The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [125]
Economists were wrong about rationality. But even had they been right about it, economists could do no better than identify local equilibria. Economics will be no better than other social sciences in providing an alternative to history’s blindness. At most the human sciences will be able to see a little way into the future. They provide foresight. But they can do so only as far as they can be confident that no new arms race will break out to destroy the local equilibria they have been lucky enough to discover.
WINSTON CHURCHILL GOT IT
EXACTLY BACKWARD
Now we can see what’s wrong with Winston Churchill’s claim that “the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.” It’s more than a little ironic that when he made this claim, he was overlooking the very thing that he spent almost a decade warning Britain about: the arms race. Of all things for Winston Churchill to miss.
Had Churchill’s interest been ancient history or prehistory, missing the role of arms races might have been excusable. The farther back in time you look, the less important arms races are for human history or natural history for that matter. A couple of million years ago, at the point where hominins emerged, the pace of arms race change was glacial and almost entirely genetic. As hominin populations increased, hominin interactions with megafauna accelerated the arms race between them. Eventually, population growth, early toolmaking, and the resulting decrease in megafauna available to hunt led to serious competition between individuals and groups of hominins—the first significant human arms races. Traits and strategies that had worked for one group for hundreds of thousands of years came to be exploited by other groups and to disappear altogether, only to be replaced by other traits in other groups.
Once protolinguistic interaction emerged, say, 250,000 years ago, the rate at which arms races changed environments further increased. By the time you get to recorded history, changes have become so fast that there is almost nothing that studying genetically transmitted behavior can teach us about human affairs. And of course the arms races of the hunter-gatherer period, between tribes, within tribes, between genders, generations, and among individuals within all these groups have little to tell us about human affairs after the onset of agriculture. All of a sudden, looking back a million years can tell us almost nothing about the next 10,000. That’s why Jared Diamond was able to explain so much about the period 8000 bc to ad 1500 in Guns, Germs, and Steel while neglecting the previous million years. By 200 years later, arms races were changing the selective environments so quickly that Diamond’s theory was no guide to the past, let alone the present or the future.
Wind the tape of history through the stages of human “progress”—Mesopotamian hydraulic empires, Oriental despotism, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the information revolution. As history unrolls, knowledge of the past becomes increasingly deficient as a basis for understanding the present and the future. The reason is the ever-accelerating rate of arms race interactions in that history.
By 400 years ago, scientific and technological change were increasing the size and dimensions of Mother Nature’s selective design space so much and so fast that no one could keep up with it anymore. Almost nothing could any longer be anticipated in the move and countermove of arms races everywhere in human affairs.
HISTORY IS HELPLESS to teach us anything much about the present. The real lesson the history of arms races teaches is that there are no lessons in history. When it comes to understanding