Ode to Man
Chapter 3 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto
Previously: The Present Crisis; Fish in Water; The Surrender of the Gods, part 1 and part 2.
Techno-humanism is a type of humanism. Humanism (as stated in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now) is “the goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience.”1
Implicit in this goal is that humans deserve to flourish. A hallmark of the techno-humanist worldview is love for humanity, including reverence for human creations.
This was once a common sentiment in the West. Indeed, it is ancient: Sophocles’s Antigone features an “Ode to Man” that begins: “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none more wonderful than man.”2 The Ode praises mankind’s ability to sail the seas, to plow the earth, to tame animals, to secure ourselves from wind and rain. “O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!” Two thousand years later, this was echoed in Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.”3
Today there is a significant current of anti-humanism. In the last chapter, I quoted one environmentalist who called humans a cancer and a plague upon the earth; this was echoed in 2020, at the beginning of the covid pandemic, with the spread of the catchphrase “we’re the virus.”4 In 2018, a philosophy professor opined in the pages of the New York Times on the question “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Although he acknowledged the tragic aspect of such an event, he called the issue “quite complex” and said that “it might just be a good thing” since humanity is “committing a wrong, a wrong whose elimination would likely require the elimination of the species.” (On the question of whether those alive today should commit suicide for the sake of animal welfare, he said “I do not have a final answer.”)5 Extreme views like these belong to a small minority, but their voices in national newspapers affect the mainstream mood, and dampen the enthusiasm of all but the most ardent humanists.
We need a corrective to anti-humanism. We need to reassert the value, the dignity, the glory of humanity. Consider this a modern Ode to Man.
Alone among all species on Earth, we have the ability to understand the nature of reality—from quarks to galactic superclusters, from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe. We can diagram the structure of molecules we have never seen, analyze the composition of stars and planets from light-years away, recount the history of events from billions of years before we existed, and prove the properties of numbers that stretch to infinity. In the words of David Deutsch, we are “universal explainers.”6 Jacob Bronowski wrote in The Ascent of Man:
Physics in the twentieth century is an immortal work. The human imagination working communally has produced no monuments to equal it, not the pyramids, not the Iliad, not the ballads, not the cathedrals. The men who made these conceptions one after another are the pioneering heroes of our age.7
We have used that understanding to become the most successful species, obeying nature in order to command her. We have spread throughout the world and prospered in every environment. Our bodies are not adapted for the cold, but we can make fire and wear furs. Our bodies are not adapted for the ocean, but we can sail ships across it. Our bodies are not adapted for the mountains, but we can scale them with ropes and picks. Our bodies are not adapted for these circumstances, but our minds can adapt us to anything.
We have succeeded in part because we have learned to cooperate better than any other species. Large-scale cooperation is not inherent in our nature—colonies of insects work together in larger teams than primitive humans did8—but it emerges from our conceptual abilities. We are the only species that comes together to build cities, to unite into nations, to form global markets. We are the only species capable of specialization and trade. Adam Smith pointed out:
By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd's dog. Those different tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species, are of scarce any use to one another. The strength of the mastiff is not, in the least, supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel, or by the docility of the shepherd's dog. The effects of those different geniuses and talents, for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better accommodation and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature has distinguished its fellows.9
We cooperate not only across all of civilization but across all of time: the human project is a cumulative one, stretching back to the hominin who fractured the first stone tool millions of years ago, and extending to the last colony in the last uninhabited solar system however many eons in the future. Our knowledge is cumulative: when anyone finds any fragment of Truth, they can share their discovery and thus enlighten the world. Karl Popper described scientists as “workers who are adding to the growth of objective knowledge as masons work on a cathedral.”10 Our technology is cumulative too, as is our wealth and our infrastructure. If not for this ability to build on what came before and to pass on what we have achieved, all of us would still be, not even huddling around campfires—since the use of fire was itself an invention—but shivering naked in the cold as we chewed on raw nuts and seeds or uncooked meat scavenged from other predators.11
On a biological scale, this project has erupted with astonishing speed. Life took eons to evolve. Single-celled organisms covered the planet for billions of years, fish and reptiles dominated for another few hundred million, mammals for tens of millions.12 Every animal before us lived their lives via mostly hardcoded patterns, with a relatively small role if any for learning.13 Evolution proceeded by natural selection, with less-fit organisms dying out or otherwise failing to reproduce. It was slow, each organism’s DNA getting only one chance to “learn” in a lifetime. Our evolution proceeds far more rapidly. In a short twelve thousand years we advanced from hunter-gatherer tribes to landing on the Moon.14
Our rapid advancement is driven by another uniquely human faculty that deserves our reverence: we are the only species that can criticize ourselves. Biological evolution “learns” through births and deaths, but with the ability to theorize and criticize, to paraphrase Popper, our ideas can die in our stead.15 The ability to criticize is the ability to improve. Nature gives to every animal drives, but we are the only species that can choose to rise above them: not to kill whoever attacks us, not to devour any food in sight, not to father or bear as many children as we can. We criticize and improve even our own institutions: replacing monarchy with democracy, authority with science, witch hunts with jury trials.
