The Wall Street Journal - 28.03.2020 - 29.03.2020

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POLITICS

BYBARTON

SWAIM

GEORGE FRIEDMAN’Slatest

book is either a work of

balderdash or a prescient

anticipation of our current woe,

or bits of both. In“The Storm

Before the Calm” (Doubleday,

238 pages, $28.95),Mr.

Friedman, specialist in

geopolitical forecasting, posits

two kinds of “cycle” in American

history: an institutional one,

which lasts roughly 80 years;

and a socioeconomic one,

which lasts roughly 50.

The institutional cycles

involve the relationship between

the federal government and the

states. From 1787 until the Civil

War, Mr. Friedman tells us, the

relationship remained ambiguous;

from the Civil War to 1945, the

federal government assumed

pre-eminence; from 1945 to

now, Washington expanded its

authority over nearly every

area of American life.

The socioeconomic cycles,

meanwhile, have mainly had to

do with the dominant forces in

the commercial sector: private

banking from 1787 to the

presidency of Andrew Jackson;

land expansion from Jackson

to the end of Ulysses Grant’s

second term; production-focused

industry from about 1880 to

the crash of 1929; technocratic

management from FDR to

Reagan; and an investment-

centered system based on low

taxes and low interest rates

from Reagan to the present.

Each iteration of these

cycles—in both categories—has

ended in crisis, Mr. Friedman

says, but in each case America

has reinvented itself and

established another period of

stability and prosperity.

“The Storm Before the Calm”

is not a work of history but of

augury. The big idea: Both the

institutional cycle and the socio-

economic one will, for the first

time, end simultaneously. This

will happen, he believes, in the

2020s. Mr. Friedman predicts

economic and political upheaval

over the next decade, then a new

stability in the 2030s and beyond.

Like other works of prognosti-

cation, this one depends heavily

on a forced reading of history,

often expressed in oracular

truisms. Are we really to believe

that the second “socioeconomic

cycle” ran right through the Civil

War and its immediate aftermath

despite the fact that roughly a

third of the economy, namely the

South, was utterly destroyed

more than a decadebeforeit

ended? Then there are the banal-

ities: “Where the United States

emerges at the end of the decade

will in large part depend on how

these crisis points are handled by

both the voters and the leaders

of the nation.” Ah.

If you take away Mr. Fried-

man’s dodgy idea of recurrent

50- and 80-year cycles, and

ignore the ever more speculative

prophecies near the end, the

book contains real insights.

One example: The two problems

now bringing us to a political

crisis, he contends, are “diffu-

sion” and “entanglement”: i.e.,

the “diffusion and fragmentation

of knowledge among individual

“experts” and “multiple federal

agencies engaged in managing

parts of the same problem.”

That sounds to me a lot like

the federal government’s helter-

skelter response to the Covid-19

outbreak.

F.H. Buckley, too, thinks we

are barreling toward a crisis,

but he sees a solution: breaking

apart. In“American Secession:

The Looming Threat of a

National Breakup” (Encounter,

170 pages, $23.99), Mr. Buckley,

a law professor at George Mason

University, asks us to set aside

secession’s associations with

the Civil War and consider the

virtues of an amicable breakup.

The likeliest split, in his view,

wouldn’t happen along the

Mason-Dixon. California has a

more robust secession movement

than the South does, and for

good reason: The Golden State

is as different from Georgia, say,

as Austria is from Germany or

the U.S. from Canada. Energetic

independence movements,

he notes, appear all over the

developed world—Flanders,

Scotland, Quebec, Catalonia.

The advantages, or perceived

advantages, include greater

cultural cohesion (good for the

right) and fewer temptations to

imperialism (good for the left).

Mr. Buckley addresses a

number of constitutional and

philosophical objections to the

idea of breakup, but I remain

unconvinced that our present

animosities match those of 1861.

Is the hatred we see in Wash-

ington and on social media

sufficiently real for secession?

“From prominent Democrats,” he

writes in an atypically hyperbolic

sentence, “there are daily calls

for resistance in the streets,

and our restaurants and theaters

have turned into no-go-zones for

people of the wrong political

party.” But “calls” for resistance

in the streets are very different

from resistance in the streets.

