Phenocracy: Going Off the Genetic Rails

Nowadays we all seek “the good life”, but in doing so we rebel. We rebel against the ordinary vicissitudes of living but, more profoundly, against our own innermost natures that want us to hurt and sorrow.

Why do we experience pain, grief, fear, and all the other distressing emotions that accompany being alive? Because they keep us alive. From the purely biological standpoint we’re the phenotypic expressions of genes selected over the eons not for our satisfaction, but to promote their survival and multiplication. The sensations they’ve inscribed in us are signals meant to guide our behaviour along a genetically adaptive course. Some of these involve positive sensations and feelings: sugar’s sweet taste, love’s rapture, victory’s exhilaration, but others, equally important, have negative valence, like injury-halting pain, the terror that makes us flee (or fight), or the worry that concentrates our minds.

Happy vibes don’t suffice to get us everywhere evolution wills. Consider the unarmed man who, upon rounding a jungle bend, confronts a tiger. What feelings best become his plight—positive or negative? A reverie, say, about a pleasant day at the beach might eventually move him along. But pertaining to one of the many conceivable locations more charming than the company of a tiger, it would probably prove too dilatory—other pleasant options likely presenting themselves, as well as the need to ponder the best way of reaching wherever they pointed. In fact, the optimum reaction to an immediate threat is not the contemplation of non-threats, but escape from that which threatens. The best way to survive tigers is to be repelled from them as expeditiously as possible—which is what is accomplished by fright.

Negative feelings typically operate by sharply increasing the psychic costs of inertia, making it intolerable to persist in whatever is being done—such as resting one’s finger on a hotplate, continuing towards that tiger, or not consulting a doctor after experiencing the first symptoms of plague. These emotional alarms are usually urgent, interruptive and highly focused. Positive feelings have less need of disruption, tending to reward goals already achieved, or raising the likelihood of their achievement by bringing to mind future pleasures. They needn’t sweep the mind clear.

Given life’s varied and complex challenges, all the things to be avoided or pursued, all its dangers and difficulties, both positive and negative sensations are indispensable to its navigation. We need to feel guilty when failing to do what we should. We need to feel anxious when a young child goes missing. We need to feel apprehensive about, and provide against, bad times, illness and old age. We need to fear death if we’re not to prematurely die. The Buddha was spot on: suffering is the price of animate existence, of the desire to live or, in more scientific terms, of the drive for genetic success.

Yet humans are, far beyond any other creature, more than a function of their genes. Many of our hard-wired traits are on a genetic short leash—things reflexive, or semi-reflexive like the fear of heights, snakes, darkness, sudden noises; but the rest, including the greater part of our learned behaviour, and those many pleasures attributable to “taste”, can wander hither and yon. And this marvellous latitude, though adaptive overall, can, under modern conditions, take us entirely off the genetic rails.

Animals, to be sure, learn as well, but their learned behaviour is usually only a few steps removed from some genetically anchored prompt. Predators learn maternally, or from their own direct experience, how best to bag a kill; cows learn to avoid the electrified fence by observing other bovines or from first-hoof experience; Pavlov’s dog learned to salivate on cue from repeated association of bell and food. Yet the complexity of all this learning is not especially large, allowing for little more than the elaboration of useful but minor variations on themes already built in.

Not so Homo sapiens, our tribe of enculturated virtuosi. We can see much further along the chain of causation, can move towards our goals with studied indirection, and can consider an enormous variety of means for reaching them. Nor are we simply super-calculators—we are self-conscious super-calculators, having a reflexivity that most other animals either lack, or possess but dimly. This means that people can regard themselves as ends-in-themselves, as beings with an identity, history and intrinsic value, further fortifying humanity’s extended ability to plan.

However generally valuable in a genetic sense, these qualities also open the door to something completely novel and biologically hazardous: the ability to reconstruct life strategies to maximise pleasures and minimise pains whatever the consequences for reproductive fitness. When this kind of behavioural pattern begins to dominate the organisation of a human society, “phenocracy”, the rule of the phenotype, is born. There is a strong case to be made that, at numerous levels, life in the West is rapidly being reorganised along just these lines.

Over the longer course of human history, mostly lived close to survival’s margins, the correctives to genetically maladaptive behaviour were usually immediate and sharp—personal suffering, premature death, and the eventual extinction of lines. Unable to escape this reality, our ancestors understood themselves as in a “vale of tears” and indulgences such as gluttony, lust and pride were “deadly sins”. Phenocracy only made sense as a divine gift bestowed in an afterlife, where pain would be banished and the nobler desires effortlessly fulfilled.

