Another excellent piece. Thank you! The enrichment of the human affordance landscape is such an essential story to tell. I love it. Two thoughts:
1) I think for many there is a distinction between agency and capacity (ability) that is important to address. We undoubtedly have more ability - as you catalogued. Agency however has a strong connotation of the exercise of free will, or, at least, the feeling of exercising free will. The reason “We have radical agency over our information diet” is so contested is precisely because people do *not* feel in control of their choices in regards to the, unquestionably vast, set of abilities that things like social media provide them.
I think it’s still possible for a detractor to make a compelling argument that our capabilities have increased dramatically but our agency has on average decreased. E.g. by charting rates of addiction (a lack of agency in relationship to a behaviour) across drugs, gambling etc. It feels like this should be addressed or should find a way to avoid connotations around people’s choices rather than their ability by defining agency or using another word.
2) Love the title ‘The surrender of the Gods’ very spicy. Would not change 😅 and that progress includes an increased capacity of ideas is also important. However, I think the narrative of Enlightenment thinking as a clean break from religious thinking, with a focus on people like Massey, may be over-reified. It seems like a story about evolution of thought is more precise e.g. Newton was a devout believer and he and Kepler’s projects were very directly driven by a belief in and search for ‘universal laws’ that were an article of faith not of observation. Something to consider.
Thanks Ben. Your distinction between agency and ability is interesting. Fundamentally I believe that people *do* have the choice to exercise these abilities, whether they make that choice or not.
Regarding religion, I agree that Enlightenment thinking was nothing like a clean break from religious thinking, and I did not mean to imply that. The “gods” of the title are more of a reference to fate, to nature dominating human will. Although as I indicated, I do believe there was in the Enlightenment at least an erosion of, a shift away from, a view of the Christian God having this control over every aspect of life—this concept of providence.
Thanks! I think the fine-grained differences between agency, ability, and so forth can be really fertile ground. I am, for the most part, in the same boat that our default position should be to believe in people's ability to choose (their agency). Though I've also struggled with addiction in the past so I know that there are situations where you can feel totally powerless.
Completely agreed that there were significant erosions of certain Christian stories about determinism and so forth during the enlightenment. All very important parts of the story.
Note the causes of the megafauna extinction are contested. From GPT:
"The extinction of megafauna in the Americas, which occurred around the end of the Pleistocene epoch (approximately 10,000 years ago), is attributed to several factors. The most prominent theories include:
Human Overhunting (Overkill Hypothesis): The arrival of humans in the Americas, who were skilled hunters, led to the rapid overhunting of large animals. Evidence suggests that human populations expanded rapidly and hunted many of the megafauna to extinction. This theory is supported by the timing of megafaunal extinctions coinciding with the arrival of humans in various regions.
Climate Change: The end of the last Ice Age brought significant climatic changes, including warming temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and the transformation of ecosystems. These changes would have disrupted habitats and food sources, making it difficult for large animals to survive.
Combination of Factors: It's likely that a combination of human activities and climate change contributed to the extinctions. The changing environment may have made megafauna more vulnerable, and human hunting pressure could have been the final blow.
Disease: Some scientists propose that the introduction of new diseases by humans and their domestic animals might have contributed to the decline of megafauna.
Vegetation Changes: The shift in vegetation types due to climate change could have reduced the availability of suitable food for many large herbivores, leading to their decline and subsequent extinction.
Each of these factors likely played a role to varying degrees, and the exact cause of the megafaunal extinctions remains a topic of ongoing research and debate among scientists."
Good point, although the vast majority of claims in academia are contested. My feeling is that this one is like 75–80% confirmed? Our World in Data calls it “likely” and says there is “strong evidence to suggest” it.
First of all, fantastic post. I don't think I've ever read quite such an effective depiction of how far we've come, and just how ubiquitous the fruits of that development.
I think you make a bit of an unjustified leap in the concluding section, when you offer that progress as a refutation of previous doomsayers:
> Toffler and others worried that as progress moves ever faster, the world will slip out of our grasp. But as we have just seen, the historical trend is the opposite: the world does change ever faster, but we get better at dealing with change.
But as you rightly note and the passage you quote from Toffler makes clear, his claim is that the impending progress he rightly foresaw would have severe negative effects on people- not that our capacity for dealing with those effects would diminish. Toffler, at least in your quotation, isn't saying that we won't "get better at dealing with change"; he's saying that the change to come would nevertheless overwhelm that capacity to some extent, causing the negative effects he predicted. And, returning to his words:
> I believe that most human beings alive today will find themselves increasingly disoriented and, therefore, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment. … Change is avalanching down upon our heads and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it … Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people.
