“AIN’T THIS JUST LIKE THE PRESENT TO BE SHOWING UP LIKE THIS?”
Bon Iver

Dare to Understand

“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity” was Kant’s first sentence in his attempt to explain the Enlightenment. Rather than accept the things we are told, when we are truly free we can question the world around us, in an attempt to gain more understanding of it.

David Deutsch interpreted the idea of progress in an enlightened modern context in the following way:

Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures – all evils – are due to insufficient knowledge… Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.

Energy and Disorder

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will always increase over time. In other words, unless there is energy applied to the system, randomness and disorder always increase.

Pinker uses this physical concept to talk about the progression of society; human effort applied to the system has increased order, and our control over the world. By applying energy to the world, we have managed to keep entropy at bay, even increasing order. As Kelly puts it, “Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more that we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization.”

It could be said that this is what makes life unique. Intelligent life being the “process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.”

This entropy-reducing energy can take two forms. The first is physical power, or “altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface” as Bertrand Russell called it. The second is harder to define but increasingly important: information. Gaining an increased understanding of the world both fights chaos in itself, but also makes our applications of moving matter more efficient and effective.

Acceleration

Ever since the Enlightenment and the beginning of the scientific method, we have seen a rapid acceleration in the advancement in technology. Technology is difficult to define; coming from the Greek techne, meaning ‘art’ or ‘craft’, tekhnologia is translated as ‘systematic treatment.’ It is perhaps best summarised as the application of scientific knowledge. An important aspect of technology is that it is self-reinforcing.

As we build on the knowledge of previous generations, every additional person becomes a potential resource. An exploding population has meant an explosion in creativity and brain-power; more time and energy to be applied to more advanced and wider fields of technology.

Together with the compounding factor that with every piece of time-freeing technology allowing following generations to worry less about large proportions of their lives, the result being increased focus on one aspect of technology. The nuclear physicist does not also have to know how to build his house and harvest his food. It is this specialisation that is both caused by technology and simultaneously advances technology ever faster.

Coupled to this, in the computer age we are currently in, technology is becoming unconstrained by the physical world. Computing power is following Moore’s Law, an exponential curve where the available computing power doubles roughly every year and a half. This means that since the 1970’s the processing power available for a given cost has increased by a factor of 100,000,000. So not only has the amount of technology being developed increased, but the time taken to iterate has also fallen dramatically. 

And thus, technology increases exponentially.

Stagnation

It has been said of the twentieth century that it started with utopian dreaming and ended with nostalgia. We seem to no longer have the enlightened optimism that Deutsch was talking about. We are afraid of the future, while nonetheless not looking for alternatives. 

By almost any measure, we are living in the best moment in human history. We are living through a period of unparalleled peace throughout the world, in which for the first time more people are suffering from obesity than malnutrition. It is estimated that the advances made by just 100 scientists have saved 5 billion lives, and counting.

Applying John Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance theory, we can try and get an objective measure of the state of our world. Undeniably more people are living better lives now than at any point in history; the world is by no means perfect, but if you could choose a time to be born, it be now.

However, this does not appear to be reflected in the average person. As Nisbet says in his book History of the Idea of Progress, “The scepticism regarding Western progress that was once confined to a very small number of intellectuals in the nineteenth century has grown and spread to not merely the large majority of intellectuals in this final quarter of the century, but to many millions of other people in the West” In one poll, the majority of people polled in the eleven Western countries said they think that the world is getting worse.

Trust in institutions is also incredibly low. In the Edelman Trust Barometer, two-thirds of the countries it studies reported fewer than 50 per cent of respondents now trust mainstream business, government, media and non-governmental organisations to ‘do what is right’. 15 per cent believe that ‘the present system is working’ while 53 per cent do not.

Entropy

These two forces currently driving society seem at odds with one another. How is it possible that technology is constantly improving at a breath-taking and ever accelerating pace, but we live in a world that feels stuck? When further examined, there is no contradiction between these as they are addressing different things; the acceleration is technological, whereas the stagnation is societal.

Berardi summarises this poignantly:

Then came the time of impotence. The overall rhythm of information has accelerated. Those flows are perceived as neural stimuli by the conscious organism, while the sensory organism lives in a permanent state of nervous electrostimulation and bodily contraction.

It is not very long ago that humans would have known everything they needed to know to survive; they would have mastery over all the technology available to them. The weapons to hunt their food with, the fire to cook it with, the shelter to eat it in. But as our society has become more complex, this is clearly no longer the case. No one person can be expected to know all the technology that goes into the farming of the salmon they eat, the weaving of their duvet that keeps them warm and the firing of their house’s bricks that gives them shelter. Our economy has pushed us into smaller and smaller niches, specialisations, to the point that it is no longer possible to have a total overview. When forced to only understand a small piece of the entire system because it is far too complex, no one feels like they are in control.

Bridle points out that we have even started developing more technology to help us understand the existing technology; “As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.”

With every added piece of complexity, we also increase the potential for entropy. It is requiring more and more energy from society to determine what the technology means to us, how it should be utilised, how it affects individuals, the community and the world at large. We have reached the point of the trajectory curve where humans are no longer adapting to the technology fast enough - as a whole, or as individuals. Society is no longer able to proactively foresee technological issues on the horizon, and instead has become purely reactive. Individuals are seeing life around them radically change, unable to keep up, and are feeling left behind.

Marx and Engels wrote that “in communist society…it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”, the aim being to reduce alienation where a worker feels that they have no control over their actions. This does not, however, address the alienation coming purely from the amount of technology itself; from there being an ever-increasing world that we feel the need to understand. This produces symptoms described by Monbiot; “Loneliness is just one symptom of a wider crisis of alienation: a loss of connection with people and place, and with a sense of meaning and purpose. Society, the world’s living systems, our happiness, our self-control, our sense of belonging: all are falling apart. Why has this happened?”

