lazer-guided commentaries

mikeb has just lent me “Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern”, by John Gray. I’m already in the middle of Gray’s “Straw Dogs”, but I haven’t let that stop me getting stuck in to this one. The volume is a little slimmer than “Straw Dogs”, and according to the author it’s a more straightforward presentation of a smaller, simpler idea. I haven’t got much further than page 34 yet, but I already have a few comments.

Scarcity, Poverty and War

[p.27] The Positivist catechism had three main tenets. First, history is driven by the power of science; growing knowledge and new technology are the ultimate determinants of change in human society. Second, science will enable natural scarcity to be overcome; once that has been achieved, the immemorial evils of poverty and war will be banished forever. Third, progress in science and progress in ethics and politics go together; as scientific knowledge advances and becomes more systematically organised, human values will increasingly converge.

“Straw Dogs” attacks the “myth of progress”, and in a lot of ways I agree with the analysis given there, and so I’ll let the first and third points stand without further comment. The second point is interesting, though. It combines what to me are two separate ideas:

• first, that science will enable natural scarcity to be overcome; and

• second, that scarcity is the cause of poverty and war.

At the moment I believe that (a limited form of) the first of these is quite plausible: if some of the more optimistic scenarios involving molecular nanotechnology come about, for instance, we will more-or-less have eliminated any kind of natural scarcity of physical resources. Some scarcity will remain, however, both in less "natural" forms of scarcity - such as the limited number of square metres on the surface of the planet open to insolation for solar-power-harnessing purposes, or the perverse hoarding or rationing of physical resources by human organisations - and less physical forms of scarcity, such as access to ideas and communications.

The second part I don't find as convincing. Certainly scarcity and poverty seem to be closely linked - I find it plausible that eliminating competition for physical resources could significantly reduce poverty - but war has many causes, scarcity of resources not necessarily greatest among them (as Gray points out elsewhere). In fact even if it were the case that eliminating scarcity on the whole massively reduced the incidences of poverty and war, I believe that human social organisation would still be chaotic enough to suffer through bouts of poverty and war of pseudorandom onset and duration. Rationality is no cure for a chaotic system.

Capitalism as Chaotic System

Gray discusses Count Henri de Saint-Simon's views. Saint-Simon was, according to Gray, the "first modern socialist", and "attacked market capitalism as anarchic, wasteful and chronically unstable" [p.29]. While I'm not sure I agree with "wasteful", I certainly agree with "anarchic" and particularly "chronically unstable"!

I find Saint-Simon's views interesting because they were formed around the end of the 1700s, long, long before chaos theory was developed. These days there's a lot of solid evidence and theory to back up people's experiences of capitalism's instability. I'm not sure of the details of modern non-socialist views of market capitalism, but I'd be surprised if chaos theory was accounted for in many of them. Certainly many of the modern socialist views I hear seem to be unaware of the implications of chaos theory.

Seeing the world as a chaotic system goes a long way to debunking the notion that poverty and war will be vanquished by science and technology. Every stable period will be disrupted, guaranteed, unless our world is transformed into a non-chaotic system. This seems unlikely.

Technological Utopias, Chaos Theory and Tegmark's Multiverse

Could there be something about SL4-style technological utopias that can avoid the chaos in the system? I believe that although the answer is in general no, certain kinds of strongly technological future could provide a stabilising influence. Chaos is inescapable, but chaotic systems can certainly be damped.

People living in some post-singularity world might be able to insulate themselves from most of the buffeting provided by the chaotic system that is physical reality. If they so chose, this insulation could be extended to isolation, a form of technologically assisted solipsism; however, even the most carefully-built technological retreat is still at the mercy of chaos theory, at least according to the physics we know today. Technological solipsism can't last forever. For those not living a temporary calm solipsist existence in our hypothetical post-singularity world, things will most likely continue chaotically as they do at present despite more uniform access to physical resources, with the same madness of crowds we experience today.

More support for the ineluctability of a chaotic future comes from recent developments in cosmology. In a recent series of articles [1, 2], Max Tegmark outlined a framework for considering the different types of possible universes that might be said to exist in some overarching multiverse of which we are a part, and investigated the possibilities of exploring the existence and properties of the various universes experimentally. One of the levels in his classification system corresponds to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The many-worlds interpretation implies that it is not possible to arrange for a stable, non-chaotic progression of events. No matter how much control over physical reality we attain, there would always (seem to) be random events that could not be accounted for. Even if human society were in the abstract a non-chaotic system, the fact that the concrete human society we live in is embedded in a physical reality would mean that at some level every process tied to the physical world is chaotic, no matter how ordered it may seem to current human observation.

Knowledge and Chaos

[p.29] Every society must pass through a series of definite stages. [...] In each of [these stages], human knowledge becomes more definite and - a vitally important point for the Positivists - more systematically organised.

That is, chaos is eliminated from the collection of human knowledge. This is an interesting idea - not on the scale of societal development, as Saint-Simon would have it, but on the scale of current ongoing scientific research. It might even be true for some fields (in the short and medium term, at least), such the core of classical physics or the central results of computer science and mathematics. Even though occasional reorganisations happen, perhaps it is the case that each reorganisation lowers the disorder in the system. Are we seeing an annealing process in the body of human knowledge as a whole?

On the other hand, what if attractor theory operates in the organisation of scientific knowledge? Perhaps the body of knowledge as a whole never settles down. Certainly new areas of knowledge are being discovered all the time - perhaps all this activity at the edges leads to a scale-free-network effect, with the overall disorder remaining constant.

Social Ritual

Gray dismisses the rituals created for the Positivist Religion of Humanity as "eminently ridiculous" [p.34]. Are they really? How are they more ridiculous than many other religious rituals? And aren't we missing social ritual as the kernel of our communities today? There are no longer any coming-of-age rituals - the traditional NZ 18th and 21st birthdays have become diluted and lost their entering-into-full-adulthood focus, and there are no entry-to-young-adulthood ceremonies in contemporary NZ society. All we have left are the core ceremonies of marriages and funerals. Even birth celebrations have been diluted - a christening requires christianity, and no secular alternative has gained real momentum.