... I would argue that this prediction seems to have largely been borne out, looking at eg increasing political polarisation on questions of fact, the apparent mental health crisis in the youth of the developed English speaking world which seems on early evidence to be linked to social media usage, etc.
The fact that we are adapting increasingly rapidly to increasingly rapid change (as one might predict, observing the same dynamics in biological evolutionary systems) doesn't imply that this acceleration will continue to outpace the acceleration of change to the extent that the change remains a net positive. And it certainly doesn't refute Toffler's claim that such change would "disorient, bewilder, and crush many people".
This is but one part of a series, of course, so I wouldn't expect you to have fully developed the optimist case by this point. But I do think the case needs to be developed further before you can fairly see "we have seen" Toffler's predictions to be falsified- or that his example therefore provides evidence against similar claims today.
Thanks for your perspective. To me it seems clear that even if some people are suffering some negative effects, they are not “disoriented, bewildered and crushed.” But maybe this it not obvious.
I think the concerns about polarization and mental health are real but overblown.
That's fair. I think it's easy to overstate the extent of this as well, so I don't entirely disagree with you about "crushed" in particular; it's important to keep in mind that people are still overwhelmingly better off than ever before in almost every way, as you convincingly argue.
I think it's fair to say that this prediction is being borne out to a certain extent, though, if you agree that polarisation and mental health concerns are real:
> find themselves increasingly disoriented and, therefore, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment
I will simply respond to the last paragraph. Most people living in the world today do not design, manage, or understand in any meaningful way the human made systems that direct the course of Much of our lives. At least we understand that it’s impossible to control the weather. When another human designs a system for his own benefit and our harm, we rightly see that as a greater loss of agency than merely being at the mercy of a storm or earthquake.
We have the choice to carefully study how the human made system can harm us, then we can make an informed decision whether we accept the risk/benefit ratio or not and , finally, the choice to take precautions against the possible harm. Of course choosing not to choose is also a choice.
I have very much enjoyed this essay, but it takes the techno optimist view that everything is computable & knowable - that nature can be subverted to our ends if we have enough ‘compute’ & that progress is accelerating but gradual. Let us imagine that world of complete foresight & acceleration … we would exist in a state of rapid phase shift & collapse. We can’t defeat the 2nd law of TD so more compute / more knowledge will not equal happy, autonomous, rational humans making great choices that optimise their wellbeing. It will mean chaos & disorder. It will be equivalent to my Facebook feed circa 2010 - a transition from slow, ordered, individual posts where I could apply system 2 & engage … to rapid, curated murmurations of information that forced me into System 1 mode. Until I switched off. Moreover, the gradualism that should afford resilient, linear progress that we can absorb bit by bit, disappears at times of rapid phase shifts. The system becomes more fragile & to maintain order in a fragile system takes top down control. So rapid phase shifts in an accelerating world do not signal cuddly democracy & citizens assemblies. They signal authoritarianism, fascism & resource grabs. As we have seen at every phase shift in history. Technological progress is great if the result is improved species fitness - longer, happier, healthier lives on average (not just more people) - but most human progress has been zero sum where we have reduced variation & diversity elsewhere in favour of top down control & order. Yes, we have supermarkets full of food but the global diversity of food & diet has diminished enormously. The American poverty diet of UPFs is not about rational lifestyle choices but about coercion from a controlling economic ecosystem. Yes, I can call my cousin in Australia over zoom but the diversity of languages, culture, rituals is all narrowing in our global ‘progressive’ world. Yes, we can fix the ozone layer & predict climate change but the ozone layer was a linear problem while climate change is complex. It will be like the sorry fate of the Bayesian yacht - slow then very fast & gone. The Luddites & saboteurs threw their clogs into the works but this was ineffective. The only adequate response to technology, authoritarianism & top down coercion is local level reorganisation. The societal leaps forward that are, in this essay, extrapolated into better lives for all in the future, were only achieved through good, old-fashioned co-operation & human behaviours that counterbalanced the top down coercion of ‘progress’. The world is not linear, it doesn’t tend towards justice, & technology does not increase species fitness by itself. It is self-organisation, co-operation & reciprocity - all as old as time - that help us seat technological advances within a human space.
Thank you again Jason for your fine words. Regarding your comment: “Our primitive ancestors lived at the mercy of nature”.
Yet today, dare I say “nature worshippers” who sees humanity as evil, probably don’t give consideration how tough nature can be and has been to humanity, only giving thought to how nature has been defiled in the present and by our long past ancestors (whom they deem to be removed from history) without acknowledging the wondrous things mankind has harnessed with nature as you pointed out in your last chapter - Fish in water.
