The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

  The future of creativity

  Before Blackmore and others realized the significance of memes in human evolution, all sorts of root causes had been suggested for what propelled a normal-looking lineage of apes into rapidly becoming a species that can explain and control the universe. Some proposed that it was the adaptation of walking upright, which freed the front limbs, with their opposable thumbs, to specialize in manipulation. Some proposed that climate change favoured adaptations that would make our ancestors more able to exploit diverse habitats. And, as I have mentioned, sexual selection is always a candidate for explaining rapid evolution. Then there is the ‘Machiavellian hypothesis’ that human intelligence evolved in order to predict the behaviour of others, and to fool them. There is also the hypothesis that human intelligence is an enhanced version of the apes’ aping adaptation – which, as I have argued, could not be true. Nevertheless, Blackmore’s ‘meme machine’ idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true. The reason it must be true is that, whatever had set off the evolution of any of those attributes, creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology dictate that no such memes are possible without creativity.

  Not only is creativity necessary for human meme replication, it is also sufficient. Deaf people and blind people and paralysed people are still able to acquire and create human ideas to a more or less full extent. Hence, neither upright walking nor fine motor control nor the ability to parse sounds into words nor any of those other adaptations, though they might have played a role historically in creating the conditions for human evolution, were functionally necessary to allow humans to become creative. Nor, therefore, are they philosophically significant in understanding what humans are today, namely people: creative, universal explainers.

  It was specifically creativity that made the difference between ape memes – expensive in terms of the time and effort required to replicate them, and inherently limited in the knowledge that they were capable of expressing – and human memes, which are efficiently transmitted and universal in their expressive power. The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity. We have no way of telling, at present, how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve in apes. But, once it began to, there would automatically have been evolutionary pressure for it to continue, and for other meme-facilitating adaptations to follow in its wake. This increase must have continued through all the static societies of prehistory.

  The horror of static societies, which I described in the previous chapter, can now be seen as a hideous practical joke that the universe played on the human species. Our creativity, which evolved in order to increase the amount of knowledge that we could use, and which would immediately have been capable of producing an endless stream of useful innovations as well, was from the outset prevented from doing so by the very knowledge – the memes – that that creativity preserved. The strivings of individuals to better themselves were, from the outset, perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their efforts to exactly the opposite end: to thwart all attempts at improvement; to keep sentient beings locked in a crude, suffering state for eternity. Only the Enlightenment, hundreds of thousands of years later, and after who knows how many false starts, may at last have made it practical to escape from that eternity into infinity.

  TERMINOLOGY

  Imitation Copying behaviour. This is different from human meme replication, which copies the knowledge that is causing the behaviour.

  MEANINGS OF ‘THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY’ ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER

  – The evolution of creativity.

  – The reassignment of creativity from its original function of preserving memes faithfully, to the function of creating new knowledge.

  SUMMARY

  On the face of it, creativity cannot have been useful during the evolution of humans, because knowledge was growing much too slowly for the more creative individuals to have had any selective advantage. This is a puzzle. A second puzzle is: how can complex memes even exist, given that brains have no mechanism to download them from other brains? Complex memes do not mandate specific bodily actions, but rules. We can see the actions, but not the rules, so how do we replicate them? We replicate them by creativity. That solves both problems, for replicating memes unchanged is the function for which creativity evolved. And that is why our species exists.

  17

  Unsustainable

  Easter Island in the South Pacific is famous mainly – let’s face it, only – for the large stone statues that were built there many centuries ago by the islanders. The purpose of the statues is unknown, but is thought to be connected with an ancestor-worshipping religion. The first settlers may have arrived on the island as early as the fifth century CE. They developed a complex Stone Age civilization, which suddenly collapsed over a millennium later. By some accounts there was starvation, war and perhaps cannibalism. The population fell to a small fraction of what it had been, and their culture was lost.

  The prevailing theory is that the Easter Islanders brought disaster upon themselves, in part by chopping down the forest which had originally covered most of the island. They eliminated the most useful species of tree altogether. This is not a wise thing to do if you rely on timber for shelter, or if fish form a large part of your diet and your boats and nets are made of wood. And there were knock-on effects such as soil erosion, precipitating the destruction of the environment on which the islanders had depended.

  Some archaeologists dispute this theory. For example, Terry Hunt has concluded that the islanders arrived only in the thirteenth century, and that their civilization continued to function throughout the deforestation (which he attributes to rats, not tree-felling) until it was destroyed by epidemics, caused by contact with Europeans. However, I do not want to discuss whether the prevailing theory is accurate, but only to use it as an example of a common fallacy – an argument by analogy about issues far less parochial.

