The theme this week is simple – yet not so simple: All will be well.
It’s about systemic thinking – how all things rhyme and relate to other things, and how it’s merely a (necessary) convenience to identify “things” in the first place – beginning as infants with our mother’s breast.
That’s the metaphysics that organizes my reality; now let’s get real.
I’m an optimist, but not a Pollyanna. Much is wrong with the world, and some of it will get worse. In fact, I’m something of a misanthrope; but despite my increasingly dim view of human nature – and the increasingly manifest frailty of the American democratic experiment – I believe in moral and institutional progress, which I guess is ultimately a reflection of our better angels. As Martin Luther King put it: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”.
King also said, perhaps more profoundly, that “hate is too great a burden to bear.” I’m still working on that one.
My argument here might surprise or even shock you, and I’m not entirely certain of it. Certainty on such big matters is always dangerous. But I think technology, for all its flaws and predations, will ultimately save us from ourselves, at least in the long term. It will save us, in particular, from itself, by solving some of the problems it creates. Maybe that’s not a great hope, but it’s our only hope.
Two reasons, two separate “logics,” converge here. And I’m using “logic” in one of the senses outlined in Inside the Liberal Arts: to describe the general rules that organize large systems. Yes, it’s a little abstract; chalk it up to the wondrous capacities of the human mind, if that mind has done the reading.
One of those logics is that science, and technology as its practical application, is cumulative, unstoppably progressive, and even, in an important if limited sense, democratic. Science is universal, because there’s only one nature; while there may be rival theories, there can only be one reality, one set of workable truths about how nature works. It’s the same in Kansas and Korea. (Of course it evolves; sun dials and steam engines were workable truths until something else – more efficient if not better – came along.)
Such progress stumbles and slows (think of how hard it’s been to develop efficient car batteries since their first use in the 1890’s); but it never stops or goes backwards – we don’t forget how to do stuff and make stuff – and it shows no obvious signs of slowing. As a non-scientist, I suspect the exact contrary is true: that at least in some key areas, scientific progress accelerates exponentially.
I’m certainly not a devotee of scientism, the idea that science is always good or cures everything. As a critical thinker, I never want to put all my eggs in one basket, much less that one. Democracy is more important, human rights are more important, than any machine or medicine that science can yield. Liberal learning is more important, because you can’t have democracy without liberal learning.
But great breakthroughs are on the horizon: hydrogen power, nuclear fusion, green energy. At some point, and I think it restates an iron law of history, autonomous vehicles will be safe and universally used. These developments will create significant social and political problems to be sure; but politics can solve them – with the help of science. New technologies will increase the salience and urgency of liberal learning to understand them and to manage them.
I’m not saying science can manage or police itself. These technologies, their benefits and dangers, will have to be understood by non-experts (meaning almost all of us). We will need, among other things, to identify new ways to create meaningful and useful work as machines take over more jobs. But technology will advance, and if AI doesn’t kill us all (we have not yet taken the measure of it) it will ultimately help mankind more than it hurts.
The second “logic” of positivity regarding the future is that while technology has many perverse functions and potentials (think of weaponry) and differential benefits in the short run, ultimately it diffuses across national and even socio-economic boundaries. That’s the sense in which it’s democratic. A group of scientists, aided by telecommunications and the internet, develop a Covid vaccine, and billions of people benefit. Not everyone in the world has a cellphone – but billions do. Sooner or later, new tools get around. Other things being equal (which they never are exactly) they work everywhere.
Globally, poverty has declined sharply over the past half-century. Barring massive ecological or public health disasters (which is saying a lot) that trend should continue. It’s also due to the spread of democracy, which in recent years has been in decline. Democracies don’t always thrive, but they are a more efficient use of human capital.
Even disasters won’t stop technological progress, unless they are extinction events. That’s because, as I’ve suggested, technology is cumulative human knowledge about how to manipulate nature. (I say this as a radical environmentalist). It’s essentially irreversible. It’s stored knowledge that we experience in trains, planes, and automobiles.
This isn’t a fairy tale of a bright future. There are dark days ahead, and things are pretty dark right now. Autocracy is on the rise in the world and here at home. Trump is not its last tribune.
I don’t love machines unless they help more than hurt humanity. I don’t think ten-year-olds should have cellphones. I don’t think five-year-olds should have computers. And I don’t think two-year-olds should even watch “Sesame Street.” Social media and the internet are numbing and dumbing us, and especially hurting our teenagers.
But on a grander scale, I still think our embedded knowledge will save us from our lesser angels. We have to hope so, in a country where science-deniers and climate-deniers have great power. A country that performed miserably when put to the test by a worldwide pandemic, that resisted vaccinations, mask-wearing, and social-distancing (Australia did far better).
We have a lot of stupidity and ignorance to overcome here in America, and that is our biggest problem: ourselves. But in the end, I believe science will win out over its two great nemeses: anti-science (the denial of proven facts about nature) and itself (being capable of wreaking vast harm to humanity). Technology, because it isn’t monolithic or monovalent, can save us from the worst predations of other technology.
It doesn’t take a majority of the U.S. Senate to figure out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere on a massive scale, but scientists are working on it. We will learn that technology is only here to serve us and will make it serve us fairly and well. We will take to heart the words of Henry David Thoreau in Walden: “All our machines are but improved means to an unimproved end.”
In the end, as I hope and believe, William Faulkner got it right in his 1950 Nobel speech, when he said that mankind won’t just survive, it will prevail. Even if it isn’t an eternal truth, it’s one we must live by.