The Human Condition: Prologue

I spend a lot of time, I think, thinking about what we're doing here. As people with our individual lives, as a species with our ongoing story, as animals drifting somewhere in space. For about as long as I can remember there has always been an air of wrongness about the world I could never quite shake. A song played out with the wrong instruments or at the wrong tempo. Occasionally the feeling would leave, often for days or weeks, only to come roaring back on the heels of an offhanded comment from a friend or a passing line in a news article. Eventually, the feeling became strong enough for me to abandon my plans of becoming an engineer and to chase that feeling wherever it chose to lead. I'm still chasing it years later.

In the prologue to The Human Condition Hannah Arendt speaks from amidst a transitioning 20th century; her thoughts are on Sputnik, the Atomic Age, and the emerging biomedical and computer sciences that would come to dominate our lives in the decades to come. However, while she draws attention to the events her concern lies instead with how human beings have situated themselves within the world they're building, and this has always been the more interesting question to me.

In many ways we are the undisputed masters of our world. In the wealthy countries all but the most devastating diseases are almost unheard of, we buy food regardless of season, alter the genes of any species we wish, choose the temperatures of our homes, travel the globe in a matter of hours, alter the atmosphere, restructure biospheres in the ocean. The list goes on. Yet, for all our power to influence, one of the most well-worn topics over the last century has been whether or not we are to be trusted with it. Are we capable of ruling and stewarding the power we've managed to harness? It's a question worth asking, but perhaps not just yet. To my mind the first question to tackle is why we feel the need to ask it at all? If we are truly free agents with the power of the stars at our command wouldn't we naturally build the ideal human world, whatever that happened to be? Or if we're simply the output of innumerable biological processes with no true will of our own why on earth would we be compelled to ask the question at all?

The answer, I believe, lies in our unusual position in the great chain of being. Were are, without a doubt, biological beings at the present end of a very long evolutionary process. In this way we can see ourselves as heirs to the fortune of 4.5 billion years of triumph and failure; filled with the instincts and patterns that allowed every generation of ancestor to adapt and survive that ever changing environment. You see the colors you see, in the clarity you do, and with the range you have not because you choose it, but because the earth and life has shaped you that way. You can no more choose what food you can ingest or who you fall in love with than you can choose the time of your birth.

Simultaneously though, we seem to be unique in our capacity for abstract thought and temporal awareness. That is, we are aware of the future (in fact many of us live there almost entirely), we can actively search the past (and have built elaborate prostheses just this in books, records, videos, etc.), and we can even inhabit (partially) entire realities of our own creation. Some people become ascetics, others artists, still others murderers or carpenters. That our lives are made of choices seems so obvious to us that it took centuries of philosophical, religious, and scientific argument to even come close to questioning it. Even so, few people truly discount freewill in the privacy of their own minds.

The problem does not stop there either. There has never been born a human being who was not enmeshed in a world partially or predominantly composed of other humans' dreams and wills. The languages we speak, the tools we use, the food we consume, the careers and partners we pursue are all (partially or in totality) the results of decisions made by the living and dead all around us. Moreover, given that an individual will live and die within just a tiny sliver of time in the eyes of the species we each find ourselves born into the only world we've ever known without the benefit of any hindsight to guide us. You and I have never known a world not dominated by automobiles, or without rapid access to knowledge, or in which marriages were a matter or economics and influence, or even without the assumption of the nuclear family or fiat currency. To say it plainly: we cannot even draw clear lines between our environment and our imagination. Our edges are beyond even our own comprehension.

So where does this leave us, contingent creatures that we are? Neither god nor beast but demiurge? Hannah Arendt seems to be thinking along similar lines in her prologue; discussing many of the strange disconnects between our rational/scientific sides and our interpersonal/political sides. In her word:

But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as through we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.

