Basic Conditions, Etc.
April 27, 2021
Grundvilk: “Basic Conditions”
A Preamble
Being a geologist accustomed to seeing all landscapes as a result of past and ongoing natural processes, it continually strikes me as obvious that we live immersed in, and are materially controlled by, not only the ongoing proximal (near) and distal (far) natural and human world(s) in space, but also by the decisions and actions of our forebears and the non-human natural world in time. This is not a unique perspective. It’s probably, to employ the word in the statistical sense, the modal point-of-view in the various scientific knowledge systems, if not in the minds of individual scientists themselves.
This complexity of influences makes individual and group navigation and movement across the human and natural landscape a lot like walking across a steep talus slope: it’s easy to twist an ankle and fall, and making good progress always requires good health, energy, and devotion of full attention. When dealing with the problems facing us on such a landscape, then, time and energy spent verbally or mentally belittling or blaming persons anywhere around you, staring bemusedly up into the sky (or fixedly down at a smartphone), or failing to give credence to the lessons of the past or to the inputs of others, are all potentially hazardous and counter-productive behaviors.
Fortunately, our various biological ancestors have indeed paid much attention to the landscapes they traveled across, and if you look closely and carefully enough, the results of this past attention can be seen quite readily in the natures of the various institutions, processes and structures (including the strictly biological and biochemical), models, and other systems that they have passed onto us. What we have received from our forebears can, in most cases, still serve as effective means of dealing with our own difficulties. Given this fact, it is fortunate that human nature and culture are significantly conservative.
People from and in different parts of the human and natural landscape have different perspectives and different wholly serious interpretations and understandings of why these biological and cultural processes and institutions are put into play and how they work. Here, however, I’ll be paying most attention to explanations and interpretations of these things that are sourced from our primary common physical and biological natures as so far gleaned by the various ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences – and not from parochial and therefore partial narratives like those taken from historians, political or other identity groups, religions, oral traditions, or myth.
The difference between generally looking at such matters somewhat scientifically – rather than through the cloudier and more myopic lenses of, say, oppositional politics and/or history - is that the scientific perspective can provide a more reliable and more transferable, fairly simple set of “basics” about “basic conditions” (grundvilk) that can be referenced again and again by anyone or any group on the globe to aid navigation, movement, and perseverance on the landscape. In the regard of solving various human problems, science functions much like as just another trade language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca).
An Example of What is Meant by “Basics”
When I was about 40 and just started to grow some man-boobs, I took up learning Okinawan karate in a moderately-sized town on the Western Slope of Colorado. Eventually this decision helped reverse the newly-emerging (sic), age-related male phenotype. Besides increasing my muscle mass, developing many, many new neuronal connections, and learning a good measure of a practical skill, I received firsthand exposure to a physical education approach long associated with Asian cultures, and with many Western vocational and manual arts as well.
Traditional, non-commercially-oriented/non-sports-oriented karate classes are guided by the extremely close attention of the karate instructor (the functional equivalent of a ballet master) to all aspects of technique exhibited by the students. This is because without proper technique, the efficacy of the karate movements of any given practitioner is much diminished. Accordingly, from time to time, our karate instructor would explain to us students how we could maintain our karate technique when he was not present. “It’s simple”, he would say, “If you are worried that your karate is starting to break down, then go back to your basics and take it from there.” He’d then review, once again, those “basics” that support and maintain our particular karate style.
According to the instructor, the karate style I was exposed to in Colorado was specifically developed for self-defense use by small people (see photo below). As such, each of its array of basic techniques was made, among other things, to compensate for the relative lack of strength and mass of the diminutive. To illustrate just one approach to addressing this problem, as far as possible the style employees body movements that accelerate acceleration, thus designedly generating what physicists call “jerk” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_%28physics%29). Coupling jerk with mass produces explosive “yank” (mass x acceleration x acceleration; http://news.emory.edu/stories/2019/09/ting_yank_bme), rather than more rudimentary and less impactful “force” (mass x acceleration) commonly produced and employed by most other martial arts, including Western boxing. In this style of karate, then, acceleration of acceleration acts as a substitute for the body mass that small people are lacking.
So, at some time in the past a human population was able to carefully and empirically work out the basics of how to meticulously use the human body and mind, every human’s most fundamental natural capital, in a way that made much more efficient use of that capital for self-defense purposes. Nature and nurture were then subsequently further combined with the efforts of martial arts teachers and students, and the initial natural capital, just like well- or fortunately-managed financial capital, appreciated and multiplied in utility and value.
