As far back as 4 million years ago and the period of Australopithecus afarensis, the standard model of hominin evolution offers valuable pieces of insight as to the importance of humanity’s great duel with nature. The current consensus, which is held by most scientists, places a significant moment in hominin evolution at the Great Rift Valley approximately 1.8 million years ago. This is marked by a notable increase in both brain size and hominin species, including Homo erectus. And while at the very frontier of science, new knowledge is constantly being gained and established debates are underway, the main model that is currently most widely accepted, namely the recent single origin hypothesis, suggests that rapidly changing climatic conditions played a role in the evolutionary jump in the Rift Valley.
Taking several significant jumps forward, it is not entirely misguided to suggest a link, however philosophically, between the human duel with nature and the earliest evidence of agriculture. There are of course many competing theories for the domestication of agriculture, and it is not my intention here to purpose or emphasize one over another. Rather, I am simply suggesting the basic idea that insight is offered in understanding the value of what agriculture provided. There is a simply logical sequence to follow: that domestication of crops provided something positive of notable benefit, otherwise it would likely not have crystalized as an established trend. In that a more stable food supply was established, with larger numbers of people being able to live together – the philosophical description of an increased freedom from immediate existential precarity is given an incredible sense of meaning. The seeds of human civilization were sown. Freedom, in the particular sense of an increased freedom from precarious existential conditions, coincided with the transition from hunter-gathers to an entirely new conception of human life.
The foundation of civilization was laid with the advent of agriculture. From there human social organization could take on much more complex forms. Writing, thought, culture – as well as special and geographical planning, city development – were enabled to slowly emerge over time. The rest, one could say, is history. This history is both deeply positive and transformative as well as bloody and barbaric. It would be prejudiced of us to only acknowledge one side and not the other. It is in reference to this latter aspect of human history in which, in the first episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, Q declares that humanity is to be put on trial. The message, the philosophical emphasis and scientific sensibility present in this episode is, for me, classic Roddenberry: human beings have accomplished many amazing things, we have also committed an astonishing list of crimes.
With that said, over thousands of years it is difficult to argue that there hasn’t been progress in almost every conceivable dimension of human life and society. Moral progress is especially evident in the last few hundred years, as Steven Pinker highlights in his book The Better Angels of our Nature (2011). Over recent centuries, with the rise of the modern scientific endeavour, there has been an exponential growth in knowledge which, in my personal opinion, has yet to even glimpse full maturation. With modern science, especially in and through the Enlightenment, a counter-force to human prejudice and bias crystallized. Modernity emerged. Values of reason and scientific rigour, along with critical conceptions of progress, democracy, egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism, were developed and impactes the human social world in an almost unparalleled fashion.
We have not even considered a fraction of the total picture, and already one might sense how remarkable it is that we’ve come so far as a species. But it is also hard to argue that in the midst of the discontinuities brought about by social, cultural transformation, historical progress and thousands of years of social evolution and development, the darker side of human nature, the less admirable qualities of human experience and behaviour, maintain some sense of continuity. Prejudice continues. Bigotry would seem omnipresent on the worst of days. War, famine, ignorance – one cannot attempt to take weight of the total picture without also acknowledging that in midst of so much change and progress, notes Brian Cox, ‘irrational, unscientific, superstitious, mythic, tribal, nationalistic, dominant, violent, and power driven patterns of behaviour remain prevalent within the human universe’.
From all I’ve read and from my current vantage point, I’ve come to the conclusion that the principle of reason is what continues to give humanity hope. In this respect, I very much enjoyed reading Cox’s book Human Universe (2014), not for the physics of which I was already deeply familiar, but because there is something magnificently grande and satisfying in the questions he asks. Human Universe reminds me some of Carl Sagan’s most inspirational literary moments. One example in relation to the continuities of the darker side of human nature follows Cox’s discussion on the advance of technological civilization. Saving detailed discussion on the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox for another time, Cox offers a nice site of reflection:
Perhaps it is L, the lifetime of civilisations, that is the fundamental reason for the great silence. This is a sobering thought. The reason we have made no contact with anyone is not because of a lack of stars, or planets, or living things; it’s because of the in-built and unavoidable stupidity of intelligent beings. (p. 113)
Whether such stupidity is unavoidable is up for debate, but the deeper point is sound.
