Try, just try, to imagine a better world

RIP Humanity: b. BC 50,000

Died: AD 2034, from chronic pessimism

Lately I’ve been thinking about the large dose of pessimism with which people approach the future, and how this pessimism pervades people’s responses to the transhuman project. I went around my college canteen and asked a handful of people what they thought life would be like in 100 years time. The first thing that came out of most people’s mouths was some disaster scenario: nuclear war or climate change. It struck me that humans are obsessed with bad outcomes – we are chronic pessimists. Take, for example, a random excerpt from the UK TV listings:

7.30pm Street Doctor The GPs arrive in Edinburgh, where alcohol-related deaths and cancer are the biggest killers. Barbara sets up an impromptu surgery at the docks. At the castle, Ayan and George treat a swollen ankle, and Jonty answers Kiaz's concerns about the menopause when he visits the Royal Mile.

8.00pm EastEnders The Beales face the shocking aftermath of the shooting as Jane is rushed to hospital and the gunman flees the scene. Lucy is determined to protect Steven from the police, but soon realises the depth of his emotional disturbance. Ian is forced to make a difficult decision.

8.30pm Panorama Hilary Andersson investigates the prospects of Barack Obama, an African-American presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, who faces the challenge of rising above his country's racial divisions.

9.00pm New Tricks Halford visits a clairvoyant in the hope of making contact with his dead wife, but instead receives a message from a teenage girl who was abducted and left to die in a transport container in 1982. Despite the unconventional nature of the new evidence, Pullman agrees to reopen the investigation. The ageing detectives become convinced it will be their final case when they are ordered to report for physical and psychological evaluation. James Bolam, Amanda Redman and Robert Bathurst star.

The same trend shows up in modern film. Look at the IMDB top 10:

The Godfather

The Shawshank Redemption

The Godfather: Part II

The good, the bad and the ugly

Pulp Fiction

Schindler's List

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Casablanca

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

What do we have here? Gangsters, Prison, more Gangsters, cowboys shooting each other, Gangsters again, Nazis, Darth Vader – may as well be a Nazi, Insane people, and finally Tolkein’s epic orgy of destruction and warfare.

Why do we have such a limited ability to imagine better things, but such a developed faculty to imagine worse things?

Think about what you are as a human. Think about life in our era of evolutionary adaptedness [EEA] - when we hunted for food and lived in caves. Think of humans being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers (this is why you are afraid of the dark), humans dying of starvation (this is why you like to pig out on energy rich foods), and humans killing each other with stone clubs. In this era we were not in a position to do anything with an ability to think of better things, because without modern technological society, we were essentially powerless to improve our world and the manner of our existence. We were stuck with the shitty way things were. Besides, as far as you genes are concerned, the goodness of the world is equal to the number of copies of your genes in existence. Eating some food and having some sex was as good as it got.

In fact it was probably adaptive to not get too upset about this state of affairs, which is why we are good at rationalizing bad things as being OK – from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post:

“Such is human nature, that if we were all hit on the head with a baseball bat once a week, philosophers would soon discover many amazing benefits of being hit on the head with a baseball bat”

So evolution did not equip us with any serious ability to imagine a radically better world. It certainly gave us the ability to imagine a world which was lacking in explicit badness (no tigers, no hunger, no deadly illnesses) and which was full to the brim with the few pleasures that primitive humans experienced anyway – so that would be lots of sex and plenty of food. This is basically the human notion of paradise. Look at any renaissance painting of heaven or utopia and that’s what you’ll see: nude women and bowls of fruit.

Now things have changed. We don’t live in the EEA any more. Our environment no longer shapes us. We shape our environment – in fact fairly soon we may be able to shape reality. A shaper of reality needs to have a keen imagination for how things could be better – so that she can know how to craft her world. [contrast this with an early human who only needs to know how to maintain the fragile genes he carries – he needs to be able to imagine all the ways he could fail to protect and pass on those genes]

So we suddenly need to start thinking about what we want the world to be like. We need to be able to imagine a better world in order to go and create it. I have just argued that we are rather bad at doing this! Is anyone trying to imagine a radically better world? Nick Bostrom has tried. He writes:

How can I tell you about Utopia and not leave you mystified? What words could convey the wonder? What inflections express our happiness? My pen, I fear, is as unequal to the task as if I had tried to use it to kill an elephant.”

My point is that in addition to the removal of the negative, there is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments that are currently out of reach.

Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good that we come across from time to time in our lives can be put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life.

Human life, at its best, is fantastic. I’m asking you to create something even greater. Life that is truly humane.