Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 26 September 2020

 

All quotations today (including secondary quotes)  are taken from Commanding Hope by Thomas Homer-Dixon, published earlier this month. 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[T]his new WIT [combination of worldview, institutions, & technology] will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics— one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities. And, to top it all off, our alternative economic WIT should avoid the suffocating burden of increasingly complex government regulation, while retaining the technological creativity of modern capitalism within a democratic framework.

Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.

--Goethe

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as fear.

--Edmund Burke

Our imagination displays before us the ever-changing picture of the possible. It is with this picture that we incessantly confront what we fear and what we hope.

--Francois Jacob

Science in the service of humanity is technology, but lack of wisdom may make the service harmful.

--Isaac Asimov

Comprehension [means] examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us— neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.

--Hannah Arendt

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

--E.O. Wilson

Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope.

--Greta Thunberg

Power over the rules is real power. That’s why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution— the rules for writing rules— has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.

--Donella Meadows

Thoughts of the Day: Friday 4 September 2020

 "Speaking is also a form of action."

— Hannah Arendt

"Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others." — Hannah Arendt

Asimov said that "science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom," and it applies all too well today. Society will never have shared opinions, but it must have shared facts!

--Garry Kasparov

Political Order and Political Decay

Francis Fukuyama

It is also reasonably clear that the existing structure of international institutions is inadequate to provide sufficient levels of cooperation, on issues from the drug trade to financial regulation to climate change.

David and Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell

What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.

Scarcity

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

Scarcity is not just a physical constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think-whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, or days and weeks. By staying top of mind, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave.

Peter Turchin: Prophet

Scientist as prophet

Peter Turchin's most recent article (at the increasingly important Evonomics.com website), "I Use the Science of Predicting the Rise and Fall of Societies", presents an excellent introduction to Turchin's work of late. I'm a fan of Turchin's (see some earlier reviews and comments here and here). I'm embarrassed that I haven't yet read Ages of Discord, but I certainly will. (#backlogged) This piece provides a concise summary of his project and his findings. 

But I have a bone to pick with it. 

Turchin writes of his theory: [T]his is a science-based forecast, not a 'prophecy'." He continues: "It's based on social science" involving "broad social trends and deep structural causes of these developments". Turchin goes on to eschew predictions of occasions as precise as an election outcome or the fate of an individual; he's talking about trends and structures, not events.  He likens himself of Isaac Asimov's character Hari Seldon his Asimov's sci-fi classic, Foundation. Like Seldon, Turchin believes that he discerns patterns that foretell an era of decline. But unlike Seldon, he does not recommend retreating to wait for the future; instead, Turchin advocates using this knowledge to shape current events. Turchin writes: 

[I]n Foundation Seldon’s equations told him that it would be impossible to stop the decline of the Galactic Empire—Trantor must fall. In real life, thankfully, things are different. And this is another way in which the forecasts of cliodynamics differ from prophecies of doom. They give us tools not only to understand the problem, but also potentially to fix it.

Turchin rejects the Sheldon course of action that retreats in the face of what he sees as the immutable future. Instead, Turchin argues for action through what I would describe as reason, dialogue, and democracy. Turchin writes: 

[T]he only way forward is through an open discussion of problems and potential solutions and a broad-based collective action to implement them. It’s messy and slow, but that’s how lasting positive change usually comes about.

Turchin rejects any inevitability (unlike Sheldon) and believes that we can avert disaster because we can act. His peroration (and that's the best label) sums it up quite well. It deserves the italics: 

Our society, like all previous complex societies, is on a rollercoaster. Impersonal social forces bring us to the top; then comes the inevitable plunge. But the descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly. This means that we can avoid the worst — perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether. 

It's a slim reed to grasp at, but I'll take it. 

But wait, what's the bone that I had to pick with this? You may discern that I have great admiration for his project, and I do. No, the bone--about the size of a chicken wishbone--is this. Turchin claims not to engage in "prophecy." I think that he does engage in prophecy. Of course, if by prophecy one means predicting the future, such as fortune telling or soothsaying; no, of course, he's not doing that. But there is a biblical sense of prophecy that I think is applicable to his effort. The great prophets of the Hebrew tradition conveyed a message to the people: turn away from your evil ways or you will suffer a loss of favor with the Lord. Their message was not the forecast of an inevitable future, but of choices to be made. Follow the way of the Lord or suffer the consequences. Turchin, in a contemporary, scientific idiom, is saying the much the same thing. Like Biblical prophets, he may want to shun the mantle, but I think that its too late for him. He won't know where this will lead him because it depends upon what further research and thought and discussion reveal to him, but I don't think he can--and I hope he won't--shun the mantle. 

