Is Equality Possible?

 

This graph is an extremely broad-brush view of socio-economic change across history.

• The grey line represents the time in which we lived as hunter-gatherers, i.e. most of human history.
• The green line represents the time where most people lived as farmers, i.e. roughly 10,000 BC to 1800 AD.
• The red line represents today, i.e. an industrial civilisation lusting for economic growth, but forced by progressive movements to spread its wealth out.
• The blue line represents a possible future. Because humanity is on the verge of colonising the solar system, and thus able to exploit a vast amount of energy and matter, this line could continue to rise for a very long time. To be clear, this does not represent a smooth continuation of neoliberalism. The future will no doubt hold revolutions and conflicts between different groups of would-be elites. Also, bear in mind that the graph is only concerned with those who are alive – perhaps in 2100 everyone will live in a happy, prosperous society, but the world’s population will only be 4 billion. History might judge the atrocities of the 20^th Century to be simply warm-ups for the atrocities of the 21^st.   

Clearly this graph isn’t uncontroversial. Were hunter-gatherer societies truly egalitarian? Was their standard of living really better than peasants? But of course the most controversial thing is the gradient of the blue line. Old school Marxists would argue that a classless society will eventually emerge from the dictatorship of the proletariat, in other words that the line will be perfectly flat. Others, such as Yuval Noah Harari, would argue that the line will become steeper than Everest.

First, let’s think about how an equal society might come to be. Far from heralding the dictatorship of the proletariat, automation and AI will probably herald the obsolescence of the proletariat. But at the same time, it could undermine the justifications given for inequality. Imagine a car company which developed AIs which could design cars, design the machines that built the cars and manage the factories. The owners of the company could afford to fire almost all its workforce (perhaps even those who developed the AIs) and then just sit back and watch the money roll in. No-one would be contributing labour or innovation. This is what Peter Frase calls ‘rentism’.

Would the public accept that those who owned the means of production had the sole right to the profits? Perhaps for a time, but the justifications would start to sound ridiculous – “I am entitled to a share of the profits because my late father had the foresight to invest in this company. The fact that I have not lifted a finger for this money is irrelevant”. As inequality grew, the government would come under pressure to nationalise more and more industries. Eventually all the means of production would be in public hands, and their fruits would be distributed evenly.

In such a world, there would still be what Francis Fukuyama calls megalothymia – the desire to be seen as better than other people. But this could be satisfied by working towards self-improvement and personal achievement. Indeed there’s a big advantage in switching to a value-system based on achievement: unlike wealth, the masses can’t demand it from you. You can demand the right to climb Everest, but you can’t demand to have climbed Everest. In this way, hierarchies of a sort would still exist, but would have no impact on the standard of living.  

Although such a utopian world is possible, we have reasons to believe that it is unlikely. Firstly, although old capitalist justifications for inequality might become weak, the elites could find new justifications. For example, the rich will be the first to take advantage of cybernetic and genetic enhancements, which would enable them to say with some truth that they are superior to baseline humans. An ideology could emerge which claims that wealth and technology should be kept in the hands of enhanced humans. Someone might argue “everyone agrees that weapons should only be wielded by people who are mentally stable and trained to use them, so by that logic surely only people with the most optimised brains should control complex, dangerous technologies? Because irresponsible use of technology could end the world, isn’t this necessary more than ever?”

Secondly, being seen as better than other people is not the root of hierarchy, and so giving awards to vain people in an egalitarian society would not be enough. People are insecure about how others perceive them because they do not want to show weakness. Social status is a means to an end – with respect and resources, you can better defend yourself when the shit hits the fan. The desire for safety, through esteem, is the root of hierarchy. There is a constant climb to the top because that’s what others are doing as well. Although it may be better for your mental health to stop worrying about the social ladder, doing so would leave you vulnerable to the whims of more ambitious people. A perfectly egalitarian society would not be sustainable – it would only be a matter of time before a group tried to gain advantage over others. Even in a society where there was no rational reason to fear others, an instinctual wariness would gnaw at many people’s minds. The Soviet Union had a good stab at creating an equal society, where even politburo members lived in normal apartments. But people in cities, particularly those who were demonstrably loyal to the Party, had better access to luxury goods than those in rural areas – not to mention those in the Gulag.

Hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian because in terms of permanent possessions there is little to go around, and nearly everyone plays a vital role in keeping the tribe alive. Agricultural societies produced food surpluses, but even the first ‘proto-cities’ were egalitarian – everyone’s house was roughly the same size as everyone else’s. Hierarchy first reared its head with the invention of bronze. Now people could extort others and use the threat of violence to defend their homes and status, becoming the first elites.

Ever since, the history of civilisation has been the history of new elites usurping old elites. Often this would be thanks to the innovative use of new technology. Some technologies, such as agriculture and smartphones, can be widely distributed and so appear to be ‘egalitarian technologies’ which give power to everyone. But there are no egalitarian technologies. Even for those that can be widely distributed, there will be some people who don’t use them well or don’t use them at all, putting them at a disadvantage. New technologies, or new ways to use old technologies, are discovered and taken advantage of by groups, not by humanity as a whole.  

As well as technology, developing more efficient organisational structures or more inspiring ideas are also proven routes to power. Because technology and the ways people think are constantly (albeit usually quite slowly) changing, the board on which the game of civilisation is played is always shifting. Those that can adapt to the present circumstances will rise to the top, and those whose adaptations were only useful in a past era will be overthrown. The 21^st Century is much more likely to see the board shifting again and new elites rising, than it is to see the end of the game.  

A third reason why equality is unlikely is that elites tend to accumulate resources and power faster than the masses can push upwards. Harari argues that in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries elites gave education, healthcare and the vote to the masses because it benefited them to rule over societies which were educated, healthy and motivated. It’s probably more accurate to say that elites only came to see and accept these benefits after the masses fought for them. The shockwaves from the French and Russian revolutions still reverberate around the world today. They gave more peaceful progressive movements the ability to demand a fairer distribution of the fruits of industrialisation.

But progressive movements have grown weak, and are likely to grow weaker. This is partly because as automation and AI improve, there will be less need for an educated, healthy and motivated workforce. But as noted above, although the masses of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries had economic and military strength behind them, it was their resolve to demand more that built a fairer society. Automation and AI will make humans’ relative economic and military value fall, but we will still be intelligent, creative and driven creatures. The great push from below will be slower than it was in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, but as long as we have the resolve to demand a better life, we will eventually get it.

A bigger threat to progressive movements is that they’ll get what they want. Just as your standard of living is probably better than Elizabeth I’s (she only ate potato once, and it made her ill), it’s quite possible that even the worst off in 2100 will live a more comfortable life than Mark Zuckerberg’s. The great push from below has always been driven by need, but in a post-scarcity world that urgency will no longer exist. There would also be no need for philanthropy. The nobility in generosity and rebellion would be gone. With the masses satisfied with their lot, the elites could focus on climbing ever higher.

But what exactly are progressive movements pushing towards?

 

The State of Nature

Living things evolve in such a way that they are happiest in an environment where they can meet all their needs, an environment to which they are completely adapted. A favourite topic of discussion for early modern philosophers, today we could call hunter-gatherer societies as living in the State of Nature. It has been estimated that if we could go back in time to 70,000 years ago and steal a baby to raise in today’s world, no-one would notice anything different about the child. If we went back further, the child would struggle to fit in. 70,000 years ago was about the time of what Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution, when we started thinking abstractly and symbolically. Since then, humans have continued to change, both in mind and in body. But humans evolved to live as social hunter-gatherers, and we still have the brains and bodies that were honed to survive in that way.

What was it like in the State of Nature? Clearly there isn’t a single answer to that question. The life of a hunter-gatherer battling the cold in northern Europe would have been very different to another living in the warm grasslands of the Fertile Crescent. But they probably had a lot in common: they would have been physically fit; they would have had varied diets; they would have used their intelligence and imagination on a daily basis; they would have had close social relationships; if they survived childhood, they could potentially live to their 70s; and, apart from in particularly harsh environments, they would have had a lot of free time. However life wasn’t idyllic – not only did they have to deal with predators, the weather and the constant threat of starvation, we have reason to believe that murder accounted for at least 5% of deaths.  

