At Our Wits' End, page 28
In much the same way, if people appreciate, when they are younger, that old age will come then they will save for a pension and they will avoid ‘living for the now’ and wasting money on trivial things that they don’t need. As a consequence, they will have a relatively worry-free final phase of life and won’t be a burden on their family or the community. And, obviously, if they are health-conscious when they are younger they are less likely to be chronically ill in old age, suffering from diabetes, gall-stones, or heart problems. The more intelligent among us will plan for being elderly when we are not yet elderly and so it will be less difficult when it (almost) inevitably comes.
It could be argued that this is one of the reasons why it is important that we understand that civilisations work in cycles and that our civilisation is now entering old age. There are some colleagues who urged us not to be direct about this; to leave the reader with a series of possibilities that they can think about. But it must be so obvious to you, by now, what precisely our conclusions are, that this would be dishonest and patronising. As we have said, we have good data on the kinds of people who read books like this: academics, university students, former university students, and intelligent people who never went to university. There’s no point sugar-coating our view with such people. So let’s just be direct. We can make old age more bearable by realising that we are going to become elderly, we need to scale back what we do, and we need to plan for when we are really old. As we age, things we used to be able to do—marathon running, staying up all night drinking, driving a car—will become at best dangerous and at worst impossible. After all, we saw in Chapter One that we used to be able to get from London to New York in three-and-a-half hours, but now we can’t. We’re too ‘old’ as a civilisation, and therefore our level of g is not as high as once it was, so it would be too dangerous to re-launch Concorde. When we were ‘younger’, and brighter, we could go to the Moon. We can talk wistfully about this, much as the elderly reminisce on what they could do when they were younger. But we don’t have the skill to do it anymore. It would be far too dangerous for us.
If we do not do this, then old age will come as a shock to the system. It will be the difference between getting gradually less and less well or being hit by a car and ending up in intensive care. All of the markers of a high g society will eventually be beyond our capabilities. We won’t be able to safely fly aeroplanes, or maintain a lavish system of social security, or keep the electricity on all of the time, or maintain law and order everywhere, or organise democratic government or have widespread use of the internet. If our data are correct, and there’s little reason to think they aren’t, we need to start to develop the infrastructure to deal with the future. Life is going to become more harsh, more dangerous, and simpler. To give an obvious example, many houses are now entirely reliant on electricity: no fireplace, no gas. What are these people supposed to do when electricity becomes unreliable? Many people now commute into London from 70 miles away or even more. How are they going to get work as trains become more and more sporadic? They need to live closer to work, just as we all once did. If we start planning for this—rather than kid ourselves that ‘things can only get better’—then things will run far more smoothly when the time comes. In much the same way, we need to appreciate the fact that—like the elderly—we will be living off capital and we cannot allow this capital to run out. This means living well within our means and not wasting money on unnecessary extravagances. Every little has to count. Similarly, our ‘civilisation’ is likely to need ‘help’ as it becomes elderly just as we have long ‘helped’ the developing world. This needs to be borne in mind.
To put it another way, we are at the beginning of winter. Even in modern day Britain, you cannot possibly get through winter by behaving as you do in autumn. At the very least, you need fuel to heat your house, you require warmer clothes, the roads have to be gritted, the food has to be imported or grown in giant greenhouses and, if there’s snow, it has to be cleared. If the infrastructure is not there to do these things then there will be chaos. Snow almost always leads to chaos in Britain, unlike in Scandinavia or Canada, because we are simply not prepared for it.