With regards to how our ancestors lived, let me say this, (and I know you have made some highlights on this further in this chapter) in Australia, the indigenous population has been here for about 60,000 years which had comprised of approximately 250 languages with over 500 different nations within Australia. These people became experts in living with nature, as have many indigenous peoples throughout the world. One of the things Australian aboriginals mastered was hunting. Archeological evidence shows that at the time aboriginals came to Australia, there was also a corresponding decline in the larger animal species population which eventually became extinct. These were slower moving animals, that were easy to hunt and a good resource for protein. However, this is not often raised with people who (once again) want to demonize humanity’s nature when in fact, the extinction of native species has been going on at the hands on humans well before western civilization. Having said that, indigenous people also have an affinity to respecting nature too and knowing how to manage the natural environment around them to contribute to their own sustainability (when Australia was first colonized, it was coined “The land of the great white smoke” due to the amount of controlled burning the aboriginals used to conduct).
As for survivability, it was not uncommon for Australian aboriginals to war with other tribes to acquire females into their tribes to strengthen their gene pools. I recall a recent documentary I watched which was with Indigenous women showing some of their knowledge passed from generations, one of which was to find fresh water. She dug a deep hole in the sand near a salt water lake to which the sand acted as a filter and was immediately able to drink the water.
In terms of “having a greater responsibility to make good choices” I agree, more so with your point on parents, I believe lies squarely with them directing and guiding the next generation. The challenge we all see here today is to a greater extent how dumbed down the younger generations are (from my perspective) all thanks to a breakdown in the family unit, single parent families, lack of father figure (more often than not) to teach some basic fundamentals and core moral values. Regarding slavery, like it or not, we could say we are slaves to our own survival, whether living off the grid or amongst our life’s conveniences.
you create a ridiculous straw man caricature of the lives of the majority of humans, living in pre agricultural times.
These people were living in prosperity because their needs were limited and their means effectively infinite.
They ate what they found, and what game they could catch - a diet unmatched for healthiness since. We try to imitate it with 'organic' vegetables and 'free range' meat and eggs, a simulacrum of what humanity once took for granted. What more did they need?
All clothing and possessions are fashioned from 'found materials'! Where are you getting your clothing and possessions from? Directly from God? Even if you knitted your socks from muons created in a particle accelerator you are still using 'found materials'! The only thing that has changed is the number of processes, people, machines and layers of capitalist exploitation between the finding of the materials and their use. Pre industrial people directly harvested their raw materials and transformed it into what they needed with their own skill and time, imbuing it with meaning, history, story, beauty. How satisfying! Now we must labour at drone-work so that an invisible supply chain can supply us with mass produced dross, at great expense to the biosphere and to ourselves.
What need had they to transform materials more thoroughly? None! So they made no poisons, no effluent, nothing that would not dissolve back into the earth in a few years. They did not poison themselves or their fellow creatures with their industrial waste.
We attempt to regain what we've lost through 'hobbies' where we carry out simulations of subsistence labour and first-hand craft-scale production. But the products of these labours are mediated through capitalism, and our primal desire to create what we need is just another thing to be monetised.
You say they had little choice of where to live! But they lived a life deeply embedded in their place, part of it, seeped through with it, knowing every inch, every tree, every beetle, the movements of the animals and the seasons of the plants. Their landscape was rich with story.
Unlike us, if they wanted to move, they could. In fact a circular dance of the seasons took in diverse food sources and places, each rich with meaning, their 'nomadic' movements a literal circle of life. Nomads are not rootless, they do not move without purpose, their homes are simply so big we cannot imagine them, cannot imagine how it felt to be at home in a territory spanning mountains, rivers, forests, just as we are at home in our living rooms. Without the burden of paperwork, passports, nationalities, they were at home in the world in a way we simply cannot conceive of.
You seem under a grave misunderstanding of the difference between nomads and farmers. Farmers are the ones who move, always looking for new land, expanding from the originating places of their culture, spreading like a disease across the world. Nomads are settled, once in a landscape, they generally stay there for many thousands of years. You should really read The Other Side of Eden by Hugh Brody to cure yourself of your agro-centrism.
They needed very little to prevent disease. Most of our diseases are of lifestyle or zoonotic, created by our exploitation of animals, or a product of overcrowding and poverty, people having to live in malarial swamps best avoided by humans. Without these diseases people in pre industrial and pre agricultural days lived a full lifespan. Do some research, you may be surprised to find human longevity, average lifespan of adults, has hardly increased and in many cases is lower in industrial societies than in hunter gatherer ones. Small groups of people, free to choose a healthy habitat for themselves, had then (and a few have now) a health and fitness and simple physicality few of us can imagine.
