Despite the urban legend I had once accepted, the phrase Here be dragons was not often used on maps and sometimes the dragons or other monsters drawn on unknown regions were decoration rather than warnings. Yet, they clearly state what “should have been true” though it was only “sometimes” true:
“Here be dragons” means dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea-monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps.
The above is the summary at the beginning of the above referenced article though that article goes on to tell us the phrase was rarely used and might have referred to the quite real Komodo Dragons of Indonesia. The decorations of exotic and monstrous creatures were mostly…decorations. I’ll use it in full-blown `urban-legend’ form. “Here be dragons” identifies regions which promise catastrophes or even apocalypses. Enter at the risk of utter oblivion, perhaps painful at that. Enter at the risk of feeling the threats, of being terrified, even before something happens.
The entire human race is sailing full-speed into a region which should be labeled as “Here be Dragons,” but bubble-headed people—including most Catholics and other Christians—see only a continuation of the same-old possibilities, including that of a return to the good times which had held in the West since 1960 or so and had held in the US for a bit longer than that. (There have been some hard times but some of those would have seemed like paradise to those living in, for example, the 14th century after the end of the very prosperous period labeled the `High Middle Ages’. See my essay, Are the Gangsters Keeping Each Other Under Some Control?, for a discussion of the similarity, especially in the US, of the end of the High Middle Ages and the past few generations—periods of declining but still substantial prosperity. Notice: that earlier period was, as we now know, approaching a brutal period [the 14th century] which ended with much smaller populations which were more prosperous and that wealth and power were more widely distributed.
But worse than that is coming to Christians, their faith and their beliefs will be tested by deep, deep conflicts between those beliefs and the realities of how this world works, conflicts between those beliefs and the “effects of the Creator in this world,” as Medieval thinkers would have expressed it. If we have faith in the God of Jesus Christ, we must re-evaluate those parts of our beliefs we draw from empirical facts and from contingent lines of reasoning. To anticipate what I’ve not yet said in this essay: we need to learn how to obey Christ’s commandments without badly damaging the Body of Christ and threatening the futures of young Christians and those not yet born. This has come about because of deeper and broader understandings of the workings of God’s Creation—understandings nearly all of our leaders are ignoring out of morally culpable ignorance and cowardice.
Arguably, many of our current and approaching problems could have been mitigated or even avoided entirely by prudential (timely and firm and courageous) action by the leaders of the West, political and academic and cultural and religious leaders alike. The deeper problem is that the easy solutions to the practical problems are in conflict with Christian respect for life. This is, to say the least, quite inconvenient to those who think being a Christian in this world is quite simple—a child can do it. But we are called to be not childish but child-like in accepting Creation as the work of God and in trying to obey the revealed commandments of God in that Creation and not in a Creation which is imagined by either Manichaeistic thinkers or idealistic dreamers. Our thoughts and dreams should be founded upon reality, upon the facts and derived relationships of Creation.
A practical example: we should have been wary about the possible dangers of entering the lands of tribal peoples, some at a level perhaps comparable to the Iron Age of Europe (think of the millennium beginning about 3000-3500 years ago and also think of Conan the Barbarian) and some at the level of the New Stone Age (ending perhaps 6000 years ago and indicative of the social forms and technologies and ways of hunting and foraging of Central African Pygmies and Khoe San of South Africa). Did the missionaries and conquerors really think these people to be “just like us,” waiting for us to come along and build them 1950s American dream-houses? Did they think those peoples indigenous to non-civilized regions were waiting for us to come along before moving from trial by fire or by combat to trial by abstract systems based upon intertwined natural law (philosophical and theological—sort-of) and positive law (legislated or ordained by recognized leaders)?
Culture and individual characteristics evolved together in the human species, though I think it better to think more generally, and more in tune with reality as being primarily relational and secondarily substantial. In fact and using evolutionary terms, it seems likely that the selective advantages of certain types of increasingly complex social organizations, communal agricultural communities (irrigation) and communities of warriors and metal-workers, drove human intelligence to higher levels and also forced the development of more cooperative personality traits. This is also true of other social creatures, including rats and mice—as will be seen as important a little later in this essay.
A good number of those belonging to tribal peoples, and presumably having the intellectual and personality characteristics appropriate to tribal peoples, have moved into the regions of Western Civilization—along with a good number coming out of tribal peoples but having at least partially the characteristics appropriate to civilization.