Ross Douthat suggests that

a decadent society like ours has

ways of keeping its members,

however rebellious they may

pretend to be, more or less

submissive. The great invention

of our time—the internet—

shames would-be rebels into

docility, routes male sexual

aggression into nonviolent fan-

tasy, and turns actual savagery

into performative outrage.

“Some of our most polarized

factions,” he writes in“The

Decadent Society” (Avid

Reader, 258 pages, $27),“are

distinguished by their extremely

comfortable late-modern lives.”

By “decadent” Mr. Douthat,

a New York Times columnist,

doesn’t mean depraved or

morally suspect. Decadence,

for him, describes “a situation

in which repetition is more the

norm than innovation; in which

sclerosis afflicts public institu-

tions and private enterprises

alike; in which intellectual life

seems to go in circles.” In reli-

gion, the arts and technology,

Mr. Douthat argues, we are

simply too prosperous and

secure to come up with any-

thing genuinely new.

“The Decadent Society”

engages with a dizzying array

of ideas and works. Among my

favorite passages are those

in which Mr. Douthat revives

Francis Fukuyama’s “The End

of History and the Last Man”

(1992), a book so often dismissed

by people who haven’t read it

that its author deserves, if only

there were such a thing, a

national apology. Mr. Fukuyama,

never the liberal triumphalist

his critics claimed, foresaw the

boredom and stasis into which

Western liberal democracies

have fallen. If Mr. Friedman has

a cyclical view of history, and

Mr. Buckley a fractured one, Mr.

Douthat, following Mr. Fukuyama,

takes a linear view. Linear sounds

purposeful and exciting, but we

find ourselves at the end of the

line with nowhere to go: affluent,

basically unthreatened but also

tired and unhappy and relying

on stupid entertainments and

perverted thrills just to stay

awake. Perhaps we need a

crisis—a real one—to get

our juices flowing again.

Crises, Real and Imagined

THIS WEEK

The Storm Before

the Calm

By George Friedman

American Secession

By F.H. Buckley

The Decadent Society

By Ross Douthat

Will

economic

and

political

upheaval

drive us

apart,

or is

stability

and

common

purpose

still

possible?

BYDANIELJ.LEVITIN

I

F YOU’RE OVERabout 20 and learned
about evolution in your high-school
biology class, it’s likely that there were
a number of things that didn’t seem to
add up, and that you were exhorted to
just take on faith. Random mutations occur,
and across millions of births, the story goes,
every once in a while an individual ends up
with a mutation that confers a benefit for
reproduction, or at least for living long enough
to reproduce. The classic example is white-
bodied moths (Biston betularia) on the trunk
of a tree with white bark—they blend in and
so are more difficult for predators to pick off.
After the industrial revolution in the U.K.
turned many of the white-barked trees black
with soot, some moths that had randomly
become black were better camouflaged; soon
they were the only ones left to reproduce, and
all U.K. moths became black-bodied.
As science, evolution is not like a chemistry
experiment, where you can mix baking soda
and vinegar and see an instant reaction, or a
physics experiment where you slam one pool
ball into another. Like relativity theory,
evolution can only really be understood
through thought experiments. But those don’t
work so well for larger-scale changes. Why
don’t we see more “intermediate” species,
such as fish with legs or short-necked giraffes?
How could anything as complicated as eyes
have developed through evolution? They are
an intricate mechanism that requires a lot of
different parts working harmoniously together,
and in isolation the development of only a few
of these parts would be pointless. Many a high-
school and college student is left to throw
questions like this onto the pile with other
unanswerables, such as what there was before
the universe formed, or whether cannibals
avoid eating clowns because they taste funny.
In “Some Assembly Required,” as well as
his previous popular-science masterpiece
“Your Inner Fish,” the biologist Neil Shubin
shows himself to be a natural storyteller and a
gifted scientific communicator. This new work
catches us up on the latest progress in
understanding such complicated cases—and
there has been a lot of it, some providing the
kind of hard, tangible evidence that many
scientists once thought would be impossible
to find without a time machine. But a time
machine is effectively what Mr. Shubin and his
colleagues at the University of Chicago and
elsewhere have found by studying fossils, and
by studying the natural variation that occurs
in contemporary species such as salamanders.
The author points out the very logical
notion that not every mutation is equally as
likely to occur. There are constraints—in the
structure and materials of bones, cartilage and
joints, for example. Consider flight—many
creatures fly, but the feat takes similar form
across bats, “flying” squirrels, birds and insects
because flight requires a great surface area in
order to bring the organism aloft. Yet wings
are made out of a variety of things—webbing
between fingers and toes, feathers and the

translucent polysaccharide of insect wings.