Our evolution has created the most marvelous artifacts: since our bodies have barely had time to evolve, we have instead created an extended phenotype of tools, machines, vehicles, buildings, and infrastructure.16 We build machines from tens of thousands of parts working in perfect symphony.17 We make geometric forms by pouring liquid stone reconstituted from pulverized rocks. We have given the globe a circulatory system of roads, rails, bridges and tunnels; and a nervous system of copper wire, fiber optics, and radio waves. We birth electronic brains by etching patterns on sand; today the transistor is even finer than the neuron.18 We forge columns of metal that breathe fire to escape the gravity of Earth and take us to the heavens. Having witnessed the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11, Ayn Rand wrote that it represented “the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness”:
One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, or of chance, or of luck, that it was unmistakably human—with “human,” for once, meaning grandeur—that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding! For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw it had to feel—not “How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!”—but “How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!”19
Humans make up only 0.01% of the biomass of the Earth (far outweighing wild mammals and birds, but far less than fish, and dwarfed by trees).20 But human-made mass, from toothpicks to skyscrapers, now exceeds all living biomass, weighing in at over a trillion tons—a “symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene.”21 To some, the fact of the Anthropocene is damning for humanity. To others, it is a neutral reality we should accept. To me, it is a badge of honor.
Our creativity goes far beyond bare material needs: we pursue knowledge for the sake of curiosity, art and music for the sake of beauty, game and sport for the sake of competition. We pursue ambitious projects for no reason other than the glory of the project, or to honor an abstract conception or religious ideal: temples, cathedrals, monumental sculpture, a clock in the desert that will run for ten thousand years.22
We are uniquely creative—and also uniquely destructive. We are not immune to the strife and conflict of the biological world; indeed we have prosecuted the most deadly conflicts. But we are also the only species that can rise above its animal nature and reduce conflict. We create custom, morality, and law. We establish constitutional republics, democratic elections, separation of powers, inalienable rights to freedom of speech and religion. We prohibit slavery, blood feuds, and wars of conquest.23 “When the laws are kept,” wrote Sophocles, “how proudly his city stands!”24
We are the only species that expresses love for others based not on evolutionary adaptations such as pair-bonding and kin relationships, but solely on our faculty of sympathy and admiration.25 And not just for our own species: we show love for other species as well. To them we may be a formidable enemy and a dominant competitor—but we also establish animal shelters and operate wildlife rescue programs, motivated purely by sentiment.
It is unfashionable to express reverence for humans—but no entity in the universe deserves it more. A species with this capacity for science and art, for inventiveness and creativity, for planning and building, for love and compassion, profoundly deserves to live, to thrive, and to expand to the planets and the stars.
Our cooperative nature means that not only are humans good, more humans are better.
