How Materialism will end Humanity, Part II

"But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, Logical" (The Logical Song by Supertramp)

In the previous post, I’ve explained that, for all intents and purposes, we should treat Materialism as our effective religion for long term predictions about our civilization. I will summarize it here if you don’t want to go through the whole thing.

I’ve argued that, even if most people would disagree with the mindset of a hardcore Materialist, our society will still be shaped by the forces of incessant progress. The rising tide of technology lifts all boats regardless of the passengers’ personal beliefs.

I’ve also sketched the worldview of a True believer. Essentially, he is a deep skeptic (to anything resembling absolute ethical truths, supernatural forces, or teleology) who relies on scientific logic (Physics, Biology, Evolution) to find explanatory patterns in the world. Nature’s main engine of creation is simply brute-force random trial and error, shuffling every possible combination, ultimately causing the emergence of stable structures (such as Life).

It should be noted that the Materialist doesn’t actually view his creed as religious nor does he “trust Science”. He simply works with whatever checks out empirically, and he’s perfectly comfortable with the possibility that many truths could simply be unattainable for the hairless apes on a pale blue dot in the Solar System -itself a speck in the larger Universe. He might decide, “just because”, that he likes pursuing knowledge as much as possible but it’s definitely not -nor is anything- necessary.

Why then, would this worldview lead to doom? After all, it seems impossible, at this point, to unite the world under one religion, or even under a unique set of moral beliefs. Isn’t a search for knowledge the only real thing worth pursuing, the only thing we actually have in common? This utopia might seem tempting, but many would still answer: No, this will simply not do.

While few are true (Materialist) believers, many thinkers are still aligned -if imperfectly- with this vision of Reality.

And they will defend it, especially against the other side, the “irrational” one.

The fight card

The intellectual sphere today, as it was in the past is still locked in a perennial boxing match between two main camps.

Out of the blue corner of this rather modern contest, we have the tribe of Materialism/Rationality -all the way to meaning and purpose. The strategy basically boils down to:

Let’s just decide that a -loosely defined- “human flourishing ethos” is our goal and use logic and reason to further this agenda forever.

The epitome of this camp is Steven Pinker who wrote two books on the subject. The subtitle of the second one, Enlightenment Now is: “The case for reason, science, humanism and progress”. He is by no means the only one in this corner, obviously.

The rough idea is that Enlightenment (Science+Humanism) values are reasonable, and they can therefore be achieved through rational progress. A scientific approach to everything, including morality, if you will. Other members of the blue corner include B. F. Skinner, Sam Harris, Utilitarians (such as Peter Singer) and Yuval Noah Harari. These thinkers do not agree on everything, but I would still put them in the camp of betterment through Rationality alone.

You might have noticed that people like Steven Pinker or Sam Harris (but not Harari) would strongly object to being characterized in the way I did a Materialist in the first post. They would specifically counter that they do believe in Morality but only through reasoning and common sense. As I mentioned in Part I, almost no one is a full-on true believer. They are (as many today would identify) Materialists with Humanitarian characteristics.

However, my point (detailed later in this post) is that this inconsistent position is untenable in the long run. If you keep scientific logic as the only vehicle of knowledge and progress, it will come crashing down. This is why I still put all quasi-Materialists in the same blue corner.

Out of the red corner, stands the tribe of Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant (to some extent), G.K Chesterton and his fence, Fyodor Dostoevsky or his more recent fan Jordan Peterson, Roger Scruton etc. But the VIP award of this camp has to go to C.S. Lewis, who crystallized this view in the “Abolition of Man”, which is a major inspiration for this post although my argument will differ ultimately. I similarly disagree with many points from the other writers/thinkers, but I concur with the general sentiment.

The slogan of this corner is simply stated: Rationality by itself is not enough to ensure human flourishing. And the overreliance on it will, in fact, lead to humanity’s extinction, one way or another.

If you follow the current state of this debate, you’ve probably heard the usual arguments:

-That movements that purported to rely on supposed rationality led to horrors such as the Terror in France or Stalinism.

-That you cannot “create” meaning by simple decisions.

-That it has to come from something above and external to you.

-That it has to be something you cannot understand and analyze fully.

Yes, it sounds a lot like God. This is a common counter to these points. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous is often criticized because they famously claim that you cannot change without surrendering to a “higher power”.

But again, I am not arguing here for theism or atheism. I don’t intend this as a call to arms on what we ought to do or believe. I am simply making a prediction on where the Materialist society is headed. That is, as far away from the red corner as possible.

So, what do these mystics, left behind by the acceleration of the technocratic future, believe?

On this worldview, a small but unavoidable element of Mystery and Beauty is thought to be essential for us to thrive. Wisdom is conceived as a separate tool of discernment that ought to guide Reason. It’s no use trying to compute exactly how this works and how much of it is needed because it’s the over computing itself that destroys the Mystery, our sense of purpose, and ultimately our will to live. In a way it’s a Gödelian catch-22.

It’s precisely because the scientific process is so efficient that a society on the Materialism train will derail, as I hope to show here.

But first let’s make the case for the blue corner.

