Apex

One common sentiment I often hear expressed (and admit to sometimes sharing) is the idea that human civilization somehow peaked a few decades ago and is now beginning an inexorable, horrific decline interrupted only by (a) the return of Christ or (b) the destruction of humanity.

This is nonsense for two reasons.

One: Egocentrism

The United States is in moral, political, and (largely for political reasons) economic decline. Unfortunate? Sure. The demise of all mankind? Hardly. India is on the rise. China (if democracy wins out) may be another great nation. Europe is falling apart but has been doing so for the last fifty years. The cold fact is this: change is not always decline. The Western world is diminishing; the Eastern is ascendant. We may as well get used to it and learn to live with the new order. We may even, through miraculous recovery, manage to slow the shift, but it's pretty hard to argue with population and nationalistic youth and vigor. Even if the United States falls clean off the world stage or embraces socialism (more) and is ruined economically, humanity will go on. Look at the decline of the British Empire. To the English it looked like the end of the world. Who even thinks about this today? It's amazing what a bit of perspective can do. The United States was waiting to fill the power vacuum and has, all in all, done fairly well. The world kept turning. The counter argument here is that the new rising nations are hardly supporters of human rights, freedom, and justice. Which brings us to reason two:

Two: Transience

Even if democracy and capitalism fall and the world is plunged into a new dark age, a new renaissance will follow it. Civilizations fall. How about them Romans, eh? The Roman Empire (and earlier the Roman Republic and earlier still Greece) was a truly amazing society, with knowledge and a passion for truth unmatched until the Enlightenment. What is left of the Romans today? The Coliseum (which actually is a symbol of decline and barbarism) and Little Caesar's Pizza. Life is tough. Countries are no more exempt to entropy than the people who comprise them. Everything dies, and sometimes death is painful. The fall of the Roman Empire triggered the Dark Ages. And guess what? We recovered. It took fifteen hundred years to reclaim some of the losses, but we recovered. Upheaval is not even truly death but rather slumber. Nigh all mistakes are reversible, any error healed by the passage of time. Is there pain, loss, turmoil? Yes. But there is no final end that we can bring about ourselves.

What is my point? Let's not get so enraptured by our own accomplishments and our own status and even our precious modern comforts that we lose track of the truth that matters. Life finds a way. The fall of the West is not the fall of humanity. Should we stave it off as long as possible? Sure. We can even mourn its passage on the day we fail. But we must do so because the fall is undesirable, not because it is the end of the world. The idea that we have reached the pinnacle of human history is unsupportable and distorts how we view the world. We all too easily forget that the only things that matter are eternal and universal. Our current civilization is neither.

The four laws of humanity

Nearly every phenomenon in the known universe can be explained by the application of a few fundamental laws. At times the laws themselves are peculiar or counter intuitive, but all complex behavior arrives from their interaction as opposed to their number. Consider, for example, the most easily observable force in nature: gravity. Gravity is governed by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, but over short distances is explained almost as well by Newton's work. The practical upshot of both theories is that masses attract each other and force of the attraction decreases proportionally to the square of the distance between them. Simple, no? But it took years to find this law because of the complexity arising from the number of bodies present in the observable subject (the solar system). Myriads of complex theories were proposed before a simple law was discovered. Once it was, prediction and comprehension were easy.

I would like to postulate that nearly all of human behavior can be explained by a few simple laws. There will always be exceptions, but in general I believe the following apply. The pronouns are male to keep my sentences simple. I am not a chauvinist. Just thought I'd clear that up.

1) A person will act in what he perceives to be his best interest or the best interest of someone else.

This may seem obvious, but it explains a lot of otherwise anomalous behavior. The Secret Service agent who stops a bullet for his charge is acting in what he perceives to be in the best interest of either the man he protects or his country. The mother who works two jobs to put food on the table is acting both in her own interest and her family's. The drug addict weighs the damage inflicted by heroin against the perceived benefit. This last is startling, but makes perfect sense when paired with the second law.

2) A person is incapable of always correctly discerning what a "best interest" actually is.

We are finite, fallen beings. Equally to the point, we are not omniscient. No one person holds all the facts and even if he did he may not act on them due to emotional distortion of reason. Let's say that you are faced by a home intruder. He has a paring knife. You have a Benelli semi-automatic shotgun loaded with deer slugs and pointed at his chest. Your young child is sleeping in the next room. He rushes you. What do you do? If you shoot him, he's going to die. If you don't, you might die, and so might your son. (We will ignore human rights to self-defense for the sake of simplicity.) If you fire, one person definitely dies. If you don't, two people might. You might be able to just clock him with your stock and stun him. You might not. He might run away. He might not. On a purely utilitarian level, there is no way to make a foolproof decision. This is a stark example, but the general concept applies everywhere. If we could see every outcome, we'd all make fortunes on the stock market.

3) People (both individually and collectively) are incapable of detecting error without external points of reference once a choice has been made.