This is not such an unusual idea in psychology, which has grappled with our less-than-conscious aspects since its inception. Often times our perspectives and reactions are rooted in a present made contemporaneous with events deep in our past we may not even consciously recall. You cannot tell where your thoughts come from or exactly how it is you move your fingers, you can project futures in your imagination but could not describe how in a lifetime of trying. No, our conscious "self" is only the last in a long chain ancient patterns and adaptive responses and is only given access to what is absolutely necessary. Even our own actions take on lives of their own and we often find ourselves the Sorcerer's apprentices hurriedly patching what we didn't understand. Did Henry Ford invent a vehicle? Modern industrial assembly lines? an entire national identity of mobility and consumerism? The most effective atmosphere altering process to date? In the final analysis we hardly understand ourselves at all.

I say all that to say this. The problem that confronts the individual is the same that confronts the entire collective of individuals throughout time; that of the iterated game. Briefly, a person must first understand what they need and want, then they need to learn to balance those competing desires in such a way that they don't break or kill themselves trying to achieve them, after which they must determine how to do so such that they can continue to do so across time (if you kill all the buffalo today what will you eat next month?), and finally how do you do so in such a way that the other people in the world can also do the same (at least without hating you enough to impede or murder you). It's the most complicated problem I can imagine and the price for failure lies somewhere between pain and extinction every time.

On the whole our solution to the problem seems to have been inventing culture. That is, a collection of agreed upon behavior and communication patterns that let us know what is and is not acceptable. Culture is the means by which you can communicate with others, understand how to be useful to them and yourself, and to focus our perspectives into manageable scopes. Luckily enough, culture also gives us a receptacle to house the various useful ideas individuals came up with along the way. In culture one person's thought can be transmitted and passed down long after their death in the form of tools, stories, structures, etc., and thus the entire process takes on a life of its own. For while a culture/society is simply the total field of human actions made within it over time (that is it exists only so long as people continue to recreate it), it also has a lifespan measured in centuries or millennia and its origins and machinations are often well beyond any single person's understanding. Given any individual may make a change in their culture through action, they themselves are shaped heavily by the very culture they seek to change and the momentum of countless actions that compose it. Here, as in few other places, the blurred line between free will and determinism is stark.

In this, finally, I think we find the core of our problem. To make a rough pass at what I'm getting at, I believe that the reason the world as a whole has felt off is because, in many was, it no longer remembers its own purpose. Our society on the whole, while quite powerful, takes very little consideration of how people actually are (as opposed to how we model them to be. See the ever hilarious "Economic Man"). It is a handmade god that falls in love with its creations and chains its creators to its will. We cannot see this well, because we really only have access to our own immediate experience and the seeds of culture can stretch back to before recorded history. It takes a lot of work indeed to find the holes in the reasoning of the thing taught you everything you know. Culture is the very process that taught you how to desire, so how can you desire to desire differently?

I think an example here is useful. Toward the end of her prologue Hannah Arendt points out the growing issue of automation in our society. Generally hailed as one of humanity's greatest triumphs automation poses a serious existential threat to our societies. It is true that industrial automation, like robotics and electronic automation in the form of software, have largely eliminated the need to "labor" (only about 2% of the US population needs to practice agriculture for example, while for most of human history it was all but a handful), however this same miracle has arisen within a society that has reduced its entire populace to one large labor force. Put another way, the entire logic and ethical system upon which our society rests is one of economic transaction and laboring.

You can see this clearly in our current political debates. Any time the topic of a social safety net or an increase in minimum wage arises it quickly devolves into a moral punching match between empathy and justice. What's to stop people working entirely if we just hand them money? What would possibly motivate people if they didn't need to earn wages to succeed? The arguments are varied, but for the most part all root down into the same articulated understanding. A person's moral worth can be determined by their work ethic and success; and we measure those though financial wealth and hours spent (The Protestant Ethic performs a nice analysis of this if you're interested). Its actually a compelling position when treated fairly. As one of the functions of a society is to determine how resources are distributed given that 1) they are finite and 2) division of labor means laying full claim is difficult, it is actually a rather elegant solution. Every individual will take up a task, those tasks most needed will be most highly valued, those most useful will rise in prestige and the whole system will be mediated by an impartial symbol of value that can be freely exchanged by any individual so that everyone has access to resources in the varieties they want and in proportion to their contribution to the whole.

