Yet Another Weary Blissful Dawn…

 

Synopsis:

Our past has shaped the nature of humanity into something ill-adapted to modern life and even less adapted to a viable long-term future.  If we do not adjust to changing realities, we are doomed as a culture, and even as a species.   Instead of making serious progress towards long term viability as a species, we have survived one futile, illusory liberation after another.  The fundamental problem lies in those aspects of our nature that render our societies dependent on competition, money and violent conflict between our personal values and rival values.  All our most effective structures of society have been adversarial, to the point where adversarial competition has come to be seen as a virtue, in spite of its elements of patent counter-efficiency.   To outgrow this juvenile phase in the development of our species, we need not so much a change of human nature, as a change of emphasis on key components of human nature.  The first stages of the changes could largely be attained through education rather than simplistic technology.  The objective would be a community with as much drive and creativity as the best of free enterprise, and as much efficiency and selflessness as an ant colony — or more.  

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 Any system, including any ethical system,
that by its own nature implicitly strives against its own success,
whether it succeeds or not, deserves not to survive;
natural selection militates against it
Anonymous

As a species we are perpetually in demanding and uncertain transition.  We have outgrown the economics of our origins and have yet to develop economics that will remain viable in our future.  We arose from a scattering of quarrelsome family groups and we never raised ourselves above the mindsets that evolved to sustain us for our first hundred thousand years or so of modern humanity.  For perhaps twenty thousand years, those mindsets have driven us repeatedly to attempts at piecemeal destruction of our kin and ourselves, repeatedly to be frustrated and rescued by our own lack of vision and our technological impotence. 

 These juvenile incapacities we are outgrowing. 

 We now face transits more demanding than in the past.  Stumble, and humanity will die wholesale within the next thousand years or so, a dingy palaeontological incident in a solar system with most of its life behind it. 

 The trouble is that our inborn and rationalised values, vestiges from our past, entail conflicts of interest that threaten our future.  Our minds' naïve desires conflict with those of our bodies; our bodies' with those of our families, our parents and our descendants; our families' with those of our communities, our communities' with those of our nations …

 To see where our Darwinistic past threatens to lead us in the future, examine our political history.  We desire to be personally powerful, or to be led by the powerful.  The effect has been to leave us hostage to thugs, mobs and parasites.  Blissful dawns came and went throughout history whenever particularly spectacular parasites made way for others; localised flickers of hope as some well-meant power structure arose around a leader, a group or a family, only to be snuffed out by the decadence or greed of  our newly absolutely powerful demagogues, or of their successors, or by invaders.   It is not bombs and gases we need fear, so much as those relative timings of our future transitions of power.  

 Imagine what would have happened if Hitler or Stalin or Hideki Tojo or even Mao had got the bomb before the western powers did.  If the globalisation of technology pre-empts the civilisation of our spirit, we are in for a rough ride; probably a short ride at that.  As long as control of our communities goes to the power seekers, and as long as power corrupts, we are doomed to dawn after false dawn until one bloody dawn too many proves false. 

 Until we manage to shed this tribalistic village tyrant fixation, things look bad.  Mentalities hobbled by peasant vices certainly can lead the world, but they generally lead downhill and mainly to the short-term gratification of themselves and their Orwellian guard dogs and sheep.  Stalin and Mao demonstrated this convincingly, if so far futilely.  The virtues we need are more like the virtues of the ant nest or of
H G Wells' Selenites, than of Louis XIV, Hitler, or the followers of either.  It is depressing to observe that the Politically Correct regard communities, even fictional communities, in which clashes of interest are eliminated, with greater horror than communities in which clashes of interest drive everything and defile and destroy everything. 

 To be sure, we are not ants, and nor were the Selenites.  But neither are we Gadarene swine — and it does not follow that in abominating the automatism of the one, we must make a virtue of rushing to our own destruction like the other.  Fashionable cant states either that laissez faire policy in an adversarial social system is the best option possible, or that we must drop all alternatives in enforcing some particular religious or political dogma.  

 And yet this dread of ant-nest politics is as needless as it is futile.   As a species we now have nearly everything we need for breaking out of our biological mould and constructing a culture to bear us through the next billion years or so.  We need not forfeit our nature to achieve civilisation, we need only develop it selectively.  What humanity needs is a spirit in which the leader (if such a thing would still exist) would die rather than betray a follower, but would sacrifice a follower rather than the community.  A follower, in turn, would die rather than betray a leader or a fellow, but would sacrifice either rather than the community. 

 Note that I do not say that we should act that way as a matter of abstract principle, but as a matter of personal values.  That is simply the way we should feel and act, not the way we should interpret our duty.  If we achieve that, then we need change nothing else; the rest would follow.

 The germs of such altruism exist within us already, though they certainly could do with a bit of nurturing and steering.  The problem is to make them dominant over our memes of self-interest and to protect the  community from external parasites that would otherwise exploit the goodwill of the rest.  In short, the problem is to build the healthy community into an ESS, that is, an evolutionary stable strategy, a structure that would be resistant to invasion by rival strategies.  Simplistic altruistic communities for example, tempt parasites to exploit the generosity of their fellows, so they are not ESSs, but are susceptible to parasitism.  

There is a fairly popular view that the proper social model would be anarchism, but I never have seen any proposal for such model that was not open to the rankest exploitation by the clever, violent, greedy, and self-centered. In other words, one that amounts to an effective ESS. Nor have I seen such any proposal for an anarchistic community, that could stand up to opposition by a functional social structure with its built-in checks and balances, bills of rights, commitments and responsibilities and powers of authority and direction. So, until human nature changes, I do not see any prospect for anarchism to be of any use as a community structure of any value in itself, or to its members, unless it incorporated formal powers of community control, and that formally would violate the very principles of anarchism. 