This might seem a bit strong, but it is a view shared at Green Bank by Manhattan Project veteran Philip Morrison. Morrison was intimately involved in the design and development of the first atomic bomb, and he helped load Little Boy onto Enola Gay destined for Hiroshima. The fact that human beings had deployed a potentially civilisation-destroying weapon twice, against civilian targets, and that Morrison had personally loaded one of the bombs, mush have never left him, and on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, it must have seemed likely that we would do it again on a much grander scale. Drake realised this as well, which is certainly one of the reasons why he introduced the time that a technological civilisation can endure into his equation: we can after all only communicate with nearby civilisations if they exist at the same time as us. This is a possible resolution to the Fermi Paradox.
[…] One could argue that mutually assured destruction, the guiding principle of the Cold War, did act to stabilise our civilisation and is still doing so today. Perhaps no intelligent beings will knowingly destroy their civilisation, which is what global nuclear war on Earth would surely do […]. Similarly, one assumes that the submersion of Miami and Norwich by rising sea levels would silence the so-called climate change sceptics […] and trigger a change of policy that will avert catastrophic, civilisation-threatening climate change in good time. (pp. 113-114)
This passage and many others like it represent a number of sobering and reflective moments offered by Cox. With science and fact, as well as a rich body of research on human evolution, history and civilisation behind him, empirical assessment of where we’ve come from has a way of raising fundamentally important questions about where we would like to go as a species. In the context of current events – from the ongoing struggle against climate change and ‘climate sceptics’ to the increasing tension in the Korean peninsula, with North Korean and US leaders boasting of their nuclear arms, it seems to me that there is a kernel of truth to the fear of stupidity. It never seems too far from being an integral feature of our past and present reality.
Cox responds with a tentative signal of hope, namely:
that a small planet such as Earth cannot continue to support an expanding and flourishing civilisation without a major change in the way we view ourselves. The division into hundreds of countries whose boarders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic disease, and who knows what else […]. The very fact that the preceding sentence sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence. (pp. 114-115)
It is a penetrating, incisive passage of reflection. It brings to mind not only some of my own studies in my spare time on irrationality, but also a much wider series questions. The main question is not limited to individual irrationality. Rather it refers to what some philosophers call the “social deficit of reason” which is much more broad and systemic in scope. Our global political system is deeply inadequate. Likewise, our current economic system can be argued to be insufficient. The current parameters of society as a whole is littered with logical inconsistencies. Cox (pp. 217- 218) emphasizes the point in his use of the following apt example: ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System), which is an important early warning system when it comes to potential asteroid collisions, could be considered almost like a global insurance policy for humanity. The cost of such a global insurance policy? One third of the annual wages of top British footballer, Wayne Rooney (Cox, 2014; p. 218). “Such comparisons always sound childish”, writes Cox (2014, p. 218), “’Is it reasonable to spend less on asteroid defense than on a footballer’s annual salary?’”
Just as in this essay, for Cox the question of rational choice comes into the human equation. Will the potential of human rationality ultimately prevail? In that, for example, “the United States spends more on pet grooming than on fusion research” (p. 238) might persuade one’s answer. But Cox continues, “I am a believer in the innate rationality in human beings; given the right education, the right information and the right tuition in how to think about problems […]. I believe that if I said to someone: ‘Here’s the ideal. You can have limitless clean energy for your lifetime, for your children and grandchildren’s lifetimes and beyond, in exchange for grooming your own cat’, then most people would reach for the comb. I have to believe that, otherwise this book is a futile gesture” (p.238).
