Ideas That Don’t Travel

Sometimes they’re stillborn on arrival; other times, they run wild

For quite a while now, I’ve become interested in Founder Effects, and not only of the biological kind. I’ve long accepted the argument—made in various forms about various societies by people like Thomas Sowell, David Hackett Fischer, and Judith Brett—that cultural founder effects also exist, working to produce societies that are really very different from each other, even among the superficially similar developed liberal democracies.

I think this phenomenon explains not only why it was impossible to export liberal democracy to places like Afghanistan and Iraq, but also why—even in other developed countries, like Germany and Japan—cultural founder effects meant that, post-war, the Allies did not set up presidential political systems. Both are parliamentary systems, while the Japanese retained their constitutional monarchy. Presidential systems are an American or French political arrangement that tends not to travel: they die or explode.

Yours truly with Nigel Biggar & Niall Ferguson in late October 2024 at the Centre for Independent Studies’ annual ‘Consilium’ conference.

However, death or destruction-on-impact isn’t the only definition of “ideas that fail to travel.” Sometimes you have the opposite problem: think introduced species in island ecologies, where birds without predators have evolved not to fly or mammals that have branched off from a very odd lineage lay eggs. Australia and New Zealand have lots of stories like this. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History tells the tale of the most notorious of them.

Feral pests like the rabbit or fox go wild, much like the Martian red weed HG Wells describes taking root on earth in War of the Worlds. This, by analogy with the same phenomenon in biology and culture, also happens with ideas. Bad ideas can be invasive pests, too.

My January feature for Law & Liberty was on settler-colonial ideology which—in the form now exploding literally all over Israel/Gaza and metaphorically all over US university campuses—is, ahem, an introduced ideology. From Australia. Sorry about that, ‘Muricans.

Ahem, that's a lot of Australians

I realised the extent of this by combining my Australian author tour with reading the above book. It’s created a situation where (as you’ll see if you read the Law & Liberty piece) present Helen has had to publicly disagree with past Helen because past Helen was wrong.

Of course,

Lorenzo Warby

of this parish is the champion of “everything social emerges from the biological,” so he has views on this phenomenon as well. They form the basis of this piece of his on the importance of weakening kin group governance in order to produce functioning democracies—even in Islamic countries. Pastoralist-style kin group dominance is what makes Islam so vicious in countries as diverse as Pakistan and Libya, and their absence explains its gentleness in Indonesia and Malaysia.

This, too, is a founder effect, and helps explain why some things—and people—don’t travel.

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