This same pattern – members of a human population laboriously, and with a great measure of trial and error determining how to do something better, and then, with kindly and cooperatively passing knowledge (the science) of this method onto others, has been repeated time and time again throughout homo sapiens’ history. Notice here, by the way, that in such a historically long and critical human context, the heightened concerns of many about ongoing and planned limitations of freedom of speech and communication pose very great significance.
The Upswing and the Downswing
Introduction
The first topic I’d like to talk about from the perspective just reviewed is how a very basic disturbance to the general system that humankind uses to get the most out of its unique ability to utilize both nature and nurture can ramify positively or negatively throughout a homo sapiens culture. Given the historically high level of discord and dysfunction currently occurring within US politics, economics, culture, and society, for example, there are strong indications that a very fundamental upset to an important subsystem of the general homo sapiens system of the employment of nature and nurture in the US is behind the nation’s many current and pronounced difficulties.
I’ll first remind you of how the nature x nurture advantage is generally deployed and maintained by homo sapiens (“basic conditions”), and then illustrate how a significant disturbance in America of only one critical part of this productive system has shaken up America for the last 60 or so years and made it far less cooperative and productive.
It’s Nature x Nurture All the Way Up and Down
As already remarked, the natural landscape can be difficult to travel across. Travelers not only have to monitor themselves internally, but also simultaneously watch out for conditions on the outside. Sometimes the inside cooperates with the outside, sometimes the inside has to confront and oppose the outside. Oddly enough, to ultimately achieve cooperation humanity very often has to quite strongly oppose those who are disinclined to cooperate. Sometimes others have to be — at least temporarily — very vigorously opposed in order to secure and maintain the very large net advantage homo sapiens gains by executing acts of cooperation.
The general scientific model of the homo sapiens advantage upon the landscape posits that this very large advantage comes from two main sources already mentioned: nature and nurture. Nature is that assemblage of biological gifts supporting human and much other animal life that have been provided courtesy of natural selection of sexually reproducing species. Nurture, while also ultimately derived from biological natural selection, is that assemblage of behavioral traits (and tricks) accumulated and disseminated through conscious social/cultural means, rather than through unreflecting biological transmission of the human genome and/or epigenome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenome). The earlier provided ‘determination-and-then-transmission-of-the-basics’ Okinawan karate style example is only a single instance of how humanity, much, much more than any other animal species, amplifies the value and utility of its basic natural capital in and through time and space by the use of nurture.
The gain obtained by this multiplier effect of nature x nurture is so significant and so critical to homo sapiens that means and methods to perpetuate, defend, maintain, and utilize this effect thoroughly permeate all of global human life, from birth to death, to and from the individual and the family, to and from the family and the township, to and from the township and the county, to and from the county and the state, to and from the state and the nation, and to and from the nation and the same social system layers within the rest of the global population. For homo sapiens it’s nature x nurture all the way down, not turtles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down).
Successful construction and conservation of the social systems that provide so much of the specifically human advantages of nature x nurture of course start in the family. The long human childhood within the family is not only spent growing most of an adult body, but also in developing and establishing a large percentage of adult behaviors, habits, and abilities that permit maximal utilization of the homo sapiens nature x nurture advantage. Much parental time in human development in the family is spent curbing (opposing) immature, more instinctual and unconscious tendencies to be self-centered and consequently careless of others. Gradually, of course, other social factors like schooling, peers, and non-family adults and institutions outside of the family begin to influence and partially shape and modify the young human personality.
According to Allport (1952),1 very critical finishing touches on human maturation are only effected, however, by learning to cope with the stresses and continual person-to-person interchanges that the closed mini-society of a new marriage necessarily and naturally impose on still-maturing humans. For example, Allport points out that until a person becomes married, it usually doesn’t become apparent to them how thoughtlessly disrespectful and unaware they can be of other people’s individual differences. Typically, too, before marriage the ability to take responsibility and justified blame on oneself is rudimentary and poorly developed. Prior to wedlock (sic! — see the no-fault/no-lock divorce laws of the US), for example, there is usually a strong tendency to reflexively blame the nearest ‘other’ in the environment (e.g., the home) for difficulties or mishaps. Unfortunately, these finishing touches on the human maturation process are usually left uncompleted in the event any two marriage participants are unable to carry out all of the personal adjustments necessary to sustain their marriage, or if any given individual is unable to marry for economic or other reasons.
The Basics of One Way Things Can Go Very Seriously Wrong while Trying to Make the Most of the Homo Sapiens Nature x Nurture Advantage
I’ll let Allport (ibid.) start things off here:
I think I have now made the point that the transition from adolescence to maturity is largely one, as I see it, of getting rid of the exclusionist anchorage of safety, narrow islands of safety--a matter of moving out with relaxation and confidence, knowing that there's more than one way to do a thing. It isn't any longer a matter of black and white. People don't have to be in-group or else enemies. This is an important stage in the transition to true adulthood, and you can see how now we can come to the criteria of the mature personality and relate them to marriage.
