CounterIntuitive

Recently I’ve encountered two counterintuitive, if not outright heretical, arguments about history and culture.

The first belongs to New Mexico’s own Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill, both biologists, who have marshaled evidence to support their theory that culture, including political culture, is a function of the disease pathogens infesting your particular neighborhood.  If you have high levels of malaria, dengue, typhus, T.B., etc., then your culture becomes increasingly wary of outsiders who can contaminate your district.

. . . severe pathogen stress leads to high levels of civil and ethnic warfare, increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment, patriarchal family structures, and social restrictions regarding women’s sexual behavior. Moreover, these pathogen-avoidant collectivist tendencies, they wrote, coalesce over time into repressive and autocratic governmental systems. Want to understand the rise of fascism, dictatorship, and ethnocentric campaigns that dehumanize outsiders? Look to the prevalence of pathogen threats.

…So, as humans moved into drier and colder and less disease-ridden climates, Thornhill says, they likely discarded their costly xenophobic disease-avoidant ways and became less beholden to tradition, more willing to trade with others, and more accepting of technological innovations. Instead of censuring the individual maverick thinker in the group, societies eventually came around to rewarding those who challenged convention. With those changes came the rise of wealth and the spread of education to a larger and larger segment of the population. The more educated the population, the more people demanded participation in their governments. Democracies, premised upon the rights and freedoms of individuals, were the natural outcome.

…Moreover, the democratizing effect of lowering disease threats, they argue, can happen quite quickly—even within a generation.Freedom House, an organization that tracks governments, civil liberties, voter participation, and equality around the globe, considers 46 percent of all countries to be “free” today, as opposed to just 29 percent in 1972. Thornhill points out that this rise coincided with an era in which major health interventions, including vaccine programs, the chlorination of drinking water, and efforts to reduce food-borne disease, became commonplace in many parts of the world. Thornhill is not shy about the implications. If promoting democracy and other liberal values is on your agenda, he says, health care and disease abatement should be your main concern.

There would seem to be some significant exceptions to this theory, however.  Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did not exactly spring from ground saturated with malaria and dengue fever. But consider that the Nazi party began its rise to power in the aftermath of a Spanish flu pandemic that had killed over two million people across Europe—over half a million in Germany alone. And remember that much of Hitler’s poisonous rhetoric specifically suggested that Jews were disease carriers.

And I suppose that if you consider war to be a pathology, both Germany and Russia suffered disproportionately heavy losses, which might have triggered a cultural immune response in the form of Hitler and Stalin.

Mention of war brings us straight to Ian Morris’ heterodox War: What is it Good For?  Morris begins with the statistic that the twentieth century, with its two world wars, its genocides, and its political upheavals, was nevertheless the safest 100 years in human history.  Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval  Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

Morris then goes on to suggest that war, or threat of war, is the only thing that keeps human beings civilized:

If the Roman empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls, if the United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans … if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity would have had the benefit of larger societies. But that did not happen … People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war, or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

Kind of sad if you’re one of the ones killed, raped, and/or dismembered, but the end results, sez Morris, are positive for posterity.

Why do I foresee a lot of really bad military SF demonstrating all this at length?