What could go wrong? In the case of those many immigrants who are fully and truly tribal peoples, perhaps a massive onslaught upon the very abstract, rules-based judicial and political systems of the West? Perhaps a return to blood-based and personal forms of justice and politics—as did happen in Rhodesia->Zimbabwe and is now happening in South Africa and other parts of Africa? Perhaps a tribalization of our own lives so that we, or our children, experience an increase in impulsiveness, a shortening of time-scales, so that we, or they, spend relatively more on immediate pleasures than did our ancestors and sacrifice relatively less for the future of the children and of generations not yet born?
In the case of those immigrants who have at least some of the abstract reasoning power and the personality traits appropriate to civilized communities, perhaps a draining into the industrialized and civilized countries of those necessary for the peoples of Africa to move towards a different future.
Let us be clear that selection processes give survival into adult lives and the consequent reproductive opportunities to those who meet the standards of those particular processes—in a particular context; those who `win’ also must be lucky at some minimal level. Prosperity, as Darwin speculated with respect to the ongoing Industrial Revolution, might endanger human communities by allowing the survival and successful reproduction of human beings who have high loads of mutations—especially important is the immune system which might have problems with fighting infections, which problems could impair development of the brain and other body parts and lead to early death. The problem of survival of those with, say, impaired immune systems might well prove to be major factors or even the dominant factors in such events as the fall of Rome, the collapse of Western Europe into chaos during the 14th century, and even the collapses we read about in the Bible or in books of ancient history. (The struggle to fight diseases with an impaired immune system leads to the loss of crucial resources for development—including brain development.)
Though I read serious books in history, my knowledge is not wide—perhaps deep in small regions. My impression from those books is that there are multiple factors involved in the decay, often seeming rapid, of a great civilization or a prominent city or perhaps in a community of artists or scholars. Those facts do include purely external events such as climate change or invasions by, say, Central Asian nomads, but there are a variety of causes and effect-causes (probably effects of something more fundamental which go on to cause specific forms of damage) which include diseases which are a result of immune-system failure along with an invasive organism which might be new or old to the people under assault, loss of vigor, seemingly rapid loss of specific skills of civilization such as literacy or numeracy due to a decrease in both intelligence and the related personality traits. I make no pretenses of having thought long or hard to produce a complete understanding of this important, and repeating, historical situation: decay isn’t logically necessary given what we know but it does seem to always happen to be best of human communities.
These are not matters to be taken lightly, especially by Christians who are forced—in my opinion—to consider human communities to be at least potentially part of the Body of Christ and maybe (Western Civilization?) a very substantial part. Yet, the leaders of Christian churches and those who head up secular do-gooder agencies and many others, do take such matters lightly—we might note to the profit of manipulative politicians and financiers who seem to seek to consolidate their control over political and economic structures by replacing peoples suited for freedom and at least some self-rule by other peoples, tribal peoples, who can be more readily dominated. [My use of the word `seek’ in the prior sentence applies in the sense of an `invisible hand’ or in the more general sense of a dynamic, self-organizing system.]
So, many Western leaders and pseudo-intellectuals want to bring into the West a whole lot of people who, by their own inclinations and according to their own traits, continued living in family groups and tribes while the peoples of northern Eurasia and China were evolving to live in societies of ever greater complexity—in response to events often quite bloody and typically murderous towards the males, young and old, on the losing side of the fight. Do those leaders understand that we of Indo-European regions—including Iran and parts of Afghanistan and India—became what we are, the Han Chinese became what they are, because of monopolization of reproductive opportunities over generations by powerful men and their direct descendants? Over half of men of Western European descent are said to carry Y-chromosomes descended from that of one man who lived 4,000 years ago or so, probably somewhere in central or eastern Europe. My Y-chromosome comes from men who were present in the British Isles about that time and were closely related to that powerful man whose sons and later descendants dominated Western European reproduction. The Han Chinese went through similar processes, perhaps with even more extreme selection of `breeding’ males.
The Africans didn’t go through those sorts of processes and, logically enough, their intelligence levels and forms of personality are what we might expect in societies roughly, perhaps very roughly, equivalent to the Neolithic and Iron Ages of Indo-European societies—in the middle or so of the rapid increase in the intelligence of the peoples of those societies which covered much of Europe, parts of the Middle East, and parts of South Asia, as well as Northeast Asia.
