New World Same Humans #8
Patterns, randomness, and our eternal quest to glimpse the future.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter by TrendWatching’s Global Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin.
These are strange days.
Wherever you’re reading this, it’s likely the coming weeks will live a long time in your memory. Thirty years from now people will be telling their grandchildren what they did, who they helped, and how it felt to be alive during the great coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
Chinese and Italian doctors are sharing stories of incredible personal fortitude. Half-truths and outright deceptions are being passed around online. Some Chinese officials are encouraging the rumour that the US created Covid-19. Once again, events provide a canvas on which the deepest human impulses – altruistic or otherwise – find new expression.
Watching it all unfold this week, I too came back to an old obsession. One about human history, our attempts to make sense of it, and our eternal quest to glimpse the future.
What comes next? Patterns, chaos, and finding a path.
The future is a place forever just around the next corner. Those who seek to understand it have only the past and present to go on. No wonder when you scratch the surface of a futurist you often find a historian hiding underneath.
Among a certain species of thinker the view is that the two endeavours – history and future forecasting – should really be seen as one. They believe that by analysing the past we will find deep underlying patterns that can be projected forward, allowing us to build accurate models of what lies ahead. They seek a kind of Grand Unified Theory of human development.
This isn’t, of course, a new idea. After all, Hegel, and then his rebellious protégé Marx, both thought they had discerned the underlying structure of history. But it is a highly controversial idea. Witness the ongoing fierce dispute between psychologist Steven Pinker and philosopher John Gray over whether there is progress in human affairs. The idea of progress – or at least Pinker’s version of it – is a pretty weak variety of the parent idea that meaningful patterns are evident in human history. But it still ignites a furious rage in Gray, who called Pinker’s recent book on the subject, Enlightenment Now, ‘pathetic’ and ‘a rationalist sermon intended to persuade liberals they are on the right side of history.’ For those who side with Gray, human history is far too messy to abide by any patterns, however weak. Instead, it must be seen for what it is: random and chaotic, an unstructured blancmange onto which we project our own hopes, terrors and rationalisations.
For people like us, it’s impossible to live through the first months of 2020 without reflecting on all this. I mean on the ways we think about the past, our attempts to glimpse the future, and where we should go from here. The events that currently dominate our newsfeeds have no precedent in the lifetimes of most of us. As billions worldwide scramble to process the impact of Covid-19, here in the UK the government has decided on an outlier strategy of herd immunity. The idea is to allow the virus to move through the population, so that by next winter most UK citizens are immune. Here is that idea being described in an Irish TV news bulletin that feels at once stolidly practical and dizzyingly unreal. I never seen anything quite like it.
So what does coronavirus tell us about the nature of human affairs, and our attempts to know the future? Are there patterns in history? Is there progress in any meaningful sense? Or are all attempts to make sense of our shared past – and by extension our future – ultimately futile?
Take the micro-view first. When it comes to coronavirus, a common and understandable refrain right now is: ‘no one saw this coming!’ Except, of course, they did. The much smaller SARS and H1N1 epidemics of 2002 and 2009 respectively made plain the possibility of a similar but more serious event. The foreshadowing was obvious enough to enable a well-informed generalist by the name of Bill Gates to warn in 2018: ‘there is a significant probability that a large and lethal modern-day pandemic will occur in our lifetime.’
Clearly, there are no iron historical laws when it comes to pandemics. As many are currently observing, probabilistic thinking about risk and randomness of the kind deployed in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan are the best tools we have when it comes to making sense of how these events fit into the broader course of history.
What about a macro-view? Covid-19 is exactly the kind of event that causes John Gray and those who share his view to mock the idea that there is meaningful progress in human affairs. Under their view, human advance is always fragile and contingent; waiting to be swept away by events. If you insist on seeing some pattern in history, they argue, your best bet is one step forward, one step back on endless loop.
