Tablet Magazine’s What Really Matters: A Live Episode at Hudson Institute

He likes to do this.

Yeah. Well, this really is in some ways the oldest human story that our very distant ancestors are sitting around and starting to figure out how to get what they need out of nature. How to find a stick big enough to hit the leopard that's coming after them, how to start a fire and use a fire. And humanity over the tens of millennia or whatever dates they keep coming up with has been slowly and gradually gaining this kind of mastery and understanding. And the process began extremely slowly. And we can see it in the archaeological record. And we can see how new ideas and new technologies start in one part of the world, maybe in Asia Minor, and then radiate out at different rates. Different groups kind of pick them up. Sometimes things are developed independently. But this kind of creative engagement with nature seems to be something that people do everywhere that they go. And over time again it becomes, you know, the mass of acquired knowledge is greater but also the speed of the acquisition of knowledge slowly begins to accelerate. And obviously we can see some sort of big break points in that. The Neolithic Revolution which is really associated with the rise of cities, the first writing systems. And once you have writing systems, of course, this accelerates the discovery because you know what someone else has found, they can write down and then instead of having to rediscover it, you can read about what they did and go on to the next step. And in the same way the rise of cities where you have a lot of different people living together, learning from each other, trying new ways. You see the blacksmith down the street, you know, has figured out how to get their fire a little hotter or something. Okay? You know, you might if you were still hunting and gathering in small tribal groups, you wouldn't have seen that other blacksmith. So gradually again knowledge expands and humanity's ability to sort of wrest a living from nature but also to create expands until you get into fairly modern times. The pace of change is slow. I think Gibbon writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire notes in 1776 that it was probably, you could probably get from London to Rome faster in the time of the Caesars than you could in his own time. So, you know, you would not say that now. You can get from, you know, unless there's like bad traffic on the way to Heathrow, you can get from London to Rome a lot faster than you could in Gibbon's day or Caesar's. And during that, and that acceleration of technological growth also you see social change connected with this and social change accelerates and it's kind of interesting to me that with the Industrial Revolution which like the Neolithic Revolution is one of the periods when the acceleration really manifests itself for the first time, philosophers start taking historical change as a major subject of philosophy. So somebody like Hegel to develop a philosophy of history, you didn't need a philosophy of history like the first century BC except to talk about cycles or something. But the pace of change is accelerating so much that you notice the change in one lifetime. The great to me American writer about this whole process is actually Henry Adams who as you may know was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson obviously of John Adams and he remembered as an old man in the, you know, 1900s, he remembers walking hand in hand with his grandfather, you know, who grew up wearing knee breeches to school and he sort of, he could see the railroad beginning to transform American society and then he lives through the full industrial revolution and watches World War I and so on and Henry Adams actually looks at this technological change and tries to think about where it's going and what it means and he drew a graph. He tried to, he estimated the amount of power that the human race could collectively muster which is, you know, for most of history that would end prehistory, sail, muscle, animals, you know, not a lot but he said so he developed this, you know, let's see I want to make sure it looks in the right direction for you rather than me so maybe I'm doing this, goes very very slowly but then starts turning upward. The slope of the curve of progress is increasing and as that happens things begin to change in political society, in the economy and so on. But he projects forward into the future continuing acceleration. And writing in about 1920 he basically can see a point where this hyperbolic curve, the slope of the curve begins to approach infinity which is fundamentally the singularity. As far as I know, this is the first kind of concrete mathematical attempt to project the point where the rate of change reaches such a point that human history has changed fundamentally. And so that for Henry Adams was the point. And so I'm happy to say the singularity was discovered by Americans but long before Silicon Valley. Anyway, as that rate of change accelerates, it stresses human societies. So, and some societies, not every society can respond as capable at any given moment of responding to change as fast as any other. And there could be complex economic reasons, historical reasons, geographical, cultural, whatever. There's a whole basket of things that go into this and I wouldn't try to sort them out but interesting, you know, you can see like in the 19th century European technology appears suddenly in Tokyo Bay with Commodore Perry and the American fleet and the Japanese go uh-oh, you know, unless we figure out how to beat these people at their own game we're going to be toast and they figure it out and within a generation Japan has emerged as a global great power. China sees the same thing but a much more complex diversified society and so on. It's not able to manage it in the 19th century and so experiences that century of humiliation. So the rising pace of change can affect fairly similar in some ways societies in quite dramatically different ways. And that interplay I think is a really important thing when we're thinking about history. But maybe that's enough on this topic.

