Building Utopia: Endurable version

Designing a society that is pleasant today is not enough. It has to be pleasant to our descendants too

The Last Car for Miramar. Postcard by Martin Anderson (1854-1932), England, circa 1910. Wikimedia Commons 

Most modern thinkers who have strived at designing the optimal society have failed to take one point into account: Laws of nature. Societies, like everything else, are constrained by laws of nature. 

The two main laws societies are constrained by are

1. Human nature

2. Cultural evolution 

The first point, human nature, is not being completely ignored. At least there is an ideal to keep it in mind when doing social engineering. It is the second point, cultural evolution, that is being overlooked by most people who are discussing how to build a good society. The idea that humans do not only have culture, but different cultures that are competing with each other, is still just a position held by isolated thinkers here and there. There is not even any significant movement that takes it into account.

For that reason, I think most theorizing that is being done about how society should be organized is deeply deficient. Building a society without taking all important laws of nature into account is a bit like erecting a nice castle on a swamp. What kind of society we would like is only the first question. The second question is what kind of society the laws of nature allow us to sustain over a number of generations. Creating unsustainable Utopias means disregarding the next generations. It makes us feel sensible and righteous in ourselves, but leaves a mess to our grandchildren. 

The question is: How can we build sustainably? What factors do we need to take into account when trying to build the most pleasant society we can?

I can think of four rough scenarios of cultural evolution from the present-day world:

Scenario 1: One culture is strong enough to painlessly and almost effortlessly absorb all the others. 

This is what most Westerners believe without thinking. High-tech, low fertility culture is so appealing for its members that everybody will want to be a member. And once they are members, people will be fully assimilated. If not in the first generation, so in the second generation. That way, high-tech cultures do not need to do anything more than being there and inspiring others. Societies not integrated in the high-tech-low-fertility world are called “developing”, regardless of whether they show any convincing signs of actually being developing into the high-technology-low-fertility pattern or not. In difficult-looking cases, it sends missionaries in an effort called “development aid”.

Although it is considered normal to believe in this scenario and abnormal to believe anything else, I find it unlikely. The whole calculation builds on the assumption that every single group of humans on Earth will be inspired to join high-tech society. It assumes the complete absence of both people uninspired to join and people incapable to join. As long as any group that is not inspired, or not capable of joining high-tech-low-fertility culture remains, that culture will grow exponentially while high-tech-low-fertility society shrinks. Failing to inspire one single culture, at any moment, will start the process of that culture taking over through numbers. 

And as things are, there is much more than one group of people who are uninspired to join high-tech society, incapable of joining high-tech society or both. The idea that everyone is becoming a high-techer out of inspiration and a bit of development aid is just an unrealistic dream for people who don't look at the world around them. 

Scenario 2: High-tech society starts oppressing all other societies 

When high-tech society discovers that it can't inspire everyone, the remaining alternative is to oppress those who can't be inspired. As China has shown during the last 50 years, using more or less brutal methods to lower fertility works.

There are possible light versions. Like making population control a condition of foreign aid. In 2100, Africa will have almost four billion inhabitants, according to the UN’s forecasts. And those forecasts assume that the fertility rate in Africa will decrease to below three by 2050 and keep decreasing after that. Our grandchildren can easily face a situation where there are as many Africans as Westerners, Chinese and Japanese together. Sustaining 4 billion Africans living on too little land is a more challenging task than sustaining 1.4 billion Africans living on more adequate parcels of land. Especially for a much smaller donor population than today. 

If the populations of shrinking high-tech societies are feeling overwhelmed in such a situation, they will be free to set conditions for aid. They will also be free to cut off aid completely and instead build a wall of military power against all Africans trying to escape their overpopulated continent. Sympathetic? Not at all. But entirely possible. 

Scenario 3: A new world war starts soon 

Throughout history, cultural evolution has been dominated by the cultures that expanded between the wars and won the wars when they began. This time is no different. If a total war starts, high-technology-low-fertility culture will be entirely sensible: In an intense war situation, young children are only a burden. In such situations it is better to use as much resources as possible to kill the enemy and as little as possible to raise one's own children. 

