Longtermism and the Democratic Culture
Commentary on some ideas offered in Will MacAskill's new book about the possibility of long-term human existence, and the threats arrayed against it
What We Owe the Future is a book which people ought to read. It should be read because it is a book about the future, and the future is something we desperately need to start thinking about.
What We Owe the Future makes two essential arguments:
The human race has an enormous life expectancy. If we do the right things, we have the potential to survive for hundreds of millions of years on earth, and potentially billions, if not trillions of years in the broader cosmos, given the time needed to crack interstellar travel.
If this is true, many more human lives stand to be lived in the future than have ever been lived in the past. As MacAskill puts it, “we are the ancients.” Thus, from an ethical viewpoint, we should take great pains to avoid short-term threats of extinction to ensure those lives have the opportunity to be lived, and also threats to the long-term quality of human existence such that those lives can be better than they might have been.
These two points are essentially the doctrine of “longtermism” in a nutshell. This is closely related to “effective altruism,” a philosophical and philanthropic movement guided by a utilitarian philosophy of doing the most good possible with a given amount of money, mostly through donating significant portions of one’s income to carefully chosen charities. When one accepts effective altruism, and then recognizes that most human lives will be lived in the future, longtermism is what follows: one ought to make moral considerations about present-day decisions and how they will effect future lives. From there, Will MacAskill investigates various risks-the jargon longtermists and effective altruists sometimes use is “x-risks” (existential risks) and “s-risks” (risks of increased suffering).
The two obviously bear a relationship, to the point that categorizing them separately seems questionable to me (a tendency MacAskill generally avoids)-x-risks such as climate change, nuclear war, or pandemics obviously will also involve immense suffering. But there are also risks which don’t necessarily threaten extinction, but do involve long-term elevated suffering.
One of the more compelling examples of this MacAskill discusses is “value lock-in,” the possibility of a one-world religion, government, or likely hybrid of the two, which enforces a set of bad values perpetually, and which, due to some mitigating factor (such as a quasi-omnipotent artificial general intelligence), cannot be changed or overthrown. Such a government could quite possibly persist for many thousands or even millions of years, and preside over many billions of human lives, drastically reducing the quality their lives may have otherwise had.
Inconveniently for us, there doesn’t seem to be any particularly strong relationship between the political systems which make people happy, and those which are most long-lived and self-sustaining. Generally, the things which matter are how much power you happen to have, and how shrewdly (and often, ruthlessly) you’re willing to use it. Nothing about those two qualities implies that the people who live within a society need to be free, or educated, or well-fed, or long-lived, or really anything else we might associate with living a good life. It may be that one only needs a strong system of religious indoctrination, a strong police state, or ideally both, to preserve a system of government effectively forever. An artificial intelligence which understands human psychology better than any human does, which makes no tactical errors or mistakes, which has access to an unprecedented store of knowledge which it can access and utilize in milliseconds, and which never ages or dies, could make the normal routes of political change impossible.
Value lock-in is a particular threat, I would argue, if artificial intelligence emerges in the context of our existing political polarization, in which the far left, far right, and hegemonic neoliberal order (what could be fairly termed the “far center”) all seem increasingly comfortable with legislating away the political power, if not the actual existence, of their competitors. Terrifyingly, there seems to exist no strong political force right now which holds the needs for free speech and equal political participation to be crucial goals in and of themselves. MacAskill rightly places enormous emphasis on the need to preserve free speech, not merely as a good in itself, but as the cultural mechanism by which political change, and therefore at least the potential for improvement, occurs. Thus, paradoxically, to preserve the capacity for change requires a certain level of ossification-a bill of rights, for instance, acting as a relatively static skeleton upon which further, more elastic developments are built.
The Role of Freedom in Social Evolution
Freedom seems to be the highest human good. Any other virtue one can imagine seems to serve to either release a person from pernicious desires, or to give them greater autonomy. A courageous or brave person is far more free, for instance, than someone who is timid and cowardly-they literally have the capacity to take more actions in the world, not being held back by excessive fear of danger or discomfort. Likewise, someone who has the virtue of temperance is freed from addiction, and from dependence on sensory pleasure for happiness, or worse, the need for sensory pleasure simply to avoid feeling miserable.
But freedom serves another quite important role: it is the necessary condition for change. One does not have the freedom to keep things from changing, unless one knows how to stop time. But under conditions of change, one does have the ability to observe new circumstances and adapt to them; in the long term, the condition of change allows for improvement, although it may also guarantee decay to some degree. Change is thus the basis for fear, but also for hope-with it, we can recognize problems, even suffer catastrophes, and nonetheless know that there will be a future in which things might, and often actually do, get better.
MacAskill is a utilitarian, and thus he offers a very utilitarian justification for the need for continuous political change.
Almost all generations in the past had some values that we now regard as abominable. It’s easy to think that one now has the best values. The Romans would have congratulated themselves for being so civilized compared to their barbarian neighbors, and at the same evening beaten people they had enslaved, or visited the colosseum to watch the disembowelment of a prisoner.
