Promotional note before the essay: I know that you are all probably curious about the next stage in human history and wish I’d get on with it, but before I begin the meandering road that leads to that apocalypse, I have to mention that the fourth story in the Retcon story mosaic is being published tomorrow. As with all the stories in the series, while it will be enriched by being read in the context of the others, it is also a complete story in itself that can be enjoyed on its own.
The title of the new story is “While Unbeknownst to the Rest, the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler”, and is about a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in 1979, at which a number of cross-purposes are being played. There are fortune cookies. And fortunes without cookies, too.
It is coming out as an ebook, and it can be preordered—or, if you are reading this tomorrow, or some day after that (the routine time travel of the written word), you can simply purchase it—at my personal web site • Amazon • Amazon UK • Apple • Barnes & Noble • Kobo • Smashwords. It’s only $0.99. Cheap! And you’ll really enjoy it. Go check it out!
Now, on with the next stage of human history…
Some topics can be navigated with masts out and wind at the back, approached directly under full sail; but others need to be siddled to from several different angles, heading in seemingly random directions, tacking against the wind to a nevertheless-always-bourne-in-mind destination. Fair warning as we set out: this essay is one of the latter.
Let’s imagine for a moment that we come to a time when we’ve worked it all out. Not each of us individually, but we, the collective: the all-too-human race.
We achieve abundance, whether through capitalistic dynamism or fully automated luxury communism or simply the invention of replicators. National states quiet down and learn to live in their own borders and to behave decently to their own citizens. Hierarchies of race and gender fall into the dustbin of history. Climate change is halted and has even begun (with carbon removal) to be clawed back; the oceans are deplasticked and the ongoing sixth extinction has been halted. In other words, all the great problems we see before us—the problems of scarcity, nationalism, war, racism, sexism, environmental degradation—have been solved. We have achieved utopia: not in the ‘perfect, boring and fundamentally inhuman society that in all honesty most of us would recoil from’ sense of the classic utopias, but in the ‘our problems become the probelms of human life not the problems of a broken society’ sense that prevades Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels—the sort of idea that stands behind Corey Robin’s marvelous notion that “the point of socialism is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness”. If you dislike socialism, replace that with your own political program: techno-future capitalist dynamism, vital-center liberalism, national conservatism, whatever your view may be. Just imagine it triumphs and fixes everything. Then we could go on with merely ordinary unhappiness—suffering “the pangs of despized love” but not “the oppressor’s wrong”; coping with the eternal and inevitable problems of the human—death, meaning, love—and not the nightmare of history from which I am asking you to pretend that we will all have awoken from. Everything would be solved, right?
No. I think there is another problem that would return us to hysterical misery.
It’s not a new problem: indeed, it’s one that has plagued us the whole time in which the problems of scarcity, war, racism, etc, have plagued humanity, i.e. since the invention of agriculture if not unimaginably long before. But it’s a problem which has been more often than not hidden by those others. This is not unusual: sometimes one problem, or some subset of them, will overwhelm the others and drive them from our psyches (and take their boney feet off the gas pedals of history, at least temporarily). There is a parallel to Maslow's hierarchy of needs which societies suffer, and we must work out issues from the bottom up. But I think that if all of the other issues currently on the table were solved, this one would rise up and create as much misery as did all the lower ones.
By now I fear I have confused some readers, or caused you to suspect me confused: You just hypothesized that everything was fixed, and then said that it wasn’t! Is this not a blatant contradiction? So allow me to now start again, and retread the opening path before I proceed further down it.
One way to imagine human history—a way that is ludicrously oversimplified, akin to calling history a nightmare or a human a sack of meat, but not entirely wrong for all of that, and not without its insights—is to see it as the working out of various problems. This was popular in the nineteenth century (Hegel was its apotheosis, seeing all history as the grand working out of what is ultimately revealed as one problem), but has both precedents and antecedents as well. The Enlightenment gave rise to people seeing human history as a series of errors and irrationalities to be overcome, a belief that persists in the Enlightenment’s self-proclaimed contemporary heirs. Or one might see much of human history as the working out of the issue of physical security (Hobbes looms here), with technology such as Westphalian states, peace treaties, and police having improved (but hardly solved, and with solutions that give rise to their own problems) these issues to varrying degrees. Marx (Hegel’s most preemenent heir) famously saw history as a series of competing economic systems, with feudalism falling before capitalism, and capitalism before socialism; this view, too, has its contemporary proponents. And of course these ideas can be combined, as Francis Fukuyama famously did, arguably a tad prematurely.
So what I am asking is not that you imagine a solution to every problem of every variety, but to all of those classic problems—a peaceful socialist utopia (or dynamic capitalist one, or whatever flavor you like). Holding that image in your mind, I am suggesting that there is another conflict around the corner waiting for us.