Scenario 4: High-tech culture goes high-fertility 

What if current high-technology-low-fertility societies transform themselves into high-technology-high-fertility societies?

High fertility tends to lead right into a Malthusian trap. That is a law of nature. Not only for the human race, but for all animals. For humans, the last 200 years have been an exception from that rule. Unprecedented technology development significantly raised the upper limit for how many humans Earth can hold. That started a new era: Cultural evolution mainly through birth rates.

Currently, cultures with high birth rates compete over which of them can fill up the Earth the fastest. Sooner or later, one after one of the expanding societies will reach the carrying capacity of their territory.

What will happen then? In history, such situations led to starvation, epidemics and wars. Is that what our descendants have to look forward to, in case Scenario 1, 2 and 3 fail to take place? Will they go right into a Malthusian trap?

Not necessarily. As we have seen during the last 200 years, there is a way to escape the Malthusian trap: Technology development. If humans can just produce enough food and water, and enough liveable land, they can expand in eternity without being caught in any trap.

And how to develop such technology? Maybe through expansion into space. If some human culture learns to build liveable and even pleasant space colonies, that culture can expand in infinity. The more children it gets, the more new land it can create. The technologically most capable cultures that get the most children will dominate in eternity. War will be difficult, because space colonies are both fragile and moveable. Taking over them by force will be a challenge. That fact will give peacefully expansionist societies an advantage.

One downside of this scenario is that it will probably make Earth an unpleasant place to be. When Earth is getting closer to the limit of its carrying capacity, cultures that are not high tech, cooperative or ambitious enough to build space colonies will also have expanded. Those cultures will have no choice but to wage war against each other. Extensive wars make life on Earth insupportable, so everyone who can leaves for space. The human race gets divided into the advanced sky inhabitants and the lowly planet inhabitants. The two divisions of humanity diverge and each follow their own path of evolution. 

The space primates continue competing with a combination of birth rates and technological prowess. The more a culture can reproduce and the more new space colonies it can build, the more it can expand. The Earth primates are likely to follow a more traditional evolutionary development more focused on warfare.

Which scenario is our scenario?

Which scenario do we have to relate to, if we want to build a society that is both maximally pleasant and sustainable in the face of the laws of nature? 

My guess is scenario 4. We live in a society that finds war unpleasant, for obvious reasons. Our society is doing its best to avoid war between equals, and it is succeeding rather well. That greatly reduces the risk that we are heading for a major war. 

Scenario 1 is just imaginary. When reality hits, it will creep over into scenario 2. And I think scenario 2 is not compatible with a pleasant society. People find believing in scenario 1 maximally pleasant. But if such luxury beliefs of our generation force our grandchildren to choose between scenario 2 or cultural suicide, that is not pleasant at all. A society that is maximally pleasant today but leads to nastiness tomorrow is not a pleasant society.

So I think that if the task is to build a maximally pleasant society that will also be pleasant for our grandchildren, a combination of population expansion and high-tech culture is the safest bet. Peaceful expansion is more pleasant than killing others off to prevent them from competing. It is also more pleasant than forcing others to conform. And last but not least, peaceful expansion strengthens the human race as a whole. If human life is something positive, population expansion is something positive. 

Population expansion alone will inevitably lead to Malthusian misery. For that reason, a pleasant and sustainable society needs to be as high-tech as possible. And technology needs to be focused on developing new and more efficient ways to sustain future humans. 

A combination of population expansion and high technology is difficult to achieve. As I outlined in my post Why fertility inevitably sinks in successful market economies, there is a built-in contradiction between fertility and high-tech society. Developing technology is done much better without children hanging around with all their tedious needs. 

A culture where people are too busy to make children will die out. A society that goes maximum fertility will not be able to achieve its technological, and hence its anti-Malthusian, potential. Some sort of compromise between the two will always be needed. But we have quite some influence over where that point is. The goal for every serious Utopia should be to maximize both fertility and technology. That is how we build a culture that will thrive for generations to come. That is what we owe the future.