Exposing the Roots of Privilege, Supremacy, and Discrimination.
When I watched the Oprah interview with Meghan Markle and Harry David (yes, that is her husband’s name), I felt like the time to write this article had come. I had just finished reading Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson along with taking in work by Ibram Kendi, Jill Lepore, Ijeoma Oluo, James Baldwin, Heather McGee, John Meacham, Ava DuVernay, Resmaa Menakem, and many others out there diligently working to understand, talk about, and heal the cultural ills that we face as a people. While I write this from an American perspective, when I say ‘face as a people’ I aspire to mean all of us, I aspire to mean the species. While western culture doesn’t define a standard for the world, there is now, no corner of the world free from its influence — in pandemic terms there is no culture left on this Earth that is free from the contagion of western-colonial ideals about how the world does and should work. So we will start here and work outwards, not caring only for ourselves, but for all of our siblings, not claiming to speak, though, for any perspective but my own.
The idea for the article started to germinate in my brain after reading Jeremy Narby’s book The Cosmic Serpent — which I recommend to anyone who likes having their worldview knocked askew, even if for the brief pleasure of a different view. That book got me thinking holistically about the parallel development of our cultural and mythological narratives about science as being a separate process from the rigorous explorations that constitute scientific discoveries themselves. We might think here of Thomas Kuhn’s foundational work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” It ends up that humans are bad at understanding complex math, for example the many studies on probability. The cognitive heuristics that we use for calculation tend to be skewed in predictable and inaccurate ways — and we tend to subjugate whatever mathematical truths we glean to master-narratives and theories, regardless of how well or poorly the math and the narrative fit together. If you’re curious about this topic the Wikipedia page on Cognitive Biases is a fascinating place to start and it has footnotes that will direct you to the original scholarship on the various biases.
Like many, I’ve used the intersection of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement to deeply explore the best art and scholarship I could find to help myself become more educated and in a position to make meaningful contributions to the struggle for equal human dignity for all. For my part, I’m a little like Sméagol from Lord of the Rings — interested in the roots of things (except very fortunate in not having been corrupted by a powerful magical artifact). So this brings us back to the first sentence, I’m watching the Meghan Markle interview with all this colonial history and cultural history floating around in my head along with this germinating seed about the mismatch between the science of genetics and the mythology of genetics — and I knew I needed to share this perspective. Because, I think I’ve figured out why the deepest rhizomes of privilege, supremacy, and discrimination have been nearly impossible to unearth up to this point in history. And I’m warning you, you are not going to like the answer.
We’ll start on the science side of things, understanding that the cultural context in the 17th century is largely defined by the struggle between ‘Natural History’ (science) and Religion over which worldview would be the dominant one. It is a struggle that rages on to this day in the United States, where many of the most staunch advocates on both sides fled from Europe. In this context, the existence of sperm was discovered by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, beginning a long, ongoing march toward understanding the functioning of life as we know it. What you need to understand for the purposes of this article, is that this discovery in the midst of this cultural struggle resulted in two important things: (1.) it was used to strengthen the case for patriarchy (male dominance) by arguing that the sperm was the location of the ‘soul’ implanted into the ‘garden’ of the woman’s womb, thereby defining the man as the one who transmits the essence of the new being and the woman as simply the ‘fertile ground’ needed to grow that essence and (2.) it laid the foundation for the ‘every sperm is sacred’ doctrine — mocked by Monty Python, but to this day the foundation for the anti-birth control and anti-reproductive freedom stances still held by many religious institutions and their members worldwide. We could, of course, devote an entire article — or a whole tome — to unpacking the history of these ideas and their complex interrelationships to the parallel evolution of biological science knowledge. But, what I want you to recognize and focus on is that the translation of basic scientific discoveries into cultural, narrative contexts is MOSTLY about fitting the facts into the dominant cultural narrative, even when the facts, incompletely understood as they always are, are trying to tell a different story. This one was long enough ago, that we can recognize how silly it is. We know SO MUCH now that we didn’t know then — about biological reproduction on the cellular level, for example. But yet, the cultural influence of those early assumptions are still with us in powerful ways, ways that negatively impact the health and wholeness of our human communities and Earth’s ecology!
Ok, now we get to talk about royalty. Three cheers. Ostensibly, part of the mythology of America is our rejection of the core concept or idea of nobility and/or royalty as a function of family of origin. Certainly, it was a necessary concession for the first continental congress — they couldn’t very well honor the birthright of the British monarchy and rebel against them at the same time. So, much like the half-meant rhetorical bluster of the Declaration of Independence, our rejection of aristocracy was rhetorically bold and actually mediocre and disingenuous. Land holding (and a penis) were still pre-requisite for political participation and land titles were still primarily transmitted by inheritance. Here again, we see the fruit borne by the culture of patriarchy, echoes of the discovery of sperm. Men own things, men create the next generation of people, male children inherit that ownership from their fathers. This is identical to the definition of aristocracy, by the way, not a hair’s breadth between them. Importantly, this is also the cultural context in which the scientific work on biology continued.
