IS THERE A DEEP HOMOLOGY OF MEMES?
As reported by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times of 26th April 2010:
"Dr Edward M. Marcotte is looking for drugs that can kill tumours by stopping blood vessel growth, and he and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin recently found some good targets — five human genes that are essential for that growth. Now they’re hunting for drugs that can stop those genes from working.
Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte did not discover the new genes in the human genome, nor in lab mice or even fruit flies. He and his colleagues found the genes in yeast.
“On the face of it, it’s just crazy,” Dr. Marcotte said. After all, these single-cell fungi don’t make blood vessels. They don’t even make blood. In yeast, it turns out, these five genes work together on a completely unrelated task: fixing cell walls.
Crazier still, Dr. Marcotte and his colleagues have discovered hundreds of other genes involved in human disorders by looking at distantly related species. They have found genes associated with deafness in plants, for example, and genes associated with breast cancer in nematode worms.
The scientists are taking advantage of a peculiar feature of our evolutionary history. In our distant, amoeba-like ancestors, clusters of genes were already forming to work together on building cell walls and on other very basic tasks essential to life. Many of those genes still work together in those same clusters, over a billion years later, but on different tasks in different organisms.
When scientists started sequencing DNA, they were able to find homologies between genes as well. From generation to generation, genes sometimes get accidentally copied. Each copy goes on to pick up unique mutations. But their sequence remains similar enough to reveal their shared ancestry.
A trait like an arm is encoded in many genes, which cooperate with one another to build it. Some genes produce proteins that physically join together to do a job. In other cases, a protein encoded by one gene is required to switch on other genes.
It turns out that clusters of these genes — sometimes called modules — tend to keep working together over the course of millions of years. But they get rewired along the way. They respond to new signals, and act to help build new traits.
In an influential 1997 paper, Sean B. Carroll of the University of Wisconsin, Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and Cliff Tabin of Harvard Medical School coined a term for these borrowed modules: “Deep Homology.”
This set my mind spinning in its usual elliptical fashion on the possibility of a Deep Homology of Memes – in particular those inherited patterns of thought that manifest themselves in modern politics.
And I set myself to apply the concept to advancing my understanding of what, for nearly all non-Americans, is a virtually impenetrable, imponderable and incomprehensible issue – the appeal of the TEA Party.
THE TEA PARTY
In an article in the New York Times of 16th April, ‘Tea Party Supporters Doing Fine, but Angry Nonetheless’, Kate Zernike makes the following comments:
‘It makes sense that people would take to the streets to protest government spending and enormous deficits during the Great Recession, when they are feeling economic pain most acutely. But the Tea Party supporters now taking to the streets aren’t the ones feeling the pain.
In the results of the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, they are better educated and wealthier than the general public. They are just as likely to be employed, and more likely to describe their economic situation as very or fairly good.
Yet they are disproportionately pessimistic about the economy and the nation. A breathtaking 92 percent said the country is on the wrong track.
What accounts for this gap between how they are faring and how they feel the country is faring? History offers some lessons. The poll reveals a deep conviction among Tea Party supporters that the country is being run by people who do not share their values, for the benefit of people who are not like them.
That is a recurring theme of the previous half-century — conservatives in liberal eras declaring the imperative to “Take America Back.”
“The story they’re telling is that somehow the authentic, real America is being polluted”.
Rick Shenkman, a history professor at George Mason University, said in some respects, he is inclined to take the Tea Party supporters at their word, that they see themselves like the founding fathers in fighting an ideological battle.
Conversations with Tea Party supporters often wind their way into nostalgia. Even those out of work aren’t mourning the loss of a job so much as what they see as a loss of an era.
Perhaps, the most telling evidence that these avowed critics of big government are really mourning an America of the past is in their shifting attitude toward George W. Bush. Only a short time ago, he was reviled on the right for his spendthrift ways (his Medicare expansion), his federalizing of education standards (No Child Left Behind) and his creation of a vast new government agency, Homeland Security.
At rallies, Tea Party supporters often nod to President Bush’s role in creating the deficit. Yet in the poll, 57 percent of them view Mr. Bush favourably — about the same percentage in the general population that has an unfavourable view.
In the new world led by President Obama, Mr. Bush is apparently a figure these new populists can pine for.
THE AMERICAN JACOBITES
Noting the common themes of indignation, nostalgia and reaction, I then started to play with the fanciful notion that there were links to the British Jacobites who pined, plotted and bungled for the return of the Stuart branch of the British royal family in the 18th century.
To my enormous surprise, this was not entirely off the wall as far as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were concerned. Others had made tentative steps to identifying a Jacobite strand in American politics.
This strand apparently can be traced indirectly in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson who idealized the independent yeoman farmer as exemplar of republican virtues, distrusted cities and financiers, and favoured states' rights and a strictly limited federal government.
But as a political philosopher, Jefferson was also a man of the Enlightenment and as such was influenced by the ideas that emanated from contemporary Scotland – of which more later.
Daniel Larison writing about American Conservatism on the Eunomia website in 2006 under the heading ‘Onward Jeffersonian Jacobites’ makes much of the ideas of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (16 September 1678 – 12 December 1751).
