THE ORIGIN OF POLITICS

A conservative treatise on power and politics as extensions of evolution.

“A society operates under two sets of rules,” writes science journalist Wade. One set has a basis in natural selection, and the other is created by politics. By Wade’s account, the two sets are now at war with each other: Whereas it is a biological imperative to keep the species alive, for example, world birth rates have dropped past the level of replacement, with the result that “almost every country outside Africa [is] on the path to eventual extinction.” This is all by way of prelude to Wade’s apparent larger purpose, which is to find fault with nearly every aspect of progressive politics, from DEI to women’s liberation, critical theory, and so forth. Although Wade paints himself into a corner by allowing that if conservatism has a biological/evolutionary basis, then there must be an adaptive advantage to liberalism as well, he insists on traditional mores: The family, he argues, is the primary social unit; socialism is in “fundamental conflict with human nature”; monogamy is unnatural (for males, in any event), while women “intrigue among themselves for the pick of available men.” Drawing on sociobiology (which, he laments, was driven from the intellectual marketplace by censorious liberals), Wade looks at the politics of other primate species to conclude that while a chimpanzee may not understand why it’s better to be high-status than low-status, it will strive for the highest status it can attain. So, he proceeds, it is with humans, measured by strength and wealth. Naturally, this is the purview of men—real men, that is, and not “a small minority of people with variant sexual orientations,” and certainly not women, and especially not female academic administrators, whose “principal function…is to diminish the success of white male applicants in applying for faculty positions.”

Readers with a taste for aggrieved hyperventilation will find plenty of it here.