Two Signposts on the Road to a New Enlightenment

Consilience by Edward O. Wilson and The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel

by Greg Burch

In his book Consilience Edward O. Wilson undertakes the laudable task of restating and revitalizing the ideals of the Enlightenment. In this project he confronts squarely the failed subjectivist "deconstruction" program of the so-called post-modernists, offering a solid alternative, and seeks new bridges between "the two cultures" of science on the one hand and the fine and liberal arts on the other. His critique of post-modernism is a well-crafted rallying point for those devoted to the ideals of reason and notions of cultural progress informed by the scientific method, but he ultimately undermines the power of his prescriptive solution by succumbing to a static conception of human nature.

Although not a book of the same depth, Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress, describes a satisfying escape from the ultimate conclusions drawn by Wilson. Rather than the deep cultural origins of the split between the rational and romantic world views explored in Consilience, Postrel's book surveys the scene of contemporary American politics and mass culture to find the expression of those two very different sets of values. She rejects the increasingly meaningless labels of "left" and "right" and "liberal" and "conservative" and crafts a robust categorization of the two competing value systems we experience today as "dynamist" and "stasist".

The central thesis of Wilson's book is captured in the title: "Consilience"; or the unification of seemingly disparate realms of knowledge and experience. He begins his journey of unification with a brief recapitulation of his biography as a successful naturalist and entomologist, coming from the improbable beginnings of a strict upbringing in Alabama as a Southern Baptist. In fluid and elegant prose squarely in the tradition of southern intellectuals, he recounts how he "discovered" evolution and, through it, the unifying vision that comes with the critical thinking that underlies the scientific method. Wilson frames his personal experience in terms of the greater stream of Western civilization, finding the roots of the search for grandly unified conceptions of nature and man's place in it in the "Ionian Revolution" of Sixth Century B.C. Greece. Before the book's first chapter is over, he has defined the vector of his thesis by plotting Einstein's fundamentally "consilient" insight as a point on a line leading from Thales of Miletus.

Wilson then defines more precisely the notion of ultimate consilience by visualizing different relationships of realms of knowledge. He walks the reader through the relationships of biology, social science, ethics and environmental policy, pointing out that these regimes of thought have both hierarchical and less linear relationships. In the process he casts his goal as a bridging of "the Two Cultures" described by C.P. Snow in 1959: The divided intellectual world of scientists and technologists on the one hand and scholars of the humanities, artists and the framers of public policy on the other.

Inevitably, Wilson perceives that his program of "cultural grand unification" harkens back to the ideals of the 18th Century Enlightenment and, as have other observers, he describes how those ideals were perverted and ultimately undermined in broad areas of Western culture by Rousseau and his followers in the Romantic movement. In just 20 pages or so, Wilson does a superb job of recounting this story in a manner so economical and insightful that this section alone should make Consilience required reading for transhumanists or people seeking to understand the transhumanist agenda. Perhaps the most compelling and important part of Consilience is found here, when Wilson gently but implacably identifies and then refutes the fundamentally pessimistic subjectivism of Michael Foucault and the other post-modernist heirs of the Romantic rejection of the Enlightenment program of consilient understanding of nature and humanity.

Having established the historical context for the great division in our culture, Wilson then makes a concise but very satisfying review of the basics of the scientific method and recounts some of the triumphs of that method in the last two hundred years. He explains the role of theory and creativity in the sciences with examples from his own seminal research into the pheromone signaling of insect societies, showing how the scientific method naturally lends itself to integrative, interdisciplinary questioning and explanation. From this rather small-scale example, he moves on to the broader subject of the connection between molecular biology, genetics and human behavior, the foundation for his ultimate conclusions (and ultimately, where he goes wrong, in my opinion). Wilson then sets out his claim that science is on the verge of ultimate consilience by demonstrating how a deep and robust understanding is now developing of the emergence of mind from the molecular biology of the brain.

Wilson clearly identifies culture as the current battle ground of the consilient enterprise and in this he is guided by a concept that many extropians have found very powerful: memetics. His view of memetics is grounded in the developing field of evolutionary psychology and, in the relatively brief treatment possible in Consilience, he does a masterful job of explaining how genes and culture co-evolve in the complex system of the human mind/brain system over evolutionary time.

