Can humanity survive?
“Today we passed on the Stard. side the remains of a vast many mangled carcases of Buffalow which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immence pile of slaughter and still their remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcases—they created a most horrid stench.
In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke…”
This 1805 journal entry by Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark fame) describes the “buffalo jump,” a practice used for millennia by Native Americans. The practice involved stampeding large herds of bison (aka “buffalo”) over a cliff, so that their carcasses could be easily harvested for meat and hide. This was an ingenious form of hunting, but also horrifically wasteful. While some of the meat that was not immediately consumed could be made into pemmican, much of it simply went to waste. Consider that the average mature bison yields 200 to 400 pounds of meat; so when hundreds of them are killed at a time…well, there was no refrigeration back then!
This is an example of what is known as “discounting the future” or “present bias,” and it’s a chronic habit of humans. (One might even say that it is the implacable opponent of cathedral thinking.) Here’s how the Association for Qualitative Research describes discounting the future: “We have a tendency to discount the future in favour of today…people tend to focus on today rather than think about what tomorrow might bring, often spending now rather than saving for the future; our future self feels distant.” As AQR points out, credit cards exemplify this bias, allowing us to incur debt so that we may spend now instead of patiently squirreling money away to purchase a thing later. But present bias is not a product of our modern markets; it has been with us from our very beginning as a species.
Case in point, we often think of Native Americans as living in harmony with the land and its various animals, but this is just a product of the “noble savage” stereotype. The fact is, Native Americans are just as human as any other group of people, which means they are as prone to present bias as any other society. They engaged in buffalo jumps not out of cruelty, but out of intelligent laziness. It was an easy way to obtain meat and hides, and as far as they were concerned, there would always be bison—why would the future be much different from the present? And even if a particular region began to run low on such beasts (or any other resource), the tribe could always just migrate to a different area where there was greater abundance.
Lest we think that our modern Western societies have advanced beyond such shortsightedness, just look at our current methods of food production—our mono-cultural approach to agriculture and our factory farming of animals. These industries pump massive amounts of carbon and methane into our atmosphere, and flush numerous polluting runoffs into our waterways. In our quest for better and larger farms, we destroy grasslands, thereby causing significant topsoil erosion (see the famous Dust Bowl of the 1930s), while we also overuse nitrogen fertilizers that eventually enter our rivers and lakes, creating explosive algae blooms that obliterate fish populations. Meanwhile, our cities are replete with factories and our roadways choked with automobiles, all of them belching fumes that contribute to global warming, acid rain, and other noxious effects. We have developed our own myriad versions of the “buffalo jump.”
Humanity is always mortgaging the future. We persist in our assumption that resources are inexhaustible, and will be just as abundant tomorrow as they are today. But what if they actually do begin to run short? Our modern attitude regarding that problem is quite similar to that of the nomadic peoples of the past—but whereas they would simply up and move to a new territory, our response is to “innovate” our way out of any mess. We worship at the altar of technology, and blithely assume that any problems created by our reckless behavior can be circumvented by a new tool, process, or app. We’ll surely think our way out of any quagmire we find ourselves in…right?
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Our present bias, and the exploitative behavior it induces, is morally problematic. Not just in the sense that we are eviscerating the natural world and endangering the lives of countless plant and animal species, but also in the sense that we are robbing future generations of humans, depriving them of the beauty and resources that should be theirs. Even worse, we might be robbing those future humans of the very opportunity to exist. Toby Ord is a moral philosopher who writes about existential risks, and along with other prominent thinkers, he expresses a worry that humanity might not make it out of the 21st century. A recent Guardian article examines his contention that, if humanity is to survive the next several decades, we will need to address our penchant for undervaluing the future. As Ord tells the article’s author: “Given everything I know…I put the existential risk this century at around one in six.”