All aboard the Future

If you could choose to be born today or as a medieval peasant, what would you chose? To help you make a decision, here’s a summary of what that life would be like:

First, you’re lucky to just be alive because you had something like a 40 % chance of dying within your first year. If you survived all the diseases from your childhood, the trauma of your dead siblings and the brutal punishments by all adults (if not outright abandonment), then you have the wonderful opportunity to start work young helping out on the farm with various tasks. Around 13, you would be sent to another house to work as a servant and learn some useful skills. Then as an adult (15 or so, there was no adolescence) you would start work on the farm you were tied to. You were not permitted to leave to find work (or a life) elsewhere. You’re born in that farm, and you’ll probably die working there. You are a serf to your lord. To whom you pay taxes on everything: your production, your livestock, your fishing, everything.

Accounting for the extra chores to do around the farm (feeding livestock, repairs, cleaning etc.), you would work more than a typical worker today and for a job that was much more unforgiving and painful.

Of course, if you really wanted to leave your farm, you could hope that your lord needed more men for war. Then, he could always force you (conscription) to fight for him in battles against enemies you never heard of. I don’t need to describe medieval warfare to make the point that this was an experience way more miserable than even 20th century battles.

If you’re still lucky, you’ll come back from that war with just something like a hand missing. But you would have to continue work obviously, until your old age.

I am of course not mentioning anything related to heating, sanitation, medications, giving birth, dental problems, or mental issues. These were all your problems and you had to deal with them.  Sure, you would eat relatively well since you grew the food…unless there’s a really bad winter. Also, meat is mostly for the upper class.

Of course, you might not be one of the 85% of peasants and be a noble. This meant though, that you were absolutely obligated to fight in wars (and that’s close to 100% chance of occurring in your lifetime since everyone was always fighting).

Of course that’s just one element of comparison. There are loads more to be gathered from The Better Angels of Our Nature for example.

Seen like that, it’s hard not to be on board with the wonders of scientific progress. Fighting against the force of Modernity seems like a genocidal endeavor when we compare the pre-modern world to our present. If rationality is ushering technical improvements of that magnitude, then surely, we should apply this miraculous tool on anything, including values and morality?

Keep in mind that Enlightenment ideals were often introduced through the lens of Reason. It is sometimes forgotten, in retellings of the French revolution, how much Cartesianism and logic were guiding principles in overturning the ways of old. This affected everything from rights to the simple names of the months. Post-revolution France famously used a reformed (“more intelligible”) calendar which named months based on the weather of the seasons. An early proposal for that calendar literally named 1788 “Year one of the reign of Reason”.

Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, correctly predicted that this revolution would end up eating itself through the Terror of an oligarchy.

Burke perfectly sums up the difference between the blue and red corner mindset in this quote:

“The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned”.

If anything is in contradiction with Materialism, it’s this: the idea that wisdom -through tradition- gives us another way of knowing, besides Reason (discernment). It’s an essential feature of our cognition and without it, Reason cannot be applied properly and will lead to collapse.

I cited the example of the French revolution to illustrate how opposed the blue corner is to this worldview: Nothing can stand above the domain of science. Think how Dawkins insisted that God should be treated as a scientific hypothesis.

The Materialist/Rationalist/Utilitarian denies that some things are not within Reason’s purview. Rights, beliefs, progress are all to be scrutinized, computed, and assessed according to scientific methods which will determine whether they are viable as is, or liable to be changed.

As I alluded to before, this shows that even the “moral ideals” defended by the likes of Pinker -such as enlightenment values- are only worth pursuing for their utility. This ethos is good because it leads to positive outcomes according to some measurable metric (life expectancy, GDP growth, amount of suffering etc.). They are not absolute in any sense.

Numbers, however, do not lie and they are clearly on the blue corner side here. So, what’s the red corner worried about then?

Everything that rises must converge

Here’s a thought experiment that can help you figure out where you stand:

-Imagine that 1000 random people are killed in some event (no suffering). Everyone (I hope) would react with horror.

-Imagine now that 1000 000 people are killed similarly. The event is now much more terrifying right?

-Imagine now that the entire planet is annihilated in a fraction of a second. No suffering or pain, no pre-warning. Just poof the entire Earth!

For some of you at least, I imagine that this is somehow now a lesser catastrophe. How is that possible? Surprisingly, whereas before, we can imagine the agony of the people that stayed and the apocalypse that ensues socially, this effect is completely neutered when there’s no one left to witness the destruction.

Of course, if you’re a believer in the intrinsic worth of life, this event is still the worse thing ever. After all, you have a framework where it’s an absolute truth that the existence of life is a Good.

If you’re a Materialist, however, things are a little different. In a first approximation, you might make a utilitarian calculation showing this annihilation as the most negative outcome possible. But you will have no basis for affirming that there ought to be Life in the first place.

Remember how I said that human flourishing was loosely defined? This is because, in a Materialist mindset, the morality of saving lives is simply a useful fiction that Homo Sapiens has come to believe through trial and error (as Harari, a rare true Materialist, states). As I detailed in Part I, the belief in this fiction has simply produced societies that last longer. It’s a bland technical matter. Humans are naturally programmed to try to survive and these stories of “Life having value” create civilizations that outcompete others through their stability.

