Chapter 24
What are good effects of inbreeding?
Personal happiness.
Opposable thumbs, complex clotting systems and immune defenses are all very well and good, but selection in higher organisms also depends on behavioral modification. Eating, staying warm and resting in humans increase the chances of survival, so when one has been deprived, achieving them is rewarded with a degree of happiness. Even in the absence of hard numbers, it seems reasonable to believe that living in a community that is at or near the point of population repose, with a slight tendency toward inbreeding, should make a human happy. This flies in the face of contemporary western culture, where reveling in the delights of urban existence – and I do not deny such delights abound – seems the only way to have a meaningful existence.
Actually, there are some softer numbers. Someone I totally trust told me that while he was at Princeton University, he made occasion to look at some questionnaires that had been returned by alumni. It seemed to him that graduates who had gone to live in the South were happier than those who had gone north. And those who lived in small towns were happier than those who lived in cities.
This is no surprise. Cities, so far as I know, never produce enough babies to sustain a population. They simply must recruit or die. On the face of it, and it would be my bet, status is the lure. Sure, cities have provided for the indigent; they did that in ancient Rome. But bringing in talented people requires more than subsistence. These guys are unlikely to starve. So there has to be the lure of status.
Look around a big modern city, and the obvious thing will be the tall buildings. To a lot of people, anybody who must live and work in tall buildings is a loser. Your typical talking head will not mention it, so you may never have heard, but farmers used to regard town folk with utter contempt. On a farm you could raise food and eat, but in town you ate only if somebody else helped you – you know, like by buying produce, trucking stuff around, running a shop – and they were under no compulsion do so. If land opened up, they could move onto a farm and live like proper people. Against such prejudice, the lure of status has to be mighty strong.
George Washington Carver announced the principle, “Live at home.” The ideal life was to have a little farm, where in return for work you could flourish. When asked whether there was anything he wanted, he asked for a diamond. When he got a diamond stick pin, he prized the gem out and put it in his mineral collection. Minerals were an interest for him since you can’t raise them yourself.
My impression is that crime is less common in a tight little rural community than in a big city. You feel safer among people you know. I fear this may be a bit of a poisoned pumpkin, though. Most people who get murdered already know the murderer. But once I was on a canoeing trip. We stopped near a bridge for lunch and fell to chatting with the locals. They warned us about the next town. Something had been stolen from a party of canoeists so we should be careful. It turned out that the crime had been committed more than five years before. Our acquaintances clearly had long memories and clearly there were not a lot of thefts to remember.
In the movie “Witness,” there is a dramatization of a little town rallying in support of a friend. I was once told that a visitor to the African countryside heard a drum being beat in a repeating pattern. In the next town another drum was sounding out the same way. He asked his guide what it meant. The guide replied, “The drum is saying, ‘Where will he play it?’” in a tone suggesting no further explanation was needed. When pressed, the guide explained that a drum had been stolen. Word had already got around, but they were putting in some time passing the message back and forth. It probably had an intended depressing emotional effect on the perpetrator, and probably there was not a theft in the region every day.
I have it on good authority, although with no reference, that there was group of indigenous people in the Far West, who shared a language. They lived in tiny groups of shelters and went about the business of surviving. The groups were associated each with a band of groups. The band would have a designation such as, “By the waterfall,” or “Near the tall trees.” So, the band had both a specific population, the component groups, and a specific location. It was the band which provided the principle identity for the people. They had little interest in other bands and were rather indifferent to difference between groups. A band would include maybe sixty nuclear families.
The Westermark effect, which declares that children who grow up up together are unlikely to fall in love and start a family, is dealt with deftly. The children in the little groups will not have married each other, but they are more likely than not to have fallen in love with an appropriate person from another group but still the same band.
It was as if they had read this book taken it to heart, this in contrast with editors who lost interest from the title alone. Strictly speaking, this is not inbreeding, but I bring it up here. So far as I can tell, this was a population in fertility repose. If anybody looks for an ideal population size, sixty would be a good place to start. Of course, getting there would still remain quite a challenge.
