Acceleration: The Forces Driving Human Progress - Hardcover

Havelock, Ronald G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 161614212X ISBN 13: 9781616142124

Publisher: Prometheus Books, 2011

Synopsis

This is a thorough and ultimately optimistic look at how humanity's unique qualities are driving it towards a better future. It's easy to be pessimistic about the future - everyday we hear about threats of global warming, terrorist plots, nuclear proliferation, and other frightening possibilities. It's also easy to look at the unprecedented toll of destruction caused by war in the 20th century alone, and conclude that our prospects for a better future stand on shaky ground. While not discounting the calamities of the past or the troubling realities on the horizon, "Acceleration" argues that humanity has a much brighter future - one that is driven by our unique ability to share information and knowledge between generations and across cultures. Grounded in a wealth of solid research, "Acceleration" offers hope that humanity is more than capable of solving even our most challenging problems.

About this title

About the Author

Ronald G. Havelock is a social psychologist and the director of the Knowledge Transfer Institute.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ACCELERATION

The Forces Driving Human ProgressBy RONALD G. HAVELOCK

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2011 Ronald G. Havelock
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-212-4

Contents

INTRODUCTION......................................................................................7PART ONE: THE FACT OF HUMAN PROGRESS..............................................................15Chapter One: The Idea of Progress.................................................................23Chapter Two: Measuring Progress in Human Terms....................................................39Chapter Three: The Case for Progress..............................................................67PART TWO: THE SIX FORCES..........................................................................93Chapter Four: Animal Learning: Forward Function Force #1..........................................97Chapter Five: Externalizing Learning: Forward Function Force #2...................................115Chapter Six: Social Connections: Forward Function Force #3........................................129Chapter Seven: Knowledge Platforms: Forward Function Force #4.....................................141Chapter Eight: Scientific Problem Solving: Forward Function Force #5..............................155Chapter Nine: Modern Global Diffusion: Forward Function Force #6..................................187PART THREE: WHERE THE FORCES ARE TAKING US........................................................197Chapter Ten: The Emergence of Ethical Humanity....................................................199Chapter Eleven: Fears for the Future..............................................................225Chapter Twelve: What Will the Future Bring? What Will Be and What Ought to Be.....................257NOTES.............................................................................................297ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................321INDEX.............................................................................................337

Chapter One

    THE FACT OF
    HUMAN PROGRESS

    Let me relate to you the tragedy of man
    How from the miserable creature that he was
    I made him conscious and intelligent.
    I speak the human race not to condemn
    But to explain my kindnesses in what I gave to them.
    Seeing they did not see, nor hearing grasp
    That which they heard, they lived like ghosts in dreams,
    In lifelong anarchy and dreariness.

    No houses built of brick to catch the sun
    Nor carpentry they knew. Like little ants
    They lived in holes and sunless cavities.
    They had no signs reliable to mark
    Winter and scented spring and harvest-time,
    Nor conscious plan to guide them, till I showed
    The variable rise and setting of the stars.

    For them in triumph intellectual!
    Did I devise the count numerical,
    And history's instrument, skill of the bard,
    The great compositor, the written word.

    I was the first to yoke the animals
    In service to the strap, and lay on them
    Inheritance of man's excessive toil.
    Between the shafts I led the obedient horse,
    That ornament of luxury and wealth.
    The gleaming sail that wafts across the sea
    The intrepid mariner was my device.

    The inventor I, who many a shape did show
    Of science to mankind, now do not know
    What science will my own release allow.

        —Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Something quite amazing was happening among the Greek city-states of the fifth century BCE. There was a great flowering of art, literature, science, and technology, following on the heals of some extraordinary military victories over the giant, invading armies and navies of the Persian Empire. The Greeks of this time had deep thinkers in abundance, people they called philosophers. Such men were intellectually fearless, making fresh observations and expressing new ideas about all sorts of things: politics, religion, the nature of the universe and the matter in it, and the nature of man himself. For the first time in human history, they were also able to write down their thoughts and observations. Aeschylus, a veteran of Marathon, did his thinking and writing in the form of poetic drama, and he used the myths passed down through earlier poets, such as Homer and Hesiod, to pose important issues for his countrymen's consideration.