Allport then describes the three basic attributes of a fully marriage-matured member of homo sapiens as follows:
1. The first is what you might call an extended ego, extended ego interests, in contrast to the original child with his clamorous self-consciousness, crying if things don't go his way. The extended interests that I am talking about all have to do with matters that become just as important to us as our own childish pride. They are interests that are grown objective.
… in maturity a person has to have these vital outward thrusts in reference to several departments of life; family for example. One's family has to matter, it has to be real, more important than life itself.
Occupation: the whole man goes to work. He should feel his work is vital, should have participation from the very roots of his being in some aspect of his occupation. Self-education: because he's always curious, he should have a vital interest in some sort of learning. Recreation and religion: because you have a more complete man if his interests are developed in all these directions. Another area is civic participation: a mature person will have a deep interest in some phase of his civic life because, in a democracy especially, one must participate or else one is not mature.
2. The second criterion of maturity is a self-objectification which is closely related to a sense of humor. With humor, one holds oneself in a kind of cosmic perspective. One asks, "Who am I to make all this fuss? What right have I got to poison the air that other people breathe with my everlasting demands?" My troubles after all are just a nit on a gnat's nut compared with other people's troubles, and compared with the important things in life! I recall that Richard Cabot once said that he thought the best test of compatibility in marriage was whether the couple laughed at the same thing or not. Maturity requires self-objectification, laughter, humor. Anybody who is all bound up in himself can't have this insight, can't see himself as others see him. And most of us are laughable to some extent.
3. Third, there is something beyond humor, because one can't live only by humor. Therefore some sort of integrative philosophy of life is always found with maturity. Usually but not always it's some form of religious orientation. Without a realization that one needs a comprehensive view of life one isn't fully mature.
It takes the maximum possible number of mature humans acting responsibly, cooperatively, and consistently with the sustained intent and competence of maturity over time at all levels of social organization in order to maximize the nature x nurture advantage practically available to homo sapiens. Where adult-age humans lack maturity, the positive effects of the nature x nurture advantage of humanity are less than they could be. In such cases humanity itself gets in the way of its own general welfare (general welfare “rightly considered”, that is).2
Psychology addresses this class of problems at the individual level by the use of the personality disorder concept. A person with some degree of a personality disorder, according the American Association of Psychiatry (the “AAP”. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/personality-disorders/what-are-personality-disorders), possesses “… a way of thinking, feeling and behaving that deviates from the expectations of the culture, causes distress or problems functioning, and lasts over time.”
Although there are, according to the AAP, ten different kinds of personality disorder, Bernstein (2012)3 states that the following five are the most commonly encountered (the wording of these disorder definitions is taken verbatim from the AAP website):
1. Antisocial personality disorder: a pattern of disregarding or violating the rights of others. A person with antisocial personality disorder may not conform to social norms, may repeatedly lie or deceive others, or may act impulsively.
2. Histrionic personality disorder: a pattern of excessive emotion and attention seeking. People with histrionic personality disorder may be uncomfortable when they are not the center of attention, may use physical appearance to draw attention to themselves or have rapidly shifting or exaggerated emotions.
3. Narcissistic personality disorder: a pattern of need for admiration and lack of empathy for others. A person with narcissistic personality disorder may have a grandiose sense of self-importance, a sense of entitlement, take advantage of others or lack empathy.
4. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: a pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfection and control. A person with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder may be overly focused on details or schedules, may work excessively not allowing time for leisure or friends, or may be inflexible in their morality and values.
5. Paranoid personality disorder: a pattern of being suspicious of others and seeing them as mean or spiteful. People with paranoid personality disorder often assume people will harm or deceive them and don’t confide in others or become close to them.
In each of the five common personality disorder categories above, it is clear that the personality type concerned either is untrustworthy and/or is distrusting. Trust, of course, is absolutely necessary for the human economic, political, social, and cultural cooperation implicit everywhere in the employment of the nature x nurture system of human advantage (see Turchin 2016; Putnam and Garrett, 2020).4
According to the AAP (ibid.), the existence of a personality disorder (or disorders) in any given person typically becomes evident only after a person reaches about the age of 18. The reason for this is that, all other things being equal, personality orders, being observable attributes of internal mental and emotional immaturity, normally attenuate or disappear with the development of physical adulthood. When they don’t significantly reduce or disappear with body age, it becomes noticeable and more troublesome.