Were hunter-gatherers egalitarian? It’s hard to know for sure, because the only evidence we have comes from today’s hunter-gatherer tribes, and they may be very different from those who lived in the Upper Palaeolithic. But if they were like today’s hunter-gatherers, then yes they were egalitarian – in today’s tribes the sexes are equal, and some tribes don’t even have chiefs. This is because no-one owns plots of land, and because cooperation between everyone is vital. Being nomadic also helps, because you can simply avoid domineering individuals by moving to another camp, and because ties within families are less important. Chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relative, are naturally very hierarchical, so it has been argued that resistance to hierarchy was a key factor in the evolution of the human mind.

Humans were kicked out of the Garden of Eden about 12,000 years ago. In a matter of decades, climate change turned the grasslands of the Middle East into desert, forcing people to domesticate plants and animals to survive. Agriculture caused a host of problems: keeping fields irrigated was such hard work that skeletons from the time are painfully deformed; everyone lived on a diet of porridge, unleavened bread and little else; the high density of people and animals was perfect for diseases; and now there was a reason to wage war over land. But agriculture was an efficient way of securing calories, and for that reason people couldn’t return to the State of Nature even if they wanted to, even after the climate improved again. If a village decided to go back to just hunting and gathering, at least some people would starve. The gates to Eden had been locked behind them.

In the millennia since, some problems have been overcome and new ones have arisen. Slavery, war and environmental destruction became the norm. But people still dreamed of returning to the State of Nature – after all, we are wired to survive as nomadic hunter-gatherers, so although the memory of the State of Nature had long since faded, we instinctively knew that we did not belong in civilisation. This yearning for the State of Nature manifested itself in the idea of a blissful afterlife, and also in the ideals of fairness and equality in this life. Societies which enshrine equality in law, from the Achaemenid Empire to modern democracies, are usually the product of negotiation between self-interested masses and open-minded elites. But the promise of a more equal society helps the slow push towards one, and comes from the niggling feeling that inequality is unnatural. We want to live in a more equal society, not just out of self-interest, but also because we feel it would be a society that makes more sense. Usually this desire for equality and justice extends only to our tribe, but occasionally the recognition that all humans are indeed human leads people to demand equality and justice for the whole species.

Some readers may question this viewpoint. Rather than some ancient instinct, surely the demand for equality is thinly-veiled self-interest? Perhaps in part. But if you don’t value equality, then this is probably because either you stand to lose from society becoming more equal, or you listen too much to the elite’s justifications. Civilisation requires ideas that suppress the desire for equality, which both pacify the masses and ease the consciences of the elites. And while you may believe that perfect material equality would be undesirable, I would hope that you believe in other equalities, such as equality of opportunity and equality before the law. If your ideal world is completely hierarchical, without a shred of equality, you probably ought to be sectioned.

Humans in general and conservatives in particular fear change, because they fear the unknown and are anxious about what it would take to survive in it. But perhaps there is also the sense that so-called progress is taking us ever further from the State of Nature, and so progress must be slowed or stopped altogether if we are to avoid civilisation’s worst excesses and a dystopia that is alien to human nature. Progressives, on the other hand, recognise that change is inevitable, and that civilisation isn’t all bad. Returning to the State of Nature is both undesirable and impossible. Instead, we should aim for a civilisation-enhanced State of Nature, henceforth referred to by a rather clunky acronym: the CESON.

The CESON is an artificial environment designed to allow humans to be as comfortable and healthy as possible. It satisfies our biological and psychological needs as humans. Our evolution as hunter-gatherers shaped our desires, but the environment often made life hard, frustrating and dangerous. The CESON is an environment where our hunter-gatherer desires are actually satisfied, with the help of technology. It is a simulation of the State of Nature, with as few of its disadvantages as possible, and with as many of civilisation’s advantages as possible. It’s like the environments we try to create for our pets and animals in zoos – you may worry about that comparison, but who hasn’t envied their pet, even if just for a minute?

To be clear, the CESON is not a place of constant bliss. Even in the most comfortable environment possible, there will still be grief, anger, loneliness and other all-too-human problems. Life would be made easy, but it would still be up to us to find happiness. Nor is it a place of passive, mindless consumption, like the spaceship in Wall-E – humans are not passive or mindless creatures. To satisfy us, the CESON would have to include challenges and places to explore. The CESON might be a physical place, or it might be completely virtual. An average day in the CESON might start with a lie in, followed by a morning hunting robotic/virtual bison with friends, an afternoon finishing a painting which you then share on DeviantArt, and an evening watching Netflix with your nearest and dearest.

In my previous post, I argued that human nature is a rather empty concept. There is no list of fundamental human characteristics, there are only probabilities. For example, because we evolved to live in communities of about 150 people, the CESON will mostly consist of small, mobile communities with large territories. But after millennia of civilisation, many people are now comfortable living in large, high-density communities, and so there would be at least some cities in the CESON.

Of course, the CESON would be egalitarian. Everyone would have roughly the same standard of living, and no-one would be put at a disadvantage to anyone else in the CESON. There would still be some hierarchies, for example some will be better at playing music than others. But those hierarchies would have no impact on standard of living.

In the State of Nature, there was little conflict between our desires and what was good for the tribe. What you wanted to do was also your role in society. But for civilisation to function, it had to force people to do things they did not want to do. Oppressive regimes and forced labour have been becoming slowly rarer over the past 200 years, but even today in the First World we still lead stressful lives because of the obligations placed on us by society. In the CESON, technology would make the imposition of alien obligations redundant, and people would be free to do as they please. Everyone’s needs are different, so the CESON would have to allow for different lifestyles.

I would be surprised if the CESON was built by 2100, except perhaps for a small minority. But no matter how weak the bargaining position of progressive movements is, they will continue to push until eventually everyone is in the CESON. However this all assumes that we will continue to have the bodies and brains of hunter-gatherers into the future. There are 2 alternatives: humans die out, or humans’ desires are altered. Or perhaps all 3 situations will exist simultaneously: some will live in paradise, some will be enslaved, and some will be left to die.

The CESON is not the State of Nature – it still exists within civilisation, and so it can never be a perfect simulation. Progressive movements will eventually hit a brick wall, and although they may keep pushing they will be eternally frustrated. This means the CESON might not be quite as idyllic as I’ve just described. Precisely what limits civilisation would put on the CESON is hard to know until we reach them, but we can be sure that one feature of civilisation will persistently ruin the CESON. Everyone within the CESON will be equal, but what about those who live above the CESON?

 

Godhood

If you think I am rehashing Rousseau, you will be surprised as I now veer dangerously close to Nietzsche. While the masses may be nostalgic for the State of Nature, the elites owe their position to our exit from it. The desire to dominate socially is older than the egalitarianism which helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Nonetheless it continued to exist, and it found particular outlets under civilisation.

Parallel to the yearning for the State of Nature, civilisation has been fascinated with gods. In the State of Nature we believed in nature spirits, but after we became farmers they started looking and acting like humans. We were starting to dominate other animals, the environment itself and other humans, and so when imagining the most powerful forces in the world it was only natural to imagine them as being like ourselves. And if the gods are as vain and crazy as humans, we had better work hard to get on their good side. Many gods came to represent different aspects of civilisation, and most cultures believed that civilisation was a gift from the gods. Some kings even claimed to be gods themselves. The idea of gods was not just a celebration of civilisation, it was a celebration of domination.

The relationship between gods and the yearning for the State of Nature differed between cultures. For example, in Ancient Egypt the gods were largely just and allowed the pure of heart to live forever among the lush fields of Aaru after death, whereas in Ancient Greece the gods were unpredictable and ordinary people could look forward to an afterlife in the dark, miserable Asphodel Meadows. Part of the reason why Christianity and Islam were so successful could be that they were a synthesis of the epitome of an imaginary CESON and the epitome of the idea of godhood – in other words, not only was eternal bliss open to everyone, it was guaranteed by a god so powerful it doesn’t make sense.   

Eventually humans started looking at the world with a more empirical mindset, and so far science has yet to find any evidence of gods looking down on us or meddling in our affairs. But we may be living in a relatively brief window between worshipping imaginary gods and worshipping very real ones.

For most of history, change was so slow that it was hard for people to imagine that the past was much different from the present, and they didn’t think much about future except that it might involve the end of the world. It was only in the 19^th Century that technological progress became impossible to ignore, forcing people to imagine what the future might and should be. Forward thinking attitudes accelerated social and technological change, creating a virtuous cycle. Change is now expected and sought after. A century ago science fiction was fringe, but today it’s mainstream. In H. G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free, a son asks his father to stop trying to invent a flying machine because his classmates are ridiculing him for it. Today, a child would probably brag if their parent was working on reusable rockets or hyperloop. This pivot to a forward-looking perspective set us firmly on the path to godhood.

