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By Root 653 0

data storage: we went from 5½-inch floppy disk drives to minidisk drives to compact disk drives to no disk drives at all in a matter of 15 years. Given enough time, engineers could have improved the floppy, the mini, the compact disk. They never had the time. The culture was moving too fast to make much local technical progress in each format. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter is famous for one big idea: that capitalism is creative destruction. It’s not just capitalism that moves the goal posts, changes the rules, makes us all move twice as fast just to stay in place. It’s the unpredictably changing culture always tearing down yesterday’s environmental filters and replacing them with new ones, making long-term movement in any one direction—local progress—rare. That’s why the trajectory of human culture is more a matter of fashion than progress.

How about moral progress? Until the twentieth century, one might have been pardoned for thinking that the world was slowly but surely progressing. It might have been moving in the direction of greater fit between human economic and social institutions, on the one hand, and core morality on the other. But the events of the twentieth century suggest that those worried about the survival and expansion of core morality should not count on humanity’s having a self-civilizing trajectory. Core morality, as Chapter 5 explained, emerged as an adaptation long ago and far away in human evolution. It did so under circumstances apparently very different from our current environment. Are the environmental features of the early human evolution that selected for core morality still in force? If so, we can expect core morality to persist as an adaptation; if not, then almost no matter what we do, it will be subject to the vagaries of drift as an adaptively neutral trait—like small ears on the African elephant. Or perhaps core morality will start to be selected against as a maladaptive trait, like the ivory tusks on the same elephants. The bigger they are, the more likely the elephant is to be killed for them by the top predator on the African savanna—Homo sapiens.

As noted in Chapter 6, there is always variation in the degree to which individuals accept and act on core morality. The variation produces at least a few moral monsters in every generation. And local environmental changes, especially in science and technology, seem to have given such monsters more scope to be monstrous than they had in the past. So much for local progress.

The worst of it is that even knowing all this is hardly any help.

The Darwinian character of human cultural change means that there is little likelihood that a scientific understanding of human affairs can ameliorate the human condition long-term. It may even be unable to avoid the worst-case scenarios of the human future. For humanity as a whole, even a little bit of local progress will be mostly dumb luck. Let’s see why.

WHY THE HUMAN SCIENCES (EVEN ECONOMICS) CAN’T DO MUCH BETTER THAN HISTORY

Is this pessimism about progress shortsighted? Maybe history can’t help us foresee the future or help us forestall its worst outcomes. But what about science? Surely, scientism has to be optimistic about the prospect that properly conducted, the behavioral and social sciences will have the payoffs that the natural sciences have had. The methods that have worked in physics, chemistry, and biology should work in psychology, sociology, economics, and political science, too, shouldn’t they?

The scientific study of humanity has been taking this thought to heart for a hundred years or so. The same agenda has been set for each of the human sciences. As in natural sciences, the aim is to uncover reliable regularities, generalizations, laws, models, theories. Together with data about the present, these discoveries will enable us to predict, control, and improve the future. At least they will provide the available means to adapt ourselves to futures we may be unable to control. Of course, there will be the problem of keeping the power that social science confers on us away