We also must respond when our environment changes. But how will we fare with our self created climate change? Gatherer-hunters could simply migrate, walk to the sea or the hills, taking with them what they needed. We have entire city-machines, rooted, immobile. Nation states. When we move to respond to change, there will be bloodshed and war, starvation, yet more horror. Our futuristic lifestyle is anything but 'future proof'.
Their lives were stable, for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Chance factors eliminated by their spread to diverse places, and the creativity of diverse, imaginative lifeways suited to their homes.
The creation of agriculture was a disaster. Crowded together with their animals, poxes and plagues crossed the species barrier to humans. Now there was land, that they depended on for food, land that could be stolen. Now there was wealth, buildings, stored food, livestock, that must be guarded, that could be stolen. Warfare was invented. Now there were power structures, the rich, the poor, hereditary bloodlines bestowing priviledge, the wealthy living without labour, the specialised labourer or craftsperson, blinded from making tiny jewellery for their masters, poisoned with the fumes of arsenical bronze... Now large tribes and nations, bands so big no-one could know everyone. Now myth and religion took on a new aspect providing much needed cohesion - cohesion that had once been provided by the natural intimacy of living, dancing and sharing food. Professionals emerged to mediate this social cohesion, kings to exploit it.
Property, misery, slavery, inequality, warfare, the blindfold of simulacra, simulation and super-reality, our orphaning from nature, bloodshed, nationhood, alienation, law, religion, exploitation, the murder of the very Earth, our unspeakable industrial scale cruelty to other forms of life and to ourselves. All followed in their course once the first seed was sown like some bloody handed ritual procession.
Thank you for the book recommendation, I will check out The Other Side of Eden.
As for the rest of this, I'm not sure if you're interested in a response? You sound very upset, and you don't seem like you would be open to debate.
If I'm wrong, maybe you can start by trying to rephrase my argument, in terms I would agree with. If you do that for me, then I will do the same for you. Once we're sure we understand each other, then we could discuss the evidence for/against our positions, or what might constitute such evidence.
That could be a way to reduce the heat and shed light on this topic. But only if you're interested.
I'm certainly open for debate, but you are perpetuating so many myths and falsehoods its hard to know where to start, and I suspect our worldviews are tragically so incompatible as to make discussion difficult. You are right I am angry, you slander the wisdom and capacity of the enormous majority of our human ancestors to promote something of no value, indeed something unbelievably harmful - the continuation of industrial 'civilization'.
Your argument seems to be that life before agriculture was primitive, brutish and short, and that everything got better and better once we had adopted agriculture and metallurgy.
I disagree with that entirely. I think human life and the life of many other beings has got continuously worse with agriculture and industrialisation, and human caused harms (which already affected megafauna even when we were all gatherer-hunters) have now reached a point where they threaten the entire biosphere.
I think what you call progress is an illusion. Humanity has made none.
What you call agency is also an illusion. The majority of humans have had very little agency since the dawning of the agricultural age when our increasing reliance on agriculture for subsistence took us away from a life we had evolved to live for hundreds of thousands of years.
Since then things have got only worse.
As human societies have increased in complexity, more and more of our lives have been devoted learning to navigate that complexity. As human social units have increased in size, power structures have become more elaborate with ever more power over the lives of people concentrated into ever fewer hands. Even the ancient right to walk away from a bad situation is long gone, we are prisoners in our human made constructs of nations, citizenship, wealth and poverty.
Many slave without agency to provide agency to a few.
And this is at the expense not just of humans, but of wider nature and other life-forms. The biosphere is pillaged to provide leisure and agency for a privileged elite.
All this violence was first defended with religion and myth and custom. Now the religions of economics, politics and scientism are the dominant ones. They defend the extraordinary violence of our 'civilization' not through moral imperatives, but simply by presenting it as inevitable. With a blur of mass media Newspeak imagined alternatives are banished and even the past is rewritten as a place of barbarism and labelled as 'primitive'. They apply a salve of imagined 'progress' to the wounds in our souls, but an imagined future cannot compensate for the horrors of today or yesterday.
Today our biggest threats, really our only threats, are the very systems we created to control natures. Especially, as we're moving from controlling nature to controlling fellow humans.
