Useless Intelligence

It occurred to me today how a civilization becomes stagnant: through meritocracy. A society is decadent when intelligence is a free pass to a class of useless rentiers, who justify their livelihood by abtruse mental gymnastics, through which they prove their cleverness and render it futile.

When historians try to explain "why the Renaissance happened" they put themselves at a disadvantage; the question is rather "why didn't it happen earlier", and the answer is, the Church. But here anti-medievalism, which was born of the Renaissance and is still going strong, leads us astray with images of blinkered, dogmatic, foolish clergymen frantically suppressing any sign of free thought among their victims - as if they could impose a reign of pious terror for near a millennium. In fact, the Middle Ages would have been better off with such a contemptible clergy - indeed, it was partly the emergence of such a clergy that brought the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

The problem with the Medieval clergy is that they were "the smartest men in the room". If you were a commoner, and far above the average in intelligence, you would join the priesthood; it was your shot at wealth and power, and the only one you'd get. Your brain wasn't doing you much good behind the plow, but writing treatises in Latin gave you a real chance to show your superiority.

By taking the cleverest part of the population and making parasites of them, turning their intellects to the justification of their status rather than any useful subject, the Church stunted (but by no means eliminated) progress in technology, development in philosophy and in the sciences, and the vitality of art.

On the other side of the Eurasian continent, China set about doing the same thing. The most intelligent men would take the civil service examination, and score well, and get the best government jobs. They would run the bureaucracy, write a great deal of poetry and invent nothing useful, think nothing original, and discover nothing remarkable.

But in Europe, the Church ran into problems - the failure of the Crusades, discontent over ecclesial corruption, but worst of all the Black Death. The priests and religious tended to the sick, and administered extreme unction to the dying, and therefore died themselves at a very high rate. The death toll among the clergy is not known with any accuracy, but probably most of Europe's Catholic priests and religious died in the Black Death. The gaps in the ranks were filled with men of much lower quality, which further lowered the esteem of the Church.

It was because of this - that a clever man no longer had the Church standing up before him, the clear and sure path to success for a man who had all his declensions and conjugations lined up, and always a quote from St. Paul or St. Augustine or St. Aristotle, whatever might be needed - that the Renaissance happened. Indeed some of the great figures of the Renaissance sought a career in the Church, but got little from it; Erasmus became a priest, but he could never become an Aquinas - that is, make a career of writing arcane books for the benefit of other Schoolmen. He had to write for the public to make a name for himself, and he had to write sincerely, rather than make whatever argument would impress the hierarchy.

Thus, what some historians have made out as the great virtue of the Medieval Church - that it gave a place for commoners of ability - is in fact, the only serious thing you can say against it, as the Church was fairly benign in other respects.

It is interesting that today, we have created something in America quite analogous to the Catholic priesthood and the Chinese mandarin class. It is called the financial services industry.

50 years ago, if you were a brilliant young physics grad chances were fair, I think, that your eventual job would involve - well, physics of some sort. Nowadays, some stat arb desk at a hedge fund is looking for brilliant physicists to fine-tune the algorithm on its HFT's - or something similarly useless and absurd, but obscenely lucrative. Wall Street has long been a giant albatross around America's neck, but previously the bankers understood that you hardly needed much brains for the sort of business they were running, and the very brightest of our nation belonged in some kind of useful enterprise. But since the 1980's they seem to have lost the big picture.

Still, a country doesn't run on its 99.999th percentile math geniuses alone - nor have they all been hired by Goldman Sachs yet. The point is that finance has become a gaping black hole that sucks in all sorts of Americans who might otherwise do something useful for our society. The most profitable industry in this country, today, consists of people selling each other money; it's like a satire of capitalism.

But even if we avoid a complete economic collapse, I don't think the priesthood of finance can have the same stifling effect as the Catholic clergy and the Chinese civil service. Those institutions stifled because they survived, and they survived because they were reasonable and humane; the moral teacher of the one was Jesus Christ, and of the other Confucius.

The moral teacher of our banking class is Ayn Rand, and as we are already seeing, there is little danger that their rule will seem reasonable and bearable.

