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If I don't put this up now, it won't go up for weeks. I'm about to be hit by a blizzard of grading. That said, I recommend waiting a least a few days to read it. I rushed hastily to conclude it, and maybe I will be able to tinker it into better shape over the next few days, in the margins of my early stage of total exhaustion
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The Wall of Infancy
I’ve written quite a bit on ethics as technology--as an
ideological tool, focused on enlightening self and culture so that we can, as a
civilization, achieve better consequences.
It is similar to how we conceive medicine today, no longer faith-based and
instead subject to verifiable, reasonable standards. The purpose of this essay is to encapsulate
and abbreviate previous writings on this topic, while introducing a new aspect;
namely, that society needs to break through a specific cultural wall to achieve
virtue, mental health, and mental maturity.
Below, I explain why I call this the Wall of Infancy, and why breaking
through it is tantamount to accepting ethics as technology. In so doing, we reject traditional standards
of ignorance-based governance.
We have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to implement better
forms of ethics. If we don’t,
civilization will likely perish. As Omar
Bradley said in his 1948 Armistice Day speech, we are “ethical infants” in
control of armageddon-capable weapons. The
dire situation invokes a quintessential imperative: we must become ethically competent, break
through the Wall of Infancy and grow our knowledge of how best to govern. We
need to deepen the collective consciousness psychologically. We have been making progress, especially in
the last few hundred years, but it must continue with greater expediency. Our cultural development, the phylogeny of human civilization, is in a race
between clear-headed decency, on one hand, and a short-sighted, greed-fueled
doom.
Human civilization, to this very day, is steeped in ancient,
sticky dogma. Mind-programming, if you
will, from warlords past. To break
through, we must accept a paradigm shift.
The ways of ancient Sumer--its machismo, warlordism, and puerile might-makes-right--must
be rejected once and for all. If culture
is seen as a kind of programming for the human brain, then we need to reject
the old programming and integrate greater awareness and wisdom into the new.
Beating others down, establishing a hierarchy based on
fanaticism, and proclaiming yourself a godking is primitive tech. Higher ethics tech starts with common
sense: equality and its logical
complements, fairness and human rights.
While medicine attends to the health of the human body,
ethics attends, as well, to the general social corpus. Imagine the benefits of medicine magnified to
encompass the prioritization of virtue over vice, principle over profit, good
over evil. Imagine a system of ideas, of
technologically improvable mental tools, focused on increasing the health of
the whole planet in concert with human and environmental flourishing. A synergy.
A symbiosis. A win-win.
We have the computing power to begin to run simulations
on how to create better culture. The
invention of quantum computing, which is coming soon, will make the simulations
even more feasible. If an economic
system is like a transistor board, a pattern of efficient and effective flows,
AI can help optimize a monetary system where profit is distributed to advance
the Good.
It’s completely possible to design and implement healthier,
wiser ways of living and leadership. It is what we have already attempted, ponderously and crudely, for thousands of years. The main antagonist to breaking through the
Wall of Infancy is ignorance-based government.
Government that thrives on ignorance; that doesn’t want truth or decency; that runs on fear-induced
obedience.
Far in the future, civilization could look back and thank us, we citizens of this early phylogenic stage of social growth. They will thank us, from their perspective in hindsight, because somehow--incredibly, amazingly-- we managed to break out of traditional mind-control traps. We escaped Ignorance, somehow liberated ourselves, opened our minds to truth, and foresaw a potential for Good governance across millions of years.
Circa the early 21st century, this barbaric
era, we tend to think of five thousand years as a long time. It is approximately how long civilization has
existed. And yet, if we continue to
advance our ethics tech and thereby eliminate war, millions of years of
heavenly existence awaits trillions of happier citizens spread across the galaxy, or even beyond.
The question we now face is of the utmost
importance: whether we will adapt more advanced forms of government; or whether we will destroy, maim and torture
ourselves due to our inability to rise above the primitive stupidity of war. Make no mistake, future warfare will be conducted
with hellish weapons beyond the pale of what we understand now.