  Easter Island is 2,000 kilometres from the nearest habitation, namely Pitcairn Island (where the Bounty’s crew took refuge after their famous mutiny). Both islands are far from anywhere, even by today’s standards. Nevertheless, in 1972 Jacob Bronowski made his way to Easter Island to film part of his magnificent television series The Ascent of Man. He and his film crew travelled by ship all the way from California, a round trip of some 14,000 kilometres. He was in poor health, and the crew had literally to carry him to the location for filming. But he persevered because those distinctive statues were the perfect setting for him to deliver the central message of his series – which is also a theme of this book – that our civilization is unique in history for its capacity to make progress. He wanted to celebrate its values and achievements, and to attribute the latter to the former, and to contrast our civilization with the alternative as epitomized by ancient Easter Island.

  The Ascent of Man had been commissioned by the naturalist David Attenborough, then controller of the British television channel BBC2. A quarter of a century later Attenborough – who had by then become the doyen of natural-history film-making – led another film crew to Easter Island, to film another television series, The State of the Planet. He too chose those grim-faced statues as a backdrop, for his closing scene. Alas, his message was almost exactly the opposite of Bronowski’s.

  The philosophical difference between these two great broadcasters – so alike in their infectious sense of wonder, their clarity of exposition, and their humanity – was immediately evident in their different attitudes towards those statues. Attenborough called them ‘astonishing stone sculptures . . . vivid evidence of the technological and artistic skills of the people who once lived here’. Now, I wonder whether Attenborough was really all that impressed by the islanders’ skills, which had been exceeded millennia earlier in other Stone Age societies. I expect he was being polite, for it is de rigueur in our culture to heap praise up
on any achievement of a primitive society. But Bronowski refused to conform to that convention. He remarked, ‘People often ask about Easter Island, How did men come here? They came here by accident: that is not in question. The question is, Why could they not get off?’ And why, he might have added, did others not follow to trade with them (there was a great deal of trade among Polynesians other than Easter Islanders), or to rob them, or to learn from them? Because they did not know how.

  As for the statues being ‘vivid evidence of . . . artistic skills’, Bronowski was having none of that either. To him they were vivid evidence of failure, not success:

  The critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition . . . These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge.

  The Ascent of Man (1973)

  The statues were all made alike because Easter Island was a static society. It never took that first step in the ascent of man – the beginning of infinity.

  Of the hundreds of statues on the island, built over the course of several centuries, fewer than half are at their intended destinations. The rest, including the largest, are in various stages of completion, with as many as 10 per cent already in transit on specially built roads. Again there are conflicting explanations, but, according to the prevailing theory, it is because there was a large increase in the rate of statue-building just before it stopped for ever. In other words, as disaster loomed, the islanders diverted ever more effort not into addressing the problem – for they did not know how to do that – but into making ever more and bigger (but very rarely better) monuments to their ancestors. And what were those roads made of? Trees.

  When Bronowski made his documentary, there were as yet no detailed theories of how the Easter Island civilization fell. But, unlike Attenborough, he was not interested in that, because his whole purpose in going to Easter Island was to point out the profound difference between our civilization and civilizations like the one that built those statues. We are not like them was his message. We have taken the step that they did not. Attenborough’s argument rests on the opposite claim: we are like them and are following headlong in their footsteps. And so he drew an extended analogy between the Easter Island civilization and ours, feature for feature, and danger for danger:

  A warning of what the future could hold can be seen on one of the remotest places on Earth . . . When the first Polynesian settlers landed here they found a miniature world that had ample resources to sustain them. They lived well . . .

  The State of the Planet (BBC TV, 2000)

  A miniature world: there, in three words, is Attenborough’s reason for travelling all the way to Easter Island and telling its story. He believed that it holds a warning for the world because Easter Island was itself a miniature world – a Spaceship Earth – that went wrong. It had ‘ample resources’ to sustain its population, just as the Earth has seemingly ample resources to sustain us. (Imagine how amazed Malthus would have been had he known that the Earth’s resources would still be called ‘ample’ by pessimists in the year 2000.) Its inhabitants ‘lived well’, just as we do. And yet they were doomed, just as we are doomed unless we change our ways. If we do not, here is ‘what the future could hold’:

  The old culture that had sustained them was abandoned and the statues toppled. What had been a rich, fertile world in miniature had become a barren desert.

  Again, Attenborough puts in a good word for the old culture: it ‘sustained’ the islanders (just as the ample resources did, until the islanders failed to use them sustainably). He uses the toppling of the statues to symbolize the fall of that culture, as if to warn of future disaster for ours, and he reiterates his world-in-miniature analogy between the society and technology of ancient Easter Island and that of our whole planet today.

