Indians see through all my bullshit 🤔?).

In another first, I think this is the first time in 17 years of blogging that my Dad finally has a glimmer of understanding of what this disreputable business of “blogging” is all about. He was genuinely surprised that ~20 people I’d never met before were willing to come out randomly to meet me in Bangalore, a city I haven’t been in since 1996. Previously, he only thought this was real to the extent I was able to manufacture Proof of Real in the form of printed books.

Speaking of Proof of Real, apparently I have more books in print than I realized. Abhishek put together his own bootleg personal bootleg editions of two of my ebooks that don’t exist in print and had me autograph them.

This sort of thing has come to my notice a couple of times, and it cracks me up every time that some readers sometimes have more energy to put together print volumes than I do. For large swathes of my writing, they often have better memory of what I have written than I do. Several people mentioned (and asked difficult questions about) essays and twitter threads I’d entirely forgotten I’ve written. Honestly, this is The Way. Blogging is really a way to make other people do your curation and memorialization work for you. Your job is to just produce…raw, poorly edited feedstock.

If you want to throw together personal print versions of any ebook-only volume or any random collection of essays that interests you, and distribute a few to your friends, go right ahead. Modern print-on-demand services make it extremely easy to do, even if you don’t know much about putting books together. Realistically, properly edited and formally published print editions of 99% of my stuff, available to buy on Amazon, ain’t gonna happen. So if you like printed material, consider all my stuff (both here and on the Substack) licensed for non-commercial print use. Do share pictures with me if you do things like this.

This is the sort of thing that makes me think the blogosphere, even in its currently embattled form, is a strictly superior and richer thing to the traditional publishing industry. There is something to be said for keeping the spirit of the open blogosphere going, despite the many temptations and efficiencies of Substackification.

One of the biggest changes in my personality with middle age is that I no longer really enjoy travel beyond local weekend getaways. Almost no destination has a pain/novelty ratio that makes it worth it. On the one hand, I’ve traveled enough that few places hold the promise of real novelty and stimulation. On the other hand, even though travel has gotten way more convenient overall (smartphones, eSIM cards, cashless payments, Uber, Google Translate — though at the expense of phone-loss anxiety), my tolerance for discomfort has plummeted. I don’t like shitty hotels/hostels, awkward couchsurfing, wrangling luggage, driving unfamiliar cars, figuring out transit systems, or spending the night in an airport as I did once in Paris in 1998. I especially don’t like wading through lots of options figuring out food options. The net effect is that I’ve gradually gone sessile. I avoid travel when I can except when one of two conditions holds — either the destination offers some genuine novelty (Antarctica maybe?) or someone, preferably not me, is paying for a business class, high-touch managed experience. If younger friends don’t make arrangements I can parasitically hook into, I tend not to wander far from hotels in new places. I made a graph illustrating my evolving preferences:

Pain beats novelty when you’re young (where the pain is simply lack of adult agency and resources) and when you’re 45+. In the middle, there is a window of 20 or so years when the equation favors exploratory wandering despite pains. For me that was 1998-2018 or so. The bookend travel experiences in those two years were a 3-week backpacking trip to Europe in 1998 and a side trip to Northumberland after a conference in Newcastle (highlight: puffins on Farne islands). The latter was the last time I made personal efforts to go to an out-of-the-way place (it involved inconvenient trains, buses, taxis, and a boat).

I still enjoy being in different places once I’m comfortably settled into a nice hotel with a charged phone and a nice restaurant or two and walking areas scoped out. I just no longer find the pain of getting there and back to be worth it. There was a time when it wasn’t even pain. Airports were exciting! New transit systems were fun to figure out! (The exception is border controls/passports/visas — always painful, even with an American passport).

When I notice people older than me enjoying travel hugely, it usually turns out they can go business class or better all the time, and have handlers everywhere dealing with the friction. Or they’ve spent a lifetime traveling very little, and have a lot of pent-up hunger for novelty to work through in retirement.

The calculus of travel applies to life generally. Growing felt-friction beats marginal novelty in every activity eventually, so you go sessile in one modality after the other. Your music and reading tastes go sessile. Your political openness goes sessile. Your tolerance for weather ranges goes sessile.

Speaking of weather, I’m headed to Singapore and India during peak monsoon for the first time in 25 years. I’m not looking forward to it. Though the Indian monsoon is amazing experienced from a comfortable balcony nursing a hot chai and a plate of pakoras, the same cannot be said of navigating Indian traffic snarls with flooded streets. I expect to be in Bangalore for a few days this time (first visit since 1996 when I interned there) and am not looking forward to the flooding the overgrown city appears to be famous for now.