My guess is that each of those bands was virtually immortal, able to survive for geological time spans and able to survive geologic changes as well as climate changes. All they needed was to be left alone. Alas this was not to be. They lay in the path of the powerful and better armed expansion of Europeans, driven by fiercely elevated fertility, caused of course by the fact that each wave of pioneers was a set of subsets of the prior wave, pushing the fertility far to the left and up on the Sibly curve. So long as that continued, yes it played out as “good” for the Europeans, provided you adopt a sympathetic definition of good. Of course, applied in ignorance, the curve only lasted as long as the geography permitted. Then the exogenous people began to move into cities, relieving a degree of pressure on the indigenous people. How it will work out in the long run, like Robert Burns’ ploughman I can only guess and fear.
There were bright moments, too. The Time Team, a program I much enjoy, once excavated a Bronze Age cemetery. A cemetery is not where you think of going for bright, refreshing experiences. It is inherently sad.
But the funeral can provide a moment for the expression of tenderness toward the diseased. Lavish grave goods and an imposing tomb might be considered as such. But they can also be interpreted as a show of wealth and status, that abiding lure for humans. But sometimes that is not the case. We buried my father in a suit of mine, he having been too modest to have one quite so presentable, and I suppose that would be considered a mark of status. But his unseen belt buckle was silver, made by a Navaho craftsman over fifty years before when my father took a trip out West. Dismiss looting the grave from your mind. After fifty years of daily wear its market value would be zilch. It only lasted because it was used with infinite care; it was the care that we were commemorating, not the silver.
One Christmas, when I was the only family member who visited my mother, I decided to have a virtual crowd and, on the Eve, I slipped downstairs and set up my lifetime collection of toy, plush, cotton-stuffed animals; each had a story behind it and a gift in front of it. So, my mother entered the room on the Morning, and said, “Oh how nice. Are they all for me?” Go ahead. Try to say no to that one.
What she did was, every time a child came by, the child would receive a present of a doll. One she kept to the grave. It was a grey teddy bear, soft, lush and handsome as could be. Now decades later, it is still in the crook of her arm. It’s against the law, of course, but I hope the statute of limitations has run out.
During the Time Team excavation, they discovered a grave of a woman who died near thirty. The bones indicated she had been placed on her side, hands gently cupped one in the other and placed just in front of her mouth. The said she had been covered with something, I think with the intimation it might have been a fabric. I prefer to think it was a soft fur. Greatly though I like and admire the Time Team, I could not do that kind of work. When somebody has cared about something, so far as feasible I would prefer it to be preserved forever, be it mortal remains or a statue or whatever. If you don’t like the past, I imagine the future is going to hate you. A general respect for feelings is one of the things I try to have.
Elsewhere in the cemetery, there was a grave with two boys of roughly the same age as each other. They seemed to have died so close to each other in time that it was likely they were best friends. One had been cremated but the other not, perhaps a reflection of status, but that had not kept them from being pals.
Thousands of years later and thousands of miles away there was a great city. No report of the metropolis has come to us. History is silent. On an evil day, the city was besieged, defeated and burned to the ground. Excavation found two skeletons, an adolescent boy and a somewhat older girl or woman, that lie where oxygen starvation killed them. The female is curled up on her side facing toward him with cupped hands near her mouth in haunting reflection of the woman in the Time Team excavation. The lad is dressed in elaborate costume suggesting stratospheric status. He lies on his back with one arm around her in comforting gesture. The other arm is akimbo with fist on hip. The pose seems to say, there where the couple now lie in a museum in Philadelphia, “There, there. I’m here. Now be quiet so they don’t find us.” Grief, affection and prudence remain for the world to see. Yes, it was against a background of violence, but human emotions come through.
Returning to much loved Time Team, they excavated a part of a very modest village. The entire area excavated was maybe the size of a generous suburban lot or two. Their work demonstrated that people had been smelting iron. With the aid of a different show, one could possibly be persuaded that one could do it oneself. Making the furnace or containers might be a problem. But these enterprising folk went on to make steel. And it was steel of extraordinarily high quality. Now that would be beyond me. In fact, figuring out how to do it would be a monumental challenge. And figuring out that pursuing the process would have been even more impressive.
