"thanks to European technology": so it is our fault after all. ;)

it seems rather peculiar to end a round of sharp exchanges with the implicit accusation that the other individual is an anti-Semite.

Peculiar in some places and almost de rigueur in others :-P

Razib, I am very sorry about the antisemitism thing, it is untrue and unfair. A New Yorker caricature shows a flying pidgeon dropping on the hat of an Orthodox Jew, who shouts angrily to the bird: "Antisemite!" That's me.

No, not the bird :-)

The idea that the Middle East is a mosaic of former peoples, which under the veneer of universal Islam, conserve their ethnic identity, is not of my imagination. Population genetics seems to have proved that in Europe, Catholicism more or less follows the borders of the Roman Empire, while Protestantism was adapted by former Germanic lands. Slavic peoples are mostly Orthodox, even if Bosnian Muslims seem to have been recently converted. I find the fine points of theological differences very unsubstancial and unconvincing. I am sure we agree on this point.

You certainly have much deeper knowledge than me, are you sure that the Middle East is genetically so homogeneous? Maybe the scarcity of studies makes it appear so. The inability of Middle East peoples to form a common political framework seems to indicate that there is little shared heritage among the human groups peopling this area. Our differences of opinion spring from the scarcity of knowledge. But science is advancing at such speed that we shall have the answer in a few years. I can wait a few years to be proved right... :-)

Catholicism more or less follows the borders of the Roman Empire, while Protestantism was adapted by former Germanic lands. Slavic peoples are mostly Orthodox

i'd like to see some numbers on this. this is rod stark's argument. ireland & poland & bohemia weren't roman. west slavs are catholic.

You certainly have much deeper knowledge than me, are you sure that the Middle East is genetically so homogeneous?

it isn't homogeneous. my point is that genetics tracked geography, not religion, at least when you extract the geographic component of variation.

discerning the form beneath the mass of historical facts is like hammering away at rock to bring out the scultpure within

Epistemological optimism, maybe? I mean do you really think there is something as solid an incompressible as a rock down there, as opposed to, say, a smurf ball? Still, I applaud the search and wish you the best of success.

Slightly off topic, but on the subject or the role of religion and superstition in human culture and psychology, I was recently re-reading V. Gordon Childe's Man Makes Himself, in which he describes the gradual emergence of new technical knowledge in the areas of ceramics (pottery making) and metallurgy, etc. The way he sees it, and I think he is convincing on this point, superstitions served to fix certain rote patterns of new behavior that, in the past, "worked", even though the natives didn't understand quite why, not being modern chemists, etc.

So once that got a series of actions that produced, say, durable pots, or that extracted copper from a certain kind of rock, they got very superstitious about it, and even used these superstitions as memetic devices, both for their own future guidance, and in passing along such esoteric knowledge to the next generation.

In a similar way, my daughter's high school soccer tea, goes through the same elaborate and absurd set of rituals before every game -- certain songs on the boom box, banging on the walls, clapping patterns, etc. -- in a superstitious belief that if they don't do these things they won't win this game the way they usually do in the past. And it works: they go out on the field with their game faces on and in more or less the same mental state that puts them near the top of their game. Went 17-2-2!

Much of Central Europe (especially Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and parts of Poland and Austria) would have been significantly or even predominantly Protestant except for military defeats followed by severe political repression. Hungary is the birthplace of Unitarianism and there still are a significant number of Unitarians there.

I've been following this debate without participating so far. I agree with Razib on the particular question, but also think that he's edging toward a superior understanding of how social and historical understanding work. There are a lot of buzzwords like complexity, chaos, discontinuity, path-dependence, contingency, emergence, irreducibility, particularity, etc. pointing toward a perception that the relationship between historical understanding and historical reality does not have the certainty, distinctness, and precision that the relationship between physical reality and physics have. ("Physical reality" meaning "reality as studied by physics", not "the whole physical world")

One way of stating this is to say that the early triumphs of science have been the low-hanging fruit, and that as science proceeds it will go into areas where laws as satisfactory as the Newtonian laws will become harder to find. This does not mean that no determinist-reductionist triumphs at all will be found, only that there will be areas of reality for which determinist-reductionist solutions seem to be systematically unavailable.