Well, I do think this, that one of America's, one of America's biggest comparative advantages in the world is that we are better able to manage a higher rate of change than most societies. That is, you know, you think about all the changes that the United States has gone through since the 18th century. You know, the increase in territory, the increase in population, changing composition of the population with immigration, enormous economic changes as the industrial revolution whips through. I think, you know, in the 1850s over 50% of Americans worked on farms. Today it's like 1%. That's a pretty dramatic kind of change. And if you think about that, you know, we still have the same constitution that we had in 1789. We still have a lot of the same political ideas that we had in 1776. So that mix of stability and dynamism is a very interesting one. But it is definitely, I think you don't have to be super intelligent to see that today the United States is feeling pretty whipsawed. American society is under immense stress. And you know, a lot of people in the late 80s and 90s, a lot of people were saying history is over. Now you'll hear a lot of people saying America is over. I don't think that's true, by the way. But I do think we are in a, that the rising pace of change is putting America to the test in a way we haven't seen in a long time.

Sure. You know, and if you think about it, one of the things that makes the 21st century different from all other centuries is that for the first time, a majority of the human race now professes one of the great religions that trace their origins back to the story of Abraham, or Abram as he was known originally, in the Middle East. We don't quite know what he was doing but sort of one day he's sitting around in Ur of the Chaldees and he hears what he understands to be the voice of God saying get up and go, leave your people, leave your father and your father's land and go to a new country where you'll encounter me. And this idea of a universal transcendent monotheistic God has originally the possession of sort of a small number of wandering herd nomads that would flare up in Egypt and in other places but basically confined to this one group. Over time this vision of the world has kind of set itself, has had an immense impact and whether we talk about the Islamic world, we talk about European history, North American, South American, the different religions that trace back to Abraham's revelation or experience continue to shape the world. Now, this is not just about the sort of proposition, oh, there is one God and so maybe we should do what he says or whatever. This has big implications. For example, science. If you, you know, when you have a single creator of the world and a belief that humanity is created in the image of that God, so that human reason is connected to the reason that is fundamental to creation, then science makes sense. If nature is composed of a lot of polytheistic spirits, you know, and the love god works in one way and the war god in another and over here we have the deity of this little spring and, you know, whatever, the tree spirit, it's not at all clear that cause and effect works the same way everywhere. But if there's one God who created heaven and earth and human reason is in the image of that God, then the mathematical formula that you can work out in your head may well describe the way that, you know, galaxies of quasars hundreds of millions and billions of light years away work, so that cause and effect works. So this is I think, and everywhere it's gone, while at various moments organized churches have been in conflict with science, but the scientific method and the scientific sensibility have historically flourished in the Abrahamic universe. Same by the way with philosophy. Now, I'm not trying to say that only the Abrahamic world comes up with discoveries or whatever, but I think you can look at history and see a very kind of powerful complex here. But that's sort of about nature. But Abrahamism, if we can call it that, also has some ideas about human history. If you think about Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all share an idea that when humanity was originally created by God, we were in a good relationship with God. Christians and Jews talk about the Garden of Eden. It's not really that different in Islam. And so, you have this early state of human existence which is kind of perfect simplicity. Then comes an, you know, we turn away from God called the fall of man. And then we're sort of down in the muck and the misery and slavery and exploitation and war and conflict and so on. But then God doesn't leave us in that dreary mess of our own making. And the process of history is understood as God reaching out to a lost humanity through prophets and teachings. And as that happens, humanity begins to climb back from the abyss toward the light. And these religions all say that at the end of history, God will reveal perfectly and humanity will reenter that original state but at a higher level, from the Garden of Eden to the City of God. So we will recover that unity with the universe, that harmony among ourselves and with God at a more complex level of social existence. All right? And that vision of history is deeply encoded in the Abrahamic things. There are other things like the equality of all people. If everybody is made by the same God, then every person has rights that don't depend on the state or any human institution, but that are grounded in our nature as creatures of the God of Abraham. And also there are things like justice that matter because they are encoded in the nature of the world just as scientific principles are encoded in the nature of the world by