Maureen Dowd on Newt

Two thoughts:
1. And this guy wants to us to vote for him to become President?

2. Asimov's Foundation series: Paul Krugman, Ian Morris (I think), and Peter Turchin (I think), along with Newt Gingrich, all claim to have been affected and led into the professional study of history or the social sciences (Krugman) by reading about Asimov's hero, Hari Seldon. I missed all this, although I was an avid reader of Asimov the science teacher (if history was my first love, medicine & biology was my second as a nerdy boy). Interesting.

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules--For Now

I like big history and I cannot lie.

Almost famous rap

Okay, that’s a bit of a misquote, but for yours truly, it works. As someone who has declared his own year of big history, this book provided a great start. The full title of this book tells a lot: Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. Quite a mouthful, and quite a claim, but Professor Morris (Stanford Classics & Archeology) backs up his claims. Let me unpack it a bit.

Morris starts with a tale of counter-history: a tale of Prince Albert traveling to Beijing in the mid-nineteenth century, held virtually captive to the Chinese hegemon. Of course, almost the opposite was true, except the Chinese emperor sent a small dog, Looty, to Balmoral Castle, as a form of homage and tribute. How did this happen? How did the West come to dominate the globe in the nineteenth century? This is the guiding question of this book, and to answer it, Morris goes back, way back.

Morris goes back to the first journeys of humans out of Africa. There were multiple migrations and multiple forms of humanoids that evolved in Africa and that migrated out. Morris retraces all of this to arrive at solid beginning for his account: race (as biology) does not account for human differences. We’re all birds of a feather genetically (Although some hanky-panky in Europe mixed some Neanderthal genes in with the homo sapiens. Neanderthals eventually died out.) After the beginning of humans, and then with the development of agriculture (about 10,000 years ago), divergences began between East and West. Note: Morris notes that distinctions between East and West are in some sense artificial and to some extent limit the human populations that he considers. By “East” he means China and its civilization, of which Japan became the most prominent offshoot. By “West”, he means that world that started in the “Hilly Flanks” of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and then migrated west into the Mediterranean, then into Northern Europe, and then across the Atlantic. He does not consider other human civilizations, such as those of the Americas.

Morris tells how, using an index of social development that he created, East and West went back and forth over the millennia in the lead for development. The West began in the lead and continued up through the time of the Roman Empire, then the East lead (around 1100 during the Song dynasty), and the two were nearly even up into the late 1700’s, when the West shot into a lead and changed the game. Up until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the empires and nation-states of both East and West would hit a ceiling of social development that neither the Romans nor the Song could break. Each time this ceiling was approached, at least one of the “five horsemen of the apocalypse” would ride: epidemic, famine, state failure, climate change, and migration. However, in the 1600’s China on the East and Russia in the West (and East geographically) closed the “steppe highway” that allowed the horsemen of Central Asia (think Ghengis Khan and Tamarlane) to move from East to West, wrecking havoc on civilizations in the West. These horsemen are the barbarians who helped bring down Rome, and in the East they were the reason for that lovely wall the Chinese have.

The weakness of the book lies in the fact that Morris doesn’t give as definitive and persuasive answer to the question of why the West shot out ahead via industrialization. Perhaps he knows of very important and provocative literature out there. For instance, he praises Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence on several occasions, but I think that he could have done more, as this change in humanity—the Industrial Revolution—is the most significant change in the human condition since the advent of agriculture and the resulting development of cities (and thus civilization). But perhaps I quibble. To get another take on this issue, see Timur Kuran’s review in Foreign Affairs.

After bringing the tale up to today, and after some discussion of China’s growing influence and how it might take the lead in social development back to the East, Morris ponders the future. In an essay that Niall Ferguson rightly praised in his brief note on the book in Foreign Affairs, Morris contemplates to divergent paths that humanity may take. First, the possibility of the rise of The Singularity, where humans and machines sync-up for a brave new world. The other path that he contemplates is the possibility of Nightfall, a phrase borrowed from Asimov’s Foundation series, where civilization collapses and the five horsemen ride again. Climate change, anyone?

The great reluctance that I have to write a review of this book comes from the inadequacy of my review to do this book justice. It’s a very learned undertaking, yet its written with a light and engaging hand. Morris blends analysis and narrative in a pleasing manner. He carefully lays out his premises and supports his conclusions. He finds patterns in history, but not laws. He does about everything right that one could hope for in such a book as this. If you want to know where humankind has been and where we might be going, you’d be hard pressed to find a better book than this one.

726 pages, published 2010.