POLITICS
Tangled Trees, Tangled Truths
Physics and biology meet politics
Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive. This old maxim used to make sense, but today in the age of conspiracy theories run wild, its truth isn’t self evident. Practicing deception is something of a moral offense, meaning you have to realize that you’re deliberately trying to distort or evade the truth. But if what you’re really doing is deceiving yourself, then you’re tangling your own web. This has more to do with the truth of what you’re saying or doing, than with your intent to deceive.
In this respect, truth looks analogous to the physical reality of matter and antimatter. In physics, these two substances annihilate each other when they come into contact. Because of this any particular universe has to be made up predominantly of matter or antimatter. Ours is a matter universe; a parallel universe to ours could be antimatter. Since the two universes aren’t in physical contact, neither is destroyed. They’re simply incompatible.
The same could be said for political truth. With the extreme polarization we live in, the truth of the left and the truth of the right never come into contact. Both exist in incompatible versions of one another.
Science fiction, which is never a slave to conventional physics, injects some nuance into the physics of matter. For instance, sci-fi writers propose antimatter engines for spaceships, and envisions “wormholes” through which the engines can transport the ships to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. These speculative antimatter engines would somehow have to tolerate antimatter fuel for some period of time to gradually obliterate it to provide propulsion energy. The question is how do you contain antimatter fuel in a vessel made of matter?
You have to suspend disbelief, that’s how. For the sake of Star Trek’s story line, I’m glad to ignore the physical reality, in order to find out what’s happening in the “delta quadrant” some 30,000 light years distant from Earth. How else would I possible know what’s going on there, since conventional communications would take 30,000 years to reach us at the speed of light?
Here in our earthly political universe, though, we seem to have one foot situated in a matter universe and the other in an antimatter universe. This stance defies physics and threatens the analogy. But bear with me, please.
I recently read David Quammen’s book The Tangled Tree about the 200 year long quest of hundreds of biologists to determine how life is organized. The tree in the title refers to the standard metaphor of life evolving vertically from primordial goo to us, with numerous side branching. The tangling in the title describes the consensus, as of now, that the tree has twisting, intersecting branches with the ability to graft onto one another.
The first attempts to describe the tree of life, predating good microscopy, distinguished only plants and animals. Microscopy eventually turned up all sorts of other little creatures: bacteria, algae, fungi, protozoa, archaea, viruses, and such. And then the question became how all these critters relate to one another on the evolutionary timeline and whose development benefitted from interactions with other critters.
Quammen tells a fascinating human story filled with the drama and intrigue of true believers holding tight to the truth as they saw it. The similarity to politics was irresistible.
The battling biologists comprised conservative and progressive camps, analogous to these political camps. The conservative biologists are loyal to Darwin’s legacy. On the political side in America conservative Republicans are loyal to the founding fathers.
In contrast, the progressive biologists are allegiant to an idea, the possibilities of medical and social benefits resulting from genetic manipulation. In their political cohort, we have Democrats, those who embrace the diversity that facilitates changes in social behavior and social order.
The analogy isn’t too forced, but it breaks down when we consider that the kind of symbiosis that the living kingdoms have exhibited over billions of years is now nowhere to be had in American politics. The two ideological branches of our politics are busy severing any possibility of cross fertilization. The very idea of cooperation is suspect — more so on the side of the conservative Republicans, as they openly admit in every news cycle. The Democrats, in contrast, do it too, but more as a defensive measure. The Republicans do it for spite, for leverage, or maybe even for pleasure. The pleasure possibility is speculative, I admit.
To get back to the tangled web metaphor, which claims to stem from deception. Is that always the case? Are the Democrats engaging in deception as they entangle our social web by accepting gay marriage, advocating for trans peoples’ rights, turning a blind eye to interracial dating, relaxing marriage vows, abandoning religious institutions, casting doubt on the free market, disparaging capitalistic greed, welcoming immigrants?
Let’s go back to the biological world and consider what a virus does when it invades our human bodies. Is the virus performing a kind of deception in using our cells to manufacture more of itself? Is its intent malicious or does it also feel it’s doing us a favor as it provides for its own propagation? (I know that viruses do not have intentionality. Just poetic license on my part.)
We, of course, remember well the flu pandemic, the COVID pandemic, the polio epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, the Ebola and SARs scares, and will almost certainly come down on the side of thinking of the little buggers as demonic. But there are instances of where microbiologists and evolutionary biologists have determined that our whole mammalian branch of the tree of life might have died out if not for retroviruses which some 200 million years ago infected the budding mammalian line and laid down a gene or genes which made the placenta impervious to the foreign body a woman carried in her uterus — her fetus.
Our immune systems will reject foreign cells, but the retrovirus genome that was intended to protect the virus itself, kind of as a thank you to its host, also protected the mammalian fetus from the mother-to-be’s immune system. There are other examples in the evolutionary history of life showing the mutual value of gene transfer and symbiosis.
Now back to the chaos of human politics. Assume that the conservative ideas of Conservatives and the progressive ideas of Progressives are akin to viruses. We are bombarded by these little thought viruses constantly, and are of the belief that we need to be vigilant about their malicious intents. Our political immune systems fight them off and we put on metaphorical masks to prevent infection, like listening only to those on our side.
The upshot of our avoidance and immune strategies does work, of course. We protect ourselves from entangling our web; we will not let ourselves be deceived. But at the same time we’re artificially controlling our development as a society. We’re not allowing for the possibility that some of the other side’s thought viruses could be beneficial. We’re making ourselves weaker potentially.
It reminds me of Poe’s the Masque of the Red Death, a survivalist strategy that turned out disastrously. The folks (rich ones) that isolated themselves, ostensibly to keep the Black Death at bay, succumbed to it instead. I feel like a similar thing can happen with political isolation. At some point the conviction that you’ve made yourself safe from the opposition, comes back to bite you in the butt. You’re ultimately going to succumb to the danger of conviction and confirmation bias; that is, firmly believing that you’re protecting yourself by staying in your own belief bubble, when just the opposite is true.
Naturally, any letting down of your guard has attendant risks. It is important to develop some feeling for the virality of what you’re opening yourself up to. There are some dangerous thought viruses and you would be right to be vigilant against them. You need to use your bullshit detector intelligently to know when to back off or when to engage. You don’t want to lose your political soul through some well meant desire to bridge a divide. Sometimes you’ve just got to resolve to live on one side of the divide. But that’s yet another analogy. Time to quit.
Thanks for reading.
