Individual, society, effective ethics

I would argue that the creation of the individual is intimately related to Christianity. Julian Jaynes though that early civilised man had no self consciousness at all. While not going as far as him, it is probable that ancient man was not as individually conscious as modern man, and that self consciousness became more prominent during the course of the first millenium BC. Christianity responded to the process of individuation which other older faiths did not satisfy. Thus guilt replaces shame as the psychological means of ethical discipline.

Self consciousness is socially adaptive, but painful. There is a desire to retrogress from it and retreat into the collective, to get rid of the awful burden of responsibility. Two routes exist: the introspective retreat into the collective unconscious (India's way: the individual ego is an illusion) and collective consciousness (ecstatic merger with the tribe: the ME/Western way). The dangers of both are obvious, from the narcissistic hippie at one end to the crusader/jihadi/fascist at the other. If we steer between and learn to live with the pain of the indiviudal consciousness, then arises the issue of its relation to society: indeed the danger is atomisation, "there is no such thing as society" as Mrs Thatcher once notoriously said.

Most individualistic post -protestants seem to have a social contract at the back of their minds, even if it is unconscious. All flows from the individual, who delegates powers to the state for functions which are inevitably collective. This tends to the political right, but you can even have a left wing version if you like (John Rawls). Very sweet and 17C, but not how things actually work. "No man is an island", the individual consciousness is a social construct (largely through language, thank you Wittgenstein) and if individuation was a late process - then society largely precedes the individual. Such as statement is neither Marxist nor Buddhist - the individual exists all right, and has autonomy, but only as part of the whole.

It is no use having the most wonderful ethics in the world if they cannot be applied. Otherwise they become like laws passed in the Italian parliament - statements of moral intent, but with no real intention of putting them into practice.

In terms of social ethical effectiveness, religion has very little to do with it. Look at Holy Russia, even before the revolution. Tsar Nicholas I said in the 1850s that he could rule the country if only he could find one honest man to assist him: clearly he could not. The Western polity has been the most successful in the past millenium, because it combined individual creativity with Christian roots with the ethical effectiveness of rule based on Athens, Rome and Germanic feudalism. The latter is often underrated, but was a key influence on building social trust: everyone had both rights and obligations, even serfs and aristocrats, something quite absent in somewhere like Russia. You want "Judeo-Christian" without Athens? then go to Russia or Latin America, not 17C Massachussetts or 21C Bible Belt. The second most successful polity has been Confucian states, where not only the practice but even the underlying ethics are humanistic.

Where religion does come into its own is to provide motivation to meet ethical goals, for men to stretch themselves. China managed that in a different way, by providing private (therapeutic) religion to complement the ethical state.

Evangelical Xtianity may be good at socialising those where there is no effective social trust, in the "Global South" so it helps to build it - but a faith whose beliefs are so at variance with the other needs of the modern world? Over half of all Americans believe the world was created 6000 years ago, you cannot long sustain a scientific civilisation that way. The alternative (which applies even in the USA) is the ethical state with private therapeutic faith. We need a Christian Zen, one that recognises the individual, in his place, without denying it.

Space colonies

This may seem a wacko idea, but it is the only way I can see that we can resolve a conundrum.

There are too many people on Earth, and even with declining birth rates the global population will continue to rise to around 9-10bn by mid century. Even without getting into debate about man made global warming, the combination of industrial society and large population is putting unbearable strain on the ecosystem. We are in the midst of another great extinction, caused by man.

Some worry that the primitives (including Muslims) take over by default as industrial populations collapse; economists worry that dependency ratios become unsustainable. I worry more that ageing societies become dull, conformist and uncreative. There is already IMO a decline in creativity, partly due to cultural exhaustion but also because of ageing population. A healthy society needs young people, and unless the death rate rises sharply (possible, as antibiotic resistance rises), that means a growing population. Transhumanism may give us young bodies, but not the flexibility and rebelliousness of young minds, and would in any case make the overpopulation worse.

When I was young we believed in progress, because the standards of living were changing before our eyes. If you are Chinese, that’s how you feel nowadays. We cannot go back to traditional society anyway, and it was pretty horrible. But above a certain level of income there is no correlation between contentment and income, and materialism becomes empty and corroding hedonism. We need a new non-hedonistic goal for progress. It may not solve the existential issue, but it gives something to do in the meantime.

Fast track back to the seventies, to the ideas of Gerard O’Neill – live in space colonies. There are no environmental constraints and space, and room for an infinite expansion of population leaving the Earth for tourism and as a nature reserve.

