Nature is a tyrant! Whenever we want or need to “think outside the box,” we’re left with only images and constructions of other boxes. Betterment must subsist on the insipid nutriment of extant reality and experience. We are confined to the dictates of physical boundaries, to mechanistic biology, to reflex and experience; and all our so-called “achievement” is a sham.
Nature is kindest to those who have been perchance advantaged by its caprice. And it is most unkind to those whom nature has presided over like a cruel, insensate monster. Nature is whimsy as much as method; it provides inexplicably and arbitrarily and clumsily; nature tenderly blesses as a tidal wave quenches.
What is our nature?
Humans have many aspects to their nature. It is our nature to be caring. But it is also our nature to be selfish – not closely related to caring at all. Nature makes us curious. And the familiar toady obsequy in our nature is predictive: our nature also makes of us mindless followers.
And, that basic span of skills, adaptations and predilections that nature has given us has brought us to the point of having the potential to compete with nature in crafting the future of our planet and our species.
All of that seems very promising. However, there are some challenges that cannot be solved by any of our seemingly infinite talents. We will not direct our evolution beyond the constraints of a limited array of immutable laws of the physical universe.
Throughout all human history, we’ve looked in supplication to the sky and asked, “Why”? We never listened for the answer, imagining it was too obscure to be known – or, being made to ‘know’, we’d reckon a masculine voice bearing an answer. But perhaps God does not intervene in our universe of misfortune not because God is weak or God is uncaring, but because God too exists in a world of unrelenting and disappointing sigh-truth, a metaphysics where to mercifully intervene is to don the very seminal identity of the tyrant. Who intervenes without an intention to control, and who unilaterally controls without assuming the nuclear mechanism of tyranny? Such is the unbridgeable philosophical difficulty of divine intervention in human affairs.
Would this, if it were so, render a merciful God powerless? The answer is No! The intervention of God cannot be fairly and correctly regarded as unilateral if it follows on the supplication of prayer or prayerful faith and does not interfere in free action (a.k.a. “free will”), but (however mysteriously and invisibly) renders the experience of mercy and of hope.
We have gotten to where we are as a species, with all our linguistic and technological and artistic accomplishments, in large part because of our inborn desire to create. Males have always invented and created – outside the obvious fact of procreative processes – more than have women. But this is now thought to be the result purely of the primitive and habitual cultural practices of human societies, where the most physically imposing of the tribe dictated the political order of things, advantaging the puissant, of course: the males. This theory, however compelling, neglects one very glaring disparity between the sexes: women create, by elemental biology (in reproduction), where men must go to especial lengths to create anything. (And the argument that men too procreate is too absurd to treat here with more than a momentary aside. The physical creature arrives from the person of either the male or the female, and in that most incontrovertible and transpicuous actuality of giving birth it certainly looks like that single creature – the female – is the creator!) Thus, so long as women have an unequal and superior procreative role, so too the male will have a relatively unequal social-aspirational creative role, as a kind of social-psychological/psychological/instrumental compensation. Or, looking at the matter from the opposite perspective, procrating females will feel fulfillment that results in lesser ambition equivalent to each woman’s real procreative role.
We all desire to create, male and female alike. This desire has led to building – of everything, from cities to machines to medicines and philosophies. We see the upside; we see progress and advancement and innovation. What is there, but there in such beguiling invisibility, is the cyclopean problem inherent in our species’ creative aspect. We can’t just call an end to it! We can’t intellectually see the futility in continuing on a certain path and redirect our efforts! Our modern political ethic is infused with freedom and independence; we must always be allowed to go our own way as individuals and remain free to innovate as we wish.
But such a course includes the central elements of calamity and disaster.
Restrictive laws can be passed, many international agreements signed, but these cannot have the effect of making transgression and violation nonexistent. Where there is money to be made, fame to be got, accolades to be enjoyed, the want to make history to guide as the cynosure, we will see men and women act, with or without the full sanction of laws and society.
Unfortunately, as gravity forces its quarry to earth after every ephemeral flight, so too our efforts to create and innovate cannot be contained or sated; we will continue creating, because it is in our nature to do so; we gain essential meaning in our lives in the act of creating, and this cause-effect cannot and will not be undone. What unbiased logic forecasts then is quite disturbing. Governments will certainly try at some constraint, some limitation, as a recipe for survival, and our efforts will be profoundly frustrated by the fact that our own creative nature is at odds with the conservative ambition to limit and to thus merely survive – through threat after threat after threat. And an example of this problem is in legislative prohibition of the cloning of human beings. We can make laws against it, but we cannot prevent it. But, sometimes, our survival will depend not on the fact of there being established laws, but on the fact of something actually not happening. These are two quite different things!