Yet, things are worse than that, as I’ve discussed before; see:
The results of certain experiments on rats and mice in the late 1950s to the early 1970s pointed to recent rigorous versions of these ideas about the dangers to communities of social animals caused by widespread survival of those with heavy loads of mutations. In two different experiments which produced substantially the same results, the experimenter kept alive as many rats or mice as possible in an enclosed population, the unhealthy and socially perverse rodents as well as those which were healthy and should have had proper behavior towards their communities and towards other community members. But even the healthy rodents picked up much of the perverse behavior of the mutants. The community decayed so that they even stopped reproducing. See Behavioral sink for some description and some explanation—density of population was hypothesized as the destructive factor of rodent communities. `Density of population’ didn’t hold up to further tests and that idea has been cast aside. High loads of genetic mutations seem to be the problem rather than high population densities or the very questionable explanations proposed by others than the original experimenter, John B Calhoun. In fact, high loads of mutations can be tested for and have been tested for in indirect and direct ways—it seems likely to be the reason for the destruction of the communities of highly social animals when they are kept alive despite health and other problems, whether kept alive by a curious scientist or an Industrial Revolution.
The basic idea is simple and goes back to Darwin, though he didn’t know how inheritable traits were transmitted or how they could change and, thus, knew not of the concept of `mutation’. This is it: mutations occur naturally because of external insults to DNA and also because of the complexity of the chemical processes in genes. Most mutations in genes carrying important traits are bad. Those bad mutations are culled by death, usually at a young age, or inability to successfully reproduce. Darwin warned that the Industrial Age might cause a decay in desirable traits as it kept alive humans who would have died in the normal processes of selection.
Along the same lines, we have this frightening article by Lance Welton, “the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York”: Are Southpaws Really Sinister? Increased Incidence Suggests We’re Headed for “Mouse Utopia” Collapse. “Mouse Utopia” is a nickname of sorts for the experiments of Professor Calhoun as summarized above and described in the referenced Wikipedia article.
This mysterious journalist was the source which referenced the article which started my ruminations along this line. The `non-existent’ Mr Welton wrote the article, Are Atheists Genetic Mutants-A Product of Recent Evolution?, which linked to The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load.
So, what’s the takeaway? Firstly, and not for the first time, we can see that Christians have a misunderstanding of this world which is part of God’s Creation; this misunderstanding is more `God-centered’ but otherwise just as bad a misunderstanding as that of other modern peoples.
Secondly, this has led to unwise and ultimately very cruel forms of charity. Perhaps more importantly, these forms of charity have done a great deal of damage to the Body of Christ and threaten more damage before the healing can start and perhaps many generations before the Body of Christ is once more robust.
Africa has been turned into a showcase of stupidity and exploitation beyond even that of the earlier colonizers. In A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, the economist and historian Gregory Clark tells us that many Africans now have a lower standard of living than they had some thousands of years ago when most Sub-Saharans were living as hunter-foragers or simple agriculturalists—perhaps as non-sedentary agriculturists such as some Indo-Europeans were living four or five thousand years ago with some continuing to live in such ways for generations after that. (Note that I use `Indo-European’ a bit loosely and intuitively; though having much in the way of common genetic roots, especially with respect to the male chromosome—the Y-chromosome, the Indo-Europeans were not a `people’ nor even—in a cultural sense—quite a `proto-Indo-European’ people. They were biological ancestors from a small group of male-lines along with a significantly larger group of female lines; their traits made it easy for a initially closely related family of cultures to form and to spread over much of Europe and parts of West and South Asia. I also will use `African’ in the rest of this essay to mostly refer to Sub-Saharan human beings—individual and communal.)
Africa, that continent which was the birthplace of humanity—though there are some interesting qualifications to that claim, had a population of about 250 million in 1955, the year I was born. The UN projects an African population of 4 billion by 2100. We might look at all that has been accomplished in medical care and building some modern infrastructure in Africa but we have to realize that this has reversed the brutal, but not always bloody, way in which the human race has progressed, or even just maintained its good traits, over the millenia—in a world which is part of God’s Creation and operates as He intended. How else could the world operate if its Creator is the All-powerful and All-knowing God we Christians worship?
