Something rather disturbing appears to be happening politically. A collection of actors who once inhabited quite different worlds are beginning to congregate in the same room. Technology billionaires, crypto fortunes, fossil-fuel interests, libertarians, nationalist populists and the far right increasingly discover that they have things to offer one another.
Meanwhile, humanity has achieved something genuinely extraordinary. We are probably more knowledgeable than at any previous point in our existence, while simultaneously displaying a remarkable capacity to behave like idiots. We can measure atmospheric carbon dioxide from space, reconstruct climates from Antarctic ice hundreds of thousands of years old, detect planets orbiting distant stars, edit genomes and build machines capable of discussing Kant. And yet, having acquired all these prodigious faculties, we apparently cannot prevent ourselves from making the only planet available to us increasingly hostile to our own civilisation. There is something almost magnificent about the folly.
Imagine discovering that your house is on fire, constructing an exquisite computer model showing precisely how the conflagration will spread, publishing seventeen thousand learned papers upon combustion, convening an international congress on the matter, establishing a market in tradable fire credits and then returning home to throw another chair upon the blaze because the quarterly figures looked encouraging.
One might eventually begin to question whether intelligence is quite the virtue we suppose it to be. Perhaps we have been conflating three different things: 1. Knowledge tells us what is happening. 2. Intelligence tells us what we can do with that knowledge. 3. Wisdom concerns whether doing it is a remotely sensible idea.
Psychopathy provides an uncomfortable example. I don’t mean diagnosing Musk, Trump, crypto billionaires or anybody else from the comfort of my desk. The interesting feature of psychopathy here is simply that intelligence and empathy are separable: a person may possess formidable cognitive powers while treating other people instrumentally and pursuing his objectives with remarkably little concern for the wreckage produced along the way. But what happens when an economic system begins rewarding precisely those characteristics?
Let us imagine two corporations. One discovers that something it does is environmentally destructive and voluntarily ceases doing it. Its competitor continues, makes considerably more money and eventually buys the first corporation.
Or consider two politicians. One spends forty minutes explaining the complicated causes of declining living standards. The other says immigrants did it. One of these messages fits rather better on TikTok.
Neither of these actors needs to be psychopathic. Rather, a system can select for psychopathic behaviour without requiring psychopaths to operate it.
I encountered essentially the same problem recently while contemplating acacia, and someone else on this forum had also raised the metaphor of how to control invasive species in a greenhouse. Here, acacia can spread with extraordinary aggression: it grows rapidly, produces a preposterous quantity of seed, regenerates after disturbance and gradually displaces the ecological community around it, to the point of taking over an entire landscape.
But the acacia isn’t evil - it hasn’t read Ayn Rand! It has merely found itself in circumstances where its capacity for replication exceeds the ability of the surrounding system to constrain it. That made me wonder whether we have misunderstood constraint itself.
Capital behaves rather similarly: it produces more of the same. Likewise, political power may be employed to acquire more political power. Ownership of information infrastructure furnishes opportunities to acquire still more information and influence. And presently we encounter a peculiar threshold: the successful subsystem becomes sufficiently powerful to attack the constraints themselves. Regulation becomes “bureaucracy”; taxation becomes “theft”; environmental protection becomes an impediment to growth; trade unions become troublesome; universities become nests of ideological degeneracy; judges become enemies of the people; journalists become liars; international institutions become illegitimate; scientists, having had the temerity to measure things, become conspirators.
Viewed separately, these attacks appear only loosely related. Viewed together, they begin to resemble an organism dismantling its own immune system and congratulating itself upon the resulting efficiency.
Herein lies the darker part of the problem. Living systems endure because their constituent parts are not permitted unlimited freedom.
Cells are constrained in their reproduction. A cell which acquires the liberty to reproduce indefinitely is not generally celebrated for its entrepreneurial vigour - we call it cancer.
Predators are constrained by prey. Plants by nutrients, competitors and pathogens. Forests by fire, death, decomposition and succession.
Remove enough negative feedback and a system does not become gloriously liberated; it instead becomes unstable.
Which makes me wonder whether some of our political vocabulary has grown obsolete. Left and right plainly still matter. Yet underneath that familiar contest I increasingly perceive another: between concentrated power and those mechanisms capable of constraining concentrated power. And the truly peculiar thing is that some of the people dismantling those constraints are exceptionally intelligent.
So, this brings me back to wisdom. Perhaps wisdom is not superior intelligence, but rather intelligence accompanied by an awareness of relationship, consequence and restraint.
A sufficiently intelligent person can determine how to manipulate millions of people. A sufficiently intelligent corporation can determine how to extract enormous wealth from an ecosystem. A sufficiently intelligent civilisation can excavate several hundred million years of stored carbon and discharge a considerable portion of it into the atmosphere within two centuries. The technical accomplishments involved are astounding, though it takes little to realise that the aggregate behaviour is lunacy.
This may explain something that has perplexed me for years about climate change. Why hasn’t knowledge saved us?
Perhaps because knowledge was never enough.
For decades we have behaved as though humanity merely required better information. Produce another report, improve the climate model, explain the science more clearly to make it more accessible, add another decimal place. Homo sapiens will see reason and ,with reason, change its ways. Yet a person may understand perfectly well that an action will damage the collective future and proceed nonetheless because the action benefits him personally. That isn’t a failure of knowledge, instead representating a failure to include enough of reality within the calculation.
Rather than forever searching for better rulers, we might inquire why our institutions so frequently reward those most willing to externalise harm, manipulate others and accumulate without restraint. For if the ecological niche remains vacant, another creature shall presently occupy it. The task is therefore not merely to install nicer people at the controls of the machine; it is to construct a machine in which behaving like a psychopath is an exceedingly poor strategy. That means making externalities costly, dispersing concentrated power, restoring feedback, shortening the distance between decisions and their consequences, and giving communities genuine authority rather than inviting them to consultations in which the biscuits possess considerably more consequence than their opinions.
There is, however, one still stranger possibility. If I imagine that “I” terminate approximately at the surface of my skin, then exploitation of everything beyond that boundary may appear perfectly rational. Forests, workers, rivers, strangers, insects and people not yet born become external variables in the grand calculation of Me. But what if the boundary is wrong?
If my existence depends upon communities, ecosystems, atmospheric stability, microorganisms, other species and innumerable generations of people maintaining systems I shall never personally comprehend, then much of what we call altruism begins to look suspiciously like self-preservation conducted with a sufficiently wide field of view.
Perhaps this is ultimately what wisdom is. Not knowing everything, nor accumulating facts until one expires beneath a great heap of them. Knowing that one is not separate from it. Intelligence, therefore, can be said to understand relationships, whereas wisdom understands that it belongs to them.
I am curious whether others perceive the same convergence. Are we witnessing principally a political realignment, or something more fundamental: a civilisation whose selection mechanisms increasingly reward those parts most willing to injure the whole?
And if the latter contains even a grain of truth, we are left with a rather urgent question: How does a civilisation avoid becoming its own invasive species?