—Here’s yet another way in.
In 2010 writer Peter Frase wrote one of the best blogposts I’ve ever read, called “Anti-Star Trek”.1 He later expanded it into an essay called “Four Futures”, and then into a book called Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. It’s worth reading in some form (I suggest beginning with the short version and proceeding from there if you’re interested) but the basic argument is this: Star Trek in its various versions presents a non-monetary, richly resourced, basically communist society—work is done for the betterment of others and for personal enrichment, not out of economic necessity; money is not a leading motive or even a necessity at all. Star Trek presents this (unusually for American popular entertainment) as a utopia. Not that the world of Star Trek is dull, mind you: it is filled with danger and adventure: after all, the audience must be kept on past the commercial breaks. But the excitement is all from outside forces and mostly (the occasional Borg crisis notwithstanding) threatens those who chose to go out to the frontiers. In the inner Federation, everyone is happy.
But Frase points out that this is not the only condition that a post-scarcity world might be in. And he imagines a world in which intellectual property reigns to keep even a society with replicators and dilithium crystals an unequal dystopia: intellectual property would charge people money in order to replicate anything, keeping the wheels grinding and the boot stamping on the human face. Potential utopia would be held in check by hierarchy and greed. In the world of anti-trek, there would be a small number of very rich people, a creative class making (to order) new replicator patterns, various sectors of the guard economy to keep people from getting free things, and then everyone else, with the majority of the population immiserated among potential plenty.2 The point, of course, is that contrary to those who think about the primary social question as “is there enough?” (with hierarchy arising due to the answer being no, and all our squabbles and troubles from that fundamental fact), the question of abundance vs scarcity—basically, how rich the society as a whole is—is separate from how equal it is. And that while abundance is better than scarcity, ultimately the question of equality or hierarchy is more important in determining how good or bad the society is to live in.
But the point I would draw my patient reader’s attention to here is that Frase sees those two issues—equality/hierarchy and abundance/scarcity—as definitional. (Of course he does; he’s a socialist.) And not just any equality/heirarchy: equality in the political/economic sphere. I imagine that if asked he would concede that the absence of war (and Borg) are also prerequisites for a happy society. But basically he is taking a view that sees one basic conflict (how can we provide enough for people to live?) and stretching it upon a two-dimensional plane (how is that “enough” divided?), and calling it history. I am claiming that that schema, and others like it (such as Mr. Fukiyama’s), are not only too simple (which presumably all those involved in thinking about themw ould readily concede), but miss a fundamental conflict in human life—that there is another dimension of conflict they don’t even begin to incorporate into their dramas. There is another scarce resource—which I will explain soon, I promise—which would turn even the blissful world of Star Trek into its own sort of hell. No Borg needed.
Of all the quotes and notions that I have assembled in my various bricolage posts, the one that has stayed with me the most, niggled at me unceasingly since I first came across it, is one of those (out of several) from philosopher Agnes Callard, from her essay “Who Wants to Play the Status Game?”, which I cited in Bricolage 2. Here it is again:
There is a philosophical conundrum at the root of all this: morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane—but we also need an aspirational target at the top, so as to inspire us to excellence, creativity and accomplishment. In other words, we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable. And no philosopher—not Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has yet figured out how to construct a moral theory that allows us to say both of those things.
Callard goes on to add that “This is a giant unsolved problem, and it touches us all. We may not explicitly articulate it, but we feel it, and project the psychic turmoil it generates onto our interactions with one another…”. My argument in this essay is that however true this is now, it will be more true, far more terribly true, in any imagined utopia.
So now, again, let’s imagine that we’ve come to a time when we’ve worked it all out: not each of us individually, but the we, the collective: the all-too-human race. There is peace; there is plenty; there is (legal and social) equality. The Federation, basically, although presumably without the Vulcans and Klingons. People are free to do what they want and have the safety and resources to do it. I claim that at that moment, what Callard calls “the status game” would come to dominate our world.
I should note at this point that while I have taken the word “status” from Callard’s essay, what I mean is not entirely captured by it. In part this is because status is not only individual, but also collective: groups and jobs and other slices of the population have, or lack, status. (Although if you think of status as something only high-status groups care about, I urge you to read Callard’s essay, and/or to listen to this interview with Cecilia Ridgeway (transcript here.)) So let me offer another word for what I am talking about: recognition. This is not unrelated to status, but it gives a stronger sense of being earned, and being earned by an individual. Recognition is, roughly, having others see our worth. Having, as Callard says, a worth that is achieved and not one that is simply given free to all. Of course, recognition can lead to status, and in our culture the two are (perhaps hopelessly) entwined; but to the degree there is a difference, I mean recognition. (But they are close enough that I will continue to use the word status too.)