Thus we need a corrective not only to anti-humanism, but to anti-natalism and fears of overpopulation. Those fears were stoked in the 1960s, when the world population growth rate climbed to 2.3% per year while over 1.6 billion people were still living in extreme poverty.26 In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which warned that “[i]n the 1970s… hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”27 The Ehrlichs said that population control should be achieved by compulsion if necessary, and supported coercive sterilization in India.28
1968, it turned out, was already past the peak population growth rate. Deaths from famine in the 1970s were the lowest in six decades, and only a small percent of the Ehrlichs’ hyperbolic forecast.29 Today population growth has fallen to 0.9%, and is projected to hit zero or negative before the end of this century, with world population peaking around ten or eleven billion.30 At the same time, world GDP per capita has almost tripled, and daily calorie supply has increased by 24% in Africa, 27% in South America and 49% in Asia.31
Despite what would seem like good news to someone worried about a population explosion, Paul Ehrlich maintains that “the most serious flaw” in his book “was that it was much too optimistic” (!) and said as recently as 2018 that the world’s ideal population is less than two billion people, a quarter of its present size.32 But Ehrlich is a piker compared to Jane Goodall, who said many of our problems would go away “if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago”—that is, around 500 million people, a reduction of over 90%.33
Goodall and Ehrlich have it backwards: the ideal human population is not small and static, but large and growing. This is true not only in some aggregate sense, from a utilitarian viewpoint, but even from a selfish, individualistic viewpoint: a larger population is better for every individual.
First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions. If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses, to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all. Of course, for every Einstein or Mozart, there is also a Hitler or Caligula. But society amplifies the accomplishments of the good, and fights to suppress the damage of the bad—which is why over the long term, we’ve created far more than we’ve destroyed.34
For other reasons, too, a larger population means faster scientific, technological, and economic progress. More people means more total research and development: more researchers, and more surplus wealth to invest in it. And it allows researchers to be more specialized and thus to go deeper in their fields. In the economy generally, the division of labor increases productivity, as each worker can specialize and become expert at their craft.35
R&D investment is also supported by larger markets, which let companies pick off higher-hanging fruit. The market for cancer drugs, for example, expands when large countries such as India and China become wealthier, bringing more people into the global middle class that can afford such drugs; this enables pharma companies to spend more on the fight against cancer.36 TSMC spends over $5 billion a year on R&D, which they can afford to do because they make over $60 billion a year by selling microchips worldwide.37
More generally, highly ambitious projects need a critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to use the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom.38 The Apollo Program, at its peak in the 1960s, took over 4% of the US federal budget, but 4% would not have been enough if the population and the economy were half the size.39 If someday humanity takes on a grand project such as a space elevator or a Dyson sphere, it will require an enormous team and an enormous wealth surplus to fund them.
Even setting aside growth and progress—looking at a static snapshot of a society—a world with more people is a world with more choices, among greater variety. A bigger society has more cuisines, more architectural styles, more types of fashion, more sub-genres of entertainment. This also improves as the world gets more connected: for instance, the wide variety of ethnic restaurants in every major city is a recent phenomenon; it was only decades ago that pizza, to Americans, was an unfamiliar foreign cuisine.40
A bigger economy has more options for what to do with your life. In a hunter-gatherer society, you are lucky if you get to decide whether to hunt or to gather. In an agricultural economy, you’re probably going to be a farmer, or maybe an artisan. Today there’s a much wider set of choices, from pilot to plumber to accountant, from crane operator to lab technician to game designer.
A bigger world gives you a greater chance to find the perfect partner for you: the best co-founder for your business, the best co-author for your papers, the best lyricist for your songs, the best partner in marriage. Whatever your quirky interest, worldview, or aesthetic—the more people you can contact, the more likely you are to find others like you. Even if you’re one in a million, in a city of ten million people, there are enough of you for a small club. In a world of eight billion, there are enough of you for a thriving subreddit.
Similarly, in a larger, more connected economy, there are more people to economically support your idiosyncratic tastes. Your favorite Etsy, Patreon, or Substack creator can find the “one thousand true fans” they need to make a living.41
These examples illustrate a few value-generating effects of a larger population. One is economies of scale: fixed costs are amortized over more output, lowering average cost. There are also network effects: value in any network is generated by connections, and more people means more connections possible per person (the total number of possible connections is proportional to the square of the number of people).42 Finally, there is the existence of non-rival goods, which can be shared by all—especially ideas, which increase the productivity of everyone who uses them without diminishing the value of the idea for others.43
When Ehrlich and Goodall advocate for much smaller populations, they aren’t literally calling for genocide or hoping for a global catastrophe.44 Even so, the world they advocate is a greatly impoverished and stagnant one: a world with fewer discoveries, fewer inventions, fewer works of creative genius, fewer cures for diseases, fewer choices, fewer soulmates.
