Right Reason

Pestilence and the Course of Evolution in Civilization

 

 

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Revelations 6:7-8

Tomorrow, Paradox Interactive shall release a new expansion to Crusader Kings II, a magnificent grand-strategy game. The expansion is called The Reaper’s Due and it focuses on the effects of pestilence, especially the Black Death, in the Medieval world. The very theme brings to mind the effects that pestilence has had on the human species since the dawn of civilization.

 

Among students of human evolution, one of the questions that comes to mind when one is first thinking about that great epic of natural history is whether human evolution has stopped. Although evolutionary biologists will be quick to chime in that evolution never really stops, the question is still one that piques curiosity. After all, has civilization not prevented the culling of the human population that would be necessary for evolution to occur? However, as The Reaper’s Due makes all too apparent, such culling has actually occurred over the course of civilization, and one of the principal reasons has been pestilence.

The human species is now living in a geological era all its own. Yes, Homo sapiens may have attained anatomical modernity in the Middle Paleolithic, or thereabouts, but the species today lives in the Anthropocene. Both the rapid destruction of ecosystems, which happened even during the era of hunter-gatherers, and global warming warrant the creation of a new geological era. However, those two are not the aspects of the Anthropocene that I wish to focus on, that aspect is civilization, the complex network of social interaction by which man has accomplished the challenge of Genesis 1:28 to subdue and have dominion over the earth.

Civilization and the problems associated with living in close coordination with other people, introduce evolutionary pressures that have changed the human species over the past twelve thousand years. It has done so principally because civilization radically changes the ecosystems in which the human species evolves. That change in ecosystem has introduced new challenges in the struggle for existence our species has faced that has affected the human genome. We only need look as far as what happened to much of the indigenous population in America upon European contact to know that some populations have a resistance to some infectious diseases and that resistance probably has a genetic

 

One of the deadliest among those evolutionary pressures in the threat of disease. The existence of even thousands of human beings living right next to each other changes the very biotic system they are living in. That people tend to often lived on top of their own refuse in densely populated areas creates an ever more hospitable ecosystem for the flourishing of bacteria. Even worse, malnutrition is prevalent in civilizations across the world because of the difficulties that agricultural societies have in supplying all of the necessary nutrients. As a result of malnutrition, people are less likely to be able to fend off the pathogens afflicting them, to the benefit of the population of those pathogens.

Overall, civilization changes the ecosystem that human beings find themselves in. Although most of those changes may be said to be for the better, the threat of disease is certainly magnified. As a result, human beings have to struggle against disease to a much greater degree than they did. That struggle for existence has exerted an evolutionary pressure on the human population. Pestilence has been one of the pressures driving human evolution. Moreover, it is an evolutionary pressure generated by human civilization itself.

JS Mill's Significance in an Age of Trumpism

 

 

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

 

The idea of liberty is difficult to pin down with a single system. Whenever we try, many of liberty’s salient aspects inevitably slip from our account, however well-formulated it may have been. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, liberty is large, it contains multitudes.

Liberty must therefore be appreciated and studied from many perspectives, such as a birthright that must be defended against encroachment or as the rule giving rise to the division of labor benefiting all of humanity. But none of those perspectives alone can suffice. To defend liberty, we must be catholic in how we approach the idea of liberty, fitting our perspective to the challenges we face. In the midst of Donald Trump’s ascendance in the Republican primary, inebriated on a dangerous cocktail of nativism and economic nationalism spiked with blind anger, we can advance liberty in our day best through the perspective of John Stuart Mill.

 

Unlike many other philosophers of liberty, Mill was never satisfied with characterizing liberty simply as a force for circumscribing the power of the state. In On Liberty, he emphatically argued that there was a wider role for liberty than constraining leviathan. He singled out individuality as an essential ingredient to human flourishing and reasoned that liberty must serve as a force that promotes the individuality each person in society. After all, to be able to make one’s own opinions about the good life and to act upon them was a part of a life worth living.

Liberty, Mill contended, must justify the right of each person to cultivate their own individuality and provide them with a social space for doing so. It is more than a bulwark against the political class, it is also a bulwark against prevailing opinion and the tyranny of the majority. If it is to truly contribute to human flourishing, liberty must safeguard experiments in living against whomever would aggressively interfere with them.

