"You still hear people say that the old South will rise again, but I doubt it has a chance unless disease prevalence goes up dramatically." R. Thornhill
Political Emergence
The fundamental energy dynamics of a human cell and the aggregations we call bodies to scale up into all the psychological and social dynamics we observe and participate in. Take democracy: modern democracy seems to have naturally emerged through the middle ages from various forms of councils, with monarchs often requiring their nobility to determine some laws and a tax rate. If we look at the recent past in the west, it might seem like a trajectory of accumulated wisdom, but I think that is mostly the wrong way to see democracy emerge.
The Iroquois nation had its own model of representative government, and the founding fathers of the United States incorporated some of the elements into the design of our government. It turns out the Iriquoi tradition dates back to around 1200 AD. Given the complete separation of social histories, we need to jettison the idea that the specific lineage of ideas about government is of much or any importance. The emergence or re-emergence of democracy is borne less from the accumulation and spread of the ideas than from the state of the bodies considering and refining those ideas. Otherwise, where did the Iroquois model come from, where did the Greek model come from and how does it come and go? At some point, it always comes from the vacuum of creativity aimed at trying to produce social harmony. The monarch’s outsourcing a tax rate to their council was better thinking about what would preserve stability...it was more enlightened self-interest. That insight comes from a change in material physiological circumstances, which favor a predisposition to peace and shared prosperity. It takes a lot of mental and emotional capacity to realize the benefits of sharing power and responsibility.
Democracy and other governance structures are not typically seen as within the scope of biology, yet they are composed of bodies. Governance structures can, and I think, should be seen as emergent biological phenomena which require an appropriate population and density with high enough physiological health and intelligence. Upon those foundations, those who can intellectually and emotionally afford to begin considering various peaceful means of arbitrating political decisions, including succession planning for society's leaders.
The American Revolution had embedded biological foundations. By 1776 North American populations had higher living standards than contemporary Europeans. During the early colonial period, the British male height averaged 5’5’’ inches, while Native American men on the eastern seaboard were around 5’8” feet tall. As the new settlers expanded for a few generations, they also got healthier and taller. At the time of the American Revolution, men’s average height had grown to 5ft 8in while the British male height remained at 5’5”. With their nutritional and energetic abundance, the fertility of American families at seven children per couple also outstripped England, which had (only) 5 children per couple. My point with all this is that with improved conditions came a significant enough change in attitude towards increasing rights and liberties for a broader population. The ideas encountering those minds also came from the metabolically enhanced and caffeinated minds exchanging ideas and ideals in the European salons. Yes, the institutions need to be discovered or invented, but there is a requisite capacity of minds for generating and appreciating them. The condition of the bodies of society are foundational.
Parasite Stress Theory
A strong candidate for the most critical factor driving the expression of personality and, thus, political preferences is stress, and in particular, stressors that affect the perceived susceptibility to disease. The parasite-stress theory of values was defined by evolutionary biologist, Professor (Emeritus) Randy Thornhill. Regional variations in pathogen load are the ultimate cause of population-based personality shifts and the political regimes that emerge from such personalities. The theory is well supported by facts on the ground and around the globe. In his own words:
First, high parasite stress evokes a value system of collectivism in which individuals are authoritarian, xenophobic and ethnocentric, with a disregard for—and in the extreme, a moral disgust about—the rights, liberties and well-being of out-group members, including those lower in the established social hierarchy. Such out-group individuals are viewed as invalid members of the in-group(s) in power and maybe dehumanized and disenfranchised. This conservative ideology includes negativism toward and oppression of ideas and other innovations perceived to threaten traditional norms and values and hence is a barrier to the creation and diffusion of novel ideas and technologies. As we have emphasized, collectivist ideology is a defence against novel contagion harbored in out-groups and a means to manage infectious agents that arise within the group.
Second, low parasite stress evokes a value system of individualism that includes anti-authoritarianism, tolerance, validity and trust of out-groups; a willingness to interact with, support, and empathize with different others; and a high regard for the rights and freedoms of the majority, including those of lower social class or with different values, religious convictions, languages, and ethnic identities. In extreme form, this is an ideology without prejudice toward any people because all are considered sentient beings with morality, autonomy, and inalienable worth. Individualist ideology promotes and rewards innovations and includes a willingness to consider and adopt them, even those from out-groups. Liberal values serve to provide benefits to individuals via promoting out-group interaction and the associated exchange of goods and services, the adoption of functional innovations of out-groups, and the establishment of social alliances with out-groups.
The empirical prediction that follows from these considerations is that, across the globe, the degree of democratization will correlate negatively with parasite stress and correlate positively with individualism (and negatively with collectivism). Said differently, as parasite stress and collectivism increase across nations, so, too, will the degree of autocracy.
The two arguments I have with Randy’s position are:
1. I consider parasite stress as only one of many values-related stresses. To say it another way: stress physiology often compromises the immune system. It plays out physiologically through mechanisms such as metabolism, inflammation and central nervous system activation. With an overactive nervous system and metabolism reduction, people will have compromised immune systems and be more susceptible to parasites.
2. Right-wing-focused authoritarian surveys overrepresent surveys for authoritarianism. The whole field of psychology is almost entirely made of people sympathetic to the left and as such, has done much less research on the left’s seemingly equivalent potential to exhibit authoritarian traits, including:
Anti Hierarchical Aggression – the belief that those currently in power should be punished, the established order should be overthrown, and that extreme actions, such as political violence, are justifiable to achieve these aims.
