Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 11/08/2015

41L69h9XdRL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_At ASHG this year a friend and I were talking, and we noted in passing how much R. A. Fisher anticipated in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. In some ways it resembles Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. But while The Origin is an illustrious book, widely read, and even more widely owned, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection remains somewhat obscure to the broader public, who are often under the illusion that Stephen Jay Gould is a grand evolutionary theorist, as opposed to a competent paleontologist who also became a master of self-aggrandizement. Any reader of this weblog interested in the science should think about getting a copy of The Genetical Theory and reading it, especially the more technical and abstruse first half.

41oVg-wh-1L._SX333_BO1,204,203,200_Speaking of Gould, he again makes an appearance in Robert Trivers’ autobiography, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist. One chapter is basically the same as Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small, published on this website a few months back. But most of the book, which I’ve skimmed through, is more explicitly autobiographical. In response to a comment on an earlier thread, Trivers does get into detailed aspects of the mental illness that he has experienced. One of the stranger, but plausible, elements of the narrative to me is that during one episode he became convinced only he understood Wittgenstein. I think that’s rather funny, because from what I’ve read Wittgenstein himself went through phase when he thought he was crazy due to the nature of his own conclusions about the world (he apparently approached Bertrand Russell to inquire where he was insane or not).

885753For me though, if you want an introduction to the classical Robert Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers, is a definitely “must have.” I’ve read this book a few times cover to cover, and it’s very rewarding. It takes the same format as W. D. Hamilton’s Narrow Roads of Gene Land. Key scientific papers are presented, but interleaved with these are commentaries and introductions, rich with autobiographical context. I wish there were more books in this format.

I’ve been reading Frank McLynn’s Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy, and switching back to his Marcus Aurelius: A Life. Two rulers who could not have been more different! Genghis Khan is a good book, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it for someone who hasn’t read other work on this topic, as McLynn’s scholarly judgement on what is, and isn’t, plausible from The Secret History of the Mongols isn’t something you want to rely too much on. In fact it has crossed my mind that people might be well served by reading Pamela Sargent’s historical novel, Ruler of the Sky: A Novel of Genghis Khan, as it presents the biography pretty faithfully, and more entertainingly than non-fiction (from what I recall Ruler of the Sky sugar-coats Temujin’s relationship to his brother Khasr a bit though).

In National Review Jonah Goldberg has a piece up, Fusionism, 60 Years Later. Recent events have made me convinced that really there’s no way American libertarianism can have an influence outside of the Right and the broad tent of conservatism. That means there will always be the sort of culture clash on a personal level, as the cultural preferences and mores of libertarians are more like that of liberals. But the Obama years seems to show that the Left really has no ability to put a stop to the warfare state (though I grant McCain really might have done some crazy things if he’d been elected!). Liberal internationalism is really the only game left in the Democratic party, just as a flavor of foreign policy neoconservatism is the only option in the Republican party. Additionally, I don’t really think of modern liberalism as “socially liberal.” With the rise of affirmative consent and a near maximalist idea of gender fluidity becoming normative, it sure doesn’t seem as if the cutting edge social movements on the Left want to “stay out of your bedroom,” and the events at Yale are a signal that freedom of thought in practice is something that isn’t even given the fig-leaf of protection from critique. There’s a specter haunting the American Left, and it’s Marcuse.

51VLZmyVmRL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_But I want to highlight one aspect of Goldberg’s piece which I want to dissent from somewhat: “The Founding Fathers were all classical liberals, but unlike many of their opposite numbers in the French Revolution, they were largely conservative in manners, morals, and faith. Their conservatism was not labeled as such because it suffused the culture and was simply taken for granted.” One needs to be careful about transposing modern categories back into the past. After all, to some extent modern Left-Right concepts come out of the maelstrom of the French Revolution itself, which post-dates the American Founding. But one of the most influential books in my own thought in attempting to understand the nature of the American Founding has been Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval. It’s a broad work, but one thing it emphasizes is that the idea of a secular republic was rather strange when the United States was assembled out of the thirteen colonies. There were a range of arrangements. The medieval Christian model was one where one particular religious institution has a monopoly on the public life of the polity. The ancient Roman one was more pluralistic, though in practice state subsidies tended to flow toward established and favored cults. In the Chinese imperial system religious sects were controlled and managed by the state, so that they were much more explicitly subordinate to the powers that be than in the medieval Christian context. But, the imperial order was still rooted in a metaphysical understanding of the social and political structure as being reflective of something deep in the natural and spiritual world.

The American federal republic was revolutionary, and not conservative, in that it marginalized the role of specific sectarian commitments in the public sphere. Today we take it for granted, but at the time it was very strange and peculiar. Though the Founders were not atheists, a disproportionate number seem to have had sympathies toward a liberal religious world-view, with some veering toward private heterodoxy. This was not rare among the elite of the period, Frederick the Great being an exemplar of a ruler who was well known to be privately irreligious. But though his Prussia moved a bit toward relative liberality in matters of religion, it remained fundamentally a Protestant domain, where Catholics suffered discrimination, and Jews were marginally tolerated. The American republic did something radically different, a rupture with the norms not just of European civilization at the time, but the standard mode of operation of complex polities since the rise of civilization itself, privatizing the gods!

Of course the Founders would never have countenanced anything like the sectarian and anti-clerical atrocities that occurred in the War in the Vendee. In this way the period of the American Founding is going to always be difficult to interpret in a modern framework because everything changed after the French Revolution. The possibilities for social upheaval, for good or bad, were qualitatively different after emergence of a French republic, and Napoleon’s wars against the older aristocratic order.

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