Chapter 28
What are the good effects of outbreeding?
I am much relieved to reach this chapter. Overwhelmingly, this is a book of heresy, that is to say it flies in the face of what is almost universally accepted, much spoken of and has been so for at least a century. This, as I trust you have already gathered, has been lurking unseen behind our history, behind our wars, behind our self-abuse when we are blaming our troubles on our own immorality instead of the other way round.
On the rare occasion when I read the reports of the Romans about themselves, two things stand out. One is their unspeakable cruelty. I’d give you some examples, but I don’t want to vomit on my keyboard. By and large, I believe the reports of this cruelty. You see the Romans, splendid engineers though they were, were quite superstitious. If we took clubs and started hitting each other over the head, there would eventually be only one survivor. You or I, observing the fray, would probably think that the survivor was the biggest or youngest or had the best club. The Romans would, I understand, think that the survivor had been chosen by the gods. Necare is Latin for kill. (Like in the Herbert motto.) Internecare means that both armies are taking terrible losses … as killing back and forth. That is what more northern folk might call a “fair fight,” a beautiful fight, a fight like they had in the old days. For the Romans it was baffling. If the gods had made up their minds, why should the winners be taking damage? We get the word “internecine” from internecare. In common usage, that means a fight within an identity group, but really it just means at the cost of great gouts of foul blood. The two correlate so regularly that the distinction means little.
So, the Romans had no reason to be coy about their cruelty; they were just doing the will of the gods, and defying divine orders has never seemed like a good idea for very long.
But when the Romans start to describe how naughty this person or that person was, particularly when the report follows “event” by many years so that rumors have had time to grow and ripen, they seem to blame all misfortune upon scandalous behavior among their leaders. My sense is that the Romans were very puritanical, easily shamed, wishing for a nice orderly society. They blamed all their ills on themselves; they had misbehaved in the eyes of the gods and now were being punished. If you don’t like this formulation, that’s fine with me. Nothing much hangs from it.
But the good things about outbreeding, about being far out to the right on the Sibly curve and reaching farther, that oh my patient reader, has given us the treasures of civilization. I suppose I am about as sentimental as anybody about some putative “good old day” among the Minoans or in the Balkan peninsula, where there were no wars. There was advanced urbanization and civil peace. But alas, splendid though these exceptional places were, it seems pretty clear people were doing each other in since long before. The proportion of ancient skulls that have been crushed into by a weapon make that clear. Bottom line: if people are willing to marry far to the right along the Sibly curve, you can have your civilization.
Civilization and agriculture seem to go hand in hand most of the time. Compare the life of a person living in a very early city with the life of a hunter/gatherer several miles away. Who works harder? The person farming near the city or providing a public service like maintaining an irrigation system or carrying on some enterprise of his own, probably is working or ready to work every waking hour. The hunter/gatherer is an over-achiever if he puts in more than a couple or three hours in an average week.
But the civilized person has a home. For a young person, this is great. It means that some things can be kept. The tribe is not going to up stakes and leave all possessions save a few rags and tools behind. For a child, the chance to keep things, however little or crude, means a chance to envision a world with a degree of permanence. A tiny toy, there for play day after day, year after year means the world can last and he or she, the child, can envision living a very long time and feel comfortable to make plans that might work out over years. The advantages of living in a community that looks to a future are obvious.
At the other end of life, for the very old or sick or both, the home has a less abstract advantage. Out there in the bush, periodically the tribe exhausts the local neighborhood and must move. There is no choice about it and alas no long-term planning. That’s urban stuff. So, anybody too decrepit to join the long march to the new stamping ground must be left behind. For those abandoned, it is only a death sentence. But for the others, well talk about “survivors’ remorse.” That term generally applies to a terrible event involving many victims and few survivors mostly on the basis of luck. The survivors tend to ask, why me? In this case, the survivors must think, “When will it happen to me?”
Between early and final years, having a place is still a splendid thing. It need not be, in fact usually is not I’d say, a detached dwelling. It might be just a bedroll in the corner of a room. But if a person can keep a few possessions in the roll, much of the glory of civilization has been won. There will be people who will make great big clay pots. If you had one, you could put olive oil in it, which would last for years. You could, if you sealed it properly, put in dried grain that would last most of the year. And of course, if my understanding of the record is right, no sooner do you settle down to agriculture than something gets fermented.
When my father was younger than I am now, he told me of looking out into the yard and seeing a blue jay on a clothes line. As my father watched, the jay fell off the line and landed with a sickening splat on the ground. Then it got up and flew back to the line. This performance repeated several times. While on the line, the bird would fluff its feathers and whimper to itself. There was a bush laden with overripe berries in the yard, and the bird had been feasting on fermented, alcohol rich berries. My father’s diagnosis was, “Maudlin drunk.”