Eliminating war is the only way for our species to
survive, and maybe for life itself to survive. Note well, it is possible to dismantle cellular replication at the molecular level, whether it is human cells or those of algae.
Other threats:
surveillance and brain integration
There are other existential threats besides the nuclear
weapons that Bradley references, when he calls us ethical infants. Soon we will have the ability to micro-manage
and control every person’s behavior all the time. Surveillance, robot police, future psych,
internal chips. If a self-centered
dictator obsessed with control comes to power under the shroud of such
omnipresence, a totalitarian panopticon becomes a fait accompli.
Imagine a society in which cellphones connect directly to
the human brain. Consider what is
already dangerous--malware, hackers, ad ware and trackware (‘cookies’)--on an
intimate scale of cerebral interconnectedness.
Soup up your brainware with our latest mindapp!
So enthuses an ad for IBI. IBI stands for InterBrain International, a
fictional corporation in my dystopian novel.
Back to reality.
Brain-computer interface is advancing quickly, driven along by Elon Musk
[f]. Musk is a genius of an inventor whose
level of ethical maturity, sadly, is absolutely dismal. Here he is giving a Nazi salute and the
Republican National Convention [f.]. This
kind of fixated innovator--the genius-level, ‘alpha’ dog who pushes headlong
for godlike power tech, while maintaining a primitive level of ethics tech, is
a major threat to human survival.
AI-generated weapons
The recent Lancet Report identified two apocalypse-level
threats [F#]. The first threat is nuclear
and the second is “AI-created biological weapons.”
Imagine a pathogen that is optimally durable, infectious
and mobile with a 100% kill rate.
Countless molecule-sized death agents released into the atmosphere. Is such a pathogen plausible?
We already know the answer is most likely yes. AI will soon be able to find out for sure. It will, as well, be able to help us manufacture
such a pathogen and determine the deadliest vectors.
We need a ‘Project of Light’
Given the above threats, and so much more world-shapery
to come, we need a stable platform of virtue and reasonable assessment. We need new and better forms of decision-making to manage our super powers. We have a
choice: continue to be immature,
reckless, blind progenitors without a stable cultural conscience; orassert
our ability to evolve the competency of our minds. We have the ability to learn, as individuals, as a culture, and in the nexus of group dynamics in-between.
We need not only summon our better angels, but liberate them
to effectuate a transition. The world we
live in now celebrates stock market bumps even as 50% of Americans can’t afford
basic necessities. The global scenario, outside
the wealth-grubbing empire, is even more dismal.
Higher ethics tech, by definition, means more
psychological skill and competence in the population, which in turn correlates
with more health and virtue, less vice and corruption. The therapeutic tools to increase the general
emotional competency of the population already exist. What we need is a delivery device. Instead, corporate marketing floods the
airwaves with ads that promote narcissistic consumption and petty insecurity.
The main obstacle, to which corporate avarice attaches itself, is
Ignorance. A mode of leadership that prefers broken, needy people whose self-esteem is not in their own
hands. People who jump through
hoops--loyalty and obedience tests--to earn a chance, if they work hard enough,
to get ahead, or maybe just subsist.
Human nature does not prevent us
Over and over, people say that ‘human nature,’ whatever
that is, prevents us from progressing toward a Good world. In response, consider this point: all the things that we have been taught cannot change already have. For most of human
existence, a span of two million years or so, war did not exist. Positive change has come in movements and
vacillations. Recently, we leapt forward
mightily, say, the last two hundred years, increasing our awareness.
It is abhorrent that a mere 150 years ago it was debated
whether Native peoples were even human. In
Standing Bear vs Crook (1879), a Federal District judge make the
monumental pronouncement … (drum roll) … that Native peoples are, indeed, human beings.
Standing Bear addressed the court as follows:
“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it,
I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hands, you also feel pain. The blood that
will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same
God made us both.” [f3]
It is sad how barbaric we were then--and still are. And yet it is joyous that we have advanced
our ethics to a place where we no longer debate whether people of certain
groups are human or not.