Marx realised that we could use technology to build the CESON, but he didn’t foresee the problems that can be caused by apes wielding god-like powers or the possibility of technologies that engrave inequality into our DNA. Science fiction went from being distinctly utopian to distinctly dystopian as we tried to get our heads around what the consequences of acquiring god-like powers were. With the benefit of knowing what happened in the 20^th Century and research into the emerging technologies of the 21^st, Harari arrives at the opposite conclusion to Marx: that elites will use genetic and cybernetic technologies to enhance themselves and thus create a gap between us and them that will be even wider than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals.

I hope to outline what makes something divine more thoroughly in a future post, but in short I think we can call something a god if it is a conscious being which is so complex and powerful that its nature, capabilities and thoughts are at least partially unfathomable to we baseline, early 21^st Century humans. No matter how hard we tried, we would not be able to fully comprehend them. The gods of the future could be AIs, and it’s easy to imagine AIs being revered in the CESON as omniscient custodians. But unless an AI was so wise that it would be unthinkable for even the most powerful humans to ignore its advice, it’s probably more likely that AI will be a tool used by more human-like gods to ensure their dominance.    

There may be long queues for technologies which enhance the capabilities of our minds and bodies, but would people willingly alter their desires, or the desires of their children? If there was a switch which changed your favourite food from chocolate to Brussel sprouts, would you use it? You would get the same enjoyment, so why bother changing? You would only change a desire to satisfy a higher order desire, such as to be healthier, safer or a more moral person. Perhaps so that they could better adapt to their situation, the gods would remove the nostalgia for the State of Nature from themselves, and in so doing make themselves more unintelligible to baseline humans. What use would the desire for wide open, lush landscapes, or even the desire for close friends, be to a god? Perhaps some gods would try to be better people by removing the desire to dominate from themselves – however they would then probably be dominated by those who kept it.

What might the future relationship between godhood and the State of Nature be? Maybe one will destroy the other. Maybe the gods will grow so tired of demands for the CESON that they will remove the desire for it, either by tampering with human nature or simply by killing anyone who wanted it. Maybe the wars between gods will be so destructive that there will be no opportunity to build the CESON. Maybe the CESON will be so appealing that the gods will leave everything to AIs and join the masses in paradise. However I think the most likely future is that, as with the history of civilisation so far, the State of Nature and godhood will continue to coexist and find a balance. Perhaps we’ll invent an idea which brings them together, for example the gods could justify their position and pat themselves on the back by building and protecting the CESON. As Christianity and Islam proved, a synthesis of the State of Nature and godhood can be a very powerful idea.

There will no doubt be a hierarchy among the gods, with the weaker ones having to submit to the stronger. Nonetheless, I think it’s likely that humanity will split into 2: most people will live in the CESON, and some will enhance themselves to the point of becoming gods. Another way to put this is that humanity will split into the happy and the powerful. Those in the CESON may even consider the gods to be afflicted by an illness that drives them to seek ever more powerful weapons at the cost of their peace of mind.

Some gods might question the point of creating the CESON, but more compassionate ones might ask, “Why not? Why oppress, enslave or kill the masses, when pacifying them by giving them what they want is an option? At the very least, we could allow them to build the CESON for themselves.” However I doubt even these kind-hearted gods would treat the inhabitants of the CESON with the utmost respect. I love my cat and I want her to be happy, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s neutered. And because of their constant fear of rivals, it’s unlikely the gods would allow the inhabitants of the CESON to try and ascend to their level – they would try their hardest to enforce the split between human and god.  

Even the ancient Greek gods were nice to humans sometimes, and they provided rest for the worthy in the Elysian Fields. Were those stories told by the masses, and added to the larger mythology as a concession to them? Or do the elites have a smidgen of a conscience after all? We need to start thinking carefully about what we would like the gods of the future to be like. What myths will the gods want to tell themselves about their birth?

Given that new technologies being discovered and used by groups is characteristic of civilisation, and that our technologies have been growing more powerful, and that self-modification is possible, then it is inevitable that civilisation will give birth to gods. Kings have claimed to be gods throughout history, but it’s only a matter of time before those claims become justified. Despite the tone of this essay, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although they may be power-hungry, they wouldn’t necessarily abuse that power – a completely self-sufficient and invulnerable being doesn’t need the obedience of the masses. And the creation of gods would be one of the greatest achievements of humanity. That said, this doesn’t mean that we should sacrifice our values and the well-being of others in the pursuit of creating gods. Precisely because it is inevitable, it does not require sacrifices. Instead, our focus should be on steering humanity’s use of emerging technologies to ensure that when the gods are born, they are responsible, just and compassionate.

 

Revolution

If inequality is unavoidable, is there any point to revolution? Of course there is. If nothing else, revolutions remind the elites that it’s dangerous to ignore the concerns of the masses. The attempted Canadian revolution of 1837-38 failed, but it paved the way for the creation of Canada as an independent democracy. If an angry crowd demanding your head doesn’t make you rethink your policies, nothing will. However, clearly revolutionaries should be as smart and restrained as possible if they are to have any hope of achieving their goals. Reckless morons just end up in prison.

Revolution is the most powerful weapon would-be elites can use to usurp the throne. It would be an exaggeration to say that we can choose who our elites are, but the masses do have a measure of influence. Democracy’s biggest advantage over other systems of government is that for all intents and purposes it allows revolutions to be smooth, peaceful and orderly. Depending on who is elected, the State acts as a counter-balance to elites, or acts as a guard dog for the elites, or helps the rise of new elites. Would-be elites only need to organise political campaigns, and would only need to contemplate violent revolution if it was impossible for them to win an election. As elites get their hands on more terrifyingly powerful technologies, violent revolutions in the future are more likely to be brutally crushed, so we need to do everything we can to keep peaceful transfers of power the norm.

However democracy by itself isn’t sufficient to make elites behave. So far in this essay I’ve talked about elites and masses as though society is composed of two homogeneous blocks. But obviously society isn’t that simple. In itself, society’s diversity does not prevent the masses from uniting against the elites. But lies and distractions create the chaotic polarisation we are all too familiar with, and while the masses fight among themselves the elites carry on as normal. It seems many people have forgotten, or were never taught, how to think critically and broaden their perspective. The balkanisation of the internet, the inefficacy of our governments and the sheer complexity of today’s world do not help either. Hoping that nationalists will see the error of their ways is not working. As crises become deeper, nationalists may be forced to re-evaluate their worldview, but they will probably need to be dealt with forcefully (as the American authorities are currently doing as they hunt down Trump’s insurrectionists). Society will only ‘come back together’ once one side puts the other back in its box. Only then can the masses effectively make demands of the elites again.

The CESON is not one revolution away. The revolutions of the coming decades will probably revolve around issues such as universal basic income and climate change – concepts that will be completely alien to inhabitants of the CESON. But they will be a part of the long road to the CESON. We will only reach that destination through struggle, which will hopefully be as peaceful as possible, but will clearly involve breaking some rules.

Before I conclude this post, I should address one elephant in the room: despite having used ‘we’ and ‘the masses’ interchangeably, I’m from the middle class of a First World nation, so I’m arguably an elite. That said, I’ve never knowingly oppressed anyone, and I doubt any of my descendants will have the money or influence to become gods. Call me a champagne socialist if you want, although I much prefer whiskey.

Not all elites are bad people, although those that are seem to be having the greatest impact at the moment. It’s bad enough that some elites are fomenting xenophobic movements, they also working hard to prevent any significant climate action, and so will be responsible for the deaths of millions if not billions – and all so that they don’t have to pay more tax. As Warren Buffet put it, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” A society can work well when the elites have the interests of the masses in mind, but today’s elites don’t care if we live or die. Some may realise that the world is going to get very bumpy in the coming decades, but instead of trying to solve the problems they are setting the masses against each other in the hope that they’ll have the money to defend themselves when the shit fits the fan. In abandoning their social conscience, they have also abandoned their right to lead society. Some elites might complain that threatening revolution is tantamount to blackmail, but if that’s the case then every fight for rights is blackmail. You cannot call someone dying and asking for help entitled. Demanding rights isn’t a cynical ploy, it is an affirmation that your life has value. Equality is impossible, but by sending clear messages to the elites on the streets and in the ballot box, we can build a fairer, happier and safer society. 

