The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach)

The news these days has us asking questions about how we survive as a species, with nuclear weapons in the hands of tyrants, and global climate challenges upsetting our equilibria. What really scares me, though, is what if we are so desperate to avoid these straightforward ends of civilization, that we destroy civilization with appeasement?

I think I should step back and share a bit about a book I read over a year ago, that has helped me shape my thoughts. It’s “What We Owe The Future” by William MacAskill. It falls in a school of thought called long-term futurism. They are philosophers, thinkers, etc. who analyze the existential threats to humankind and try to understand these risks rationally and mathematically. They also try to quantify the future lives extinguished, diminished, or otherwise restricted by each choice we make now. It’s a profound book- it has some conclusions I don’t fully agree with, and some of its acolytes have committed some grave mistakes through unwise applications of some ideas, but it got me fundamentally future oriented in a good way.

Namely, one error committed by some of the “tech bro” types who’ve been attracted to the idea, is to consider the avoidance of nuclear war to be so paramount that all appeasement and measures should be taken to avoid it- including concessions to tyrants.

Of course, my own long term futurist view is that our species will be at far higher risk of extinction because then, tyrants learn that if they can only succeed in getting a few bombs made, they can get what they want. There will be a net increase in bombs, in a wider range of shakier hands and tenuous geopolitical situations, so it’s therefore the less acceptable outcome. We have to make minor, but meaningful risks of wider war now, or we risk a century- if not a millenium- of constant higher risk.

One of my favorite books is Vital Dust, by Christian de Duve. He’s a Belgian scientist who gives an elegant overview of each of the major steps in life’s evolution, from a chemist’s perspective. He compellingly shows that life is a likely result of abiotic chemistry. Far from an aberration- it’s convincingly likely. Moreover, the development of many of the key features that led to our intelligence, are also likely to be repeated given the chance to run things through again.

This gives me great hope that life itself will continue no matter what we do. It also suggests we are not alone in the universe. As we work on the preservation of life on our planet, it’s nice to know we are probably not the whole show, and things would go on without us if necessary. Heck, a new intelligent species would likely emerge over a few hundred million years.

That being said, reading his book, and MacAskill’s, we can be struck by how precious this experiment is, how cool it is to be the first emerging intelligent species of the planet, and how we’re at a point in our history with such powerful leverage to shape the most important age of our species. We are a globe spanning megaculture already, in a few ways, and the morals we hammer out now have a chance to stick with us as we strike out to colonize or survive ever more challenging environments.

MacAskill got me thinking about how I want my own life to have contact with a wider range of people, for more chances to do that shaping. It also got me thinking about showing as much love and empathy, in advance to future generations, as I may do to past generations. That is to say, we spend a certain amount of our life wondering if our parents or grandparents may approve, or what our forebearers would think of where we are, but we should consider playing sometimes to a different audience- trying to forecast what kind of shaping operations we can take for those 2, 3, or 4 generations out, and beyond.

It’s partially for those reasons that I’m excited to spend a portion of my life in volunteer response. We regularly spend 2-8 years in university to shape ourselves into different people, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars, and opportunity costs. I am looking at my 9-months-and-counting “gap year,” with its pricetag far cheaper than a college education, and its time opportunity cost being quite modest, and sensing that it will shape me, and stars-above-willing, will positively shape a lot of people around me. MacAskill challenges us to put as much weight to a theoretical life in the future as one now, and when we do that, we ALL have a massive burden of future generations to prepare for. I want to see a world where injustices are nipped in the bud by bold, self confident coalitions organized around common values, and where natural disasters are compassionately mitigated by acts of solidarity across border lines, across ethnic and religious divides. If we raise our children like that- to be bold enough to defend what matters, compassionate enough to move in towards disaster, we can raise generations that will be ready for the unfortunate likely upheavals of this century. And if that all sounds too doom and gloom, it’s good to note that the very act of preparing for the worst scenarios may give us the intellectual courage to work that much harder to avoid them. Thinking about how hard a mitigating or repair effort may be, can be exactly the drive needed to apply our efforts to prevention.