Ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution during the last decades of the eighteenth century, humanity has become obsessed with change. First in Europe, where the revolution originated and gained momentum. Then in Europe’s overseas offshoots, primarily but not exclusively the English-speaking ones in North America and Australasia; and finally in other places as well. By the middle of the nineteenth century, at the latest, it was clear that the world was being transformed at an unprecedented pace and would continue to do so in the future. Those who joined the bandwagon, as Japan did, prospered; those who refused to do so fell behind and in many cases have remained backward right down to the present day. As change accelerated there appeared a whole genre of visionaries who made it their job to try and look into that future—starting with Jules Verne and passing through H. G. Wells all the way to Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Harari.
As readers know, I am a historian. As a historian, I have spent much if not most of my working life doing what generations of historians have always done and still keep doing: namely, identifying the origins of change, tracing its development, pointing out its implications, and speculating on where it may yet lead. So with Polybius who, about 160B CE, believed that no one could be so ignorant and so lazy as to fail to take an interest in the way Rome expanded until it dominated the entire Mediterranean; and so with countless authors today.
In this post, though, it pleases me to try to put the idea on its head. Meaning, I am going to focus on some of the things that have accompanied humanity for a long, long time and which, I think are not going to change. Certainly not any time soon. Perhaps, not ever.
- A world without war, meaning politically motivated and organized violence, is not in the cards. To be sure, starting in 1945 much of the planet has enjoyed what is sometimes known as the Long Peace. Meaning that, relative to the size of the earth’s population, fewer people have died in war each year than was the case during any other period from which figures are available. But let there be no illusions: the most important, if not the only, reason behind the decline is not the kind of sudden wish for peace (“the better angels of our nature”) some authors have postulated. It is nuclear deterrence which, by cutting the link between victory and survival, has prevented the most important countries from fighting each other in earnest.
Unfortunately experience has shown that, under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, there is still plenty of room left for smaller, but no less bloody, conflicts. Especially, but certainly not exclusively, of the intrastate, or nontrinitarian, kind as opposed to the interstate, trinitarian one. Such being the case, a world without war would require two things. First, a situation where every person and every community is always sufficiently content with his/or its lot to refrain from resorting to the use of organized violence against other people and other communities. Second, a world government capable of identifying and deterring those who would resort to it from doing so.
War is to a large extent a product of the emotions. As a result, such a government would have to pry into the brains of every single person on earth, monitoring the emotions in question and possibly using electrical and chemical methods to regulate them were necessary. That would apply both to the rulers and to the rulers. For good or ill, though, there is no indication that either of those conditions, let alone both, are anywhere close to being met.
- There is no reason to think the world in which we live is better or happier than previous ones. Not only is happiness the product of many different interacting factors, but its presence or absence depends on circumstances. Does it presuppose a minimum of physical comfort? Yes, of course, since those who are screaming with pain can hardly be happy. However, the extent of that comfort, and even what counts as comfort, is largely dictated by what we expect and do not expect. For all we know a bushman of the Kalahari, as long as his world remained intact, was quite as content with his lot as a resident of Monaco where per capita GDP stands at $ 162,000 per year and no one pays income taxes.
Does happiness require a belief in God? Possibly so, but contrary to what priests and imams and rabbis are always saying there is no proof that religious people are happier and less troubled than unbelievers. Does it require leisure, time in which to relax, enjoy, and think? Yes, of course, but the fact that, in Rome during the second century CE, almost half of the year consisted of feast days does not mean that the contemporaries of Marcus Aurelius were happier than their ancestors or their successors. Does it require an occasional dose of adrenalin? Yes, of course, but again there is no reason to think the ancient gladiatorial games were less able to provide it than modern football does. Does it require good interaction with at least some other people? Yes, of course, but there is no reason to believe that such interaction was less common and less satisfying in previous generations than in our own. Does it require purposeful activity? Yes of course, but then what does and does not count as purposeful is almost entirely up to the society and the individual in question. Some find happiness in risking their lives while trying to climb the Himalaya; others, in staying at home and looking after their flower beds or simply reading a good book.
To claim, so soon after Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and whole hosts of lesser murderers that our world is getting better and happier—that is worse than a lie. It is, rather, making a mockery of the dead.
- Poverty will not be eradicated. Taking 1800 as their starting point, economic historians have estimated that, in the developed world, real per-capital product has risen thirtyfold. Based on this, and assuming the benefits will keep spreading like ripples in a pond, there have been countless confident predictions concerning a golden future in which everyone will be, if not exactly as rich as Jeff Bezos, at any rate comfortably off.
However, these predictions have failed to take into account two factors. First, wealth, poverty and of course comfort itself are not absolute but relative. In many ways, what was once seen as fit for a king is now not considered suitable even for a beggar; for example, a house without a flush toilet, running water, hot water, and, in cold climates, some kind of heating system. Second, though the production of material goods has in fact increased almost beyond measure, the way those goods are distributed has not become more equal. If anything, taking 1970 as our starting point, to the contrary. The two factors combined ensure that the contrast between wealth and poverty, plutos kai penia as Plato called them twenty-four centuries ago, will persist. And so will the psychological, cultural, social and political consequences it entails.
