Review: The Past Is a Future Country by Edward Dutton
A Virtuoso Dive into Demography, Religion, and Destiny
Edward Dutton, an English anthropology professor at Oulu University, Finland, is a controversial scholar whose lack of regard for the politically correct and incredible synthesizing powers take the reader on a roller coaster ride of interesting hypotheses. His books are small and dense, but minimize academic jargon, and often contain remarkably helpful one or two-page summaries of other scholars’ entire bodies of work, just so Dutton can get to his next point in linking together the implications of disparate fields of study. While I disagree with some of his conclusions, reading his books is like watching a virtuoso perform a Paganini concerto. For an INTP with a rebellious streak like myself, it’s literary crack. Dutton, however, can be rather depressing and best consumed in occasional doses.
His latest, The Past Is a Future Country, is relatively more hopeful and combines several themes from his previous scholarship to make more definite predictions. Buckle up, because his explanations are rather brutal.
Note for Christians among my audience: Dutton relies heavily on evolutionary reasoning but describes within-species human evolution compatible with a Christian worldview, not speciation of new body forms.
The first phenomenon Dutton attempts to explain is why prosperous societies tend to move to the left politically, like a ratchet. He answers that as societal conditions improve, infant mortality drops, which results in more children with marginal genetics surviving into adulthood. Since mutations tend to correlate, this results in a larger adult population of what he calls “spiteful mutants:” Leftist-oriented phenotypes high on individualism, narcissism, and atheism, and low on conscientiousness, duty, and physical beauty. These are of course statistical tendencies at the societal level, not generalizations that apply to every individual.
He further relies on the scholarship of Jonathan Haidt, who has shown that while conservatives tend to have a balanced sense of morality concerning the needs of the community and individuals, liberals tend to be biased toward the needs of individuals. Hence, in political contests, conservatives, with their balanced moral sense, can partially sympathize with liberal demands for individual tolerance and freedom, while liberals cannot sympathize at all with conservative concepts of duty and propriety. A recent study found:
“Conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives. This asymmetry was partly explained by liberals’ harsher moral judgments of outgroup members (Studies 1-4) and the fact that liberals saw conservatives as more harmful than conservatives saw liberals (Studies 3-4).”
Given liberals’ higher mutational load, it could also be that conservatives simply feel sorry for them for having lost the lottery of life; why not give them a crumb from the table now and then? The result: conservatives always get taken for a ride, giving in here or there to liberal demands, concessions that are never reciprocated when liberals take power.
A materially advancing society, then, will tend to become ever more liberal until it hits the barrier of reality. When liberalism overshoots, it results in what Dutton calls an evolutionary mismatch between those minimum qualities necessary to sustain a healthy population — the essential qualities of such Dutton cites being the highly correlated traits of religiousness, positive ethnocentricism, and believing life has eternal meaning — and the actual policies and incentives provided by the government. According to Dutton, we now live in such a time.
We see this in the famous cycle of history: strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, and bad times create strong men. Embedded in this cycle was the tendency for elites to have fewer children as they became more prosperous. Our cycle, however, has lasted much longer because of the Industrial Revolution. According to Dutton, it was Christianity’s hostility to contraception or other sterile sexual practices that led to a sustainable elite that reproduced itself long enough to develop the breakthrough technologies of prosperity that had eluded other advanced civilizations from Egypt to Greece to Imperial China.
Ironically, it is this great advance of man over nature, enabled by Christian virtue, that has led to the Modern West, the most decadent, delusional liberal civilization that has ever inhabited the Earth. Our historically unprecedented prosperity has delayed the discipline of nature that washed more quickly over decaying ancient societies.
Now, however, we are deep in the cycles typical of late antiquity. We are at below-replacement fertility and our capitalist abundance is increasingly hindered by transfer payments to largely unemployable, nonproductive internal populations and corrupt overseas military vassals. With the passing of the Baby Boomer generation and environmental hysteria, we are likely to enter a crisis of competence as the basic knowledge necessary to sustain prosperity is lost, while the rising generation wants email jobs instead of those that add value to the real economy.
Dutton, however, disagrees with many demographers predicting shrinking populations, one of the notable theses in Tomorrow’s People. Utilizing General Social Survey data, he identifies two growing subgroups: smart religious conservatives and those at the bottom of the welfare dependency class. Increasingly, the only smart people reproducing are conservatives.
