Paysage à Saint-Joachim (1903),
Clarence Gagnon. A
hundred years ago genetic evolution came to a halt throughout the West, yet
cultural evolution continued to forge ahead ... at an accelerating speed.
My
last post covered the reasons why liberal regimes have historically prevailed
over conservative ones. In short, liberalism delivers the goods. By reducing
the importance of kinship, it has given the market a freer rein to mobilize
labor and capital for production of goods and services. More wealth is created—not
only in peacetime but also, and just as critically, in wartime. Because liberal
regimes are not tied to a single ethnocultural community, they can recruit from
a broader pool of people and, if need be, relocate production of arms and
ammunition to territories far from enemy attack.
In
this post I wish to discuss the contradictions of liberalism. By
"contradiction" I mean an inherent problem that will worsen even in
the absence of organized opposition. Here, I will focus on one problem: liberal
regimes tend to erode their own cultural and genetic foundations, thus
undermining the cause of their success.
End and reversal
of gene-culture coevolution
Liberalism
emerged in northwest Europe. This was where conditions were most conducive to
dissolving the bonds of kinship and creating communities of atomized
individuals who produce and consume for a market. Northwest Europeans were most
likely to embark on this evolutionary trajectory because of their tendency
toward late marriage, their high proportion of adults who live alone, their
weaker kinship ties and, conversely, their greater individualism. This is the
Western European Marriage Pattern, and it seems to go far back in time. The
market economy began to take shape at a later date, possibly with the expansion
of North Sea trade during early medieval times and certainly with the take-off
of the North Sea trading area in the mid-1300s (Note 1).
Thus
began a process of gene-culture coevolution:
people pushed the limits of their phenotype to exploit the possibilities
of the market economy; selection then brought the mean genotype into line with
the new phenotype. The cycle then continued anew, with the mean phenotype
always one step ahead of the mean genotype.
This
gene-culture coevolution has interested several researchers. Gregory Clark has
linked the demographic expansion of the English middle class to specific
behavioral changes in the English population: increasing future time
orientation; greater acceptance of the State monopoly on violence and
consequently less willingness to use violence to settle personal disputes; and,
more generally, a shift toward bourgeois values of thrift, reserve,
self-control, and foresight. Heiner Rindermann has presented the evidence for a
steady rise in mean IQ in Western Europe during the late medieval and early
modern era. Henry Harpending and myself have investigated genetic pacification
during the same timeframe in English society. Finally, hbd*chick has written
about individualism in relation to the Western European Marriage Pattern (Note
2).
This
process of gene-culture coevolution came to a halt in the late 19th century.
Cottage industries gave way to large firms that invested in housing and other
services for their workers, and this corporate paternalism eventually became
the model for the welfare state, first in Germany and then elsewhere in the
West. Working people could now settle down and have families, whereas
previously they had largely been a lumpenproletariat of single men and women.
Meanwhile, middle-class fertility began to decline, partly because of the
rising cost of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle and partly because of
sociocultural changes (increasing acceptance and availability of contraception,
feminism, etc.).
This
reversal of class differences in fertility seems to have reversed the
gene-culture coevolution of the late medieval and early modern era. The
evidence is still incomplete, but a consistent pattern is emerging:
1.
Mean reaction time has risen in Great Britain by 13 points since Victorian
times (Woodley et al. 2013). This finding may be an artefact of better sampling
of the general population over time (hbd*chick 2013a). A Swedish study,
however, has confirmed this lengthening of reaction time, particularly in
cohorts born since the 1970s (Madison 2014; Madison et al. 2016).
2.
The genetic basis of intelligence has fallen in Iceland since the cohort born
in 1910. This is shown by a progressive decrease in the "polygenic
score" of alleles associated with high educational attainment (Kong et al.
2017).
3.
The Flynn effect is slowing throughout the West (Flynn 2007, p. 143). In
Scandinavia, mean IQ peaked during the late 1990s and has since declined
(Teasdale and Owen 2005). A review of this literature has shown recent declines
in mean IQ in England, Denmark, Finland, and Austria and a leveling off in
Norway and Australia (Rindermann 2018). The Flynn effect does not, in itself, seem to be a real increase in intelligence. Rather, it is simply a greater familiarity by people with the process of doing tests and, as such, has masked an underlying decline in real intelligence. Now that the Flynn effect has exhausted itself, we are seeing this underlying decline.
Causes?
Some
of this decline may be due to class differences in fertility, especially during
the early to mid-20th century. Today, with widespread use of contraception and
abortion by all social classes, this factor is much less operational (Jayman
2012). Recently, two economists, Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg, have found
that the reversal of the Flynn effect in Norway is largely explained by
"within-family variation." So this decline is not due to the poor
outbreeding the rich or to immigrants outbreeding natives.
It
doesn't follow, however, as Bratsberg and Rogeberg argue, that a genetic cause
is excluded. In Norway, as elsewhere, siblings are increasingly half-siblings.
This is not a minor factor. Bratsberg and Rogeberg charted their country's IQ
decline by looking at pairs of brothers; their data came from the military
conscript register, and only men are subject to conscription. To produce a pair
of brothers, a woman has to have three children on average. Among Norwegian
women with three children, 36.2% have had them by two or more men (Thomson et
al. 2014). Furthermore, because half-siblings tend to be born farther apart
than full-siblings, they have contributed more to changes in mean IQ over time.
If
the genetic basis of intelligence has been declining between older and younger
half-siblings, two things must be happening:
-
Divorced mothers are, on average, having their second children by lower-IQ men;
-
Such men have been contributing more than other men to succeeding generations
of Norwegians, at least during the last forty years.
Lappegård
et al. (2011) found that multi-partner fatherhood is most common among
Norwegian men with the lowest level of education. Furthermore, multi-partner
fertility has increased over time among such men. Thomson et al. (2014) have
similarly observed that education is negatively associated with childbearing
across partnerships in Australia, United States, Norway, and Sweden. These
differentials increased from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Unfortunately,
we cannot easily measure the impact of multi-partner fatherhood on the IQ of
the next generation. How can we compare the first father’s children with the
second father’s children when Norwegian statistics do not identify a child's
biological father? Only the "registered father" is identified. Once a
man has adopted the earlier children of his spouse, he becomes their father for
all statistical purposes.
Uncoupling of
gene-culture coevolution
There
has thus been an uncoupling of gene-culture co-evolution. Genetic evolution is
leveling off throughout the West and even reversing in some countries.
Meanwhile, cultural evolution has been forging ahead. The mean phenotype is no
longer one step ahead of the mean genotype. It's several steps ahead.
A
century ago the market economy was important, but a lot of economic activity
still took place within the family, especially in rural areas. In the late
1980s I interviewed elderly French Canadians in a small rural community, and I
was struck by how little the market economy mattered in their youth. At that
time none of them had bank accounts. Few even had wallets. Coins and bills were
kept at home in a small wooden box for special occasions, like the yearly trip
to Quebec City. The rest of the time these people grew their own food and made
their own clothes and furniture. Farms did produce food for local markets, but
this surplus was of secondary importance and could just as often be bartered
with neighbors or donated to the priest. Farm families were also large and
typically brought together many people from three or four generations.
By
the 1980s things had changed considerably. Many of my interviewees were living
in circumstances of extreme social isolation, with only occasional visits from
family or friends. Even among middle-aged members of the community there were
many who lived alone, either because of divorce or because of relationships
that had never gone anywhere. This is a major cultural change, and it has
occurred in the absence of any underlying changes to the way people think and
feel.
Whenever
I raise this point I'm usually told we're nonetheless better off today, not
only materially but also in terms of enjoying varied and more interesting
lives. That argument made sense back in the 1980s—in the wake of a long
economic boom that had doubled incomes, increased life expectancy, and improved
our lives through labor-saving devices, new forms of home entertainment, and
stimulating interactions with a broader range of people.
Today,
that argument seems less convincing. Median income has stagnated since the
1970s and may even be decreasing if we adjust for monetization of activities,
like child care, that were previously nonmonetized. Life expectancy too has
leveled off and is now declining in the U.S. because of rising suicide rates
among people who live alone. Finally, cultural diversity is having the perverse
effect of reducing intellectual diversity. More and more topics are considered
off-limits in public discourse and, increasingly, in private conversation.
Liberalism
is no longer delivering the goods—not only material goods but also the goods of
long-term relationships and rewarding social interaction.
To
be cont'd
Notes
1.
Markets, of course, go much farther back in time, farther than the earliest
historical records. For most of that time, however, they were secondary to
kinship. People organized their lives primarily in terms of blood ties or the
ties of procreation between husband and wife. The main unit of economic
activity was the family. Markets were not only of secondary importance but also
highly localized in space and time. In short, there were markets but no market
economy.
2.
Hbd*chick has accused me of plagiarizing her work on the Hajnal Line and the
Western European Marriage Pattern. The truth is that I became interested in
that subject much earlier— during the early 1990s in an exchange of letters
with Kevin MacDonald in the pages of Ethology
and Sociobiology. Afterwards, I intended to write a follow-up that would
prove two points: 1) the Western European Marriage Pattern predates
Christianity; and 2) this cultural environment has selected for certain
psychological traits. Over the years I gathered material, but I didn't feel I
had enough for a publishable article. I finally wrote up several blog posts on
the subject in 2011 and eventually a full article in 2017. Meanwhile, hbd*chick
had published her first post on the Hajnal Line in 2011. I did read that post
but she seemed to be taking the same position that Kevin MacDonald had taken,
i.e., that the WEMP was created by the Catholic Church and that outbreeding was
key to emergence of the Western mindset. Later, in a 2012 post, she began to
see the WEMP as a template for gene-culture coevolution. At that point I had
the impression she was drawing on my material, either directly from my articles
and blog posts or indirectly through various bloggers.
So
did I "discover" this idea? No, of course not. Neither I nor
hbd*chick was the first to write about the Hajnal Line or the WEMP. More
importantly, neither of us was the first to link the WEMP to Western European individualism
and mercantilism. I would award that title to Wally Seccombe in his 1992 book A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to
Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. In the end, few ideas are truly
original. It's no coincidence that both of us began writing about that subject
around the same time. Other people were writing on related topics, and those
people were influencing both me and her. I'm thinking here about authors like
Gregory Clark and blogs like Jayman
and Those Who Can See. I didn't read
it at the time, but in January 2011 Kevin MacDonald wrote a book review that
discussed the Hajnal Line and European individualism:
The nuclear family, freed from extended kinship obligations, is the basis of Western social organization. It is unique relative to other culture areas. This pattern is particularly noticeable in the Northwest of Europe rather than the Pontic steppe region. As one goes from the Northwest of Europe to the Southeast, there is an increase in joint family structure, with brothers living together with parents, grandparents and children. Family historian John Hajnal discovered the "Hajnal line" that separates Western Europe from Eastern Europe, the former characterized by nuclear family structure, relatively late marriage and large numbers of unmarried in economically difficult times, the latter by joint family structure and relatively early and universal marriage.
Finally, while preparing my 2017 article, I wanted to cite hbd*chick as someone with an alternate point of view, but I couldn't find anything published under her real name. There were only pseudonymous posts from her blog. To cite her in my manuscript would require inserting citations like (hbd*chick 2014). The reviewers would immediately notice, and the chances of rejection would increase accordingly. This point should be obvious.
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#LCI14
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