Anti Conventionalism – the rejection of traditional values, a moral absolutism concerning progressive values and concomitant dismissal of conservatives as inherently immoral, and a need for political homogeneity in one’s social environment.
Top-Down Censorship – preferences for the use of governmental and institutional authority to quash opposition and bar offensive and intolerant speech.
In recent years, however, research into the left-wing form of authoritarianism has been ramping up. Particular sentiments of left-authoritarians are captured with questions like:
“I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views”
“Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech,”
“I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.”
Traits shared by both political extremes:
“preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”
I have yet to find a paper describing the physiology of the two types - if there is any. My guess is that if someone expressing a high degree of authoritarianism feels they are reproductively benefiting from the existing hierarchy, they will aim to bolster it, while if another authoritarian is being reproductively denied by the social structure, they will seek its destruction, but that is only my unsubstantiated hypothesis. If true, however, it would suggest that there might be an endocrine profile of positional security and one of positional insecurity, which to me seems at least plausible and consistent with other primate studies. Curiously, Thornhill and Fincher’s 2007 study associates low secure childhood attachment to liberalism and high secure childhood attachment to conservatism. If valid, this finding leaves me a lot to unpack and iron out in terms of the timing and effects of different types of stress. My intuition would be that more secure attachment would lead to more resistance to contagion and more openness to novel people, places and pathogens, so either the work is inconsistent or my understanding is flawed.
In any case, both types of authoritarianism seem ascendant in more recent times. Neither rise can very well be explained by a rise in parasite exposure (before the recent pandemic), so we must assume, as I do, that other psychobiological factors such as a general increase in physiological stress are affecting people’s psychology. The mind is changing when the body becomes more susceptible to disease. When susceptibility increases, the behavioral immune system expresses contagion-risk-reducing emotions and values, values and emotions consistent with authoritarianism.
Given this psycho-bio-evolutionary-existential situation, we would benefit from a new biologically based political science, perhaps a ‘biopolitics’. We can now understand that stressed body states drive inclinations towards collective, authoritarian behaviors on either political extreme. We do not yet understand why someone might be moved one way or another, but both extremes are expressing increased disgust, fear, anxiety along with expectations and enactments of violence. Unfortunately, the increased anxiety in a polarized culture seems to have very clear feed-forward mechanisms perfectly in line with the dynamics of all human conflict escalations. One party feels angry or anxious and blames the other and, in doing so, creates the fulfilment of their prophecy or expectations because the other reacts to the expressed anxiety by becoming defensive with return criticisms and the cycle repeats. Historically it repeats until there is organized physical violence with a clear victor who often enough perpetrates genocide.
Perhaps civil war seems impossible in a world with golden arches and smiling Ishtar on every corner. Still, I follow various credible thinkers articulating the trajectory where war is increasingly likely. These thinkers don’t attend much to the biological substrate of the situation, but the larger social patterns seem clear enough for their predictions. Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers, only last week sent an essay with this in the first paragraph:
“the US appears to be on a classic path toward some form of civil war”
Consistently, the Pew Research Foundation has been tracking the last two decades of increasing division:
Peter Turchin, a mathematical historian, has been tracking broad indicators of stress and forecasting the impending division of society for a few decades:
“Popular immiseration has been increasing for decades. I have written before how shocking it was for me to see such Malthusian indicators of stress as declining life expectancy, which turned down before Covid-19”
“The overall trend towards immiseration is very worrisome, especially because it is broad-based. It’s especially worrisome because the previous immiseration period almost perfectly coincides with the period of social turbulence and political violence”
Peter’s process is closer to mine as he focuses on stress indicators that include health status, family formation and age of childbearing. Below are his aggregate indicators. We only see similar situations existing around and after the (first) civil war and before the revolutionary war. Tracking the blue (or green) line, well-being has been trending down since the 60s:
Years ago, I thought extreme views were based on features or bugs of social media and perhaps types of reduced exposure childhoods that limited play and humor. While those may be factors, I am now disposed to think that a personality that attaches to extreme views is much more based on the person’s present material reality. Despite all our advances in technology, we’ve begun regressing in both health and intelligence at the broadest social level. Many Americans are much worse off physically and psychologically than they would have been a generation prior. Mean incomes through stagnant do not capture the declines in health nor the new medical uses of those stagnant incomes. Changes in the body are changes in the mind, and our stressed and often disease-burdened bodies are sending very important reminders of challenging conditions, conditions that foretell even tougher times ahead.
Selected References:
The_Parasite_Stress_Theory_of_Values
What is the relevance of attachment and life history to political values?
How Experts Overlooked Left-Wing Authoritarianism - The Atlantic
The Germ Theory of Democracy, Dictatorship, and All Your Most Cherished Beliefs
Parliament of England - Wikipedia
The Connection Between Disease and Authoritarianism | Cato Institute
Clarifying the Structure and Nature of Left-Wing Authoritarianism
Democracy and the Iroquois Constitution | Field Museum
AMERICAN MEN OF 1776 SAID TO HAVE STOOD TALL - The New York Times
United States: fertility rate 1800-2020 | Statista
United Kingdom: fertility rate 1800-2020 | Statista
For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
The Rising Risk of Civil War: Following in the Footsteps of History
Peter Turchin Age of Discord II
Political Polarization in the American Public | Pew Research Center