The Fracturing of Discourse

The principle disagreements among serious thinkers today (by which term I mean just that, and not the random pack of fools given prominence by failing institutions, whether academia or journalism or commerce or government) consist not of differing positions on the same questions, but rather differing preoccupations. These are the concerns that I find reasonable:

1. That we are destroying the ecosystem.

2. That by artificial intelligence, or genetic engineering, we will bring about the extinction of humanity.

3. That culture, across the world, is deteriorating so that each generation is more base, more superficial, more thoughtless, weaker and more ignorant than the last.

4. That an elite kleptocracy rules the world, and has created a massive political and economic crisis that has already started a global depression, and will probably lead to a global war.

5. That, as happens throughout history, various groups are displacing and eliminating various others, which creates a vicious circle of factionalism and revenge.

6. That our consumption of the earth's resources is not sustainable with our current infrastructure, which it is perhaps too late to reform, and several billion people will have to die in order to reach sustainability.

No serious thinker today can avoid a preoccupation with one of these concerns, but they generally ignore some of them. Let us consider these problems in slightly more detail:

1. By deforestation, fishing and various industrial and agricultural practices, we have radically changed the content of the biosphere, invariably in the direction of impoverishment. We have also chemically changed the content of the atmosphere, principally by increasing CO2 levels. Although the exact consequences of this are difficult to foresee, and in dispute, they will not be good, nor negligible.

2. Research in artificial intelligence will eventually create machines capable of performing every function of the human mind, far better than the human mind itself can perform it. At this point the purpose of humanity itself will be called into question. At the same time, research in genetics will not only allow us to change the nature of the human species, but also allow us to create and modify pathogens, to make biological weapons capable of killing large populations. Any of these things could result in the end of humanity as we know it, and possibly the end of humanity period. But the first of these is the greatest danger. There are those, that I consider extremely foolish, who regard artificial intelligence with aplomb, finding it acceptable that machines should be our "successors". However, as AI researchers are now stating, it is much more expedient to make computers to perform one particular task of the human mind, rather than all of them, and to do it in a "computer way" rather than a "human way." So there is no reason to think that AI's will be "successors" to mankind except in the sense that the seed drill was the "successor" to the sower. And any who think that billions of people will be allowed to live, uselessly, off the largesse of the machines, does not understand the nature of power in this world. Those who own the machines will live. Labor, which is to say me, and most of you, which owns nothing of consequence, will go extinct. The Welfare State of modern times does not exist, and did not come into existence, because the mass of men are running society for their own benefit, but because starving and homeless people can cause trouble for the men in power. When it becomes impossible for mere men to make trouble in a world run by smarter, more powerful machines, the need to support the unproductive will no longer exist. The only question is whether they will kill us off slowly or quickly.

3. As society becomes more complex, the individual is increasingly trained to perform a particular function, and those elements of his person incidental to that function are treated with the maximum possible neglect. All the means by which we tend to ourselves - by learning, by recreating, by eating, by exercising, and by reflection on our meaning and purpose - have been drastically altered in the past century, invariably to perform the immediate purpose of the thing more efficiently, at the cost of our general well-being. Thus we only learn what is necessary for our profession, we enjoy artificial pleasures like computer games that leave no happy memories or lasting satisfaction, we eat strange things filled with strange chemicals, we take exercise in the manner of a lab rat, and our existential questions are answered with something cheap and thoughtless. Likewise both physical and psychological problems are treated by drugs, even when it would be healthier to alter our lifestyle either to eliminate or to accommodate the malady, because the only point of treatment is to eliminate the reduction in our efficiency, as efficiently as possible. Because of these things people have become frailer, less happy, and less able to control their own destiny. What precise calamity this portends is not obvious, but it leaves us more vulnerable to any sort of disaster.