Technical mastery and mass prosperity finally allowed phenocracy to inherit the world. Technical mastery found ways to separate pleasurable indulgence from its previously deterring wages: in the case of licentiousness via birth control and anti­biotics, in the case of sloth and gourmandising, via labour-saving devices and the rest of modern medicine. And where chronic shortage once prevented many pleasures from being overindulged, mass prosperity—plus democracy’s redistributive ways—have drastically reduced the penalties of indigence, allowing “poverty” in many advanced countries to become associated with, of all things, obesity. More and more, the traditional consequences of misbehaviour have been pushed beyond psychological event horizons, or even beyond the span of individual lifetimes. The temptations created have been abundantly succumbed to.

Phenocracy’s specific consequences have been important and diverse—each part and parcel of what many would today consider the “good life”. Perhaps the most significant have been drastically fallen birth-rates, below replacement in virtually all Western countries, and falling in much of the non-West. Genes replicate themselves through the production of new individuals, so replacement failure is equivalent to adverse selection and, if unstopped, to genetic extinction.

To get organisms to reproduce, a risky and costly enterprise, evolution gave the sex act a huge and immediate pleasure payoff. Humans are unusually “sexed”, having no seasonal mating system or even a monthly oestrus cycle, and thus receptive more or less continuously. This almost entirely describes male inclinations. For women things are somewhat more complicated. Paying the full biological cost of carrying a child, and most of that involved in raising one, their mating strategies have traditionally been laced with cautions, some biologically engrained, others reinforced by culture and calculation. Still, provided it is in a familial framework, “be fruitful and multiply” has not only, for both males and females, been the great Judeo-Christian injunction but, in effect, that of most other religions as well. The corollary of high death-rates is strenuous reproductive effort—the historical rule among humankind.

In earlier times phenotypic and genotypic “interests” tended to be closely aligned—having a large, reproductively successful family generally connected with having a prosperous, relatively comfortable personal life. During periods when labour was at a premium, more children meant more hands for field and household, hence more food and possessions, as well as a feeling of security about support in old age. In primitive societies, families thus tended to be an economic net plus, enhancing the fitness of parents and the extended groups with which they were associated. Offspring could also be employed “politically” in forging marriage alliances with other families, or as fighters in intergroup conflicts, other net pluses.

Today the calculus can be altogether different. For one thing, few personal incomes are earned through collective family effort, and in many developed countries the costs of prolonged education have often led the purely economic impact of children to go negative. As a result, one might now have more financial security in old age by forgoing the costs of child rearing in favour of a well-invested portfolio. Moreover, the nanny state has created a range of seemingly solid eleemosynary alternatives to lifetime care by one’s family. Given the spendthrift ways of many welfare states, and the sub-replacement birth-rates that go with them, these expectations of public charity may prove fool’s gold. But, like that gold, their glitter still seems to tantalise, the default possibilities lying beyond most phenotypic horizons.

Pre-modern societies were not without the means of practising birth control. Marriage could be delayed which, assuming female chastity, automatically decreased the birth-rate. Moreover, women knew that prolonged nursing could extend the period between pregnancies. A variety of simple sexual techniques also diminished the likelihood of conception. And there was infanticide. But apart from chastity (and the murder of infants) these methods were uncertain.

By contrast, contemporary prophylaxis is highly effective, and when it fails abortion is almost universally available, safe (for the mother) and free, or nearly so. Every year there are forty to fifty million abortions worldwide, and perhaps about seventy thousand in Australia, in many quarters carrying no stigma. An extraordinary combination thus prevails: lengthened life-spans, enriched nutrition, vastly enhanced creature comforts, and below-replacement birth-rates. Parenting, once something that “came naturally” and usually provided wealth, has become an expensive consumer item, another of life’s indulgences, usually taken in small doses by those who wish.

Phenocracy is not, however, simply a material matter—satiated organisms parasitical on their genomes. It also has its intellectual side, since inverted natural relationships cry out for justification. The intellectual landscape of modernity is replete with “phenotypic thinking”.

Unless parked safely in the hereafter, all forms of utopianism are phenotypic. To see this, one need only recall that our genes have but a limited use for happiness. To ancestral humanity utopia would have seemed risible as a practical project, a recipe for hubristic disaster. Today utopias have become the stuff of everyday discourse—particularly among the postmodern intelligentsia.