All well and good, but there is a huge gap between launching small payload satellites and getting billions of people into space, and if you can see any serious thinking or research on the following issues, well it has passed me by and please pass me to the sources:

- We need new technology, especially for the energy-intensive bits of getting out of the Earth’s gravity well, chemical rockets are far too primitive and wasteful. My own favourite would be space tether which is electrically conductive, where descending to earth vehicles are braked magnetically by generating electric current ( a bit like the regenerative brakes on an electric train) which powers a vehicle going up into space.
- All the resources needed to develop such colonies are available in huge quantities in the solar system. We cannot bring them from Earth, not only for obvious ecological reasons but also because of the energy penalty of the Earth’s gravity; it would take far less effort to send unmanned supply ships to collect water from Jupiter’s moons than to bring it from Earth.
- Cosmic rays and micrometeorites? Two metres of solid shielding will do the trick, and rotation provides artificial gravity

This requires huge technological leaps – but none of it unfeasible – but the smallest viable scale space colony is quite large, and needs a whole support system. We can envisage a space colony system (yes, run with private industry) but how to get there from here in incremental steps – it is not obvious. We need a process not one-off events.

Sending a man to the moon was a bit like Admiral Zheng He and his fleet sailing the globe in 1421: a bit of government show which led nowhere. We need the equivalent of European colonisation of the Americas (but no slaves growing sugar, please). There are no products from space that make the huge expense worthwhile. The only other motivator is an arms race, as in the 50s and 60s. China may indeed provide that, and a race to build a moon base first. Meanwhile one can see the goal, but no process to get there.

The Post Protestant Paradigm

No religion? Well, we live in a Protestant world, or more precisely the post-Protestant paradigm of utilitarianism. It is so stripped down to essentials that even God is an option, although Progress is a given. It exists to condemn us all to be "happy", or at least to attempt to delude us that a constant round of fun will distract us from thinking about anything serious. It was discovered by painful experiment that the post-Catholic paradigm, dated to 1789 (major upgrades 1871 and 1917) ,Historical Necessity mediated by the Party, was simply not as effective as the 1688 model (upgrades in 1776 and post-1945). In the real Brave New World, world controller Mustapha Mond and his colleagues could not function without decentralisation, and the ideal has proved to be the self organising system of the market.

The post Protestant paradigm (the PPP from now on) really emerged as the sole faith around 1960. Franco was the last traditional leader of any note - the PPP Opus Dei seized control of the last Catholic theocracy in the 60s, and four decades on it is amongst the most immoderately liberal states on Earth. While the death rattle took thirty years, Communism was emotionally and intellectually dead by 1960 in the West (it took China another decade to discover that). Both the PCP and PPP were surprisingly socially conservative - the family and traditional social roles were taken for granted - and the death of competing faiths does make you wonder about the social revolution of the 60s. I have always thought that it was an amazing coup by the Frankfurt school fellow travellers, but conspiracies are rarely plausible on their own, it had to be pushing on an open door. Restraints destroyed by the lack of competing faiths; or the fact that, as the economic machine had supplied the developed world with necessities, the PPP machine needed to destroy traditional morality to keep consumption increasing? - interesting that in Japan, where traditional morality has survived better, the consumer state has failed to be established and the demographics have tanked more than elsewhere. Christopher Lasch considered the therapeutic state's relation to sociology as similar to Keynesianism's relations to classical economics and communism: true conservatives wanted to retain the traditional patriarchal family, and socialism toyed with destroying it, while the therapeutic state retains it in theory but autocratically directs it with experts.

Fascism was the only non-materialistic choice on offer (which is why the PRC is not fascist). At the moment it is a semi-fascistic strain of Islam, but interesting that while it has violence and demography as weapons, it make very few converts, while traditional Islam was still converting Indonesia, in a syncretic way, quite peacefully as late as the 19C. It does seem to repel non-adherents but galvanise the faithful, in the same way that Hitler only spoke to Germans. Other possible alternatives have either been converted into PPP therapeutics , in other words, techniques to help people be happy or reduce suffering, but not change the status quo. These include Christian Evangelicalism , also westernised Buddhism (self improvement, totally misses the point) and Hindu guruism.

The parallels with late Rome are seductive, but the problem is different. That was a brutal and loveless society, which needed to discover the love of God (agape) and a sense of sin. This may be a shallow world, with more than a touch of narcissm, but it is not loveless, by and large people do care for others, and are still committed to ideals like fairness. The problem is emptiness (the root of narcissm) - homo economicus has no soul, which is why existentialism, authenticity, deliverance through art are all empty suits.

I have been reading conservative writers recently, and they are like annoying office juniors who come moaning about the problems. The ones who are considered for promotions have at least suggestions for solutions, and no plausible ones have been offered, just new variants of PPP therapeutics. Well in which case apply sticking plasters to the biggest problems (environment, demography). The PPP is hugely flexible, thus it can dematerialise materialism by marketing "services" including therapeutics. As for the empty soul, the East makes a cult of emptiness anyway. There is a narrtive there, based on the evolution of the universe, but none has told it well so far, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke and Teilhard de Chardin are not first division.

The result is uncreative except in the technical sense, broad but extremely shallow , but potentially sustainable. Athens or Jerusalem it is not, but better than collapse or revolution, but then my irrational faith is Muddling Through and Something Will Turn Up.