The making of steel did not go on long. Transportation costs rose and the work was taken over by the city of Sheffield. You can get fine steel in great quantities there. You might consider getting steel from China – they make a lot of it – but their coal and iron ore sources are not happy nowadays.
On the face of it, making fine steel was developed by geniuses in a little village. Sheffield steel works was developed by more pedestrian brains that simply used the technique and applied it on a large-scale, using purchasing, marketing and transportation routines established long before. Going one more step down the rabbit hole, I’d like to mention that temperature was a key part of the process. Lacking anything like modern equipment that could measure temperatures in the right range, they relied on the color of the hot metal. And color, they say, is far better seen by women than by men. If they were using color, then it stands to reason they were including women among the band of geniuses.
Consider the statement: religion serves both spiritual and ritual needs. You are most welcome to agree or disagree as you please, but be ready for me to use it as a kickoff for discussion. If you are so outraged by it, then I fear the remainder of this chapter is not for you, and you would do better to move to the next chapter.
Spiritual value is not to my knowledge scientifically demonstrated but appears to be nigh universal. Let me digress a couple of levels. You may find what I am about to suggest reminiscent of the teachings of one David Icke, who has written a book, All You Ever Needed to Know but Were Never Told, and who often appears on my YouTube feed. My understanding is that he envisions the universe as having multiple planes vibrating at different frequencies, with a spiritual overlay at each frequency.
Second level of digression: this was not the first time I heard that. In the wonderful movie “Friendly Persuasion,” the passionate father of a Quaker family has brought his children to a fair, where the father wanders into a stall selling musical instruments. The salesman hurries over and offers to help, but the Quaker answers that his religion teaches that music is evil. Slick as an otter, the salesman replies that it all depends on the music. “This is an organ. Listen to one note and the soul rises upward. … This is a banjo. Listen to one note and …” Both the men look at the ground and look very sad. He makes his sale.
Since the planes vibrate at different frequencies, they do not interact to any great degree, as a tuning fork set for F will not exchange much energy with a tuning fork set for G. However, I get a little curious about overtones. Strike a tight string and expect to hear a tone. Gently touch the exact center and you should hear a tone an octave higher, the first overtone. So, if the fourth overtone of one string exactly matches the fifth overtone of another, should they not interact? And would the same thing hold for different planes or reality? But my purpose is not to criticize Icke nor to claim to be able to present him fairly. My interest is that after a line of reasoning, he asserts that we are all the same consciousness, experiencing reality from different perspectives.
So, let me see if I can arrive at the same conclusion along my own line of logic. Standard modern cosmology holds that the universe began with a Big Bang, when starting at the size of a geometric point or so it suddenly began expanding and continues to do so to this day. Now it seems to me this is preposterous. In that first moment, and indeed for long thereafter, the universe would have been a Black Hole, a region that is so dense and has such strong surface gravity that the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light so nothing, not even light, can ever escape.
This rather mystical idea seems to be very close to the words, “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, “Let there be light: and there was light.” Some mental lightweight tried to sidestep the Black Hole problem by inviting in an oscillating universe going: BigBangBigCrunchBigBangBigCrunch … thus multiplying a few impossibilities by infinity. I think the eternal cycle probably came from an Eastern religion.
It gets worse. The early universe would have been nothing but light. And light must remain light until it interacts with ordinary matter, that is to say until it is “observed.” Nobody has even seen fit to explain how matter emerged or even to admit there is a problem. But scripture slaps a bandage on without hesitation:
“And God saw the light.” Hmm.
H. P. Lovecraft as a youth decided he believed in “Scientific Atheism,” that science can explain all. We have already seen that this is not the case. I don’t think there is evidence that Lovecraft’s assumption drove him mad, but he certainly was able to portray madness with the best of them.
Oh, it gets worse still – lots worse.
There was a man, Alan Turing, of monumental intelligence. He was a key figure in the allied ability to read German secret codes during WW II. His angle was to use a computer to simulate messages. The Germans changed the key regularly but it took a while for them to realize that ending every letter with “Heil Hitler” was not a good idea.
