Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190831 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/8/2019 18:12 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

• The Guardian Sat urday 31 Aug ust 2019

2

to rule out. David Cameron had some of the

same stuff , exemplifi ed by his “ Flashman”

persona and the idiotic decision to call

the 2016 referendum in the fi rst place. But Johnson is

something else again. Encouraged by his close adviser,

Dominic Cummings (who seems to me not so much

the genius of Tory imaginings, but someone who has

cottoned on to the fact that if the modern political

right is to win, it has to be utterly reckless), he has

seemingly decided not just that Brexit must happen at

the end of October, but that what he does between now

and the conclusion of a general election will be based

on the supposed division between “the people” and

parliament, with the latter portrayed as the acme of all

the liberal arrogance that Brexiteers have projected on

to remain supporters.

It says something about the decay of our most basic

democratic institutions that the House of Commons

presents such an easy target. If we have had any recent

national conversation about the state of our democracy,

by far the loudest voices have been those dismal

provocateurs concentrated in the right wing press, who

would have you believe that MPs are corrupt, entitled

people who should be paid as little as possible. For these

people, Brexit was a gift: a chance to take the supposed

division to its logical conclusion, while performing

a classic act of bullying: giving a body of people an

impossible job, and then raging at them for their

inability to do it.

B

ut there is also something deeper at

play. For all that it remains the best

model of government and politics

human beings have yet come up with,

in the 21st century, representative

democracy is a very tough sell. When

people spend half their lives online and

can experience at least the sensation of

agency and instant gratifi cation, the idea that we elect

MPs to exercise their own judgment and then eventually

submit their record for approval or rejection can easily

seem woefully old-fashioned. I have lost count of the

number of people I have met over the last few years who

have angrily told me that the function of the Commons

was to simply “do our bidding”.

In a recent YouGov poll , 63% of respondents agreed

that MPs must “act according to the wishes of their

constituents, even when this goes against their own

judgment”, a fi gure that reached 78% among leave

voters and – at which point Edmund Burke spins in his

grave – 81% of Tory supporters. It is no accident that,

like so many populist forces, Nigel Farage’s Brexit party

claims to be in favour of direct democracy. Whatever

its dangers, it is an idea that may be perfectly suited to

a future of easy and instant everything, and the clarion

call Amazon now suggests its customers ask their digital

assistants: “Alexa, where’s my stuff ?”

These things threaten to further the development of

a turbulent, volatile, almost amoral politics. If we are

going to stand any chance of averting such disasters, we

will have to not just make the case for representative

government, but rebuild and reform the local, regional

and national institutions of our democracy, a task

every bit as urgent as the need to make the UK more

economically equal, and one that the political left has so

far not paid nearly enough attention to.

In contrast to the forces on the other side who are

currently running rampant, so far, we have neither

the ideas nor the language to even start – so, in the

meantime, politics is going to carry on channelling

awful division and opening up profound dangers. To

paraphrase the 20th-century communist Antonio

Gramsci , it is not so much that the old world is dying

and the new cannot be born: it is that the only vivid

and coherent vision of the future of power and politics

on off er is currently being off ered by irresponsible

chancers, whose chief concern is not the ghouls they are

letting loose, but their own survival.

Their opportunity lies in the chasm between this

week’s protests and the millions of people who either

avert their eyes or see them as so much liberal, remainer

nonsense; it is also our side’s greatest challenge, whose

urgency, even now, has yet to sink in.

Earlier this month Donald Trump accused the man he

had appointed to run the United States Federal Reserve,

Jerome Powell, of being an “enemy”. His public dressing

down of the central bank chair, who is supposed to be

independent, was accompanied by further escalations

of the US–China trade war. Mr Trump wants Mr Powell

to lower rates to spur growth in the sputtering US

economy and give him the upper hand with Beijing.

This incompetence and bluster is hardly inspiring global

confi dence. It was a coincidence, however, that on the

same day the Bank of England’s governor, Mark Carney,

warned the annual gathering of the world’s central

bankers that the global economy was becoming over-

reliant on the dollar. That may have been fi ne when the US

was viewed as a responsible leader of the world economy.

Mr Carney plainly thinks that is not the case today.

There are reasons to worry. Almost every nation is

tied to the monetary policy of the US. More than half

of all trade invoices are in dollars, as are nine-tenths

of all foreign exchange transactions. Since the 2008

global crash, corporate and government levels of dollar

debt in the emerging world have rocketed, leading to

fi nancial instability. Despite the Trump administration’s

volatility and belligerence, the dollar keeps rising in

value. It matters not that the US Fed cut rates in July:

investors want to put their money into greenbacks.

This is no new phenomenon: the US’s “exorbitant

privilege” was noted decades ago.