virtue of their creator. All right. Now let's think about outside the religious box because if we think about, let's just think about Marxism for a moment. How does history begin for Marxism? In the utopia of primitive communism, hunter-gatherers living in harmony with one another. But then, you know, with the Neolithic Revolution essentially comes the fall, the precipitation into class society, oppression, exploitation, slavery, war. And Marx takes God out of the equation, but tells the same story. And for Marx it's simply the technological progress that human beings achieve, the material progress and scientific progress from their own intellects that is going to lead us ultimately back to pure communism, you know, communism with Chinese characteristics even I can say on a day when Xi Jinping is visiting Washington, right, that it's the same direction of history, same ending. But one way to think about the singularity, to revert to Silicon Valley, is that that's another name for this intervention of God at the end of history that takes us up to that higher level of the original utopia. So when you hear optimists in Silicon Valley talk about what the singularity can be, what's it going to get rid of? Death. We'll either, you know, be able to make our bodies immortal or we can upload our consciousness to the internet. Poverty will be gone. With all of these, who will need war when there's no death and no poverty and all sickness is curable? So what we see then is that Marxism, liberalism and technologism all kind of share that Abrahamic mold. Am I making sense? So that, and so as we approach, interestingly, as we approach the singularity in a scientific discernment, I have no idea by the way whether we're in the singularity or not, those are, you know, it seems to me that's probably something you can only figure out retrospectively, but in any case we're seeing something else which is with the Enlightenment, the world thought that we were going to kind of secularize the way we thought, the way we lived. That religion, okay, you can have your personal religion, that's kind of in the background, but that doesn't matter so much because, you know, reason is going to make things better. We're going to, with more education, with better technology, living standards will rise. The state, you know, life is going to become more rational, right? And so religion may still linger. Kind of like the smile of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. The cat disappears until only the benevolent grin is left, right? But actually something different happened which is back, you know, in the Middle Ages and earlier this concept of the end of history or even the end of the world, the singularity was only a kind of religious, almost mythological concept. How could the, only way the world would end would be for God to come in and work miracles, right? And, you know, overthrow the kingdoms, the stars fall from the sky, a miraculous apocalypse was the way people, only way that you could envision this end of history and the transition of humanity to a different stage of existence. But suppose simple scientific and technological progress can get us to the singularity, that we could reach the end of history not by supernatural divine intervention but simply by normal historical processes. And that's why Marxism is a very optimistic philosophy. Liberalism is a very optimistic philosophy because they envision human beings without help from God necessarily being able to perfect our lives until we reach that kind of glorious final consummation. But you know what? Encoded in some of those old religious texts like the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible and other rather stressful prophecies in the Hebrew and Islamic scriptures. All right. The singularity doesn't look all that peaceful. All right. And in fact from our perspective today we can think of bad singularities, bad ends of history as well as good ones. For example, nuclear war that destroys mankind. All right. Runaway climate change that turns the earth into Venus and makes life impossible. Right? Malign AI that decides that we need to be exterminated as it escapes our surveillance. We are moving to a proliferation of bad as well as good singularities. Making sense? And here's the thing. If the singularity is simply a matter of religion, then we pray about, oh Lord, you know, let us have like a good end, not a bad one, right? But if it's done by history, that means politics matters. If we have good policies, we can have utopia, a good singularity. But if we have bad policies, we're all going to die horribly, right? That changes politics. In fact, it sacralizes politics. It turns politics into religion. If I think the sales tax should be 4% and you think the sales tax should be 5%, we can like argue about that and I can have big signs down with 5% down and you can do the same. But at the end of the day, we can compromise. But if I believe that raising the sales tax to 5% is going to like bring about the end of the world and the death of all human beings, compromise becomes harder. So you can see this in issues like, you know, how sort of a lot of climate activists see what they're doing genuinely as a matter of life and death. And how do you compromise when what you're trying to do is save the human race from destruction? So politics becomes religious as we approach the singularity. Even for people who, you know, don't believe in God, they become, and all of the zealotry and wars of religion that you have seen in the past among religious groups, we are now seeing erupt into quite secular political arguments and discussions. This is one of the reasons I think our politics has gotten so spiky.