4. The corporate, and in particular the financial elite has taken the bulk of the world's wealth, and through well-documented and ongoing theft and fraud, is increasing the disparity between them and us. Since the 1890's (when it was already clear, to those with eyes, that we would be the Great Power of the 20th century) United States foreign and domestic policy was made by and for investment bankers, always with the one mindless purpose of securing the return on investment. For this reason "we" have kept Latin America poor to secure cheap labor, and killed whatever natives threatened "our" investments there (read about the career of this remarkable soldier if you were not aware of how long this has gone on). To protect JP Morgan's exposure to Allied European debt, and for no other reason, we entered WWI, turning what should've been a horribly bloody stalemate, that would have sated Europe's appetite for war, into a disastrous victory for the Allies (as pro-Allied a man as Churchill considered that WWII could not have happened, if we had not forced them to win WWI). And then, to strengthen our export market we invested in Germany, conditional on their purchase of American goods, worsening the debt load of that bankrupt country, thus worsening the misery and desperation that brought forth the Nazis - whose military buildup we promptly financed as well. This pattern, of wrecking the whole world for the sake of a bond, the bankers have continued to the present day. Recently they created an enormous global housing bubble, and when it began to burst (in much of the world it is still going strong) they made out their own, carefully-crafted insolvency as a public crisis, which through a corrupt government they are "resolving" by the greatest monetary theft in history, which goes under various guises like TARP and ZIRP and Maiden Lane and QE but is all just thievery.

5. Anthropologists have noted the tendency of people everywhere to divide themselves into rival factions for little obvious reason, but it is equally important to note the perfect rationality of this behaviour. If one part of a society makes a faction of itself, pursuing its own interests above the others, then ceteris paribus, they will out-compete the rest of society in every respect, by giving favours preferentially to one another, while receiving favours impartially from everyone else. The only answer to the collective self-promotion of a faction is some kind of counter-faction. The logical result of this is a perpetual "arms-race" in which the least hint of factionalism on the part of one's neighbors, requires the creation of some yet-stronger alliance to counter it. The fact that societies can have any cohesion at all, is due to an "irrational" (or at least, non-self-interested) gregariousness and sense of tribal unity. This logic underlies every tendency that is popularly called nationalistic or racist, and because these spring from logic, not a quirk of human instinct, they cannot be eradicated by "enlightenment". Because the threat from a competing faction is more immediate, more obvious and more familiar than the other problems that confront a person today, factional rivalry is the main political concern of most people, today as always. "Globalization" i.e. wage arbitrage, has worsened this by encouraging ethnic rivalries arising from immigration and offshoring. Indeed throughout history, immigration is a typical prelude to ethnic cleansing, either of the immigrant or the native people; where the historical record is cloudy, it is in fact difficult to distinguish migration from genocide (see for instance the Indo-European migrations, or the Dorian Invasion of Greece). So it seems likely that mass immigration into the United States and Europe will result in a violent ethnic struggle of some sort. Of course all this detracts from our ability to solve any of these other problems.

6. At some point in the 21st century we will have to end our dependence on oil wells and other non-renewable resources. This is entirely possible; hydrocarbons can be synthesized if you have power (for instance the Fischer-Tropsch process), and we have renewable sources of power. The question is whether we can change our infrastructure in time. If sources of crude oil should run out more quickly than we expect, we may not have time to adjust, and a drop in hydrocarbon production would devastate the entire economy, but most importantly agriculture. A global famine would be a likely result.

Because each of these problems are so terrible, we tend either to fixate on one to the exclusion of the others. Furthermore, the scope of these problems often drives us to denial. We imagine that we can do as we like to the environment, and use resources at whatever pace we please, without risking disaster - that the economy is not in a global depression, and that our governments represent the people and not a few small cliques - that any concern over cultural decline is somehow invalidated by the fact that other people, in the past, have thought their cultures in decline - that the brave new world of genetics and artificial intelligence is mostly an upside, with only a few "risks" involved - that unfettered immigration only causes problems because bad people are thinking un-liberal thoughts, and the laws of human behaviour can be abrogated by a little moral indoctrination.

If you accept the reality of all these problems at once, it becomes difficult to suggest a course of action. This is why I am calling the blog Philosophy on the Precipice - because at this moment of great crisis, we have no choice but to pause, and think, even if it seems that we do not have time for it. But we can simplify the problems to some degree: in every case, the problem exists because the world is run for the benefit of a few people today, and not the many of today and of the future. Therefore any talk of a solution must be first of all political.