A thought experiment about homosexuality

Here's a thought-experiment about homosexuality. Before I go any further, I'll say this: I consider homosexuality -- which, for the sake of argument I'm going to simplify as 'the desire to have sex predominantly or exclusively with people the same gender as yourself' -- to be a value-neutral form of human existence, to exactly the same degree that heterosexuality is value-neutral. Sexual preference is not a 'value'. That said, and nonetheless, I consider the presence of a proportion of gay people in the population to be a self-evidently good thing, on grounds of diversity and variety; and it seems to me that homophobia, overt or covert, is very obviously a great human wickedness and has created enormous, gratuitous human misery.

OK: so what follow are the premises of my thought-experiment. They are themselves relatively evidence-free, and may be wrong. But they strike me as within the bounds of plausibility. The starting point, upon which everything that follows, is the dodgiest (from what I read, there is some evidence supporting it, but it may be completely untrue and it is almost certainly much more complicated than any simple account might suggest). It's this: homosexuals inherit their desire to have sex with people of the same gender as themselves. By that I mean: homosexuals do not consciously 'choose' to be gay, and equally cannot simply 'choose' to be straight. But I mean something more than that: I mean that, to the extent that homosexuality constitutes a necessary component of who any particular gay man or women is, it is part of their genetic makeup.

Now, here's a second key premise. Some gay people want to have kids of their own, of course; and some gay people go on to do precisely that. But: looked at overall, gay people are less likely to pass on their genes than straight people. The whole system of society is set-up to facilitate straight people having and raising kids, after all, and is often explicitly hostile to gay people doing so even when homosexuality is ostensibly decriminalised. Plus gay men and women must, by and large, make conscious choices to step away from their usual sexual practice in order to conceive kids. Accordingly, straight people are more likely to have kids than gay people -- not that gay people can't, and certainly not that they shouldn't, but that, broadly speaking, they don't.

Which leads me to premise number three. If 'gayness' is a heritable quality, then we might expect two large-enough populations of breeders, one straight and one gay, to produce offspring that are weighted, respectively, accordingly: with more straight orientations in the former case, and more gay in the latter. Of course it's not true that gay people will inevitably breed gay children, or that straight people will inevitably have straight kids -- very often, empirically, that isn't the case; and we know that that's not how genetics work (as our own experience confirms; for our own children are not simple clones of ourselves). But over time, and broadly speaking, we might start to see a diverging trend between these two populations. Because that is how genetics works: on large populations, over long-enough periods of time, to magnify traits.

Now, here's a 'what-if?' What if a global climate in which gay people can live 'out' lives, decriminalised and without stigma, eventually begins to breed-out homosexuality from the population?

This is to hypothesise one key argument about human social history. Until recently, large numbers of gay men and women were in the position of being compelled, by oppression and criminalisation, to live 'straight' lives. On an individual level, it is clearly an ethical monstrosity to create a climate that forces people to live a lie. But could it be the case that this broader climate kept the same proportion of gay people in the business of producing children as was the case for straight people? (ie: not all straight people have kids, any more than all gay people do -- but when gayness was criminalised, these two proportions were closer, and now that gayness has been decriminalised it will tend to move apart). Or to put it another way: in previous generations, many gay people were effectively pressganged into heteronormative roles in their culture that they would not have chosen to fill, had they had a choice; and amongst those roles was the expectation that they would have kids.

To model it, crudely: let's say a combination of genetic factors and social pressure to pretend to be straight result in 4% of the population being gay; but let's also say that the transmission of these genes depends upon gay men and women having kids that they would not, if given the choice to live 'out', free lives, have had. Now imagine a world in which that social pressure was removed, and gay people only had kids if they actively chose it. The obvious extrapolation would be -- a smaller number of gay people will have kids, and the proportion of the population being gay will diminish. The asymptote (or doomsday scenario) here would be: the proportion of the general population that is gay falls into statistical nullitude.

If there's anything in this (and of course I concede it's a big if), does it have any larger ethical consequences? To thumbnail it: most people, or most people outside the centres of world religious fundamentalism and bigotry, would agree that the ethical way to behave is to let people live their lives according to their own sense of their sexual orientation. But what if, on a larger scale, and across the generations, this results in homosexuality becoming, relatively, much rarer in society?