Animals that fly arrive at wings independently,

but once they do, the physics of the matter

dictates that wings will share a similar form.

What about that missing link, the short-

necked giraffe? Mr. Shubin describes

something even more spectacular: independent

evolution of radically different forms of an

organism that have been geographically

separated. Various Caribbean islands have

similar lizards on them. Forest lizards come in

three types, with specialized adaptations for

living in the canopy of a tree, on the trunk or

near the ground. You might expect that the

canopy-living lizards, with their big, deep green

heads (the color of foliage), would be most

closely related to other canopy-living lizards

across the islands. But they’re not. Rather, the

lizards on each island “are most closely related

to others on their own island.” What began as

a single type of lizard on a given island

became, over time, three types—on each island,

they adapted independently, with evolution

producing the same result over and over again.

Something similar took place with mam-

mals. Marsupials—those pouch mammals that

include the kangaroo, wallaby, koala and, here,

the Virginia opossum—include diverse species

that mimic the forms of nonmarsupial

mammals, another instance of evolution

independently coming up with the same result.

“There is a marsupial flying squirrel, a

marsupial mole, a marsupial ground cat and

even a marsupial groundhog. And those are

just the ones that are alive today—marsupial

lions, wolves, and even saber-toothed cats”

once roamed Australia.

These findings show us that the diversity of

life as we know it is not the one-in-a-million

shot of contingencies being just so. The forms

that organisms take are constrained by the

ways “genes and development build bodies,

by the physical constraints of environments.”

There is a certain poetry to Mr. Shubin’s

account, as when he explains that “the genetic

architecture that builds the bodies of flies,

mice, and people reveals that we are all

variations on a theme. From a common toolkit

come the many branches of the tree of life.”

You might say it’s in-gene-ious.

With so much in the news about

coronavirus, we could all do with a better

understanding of what viruses are and how

they work. Mr. Shubin provides: “Viruses...

have genomes stripped of everything but the

machinery needed for infection and

reproduction. They invade cells, enter the

nucleus, and invade the genome itself. Once in

the DNA, they take over and use the host’s

genome to make copies of themselves...with

this infection, a single host cell becomes a

factory to make millions of viruses.” Viruses

are not “designed” to be destructive; indeed,

if they are too infectious, the host will die and

so will the viruses. And of course, not all

viruses are bad; some are beneficial. So here’s

where the story gets really wild.

Scientists discovered a gene called Arc

(Activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated

protein) that is activated every time you learn

something; flaws in this gene have since been

implicated in amnesia and Alzheimer’s disease.

All land-living animals have the Arc gene, due

to a virus (a relative of HIV, by the way) that

invaded the genome of our common ancestor,

about 375 million years ago. Once the virus

entered a host, it brought with it the ability to

make a protein that enhanced neuroplasticity

and memories. Traits can appear in one species,

only to be borrowed, stolen and modified by

another through viral infections. “Our ability to

read, write, and remember the moments of our

lives,” Mr. Shubin writes, “is due to an ancient

viral infection that happened when fish took

their first steps on land.” Viral infection, and

later domestication of the virus, is now under-

stood to be a source of these “independent

inventions,” such as the weird coincidence that

written language appeared more or less

simultaneously all around the globe. If you’re

reading this while sheltering in place during the

coronavirus pandemic, thank a different, benev-

olent virus for giving you the ability to read.

And to remember that favorite song you want

to play next time you’re feeling down.

Mr. Levitin’s latest book is “Successful Aging:

A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and

Potential of Our Lives.”

Some Assembly Required

By Neil Shubin

Pantheon, 267 pages, $26.95

How Nature Finds a Way

ONLY WAY TO FLYAnimals that fly evolved wings independently, but due to the physics of matter wings always share a similar form.

PASCAL GOETGHELUCK/SCIENCE SOURCE

BOOKS

‘Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made.’—NEIL SHUBIN

Did a virus help humans

develop the ability to read,

write and remember?