In such cases, particulars and instantaneous events can be decisive, and you end up having to make fine-grain distinctions between, not only Sunni-Shia, but between kinds of Shia, kinds of Twelvers, Twelvers in different geographical regions, etc.

This is the famous butterfly effect, which has been terribly misused. It doesn't mean that history is unintelligible and it also doesn't mean that history can be perfectly understood as long as you take the butterflies properly into account. It does mean that when looking at historical events (including contemporary events) you have to be attentive to very fine-grained detail, and it also means that your understanding can never be as good as you wish it was. I compare the understanding of history to a mixed game of chance and skill, like backgammon or poker. A beginner can win one game or one hand if the dice and the cards fall for him, but over the long haul the good player always defeats the poor player, and the great player always defeats the good player.

A real-world case of mistaken theorization was "shock therapy" Russia (and to a lesser extent the Chicago reforms in Chile). In these cases an economic theory was applied mechanically without any attention to politics, culture, or history, and in Russia the results were disastrous. (They actually succeeded in producing something worse than Communism). It could be argued that the theory applied was just a bad theory, but I think that any theory, mechanically and blindly applied, would have led to bad results, The economists believed that they had found the master theory of human life, and they certainly hadn't, but I think that the problem wasn't that they had found the wrong theory, but that no such theory can exist.

In response to Luke's comment, I think that there should be a study done of the phenomenon of religious sectarians and fallen-away sectarians in science. The influence of Orthodox and ex-Orthodox Jews in science and math is famous already. An ex-Mormon friend says that he often meets ex-Mormons and Mormons too in the science world. Major scientists like Newton and Faraday were schismatic Protestants. In East and South Asia there are traditions of Confucian and Vedic schooling which have produced family traditions of diligent scholarship.

The relevant factors common to science and to some forms of sectarianism are a.) memorization of large bodies of detailed knowledge whose relevance is not immediately clear, b.) traditions of rigorous schooling and support for good students, c.) willingness to stand aside from, and against, general public opinion and "common sense".

This way of thinking divides the human world differently: on one side, the inexact literary / philosophical / everyday / popular / commonsense ways of interpreting overall reality in terms of consensus using traditional, imprecise terms; and on the other side, all the various better-defined, non-consensus ways of taking reality, including not only science but also schismatic religious and political movements (to which scientists often belong).

My understanding is that history has a foot in both worlds, because the inexact commonsense literary understandings of history do embody aspects of history which have not yet been theorized, whether or not they are ultimately theorizable. Some forms of philosophy (e.g. pragmatism) also bridge the gap, but not the philosophy taught in most schools today.

In personal history I come more from the literary, holistic ways of taking reality, but increasingly I've been looking at the scientific, specialist ways. I really don't think that there ever should be a choice between them, though everyone always ends up more on one side than the other.

klein: do you still believe that Juan Cole is an Anti-Semite or have you recanted againt both Razib and Juan Cole?

Prof. Juan Cole is an eminent expert on the Middle East. I do respect his scholarship and learn from him. People should not be made responsible or tortured for things said/written in a moment of anger. Even the Pope is infallible only when speaking ex-cathedra, the rest of the time he is fallible like all of us.

The term "shock therapy" arose from reforms in areas of eastern europe like Poland and Estonia, though it did not become very well known until Russia, but the reforms of Russia were quite different from the places it had been more succesful earlier. I don't think a Weberian cultural explanation would be good at explaining the difference between Russia and the other former Soviet countries, but a public choice model could probably work. One of the most interesting comparisons I've seen of Russia and other former Soviet countries in post-Soviet economic performancy is Comparing Apples (it's a pdf, not a book I'm encouraging you buy from Amazon) by Peter Leeson and William Trumbull. If you are deathly afraid of graphs, spending too much time reading about Russia or formats other than html, this excerpt from a longer piece by Anders Aslund makes many similar points (though the take-away message is the optimism the other argues against).

VVVIIIRRRGGGIIIINNN!!!!!!!!!