This may sound confusing or unduly cynical, but consider it for a moment. If an entire population is convinced of something (say, that the earth is flat), then unless external, independent evidence emerges to the contrary people will continue to act as though the earth is flat. Locke wrote that a person's knowledge cannot exceed his or her experience. Something similar attaches here. We cannot detect our mistakes without either prior knowledge (which we ignored in order to make the mistake) or future evidence. This is, as you have probably guessed, a corollary of Rule Two. People not only cannot always determine what is in everyone's (or even their own) best interest, we cannot learn without trying and failing and thus gathering more knowledge. Another way to phrase this is that a choice always seemed like a good idea at the time.

4) People (collectively) have short memories.

We are only capable of learning from experience/evidence, but easily forget exactly what we theoretically learned. Consider government regulation of economics. It's never worked well, but that has not stopped us from trying it again.

These four rules (the first two the most fundamental) explain much of human behavior, especially when large numbers of people are involved. I'm not Hari Seldon, and these ideas likely fail Popper's falsifiability test, but in future posts I'll apply them to our current issues and see how much behavior I can accurately predict.

All things work according to their nature

The great tragedy of the twentieth century that will have the greatest impact in the twenty-first may well be that we have discarded the idea of human nature. Turn on the news. Watch it as long as you can stomach it. A woman is murdered in New Orleans by three fifteen-year old kids. In Indiana a man shakes his infant son nearly to death. Four toddlers are burned with acid by their mother's boyfriend in Texas. What is more horrifying than this? My reaction, and probably yours. We look at these incidents and are saddened or angered, but we get on with our day. The simple fact is that this stuff happens all the time. We learn to deal with it. The world is riven. That is simply the way things are. That is the way people are. Not everyone kills someone or robs a bank or blows himself up in crowded restaurant, but we all are born with the potential, and this potential is causing pain we can scarcely imagine yet clearly see.

Welcome to the sin nature. Welcome, as Morpheus puts it in The Matrix, to the real world.

But, thanks to modern thought and philosophy, the human sin nature need not be blamed, or even acknowledged. America has embraced Rousseau. "Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains." The most heinous offenses are not a matter of sin, or evil, or even morality. Chemical imbalances. Environmental factors. Genetic predispositions. Emotional repression. Our shiny new scapegoats. Suddenly, no crime can be blamed on the perpetrator. We are "born free." It was his parents. It was his medication. It was her genes. It was the NRA. It was the economy. Even Twinkies have been blamed for murder. Why the drastic effort to shirk responsibility?

The answer to this question is easy but also deeply troubling. We would like to believe that there is some hope of a better life. We want to believe that things will improve. And, indeed, they do. To an extent, the human race has made progress. We live longer, have microwaves and television, enjoy penicillin and trichinella-free pork. We have a stable structure in place for mediating international disputes (in theory) and the global standard of living has improved. We want to believe that if we advance enough we can somehow live together as a big, happy family. On the other hand, we have invented astonishingly effective ways to kill each other, allowed and fostered the spread of AIDS, and committed the worst genocides in history.

Welcome to the real world.

The word "utopia" means nowhere. Far too many have forgotten this, especially in Washington. Many of today's leaders are operating under the impression that the right laws and the omnipresent influence of government can correct the flaws of humanity by correcting the conditions that give rise to conflict. We hear talk of fusing all of society into one great middle class. Poverty will be eliminated. Crime will be a bad but fleeting memory. Boom and bust cycles will be replaced by the steady growth promised by government regulation. If we all just work together...

The problem, of course, is that we can't. Hobbes speculated that the state of nature is war. His solution amounted to totalitarianism. All well and good, but the people with the reins of power are inevitably just that: people, and people subject to the same imperfections that plague the rest of us. I am fond of likening society to a bunch of eight-year-olds on a playground. It is easy to neglect the fact that our leaders and guardians are not teachers but peers. Human nature is universal, and it neatly kills the idea of an earthly utopia. Hence the fact that every effort at utopia has gone the way of New Harmony and the Soviet Union. Utopian states usually were based on the ideals of socialism, and quickly went more George Orwell than Thomas More.

Welcome to the real world.

So, why does the dream of utopia survive? The entire idea stems from the assertion that our problems are somehow external to our nature and thus solvable. I said a few paragraphs ago that I had a simple answer to why we try to shirk responsibility. Well, here it is: it's in our nature. Read Genesis for the first example of the blame game, all structured around Man's first failing. Watch C-SPAN for contemporary examples. Every problem in our world is our fault. We are also powerless to fix them. Dante should have nailed the words "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" over the exits of maternity wards.

Or should he? The truth we must remember, the only source of true hope, is that this world is not permanent. We all die; we all move on. We cannot place our hope, our investments, in this crumpled and broken realm. This earth will pass, the Earth will be revealed. We have been offered salvation by our Maker. We can only do the best we can to hold on until He says,

"Welcome to the real world."