Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 66. Sunrise is 5:25 and sunset is 8:18 for 14 hours 53 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 40.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1819, the SS Savannah leaves port at Savannah, Georgia, United States, on a voyage to become the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. (Savannah‘s departure had been delayed for two days “after one of her crew returned to the vessel in a highly inebriated state, fell off the gangplank, and drowned.”)
It was German scientist Ernst Haeckel, more than a century ago, who coined the now-discredited expression that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ described simply as an organism’s development as an embryo (ontogeny) repeating (recapitulating) the evolutionary past of its species (phylogeny).
And yet, if not in the natural world, then perhaps elsewhere, one might find a concept of recapitulation to prove more fitting. (There are, in fact, social science concepts that do apply recapitulation.)
I’ll suggest a loose application of recapitulation theory (very loose and permissive!) to small-town politics: a political or cultural faction rising in a town adopts the form and behaviors of the prior factions it supplements or replaces. That faction’s evolution outside the womb, so to speak, reflects the habits of earlier factions in the community.
This claim would hold true despite ideology — it’s a claim about behavior apart from ideology. One can even set aside the metaphor to an old German scientist’s views and instead see this as a contemporary American condition (and problem): those who rise now, even and especially despite their claims of unique ideological positions, soon look and behave like those who came before.
And so, and so, when a faction comes along and says it’s a new approach (MAGA after traditional conservatives or the center-left after conservative cronyism) how it truly looks and what it truly risks being little more than a recapitulation of past forms and conduct.
If, for example, a district board goes from one ideological majority to another, yet exhibits the same habits and forms of the past, is it truly new? Is it not, instead, merely a descendant of, and a dependent of, earlier habits and forms?
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
French artist JR inflates a giant ‘cave’ over Paris’ oldest bridge: