There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-- Kung Fu Monkey
A very common theme in fantasy is based around a world where some lucky fraction of the population has an innate ability to control magic. The same concept occurs in SF and comic book worlds with other kinds of special powers (especially mental powers like the Force). Usually the story begins with the protagonist discovering something that indicates that they are special and often then being contacted by a secret or semi-secret society for training and the story's adventures.
It's all fine and fun and the are a million ways to tell the story of growth and self-discovery from there. The meme's popularity suggests there's something pretty fundamental (adolescent?) about the idea of suddenly discovering that you are special and life isn't as ordinary and mundane as it seems.
But hiding under the concept is a very strong theory of nativism -- some people are born special. Those endowed with special powers can do things other cannot. This enables the story to be constructed as: something bad is going to happen and only the protagonist (you) can prevent it! If it didn't require specialness, then anybody could do it.
If the author needs to flesh out the world with other characters who share the specialness, then it will be necessary to figure out how to place the super-powered (magical) in the world. A question to face is then: why don't the super-powered run everything? What stops them from taking over the world and enslaving the non-powered? Often, this is set up as the thing the villian will do with their super-powers and the task of the protagonist is to stop them.
So you seem to find the super-powered ending up in certain kinds of roles. They might be hidden for fear of persecution (e.g., early X-men or Harry Potter) or perhaps they take on hidden, specialized advisory or problem-solving roles (Jedi in Star Wars, wizards in LoTR, most comic books). Some sense of duty or empathy towards the unpowered keeps them from exerting their dominance over everybody else. But it's also worth noting that the fiction worlds based on this idea are virtually never really democratic. At best they are democratic until trouble comes and then control is turned over to the super-powered elite to save everybody.
But even without evidence of magical superpowers, theories of nativist differences among people are everywhere as explanations of real-world phenomena. Given how much inequality exists in society, there's going to be a temptation to hypothesize that some fraction of the reason that some people end up at the high end is based on nativist differences (better IQ genes is the most popular version). Note that this is a lot like saying you're born with superpowers -- superpowers of intellect or related success-increasing traits.
I suspect this idea is what makes Randianism, objectivism and related forms of libertarian thinking so attractive to adolescents (and some never get over it). It's like discovering that you are Harry Potter, only instead of being a particularly powerful wizard, your power is in your ability to generally be on the winning side in our capitalist society. And if you want to push on that idea, well, why shouldn't the best and brightest own and run everything? Do you want imbeciles making policy decisions?
If you accept the logic of strong innate/nativist differences in ability, it's a tough logic to fight. One way is the "smart technocrat" concept, which is a lot like taking the best and brightest and making them the Jedi (wizards) of real society. Perhaps operating as stealthy bureaucrats who quiety solve problems and run things from behind the scenes (e.g., the Fed Reserve Chair).
This seems to map onto political approaches. In general, the Republican version says let competition work itself out and let the best and brightest have what they need to run the world the best. I would guess why they end up being the natural party of racists -- anybody who believes they are genetically superior to others wants the benefit of that superiority.
On the Democratic side, I think there's a number of different approaches to opposing the idea. The empathic "smart technocrat" (i.e., neoliberal) approach is one. A harder approach is to attack the underlying nativism directly.
In a generally laissez-faire society, competition (markets) will spread people out along a success continuum. The more successful will tend to have more resources and frequently as a result also have greater control over the political structure. If you are both strongly nativist and believe that success is well-predicted by innate differences, you should be ok with this since the better, smarter, more innately successful people will tend to be in charge.
But this fails if either innate differences are relatively small or success is strongly affected by non-innate factors (the phenotype does not always follow from the genotype). In either case, there is less reason to believe the set of genes among the successful is any more likely to predict future success than the sets of genes among the unsuccessful. From there, it is easy to argue in favor of democracy and for more equitable distribution of resources.
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