Evolution: Biological and Political

Digital Art Piece I made for SIUC's Darwin Week art competition.

What a curious week this is, beginning with the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan (today) and ending with the 202nd birthday of Charles Darwin (this coming Saturday).  Two potent figures in the theory of evolution.

Darwin gets credit for "inventing" the theory.  Others deserve some credit in there, but Darwin's observations and conclusions are as good as any to give originary credit to.  His was an elegantly simple claim, really: that species change to adapt to their environments.  This change happens over long period of times and is driven by forces of natural selection.

The concept of "survival of the fittest" was subsequently bastardized and taken up by many as scientific evidence of might-makes-right and only-the-strongest-survive social policy.  Call this Social Darwinism.  Borrowing from Puritanical views that Nature is "red in tooth and claw," here were images of competition where greed and brute force drives the success and failure of species.  And if species, why not groups of people?

More recent thinking in evolution finds compelling evidence for altruism in species development -- that life in its drive toward ever increasing complexity experiments with, among other things, interspecies cooperation.  Survival of the fittest depends as much on cunning and scavenging as it does on brute force.  Find a niche and occupy it.  Evolution is driven as much by genes being creative as by some desperate need to survive.

Odd to think of Reagan as a champion of evolution; in truth, he is anything but.  He famously participated in a failed 1972 law suit as Governor of California to force public schools to teach creationism alongside the scientific theory of evolution.  In the White House, he made similar proclamations that evolution is only a theory and that creationism deserved at least equal time if not greater attention for its moral, religious value.  Reagan's Creationism would evolve into "Intelligent Design," a bastardization of scientifically nuanced speculation in service of manufacturing support for the Biblical explanation of life on the planet. 

And yet, many of Reagan's own policies showed a certain preference for survival of the fittest and withdrawal of any assistance for the weak.  As Governor of California, he decreased funds to state mental facilities, turning the mentally ill out onto the streets to fend for themselves.  For five years as President, he failed to mention publicly AIDS or provide any Federal assistance for AIDS research.  When in 1986 he was finally forced to address the issue, he haggled with Congress to keep AIDS funding low.  Perhaps like others on the Religious Right, he saw AIDS as divine retribution or a "natural" cleansing of an unwanted biological trait (whether intravenous drug use or unprotected gay sex or blood transfusions or...).  His Tickle-Down Economics embraced a model that suggested the poor and middle class should make do with the leftovers of the rich or get rich themselves -- a kind of economic Darwinism, that.

If Darwin's evolution is primarily about the passing of traits (or genes, in the common parlance) from one generation to the next, the modern political scene shows a much more accelerated evolutionary cycle with memes.  A meme is an informational pattern that travels culturally; some evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins posit memetic transfer of information as the true evolutionary advantage humans have over other species that depend mostly on generational genetic tansfer of information.

But memes are tricky.  Consider that Reagan raised taxes 11 times during his Presidency, nearly tripled the national debit, and grew the size of the Federal government [cite].  Consider that he was the first President to make the US a debtor nation [cite].  Consider that he advocated for abolishing nuclear weapons and chided Israel for preemptive military attacks [cite].  Consider that while he arguably ended the Cold War with Russia, his backdoor funding of foreign wars (Iran/Contra) and future terrorists (the Mujahideen that would become, in part, Al Qaeda) planted the seeds of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And yet somehow he has evolved into the darling of the neoconservatives and the Tea Party -- an image of Conservative values, a deficit hawk, a no-compromise champion of small government, a symbol of US might-makes-right foreign policy.

But then, that's the difference between a gene and a meme.  A gene is biological information at the molecular level that transforms slowly across eons and generations.  Those changes are tested in the environment.  A meme transforms more quickly and shows incredible capabilities of developing rapidly into myth, an organizing narrative whose fidelity to reality is not important.  So today, many will celebrate St. Reagan as they call for magical deficit reduction and smaller government and US exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, all while ignoring the benefits they reap from the government they so want to destroy or Reagan's much more questionable political record.

Let us hope genes win out over memes in the end and evolution provides an answer to self-destructive, congenital stupidity.  Or perhaps, from a systems perspective, that is what the global ecological collapse we seem to be entering is all about...

Grace is in the Recovery

"What?"

This week's theme over at Illustration Friday is "clumsy."  I struggled a bit with this week's theme, and hence my offering of two submissions in one blog post. 

The title of this entry -- "Grace is in the Recovery" -- is something of a life philosophy (yeah, I have a lot of those).  I've never been the most graceful person.  I trip a lot; I bonk my head a lot.  Sometimes I think I never really grew into my body.  However, even as an audience member, I bore quickly of the precisely controlled performance.  But I find it very exciting when an actor or artist has to deal with an unanticipated problem.  Yes, that is painful if they don't deal with it well.  But I am ecstatic if they respond well.  I feel like I am in the presence of a unique moment where a scripted and precise action gave over to one that must respond to context.  And how do we access those moments if not for the willingness to be clumsy?  That's not to say I value the under-prepared performance -- more that I value preparation that readies the performer to deal with the unexpected.

