Howdy, Cousin

Our culture is so conditioned to the idea that a society is formed by the voluntary association of individuals that it may come as an actual shock to some people to learn that there are alternative models of social formation. In fact, as I think everyone realizes deep down, the original mode of social organization was kinship. And this remained the dominant mode until very recent times, by way of a series of extensions or expansions: from family to clan to tribe to nation, with accompanying formalizations of relationship and status, reaching a peak of elaboration in the kind of hierarchical society exemplified by, say, the court of Louis XVI.

Now, I'm not going to argue that humanity's needs would best be met by a return to monarchy and hierarchy. But I am going to suggest that something of real value is lost in the current atomistic-individualistic view of things. In the understandable rejection of tyrannical absolutism, we’ve gone a bit too far in the opposite direction. One way of looking at it: In the famous revolutionary triad of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité," the present-day view seems to regard them as listed in descending order of value; indeed, "fraternité" seems largely to have gone off the radar in our hyper-competitive, social-Darwinist era.

The fact that we humans really are all members of one big family can be illustrated by something I’ve been mulling over recently:

Every human being has two parents. You have two parents, your parents had two parents each, giving you four grandparents, each of whom had two parents, giving you eight great-grandparents, and so on. So in looking back at your ancestry, the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation further back you look.

There's a conundrum here. At this geometric rate of expansion, by the time you get back to your 28-times-great grandparents, you've got a billion ancestors in that one generation. Allowing 20-30 years per generation, that would have been the situation somewhere between 600 and 900 years ago, i.e., sometime between the years 1100 and 1400. But according to experts' best estimates, the total human population didn't reach 1 billion until the early 1800s. And the disparity just gets bigger as you keep counting backwards: If you go back a further 30 generations, the number of your ancestors in that one generation rises to a staggering 1.2 quintillion; meanwhile, the actual population on Earth has shrunk to an estimated 200 million.

So how can we reconcile the obvious truth that everyone has two parents with the equally obvious truth that the human population gets smaller the further back in time we look? I think there's only one explanation: Among those theoretical 1 billion or 1.2 quintillion people, there's a lot of duplication. In other words, the same couples appear multiple times in a given generation, making them your ancestors along multiple lines of descent.

Suppose, for instance, you lived in the 15th-century and your father hiked 20 miles to a (to him) distant village to find his bride. Well, there's a fair chance that his great-great-great grandfather did the same thing in the opposite direction. So your father might have ended up marrying his fourth cousin, and you would have the same 4-times-great grandparents on both your mother's and your father's side – which, incidentally, would make you your own fifth cousin.

What this boils down to is that when you're standing in line at the grocery store, there's a pretty good chance that the cashier or some of the other people in line are your not-terribly-distant cousins. And if you don't believe a more or less random selection of people can turn up these kinds of family connections, recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, the genealogical experts at Burke's Peerage informed the world that Barack Obama is an 11th cousin of George W. Bush and a ninth cousin of Dick Cheney.

Everyone is aware that all humans are related on the basis of the so-called "mitochondrial Eve" or whatever, but that kind of connection goes back tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, so it may seem pretty remote and not very relevant to our lives today. But it turns out not to be necessary to look back anywhere near that far to see how connected we are, how closely related we all are.

Regrettably, in an age when social atomism has reached such an extreme that even the nuclear family seems increasingly fissile, it may not matter much to a lot of people to be reminded of their kinship with strangers; they’re already used to treating members of their immediate family like strangers. One way of looking at this spreading alienation is as an increasing narrowing of our horizon of interest or concern: from all humankind to our close kin to, finally, our singular personal selves.

It's an even more drastic narrowing of horizons if one looks at it from an even wider perspective than the merely human, as I want to do next time.