Obviously it didn't work out that way but it does sound nice on paper.

As a thought experiment then, I ask that you imagine a world in which automation has expanded to cover almost every tedious aspect of human work. Our trucks are self-driving, your basic medical checkups are made by devices in your home or that you wear, basic clerical tasks are performed by software, factories are almost entirely robotic. In short, imagine that we have conquered almost every task so monotonous or exhausting that we needed to pay someone to do it. Is that a triumph? People have dreamed about a world without drudgery since the moment we were capable of the thought, so are we not then moving into some kind of new golden age? Perhaps, but I don't think it will be quite so easy. For one thing we would need to develop, collectively adopt, and implement an entirely new way to distribute resources throughout the society or risk its total collapse.

Let's say that in the example above 30% of the population is no longer employed in the fields that can be easily automated. The usual argument made is that new jobs have always appeared and this would be no different. In the past this has proved true enough but with the introduction of more sophisticated robotics and software I'm unconvinced that that logic can still be relied upon. While a large proportion of automated fields may fall under "unskilled labor" much of it is in traditionally human-only fields. What do you do with the millions of office workers replaced by software? Or the medical workers replaced by diagnostic and predictive systems? Simultaneously, keep in mind that the progress of labor division has turned most every "job" into just a handful of discrete steps. By the very logic of our current social structure these individuals are no longer capable of fulfilling even their basic needs and their only recourse is then to either entirely retrain (often quite late in life) or to throw their hat into fields that are now radically more competitive.

By the laws of supply and demand that same competition will tend to drive wages down leading to even greater pressure on workers to make ends meet; and that's not even the end of things. With large segments of the population making nothing, and other segments making less than they had previously the great circulatory system of capitalism suddenly slows to a crawl as the pools of value that normally flowed through businesses begins to dry up and staying viable means finding places to cut costs (such as wages and employment). You can follow the logic from there. What makes this situation so difficult, though, is the degree to which our own value system has become tied to the equations of capitalism; a calculus that binds its own existence to the paradox of commodified labor in the free market. To alter course or to evolve the system now goes against deeply held beliefs on justice and prosperity that all but define our current political discourse. As Arendt so elegantly put it:

The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation into a laboring society. The fulfillment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.

What should have been lauded as one of the great triumphs of our species and the beginning of some new age of human expression instead hangs like the sword of Damocles above our entire social structure. Compounding this, its a discussion precluded from the wider political discourse through our own conditioning. This news comes with a silver lining, though, in that the obstacles in our path remain only so long as we keep them in good repair. While it may feel as though the culture at large is something outside of our control (and it may often be right to treat it as such) it is also only a particularly persistent collective dream that we are free to reshape at any time. That in no sense makes the change easy to enact, but it does put it squarely within the field of human will to achieve.

I will claim no special insight on the deeper nature of human efforts or our universal nature, but I do believe we find ourselves at an inflection point of sorts. My feeling of wrongness, I've come to think, is that feeling you get when in the middle of a game who's rules no longer make sense, even within its own context. Of watching a creature build a nest that even it could not happily live in. Whats worth remembering, as often as we can remind ourselves, is that we are active architects in our worlds and not simply its unhappy flotsam. When we act, or refrain from acting, we add momentum in one direction or another and given time that can lead to tremendous change. We are both products and creators of the world in which we live, if only we keep that truth planted firmly in our minds. In fact, I think that Hannah Arendt said it best in the closing words to her prologue. If we truly wish to live in a world that revolves around collective and individual human thriving we must simply "think what we are doing."