#permanent stagnation

[ubersaur]

can never get shit done

[geopolicraticus]

Sustainable Dystopia: A Form of Permanent Stagnation

The classes of existential risk identified by Nick Bostrom includes permanent stagnation, which Bostrom defined as “Humanity survives but never reaches technological maturity,” and which includes the subclasses of unrecovered collapse, plateauing, and recurrent collapse. To these I would add the subclass of sustainable dystopia as another kind of permanent stagnation.

What is sustainable dystopia? Sustainable dystopia is when human civilization achieves sustainability for the foreseeable future, but this sustainable form of civilization includes some or many dystopian elements. This is the kind of development that Churchill warned against when he said that, “...if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” 

Sustainable dystopias might cover a range of suboptimal civilizations from the mildly dystopian to the hellishly dystopian, depending upon how many dystopian elements are integrally part of the sustainable civilization, so that an ongoing dystopia is baked into the cake, so to speak, of all futures following this stage of sustainable dystopia (if there are any further futures). One might say that a sustainable dystopia, even if it were not permanent—we could call this permutation an ephemeral sustainable dystopia—would leave a permanent mark on human experience and subsequent human societies, much like the experience of the Black Death.

An example of a sustainable dystopia might be what Joseph Voros has called an, “energy disciplined society,” as described in his paper, Big History and Anticipation: Using Big History as a framework for global foresight:

“The notion of constraints on what human society can do being forced upon it by relative energy scarcity can also be considered an unusual twist on the Disciplined / Constrained Society archetype. In essence, at the end of the energy descent process, human civilisation is in this case constrained not  by the social values held by the majority of the populace (that is, by an ‘endogenous’ constraint), which is the more usual form of this archetype, but by the fact that cheap abundant energy is no longer easily available for use by the society—an exogenous constraint.”

In this scenario, civilization is ongoing, certain accomplishments are possible within this civilization, a range of experiences are to be had, but the accomplishments and the experiences are limited by the need to ration energy resources, so that the accomplishments and experiences aren’t all that they might have been. In this way, suboptimal outcomes would be incorporated into everything achieved by that civilization, even if that civilization had attained a robust sustainability for its foreseeable future, and even if many people within that civilization lived happy lives.

In a minimally dystopian society, or a middling dystopia, it is entirely possible that some members of society would feel perfectly content (at least, the ones who could live happy lives in spite of the constraints), and may even judge their society to be a realized utopia, while other members of the same society might find themselves chafing under the required discipline and limitations, and such persons would be likely to judge their society as being more than mildly dystopian. 

To give a concrete example, an ideologically-committed environmentalist might experience an energy-disciplined society as a joyful social experience, and take pleasure in upholding the required constraints of life under such a regime, because this regime was fulfilling an end of great (perhaps transcendental) importance: sustainability. On the other hand, the kind of individual who would have, under other circumstances, taken risks, lived fast and recklessly, or who aspired to live large, would chafe under the obligated constraints.

As we moderns are often uncomfortable talking about our moral experiences in explicit terms, we tend to gloss over perhaps the most important aspects of the human condition (including the experiences that bring us the most joy, such as practicing our moral beliefs), either dismissing it out of hand as illusory, or assuming the universality of moral experience and thus the implicit agreement of all persons (and therefore the lack of any need to discuss this presumptively universal element of human experience). Because of this, we often fail to see how individuals take joy in practicing their virtues, and feel like better human beings for doing so. For the same reason we fail to see that different individuals are likely to experience joy from practicing different virtues.

Our overly-simplistic conception of the moral life leaves us wondering how earlier human societies—take, for example, the Puritans—could have suffered through their seemingly repressive societies. In fact, we have reason to believe that the Puritans took joy in practicing the faith they professed. Being ideologically committed to founding a New Jerusalem, the hardships of the wilderness were likely borne with good will and with a sincere desire to fulfill a goal of great (perhaps transcendental) importance. To the extent that they felt they had contributed to realizing this end, a sincere member of Puritan society might experience a kind of felicity unknown in more permissive societies. In this way, endogenously disciplined societies (and presumably also exogenously disciplined societies, under certain conditions) will not be repressive or dystopian for the true believer.

