On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Bleakest of Expectations

The substance of this book is scientific, namely the most important threats to human life on Earth and their elimination or mitigation. But Rees’s intention, of course, is political. He understandably wants to contribute to the generation of a consensus and provoke rational cooperative action - on tax, on technological development, on research priorities, on government funding for science, on sociological attitudes and even on the structure of politics itself. It is this last which is probably the most important but about which Rees has almost nothing to say. It is this absence of a remedy for politics that I find the central and most frightening aspect of the human condition.

Rees believes that economics can take care of some issues - just being more efficient in fuel usage and re-cycling of material like steel are “win-win” for everyone involved. Other problems require international coordinated planning and direction - global warming for example. He suggests the United Nations as the central body to supervise such efforts. So one might call Rees a political pragmatist: use the market - including the democratic ‘electoral market’ - where possible and a benign dictatorship where necessary.

There are of course a whole range of political possibilities which sit in between the radical neo-liberal and the radical socialist. But these two set the rough boundaries of the political experience of humanity. The Scylla and Charybdis, one might say, of human potential. Beyond either limit is merely national shipwreck and chaos, including the end of civilized political activity.

I am incompetent to comment on the scientific credibility of what Rees has to say about the technological solutions which seem most promising to keep the planet habitable. Obviously there is a necessary debate which will persist among professionals as they carry out their research and respond to innovations. This debate is conducted within certain rules of accepted scientific method, logic, and other ‘tools of rationality’. Such debate is not without its political aspects - about things like what constitutes evidence, the credibility of individual researchers, and the assessment of the weight of proof on various sides of an argument for example. But science is a constrained politics. Its criteria of value, of what’s important in any discipline, while not fixed, are fairly stable.

Politics outside of science are an entirely different matter. There are no political checklists by which good and bad politics can be distinguished. And certainly whatever values, criteria of correct action, prevail at any moment, there is little hope for their stability. Even just realizing these values - economic growth or more equitable income distribution for example - will change what’s important in general politics. In a sense, therefore, there can be no real or lasting political progress. Politics is a pre-rational activity, one which seeks to establish which criteria, which values, are appropriate in the moment. Rees is making the case that scientific values should prevail.

The problem is that Rees’s case for the interests of science does not cope very well with the wider interests of human beings. Idealists may be concerned about freedom of speech; realists about the degradation of the oceans, ecologists about the loss of species. Most may be simply worried about their chances for survival or employment or advancement. Whatever their situation, it is inevitable that people, and the political groups to which people belong, will have different views on priorities, and the correct actions to address them. Politics is the process by which these views are reconciled, compromised and turned into reality. In this process science is just another set of interests.

This has profound implications which most of us would rather not think about too carefully. One person who has done, however, is the Nobel Laureate economist, Kenneth Arrow. In the early 1950’s Arrow formulated what has come to be called his Impossibility Theorem, a sort of rule of logic for group decision making. Like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Physics, the Impossibility Theorem, although hardly as well known, is at first somewhat difficult to grasp. But once it is understand, it is possible to see its effects everywhere - from democratic politics to corporate decision-making to family feuds.

The proof of the Impossibility Theorem is fairly complex. But its conclusion can be stated simply: For any decision to be made by a group, if the members of that group have even slightly different criteria of correct action, interests, or values, the decision agreed upon will be that which everyone can accept but which no one wants. Once admitted to consciousness, the Theorem explains many otherwise unexplainable phenomena - from the prosecution of wars, to the election of Donald Trump. The consequences of the Impossibility Theorem are not occasional ‘glitches’ in decision-making, they are the rule, that only rarely result in anything that a scientist, or any fully aware person, could call rational.

So Rees’s confidence in either the market or in the capacity of democratic government to address the issues he raises is clearly whistling in the dark. Arrow will prevail as it always has done. Given the urgency of many of these issues, it isn’t at all likely that any kind of rational consensus can be achieved even if all his views about the future were accepted in their entirety. So does the future of the planet lie with the establishment of a benign dictatorship, perhaps, as Rees suggests, executed through the United Nations? Well certainly not if the United Nations operated as it does now as a trans-national committee representing national interests.

But suppose there was a ‘top-man’ at the UN, a world leader who had been given the authority and the military power by its members to enforce Rees’s scientific agenda. Is our global future dependent upon rooting out the roots of the Arrow problem by eliminating the inherent group decision-making irrationality of democratic politics?

Unfortunately, even such a dictatorship is incapable of pursuing the scientifically rational agenda. The reason is once again simple: The first rule of power, its Prime Directive, is the maintenance of power. In other words, power has its own inherent interests. These interests are perfectly rational - without power it can do nothing. Therefore, even in scientific terms it must oppose the rationality of science. Trump’s recent attempts to trash science - from his refusal to recognize global warming to his blaming inadequate ‘raking’ of brush for California wildfires - is an example of such rational opposition. It is rational according to the demands of power. Every time the man makes such crazy assertions, he solidifies his political ‘base’, whether he believes what he’s saying or not.

Trump is not alone in his demonstration of the Prime Directive of power. Rees quotes the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who makes the point unequivocally: “We all know what to do; we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” This from a man who is well-insulated from the interests of the hoi polloi of Europe. Even dictators who are immune from the tedious conventions of democratic politics, have politics to contend with. Rees doesn’t seem to take this basic fact at all seriously.

The question begged by Rees then is ‘What political process is capable of addressing the kinds of issues that confront humanity?’ The sad answer is simply ‘None’. Nothing on the entire spectrum from any sort of representative democracy to the most absolute of dictatorships holds the solution to the Arrow paradox or the prime directive of political power. We seem to be in the realm of the miraculous. So I suppose mass conversion to some sort of global religion might stand a chance. But the probability of such an event seems less than that of the human race emigrating to some distant planet to escape the conditions its very existence creates.

I can only hope that someone sees where I’ve gone wrong.

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