Humans: neither perfectible nor degradable

THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN JANUARY OF 2006.

There was a news story about Google striking up a deal with China. What I wrote is a response to two passages in an email exchange, by different people:

"First, I'm an enormous fan of Google. That freely acknowledged, I'm deeply concerned with the recent deal Google has cut with China. Let's cut to the chase. By any reasonable definition China is a fascist state, interested mostly in economic advance at least so long as it doesn't hamper the power of the state itself."

One refreshing thing about Google's deal with China is that it is saying exactly what it is doing and why. It's out in the open. (Google may be doing shady things in secret, but any such secret activities aren't what we're discussing here.) As a news item, it has highlighted China's censorship policies.

Also, I don't think demonizing China's government is helpful. Judging a country against modern western ideals rather than its own history and potential is a mistake. It is a view that sets the stage for thinking that invading Iraq was a good idea. Naive right-wingers thought Iraq could become democratic, happy, and prosperous once Saddam Hussein was removed from power. The history of the ordinary person in China is long and quite bleak. Despite extreme poverty, peasants are probably better off today than they have been before. The economic boom offers prosperity to some and hope to many more. China does not have a tradition of a meaningful democracy that was reversed by the current regime.

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"A compelling need to behave in an ethical manner is still not part of the general human psyche, and considering that the prescription for behaving in such a way has been with us for over 3000 years, it is starting to appear that it never will be a part. Our weapons development has so exceeded our ethical development that one really has to wonder whether there is any long term future for us."

It's been a good long while since I thought that we humans were on the road to making great leaps forward in ethics. For me the bedrock of understanding our condition is our biology as shaped by natural selection. I just finished a delightful book, "Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution" by Alison Jolly. It is not the first book to make a convincing case for an evolutionary basis for this basic arrangement: love in families, cooperation within the group, but hostility towards other groups. We are not limited by our evolutionary tendencies -- we can overcome them, but the effort must be constantly renewed, since our biology does not change. Civilization, like liberty, requires eternal vigilance. As a measure of how we have extended our basic goodwill from a small band to our society at large, I would consider traffic. Incidents of road rage and rude driving exasperate us, but I see them as occurring against a background in which the vast majority of drivers and pedestrians, the vast majority of the time, cooperate amazingly well in helping others get where they are going efficiently.

By the measure of history, the developed world today is an amazing success. Most people are healthy, the vast majority of children live to adulthood and a ripe old age to boot, and we live in comfort unimaginable to most of our forebears. Despite a few recent worrisome developments, we are largely free to do what we want, and we live in an economy where most of us can find jobs. I can't think of an oppressed group that isn't much better off than it was 100 years ago. I think there is something profound in the observation that in the US, poor people are fat instead of skinny. Despite our tendency for hostility towards other groups, in Europe and America and many other places we have not been slaughtering each other wholesale for a full 60 years now. The immense danger today is that we are destroying our environment. Even if the US can't manage it, a lot of other nations can at least sign the Kyoto accords.

The European Union provides a (far from ideal) model of how we can regulate capitalism if we develop the political will. I believe that they have made some decisions that food should be healthier even if it costs more. It may be very hard for an individual shopper to resist the item that is half the price, but if by a collective act of will the item isn't on the shelf, it's not so hard. We tout the goal of "free trade" but it is far from free, with rich countries and powerful industries awarded exceptions. There is no fundamental obstacle (though devilish details, to be sure) to imposing tariffs on products from countries to the extent that wages are low or political liberty is weak. The UN today imposes sanctions on countries that step out of line, however clumsy and imperfect; the IMF also imposes sanctions, though not according to values I hold dear.

My main point is that we have been able to make the world a much better place without needing a fundamental advance in our ethics.

Many among us see how the world isn't as we would like it to be, we despair of its imperfections, and we work towards its improvement. There are quite a few of us who look beyond our own selfish interests in this way. When I try to put myself in the shoes of posterity looking back at us from a few hundred years in the future, I see an exasperation that even people of goodwill spent such comparatively little time working against the destruction of the environment. If Europe really does take on the climate of Siberia, and Brazil and India come to resemble the Sahara, people may wonder why we were worried about the national aspirations of some ethnic group, equal rights in this country, or the improved treatment of some rare disease. But our focus on these issues does fit with our evolutionary heritage, where concern for the environment was not important. Keeping your clan healthy and competing favorably with other clans was.