The whole human world operates by means of cliques of no more than a
dozen individuals, usually fewer. This applies to governments or
businesses, the arts or the sciences, professionals or tradespeople,
worthy or less-worthy pressure groups, legal or illegal enterprises,
religious or secular cultures, physical or intellectual fashions,
ideologies of the left or the right, highly intellectual specialisms
or trivial hobbies, democracies or bureaucracies, elite classes or
underclasses, teenagers and oldies, and so on. Even in the case of
apparently over-powerful individual leaderships, a loyal clique is
necessary immediately below them or they don't last long. Even in the
case of lone creative intellectuals, their ideas never see the light
of day unless they acquire a clique of believers who propagate them.
It takes no more than a few minutes of thoughtful scrutiny of any
purposeful decision-making activity that we read or see about us to
realize this fact. But, other than those in the really powerful
cliques at the very top of their particular heaps, most of the motley
don't realize this, anymore than they notice the air they breathe, or
fish in the water they swim in. This small group-ness has applied to
us ever since our ancestors broke away from other primates and struck
out (probably forced out!), bewildered, fearful yet ever curious,
into the savannahs of Africa six million years ago.
There are many more behavioural characteristics -- social certainties
and cultural predispositions -- that our genes and epigenes have
shaped in us due to the particular exigencies of life on the
savannah. But the basic platform is still that of the small
hunter-gatherer cliques of mature adults. This has not changed.
Civilizations don't succeed others bodily by means of some sort of
spontaneous urge but only when they're spearheaded by small groups
who've adopted new physical or mental innovations or have moved to
new locations and shown that they can do better than before.
Historians know this but they're small in number and usually don't
come to balanced views about a topic until it lies many generations
or even centuries or millennia in the past. Also, they're not usually
to be found as advisors to present-day power cliques. If they have
any wisdom to offer it is only of an anecdotal sort and may seem
unlikely to apply to specific modern circumstances.
But evolutionary science is entirely a different matter. Apart from a
premature phase of eliciting catastrophic misinterpretations by
politicians, Darwin's ideas largely slumbered for about a century
after his death until being revived with a whoosh when genes were
elucidated beyond doubt 60 years ago. Evolutionary scientists who
carry out precise experiments at gene level and upwards, and fellow
specialists such as anthropologists who closely observe all sorts of
society, all agree to a surprisingly large number of universal
characteristics that are found in every society of whatever sort. And
the small-group nature of our species is arguably by far and away the
most important of these.
Because evolutionary scientists are also engaged in research which
will have vast medical applications, their future reputation overall
will grow and their role as advisors will become a great deal more
influential than historians have ever been (or even economists dare I
say?). They'll not be advising us to change the principle or practice
of clique-ridden cultures because they know that this will never
change this side of a million years. But in a future of many more
necessary specialist cliques -- with even greater powers than now for
good or ill -- they will undoubtedly be able to offer better ways in
which cliques can recruit better candidates. Undoubtedly they will be
offering demoselection of governance rather than our present
'democracy' which has yielded cliques who don't what they're doing
apart from bribing electorates to vote for them at election time.
Meanwhile, at least the present generation of children and young
people in both the advanced countries and elsewhere will have to get
through the consequences of those cliques which have led the Western
world into our present parlous condition. My selection of the most
disastrous three of these are:
1. The clique at the Geneva Conference of 1922 which overthrew the
primacy of non-inflationary gold-backed money and made it subservient
to government-manufactured stuff;
2. The cliques of Western central bankers and politicians ever since
who have over-printed money to such an extent that almost all their
countries are now deep in debt;
3. The cliques of traders at JPMorganChase and other investment banks
who invented sophisticated derivatives in the last 20 years beyond
all understanding of their consequences even by their own notional bosses.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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