Turing did a thought experiment envisioning a paper tape with means to read, write and erase under instructions. The tape referred to a long loop of paper tape they were using during their code breaking. I dare say occasionally it would fail and fall as confetti. Turing proved that this imaginary device could do anything any computer would ever be able to do. Moreover, he proved that no computer could ever do abstract reasoning. Try it: take eight and subtract two again and again; will you reach zero? Of course. Now try starting with seven. Answer, I’m sure you know will be no. You will go right past zero and keep going. There; you just did abstract reasoning. But a computer cannot. It can only run the program, and of course it can never come up with an answer. Oh, you can teach it to check for such skullduggery, but it cannot figure it out on its own.
Anything science can do, record a picture of an animal, figure out where a planet will be at some moment, sift through masses of data seeking the Higgs boson, can be done by a computer. So, from a scientific standpoint abstract reasoning cannot exist. But you just did it.
Adding to your woes, remember that the universe cannot have started with a Big Bang, but here it is. Ah, but it could end at a sub microscopic black hole. So how can we make a universe? I’ll need three things. Lend me a neutron. Now I’ll need a lot of empty space. I release the neutron into the space, where it undergoes peregrination, traveling erratically. It will go forward and backward in time. There will be places where it spends so much time that the accumulated gravity is substantial and time runs one way. And there will be places in between where gravity pulls outward and time runs the other way. Sometimes the neutron will decay into proton and electron and sometimes those two will combine to form a neutron. From time to time an accumulation gets started, but the mass is electrically charged or the mass is misshapen or spinning and falls apart. By miraculous coincidence, eventually the neutron gets right back to where it started, going the same direction and speed, so I can give it back to you. And now we know why all neutrons are alike; it’s all the same neutron.
Within this alarming chaos of time and space one particular mass, collection of summated neutron presence, is just right; perfectly spherical, uncharged, non-spinning and made of ordinary matter instead of anti-matter, which of course is just matter traveling in the opposite direction in time. Whether that’s true or not, little or none is in our sphere. The sphere begins to collapse and soon the edges are traveling inward at the speed of light. Now, as well as no light leaving, no light can enter the sphere or at least no light can enter and interact with the contents, and a veil is drawn over the mind-destroying chaos.
You might enter, by means impossible, this sphere, whereupon you would see that order is decreasing as you go one direction in time and increasing in the other direction. The bigger size has more room, requiring more information to locate a ponderable object, so the smaller size cannot specify it. Now the experts maintain that the bigger size is cooler, and that makes up for the discrepancy. But if you take a container of gas, the most likely temperature for any one atom is absolute zero. Logically, then, if location depends on temperature alone, any sealed container should have its contents boiling off to be randomly placed in the universe, which is mostly hard vacuum. This is not observed, so I remain with the contention that the bigger sphere is unspecified by the smaller, disorder increases and what you would call the future is in the direction of the larger sphere. The whole thing would seem rather familiar.
But I need one more thing to complete the replica universe. I need a thing that can engage in abstract reasoning. I have not the foggiest idea what that might be, but I only need one. Like the neutron, it will have bounded in and out so that there might be any number reflecting upon issues. They are all alike because like the neutron there is only one thing. That is the simplest explanation, and according to the principle of Occam’s Razor, that’s a good first guess.
You might call this thing a soul or spirit. Anything else would be just a quibble.
What to make of this soul and what might nurture it I have no clue. Don’t worry. It’s called a religion, and there are plenty of people who would be happy to give you ideas. Personally, I think that love and loving have much to do with an improving soul. There is a beautiful picture by Gustav Doré inspired by Edgar Allan Poe: a lad has dozed over a book, and his girlfriend is looking at him.
According to this formulation the universe did not begin as a Big Bang and continue forever growing and cooling. It began with the veil over chaos and will end with the final cinder. The way we ordinarily understand time, it will so end, and then the veil is lifted. Death will be no defense, since it is the workings of the great sphere that keep you dead. We shall all have to face it. You might consider the nurturing of your soul while you can understand a bit of it.
That is as far as I can take the spiritual aspect of religion. What is also important here is the ritual aspect.