 

Trumpism is an explicit rejection of Mill’s philosophy of liberty. Donald Trump’s successful coup of the Republican party demonstrates why a robust defense of liberty must extend beyond ideas of limiting the political class and that it must also extend to protect people against prevailing opinion. One of the greatest advantages that Trump has had so far in that endeavor has been that his brand directly appeals to the white-identity politics with the party that most other Republicans only flirt with. Rather than validating the dignity of people at the margins of prevailing opinion, Trump belittles them in order to raise the prestige of the prevailing white identity.

A sizable fraction of his voters believe that they—the white, Christian, non-college educated portion of the American population—are the ones under threat and need protection from the government—protection that Trump is selling. The American National Election Studies’ The 2016 Pilot Study attests that independent and Republican voters who esteem their white racial identity as important are 30 points more likely to support Trump than those who do not similarly esteem it. These are the people who believe that they have been left behind as they watch both manufacturing jobs go overseas and their status in their status in society be diminished.

 

In his campaign, Trump has gleefully exploited their fears and apprehensions. His appeal transcends matters of policy and revolves around an unapologetic affirmation of his supporters white identities. Trumpism isn’t a collection of ideas, it is a force for white identity consolidated under the cult of personality of its leader: The Donald, who with his WWE appearances and his hard-constructed aura of capitalistic success, immediately appeals to disaffected whites within the Republican party.

‘Make America great again’ can be translated as ‘make the white identity prestigious again.’ Whether it’s bringing back jobs from China, negotiating with Iran or passing a new health-care plan, Trump is simply going to make his followers important again in the world. He is going to ensure that they should be respect, and feared, the world over. How is Trump going to do this? If what he has said is to be believed, he’s going to triumph because he’s the winniest winner who has ever won. Being the consummate alpha male, the strength of Trump’s will shall simply overwhelm all who oppose him.

Suiting the style of identity politics, Trump’s rhetoric has demonized those who do not neatly fit into Trumpism’s notion of whiteness. Muslim refugees are branded as terrorists. Mexican immigrants are reviled as drug-mules and rapists. Of course, when Trump was confronted with a question about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, he had to do some research before repudiating them, later rationalizing the entire incident as being caused by a faulty earpiece, even though he had repeated Duke’s name to the reporter. All in all, Trumpism seeks to retreat Americans back behind the walls of a secure white identity and to raise the drawbridge up behind them.

 

John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty is a useful, and much needed, palliative against Trumpism and its prejudiced emphasis on white identity as being the sole identity to be esteemed in society. Mill’s philosophy teaches how a drawbridge-down approach to the world is how we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us. Against Trumpism’s confidence in the superiority of a single identity, On Liberty reveals how openness to the wider world, not hostility towards it, is how we achieve virtue and flourishing. Even Pope Francis has expressed a similar opinion when said that no one who only thinks of building walls, rather than bridges, could be a Christian.

Liberty also wasn’t an academic curiosity to Mill. During his life, he championed the individuality and dignity of the people at the margins of his own society, including women, slaves and religious nonconformists. As a Member of Parliament, he advocated women’s suffrage and the legalization of contraceptives. Today, he would certainly be writing about how black lives matter, speaking out against those disparaging Mexican immigrants and advocating the cause of Muslim refugees. Against Trumpism, Mill would defend a robust drawbridge-down stance as a force that benefits and enriches the societies that adopt it.

 

Liberty flourishes in an environment in which people are free to cultivate their own individuality. Trumpism, with its unmitigated glorification of white identity at the expense of those at the margins, represents a threat to that environment. To palliate Trumpism, those who love liberty need to inject some of the themes of Mill’s On Liberty into their political discourse. We need to emphasize that theme in Mill’s On Liberty that liberty is about more than just constraining the state, that it is also about justifying those at the margins of prevailing opinion, whether they be Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees or just those who do not conform to the white identity at the heart of Trumpism.

Suiting the style of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty, all lovers of liberty, whatever political labels they may take, need to condemn those who would raise the drawbridge behind a single comfortable identity, even if it may be their own. To once again quote Walt Whitman, they must take seriously that “whoever degrades another degrades me.”