Another excellent piece. Thank you! The enrichment of the human affordance landscape is such an essential story to tell. I love it. Two thoughts:
1) I think for many there is a distinction between agency and capacity (ability) that is important to address. We undoubtedly have more ability - as you catalogued. Agency however has a strong connotation of the exercise of free will, or, at least, the feeling of exercising free will. The reason “We have radical agency over our information diet” is so contested is precisely because people do *not* feel in control of their choices in regards to the, unquestionably vast, set of abilities that things like social media provide them.
I think it’s still possible for a detractor to make a compelling argument that our capabilities have increased dramatically but our agency has on average decreased. E.g. by charting rates of addiction (a lack of agency in relationship to a behaviour) across drugs, gambling etc. It feels like this should be addressed or should find a way to avoid connotations around people’s choices rather than their ability by defining agency or using another word.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-with-drug-use-disorders
2) Love the title ‘The surrender of the Gods’ very spicy. Would not change 😅 and that progress includes an increased capacity of ideas is also important. However, I think the narrative of Enlightenment thinking as a clean break from religious thinking, with a focus on people like Massey, may be over-reified. It seems like a story about evolution of thought is more precise e.g. Newton was a devout believer and he and Kepler’s projects were very directly driven by a belief in and search for ‘universal laws’ that were an article of faith not of observation. Something to consider.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.6345
Thanks Ben. Your distinction between agency and ability is interesting. Fundamentally I believe that people *do* have the choice to exercise these abilities, whether they make that choice or not.
Regarding religion, I agree that Enlightenment thinking was nothing like a clean break from religious thinking, and I did not mean to imply that. The “gods” of the title are more of a reference to fate, to nature dominating human will. Although as I indicated, I do believe there was in the Enlightenment at least an erosion of, a shift away from, a view of the Christian God having this control over every aspect of life—this concept of providence.
Thanks! I think the fine-grained differences between agency, ability, and so forth can be really fertile ground. I am, for the most part, in the same boat that our default position should be to believe in people's ability to choose (their agency). Though I've also struggled with addiction in the past so I know that there are situations where you can feel totally powerless.
Completely agreed that there were significant erosions of certain Christian stories about determinism and so forth during the enlightenment. All very important parts of the story.
Note the causes of the megafauna extinction are contested. From GPT:
"The extinction of megafauna in the Americas, which occurred around the end of the Pleistocene epoch (approximately 10,000 years ago), is attributed to several factors. The most prominent theories include:
Human Overhunting (Overkill Hypothesis): The arrival of humans in the Americas, who were skilled hunters, led to the rapid overhunting of large animals. Evidence suggests that human populations expanded rapidly and hunted many of the megafauna to extinction. This theory is supported by the timing of megafaunal extinctions coinciding with the arrival of humans in various regions.
Climate Change: The end of the last Ice Age brought significant climatic changes, including warming temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and the transformation of ecosystems. These changes would have disrupted habitats and food sources, making it difficult for large animals to survive.
Combination of Factors: It's likely that a combination of human activities and climate change contributed to the extinctions. The changing environment may have made megafauna more vulnerable, and human hunting pressure could have been the final blow.
Disease: Some scientists propose that the introduction of new diseases by humans and their domestic animals might have contributed to the decline of megafauna.
Vegetation Changes: The shift in vegetation types due to climate change could have reduced the availability of suitable food for many large herbivores, leading to their decline and subsequent extinction.
Each of these factors likely played a role to varying degrees, and the exact cause of the megafaunal extinctions remains a topic of ongoing research and debate among scientists."
Good point, although the vast majority of claims in academia are contested. My feeling is that this one is like 75–80% confirmed? Our World in Data calls it “likely” and says there is “strong evidence to suggest” it.
Also this came out recently: https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1810218126199394811
Don't quote GPT as a source. It's not reliable.
Great work, brother! Well constructed & developed idea. Looking forward to the next chapter!
First of all, fantastic post. I don't think I've ever read quite such an effective depiction of how far we've come, and just how ubiquitous the fruits of that development.
I think you make a bit of an unjustified leap in the concluding section, when you offer that progress as a refutation of previous doomsayers:
> Toffler and others worried that as progress moves ever faster, the world will slip out of our grasp. But as we have just seen, the historical trend is the opposite: the world does change ever faster, but we get better at dealing with change.
But as you rightly note and the passage you quote from Toffler makes clear, his claim is that the impending progress he rightly foresaw would have severe negative effects on people- not that our capacity for dealing with those effects would diminish. Toffler, at least in your quotation, isn't saying that we won't "get better at dealing with change"; he's saying that the change to come would nevertheless overwhelm that capacity to some extent, causing the negative effects he predicted. And, returning to his words:
> I believe that most human beings alive today will find themselves increasingly disoriented and, therefore, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment. … Change is avalanching down upon our heads and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it … Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people.
