The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [118]
That’s why when it comes to predicting the future, history is bunk with a capital B.
HUMAN PROGRESS? NOT MUCH, PRETTY LOCAL, AND LIKELY TO BE THREATENED
Is there such a thing as human progress? Does history reveal the long march of civilization to what Winston Churchill called the broad sunlit uplands? Is there anything to the hope of Martin Luther King that Barack Obama is so fond of quoting: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Almost certainly not. On the other hand, we are probably not going to hell in a handbasket either.
In natural history and in human history, all progress is local. When one geological epoch gives way to another, yesteryear’s or yesterday’s advantage can become today’s handicap. That’s how the dinosaurs became dinosaurs. The same goes for our history, especially once human culture began to be the most important environmental filter in our own evolution.
Read a book like Barbara Tuchman’s The Distant Mirror or William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire, and it will be hard to deny that since the Black Death there has been some real progress in human history. But if there has been, it is local progress in two senses. First, almost all of it has resulted from technological progress driven by Darwinian processes operating in science. This is what has enabled us literally to enhance our adaptive fitness by adapting the local environment to human needs and wants. It’s clear that we may succumb, like the dinosaurs, to some exogenous shock, like an asteroid, or an endogenous one, like global warming. Even if we don’t make ourselves extinct by our impact on the environment filtering us for fitness, we will inevitably change it to make today’s adaptations tomorrow’s maladaptations. If we are lucky, we’ll last as long as the dinosaurs—225 million years. Don’t bet on it. In a 100 million years or so, supersmart rats or loquacious cockroaches may be at the top of the food chain worldwide. With any luck, by the time that happens at least some of our descendants will be living around other stars.
Humanity has survived many environmental vicissitudes on the way from its first emergence to the present. Fortunately, the environment changed enough or we fortuitously hit upon some variation in our traits—language or technology, perhaps—that made survival and expansion possible. The gravest environmental challenge we faced in recorded history was the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Gene sequencing now tells us that the plague killed more like 50 percent of the Western world’s population instead of the merely 30 percent long supposed. Why has the bubonic plague not revisited humankind on a worldwide scale? Because the ones who survived it were just the ones with genetically encoded variant traits making them and their descendants—us—resistant to the plague. Darwinism in action. What this bodes for our own future is minimally optimistic. However much we bugger up the planet, probably lurking within the range of our current genetic variation is a suite of traits that will enable some of our descendants to survive almost any environmental challenge—climate change, pollution, toxic chemicals, radiation waste.
Scientism gives us confidence that humankind will survive, but almost certainly not unchanged, genetically as well as culturally. You can call this local adaptation of successive generations “progress.” But that is not really what anyone was hoping for.
In fact, human cultural evolution is going to show much less local progress than even the local progress of biological evolution. The cultural environment that filters variations for increased adaptiveness changes too quickly for significant local progress. Think about personal computer