260719: Meliorism & Empowerment
What we cannot lose is our sense of improvability. At various points time, in various cultures, we have believed that the Universe was one-and-done: dead-set forever, a fixed and perfect order. Like a watch, made once and ticking from its setpoint. Or we have believed that the world was a fixed-sum game: that our neighbor's plans and ploys for personal gain would always come at a cost to our own luck; that holistic betterment of the community was impossible. Some remnant of this belief survives today in our political parties, where (as John Adams observed some two centuries ago) any good idea put forth by one party must necessarily be opposed as villainous by the other.
"Progress," in evolutionary studies, is a contested term. Does evolution have a telos? With the retrospect of a fossil record, we can now say with confidence that the world's biome has become more complex over time. That there has been a simultaneous speciation and integration of life, an overall diversification coupled with ever-more coordinated, nested, hierarchical organizations of matter: from simple to complex cells, to multicellular life, tissues and organs and animals, families and tribes and nation states and perhaps a global community. This is a compelling thesis; it is the concurrent, complementary, reciprocal force of entropy; it is a corollary to the second law of thermodynamics. And if we wish to attach ourselves emotionally to this seeming inevitable drift of the universe—Time's Second Arrow—we may. Perhaps such an attachment will accelerate the lean. Perhaps such an attachment was a predestined means of acceleration. There have always been men who wish to worship inhuman forces and wills beyond themselves. Their visions have been beautiful and terrible in turn.
But it is also true that organisms do not really get "better," insofar as there is no "better" in evolution, except fitness relative to the environment. Perhaps, on the whole, life is better at persisting; but if mere persistence our standard of success, than extremophiles like Deinococcus radiodurans are far more successful than Homo sapiens. No, there are only changes in the environment, which threaten the ongoing fitness of organisms, that is, of other aspects of the environment. There are only the responses by said organisms, which bring them back into fitness with it. If nothing else, we need be constantly bringing ourselves back in fitness, bringing our culture back into fitness.
Today it is our technology which drives the disruption. This is what humans have always excelled at—being generalists, capable of niche construction, they gain maximal advantage by increasing the dynamic instability of the environment through niche-construction. Within this instability, their generalist intelligence gains further advantage: Always and ever transforming the world to be more hospitable to themselves, and less hospitable to others. So far, the plasticity of their culture has kept pace. Now, the question is whether this will continue. Maintenance is a buzzword in the Valley these days. Even if we do not believe in progress, lowercase or uppercase alike, we must believe in the maintenance of fit.
So the culture must adapt to the new environment wrought by science. It has been like this a long time now. The modernists felt it, after World War One: that the culture had not kept pace, it lagged behind. In terms of tactics, the bright red trousers of the French, in their tenue garance, their pantalon rouge, engaging in a suicidal attaque à outrance. Saber-rattling cavalry charges against barbed wire and machine guns. In terms of strategy: the concept of a world war to begin with, the idea of such unlimited hostility between the great powers, which at the very least becomes more restrained in the second half of the century, the powers more reserved, the actions more limited. It was a truism after the Trinity test, that mankind would have to grow up spiritually, had to mature culture if it were able to handle its weaponry, that is, survive its technology. So the present moment is merely a continuation of this ongoing challenge, this ongoing and urgent invitation to change.