Every kind of source must be interpreted
Sarah Zhang at the Atlantic takes off from Taleb’s rudeness to Mary Beard to talk about what we don’t know about genetics.
In December, the BBC released on YouTube an old animated video about life in Roman Britain, which featured a family with a dark-skinned father. This depiction recently caught the ire of an Infowars editor, who tweeted, “Thank God the BBC is portraying Roman Britain as ethnically diverse. I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?”
To which Mary Beard—best known as a classicist at Cambridge, and more recently known for taking on internet trolls—replied, “this is indeed pretty accurate, there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.” To which Nassim Nicholas Taleb—best-known for railing about epistemic arrogance in The Black Swan, and recently known for arguing on Twitter—replied:
Historians believe their own BS. Where did the subsaharan genes evaporate? NorthAfricans were lightskinned.
Only "Aethiopians", even then https://t.co/e9ruWqnZpl— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) August 2, 2017
Oh how quickly the conversation jumped from children’s cartoon to Infowars rant to genetics. Having completed a close reading of the entire thread—you’re welcome—I think the most charitable interpretation is a classic Twitter case of arguing past one another. Beard is saying there were indeed dark-skinned people in Roman Britain. Taleb cries BS: A mixed family was not typical of the time. Those positions are not inconsistent. We each have hills to die on, I suppose.
That genetics even came up at all in a debate about ancient Roman history is indicative of science’s stature in these fractious times. Genetics gets invoked as neutral, as having none of the squishiness of historical interpretation.
Or the bullshit, as Taleb so politely puts it.
But that is simply not true—as applied to Roman Britain or any other time or place in the ancient world. Geneticists, anthropologists, and historians who rely on DNA to study human migrations are well aware of the limitations of DNA analysis. At the same time, ancestry DNA tests are becoming ever cheaper and more popular, and misconceptions abound.
“We have written sources. We have archaeological sources. Now we have genetic sources, but no source speaks for itself.” says Patrick Geary, a historian at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, who is using DNA to track barbarian invasions during the fall of the Roman empire. “Every kind of source must be interpreted. We are only at the beginning of how to properly interpret the genetic data.”
Interpreted? But that’s that humanistic bullshit that Taleb is so scornful of.
But seriously, what she goes on to say about how historians use genetics is interesting.
I do suppose few if any sub-Saharan Africans were in Roman Britain. The Sahara was a pretty stiff barrier to transmission of people, ideas, trade, etc. (Around the edges, not an absolute one, but still.)
That said – North Africans weren’t and aren’t Nordic. Sheesh. The whole Mediterranean has and had people around it rather darker than Celts. Boy howdy would they have had a hard time in (e.g.) 1950 Alabama. And it looks like they’re not precisely welcome in 2017 Britain in right-wing fantasies of racial purity.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb is one of the more confounding people I’ve come across in any sort of discussion; I read his book, and thought I’d taken its point well, but every time I’ve come across him as a person he’s come across as contrary-for-the-sake-of-it, much more so than Christopher Hitchens ever hoped to be. I recall the debate in South America, where Hitchens and Daniel Dennett (and I believe Harris and Dawkins, or perhaps Shermer) squared up on one side, while Taleb was on the other with a few religionists, and every sentence Taleb uttered was simply a fancier and fancier way of saying ‘nyuh-uh’. I get the same impression here.
Of course there were sub-Saharan Africans in the Roman Empire, especially after it acquired Egypt as a province. Just as there were Arabs, and Moors, and western Asians, along with the swarthy Mediterraneans that formed the bulk of the Empire. To insist that all of them were as pale as Celts and spoke in Received Pronunciation is absurd.
And isn’t it funny that the people who lament the loudest about ‘identity politics’ seem to be those who insist that every instance of popular representation look exactly like them?
Love it, Seth! Perhaps someone should mention that there were trade routes up and down the Western coasts of both Europe and Africa (and the Nile valley) long before anyone ever heard of the Romans. We need to get that in quick before Prof Taleb has that fact banned too.
Also, we don’t actually know much about what the peoples of North Africa looked like before the massive Arab invasions and social dominance a few centuries later.
Seth – on that question (the identity politics), I would like to offer up a piece I recently posted on my (new and still working – in short, not much there yet) blog:
https://ofliberalintent.com/blog/2017/8/1/identity-politics
Iknklast, thanks for the link — I enjoyed the article, but couldn’t figure out a way to leave a comment, so I resorted to a follow and a retweet of it. I have some thoughts on it, but this thread isn’t the place to share them.
I don’t actually recall any claims that any particular person was “Subsaharan”. This all started with comments on a kids cartoon that showed a guy with dark skin. I doubt the cartoon racial markers would be accurate enough to establish his exact ancestry…
North Africans are black. So are east and west Africans who traded between north and subsaharan Africa. Does Taleb somehow think these people are not black? Or could not have been represented by an ambiguously dark skinned character in a cartoon? We know the inspiration for the character was an Algerian Governor of Britain. We have found other examples of Very Definitely Black people present in Britain – and not only as slaves – in documentary evidence, artwork, and archaeological remains. No one is attempting to argue that non-white people were anything other than a minority – but a minority is not the same as non-existant. It’s just as historically inaccurate to pretend Britain was 100% white.
My favourite story of classical multiculturalism is the Lady of York or the Ivory Bangle Lady. A young wealthy African woman found buried in York wearing one bangle of Whitby jet and another of African elephant ivory. Now that’s an image for today.
Comments are disabled on that blog, but comments can be left on Facebook, I believe.