Our Evolutionary Crisis

To a guy of my 76 years, our planet now looks like someone else’s. It’s not even close to the one I was born on.

Consider Xi Jinping. There he stands, tall, impassive and inscrutable, reviewing dozens of heavy missile carriers and thousands of troops drilling and shouting in perfect order. Even when just preening before thousands of women whirling in pastel gowns, he’s as creepy. We aleady have one Little Kim. Do we really need one a thousand times more powerful, ruling the world’s most ancient civilization?

In the midst of it all comes Vladimir Putin, massing the greatest collection of troops and armor seen in Europe in 77 years. It’s all arrayed around Ukraine, but Putin says it’s not for an invasion. The Western world is threatening a banking freeze in response, nothing more. Why do the words “Peace in our time” keep ringing in my ears?

Then there’s us. Don’t get me wrong. I like Joe Biden. I voted for him, with some enthusiasm. As Picasso said about being 92, Biden was and is better than the alternative. Far better.

But Biden is the antithesis of youth and dynamism. Our Congress is a veritable gerontocracy, with a mean age of House members of 57.6 and of Senators of 62.9. Wasn’t 65 once our retirement age? And from whence did we drag a Supreme Court that gets its “law” from the Bible and the Eighteenth Century? Just today it ruled it proper to confine Alabama’s 25% of Black people to electing one out of seven US representatives.

Last year a bunch of crude, big guys with automatic weapons showed up at the Michigan state capital to intimidate the duly elected governor, and nothing happened. A few months later, a much bigger mob of insurrectionists showed up at our national Capitol, ransacked the place, caused four deaths and dozens of injuries, and drove out our legislators. And still nothing much happened to the perpetrators.

Some people have been arrested, and some have been jailed. Leaders of one of our two big political parties called it all a “legitimate political discourse.” Still they back the guy, the Demagogue, who appears to have incited the Insurrection in an attempt to change the election’s result.

And then there’s the global epidemic of sexual harassment and predation. Men use their political, economic and social power, if not just their bigger muscles, to take what they want from women. Hollywood and media moguls have been doing that for most of a century. But now it’s also the Catholic Church, for God’s sake, taking from little boys!

Then there are the nice guys. Remember Canada? Does a downtown Toronto clogged by thousands of Big Rigs massed by angry truckers protesting vaccine mandates sound like Canada to you?

I could go on and on. But you get the idea. The world has gone mad. The center cannot hold. It’s all topsy-turvy. Recite whatever cliché you prefer. But it’s all happening now, at once. Nothing makes much sense, and the pandemic keeps grinding away.

One source of it all is crystal clear. We’ve come up against the limits of our evolutionary biology. We’ve reached our Peter Principle as a species.

We now have weapons that we can use to extinguish ourselves, if not destroy our entire biosphere. We have a global energy economy big and powerful enough to destabilize the climate in which we evolved. So far, we’re just letting it rip, with dire and unforeseeable consequences, mostly because rich and powerful people gain in the short term.

We just can’t seem to govern ourselves. We can’t even seem to control ourselves on a national or regional level. As David Brooks pointed out in a must-read news analysis, even the religious among us are running amok, purging and damning each other with hate and fear, not Christian love. Truly the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The crux of the matter is how we evolved. We developed from apes in clans of about thirty or so individuals. An alpha ape ruled each clan absolutely. He was the biggest, the strongest, the quickest and the fiercest. Often he was also the nastiest. He ruled the females as his harem. There was no “consent,” only procreation. (That’s why there’s so much sexual predation among our political and industrial rulers today: it’s literally in our DNA.)

There was no democracy or consensus among our ape ancestors. To the extent communication was inefficient, a snarl, a growl, a showing of teeth, or a roundhouse swipe of the alpha ape’s great arms wrought compliance. Beta males were ostracized from the clan, by force of combat. Some of them slunk away, perhaps to start their own clans. Others waited in the wings, hoping to become the next alpha rules by force, as the incumbent alpha aged. Combat was only rarely deadly, for evolution does not favor wasting good genes, even if second best.

This same regime continued throughout our biological evolution. It took us 3.5 billion years to evolve from a single-celled creature and an estimated 6-9 million years to evolve from our primate forebears. In comparison, the roughly five thousand years of our recorded human civilization ranks, respectively, as less than 0.00015% or 0.085%.

So our brief recorded history hasn’t given us nearly enough time to evolve another style of governance. The alpha-male ruler is still encoded in our DNA. That’s why a strongman feels so “right” to many of us, especially males, and especially in times of uncertainty and stress like now.

That’s why some 71 million Americans could vote for the Demagogue, despite his obvious failings in morality, intelligence, veracity, consistency, and simple competence. That’s why few males object seriously (let alone violently) to sexual harassment, even though they know it can impact their own mothers, daughters, aunts, and sisters, or their own wives. Back in our ape clans, the alpha ape’s physical dominance and harassment were the “right” way to procreate and organize the clan.

Every time I see TV images of Xi before his multitudes, I can’t get the incongruity out of my mind. Here is an alpha male before his minions. Thousands are present in person, dancing, marching, in tanks or driving missile carriers. Somewhere behind electronic media, or in homes throughout China, are all 1.4 billion of them.

And all this evolved out of clans of thirty of so individuals. Can the ancient paternalism of Confucius really encompass 1.4 billion modern humans? Can it do so although millions, maybe tens of millions, have critical knowledge, information, expertise and skills that Xi lacks? If it all weren’t so tragically and spectacularly inane, I would laugh until I got a hernia.

