Nationalism’s Greatest Threat
If one wishes to understand humanity they must understand humanity’s past. It is not enough to look back thousands of years, we must look back eons. Our ancestors are not only grandpas and grandmas, but rodents, amphibians and fish. Humanity is but a recent form of life on earth shaped over millennia of death, reproduction and adaptation. Trying to understand Humanity is like discerning a figure in fog. His form is fuzzy and changing. But if we raise the lens of evolutionary biology to our eyes the optic cuts through the haze and Man’s deepest drives lie bare. Suddenly the complexity of his forms and actions align upon a single organizing principle: survival.
Thus the story of human history is evolutionary history. The journey of a species surviving against nature, other species, and other sub-species within itself. At the closest level of analysis we see the individual; but since the individual does not emerge ex-nihilo but from a mother and father and is embedded within an ever expanding web of family, this level is too narrow. Isolated individuals lose to cooperating groups and it is the DNA of the group that perseveres throughout time, not the individual. Thus the racial group is the most explanatory level of analysis. Nationalism is built on this belief and seeks to organize societies in accord with this biological reality.
Humanity however faces a truly new era.
After eons in the swamps of survival of the fittest, we ascend Mount Olympus. A new power lies waiting on the table of the gods, the ability to radically remake ourselves: gene editing, mind uploading, expansive computation and Strong AI. These tools, if realized, have the power to end humanity and usher in a new era, Post-Humanity.
Millennia of good breeding could be stolen and given to any race by a few edits in the genome. The individual would no longer need to find his immortality in his children but reach out and grasp it for himself. Casting off his flesh he could clothe himself in silicon passing centuries without corruption. Those denied apotheosis, made unemployable by Strong AI, will despair in their humanity. Retreating into simulations and returning to only collect their Universal Basic Income, have sex with a robot or drip designer drugs into their outdated chemistry. The nationalist mass, no matter how fervent, couldn’t stand a chance against the robot armies of an ascendant deity. And it wouldn’t matter for the despair and consumerism would likely rot their hearts before any bullets could find them.
This is a future I fear and a brave new world that might soon exist. Perhaps these fears are misguided. Perhaps multi-culturalism will destabilize Western cultures before a Singularity can be reached. Perhaps Mind Uploading and Strong AI are centuries away. Only time will tell. If technological progress slows or finds limits I will continue to preach Nationalism as the best principle for human organization. However, if technological progress races towards this precipice I might despair that nationalism was only right for when we were human.
If the myths can be our guide we have every right to fear the ascension of so fallen a being to power. The Midas of Humanity, having his wish granted, is horrified as his food and daughter turn to dead metal.