The documentary maker Adam Curtis describes this as Hypernormalisation, explaining that governments and technologists are merely attempting to keep the world stable by creating a ‘fake’ world, as the real world is far too complex to understand. Calling back to the Soviet Union, he explains that the government invented an alternative reality in which the communist system was not failing, and while the citizens knew this was not the case as they could see around them the failures of the state, it became more convenient for everyone to accept this shared delusion.

If we want to break out of the cycle of hypernormalisation, we are left with two choices: slow down the acceleration of technology or break out of the stagnation of current times. 

At a certain point, Obama changed his philosophy from the hopeful ‘Yes We Can’ of 2008 to a cynical ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’. Okay, I told myself, ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’ is a pragmatic compromise considering the complexity of the contemporary world.

Reversing Advancement

The elections over the last few years have generally been trying to pull the brake on technology, and even attempt to make the train reverse. This has resulted in votes against the establishment, that are really a thinly veiled attempt to return to an old establishment. Rather than striving towards radical new systems, the current ‘rebellion’ is to go backwards, back to a time where the pace of things was slower, and one could still feel in control (at least if you were a straight white male). There is no longer the perception within society that there are options that have not yet been tried, future alternatives not yet discovered that may answer the problems of today.

This rearward view that has led to populist backsliding around the world is best exemplified in the examples of the UK Brexit vote and the election for Donald Trump as president, but there are also examples in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and France. What unites these movements is an idea that the best days are in the past, and there must be a regression back to the ‘good old days.’ These movements “look backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogenous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing.”

The most literal example of this is Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”, making the point that currently America is not great and will not even return to this through forward progress and more problem solving, but that the ideal society came and went; that recent developments must be undone. It is also interesting to note that one of the best predictors of Trump support was pessimism, with sixty-nine per cent of Trump supporters feeling that the US was “seriously off track.”

Similar backward-looking campaign phrasing was used in the EU referendum in the UK, such as “Let’s Take Back Control” and “We Want Our Country Back," hearkening back to a time of British Imperialism. As in the US example, there is a strong link between voting for Brexit and believing Britain’s best days lie in the past.

Whilst this appeal to nostalgia clearly worked on voters, it is of course not based in truth. As already discussed, in almost every factor the US and UK are better off now than ever before, and it is clearly now a more moral society than ever in its history, for example with regards to the LGBT community, let alone equality of racial minorities. These populist movements are threatening human progress and the values of the Enlightenment, constituting “a pushback of elements of human nature – tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking – against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them.”

There is also little point of attempting to slow down the pace of technology for a variety of reasons. As discussed, technology is applied knowledge, so to slow down technology we would have to collectively forget. While this has happened at various points in history, not only did it decrease the quality of life, but society eventually sprung back - for every dark age there has been a renaissance. Technology should therefore be seen as something that almost is a physical force in itself, that can be harnessed but only ineffectively controlled.

In addition to this the problems facing the world of tomorrow are becoming too big to be tackled by ignorance and avoidance. While Europe could come out against gene modification in foetuses, China might still attempt it, and the effects would still be felt everywhere. We are living in the Nuclear Age, where no country, society or individual can live in total isolation from the effects of others. Burying our heads in the sand is a short-sighted strategy, in that it is no strategy at all.

It is clear then, that if slowing the technology is not the solution, we must speed up society.

Exponential Culture

People are no longer dying in the same technological world as they were born in. 10,000 years ago, you could have made an educated guess as to what life would be like 1,000 years in the future. Progress was happening, but it was at such a slow pace that a generation over a lifetime could easily adjust to these new advancements; perhaps it was a new method of harvesting slightly more efficiently, or a way of keeping livestock alive a few years longer.

Fast forward to 1000 years ago, and it was no longer possible to see a millennium into the future; the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons could not have predicted today’s internet. In their lifetime they may have seen technology advance more rapidly, but not in a way that it greatly changed the lives of most people. Perhaps it is a new navigational tool or a new, more deadly form of weapon.

Starting with the Age of the Enlightenment we saw technology really start to take off. Within a person’s lifetime, steam power could have become widespread, making it suddenly possible to travel distances in hours that as a child would have taken days. They may have witnessed society’s transformation by electricity or long-distance communication. It was difficult to see what the world would look like at the end of your life, and while adjustment may have been sometimes difficult, it was possible.

In this day and age, it is difficult to even know which sector the next big disruption will take place in. Will Artificial Intelligence enable self-driving cars, or will it make everyone redundant? Will better understanding of the brain allow for curing of mental illnesses, or will it just create more effective advertising? Will gene editing be able to cure all disease, or will it create a separate class of superhumans?

Technology has been advancing exponentially, and while society has still come out on top in this race until now, that is not a law of nature. With each passing moment, technology may outpace what society is equipped to deal with; indeed, we are seeing signs that the climate crisis may have broken the limits of what humans are capable of dealing with. The societal rate of progress must increase to stay ever above that of the technology; the only way to effectively harness the future is if we know how we want to approach the problems.

There is a riddle given to children in France. Lilies in a pond must be kept in check, as their growth means they double every day, and if they were to cover the pond they would kill everything inside it. The children are told it takes 30 days to cover the pond. When does it cover half? The answer is of course 29 days. There is only one day to save the pond.

The Stories of the Past

This post is a continuation of The Problem of the Present “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Phillip Pullman What Makes Us Human? The biggest advantage we humans have evolutionarily is our compassion. There is no other animal that feels the

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