Right now, our status games are enmeshed in a thousand others. We scramble for money because we need money to survive, and find that that fairly often that scramble is inextricably linked from scrambles for status—the higher-status person gets the contract, the job, the recognition, which then leads to money. It is usually hard to tell which is the primary motivation: do people want status to make money, or money to gain status? But despite this, the status game is usually seen as secondary, as a way to win at the money game: rich people defend themselves by saying that everyone wants money, not that they are trying to score more points on the gameboard of life. On a larger level, countries scramble for status, which means prosperity and security and all sorts of things.
But in Anti-Anti-Star Trek, in the world of the Federation as I think it would really be, what would happen is that the sole remaining scarce resource—recognition from others—would become what is fought over. Rather than finding that, having solved war and scarcity and racism, everything was fine, we would find that we were plunged into a new stage of history, with a new scarcity which make most of us find it hard to live: sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath.
Utopians and dreamers and optimists see the world around them and believe that if we solved these problems, all would be good: I am saying that there is another problem that would rise to take its place—one that, like any villian in a sequel, is more terrible and powerful and hard to defeat than the original, however terrible that seemed at the time.
This is an admittedly bleak view. It might even be understood as saying that we struggle not just because there is something worth struggling over, something we need, but because struggle is in us, in our natures (as the scorpion said to the frog). I am enitrely unsure whether this is true. But I do think that recognition is something we need—”a vital human need”, as philosopher Charles Taylor has written. It is, like meaning and creative outlets, lower on the hierarchy of needs than more pressing issues of food and security,3 but a need which will twist the human soul if given space to do so.
There are ample reasons to believe this. Status is an anthropological universal; indeed, it seems to have been informal status that governed the human race for most of its history, with formal positions and rules only coming, like planting and writing, comparatively late in the game. Jockying for position is very human, woven into our history and the bodies wrought by evolution.
Or look at it another way. One of people’s deepest needs is to be seen, to be recognized, to be valued. For many of us, this comes only in the context of family and friends: love is an important form of value, recognition, sight, perhaps the most basic one. But I think it is also deeply ingrained within us to want to be valued for what we have done—to want our actions to be valued. For worth, as Callard said, to be acquirable—but not, as she says, simply as a background moral necessity for the encouragement of “excellence, creativity and accomplishment“, but organically, as a deep impulse and fundamental need of the human spirit.
But recognition is limited. Unlike safety, abundance, and so forth, which we have come to see are, if not unlimited, then creatable in such plenty that no one need lack for more than they need, recognition requires another’s involvement on something like a one-to-one level. In other words, recognition requires someone to recognize: if we want to be seen, we need someone to see. If you are a musician, you need an audience; if you are a scientist, you need your discoveries to matter, not simply to be true. We all want esteem: and esteem is not the recognition of one, but of many. In small tribes that many might be measured in the dozens. But in our world?
Recognition is not just another scarce resource; it is a fundamentally scarce resource.
Now, perhaps this will turn out to be wrong in some fashion. For centuries there were plenty of arguments that abundance was limited—all wealth came from land, and land was limited, therefore, etc—which turned out to be wrong in ways their makers could not have begun to imagine. We can’t rule out the unimaginable. And we can even take a few (tentative) steps towards imagining some sort of solution. Perhaps AIs, with fast comprehension and functionally unlimited time will tell each of us that our work was worthy, and make us believe it enough to satisfy us. Or perhaps we will find that for recognition, as for material goods, enough is as good as a feast: everyone will be in the audience for their friends and family, and be content with that.4 Shaenon K. Garrity once wrote that “on the Internet, everyone is famous for fifteen people”; perhaps that will be enough. No one will really want more than that.
Perhaps.
For now, however, it looks like this is impossible. For now, at least, it seems like recognition is limited in a way that abundance and security and so forth are not: because it comes from human beings. And human beings are limited—in time, if nothing else, although also of course in attention and capacity and care and lots of other things. But time will do. People will let recognition slide if hungry or in fear for their lives or sufficiently beaten down. But when they are not?
I think that this mad scramble will become fundamental.
I think that even if, say, Marx were in some broad sense right5 (that capitalism will eventually fall before socialism, and that that will usher in an age of freedom and prosperity for all), or that Fukiyama is (and that liberal capitalism is the end-state of human history and we’ll eventually come to see it), they will find that what they have thought was the story of history was, instead, simply one plot among many: that the next stage was, not unimaginable—it lurks right now, in our social ties and in our all-too-human hearts—will be followed by the next stage, the next problem: one that, at least now, it is hard to even imagine a solution for. Granted sufficiency, we will fight to be seen: and that fight will be no less terrible than the one that has passed.