Prometheus, the forethinker, was the god of technology, and he stole the special technology of fire making from Zeus to give it to man. Aeschylus expands on what this gift symbolizes to include the wisdom to create all manner of new technologies. Thus, he is a stand-in for human-as-creator, the special human capacity to fashion new artifacts and develop new skills to improve his or her lot on Earth. According to the myth, Zeus is so angered by this deceit that he punishes Prometheus, chaining him to a rock where the buzzards feed perpetually on his flesh. But why is Zeus angry and why does Prometheus need to be punished? Could it be that there is something wrong about humankind's efforts to improve itself ? Are humans trying to achieve godlike status through their own clever invention? The play is a dialogue around this issue: humankind's arrogance and hubris in trying to improve itself, in reaching for godlike powers, in defiance of the power of God himself. Prometheus could be punished and restrained but not killed because he, too, was immortal—as is the capacity in humankind to improve itself, using its intellect to advance toward a more and more godlike condition. That is what the forward function is all about.

Since the time of Aeschylus, this human drama has been replayed countless times, pitting the hopeful promises of humankind's progressive drive against its fears of what punishments might have to be endured for challenging the old ways and the powerful old gods of our fathers. On the pages that follow, this battle is engaged once more as we take up the cause of human progress. This is another time of amazement, a time when science is finally cracking many of the mysteries which befuddled our ancestors and a time when wondrous new technology "fires" are transforming the very meaning of our existence.

The case for progress requires two issues to be settled. The first is to determine what better means, and the second is to marshal the evidence, the pros and cons, regarding any detectible advancement toward whatever that "better" is. Part 1 works on both issues.

WHAT WE HAVE COME TO KNOW IN AN AMAZING TWO HUNDRED YEARS

For some time we have known that we live on a solid, spherical mass. We also now know that our planet has been circling our sun for more than five billion years. In contrast to this multibillion-year extent, individual lives seem absurdly short, spanning at most eighty-five or ninety years. Even a long human life is just a tiny tick on the universal clock on which our "old" planet rates as just a youngster. It was not even two centuries ago that we first began to realize the vast stretch of the ages. This dawning awareness began when Scottish naturalist Charles Lyell, a founding father of geology, started looking at old rock formations, many then recently revealed in clear detail by the new railway cuts tracing across the countryside of the British Isles. In some of these layers he also noted the fossil tracings of animal creatures similar but not identical to many of the sea animals living in his own (and our own) time. He correctly concluded that the only way these traces of animals could have gotten into that rock was by falling as sediment to the bottom of the oceans and lakes of a long-ago time. Yet these layers could be thousands of feet thick, as we can readily observe in such places as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Then the question arises, how long does it take for such layers to form, one on top of another, upper layers eventually crushing and heating lower layers with such pressure that they turn to stone? Lyell reckoned the answer in millions of years, a substantial underestimate as it turns out, but a time span long enough to upset the authority of biblical teaching and stir the minds of his contemporaries.

We have come a very long way in the two hundred years since Lyell's insightful observations. Charles Darwin, a friend and admirer of Lyell, followed with some systematic observations of animals, both living and fossilized, and put together a rather simple but highly plausible theory of animal origins and transformations. Darwin was aware that his theory made sense only because of Lyell's enormous stretching of the time line of earthly existence. The layers showed the way, and a detailed examination of what was in the layers began to provide something like proof that Darwin was essentially correct. We have also come to realize in just the last few years that all living things have a common ancestry, and this common ancestry is nearly as old as Earth itself, perhaps three billion years or more. This common heritage encompasses all the life around us: plants and animals, both large and small. To this strange list of our cousins we can now add the multitude of microscopic creatures that were beyond our awareness two hundred and fifty years ago.

We now also know that we have a common chemical genesis. Every living thing has a common basic structure that we call a cell, even though some animals and plants are single-celled while others are aggregates, sometimes of billions of cells, that operate as a single unitary system. In any case, it is an established scientific fact that all the cells in all living things today are the direct descendants of the first cells that were planted or organized themselves on this planet four to five billion years ago. We don't yet know exactly how this all started in the beginning. We don't know, for example, how single cells came into being; nor do we know how multicellular systems started; nor how animals derived from plants, or perhaps vice versa. Yet we have done one big thing just within the last fifty-five years: we have broken the chemical code that governs heredity, that special complex molecule that exists in every cell of every living thing, the code that links us to the still-mysterious billion-yearlong past. We know that in a biochemical sense, at least, we are all actually billions of years old, and without those intervening billions of years there would be no humans here on this planet. It took almost all those billions of years for nature to select out all the peculiar attributes that make us human.