It is extraordinarily unlikely that, of all generations across time, we are the first ones to have gotten it completely correct. The values you or I endorse are probably far from the best ones. Moreover, there are so many ethical questions to which we know we haven’t yet figured out the answer. Which beings have moral status? Just homo sapiens, or all primates, or all conscious creatures, including artificial beings that we might create in the future? How should we weigh the promotion of happiness against the alleviation of suffering?
And so on. Our values are most likely sub-optimal, because everyone else’s values have been sub-optimal, so far as we can tell, and thus we have to leave an escape hatch to our own ways of doing things-we have to give future generations room to rebel against us, the same way prior generations left the option to us. But how do values change and improve? MacAskill offers the idea of charter cities, independent political entities within a nation which are able to write and live according to their own charter, allowing us to test these ideas against each other in real time. This is obviously a useful idea, although I’m not entirely sure how we get to a point where liberal democracies would allow for the implementation of such things. Despite what the right says about the state of liberalism, it doesn’t seem particularly likely that any liberal state would voluntarily participate in the creation of “Marxist charter cities,” let alone “anarchist communitarian charter cities” (although the nod is appreciated).
“Charter Cities”-or Communes?
This is actually a sort of hilarious way of smuggling far left radicalism through the back door, in a package Elon Musk would promote. “Charter city” is effectively neoliberal-speak for “capitalist commune,” which MacAskill quietly redefines as just “commune”.
And that’s all well and good-charter cities, if the sorts MacAskill describes could be established, would be a great incubator for new political practices. What receives remarkably little treatment, however, is the role of individuals in those societies. What is rarely discussed in the swirl of “-isms” is a society which is committed to the idea of gradual, perpetual change as such.
Typically, a diversity of ideas persists for a short period of time between epochs, and then crystallize-as in the case of the Hundred Schools of Thought resulting in an attempted lock-in of Legalism, and finally Confucianism in China; the diverse schools of Early Christianity in the 2nd century AD finally resolving into the biblical canon in the 4th century; a dizzying array of socialist schools of thought finally being collapsed into the authoritarian tendencies of Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism.
In every case, a large intellectual millieu grows around a certain event or cultural tendency, and for a period there is intense intellectual labor, debate, and revision; then, someone “wins”, usually by virtue of having the most firepower or state support, and generations have to live with the consequences. We are actually already living under a sort of value lock-in, albeit not as concrete as the one MacAskill envisions. The sense of what Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism,” the idea that there really cannot be anything that comes after capitalism, is its own kind of “Thousand Year Reich”-one we are told is immovable, not because it is enforced by states with a greater potential for mass destruction than any which have existed prior, but because it’s simply “human nature.” Intellectual movements come and go beneath capitalist realism, but the “horse tranquilizer of liberalism,” as a friend of mine called it, stays in effect and nothing fundamentally changes, not because of some magical property of liberalism, but because it remains by far the most powerful player at the table.
But, if some set of conditions arose under which we could escape, what if we did produce an alternative which was genuinely developmental, which embraced change and the pursuit of better values as a condition, with the awareness that a system is needed which could potentially be responsive to the kinds of problems people will have, say, 20 million years in the future? What if the cast never quite sets, and were allowed to remain flexible, without ever shattering and demanding a complete reformulation? What if the refusal to embrace dogma was itself the dogma?
This doesn’t sound groundbreaking, perhaps, because it isn’t. In theory at least, that aspiration is why we favor democracy-we wouldn’t have much use for it otherwise. The disagreement inherent to democratic life provides the centrifugal force which keeps society spinning like a top-it’s when the movement stops, when the ideas and values of a society ossify, that things grind to a halt, and new problems can’t be adapted to and solved the way they once could.
One thinks of the wonderfully thought provoking quote from George Orwell’s dual book review of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus:
Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right.
Socialism was dysfunctional. Capitalism remains dysfunctional. Socialism, in the highly centralized form in which it was implemented, was prone to all the failures of central planning, and hampered by the anti-intellectual fanaticism of its planners. Socialism destroyed much of the old world. Capitalism, in exchange for producing a lot of stuff in a very short period of time, is destroying the entire fucking biosphere.
So why the hell are we still talking about them, let alone living under one of them, nearly 80 years after Orwell wrote those words? Why’d the top stop turning?
In essence, the central dogma of democracy only made sense when the people felt a definite sense that they were a part of it. This sense of one’s active participation in democracy, and the ethic that derives from it of the importance of intellectual life, is eulogized in Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites:
Citizenship appeared to have given even the humbler members of society access to the knowledge and cultivation elsewhere reserved for the privileged classes. Opportunity, as many Americans understood it, was a matter more of intellectual than of material enrichment. It was their restless curiosity, their skeptical and iconoclastic turn of mind, their resourcefulness and self-reliance, their capacity for invention and improvisation, that most dramatically seemed to differentiate the laboring classes in America from their European counterparts.