Ord acknowledges that there are several scenarios that could result in the extinction of humanity (or at least the collapse of civilization) but which are mostly beyond our control: a nearby supernova bathing us in gamma rays, or a comet or asteroid slamming into our planet, or worldwide volcanic eruptions causing a new ice age. Yet most of the existential threats we face are a product of—or at least exacerbated by—humanity’s shortsightedness. Global nuclear war, pandemics far deadlier than Covid-19, or runaway climate change—all of these are caused by and fed by our species’ inability to treat the future as having the same (or greater) importance as the present. The Guardian piece expands on Ord’s argument:
“[I]t’s vital that, if humanity is to survive, we need a much larger frame of reference for what is right and good. At the moment we hugely undervalue the future, and have little moral grasp of how our actions may affect the thousands of generations that could—or alternatively, might not—come after us. Our descendants, [Ord] says, are in the position of colonised peoples: they’re politically disenfranchised, with no say in the decisions being made that will directly affect them or stop them from existing.”
This is very clearly a moral concern. Most of the world, and particularly Western democracies, claim to value individual rights and the sanctity of human lives. And yet our mindset engenders behaviors through which we exploit the present in such a way that we possibly foreclose similar options in the future. As such, we demonstrate no regard for the rights of future generations of humans. I once read a science fiction story about a corporation from a desolate future sending time travelers back to a prehistoric era, where they would harvest resources to bring home with them, caring little for the consequences to that past environment. In the book, the wrongness of such behavior—pillaging an abundant past to fuel a dystopian future—is obvious. Yet aren’t we doing something similar today? Aren’t we drawing down nature’s balance at such a rate that there might not be anything left for future humans? And if so, could we really fault any future time travelers for coming back to our era and taking what they needed, benefiting themselves while harming us?
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As Ord pointed out, our present bias poses not just a moral problem but also an existential one, and present bias is not the only human characteristic that get us into trouble. In their book Unfit for the Future, authors Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu point out that many behaviors and attitudes of homo sapiens, while beneficial when we lived in small groups and were always in danger of resource scarcity, have become detrimental in the wake of humanity’s explosive growth in population and technology. In our ancestral environment—before we developed agriculture and constructed cities—many human behaviors made sense: in order for our small tribes to survive, it was logical that we practice altruism within the group but regard outsiders with suspicion or even chase them off; it was also sensible to unreservedly exploit the food and other resources we encountered since life was unpredictable and there was no guarantee of living to see tomorrow. For tens of thousands of years, in-group altruism and present bias were useful characteristics for our survival.
But now, with our global population topping seven billion and our technology permitting most of us to live a life of relative abundance, many of our inherent traits have turned from useful assets into terrible liabilities. Our culture and technology have evolved while our evolutionary instincts have not. As biologist E. O. Wilson famously said, “The real problem of humanity is [that] we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Wilson is quite right, for although most civilized cultures have developed various forms of government and religion to curb some of humanity’s worst instincts, the meteoric rise of our technology in the last few centuries has reached such a break-neck speed that our cultures cannot keep up. This scenario—modern technology in the hands of glorified cavepeople—is a recipe for disaster.
One problem we face is the greater ease in causing harm than in doing good. Any one of us can take ten people’s lives with relative ease, but think of how much harder it would be to save that many lives. But what’s most concerning to authors Persson and Savulescu is that, since around 1950, humanity has had the capacity to cause what they call “ultimate harm.” Most obviously, various nations around the world have enough nuclear weapons to obliterate civilization and quite possibly our very species; but there is also the danger of our constantly accelerating emission of greenhouse gases and the radical climate change they induce. Compounding these twin dangers is our aforementioned tendency toward in-group altruism; it is easy for us to feel hatred for and to engage in war against those from another nation because they are not like us, and it’s also easy for us to wash our hands of responsibility and ignore the suffering of the poor because we see them as different.
Humans also have a problem with number sensitivity, probably due to the fact that for most of our species’ existence we lived in small groups of 150 or less. As such, while we can vividly imagine the suffering of one person, imagining the suffering of 100 or 1000 or 10000 people is far more difficult; and while we can feel tremendous compassion for a single victim of tragedy, our compassion does not scale arithmetically—we don’t feel ten times more compassion if ten people are affected by a tragedy. [For example, notice how an entire nation can be emotionally enthralled by a single endangered child like “Baby Jessica” in the well, yet feel a general numbness or even disinterest when a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina kills thousands.] So a nuclear exchange that kills millions is simply beyond our comprehension, and we lack the ability to understand how the everyday behaviors of billions of people and millions of industries can steadily rework our planet’s climate so that it becomes inhospitable to its current lifeforms.
