Blowing Holes In Principles

The bedrock principles on which we build our lives are how we determine our actions, and, on a national basis, we mostly share those principles. But what if they’re wrong for a situation?  Graham Lawton goes there in NewScientist (14 September 2019, paywall):

Contemplating the Brexit struggle, I was reminded of conversations I had with scientists and policy-makers after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its 2018 report about the radical and rapid changes required to stop warming from exceeding 1.5°C. Some openly questioned whether the scale of the challenge was compatible with democracy.

At this point, it helps to bring in a bit of cognitive science. For many people in the UK, Brexit appears to have become what is called a “sacred value”: something so central to their identity and worldview that it trumps all else. As the name implies, such values are often religious, but not always. Nationalism, freedom and democracy are sacred for some people, too.

Environmentalism can also be a sacred value. When the climate crisis bites harder, we will face a similar reckoning. Now I’m on the side of parliamentary democracy, but when the shit truly hits the fan, I’m not so sure that I would take to the streets to defend it. [NewScientist (14 September 2019)]

This is one of the most important and sober realities about how people will react as the climate crisis worsens – what they’ll hold so dear that they’d rather see human civilization in ruins rather than give it up. Whether it’s because of perceived divinity or the mistaken belief that it’ll save civilization, such things as traditional religion^[1], democracy, medicine, capitalism, and high technology may well prove to be impossible to renounce.

And they, or perhaps more accurately WE, may be right. Perhaps those institutions will save us. But let’s stipulate, for the moment, that they won’t. Then here’s the problem: the human creature is not structured to perceive the problems that come with changes in scale, which is to say as we overpopulate. But these institutions may not, as software engineers are wont to say, scale well. That is, the activities they encourage may, in fact almost certainly do, have positive group survival value at low population densities, however you want to define the latter, but negative group survival value at high population densities.

But we don’t generally understand that. We learn the principles of the institutions, absorb those which we believe will lead to a prosperous life either here or in the alleged hereafter, and off we go. Rare is the person who contemplates changing principles.

Or, more bluffly in the context of the institution of religion, morality is relative. You won’t find a cleric who teaches that; for them, morality is absolute and unchanging, because God told them. Right up until it does change. Similarly, such concepts as democracy and capitalism, because their characteristics are inevitably tied up in both the cold laws of population dynamics and the hot data of humanity’s variable devotion to the principles of those institutions, must also have flexible principles – or they’ll perish as institutions.

Possibly right along with their adherents and their opponents.

But some principles are foundational or definitional, and some are not. If those foundations are not group survival positive in conditions radically different from their origination context, well, as beloved as they may be, those institutions may be inevitably doomed with no responsibility imputed to the behavior of their adherents.

But this is difficult to predict, as I’m sure Lawton would acknowledge.

Professor Turchin points out that humanity goes through long cycles of prosperity and tragic distress, and perhaps that’ll be our fate, especially if the stars remain out of our reach. Democracy’s project has been to smooth the waters, snuffing out those regimes which are rapacious, but democracy itself may contain its own seeds of destruction, as do other forms of government.

The future should be fascinating, but possibly not in a good way. Better hope the scientists figure out how to reach the stars.

¹ Non-traditional religions tend to dissolve and disappear as their tautological negative survival characteristics in their native contexts destroy them. Or, if you prefer, they “… disappear in a puff of logic.” – Douglas Adams. I need the laugh while writing this post.