In the same spirit, the true believer in sustainability may experience the repression and limitation of energy discipline as a contribution to a greater good, and to the extent that this individual contributed to the greater good, that individual may experience a felicity unknown in energy profligate societies. Making a virtue of necessity (literally so), the exogenous constraint is transformed into an endogenous constraint by the individual whose personal morality spontaneously conforms to the social need.Thus a sustainable dystopia might well not be a dystopia for everyone, but it would be enough of a dystopia for enough individuals that punitive measures who have to be employed to ensure compliance with the limiting regime. (And it is likely that the infliction of this punishment would bring further satisfaction to those who wholeheartedly assent to the regime and believe its limitations to be just.)

I have made a bit of digression away from the exposition of a sustainable dystopia, but personal beliefs and happiness and social harmony are crucial elements in any society. In so far as a society—whether a sustainable dystopia or not—can provide a context in which personal beliefs can be practiced in happiness and harmony, that society will experience some measure of success, and be accounted a success by some of its members, and some part of posterity.

Moreover, if humanity were faced with a choice between a sustainable dystopia and an unsustainable dystopia, I assume that the sustainable dystopia would be the preferred choice, as it at least leaves the elements of human society in place, so that further developments may be possible in the future. From this perspective, those who chafe under a regime of discipline and limitation are the price that must be paid for the maintenance of the human condition through a period of privation. And if this privation were to be overcome in the future (perhaps through a scientific or technological innovation that removed the previous constraints), the disciplined society would be seen in retrospect as an exercise in delayed gratification.

One could plausibly argue for sustainable dystopia as a subclass of flawed realization (instead of permanent stagnation), except that sustainable dystopia could come about without any realization of technological maturity, however technological maturity is defined. A flawed realization assumes a realization, whereas sustainable dystopia assumes no such realization of technological maturity.

[geopolicraticus]

Equilibrium Thresholds

The high level equilibrium trap was proposed by Mark Elvin to explain the absence of an industrial revolution in China. One might also invoke something like a high level equilibrium trap to explain why other mature agricultural civilizations failed to experience an industrial revolution. Here is how Elvin summarized the high level equilibrium trap as it manifested in China:

“...in late traditional China economic forces developed in such a way as to make profitable invention more and more difficult. With falling surplus in agriculture, and so falling per capita income and per capita demand, with cheapening labour but increasingly expensive resources and capital, with farming and transport technologies so good that no simple improvements could be made, rational strategy for peasant and merchant alike tended in the direction not so much of labour-saving machinery as of economizing on resources and fixed capital. Huge but nearly static markets created no bottlenecks in the production system that might have prompted creativity. When temporary shortages arose, mercantile versatility, based on cheap transport, was a faster and sure remedy than the contrivance of machines. This situation may be described as a 'high-level equilibrium trap'. In the context of a civilization with a strong sense of economic rationality, with an appreciation of invention such that shrines were erected to historic inventors (though, it is true, no patent law), and with notable mechanical gifts, it is probably a sufficient explanation of the retardation of technological advance.” (The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Stanford, 1973, pp. 314-315)

A cruder way to explain lack of achievement on a civilizational scale is to be found in the famous quote from The Third Man (based on the novel by Graham Greene, and Greene wrote the screenplay of the film too, but the following quote does not appear in the book, only in the film):

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

This implies a very different explanation for stagnation, even though it highlights art rather than technology. Whether we focus on a civilization’s art or its technology, civilizations are so complex, and the historical antecedents of any event in the history of a civilization are so over-determined, that explanations of developmental trajectories of civilizations are always going to involve far more questions than answers. I don’t regard this as a counsel of despair, though I myself do attempt to formulate explanations of the developmental trajectories of civilziations, but I do so fully mindful of the complexity and the multitude of factors that could enter into an adequate explanation. 

We can understand long periods of stagnation in civilization -- such as Elvin found in China, and the protagonist of The Third Man found in Switzerland -- as the realization of an existential risk (that of permanent stagnation), or we can understand long periods of stagnation as a stable period in which historical forces that might otherwise drive change are approximately in balance -- an equilibrium, in a word. 

