One Panic After Another

One of my formative experiences was to have been introduced to three things almost simultaneously: economics, cultural anthropology, and the raging late twentieth century panic about where gay boys come from. As a gay boy myself, I’ll admit to having had a bit of a stake in the matter.

The theories abounded. Was it a lack of physical discipline? A lack of strong male role models? Too much contact between the boy and the mother? Was the mother overbearing? Was there childhood trauma, like sexual abuse? 

Such were the 90s; such were the views we had to take seriously. And I did: I thought carefully about these scenarios, absolutely none of which I’d experienced. I was undeniably gay, but with no idea how to account for it. A lot of people feared that contemporary social changes, like gay marriage, might yield many more gay people. That would lower the fertility rate, which could threaten civilization itself.

At the same time, I was doing my first independent historical research projects, and several of them were cross-cultural. I learned about societies that were organized on very different plans from our own, like the seventeenth-century Iroquois people of what’s now eastern Canada. Every year, the adult men all left the village for a lengthy hunting expedition. The mothers stayed in the longhouses, tended the crops, and raised the children. The women and children often didn’t see the men for months. Iroquois villages were organized around matrilineal and matrilocal kinship, with women having a great deal of social power, especially over their children. They also picked the chiefs.

Here, I thought, was a natural experiment: If, relative to American norms, too much contact between a boy and his mother was really the issue, or if the blame lay with relatively overbearing moms or absent male role models, then the boys in this society should very often grow up gay—but the sources didn’t seem to say that. Seventeenth-century French Jesuit missionaries lived side by side with the Iroquois, and the missionaries had no compunctions whatsoever about narrating what they considered morally abhorrent events. If homosexuality were especially notable, they would have recorded it; what they found were only a few incidental cases. 

Sodom and Gomorrah it was not. Weirdly, figures on the far right today may use the longhouse as a racially pejorative term for a feminized society. Iroquois men impressed the French missionaries in just the opposite direction; they were feared warriors whose prowess was legendary. Iroquois men simply occupied a somewhat different gender role in their society than any we have in our own—neither feminized boys failing to launch, nor American-conventional masculine heads of household. Somehow, for them, it worked. A sentence that cultural anthropologists must say a lot.

That natural experiment sits beside thousands of others. Kinship, childrearing, and work can all be organized in what are, to contemporary Americans, a panoply of mind-boggling and gender-bending ways. I won’t say that these differences can have absolutely no effect on sexual orientation, but if a pattern of cultural practices reliably produced lots more of any sort of LGBT people, we’d almost certainly know about it by now.

And we don’t: Ancient Greece and Rome were more open to talking about (some forms of) homosexuality, but that wasn’t why Rome fell, and it won’t be why we do, either. After Rome fell, the Middle Ages most certainly had plenty of both straight and queer people. Life goes on, for all of us. It’s punctuated by panics, which regularly target some of us—for fear that if we’re not dealt with, life will not go on. Yet life does go on, and here we all are again, and life will go on again.

Ethnographies usually emphasize the differences across societies, but the general layout of human sexual orientation is a surprisingly stable phenomenon, even while the ways that we integrate it into our societies can and do differ extravagantly. Whatever we try, almost everyone still seems to end up straight, or almost entirely so, and some of us still end up otherwise. Variations from one society to another are more easily explained by hiding in response to repression, a hypothesis with a causal mechanism that we know happens all the time. The competing hypothesis, that interventions can successfully change many individuals’ orientations across an entire society, is something that we can’t even reliably establish for individuals in a clinical setting. 

There’s a lesson there. Whenever you see a claim about how society is in imminent danger from something that’s probably always existed at a low level everywhere, it’s good to ask about why the collapse hasn’t already happened. There are deep foundations to almost everything human, and we still understand many of them only dimly. But we’ve been taking notes about social setups for thousands of years, and some things—like both hetero- and homosexuality, and like the tendency of some people to cross gender boundaries—seem always to be with us. The inference I’d offer is that there’s an equilibrium to sexuality in general, a self-regulation that we manifestly can’t easily affect, and that it reliably creates, not just straight people, but all of us. 

When an equilibrium seems especially hard to disrupt, it’s often because it rests on many different factors, all of which cooperate to bring it about. If one or even several factors fail, the equilibrium of many factors may still survive in some form. The stability of such an equilibrium, always coordinating on a pattern that yields lots of fertility, would contribute to the fitness of the species, even if not every individual were maximally fertile. Adam Smith memorably quipped that there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, but this is different: a system that stably yields several outputs, none of which are the system’s ruin.