Well, I would say first of all that is less a difference between Christianity and Islam than it is a difference between sort of societies at different levels of economic development because the Christians in Africa are pretty fervent, are having a ton of babies, right? And you know, so in many ways they look more like poor Muslims in other countries. There are also interesting mechanisms that going back actually literally as far as Adam Smith. Adam Smith had an argument for why urbanization created more fervent forms of religion. While typically a lot of social scientists will say urbanization creates secularization, Smith's idea was, you know, you have all these rural people coming into the city and for him the example was of course London, right? And they come from pretty, you know, traditionally religious backgrounds, the typical English village with an inherited social structure and so on, and then they find themselves in the city and he says, look, a workman who is working in the city of London, but you like start drinking a little gin or running around with floozies or whatever else, you know, one might do in 18th century London. All right, he says you can destroy yourself in a week. You can, you know, and there's no social safety net. So if you don't find a way of getting yourself into a community and a structure and a structured life, you're going to go. And he says this, and he says the most fervent sects of religion are the best at this. You find yourself in a community of people who are policing your behavior, watching you, who are interested in you, holding you to standards, right? And giving you a new structure that replaces what you knew in your village. And I would argue that in a lot of the Islamic world, including by the way in Western Europe and so on, the surge of radical religion that you find in this process of urbanization, not always identical to what Smith was talking about, but his idea here intuitively continues to me at least to make a lot of sense about what we're seeing.

And you know, capitalism, capitalism is different from markets. That is, there were markets in Damascus in 3000 BC. And what you wanted to do in these markets, let's say you're a rug merchant in Damascus and you're pretty good at what you do. And what you basically want to do is every year you send roughly the same number of camels on the same trek, let's say to Persia, and for roughly the same price, a few fluctuations, you buy roughly the same number of rugs, you know, and you bring them back and then you sell them, you know, for more or less prices that you sold last year and you make that profit and you, you know, that's what you do. And your goal as a successful, effective merchant is most of the time, like when you die, you want to pass on to your kids the family business in at least as good a shape as you founded it. All right. Now, if Walmart or Amazon tried to work that way now and each year buying the same things at the same prices, using the same technology, you know, delivering in the same way and so on, they'd be bankrupt really fast because somebody else would figure out more efficient ways, cheaper ways, cleverer ways of doing this. And that difference is what capitalism in a way is all about. It is the most powerful engine for accelerating technological, social and political change that the planet has ever known. Even Marx says this in the Communist Manifesto. So that, you know, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class are the great revolutionaries. And that revolution which starts in the UP and then really takes hold in the UK in the 18th century launches us on the path of the industrial revolution and then the United States kind of picks it up in the 20th century and extends it. That remains the kind of, you know, the chief engine driving the human race. Now obviously capitalism, other countries pick it up and adapt it and are trying to run with it in different ways and I'm not predicting what the future will be when I say we're coming out of 350 years of Anglo-American, you know, dominance based on this capitalist foundation. I'm not saying, and oh by the way we're going to have 350 more years of it. I don't know any more than anybody else here what's going to happen next week, next year, 15 years. Xi Jinping may live to see China take the crown. I can't tell you. I have my suspicions that probably not, but that's a different story. But in terms of understanding this, why did the Anglo-Americans manage to do this? And I think it comes back to this idea that British and American society were better at managing and embracing change than some of the other countries were. And why was that? Again, a lot of it comes down to religion. Henri Bergson, I don't know if any of you guys know who he was. He was actually an Anglo-French Jewish philosopher who was really interested, he sort of thinks after Darwin, he's one of the people who's trying to kind of incorporate an idea of, you know, evolution into how do you think about human society and human nature. And he comes up with