In my previous
post I stated that looking around at how our society is evolving, the kind of
cultural manifestations it produces and the long term trends of growth it
displays (both economic and demographic) I was becoming more and more
Spenglerian (the West is significantly decaying) and less and less Toynbeean
(no, we will not end up being the first civilization in the history of the
species that escapes from the cycle of rise, consolidation, degeneration and
final demise). In this post I want to develop a bit more such argument, and
share with my readers the reasons for such a (at first sight pessimistic)
assessment of our immediate prospects.
But first I
would like to subject the argument to a bit of self-critique, as my contention
about the already apparent decadence of the west (and, as the West already encompasses
the whole world-system, the decadence of humanity) can be accused of
unfalsifiability, and of being held by the expedient (and all-too-extended) method
of paying attention only to those news that portray increasing violence, riots,
revolutions, conflicts and social and technical failures, whilst ignoring all
the good things that are happening out there. Such biased perception can easily
enter in resonance with the overtly negative tendency of the media to over-report
bad news, which sells more papers that just highlighting how everything is
reasonably hunky-dory. That is indeed a danger of any generalization about
society, and that is why “social sciences” (an oxymoron, I know, but just bear
with me) try to be extra careful in the collection of significant enough data
to support their theories (big background laugh, of course). Any semi-literate
conservative (and most members of the dominant liberal elite that rules the
opinion forming circles in the West are semi-literate conservatives these days)
would tell you that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that
humanity as a whole never had it so good (exhibit A would be that recent classic
by Steven Pinker The Better Angels of our
Nature), and present an impressive amount of statistics about declining
violence, increasing wealth, improving health and unclear tendencies about
reported happiness (but “reported happiness” is another canard, an insufferably
self-referential and vacuous concept that we should never be fooled by). Which
may very well be both true and inconsequential. It could very well be true at
the same time that “this is the best age in humanity’s history” AND “the current
state of affairs of the world is morally unacceptable”…
Back then to
the accusation of unfalsifiability regarding my original contention about the
demise of our civilization. Being ultra skeptical of quantitative analysis of
big scale social trends (you end up with bad political philosophy masquerading as
bad statistics), I’ll rather counter such accusation by offering a number of
predictions that, were they to come true in the next decade, would make me
seriously consider I am (was) wrong about our whole culture going already to
the gutter:
1. We put a living human being on the
surface of Mars
2. We have a working fusion reactor
(one that can extract more energy than the amount required to ignite the
plasma)
3. We have a functioning (commercial)
fission reactor of 4th generation or above
4. We have a supersonic means of
transportation (plane or hyperloop)
5. We have more that 40% electric vehicles
worldwide
6. We have banned and destroyed all existing
nuclear weapons
7. We have defeated extreme poverty (the
percentage of population living with less than 2 $/day -2010 $ is below 10% of
the total population of the planet)
8. We have built a permanent
(habitable) moon base
9. We have launched a vehicle aimed
outside our solar system (obviously, with the capability to get there and send
us communications from there)
10. We have reached a life expectation
above 100 years at least in one country of more than 5 million inhabitants
11. We have developed a general purpose
AI capable of passing a full-fledged Turing test (with unlimited time and no
confounding factors)
I’m strongly confident that exactly
ZERO of those predictions will come true between now and 2026. Indeed, if my
thesis of civilizational decline is right, to reach any of those milestones we
may need to wait centuries, since the collapse of our current system plays out,
and a new system emerges, more capable of tackling those kind of challenges
which will have proved too much for our current collective capabilities.
Am I putting the bar too high, and
setting objectives that is unreasonable to ANY civilization to reach, no matter
which phase of development it finds itself in? I don’t think so, as previous civilizations,
or even our own one in previous decades, have cleared similar hurdles, except
for the last one (indeed, our civilization is the first one so deluded as to think
it could fashion something that it doesn’t understand, and somehow manufacture
artificially that which still can’t characterize in its more humble, natural
appearance).
So, having established the factual
bona-fides of my position (“our civilization decays” can be translated for “our
civilization is not capable of achieving any of those milestones… or any other
of similar significance”) let’s guide our attention of what such inability
teaches us. The first thing that a critic may retort is “well, there is one
reason why those things may not be achieved in a decade, which has nothing to
do with the vibrancy or overall capacity of society as a whole: there is not
enough money NOW for such expensive undertakings, but as the economy keeps on
growing and we get richer they will fall more and more within our grasp, and
sooner rather than later we will end conquering all of them, most likely within
the current form of social organization”. That’s the argument from
techno-optimism, and it has been straw manned under the name of “cornucopianism”
countless times. As I find it a most pernicious mystification, I will devote
the remainder of this post to its rebuttal.