... I would argue that this prediction seems to have largely been borne out, looking at eg increasing political polarisation on questions of fact, the apparent mental health crisis in the youth of the developed English speaking world which seems on early evidence to be linked to social media usage, etc.
The fact that we are adapting increasingly rapidly to increasingly rapid change (as one might predict, observing the same dynamics in biological evolutionary systems) doesn't imply that this acceleration will continue to outpace the acceleration of change to the extent that the change remains a net positive. And it certainly doesn't refute Toffler's claim that such change would "disorient, bewilder, and crush many people".
This is but one part of a series, of course, so I wouldn't expect you to have fully developed the optimist case by this point. But I do think the case needs to be developed further before you can fairly see "we have seen" Toffler's predictions to be falsified- or that his example therefore provides evidence against similar claims today.
Thanks for your perspective. To me it seems clear that even if some people are suffering some negative effects, they are not “disoriented, bewildered and crushed.” But maybe this it not obvious.
I think the concerns about polarization and mental health are real but overblown.
That's fair. I think it's easy to overstate the extent of this as well, so I don't entirely disagree with you about "crushed" in particular; it's important to keep in mind that people are still overwhelmingly better off than ever before in almost every way, as you convincingly argue.
I think it's fair to say that this prediction is being borne out to a certain extent, though, if you agree that polarisation and mental health concerns are real:
> find themselves increasingly disoriented and, therefore, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment
I will simply respond to the last paragraph. Most people living in the world today do not design, manage, or understand in any meaningful way the human made systems that direct the course of Much of our lives. At least we understand that it’s impossible to control the weather. When another human designs a system for his own benefit and our harm, we rightly see that as a greater loss of agency than merely being at the mercy of a storm or earthquake.
We have the choice to carefully study how the human made system can harm us, then we can make an informed decision whether we accept the risk/benefit ratio or not and , finally, the choice to take precautions against the possible harm. Of course choosing not to choose is also a choice.
I have very much enjoyed this essay, but it takes the techno optimist view that everything is computable & knowable - that nature can be subverted to our ends if we have enough ‘compute’ & that progress is accelerating but gradual. Let us imagine that world of complete foresight & acceleration … we would exist in a state of rapid phase shift & collapse. We can’t defeat the 2nd law of TD so more compute / more knowledge will not equal happy, autonomous, rational humans making great choices that optimise their wellbeing. It will mean chaos & disorder. It will be equivalent to my Facebook feed circa 2010 - a transition from slow, ordered, individual posts where I could apply system 2 & engage … to rapid, curated murmurations of information that forced me into System 1 mode. Until I switched off. Moreover, the gradualism that should afford resilient, linear progress that we can absorb bit by bit, disappears at times of rapid phase shifts. The system becomes more fragile & to maintain order in a fragile system takes top down control. So rapid phase shifts in an accelerating world do not signal cuddly democracy & citizens assemblies. They signal authoritarianism, fascism & resource grabs. As we have seen at every phase shift in history. Technological progress is great if the result is improved species fitness - longer, happier, healthier lives on average (not just more people) - but most human progress has been zero sum where we have reduced variation & diversity elsewhere in favour of top down control & order. Yes, we have supermarkets full of food but the global diversity of food & diet has diminished enormously. The American poverty diet of UPFs is not about rational lifestyle choices but about coercion from a controlling economic ecosystem. Yes, I can call my cousin in Australia over zoom but the diversity of languages, culture, rituals is all narrowing in our global ‘progressive’ world. Yes, we can fix the ozone layer & predict climate change but the ozone layer was a linear problem while climate change is complex. It will be like the sorry fate of the Bayesian yacht - slow then very fast & gone. The Luddites & saboteurs threw their clogs into the works but this was ineffective. The only adequate response to technology, authoritarianism & top down coercion is local level reorganisation. The societal leaps forward that are, in this essay, extrapolated into better lives for all in the future, were only achieved through good, old-fashioned co-operation & human behaviours that counterbalanced the top down coercion of ‘progress’. The world is not linear, it doesn’t tend towards justice, & technology does not increase species fitness by itself. It is self-organisation, co-operation & reciprocity - all as old as time - that help us seat technological advances within a human space.
Thank you for your article; I appreciate your theory. I believe that only through development can we solve the problems brought about by development.
Thank you again Jason for your fine words. Regarding your comment: “Our primitive ancestors lived at the mercy of nature”.