Rituals bind communities together. Consider a ball game as a ritual. The ritual has expected support from a community, in this case perhaps a great city. Nothing is actually accomplished by the event. There are prescribed clothes for various participants. There are rules governing what people do during the event/ritual/game. There is intense emotional engagement by the people/congregation/fans. The event recurs at regular intervals.
When I was younger, the town was free from hostility between groups, whether “racial,” ethnic or religious. In this enviable environment the Methodists and Presbyterians, during the lazy summer months, would have union services. One Sunday night they’d all gather at one church and the next week at another. Preacher Gordon, the Presbyterian minister said, “It halves your work and doubles your congregation.” The hymnals were different, but who memorizes a hymnal? There were variances in the pattern of the services, but as docile congregants we were accustomed simply to doing as we were told. The trigger came with the Lord’s Prayer, which everybody memorized. The difference was that where the Presbyterians said, “Debts,” the Methodists said, “Trespasses.” Until then, a casual observer could have no idea which person was from which church. But when the litmus word came, and you were a Methodist visitor you sounded like a nest of snakes, and everybody knew.
So, ritual binds the individual and assures the identity of the flock. If, far less expensively, this same dynamic is playing out a modest subsistence village, the ritual binds the members. On the face of it, this is of value. If there are two such villages, and members from one move to the other and members of the other move contrariwise, everybody loses. The migrant must learn names and reputations. The reputation of the migrant cannot be assessed, but the name needs to be learned. Local lore, like where the good honey trees are and what to plant where and when, will be different. It’s a waste of energy and time all around. So, when the ritual comes up and the newcomer is at a loss, one must expect that person would return unless bad behavior forbad it, and in that case no village needs such a person anyway.
Decades ago, I went to the Methodist Church Camp in Leesburg. My brother had gone there and came back with such glowing reports that I really wanted to go when my age was right. Actually, glowing reports have always been a specialty of his. The camp lay on the eat side of Lake Griffin. There was outdoor seating looking toward the sunset and a chapel with windows looking the same direction. The girl who played the organ did so barefoot. Be still my heart. There were a North Camp and a South Camp. My cabin was among those in North Camp.
At one time we got a message from South Camp challenging us “Little Yankee Doodle Dandies” to a ball game. In the event, I played for (poorly) and cheered for (always had that voice) the Yankees. Afterward one of the boys from South Camp came to me in tears and told me how unhappy he was that we were cheering for the North. I cannot imagine what it cost him; boys don’t like to be seen crying. I reassured him that there were probably as many Southerners in North Camp as South, we had not chosen our own name and I loved the South as much as he did. This appeared to comfort him, and in the innocence, I have now lost, I dismissed it.
But were I cursed with reliving, I would go to the cabin counselors one by one and inquire whether this game was repeated each week. If the consensus was positive, I would have concluded that the camp director was playing globalist games forcing us to loosen our local identity. I would have gone straight to him and said he had reduced at least one of the young people entrusted to his care into tears with his cruel agenda. Since he lived in the South and had Southern neighbors and was betraying his trust, he obviously hated his neighbors. Maybe the pay was good, but he was no Christian.
It was not beneath him. He played with daylight time and standard time in a way that cheated his staff out of an hour of unpaid work every week. And then there was a likeable, bright, good tempered medical student from Singapore. He played the guitar as well as I ever could (faint praise) and he was supported in his studies by the church and specifically the camp. It never crossed my mind that there might be Americans who would have been happy to go to medical school if they could have afforded it.
So yes, rituals bind communities and thus benefit them. Of course, that is all without even mentioning fertility. Rituals bring people of the community together, and this promotes fertility, upon which survival of the community absolutely depends.
Mormons, or Latter Day Saints if you prefer, have a strong sense of communality. Their teachings seem agreeable, although they have supported polygamy in the past, which is a sticking point for some folks. I am no expert here, but compare them with the Amish.
