ROMANTICS
Romanticism saturates current evolutionary thinking. Early humans are only ever painted, drawn, CGI’d or facially reconstructed in a very limited set of stereotyped poses. All of them Romantic.
Look at that caveman frown like Beethoven as he strikes fire from flint. There he goes, striding across a hostile landscape of immense sweep, a cloak of hide around his shoulders, destiny in his eyes.
You will never go into a natural history museum and see prehistoric humans (or rather their depictions) do any of the following:
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pull funny faces and make silly noises to amuse a toddler. |
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kvetch about back-ache. |
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make up a tune while walking. |
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try to talk while eating and have food go down the wrong way. |
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laugh until the water she has just drunk comes out her nose. |
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be in a big group of friends who find a great ledge for diving, and spend hours and hours doing somersaults and belly-flops. |
It is impossible that our ancestors did not do all these things. They are our ancestors after all. We did not, despite what Francis Crick believed, come from outer space in the rocket ships. But the lesson from museums, documentaries, and textbooks seems to be that our ancestors were too busy evolving into us to muck about. If they’d been larking about at the swimming hole, now where would we be, huh? We’d have perished in the snow. There was no time to muck about because it was so hard to subsist. Yes, but if they hadn’t been mucking about then how could they ever have become us?
The Romantic insistence on the craggy, the dour and the windswept, gets its impetus from being a reaction against another Romantic vision: the Pleistocene pastoral. All those op-ed pieces saying that we suffer from having a Stone Age brain in a high-tech world imagine an idyllic Pleistocene. Our evolutionary history, they tell us, hasn’t equipped us for the fast rate of change in modern life. It used to be that a hand axe design lasted hundreds of thousands of years, but nowadays a new version of iTunes wants permission to download every half hour. And that’s why we go crazy, smoke crack, and run through the streets with a meat cleaver. It’s the stress of it all. Everything changing so fast and that. We can’t take it. Can’t keep up. Not with our poor Stone Age brains that evolved during halcyon millennia on the East African savannah, our ancestral homeland, those softly waving grasslands where time stood still.
In fact, the rate of change in the Pleistocene Rift Valley was fast and furious, stressful and bewildering. You are throwing rocks at prowling megafauna you’ve never seen before. You are continually on the move. There are volcanic storms and lava flows. A land bridge appears, a valley disappears. Lake floods land. Lake evaporates.50 Vegetation zones move southward, taking the familiar animals with them. The hunter gatherer party that went off last month to look for nuts and fennel are cut off by ice, never to be seen again, until 80,000 years later, when your descendants meet at a party in Brooklyn and fall into an unexpectedly bitter argument about food miles.
A classic Romantic death was to die of consumption at age 25. In the Pleistocene epoch, this wouldn’t have enjoyed quite the same caché because at 25 you’d be the oldest member of the tribe. All the mourners would be standing round at your funeral saying:
‘Well, she had a good innings. Better she went now than be a burden. There’s no quality of life after 25 is there? I’d have hated to see her linger on to 27!’
In 1893, at the Chicago Expo, Frederick Jackson Turner presented a paper called The Significance of the Frontier in American History, while Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show retold the Oregon Trail as a fight to the death between superior European settlers and inferior Native Americans, who must give way to the inexorable progress of Manifest Destiny.
In fact, as Buffalo Bill well knew, Cheyenne altruism saved the white colonists when they were trekking West and ran out of food and water and were drowning in rivers (drowning was the biggest cause of death on the Oregon Trail). Likewise, the Pilgrim Fathers were starving, their European import crops perishing in the New World soil, until the Powhatan Native Americans taught them a little soil science and handed out food parcels to tide the colonists over the winter. All this has since been written out of the story in favour of the myth of rugged individualism.
Between Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill, the Chicago Expo spawned the cult of rugged individualism, a perfect fit with survival of the fittest, both of which became weapons in the struggle against Big Government in the United States.
Rockefeller and Carnegie hosted a banquet at New York’s Delmonico’s restaurant in honour of Herbert ‘survival of the fittest’ Spencer, who was toasted by Carnegie as the greatest philosopher of all time. As well he might for Spencer’s survival of the fittest had just made laissez-faire capitalism look like the highest, noblest social justice.
The cult of rugged individualism reigned for forty years, before biting the dust of the Great Depression’s dustbowl to be replaced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in the United States.
