New World Same Humans #13
Humanity currently faces a common enemy in the coronavirus. But conflict is an inescapable feature of our collective lives – and the pandemic won't change that.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
I started this newsletter to look at the trends and historical forces shaping the world around us.
As the weeks pass, one theme is emerging into even sharper focus. That is, the rise of a highly-networked world-system and its implications for the future.
That emergence has even led some thinkers to float the idea that humans are now best understood as a single, global entity. A superorganism. This week, I thought about the ways in which that is true. And the important ways in which it’s not.
One for all
Back in late January, in those golden days when going outside was a project that could be undertaken lightly, I went to a talk by the astronomer and futurist Martin Rees.
Some of you will remember that I wrote about it in the second instalment of NWSH. For those of us in the UK at that time, the scale of the threat posed by coronavirus was only just becoming visible. Still, when Rees talked about the Wuhan epidemic (as it was then), he made an argument related to it that has stayed with me since.
Rees said that we now live in a world of networks – of electricity grids, computers, transport hubs and more. Those networks have fuelled incredible advances. But it’s less often observed that they also expose us to new forms of risk. That’s because in such a world, a failure or contagion in a localised part of the world-system is liable as never before to cause catastrophic breakdown of the entire system. Here is Rees writing about that idea in 2015, with particular reference to the risk of a pandemic:
‘It is imperative to guard against the downsides of such an interconnected world...The magnitude of the societal breakdown from pandemics would be far higher than in earlier centuries. English villages in the 14th century continued to function even when the Black Death almost halved their populations. In contrast, our social framework would be vulnerable to breakdown as soon as hospitals overflowed and health services were overwhelmed—which could occur when the fatality rate was still a fraction of 1 per cent.’
Fast-forward to April 2020, and we’ve lived inside that paragraph for the last two months.
This week I was reminded of Rees again when I read this piece, which argues that networks have turned humanity into a single, global superorganism. A superorganism is comprised of individuals who are best seen as interrelated components of a single collective, with its own coherent behaviours. Ants are the classic example.
The idea that 21st-century humanity is best understood as a superorganism has been around for few years. And it’s related to a way of looking at our shared past that is currently enjoying a long moment. Big History eschews the methods and interests of traditional academic history, and instead attempts to situate humans in a single, totalising story about Life, the Universe and Everything. To achieve that goal the discipline draws most often not on traditional historical evidence (which is usually documentary) but on science: students of Big History love talking about energy flows, evolution, and stages of technological advance. The Anthropocene – the idea that humans are now the primary influence on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems – is an idea that emerged under the influence of this intellectual fashion.
By taking the long view, practitioners of Big History seek to identify long-range trends in human development. And one such key trend that they have pointed to is the movement towards ever-greater unification of the human species. That trend is one of the guiding ideas in the work of the most successful populariser of Big History so far, the mega-selling Yuval Noah Harari. Humans, points out Harari, started out in tiny, itinerant bands of hunter gatherers. For those who lived in the first fixed communities after the agrarian revolution, the second valley over was a different world. In the 16th-century, the citizens of Berlin were not strangers to one another, but they knew next to nothing about people in Beijing, whom they would have regarded as entirely alien. Today, by contrast, we increasingly inhabit a single global culture: one that agrees on the same clock, worships the same movie stars, and eats the same Big Mac, whether in Berlin, Beijing, or Bangalore.
There’s no denying the surface truth of these observations. And their support for the idea that 21st-century humanity is a single, global superorganism. What’s more, that idea seems overwhelmingly important right now given two challenges: the coronavirus crisis, and (even more so) the long-term threat posed by global heating.
When it comes to the coronavirus, it’s likely you’ve already seen a variant of the superorganism argument somewhere in your newsfeed. For the first time in our history – so runs this thought – all of humanity is engaged in common struggle. We must pull together as one, and get through this.
