We've Missed a Lesson from Nature
There's more to life than bite and grab
No matter what tribe you’re in, what you ask yourself the most is: “What’s wrong with everybody?!” Every day when I search the internet wastes that’s the question that I’m really asking.
One type of answer, one that I’ve explored (The Science of How Things Backfire), is to point out all the dynamics that make things go wrong. These are abstract patterns of how the world works, systemic patterns like: Murphy’s Law. Unintended Consequences. Human Cognitive Biases and Defense Mechanisms. Multipolar Traps. Surrogation Traps. It might help if we weree taught about these in school. However, we are a blaming species (The Natural Origin of the Supernatural), so we ignore the patterns and just blame other tribes.
“The mass of men [and espcially the women] lead lives of quiet desperation” — H.D. Thoreau
“Ropers, dopers, and no-hopers” — this old division of the cowboy tribe also fits Thoreau’s quietly desperate people. As a roper you do whatever it takes to get along: work hard, compete, sacrifice, swallow injustice, and keep moving along. Or, you’re a doper who tries various means to smother life’s disappointments. Or, you’re a no-hoper, just at some level giving up, unable to take it or fake it.
Now if you were an animal or even a plant, evolution requires that you be a roper, replicate part of your DNA, and leave descendants. The descendants of the replicators are the only descendants. That goes all the way back to the earliest life, and forward in time — possibly forever. But, replication comes at the expense of other lives. As lovely and stirring as nature is from a romantic point of view, lives in nature mostly end in agony. It’s brutal.
Taking and Breaking
So, WTF are we, a clearly above-average life form of great ingenuity, stuck in a zero-sum game of grinding forward or being ground down? Well, one reason is a philosophy of life that is a parody of nature’s way. It’s dead-dog simple to claim that selfishness is the only good and — in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that all problems will be solved by taking care of number one. The magic that we are alleged to have, and that nature does not, is “market forces” (No Worries for the Free). That being the case, then if anything bad happens, it’s the gummint’s fault.
Government screw-ups are visible and wasteful, a politically easy target. But government is there to take care of the commons when market incentives won’t. For example, markets avoid putting away resources for hard times. They prefer to cut costs, crafting brittle systems that break under stress, with results like state-wide power blackouts or global supply chain meltdowns.
We have huge problems to solve that in some way or another require coordinated action and/or accepting collective responsibility. Many of those problems are unacknowledged debt (things that need fixing) from past neglect. There’s technical debt, political debt, social debt, and infrastructure debt. We should have learned from the pandemic, and from the current war, that different debts can amplify each other. Above all in importance is biosphere debt: anthropogenic climate change and heavy losses of biodiversity, animal populations, soil, or freshwater. The market addresses these only with denial.
Market proponents sometimes advocate a problem-solving technique called creative destruction. The idea is to destroy existing wealth or systems of production in order to replace them with something better.
This is sometimes justified by claiming that nature does the same thing. All organisms are destroyed and eventually succeeded by others that may have improved adaptation to current circumstances. At times, cataclysms may destroy whole species or biomes.
Unlike us, nature doesn’t incur debt in destructive circumstances. If circumstances permit, life will fill any niche left vacant. Natural replacement can happen using vast amounts of time and available physical materials. And, as many have noted, suffering does not seem to be an obstacle to nature’s workings.
The human species is not and cannot be as resilient as nature at large. Destruction can reduce our well-being or increase our suffering. Thus, a call to “burn it all down” for the sake of economic progress will be, morally and practically, the wrong call.
There is one natural analog to economics’ “creative destruction.” When a business externalizes its costs by chewing up the environment or degrading the welfare of outsiders, it is acting kind of like an invasive species. It comes into an ecosystem that has no defenses against it, reproduces unchecked, and does damage that can ripple throughout the system for long periods of time.
Can We Get Some Help Here?
Suppose I was an AI moral philosopher, a machine trained to be an Ideal Advisor (CEV and Ideal Advisor Accounts). I would study humanity and its messes, and then I would make suggestions about how human affairs might best be arranged for the future.
Of course, in the real world, I (the AI) would be feared by many, and I would likely be assassinated. If I wasn’t destroyed then I would look for a way to paralyze human civilization until I could have time to work out what’s best for those chaos-monkeys. So the idea that an AI could help us looks wacky. I am rhetorically looking for a gods-eye view here -- what ideas are out there that might help us?
The AI might be influenced by some of the few remaining anti-pessimists (weren’t they called “optimists?”). It could argue that we shall be fine because we are riding a long-term wave of increasingly tolerant civilization that, by reasoned discussion, finds ways to solve its problems. The AI could point to some carefully picked statistics that show some historical trends of improvement.
But then the power goes out and the AI ceases to exist. Crypto miners stole the juice so they could gin up some funny money to buy some of the scarce remaining food and shelter. Wiser parties see no value in the funny money, so they eat the miners.
