"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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What uniformity seems to exist on the surface amongst any ruling elite is consequently the result of choice and/or the illusion created by the deceptive practices of a large cohort of "public relations" professionals (professional liars) in the pay of that same elite. Any underlying solidarity and apparent uniformity of viewpoint results from a natural tendency toward support of those beliefs and behaviors that enhance the ability of individual members and families to control ever greater amounts of land and resources and exploit the labor of subordinate classes. Hence, you see occasional apparent incongruencies, such as the progressive assertions by a Soros or a Gates, that seem to be in contradiction to the exploitive views expressed by the majority of ruling class people. The examples of apparent inconsistency amongst the ruling class are so few not because there exists a lack of diversity amongst the members of the class but rather because most ruling class people choose not to abandon the extreme privacy and secrecy that is felt to be a basic right of rulers. These observations make sense if you view humans as largely a biologically, rather than culturally, determined species. From the biological point of view, who we are at our core is almost exclusively the result of countless millennia of selective pressures that have shaped us as social primates. The intricacies of our natures have been formed as a result of adaptation to changes in our physical and natural environment. This point of view has been explored intensively by a large number of researchers and authors in recent times. Space and time do not allow for references, but they are easily found. Evolution has a way of generating catastrophe out of success. Species routinely court extinction by being forced into a narrow ecological niche by virtue of having evolved a particularly successful evolutionary strategy that fails spectacularly in the face of a changing environment. The biological question of import is whether or not humans will join the vast array of species slated for extinction as part of the mass extinction currently under way, which has been caused by the climatic changes imposed by the inordinate success of our specie's invention of civilization. It seems incontrovertible that, whatever the outcome, our numbers will be greatly decreased in the near term as radical environmental change sets the tune for survival. Modern humans, based on genetic analysis, seem to have been the result of what is called a bottleneck event. At some point in the remote past we humans were reduced to as few as fifteen hundred individuals. Such genetic bottlenecks create a great degree of genetic homogeneity. On the surface we may be of different colors, shapes and sizes, but at the genetic level we are more like each other than the vast majority of other species are self-similar. So the question arises, what was retained in our genetic tool kit when it was reduced to being carried by so few individuals? Genetic research seems to indicate that what was conserved most diligently was diversity of behavior styles. As the few reproducing groups of humans confronted the needs of survival over a period of great environmental challenge brought about by climatic instability that caused the recurrent ice ages, those groups that retained the ability to respond in the greatest variety of ways to these challenges survived to become us. Groups that were more homogeneous in behavior succumbed as their way of doing things failed to cope with change. Hence we became a weed species. A species of rugged generalist with an talent for elaborating new, more adaptive, behaviors. The source of this resourcefulness lay in the retention, by these early groups, of a diversity of genetically determined behavior styles. As an example, consider what current researchers believe about the apparent anomaly of the prevalence of the condition called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Looked at from the perspective of individual survival it is hard to imagine how what we modern humans tend to see as a disease could persist in the gene pool in such numbers. In social animals rank tends to determine reproductive success. So how did these space cadets manage to reproduce? The speculation is that these people were the natural experimenters that allowed groups to learn quickly about new environments. Impulsive and hectic in their behavior, they would have been the ones to try new things as these early groups wandered from one ecological arena to another. "Normal" people benefited by observing which of these new behaviors worked and copying them. "Look, Grog ate that strange plant and he didn't die." Genetic science now recognizes many such seemingly destructive traits that, seen in a larger perspective, are beneficial to a population. The best known is the Sickle Cell gene. Individuals with two Sickle Cell genes die early and fail to reproduce, but those with a single Sickle Cell gene and one normal one are marginally more resistant to malaria which, in turn, leads to the retention of the destructive gene in a population affected by malaria. A disability of the few enhances the survivability of the many. In the case of ADD surviving populations benefited from the brief but dramatic lives of the those carrying these genes so that the trait was conserved. This is how behavioral and perceptual diversity strengthens a generalist species such as our own. It seems evident to me that this strength through diversity translates directly to the sphere of social organization. A group that manages to retain the largest degree of behavioral and perceptual diversity will stand a better chance of surviving and flourishing under changing conditions. The coming period of climatic instability that has been brought about by industrial technology in the hands of hegemonic elites (it is official, we now are in a new geologic epoch called the Anthropocene) will once again transfer the baton of species survival to those self-sufficient groups that express the greatest degree of diversity within their ranks. The period of earth's history that we are leaving behind is called the Holocene. This period was marked by an unusual degree of stability of climate which encouraged agriculture and the large social groupings we call civilizations, with their enforced homogeneity and rigid class structures. The changes that we are about to be forced to deal with as a species will be sudden Why is this important to you? The likelihood of your genes being passed down to successive generations will be directly related to your membership in small groups that are not homogeneous, not stuck in self-destructive patterns, and not dependent on the failing civilization for survival. For those wishing to contemplate the future in these terms I recommend Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Pay particular attention to the section on the Scandinavian colonies in Greenland (Chapters 6-8). This extinction of an entire group of people was determined by their unwillingness to give up the farming technology and plan of social organization that they brought with them from the old world. The now-dominant class based, industrial technological cultures of the world face a similar fate as resources are depleted, the earth warms, the seas expand and the mass extinction that we are witnessing progresses. Those groups that prove nimble enough to transition through these changes will survive. The rest will perish and we, as a species, will likely pass through another bottleneck event that will reshape again what it means to be human, that is if we survive as a species at all, which becomes less likely by the day as the old patterns of war prone hegemonic culture drive us further toward the point of possible extinction. But to paraphrase that dinosaur Madeline Albright, all the death may be worth it if we bounce back as a more cooperative, more innovative and more egalitarian species that can resist the attraction of class based hegemony expressed in large social groupings. © by the author.
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