See A Wider View

Ross Douthat in the NYT:

From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. .. Well, maybe. But describing the division this way .. gives the elite side of the debate .. too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. .. The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe. They have their own distinctive worldview .. common educational experience, .. shared values and assumptions .. outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. .. From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” .. is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home. ..

It is still possible to disappear into someone else’s culture, to leave the global-citizen bubble behind. But in my experience the people who do are exceptional or eccentric or natural outsiders to begin with .. It’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe. .. They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project.

You have values, and your culture has values. They are similar, and this isn’t a coincidence. Causation here mostly goes from culture to individual. And even if you did pick your culture, you have to admit that the young you who did was’t especially wise or well-informed. And you were unaware of many options. So you have to wonder if you’ve too easily accepted your culture’s values.

Of course your culture anticipates these doubts, and is ready with detailed stories on why your culture has the best values. Actually most stories you hear have that as a subtext. But you should wonder how well you can trust all this material.

Now, you might realize that for personal success and comfort, you have little to gain, and much to lose, by questioning your culture’s values. Your associates mostly share your culture, and are comforted more by your loyalty displays than your intellectual cleverness. Hey, everyone agrees cultures aren’t equal; someone has to be best. So why not give yours the benefit of the doubt? Isn’t that reasonable?

But if showing cleverness is really important to you, or if perhaps you really actually care about getting values right, then you should wonder what else you can do to check your culture’s value stories. And the obvious option is to immerse yourself in the lives and viewpoints of other cultures. Not just via the stories or trips your culture has set up to tell you of its superiority. But in ways that give those other cultures, and their members, a real chance. Not just slight variations on your culture, but big variations as well. Try to see a wider landscape of views, and then try to see the universe from many widely dispersed points on that landscape.

Yes if you are a big-city elite, try to see the world from Brexit or Trump fan views. But there are actually much bigger view differences out there. Try a islamic fundamentalist, or a Chinese nationalist. But even if you grow to be able to see the world as do most people in the world today, there still remain even bigger differences out there. Your distant ancestors were quite human, and yet they saw the universe very differently. Yes, they were wrong on some facts, but that hardly invalidates most of their views. Learn some ancient history, to see their views.

And if you already know some ancient history, perhaps the most alien culture you have yet to encounter is that of your human-like descendants. But we can’t possibly know anything about that yet, you say? I beg to differ. I introduce my new book with this meet-a-strange-culture rationale:

Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best (Herodotus 440bc)

The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in space-time. Its residents, like us, find their world mundane and morally ambiguous. (Hanson 2008a)

You, dear reader, are special. Most humans were born before 1700. And of those born after, you are probably richer and better educated than most. Thus you and most everyone you know is special, elite members of the industrial era.

Like most of your kind, you probably feel superior to your ancestors. Oh, you don’t blame them for learning what they were taught. But you’d shudder to hear of many of your distant farmer ancestors’ habits and attitudes on sanitation, sex, marriage, gender, religion, slavery, war, bosses, inequality, nature, conformity, and family obligations. And you’d also shudder to hear of many habits and attitudes of your even more ancient forager ancestors. Yes, you admit that lacking your wealth your ancestors couldn’t copy some of your habits. Even so, you tend to think that humanity has learned that your ways are better. That is, you believe in social and moral progress.

The problem is, the future will probably hold new kinds of people. Your descendants’ habits and attitudes are likely to differ from yours by as much as yours differ from your ancestors. If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you’d realize that you should expect your descendants to seem quite strange. Historical fiction misleads you, showing your ancestors as more modern than they were. Science fiction similarly misleads you about your descendants.

New habits and attitudes result less than you think from moral progress, and more from people adapting to new situations. So many of your descendants’ strange habits and attitudes are likely to violate your concepts of moral progress; what they do may often seem wrong. Also, you likely won’t be able to easily categorize many future ways as either good or evil; they will instead just seem weird. After all, your world hardly fits the morality tales your distant ancestors told; to them you’d just seem weird. Complex realities frustrate simple summaries, and don’t fit simple morality tales.

This book presents a concrete and plausible yet troubling view of a future full of strange behaviors and attitudes. You may have seen concrete troubling future scenarios before in science fiction. But few of those scenarios are in fact plausible; their details usually make little sense to those with expert understanding. They were designed for entertainment, not realism.

Perhaps you were told that fictional scenarios are the best we can do. If so, I aim to show that you were told wrong. My method is simple. I will start with a particular very disruptive technology often foreseen in futurism and science fiction: brain emulations, in which brains are recorded, copied, and used to make artificial “robot” minds. I will then use standard theories from many physical, human, and social sciences to describe in detail what a world with that future technology would look like.

I may be wrong about some consequences of brain emulations, and I may misapply some science. Even so, the view I offer will still show just how troublingly strange the future can be.

So let us begin.