Is the Future as Ugly as it Seems?
War, ISIS, environmental crisis, economic collapse… Sometimes, it would seem the end of times is just around the corner.
Speculation about our future was traditionally the object of a discipline called philosophy of history in which indulged some of the greatest thinkers of the Ancient times, such as Aristotle, Herodotus and St. Augustine. But arguably the first theoretician of history was Ibn Khaldun, the greatest philosopher nobody has heard of. This man, who lived in the 14th century Maghreb, was the precursor of some great ideas such as Keynes multiplier, the Laffer curve and evolution.
Khaldun’s magnum opus, Muqaddimah, combines politics, economics, sociology, cultural studies, biology and chemistry. British historian Arnold Toynbee called it “the best work of philosophy of history that has created any mind in any time or place”. Muqaddimah was the first attempt to develop a rational account of the laws of history, which Khaldun saw as a succession of cycles of prosperity and decline.
Centuries later, Kant saw history as a progression toward the fulfillment of human potential; Hegel, as a progressive deployment of the idea of freedom; Marx, as the advancement of productive forces toward worker’s revolution and socialist paradise. In spite of their obvious differences, they all saw human evolution as positive.
The picture soured in the twentieth century. Auguste Compte’s positivism based on technology as an engine of progress crashed on Auschwitz, according to Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
In the second half of the 20th century, philosophy of history came under heavy fire by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies (one of the best books I’ve ever read). Popper advised us to remain skeptical of philosophy of history, since it is epistemically unsound and ultimately seeks to defend a political project. Both the Nazis and the Soviets saw themselves as the pinnacle of historical evolution.
After Popper, philosophy of history was buried for decades, until Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), a neohegelian interpretation of liberal democracy as the final stage of human political evolution.
But then came Islamic terrorism, 9/11, neoconservatives, the mortgage crisis, and a new wave of pessimism. Now the world seems to be going down the drain (or is it just a new down period in our cyclical history?), a new wave of researchers give us reasons to remain optimistic.
Some, such as Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis, promise that exponential technological advances in energy, health, education, etc., will unlock a future of unprecedented abundance.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker shows that, from a historical perspective, this is the least violent time in human history. The 20th century, some called “the century of genocide”, was amazingly peaceful by historical standards.
Is this some sort of neocomtisme soon to crash into a new genocide and the Dialectic of Enlightenment 2.0? Or is there reason to believe that “this time it’s really different”?
Niels Bohr said: “Nothing is harder than making predictions, especially about the future”.
But we can at least have some ideas about the possibilities ahead of us. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One ends with a reference to Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Institute for the Future. He argues there are four conceivable paths for the future of mankind.
The cyclic scenario is the less likely. Extinction has a small chance of occurring (you can never rule out the possibility that somebody will press the red button). Although by far the plateau and takeoff scenarios are most likely. I don’t doubt the future will be better, fulfilling some old philosophy of history prophecies. In a future post, I will explain why.