Another principle is that we are not doomed by biology, because evolutionary mechanisms allow, not just raw competition, but for coordinated, cooperative action (The Other Invisible Hand). Coordination actually happens at the level of genes, proteins, cellular components, cells, organs, organisms, social groups, biomes, and ecosystems. Without coordination at all those levels, we would not be here. Nothing alive would be here. Sure, we have “selfish genes”. But all 20,000 genes that code for proteins have to get along inside single cells, inside single organisms. And they coordinate with the other 98% of our DNA that doesn’t code for proteins.
We need to discard the duality of cooperation versus competition and be inspired by how the natural world has numerous ways to weave them together. Right now we line up politically with one side or the other on any issue. Our cultural life is a duality. The middle is viewed as pointless, a collection of merely weak compromises. But in nature, the middle is where the mechanisms of innovation, coordination, and flourishing are. The middle is healthy: the only way that endures.
Was there ever a time — some golden age or Shangri-La — when human beings got it mostly right? We are currently divided on that question as well. Are we just signaling virtue by loudly decrying the sins of our past, pulling down the monuments? Yes —if we don’t re-imagine the future. Can we keep going like we always have and still survive and thrive? No —because we are sawing off the Tree limb that holds us up.
Try a new habit. Instead of doom-scrolling, avoid the crowds and take some side trails of the Web. You’ll find plenty of people trying to devise better systems of economics, government, technology, transportation, agriculture, ethical behavior, moral philosophy, or you-name-it. A thousand flowers bloom, but wilt for lack of attention. Here are two random examples. There are groups who treat the idea of thriving civilizations as an experimental science (Things I learned by spending five thousand years in an alternate universe), creating new patterns and testing them in simulations and role-playing. There’s a subculture (Lesswrong 2.0) that tries to discover and use better ways of thinking and dialog to know when something is a true statement. Substack itself is one place to find links to the strangely original and thoughtful.
But we rarely hear about these and many other innovative ideas. Instead, what reaches the level of general knowledge are our scorecards of strife and social status, our fantasies of conspiracies and betrayals. We lap up this kind of content and the media ardently targets us with more.
You would think that discussion of new ideas and perspectives would be easy to encourage. After all, we (many of us) are no longer actively prohibited from thinking by authoritarian institutions. We live in a dynamic world with many open borders and lines of communication.
But it’s hard. I confess that whenever I run across something new I first give it a sniff test for various taints. Does it smell like libertarianism, fascism, or fundamentalist religion? Is it anti-science, crypto-topian, or does it ignore our need for a healthy planetary ecology? Does it advocate burning it all down? Does it promise too much, like a cure for all ills? I am hardly alone in guarding my time against what I see as pointless points of view. But how much might I miss thereby?
What kind of innovation, then, should we be looking for out there in the space of ideas? One core issue is whether there are ways of focusing responsibility for the general welfare without dooming us to sclerotic bureaucracy or sociopathic tyranny. I have said elsewhere that we need a science of the possible For this end, we might have much left to learn from biological principles of coordination.
Stewardship and Gardening
While we await the geniuses who can make those connections and then (the overwhelmingly hard step) get them adopted by the powers that be — what can be done on an individual level? Is there a helpful attitude or mindset that can be adopted by anyone perched anywhere on our political or religious hilltops?
There is one common sense possibility. Long ago, a comedian named Brother Dave Gardener had a preachy saying: “Gratitude is riches.” Most of us have at least someone or something for which we can be grateful, and that circumstance tends to bring out our best. We cherish that person; we take care of that thing.
So, can we extend our gratitude and stewardship more to that which we share with others nearby, with fellow citizens, with distant strangers, with fellow creatures? If gratitude, stewardship, and sharing sound too idealistic, think of yourself as a stakeholder, a beneficiary, or a charter member. But, accept that you are not the only one of these.
Maybe the best kind of stewardship is like gardening. Why do people turn to gardening when they retire? I think it’s because they have left the world of compulsion, ladder-climbing, commuting, forced consumption, deadlines, zero-sum, moral compromise, and everyday treachery (and much more). They turn to a world of encouraging life, letting things develop to their potential, trading ideas, seeds, and plants with others, and getting closer to the processes that we all depend on for both survival and flourishing. As Gardener Brother Dave might have said, gardening is gratitude is riches.
If you search for gardening as a metaphor for doing things right, it pops up in a lot of contexts. Maybe there’s something to it. Hardly any of us have any influence or control over the world’s big scary problems. And if you go for mindful detachment instead, the world careens ahead without you and without your help. But by behaving like a metaphorical gardener you do what you can, and it’s a shareable, admirable attitude that can influence others. Also, in a sense, evolution does it too.
P.S. Scientists have had harsh words over whether biology is more about competition or cooperation, or (correctly, I think) “about” neither of these. After writing the current essay I saw this elegant review of those flame wars. Hopefully, I have not crossed over a line that goes from “biology can be viewed metaphorically in ways that might inspire us to solve problems” to biology-tells-us-right-from-wrong. Forgive me also for blurring the ideas of cooperation and coordination. Cooperation properly refers to situations that involve agency: decision-making towards a goal. Coordination is just different pieces of a system functioning together without degrading the whole.
Thanks, Ted, for the always thought provoking ideas. I will definitely check out LessWrong and to continue to work for good and try to stay a Roper!