What does it mean to be human? An exploration of Yuval Noah Harari's fictions

 

What human nature is has perplexed philosophers for a very long time. When Plato supposedly suggested that it was to be a featherless biped, Diogenes the Cynic plucked a chicken and said ‘Behold! I have brought you a man’. But the question itself is fundamentally flawed. There is no such thing as human nature.

Most humans share certain similarities, but this only describes what is normal for humans, not what the essence of humanity is. Whether or not He exists, God did not design us and so there isn’t a blueprint in a drawer somewhere in heaven which explains what humans are meant to be like. Instead, each of us is given characteristics by accident, some of which help us in life and some of which hinder us. I am the way I am, not because I am close to or far from an ethereal standard, but because I am the result of long, chaotic causal chains.

The closest thing to a definition of human nature would be a biological one, i.e. if your DNA could be mixed with the DNA of another human to produce fertile offspring, then you are a member of the species homo sapiens. But generally when people invoke human nature, they are merely summarising their experience of humans. Some will say ‘It is human nature to be kind’ and others will say ‘It is human nature to be cruel’, and both will have countless examples to back up their perspective. That’s because humans are both kind and cruel. Evolution has implanted both kind and cruel instincts in most people’s minds because sometimes it pays to be empathetic and sometimes it pays to be murderous. Which instincts are actualised and utilised depends on the circumstances.

The idea of human nature serves the social function of separating us from them. Evolution taught us to be suspicious of those outside our tribe, which helps to explain why the names many hunter-gatherer tribes and even some modern nations give themselves simply mean ‘the people’. Foreigners come from the slopes of the uncanny valley. Over the millennia we have learnt to be more open and understanding, but the xenophobic instinct remains. This was horrifically demonstrated by Nazi Germany, who took away the rights of any who didn’t meet their standards of purity. It still exists today, not just among racists but also among liberals. Somewhat ironically racists  are seen as lacking a portion of their humanity, making them not fully human and therefore deserving only hatred and revulsion. Perhaps we can look forward to the day when humanity’s xenophobic instinct will be focused almost entirely on xenophobia itself. But instead of dismissing other people as monsters, it is far more rational to accept that they are as human as you are. If you don’t like something that they believe or do, then you need to try to understand how they came to be that kind of human.     

 

Consciousness

Even if human nature is a fiction, perhaps there is something special about our species, and a good place to start looking is our minds. You could say we are conscious in two ways: firstly, we are aware of the external world and its patterns; secondly, consciousness is mental processes concerning other mental processes, and as such exists as a kind of supervisor. Our senses generate a vast amount of information (the first way in which we are conscious), of which only a part is looked at by the higher mind (the second way in which we are conscious).

There are two ways in which something comes to the attention of the higher mind: firstly, the higher mind seeks out information (for example, you subconsciously know that this text is black, but only become conscious of it now that I mention it); secondly, the subconscious alerts the conscious to something (for example, an urge to look over your shoulder).

Humans certainly excel at understanding the world, particularly in the past 500 years. Science is the first deliberate attempt to increase our awareness of the world as far as possible, even to the point of discovering things such as quantum mechanics which our minds simply didn’t evolve to understand (knowing that it is possible for something to exist and not exist at the same time would not have helped our ancestors on the African plains). But consciousness in this sense is hardly unique to humans. Everything except the simplest of animals needs to have an internal model of the external world if they are going to survive. Indeed, because many animals have much better senses than us, you could argue they have a much richer and more accurate model of reality than humans normally do.

Perhaps humans are unique in being conscious in the second way, but even this is doubtful. A chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo was known for carefully making piles of stones which he would then later throw at visitors in fits of rage. In other words, he knew he would be angry and want stones when the zoo opened, so he made plans accordingly. This would have required having thoughts about his emotions and desires, i.e. a higher mind reflecting on other mental processes. He was not just reacting to external stimuli, but practicing self-reflection.  

People far more intelligent than me have written volumes about the nature of consciousness, so I’ll stop there and move onto an aspect of humanity which is arguably more mysterious.

 

Sapience

Anatomically modern humans evolved about 200,000 thousand years ago. We were conscious, intelligent, social, tool-using animals. To a passing alien, we may have been an interesting species, but not one which was likely to make much of an impact on the planet. Then about 70 to 50,000 years ago, something changed in our minds. Anthropologists call this the arrival of ‘behavioural modernity’, which is characterised by symbolic thinking, among other things. Yuval Noah Harari calls it nothing short of the ‘Cognitive Revolution’.

According to Harari, this is when we stopped living solely in objective, physical reality and created a new layer of reality on top of it. The world became alive with a myriad of spirits. This allowed us to break down the barriers between tribes. We had probably lived in groups of no more than 150 people, but anyone could potentially share in the same inter-subjective reality. If two people from different tribes gave thanks to the same spirits, they could trust each other and work together. The cooperative capability of humanity expanded enormously. After we settled down and started building civilisation, this new layer of reality became populated with gods, nations and corporations, and our ability to work with large numbers of strangers became more refined and powerful.

Harari calls these ‘inter-subjective realities’, or simply ‘fictions’. For our purposes, let’s call the ability to create and believe in these ‘sapience’. Whereas sentience (which literally means the ability to feel) is often equated with consciousness, sapience captures the uniquely human experience of living in both objective and inter-subjective realities. We’ll see if sapience lives up to its literal meaning of wisdom by the end of this essay.

In keeping with the assertion at the beginning of this essay that there is no such thing as human nature, sapience is a normal rather than essential characteristic of humans. A small minority of humans only live in objective reality and struggle to see the entities everyone else is familiar with. Fantasy and suspending disbelief, particularly for protracted periods of time, are alien to them. This doesn’t necessarily make them uncooperative or handicapped, but it does force them to play along or risk being seen as mad. Alternatively, they could leave society, which from their perspective has gone mad, and become sagacious hermits. Today, they are most likely to simply admit they don’t understand the world and why people are so passionate about imaginary things.

The big question which I want to try and answer in this essay is: where did sapience come from? How did a species rooted in objective reality come to believe in imaginary things, and in so doing restrain its xenophobic instinct and build a global civilisation? If we can find an answer, we can better understand the nature of sapience and what that means for we 21^st Century humans.  

Language is a plausible candidate. When a chimpanzee band splits into two, the new bands quickly lose familiarity with each other and become rivals. Chimpanzee bands rely on close kinship and friendship, so distant relatives are strangers. However when a human band splits in two, they will continue to speak the same language. Although they may eventually diverge into two languages, the evolution of language is usually a slow process, so the two tribes could potentially understand each other for centuries. Distant relatives don’t seem so strange, and there is little to distinguish between the two tribes. Maybe they even consider themselves parts of the same tribe. If they thrive and expand into other bands’ territories, a single language with minor variations could be spoken across a wide area.

However this doesn’t explain the creation of inter-subjective reality – conceivably a complex language could only be concerned with objective and personal subjective realities, and not invisible spirits. And more importantly, sharing the same language may not be sufficient for trust and cooperation. Brits and Americans both speak English, but Brits still find Americans baffling and at times quite scary. The two countries cooperate where their values and interests overlap, not because of sentimentality over the English language.

Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory was that the human mind evolved thanks to our ancestors consuming hallucinogens, in particular mushrooms. The theory has serious flaws, for example McKenna argued that eating mushrooms had the evolutionary advantage of making their vision sharper and libidos more aroused – things I doubt many shroomers would recognise. But it is an interesting idea, not least because mushrooms have been shown to stimulate the growth of new, stable connections between neurons in the brain, meaning that the shroomer will come to believe new things while high and continue to believe them long after. McKenna was living proof of this, as he earnestly maintained that mushrooms were in fact aliens trying to communicate with humanity through psychedelic experiences (he was a very intelligent, knowledgeable and eloquent man, but also absolutely nuts). It’s possible that through epigenetics the consumption of hallucinogens slowly changed the structure of the human brain so that we became able to believe in things we had never actually seen.     

Another reason we may believe in imaginary things is because it’s better safe than sorry. For much of our history humans were prey, so we evolved to assume that an unexplained rustling in the bushes was something that wanted to eat us. This is called hyperactive agency detection. It’s easy to see how this instinct could have led our ancestors to believe that the whole natural world was alive and conscious, with whispering trees, sleeping mountains and angry storm clouds. Natural phenomena came to be seen as the actions of invisible spirits, who may have been benevolent or may need to be placated.

Death may have forced us to question if the visible world was all there was. If humans struggle to accept that all that waits for us is oblivion, especially when life is nasty, brutish and short, then you need to construct a worldview that explains how a person can be alive while being visibly dead. Despite what some atheists may think, I suspect religious belief today is more closely connected to how strong worldviews given to us as children can be, rather than existential angst. But perhaps trying to deal with death forced our ancestors to create a reality separate from the visible, objective one.