Pinker, meanwhile, points to the underlying trends in life expectancy, wellbeing, material wealth, education and more and asks: if that isn’t progress, what is?
For my part, I’m by temperament suspicious of the idea that there are patterns in history – certainly of the strong variety. When it comes to the Pinker/Gray debate, it seems to be it’s mostly a case of two people defining progress in different ways, and then proceeding to talk past one another. Pinker says we can make – and indeed have made – the world a better home for humans via the application of reason and science. Gray says advances are always fragile, and prone to be swept away. Both are true.
Perhaps what is flawed, and therefore incendiary, about the idea of progress is that it implies a destination; an end point. The idea of progress doesn’t make much sense unless you’re progressing towards something. But the truth is that while we can make powerful advances that improve the conditions of life for all of us, there is no such pre-determined end point for human affairs. Instead, history is better viewed as a continual struggle to make those advances. There is no destination, no final destiny. Just a process of continual renewal. Events like this pandemic are a reminder – a relatively small reminder by historical standards – of that truth.
So where next? John Gray (who I revere, so no shade is being cast) may mock Pinker and his fellow liberals. But there’s no denying that in the 20th-century the west unlocked massive advances by putting a conception of human freedom and individual agency at the heart of its collective life. The centrality of freedom as a value evolved in response to the key collective challenge of the preceding centuries: the threat posed by an all-powerful, tyrannical state.
Now, it seems to me, the new world we’ve built demands a new value system. This thought is closely related to others described in NWSH #6, where I wrote about how the old political categories – conservative vs progressive – no longer make sense.
In our struggle to build a better home for ourselves, we’ve created a single world-system unlike anything that has existed before. If freedom was the value at the heart of our social-economic system in the 20th-century, then today we must build a new system that deals with the central fact of this new world: interconnectedness (back in NWSH #2 I wrote about some of the special characteristics of a networked world).
It’s ever-more clear that global interconnectedness, and the overwhelming complexity to which it gives rise, is the central challenge of the decades ahead. Today, an economic crisis, supply chain disruption or viral outbreak in one part of the world has near-instant, dominio effect consequences for the whole system; meanwhile, global heating respects no borders.
We must build social and political modes of being centred around these challenges. Modes of being that allow us to remain open to the incredible benefits of global interconnectedness, while doing more to shelter us from the harms. That means new thinking on how the individual citizen relates to the collective, and on how the local relates to the global. Yes, we should preserve the inheritance bequeathed to us by liberal democracy: freedom, tolerance, the dignity of the individual. But we must also acknowledge that uninhibited individualism, and the liberal fantasy of a borderless global system, exposes us to new dangers and does not accord with the way most people understand their own lives.
These changes will need to start with a simple reassertion of ourselves. That is, a reminder that the social and economic systems we build are there to serve us, not the other way around. Inside the vast complexity we now inhabit, we must find new ways of turning back to one another. New ways of reprioritising those around us above the phone screen, the newsfeed, the share price.
We can do it; we must. After all, in the end each other is all we’ve got.
Come together, right now
In the spirit of the above, and in these strange times, how about we turn to one another, too?
Many of you are working from home right now. Probably daily life and routines are pretty disrupted. Also, you’ve read this far into this newsletter, so you’re obviously deeply interested in trends, technology, and society. All this gives me an idea.
If you’d like to join an informal New World Same Humans community that shares viewpoints, thinking and evidence on our shared future, then drop a note to david@trendwatching.com. At some point I’ll open a Slack group, and we’ll all get to talk.
It can be a place of ideas, reflection, curiosity and support. See you there!
So long, and thanks for all the fish
In the absence of a definitive answer on the meaning of history, life, the universe and everything, we still have the suggestion put forward by the great British humourist and science-fiction writer Douglas Adams.
That answer is 42. Worth considering.
Until next week, go well. And look after each other.
David.
P.S: If the amazing illustration in this week's email will haunt your dreams, you can thank Nikki Ritmeijer.