Entropy of mankind
Let’s make a thought experiment. Imagine that you have two bowls of marbles-one holds only white beads and the other only black beads. If you take a random marble from each bowl and move to the other there will be one white ball among the black and a black among whites.
This is all pretty obvious. But what happens if you repeat the procedure an arbitrarily number of times?
One quickly realises that after a sufficient number of repetitions, both bowls will include a mix of black and white marbles. No random selection will be able to separate black and white beads again. In other words: the mixed system is more likely than the sorted one.
In thermodynamics, there is a concept that describes how disordered systems relate to the ordered systems: entropy. Simplistically, one can say that all systems spontaneously go toward a state of high entropy-or disorder-leading to more stability. The stability does not mean that things are not happening to the system, but all changes basically maintain the macro-state of the system (i.e. the state of high entropy) through a dynamic equilibrium.
Transferred to the example of the marbles, the state with full mixing has higher entropy than the state with full order. It doesn’t matter with what frequency the beads are exchanged, the dynamic equilibrium will remain.
Let’s now expand the thought experiment, but instead of bowls using countries, and instead of marbles different groups of people. Let’s, for the sake of simplicity, assume that the groups are initially homogenous within each country. In other words, only French live in France, only Germans in Germany, et cetera. What happens if we now let people move between countries?
Over time, the mixing of people-the disorder-will of course only increase. People do not move randomly, but we make independent, uncorrelated decisions, so the effect is very similar. One realises that this sort of mixing has been going on as long as mankind has existed and has created all the cultures we have right now, with all its complex influences and commonalities.
Our cultures are not more than snapshots of something that is in a state of continuous change. Each year, people from, let’s say Sweden, move to all corners of the world (either permanently or temporarily) and mix a bit of their culture with that of their new homeland. And every year, people move to Sweden from all corners of the world and bring a bit of their culture. If we could measure the ‘entropy’ of mankind, we would find that it has always been increasing and will always increase.
This increase in entropy is impossible to stop. Wanting to preserve some kind of fictional ‘constant’ culture as defined by national borders, and oppose mixing and multiculturalism, would therefore qualify as one of history’s most pointless projects. ‘Multiculturalism’ in society — in all the world’s societies — is increasing every day and will do so until the end of civilisation, just like the physical entropy in the Universe always increases.
ISIS, Putin, Trump and the various nationalist parties of Europe are united in their deeply misguided view that humanity by nature should be in a static state of nationalities, religions and cultures. In fact, Earth’s societies will be more multicultural tomorrow than they are today, and is already more multicultural than yesterday.
There is no politician, no party and no voters who can change this. It will happen — in the end it’s a mix of all the marbles in all bowls. So why waste so much time and effort to try to stop it?
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on February 21, 2016.
