As sometimes happens, after I wrote my last essay, I started noticing more things in the media on the same subject – or at least, which shared some of the themes I’d been writing about. (I’m fully aware that that’s just a classic instance of selection bias at work in what my eye catches when I surf the internet, by the way.) There was an essay in the New York Times yesterday, for example, on how we can now realize a luxury, vacation-filled form of communism, the way the pre-purge Trotskyites imagined it – written with slightly more verbal elan than the Trotskyites ever managed but with less intellectual rigor and a kind of winking po-mo materialistic-but-trying-to-mock-it-as-a-lame-fade style, which, as a proper Trotskyite (the kind that would have been shot by the NKVD in a boarding house in San Francisco in 1937), really cheesed me off. Separately, there have been a number of articles across the internet questioning whether or not we have any hope of actually “halting” or reversing climate change, or whether we need to accept the fact that the climate has and will continue to change. One article sent by a friend took an apocalyptic view; another was more balanced but still took the point that “the world is changing and we need to think of it as undergoing change, not somehow as a project we can reverse or overcome”.
It’s a problem in modern economics and environmental studies – both of which are more related than most of their practitioners realize – that the writing is just dreadful, so I’m not providing links to the articles above, simply out of a desire to not waste your time or offend your aesthetic sensibility, dear reader. But my essay had three primary points, each of which kept getting echoed in the online postings of the last week:
(a) we are living in a post-scarcity era, yet our economic systems and even our ways of imagining economics remain stuck in concepts which are only sensical in the presence of scarcity;
(b) we also seem to have crossed the threshold where the technology we initially built to surpass the limits of scarcity have created a new environment of existential threat; but,
(c) we’re building and assimilating technology so fast at this point, that it seems highly unlikely that we’re truly facing a physically existential threat – although all of the above factors mean we are at a kind of psychological and intellectual inflection point.
I’ve been wrestling especially with the third point, mostly because I don’t like the idea of being predictive about the future and I’m crossing that predictive line with such a statement. I’m willing to make observations about the present which are unconventional if supported by historical data – both causal and what I’d call “field based”, that is, judgments which aren’t rooted in cause and effect but which show a field of related and sometimes correlated trend vectors which point to an obvious basis for current conditions. I’m really reluctant to draw that forward, even though as a human being you kind of have to because you’re trying to position yourself for “the good life”, as Mark and Viktoria keep reminding me, at all times. We can disagree on what the good life consists of, but we’re all trying to achieve it, and to either get closer to the goal of the good life or maintain a good life that we’ve already discovered. So you have to project, if only to then be able to evaluate different choices against a backdrop of what you think the future may be while you ignore the fact that you have a poor and blinkered view of what “choice” and “possibility” actually are and you’re ultimately stumbling about in a dark of your own creation.
But I don’t think it’s particularly interesting to note that we are building and assimilating technology incredibly quickly, faster than ever before. It’s not even interesting to note why: communication is now essentially free (other than due to self- or societally-imposed censorship barriers), transportation of the goods and service providers required to create interesting new stuff is also essentially free (especially in terms of time), and there are lots more of us clever hominids around to have ideas and see where they go. So if the equation that leads to the quantum of innovation in a given period is something like:
Innovation = ∫ f(population, lifespan) • g(proximity) d(f(), g())/dt
Inserting some numbers into the above, we’ve gone from less than a bit less than a billion people, to nearly eight billion people (increasing by call it a factor of 10). By proximity, I mean both physical closeness and the proximity of ideas or of values. Initially we were separated in space and with immense time costs to overcome, but now with almost no separation materially in space (factor of 104, meaning it’s literally at least 10,000 times faster for two human beings to interact via trade or the like than pre-industrial times) and with time compressed in terms of the time used to connect and share information as well (at least a factor of 104 and rising), it’s an almost supercritical implosion of ideas and people and the things we share amongst ourselves. Even the number of years of life in which we can share amongst ourselves has vastly increased and thus the idea of “usable lifetime” has doubled – small change compared to the other accelerations but still material. In other words, we’ve increased the potential for innovation by something like 2×109in roughly two hundred years.[1]
That’s a pretty big shift in potential. We have 2 billion times the creative capacity for innovation over a given period of time (call it a year, or a decade) as a species as we had in 1750, if I’m roughly correct on these orders of magnitude. Unsurprisingly, it would seem, we’ve not only gone to the moon, split the atom (for good and for ill), cured or found preventative mechanisms for most of the diseases that used to kill us, continue to raise more food than anyone thought possible, and managed so far to not kill ourselves – either intentionally through war or unintentionally via poisoning the planet beyond recognition.
