E. O. Wilson

Untethered from questions of inflation, infrastructure spending, and cryptocurrencies, all of which have been occupying my time in recent weeks, permit me time to speculate on something a little more provocative [this remains a work in progress]:

E. O. Wilson was here before us when he said:

“We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology,”

The development and application of technology has, over the past three hundred years or so, lifted us out of the primordial economic problem.  I define this problem not just in terms of our ability to locate the energy needed to sustain ourselves, but also in terms of providing for ourselves in a relatively secure way.  Safety from predators was as much a problem for our ancestors as was the source of food.  The consistency of safety, food sources, and shelter was never assured.  We live in the shadow of this lack of consistency even today.  It’s almost as if we cannot quite believe our achievement.  We conquered the impress of nature and freed ourselves from the ancient fears that shaped our senses, beliefs, and instincts but have not yet shaped new ones more fitting to our prosperous circumstances.  We are lugging around a set of beliefs that are inappropriate and not at all helpful.  How can we decide what to do next if we are bedeviled by shadows of the past?  

That’s what Wilson is getting at.  And it’s what we often forget when we theorize about human behavior.  We are animals conditioned and evolved in a harsh context.  That conditioning produced a host of what we can call legacy emotions.  The creation of superstitions, and ultimately, religions are explicable in the context in which we found ourselves.  To this day those creations linger within us.  We find it easy to fall back onto frameworks that rely on the existence of something “out there” to explain why we feel insecure despite our relative security.  The contradiction of our post-industrial affluence with our pre-industrial background leaves us vulnerable to emotions that have no real basis in our currently lived world, but are simply echoes of the past.  Our achievement comes at the cost of having to manage this contradiction.  We are wired to live in a Malthusian trap, yet we have escaped.  

Wilson himself reveals this dilemma in his use of the word “god” with reference to technology.  The superstitions of the past lead us to attribute natural phenomena to unnatural causes.  So something that appears unnatural, such as the immense power of a steam engine, is too easily seen through the lens of superstition.  We think of its power as “magical”, when it, manifestly, is not magical at all.  

Many of us feel that we need explanations of our ability to create machines and technologies of such power that don’t refer directly back to ourselves.  We need, apparently, to make all this ability attributable to something other than our own skill, learning, or intelligence.  How can it be that we, scared, lonely, and preyed upon, can conquer nature thus?  How can we, natural born animals to our core, have created something so clearly “unnatural”?  Are we leaving the natural world behind?  Our modern being clashes headlong with our pre-modern beliefs.  That conflict is the source of the insecurity we feel needs explanation.

In this view the machines do perform magic.  They do things that are beyond our human capacity.  They exert power, channel energy, and produce prodigiously.  Whilst all these activities existed within the pre-industrial era, and had all been subject to varying degrees technological application, it was only during the recent past that they moved to the levels of capacity they now have.  The suddenness of the change, and the continuing ongoing change, has left us with little time to adjust our emotions whose roots continue to linger in the past rather than the present.  And by relying on magical references we can avoid responsibility for what we have done.  We can pretend that the consequences of our victory over the economic question are somehow not ours to resolve.  It’s magic, after all.  Not us.  

This is, of course, untrue.  It is us.  Technology is us.  And as it becomes more and more insubstantial, less physical, and more dependent on information, it increasingly resembles us.  It’s as if we are facing the possibility that we are technology ourselves.  That’s disturbing.  So we use magic to intermediate between ourselves and our progeny.  It cannot be true, can it, that we have discovered the boundary between life and non-life? Or that technology will blur that boundary so substantially that we cannot tell the difference?  Is there a difference?  Is there simply a sliding continuum along which technology, not some cause “out there” determines what is alive or not?

Is this what we have done?

Have we re-written the rules of “being”?

Our destruction of the limitation imposed on us by nature has of course created a series of subsequent consequences, each of which remind us, or ought to, that we remain animals living in a harsh environment.  This adds to the confusion.  We tumble forward into this now unnatural environment confused about our new role.  Are we exploiters of nature through our technology?  Or are we curators of it?  Is it our responsibility to interfere or let nature take its course?  Are we a help or a hindrance?

The inevitability of technological advance and its promise has opened up a moral horizon foreclosed before by the economic problem.  We didn’t have to concern ourselves with deep questions of husbandry on behalf of anyone but ourselves.  We could create mythologies and superstitions that centered on ourselves.  What was beyond that self-centered boundary was hostile — it threatened us so we could treat it adversarially.  It was morally correct for us to defend ourselves and to drape ourselves in any number of anthropocentric notions.  

Now it is not.

We have broken free.  This is our place now.  Not “nature’s”.  Technology has done that.  We have done that.  

When Wilson writes about “god-like technology” he is telling us that we have displaced superstitious causes of our circumstances and taken on the responsibility ourselves.  Technology, our own creation, that extension of our intelligence is forcing us to confront what and who we are.  Ambivalence about technology is merely ambivalence about ourselves.  We question the power we have discovered.  That power is essential to our prosperity, but it casts a shadow over our primordially shaped conscience.  

This is our place now.  There are no predators around the corner.  Safety and security are within our grasp.  Our issues are now cultural and political.  They are within our power to resolve, not nature’s.  

Because of technology this is our place.

Now what?