Long-sightedness in politics
How do we know long- or short-sightedness when we see it? Clearly there is the risk of polemical use, but there are some objective markers one could point to. One lies in discourse: the willingness to identify long-term objectives and build policy programmes that, rhetorically at least, are committed to their pursuit. Party manifestos are one kind of text that can be studied, often cited as evidence of unambitious or backward-looking views in the present (Zielonka, 2023). Investments are another possible indicator: the willingness to devote resources to projects that take time to mature (e.g. the building of infrastructure), or to hold back resources for future use (e.g. by creating a sovereign wealth fund), or to introduce regulations likely to produce short-term costs and long-term benefits (e.g. carbon taxing) (Boston, 2017; Smith, 2021, p. 3). Having regard for the future often means the willingness to make sacrifices in the short term.
Another indicator of long-sightedness widely invoked is consistency. Often this rests on the assumption that a certain line of policy is optimal (see e.g. the attachment of central bankers to an inflation target of 2–3 per cent), and that responsible policymaking involves minimising deviation from it. Commitment in adversity would be another way to conceive this: the willingness to stick to an agenda when progress seems in doubt or opinion turns against it. 3 Finally, as an additional marker of long-sightedness, one may refer to the sustainability of methods. This describes an actor’s willingness to pursue policies in a way that does not weaken the institutions and authority on which future deliberation and policymaking will need to rely. Transparency, capacity and clear procedure are amongst the values that may be embraced to this end (Thompson, 2010).
Jonathan White (2024). Technocratic myopia: On the pitfalls of depoliticising the future
Insect insights
The modern insect societies have a vast amount to teach us today. They show how it is possible to”speak” in complex messages with pheromones. And they illustrate, through thousands of examples, how the division of labor can be crafted with flexible behavior programs to achieve an optimal efficiency of a working group. Their networks of cooperating individuals have suggested new designs in computers and shed light on how neurons of the brain might interact in the creation of mind. They are in many ways an inspiration. The study of ants, President Lowell, of Harvard University, said when he bestowed an honorary degree on the great myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler in the 1920s, has demonstrated that these insects, “like human beings, can create civilizations without the use of reason.”
Bert Hölldobler & E. O. Wilson (2009). The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect societies, p. XVIII
Think I might read this book at some point. Might be interesting to try to understand human sociality by contrasting it with insect sociality. And seeing the various kinds of selection pressures and circumstances that can favor the emergence of cooperation.
Vague musings
If modernity meant recognizing that we are masters of our own fate, the next transition will mean handing over that fate to our successors. It will require a similar reexamination of fundamental values and assumption.
The Enlightenment view of history
Ancient writers, both classical and biblical, assumed that the essential patterns of life remained identical and therefore that history provided lasting models for instruction and imitation. Hence the search for historical prototypes of current customs and institutions. Legendary founders of cities, ancestors of existing professions, prehistorical legislators, and establishers of rituals were believed to grant them legitimacy. This belief in tradition persisted among Christians, even though the coming of Christ divided their time into two distinct periods. The basic relation between past and present remained constant, except for the unique event of the Incarnation that had set a new beginning and a new end to history.
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century undermined this stable concept of time. The abrupt change it caused in the modern worldview suggested that time was pregnant with novelty and directed toward the future rather than repeating the past. The new orientation was supported by a philosophy that viewed the person as the source of meaning and value and hence capable of changing the course of history. The modern conception of history resulted in two quite different attitudes toward the past. Some, beginning with Descartes and all those primarily interested in the scientific achievements of their age, felt that the study of the past could contribute little to the scientific enterprise. For others, however, a more accurate knowledge of the past formed an integral part of that comprehensive renewal of knowledge introduced by the scientific revolution. Thus, David Hume regarded the study of history as essential to the study of human nature, the basis of all scientific knowledge. Some historians, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Gibbon, were convinced that a solid acquaintance with the past was to vindicate the changes of the present.
Louis Dupré (2004) The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, p. 187-188
Moral facts as facts about cooperation
I find the perspective of Sterelny and Fraser (2017) rather appealing:
while there is no full vindication of morality, no seamless reduction of normative facts to natural facts, nevertheless one important strand in the evolutionary history of moral thinking does support reductive naturalism—moral facts are facts about cooperation, and the conditions and practices that support or undermine it.
For moral thinking has evolved in part in response to these facts and to track these facts. So one function of moral thinking is to track a class of facts about human social environments, just as folk psychological thinking has in part evolved to track cognitive facts about human decision-making.
The idea that connects moral thinking to the expansion of cooperation in the human lineage has two complementary aspects. First, it is important to an individual to be chosen as a partner by others; access to the profits of cooperation often depends on partner choice. Choice, in turn, is often dependent on being of good repute, and (often) the most reliable way of having a good reputation is to deserve it. It is worth being good to seem good. Recognizing and internalizing moral norms is typically individually beneficial through its payoff in reputation. Second, human social life long ago crossed a complexity threshold, and once it did so, problems of coordination, division of labour, access to property and products and rights and responsibilities in family organization could no longer be solved on the fly, or settled on a case-by-case basis by individual interactions. Default patterns of interaction became wired in as social expectations and then norms, as individuals came to take decisions and make plans on the assumption that those defaults would be respected, treating them as stable backgrounds; naturally resenting unpleasant surprises when faced by deviations from these expectations. The positive benefits of successful coordination with others, and the costs of violating other’s expectations, gave individuals an incentive to internalize and conform to these defaults.
These gradually emerging regularities of social interaction and cooperation were not arbitrary: they reflected (no doubt imperfectly) the circumstances in which human societies worked well, and how individuals acted effectively in these societies to mutual benefit. Given the benefits of cooperation in human social worlds, we have been selected to recognize and respond to these facts. So this adaptationist perspective on moral cognition suggests that normative thought and normative institutions are a response to selection in the hominin lineage for capacities that make stable, long-term, and spatially extended forms of cooperation and collaboration possible.
No doubt there are trade-offs between the size of the cooperation profit and its distribution. But despite these complications, a natural notion of moral truth emerges from the idea that normative thought has evolved to mediate stable cooperation. The ideal norms are robust decision heuristics, in that they satisfice over a wide range of agent choice points, typically providing the agent with a decent outcome, in part by giving others incentives to continue to treat the agent as a social partner in good standing. The moral truths specify maxims that are members of near-optimal normative packages—sets of norms that if adopted, would help generate high levels of appropriately distributed, and hence stable, cooperation profits.
So no adaptationist, truth-tracking conception of the evolution of moral thinking will deliver a full, clean vindication of diverse moral opinion. Indeed, we expect the moral case to be intermediate in a variety of respects: First, our moral practices are a mosaic; some elements may turn out to be vindicated, others revised, others discarded. Second, as we have noted, moral judgements function to signal, to bond, and to shape, not just to track; vindication is only in question with respect to tracking. Third, as we shall now explain, tracking is only partially successful; moreover, its success may well have varied across time and circumstance.
On the Historical Role of Philosophy
The greatest philosophers of tomorrow will be the ones grappling with AI, according to R.G. Collingwood:
In part, the problems of philosophy are unchanging; in part they vary from age to age, according to the special characteristics of human life and thought at the time; and in the best philosophers of every age these two parts are so interwoven that the permanent problems appear sub specie saeculi, and the special problems of the age sub specie aeternitatis. Whenever human thought has been dominated by some special interest, the most fruitful philosophy of the age has reflected that domination; not passively, by mere submission to its influence, but actively, by making a special attempt to understand it and placing it in the focus of philosophical inquiry.