Harari doesn’t really talk about how inter-subjective realities came to be. As a historian he is more interested in their implications, and so perhaps he is happy to leave their mysterious origins to anthropologists and opinionated bloggers. But in 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century he elaborates on how they work: “false stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If a big chief says ‘the sun rises in the east and sets in the west’, loyalty to the chief is not required in order to applaud him. But if the chief says ‘the sun rises in the west and sets in the east’, only true loyalists will clap their hands” (p.239).

Could domineering chiefs demanding loyalty have created sapience? We have good evidence that hunter-gatherer societies were quite egalitarian. If a chief started spouting absurdities, they’d probably replace him with a more sensible one. Even if the chief was able to convince/force his tribe to believe his absurdities, like a Palaeolithic Big Brother, why would other tribes come to believe them too?

 

Authority

A flaw common to many of the ideas above is that they may explain how an individual or a tribe might come to believe in an invisible world, but they don’t explain how such beliefs would spread beyond the tribe. The miraculous thing about sapience is that it breaks down the xenophobic instinct and builds supra-tribes out of many small ones. If beliefs weren’t able to spread beyond the tribe, then we’d probably live in a world comprised of 150-member tribes, each with their own unique mythology. If some tribes developed agriculture and other technologies, perhaps they could spread their beliefs simply by multiplying and forcing other tribes off their land, but without long distance trade technological progress would be even slower than it was in our timeline. The city-state would probably be the highest stage of civilisation we could reach – building an empire would be a pipe dream.

In terms of the Fermi Paradox (the question of why we seem to be the only civilisation in a vast and ancient universe), sapience may be one of the biggest filters a species has to overcome. Given that xenophobia is a natural and useful trait for most animals, maybe it’s rare even for intelligent species to become cooperative.

Imagination is the foundation of sapience. Pre-sapient humans were intelligent, and also usually had a lot of free time (they may have only spent 5 hours per day hunting and gathering), so they probably speculated about the world’s mysteries. What moves the sun, why does it rain and what happens when we die? They probably came up with lots of imaginative answers. But they couldn’t hope to know for certain. They could only imagine possibilities. At most an individual might become convinced that one possibility is the right answer, and if he is persuasive enough others might come to believe too. But how did we leap from lots of maybes to unwavering belief among thousands and millions of people?

How do you convince your tribe that you know how the world works behind the scenes, but you only have weak evidence or none at all? You have to convince them that you have special access to knowledge that they don’t, in other words, that you are an authority – not in the political sense, but in the wider, epistemological sense. These were the first shamans, who claimed to be experts in entering, navigating and communicating with the spirit world.

These shamans broke down barriers between tribes, because other tribes would want to benefit from their knowledge. Perhaps someone would hear about another tribe’s shaman and try to imitate him to become their own tribe’s shaman, but if he didn’t know the shaman’s secret techniques or simply wasn’t very convincing, his own tribe would probably be willing to set aside their differences with the neighbouring tribe (at least occasionally) in order to learn from their shaman how to placate the nature spirits, talk with their ancestors and maybe even glimpse the divine. Although they are not familiar with the members of the other tribe, the fact that they trust the same shaman must mean that they are trustworthy. Slowly but surely the two tribes would coalesce into one, united by their shared mythology which was underpinned by their belief in the authority of their shamans. If they thrived and spread into other territories, their belief in the authority of their shamans would keep the tribe culturally united for a long time.  

The belief in authority became fundamental to our organisations, worldviews and identities. Proof that Jesus was the messiah can be found in the Holy Bible, which was written and compiled by divinely inspired sages. We know for sure that Peugeot exists as company because it is written in special documents created by those with the necessary legal expertise. I have no direct experience of Australia, but I say I know it exists because I trust the authority of map-makers, the media and people who say they’ve been there. Without authority, we could still build organisations, worldviews and identities, but not on a large scale.

Harari says that if we can identify one trend in history, it is the gradual coming together of humanity into one culture. Indeed, once we developed sapience, this was probably inevitable – it will keep on breaking down barriers between tribes until there is only one tribe left. Sapience is excellent in helping the diffusion of technologies, and many technologies are excellent at keeping people connected, creating a virtuous cycle. Of course this process is painful and even uses xenophobia – usually it takes the form of an empire conquering what it considers to be barbarians and then pressuring them to forget their former identity and adopt the empire’s supposed civilisation, like a predator digesting its prey.    

The trend towards unity has its ebbs and flows, and we seem to be experiencing an ebb at the moment. But we’re very close to achieving unity – every country in the world takes part in the same economic system, uses the same science and will be impacted by climate change. Politics just needs to catch up. Unity shouldn’t and can’t wipe away national identities, just as national identities shouldn’t and can’t wipe away our personal identities. Sapience allows people to trust multiple authorities, which is why our identities usually have many layers.

In my previous post, I called centralisation and fragmentation two of the most important forces in human history. If a group can convince people that it is an authority using a powerful enough idea, it can build and direct a system that extends far beyond their local area. If a widely respected authority is discredited, the systems built around it start to fragment. People will then start looking to other authorities for guidance, often authorities who had been centralising forces in the past. For example nations are some of the most enduring ideas in history, created from the fusion of numerous tribes. When a supranational idea such as communism or neoliberalism is discredited, people often turn to authorities who paint a worldview with the nation at the centre, with devastating consequences.

However it is only a matter of time before an authority with a centralising idea more powerful than the nation rises again, and it will probably be one that tries to unite the species. We can probably look forward to the identity ‘human’ becoming a powerful force in the 21^st Century, although under whose authority it remains to be seen.  

 

Wisdom

How does sapience relate to consciousness? You could argue that becoming sapient involved us becoming less conscious and learning to ignore some realities. To be sapient is to feel certain about things you cannot actually be certain about. The world used to be full of mysteries, but instead of exploring or embracing those mysteries we plastered over them with fictional certainties. Whereas a fully conscious human might believe that the universe is indifferent to him so he can do what he wants, a sapient human will insist that the universe has an objective (if invisible) meaning which gives him a defined purpose. Only with philosophy and eventually science did humanity learn to see and explore mysteries again. Harari goes even further, claiming that even today humanity remains a ‘post-truth species’, hopelessly allured by cosmic dramas in which humans play an important, if not leading, role. 

I take the opposite view: that it was humanity’s desire for truth which made us sapient. The first shamans developed their rituals to try to uncover the mysteries of the world, and people wanted to learn about their discoveries and even see them for themselves. In this sense the advent of sapience was the first scientific revolution. Even before they became gatekeepers of the spirit world, shamans were probably highly valued members of society because of their knowledge of plants – which ones healed, which ones were fun, and which ones killed. Knowledge was important for survival, especially in the strange lands beyond the Great Rift Valley where humans had to adapt to environments they had not evolved in and you could not always trust your instincts. It was natural for people to seek and value knowledge, and it was only a matter of time before knowledge of the heavens and the afterlife was sought.

Although the shamans and their successors believed that they now knew how the world worked, modern science has shown that the world works by natural processes without supernatural intervention. The fact that people are still willing to believe in fictions today (such as Christianity, nationalism and Peugeot) seems to have convinced Harari that we are predisposed to believe in fictions. But I would say this is like arguing that because the sun has always risen it will definitely rise tomorrow. The shamans and their successors had to base sapience on very inaccurate worldviews because they had very limited tools at their disposal. Some of these inaccurate worldviews have persisted into the scientific age because they are stubborn and/or useful – if Peugeot’s executives read Harari’s books and realised that Peugeot was a figment of their imagination, they probably wouldn’t shut the company down. But this does not mean that we can’t base sapience on accurate worldviews.   

Humans have been moulding the world as we see fit for millennia, but we have only become acutely aware of our own power in the past few centuries, leading to the evolution of ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and fascism. These ideologies have often fallen into the pitfalls of pseudoscience, and Harari predicts they will become less relevant in the future as humanity loses control of its destiny. Nonetheless they are an improvement on previous worldviews because they are based on the scientifically attested fact that humanity is the most powerful species on the planet.

Inter-subjective realities are used as tests of loyalty, but that is not their origin or primary function. We can still use something like the reality of climate change as an inter-subjective reality because we can cooperate around it. Like other inter-subjective realities, we can use climate change as a test of loyalty – if you believe what the scientists say then we can work together, if you don’t then shut up and fuck off. The fact that this is happening disproves the idea that sapience must be based on fictions.

