Chapter 6: Principle of Optimism

The sixth chapter from the documentary I’m creating is now live. (Also see chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

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Transcript

“The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.”

— Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994)

How can we have a duty to remain optimists? Isn’t optimism just a kind of mood, a disposition that captures some people and not others? In the face of so many Enemies, isn’t optimism naive? After all, surely socialists, environmentalists, doomers, and the rest will always be with us in some form or another. Similarly, it is a common refrain to say that, “the human condition is fallen, and so evils like racism and murder will always be with us. All we can do is hope to minimize them.”

But throwing up one’s hands in quiet resignation that any of those evils will forever be with us is the mistake of philosophical pessimism, which says that some evils cannot ever be solved or entirely defeated. This is not merely a mood or a disposition, but a deep assertion about how the world works. And it is wrong.

Consider the set of all possible transformations that the laws of nature allow for. This includes not just spontaneous ones such as when a star becomes a black hole, or when helium atoms fuse into carbon and iron inside the furnace of a star, or when particles and anti-particles collide and produce high energy photons. Those transformations are extremely few and far between as compared with the transformations that life can cause. Sure, the furnace of stars and the violence of supernovae have spawned the ninety or so naturally occuring elements of the Periodic Table. But the human genome alone creates as many as one-hundred thousand different proteins, and humans are but one of about five billion that have ever occupied the Earth, each producing a different set of biomolecules and causing different side-effects on the environment. 

And the set of transformations that people can cause is greater than that of the biosphere—in fact, people are the only entities in existence that can bring about any transformation that’s allowed by the laws of physics—we can recreate not just the nuclear fusion found inside stars or biochemical reactions inside a cell, but we can also create objects that neither the lifeless cosmos nor the biosphere could ever possibly bring about—skyscrapers, particle colliders, computers, video games, novels, and intergalactic civilizations. As for material objects, so with ideas—we can transform a static society into a dynamic one, a bigot into a nonbigot, a violent criminal into a peaceful citizen. We have already made such transformations on a societal scale many times before—slavery was once taken for granted in the West, and now the very idea that it is desirable is virtually extinct.

Is there a limit on the transformations we can cause, on the problems we can solve? Well, the laws of nature tell us that some transformations are impossible—we can never travel faster than light, we can never violate the conservation of energy, we can never determine prices without markets, we can never predict which mutations will emerge in Darwinian evolution. But while Nature is uncompromising in her prohibitions, she is a rather liberal Mother. For instance, while we can’t exceed the speed of light, we can create spaceships that fly extremely quickly through the cosmos—fast enough for any problem that requires large-scale travel. And already, we communicate at speeds that our letter-writing ancestors would have hardly thought possible. And while we can’t predict which mutations will emerge in a species’ offspring, we can selectively breed animals until we get the one we want, or we can genetically engineer them from scratch. For any such transformation, people are capable of bringing it about if and only if they create the requisite knowledge for how to do so.

Is there a transformation that is forbidden by the laws of physics but that people cannot cause, no matter how much knowledge they bring to bear? As David Deutsch says, “If you imagine the set of all transformations…some of those transformations are permitted and some are not permitted by the laws of physics. So the question is, which ones of them can we actually achieve in real life? The answer that must be…that the ones that we can achieve in real life are precisely the ones that are not forbidden by the laws of physics…if there isn’t a law of physics that says ‘you can’t live to be five hundred’, then living to be five hundred is a soluble problem. It’s just a matter of knowing how…if there were a thing that we can’t achieve no matter what knowledge we bring to bear…then there is another law of physics that says we can’t do that. And that’s a testable law. A testable regularity in nature is a law of physics.”

So the pessimist is wrong to think that murder and doomerism and the rest will always be with us. After all, no law of nature says that it must be so. On the contrary, they are problems—soluble problems, provided we create the knowledge of how to solve them. 

Moreover, optimism is not some naive disposition, or some optional mood that one may adopt from time to time. It is the rational stance in the face of humanity’s endless stream of problems. Popper was right that we have a duty to fight for a better world—now we can explain why.

Evil ideologies such as doomerism, problems such as death and sleep and hunger and war and poverty, and stultifying institutions like the modern school system will last precisely as long as we lack the knowledge of how to eliminate or improve them via the right transformations. And since this is always possible, giving up is not just the boring thing to do, but the immoral one as well. As Deutsch says, all evils are caused by lack of knowledge—including the evil of giving up in the face of problems.

Now, if all evils are caused by lack of knowledge, then the growth of knowledge is the fundamental driver of progress, the primary weapon in the fight against our problems. With this understanding in mind, we can see in clearer terms precisely why all of the ideologies we discussed are, in fact, Enemies of Civilization: they slow the growth of knowledge and wealth (wealth being the set of all transformations we know how to cause).

Socialism slows the growth of knowledge and wealth by killing society’s magical ability to allocate resources efficiently. We therefore waste more than we otherwise would, leaving us with relatively fewer ways by which we transform the world from a worse state to a better state. 

Environmentalism causes us to stop consuming as much energy, thereby putting a ceiling on the set of transformations we can cause. Put simply, the more energy we have at our fingertips, the more ways we can transform the world to our liking.

Scientism places an arbitrary premium on scientific knowledge over moral, economic, and political knowledge, thereby curbing the growth of the latter. To make progress, it isn’t always enough to know how to bring about a particular transformation. We also need to know whether such a transformation is worth the tradeoffs and satisfies our ideas about right and wrong (questions that can be answered with economic and moral knowledge).

Relativism rejects that there is a difference between, say, indigenous ways of knowing and universal scientific theories. To the extent that such an idea is taken seriously, the creation of genuine scientific knowledge is made that much more difficult—after all, while there is an indigenous worldview for every primitive tribe, there is always only one truth of the matter. More generally, there is an infinite number of false scientific theories for every one true one. Relativism lumps the true ones in with the false ones, mistakenly empowering the latter group by its sheer force of majority rule.

Dogmatism curbs the growth of knowledge by asserting the uncriticizability of some ideas. We’ve seen that knowledge grows by criticizing our ideas and then offering better ones to supplant them. If we can’t criticize an idea, we can’t figure out what’s wrong with it in the first place, and therefore how we can improve upon it with a successor.

Doomerism is just a modern incarnation of philosophical pessimism. The doomers of all kinds—AI will kill us all, social media is poison for children, digital tracking technologies will end our privacy and freedom forever—are mistaken, either in their hyperbole, or their harping on the downsides of something without considering the upsides, or in their prediction that such-and-such technology guarantees the end of humanity. By disabling the human mind from considering that progress is possible, pessimism stops us from considering solutions to those problems we consider impossible to solve. And since the creation of any novel solution entails the creation of more knowledge, pessimism is necessarily antithetical to both.

So the growth of knowledge and wealth is necessary if humanity is to keep making progress. And if that’s true, then we should want to accelerate this process—no evil should last a moment longer than it needs to. There is no reason to stop converting the raw materials of the cosmos into resources for our benefit—on the contrary. The dead, monotonous universe is there for our making, our happiness, our problem-solving. Greed is not a sin, after all.

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