None of this is to say that this is a fight everyone will wage, at least on more than a small scale. After all, most people don’t scramble after vast sums of money, either, and certainly there are those who go live on berries in the woods and disdain every possible racing of rats. In the competition for safety, there are pacifists. We can even imagine new sects arising which deliberately deny themselves recognition as a religious rite, as many now require poverty or pacifism. (And just as those, we can imagine the perversion of those sects into vehicles for rather than movements against the struggle: after all, Christianity originally commanded its followers to be not only poor and pacifist, but humble and self-effacing.) But a struggle need not involve the entirety of society to dominate its structure. The resource most desired, most struggled over (with words, I hope, not weapons) will be respect.
We see some signs of this even now. Some writers claim that much of the unhappiness in our society is due to the overproduction of elites who want, well, interesting jobs: who want to be artists or scientists or reporters or other things of that sort. And that there is not enough for all of them. Not enough money, of course: but it’s not just about money, since many of those would want more than just that (or they would pursue more lucrative paths). No: it’s about recognition. And how there’s not enough of it to go around. Perhaps, as we slide towards abundance (not for everyone, for far too few, but for more than has had it in previous eras) this problem is concurrently coming to the fore.
(There are two problems here that may be worth distinguishing: there is the fact that some people are not good enough; and then there is the fact that there are too many good people—too many brilliant artists and game designers and scientists and builders to let all be given due praise. Some will say that it is simply the former: that the genuinely talented rise to the top, and that the rest are simply bitter wannabes. I find this so obviously wrong that I stutter to put into a few words the many contending sources of its falsity; but in any event that is a different topic for another essay.)
I think that neither a technological agnitio ex machina will save us, nor will people learn to be content. I think that with all other wants satisfied, we will pursue the one remaining one with a fire that would melt the molten core of the sun.
When there is nothing else left, we will all try to scrawl our names on the sole surface that remains, and fight for the pens and chisels that would let us do so. Fight to make our own name largest.
Two questions remain for this, which is merely an initial exploration of a vast topic, an exploration which (if I am right) will continue endlessly into the future.
First, what would a society where reputation was the great scarce resource look like?
It’s a natural question, but I shall not be foolish enough to give much of an answer. We simply can’t imagine it yet. The few hints I have given above are mere phantoms, and I trust my readers not to take them too literally.6
But if it is impossible to imagine, it is equally and at the same time hard to not imagine, so I will offer this: when I try to imagine such a world, I see high school at its most stereotypical, with its endless jockeying for position and reputation and status. My picture of the future is not a boot stomping on a human face forever, but a high school popularity contest wringing our hearts out forever.7 Perhaps not quite as bad, but certainly bad enough.
Finally, what can we learn from this? Here, too, I shall not be foolish enough to a meaty reply. But there are two things I will venture to say. First, I think being aware of this, seeing it as shaping the future, can help us understand the present and the past (where these dynamics are inevitably under-recognized).
More importantly, it will (or should) temper utopianism for an entirely new set of reasons. The two classic complaints about utopias is that they are impossible, and that the effort to reach them inevitably creates terrible human misery. Those are warnings about the path from the perspective of one contemplating setting out: that there is no path, and what paths there appear to be are filled with dangers. But thinking about the issues of recognition, of the valuing of the human, should lead us to see an entirely different set of dangers, from the perspective of one about to reach the end of a path: it may not be all you think it is. Hard as the walk you have already made is, it may be that your troubles are, in fact, just beginning.
If I was still giving out my Best of the Blogosphere awards, it would definitely get one.
In the “Four Futures” versions of the idea, he adds to the egalitarianism vs heirarchy binary an abundance vs scaricity binary (with the Trek/Anti-Trek being the abundance side of the egalitarianism vs heirarchy binary).
George Orwell wrote in “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943):
To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we are now fighting. I don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that would solve anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible.
I think most people who are familiar with Orwell would not think of him as someone who thought that “the major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality”, but that’s what he said: he just understood that in the hierarchy of needs, other things come first “not in the scale of values but in point of time”.
But “from what I’ve tasted of desire” (as the poet said) I find this implausible.
And in case it’s not clear, I don’t actually think this: I think that the world can be made saner and more decent and that capitalism can be tamed (but will probably always be one of the tools in our kit), and that something which takes the end of human society to be the betterment of all might arise: but not that it will happen for the reasons Marx outlined nor in the way he said. But his picture is a powerful one, and one that many people will (still) be familiar with, so a good one to use here.
It is a pity that the phrase “seriously but not literally” arose in the context of the foulness of Trump, since it’s a good phrase that deserves wider use and ought not to be (although perhaps it inevitably is) weighed down by the stench of its accidental origins.
There is a connection to be made between this notion and Erik Hoel’s notion of “the gossip trap”. I don’t think they’re related, but they are connected in various ways that would take another essay to explore.