The important concept is `reproductive advantages’, though we have to survive before reproducing. And, with human being which is both communal and individual, we have to remember that both components are involved. As I put it a few months ago, relying on thinkers dealing with these issues in an honest way:
[E]nfleshed human social and moral natures [at least in the western Eurasia] evolved and developed in well-ordered societies on a foundation of “collective worship of moral gods” as some scientists put it. Healthy human being is tied to religious practice.
Africa does not now have, and never has had, the environmental conditions to provide reproductive advantages for those with the mental abilities compatible with civilization, European-style or Indian-style or Chinese-style. These mental abilities cover not only `high-level genius’ but also metal-workers and highly disciplined farmers. There is one obvious, and disconcerting, exception I know about and perhaps others I don’t know about: the Igbos and other tribes began to develop signs of higher mental abilities in recent centuries, likely because they controlled the riverways coming out of the inland regions of West Africa. The mental abilities of these African peoples seemed to rise and they began to also show related merchant-type personality traits as they traded with the Europeans—slaves as well as natural resources. This isn’t unusual. The first, Nordic, aristocracy of Russia became prosperous because of trade with the Islamic regions to the south and their trade included Slavs sold as slaves—said to be the origin of the name `Slav’. Some of the prominent American families of the Northeastern states, including many of the notable families of the northeastern American states, Cabots and Perkins and Russells and Tafts and Delanos and Walkers, made their money in slave-trading or opium-trading. Maybe some worked both trades.
If we Westerners had not intervened in Africa in ways exploitive or charitable by intention, perhaps Africans, as individuals and as peoples, would have moved towards societies which gave reproductive advantages to those with higher reasoning abilities or inclinations towards developing good work-habits or some combination of the two. Perhaps and perhaps not; and, if they chose to remain tribal peoples, so be it. After all, to wish that sub-Saharan Africans had lived under conditions to bring about higher IQs than they now have is to wish away many of the Africans who exist now. We should realize this. You can’t magically `elevate’ someone suited to `Iron Age’ tribal life to make them compatible to life in a technologically advanced civilization.
There are differences in the distribution of IQs among even the most intelligent of peoples so that Europeans, including European Jews who also have higher average IQs, produce proportionately more geniuses than the highly intelligent peoples of East Asia. The leaders of the West, since at least the 1960s, have chosen not to educate the educable and nurture the academic talents of those who have any in the interests of trying to provide higher education to those with no talent or no interest. When that failed, they—consciously or otherwise, began to socialize all students to the simultaneous profit of government-allied `private’ corporations and left-wingnuts who are opposed to all that is good in the West—except for coffee-bars and European sports-cars. And so, in at least this way, we further aggravate the problems coming from a build-up in genetic mutations in the peoples of the West and from the entry into Western countries of those who are not suited to life in a civilization—certainly not one so technologically advanced. In fact, it’s likely that many of the businessmen and ideologists profiting off the decay of the West—think of them as maggots on a dying body if you wish—are sociopaths with a heavy load of genetic mutations or humans of more ordinary sorts of weak moral character who are picking up the personality traits of the sociopaths around them.
See my essay, Why Middle-class American Men Don’t Care Much If They Die., for a discussion of the way in which the leaders of the West act in the way of psychopaths—though it’s likely that only some are true psychopaths and many are humans of low moral character who pick up the behaviors and attitudes of surrounding psychopaths to prosper in a decaying civilization. That essay refers to the academic study, Psychopathy by U.S. State where we learn of the very dense concentration of psychopaths in Washington, DC—Connecticut has the highest concentration of any state but Washington’s concentration is far greater. In the case of Connecticut, think of all the hedge-fund managers and investment bankers who live in the Southwest of that state and work in New York City. But there are hints that some of these psychopaths were created by their nearness to power and wealth and maybe to the stresses of living in a region filled with aggressive, ambitious men and women.
A proper sort of personality is necessary for a people to build or even maintain a civilization. That proper sort of personality is made of traits which can make for mathematicians dealing with abstractions and not `just’ triangles and novelists who can produce works exploring wrong or plausible philosophies of history or of human society and theologians capable of dealing with abstract metaphysics and politicians capable of dealing with such abstractions as impartial justice—non-tribal justice from a perspective important to understanding what is happening on American campuses and many other parts of our decaying polity.