Working at the individual level, psychiatrists have developed a number of one-on-one and group therapies meant to help people with non-cooperative personality disorders mature and thus better ‘join the adult world’. Given the chronic presence of oppositional immature humans interfering with the effective operation of human society’s nature x nurture functions, however, human cultures have established numerous workarounds to minimize the negative effects caused by the discomfiting and destabilizing presence of immature humans and, ideally, help increase the probability of the eventual successful maturation of these young or otherwise immature people. In this regard, think of the institutions of marriage, schools, legal systems, police departments, religions, governments, and – as a last resort -- armies.
Bernstein (ibid.), as he tends to do, cuts right to the chase and indicates how and why these various societal workarounds help usefully deal with the harmful actions and negative influences of immature humans. Referring to these immature individuals as “emotional vampires”, Bernstein (chapter 2, ibid.) ‘conservatively’ says,
Understanding emotional vampires’ immaturity is your ultimate weapon. Many of their most outrageous actions would make perfect sense if they were done by a two-year-old. Don’t let vampires’ chronological age or positions of responsibility fool you. They are two-year-olds, at least when they’re acting up. The most successful strategies for dealing with emotional vampires are precisely the same ones you’d use with young children — setting limits, arranging contingencies, being consistent, keeping lectures to a bare minimum, rewarding good behavior and ignoring bad, and occasionally putting them in time-out.
However, Bernstein (ibid., chapter 1) also qualifies this pronouncement with a later ‘progressive’ remark that indirectly refers to another angle of approach also often used by mature homo sapiens (especially parents and other caretakers) to indirectly handle the problems caused by human mental and emotional immaturity:
Usually, the difficult people discussed in this book are indistinguishable, both physically and psychologically, from everybody else. Vampires’ immature tendencies usually come out only in threatening situations. The rest of the time, emotional vampires act like normal, responsible adults. That said, I’ll also point out that vampires tend to be threatened by things that don’t bother ordinary people.
The subject of this last Bernsteinian observation is examined by recent research that indicates that, in many cases, temporary overwhelming personal difficulty only temporarily decreases apparent mental age in humans (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013).5 Although the longstanding American ‘conservative’ cultural tradition of striving to rely on personal efforts views such ideas skeptically, the fact that immature behavior is often reversible upon externally-provided stress relief shows that there is basic justification for sometimes employing other methods besides more curtly treating immaturely-acting humans in American society as two-year olds. Mullainathan and Shafir discuss the whole matter much more fully.
Empirical National-Level Proof of the Basic Importance of Personal Maturity to the General Welfare of Homo Sapiens
Essentially, the main finding related in Putnam and Garrett’s recently-published book (2020), The Upswing, is that a long period of comparatively mature (‘progressive’) behavior across the entire political spectrum in the United States was directly responsible for the high level of economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that gradually built up within the US up until on or about 1960. After 1960 or so, however, the adult-aged population of the United States quite suddenly began exhibiting what Allport and Bernstein would both label as measurably less mature, more self-centered (‘regressive’?) behavior, and simultaneously became less trusting and/or trustworthy. Coincident with these negative changes within the populace, the economic, political, social, and cultural quality of life of Americans – all, you will recall, a product of the prior continuous and concerted application of that homo sapiens nature x nurture advantage in America – also abruptly started decreasing. The general state of things in America continues to decline to this day, according to Putnam and Garrett (and by many recent events effortlessly recognizable by many adult US citizens).
The following graph from Putnam and Garrett (ibid.) illustrates the change in the statistical index used by them to indicate changes in the relative level of aggregate self-centeredness in American citizens over time. In this illustration, higher points on the graph line represent higher overall levels of national level cooperation and comity (mature behavior), while lower points on the line represent the greater national influence of the opposite habits of self-centeredness and consequent discord (less mature behavior).
Putnam and Garret (ibid.) devote most of their book recounting the history of improvements and gains made in the nature and performance of the US from the 1890s to about 1960, and the general social, political, social, and cultural decay and losses that have occurred since. In the end, however, the authors admit they were unable to isolate a clearly convincing cause (or causes) for the 1960s era reversal of the quality of American life and social behavior. They did, nonetheless, suggest that somehow choosing and beginning to act much more like our pre-1960s forebears would probably help the nation eventually reverse its chronic overall decline.
However, keeping in mind Allport’s identification of marriage as the ‘capstone course’ of the human maturation process, and examining the time-series of divorce and marriage rates for the US for the last 130 years, an extremely likely major cause for the ongoing cultural, social, economic, and political problems of the US becomes evident. See the next graph.