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- Whatever some feminists may say, men and women will not play the same role in society, let alone become the same. Partly that is because nature has made them different—as is proved, above all, by the fact that women conceive, bear and give birth whereas men do not. And partly by other biologically-determined differences between them in respect to size, physical strength, robustness, endurance, risk-taking, aggression, and dominance. So fundamental are these physiological differences that they dictate much of the social order. For example, that men should be the maintainers and protectors of women rather than vice versa.
Not only are men and women different, but they want to be so. “The more like us you become, mes dames,” that incorrigible skirt chaser, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is supposed to have said, “the less we shall like you.” Conversely, in all known places and societies the worst thing one can say about a man is that he is like a woman. It is the differences between men and women, as much as the similarities, which attract them to each other. On pain of humanity dying out for lack of offspring, had they not existed they would have to be invented. So it has been and so, in all appearances, it will remain,
- We shall not gain immortality. It is true that, starting in late eighteenth-century France and Sweden and subsequently spreading to other countries, global life expectancy has more than doubled from about 30 years to a little over 70 today. Moreover, and again taking a global perspective, the pace at which years are being added to our lives has been accelerating. This has led some people to reason that, if only we could increase it fast enough (meaning, by more than a year every year), death would be postponed to the point where we shall become immortal. The first person to live for a thousand years, it has been claimed, has already been born or is about to be born soon enough.
However, the calculation is flawed on four counts. First, most of the increase in life expectancy has resulted from a decline in the mortality of the very young. To that extent it represents, not an increase in lifespan but a simple statistical sleight of hand. Second, the term “global” masks the fact that, the higher life expectancy in any given country, the harder (and more expensive) the attempts to increase it further still. In other words, we have entered the domain of diminishing returns; starting in 2015, in twelve out of eighteen high-income countries life expectancy has actually declined.
Third, the fundamental underlying reality has not changed one iota. Now as ever, the older we grow the more errors creep into our DNA, the more susceptible to age-related diseases we become, and the greater the likelihood of us being involved in an accident; turning us into runners on a treadmill and leading up to our final collapse. Fourth, and as a result, it is true that the percentage of old people has been growing rapidly. However, there is no indication that the life span granted to us by nature has been increasing or is capable of being increased.
- The mind-body divide has always existed and, as far as anyone can see, will continue to exist. Starting at least as long ago as the Old Testament, people have always wondered how dead material could ever give birth to a living, sentient, self-aware, being. Especially in regard to the brain as the most important organ in which thought, emotion and, not least, dreaming take place. To answer the question, they invented a God who, to speak with Genesis, blew “the spirit of life” into man’s nostrils.
Darwin, in coming forward with his theory of evolution did not solve the problem; instead, he side-stepped it. Recent advances in neurology, made possible by the most sophisticated modern techniques, are indeed astonishing. In some cases they have enabled the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and the lame to (sort of) walk. Yet they are limited to studying the structure of the brain and tracing the patterns of activity that take place in it as we engage in this activity or that; at best, they duplicate a tiny fraction of that activity. They neither can nor do tell us how objective chemical and electric signals translate into subjective experiences. Leaving us exactly where we were thousands of years ago when our ancestors, while well aware that consuming certain substances led to increased awareness and others, to torpor, had no idea as to how those effects were produced
Computers can perform calculations a billion times faster than we can. However, they cannot experience love, hate, courage, fear, exhilaration, disappointment, hope, despair, and so on. Between them, these and countless other emotions shape our personality==in fact they are our personality. All are linked both to each other and to the “thinking” part of our brains; they influence our thought and are influenced by it. It is, indeed, probable that a thought that did not originate in some kind of emotion has yet to be born. That is why, even if computers and their programs grow a thousand times as sophisticated and as complex as they are today, they still won’t be able to develop anything like a human personality.
- Our ability to control the future, or even to predict what it will be like, has not improved and almost certainly will not improve one iota. There used to be a time when looking into the future was the province of shamans, prophets, oracles, Sibyls, and even the dead who, as in the Bible, were raised specially for the purpose. Other people tried their luck with astrology, palmistry, augury (watching the flight of birds), haruspicy (interpreting the entrails of sacrificial animals), yarrow sticks, crystal balls, tarot cards, tea leaves, patterns left by coffee in near-empty cups, and other methods too numerous to list.
Some of the attempts at prediction relied on ecstasy, others on the kind of technique broadly known as magic. Starting around 1800, at any rate among the better educated in Western countries, two methods have dominated the field. One is extrapolating from history, i.e. the belief that what has been going up will continue to go up (until it doesn’t) and that what has gone down will continue to go down (ditto). The other is mathematical modelling, which consists of an attempt to identify the most important factors at work and link them together by means of algorithms.
As the enormous accumulated wealth of many insurance companies shows, of the two the second, especially as applied to very large numbers of people, has been the most successful. But only, as the bankruptcy of AIG back in 2008 demonstrated all too well, as long as conditions do not change in a radical way. And only at the cost of ignoring what to most people is the most important question of all, i.e. what the future will bring for each and every one of them.
Do these considerations suffice to put change, that keynote of modernity about which everyone is talking all the time, into perspective?