As Harari himself notes, humans usually seek to understand the world in order to control it better. Therefore, contrary to being a ‘post-truth species’ as Harari claims, we have always been interested in discovering truth. It is simply that for the vast majority of history, like with many other things, we haven’t been very good at it. For millennia we have cooperated around fictions because we didn’t have anything else, but we don’t have to rely on them forever. Humanity is almost old enough to stand up without their support.

Is it human nature to value truth? No, a Daily Mail reader is no less human than a New Scientist reader. But we are unique as a species which has the urge to push the boundaries of knowledge. All life tries to spread as far as it can geographically, but this isn’t enough for humans – we feel the need to explore in every dimension we can think of. 500 years ago a critical mass of knowledge was reached, accelerating knowledge-creation to the point of giving us god-like powers. But for at least 50,000 years, we have known the value of knowledge, which shaped us into a distinctively ultra-cooperative and slowly unifying species.

Will Trump Cause the Collapse of Civilisation?

Civilisations can and do collapse. The Late Bronze Age Collapse was so total that in Greece the art of reading and writing was lost, and people came to believe that the palaces that had fallen into ruin had been built by giants. The collapse of the Roman Empire left Europe in the hands of weak kingdoms which relied on local feudal lords for a millennium.

Many people assume that our civilisation is somehow immune to this, that the progress of the past few centuries must mean that there can only be continual, never-ending progress into the future. This complacency betrays an ignorance of both history and the threats to our civilisation, and will allow those threats to hit us before we can prepare sufficiently. History is not a straight line. It has overall trends, but it has its ebbs and flows. And as our technologies become more powerful, those ebbs and flows become more extreme.

As you may have noticed, we are experiencing what we could call a nationalist revolution. It is happening all over the world, from Brazil to Italy to Hungary to Turkey to India, but is exemplified (at least for me) by Britain voting to leave the EU and Trump becoming President in 2016. At the time of writing in early 2020, it still isn’t clear what the fate and consequences of this revolution will be. Broadly there are three possibilities:

1)      It renders itself irrelevant and unpopular. Governments cannot solve the problems we face, from derelict communities to global crises, by severing ties with other nations. Once this becomes clear, support will shift from nationalists to more progressive, outward-looking movements.

2)      It achieves a kind of balance with the global system whereby its constituent parts are better protected and the system is more resilient as a whole, which seems to be one of the revolution’s goals. Previously centrist voters would see the appeal of nationalism, making it the new norm and giving far right groups even more confidence. Trade wars and tough immigration policies become more acceptable, and human rights and international organisations more suspicious. Global institutions still exist, but remain far too weak to prevent the slow descent into ecological meltdown.

3)      Nationalism pushes its agenda so thoroughly that the global economic system breaks down. International trade and cooperation become fragile or even non-existent. Countries become very insular in their outlook, relying on national identity and fear of the outside to maintain social cohesion as incomes fall and sea levels rise. Wars rage over dwindling resources, and the temptation to push that big red button grows ever stronger.

I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be the first possibility. Nationalism is probably too detached from reality to either work or cause catastrophe. Before either happened, economic and political forces would compel nationalist leaders to row back. Will Trump cause civilisation to collapse? I doubt it. At least, not directly.

With or without nationalism, the global system is still heading towards collapse. It is built on extreme individualism, which means allowing corporations to dig up and burn fossil fuels because it turns a profit. An individual’s right to make more money is sacred and inviolable. Nationalism is merely an obstacle that needs to be removed before the system can be fixed. If green internationalist parties come to power in the next few years, that will be when the real work begins.

There are two big problems with fixing the system. Firstly, the timing. We have until 2030 to halve our carbon emissions as a species if we’re going to stand a chance of avoiding going over the 1.5 degrees threshold. In order to achieve that, climate-focused governments need to be in place around the world and successfully reducing emissions by the end of 2020. Will we be able to beat nationalism by then?

Secondly, is fixing the system even possible? For years liberal-minded politicians have hoped that the problem will be solved by tweaks to the system, such as by subsidising solar panels. This has not worked, as evidenced by the inexorable rise in emissions. The problem is the system itself. Neoliberalism cannot get us out of the climate crisis. It forbids large-scale intervention from the government, and instead demands that problems – even global, extinction-risking problems such as climate change – be solved by individuals. Many people have descended into climate malaise because they cannot see how 7 billion individuals can coordinate themselves to beat the crisis. The answer is to see climate change as a systemic problem, rather than buy into neoliberalism’s worldview.

Although there are still some socialist countries (democratic or otherwise), the idea of free trade is the foundation of the global system. Will we be able to whip out the tablecloth out from under the tower of glasses, or will we just smash everything? Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Union and in so doing hastened its collapse, leading to Russian GDP almost halving, the Yugoslav wars and the rise of Putin’s nationalistic oligarchy. State control was the foundation of the Soviet Union. By trying to relax state control, the Soviet Union ceased to function well enough to survive. If we end neoliberalism, will the global system collapse? If so, then we appear to be in a Catch 22. Neoliberalism is leading us towards collapse, but getting rid of neoliberalism will also lead to collapse. Perhaps our civilisation is simply ripe for collapse.

Transubstantiating the Foundations

Well that’s a depressing idea, but before we resign ourselves to cannibalising our children let’s look a bit closer at the nature of system collapse and see whether this idea holds up. Everything from atoms to galaxy clusters are systems, including single-celled organisms, human beings and empires. You are a system composed of many smaller systems, and you are also a node in much larger systems. A system is a network of many individual parts that interact with each other in such a way that the network continues to exist. The foundations of a system are how its constituent parts interact with each other. A strong system will keep the connections between parts strong, so that they don’t weaken or leave the system.

The system grows until it inevitably hits the reasons why it can no longer expand, which manifest themselves as physical limits and barriers which make the system distinct from things outside it. Growth stops and its shape becomes relatively stable. But circumstances change, sometimes due to an inadvertent by-product of the system growing, sometimes due simply to the passage of time. Eventually the system will find itself in circumstances which weaken the connections between individual parts, making the system as a whole less effective, which in turn weakens the connections more, and so on. It might be a quick collapse or long and drawn out, but systems cannot survive changing circumstances forever.

Generally speaking, systems react to impending collapse by doing what they’ve always done but more vigorously. Imagine an army that has won many battles, but has finally met an enemy that is stronger than them. After it becomes apparent they cannot win, the soldiers flee for their lives. What will the general do? Quite likely, his instinct will be to continue barking orders, but even more loudly. He will only know how to do certain things, because that is the way he’s been trained and they have always worked in the past. So he will continue doing what he does best, even though the mechanics of the system have been broken and his soldiers ignore his meaningless orders.

Another example of system obstinance in the face of crisis is the collapse of the Mayan civilisation. According to archaeologist Professor Arthur Demarest, before their collapse the Maya expended great effort building enormous, ornate temples. What we might mistake for a Golden Age was actually the Mayans panicking and pleading with their gods to stop giving them misfortune. From their perspective, placating the gods with temples had always worked, but in reality spending more time building temples only hastened their demise.

Another, more down to earth example is leaves in autumn – the red and yellow colours are in fact a sign of photosynthesis in overdrive, as the trees try to absorb as much energy from the sun as they can as the days get shorter, until the leaves become redundant.

Another, more topical example is how governments continue to enact neoliberal policies such as tax cuts despite the fact neoliberalism is now obsolete and dangerous. And so money that needs to be spent on developing green technology and building green infrastructure is instead spent by billionaires on bigger mansions – our civilisation’s equivalent of the Maya’s useless temples.

Most systems, be they inorganic, organic or even human-made, will continue doing what made them successful in their prime until they die. But humans are different from most other systems. We can form a fairly accurate picture of the world in our minds, and use that to find the best path to our goals. If we see that we are heading towards disaster, we can change course. Let’s go back to the general of the defeated army. Instead of simply bellowing his orders more loudly, as an intelligent and innovative being who understands how his men think and who has a strong desire to keep the system intact, perhaps he can find another way of bringing his men back into formation.

Can we, as intelligent and informed people, pull that trick on our civilisation? Can systems radically reform themselves in order to adapt to the circumstances without collapsing? Bear in mind that we are not talking about simply changing direction, we are talking about altering the fundamental connections between people, changing the very nature of the system. This may be relatively straightforward for small groups of people, but we need radical reform on a global scale. 