Given humanity’s current capacity to cause “ultimate harm,” whether through intentional nuclear weapon exchanges or unintentional anthropogenic climate change, it has become terrifyingly clear that, if our species wants to continue its existence, we must address our “paleolithic emotions”—we cannot afford to still be cavemen if we’re walking around with nukes. But how do we achieve this? Given that evolution works over lengthy geological time scales—while we need a solution in a matter of centuries or even decades—what are humanity’s options for achieving the necessary moral enhancement?
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In Plato’s Meno, the title character engages in a dialogue with Socrates regarding the nature of virtue. The two men agree that virtue (i.e., the characteristics of being a “good man”) don’t simply arise naturally as a product of birth. We are not born virtuous or acquire it as some sort of genetic legacy; Socrates points out that many of the greatest leaders of Athens had children who fell far short of their parents in terms of morality and wisdom. The debating duo also agree that virtue is not some kind of concrete knowledge that can be taught, in the way that a carpenter or stonemason might be able to teach proper construction techniques. Of course, there are many supposed teachers of morality—priests, professors, etc.—but the fact that so few of these “teachers” can agree on what virtue is, or successfully instill it in their students, indicates that virtue is not something that can be acquired intellectually. In the end, Socrates can’t help but conclude that “being good is a quality that comes to people, when it does, by gift of god.”
The concerns of Plato and Socrates about the virtue or “goodness” of individual men can also be applied at the species level. The conundrum of how to make a single person virtuous is dwarfed by the larger mystery of how to make humankind as a whole more virtuous. As Plato’s Socrates points out, our efforts at teaching virtue have had limited success. Such efforts fail more often than they succeed, and even if they do stick, it is only for a single generation; the person who acquires some form of virtue must then try to pass it along to his or her heirs, with the same long odds they themselves once faced.
But are we truly consigned to a state of general helplessness, where we are indeed reliant on a roll of the cosmic dice—a “gift from god”—to become a good person? I’m not so sure. Although I agree with Plato (via Socrates) that the teaching of virtue (while better than nothing) is of limited success and (when successful) of limited duration, I’m not ready to dismiss the role of “nature.” While I am not at all a fan of biological determinism, I do recognize that some of what we consider the best and worst traits in people have roots in our genes and in our brains. Altruism and selfishness, openness and xenophobia, cooperation and competition—all of these things are endemic to every human society; they are all coded for in our internal biology and then expressed as a result of our external environments.
And while we have made some strides in modifying our external environments over the millennia—creating governments that arbitrate disputes and reduce violence, developing technologies that increase resources and reduce scarcity—we have had little opportunity to modify our internal biology. We have never had the understanding nor the tools to do so…until now. In the 20th century, humanity took its first steps towards understanding its own genetic code and charting its complex brains. And now, in the 21st century, our knowledge is expanding exponentially; we are entering an age in which we can—if we choose—take the wheel from nature and begin to drive our own evolution.
But should we? After all, science fiction is full of horror stories about the consequences of humans tinkering with nature, and those warnings are worth heeding. But I’m beginning to be convinced that if humanity wants to survive this century, and truly make the leap to a higher stage of civilization, we might need to take control of our destiny by engaging in genetic and cognitive behavioral modification. Because as Toby Ord and others warn us, our existing nature could very well get us all killed.
To be continued…
Addendum (07/29/20):
My astute friend Megan pointed out that in an early section of the post, I chide modern humans for their reliance on technology to extricate themselves from the problems their shortsighted behaviors create. But near the end of the post, I suggest that technology (i.e., our ability to manipulate our gene expression and brain function) might be the best solution to our problem. That is indeed a bit contradictory—touche, Meg!
So I thought it over and can now offer a clarification. I think that we have traditionally directed our technology outward, using it to manipulate and control the world around us, assuming that we are (nearly) perfect and it is the world that needs to change. What I am proposing is that we now begin directing our technology inward, using it to ameliorate the inherent conditions at the root of so much of our species’ friction with each other and with the natural world. Historically, our technology has been mostly exploitative, and even when it has been applied in a remedial fashion it has only sought to treat the symptoms of our “human condition”—simply putting bandages on our wounds, so to speak. But with the technology we are developing today, we can begin to attack the disease itself, going right to the source of those symptoms. It is this application of technology that I find far more promising for our species’ long-term health.