  Thus Attenborough’s Easter Island is a variant of Spaceship Earth: humans are sustained jointly by the ‘rich, fertile’ biosphere and the cultural knowledge of a static society. In this context, ‘sustain’ is an interestingly ambiguous word. It can mean providing someone with what they need. But it can also mean preventing things from changing – which can be almost the opposite meaning, for the suppression of change is seldom what human beings need.

  The knowledge that currently sustains human life in Oxfordshire does so only in the first sense: it does not make us enact the same, traditional way of life in every generation. In fact it prevents us from doing so. For comparison: if your way of life merely makes you build a new, giant statue, you can continue to live afterwards exactly as you did before. That is sustainable. But if your way of life leads you to invent a more efficient method of farming, and to cure a disease that has been killing many children, that is unsustainable. The population grows because children who would have died survive; meanwhile, fewer of them are needed to work in the fields. And so there is no way to continue as before. You have to live the solution, and to set about solving the new problems that this creates. It is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain, with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had at its zenith, and at an enormously higher standard of living. Appropriately enough, this civilization has knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain.

  The Easter Islanders’ culture sustained them in both senses. This is the hallmark of a functioning static society. It provided them with a way of life; but it also inhibited change: it sustained their determination to enact and re-enact the same behaviours for generations. It sustained the values that placed forests – literally – beneath statues. And it sustained the shapes of those statues, and the pointless project of building ever more of them.

  Moreover, the portion of the culture that sustained them in the sense of providing for their needs was not especially impressive. Other Stone Age societies have managed to take fish from the sea and sow crops without wasting their efforts in endless monument-building. And, if the prevailing theory is true, the Easter Islanders started to starve before the fall of their civilization. In other words, even after it had stopped providing for them, it retained its fatal proficiency at sustaining a fixed pattern of behaviour. And so it remained effective at preventing them from addressing the problem by the only means that could possibly have been effective: creative thought and innovation. Attenborough regards the culture as having been very valuable and its fall as a tragedy. Bronowski’s view was closer to mine, which is that since the culture never improved, its survival for many centuries was a tragedy, like that of all static societies.

  Attenborough is not alone in drawing frightening lessons from the history of Easter Island. It has become a widely adduced version of the Spaceship Earth metaphor. But what exactly is the analogy behind the lesson? The idea that civilization depends on good forest management has little reach. But the broader interpretation, that survival depends on good resource management, has almost no content: any physical object can be deemed a ‘resource’. And, since problems are soluble, all disasters are caused by ‘poor resource management’. The ancient Roman ruler Julius Caesar was stabbed to death, so one could summarize his mistake as ‘imprudent iron management, resulting in an excessive build-up of iron in his body’. It is true that if he had succeeded in keeping iron away from his body he would not have died in the (exact) way he did, yet, as an explanation of how and why he died, that ludicrously misses the point. The interesting question is not what he was stabbed with, but how it came about that other politicians plotted to remove him viol
ently from office and that they succeeded. A Popperian analysis would focus on the fact that Caesar had taken vigorous steps to ensure that he could not be removed without violence. And then on the fact that his removal did not rectify, but actually entrenched, this progress-suppressing innovation. To understand such events and their wider significance, one has to understand the politics of the situation, the psychology, the philosophy, sometimes the theology. Not the cutlery. The Easter Islanders may or may not have suffered a forest-management fiasco. But, if they did, the explanation would not be about why they made mistakes – problems are inevitable – but why they failed to correct them.

  I have argued that the laws of nature cannot possibly impose any bound on progress: by the argument of Chapters 1 and 3, denying this is tantamount to invoking the supernatural. In other words, progress is sustainable, indefinitely. But only by people who engage in a particular kind of thinking and behaviour – the problem-solving and problem-creating kind characteristic of the Enlightenment. And that requires the optimism of a dynamic society.

  One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one’s own and others’. But the idea that our civilization has something to learn from the Easter Islanders’ alleged forestry failure is not derived from any structural resemblance between our situation and theirs. For they failed to make progress in practically every area. No one expects the Easter Islanders’ failures in, say, medicine to explain our difficulties in curing cancer, or their failure to understand the night sky to explain why a quantum theory of gravity is elusive to us. The Easter Islanders’ errors, both methodological and substantive, were simply too elementary to be relevant to us, and their imprudent forestry, if that is really what destroyed their civilization, would merely be typical of their lack of problem-solving ability across the board. We should do much better to study their many small successes than their entirely commonplace failures. If we could discover their rules of thumb (such as ‘stone mulching’ to help grow crops on poor soil), we might find valuable fragments of historical and ethnological knowledge, or perhaps even something of practical use. But one cannot draw general conclusions from rules of thumb. It would be astonishing if the details of a primitive, static society’s collapse had any relevance to hidden dangers that may be facing our open, dynamic and scientific society, let alone what we should do about them.