At several levels of socioeconomic development it could be argued, more or less as Elvin argues, that a given society functions so well that there is no incentive to innovate, hence stagnation (or equilibrium) sets in. However, we should not think of stagnation as an aberration that needs to be explained; on the contrary, stagnation is the perennial condition of human society, and it is innovation that demands an explanation. Also, “stagnation” implies a very different conception than if we called the same state-of-affairs “equilibrium” or “maturity.” 

How many socioeconomic equilibria are there at which a civilization (or even a pre-civilized society) might be trapped? The major equilibrium thresholds are natural stages to identify in the development of society -- natural types, if you will. Many of these thresholds are well familiar, as I have written about them repeatedly. The following come to mind:

Hunter-gatherer nomadism: if the breakthrough to civilization had not been made, human beings could have continued as nomadic hunter-gatherers as long as some part of the planet was habitable for human beings. Early human beings before civilization traveled the entire planet, and they could have continued to do so. In a severe ice age, they could have moved toward the equator; in a severe hothouse, they could have moved toward the poles. Nomadic people are by definition mobile, and they would have followed the availability of game and gatherable food. This is a regime that could be continued for millions of years without essential change. 

Agricultural civilization: the high level equilibrium trap was formulated for the purpose to explaining why agricultural civilization in China did not experience an indigenous industrial revolution; the same reasoning might be applied to every civilization that did not experience an indigenous industrial revolution, because it only appeared in one civilization. The high level equilibrium trap of (relatively) efficient agriculturalism and (relative) levels of sustainable prosperity represents an opportunity for a civilization to continue in this form as long as there is arable land with sufficient rainfall and sunshine. As with hunter-gatherer nomadism, this regime could be continued in an essentially unchanged form for millions of years. (I have formulated several thought experiments about million-year-old agricultural civilizations, for example, Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project.)

Stabilized technological civilization: present day technological civilization cannot be considered a stable or sustainable social formation, but once the shift to renewables has been completed (cf. The Conversion of the Terrestrial Power Grid), a reformed and sustainable technological civilization could plausibly survive at a planetary-scale equilibrium even longer than nomadic hunter-gatherers could survive, as a technological civilization is in a position to intervene in its environment in order to keep the planet habitable for longer than it would be habitable without climatological intervention. Again, this regime could endure essentially unchanged for millions or billions of years. 

Beyond these obvious and familiar equilibria, they may be further equilibria -- higher level equilibrium traps -- that define additional natural thresholds, and would further extend a natural taxonomy of civilization.

Each of these equilibrium regimes could potentially endure for millions of years, or even billions of years at the outside. From the perspective of a paltry 10,000 years of terrestrial civilization, a social equilibrium that can endure for orders of magnitude longer than the entire history of civilization to date constitutes effective civilizational immortality.

Can we distinguish between an equilibrium of this kind and stagnation? What makes stagnation permanent stagnation, thus transforming it into an existential risk rather than a natural taxon on which civilizations are likely to converge as the mature expression of a particular method of exploiting homeworld biosphere resources?

[geopolicraticus]

Stagnant Supercivilizations Again

What Do Stagnant Supercivilizations Do During Their Million Year Lifespans?

In Stagnant Supercivilizations and Another Formulation of Stagnant Supercivilizations (as well in my recent Medium post, Suboptimal Civilizations, which includes some of this earlier material), I discussed the possibility of supercivilizations (in the sense that Kardashev introduced the term) that are stagnant. I think it is more common to think of supercivilizations as growing, viable, and vital entities, so I wanted to explore the possibilities of civilizations that have become very old, very large, and very powerful, but which have ceased to develop.

Let us revisit the idea of a stagnant supercivilization, and let that stagnant supercivilization be a truly accomplished civilization in possession of mature technologies, as well as both the technological and economic wherewithal to pursue any aims that it cared to pursue. I have often mentioned that Carl Sagan speculated on the possibility of million-year-old civilizations (and others have discussed the possibility of billion-year-old civilizations), so let us suppose that our supercivilization is a million-year-old civilization or better.

Scientific Possibilities for a Supercivilization

We shall assume that the supercivilization has become a supercivilization at least partially due to its mastery of science. Such a civilization would be in a position to be able to scientifically observe worlds with mature biospheres in order to watch and wait for the emergence of intelligent life, and perhaps to observe the entire process of the origins and development of civilization from an uncivilized condition.