Universal Suffrage (1920 in the USA) broke from millennia of despicable ignorance. In the mid-20th century, Virginia
Woolf--speaking out when a woman’s voice could finally do so, publicly and
durably--wrote about women of the past who she referred to as “Shakespeare’s
sister.” Countless generations of women
and girls were never allowed to write, or allowed to even learn to write and, as well, denied so much more--myriad and variegated opportunities to express,
achieve and actualize.
Yes, we’ve made incredible progress in the last few
hundred years. But we must face the
horror of the past, the unspeakable cruelty of oppression and slavery--and the
horrors that exist to this day, in our own vicious, soul-crushing time--if we
are to wisely seek the Good of the future.
What is an Angel like?
We can start by admitting that Good and Evil exist, if
only as self-fulfilling prophecies projected from our minds onto the ways we
live and shape the world. That alone,
our ability to shape the world and determine the state of our minds and souls,
establishes Good and Evil as a presence.
We’ve confronted many an image of mythic demons and monsters. Our entertainment industry feasts on them, ballyhooing
an ongoing parade of adrenal malignities, complete with realistic special
effects. The result is an expanding lore
of horrors: fantastications, curses, and
tormented, tortured fates --a mega-compendium of what it means to suffer fearsome,
gruesome, soul-crushing incarnations of evil.
This Hollywood-exploration has had little to do with
religion. The entertainment industry has
separated out demons and monsters the name of ‘terror pleasure’ and
profit. Even when exorcism is the theme
of a horror movie, the Church is little more than a side prop.
In contrast to our familiarity with monsters, we know
relatively little about the potential aspects of an angelic creature. What would an angel be like?
As robotics and AI progress, our ability to create functioning ‘thinking’ robots looms nigh. An ethical robot, an angelic instantiation,
becomes more feasible. The main hurdle
may be our great preference and fascination for monsters.
As it stands, a case can be made that we will create the scariest
and most deadly robots as soon as possible.
The reason is that it meshes with the strategy of mutually assured destruction or MAD. The strategy of MAD is as
follows: the higher the threat of a nightmarish
response, the less likely it is that anyone would dare to attack us, thereby
minimizing the risk of all-out war.
This justification provides the rationale for the world you
and I must in: a planet pimpled with tens of thousands of ICBM silos.
Our current mentality, crippled by a dogma of fear, likely will usher in an era of Terminator-grade
robots--scary lethal hunter/assassination machines--as soon as we
have the ability to do so.
We can choose to focus on angels instead of demons
What would it take for us to focus on angelic
robots--true guides toward Goodness--instead of Terminator robots, which take
us one step closer to creating an actual hell on Earth, a self-fulfilling
prophecy of our own worst fears?
An angelic being require a sophisticated ethical
decision-making process, one that is reasonable, logical, and empirically
testable to derive Good results. It
would rely on a body of knowledge both scientific and philosophic, literary and
psychological. The whole of human knowledge
and wisdom, embodied in experience and understanding, would be needed to
extract a plausible path.
Imagine all the disciplines of academia, all the realms
of cultural expression, science yes, but also the arts, from the terpsichorean
to the poetic, those expressions of who and what we are, our hopes and dreams--all
of them summed to and help us approach high-tech answers to the ultimate
questions of life, such as, “What is happiness?” “What is the Good?” “What is the nature of health and
flourishing?”
“Know Yourself” is ancient wisdom, going back to the
Greeks. It could be applied to a society
as well. A society must know itself, and
act on that knowledge. Knowledge is
power--but for what? The Angelic model
and the Demonic model go down starkly different roads, represented by
lightcraft (advanced ethics tech to seek the Good) and darkcraft (advancing
mind control tech to ensure optimal obedience).
Faith-based answers to the deepest, most meaningful
questions of life have helped move us
forward in some ways. They provide
comfort in a brutal world. But they have
also--when completely unregulated by reason and fairness--mired us in superstition,
myopic fanaticism, and a balkanization into schisms which led to war,
inquisition, witch trials and other vast injustices.