It's possible to turn this around: there are relatively powerful activists, particularly in the Bible Belt of the USA, who simply refuse to accept gayness as one fact of human life. What these people want, it seems to me, is to go back to a time when gay people were forced to live the heterosexual lie. But what if, by doing so, these bigots were actually guaranteeing the continuing presence of a sizeable homosexual contingent in society as a whole?

My gut feeling is that if (big if) a worldwide, longlasting culture of tolerance leads to a dimunition of the proportion of the population -- then that would be a bad thing, broadly speaking. But, I wonder why I think so? Certainly, I don't see any reason to argue that gay people ought to be driven underground in order to 'preserve' gayness as an aspect of human culture; the trade-off (enormous human misery now for some nebulous future 'gain') is simply untenable. But I do wonder.

Who else has argued-through this thought-experiment, I wonder?

Shoalwater

The Kentish Knock is hemmed by the Knock Deep;
Black Dee, Barrow Deep, Oaze Deep and The Warp
Claw-gouge the pathways towards London;
Swin and Wallet define the spearblade-shapes
Of islands, like bunting fluttering eastward
In the geological and marine strong wind.

Descreivit and Red

Descreivit came to a certain small planet, with its pelt of forests, its untrampled mountain peaks, its unharvested oceans. He travelled through space, but drew his power from higher dimension.

On the planet he befriended a beast: a slim-hipped hominid with a coat of peat-coloured bodyhair that shaded into ginger on his head. The beast had wide-spaced eyes, black as nightsky, and in these the potential for intelligence glinted. He had no name as such, this beast; although he was recognised by his tribal fellows by his smell, by his stance, and by the particular arrangement of his facial features. Descreivit called him Red after his head-hair.

The ‘befriending’ took pretty much the whole season, but Descreivit was in no hurry, construing a way through the natural cautiousness of Red’s instincts. Ah, Descreivit! He had been sent to perform a certain task, and he was ready for it to take as long as necessary. He modified his appearance, internalising his lifesupport technology to appear more like a hominid. He sat with the tribe; he bickered and played with Red; he deferred to Red’s father, Alpha; he shrieked and ran and slept with them all. Soon Red treated him as he treated his kin; with the same amused, snappish tolerance.

‘Accept my gift,’ said Descreivit. ‘Gift?’ sniffed Red, his face full of suspicion, seeing nothing. ‘It is not a thing,’ explained Descreivit, straining the beast’s language as far as it would go. ‘In your head, there is flesh. This flesh thinks.’ He rapped Red’s forehead. ‘My gift will lift your thoughts, make them broader, better, thread them with immortality. It will give you soul. You shall be something new, more than your others; you will be a man. Your children too.’

A week passed before Red was prepared to accept the gift.

Descreivit called on the resources of his ultradimension; he took the knot of perception and instinct in Red’s cranium and folded it again, connected it to the higher level. He made something imperishable there, something that would only loiter on the planet until its flesh died and released it. ‘Now you are a man, a beast no more,’ he told Red. Communication was much easier now. ‘I am not from this world; from another place—another dimension. You have been chosen to join us; a congregation of life-forms, only partially wedded to this dimension. When you die now you will transcend to the ultradimension. This is because you have now what you did not have before: a soul. You are a man, no longer a beast.’

Red was amazed. ‘I shall never die!’ he said in amazement. ‘I shall pass on to a new life at death! But I must take my father with me. I must take my mother.’

‘No,’ said Descreivit. ‘Your parents are beasts, and they shall die. You are a man and shall not.’

Red considered this. ‘Gift them souls too.’

‘No,’ said Descreivit. ‘This cannot be done.’

‘Then I reject your gift,’ said Red, angrily.

Descreivit put his face in his hands and wailed. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘No! You cannot unwish the gift! By rejecting it, you bring great disaster on yourself and your children! Better to kill yourself now, to join me in the ultradimension immediately—that cliff there. Hurl yourself. This is your last chance. Oh how terrible this is! There is horrible danger here!’

‘How can it be,’ said Red, thinking through what he was saying as he said it, ‘that I am a man if my parents are beasts? I stand with my parents.’

‘Listen to me, Red,’ urged Descreivit, clinging about him, desperate to change his mind, for a great wrong was about to be knotted into the continuum of the ultradimension. ‘Your soul is woven into your consciousness. It is governed as much by your Will as your thoughts. If you will this thing you will kink the soul out of shape, and that will damage not just you but the whole ultradimension! Listen to me. How can you wish to be a beast again? Have you no pride in your manhood?’