But none of this is necessary or true or meaningful. Ask a pure Materialist if it’s bad to erase the earth out of existence and he cannot possibly hope to answer that. Good and bad are relative concepts invented by humans for their utility. If there are no humans left, then there’s nothing to be useful for.

Of course, you can simply decide that you want Homo Sapiens to survive and thrive but as a Utilitarian/Materialist, it will remain just that, an arbitrary decision. And once you’ve opened the gates of rationality, it will consider that everything -including this very decision- is under its purview.

A random choice simply doesn’t have the same weight as an unshakable belief. If you want some things to be untouchable by reason, then you have to declare that some truths are knowable through other means, such as traditional wisdom. We would then have to follow that wisdom against our logic sometimes.

And we’re back in the red corner!

Also please don’t think that this is simply a theoretical matter. Some movements today actively advocate technological acceleration above all human concerns. There is no better example of scientific progress destroying moral values than the effective accelerationist. As expected, this particular strand of futurism chooses random targets as their goals such as the “proliferation of consciousness” or “entropy acceleration as the will of the universe”. Again, an obvious counter to this: if Rationality is allowed to question anything including our basic values, then why should we have these goals, or any goals at all? This seems arbitrary, exactly as C.S. Lewis predicted The Abolition of Man.

Of course, this has been argued in some form by several thinkers but none as definitively and presciently as C.S. Lewis. In his essay, he imagined that a future human race would have random goals when they have rejected the Tao. Lewis is a Christian, but this is how he refers to the traditional wisdom, weirdly enough (trying to convey the universality of morality). He thinks there is a risk that modern ideas will try to overthrow this conventional knowledge, leading the abolition of the title.

Indeed, Lewis is right that a Materialist has no safeguards against relativism, for he lacks a framework to outright reject an uprooting of the moral order. However, I do think that Lewis is mistaken in thinking that it will be a deliberate subversion of absolute morality that will bring about this abolition. He does not refer to technology at all and in his essay, humanity continues eternally into the future. He is simply worried about the spiritual and intellectual state of future humans because his present was already being challenged by moral relativists.

This is where I disagree, as I think that technology is the prime engine of the end of humanity.  

While some people are outright relativist in the extreme, I will keep insisting -because it’s unintuitive- that almost everyone in the blue corner still has a general moral sense -either implicit or explicit:

-Sam Harris and Steven Pinker believe in a Moral ideal (even if I think it’s contradictory to a purely scientific framework, this is still what they believe).

-Dawkins recently suggested that he likes living in a Christian culture despite not believing in any of it.

-Alex O’Connor -who is does not believe in Moral absolutes- still fights against animal cruelty.

So, if even the blue corner sort of supports some morality -even inconsistently- what’s the problem? Lewis’ specific fear is unfounded since it’s unlikely the whole world will be convinced of Moral relativism through philosophical debate.

No, the problem is actually way worse. It obviously doesn’t help that some people are intellectually trying to subvert moral absolutism, but it won’t be the actual cause of the future collapse. 

The destruction of our moral sense will happen slowly, imperceptibly through all of us channeling it by our use of soothing technology.

And the winner is

The blue side by red corner retirement…

The reason I love the Burke quote cited above is this: It implies that a lack of a proper definition for rights is a good thing. It’s precisely the overly robust definitions of every single concept that lead to unexpected negative outcomes. It’s because Science is extremely successful that it will eventually be allowed to question everything including the foundations of our beliefs. That system will fail because it’s efficient, which is why I referenced a Gödelian crash earlier. It’s when the system becomes too powerful and well defined that it starts to eat itself!

In the pre-modern world, the proverbial flood gates were unquestionably closed thanks to our belief system which -it turns out- was specifically set up to override logic being applied to undermine things we cherish irrationally… you know, like the value of Life.

In a way, it’s similar to our current struggles with safe AGI. We are afraid that it will apply its internal programming to domains it was not meant for. Which means, essentially that we cannot convince the AI that it’s supposed to logically maintain our humanity because that cannot be deduced through reasoning.

But Rationality’s victories in the modern world mean that no land is now beyond its conquest and the deluge of scientific questioning, once started, is unstoppable. We now have none of our traditional guardrails against any technological leap forward.

And those leaps will happen, because they’ll look like progress, in every way that matters to the blue corner: identifiable, measurable gains that are undeniable unless we can produce numbers to the contrary. And the red corner won’t because -as Burke realized- it doesn’t believe that you can quantify everything that matters.

Materialism, in the end, is a religion with no god, no tenets, no adherents. Yet it will still conquer the world. Its heralds are unwitting and unwilling. We are all participating in it in some sense. Giving in to minor, seemingly innocent improvements in our increasingly technocratic world.

Ok, I admit this is a bit theoretical for now. How will technology actually cause our end?

We have lost the intellectual debate in a sense -since science is effectively allowed to question everything. We are now standing at the edge of the precipice. But what will push us over?

If we figure out safe AI, won’t we create a utopia?

Maybe, but it won’t be with us humans.

My next post will tell that charming story.