My pain-vs-novelty utility curve also explains why I am skeptical of longevity tech. It’s not sufficient to extend life. You have to suppress the pain of the friction of life enough to keep it below the declining novelty curve (or manufacture increasing amounts of novelty). Money alone will do the trick up to about 80. Given reasonable health, with luxurious-enough curated experiences you can continue to find things like travel stimulating. But at some point you’ll have pains that money can’t ease enough to make it worth the effort.

Longevity tech as it exists today, even for the wealthiest, seems to require far more investment of time and energy than I’m willing to put in for the “return on life.” Maybe it’s just me, but the equation doesn’t compute. I simply don’t have the kind of appetite for life that can survive arbitrary amounts of friction pain.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a good thing. I occasionally fight the sessile tendencies and am often glad I did. But more often, I don’t, and find myself wondering why I bothered when I could be home relaxing.

I’ve long held that civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary. The incomprehensible can be scary but the arbitrary tends to be merely exhausting. Unless the stakes are high, such as in paperwork around taxes or passports and visas. Then the exhaustion becomes tinged with anxiety. Either way the steady increase in arbitrariness creates, in the name of progress, a growing ocean of mind-numbing details you just have to know. Or figure out the hard way by reading instructions. Or by brute force trial-and-error. For example:

1. Which way does the USB cable go in?
2. Where is the hood button on this rental car?
3. Which way do you insert the card into the machine?
4. How do you get to the city from the airport in this city?
5. You need to get over to the second lane from the left on this exit
6. The option you need is in that sub-menu
7. This is how you check-in in this particular airport
8. This is how you replace this filter in this weird device
9. This is how you repack an appliance you want to return
10. This is how you use codes and apps to get a package
11. Everything to do with health insurance
12. All technical shopping

Not surprisingly a lot of such knowledge is symmetry-breaking knowledge or raw information about names or numbers. As tech gets more complex, things seem to get more intuitive locally, but overall the arbitrariness keeps going up. The number of YouTube videos explaining arbitrary shit keeps going up.

Automation often pretends to solve arbitrariness but usually just moves it around. Uber makes getting a ride in a new city supposedly easier, but then you have to learn local stupid games the drivers play, weird edge cases, and so on. GPS makes some aspects of driving much easier but when everyone has GPS you get new kinds of arbitrary.

I think arbitrariness costs are an undertheorized variety of transaction costs. I find them particularly exhausting to deal with. Often I’ll forgo a potentially fun new experience because the arbitrariness burden is too high. Arbitrariness neutralizes intelligence and strategic intuitions. It slows you down to the speed of entropy. It creates barriers around value.

There are only two real solutions to arbitrariness burdens: Paying for premium experiences that lower it, or paying flunkeys to deal with them for you (not always possible). Either way, the fact that costly solutions exist shows that the transaction costs of arbitrariness is real. I’m usually willing to pay to not deal with it if I can afford to. For example, I’m always happy to pay for valet parking. Or “expedited” processes. Or luxuries I don’t otherwise care for just to get lowered arbitrariness benefits. Or a human interface.

There’s something not quite right about this tendency of civilization towards exhausting arbitrariness. Maybe AI will fix it by learning all the arbitrariness rather than moving it around. I’m not optimistic. I suspect the so-called meaning crisis is in fact an arbitrariness burden crisis. Things that might otherwise feel meaningful aren’t anymore once wrapped in sufficient arbitrariness.

In thinking about decision-making under stress, most people focus on fight-or-flight responses. Both fighting and fleeing are obvious courses of action that inherit a clear sense of direction from the characteristics of the threat itself, and are energized by the automatic mobilization of emergency reserves by an acute hormonal response. It’s barely even a decision, since you’re likely to pick one or the other very quickly and intuitively.

But the most difficult modern decisions are marked by the lack of a legible threat (the opposite of a “clear and present danger”), and a slow build-up of a maladaptive chronic stress response. As Robert Sapolsky argued, this is why zebras don’t get ulcers but humans do. Our default impulse is neither to fight or flee — there is no clear adversary to fight or flee from — but the under-theorized third F: freeze.

To freeze due to a sense of an acute stressor is to go into hypervigilance and scanning mode. You think there’s a lion but you can’t tell which direction it might come from. This is not what I’m talking about.

Under chronic stress there is no lion. The threat is really your own compounding inaction and lack of imagination and creativity to break out of it. You sense vaguely that you should make a change in your work, family, or creative life. You sense energy slowly draining away. There’s a slowly ticking countdown clock at the edge of your awareness. You’re losing life traction. Maybe you’ve even tried some half-hearted and ennervated experiments to shake things up but they didn’t work — you fucked around but found out nothing.