Take contemporary “social constructivism”, often phenocratic utopianism run amok. Its more radical academic versions approximate genotypic denial, an avowal that biological realities are not something that constrain us, or to which we must adapt, but something that can be re-engineered according to preference.

Compared to it, nineteenth-century social constructivism, à la Karl Marx, was relatively modest. Blind to genetic self-serving, it sought a classless society with desires co-operatively fulfilled—an experiment that failed from its cradle. Unshaken, much of constructivism now aims even higher, to the abolition not only of class but of “gender”. Social classes only arose after the agricultural revolution, about ten thousand years ago, which produced the first surpluses capable of being fought over. As a social distinction class is thus a recent phenomenon. Gender, that is, sexually specialised life strategies, probably date back to the Cambrian, more than half a billion years ago. The attempt to abolish gender through an act of will, or better, via a chorus of cognoscenti chatter, represents—thus far at least—phenotypic ambition at its most exalted.

Feminism, even when not utopian, is distinctly phenocratic, subordinating maternity to professionalism. It is usually forgotten that men went through an earlier, comparable period of “emancipation”. Though never as completely as women, most men in the simple economies and caste-defined societies of premodernity were occupationally locked in, the sons of peasant farmers generally remaining peasant farmers. But when industrialism and meritocracy diversified male career paths it was to very different effect than it would later be with women. The multiplication of male occupational specialties grew populations, and thus replicated genes, because it delivered to mothers more resources for child rearing. Mass female entry into the workforce likewise heightened productivity, but by depressing maternity has perversely linked phenotypic boom to genotypic bust. (Assuming, of course, that women in the workforce are, in fact, generally happier than women at home.) Feminism doesn’t equal extinction—a low death-rate society can accommodate female careers while still replacing itself, though virtually no advanced society has yet managed to pull the trick off. The value system of feminism, however, clearly favours the organism over the gene.

Some other leading forms of political and ethical reasoning are also phenocratic. Take utilitarianism, for most people today the default ethical option. As a rule of thumb in policy-making it has some intuitive appeal—where all else is more or less equal, why not prefer the more over the less? But it’s conspicuously counter-genetic. Assuming long-term human survival is a desirable outcome, a comprehensive and successful utilitarianism forfeits that which we can’t afford to lose. Eliminating bad feelings by insulating whole populations from fear, want, worry, frustration and disappointment would be as genetically fatal to them as it would be to an individual.

Natural-rights theory, much more a vale-of-tears product, is a different story. The desire for self-preservation, and an understanding of reciprocation as a key means of achieving it, are both genetically anchored. Most natural-rights arguments build on these principles, though the higher the edifice—the more elaborate and specific the rules of justice erected upon them—the more rickety is likely to be the argumentative structure. But its allowance for a reasonable give-and-take between primal and enlightened self-interest makes natural-rights thinking something that people can readily accept, particularly with respect to relationships involving social peers. While a phenocrat might be open to the reasonableness of enlightened give-and-take, he might simultaneously be too blinkered by narcissism to practise it.

But why worry over actual consequence? There’s a growing virtual realm out there, phenocracy’s new, endless frontier. While the world of gaming hands out both victory and defeat, rewards and punishments, its signature is riskless heroism, conquest without courage, athleticism without injury, all the ups and few of the downs of conflict and combat. Virtual endangerment fills a vacuum as phenocratic societies become more and more risk-averse—“Grand Theft Auto” for kids not allowed out on the streets alone.

In most times and places, play-it-safe may have sufficed for mediocrities, but for those seeking lofty achievement pain and gain have been inseparably joined. As “virtuality” supersedes reality, phenocracy strips the first from the second. Does this build character, stamina, grit? We’ll know whenever the machine stops.

Is that how phenocracy ends? Can pain and risk safely be separated from human existence without annihilating consequence? Can our technological edge, or raw calculating powers, allow us to devise life strategies that circumvent ill feeling yet preserve a steady social state? Might artificial intelligence prove the ultimate saviour, the phenotype’s final nanny, gently rocking our species to sleep as it moves towards its own exotic goals? Or, in vindication of the genotype, will the gods of the copybook headings in terror and slaughter return? There are still many living by the old rules, indeed hardened by them, and prepared to wield the technology and weaponry of modernity in their service. Just read the headlines.

But wherever we’re travelling, one thing is clear: it’s uncharted territory.