It’s that last bit that has media articles focused on risks and the potential for some kind of accelerating Venus greenhouse effect planetary spiral (albeit in the face of 4 billion years of evidence to the contrary), but I’d argue even there, our innovation and potential as a learning species is coming to the fore. In all developed economies, the birthrate is now comfortably below replacement; that’s a kind of learning as the species becomes accustomed to abundance. With expanding lifespans and material plenty, we’d be idiotic to continue to reproduce at pre-modern levels, and sure enough, we don’t. As we reproduce at lower levels, which, demographically speaking, compensates for the expanding lifespans by not overly stressing population growth in the moment, we demonstrate the system’s ability to learn.[2]
So our capacity for innovation has exploded, like nothing ever seen before in the history of the species, and we seem to be initiating a strange combination of changes – societal and technological – which are tuning us as a species to the new condition of both abundance and innovative potential. We’ve not completely lost our chance with the planet, either, although we might have to get used to a bit of a stampede as we all migrate to northern Manitoba and deal with some not insignificant and probably quite violent shifts along the way towards dealing with a planet which will take millennia to cool down again. As a species obviously capable of violence, it should surprise no one that – even as we learn (hopefully) less violent ways of collectively navigating change, we’ll engage in a lot of killing one another along the way.
I hope I’m not coming across either as optimistic or callous. I’m not optimistic about the future simply because the capacity for narcissism in us as individuals means the future will be awful no matter what happens to the environment, or to our ability to solve cancer or create new diseases, or what have you. Our own selfishness – our individual inability to love for its own sake – will ensure that on any given day in the future, most of us will wake up and struggle to hold back tears of despair for a race so God-forsaken as ours, while others of us wake up, snort a couple lines, and spend another day viewing other individuals as objects for their own consumption. And while I think too much in terms of statistical dynamics, which often risks allowing one to ignore the individual souls who are affected by the processes of complex systems such as the system of human society, or the linked systems of humanity and the non-human natural environment of our planet, I also am choked up every day, trying to deal with the terrifying duality of an effective learning system being built on the backs of individuals who suffer, who are confused, who harm one another with a kind of smug contempt, who are ground down into dust, who die without a viable hope other than the myths we invented back before we knew how to live with abundance.
One (again poorly written) essay I read recently, riffed on the idea that, if the planet (or our species, which to us is the same thing) were to be destroyed at a time certain in the future, our very notion of time would change. Public figures often talk about needing to do things to preserve our way of life – or at least, life itself – for our grandchildren or what have you, but the essay raised the question “well, what if we knew there would be no grandchildren – we’d all be dead from an asteroid in 30 years?”. They used this to introduce what should be an intuitive thought, that we’re motivated at a certain base level not by preserving life for our grandchildren, but we’re preserving life for the idea of the species continuing to have children ad infinitum. We cherish that idea of the species living far more than we acknowledge – preferring to hide behind the vaguely recognizable faces of as-yet-unborn-but-surely-imaginable children of our children’s children.
Where I’m optimistic is for the species, and for the system we call Earth. We – and this is a collective we, humanity and its host – seem to be getting better and better at learning and responding to one another. The system seems to be holding up well; Earth is getting deadlier to us at an individual level, which is good in terms of thinking about how a learning system should work (bad for individuals, obviously), and collectively, the system is getting more innovative, and we’re even starting to get less damaging with our innovation (read about changes in mining pollution from pre-1970 times to today and tell me that’s not true). There are more of us – but we’re somehow hearing a kind of system feedback, and we’re responding in our collective individual lives, leading us to have fewer children as we live longer and face a more challenging existential environment.