So you slip into a low-vigilance, non-scanning freeze mode. One where the only thing you do is conserve energy, which just leads to a downward spiral of progressively falling energy levels, like in a strategically lost company that is trying to cost-cut its way back to a decisive vigor. There is no impetus or acute threat to do anything in particular, and no cue to pick a direction. Most importantly: No energy source has been unlocked. Decisiveness is not about making clear choices as much as it’s about unlocking energy. Indecisiveness is enervation.

I think of this state as a decision brownout, as in an electronic device shutting down, getting unreliable, or slipping into a failed reboot loop, due to insufficient or unstable supply voltage. While you’re in a brownout, you procrastinate on all decisions to conserve energy because you have no sense of what’s important. The mail piles up, the hallway gets cluttered with boxes, you defer obvious purchases and repairs, you stop taking vacations or breaks, or even doing anything fun on a small scale. You pull clothes to wear straight from the dryer, or from a pile on the floor, and throw used clothes directly into the washer or on the floor, like in the famous laundry xkcd. You stop fighting entropy beyond the bare minimum, letting your life gradually enshittify. There is no goal to optimize around, so any high-energy, low-entropy state of preparedness seems pointless. You pick the path of least resistance every time. Your OODA loop has collapsed, like a deflated tire, and needs reinflation.

To get out of a brownout you need two things: a new sense of direction, and the energy to pick a path of greater-than-least resistance. Of the two, the energy is the more important thing. A non-default decision option will feel right primarily because it feels energizing enough to make at all, not because of its external effects. And if you make enough non-minimum-energy decisions in a row, the chances of locking on to a new direction increase (but there is no guarantee). The goal is not a particular new vector but a positive-feedback energization spiral. When you want to push-start a car with a dead battery, the correct direction to push is “downhill.” Once the energy is flowing, you can worry about steering.

Another physics metaphor. You’ve probably heard the heuristic that in driving you should accelerate through a turn. You brake before the turn to decelerate to just below the right speed for the turn, then accelerate through. This is because the turn requires extra traction force, generated by the acceleration. If you do the braking, but not the subsequent acceleration, it’s a bit like a brownout. You lose traction. Except with a general decision brownout, there isn’t even a road curving in a clear direction forcing your hand. You just drift around on a featureless 2d parking lot for the brain.

I think one reason I’m so interested in decision-making is that I’ve been prone to decision brownouts all my life (I’ve spent maybe a third of my days browned-out), which I think of as being a “low-energy” person. This is not quite accurate. I’m capable of sustained periods of high energy activity. I just don’t get motivated by the sorts of clearly defined activity where a reliable “voltage supply” is trivial to find. It’s probably a mix of literal energy patterns, personality, and having the most aptitude for uncertain, ambiguous, exploratory activities in domains without reliable power outlets.

I think I’ve made my peace with this, but it never gets easier. Almost by definition there is no formulaic way to exit a brownout. If there were, you wouldn’t be in a brownout-prone decision regime. All you can do is cultivate patience, and learn to endure long periods on subsistence levels of psyche energy. I suspect many people incorrectly pathologize this life pattern as bipolar disorder or other conditions, rather than attributing it to the decision environment you’ve become adapted to. Roving on Mars, reliant on solar power and vulnerable to dust on the panels, is simply a different state than being on Earth with reliable grid-power outlets around you all the time.

But it’s not just me. Lately it seems most of the world, at all levels of organization and abstraction, is in decision brownout mode. I used another metaphor for this earlier: a world becalmed as in sailing, lacking worldwinds. I think that metaphor is essentially the same, but I like brownouts better for thinking about decision freezes.

The prospect of picking a presidential candidate to vote for, for instance, is brownout-inducing. Both candidates are deeply de-energizing to even think about. The competition is not between Biden and Trump. It’s between the least-resistance path of just not voting and even thinking about it. In this case it’s not me, or any individual bipolar tendencies. It’s the nature of the decision and the energy environment available to navigate it.

We read an interesting paper today (ht Sachin Benny with an assist from ChatGPT) in the Yak Collective weekly governance study group (Fridays at 9 AM Pacific). Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War, by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin (World Development, V 39, No. 2, 2011). It compiles, codes and analyzes data about a subset of modern civil wars that could be considered “Sons of Soil” (SoS) civil wars, marked by conflict between an ethnic minority which views itself as being “sons of soil” of a regional base, facing demographic incursions by a larger ethnic majority (possibly with its own adjacent “sons of soil” claim in an adjacent territory) expanding into the minority territory. The paper compiles 139 examples from 1949-2008 (yes, Israel-Palestine is in the set, no the US Southern border is not) and codes them, and concludes that worldwide about 22.3% of civil wars are SoS civil wars.

The paper focuses on the settled (for now) Sri Lankan Tamil case as the main illustrative case study, but obviously the Israel-Gaza is top of mind worldwide. In the US, the southern border migration crisis is equally salient but is unfortunately not coded into the dataset of the paper.

My brief notes on the paper:

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