Let’s start unpacking what may lie
behind the argument that just a “lack of money” prevents us from achieving
faster such lofty goals. I won’t go in the debate of “what is money” (a social
mechanism to keep track of who owes what to whom) and present the
techno-optimist with the following predictions:
1. The US will have spent an estimated
amount of 350 billion $ in the development and purchase of its new F35 fighter
jet, assuming it can have the first units ready by mid-2018 (a very big if,
additional overruns are expected). The total cost including maintenance and
operation of the planes is currently estimated to be in the ballpark of 1.5
trillions (about 650 million $ per plane)
2. The current projected cost at completion
of the Flamanville-3 EPR reactor (still 3rd generation, and with a
technology that outside of the nuclear industry would be considered already
obsolete) is of 13 billion $ (depending on the exchange rate with the euro),
assuming it can go online in 2018 (again a big if, in the face of continuous
delays that also affect Olkiluoto-3 in Finland, with the same technology). The
initial cost estimate was around 4 billion $
3. If it just sticks to its currently
approved budget, the UK will spend roughly 565 billion dollars between now and
2026 in its "defense" (basically armament and payroll of its armed forces). Let’s remember we are talking of a relatively peaceful island with no
territorial disputes (well, there’s the Falkland islands, which Argentina
famously attempted to seize in 1982…) Only slightly more ludicrous, in the same
timeframe Brazil (yup, that paragon of wealth and welfare for all its citizens)
will spend in the ballpark of 270 billion $
4. The technological giant Apple
recently disappointed investors with his profit for the 2nd quarter
of the fiscal year, of only 1 billion $ (analysts expected ten times that, as
in previous quarters they had easily passed the 10 billion mark) with sales of
roughly 50 billion $. The total valuation of the company stumbled to “only” 700
billion $. It is interesting to note that for many years Apple has been unable
to find lucrative enough venues to invest the tons of money it was making (at
the clip of roughly 40 billion $/ year no wonder!) and even before announcing
an increase in what it pays back its shareholders via dividends it is believed
to be sitting on a humungous pile of cash (about 200 billion $ of it, according
to some estimates)
5. In 2015, an especially tough year (“the
worst since 2011”… jeez, these guys have really short term memories!) the 20
most successful hedge funds “made” 15 billion dollars (net of fees, which were
in a similar ballpark of stratosphericity) to their top clients
I could go on and on and on. To put those
figures in perspective, I’ll just quote some estimates of what it would cost (a
very imperfect and most likely insufficient estimate, but it’s the best we
have) to reach some of the civilizational goals I mentioned before:
1. Sending a manned mission to Mars: 80
to 100 billion $ /http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140422-mars-mission-manned-cost-science-space/),
btw, Elon Musk claims he can do it for much less, and recently announced he
expects to send the first flight there around 2015, in direct contradiction to
my first prediction. I still know who I would bet for in this one
2. Cost at completion of ITER (the
closest thing we have to a fusion reactor, it is doubtful if it will be able to
produce it first plasma –still with a gigantic energy deficit- within a
decade): anything between the current 15 billion € and 20 billion € (up from an
initial estimation of 5 billion €)
7. Cost of eradicating extreme poverty:
730 billion $/year (just give 2 $/day to each of the roughly 1 billion people
still living with less than those 2 $... the cost of getting below the
threshold I marked of having less than 10% of the population below that level
would be substantially lower, though, as it would be enough with getting just a
third of those out of destitution, with a third of the cost)
I mention the Mars travel and
poverty as they are supposedly some of the most intractable problems of
humanity, which dwarf because of its sheer size very other problem (and
interfere between them: how can we morally devote a single penny to space
adventures when innocent children are dying by the thousands every day by
easily preventable maladies? Conversely, how can we just give them food and
incentivize their reckless reproduction when there isn’t enough space for all
of us in the planet already?). Well, confiscate Apple’s benefits and the 100
more rapacious/ luckiest hedge funds and you can solve both and still have some
money to spare. I don’t mean literally you can “solve” things so easily, I’m
just saying that the “lack of money” is a false argument, which reveals the
underlying problem I pointed at in my previous post: civilizations collapse not
because they can not raise enough resources to keep working, they collapse
because they loose common narratives that are required to set a common set of
values everybody can agree on, and that are essential to set themselves common
goals that keep their peoples working in coordination.
The hedge fund manager and the Apple
investor have very different views of what a life well lived consists in, what
priorities would be attended first by collective agency, and what is the proper
way to allocate resources (especially scarce ones). The goy in the slums of
Mumbai and the taxi driver in Buenos Aires have yet a different set of values
and priorities, and we, collectively, don’t have a clue on how to adjudicate
between their competing interests, so we have settled for the minimum common
denominator, and let everybody decide for themselves what to do with their
time, how to employ their talents and what to do subsequently with their gains.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with such approach (I don’t like
the collectivist tone I was using, either, and it is not that history supplies
us with tons of examples of how to do things differently and more
satisfactorily), only that it is not the most conductive to achieve great
things, do great deeds and utter great words.
And indeed, what our epoch seems to
be chock full of is small deeds and small words, and what we have to
investigate relentlessly are the mechanisms of our current era that impede such
great achievements as those of the past. Not just the Acropolis of Classical
Greece and the cathedrals of Paris, Burgos or Prague bequeathed to us from our
forebears in Medieval Europe, but our most immediate predecessors, which just a
generation ago formulated new encompassing models to understand reality
(quantum mechanics, relativity, the Standard Model), built the complex machines
to prove the validity of those models (CERN), sent a craft outside the solar
system (Voyager 1 recently surpassed the limits of such system, we launched it
in 1977), built supersonic passenger transportation systems (the Concorde,
first flight in 1969, retired since 2003), reached the moon (first lunar
landing in 1969, haven’t been there since December 1972) and developed and
deployed a completely new source of energy (nuclear fission reactors, first
went in operation in 1954 in Obninsk).
But hey, the last 30 years have been
amazing, too! We have invented and deployed mobile telephony! (well, that’s
truly something) and the Internet! Doom (the videogame)! Grand Theft Auto! And soon
Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality! Call me old-fashioned, but somehow I think
they are not on the same level of greatness, and I can’t see our descendants
3,000 years from now looking at us in awe and wondering how we could conceive
and materialize such wonders
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