For a generation after the war, survival of the fittest was beneath contempt. Dead heroes leave no offspring – so how could you say the fittest survive when all the best and brightest had just been killed? Post-war Britain achieved the welfare state, democratic control of nationalised industries and perhaps the greatest social mobility in human history. Then the 70s brought The Great Rollback of the Post-War Settlement. Reaganomics in the USA and Thatcherism in the UK held that laissez-faire capitalism was more likely to succeed because it was closer to how things really worked in life, closer to the nature of things. Ideological outriders for these rollback projects were EO Wilson’s Sociobiology in the United States (1975) and The Selfish Gene in the UK (1974).
The paradox of selfishness as a force for good in the world has a history. It comes from the Enlightenment reaction against attempts at state-intervention in social life. The Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith argued that top-down reforms don’t work, whereas small selfish acts of ‘enlightened self-interest’ do. It’s the same message you get in Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714):
Thus every part was full of Vice
Yet the whole mass a Paradise.
So long as everybody looks out for No. 1 then we’ll be all right. The disasters will only come from collective effort… Except that’s not how a hive of honeybees works, is it? Nobody today would describe a hive of bees as a den of vice. When bees perform a waggle dance to the other bees, it is only accidentally bootylicious. If a bee twerks, blame the flight path to the nearest nectar, a flight path whose twists and turns she is faithfully replicating. In fact, don’t blame the flight path, blame yourself, you pervert. It’s a bee. What’s wrong with you?
‘Practical men,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes, ‘who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ In the same way, science writers who believe themselves to be dispassionately reporting what the science says are often the slaves of some defunct political philosopher. And sometimes they form a positive feedback loop, mutually reinforcing each other.
Selfish gene theory has never had less scientific respectability and at the very same time it has never had more influence. In large part because it is such a magnificent vector for free market economics. You can hear its influence, for example, in the way the business press huzzahs German intransigence over fiscal austerity for the rest of Europe, or in Angela Merkel herself, when she says:
‘It doesn’t actually help the Greeks if you spend your time helping them. No, you have to plunge them into the crucible of unregulated competition and from the smoking wreck of Athens, leaner, meaner, fitter – the ones that deserve to live – shall crawl.’
Marvelous Nietzschean rhetoric! Stirring stuff! Uplifting and enlivening to read! Problem is, it’s not exactly how Germany became a post-war economic and industrial powerhouse, is it?
In 1946, Germany had almost all its debt written off so that it could reindustrialise, which it did with such gusto that by 1952 West Germany was $65 billion dollars in debt. Cue the 1953 London Debt Conference, at which all the nations of Europe, including Greece, including Ireland, agreed to forgive West Germany all its debt, right down to the last pfennig. Now this wasn’t pure altruism of course. The European nations shared a memory of the fact that they had once before attempted to impose a policy of stringent fiscal austerity on the Germans in the 1930s. And I’m not sure if the phrase ‘with mixed results’ is entirely adequate or in any way fit for purpose to describe what then ensued. But there was a more communitarian ideal in international affairs at that time. As the London Debt Conference’s Declaration put it, they were forgiving German debt because:
‘Desiring to remove an obstacle to normal economic relations [and] as a contribution to the development of a prosperous community of nations.’
In the 1950s the Germans were not plunged into the crucible of structural adjustment that the Greeks are being plunged into now. But just as the idea that living creatures evolve to do things ‘for the good of the species’ or ‘the good of the group’ is totally and utterly the wrong message about natural selection, so what the historical record has to say about the 1953 London Debt Conference is totally and utterly the wrong message about the economy.
‘Capitalism,’ said Keynes, ‘is the extraordinary idea that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.’
This extraordinary idea enters the bones like freezing sea mist. The public sector is a sickly dependent, only perfused and kept alive by dynamic, go-getting private power. Look at Google, poster child of free market innovation. There’s an example of what happens when private enterprise is allowed to slip the leash of unwieldy Big Government. Research and development of the algorithm behind Google’s search engine, however, was funded by a National Endowment grant, or in other words, by the stultifying dead hand of democratic finance and the public sector. The only private thing about Google is its profits.
But (to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare scholar James Shaprio) let’s not let truth get in the way of truthiness.
Mark A Maslin et al. East African climate pulses and early human evolution, Quaternary Science Reviews (2014). |