The Amish also have a strong sense of communality. Their teachings are again agreeable. Years ago, a storm destroyed a lot of homes in Chicago, far more than local contractors could have replaced for a long time. Amish came in large numbers and explained they would rebuild if only the materials were supplied. When the delighted owners offered to pay, the Amish declined. “It’s just what we do.” Amish churches are modest and beautiful. I often try to antagonize friends by saying that the only beautiful buildings in America – the Capitol, the White House, Mount Vernon, Monticello and a number of Southern Mansions – were built by slaves. In honesty I should have conceded that Amish churches are beautiful. By contrast, Mormon churches, at least the major ones, are heroic, sky-reaching, bold in verticals and pure white. They, too, are beautiful. Mormons read voraciously and rejoice in music. Amish have no use for music and read little beyond scripture. But they share in that they both have sturdy growth. They are doing something right.
When two populations collide, the one with the greater numbers have an advantage, other things being equal. But once it went the other way. The Romans had conquered everything west of the Rhine and a fair-sized colonys’ worth beyond the Rhine. In the year nine, there had been no uprising or other problem for ten years. It seemed like a reasonable place to put a man named Varus, who was a lawyer with family connections but with little spectacular to claim as accomplishments.
Varus took three of Rome’s nineteen legions on an expedition beyond the colony to see if the area of control could be extended. But the suppressed Germanic people were not happy with Roman laws and Roman taxes; they were biding their time and doing their homework. The legions were supported by Germanic cavalry led by a chief named Arminius, or Hermann if you will. He had been raised in Rome in the expectation that being so taught he would be a loyal servant. He knew Roman tactics and their weaknesses. He had been on campaigns, none that had gone against Rome, but Hermann was aware that sometimes the outcome was close.
At summer’s end, Varus dismissed the auxiliaries and took his legions back toward the Rhine and winter quarters. Hermann, of the Chenusci tribe, had persuaded other tribes to support him, and at a critical moment he sent one piece of disinformation to Varus; there was an uprising in the north. Varus responded to this first threat in ten years and turned his legions onto the most direct road to the non-existent rebellion. It was also, by Hermann’s design, through the thickest part of German forest, the Teutoburg.
Once somebody asked Sergeant York, if you had a lot of people to feed and found in the woods a line of turkeys walking, which would you shoot first? He said the last one. Similarly, Hermann began to attack the mighty column at or near the back. Marching legions tend to get broken up. While the back of the column was being slaughtered, the rest went on as oblivious as turkeys.
Eventually the vanguard reached the worst stretch of the worst road in all the Germanic land. There was impenetrable forest on one side and within a bowshot impenetrable marsh on the other. Hermann had improved the funnel with an offensive field fortification. This had never been done before. The leaders were defeated, and the highest officers committed suicide so no order could be given to turn back. The Romans just kept coming. I don’t know if there were any survivors from the legion, but one way or the other Rome soon learned of their defeat.
We hear often enough of the “Pax Romana,” a period of peace while Rome controlled everything. But when I read over it in detail, Rome was engaged in warfare just about constantly, the only exception being the reign of Augustus Caesar. The battle came during his reign. So much for any Pax Romana. OK, OK, it was just one day. Otherwise, there was peace under Augustus.
It took six years before Romans visited the battlefield and gathered bones. They left mass grave after mass graves for miles.
This left Hermann with a couple of questions. He could march on Rome to burn it, knowing there was not a legion in the way. He declined to risk overreach. The other question was whether to unite his alliance into a single nation. We have no record, but since he was assassinated some twelve years later, I suspect he wanted to do so, and at least somebody thought that defeating the Roman Empire did not accomplish that much if they just made their own.
The history I read to the rather ironic view that although the Romans, who were never able to replace those legions, lost, the real losers were the Germanic people. They won their freedom but they lost the blessings of civilization. Maybe like me you are thinking: slavery, blood sports, crucifixion, tying people to stakes and burning them alive to light garden parties, endless wars, and heavy taxation. Not so much to give up for your freedom.
They went on to say that the day of triumph caused a rift in Europe that led to wars down to the present when the European Union is trying to “heal” the wound. Maybe you are thinking it’s just another attempt to turn around that day late in the year nine.
Alas, could I but have an evening with Hermann. I could show how uniting the tribes was fine when it came to defense or trade, but uniting them for the purpose of mating was suicide. Maybe if he had taken that tack, he would not have been murdered and his tribes would have survived instead of being in the terrible demographic declined they are now cursed with. Maybe if the world took that tack the human species might survive past the end of this century.