Eugenics
So, one possibility is to prepare for old age and winter and simply accept it as fate. But there are others. We have already seen that Sir Francis Galton highlighted the problem of those with lower g outbreeding those with higher g in the 19th century in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. Later, he argued that this problem could be solved by a programme of ‘eugenics’. This would involve financially incentivising those with higher g to have more children. Galton was perceptive enough to realise that g is associated with intellect, being interested in ideas, and thus, to some extent, being disinterested in having children. And so his proposal combined offering financial incentives with inculcating people with a kind of latter-day religiosity, which emphasised the importance of improving the ‘human stock’.[4] Likewise, we have already met Richard Lynn. In his book Eugenics: A Reassessment, Lynn has defended Galton’s idea (despite the obvious terrible press which eugenics has received) and provided more detail, for example advocating licensing to have children, with the permitted number dictated by the couple’s IQ level.[5]
Advances in understanding the genetic basis of traits like g, educational attainment, and various diseases have led some to propose a liberal eugenics which is based on voluntaristic (rather than coercive) approaches to improving the inborn characteristics of one’s descendants.[6] Certain bioethicists, such as the Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu, who is based at Oxford University, have even argued that individuals are morally obliged to use genetic enhancements on their descendants, so as to bring about greater human flourishing. A key problem with this liberal eugenics is that it is unlikely to ever ‘catch on’, owing to what bioethicists call the ‘yuck factor’—this is a basic and visceral rejection of meddling in human nature that colours much of the debate about the desirability of eugenic intervention among Western populations in particular. Gerhard Meisenberg (who we met earlier) conducted a study into the attitudes of 1,464 medical students on whether or not and also under what conditions reproductive genetic intervention should be acceptable.[7] He found that ‘the strongest and most consistent influence [on attitudes towards the desirability of reproductive genetic intervention] was an apparently moralistic stance against active and aggressive interference with natural processes in general.’ In other words the sample had negative attitudes towards reproductive genetic intervention, especially if the objective was human enhancement. This suggests that the majority of individuals would likely fail to take advantage of ‘genetic enhancements’, even if they were cheaply and legally available to prospective parents, these simply being too ‘yucky’ to contemplate. The fact that leading a horse to water doesn’t necessarily entail it drinking is less of a problem, however, than the uses to which the increasingly distant and unaccountable globalist elites—the ones that Spengler predicted would come to dominate the political life of civilisations in winter time, and indeed did—may put such technologies. Recall that the historical period associated with rising levels of g was also associated with group selection—essentially g could only rise to the extent that it benefitted the group via provision of geniuses, whose innovations could create new opportunities for group expansion. An elite that is anti-group selected (i.e. purely self-interested) is likely to enhance in their offspring those traits that were most important to its success—traits such as psychopathy.[8] Thus such a ‘liberalised’ eugenics is more likely than not to make things worse for civilisation in its winter years.
Nurturing Genius
Dutton and Charlton offer another solution, however, and this is a return to a society that actively encourages genius. We need to recognise the importance of genius, identify potential geniuses, and then give them the space they need to do genius work. In essence, they need the things that they find difficult—that is, practical things that ordinary people have no problem with, like driving a car—dealt with. Otherwise, as unworldly people they won’t require much beyond basic sustenance and minimum financial security. There should be no pressure to publish, or deal with bureaucracy, or attend conferences. They must simply be permitted to get on with it, as Newton was. If we can do this, then it is possible that a genius will come up with ideas regarding how to break the cycle of civilisation, just as they once came up with a way for pretty much breaking the Malthusian cycle.
But the cynic might counter that our geniuses did not come up with a way of doing this in the 19th century when they were much more intelligent than our geniuses are now and when they were seriously contemplating this issue. So, it’s extremely unlikely that our modern day, far lower g, geniuses are going to have much of a chance of solving such an intractable problem. Maybe the best we can hope for is that, given the right environment, some geniuses can work out a way of colonising Mars before our g dips too low. The colonists will then take current technology to Mars but may well find themselves subject to intense selection for g for a considerable period due to the planet’s extremely harsh conditions: no breathable air, little air pressure, intense solar radiation; the need to constantly and very carefully plan ahead. Assuming that we want scientific progress to continue—after all, 90% of us would never have lived if it hadn’t taken off—this may be our best hope. But even this is very uncertain.
Religion
Furthermore, it assumes that we have the will to carry on; the fight in us to wish to keep civilisation going forever; some kind of sense of the eternal. Increasingly, people don’t have this in Western countries. The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, whom we met earlier, has argued that the solution is for us to ‘live as if’ our lives have eternal significance.[9] But it’s unclear how we can actually do that if we don’t really believe it.
So, we come back to Galton’s idea that those with influence should inculcate the population with some form of religiosity and somehow force themselves—through so-called ‘self-deception’—to believe it, something which tends to make people more persuasive. It seems it is possible to persuade yourself to believe something if the pay-off is sufficient. Indeed, it has been argued that this is why IQ predicts liberal views in a society in which it is considered civilised to hold liberal views. Cleverer children are more likely to adopt such views.[10] In an extremely religious society, which made a point of valuing large families, we would expect those with higher g to have larger families and so slow down the decline of civilisation. As such, the adoption of traditionalism—which argues for the return to a religious society—would potentially yield some benefits. It could slow it down enough that we are able to work out how to colonise another planet. Also, any slow-down would mean that the civilisation that follows ours, drawing upon our achievements, will be able to go even further, before collapsing itself.