Bolingbroke was an English politician and philosopher who contributed substantially to the development of the concept of a loyal parliamentary opposition, even though his sympathies lay with the restoration of the Stuart dynasty.
As such, he can be seen as one of the founders of the English Conservative or Tory Party, though he himself used the term Country Party.
He instructed the members of the Country Party to "Wrest the power of government, if you can, out of the hands that employed it weakly and wickedly"
In the late 20th century, he was rediscovered by historians as a major influence on Voltaire, and on American thinkers, especially John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
It seems that his works were widely read in the American colonies, which were generally loyal to the London government throughout the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite Rebellions in Britain but which also shared concerns about the commitment of Westminster to plurality and power sharing.
Taking up the story, Larison has the following to say:
"The Country opposition finds its first definite exponent in Bolingbroke, who had inherited the ideology of resistance of the Jacobites after the 1715 rising collapsed in defeat, and who drew on the thought of Harrington to support his critiques of the Hanoverian dynasty and Whig establishment in terms of the establishment’s “corruption” (in this time the term referred specifically to the Crown’s buying of men in Parliament and more general attempts to create a network of placemen and patronage that would provide the Court with trusty lackeys).
'For those loyal to these ideals of widespread landownership by middling landowners, the mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy and republican government, and the diffusion of power, 1688 was a black year that virtually signalled the permanent exile of men with Country sentiments from positions of influence within England.
'This will seem counterintuitive to those used to remembering 1688, if they remember it at all, as a blow against absolutism (when it was, in fact, nothing more than the empowerment of a Whig oligarchy and the end of any possibility of Catholic revival in Britain with the abdication of James II), but there should be no doubt that the victory of William III and the party of treason simply secured the concentration of power in a different set of hands far more likely to abuse it.
'The colonies, for their part, were naturally predisposed to embrace the Country view, as they were as far removed from the metropole and the Court as could be and saw any greater concentration of power in London as a threat to their own rights.
'First the Antifederalists and then the Jeffersonian Republicans took up the same themes in their hostility to consolidation, with the Jeffersonians particularly fearing the collusion of finance and government and the power of the “moneyed interest” during the clashes with the Federalists in the 1790s over the creation of the Reserve Bank.
'If we brought together the entire Country tradition under another label, my preference would be to call those who adhere to it Jeffersonian Jacobites, capturing at once a hostility to consolidation and the Whigs of the 17th and 18th centuries.
'Understanding the Constitution as a mechanism for restraining state power, as Dr. Wilson wrote of the Populists, is one of the things that all real conservatives share – no doctrines of implication and construction for us, thank you very much.
'This hostility to consolidation and centralising elites has nothing to do with “libertarianism” (which has no American representatives before the 20th century and is almost entirely a transplant from central Europe) and everything to do with loyalty to family, community and the states which have been the real countries of Americans for most of our history.
'Separately, those who belittle the revival of this American Populism and the Country tradition in this country mark themselves out as friends of the forces of consolidation and enemies of the decentralist, agrarian and conservative traditions of this country.
'That Bolingbroke and his Opposition appeared to later radicals with a radical face is neither surprising nor difficult to reconcile with his basic conservatism.
'Part of the ideological dynamic of his politics was “populist,” even though an early and most aristocratic populist manifestation, and inherent in populism is a force at once intensely radical and reactionary. It is always “the people,” be they yeoman farmers, urban small traders, or failing gentry who are being victimized by the small conspiratorial financial interests.
'Bolingbroke’s conservatism stands not only as the fons et origo of Country-Jeffersonian-Republican agrarian resistance to the new Court of the Federalists and Whigs, but perhaps even as the core of the entire Anglo-American populist tradition.
'I will go so far as to say that, as good as Burke can be, it is the Viscount Bolingbroke and not the Irish Whig who represents the real source of Anglo-American conservatism. It is especially to him that we should look as “the reactionary imperative” becomes ever more imperative.
'Bolingbroke’s reactionary radical combination of defending the people and their liberties against the usurpations of the government and the moneyed interest, the Opposition’s rejection of the standing army, and its aversion to war and foreign entanglements all anticipate many of the themes developed by American agrarians in their arguments and taken up again by their latter-day populist inheritors.
Look homewards, America – and look to Bolingbroke".
Not surprising perhaps then that although the ‘Jacobite Lament’ is monarchist through and through the best modern version has been done by a republican group, the Clancy brothers.
IDEAS THAT ENDURE
Well, with respect to the American Constitution, I guess we have to filter out some of the meme DNA that originated with the Scottish Enlightenment - entangled as this is with the romanticism of 'the true King across the water'.
Brian Skea [“Tension of the Opposites in the Cultural Self of Scotland: Polis versus Ethnos” (2006)] notes that:
‘The Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were “nostalgic yearnings for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her ordained place and stayed in it”. A constantly changing and capitalist society offers opportunity and individual freedom, but is anxiety provoking and competitive, with not everyone succeeding'.
