Expanding Longtermism

Longtermism is a recent school of philosophic thought that essentially says we should value future generations as much as we value our children in terms of planning our lives and behaving on Earth.  It is considered a liberal perspective in that it specifically seeks to address global warming and pollution and a myriad of other forms of environmental degradation.  For the sake of others, they say, let's leave the planet better than we found it and with more than enough resources in the Earth left for them.  

Not so fast cry the so-called conservatives.  I say “so-called” because it has always struck me as strange that people identifying as “conservative” actually oppose most forms of conservation that are not directly related to immediate human religion, wealth or sportsmanship (mostly hunting and fishing).  For conservatives, the natural world has no intrinsic value.  The Earth is, first and foremost, a resource and should only be conserved to the extent that it can continue to generate economic security and pleasure for as many humans as possible.

(As an aside: This ridiculous idea is another infliction of the Abrahamic religions upon the Earth.  In Genesis, Yahweh gave humanity “dominion” over the Earth, which is one of the stupidest things He ever did.  I have more sense than that.  Why God would create everything only to have humanity destroy most of it is beyond all justifiable faith.  It is a blatant affront to creation itself.  They might argue that it is “evil” that caused humanity to destroy what God perfectly made.  Careful with that logic.  If the destruction itself is evil then our ongoing economic models are inherently wicked.  If the destruction is not evil then God screwed up his perfect creation through granting humanity dominion.  That's a Joe Biden caliber move there.)

Anyway, with regard to longtermism, conservatives are skeptical of actually conserving things at the expense of economics and human pleasure.  Essentially, they claim that we are terrible at predicting the future (which is true enough) and our erring predictions tend to cause undue stress on economies without any actual benefit at all.  

Addressing global warming today, for example, will inevitably harm the poorest of people and create additional economic cost burdens that need not exist because things are probably not going to be as bad as these pesty longtermists claim.  Supposedly, other than the actual rising mean global temperature itself, there is little or no reliable data to support the claims of climate activists about the causes and consequences of global warming.

This is classically the position of economists who opposed efforts at curbing CO2 emissions like Jordan Peterson's buddy, Bjorn Lomborg.  At best, they might claim, longtermism better serves humanity if we think of ways to generate more wealth by educating more people so that we can expand economic opportunity to everyone in the future.  

But that strictly isn't a longtermist perspective since it does not look far enough forward to unborn generations.  Longtermism is about many generations from now, not just our next generation or two.  It involves a vast, psychological perspective.  Human beings are not accustomed of thinking about the world this way.  We either want to abstract it as “history” or we abstract our grandchildren's grandchildren as outside our considerations about anything except supposed eternal truths which don't include the environment.  In truth, no one thinks about their grandchildren's grandchildren.  They do not enter our considerations at all.

Recently, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp expressed support for electric cars as environmentally sound.  He claimed that he cares about nature “the way hunters and farmers do.”  This is a great example that proves my point about conservatives not being conservationists.  Hunters care about nature to the extent that there is plenty of prey and land on which the hunt.  It is nothing but a resource.  Farmers care about their land and the homogeneity of their crops against all possible predators – insect, plant and otherwise.  It is nothing but a resource.  “Nature” does not typically enter into the thinking of either hunter or farmer in anything like its true diversity.  So, caring about nature like hunters and farmers is not caring about it at all or, at best, caring about only a tiny part of it.

This represents the foundation and root of anti-longtermism.  It is the utility of everything that matters.  Not utility from Nature's perspective, mind you.  Utility is only about human needs (and we are back to the stupidity of God in Genesis again).  When you combine humanity's long history of errant predictions about the future (we rarely get it right and often get it ridiculously wrong) with human conduct fundamentally guided by economic utilitarianism then you can understand why looking at what might be best for distant future generations is likely incompatible with what we know we need right now.

We need coal right now, for example.  As I have mentioned before, alternative energy sources are simply not where they need to be to substantially shut down coal-fire plants.  We could theoretically change our way of life but, also as I have pointed out before, human desire for convenience and consumption are among the most powerful forces in the Anthropocene.  We simply will not change our lifestyles for the sake of the environment.  It is not in the cards.  (Unless the environment itself forces such a change, of course.  Which it eventually will.)

So longtermism seems, at face value, to be a high ideal but utterly pointless, even if its critics are wrong.  Unless we can cope with the twin monoliths of convenience and consumerism, no generation of human beings is going to look much past their grandchildren, if that far into the future.  That is not to say that the ideal should be discarded, however.  There are plenty of people (at least, hundreds of thousands) on the planet who would agree with the basic principles of longtermism and, perhaps, this foothold into culture might grow in subsequent generations.  After all, that is how change happens, incrementally from modest beginnings.

