Darwin's Revenge

Reagan's viewing attracted tens of thousands of mourners. Traffic was so bad it scared even L.A. drivers.

In Crown of Slaves, an novel by David Weber and Eric Flint, the professor Web Du Havel speculates that nations require traditions; something to rally around; a unifying force. These can be a revered constitution or a monarchy, it doesn't really matter. It strikes me that these traditions are even more arbitrary than Weber would have it, and that they also need to be occasionally renewed. These traditions have a shelf-life. They eventually either become so overwhelming as to be meaningless, as seems to be happening to the founding fathers (James W. Lowen, a former professor of race relations at U. Vermont, spent eight years writing a book on this) or fade into obscurity.

A note: the more arbitrary these traditions are, the longer they seem to last. The Tower of London's ravens are older than our constitution now, and still have more meaning. Far more people visit the Liberty Bell than Constitution Hall, and the buildings are mere blocks apart. They're also more localized. Who in Mississippi cares if the battleship New Jersey fights in the next war? Who in New Jersey cares about The Days of '47.

So, to remain unified, countries must occasionally add new traditions, revise their national character. The Civil War added a unity that wasn't present before to our national tradition. The second world war a sense of righteousness. We've also added smaller traditions, like the aforementioned New Jersey.

Weber and Flint's absent-minded professor of political theory calls himself a conservative "only in the ancient sense ... that societies are organisms, not machines, and political change is like a surgery, not like replacing a broken part." This social evolution is present in America, like anywhere else, and a function of the same process that have remade our national culture as something unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers.

Like all change, this process can only be bad if we do not understand it.

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