Well, we’re all “elitists” of some stripe. Politically, we may be liberal, whiney-ass urban intellectual elitists, or conservative, whiney-ass let’s-stomp a terrorist-today redneck elitists—or whatever favorite effete stereotype you want to believe in. So, in one sense, it’s all about which team to root for. This is so even when the stakes are more dire and more permanent than suggested by “just a game”.

Which, assuming the dubious accuracy and appropriateness of the stereotypes, is better, then—the fuzzy-headed idealistic condescensions of the so-called liberals, or the in-your-face and down-your–throat posturings of the so-called values-oriented conservatives?

My own conjecture is that the former thrives in an expanding economy, with the latter becoming the dominant asset—milkable for shear numbers, at least, when woes and travails are at least locally increasing.

There are straightforward reasons behind this idea: Good times are rising tides that lift all boats—some more than others, to be sure, but most everyone is a little better off, and therefore able to indulge in some reflection. Bad times, on the other hand, are falling tides: Most people are worse off, though some are better off, and a few are much better off, but the latter attain their status at the expense of the sinking minority. In this context, the best way to claw and scramble is as a group—a collective. That is, in bad times populations tend toward social conservatism, clumping around the nearest dogma. In other words, the borders of one’s circle become firmer.

William Calvin (A Brain for All Seasons) suggests a kind of “pumping” action that forces the evolution of cooperation among humans. In an ice age, say, when resources were scarce, those who survived the best were the incipient cooperators. After a few rounds of such travails and challenges, cooperation had become more or less a culturally well-oiled machine, so to speak, and possibly even hard-wired into the genome. What Calvin doesn’t mention is this mechanism is precisely what is needed to bring religion into prominence, one of the principal elements of religion being a common, group ethic—cooperation. Rodney Stark, in fact, posits just this mechanism as the driving force behind the rapid rise of Christianity, from a few desperate souls at the time of the Temple’s destruction to a near-majority during the reign of Constantine (see The Rise of Christianity). A darker way for this cooperative impetus is as an us/them dualism—a way to tell who is on which team.

So, dogmatic religion is clearly adaptive, and most obviously so during hard times.

All this is highly ironic, of course, in that a major tenet of modern fundamentalism is its aversion to evolutionary explanations of just about everything. To be sure, this aversion makes a certain amount of sense on several levels, though for present purposes it is enough to note that some seed tenet is required for a dogma to serve the needs of group cohesion. In this regard, what I am leading up to is that those who live by dogma are vulnerable to the abuses of it. That is, dogma is an exploitable resource in the hands of politicians and other manipulators of minds. Dogma is, after all, a kind of shortcut (like stereotypes, representational language, and other things…). And shortcuts evolve because there is a supreme economic advantage in using them: Analyzing turtles all the way down is costly; making as assumption about the appropriate levels of turtles is relatively cheap.

At least, this approach seems to be optimal for hunter-gatherer humans, for whom our now-antique brains were customized. Whether it is appropriate nowadays is much less clear, since the societal, economic, geographic, and military contexts have changed far more than the genotype. Or, rather, my real concern is that the professional politicians/marketers/spin-doctors are a step or two ahead of the population which is used as fodder for the ravenous maw of The Machine. It is an arms race favored to favor, as it always does, certain political types.

But, whatever the political system, there is a Tragedy of the Commons in its longevity: After some period of existence, a system will cease to exist for its original purpose, no matter how idealistic it was at its genesis, and begin existing  only to make itself larger. (Not-so incidentally, this is also the definition of a malignancy.) Hence, of necessity, it will preemptively grab all the resources it can, before anything else can challenge it.

This is not so troublesome in a growing economy. As noted earlier, a rising tide lifts all boats—some more, some less. But in a falling, or even a stable economy (which, of course, is also “falling” so long as more and more participants want a piece of the action), the professional grabbers really come into their inheritances.

In a democracy, ballots are the milk that nourishes the political system, and the voters are the cows. And domesticated cows provide by far the both the best return on investment, and the best quality product. Thus, in terms of my metaphor, during the down times, the economy bifurcates into a few farmers (not to disparage non-metaphorical agriculturalists!) and many cows: Ergo, feudalism, the dynamic imperative of troubled times, and one of the tyrannies despised and feared by the nation’s founders.

There are no young redwoods in a mature forest; the elders have co-opted the available sunlight before the youth could establish roots. A new stand requires a catastrophic fire. So, too, the removal of the old, corrupt, inefficient, diseased (and, therefore, inappropriate) human political system usually requires revolution. Yet it is not clear that, these days, a “real” revolution would do the trick, or what such a revolution would even look like. We know how changes occurred in the former Soviet Union and its client states, but it is not obvious that the changes were, ultimately, for the “better”, or even more stable.

There is much to ponder here….