I would like to take the term “longtermism” and rehabilitate it to some extent.  Or, at the very least, give it a metaphysical chiropractic adjustment.  The valuing of future generations implies extending the ethical dignity of humanity far across time.  But longtermism in its present form strikes me as half-blind.  Why look one way (the future) and not the other (the past)?  Of course, we supposedly have more control over the world that we hand off to humans in the coming centuries and we have no control over the past.  So there is that.  

But my claim is that by opening up the vista of our metaphysical consideration not only in both directions of time but also to the height and depth of the present is to adopt a perspective that will benefit traditional longtermism in terms both of contextualizing the future and addressing the present.  I call this perspective expansive omnidirectionalism (EOD).

By expanding our valuation in all directions, past, future, the macroscopic and microscopic present, we situate ourselves properly within time and space.  Taking the EOD view, we can see, for example, that homo sapiens have only been around for 300,000 years.  That seems like a long time even in terms of traditional longtermism, but that is precisely why the traditional approach is inadequate.  In reality, 300 millennia is a short time in terms of the evolution of life.

According to astrophysicist Adam Frank: “Compared with microbes, sharks, and crocodiles, that is a blink of the geologic eye. Even more to the point, our project of technological civilization only got started after the last ice age ended, around 10,000 years ago. So when you consider how radically different human beings are from any of the species that came before us, you can see exactly what our problem is.

“We are so new at being human that we still kind of suck at it.

“Crocodiles have had 95 million years to perfect the art of being crocodiles. It took a lot of time and patience for them to figure out how to lie mostly submerged in the water until lunch wanders by. We, on the other hand, have only just started trying to figure out what these big brains are good for. The strange aptitude for abstract thought, the potent ability to fabricate complicated machines from raw materials, the complicated, large-scale social interactions with their bizarre mix of aggression, compassion, violence and empathy — what are we supposed to do with these traits? We are so new to our own capabilities, it is no wonder they still get us into trouble. And the fact that said capabilities can come close to destroying the world further complicates our efforts to adapt.”

Now that is the proper perspective.  Not only should we value generations of the distant future, we should equally value our distant past with respect to understanding how relatively recent human Being actually is.  Once we realize we are a young species then we can see that our present mistakes are actually youthful mistakes of inexperience.  

How can we seriously expect to learn to value our future generations when we do not understand where and how we are situated in time itself?  As a species, it is impossible that we learn how to value our future generations, which is the aim of longtermism, until we learn how to mature as a species.

Our maturity involves mistakes.  Global warming, the karma of a religiously embedded arrogance of placing humanity above all of nature, or our preference to devolve into military and cultural wars are all the acts of boastful and tactless youth and inexperience.  Excessive behavior and the desire to prove dominance over other persons and things are common traits among children and adolescents.  Most adults even carry these traits into their years.  

But we consider those wise among us who transcend these traits.  Many of us pursue their path and are successful in varying degrees at acting more wisely and minimizing the traits of excess and the need to control others.  This is progress.  It is more than progress, it is necessary if, as longtermists claim, that we should incorporate the potential impact of our present behavior upon future generations.

With respect to the critics of longtermism, the conservatives who wish to conserve human excess and dominance under the guise of greater religion and wealth for everyone, the ones who ask how we can place a future-shifted value upon our acts when we are so bad at predicting the future, there is a solution for their traditionalism.  We might be terrible at predicting the future but advanced technology is not so bad.  Our abilities to predict storms and hurricanes and even precipitation up to two weeks ahead of time has improved dramatically in the past 20 years thanks to satellite technology and more sophisticated weather modeling.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence, the predictive capabilities available to humanity are unprecedented.  AI can now accurately predict with a fair degree of accuracy many cancers, dementia and other diseases long before conventional medicine can see them.

There is no reason this emerging power of prognostication cannot continue to grow exponentially to assist humans in predicting the future implications of our present behavior on the Earth.   One possible example to watch unfold is the recent AI prediction that the percentages favor that we will blow past our climate change limit of 2 degrees Celsius in the next ten years.  That would be dramatic.  It will be interesting to see if it happens.  Through AI we could become better predictors than ever before.

So our maturing as a species can be greatly aided not only by the wise among us but by emergent technology to foretell the results of the choices we make today.  This, of course, does not guarantee that we will suddenly cease to allow consumption and convenience to rule our lives.  That will take time, if that transformation ever happens at all.  We might choose to be consumers first and forever. 

