Dispatches from the Empire

Currently reading: What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill 📚

…imagine if Nazism had not grown in popularity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenics was widely supported among intellectuals in liberal countries like the United States, Britain, and Sweden. If Nazism had not created such a strong opposition between eugenics and liberal ideas, then, horrifically, perhaps forced sterilisation and forced abortions would be widespread practices today. Or note that most cultures historically have been extremely patriarchal. If Roman attitudes towards gender had persisted in Western Europe, then perhaps the feminist movement could never have gotten off the ground.

I’m not claiming that we know the truth of any of these counterfactuals; it’s impossible to know anything like this for certain. But given the theoretical reasons to expect multiple moral equilibria and the plausible examples of moral contingency that we can see today, we should not be confident that these very different moral worldviews couldn’t have become widespread or even globally dominant. Certainly, the expected contingency of moral norms is high enough that the value of ensuring that the world is on the right track, morally, is enormously high. But if we take value changes seriously, which values should we promote, and how?

Huh.

Strangely, I find the premise of this book to be at odds with my Taoist…faith. (Can something be called a “faith” if the only faith it professes is a faith in doubt? I’m not sure it can.)

There’s a real sense of needing to control in this book.

Here in lies my central struggle with this book and the people I see as relentlessly, defensively optimistic: they insist that my belief that our species is heading toward a catastrophic collapse (by which I mean a tremendous amount of suffering in humans and many, many other species) is the very thing that will cause the collapse.

And let’s be honest: they might have a point. If no one dreamed of a world without it, perhaps there would still be slavery.

(Zeno’s paradoxes are present in this moment, are they not?)

Yet my counter-argument is just as effective: those that would argue a collapse is not inevitable are willfully ignorant of human nature and the laws of physics and biology. Undergirding their belief is a subconscious assumption that humans are somehow better than, different from, or exceptions to the rule.

No species that consumes resources and breeds as we do is immune from collapse, and we consume far more resources than any other species. Even with a declining birth rate in several countries, the consumption of resources in those same countries has been increasing.

And while in the last three decades there’s grown a global awareness of climate change and its effects, has there been meaningful change? From a purely utilitarian point-of-view, have all things gotten better over the last three decades? What about the last century or two?

What do I mean by “have things gotten better”? Consider all the deforested land in the Amazon, the nearly-dead Great Lakes, the hundreds of millions of animals in industrial feedlots and slaughterhouses.

Is there now in this present moment less suffering — and not just human suffering — than there was, say, at the start of the Industrial Revolution? Or is there more?

Sure, globally, there are record low levels of poverty and violence, but I’d argue that this comes at the cost of the environment. The Industrial Revolution and cheap energy have benefitted us humans greatly, but what about the world as a whole? All species, all living things? It’s pure anthropocentrism to argue that the last two hundred years have been good for the planet.

This is my point: when I say that a collapse is inevitable, it’s because it’s already happening. If you learn how and where to look, you can’t not see it. Devastated ecosystems, mass species die-offs, warming oceans. And for what? So humans of the last two hundred years or so can have convenience, longer lives, fun toys? Is that a worthwhile tradeoff?

Let’s be honest: for nearly every person you know, that answer is ‘yes.’

That is why I believe collapse is inevitable.

If I’ve learned anything from Taoism, it’s that an unwillingness to accept things as they are always leads to more entropy, more suffering. The insistence that “it will get better” is a delusion. A comfy delusion, but a delusion nonetheless.

Unwilling to see things as they are, these people lock us into the very collapse they insist won’t happen.