I’m sure our durable hunter/gatherer ancestors ran across a wild berry fermented by wild yeast and some may have enjoyed it, but it would not have been an every day thing. On the other hand, an urbanized society would have had jars of grain or grapes in every house – big jars. Gallons and gallons. Of course, they would have fermented (it might have been necessary to moisten and then grind the grain, but it was going to be ground anyway) and the result was obviously quite drinkable beer and wine.
The availability of almost unlimited fermented drink inevitably led to some new social events. For one thing, diluted alcohol is said to be safer to drink than unprocessed water in a city. This was particularly important for children, who dehydrate faster than do adults. When my big brother was an infant, my mother told the doctor that he was constipated and asked what to do. He said, “Thank your lucky stars.” Diarrhea was a killer in a country near here during times remembered by a writer at this desk. Obviously, in ancient times fertility was a major issue. Ceramics was not invented so we could have reusable dishes; it was invented so we could make little stylized figurines of young women. I imagine there was some sort of “sympathetic magic” conjured up in minds. There were so many of these little idols that I even have one myself. So, having babies was, again and again, an issue of the first importance in those days. But I have never seen an account of an idol to the Formed Stool God, which would have made more sense, considering the toll of diarrhea. So, let’s hear it for beer.
Drinkable stuff in large quantities meant people could flock in numbers limited only by safe space. As a child I purely loved being in a happy crowd. I have friends to this day who hate any kind of crowd. Either way, it would be a social event quite unavailable in a village.
Then there is the private drink, of little consequence except possibly being pleasant, and the private drunk, which would have meant another previously unknown social situation. There is more than one kind of drunk: maudlin, fighting, laughing, sleepy, singing and I’m sure you know more. I imagine our first sodden ancestors bore their new experience with no better grace than did my father’s jay bird. It would have taken a long time for the down side of alcohol to be covered by social progress. Then somebody invented the automobile, and drunks started taking us out with an efficiency such that we invented a whole new kind of witch hunt.
In a village, music would generally have been the creation of a single artist. I have a very charming picture on the back cover of a Walt Kelly book about Pogo. In the sketch, which hides great sophistication under an innocent veneer, the little opossum is playing a single stringed instrument and is being interfered with by a little bird, the musician’s face reflecting both amusement and frustration. Now there is village music.
But big cities rejoice in “massed bands.” There are from ancient times pictures of parades, including ranks of harpists, playing harps shaped rather like sailboats. One of my dear music teachers went to Burma (still so called in those halcyon times) and studied the Burmese harp. She showed one to me once. Her husband, a physics professor, undertook the study of the acoustics of the contraption while she learned the music. One thing she learned was that there were at least two schools of Burmese harp music, and if you met a master of one school you must never admit you have ever heard of the other school. As for the acoustics, I took home one lesson. Even in a quite living room you could not hear the music without holding your breath. But there in ancient Sumer marched harpists and with identical instruments, row on row as well as other kinds of music makers.
Then there are modern very tall buildings, the apotheosis of architecture. Pretty much the tallest top out somewhere short of three thousand feet. Now back when the Empire State building was the tallest, it was not hard to see why very tall buildings are so ugly. It was just a big matchbox. Same pretty much holds for the Chrysler Building but not quite so bad. Of course, it was all political. Show me pollical architecture and I’ll show you an ugly edifice. There may have been a little softening of the politics, but the original World Trade Center turned that right around. It was black matchboxes instead of a white one.
The newest ones, and I leave it to you to decide whether they are the politics of despair, do show significant amounts of effort. Somebody tried to make them look nice. But all in vain. All I get out of the tallest few is a celebration of the insignificance of the two footed animal. So how tall is too tall?
We have an expression in medicine called the “LD50.” That means the amount of a chemical it would take to kill have the people exposed. The LD50 of a fall onto a hard surface is about forty feet. So, you should never put up a building that high. Maybe thirty feet would be a good limit. A lot of youngish people don’t really mind walking up a couple flights of stars. There might be an inviting bannister or two. Sometimes ambition to build high outstrips preparation: Chicago tower abandoned (1429) Abandoned - Chicago Spire - YouTube
Yes, I know. I’m trying to think of treasures of civilization we can all agree are good, and I’m low-rating one of my own examples. But if you happen to like skyscrapers, then I’m sure you have lots of company. Besides, short of brute height there are twisty looking buildings in greater variety than you could easily remember.
Then there are books. I guess the time of books was from the first to the twentieth century. Now, well, we are so rich as a culture, we can have all the books we want. It contrasts with the possibly truish story of the bishop who entered the library in Glastonbury and fainted at the sight of all the books. I should be most desolate at the thought of not having them around, even though I read them mostly supine on the couch, so the limit of my erudition is the strength of the little finger of my left hand. It is odd to me that the inventors were making a great effort to provide us with the ability to control our cyber resources by voice, and in the event most of us seem to spend our time texting when it would be quicker just to speak on the same cell phone.