Yet today, dare I say “nature worshippers” who sees humanity as evil, probably don’t give consideration how tough nature can be and has been to humanity, only giving thought to how nature has been defiled in the present and by our long past ancestors (whom they deem to be removed from history) without acknowledging the wondrous things mankind has harnessed with nature as you pointed out in your last chapter - Fish in water.
With regards to how our ancestors lived, let me say this, (and I know you have made some highlights on this further in this chapter) in Australia, the indigenous population has been here for about 60,000 years which had comprised of approximately 250 languages with over 500 different nations within Australia. These people became experts in living with nature, as have many indigenous peoples throughout the world. One of the things Australian aboriginals mastered was hunting. Archeological evidence shows that at the time aboriginals came to Australia, there was also a corresponding decline in the larger animal species population which eventually became extinct. These were slower moving animals, that were easy to hunt and a good resource for protein. However, this is not often raised with people who (once again) want to demonize humanity’s nature when in fact, the extinction of native species has been going on at the hands on humans well before western civilization. Having said that, indigenous people also have an affinity to respecting nature too and knowing how to manage the natural environment around them to contribute to their own sustainability (when Australia was first colonized, it was coined “The land of the great white smoke” due to the amount of controlled burning the aboriginals used to conduct).
As for survivability, it was not uncommon for Australian aboriginals to war with other tribes to acquire females into their tribes to strengthen their gene pools. I recall a recent documentary I watched which was with Indigenous women showing some of their knowledge passed from generations, one of which was to find fresh water. She dug a deep hole in the sand near a salt water lake to which the sand acted as a filter and was immediately able to drink the water.
In terms of “having a greater responsibility to make good choices” I agree, more so with your point on parents, I believe lies squarely with them directing and guiding the next generation. The challenge we all see here today is to a greater extent how dumbed down the younger generations are (from my perspective) all thanks to a breakdown in the family unit, single parent families, lack of father figure (more often than not) to teach some basic fundamentals and core moral values. Regarding slavery, like it or not, we could say we are slaves to our own survival, whether living off the grid or amongst our life’s conveniences.
you create a ridiculous straw man caricature of the lives of the majority of humans, living in pre agricultural times.
These people were living in prosperity because their needs were limited and their means effectively infinite.
They ate what they found, and what game they could catch - a diet unmatched for healthiness since. We try to imitate it with 'organic' vegetables and 'free range' meat and eggs, a simulacrum of what humanity once took for granted. What more did they need?
All clothing and possessions are fashioned from 'found materials'! Where are you getting your clothing and possessions from? Directly from God? Even if you knitted your socks from muons created in a particle accelerator you are still using 'found materials'! The only thing that has changed is the number of processes, people, machines and layers of capitalist exploitation between the finding of the materials and their use. Pre industrial people directly harvested their raw materials and transformed it into what they needed with their own skill and time, imbuing it with meaning, history, story, beauty. How satisfying! Now we must labour at drone-work so that an invisible supply chain can supply us with mass produced dross, at great expense to the biosphere and to ourselves.
What need had they to transform materials more thoroughly? None! So they made no poisons, no effluent, nothing that would not dissolve back into the earth in a few years. They did not poison themselves or their fellow creatures with their industrial waste.
We attempt to regain what we've lost through 'hobbies' where we carry out simulations of subsistence labour and first-hand craft-scale production. But the products of these labours are mediated through capitalism, and our primal desire to create what we need is just another thing to be monetised.
You say they had little choice of where to live! But they lived a life deeply embedded in their place, part of it, seeped through with it, knowing every inch, every tree, every beetle, the movements of the animals and the seasons of the plants. Their landscape was rich with story.
Unlike us, if they wanted to move, they could. In fact a circular dance of the seasons took in diverse food sources and places, each rich with meaning, their 'nomadic' movements a literal circle of life. Nomads are not rootless, they do not move without purpose, their homes are simply so big we cannot imagine them, cannot imagine how it felt to be at home in a territory spanning mountains, rivers, forests, just as we are at home in our living rooms. Without the burden of paperwork, passports, nationalities, they were at home in the world in a way we simply cannot conceive of.
You seem under a grave misunderstanding of the difference between nomads and farmers. Farmers are the ones who move, always looking for new land, expanding from the originating places of their culture, spreading like a disease across the world. Nomads are settled, once in a landscape, they generally stay there for many thousands of years. You should really read The Other Side of Eden by Hugh Brody to cure yourself of your agro-centrism.