So, along comes Darwin in the early 19th century with the theory of natural selection and then Oscar Hertwig half a century later is the first to witness sexual reproduction at the microscopic scale. For context, this is the same period of time in which the transatlantic slave trade was finally ended, an institution that began a century before van Leeuwenhoek saw squiggly sperm in his rudimentary microscope. So, we cannot extricate the interpretation of our foundational scientific discoveries in biology from the cultural contexts of aristocracy, colonialism, and race-based enslavement. In the same way that the culture of patriarchal religion shaped the narrative interpretation of the discovery of sperm, the culture of aristocracy and racial supremacy shaped the narrative of the interpretation of the theory of evolution and the science of biological reproduction, heritability, and genetics. Welcome the age of eugenics, which you have to thank for such lasting human accomplishments as the Holocaust and most recorded genocides. So we add to these distortions the many subsequent discoveries of the biological science: the sequencing of the human genome, the discovery of epigenetics, and the violation one of Darwin’s foundational assumptions (more on this soon)… and that’s where we are now.
Now, let’s look more closely at how the math of genetics is different from the cultural narrative about genetics, so we can start to parse out what is the science and what is the cultural baggage, so that we can decide whether that baggage is a reasonable interpretation that we should keep, or an erroneous and misleading interpretation that we should jettison in favor of a new story. We may get to a point in our evolution where we don’t need ‘story’ versions of the science, but it’s clear that we’re not evolutionarily at that point yet. We’re going to start with the way that heritability is taught in the introductory textbooks of the last few generations (shout out to some of the newer curriculum which is much better). Usually the example is flowers or animals, but the narrative is the same. Creature A is a female and has its genes, creature B is a male and has its genes, the two mate and create a brood of creatures each of which has half its genes from A and half from B. This is the moment where the truth get’s dumbed-down in an important way for our story and for the inheritance narrative. This happens, in part, with the concept of consanguinity or blood-relation. It’s important to recognize that this concept was often the mathematical foundation for many studies, for example of altruism among humans. So, we end up with concepts like the coefficient of relationship that attempt to describe the phenomena:
We’ve all seen this kind of math used to represent degrees of relatedness, here’s what you need to know. In light of our current understanding of genetics, these numbers are ridiculously, ludicrously, and laughably wrong. While it is true that the coefficient of relationship for identical twins is 1, every other number on this table is off by orders of magnitude. What’s missing from this table are three really foundational and fundamental misinterpretations of genetic science: (1. — as promised earlier) Darwin’s original assumptions that genes are (a) only transmitted or changed during reproduction is just wrong, provably wrong, proven wrong, and (b) that random chance mutation accounts for all or most genetic variation, not correct, not substantiated by lab testing or genetic archaeology. (2.) Second, although our emerging understanding of nanotechnology is still in it’s infancy, it appears that the DNA-protein set of complexes function, in part, as repeatable and reproducible data storage and transmission devices (or languages if you prefer). This means that treating them like ‘data’ makes more sense than treating them like ‘objects’ — in the important sense that talk of ownership isn’t relevant to their analysis. If you got a gene for eye color, it came from somewhere, but it is the same gene for eye color as you would find in any remote genetic line from the same species. (3.) Third, heritability does not occur outside of a mathematical context, or set of sets. In this case, the sets involved are per species and genetic. In order to reproduce sexually, creatures must be of the same species and therefore must fall inside a limited window of genetic variability with tightly comparable and compatible genomic sizes. For example, human genetic variation tends to be about 0.6% — or 20 million out of 3.2 billion base pairs. So, if we were to look at the last entry on our original coefficient of relationship table(only the top portion of which is shown in the above image) you’d find the data: Degree of Relationship = 10, Relationship = fourth cousin, Coefficient of Relationship = 0.1953125% (2*2^-10). But this math is based on the assumption that you are a 1 and some stranger is a 0. The genetic variation math suggests instead that the value of the average stranger isn’t zero, it’s more like 0.994. If we assume a normal distribution (suggested by several studies, but perhaps better assumed than presumed), then even a worst-case number for a stranger would be something like 0.988. That’s pretty damn close to 1! So your average stranger, just for rounded easy to remember numbers, is about a 99.5% of you and the most remote stranger drops to only a 99% of you. Similarly, that distant cousin is likely to be, what? a 99.6? The fallacy of drawing meaningful distinctions between the infinite minute shifts of value between 99% and 100% is possible, but we need to recognize that it is also essentially meaningless.
