Evolution v. Mutation

A Theory of the New Political Landscape

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a rumination on politics. I have a piece out in Compact on George Saunders’ Vigil.

Best,

Sam

EVOLUTION V. MUTATION

My college biology class, a science requirement, hasn’t left much of an impression on me, but it did in one way, for the jump scare right at the end.

The entire class was dedicated to embroiderings of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In that what we’re supposed to consider is the impact of time, and incremental change, in contributing to the evolution of species. Everything is majestical and microscopic, too subtle to be noticed by anything except science’s finer instruments. And then, right at the end, just as everybody was getting ready to leave for the summer, the teacher introduced mutations.¹ Mutations, it turned out, weren’t just creepy fish in stagnant ponds, it was a much larger, and actually more comprehensible, piece of the story of evolution than earlier generations of scientists had realized — rapid changes in environment, or else just surprising developments, producing mutations accordingly.

That class was just about the last time I’ve thought about biology but that idea really did stay with me and has struck me as a kind of rift in how people think about very different, more sociological, questions. Darwin’s theory has become so much the conceptual ground for how we view the world that we tend to have recourse to one or another version of it whenever we are looking for an analogy. In the spiritual community, telling people that they are ‘evolved’ is the highest compliment. Jefferson Airplane has a song called ‘Crown of Creation’ that contains the same idea. And the liberal institutions base themselves, often implicitly, on analogies to evolution and natural selection. Recently, I came across a Substacker discussing the academy, complaining about it, but saying that, at the end of the day, ‘more knowledge is a good thing.’ Embedded in that is the premise that progress is essentially a process of accumulation — of incrementally improving towards greater and greater complexity even if the specific end isn’t always clear. Greg Berman and Audrey Fox put this in sophisticated form in their book Gradual with the idea that the gradualist incrementalism of bureaucracies (exactly the thing that everybody loves to hate about bureaucracy) is precisely that which keeps civic life flourishing.

But all of that implies a continuous progress within a more or less steady environment. A contrary view would put mutations first. Here is how Michel Houellebecq phrases his view of ‘metaphysical mutations’ in the opening of Atomized:

Metaphysical mutations — that is to say rapid global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe — are rare in human history. The rise of Christianity might be cited as an example. Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it tends to move inexorably toward its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away ethical considerations and social structures. No human agency can halt its path — nothing, but another metaphysical mutation.

Certainly, Houellebecq seemed to be onto something important — ideas (or, as Houellebecq might prefer to put it, a more general discontent) leading a path out of one paradigmatic structure into another. When I came across writers like Marshall McLuhan and Martin Gurri, I started to glimpse what the mechanism might be for that kind of paradigm shift, and basically it was the flow of information. The Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution it went in tandem with, were only possible really with the advent of printed books. The dissemination of writing and reading produced a fundamentally different ground in which information was exchanged and paved the way for, as Houellebecq would put it, the metaphysical mutation. The inference is that we also are living through a time of mutation. How can we not be? Our entire information structure is being uprooted. We are moving from a system in which information basically moved from the center out to a system in which information is shooting erratically all around the society (largely being manipulated by brand-new platforms with immense power but not entirely). And in that rapidly-changing shift in habitat, the certainties that applied to a more ‘evolutionary’ era may no longer apply. Is it really certain that ‘more knowledge’ is good? Not necessarily if that just means getting lost in all the noise. Is ‘gradualism’ in bureaucracies proof of progress? Not if it keeps institutions from adapting to rapidly-changing circumstances.

In some sense this may be the great rift in understanding. It’s what Michael Anton, for instance. was getting at, in deranged form, in the Flight 93 essay. Liberals tended to be wedded to the notion of evolution and the presumption of gradual change. The wings — whether neo-right or progressive — have committed themselves to a notion of mutation, that the world is changing so rapidly that even normal notions of morality no longer apply. As much as I may deplore the nihilism of the right or the ends-justify-the-means logic of the left, I can’t help but feel that there is something basically accurate in their analysis — that, in this particular set of circumstances, mutation applies and not evolution. That is an observational claim, not a normative one. What it really means is that this is an era in which we may not be able to rely on habit or tradition. The world — as in the communicative foundations of the society — is changing so rapidly that all that counts is whether we can keep our wits about us and roll with the punches.

1. The more scientific term for what I’m talking about is “cladogenesis,” as opposed to the older premise of “phyletic gradualism.”