 Not much of an ESS!

 The second problem is that if the community merely opted for a life of interminable complacent peasantry, it would be doomed in the long run.  Humanity needs to get off the planet, emerge from the eggshell and its smug delusions of security.  We need commitment to schemes that would transcend the scope of each current generation and make long-term policies viable.  For instance it is technically attractive to make Venus a home for an affluent population twice the size of what Earth can support, powered by plentiful renewable energy, but the project would take perhaps some thousands of years.  For the species this would be a minor investment, the merest training run for serious entry into space and interstellar pioneering.  But as long as we are driven by, and limited to, a vision of present personal profits, any such long-term scheme is the idlest of pipe dreams and our horizons remain those of individual mortality and perceived material profit. 

 One could construct whole families of Utopian prospects consistent with universally open, sincere, trusting citizens.  The fundamental question though, is whether the community could combine a lack of personal competition with the vigorous growth that the drive of constructive competition can bring.  In short, what is to replace the sacred free market and the profit motive?  Who is to direct the ants and supply the drive?  What is to supplant, not merely money itself, but the role of money, not the medium of exchange, but the channel for the energy that drives industry and nourishes hubris? 

 Hubris is a dangerous infection in a community of fellahin with megalomanic leaders.  We have no shortage of historical horrible examples, not all of them as spectacular as the Great Wall and the Pyramids, but alarming in principle and in their results.  If Donald Trump served for anything positive in his life, it was as an example, nauseating, but dreadful; however ghastly he and his doings might be, the real nightmare is not Trump as a loser, but his Gadarene followers; they might be the most pathetic of the losers, but they are the operative threat to the rest of society, even to the rest of humanity. 

 In contrast, in an educated community of shared commitment, hubris in the spirit of the tower of Babel, would become our strength and our salvation; this has a good biblical basis: "Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." To anyone of good faith, that would sound like a passionate recommendation, but to the peasant authoritarian theocrats of the day, it was presented as an evil, and passionately to be opposed. 

 As I said, it should be possible to achieve such ends purely by education that exploits existing bases of our value structures, but the resulting social structure would be metastable.  Only let a nucleus of parasites, such as present day gangsters or politicians, form an effective subversive movement, and it is hard to see how we could avoid falling back to the most miserable serfdom in human history. 

 However, if we could commit to breeding for those values, our future would be fairly well assured for as far as human eye can see.  Parasites would be isolated and the community would not be mindlessly trusting, but alert and ambitious, embodiments of the conscious tit-for-tat principle that: "If a man does thee once it is his fault; if he does thee twice it is thy fault; and if he does thee good, it is thy desire to do good to his values."  Anyone seen to be acting in bad faith would be recognised thereby as necessarily anti-social. There is a good Christian adjuration favouring this principle:

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing,
but inwardly they are ravening wolves. 
Ye shall know them by their fruits.
Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit;
but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit".

 Impossible?  Hardly.  In biological terms we have achieved more than that in breeding dogs, and done it quickly and repeatedly.  Furthermore, we have the physical resources; the obstacles are sociological, not technical.  No cloning, no restriction endonucleases or transcriptases, just a bit of national and international family planning and education.  

 Do we really want a future for our species, in which everyone is for everyone, where money becomes a measure of effort rather than a medium of currency?  What happens to mental independence, creativity, competition, passion, all the things that drive us and make us human?  

 What indeed?  Nothing in the suggestion precludes any of these things; all that is necessary is a subtle change in the orientation of our value judgments.  No doubt one ant is as simple minded as the next, but suppose citizens agree on common goals and commit uncompromisingly to those goals, in unquestioning confidence that they and their families and communities will equally uncompromisingly be fed and cared for: they could enjoy (or suffer) as rich an emotional and intellectual life as our choicest  spirits today.  In fact, for us to have a resilient community, citizens would have to develop their physical, emotional and mental faculties to the fullest. 

 Conversely, nothing in this picture guarantees agreement on everything by everyone, nor indeed by anyone, neither on facts nor theories, neither on ends nor means.  Where there is disagreement, there would be argument and competition.  The only difference would be that resentment and dishonesty would be overshadowed by persuasion, trust and goodwill.  A painless community, boring and small-spirited?  Small souls, unloved by God and uncoveted by the devil? 

 I hardly think so; certainly not in comparison to Homo mediocriter as we have bred the species for millennia.  Eric Hoffer had no need of any brave new world to observe that: "Where men are free, they usually imitate each other." 

 And realistically?  Granting (as most readers will no doubt decline to do) that some such vision is desirable, how do we get to there from here?  

 I don't know. 

 I would despair utterly, but I am tempted to hope by the fact that there have been some influential movements towards positive advances in civilisation. 

 Consider the population problem: so far only the Chinese have tried anything really assertive, and they made a typical politicians' mess of it. If they had stopped to think, then instead of drastically trying to limit procreation to one child per family, they would have aimed at one per person. The resultant population reduction would have been sociologically benign, driven only by those who could not or would not reproduce. It would none the less have left scope for encouraging the reproduction of the most socially welcome and would have decreased the hysterical pressure for boy children. Though too gradual for most people to notice, the scope for encouragement of healthy, productive, socially beneficial offspring should be rapid in evolutionary terms.

 Stammering and confused the gropings towards social and biological improvement may have been so far, but many of the idealists have been among the intelligentsia and the intelligentsia have included most of the technocracy.  In comparison to the social obstacles, the technical obstacles are so trivial that I cannot help hoping.