Nicholas Wades Updated Genesis - Road to the Middle Class

THIS WEEK I am reading Nicholas Wade’s Before The Dawn. It’s a review of recent developments in archeology, particularly the important contribution that biogenetics is making to our knowledge of our ancient ancestors.

For instance, tracking of the Y chromosome in men indicates that we are all descended from one man. And tracking of mitochondria in women indicates that women are all descended from the same woman. And it seems likely that all people except those in Africa are descended from a band of hunter-gatherers that crossed the southern end of the Red Sea from Africa to Arabia about 50,000 years ago.

It is intriguing that the Biblical speculation of Adam and Eve, and even the Mosaic Red Sea crossing receive echoes in the latest science.

Nicholas Wade is a science correspondent for The New York Times and so it is significant that he tells his readers that, like it or not, ancient man engaged in constant warfare. That behavior, of course, is shared by our great ape cousins. Male chimpanzees frequently engage in border raids on the territory of neighboring troops. They do it for a practical reason. A bigger territory means more food, and more food means more baby chimps making it to adulthood.

But over the years, humans have become more “gracile,” meaning that our skulls and skeletons have become less robust. In other words, we have become more oriented towards cooperation and less to competition and conflict.

But here’s an interesting speculation. The big problem for humans is to develop the trust circle for cooperation, and particularly cooperation outside kinship. How do you control and sanction the freeloader? The human solution, he suggests, is religion.

Maybe that explains why the rising European bourgeoisie of the last millennium developed their own religion, Protestant Christianity, to define their trust network. And maybe that explains the explosive growth of evangelical Christianity in the emerging economies of the world. The big problem for the people in the huge new cities is to establish trust networks to replace the old kin-based trust in the village.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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