Page 30 - Ruminations

28. Perils of monoculture

The analogy of genetically-identical factory-farmed crops facing
extinction from a single pathogen to the current and accelerating
destruction of planetary human cultural diversity is worth considering.
From the invention of agriculture and domestication of mammalian
quadrupeds, people in ever-greater aggregations have conquered and
absorbed other groups, the winners’ culture then imposed imperfectly
on the losers. Until the past three centuries, however, that process has
proceeded slowly and fitfully, limited by competing spheres of
influence, the technology required to expand them and resistance to
the new regime’s attempts to replace entrenched beliefs and practices.
Thus, at the dawn of the eras of exploration, industrialization and
imperialism, the world contained two sorts of cultures. The first,
clustered around the great powers of East and West, were satellites of
their subjugators, with varying degrees of independence and retention
of prior ethos and technic. Their physical survival, despite military
defeat, permitted many of the old ways to persist—often in secrecy.
The second, perhaps less fortunate type, were isolated communities
unable to resist the sword or the virus: slavery or oblivion wiped these
cultures out by the thousands, their bearers by the millions.
And that aggression will prove self-defeating, in the same way as
will habitat destruction of plants and animals whose physical
properties could have provided medical benefit to humanity. Each
vanished or formerly distinct social group had discovered and
developed ways of organizing itself, of allocating roles and identities
and avoiding conflicts. Ironically, the first great conqueror to include
scientists on his expeditions was Napoleon, exemplar of la mission
civilisatrice. But a vast database of human knowledge is gone.
Having accomplished this feat of global eradication, the march of
progress turned its corrosive attentions upon itself. The formerly
haphazard diffusion of dominant culture, taking generations of
idiosyncratic adaptation to arrive at variants with at least minimal
resemblance to what was being erased, is now racing around the earth
at the speed of light. A universal culture, plugged into semi-automated
computer systems, is eroding differences at a rate exponentially higher
than ever before. Like corn or bananas, we may be left with one over-
extended and fragile crop of people, vulnerable to one fatal vector,
desperate to be repaired or strengthened by input from any stronger
strain. But for us there will be no seed bank.