Last week’s musings about temptations and human frailty led me down a different thought path. Rather than considering this at a micro, individual level, we can also use temptation to explore the macro level of a society or even humanity as a whole.
Ants are wonderful creatures. Despite having tiny brains and flimsy bodies, they achieve great things. Their concept of society might even be considered as superior to humans, since I am not aware of dysfunctions such as mass shootings or anxiety among ants.
How do they do it? Well, they have evolved in such a way that they develop and retain collective wisdom, and they find a way to collaborate, with common goals, roles, signals, leadership and learning. It is a wonderful miracle, a testament to evolution. But it also carries the clear lesson that collaboration can beat individualism, given the right structures.
The main difference between humans and ants is that we have evolved to consciously think as well as do. Ants know their roles and goals, but we can think about ours. We have some hardwiring, thanks to evolution, leading to primary goals of reproducing and nurturing. But we all make conscious choices all the time.
What a mixed blessing this is! This huge brain that we have accelerates our evolution, so much that we can almost feel it happening. But evolution is known to be a process of trial and error, and it hurts us to witness the errors. It hurts us even more to feel that we could reduce the errors, if only… Well, we all have our own set of “if only” statements, many of them blaming other people. I think we can argue that most of the mistakes come from our temptations. Given that those temptations are part of our evolutionary make up, we are doomed to some mistakes. Our challenge is to reduce them.
Or is it? What defines a mistake anyway? Unlike ants, we can also choose our own goals and our own roles. We have sensations of happiness, anxiety, empathy, fear, and many others, all linked to our evolution but somehow individual as well. Among many other things, we all have to decide, consciously or not and riddled with execution errors, how our personal goals can overlap with those of our family, our tribe or the whole of humanity.
Oliver Burkeman had a wonderful story in the Guardian weekly this week – indeed he has most weeks. It was in the context of task orientation. A new Yorker goes on holiday to Brazil and meets a local who whiles away his time fishing, drinking and playing music with friends. Never short of an opinion, the New Yorker offers a lecture about the potential to make millions from building a fishing empire with staff and assets. That way the local can retire, and then while away his days fishing, drinking and playing music with friends.
As well as being a funny reflection on the New York character, the story speaks to our different goals and how we see time. It can also be linked to the famous experiment with marshmallows: would we rather have one today or two tomorrow?
This is how humanity progresses, through fits and starts, errors and brilliant discoveries, using our scale and diversity to grow wisdom. Our complex brains can achieve everything the ants can, and much, much more.
We can see this as a race. We can either be like the ants, with set roles and goals and steady progress, or we can go faster, but with pitfalls. We progress when we can collectively grow our wisdom more quickly, so long as our systems and structures are able to keep pace and so long as our temptations don’t get the better of us.
When we all lived in villages things were simpler. We hunted for food, sought sexual partners and nurtured our young. There was some specialisation, we learned to look after the old for their wisdom, and we devised some rules and hierarchies. Superstition became religion, and some people used religion to embed structures advantageous to their own type. The structures helped to keep temptations in check, but at the expense of slowing the growth of wisdom.
As we developed, things became more complicated. Communications and technology and all the other drivers of development expanded our scope to accelerate. The village became a town and then a tribe and then a nation, all enabling more specialisation and teamwork, but requiring more sophisticated structures to be effective. Our various goals drove forward our collective wisdom, competitiveness being among the double-edged drivers, a spur and a temptation.
Systems have evolved in response. Village councils became influenced by priests and kings, then parliaments and autocrats. Laws developed for property, companies and misdemeanours. Now we even have a series of challenges that a global in scope, notably climate change and nuclear weapons.
Through this story we can be broadly divided into those embracing some risk in the interests of progress, and those preserving existing structures to prevent chaos (or more likely in practice to protect privileges). Embracing risk involves including more and more of humanity to solve larger and larger challenges, but sometimes invites chaos or disaster or unintended consequences.
So, just two hundred years ago, kings had real power and only wealthy, male, landowners could vote. Everybody else was a worker ant. In some respects now, we are all kings.
A good example for how this can develop is the use of referenda. The Swiss have fine-tuned a system for these to be more often a driver of progress than of chaos. In theory, referenda are a wonderfully inclusive, empowering tool. Social media and other communications advances offer a future in which we can all contribute to collective governance in real time.
What could go wrong? Well, in the great race, our wisdom has not yet caught up and our temptations get in the way. I saw this in a related context, in a company that I sometimes work for, where smart software enables many people to share and compare ideas in real time. It is brilliant and always insightful, but without a strong moderation it usually fails. Our team has to work behind the scenes to make sure questions are asked and followed up in a smart way. Otherwise, the output is usually banalities such as “we must work better together”.
That links to a common failing in political situations, the confusion of goals and plans. A plan with no goal is an aimless mess. A goal with no plan can be inspiring and a good starting point, but will only lead in a positive direction if people can respond independently to the goal. You need a goal and a plan. Make America Great Again is a goal, but can be worse than worthless without credible steps to head in that direction.
Similar failings doom many a worthy cause. We are either not smart enough to take advantage of a potential advance, or our structures let us down, or our temptations get in the way. Communism started as a strong idea. Chavez was once a powerful leader. A Brexit referendum might have been a good idea in different circumstances.
I find two major takeaways from all of this. The first is that it is not hard for me to choose the progressive side. The potential of humanity is unleashed if we strive for progress, accepting some failures along the way. It is usually easy to spot the selfish arguments on the other side. Black people are not inferior. Women can do better than men at most human undertakings. M5S in Italy started as a worthy endeavour, focussing on input from the people at every stage. The only valid arguments against innovation are practical. Can we make this work within our structures? Does it risk falling foul of our temptations? If the answer is yes, which it sadly often is, then the honest challenge is how to fine tune the idea or the structures, not to abandon the whole project.
The second takeaway I find inspiring. It comes back to those pesky temptations. If we accept this model for human progress, then pride, greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, envy and anger really are our limiting factors. If we could find a reliable way to moderate those temptations, that could be a true game changer for progress could accelerate. Yet each succeeding generation is doing a much better job of handling temptation, and the science of the brain seems on the verge of achieving huge breakthroughs.
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