Even if we avoid the 2 degree limit, we are probably not going to “grow up” fast enough to avoid passing the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures.  But, if we look beyond that toward a probable future where we have so negatively impacted our environment (because we muck things up already let alone in the future), we will see that most of us will still survive.  

The world will change, species will die (perhaps one out of three), oceans will rise, climate migrations will happen, but we will survive.  This massive disruption and loss of natural life is not a happy thought but it is probably a realistic one.  And it is perhaps a necessary one.  Humanity won't learn from its mistakes if we can't all agree that something was a mistake to begin with.  

Global warming is a teachable moment.  At the expense of numerous other species of plants and animals (and millions of humans through adverse environmental degradation), we will have a chance to learn how we should value the future of Nature itself.  That would be a step toward the maturity we need for longtermism to work.

EOD is also about the present, the intimate and the ultimate of the Now.  Intimately, it is easy to see that our biology, our brains, our emotions all need to be explored, learned from and changed as necessary to influence better outcomes for our lives.  

Human consciousness and behavior can now be explored through meditation, creativity, or emerging hacks being discovered in unprecedented ways by neuroscience.  The mass cultivation of a greater awareness and understanding of consciousness is potentially transformational to human behavior.

Ultimately, we should look beyond the Earth itself to our planetary and intergalactic realities.  Becoming aware of ourselves and our complete surroundings is still a challenge of our immaturity.  The basic human need for enchantment and security means that religion and magical thinking will be with us for at least a few more generations.  

By properly focusing on the distant past we discover there is at least as much to unlearn as there is to learn for the distant future.  Much of what once was has already been forgotten.  There is no reason to think this forgetfulness will not continue as we evolve as a species.  (Except digital preservation apparently lasts forever.)  

It might be essential to learn new ways of Being.

Just as we have to mature to properly take into account our environment and the natural world, there is more to the Now than our planetary surroundings.  The ultimate distance of the cosmos means that there is very little connection between our needs and the forces of physics in the universe.  This is just as difficult for us to address as it is to sufficiently value the future.  

And yet, we can obviously explore the vastness of our solar system.  Beyond that, we can spot exoplanets, some of which might contain life.  Properly applied, knowledge of this vastness can make our life on Earth more precious not only because it is so incredibly rare but because we even have the awareness to properly situate ourselves to begin with.  Our capability for wonder is, in itself, wonderful and can be cultivated in each life.

As we must learn to become a mature species (Nietzsche's ubermensch), our connection with the greater universe is also largely derived through learning.  Our ancient and habitual tendency for magical thinking wants to connect us directly with the vastness of the cosmos.  We would like to think that, though we are small (trivial) comparatively in a physical sense, everything levels-up at a supposedly deeper “spiritual” sense.  Magical thinking and the capacity of human imagination is the “great equalizer” for the infinity of space and time.

While I do not necessarily oppose this perspective per se (it seems natural enough for most of us), I would classify it as at best the workings of our immature imagination and at worse arrogantly human-centric on our part.  There is no evidence, even in terms of meditation and spirituality, that anything about our humanity is “connected” to the cosmos (other than the fact we are all made of starstuff, as Carl Sagan pointed out long ago).  

Belief otherwise is just another immaturity we have to overcome.  Ken Wilber's so-called “unity experience” is just another part of our finite human consciousness and its contents, i.e. our imagination.  I will address this more when I post on cosmicism.

Whether or not I am right about this last point does not really matter in terms of my primary claim.  EOD nests longtermism in a better context.  It also addresses the chief concern of anti-longtermism because by combining the true fullness of the present with the fullness of the past and future, technological change is part of the equation which greatly improves (and will continue to improve) our predictive capabilities, allowing us to better account for the impact of our behavior on future generations.

We should not allow our concern for the future to override a complete orientation of humanity within the unfolding of time.  The real problem with traditional longtermism is not that we are bad at predicting the future or that present needs must outweigh guesswork at future possibilities.  

Rather, it lies in the unquestioned myopia of adopting a purely future-shifted mentality.  That ignores and undermines the highly instructive teaching of our connection with the distant past and the equally valuable understanding our place as we live and breathe within infinite space and microscopic forms of reality which are the very nature of natural physics and human health.  

EOD allows us to situate ourselves so that we can better understand where we are headed.  It potentially supplies depth and breadth of wisdom whereas simply peering into the future by itself is mere hypothesis.  

If we are going to get “real” about our future as a species, that reality must include where we came from and where we are microscopically and cosmically right now as we ponder our present behavior and choose our next course of action.