Web of Trust

"The Web of Trust"

Bill Whittle's latest is, as always, a remarkable explanation of the things that underlie our lives. Whittle has mastered the art of seeing what Chesterton saw when writing of the stoplight, called in his day a "signal box":

A great many people talk as if this claim of ours, that all things are poetical, were a mere literary ingenuity, a play on words. Precisely the contrary is true. It is the idea that some things are not poetical which is literary, which is a mere product of words. The word "signal-box" is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death. That is the plain, genuine description of what it is; the prose only comes in with what it is called.

Whittle sees the poetry in things that few pause to consider, and from that can envision the whole grandeur of civilization. He can see the men laying fiber cables and other men molding plastics, and still more men training for years in the use of inventions like radar -- itself a wonder. And he can put it all together for us, and show us how all that work underlies the business of bringing a plane down to the earth.

Yet I find that I think he has misread something fairly fundamental to his argument, something he says is coastline rather than map. The idea that "human beings are interchangable" is simply not quite right. The truth is that human beings are not interchangable at all -- each one is individual. This isn't just because of upbringing, as Whittle suggests, and why it isn't is a truth of the same material as the rest of his argument.

Let me explain. Whittle writes:

I mean that had Baby Billy been dropped off in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and raised by Yanomami tribesmen (and according to my mother there were times when I was in real danger of this happening), I would have spent my youth learning to hunt monkeys with my bow and 6ft. long arrows, and generally hanging around the shabono sleeping in till almost 6am. Likewise, if Baby Kopenawa had my parents, he’d probably be cranking out online essays at irregular intervals and shooting instrument approaches in experimental canard airplanes.

I think we can all agree that it's entirely plausible that Billy Baby could have been given over to Yanomami tribesmen, and grown up to hunt monkeys. There would be nothing strange in that.

Yet it is very unlikely that Baby Kopenawa would have grown up to crank out essays of the type and quality of Whittle's own, to say nothing of having his fascination with airplanes. It is not impossible, but it is not likely.

Civilization not only entails the web of trust that Whittle discusses, but it also requires a far greater degree of specialization. Whittle-the-Amazonian would have learned to hunt monkeys because everyone has to hunt monkeys. Kopenawa, by contrast, would have found himself facing a whole array of choices, to which his native intelligence and individual aspects would have inclined him to some and away from others. To succeed, which means to survive, Whittle of the Amazon would have had to do more or less exactly what everyone else did. To succeed, which means to prosper, Kopenawa would have to do what he did best.

What would that have been? There is a fair amount of research, and a great deal of practical experience, that suggests that there really are genetic inheritances that pertain to kinds of intelligence as well as physical attributes. Individual variation is more important than group membership, but if one were to exchange not one baby but thousands of babies, there would be trends that we could identify. One of the consequences of civilization and its specializations is coming to terms with that. As whole nations and peoples become civilized and specialized, the market begins stratifying them according to which intelligences are most marketable. As we understand more about the mechanism, we may wish to think more about whether to try to modify the market's results -- and if so, how we could do so.

As we become more capable of editing genetic traits, new questions arise. These questions will become more rather than less important, and more rather than less numerous, with each scientific success.

Let us say, for example, that one could modify a set of genetics so that you could replace a prediliction for one kind of intelligence (say, the kind that lets you perform a given task without growing bored for hours on end) with another (say, the ability to do higher mathematics with ease and comfort). Now let's say we have a genetic group that tends toward the first kind, and which has therefore (because the market prefers mathematicians and engineers to janitors and clerks) become identifibly poorer than other groups. What do you do about that? Anything? Nothing? Does it matter? Once it becomes in our power to change, ethical issues arise that don't exist when it is beyond us.

We cannot, therefore, adopt Bill Whittle's idea as ideology -- not that he would wish you to do so. He says to look at the coastline, not the map, and that is what we must do. His point that culture is more important than genetics is certainly true. However, as part of the business of civilization, we have to look at the genetics as well.

We should think about these things, because they are the next challenge -- the mental bridge Whittle mentions, to be considered before the first rivet is driven. There is the chasm before us. We had better give it some thought.