I referenced this chart recently in my strategy piece for Texas A&M. At the elite level of IQ — 98th percentile or above — conservatives are having nearly twice as many children. Note this data is from 2018, well before the acceleration of LGBT mania. Something like 20% of Generation Z now identify with sexualities that are biologically sterile. I couldn’t find convenient cross-tabs by political ideology, but population-wide, something like 18% of liberals and 4% of conservatives identify as LGBT. If we assume a 70/30 split liberal/conservative in this group and the same proportion of LGBT likelihood by political ideology, we can estimate that among Gen Z liberals, LGBT identification is something like 26%:
Pareto’s law holds that elites always run societies, regardless of the window dressing of their formal form of government. In the future, there will be very few liberal elites and rather a lot of conservative ones. One is reminded of Paul’s insult in Galatians 5:12, except it’s literally coming true.
Dutton explains:
“The ability to resist leftist-induced dysphoria is the new crucible of evolution. Where once the crucible of evolution was child mortality it is now Woke morality. Where evolution was formerly selecting for resistance to genetically-based diseases, the emphasis has now switched to ‘memetically’ based diseases; ideological mind viruses that induce infertility in their nonimmune hosts. Those who resist leftist ideology, and its direct and indirect inducements not to procreate, are those who survive. In significant part, this will be those who are, for mainly genetic reasons, religious and conservative.”
In a darker turn, Dutton predicts that the other major group to continue growing will be those in the underclass who are too indifferent or incompetent to prevent out-of-wedlock pregnancies. With the decline in the productive population, he predicts this subset of the welfare-supported underclass will continue to grow until Western social safety nets collapse under their own weight in 20-30 years.
While Dutton’s methodology is rather imprecise (he simply projects current fertility rates among subgroups into the future), his conclusions make intuitive sense. One way to look at the Sexual Revolution is as a powerful poison designed to eradicate human beings like bacteria in a petri dish by interrupting their natural reproductive ecology. Like an antibiotic, if the dose is insufficient to uniformly kill the entire population, any surviving members become resistant. Dutton then simply identifies the two populations who have successfully resisted the poison: highly religious, intentionally fertile families who reject the Sexual Revolution explicitly, and those who lack the self-control or conscientiousness to make use of its technologies to prevent unintentional pregnancies.
I observe this myself. The only mothers I know of with an extraordinary number of children are either a) highly religious and intentional about it or b) highly dysfunctional single mothers whose children end up in the foster care system. In their respective ways, both populations have resisted the Sexual Revolution’s sterility and will, over time, become the dominant “drug-resistant” human populations of the future.
He makes further interesting observations about the Trump phenomenon. Some outcome-oriented conservatives support DeSantis this primary cycle as the more effective executive. Dutton explains, however, that Trump’s vulgarity is a feature, not a bug, for many of his supporters. Their apparent conservatism is out of frustration with the pain of constant self-regulation in not offending the upper-class woke religion, especially among the unsanctified white working-class untouchables.
Trump is their id, who gives voice to their pain in being society’s designated scapegoats. They are as annoyed with the grating HR lady who reminds them of Hillary as they are with the Romney-like Ivy League jerk who gutted their company for parts and laid off their friends. DeSantis can’t catch a break because they like Trump’s style better, and they prefer style to substance.
Ironically, Dutton says that while this group may put a new post-Trump conservative elite in power, their own destiny is likely with the underclass, as so many of their children fall into underclass behavior and reproduction patterns (this also explains their support for abortion and marijuana decriminalization). That no one seems to care about them is a great tragedy; they are sheep without a shepherd. Conservatives can hope that future leaders emerge who can build coalitions like Trump but govern like DeSantis, and hopefully influence Americans of all social classes and regions to make better personal choices. A genuine religious revival, more Jonathan Edwards than Hillsong, is likely necessary as well.
In painting this mixed, both hopeful and bleak future, Dutton draws a historical parallel with the role of Byzantium (Constantinople) in Europe’s Dark Ages. He cites sources showing that many intelligent, civilized people relocated to this city (including those as remote as defeated Danish nobles from England) as a refuge of the former civilized glory of Rome. He predicts likewise that the growing conservative elite will form “new Byzantiums” throughout the West to insulate themselves from both woke and underclass dysfunction, in preparation for a second renaissance. I wonder if I identified some of them in my analysis of the largest outlier Republican counties.
If Dutton is right, these trends will accelerate the winner-take-all dynamic of brain drain from the country’s interior. Behavioral pathologies are indistinguishable epidemiologically from infectious diseases. If you’ve been to a rural Walmart lately, even in deep-red Trump country, you know that voting patterns are no guarantee of cultural health. Thoughtful conservative families will have difficult decisions to make in whether to stick to their roots or trade up to these enclaves so as to provide better peers for their children and grandchildren.
Interesting article. A lot of the data represented dealt with things that I wouldn't even consider measurable in a quantitative way, but the data certainly confirms many of my own observations.
The Trump observations are scarily accurate. Populists are fickle. In a bizarre turn of events, I read this morning that a BLM leader actually endorsed Trump. I'm still processing the ramifications of that one.