Lasch goes on to quote the French statesman Michel Chevalier from his observations of American life in the 1830s, published as Society, manners and politics in the United States. The relevant passages are quoted below:
The conquests of the human mind, to which the Reformation gave the signal and the impulse, and the great discoveries of science and art, which, in Europe are yet concealed from the general eye by the bandage of ignorance and the mists of theory, are, in America, exposed to the vulgar gaze and placed within the reach of all. There the multitude touches and handles them at will. Examine the population of our rural districts, sound the brains of our peasants, and you will find that the spring of all their actions is a confused medley of the Bible parables with the legends of a gross superstition. Try the same operation on an American farmer, and you will find that the great scriptural traditions are harmoniously combined, in his mind, with the principles of modern science as taught by Bacon and Descartes, with the doctrine of moral and religious independence proclaimed by Luther, and with the still more recent notions of political freedom. He is one of the initiated.
And:
In political affairs, the American multitude has reached a much higher degree of initiation than the European mass, for it does not need to be governed; every man here has in himself the principle of self-government in a much higher degree, and is more fit to take a part in public affairs. It is also more fully initiated in another order of things, which are closely connected with politics and morals, that is, in all that relates to labour. The American mechanic is a better workman, he loves his work more, than the European. He is initiated not merely in the hardships, but also in the rewards, of industry; he dresses like a member of Congress; his wife and daughters are dressed like the wife and daughters of a rich New York merchant, and like them, follow the Paris fashions. His house is warm, neat, and comfortable; his table is almost as plentifully provided as that of the wealthiest of his fellow citizens. In this country, the articles of the first necessity for the whites, embrace several objects, which, amongst us, are articles of luxury, not merely among the lower, but among some of the middle classes.
I’m more circumspect about how to read Chevalier than Lasch-he was a Saint-Simonian who certainly wrote from the perspective of wishing to see Europe embrace a utopian equalitarianism. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, he wished to see France live up to its own democratic ideals, and one can’t help but think that both saw some of what they wanted to see in the world’s other great hope for democracy.
But nonetheless, Chevalier describes an image of intellectualism as the basis for a common American identity. Having both a free society in which even the lowest classes could cultivate their intellect, and a political system and culture which placed emphasis on the need to be able to participate in civic life. It is the shift from this as the American ideal to one of class mobility, of trying to make one’s way out of manual labor and into intellectual labor, which more than anything else undercuts a democratic society. Of the real American ideal, Lasch observes:
That ideal was nothing less than a classless society, understood to mean not only the absence of hereditary privilege and legalized distinctions of rank, but a refusal to tolerate the separation of learning and labor. The concept of a laboring class was objectionable to Americans because it implied not only the institutionalization of wage labor, but the abandonment of what many of them took to be the central purpose of American life: the democratization of intelligence.
Even Henry Adams, not usually thought of as a tribune of the people, voiced this aspiration through one of the characters in his novel Democracy, who clearly spoke for Adams himself:
“Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization now aims at this mark.”
A laboring class, then, implied as its necessary antithesis a learned and leisure class. It implied a social division of labor that recalled the days of priestcraft, when the clerical monopoly of knowledge condemned laypeople to illiteracy, ignorance, and superstition. To have broken that monopoly, the most pernicious of all restraints on trade, since it interfered with the circulation not just of commodities but of ideas, was widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the democratic revolution. The reintroduction of a kind of clerical hegemony over the mind would undo that achievement, reviving the old contempt for the masses, and the contempt for everyday life, that was the hallmark of priestly societies. It would recreate the most obnoxious feature of class societies: the separation of learning from everyday experience.
Of course, this was an aspiration of the commons, not one which could be ascribed to the old world. The Greek aristocrats, for their part, actively repudiated the idea of a laboring intellectual-Aristotle’s Politics advises citizens to eschew even learning how to engage in vulgar craftsmanship. Craftsmanship, in fact, is really just a kind of “delimited slavery” in C.D.C. Reeves’ translation, and naturally distinct from a life of intellectual labor concerned with politics and philosophy. Given the regularity with which revolutions to establish direct democracies occurred in the Greek Classical era (what Aristotle dismissively terms “extreme democracy”), one suspects that regular Greeks may have thought more along the lines of regular Americans as Chevalier and de Tocqueville observed them.
But in the classical tradition, the American ideal and its liberal foundation is thus distinct in its contention that everyone ought to be political participants, and everyone thus must achieve a degree of material wellbeing to allow for the intellectual cultivation involved in that task. But this also involves a culture of inquiry and robust debate. This constitutes the basis for a genuinely free society, and the means for it do exist-people in the 21st century are presented with an almost limitless platform for the pursuit of education and communication-but the culture has not caught up, and without the culture, alternative political structures will be hollow shells of theory superimposed over an incompatible reality. If value lock-in does occur, and those values are ones which guarantee a stagnant and unsustainable society, then perhaps we really will be at the end of history.