Now in the very short span of a few hundred years, we have invented a special process for continuously discovering more about who we are and what our universe is all about. This process is called science. We have also been learning more and more about how to take this scientific knowledge and use it to steadily make our lives better and ourselves wiser. Those fortunate enough to be born into the most developed countries of the world will most likely also live long lives in safety and comfort, exposing themselves to an expanding array of rich experiences.

APPLYING WHAT WE KNOW TO MAKE LIFE BETTER

Nothing in our world is expanding faster than our knowledge about it. That should be very good news. If we can only get our minds around what is really happening, surely we can use our new knowledge to make things better. A bewildering array of transformations are going on everywhere about us. New knowledge and its offspring in new technologies are probably the largest contributors to this noisy confusion. That is reason enough to take a little time to think about the nature of progress. What are likely to be the true consequences of the knowledge explosion for the human future, near term and far term? We need to take a time-out for some thoughtful analysis of all the facts at hand before we jump to any conclusions and certainly before we take any drastic actions. We should be wise, informed, careful, and cautious, but we need not shroud our thoughts of the future in gloom. Neither should we be arranging our lives to forestall any imagined but grossly improbable near-term catastrophe. The near and far prospects for humanity are not easily foreseen, but there are many reasons to believe that these prospects may be getting better, not worse.

WHAT WE ALL WANT AND WHAT WE WILL COME TO WANT

The words proclaimed as inalienable rights in the United States Declaration of Independence, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," overflow with meaning. They define in a simple but comprehensive way what we all want. There is room here for an enormous array of different lives, different forms of liberty, and many different paths to happiness. The implication is that we should be free to pursue our own paths as much as possible without coercion by others and their particular definitions of what these words might mean. Progress can be measured as the extension or expansion of a life on any of these dimensions: the life dimension, the liberty dimension, and the happiness dimension.

Progress can also be pictured on a scale of two dimensions as pictured in figure 0.1. The vertical dimension represents the summation of life, liberty, and happiness as it might be for a given people at a given time in history. The steep high curve represents the optimum life experience attainable by an individual or a group in any given epoch. The black curve at the bottom represents life itself, however long or short it might be. As we move up the scale of civilization, more attributes may be added to the potential of a given life, including liberty, leisure, luxury, artistic enjoyment, and a panoply of varied experience beyond. The vertical axis thus represents the ever-growing potential of a single life, including all the experiences that are summed up in the years of that life.

The possibilities of what can go into a full human life have expanded enormously through the five thousand years of civilization. They continue to expand into new areas, as suggested by the progressively lighter-shaded curves that keep building on top of the basics as more and more progressive steps are taken. How much of this expanse of life experience can be enjoyed by a particular individual depends on many factors, starting with the mere length of that life. A very short life barely gets out of the black. Longer lives impoverished by pain, failure, subservience, and the sheer emptiness of feeling are not much better off. A long life loaded with education, travel, and opportunities of every kind can reach way into the light. Until our own times, this sort of life was the preserve of kings and princes, but as we have advanced through the last few decades, the number of people who have access to this kind of life has been rising exponentially.

Now imagine that the horizontal axis represents all humanity of a given era. When the earliest modern humans started spreading out from Africa some one hundred thousand years ago, there were perhaps no more than a few thousands of individuals. At the end of World War II there were about two billion. Now there are closer to eight billion. So this horizontal axis is also stretching out over time with no end in sight. Millions of these lives are filled with diverse, pleasurable experiences hardly dreamed of by their ancestors. Much of humanity is still in the black but nevertheless is still lucky to be alive. Most of our earliest ancestors surely lived short lives at close to a subsistence level. Preoccupied as they must have been with food gathering and child rearing, they had little time for much else.

There is a steady trend through human prehistory and history toward both population increase and increase in the length and quality of individual lives. This is not a trend that is consistent year to year, nor is it equal among all peoples. Nevertheless, as time goes by, more and more members of the human race are living lives of higher quality and length. Moreover, such positive life experiences tend to spread out to benefit an ever-widening circle over time. The overall trend is relentlessly progressive. These first three chapters state the case.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from ACCELERATIONby RONALD G. HAVELOCK Copyright © 2011 by Ronald G. Havelock. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 161614212X
• ISBN 13: 9781616142124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 363