The Story Of The Week

I tried not to read much of the news last week on my vacation, but this Science Times story knocked my socks off. I’m not sure whether the blogosphere has already discussed it, but the ideas behind the forthcoming book, "A Farewell to Alms," strike me as culture-shifting. The piece discussing the book is here. I have it on order and haven’t read it yet, but hope to. The gist:

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues. Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past.

Here’s the envelope-push:

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

I guess it’s obvious what worms crawl out of that can.

Conservatism has long posited that human nature has no history. But what if it does? What if genetic adapation occurs more swiftly among humans than we once believed? This implies that human nature is actually more plastic than we have long thought – but generationally, not individually. It suggests that different populations may have not just different cultural but different genetic inclinations. It means that some populations may therefore have different skill-sets than others, and even different aptitudes with respect to complex systems like, er, liberal democracy, that require specific habits of mind and custom. It means that these facts about human societies across the globe may be somewhat stubborn things in the short term, if not in the long.

If these ideas undermine parts of conservatism (its belief in unchanging human nature in history), they also entrench others (that societies cannot be abstracted from their moment in time or culture). These ideas also suggest, of course, that a place like, say, Iraq, will not soon muster anything like the skills and practices for a Western European democracy. These are my wild-eyed inferences from a book I have not yet read.

A Rove Round-Up

Of course, the "spending time with family" line is piffle. Scott Horton wonders what’s up. Hamsher speculates further. I think it’s just an obvious time to get out. Andy Samwick surveys the fiscal legacy. Malkin says good riddance. Larison writes:

There is something very strange about the people who have assembled themselves around the President over the past few years. Many of them seem to have an outsized sense of their own world-historical importance, and many of them are convinced that they have a superior understanding of the lessons of history, but their grasp of history never seems to escape the generic, the vague and the facile.

And Churchill trivia.

Huckabee As Veep?

After Ames and the debates, it seems an obvious choice for the current front-runners. All of them – Giuliani, Romney, McCain, FThompson – will have problems with the Christianist core of the GOP. Hillary will only bring out so many base Republicans. Putting Huckabee on their ticket would go a long way to encouraging more to emerge from their nooks. He’s also a press fave, which can only help a GOP in a popular mire. And he has a sense of humor and genial demeanor, which are key for any candidate running on morality. It seems like a no-brainer today.

Rove Exits

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While he spins. The man’s legacy is a conservative movement largely discredited and disunited, a president with lower consistent approval ratings than any in modern history, a generational shift to the Democrats, a resurgent al Qaeda, an endless catastrophe in Iraq, a long hard struggle in Afghanistan, a fiscal legacy that means bankrupting America within a decade, and the poisoning of American religion with politics and vice-versa. For this, he got two terms of power – which the GOP used mainly to enrich themselves, their clients and to expand government’s reach and and drain on the productive sector. In the re-election, the president with a relatively strong economy, and a war in progress, managed to eke out 51 percent. Why? Because Rove preferred to divide the country and get his 51 percent, than unite it and get America’s 60. In a time of grave danger and war, Rove picked party over country. Such a choice was and remains despicable.

Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war – and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency. His divisive politics and elevation of corrupt mediocrities to every branch of government has turned an entire generation off the conservative label. And rightly so. It will take another generation to recover from the toxins he has injected, with the president’s eager approval, into the political culture and into the conservative soul.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)