Following in Galton’s footsteps, Cattell (who we met earlier) proposed that a ‘new morality from science’, which he termed Beyondism, be promoted so as to promote eugenic aims and spread eugenic virtues. Beyondism basically advocates a society organised along scientific lines, with a ‘priestly caste’ of evolutionary biologists who regulate and plan the evolutionary development of the society. Cattell was acutely aware of the role played by group selection in the evolution of higher levels of g and genius, and consequently proposed that ‘cooperative competition’ be employed by the various Beyondist ‘actors’ on the world stage, whereby:
‘[L]ike players in some greater more vital game than men usually play, cultural groups recognize that the maintenance of inter-group competition is indispensible to evolution and they agree to cooperate in whatever rules are necessary to maintain it in effective action.’[11]
Cattell also foresaw the problems highlighted previously, in our dealings with eugenics, specifically in relation to the hazards associated with the genetic enhancements favoured by the ‘liberal eugenicists’ of the present day. He saw these and other ‘eugenical tools’ as needing to ultimately serve the interests of the group in order for societies to flourish:
‘A group positively planning well for its future will employ all three of the above: (1) differential birth/death rates, (2) rhythms of segregation and well-chosen-hybridization, and (3) creation of mutations along with genetic engineering... These methods we need to use toward group goals to bring about by a collective movement of its citizens (a) survival of the group, and (b) launching out on its own evolutionary adventure.’[12]
So, Cattell’s Beyondism seems to solve the problem of a eugenics that is unbound to the concerns of the groups (or that could even be used to subvert the group in the case of ‘liberal eugenics’), at least in theory. It can be looked at as a sort of super-charged eugenics, which even fleshes out Galton’s ‘eugenic spirituality’ into a fully developed religious-ethical system. In practice, however, within Beyondism the consequences to a group of losing out in cooperative competition are dire—amounting to an essential ‘phasing out’ of that population. Granted, Cattell saw the ‘rules of the game’ as being essentially voluntary—something that individual nations would agree too—much like arms limitation treaties, and presumably the Beyondist equivalent of the UN or the EU would ensure that the rules were scrupulously adhered to. Such an abstract morality is unlikely to appeal to ordinary people and would in all likelihood need to be forced onto those people —and thus would be unacceptably coercive, to most. Were it imposed, it would likely lead to war, hastening the collapse of civilisation.
Long-Term Knowledge Storage
Have you ever wondered how much more advanced we would be today had the Royal Library of Alexandria not been burned in 48 AD? How many novel mathematical proofs had to be rediscovered simply because the originals were destroyed? How much more knowledge of the ancient world, its customs, its triumphs and failures, would we have had at our fingertips had the library survived? There is much good in the current world that is worth preserving for future generations, profound mathematical proofs, brilliant scientific and philosophical insights, beautiful prose and inspiring artwork. Let’s say for a moment that the collapse and new Dark Age is inevitable—that it will happen and that not even Beyondism can save us. Imagine if whilst some future civilisation was starting to crest the wave of rising g it received a gift—from the past—in the form of a giant time capsule; a doomsday vault in fact containing physical copies of all that is great and worth preserving from the present era. Imagine how much further than us that civilisation could soar with the benefit of present day advances. Hundreds of years need not be wasted on rediscovering lost knowledge. Instead the past can simply be ‘data-mined’, and our present day knowledge enhanced by a high-g future civilisation at the peak of its powers. Foreknowledge of things like the decline in g may even lead to novel solutions being found to the problems. Perhaps future politicians could benevolently guide some kind of voluntaristic eugenics programme which, if implemented early enough in that future civilisation’s autumn years, may help it to stave off collapse, allowing technology to advance and maybe even reach that vaunted Singularity of Vinge’s.
Making a gift of knowledge to future civilisations would be a good idea, even if everything that we have proposed turns out to be wrong, as there are a multitude of other ways in which civilisation could abruptly end, including an asteroid strike, a super-volcano, nuclear war, or even a new Ice Age. This is the mission of ‘The Long Now Foundation’,[13] which was established in 1996 to encourage the sort of long-term thinking that might safeguard knowledge for 10,000 years or more. And this is crucial because there does not appear to be anything we can realistically do to avert the collapse of civilisation. It seems that it cannot be stopped.
The Bleak Mid-Winter
We have seen that there are probably ways to slow down the collapse of civilisation, so that civilisation can be taken elsewhere, but that will be for a small minority if it happens at all, and those people will have to survive very harsh conditions. All most of us can really do is prepare for the winter that is upon us and safely store the knowledge that our civilisation has produced. Eventually, the winter will give way to spring and then summer. Perhaps, with a gift of knowledge from the present to the future, because we have come so far this time, the next Renaissance will take those who are to come even further. But we—you and us—will be long gone by then. Winter has come and it’s only going to get colder. Wrap up warm.
1 Shakespeare, Sonnet 18.
2 The father in question has published a bestselling memoir of what happened: Brookes-Dutton, B. (2014) It’s Not Raining Daddy, It’s Happy: Surviving Grief, a Father and Son Start Again, London: Hachette UK. Brookes-Dutton is not related to Edward Dutton.
