A Destiny Fitting of the Children of God

Below is a lengthy quote from David Brin's comments to this post on his own blog. Regular readers know I love Brin's work - fiction, science, philosophy, politics - but in order to appreciate his train of thought here, I need to explain a few things.

The "Enlightenment Project" is described pretty well at Wikipedia - broadly, it's our attempt to organize society according to reason and aimed toward progress (in opposition to 99% of history, in which societies were controlled by economic/religious/power elites).

"The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for or contact with such civilizations" - from Wikipedia.

Brin's concepts of the "Social Pyramid / Diamond" describe two ways societies can be organized economically. In the social pyramid, there's a small wealthy elite (the peak) supported by a great mass of poor serfs (i.e., 99% of human societies throughout history). The social diamond corresponds to the rise of the middle class, most especially in the US between the New Deal and the 1980's (our diamond has been shrinking since then).

So here's the comment in full; a beautiful, real, hopeful dash through our nature, our place in the universe, and a dream worthy of our wildest love. -h

BigC you are right to remind me of earlier statements about the surprisingly positive parts of human nature. Indeed, those parts were essential in order for the Enlightenment Project to happen at all... even as a fluke and unlikely, lucky-chance emergent property, rather than a first order effect of human nature.

Indeed, I will go farther. I believe that one of the higher candidates for a "Fermi Paradox explanation" is that intelligent life does emerge many times across the galaxy... but that it destroys itself through lack of foresight and self-control. Either in self-imolation spasms or through whimpering decline and degradation into "intelligent" but grinding poverty on ruined worlds.

Yes, this is an old explanation, but I give it a twist. Because I think it possible that - despite our self-criticism (in fact, BECAUSE of it) - we may be among the few destined to cross this crisis quickly and arrive at a civilization that is truly worthy of the name.

Think of a sapient life form descended from bears, or tigers, or paranoid zebras. Could they, no matter how smart, show the complex MIX of gregarious and individualistic ... competitive AND cooperative... traits that give us our intellectual breadth and variability, out of which self-criticism and mutual accountability/creativity can arise?

Moreover, now posit that even WE fell into oversimplifying social patterns that quashed creativity and criticism, 99% of the time across our history! Nearly all human cultures, dominated by feudal elites, suppressed the ferment of reciprocal criticism that lets a culture find its mistakes in time.

Read Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE in order to see how frail we are to ecological error. Alas, Diamond's few "success stories" were also towering failures. For although they avoided eco-error, they did so by enforcing brutally conservative regimes, devoid of any ambition to grow and learn and improve. A wretched prescrtiption and if that is our only path to survival, I choose glorious collapse.

Hence, am I more pessimistic than Jared Diamond???? Perish the thought. And yet, in the context of the Fermi Paradox, it seems that I must be.

This fluke of ours, this project that arose out of the genius of Pericles and Locke and Franklin and million proud craftsmen, is very clearly an anomaly. Under the traditional and deeply human-nature driven social DIAMOND [Brin means "social PYRAMID" here - in his excitement, he got his own images confused - see his own usage below -howie], the very best you could hope for was the genteel meritocratic imperium of Old China, in which Confucian noblesse oblige and civil service testing still allow a smidge of social mobility. That, certainly, is the vision updated by Lee Quan Yew in Singapore, and pursued by China today. It is the finest "pyramid" of them all, and they see it as the best "natural" human society. And they think we are quite mad. And they may be right.

But that path of theirs only slows down the grinding failure mode of genteel decline. I know this, because the stars tell me so. Because, blatantly and obviously, the Confucian pyramid is a social pattern that must have been tried many times among other life forms. It is a simple extrapolation of self-interest among rulers and ruled, after all. A little smarter than most feudal patterns. One can easily imagine it happening out there...

... because it happened (in various ways) so many times here! And here's the point.

The Fermi Paradox. The sky appears so empty. A Great Silence. Something is "wrong". There are many explanations. I am the one who has catalogued them, after all. But if this one is THE explanation ("Intelligence destroys itself") then the traditional pyramid - even the superior Confucian version CANNOT BE WORKING. It is obvious, pervasive, and the stars tell us that it must be wrong.

What might work is a gamble on something different. So different, so demanding, so "emergent" and contrary to FIRST ORDER animal nature that it was extremely rare on Earth, as it may have been rare across the galaxy.

Our new Experiment may be just that sort of thing. It is vibrant. It finds errors. It yells and spews noise, mixing individualism and community in chaotic ways, stirring cooperatin and competition in a vast brew. Oh it may be all wrong. It may be as awful, self-indulgent and immature as the Confucians - and the President of Iran - say it is...

...or it may be our hope. It may be THE hope of every race that is suffering and languishing out there in a desert of their own wastes... all of them in need of rescue, awaiting the first race to rise up enough to attain Star Trek levels of success, joy and generosity. What a fate for our descendants.

To go forth and rescue and teach them. What a destiny. Better than any portrayed in religion OR science fiction.



But...

...as I sit in this heat wave, I am left to wonder. ARE we smart enough? The Experiment is failing. Now, boys and girls. Right now, on the brink of our success. The neo-feudalists and their terrified-of-tomorrow allies are making their move. And the heat, the heat, this damned heat may be telling us that it is already too late.

I don't really believe that. I can't.

But oh, the irony. To have the tools in our hands. To ALMOST rise up and become the rescuers. The heroes that the suffering Milky Way eagerly yearns and waits for.

What a destiny that would be. So vastly more grand and fitting than anything told in Revelations! A destiny fitting of the Children of God. Apprentices, picking up His tools and setting forth to do high and noble work, both merciful and grand, making Him proud.

Oh, to have a destiny like that in our grasp... and to JUST miss!

That would be too painful. So very much worse than death.

david brin