None of us now have a strategy for our surviving the global threat to our species from nuclear weapons. The specter looms over humankind decade after decade, and we have no real solutions.
Does a hundred years seem like a very long time? It is a human lifetime: not very long! In the next one hundred years, we will reach what scientists call “the technological singularity – an infinitely fascinating topic! The singularity is that juncture – now less than a hundred years off – where artificial computational power (computer thinking ability) exceeds the ability of the human mind. From such an eventuality forward, futurists have contended, nothing can be predicted. The singularity hence marks a puzzlement in the history of human affairs. The fantastical potential of quantum computing and the singularity will bring forth a peculiar development/innovation trajectory where change may come faster and far more unpredictably than anyone can guess.
At any rate, it is worrisome that life should reach a point – no, not a thousand years from now, but quite likely in the present century – where nothing can be predicted. Can computers really save us from ourselves, from our incessant need to make and control things, from our perforce-creative biology? It surely seems now (in 2016) that capitalism is destined to predominate globally, and this seems even more certain than liberal democracy prevailing. A realpolitik reading of history tells that the levers of destiny are pulled most effectually by the prospect of dollars over the prospect of enjoying or maintaining individual freedom, or of maintaining coherent and strong institutions of republican self-government. The one positive in all this is that capitalism assumes an underpinning of freedom. And we will likely continue internationally championing an individual freedom ethic not because of moral scruple or philosophical astuteness or prudence and sagacity in politics, but because we insist that we be free individually to get materially richer and richer, and individual freedom assures this political reality most effectually.
Looking forward, what shall we see? We cannot avoid our nature, much as we’d like to. We create. Ergo, we will depend on computers to think things and do things for us. And this will continue endlessly. We create. Creating, at what point of this propitiousness do we look clairvoyantly into our crystal ball and deduce that we are too dependent on these non-human devices? And at what point does the discerning mind deduce that tantamount enslavement is on the horizon – where we’ve given over the controls of everything from space exploration, scientific discovery and the joys of innovating to the computers and, and in the careful observance decided to take back control of our destiny?
We will either avoid our enslavement (or extermination) by reigning in the computers, or we’ll lay back and let ourselves become slaves to them. But, bad news: doom is inevitable in either course of action. Giving control to the computers means that at some point we cannot and will not regain control. And not allowing computer (or computing capabilities, whatever the manifestation of this reveals in the near future) abilities to do what they might would probably be motivated by our own egoistic and creative wants, those sublimated creative wants that are our nature. And, conversely, in creating we will just continue to create threats, ominous catastrophic portents and nuisances, such as nukes and singularities. And even if we find a strategy that brings world peace, we cannot realistically expect the same to be lasting: we can’t find an enduring freedom peace because the freedom that produced the peace is also the creativity-impelled nature that will offer something “better” than the tired, stale, straightjacket extant peace. Therefore, no peace – freedom peace or not – can realistically be a permanent, a saving, a rescuing, a final and threat-removing peace. Our creative impulses have afforded our technological attainments, our creature comforts, our myriad civilizational blessing, but they cannot avoid the pitfalls of tyranny-nature; and, as we’ve built the august and magical integrants of modernity with the tools of our nature, so too will we produce the integrants of our demise. We, as a species, will not disavow the instruments of calamity – nuclear armaments – as the ilk is against our nature, and we will not survive, because any attainment of peace will always eventually find (inevitably, of the unquenchable creative impulse) its counterpoint, its contrariety, its “betterment”, its repudiation in the championing of something new and different. And, in this way, the cruel, boomerang irony of our erstwhile boon, our creative nature, will bring disaster; and the creative improvements of peace will eventually array the causative gears of catastrophe. It is said that “time heals all wounds.” But time too assures eventual calamity. And the central truth of this unappealing doctrine cannot and will not be fully disproved by anything short of sophistry.
(And I doubt not that sophistry will avail when called upon!)
I do not wish the foregoing misfortune upon humankind. Mine is a rueful beholding; rudimentary intelligence simply apprehends it. And, what one’s intelligence commends compellingly, one cannot other than believe and contend. How much easier it was in 1938 to believe that surely the world would not sacrifice tens of millions of human souls to the nether-god of hopeless tyranny and power hungry oppression. And consider at once how dreadful and how much the reality over the ensuing eight years. Our wants, however heartfelt, cannot overbear and dictate belief! Responsibility and self-respect cannot cow and follow such an ill-conceived stratagem! We are, and must be, servants of truth above all; and wants – however laudable and compassionate and principled – cannot, and must not, color or skew our apprehension-ken of truth arriving in us in our calmest, most contemplative and informed, most ambitionless and most unbiased experience. Mine is sheer observance, ready and eager to receive counterargument that is equally or superiorly unbiased, ambitionless, calm and informed. The present writing welcomes and beseeches your comments.