Having established that a rationalist and scientific program of open inquiry into natural science ultimately leads to important insights into human nature, Wilson assaults the bastions of the "other culture", social science, art and ethics and religion. He points out the failure of economics to account for many fundamental insights from evolutionary psychology such as, to cite just one example Wilson discusses, the persistence of tribalism. In the arts, he shows how meaning in art is ultimately grounded in objectively knowable parameters of biologically evolved human nature, finding the roots of many of the most powerful and common themes in the arts in the long evolutionary history of humanity. Then, he sketches a natural history of religion grounded in humanity's hierarchical primate social order and our basic primate drives to seek explanations wherever we encounter mystery. Finally Wilson asserts that an empiricist ethics can be derived from inquiry into humanity's biological nature.

From this last step in his exposition, Wilson ultimately reaches conclusions that subvert the power of the fundamental ideas upon which his program of conceptual integration are based. In the last section of the book he recounts the basic litany of facts upon which most ecological pessimists base their condemnation of the notion of progress. He describes the concept of ecological carrying capacity, recounts the sad story of the destruction of biodiversity caused by the growth of current industrial civilization and, using straight line projections, demonstrates that mankind must accept fundamental limits on its progress.

The most disappointing aspect of the conclusions Wilson reaches is how close he comes to the solution to the doom he foresees. He clearly identifies our age as a transitory one in which medical science can lead to explosive population growth by allowing humanity to escape mortality caused by genetic defects, but cannot directly address those genetic flaws. He places as no more than 50 years in the future the time when genetic engineering can eradicate the genetic flaws that cause most disease and the point at which humanity as a species will be capable of escaping completely the bonds of biological evolution. But he concludes that we must and inevitably will draw the line short of enhancement of the human genome because, in his words, to do so would be to risk altering the "emotions and epigenetic rules of mental development" that "compose the physical soul of the species." He clearly sets himself in opposition to the transhumanist agenda: "Alter the emotions and epigenetic rules enough, and people might in some sense be ‘better,' but they would no longer be human. Neutralize the elements of human nature in favor of pure rationality, and the results would be badly constructed, protein-based computers. Why should a species give up the defining core of its existence, built by millions of years of biological trial and error?"

In rejecting the solipsistic negativism of Romanticism and its current spawn, post-modernism, Wilson rejects the notion that science offers a Faustian bargain. He eloquently defends the unity of science and art and the consilience of truth and beauty. But he then finds the "real" Faustian trap in the coming age of intentional control of human development. In this respect, Wilson is like Moses, who traveled far to bring us to the promised land of consilience, but cannot himself enter. He is tragically forbidden the correct conclusion by the very mistake he condemns in the Romantics.

A much more positive conclusion comes from Virginia Postrel, whose book in many ways subsumes Wilson's. She begins her overview of current attitudes toward the basic value of progress in Disneyland, setting the tone there for a brisk walk through many facets of popular culture and the often unstated assumptions that lie beneath the formulation and expression of public policy. From Disney's "Tomorrowland" as an evolving mirror of society's image of the future, Postrel grounds her analysis in a telling anecdote: She describes how Jeremy Rifkin, the "leftist" voice of ecological pessimism, and Pat Buchanan, the icon of fundamentalist "conservatism", fell into natural agreement in a 1995 Crossfire television program about "the future." Over the fundamental question of controlling the future, Rifkin and Buchanan found that they agreed on one issue after another: What they both opposed was the idea that the future should be allowed to simply happen. Instead, they agreed that the brakes had to be put on on a wide variety of issues.

Postrel demonstrates with examples from immigration, trade, health, environmental and cultural policy that traditional categorizations of ideology into "left" and "right" have come to mean less than underlying attitudes toward progress and social control. She finds a unifying element of opposition to openness to be a common value among what she labels the "stasist" element in every segment of contemporary cultural and political life, whether "conservative" reactionaries or "liberal" technocrats.

In contrast to the stasists stand the "dynamists", people who find value in open systems that establish their own spontaneous order, from free market economists to self-employed free agent software designers, to "new ecologists". Although she pays due homage to the likes of Hayek and Julian Simon, Postrel makes her case more with commonplace examples of spontaneous order, like the development of a vital doughnut shop industry operated by emigree Cambodians in Los Angeles, or the effectiveness of pay-per-dump garbage policies over centralized recycling programs. Her conception of "dynamism"  and "stasism" recaptures some of the original vigor of the left/right distinction from the early days of the French Revolution, when those seated on the "left" of the French assembly sought a new, dynamic social order and those on the right opposed change.