A world with a large and growing population is a dynamic world that can create and sustain progress.
Parts of this chapter were adapted from the essay “Why you, personally, should want a larger human population.”
For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.
Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 410.
Sophocles, “Ode to Man.” Note that “wonderful” is interpreted by other translators as “remarkable,” “strange,” or “formidable,” or in the sense of inspiring awe or even terror. But if not expressing love for man, Sophocles was certainly expressing respect and admiration.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2. Note that Hamlet himself seems unimpressed with mankind, at least in his current mood: immediately after praising man he goes on to say “to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…” But this seems to be a way of illustrating his depressed state.
Garcia, “We’re the Virus.”
Deutsch, Beginning of Infinity, 146.
Bronowski, Ascent of Man, 264.
“The population of a mature colony of Eastern subterranean termites ranges from around 50,000 to several hundred thousand termites” (“Termite Biology”).
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chapter 2.
Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject.”
“Many zooarchaeologists who study Early Stone Age faunal assemblages think it's likely that at least some animal carcasses that were butchered by hominins, especially the larger ones, were obtained by scavenging” (Pobiner, “Meat-eating by Early Humans”).
Cooper, “Origin and Evolution of Cells”; “Mesozoic Era”; “Cenozoic.”
“The first evidence of cultivation and animal domestication in southwestern Asia has been dated to roughly 9500 BCE” (“When did the Neolithic Period begin?”)
“Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead” (Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject”).
Dawkins coined this term in The Extended Phenotype, although my usage here is more poetic than technically correct by his definition.
The LHC has almost ten thousand magnets alone (“Facts and Figures about the LHC”).
Human neurons range from 4 to 100 micrometers in diameter (“Neuron”); modern transistors range from about 5 to 45 nanometers (Salter, “World’s First 2nm Chip”).
Rand, Voice of Reason, 166–7.
Ritchie, “Humans make up 0.01% of Earth’s Life.”
Elhacham, “Human-made Mass Exceeds all Living Biomass.”
For more on the reduction of violence throughout history, see Pinker, Better Angels.
Although in the play, Antigone arguably does the morally correct thing by defying the law.
Silk, “Adaptive Value of Sociality.”
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, xi.
Ehrlich, Population Bomb: “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail” (p. xi). “When [Chandrasekhar] suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan … Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause” (pp 165–6).
Roser, “Population Growth will Come to an End.”
P. Ehrlich and A. Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb Revisited.”
Bryan Caplan makes similar points in “The Expected Human”, in which he quotes Julian Simon, who argued for more humans, “each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein,” and Herman Daly, who made the counterpoint about the chance of “getting another Hitler or Caligula.”
An effect known as “Smithian growth”, after Adam Smith who emphasized it in Wealth of Nations.
This example taken from Tabarrok, “Growing Market for Cancer Drugs.”
Amon et al, “Chipmakers Raise R&D Expenditures”; “TSMC 2023 Annual Report.”
Mazoyer and Roudart, History of World Agriculture, Chapter 4.
Harwood, “How much did it cost to land astronauts on the moon?”; Dreier, “An Improved Cost Analysis of the Apollo Program.”
Ewbank, “When the ‘New York Times’ Explained Pizza.” Paul Fairie (Twitter) has more examples.
“One thousand true fans” is Kevin Kelly’s concept of the paying audience a creative needs to find in order to support themselves (Kelly, “One Thousand True Fans”).
This intuitive idea was formalized in an economic model by Paul Romer, who won a Nobel for his work (Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change”).
Crawford usually when I read substack articles I want to get to the end,you are a rare one I want the end to be as far down as possible
Not sure how this got in my email box, but I really enjoyed it. Great article