Right Reason

David Brooks writes about Western civilization

 

Over at The New York Times, David Brooks has penned an article titled, "The Crisis of Western civilization," about the rise of illiberal threats to Western civilization in the past couple of years. Although Mr. Brooks wisely begins by noting that the West is successful because of its ideas and institutions, he quickly degenerates into identifying the West with its heads of state.

If the West had been defined by its heads of state all along, it would not have been so successful. If the West could only be identified by its heads of state today, it would not not worth defending.

Here is the real crisis of Western civilization: Intellectuals and the clerisy are panicking about heads of state even as they neglect their duty to teach and defend the West's intellectual and moral foundations. Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are not the West. Greco-Roman philosophy, Christianity, the rule of law, the scientific method, and the honest pursuit of income are.

Mr. Brooks is right that intellectuals need to regain faith in Western civilization, that they need to once again identify themselves as thinking within a particularly 'Western' tradition of thought. However, to have a reasonable conversation about Western civilization, we have got to stop beatifying heads of state we like, be they St. Obama or St. Thatcher, and talk about the ideas that inform the particularly Western tradition of thought. The West is not "Obama, Cameron and Merkel" and the anti-West is not "Putin, Erdogan, el-Sisi, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump." (Side note: Does Mr. Brooks even recognize that Mr. Putin was President of Russia and Mr. Erdogan Prime Minister of Turkey before Mr. Obama was President of the United States? The world really hasn't changed that much...)

We should not prostitute Western civilization to serve our current political ends and fashionable social movements. I fear Mr. Brooks does both in what started as an excellent article. Then again, suiting the fashions of The New York Times' readers, Mr. Brooks couldn't even type 'Christianity'; instead, he typed the thoroughly bland and uninformative neologism: 'Age of Faith,' as if it did not matter if the Age of Faith were a Pagan, Christian, or Muslim Age of Faith. 

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.

The History of Disease...

Whether its the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the Black Death, or the Spanish Flu, the spread of infectious disease has helped define the course of the history of human civilization. ‘Cholera,’ ‘bubonic plague,’ ‘small pox,’ and ‘influenza’ are but a tiny sample of a legion of biological dangers that man has learned to live with and to mitigate over the course of his learning to live in civilization. In his Second Discourse, Rousseau argued this point, that the history of civilization is a history of disease:

When one considers the good constitution of Savages, at least of those we have not ruined with our strong liquors, when one realizes that they know almost no other illnesses than wounds and old age, one is strongly inclined to believe that the history of human diseases could easily be written by following that of civil Societies…
With so few sources of illnesses, man in the state of Nature has, then, little need for remedies, and even less for Doctors; in this respect, too, the human species is no worse off than all the others, and one can easily find out from Hunters whether they come across many unhealthy animals in their treks. (Rousseau 1997, 138)

Infectious disease is a cost of the great benefits of human beings living socially together. Although human beings have grown wealthy due to the productive possibilities of such social living across history, so too have they been made miserable by disease. Just like any other complex system, a complex society is only possible because of the interactions of many, many component parts. Such interactions require people to live in close proximity together, which welcomes the easy communication of disease, especially when people also live in close proximity with domestic animals. The very same cities that have been nexuses of trade have been the nexuses of communicable diseases. Wealth and disease have followed hand-in hand.

As society has evolved to become ever more complex, so has disease become an ever more potent danger. No civilization has been immune to the danger. Even the Roman Empire, which brought aqueducts and bathing along with its legions, was not exempt. In a recent paper in Parasitology, Piers Mitchel has argued that Rome’s public-sanitation infrastructure was insufficient to prevent the spread of parasites and so the Roman Empire became an instrument for spreading such agents of misery across Europe. Maev Kennedy of The Guardian reports on the story, writing:

What did the Romans ever do for us? Despite all the hot baths and smart multi-seat public lavatories, the surprising answer turns out to be lice, fleas, bed bugs, bacterial infections from contamination with human faeces, and 25ft-long tapeworms, a misery spread across the empire by the Roman passion for fermented fish sauce.
“It seems likely that while Roman sanitation may not have made people any healthier, they would probably have smelled better,” said Piers Mitchell, an expert on ancient diseases at Cambridge University’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Mitchell found evidence for the tapeworms, previously associated with the taste for raw or pickled fish in Scandinavia, in countries where they had not been recorded before the Roman period. He believes the culprit was garum, the Romans’ ubiquitous fish sauce seasoning, which was made from fermented but uncooked fish.
Wrapped around the Romans’ intestines, he said, the parasites could remove nutrients from food before it could be digested, which could cause severe or even fatal anaemia. Evidence from some Roman sites in Italy revealed that up to 80% of the child skeletons had evidence of severe anaemia.
His research, published this week in the journal Parasitology, has gathered archaeological evidence – and faecal samples – from sites across the Roman world. His conclusion is that the civilised Romans may not have been any freer from disease than the barbarians they despised. The evidence is in their bones, in objects found at Roman sites, and in their cesspits. They were prey to bedbugs, pubic lice, fleas that may have spread the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague, bacterial infections and intestinal parasites including whipworms, roundworms, and fish tapeworms, which their culinary fashions spread to countries where the infestations were previously unknown.