I recently wrote a brief piece for an environmental education center's newsletter where I discussed my lessons learned from walking down the side of a glacier's lateral moraine.  In that piece, I talk about how you have to give up the idea of sure and stable footing and be ready to respond quickly to the steep and slippery gravel-mound's tendency to slide.  There is really no way to do it and look pretty.  At its heart, the experience is about letting go and trusting your ability to respond.  That is where grace resides.  Not in the perfectly executed gesture, but in the capacity to recover from the fumble.  And that is a lesson about grace that goes well beyond walking and performance. 

We all fall.  None of us are perfect.  All of us are sometimes (often times?) clumsy.  But beauty is in how we respond to clumsy -- in ourselves and in others.  And I think beating ourselves up about not being perfect, about not being graceful, is about the least graceful we can be. 

Ah Wilderness

Illustration Friday's theme this week is "wilderness."  Okay, so this is a great one for me.  I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about the wild, and I recognize the problems with it as a concept.  Namely, we have a lot of romanticized notions of wilderness and what it means.  Orginally, the concept referred to something unpleasant -- and so is etymologically linked to words like "bewilder." The Puritans saw the wilderness as a site of evil and danger, something to be tamed (like all "baser nature," internal or external).  It took visionaries like Romantic poets and early American nature writers to see in the wilderness the sublime, that mix of awe and wonder at once terrifying and spiritually uplifting.

Today, several environmental thinkers posit that our perceptions of wilderness get in the way of meaningful environmental management more than they motivate it.  Folks like William Cronon and Neil Evernden posit that our received notions of wilderness are more social construction than actual nature.  Cronon notes that in the US, we tend to equate wilderness with the absence of humans, and in the process conveniently erase the humans that lived here before European colonization.  Evernden cautions that many neophyte ecologists tend to focus on the happy "light" side of wilderness by emphasizing harmony and balance and downplaying the shadow side of all that -- including predation, parasitism, disease, etc.  Both (and others) suggest that the evocation of wilderness is often a problematic call for preservation that fails to recognize that nature is always about change.

So what is "wilderness," given all this history and critique?  For me, it is about systems of relationship.  It's about organisms in relationships, be those relationships predatory, parasitic, symbiotic, nurturing, or what have you.  Wilderness is an "organic" system, by which I mean both living and emergent/unplanned.  This conception allows us to consider humans as both a part of wilderness (nature) and apart from it.  The first half of that observation is easy -- we cannot escape it, it's all around us, and it supports us.  But humans also create, with purpose, their own complex systems (towns, buildings, farms, ranches, factories, etc.) -- and those systems often compete with wilderness systems.  The result of that competition is often bad for the wilderness, although occasionally wilderness "wins."  More importantly, wilderness adapts from the competition, although perhaps a bit more slowly than human systems do.

The ecological systems we designate "wilderness" have developed over eons.  They represent incredible diversity that still extends beyond our capacity to catalog let alone comprehend.  And much as we like to ignore it in the name of human "progress," those finely honed organic systems support us, making our life on this planet possible.  We have yet to replicate the dynamic and intricate system of relationships that is a wild ecosystem.  Perhaps, one day we will.  But until we do, we are ill-served in the casual destruction of wilderness.  If that sounds like a preservationist's ethic sneaking back in, so be it.  Or maybe, just maybe, it's about humbly accepting our place in (and not above) these wild systems of relationship.

2010 -- A Year of Renewal?

The good folks over at Illustration Friday have kicked off the new year with a great prompt, "Renewal."  Indeed, as we put away the old and face the new, now is a great time to consider renewal.

Surely, 2009 gives us a lot to be cynical about.  In the US, Health Care reform consumed our political process, demonstrating that even though the bulk of the population wanted meaningful reform, special interests were able to clutter and stymie the process so much so that the current compromise(s) offers little in the way of real reform.  We thought with its hopeful beginning and a new President, 2009 might see significant changes in our foreign policy -- and we have.  But that change still involves more troop deployments and daily news of unrest in the places where we are involved.  Christmas Day reminded us that the free world is still vulnerable to terrorism -- avoiding it often only with a little luck.  And then, with a heavy sigh, we look at how little was accomplished at Copenhagen with regards to meaningful international agreements on climate change mitigation.

Now is not the time to give up hope.  And so, we recycle the wrapping paper, compost the holiday leftovers, pick up the party detritus, and come back from this liminal solstice time to the work of the new year.  The planet is doing its yearly tilt-thing, and the sun is coming back in the Northern Hemisphere.  Let us take energy from its shine and renew our commitments to getting it right. "It" being our lives -- individually and, more importantly, collectively.  We are all in this world together.