‘No pride,’ confirmed Red stubbornly. ‘I stand with my family.’ He loped off, his knuckles tha-thadding on the compacted dirt.

‘No!’ cried Descreivit after him. ‘You cannot undo the soul in you! This is damnation and disaster!’ But Red put his thoughts elsewhere. There was the smell of rain in the air. The forest lay like a dark cloud on the horizon. He was hungry.

On the social hysteria of passing fame

Whom the mad destroy they first make gods.

Latifundia perdidere Italiam

Pliny the Elder famously intones, "To tell the truth, the latifundia destroyed Italy, and now they are destroying the provinces as well". The latifundum 'symbolises the decline of the idyllic family farm, and its replacement by soulless industrial agriculture. I'd taken this at face value, until I read Mary Beagon's argument: that Pliny's objection was not to the size or efficiency of these superfarms (how could he object to that? Wasn't the Roman Empire similarly vast, and efficiently run? Don't, in fact, latifundia metonymise the Empire itself?) so much as the belief that excess in any sort of wealth leads to decadence (a kind of residual Senecan stoicism). 'It is likely that Pliny’s remark is occasioned by the neglect of large tracts of land. Ranchland in the south of Apulia, where depopulation was also a problem, has been suggested. This, moreover, is exactly the type of land Columella describes in the De Re Rustica: men of enormous wealth possess lands of which they cannot even make the rounds, and either leave them to be trampled by cattle of wasted by wild beasts, or keep them occupied by debtors or ergastula.' Me, I like the implicit paradox in Pliny's apothegm. The more wide, fertile land we have, the more pinched and barren we become.

Debt

I used to think (to the extent that I thought about it at all) that the phrase 'we all owe death a debt; and it must be repaid, sooner or later' was a striking, thought-provoking way of thinking about death. Now it occurs to me it is a way of normalising and naturalising the economy of borrowing and lending. After all, if we look at it from the other way around, we can hardly help observing: not all monetary debts are repaid ...

Asthenospherians

Pondering a new sort of hollow-earth story. Aliens, somewhat after the manner of Wyndham's Kraken, invade, but are uninterested in the surface of the world, and instead colonise the Asthenosphere:

The asthenosphere (from Greek asthenēs 'weak' + sphere) is the highly viscous mechanically weak ductilely-deforming region of the upper mantle of the Earth. It lies below the lithosphere, at depths between 100 and 200 km (~ 62 and 124 miles) below the surface, but perhaps extending as deep as 700 km (~ 435 miles). The asthenosphere is a portion of the upper mantle just below the lithosphere that is involved in plate tectonic movements and isostatic adjustments. In spite of its heat, pressures keep it plastic, and it has a relatively low density. Seismic waves pass relatively slowly through the asthenosphere, compared to the overlying lithospheric mantle, thus it has been called the low-velocity zone (LVZ), although the two are not exactly the same. The lower boundary of the LVZ lies at a depth of 180–220 km, whereas the base of the asthenosphere lies at a depth of about 700 km. This was the observation that originally alerted seismologists to its presence and gave some information about its physical properties, as the speed of seismic waves decreases with decreasing rigidity. Under the thin oceanic plates the asthenosphere is usually much closer to the seafloor surface, and at mid-ocean ridges it rises to within a few kilometers of the ocean floor. The upper part of the asthenosphere is believed to be the zone upon which the great rigid and brittle lithospheric plates of the Earth's crust move about. Due to the temperature and pressure conditions in the asthenosphere, rock becomes ductile, moving at rates of deformation measured in cm/yr over lineal distances eventually measuring thousands of kilometers. In this way, it flows like a convection current, radiating heat outward from the Earth's interior. Above the asthenosphere, at the same rate of deformation, rock behaves elastically and, being brittle, can break, causing faults. The rigid lithosphere is thought to "float" or move about on the slowly flowing asthenosphere, creating the movement of crustal plates.

The aliens themselves would be petrapiscine; their motion slow relative to ours (swimming through the ductile medium) but strong, implacable; and by manipulating the asthenosphere they could shrug human cities to rubble. The main problem would be our inability to reach them; but the story -- cast over a longue durée, would dramatise the initial unsuccessful and latterly more successful insurgency against the assault. Title: The Strong Weak Sphere.