One of the regular features on an urban society, which I take to mean a situation of rampant outbreeding, is astronomy. Some writers assert that astronomers were needed to tell farmers when to plant. That’s absurd on the face of it. Lifetime farmers know perfectly well when to plant, and it’s not just a matter of the celestial clock. You have to have some food in order to hire people to sit around and watch the night sky. One early example of astronomy was a scapula that was found from stone age times; somebody had scratched on the surface little outlines of the moon in sequence showing phases. When he/she got to the edge, the direction of the sequence changed. There may be strange and wonderful things to be learned by keeping track of the phases of the moon, but when to plant ain’t one of them. Of course, it doesn’t need a lot of people and doesn’t need a lot of outbreeding urbanity to scratch a bone. But as cooperative communities have enlarged, we now do a lot more sky watching. It is high status work. Our experts keep track of observations utterly beyond the ken of anyone a few centuries ago.
Of course, it’s all hot air. No astronomer from the time of ancient Sumer down to the present decade has ever come up with anything of practical value. Yet they are high status and well paid, not to mention well equipped. It’s just a quirk of the human brain. So be it. If we all want to know somebody is checking out a sky we really can’t reach, then they’ll do their least bad work if they get money, real money, the kind of money you can pile up if you are ignorant or crazy or stupid enough to engage in serious outbreeding.
Another advantage of rampant outbreeding is two bladed. There will be greater access to a variety of goods and services. Imagine some little band in a natural paradise. With moderate effort, they can catch fish and get caviar, kill birds and edible mammals, pick fruits and berries, pull roots and raise livestock and field crops. Of course, not everything will be available at every time of year, so there will always be the fun of looking forward to the next season. Outbreeding, and the enhanced marketing this permits, means that there will be more variety in any one season until by now we have just about everything available on just about every day. Reminds one of the early days of the Rays baseball team; a guy calls the field and asks when the game starts, and the reply is another question, “When can you get here?”
Or suppose instead of food, you are looking for an occasional gift. There might be somebody in the world doing images of owls made of pinecones. That might be something you could use, maybe because of a standing family joke. But the chances are quite low that the artist is not in communication with you. On the other hand, today there is an artist in Brazil cranking out owl impressions at a virtually industrial rate. Want an owl image? You can get it.
And of course, it isn’t just frivolous things. Food, clothing and home improvements follow along the same commercial routes. Don’t blame me if almost everything you see in a gift store makes you cringe. If you think you can do better, have at it, and the world is your oyster.
Yes, the supplier as well as the buyer finds advantage in the large commercial/social/genetic pool. That owl creating genius in Brazil need not worry that everybody in town has an owl he got as a gift, that the mice have become utterly fearless and that everybody in town is bored to exasperation with his boasting about how good his owls are. The world beckons.
Then there are services. Want your hovel swept out? Somewhere there is a village with a sweeper, but you can’t find it. The big population lets you hire somebody, if you are rash enough to let a stranger in among your treasures, and somebody might invent the vacuum cleaner.
In any little community there will be a pecking order. Somebody will be more persuasive than most and people will tend to follow that person’s suggestions. And the big man/woman knows exactly who you are, what you can be wheedled into, and how best to manipulate you. In the big outbreeding social pool, you are anonymous. The leaders, the powers, have to guess about you. Then they must tailor their propaganda for this non-existent person. They often do such a wretched job of it that your intelligence is insulted.
To a first approximation, then the central power doesn’t know who you are. I am reminded of a sally of wit in Punch magazine, back in the day. They were the humor magazine’s list of nautical rules of the road. One was, “Continents have right of way over supertankers. … This rule is being increasingly ignored.” Authorities have cameras, pattern recognition, computerized searches and so forth that give them a clue about your whereabouts. Who pays for it? Well, you do of course.
And no, it’s not new. Ancient Rome, loathsome though they were, had “talking statues.” People could gather near a designated statue and chat or make speeches. Easy enough it was for the government to place soldiers at the statues and arrest anybody whose words smelled of sedition. And any group hanging out on a street corner not designated was considered subversive for that fact alone.
We don’t even have talking statues. Attempt to communicate by normal means as you would about family matters, “social media” they call it, and you don’t even get picked up by a soldier after the fact. Some arcane computer program, “algorithm” being the jargon, will sniff you out. Far as I know, not one of those algorithms has had its source code made public. At least you could know more or less the capabilities of a Roman soldier at a talking statue. I’ll bet speaking in code became a highly developed art form under those circumstances. My how the conspiracy theories must have thrived. But no problem for the bosses. They could torture and kill plebs like you and me with little inconvenience.