What about democracy, you ask? Well, what about it? In our recorded history, it has been a rarity, an oddity. The democratic Greek city-states were minuscule relative to the great empires that preceded and followed them. They are notable only for their art, philosophy and ideas, which left an intriguing written record replete with future possibility.

In all our short human history, only three powerful empires have been democratic: ancient Rome, the British Empire and (as its successor) the United States. Rome lasted a few centuries and degenerated into empire. The Brits held sway for at most three centuries. They are still around but have lost their Empire and (with Boris Johnson) their gloss. And US democracy now hangs by the thread of a Constitution defectively designed to preserve slavery.

Does this mean that democracy and human “rights” are doomed? Are we all destined to live henceforth in rude empires, crawling over each other like crabs in a bucket—by force, duress, colonization and conquest? Will our species live thus until someone finally sets off the nuclear spark and puts us out of our misery, or until we immiserate ourselves and catastrophically reduce our population with runaway climate change?

Not necessarily. Two other features of our biological evolution offer hope: our intelligence and our ability to learn. Both modern democracy and modern science are their products. Both arose at about the same time, during the seventeenth century, in a phase of human history that we in the West call the Enlightenment (or, in self-congratulation, the “Western Enlightenment”).

Science and democracy are intertwined and interdependent. You can’t have good science without freedom of inquiry. If “truth” comes only from the Emperor, there is no use making observations or doing experiments. That’s what the Pope, then as supreme leader, tried to prove by excommunicating Galileo for his heliocentric theory of the Solar System.

Modern science depends upon a vast industrial and technological infrastructure, whose development and advancement require cooperation among specialists on an unprecedented scale. It takes thousands of people to design and build a car, many thousands an airplane. It took a whole infrastructure of scientists, engineers, technicians, technologists and industrial workers just to build the single torus of high-temperature-superconductor material that we hope may some day bring us nuclear fusion (a small Sun in a bottle) and thus all the carbon-free energy we need. And the mRNA vaccines that are the most promising defense against Covid-19 (in part because they are easy to replicate for variants) resulted from vast international collaboration over the Internet.

The crux of the matter is specialization. No single person has the knowledge, expertise and skill necessary to build a power plant, a solar panel, an airplane, or a computer, or to design and make a vaccine against a new pandemic. It takes millions of specially educated and trained people to make our modern industrial society work.

So strict top-down rule doesn’t work well with modern industrial-scientific civilization. Modern science, engineering and industry work best with voluntary cooperation among the many specialists required to make them function. Hence democracy has a chance to succeed alpha-ape rule, if only for its practical advantages. This explains the origin of the bureaucratic state and its expert regulators.

But make no mistake about it. Democracy and the science it facilitates are most definitely not encoded in our DNA. They’re a product of our Reason and our conscious striving for a better life for the greater number. Without books or modern computer storage to perpetuate them, both science and democracy could vanish in a single generation. That might actually happen after a nuclear war.

Democracy and science are thus always contingent and precarious. They depend on each succeeding generation’s education, training and understanding. Nature copies our DNA for us automatically, for each succeeding generation. But like the hatred sung in “South Pacific,” democracy, science and human rights have got to be carefully taught.

Science doesn’t actually require democracy, although democracy helps. Science can limp along even in the most repressive of empires. It did just that in the brief twelve years of the Third Reich. But Nazi science lost the race for nuclear weapons because the best minds had escaped its harsh empire and worked furiously in the free West.

Will something similar happen under Xi Jinping as Big Brother? It’s much too early to tell. Xi is smarter and better educated than Adolf Hitler was. He’s well aware of the role of science and technology in the recent rise of the West. He’s also much smarter than our own Demagogue, let alone the Demagogue’s lackeys. So science would likely flourish better in China than here if our Demagogue ever returned to power.

Historically, science and democracy have flourished together because science works best in an atmosphere of free inquiry. But there is no reason why science could not flourish a bit less, but still impressively, under a sufficiently enlightened Emperor. That tale is yet to be told: modern science as we know it only emerged toward the end of the Age of Empire in the West.

It’s possible that strong national leadership in an empire like modern China could convert its energy infrastructure to renewables, or even nuclear fusion (if it ever works), faster than could a democracy beholden to carbon-based legacy technologies and industries. The big trouble with empires is that even enlightened absolute leaders grow old and die. There can be no guarantee that the next winner of the alpha-ape power struggle will be as enlightened as the last. Often a second- or third- rate offspring of the deceased prevails by inherited influence, not merit. (Indeed, Xi himself might fit this mold, as an offspring of an early Communist leader.)

Yet at the moment, all eyes are on the West, where democracy is busy devouring itself. Misinformation, disinformation, disorder, hate and nonsense are propagating widely for profit, as men like Mark Zuckerberg storm the hills of competition in their own narrow industries, and in their own personal interests, without regard to consequences.

So Reason in the West is on the run. Nonsense, lies, disorder, ideological cant, propaganda and hate are on the rise. Unless the democrats and the few oligarchs who back them can reverse this trend, the mantle of science and Reason may pass to Asia and its more paternalistic empires, at least for a time, as I half predicted in 2009. (Perhaps Japan’s aging democracy will help keep the spark alive.) That in itself would not be so bad for our species, as long as life elsewhere did not get so chaotic as to let the nukes fly or global warming run away.

But for us in the West, the prognosis is not good. From relative tranquility and confidence after the Cold War’s end, we have entered a new world of “interesting times” (the Chinese curse) with head-spinning suddenness. Further human biological evolution is far too slow to offer any help. So for now, it’s all up to what remains of our Western Reason and self-discipline, characteristics in which China seems ascendant. The small flame of the Western Enlightenment is guttering even now. Soon it could go out.


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