Overcoming
fatal flaw in progressivism and evolution
Faith
in progress has mostly been a positive force in human society, especially when
it led to some exuberance in the 1960s. But only lately have I started to hear
about “progressivism” as a kind of secular religion, though at times it becomes
a religious religion. The key tenet: Even if we don’t pay to much attention to
the details, we can be sure that progress in science and technology will always
be the path forward to an ever better state of life. In its most extreme forms –
progressivism, like sharia Islam, tries to exclude dialogue which questions its
basic premises. I see more promise in a variety of spiritual progressivism, developed
by Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin describes “evolution” as a process which can
take us ever onwards and upwards.
Problem number one: the
trilobite (or trilobyte?). Never forget the trilobyte. Really serious students
of evolutionary biology noticed long ago that evolutionary “progress” often
leads to a dead end and extinction. Detailed quantitative studies, decades ago
(Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, by R. May), showed that the
natural process of evolution simply is not a reliable path upwards. To the
extent that real mainstream science understood the natural process of evolution
in the twentieth century – it was less a matter of guaranteed progress and more
a process of guaranteed entropy, viewed as a path towards disorder eventually
going to a “heat death” (or lifeless rocks in space). Current politics on earth
seem much more like that, like the phenomenon of old age.
The politics of technology
are very much a key part of this story, because wrong directions (entropy) in
the development of technology are central to all three of the clear threats of
human extinction in sight today (which I have referred to as “H2S/NUC/AI” for
short). Faith that all new technology
and all new knowledge get us closer to survival... would be comforting, but it
is perhaps even more dangerous to humanity than the mindless faith that there
is no such thing as climate change.
Based on life experience, I
would agree with Teilhard, Jung and Verdansky that there exists something real
and active out there like what they called “noosphere” or “collective mind”. (I
can’t get myself to write “unconscious”, since that is misleading. When a young
male full of testosterone responds very intensely to a female stimulus which he
tries to ignore, it is a bit misleading to describe him as “unconscious” of the
stimulus, no matter what he actually says or does about it. Unless he is really
crazy.)
In fact: how could there be
any hope at all for the human species, given the growing entropy and new risks
and lack of the conscious response needed to solve the complex problems?
In my view... the only hope
lies in the implications of a theory which most people do not understand but
which I find very compelling. (In a way, this is like my post on FTL travel,
where hope – i.e., a nonzero probability of success – is totally dependent on
the possibility that one of the theories of physics which would allow it might
be true.) In this case, the theory is that our noosphere... the noosphere of earth...
is not just a product of local entropy, but is a member of a much larger
species, constructed from dark matter or something more exotic, which has
evolved a certain kind of specific anti-entropic trait analogous to the traits
in human bodies which allow them a longer lifetime than most other species.
Only by fully expressing those noosphere-level traits do we have a chance of
avoiding “old age” very soon. (Some of the scary, aged, creaking zombie brains
I see on TV remind me of this every day...). As a crude approximation... I see
these three most fundamental... inner imperatives?... to be something like “the
spirit of benevolence/love” (ala Yeshua, on the spiritual level, expressed by
angels who start with “fear not...”), “the spirit of truth” (no denigration of
mathematics or the scientific method, or repression of core realities of free
thought and free speech, is tenable under this constraint) and rational
impedance matching (RIM). RIM is the hardest for me, and very tricky. It
includes sincere efforts, for example, to avoid writing so many details that it
hurts people’s brains... something I have found it hard to learn... and it
includes real respect for privacy, more than what progressivists like Brin can
respect, and it includes not telling wild children how to build bombs which
could blow up the entire earth. (It is
related to the issues of balancing sparsity and connectivity in neural
networks.) It is awkward and problematic, requiring lots and lots of heavy analysis, but without it... the present entropy of low-consciousness policies is ever more worrisome.
But these inner disciplines
are not enough... besides a proper formal structure (like the US or German
Constitutions of the time I write), there are certain key essential elements of
“corporate culture” (as in the book by Ashkenasy et al, which I cite in my
article in Bainbridge’s book on Leadership in S&T). The “legal corruption”
in the US today is an example of a mid-level problem severe enough to end up in
deaths of all humans on earth if it is not corrected. (No exaggeration:
studying scenarios for H2S/NUC/AI... it is quite real.)
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But then: let me conclude with some humor, as I track
the political process in the US (a narrow but serious spiritual duty, in my
view).
In the recent” town hall”
quasidebate, a CNN reporter asked Clinton: “Do you really believe all that
about a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get you?” She replied: “Don’t you.
Let’s be real...” Some people thought
she may be too paranoid. I sadly worry that she may not be paranoid enough. For
example, some folks without a DC background ask: “How could we trust a
candidate who is under FBI investigation?” My response: “How can we trust
candidates who support folks like Lamar Smith in empowering them to use the FBI
as their own personal hit squad to attack rivals, and try to enforce a new rule
that folks in Cheney’s obedient network dictate even to the President how to
handle sensitive strategic information? How does the judgment of Cheney’s
unelected cronies get to override the right of a Secretary of State to make
strategic judgments?” The problem with Benghazi was that Clinton gave TOO MUCH
ground to those folks. She and Sanders seem to think that the problem of
corruption is all about election money and legislation... while seeming blind
to the vast corruption and re-management of the actual administrative apparatus.
I certainly remember the shock on the face of a new government hire saying: “I
still don’t know what to do... they tell us we have to follow a certain reporting
chain which is kind of extreme in not being what they told us in the law and in
the Constitution. But I can see how they have re-engineered the whistleblowing
function too...”
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And then...
There are lots of amusing
ways to try to be in touch with the personal and also the collective
unconscious. Jung’s “synchronicity” is
certainly part of that.
I was rather struck,
consciously, when, after one of those Sanders/Clinton exchanges, a face
appeared... “Bernie...
the greatest scam of the twentieth
century.” OK, it was a commercial for a movie about Bernie Madoff, but the
timing and the feeling of the face and so on... is it an authentic
psychological shadow of how many people feel? TBD. And then... I realized that
the new big teddy bear commercial really reflects a side or view of Trump...
which has more power in the collective unconscious than many would expect. (Beautiful
women all over him... big, orangeish, fluffy... leaving a question about depth
of understanding...). I then wondered: are there any others like that? The New
York State commercial... Clinton and that commercial project real New York
values much more than Trump’s events... incredible efficiency and cleanliness
and progress compared to those others... yet where are the people? Hopefully
not subsumed by a threatening possible disaster like Watson. (I even posted a brief,
direct comment on the site of “Watson for President.”) This is related to the
people worried about “does she care about people like me?” And finally, there
is also a commercial with a guy being shot at on the phone to his mother... “please vote for my baby. He is a bit
challenged, but..” Guess which candidate lines up with the commercial for
Spectre, trying to take control of the world in a grossly cynical way
(promoting a corporate and spiritual culture guaranteed.... to provoke more
than you kind folks might ever imagine... like my recent blog post on the 900
pound gorilla, which sanitized the possible future world-line).
Minor detail... one more very
small but startling (to me) bit of evidence on the time stuff I talked about
before.
Best of luck. We still all
very much need it.
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