Genealogy of Normals

Why do we talk about genealogy and what do we mean by it? "We" here are humanists, ostensibly the scholars furthest from disciplinary engagement with biological science where genes and descent are discussed in literal terms.

I'm considering this question because of something I said offhand without really thinking about it. The other day in discussion section I found myself describing the 19th century mass extinction of social and cultural forms. Continuing the prehistory motif, I think I mentioned the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the "great dying" around 250 million years ago. I wanted to explain a massive reduction in diversity in a familiar way and to convey a sense of objectivity to it. What had been a massive and complicated array of life-forms was reduced hugely, and one particular strand, your diapsid reptiles if you will, would become dinosaurs, diversifying to rule in the Mesozoic age.

To take the example of political thought, I suggested to the class, one could at the middle of the 19th century define very different kinds of public or collectivity particular to Islamic, Confucian, and Western liberal traditions. In the 19th century, the last model triumphed, and within a hundred years it filled every evolutionary niche, and all political situations are judged as successful or failed nation-states with better or worse legal codes. There are references to sharīʿa in the constitutions of Muslim countries; there is the sign of the supreme ultimate on the South Korean flag, but these are phenotypes belying the common genotype of the nation-state. The genetics presented in statist forms of partisanship, bureaucracy, and nationalism is of a new kind. Perhaps non-Western nation-states have exclusively Western formal features, perhaps they reflect a blend of hegemonic and local forms, but they are definitively new.

How is this the common sense account? It is handy, meaning it was at hand, and I used it because I wanted to borrow the authority commonly associated with sciences. When I'm just talking, and not thinking about things in the writerly way, I associate science with clarity. So, I wanted to borrow one of the clearest depictions there and that's a dominant metaphor of modern power: that of evolution. For the students I was talking to, I don't think I gave them something too irresponsible. But the evolutionary genealogical model isn't the fittest for more intense forms of discourse.

There are two reasons for this: 1) I don't know evolution, not really, and 2) gene-flow doesn't capture the interface between knowledge and power that's at the heart of meaningful modern intellectual historiography.

First, evolution: what is that? My understanding, like quite a lot of humanities and social-science types I know, is a collection of 19th-century tropes like the Darwinian struggle, meaning a justification of the ways of power already in place conveniently located in a racialized discourse at hand.

Second, this limited reception of Darwin can't capture a lot of what transforms in traditions as they flourish or fail. What metaphor of parentage or adaptation explains the relationship of fertilization and mutual transformation between the Buddhist and indigenous Chinese traditions in the 7th through 11th centuries? Perhaps sophisticated bio-ecological understandings like scientists today might have could do this, but nothing in the theory-shorthand many of us do.

So, if this isn't the best, why is it hard to resist? I think that has to do, at the very least, with Nietzsche and Foucault. However, I want to suggest that both forms of genealogies leave a lot of room for rethinking for intellectual historians.

In sum: Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals was an act of violation, defaming the sanctimony of liberal and Christian values in associating them with slaves, with slaving, with the shame and self-loathing inflicted by those impotent in violence. Foucault took this de-elevation further in locating the agents of development in microphysical processes, the reorganizations of space and time hour by meter that are commensurate with modern power. Both are valuable, but we need more to come to terms with the thought structuring, responding to, and obscured by our world.

The problem with even those genealogies point to origins, to points and processes of speciation, to concretes of historicity of which we need to be more critical than we have been before. In difficult environments, life forms change over generations or they die, and this modern environment is particularly hostile to certain forms of self-formation and communal mutuality.

However, to understand forms of spiritual or intellectual sustenance in the margins of public society or among vulnerable people, we will need an idea of tradition or continuity between life and death, in suspense. Understanding what might become of Confucianism or Anglicanism, or the much more complex case of sharīʿa jurisprudence, need to account for how living forms might become more porous and plastic than they have been before. In this, the questions of influence or heritage to which the genealogical explanation incline us are limiting rather than opening. 

Nevertheless, the fact that the genealogical or genetic model is the model at hand for a lot of us is significant in and of itself. It after all is an immanent product of the processes we are trying to come to terms with.