As can be seen in this graph, the Allport ‘maturity incubator’ of married life operated at full heat to about 1960 in the US, and then was suddenly turned down. Again, Putnam and Garrett show in detail that most of the ‘progressive’ advances in US economics, politics, society, and culture were achieved during the period of high marriage rate and relatively low divorce rate that occurred in America up to about 1960. Given the demonstrable role of marriage in fostering the development of individual maturity, presumably these ‘progressive’ advances were achieved under the primary influence of the aggregate greater overall maturity of individual adult US citizens of the past. Once again here recall earlier comments that individual maturity directly supports and maximizes efficacy and execution of the nature x nurture advantage available to homo sapiens, and thus increases the general welfare rightly considered.
Although the divorce rate in America has been declining since about 1980, the ‘standing crop’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_crop) concentration of married, presumably more mature and cooperative, people in the US has continued its decline begun in the 1960s to the present day. This is because, although the divorce rate has fallen appreciably since about 1980, the percentage of adult-aged people in America getting married and entering the traditional ‘maturity incubator’ is getting ever smaller and smaller.
The last graph of this piece below indicates that the 50-state revolution in US divorce law, among other reinforcing factors (e.g., “the pill”), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce#United_States) served as a cultural ‘enzymatic’ catalyst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzyme) strongly accelerating the destruction of marriages in America by reducing the former difficulty6 of breaking up a marriage.
In summary, rather than just indiscriminately whipping up and seeking to implement a new, ad hoc and chaotic hodgepodge of Progressive Era-like governmental legislation and programs, as suggested by Putnam and Garrett, it seems much more to the point to first recognize and acknowledge a primary major cause of the nation’s current problems (i.e., go back to the “basics”), and then, as far as feasible, tailor each and every social, political, cultural and economic action and institution in the US so that they more firmly support marriage formation, marriage stability, and consequent and increasing overall level of adult-aged citizen maturity. Returning to these basics and thereby rebuilding the overall level of decision-making and behavioral competence of the US would, no doubt, not only help gradually restore an overall atmosphere of cooperativeness and comity within the US once again, but would also lead to the once again continued ‘progressive’ appreciation of the value and utility of America’s general welfare, rightly considered.
Much more often than not, it appears that full maturity of an individual’s personality is only reached with the agency of a new, mutually self-nurturing/auto-correcting family group formed by two nearly-mature human beings (Allport, Gordon, 1952, The mature personality: Pastoral Psychology, v. 3, pp. 19-24). I cannot imagine that the particular gender distributions of marriage participants would make any difference to the individual maturation process explained by Allport as taking place in marriage as long as the couple is able to cooperatively establish and persevere in the married state.
Borrowing part of a turn-of-phrase from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 Democracy in America. De Tocqueville coined the complete phrase, “self-interest, rightly considered” to mean self-interest that also seriously takes into account the rights and concerns of others. “General welfare, rightly considered” is meant here to include the self-interest of homo sapiens and the interests of everything proximal and distal to homo sapiens that is ‘not homo sapiens’.
Bernstein, A.J., 2012, 2nd edition, Emotional Vampires: McGraw-Hill Education, NY.
Turchin, Peter, 2016, Ultrasociety: Beresta Books, Chaplin, CT. Putnam, R.D, and Garrett, S.R., 2020, The Upswing: Simon and Schuster, NY.
Mullainathan, Senhil, and Shafir, Eldar, 2013, Scarcity: Henry Holt and Company, NY.
“Activation energy” in chemical speak.
While the breakdown of marriage and the family has, I believe, long been blamed for many social ills, I really appreciate the particular approach you’ve taken here.
I’ve come across a couple people in the psychology field who postulate a connection between the increase in the divorce rate (in the US in particular) to the apparent (and actual - albeit often anecdotally since serious research on this topic is fairly new) rise in people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder. There’s certainly more sociopaths running amok than we might think (see Martha Stout’s book _The Sociopath Next Door_).
So, I don’t think it a stretch at all to say we can trace it farther back down the communal family tree to see that there’s also likely a cyclical and exponential component over time to the breeding of amorality, to which promoting marriage in the way this article describes is a viable antidote. I’ll venture to take that a bit farther however, and say that the proper formation of a marriage might need to be considered, lest one fall prey to a dangerous cycle; marriage can also be a hiding space for disordered people to appear not-so-threatening. Perhaps that serves as more support for your argument, since marriage itself would then still create a bit of a buffer to the larger society?
Even in the case of intact marriages where one parent is personality disordered (and as such, an emotionally immature child in an adult’s body) marriage itself cannot “right” that person, nor prevent the ill-effects it has on any children in the family system. So, I do believe the end result for that subset of marriages would be the same regardless.