Postrel describes a view that connects with the major theme of Enlightenment rationalism and the scientific method when she discusses what she calls "the infinite series" (an epithet hurled at dynamists by 1930s agrarian stasists, but that she proudly adopts), the value of science and critical inquiry as process rather than conclusion. Again using concrete and often humble examples (such as one of her favorites, the development of contact lenses), she illustrates how open-ended and socially open "bottom-up" critical approaches to the concrete needs and wants of individuals create the diversity and richness of a satisfying human environment. In this, Postrel clearly stakes out an alternative to the zero-sum, closed world for humanity that Edward Wilson prescribes, and in this she is more true to the core values Wilson declares than he is himself. In open and growing systems Postrel finds the kind of creativity and resilience that are the only hope mankind has of making it past the ecological crisis and moral challenges Wilson foresees in our near future.

Ultimately, Postrel shows us that it is a many-branched "tree of knowledge", the distributed wisdom of a maximally free and open society, that is the only hope for our kind. Only by allowing as much experimentation -- and freedom to fail -- as possible can we hope to find the best solutions to the problems that we already face, much less the much more serious issues that lie ahead. The corollary of distributed knowledge is flexible rule-making. Postrel points to many examples of emergent order: From the internal order established on menu selections by a corporation like McDonalds to the community building experiments now underway in cyberspace, she shows how minimal constitutions that allow both binding "local" orders and flexible experimentation between such orders produce the greatest level of creativity and social satisfaction. In particular, Postrel shows how successful dynamist systems are based on contract, rather than status, a key insight and ultimate goal of the Enlightenment program. In a very extropian discussion, she also gives some examples of privately produced legal experiments, both in cyberspace and in high-risk international trading relationships.

Postrel's insight and the value of her book is nowhere more evident than in her discussion of dynamist and stasist approaches to man's relationship with nature. Again using a casual, anecdotal and journalistic style, she describes the development of the "new ecology" movement, that stresses the very dynamic nature of eco-systems and the fact that humanity has already imprinted its signature on almost every "natural" system we encounter. She illustrates how stasist adherents to the till-now mainstream romantic notion of a fixed and unchanging natural environment view the challenge from the new ecologists as an essentially ideological and political one. And it is here that we can see how she succeeds where Wilson fails. Wilson, the professional naturalist, ultimately suffers from a failure of vision within his own science: He cannot see that the emergent evolutionary process that gave rise to mankind is expressing itself, albeit in a wholly new form, in humanity's new adventure in fundamental self-transformation and that it is only in following that wholly "natural" course that nature itself can be saved. Postrel offers real hope here, but not a hope that arises from any grandiose plan for mankind. Rather, she points to the broad-based, bottom-up pressure for genetic therapy as the engine that will drive science, technology and those people brave enough and creative enough to take the lead, into a continuation of her "infinite series". And in her hope, she places herself in the worthy tradition of real humanism, rather than the bogus humanism of the post-modernists: "If we understand biological nature as morally neutral, rather than a source of standards and justifications, there is no reason not to evaluate actions by their consequences rather than their causes." Nature can be instructive but cannot be the ultimate source of values. Thus she cuts the Gordian Knot of the naturalistic fallacy to which Wilson falls prey, and frees humanity to continue its progress.

Ultimately, Postrel does not carry her discussion forward to the natural transhumanistic conclusions to which they inevitably lead. She doesn't mention transhumanism or extropianism, even though she's well aware of these movements, nor does she refer to Jaron Lanier's use of extropianism as a concept in opposition to the notion of "stewardship", an idea very similar to her dichotomy of dynamism and stasism. Even in her survey of popular culture, she ignores the obvious expression of dynamism found in Wired magazine's editorial philosophy. This may be a good thing, though. She is writing for as wide an audience as possible, openly seeking to build solidarity among dynamists, "the Party of Life," as she calls it. Her book will reach many people who might shy away from the core values she illuminates if she were to continue her exposition into the terrain being mapped by Moravec and Kurzweil in their latest books. It is more than enough that she picks up the torch of the Enlightenment where Wilson sets it down.