This is a different concept than worrying about “mankind on earth” or even about my grandkids. I struggle with what I’ve imposed on my son in terms of how his life will be able to unfold, beginning as it did in a specific moment in May, 2012. I’m mostly not worried about the long-term effect of his parents’ divorce on him; he’s been loved and he so clearly understands what that love means, in the varying ways we both show to him, that that side of him, the side that will discover and add new meaning to what love can be, will be fine. No, I worry about the choices he might be forced to make, about him being potentially the first generation to live confronted with the full effect of abundance while being stuck with a human set of wiring that has its breakpoints, whether around social jealousy or the power of chemical addiction. And I’m worried about what I’ll tell him about those choices, and about the why at the heart of the matter: why his mother and I had him. We made a great decision, I know – but will I be able to express why?
My son’s offspring are literally not real and won’t be, likely, for a couple decades or more; I’m not worried about them yet as concrete beings. On the other hand, the species, and the sentient-species / earth system that really makes up who we are, is very real. It is mine just as it is everyone’s, and I’m fascinated by it. That system is having a bit of a growth spurt problem, but I’m not worried about that either – not merely because I have a vanishingly small impact on that system, but because even in its growing pains, it shows the unmistakeable signs of learning. Even as some lessons don’t get learned well or quickly (“hey, should we really burn 100 million years worth of carbon accumulation in 200 years?”), the act of learning is clearly taking place, including the painful discipline that results from getting things wrong for awhile. That all makes sense to me.
When you center that process on a specific sentient individual, however, that’s where it becomes hard. That’s where I worry. Especially when you were part of the process to bring that sentient being into the world.
My dog passed away last summer, and I wrote about how I felt the need to state that I killed him, or had him killed. I’ve come to realize both (a) I was right, and (b) I was wrong, and (c) the words I have available to me are so sparse, so impoverished, that capturing the full force of what I felt was impossible, so I simply need to be nicer to myself. That being said, once you help a creature – a dog who otherwise would have been abandoned or put to sleep alone – you also condemn them to a new, future death. Once you give birth – or you participate in a birth as a father – you do the same thing. You’re not selecting the moment, and you’re not killing them outright (unless you’re a monster) – that is to say, their death, even if you bring it about out of kindness, is not your fault. But calling into being a sentient creature, capable of giving and receiving love, capable of understanding the world on their own terms, also involves setting them on the path towards death without, fundamentally, asking for their input in the decision. It was your choice, not theirs, and you have to own that, just as much as they will own the actual act of dying. I helped bring my son into the world – which means I also condemned him to leave it someday.[3]
This is, I think, maybe the more fundamental existential demand of our emergence into abundance. Back when lives were properly nasty, brutish and short (Hobbes got it right for all of human existence up until around 1960 or so), we brought life into being unconsciously, and stared somewhat incomprehensibly at our offspring if – if – they asked us why. We faced our mortality as if in a constant daily lottery, as did our children. Any of us could die tomorrow, due to famine or accident or disease most likely, but lurking just around the corner was the imminence of death by war and crime (crime, interestingly, has been falling as a cause of death pretty much since we have archaeological records to infer it). We brought our children into the world as both insurance and as a reaffirmation of our own existence in a world where scarcity and the fear created by that constantly challenged that existence. But now, we don’t need children to affirm our life tomorrow – we know we’ll die, but in awhile, and most likely due to a “disease” which is really just the slow accumulation of our own poor nutrition choices or overindulgences. And since society runs, well, pretty efficiently, we don’t need children to care for us in retirement. We might want companionship, but that’s existentially different from needing children to actually supply us with food and shelter in our post-working years.
As such, we’ve lost the answer to “why am I here, parents?”. It used to be quite simple, if a bit selfish: “you’re here because we’ll need you, and if we’re being perfectly honest, we need a lot of you because most of you will die prior to full recovery of the cost of husbandry in a world cursed by scarcity”. Now, when our children ask us why they exist, that answer is completely discredited. So we damn well better have an answer more compelling than “well, I was bored” or “your mom and I were acting out of a kind of societal habit” or “because maintaining a steady path of GDP increase requires a certain base level of population growth in an economy still dependent on resource distribution in an overall Ricardian framework of land and primary good scarcity.”