We’ve already mentioned glasnost and perestroika, attempts to reform a large system which did not go well. But history has another, even more ambitious example which arguably succeeded: the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. For centuries the foundations of the Empire had been faith in Rome’s military strength, its Republican political system and later its divine emperors. By the time Constantine converted, the Empire had been wobbling for some time and people were looking for fresh ideas. Authority shifted to the priesthood of the cult of a Jew who had been executed by the Romans. Now, paradoxically, to be Roman was to be Christian. The rise of the Church was accompanied by a radical change in how people had to relate to those in power – fear of and loyalty to Rome was replaced by fear of and loyalty to God. Whereas before you could pick and choose your cults, now there was only one game in town and its priests had a lot to say about how you should live your life. Disparate tribes became one congregation.

But obviously it wasn’t a smooth transition. Taking the eucharist did not prevent the Visigoths and Vandals from sacking Rome, and indeed some historians argue that Christianity was one of the factors behind the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Radical reform cannot save the whole of a crumbling system, so some things will need to be sacrificed. But what we call the Byzantine empire (or the Basileia Rhōmaiōn as they called themselves) lived for another thousand years after the fall of the Western Empire, thanks in no small part to the renewed identity, unity and drive that Christianity gave them. Christianity was the salvation of the Roman Empire, politically if not spiritually.

Could we pull off a similar revolution? Possibly, but bear in mind that the Roman Empire may have had a population of about 90 million at its peak. We have to reform a system with a population of 7 billion. The Romans had to sacrifice Rome itself. What would we have to sacrifice?

Calm down, dear

Some of you may be thinking – isn’t this all a bit dramatic? A shift in values and economic models does not require an apocalypse. The shift from Keynesian social democracy to neoliberalism in the 80s, while painful and chaotic in some places, was not a cataclysmic event. While many of the specifics are still be to agreed, we broadly speaking know what we need to replace neoliberalism with: a world where states are interventionist, enact evidence-based policies and are willing to cooperate internationally. There are politicians who understand this, we just need to get them into office. Whipping the tablecloth out from under the tower of glasses is a false analogy.

This viewpoint does not understand how radical a change to our lives the climate crisis necessitates. Getting politicians who understand the scale of the problem into office is just the first hurdle. Firstly, we need global cooperation as we have never seen before. A global ban on fossil fuel extraction would quickly be rendered meaningless if one country ignored it. The United Nations was founded on mutual fear, but if the crisis is to be solved nations will have to rise above tribalism and genuinely try to solve the problem together. This will require moving more authority to global institutions, and away from nation-states.

Secondly, the tough decisions that will need to be made will raise fundamental questions about how we organise our societies. Take for example air travel: because our battery and solar panel technology will probably never be good enough for a plane to be able to fly without fuel, air travel would not be possible in a zero carbon world. Of course not even the most radical green government would completely ban air travel, but if their policies led to a sharp decrease in the number of flights, that leads to the question: who should be given those plane seats? Naturally the rich will continue to fly as though nothing had changed, but why should the poor be asked to forgo seeing the world, because of a crisis not of their making? A frequent flyer tax would be a good start, but even if people only made 2 flights per year, that would still be too many. Perhaps we could ration out plane seats, but how could we ensure this was done fairly and without succumbing to complete state control over daily life?

The shift from social democracy to neoliberalism was a shift of emphasis onto elements of culture (individualism), society (businesses) and psychology (greed) which had been influential for a long time before the 80s. The shift we need in the 2020s is not merely a return to social democracy. We will need to forge new kinds of relationships within and between communities, governments and global institutions. We need to replace profit as the supreme value. And we somehow need to do that in a matter of years, before we trigger global warming’s vicious circles.    

The Lifecycle of Empires

Many kinds of cycles in history have been proposed, including economic cycles, psychological cycles and even biological cycles. I think you can argue there is a cycle based on a simple idea: that the two greatest forces in human history are centralisation and fragmentation.

Yuval Noah Harari argues that some 70,000 years ago humanity went through a cognitive revolution that allows us to cooperate with people outside our tribe thanks to ‘inter-subjective realities’. For example a French knight and an English knight may not know each other, but thanks to their shared beliefs they trust each other enough to go on crusade together.

However a capacity for shared beliefs is not enough to forge an empire. To bring many tribes together, you need a strong idea – one that appeals to many diverse people, fits into how they see the world, has a concrete goal and justifies a particular group to lead the charge.  ‘Rome’s strength will civilise the world’, ‘We worship God and so He smiles on our empire’, ‘The proletariat taking control of the means of production is the next stage of history’. History’s greatest empires have been driven by ideas that allowed them to adapt to and take advantage of their technological, social and psychological circumstances.

Once the empire has some success, the idea behind it becomes more persuasive, and there becomes a virtuous circle between the strength of the idea and the strength of the empire. Eventually, as the economic strength of the empire reaches its limit, the idea begins to lose its strength. ‘Rome is just another empire who couldn’t conquer the world’, ‘God did not protect us from the heathens and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry with the Second Coming’, ‘Communism is a cynical power grab by bureaucrats’. The idealistic façade drops as reality becomes harder to ignore, and the empire becomes weak.

Fragmentation is the default for humanity. It is the instinct to preserve ourselves, our family and our tribe, and the belief that anyone outside that tribe is suspicious. Xenophobia is deeply ingrained in our minds because for millions of years it was a successful strategy. Humanity’s strength lies in overcoming that xenophobia with inter-subjective realities. But centralising ideas are precarious things, as you might imagine any attempt to get millions of apes working together to be. Once the idea is discredited, the force of fragmentation will pull the empire apart.

Whether you’re a peasant or an aristocrat, while the empire is keeping you safe, you will give the empire what support you can and you won’t rock the boat. But once it stops making you feel safe, you will stop caring about the empire and do what you can to protect your interests yourself. As the empire fragments, people will start looking for new ideas. Some of these will justify and reinforce the fragmentation, but some might be centralising ideas which herald the birth of a new empire.

This is a cycle that can be seen throughout history: an empire flourishes in an age of idealism, but once it starts to suffer defeats and seems to become unable to deliver its promises, morale goes down, leading to an age of cynicism and realism as the empire declines. But it should be noted that idealism and realism are not mutually exclusive. For an empire to flourish, the idea behind it must at least appear to be grounded in reality. And an age of realism is fertile ground for new ideas.

Clearly we’re currently living through an age of realism and fragmentation. The neoliberal order, underpinned by American military might, reached its peak in the 90s. The centralising idea behind it was ‘A global and free market will make everyone richer’. In 1992 Francis Fukuyama was confident enough in the power of that idea to declare the end of history. In the 21^st Century it reached its limits. The failure of the War on Terror proved not only that the American military was not as effective as it thought it was, but also that its priority was merely to secure oil for itself. The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent austerity made a lot of people question whether they stood to gain from neoliberalism. Trump’s belief in isolationism is perhaps proof that the neoliberal order has fragmented. If he struggles to see the point of NATO, which is the closest thing the USA has to an actual empire, then why should the world follow America’s lead? Neoliberalism is dying, and those who still defend it are hopelessly dreaming of a return to a time when ‘things made sense’.

Clearly nationalist movements around the world are exploiting and encouraging this fragmentation. But some of the Left also seem to want further fragmentation by giving people greater control over their communities. As a bleeding heart lefty myself I’m not unsympathetic to this, but at the same time it’s clear that in many cases people already have too much control over their communities. Areas outside cities in England need more wind farms, and more and cheaper housing, but residents concerned about house prices prevent these from being built. Nimbyism can only be cured by centralisation. A deepening of democracy could only work if it was accompanied by a heightening of democracy, that is, if people were more engaged with global institutions. Indeed, to move beyond our age of fragmentation, perhaps the centralising idea we need to rally around is as simple as ‘Through international cooperation, lets tax the superrich and use the revenue to stop climate change’.  

The Birthplace of Progress

If systems are generally obstinate in nature and cannot easily transform themselves, how does evolution work? Systems are simply replaced by other systems which are more adapted to the circumstances. These more adapted systems are often born on the periphery of the original system. They are heavily influenced by the original system, and thus inherit at least some of the features which made it successful, but they are nonetheless different in nature because circumstances on the periphery are tougher or simply different.

In human-made systems, the periphery is often geographical. Take for example the spread of civilisation in the Iron Age. When the Persian empire ruled the known world, Greek civilisation flowered on its periphery. Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, and although his empire fell apart after his death, Greek dominance from India to Italy was unquestioned for centuries. On the periphery of the Greek world was Rome, which went on to build an empire which stretched from Scotland to Kuwait. Thus did civilisation spread from the Middle East to Western Europe.  