More than that, such a civilization could terraform worlds at will, seed them with life, and guide them to the development of intelligent life and civilization -- in other words, such a supercivilization could be an agent of panspermia, and the cognitive and social equivalents of panspermia (say, pancognitivism and pancivicism, to coin two unlovely but potentially useful terms).

Could a stagnant supercivilization remain stagnant and without development if it were in a position to observe the emergence and development of intelligent species and their civilizations? Presumably, observing this macroscopic process would yield truly impressive knowledge about the possibilities of civilization. Could a civilization remain static and stagnant while assimilating such knowledge? It seems unlikely, but we can at least entertain the possibility.

Scenarios for Stagnant Scientific Observation

I can think of at least four possibilities for the stagnant reception of the knowledge of civilization, which is a form of self-knowledge for any other civilization:

A stagnant supercivilization observing the rise and fall of younger civilizations might be in possession of an exhaustive science of civilization such that nothing that they observe is anomalous or novel.

A stagnant supercivilization observing the rise and fall of younger civilizations might be so lethargic and jaded that even the stimulation of observing the emergence of civilizations might leave it as unaffected intellectually as would it would presumably be unaffected morally or emotionally.

The stagnancy of a stagnant supercivilization might be so deeply entrenched in the culture that the civilization is incapable of conceptualizing what it observes as different from its conceptual framework, so that even if it observes anomaly or novelty, it is incapable of recognizing these as such.

 A stagnant supercivilization might actively suppress knowledge that suggested intellectual stimulation that could prod that civilization out of its lethargy.

No doubt there are many other possibilities, but I here suggest those that come to mind simply to give a flavor of the kind of scenarios I am entertaining.

Stagnant Supercivilizations of the SETI Paradigm

One could argue that for merely contingent historical reasons it is impossible for even a supercivilization to observe the emergence of other life and civilization. Say, for purposes of argument, that our supercivilization in question conforms to the SETI paradigm (i.e., the assumption that civilizations are trapped within their planetary systems and therefore communicate rather than travel, i.e., that there are hard limits to interstellar travel), and so cannot observe worlds in other planetary systems. Still, this would not preclude megascale engineering within the home planetary system of the supercivilization, which could include panspermia-like initiatives.

If terrestrial civilization became a supercivilization constrained by the scope of its home planetary system, we could still take worlds like Venus or Mars, move them into appropriate orbits, terraform them, and supervise the creation of other biospheres with other life. If the lifespan of this terrestrial supercivilization passed into the hundreds of millions of years or billions of years, we could even terraform other planets within our system, just to see what would happen, and then sterilize them and again start from scratch, over and over again.

While these are interesting ideas, the present point is not that these things are possible, but that even a supercivilization constrained by the SETI paradigm could produce the kind of stimulation I have discussed above within its home planetary system. Moreover, it could be argued (I think persuasively) that a supercivilization constrained by the SETI paradigm would be a candidate for stagnation given this strong constraint. Nevertheless, the possibility of civilizational-scale stimulation remains even for a stagnant and constrained supercivilization.

Stagnant Superciviilzations Surpassed by Developing Civilizations

We can inject another twist into the scenario of stagnant supercivilizations by considering the possibility of stagnant supercivilizations that not only observe the emergence of other civilizations de novo, but, beyond this, observe the emergence of other civilizations that continue to develop and eventually to surpass the stagnant supercivilization that observed their emergence. Could a stagnant supercivilization sit by and watch as a civilization it saw develop from its earliest stages surpasses it and goes on to greater things?

This is one way to interpret Arthur C. Clarke’s great novel Childhood’s End: the Overlords in the novel are essentially a stagnant supercivilization that can assist the Overmind in superintending the development of less advanced civilizations, but the Overlords themselves cannot make this transition. This is a rather melancholy state of affairs, and it is presented as such in the book (the recent television production failed to capture many of the most important themes of the book).

In Clarke’s tale the Overlords are intrinsically incapable of transcending their contemporaneous level of development. This suggests a distinction between stagnant supercivilizations intrinsically incapable to continuing the self-transcendence that marks developing civilizations, for whatever reason, and stagnant civilizations that are capable of transcending themselves, but for extrinsic reasons, whatever these may be, they are held back from further development.  