Yet with great power comes great responsibility,

as the US found out when forced to stabilise fi nancial

The argument that some behaviour is “in our genes” is

distrusted by the left. Too often it is used to whitewash

terrible injustices. Yet it cannot be entirely dismissed.

Certain patterns of behaviour and thought, such as the

faculty of language acquisition, are very clearly a part

of our genetic inheritance as a species. The instinct for

justice itself appears to arise spontaneously in small

children. The escape from the idea that genes determine

our fate is not to pretend that they have no infl uence,

but to come to understand that they can have many

diff erent, often confl icting infl uences, even within the

same people and certainly within populations. This is

true both of their eff ects on behaviour and on bodies.

Biology is a science that deals with variations. There is

no one perfect type of a species. Diversity, in this sense,

is not just something to aim at but something necessary

for a population to fl ourish. The idea that natural

selection works only on mutations is a deeply misleading

oversimplifi cation. It is much more likely to alter the

proportions of an already existing mixture of genes.

What is more, game theory shows that the balance of

advantage will shift as a result of the shift in a gene’s

frequency. With very few exceptions, such as the change

that Noam Chomsky postulates makes possible the

complexity of human syntax, few mutations are going

to be so overwhelmingly advantageous that they drive

out all other variants. More often, if any one variation

becomes dominant, there will be an advantage for its

opposite. “Normal” is thus a shifting, fuzzy category.

This is especially true of the genes which can

markets during the worst fi nancial crisis since the

Great Crash of 1929. The US Fed engaged in loans,

guarantees and outright purchases of fi nancial assets

that were not only unprecedented but cumulatively

amounted to $29tn. This staggering amount is twice

the size of the nation’s GDP.

Mr Carney’s solution was to call for the emergence

of alternative international reserve currencies. He

thought it would be a good idea to create a new

“synthetic hegemony currency”, to make the global

monetary and fi nancial system more “diverse”. Yet

the problem is that before any currency can replace

the dollar, world markets have to develop a great

deal of trust in a new international lender of last

resort. Right now that is the US Fed – which is why Mr

Trump’s attacks are so disconcerting. The president’s

failure to grasp macroeconomics is terrifying. The

US trade defi cit, which drives the president crazy,

means that the US is a net importer of capital.

That means that the US government provides

safe US dollar assets so it is hard to see how the

trade defi cit can be eliminated without damaging

the global fi nancial system. John Maynard Keynes

worried in 1944 that the Bretton Woods system could

rely on the dollar only as long as America had a trade

surplus, and the moment the US became a defi cit

country, the system would collapse. That is what

happened in 1971. Mr Carney echoed this sentiment

in his speech, noting “past instances of very low rates

have tended to coincide with high-risk events such

as wars, fi nancial crises and breaks in the monetary

regime”. Mr Trump’s concern that the dollar is too

strong may be reasonable. But his unpredictable

actions are making the problem much worse. Tariff s

and interest rate cuts will not lower its value. In the

short term, some kind of concerted international

action by central banks could bring the value of the

dollar down. But that would need a volte-face from

the Trump administration and a commitment to

abandoning trade and currency wars.

infl uence human behaviour and emotional

predispositions. Not only is the chain of causation

from gene expression to behaviour unimaginably

complex , it is also profoundly aff ected by outside

circumstances. Identical twins, who share the same

DNA, are not identical people, because they cannot

entirely share the same life and experiences.

What science can do, under these circumstances,

is to look for correlations between DNA sequences

and observable behaviour. The correlations can,

at best, give pointers towards where causes might

be found. The latest eff ort has been to see if there

is a genetic cause for homosexuality and the result

is clear. There isn’t.

Using a data set of nearly half a million people,

of whom 27,000 reported same sex contact ,

researchers found – in their own words – “In

aggregate, all tested genetic variants ... do not

allow meaningful prediction of an individual’s

sexual behaviour”. There are fi ve loci which

appear to have a measurable, though far from

decisive, infl uence on sexual preference. Some are

also involved with the sense of smell, and one is

associated with male pattern baldness.

This leads to perhaps the most interesting feature

of the research: it not only shows that there is no

clear genetic cause for same sex attraction, but that

the attraction itself does not form a coherent whole.

Some of the genetic variations weakly associated

with same sex behaviour are diff erent in men and

women. In place of the old idea that there might be a

single cause for a single pattern of behaviour, there is

now an understanding of multiple causes for varying

patterns of behaviour. In place of a single scale of

sexual attraction as posited by Kinsey, in which desire

for the same sex and opposite sex are linked so that

more of one means less of the other, the researchers

suggest that these are independent variables.

Diversity is good in itself and humans are more –

much more – than the sum of their genes.



 Continued from front

The fruitless search for

a ‘ gay gene’ shows the

complexity of biology

Genetics

Dollar dominance

Trump thinks he can bully

the Fed into lowering US

interest rates. That’s bad

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