Having been imprisoned by Mussolini’s regime, the Marxist thinker Gramsci wondered why the world’s first communist revolution had taken place in Russia, which had barely moved past feudalism at the time, and not in the industrial heartlands of Europe as Marx had predicted. He developed the idea of ‘cultural hegemony’ – the bourgeoisie of advanced capitalist societies were able to prevent revolution because they were able to plant their values in the minds of the rest of society. Another way of saying this is that the connections between people in the capitalist system were stronger than Marx had hoped, and this meant that despite its flaws it was resilient. This does not mean that capitalism was the most adapted system to the circumstances, only that new ideas could only flourish on the periphery of capitalism, such as in Russia. Communism proved to be a good adaptation to the industrial world (again, despite its flaws), helping Russia to conquer Eastern Europe, become a nuclear power and even pressure capitalist societies to treat their workers better.

Being on the periphery does not guarantee that you have better or even good adaptations. Britain was on the periphery of the Roman world, but the Romans can’t take much credit for the world-spanning empire that sprang from that island over a thousand years after the legions left. The periphery is mostly populated by creatures that are hungry to scavenge the corpse of the system, such as bacteria and barbarians.

As the Western Roman Empire struggled to hold onto its territories and increasingly relied on mercenaries to guard its borders, communities were forced to shift their focus onto their localities because they could no longer rely on support from the empire. This was the beginning of feudalism and of the fragmentation of the system. Eventually the Germanic tribes conquered the Western Roman Empire, but because they didn’t have any strong ideas or organisational structures, Western Europe remained weak and fragmented. It look a long time for strong, centralised kingdoms, let alone empires, to emerge from the ashes.    

What is on the periphery of neoliberalism? Because it is a global system, we have to think in dimensions other than geographical, but here are some possibilities:

1)      China certainly used to be on the periphery, until Deng Xiaoping partially opened the country up to the global system. Since then it has grown into an economic powerhouse and taken its place among the leading players of the global economy. Neoliberals had long believed that democracy was necessary to keep the state from overreaching its bounds, but Milton Friedman maintained that individual freedom is more important than democracy. China went from being communist to the private sector accounting for about 60% of GDP – a huge leap in individual freedom in Friedman’s terms, and one which has clearly helped China. If free market miracles are possible without democracy, then could neoliberalism afford to ditch democracy? This has no doubt been in the back of the minds of would-be demagogues across the world, who have started to test democracy’s fortifications for cracks. Despite massive tree planting initiatives, it has yet to be seen whether China’s model is a good one for the Anthropocene.

2)      Nationalist movements have been on the social periphery for decades, and were largely mocked until they gained confidence in 2016. Their ideology, if it can be called that, is fragmentation. Neoliberals are trying to use them to prop up their system, in much the same way as the Roman Empire paid Germanic tribes to guard its borders as it grew weak – a strategy that did not end well for Rome.

3)      Movements such as School Strike 4 Climate and Extinction Rebellion can mobilise large numbers of people and give voice to their passion, but lack the organisation to be influential by themselves.

4)      International organisations, most notably the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, were sponsored by countries to further their own interests, although of course they ignore them if it suits them. But in doing so, they created an architecture above the geographically-limited nation-states which could form the basis of a global government. In my Master’s thesis I argued that having an elected parliament would give weight to the United Nations – if you’re a government that claims to respect democracy, it would be hard to ignore the rulings of a global parliament. But that isn’t realistic in the near future, not least because a significant proportion of the world’s population still lives under autocracy (thanks China). Nonetheless, the General Assembly could take the role of legislature if national governments agreed to execute its will. Perhaps the UN could take inspiration from the Vatican’s reign over Medieval Europe - despite Europe being fragmented at the state level, the Church was a centralising force that Europe’s kingdoms obeyed solely because of its ideological/cultural power. This is the kind of empire we need to build. With the backing of popular green movements and the scientific community, the United Nations is probably the institution most likely to end the climate crisis.

Who will come out on top? In the short term, it will be whoever takes opportunities and risks. In the long term, it will be whoever builds an empire with strong foundations. To build a successful empire, you need at least one (preferably all three) of these ingredients:

1)      The latest technology – Harari argues that this is one of the least important factors in building a successful empire, yet it is hard to imagine the Roman, Ottoman, British and other empires even existing had they not used more sophisticated technology than their enemies. For much of history, it was military technology which mattered most, and to a lesser extent transportation technology. But information technology has played an underrated role in many empires, and in today’s hyperconnected world, who wields it the most effectively could win – especially given how it can empower the second ingredient.

2)      Organisation – knowing the talents of those who have the same goals as you, and building roles, processes, rules and communication networks for those people so that you can work together well. Harari argues that this is by far the most important factor in whether one group can dominate another, and with good reason. For all of history thus far the best technology we have had is the human – a flexible computer which even comes with two nimble hands. Technological developments could be seen as just add-ons, ways to make the human even more useful. So the most powerful machines are those made out of humans working well together, whether they are organisations within society or society itself. As discussed in another post, if a group with the right talents become the leaders of society, they can make society survive and thrive in new circumstances. As artificial intelligence becomes better, organisation will become a less important factor, as those with the technology will rely less on other humans.

3)      A motivating idea – empires cannot be built without sacrifice. An empire can’t promise that every individual will benefit from it, because it would fall apart as soon as some sacrifice was needed, so instead empires are based on ideas. Liberalism, and in particular neoliberalism, are ideas which are thinly veiled self-interest, but nonetheless are ideas which people are willing to sacrifice for. An empire must convince people that the success of the empire is an inherently good thing and good enough to override self-interest. One would hope that Earth’s survival is motivating enough.

Conclusion

Our civilisation is currently going through a choke point – we’re powerful enough to wreck the planet, but we’re not yet powerful enough to live self-sufficiently in space. Whatever happens in the 21^st Century, I’m confident that our inventive nature will prevent humanity from going extinct. I’m even confident that civilisation in some shape will survive, even if only in bunkers. The real question is how many people will die early deaths. Millions? Billions? If this map of a world 4 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels (a possibility by 2100 if no climate action is taken) is even just slightly accurate, the transition to such a radically different world is unlikely to be smooth and peaceful.

For countries such as Britain, more frequent flooding will be a problem, but the real danger is that the state will become violently xenophobic. When there are hundreds of millions of refugees trying to cross the channel, it will become next to impossible to persuade anyone that opening the borders is the right thing to do. Whether by denying them help, or by actively deterring them with violence, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that some of the most developed nations will commit the most devastating genocides in history. If you’re thinking ‘I’m already in a developed nation, so at least I’ll be safe’, beware that a country anxious about its survival in a crumbling world will likely toss away any citizens it considers insufficiently useful, normal or loyal.

The stakes have never been higher. Civilisations have collapsed before, but never has humanity been faced with the possibility of a loss of life of this magnitude. Precisely because we are the most powerful civilisation in history, our collapse would be the most catastrophic and there’s no telling how far technology and society would plummet. If there is a chance that tearing down a system based on free markets and sovereign nation-states will save civilisation, then it is absolutely worth the risk. The fact that we are facing global collapse proves that we are a global civilisation – it’s about time we acted like one.

Since I started writing this essay, Bernie Sanders has dropped out of the race to be the Democratic candidate. If anyone was going to at least start radically reforming the neoliberal order, it would have been him. A self-declared socialist becoming President of the United States would have been like Constantine’s conversion. But that’s no longer on the cards, at least for another four years. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, we can’t wait that long. And even if we did wait, there is no guarantee that a socialist USA would be strong enough to save the planet. The American-backed neoliberal order is already weakening and fragmenting. Our best chance is therefore a new green, globalist order to emerge from the periphery and quickly secure the world as the neoliberal order collapses. The alternative is a fragmented nationalist order which will not provide the coordination needed to stop climate change, and even if we manage to put nationalism back in the box in the 2020s it will only re-emerge with a vengeance when the impacts of climate change become severe.

The transition to a green, globalist order would no doubt be chaotic, but it need not be destructive. As mentioned earlier the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a lot of pain, but at the same time it was miraculous: against all expectations, the superpower collapsed without a single nuclear weapon being launched. This proved that in the nuclear age, a powerful system can collapse without ending the world, although of course the fact it didn’t happen once isn’t a guarantee that it can’t happen. We have to be careful, clever and determined, but we can change the world. 

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