Applying a Modern Genetic Metaphor to Culture

Metaphors are great tools to advance thinking, but the wrong metaphor can really lead one astray. Let me suggest a complex metaphor which I hope will be useful.

Ancient travelers such as Marco Polo, who traveled slowly overland, did not see Asians as yellow and Europeans as white; they saw continuous gradients of people as they traveled across the Eurasian land mass. However, when Europeans began to make long sea voyages, they clearly saw differences of the people in their Asian ports of call from those they left at home. There arrived the concept of yellow Asian, white European, black African and brown American races.

Modern genetics has demonstrated that people have tens of thousands of genes, and that patterns of genetic variation are quite complex. An allele of a gene arises in one place, and will spread geographically through a region where conditions are such that it offers an evolutionary advantage. While all people are pretty much alike genetically, more so than is true for most species, the patterns of allele frequency in 20 thousand plus genes are complex.

We hear a lot about the "Clash of Civilizations", and think of that especially in terms of Christian versus Islamic civilizations. I guess that that idea dates back to the middle ages and the papal justification of the crusades.

However, culture is a lot more complex than that model would suggest. Religious belief is just one of many ways in which societies differ one from another.

It should be obvious that neither Christian nor Islamic societies are homogeneous. Indeed, the crusaders sacked Cristian Constantinople during one Crusade. The Mongol armies that swept out of Central Asia to conquer peoples in the far east and far west; as they did so, they often converted to local religions.

Peoples war on others that they can reach, historically on the peoples on their frontiers. The fact that a number of peoples that included Christianity in their cultures were waring on a number of peoples that included Islam in their cultures does not mean that there is a natural antipathy between Christian and Muslim. It may mean that that the spread of world religions has been wider than the spreads of some other aspects of culture.

The Bush administration seems to have made a major mistake in assuming that the Iraqi culture was homogeneous, while it is tribal, divided linguistically and religiously as well as between rural and urban, educated and uneducated, as well as more and less traditional peoples. Lets not make that mistake again in other countries. Lets use a better metaphor for understanding the complex patterns of culture.