They needed very little to prevent disease. Most of our diseases are of lifestyle or zoonotic, created by our exploitation of animals, or a product of overcrowding and poverty, people having to live in malarial swamps best avoided by humans. Without these diseases people in pre industrial and pre agricultural days lived a full lifespan. Do some research, you may be surprised to find human longevity, average lifespan of adults, has hardly increased and in many cases is lower in industrial societies than in hunter gatherer ones. Small groups of people, free to choose a healthy habitat for themselves, had then (and a few have now) a health and fitness and simple physicality few of us can imagine.
We also must respond when our environment changes. But how will we fare with our self created climate change? Gatherer-hunters could simply migrate, walk to the sea or the hills, taking with them what they needed. We have entire city-machines, rooted, immobile. Nation states. When we move to respond to change, there will be bloodshed and war, starvation, yet more horror. Our futuristic lifestyle is anything but 'future proof'.
Their lives were stable, for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Chance factors eliminated by their spread to diverse places, and the creativity of diverse, imaginative lifeways suited to their homes.
The creation of agriculture was a disaster. Crowded together with their animals, poxes and plagues crossed the species barrier to humans. Now there was land, that they depended on for food, land that could be stolen. Now there was wealth, buildings, stored food, livestock, that must be guarded, that could be stolen. Warfare was invented. Now there were power structures, the rich, the poor, hereditary bloodlines bestowing priviledge, the wealthy living without labour, the specialised labourer or craftsperson, blinded from making tiny jewellery for their masters, poisoned with the fumes of arsenical bronze... Now large tribes and nations, bands so big no-one could know everyone. Now myth and religion took on a new aspect providing much needed cohesion - cohesion that had once been provided by the natural intimacy of living, dancing and sharing food. Professionals emerged to mediate this social cohesion, kings to exploit it.
Property, misery, slavery, inequality, warfare, the blindfold of simulacra, simulation and super-reality, our orphaning from nature, bloodshed, nationhood, alienation, law, religion, exploitation, the murder of the very Earth, our unspeakable industrial scale cruelty to other forms of life and to ourselves. All followed in their course once the first seed was sown like some bloody handed ritual procession.
Thank you for the book recommendation, I will check out The Other Side of Eden.
As for the rest of this, I'm not sure if you're interested in a response? You sound very upset, and you don't seem like you would be open to debate.
If I'm wrong, maybe you can start by trying to rephrase my argument, in terms I would agree with. If you do that for me, then I will do the same for you. Once we're sure we understand each other, then we could discuss the evidence for/against our positions, or what might constitute such evidence.
That could be a way to reduce the heat and shed light on this topic. But only if you're interested.
I'm certainly open for debate, but you are perpetuating so many myths and falsehoods its hard to know where to start, and I suspect our worldviews are tragically so incompatible as to make discussion difficult. You are right I am angry, you slander the wisdom and capacity of the enormous majority of our human ancestors to promote something of no value, indeed something unbelievably harmful - the continuation of industrial 'civilization'.
Your argument seems to be that life before agriculture was primitive, brutish and short, and that everything got better and better once we had adopted agriculture and metallurgy.
I disagree with that entirely. I think human life and the life of many other beings has got continuously worse with agriculture and industrialisation, and human caused harms (which already affected megafauna even when we were all gatherer-hunters) have now reached a point where they threaten the entire biosphere.
Go and live as a hunter gatherer and let us know how it goes.
I think what you call progress is an illusion. Humanity has made none.
What you call agency is also an illusion. The majority of humans have had very little agency since the dawning of the agricultural age when our increasing reliance on agriculture for subsistence took us away from a life we had evolved to live for hundreds of thousands of years.
Since then things have got only worse.
As human societies have increased in complexity, more and more of our lives have been devoted learning to navigate that complexity. As human social units have increased in size, power structures have become more elaborate with ever more power over the lives of people concentrated into ever fewer hands. Even the ancient right to walk away from a bad situation is long gone, we are prisoners in our human made constructs of nations, citizenship, wealth and poverty.
Many slave without agency to provide agency to a few.
And this is at the expense not just of humans, but of wider nature and other life-forms. The biosphere is pillaged to provide leisure and agency for a privileged elite.
All this violence was first defended with religion and myth and custom. Now the religions of economics, politics and scientism are the dominant ones. They defend the extraordinary violence of our 'civilization' not through moral imperatives, but simply by presenting it as inevitable. With a blur of mass media Newspeak imagined alternatives are banished and even the past is rewritten as a place of barbarism and labelled as 'primitive'. They apply a salve of imagined 'progress' to the wounds in our souls, but an imagined future cannot compensate for the horrors of today or yesterday.
Today our biggest threats, really our only threats, are the very systems we created to control natures. Especially, as we're moving from controlling nature to controlling fellow humans.