I could be accused here of making a best-case scenario argument, so let’s unpack that a little bit so we can understand what the median and worst cases might look like, and you can judge for yourself if you think they undermine the central argument. Worst case projections, from the perspective of my hypothesis, is that further development in genetic science confirms that 98% of the genome is non-coding and that it is theoretically sound to exclude all of this non-coding DNA from our analysis. Even in that worst case scenario, a perfect and worst case stranger is still a 0.5 to your 1, not a 0. In the intermediate cases, you can do the math, if a strangers ‘true value’ in terms of genetic variation is somewhere between 0.5 and 0.995 then the coefficient of relationship concept could be more significant than I have relegated in my best-for-my-argument case scenario. True enough, which is why the science alone isn’t enough to wrap this argument. So let’s swing around again and look at the cultural side of how the unfolding of the discovery of these genetic facts played out in the cultural context of patriarchal aristocracy and it’s children: race supremacy, colonialism, and dehumanization.
What we have to understand about royalty and aristocracy, is that the monarch is not a 1 in the mathematical regime we’ve been discussing. Culturally, in both caste and class senses, maybe they are more like a 1000 — three orders of magnitude removed from any basic 99% of the population person. Within a caste system or an aristocracy, there are tiers, where the highest tiers are differentiated from the base tier by orders of magnitude — enough to make them seem a different kind altogether. For example, we could talk about Harry David’s grandmother, the monarch of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Windsor. Let’s do some rough back-of-napkin math based on the pyramid-scheme of peonage setting the ‘value’ of the monarch at essentially the sum of the values in the pyramid below. Let’s assume that the monarch is at the pinnacle, the royal family is the second tier, the roughly 600 noble families are the third tier, and everyone else in the UK are lumped together in the fourth tier at base value 1 each. We could say, as I suggested in the beginning of this paragraph, that commoners are 1’s, nobles are 10’s, royals are 100’s, and the monarch is a 1000. Nice, tidy… arbitrary. But I think the reality looks more like the occupy movement’s numbers: 67,000,000 British, ~10,000 nobles, ~20 royals, and 1 monarch. This pyramid puts the ‘value’ of the monarch around 67 million, each royal at about 3.35 million, each noble at 6700, and every other Britain at 1. Now we start to see why the act of marrying a 1 to 3,350,000 is a big challenge to the aristocracy, to those who have been taught to believe themselves to be worth 3,350,000. Well, you know, Harry David’s mother was a 1, so his starting value was more like 1,675,000 — if we add another 1 in, or, god forbid, she’s mixed race right… oh, what? a 0.5? a 0.25? into the math, well, that child is barely noble, certainly not royal! Are you feeling sick yet? Disgusted? You should be.
Elizabeth Windsor is a 1. Harry David is a 1. Meghan Markle is a 1. You are a 1. I am a 1. Your mom, 1. Your child, 1. People you love, 1. People you hate, 1. Let’s bring it to the U.S., the current president, 1. All past presidents, 1’s. Founding fathers, 1’s. Every slave imported from Africa, 1’s. Your senator, 1. Your mayor, 1. Your governor, 1. Your garbage collector, 1. The homeless person in the tent under the overpass, 1. The prisoner on death row, 1. Assigning a value other than 1 to any human being is two things: dehumanization and a lie.
I’ll bet most of you are still feeling pretty comfortable, yet I promised you in the beginning of this article that you weren’t going to like the conclusion. I intend to keep that promise. Here we go. we’ve gotten a chunk of the rhizome mass out of the ground, now comes the hard part, that deepest root, the thin one so deep in the Earth that it feels like part of it, with just enough mass to ensure that the root will grow back if you don’t get it out. What is the common factor between this talk of royalty and of coefficients of relationship? I get it, we’re all 1's! That’s not new! There is a term that ties this all together, and that term is consanguinity — blood relation. It is the illusion, propagated by our mythological appropriation of science, that we ‘own’ our genes. For the tech-geeks among us it is the DMCA of biology — a pack of ludicrous fabrications constructed to maintain a crumbling status quo in the face of overwhelming evidence of shifting paradigms of our comprehension of reality AS IT IS, NOT AS WE WISHED IT (or misunderstood it) TO BE.
The root of the persistence of privilege, supremacy, and discrimination in world cultures up to this point is the false belief that you own your genes and that this ownership makes you and your children 1’s and everyone else, well, not quite 1’s (in the best case) or 0’s (in the worst case). This fundamental concept of ‘doing whatever you have to’ to protect your family, your biological lineage, is, well, bunk — mathematically speaking. It is a lie that is bolstered by the parallel mythologies of radical individualism and chance based natural selection. So let’s unpack those before they blow up like undiffused bombs.