The primary philosophical impact of the end of existential insecurity – the beginning of abundance – is that it demands of us some clarity for not just why we’re here, but why we’re participating in others being here. It’s terrifying because we can no longer hide behind a few static questions – “why am I here”, “what is the good life” – and instead we face an insistent demand for a dialogue, not between ideas in a Kantian dialectic, but an actual dialogue amongst sentient, and therefore unpredictable and limited but differently limited and thus not wholly intelligible, individuals. And the dialogue then extends to include a learning discussion with nature as a whole, implicitly trying to discover whether our sentience makes us the adults, or whether the conjoined complexity of the earth makes it the mentor and reduces us, both as individuals and as a collective, to preschoolers – or whether we’re all just infants blindly searching. It becomes a dialogue with those who brought me into being, and those who I bring into being, and that cradle of nature from which all of us sprang, about why we all chose to be here.
The existential terror of our time is facing that question without the crutch of fear, of the uncertainty of survival tomorrow or even today, giving us a morally justifiable way out of resolving the question. It’s facing Sartre’s guilt over being alive in the midst of death, but just as much, facing our own confusion as to why our parents brought us into being, and looking at the future and telling all of them, too, yes, you’ll die, you were born (in a certain accurate way of saying it[4]) in order to die. But that is no reason for despair, even though many of you may die painfully or willfully at the hands of others. Fear – and despair – are easy but no longer credible cop-outs to that question now that abundance exists.
Until now, we’ve gotten a bit of a free ride. It wasn’t free: we paid for it in scarcity, in famine, in plague, in war. But now we have to look at ourselves – our system, the whole system, sentient us plus Earth that’s too complex to fathom or understand – and every day come up with a why. Abundance is the signal that our childhood, as a species, as a planet, is over.
If you, reader, remember the moment when you first realized childhood was magical – that moment when you also realized it wasn’t truly real anymore, even if it had been when you were living it – you’ll probably remember thinking that adulthood remained an abject mystery. You knew that something whole in childhood couldn’t be authentically felt any longer, but that the new – that thing that you were supposed to understand – seemed terrifyingly out of reach. My response to that moment was a bit obsessively intellectual, and it’s taken me thirty years to claw back to a point where I can recover the body memory of being a child while still being ready to face what will, inevitably, come. Tying those loops together – tying together time before I was born and time after it, tying together nature and being human, tying cords of love and letting them bind or fail as they will – will never be easy. But, dear reader – and my son, for whom I’ve always been writing – we’re here to learn. I wanted to bring you here to learn, and for you to teach me. You’re doing great.
[1]I know, the factor of 10 increase in population means that we have a physical impact on the environment greater than ever before. And the impact of the technology required to reduce the physical separation of each of us means that we accelerate that impact even faster. But, I’d argue, even a physical impact equation would not have the 104multiplier associated with our communications. Innovation, in other words, travels at the speed of communication; environmental impact travels at the speed of a truck, or a pipeline, or a smokestack, and with a dissemination function (time to get plastic bag from factory to Great Pacific Trash Gyre to whale’s stomach) slowing it down from there.
[2]Demographics are fun and easy, by the way – you can set up your own world population model in an hour or so in Excel, and in a few more hours, build a fun model to test your own theories about birthrates, expanding lifespans, shifts in mortality trends, and you can even throw in some random variables for things like wars on the downside or sudden upticks in lifespan due to, say, a cure for cancer. Seriously, it’s fun!
And in other news, I still have no girlfriend.
[3]That doesn’t happen in relationships, oddly; we find someone already on that path, and we see if we’d like to walk together for awhile, and if it doesn’t work out, we resume separate journeys but, after all, that other individual didn’t send us on the path, and didn’t really even change our path. They just made it more or less enjoyable while they walked nearby. Topic for a different day, I suppose.
[4]Accurate but burdened by the poverty of language – I’m trying to learn from putting down Gordy. But this is important as well: part of the existential fear of this transition to abundance, and the dialogue it forces on us, is that we can’t use simple language to have the conversation. We need to rediscover the roots of where we came from back when we were pre-sentient – and we have to anticipate a dialogue at the level of the system as a whole for which we still lack any real tools. Our language is both far more complex than anything existing in nature – and far less complex, and far to poor in complexity, to comprehend that nature taken as a whole.