Two Kinds of Stagnant Supercivilizations

We may distinguish, then, between intrinsically stagnant supercivilizations and extrinsically stagnant supercivilizations. For an example of the latter, we can take a supercivilization conforming to the SETI paradigm that finds itself stranded within a home planetary system with insufficient resources to do anything more than survive. Such a supercivilization might be long-lived, and possess an advanced science and technology, but it would be severely constrained in what it could do with its science and technology.

For an example of the former, an intrinsically stagnant supercivilization could structurally incorporate constraints that would limit it as effectively, or more effectively, than any extrinsic constraints, though it may possess resources sufficient to break out of its permanent stagnation. How could a civilization be so constituted? Perhaps this could involve ethical or religious limitations placed upon intelligence or particular activities.

For example, it is easy to imagine that an advanced civilization might choose not to stimulate itself in the way described above, that is, by terraforming worlds and observing the emergence of intelligent beings and civilizations. This might well be viewed as morally repugnant. Many today would likely argue against this, even as a speculative enterprise that we are not now in a position to initiate.  

Perhaps truly transformative knowledge that could drive the self-transcendence of a stagnant supercivilization is all or mostly of this character, requiring some radical intervention into the course of nature that no advanced civilization is willing to undertake. The gradual stagnation of science from ethical proscriptions could be a source of the stagnation of scientific civilizations.

[geopolicraticus]

Existential Risk: A Chicken and Egg Scenario

In my recent post to my other blog, Existential Risk and the Developmental Conception of Civilization, I distinguished between ontogenic forms of existential risk -- e.g., personal extinction, i.e., death --  and phylogenic forms of existential risk -- e.g., extinction of civilization.

Each of these forms of existential risk can be taken in isolation from each other. An individual will experience personal extinction even while the civilization of which the individual is a representative may continue in existence, or, vice versa, a civilization might go extinct while the individuals who are its representatives might survive it.

While this latter scenario is much less likely than the former scenario (which happens every day), it is nevertheless conceivable that short-lived individuals might outlive a usually long-lived civilization, if the said civilization collapses rapidly. For example, if we allow that there was such a thing as Soviet civilization -- something that was, after all, one of the pretenses of the Soviet regime -- then everyone who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union survived the end of the civilization. (This is a topic I visited early in the history of this blog in The Genocide of Homo Sovieticus, and then again recently in Other People's Ideals.) 

While ontogenic and phylogenic existential risk can in theory be treated according to the method of isolation, in actual fact we are likely to find that the two stand in some kind of significant relationship to each other. Given the complexity of human life, individual identity cannot be cleanly separated from social identity, and vice versa.

This suggests that, for example, individuals experiencing permanent stagnation may contribute to the permanent stagnation of the civilization of which they are representatives, or that a civilization experiencing permanent stagnation may contribute to fostering lives of permanent stagnation in the lives of individuals who are its representatives. 

Obviously, this is a chicken-and-egg scenario, in which we find ourselves asking, "Which came first, the chicken of civilizational stagnation of the egg of individual stagnation?" (Similar considerations hold, mutatis mutandis, for flawed realization.)

The equally obvious response to this chicken-and-egg scenario is that subtle and incremental changes both in the individual and in the civilization reinforce each other, and the ontogenic and phylogenic trends comes to reinforce each other in a vicious circle.

How does the vicious circle get started? Where does it begin? As I have formulated it previously:

"...if some alien species should examine the remains of our ill-fated species and their archaeologists reconstruct our history, they will no doubt focus on the problem of when we turned the corner from viability to non-viability." 

Here the historian's temptation to always find clues deeper in the past may mislead us more than it enlightens us; there are always early signs of any major development, but in determining the moment in which the balance tipped in one direction of the other, we want to try to identify a moment of preponderance, and not the first hints of catastrophe (or triumph).

The moment of preponderance is simply a window of time when multiple developments appeared at a time when separate events were in a position to mutually reinforce one another and therefore to push history in a particular direction thereafter.

This same analytical structure -- a moment of preponderance that appears in a window of opportunity or a window of vulnerability -- can be brought to the relationship between ontogenic and phylogenic existential risk, so that what we must look for is the nearly simultaneous appearance on both ontogenic and phylogenic scales of events that may prove to be mutually reinforcing, therefore pushing both individuals and civilization alike in the direction of viability or non-viability.