I’m not saying individuals don’t exist, but they certainly don’t exist in the isolated fashion by which they are treated in western individualist-centered culture. I mean, we have the biological fact that there are more cells in your body at this moment that don’t have ‘your’ DNA than do. This makes ‘your’ skin a much more ‘grey’ and much less ‘black and white’ boundary around which to construct a myth of separateness. Following the development of individualistic culture, let’s pin that around the enlightenment for the sake of ease, we had the emergence of the the cultural phenomena of anomie, depression, and suicide at new unprecedented scales. Coincidence or evidence of interrelationships? My reading of history leans strongly toward the latter. If you want to read about what being raised as an isolated (true?) individual, out of relationship with others, looks like, you could start with the outstanding work of Bruce Perry in “The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog.” Bootstrapping is a myth. Intellectual property, myth. Rugged individualism, myth. Now myth doesn’t mean ‘something to be dismissed or discounted’, in my book it means a ‘cultural construction that needs to be understood as-such, to determine whether it is performing constructive (life-affirming) or destructive (dehumanizing) duties within the specified cultural system.’ The three myths I mentioned by name fall into the latter category in my current analysis. We don’t learn without each other, we don’t thrive without each other, we don’t grow without each other. Socio-centric cultures have historically done a better job of incorporating these truths into the fabric and structure of their societies — avoiding some western destructive myths, but often embracing others. For example, the caste system of India is based on the same family=genetic-ownership=consanguinity concept as western aristocracy. And it is now, and has been for many generations, maladaptive for that culture — resulting in some of the most cruel, violent, and crushing poverty and wealth-disparity in the world. All because FAMILY is presumed to be the correct measure of the quality, value, and capabilities of a human being. A presumption which has been proven false by scientific research, but is maintained by the cultural and mythological narratives we have spun around survival-of-the-fittest and chance-based-natural-selection. Go ahead, pick up any article about evolutionary biology — it is full of people spinning mythologies about how this or that development increased the reproductive success of this or that parent and how they procreated more passing along ‘their’ genes. Never mind that we now understand that procreation isn’t the only pathway for genetic communication and adaptive mutation. Never mind that the current model of defining species fails to capture essential and inevitable relationships between the migration and transmission of microbial populations among and across individual and species boundaries. Never mind the quite real and literal possibility that DNA photon emission could emerge as a verifiable method for communication, collaboration, and even neural-style networked intelligence among DNA strands. When do we stop pretending that DNA are ‘just inert chemicals’ and realize that they are very complex nanotechnology. THE very complex nanotechnology which forms all life as we know it.
Family exceptionalism, bunk.
National exceptionalism, bunk.
Racial or ethnic exceptionalism, bunk.
Gender exceptionalism, bunk.
Human exceptionalism, bunk.
Your dog is a 1. Your cat is a 1. The goldfish in the tank at the pet store is a 1. The tree in the Amazon rain forest is a 1. The microbe in your gut is a 1. The algae in the sea is a 1. Assigning a value other than 1 to any living thing is two things: dehumanization and a lie. Jesus spoke the truth, as have nearly all other wisdom traditions, the measure of us is how we treat the least of us. So, when I call the treatment of animals in factory farms an act of dehumanization — I am using that word to help you understand that the living essence of who and what you are is degraded by that treatment. Further, I believe that we can find causal chemical and microbial chains that radiate that disease and unhealth into our own bodies through the process of consumption. I am not proposing that this 1.ness is theoretical, I am proposing that it is actual and measurable and that we can see it if we have the courage to remove our mythological blinders.
You have been told that we are playing a zero sum game. This is not true, we are playing an infinite game called ecology. Only the made-up human games within this larger and very real game are zero sum.
You have been told that it is good and right and just to protect your family AGAINST other families and at any cost. This is not true. There is no living thing that is not your family. The AGAINST is an illusion in your worldview, not a fact of your reality. We are all siblings, and not just those of us who use keyboards and mice.
You have been told that violence against your siblings is justifiable. It is not. It is the same lie of AGAINST that we apply to families, communities, towns, cities, countries, ethnicities, and races. We must defend AGAINST others. There are no others, there is only us, one form of life on this planet with many expressions. One ecology clinging to the surface of one small planet in a sea of interstellar dust. That’s what we know. We dream of more, and dreams are good.
Am I asking you to love your children less? No, I am asking you to love all other children, even non-human children, at 99.6% — that is close enough. They are not 0’s, they are 1’s and they are your 1’s as surely as those you think of as your own. When you lie to yourself about this you dehumanize them, and this inevitably dehumanizes you and your children too. You are not separate from the web of life, you are part of it. You have shut down your feelings of oneness to insulate yourself from the brutality that the human ego has brought to our world. I am asking you to wake up, to let those feelings back in, to let them guide you to making more humane choices. We are all afraid, and because fear is so uncomfortable many of us have developed the habit of transforming that fear into anger and imagining an ‘other’ onto which we project that anger. We can stop hurting each other. We can grieve the terrible crimes which we have perpetrated against each other. We can abandon the lie of revenge for the truth of reconciliation.
