A Patriots Manifest May 07 2008
William White
There are two kinds of intelligent mistakes and I would like to illustrate this from Jared Diamond because he is careful about his sources. In “Guns, Germs and Steel” he came out in favor of the African origin of Smallpox. This was dealing himself into an academic flame war that has raged for decades and may continue for centuries. The only thing that can be said definitely is that the India, Africa and Persian Gulf trade predates recorded history and maybe even agriculture and civilization so determining the real homeland of smallpox is a hopeless task. I am not going to give the evidence for Indian smallpox genesis here because I see no need to stick my foot in that bear trap but the evidence was available prior to Diamond’s publication of GG&S. “Collapse” on the other hand was in its final stages and maybe at the printer’s before the thesis of “1421” took off and Mayan inscriptions were translated and correlated with each other to disprove Diamond’s theory of Mayan collapse and probably his theory on Greenland.
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Both types of error contributed to getting America into the mess it is in now. There are two major traditional ways of making sense of history/politics: diffusion (Diamond is the most respected advocate of this position) and cyclical comparative history (Toynbee and Spenglar are the famous advocates of this position). At one time these positions were in opposition but with work on ecological barriers to diffusion, led by Diamond among others, these two methods of looking at politics have been more or less amicably fused. Then E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and many others came out of genetics/biology and in effect said “uh-uh babies.” while throwing socio-biology and evolutionary psychology into the mix. Niall Ferguson is the main advocate of a psycho biological history of politics. Better ye t a whole slew of popularizations of what this means have been thrown out by Robert Wright, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker and many, many others. While mostly libertarians, flaming liberals such as Marc D. Hauser and Daniel Pink have also joined the sociobiology party.
If the homeland of Smallpox is a bear trap then trying to explain the political ramifications of genes and memes vs. diffusion and comparative history is tap dancing in a nuclear minefield. In grossly oversimplified form that, hopefully, will not get my butt in a sling here are the parameters of the debate:
Comparative history/diffusion is about groups and group goals. The Democrats are the big advocates of this position in American politics which is why they haven’t had a clear majority in both votes and the electoral college in a presidential election since 1976. If, as seems likely, they get a clear win this time the results are likely to be even worse than the Carter presidency and the consequences longer term. Republicans are not too far behind the Dems in the bitch from hell contest because of their milder advocacy of this disproven approach to politics.
Sociobiology is about the use of groups to achieve the goals of individual genes and memes. Various libertarian and constitutionalist groups/parties are sidestepping around the advocacy of sociobiological politics. The Libertarian would have to give up their Self-Ownership Principle since you don’t own yourself in sociobiology: your genes and memes own you, you are just their hired manager. Constitutionalists would have to give up the idea of natural rights and start advocating reasonable limits to selection and cashing in on temporary fitness (all forms of fitness are situational: power lifters are not hired as NFL running backs). Leftists/Liberals are also getting into the act by emphasizing evolutionary psychology rather than sociobiology. So the future political spectrum is known in outline but getting to it is more problematical.
In case it isn’t blindingly obvious future findings can hurt early leaders in getting out of this mess.
The views expressed by William White are his and his alone and may not be the views expressed by A Patriots Manifest. Thank you .... Michael Roller...