two ideas of society: open society and closed society. Obviously, we still use these terms today a lot. And an open society, well, a closed society was easiest to understand. He says it's like a hive of bees. Every bee knows what their job is from birth. And every bee does their job and the hive just runs on instinct and this generation of the hive is not different from the last generation of the hive. And he says there is that side of human nature. We can see very traditional societies where people want to just kind of keep repeating the patterns. Obviously, you know, not as mindlessly as a hive of bees, but still. And he says, and often religion does play a role in the stability of these societies. So, you know, let's take the example, you know, there might be some religious taboo. It's like taboo to eat this food. And somebody might be thinking, oh, that kind of looks delicious. And maybe they eat some. And then that night, you know, they had this dream, this nightmare. And their grandmother, their dead grandmother is shaking her bony finger. How could you do this? You're betraying the people. And he wakes up. I'll never do that again. Right? So you've had a kind of a spiritual experience that has anchored you to the traditional way of life. All right. But Bergson also looked around the world and he said, okay, human societies are very traditional, but even very traditional societies of human beings live in very different ways. I mean, you know, we've got Eskimos and we've got people living in rainforests and they, you know, they've all got in their way traditional societies, but they're not the same traditions. And if we believe that people originally came out of Africa and then radiated around the world, well, how does that happen if we're like bees and all we do is the same thing? And so he posited this idea that human beings also have a kind of, one of our instincts is an instinct for change and experimentation. So that, you know, we, and here again he sees religion as having a role. He talks about dynamic religion that builds open societies and static religion that cements closed societies. And a great example of open religion is what we talked about at the beginning of this, Abraham, you know, in his home city and the voice of God says get up and go. The voice of God does not say sit down and stay. Does not say and behave, worship the same gods that your ancestors did, live in the same place, live in the same way. It says no, get up and go. Go to a new land and there you'll have your encounter with transcendence. All right. My guess would be, and this was Bergson, that over the millennia a lot of human beings have had experiences like this which got them from the savannah of Africa to the shores of Greenland, or is it now American Greenland? I, you know, losing track. All right. So this is, you know, this is kind of an Anglo-American society, particularly after the English Reformation, ends up with a form of religion that is heavily tilted toward a dynamic religion, a religion of change. The Puritans leaving, you know, leaving England to come find God and follow God in a new world. People, generations of Americans wanting to move west. I, you know, mom and dad, goodbye. I'm heading over the hills for a better life. And there's some way in which that appetite for change becomes part of our tradition. So that you don't feel that you are, you know, fighting tradition by taking up a profession that no one in your family has ever done, embracing a new technology, moving to a new part of the country. And I think this dynamism has kept American society stable while embracing change. And again, if you just come down to the grim state of power politics, which is not a very pretty subject, for the last 300 years, if your society has been able to live on the technological frontier, which means that, you know, you have a stronger economy because you're building new things and have more efficient technologies and that allows you to capture markets and stuff, you know, and you have better weapons if it comes to war and you have more money to fight the war with and a more sophisticated financial system that can handle the cost and the difficulties of war, etc., etc., etc., you tend to win. And if you add that to the geographical advantages of both the US and Britain having this kind of sea power position, a little bit of protection from the, you know, the land power rivalries, I think you can begin to see maybe why world history has had this shape. But as I said, so that's why I'm studying this historical process, why I think it's important for today, but I am not deterministic. You know, just because it's been this way doesn't mean it's going to be this way. And as I try to study this capitalist world system at a time of great and accelerating change, international challenge, I'm very alive to the possibilities that things may move in different directions. And I'm trying to use this historical insight to help me gauge the direction, intensity, and meaning of some of the changes and challenges that we see.