But the romantic side of the Scottish character was both the inherent subject of study by rationalist fellow Scots and a tendency that needed to be checked and balanced - with reason forging passion into an instrument of progress. Walter Scott put it this way: “The Scottish mind is made up of poetry and strong common sense, and the very strength of the latter gives perpetuity and luxuriance to the former.”
Skea draws heavily on Arthur Herman’s book, 'How the Scots Invented the Modern Mind' (2001), noting that:
The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history; that human character is constantly evolving, shaped by environmental forces. These forces are not arbitrary but follow discernible patterns.
Thus the study of man is ultimately a scientific study, and Herman considers the Scots as the true inventors of what we today call the social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, history and economics. For example, the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was printed in Edinburgh in 1768.
Even before the American Revolutionary War many Scots had emigrated to the Colonies and Canada. They were soldiers, clergymen, government officials, physicians, teachers, farmers and merchants.
During the war some fought with the British, some with the rebels. One third of the signers of the Declaration were of Scottish or Ulster Scot extraction.
Drawing on Herman’s work Skea suggests that the Scots had a profound influence on the American Constitution, citing the writings of Frances Hutcheson, Lord Kames, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson.
The links that have been observed are as follows:
Francis Hutcheson postulated that all human beings are born with an innate moral sense, and not just as coerced by strict religious or political laws. “It is expressed through our feelings and emotions. The most important is love, particularly love for others, which is the starting point of all morality. Love also proves man is not inherently selfish. The happiness of others is also our happiness, such that self-interest and altruism do not have to be at odds.
This “pursuit of happiness” would show up in the American Declaration of Independence when Jefferson added it to his list of inalienable rights of man. Underlying such pursuit of happiness was the concept of the right to universal freedom, that the desire to be free survives, even in the face of the demands for cooperation with others in society.
Lord Kames looked at the need for laws from a historical perspective in his Sketches of the History of Man. He organized human history into four distinct stages:
• the hunting/fishing/gathering stage, (family units)
• the pastoral /nomadic stage (clans and tribes)
• the agricultural stage (cooperation of specialists, ploughman, carpenter, blacksmith etc, feudal hierarchy, landlord/tenant, master/slave), and
• commercial society (from village to market town, city and seaport, involving manufacturers, merchants, bankers and lawyers as well as trades people).
Kames therefore provided the basis for claiming that the common laws of England and its unwritten constitution were outdated and that the American Colonies needed a clear overarching constitutional document and codified laws as it became a commercial society.
David Hume stressed that learning by studying cause and effect develops into habitual modes of finding ways of meeting our needs. Self-interest, the desire for self-gratification is the most basic human passion, and is the basis for any system of morality, and any system of government. Instead of plundering ones neighbor, why not open a bank! The Golden Rule is: I won’t disturb your self-interest, if you won’t disturb mine.
In his Political Discourses (1752) David Hume wrote that “in all governments there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty, and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest.” Liberty preserves individuals, while authority preserves society. Absolute authority as in a totalitarian state destroys society, while absolute individual freedom creates anarchy. Balance and mutual sacrifice is required.
In drawing up the Constitution Madison is held to have relied on the writings of David Hume above all others, in creating a system based on gridlock, checks and balances between the institutions of power, thus preserving liberty at the private level.
Adam Smith coined the term “fellow feeling”, a natural sense of identification with other human beings, as ‘society acts as a mirror to our inner self, by reflecting back to us the reactions of others, and becomes our guide to what is good and evil in the world’ and he was well aware of many of the problems that arise out of a narrow focus on self-improvement through material acquisition.
Of course he made a strong case for the natural creation of wealth through the development of economies of scale and specialization, guided by the invisible hand of the free market but this was ultimately dependent on the pursuit of enlightened liberalism by government. And he saw that a moral life is a matter of imagination such that a society that impoverished its citizenry would not be one that could rally effective citizens to its defence in times of threat.
Thomas Reid was associated with the philosophy of “common sense” which tells us that the more we know about that outside world, the better we can act on it, both as individuals and as members of a community. He coined the term “self-evident truths” which was taken up by Thomas Jefferson, and used in the Declaration.
Finally, Adam Ferguson stressed the need for free societies to develop a heroic spirit of honour, valour and self-sacrifice as an antidote to materialism, proposing in his ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society’ that “free people needed to keep and bear arms in order to defend their liberty”.
SUMMING UP
So the American constitution was a pure product of the Enlightenment?
Perhaps - but as we have seen, there is also some evidence that true blue British conservatism from the shires played a part in its parentage - fostered by the romanticism of the Jacobites.
Having sifted and centrifuged the memetic DNA that contributed to the American Constitution, we may be left with some that harks to a less enlightened, more rustic and Tory origin. Perhaps the Tea Party does draw some of its memes quite legitimately from this source - feeding its themes of indignation, nostalgia and reaction.
But as for Bolingbroke, the British verdict is that ‘his writings and career of make a far weaker impression upon posterity than they made on contemporaries. His genius and character were superficial; his abilities were exercised upon ephemeral objects, and not inspired by lasting or universal ideas.’
Let's leave it there.
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