As the Dali Lama writes in Beyond Religion, ethics
can be reasonable and universal, beyond any one religion. This is not an abandonment of spirituality,
emotion, passion or religion itself. Religion
can be part of a Good world. What is
required, for honesty and decency, to go beyond the damaging effects of
ignorance, is a reordering of priorities.
Critical thinking over dogma. Science
over zealotry. The rejection of any form
of credo quia absurdum . A commitment to emotional competence and its
aegis of virtues.
Conclusion
With so much at stake, the future of civilization and of
the planet itself, and potential fate of other planets as well, we ought to
absolutely put every mental and constitutional effort into unlocking the
potential of our minds to escape crippling social programming, the sort that
incline toward the ultimate destruction and failure that is war. Ignorance, as a kind of capital, for
thousands of years has been central to the operation of government. People are spoon fed ignorance from birth, programmed
to help spread it, and rewarded or ostracized accordingly. We live under the pall of an ancient bloody acculturation
of vicious, irrational force--derived from and delivered by the sword--one that
has ramified and adapted along vectors of diaspora, the Ignorance Vortex.
In terms of the phylogeny of a civilization, we are at a
very early stage, on a scale that can be measured, hypothetically, in millions
of years. We live in what could be
called (as I have written) the Era of Dumbing.
We are ethical infants. And we quite
likely to destroy ourselves with godlike technologies that we are incapable of
handling, if we continue to let immature macho males, who have diagnosable
mental disorders, sit on their de facto thrones, rattle their gun barrels,
point their missiles, and play chicken with each other so they can snatch the
latest flag from some vaunted hill, even if it is only a tiny, uninhabited
island.
We live in a time of such stupidity that we can easily
imagine a territorial battle for such an island erupting into a full-scale
global war.
A good first step for us, right now, is to simply begin
to talk about the Wall of Infancy. To
consider the idea that we have potential to be much more psychologically
healthy and correspondingly
ethical. Mental harmony and virtue
entwine. We can seek inner mental
harmony as individuals, as social harmony as groups. These two, as well, intertwine.
If all this seems magical and impossible, consider the
following practical, real-life, grounded quote:
“Authoritarian leaders, like narcissistic family members,
rely on well-worn tactics to manufacture a psychological state of volatile
uncertainty — where outcomes aren’t just unknown, but constantly shifting and
unpredictable. This overwhelms the brain’s ability to anticipate and prepare,
keeping people mentally off-balance and easier to control. The good news:
Awareness works like a vaccine, gradually building psychological immunity
against further harm.”
(“I’m A Psychologist Who Specializes In Narcissists.
Here’s What We Need To Do To Stop Trump,” -- Jocelyn Sze,
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m-psychologist-specializes-narcissists-stop-115203532.html
Maybe the most important sentence is “awareness works
like a vaccine.”
Have we even attempted to give this vaccine to ourselves
as persons, as institutions, as a population?
The techniques already exist to increase our wise knowledge.
Admittedly, even talking about a Wall of Infancy is extraordinarily
hard for us. It requires deep honesty,
which the first thing that primitive cultural programming takes away. It gives power over truth to egotistic
leaders, not individuals.
Starting with ancient times and proceeding to this day, no
one ever born in civilization has lived in a Good world. Or seen a Good culture. Not me.
Not you. Not anyone. The cultural programming in my head, and
yours, and everyone’s, fights against even a discussion of our lack of maturity.
What we do know is that culture can and has changed. So-called human nature has not prevented us
from major paradigm shifts in regard to equality and fairness. We also know, if we think for a moment, that
our own culture will be very different from than it is now in ten years. Culture always changes, even though we are
taught, as a standard canard, that nothing ever changes.
Despite the depressing, molasses-gooey pace of the struggle
(so it seems from the perspective in which we are embodied, that of a single
human life) ethics can advance. On an
historical scale, change is happening very fast and accelerating. The legalization of gay marriage in 2015 was
met with surprise and joy, as much as the inevitable furious backlash from the
homophobic forces of traditional ignorance.
Let’s at least start talking about our Wall of
Infancy. Millions of years of future
citizens could be grateful to us today, if only we dare to raise our heads and
being to ponder, and somehow start to climb.
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