We should remember there are a large number of smart and capable Africans, intelligent human beings with personality traits at least sufficient to begin transcending tribal ways of thought and feeling and action, but too low a percentage of the total population to build a civilization and probably too low to maintain a civilization given to them—if that unwise project of Christian and secular missionaries had ever been possible. This has created a situation where those Africans who have the proper reasoning abilities and personality traits often choose to migrate to Western countries. Those without such abilities and traits also choose to at least try to migrate to Western countries. The first travel quietly in jets carrying luggage bearing their diplomas from African or Western universities, the second travel with great publicity in boats, sometimes fragile, across the Mediterranean. This is all encouraged by unscrupulous politicians, as well as by those who have ideologically malformed senses of guilt for our past crimes against Africans, not recognizing that the slaves brought over to the United States were harmed far less than many of the descendants of those left behind in Africa who now are said by Professor Clark (A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World) to have lower standards of living than they had in their `primitive’ days before missionaries and investors and colonial administrators reached them.
I’ll make a horrible speculation: Africa will suffer the greatest humanitarian disaster in history within the next two generations; hundreds of millions will die of starvation or disease or humanly-inflicted violence as a result of the breakdowns coming as Africans continue to try to take over the pieces of a civilization built for the benefit of the departed colonists and for the alleged benefit of African peoples. It’s likely parts of Africa will be re-colonized or re-enslaved by Asian and/or Western peoples wanting the natural resources and needing miners and plantation workers. As this is happening, desperate people will flee to safer regions which have cultures alien to the Africans. Many of those will probably die on the way or arrive to die soon or to live in poverty at the edge of the civilizations whose benefits they desire; some might survive and even prosper. In fact, it is happening already at a scale far smaller than what is all but certain. Both exploitive men and well-meaning men have created a situation moving towards a crisis which can’t possibly end well so far as we Westerners or the Africans are concerned.
I’ve contemplated the problem for a few months or so, and have achieved nothing but to descend into a dark night of the soul, of sorts. I’ve ascended somewhat by putting aside any goal of reaching a good answer anytime soon. Instead, I’m trying to write about it, from different angles and using tools from different intellectual traditions. This more active approach has stopped the cold-war between my faith and my reason, my faith in God the Creator and my trust in established empirical facts. One faith-based fact is that God has told us to respect, to try to love as appropriate, all human beings. One empirical fact is that God has created a world and forms of live such that constant culling of living creatures with genetic defects is necessary for the very survival of their family-lines and the entire species. Another empirical fact is that there is a build-up of mutational loads in the human race because we can now keep alive those who would have died young in that vast period prior to the Industrial Revolution.
And I remember also one claim I’ve made consistently for ten years or so: the Heavenly Body of Christ is a perfected and completed civilization with the Christian Church as the central organ. When we damage any Christian civilization, we damage part of the pilgrim Body of Christ.
What will happen in a society in which reproductive success is independent of selection for the traits so necessary, at least in a significant minority, for the human race to remain what it is or to move still closer to being an image of God? We are not only making choices which have already led to perhaps a 10-15 point drop in average intelligence in the West since 1900 or so, we have also made overlapping choices which have led to the destruction of the individual and communal traits which define the Body of Christ.
We Christians of the 21st century, and all of the secularized Christian and Jewish heretics of the West, need to realize that we weren’t created by a special act in some paradise and can’t create any paradise on earth by the best of motives and the strongest of wills. We live in a world of evolution and development. We need to make the best of such a world rather than developing delusions about our powers to keep all human beings alive while maintaining our human communities—ultimately, the Body of Christ. We need to do our best rather than assuming great good will come from the migration to civilized regions of peoples who have not the traits and characteristics for such ways of life or even the creation by foreigners of technologically advanced infrastructure in those regions of peoples who have not the traits and characteristics of civilized peoples. Without a technologically advanced civilization, Africa can perhaps sustain a population in the tens of millions, probably far less than the 250 million population of 1955. As I noted, Africa could probably sustain a larger population if it were re-colonized and re-enslaved, but we should consider a policy of benign negligence: let nature take its course and then let the Africans choose their own future. Certainly, we can’t let masses of pre-civilization peoples into regions of civilization without doing great harm to those regions and even to the immigrant peoples.
“Here be dragons.” Indeed. Here there are dangerous creatures, but real creatures of God’s making, which are probably an even greater danger to Christian thought and faith than are the various sexual and financial scandals of our days.