The system’s overall stability might even depend on not hitting optimal fertility in any particular generation, or ever. It makes sense that evolution might land in territory like this—a situation of many factors, all of which contribute to a stability that’s not fully maximizing fertility in any one moment, but that’s very hard to disrupt over the long term. If there’s a price to be paid for that stability, in the form of some individuals who aren’t as fertile as the rest, that might be a fair trade from an evolutionary perspective. The reward is that, across a wide range of behaviors, the species always stays very fertile. We may worry, but we don’t have to.

A multifactor causal structure for human sexual orientation also makes sense in light of one of the great scientific disconfirmations we’ve had since the 90s: the failure to find any specific human genes that alone determine someone’s orientation. That we’d one day find such genes used to be an article of faith among liberals, who expected that science would soon close up this gap in our knowledge and establish the naturalness of the less common orientations.

In some circles today, the fact that no gay gene has ever been found may still be used to deny that gayness is natural. But that’s a hasty conclusion. Nature has many paths to its ends. Concluding against one theory doesn't necessarily prove another. In the face of doubt, liberalism still says to avoid cruelty, and to affirm the dignity of all. That’s also a safe heuristic when it’s not quite clear what’s going on, and when we might be tempted to panic.

Physicists tell of a theoretical phenomenon called false vacuum decay. The claim’s something like this: Space itself has an energy state. It’s not actually nothingness; on this theory, space bears an exotic potential energy that might be able to exert various dramatic effects. If something discharged that energy, the space of the universe would revert to a true vacuum state, which we’ve never experienced before. What that would look like is unknown, but suggestions at Wikipedia include everything from “complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with the survival of structures like galaxies, stars, and even biological life, while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe.” At any time, and with no warning, all that we value might end in an instant.

Physicists don’t know as much as they’d like about false vacuums, but they do know that if they exist at all, they must be incredibly rare. We’re still around, and existence as we know it appears to have been stable for billions of years. Granting that nothing is simple in modern cosmology, the physical properties of the universe nonetheless seem safely uniform; they aren’t changing dramatically across any frontiers in the observed universe. If sudden changes in physical constants were anything near a common event, we would already know about it.

This isn’t to say that the physical properties of the universe derive their stability from a deep equilibrium. It’s to introduce a heuristic: We shouldn’t assume that enduring but poorly understood phenomena—like sexual orientation, or the stability of empty space—stand ready to crumple before the terrors that our minds all too easily imagine. The mind comes up with all kinds of stuff, and a lot of it’s not very helpful. And so life goes on, punctuated by panics.

Now, anyone putting this kind of quiet confidence out in public is likely to be met by a well-meaning interlocutor, who may note that some disasters really do occur. He’ll add that one can never be too careful, a note of socially acceptable worry that seems to end a lot of the conversations that happen right at the edge of our knowledge.

As for me, I’ll grant that disasters do occur—but I’ll add that time and resources are finite, and not all feared disasters are real. Hypervigilance is no answer here, so let’s turn to another example.

Food production is an area where we can definitely cause an equilibrium to collapse through the conscious design of our institutions. It’s even happened in this decade, in Sri Lanka, whose economy collapsed after a deeply unwise attempt to ban all inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. It also happened in the Terror Famine of the Soviet Union, and it happened in the Irish Potato Famine. Relative to what we’ve been discussing above, the equilibria of food production are much easier to disturb—and we know it because history is full of famines. 

We need a theory of equilibria, and we have one, in the form of economics. Many economists thought the Sri Lankan experiment was especially foolish, and they said so at the time. They knew the country was in trouble by looking at the factors that create and show the endangered equilibrium—consumer demand, the inputs needed to meet that demand, their prices, and the contributions of the various factors to agricultural productivity. Equilibria don’t always hold, and this one didn’t.

Yet the phenomena of economics are in some ways a poor model for the phenomena of the natural world. Whatever keeps the vacuum of space stable, it’s not responding to anything we’ve done so far,  and it also seems to have been stable over billions of years with respect to nonhuman disturbances. Human society, on the other hand, takes constant work to enact; individuals must be convinced to do that work, day in and day out; and each one may be subject to private ideas that pull them away from it. Some specific humans are tasked with actively maintaining the background conditions that allow the rest of us to behave in ways that yield an economic equilibrium. We call the background conditions “law,” and we call the people who look after the laws “legislators.” The universe might have such a person, but if so, he doesn’t seem persuadable.

On Earth, though, our legislators’ private ideas are pliable, and when they change, the people who write our laws may change the conditions by which we seek our economic goals, perhaps making the resulting equilibrium drastically worse. That’s certainly something to be on guard for. We may know it when the prices change, and we hope that we don’t discover it only when the shelves are empty.

But both the stars and our bodies are in states more robust than that. They’re less responsive to what our minds may have to say about them. Steady regularities like those are common in the foundations of human experience. Common in everyday life, unfortunately, are the people who would profit by saying that everything is about to fall apart. And so life goes on.