And many are pointing out that this situation echoes the even greater challenge we face when it comes to our relationship with our home planet. The human superorganism has altered the global ecosystem, and thrust us into the Anthropocene. Now, all humanity faces the common threat that is rising planetary temperatures. We must act as one, or we will suffer as one.
Again, there’s much that is true in all this. Humans are networked as never before. They do in many ways inhabit a single, global economy and culture. And both the coronavirus and global heating are single-issue, coherent challenges that affect every human being on Earth simultaneously in a way that wasn’t possible in the past.
But look more closely at either the pandemic or at global heating, and it quickly becomes clear that the 7.8 billion humans on Earth do not constitute a single, coherent superorganism. Indeed, if we try to view humans as such, we whitewash some of the most important aspects of these crises.
Let’s take global heating. The truth is that while this phenomenon affects the whole planet, it will play out very differently for different sets of people. Some parts of the Earth, by dint of their geography, will be far more affected by desertification or rising sea levels than others. Some will be far more affected by water scarcity. And most of all, both within and between countries the poor will be far more adversely affected than the rich. If global temperatures rise by more than four degrees, every single human will see Earth change in dramatic ways. For some that will mean a gated community, income from rents, and 24/7 air-conditioning. For others it will mean a massive refugee camp and little fresh water. There will be winners and losers. And much conflict over who gets to be in which group.
The underlying truth is this: rather than being a single, coherent unit, humans are continually divided by historical circumstance into classes of people separated by competing interests. The lesson of history is clear: in a world of finite resources, conflict is an inescapable part of human collective life.
Nothing about living inside a single, networked global system changes this. Yes, such a system does much to bring us together. But it also generates new shared problems (both the pandemic and global heating are in part products of a networked world), and in turn amplifies the differences between new classes of people with incompatible goals.
In seeking to view humans as a uniform humanity or even a single superorganism, Big History too often glosses over all this. That means it whitewashes inconvenient truths about the very historical processes that led us to the situation we’re now in.
That shouldn’t be such a surprise. In its current incarnation, the discipline is the product of a liberal humanist worldview that is itself in thrall to the idea of a single humanity with a shared nature and, crucially, a common historical destiny. That is a story written by western liberal humanists for western liberal humanists, who want to believe that societies around the world will eventually converge on some variant of early 21st-century Sweden. Thinkers such as Steven Pinker rightly trumpet the progress made across the last two centuries by the liberal democratic west, but downplay the ways in which that progress was purchased via the exploitation of others. Now, having engineered the Anthropocene and brought us to the edge of ecological breakdown, some liberal humanists want to leverage Big History and the superorganism argument to perform the same trick: ‘hey guys, we’re all in this together! One humanity, one enemy, one struggle, right?’
The truth is not so simple. In the near-term, the struggle against coronavirus is far from uniform. Far-reaching sanctions – the product of global geopolitical conflict – are helping to fuel the catastrophe playing out in Iran, for example. South Sudan, a nation of 11 million people, has four ventilators. Looking further out, the rich citizens of Berlin won’t suffer much because of rising global temperatures. The poor citizens of Bangladesh are already being devastated. If we are to alleviate these realities, we first need a historical narrative that acknowledges them.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for taking a historical long view. This newsletter, in its attempt to understand the historical trends shaping our shared past and future, is much influenced by the project that is Big History.
But let’s not use that project as a means by which the winners of history get to keep pretending that there are no winners, and therefore no losers. The truth is that while global networks are powerful, they don’t liberate us from the bonds of history. In the new, highly networked world we inhabit, the same old human propensity towards conflict will continue to manifest itself. We will remain just as divided by incompatible interests and values. Historical processes will create winners and losers. Those who want to understand what lies ahead, and who seek to alleviate human suffering in the 21st-century, must start with that truth.
It's a WFH thing
Time for me to go.
I leave you with news that the street artist Banksy is angering his wife with his work from home habits.
I’m planning a super-short midweek note this week. Until then, wishing you a peaceful week,
David.
P.S: people of the world must unite in praise for Nikki Ritmeijer, who designed the illustrations in this email.