The Origins of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations, by Nicholas Wade (HarperCollins, 256 pp., $32.00)
City Journal readers may know Nicholas Wade for his courageous writing on the “lab leak” theory of Covid-19’s origins. New York Times readers may recognize his name from his decades of quality science reporting for the paper. Those with a taste for the taboo may recall the uproar over his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, while the rest can probably guess the nature of that controversy from the title.
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No matter how he lands on one’s radar, Wade is worth reading. His latest book, The Origins of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations, explores the conflicts between current political fads and human nature.
The book serves as a solid introduction to the science of human nature, and a sure-to-be-contentious application of that science to today’s controversies. Consider it a shorter, updated spin on Steven Pinker’s 2002 classic, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Humans can behave in all sorts of ways. And groups of humans have formed all sorts of societies: egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, farming communities, and industrialized nations with millions of people. Yet human nature has certain constants—lines that cannot be crossed, and tendencies that must be accommodated or addressed as societies structure their institutions. Many of these “human universals” have obvious evolutionary advantages, are seen in all known human societies, and/or can be found in other species, suggesting that they have a biological basis and are not just cultural choices we can discard at will.
This kind of argument is, of course, a tricky business. It can be hard to tell when a new idea is too deeply in conflict with human nature as to be a nonstarter, or when a conflict can be ironed out or tolerated. And that assumes we can agree on which human tendencies are cultural versus universal.
As an example of a well-meaning experiment that failed in some highly informative ways, Wade turns to the kibbutzim, a network of collective farms in Israel that began in the early twentieth century. These were originally utopian communities premised on absolute equality, with men and women having the same kinds of jobs; even clothing was sometimes considered community property. Most radically, the kibbutzim abolished the family, with kids separated from their parents and raised communally.
These features didn’t last long. By the second generation, women and men were gravitating toward sex-stereotypical jobs, and mothers were insisting on greater access to their own kids. Over time, the groups started screening newcomers to weed out those who would take advantage of the promise of equality without working (which, Wade notes, has some parallels to hunter-gatherer bands’ ability, thanks to their small size, to share everything while sanctioning shirkers). Many dropped their equal-pay and family policies entirely.
Some systems simply won’t work for humans. And yet sometimes a struggle against core elements of human nature can be worthwhile—as Wade explains in discussing monogamy.
Most human societies, particularly since the adoption of agriculture, have allowed men to have multiple wives. But since humans give birth to roughly equal numbers of males and females, allowing one man to have an additional wife requires another to have none. Polygamy thus creates lots of involuntarily celibate young males—hardly a source of social stability.
Banning polygamy might restrain human nature, but it’s still in humanity’s best interest. Some researchers have even hypothesized that human societies can’t grow beyond a limited size unless they impose a norm of monogamy. And sustaining larger states requires overcoming tribalism, which is rooted in kin networks.
We simply can’t have big, advanced modern societies without fighting human nature at least a little—which shouldn’t be surprising, since we mostly evolved in little bands scrounging for food.
Much of this background will be familiar to regular consumers of books in this vein, including Wade’s own Before the Dawn. The Origins of Politics gets a little spicier when Wade turns to hot-button controversies.
The concept of “feminization,” for instance, is having its moment in the limelight. As Wade frankly discusses, men and women on average have substantial differences, both physical and psychological, stemming from human evolution. Men are stronger, more competitive, more physically aggressive, and “adept at forming alliances with other men to secure the goals vital to their society’s existence.” Women, by contrast, “look to make close personal friendships with those around them to and to develop a supportive network for child-rearing.”
As society’s institutions become increasingly female, they will undoubtedly change in fundamental ways, though Wade concedes the exact nature of these changes is yet “unknown.” One component of the problem is the political Left’s quest to make every institution and desirable occupation at least 50 percent female, which requires lowering standards for women in areas where they’re less competitive—an inherently problematic approach to anything important. Another is that male groups, female groups, and coed groups have different dynamics—even apart from individual abilities—and one of those dynamics might be best suited for the task at hand. This is particularly pressing in the military context.
Wade also spends some time documenting the decline of the nuclear family—though this is not so much an attack on human nature as an erosion of an institution that channels our nature productively—as well as the perplexing fact that, for all evolution did to encourage humans to reproduce, people across the developed world are choosing not to. As he notes, efforts to raise below-replacement birthrates have seen limited success at best, and some countries seem to be hurtling toward extinction. I was surprised, though, that Wade didn’t give more attention to the possibility of further evolution: humanity finds itself in a radically new environment, and people who don’t feel like procreating are removing themselves from the gene pool.
Human intuitions toward fairness also pose difficulties to modern societies. Meritocracy and capitalism generate immense wealth but also create a degree of inequality that many find inherently objectionable—perhaps drawing on instincts developed during humanity’s egalitarian hunter-gatherer phase.
Meantime, modern liberalism is eroding many forms of the social cohesion humans crave—banning even the most anodyne religious instruction in schools, diversifying nations through immigration, and refusing to enforce a common language. Wade finds these trends worrisome, but others might see them as signs of progress and tolerance, fights worth having against humanity’s worst instincts.
Again, arguments based on human nature are a tricky business. How do we tell beforehand whether a given idea will turn out more like taking kibbutz kids away from their parents, or more like banning polygamy? As a result, few readers will come away convinced of every argument Wade makes here.
The Origins of Politics is nevertheless an informative, accessible read that will get its audience pondering the hard realities of human nature—and looking at modern political debates through a new lens.
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