The Laughter of Wolves
The Laughter of Wolves
As I write these words, lean gray wolves are pacing through a rain-soaked landscape in eastern Europe. Dim rumbling sounds in the far distance, like summer thunder that’s strayed into the wrong season, don’t bother them. Nor does it trouble them that the forest around them is dotted with the decaying ruins of buildings abandoned half a century ago. Something else doesn’t disturb them, either, but we’ll get to that. Keep the wolves in mind as we proceed.
It may seem like an improbable leap from wolves running through the forest to a flustered speech by one of the pampered darlings of the Western world’s corporate aristocracy, but there’s a connection. The pampered darling is Yuval Noah Harari, the chief intellectual of the Davos set these days. I hope I won’t be accused of setting up a straw man if I mention that he’s a gay vegan atheist who practices mindfulness meditation and writes the kind of big-picture history books that evoke adoring swoons from the corporate media and get eyerolls from real scholars. His most famous book is titled Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future; in it, he takes it for granted that even the stickiest wet dreams of today’s internet-addled tech bros must surely come to pass. Intellectual hubris? His picture should be next to the entry in your dictionary.
This is the guy who did a fine display of pearl-clutching in an interview a while back, insisting that if Donald Trump is reelected this year, that will be “the death blow to what remains of the global order.” It wasn’t simply the King in Orange who had Harari fainting on the couch in the best Victorian style, though that certainly played a role. The thing that seems to have shaken Harari’s world is that Trump and the people who support him don’t just disagree with the specific institutions and ideals that Harari’s friends at the World Economic Forum are pushing these days. They reject the entire concept of a planned global order.
Reading about Harari’s outburst, I found myself nodding and muttering, “He almost gets it.” For all the mockery I’ve directed at him, the man deserves credit for an intellectual leap that most people of his class seem incapable of making. This inability to grasp the rejection of global order is quite a recent phenomenon, all things considered. For that matter, the entire project of an international order planned and managed behind the scenes by an economic and political elite only dates back a little more than a century.
Previous efforts to impose some permanent structure on the seething chaos of human affairs mostly took the form of imperial conquest, on the one hand, or of treaties woven via careful compromises between major political and military powers, on the other. It took the gargantuan carnage of the First World War to convince a great many people in the wealthy classes that these two older options wouldn’t make the world safe for plutocracy. That led to the creation of paired nonprofits in Britain and the United States—the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations—and thence to similar organizations, of which the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum are perhaps the best known these days.
All of them follow the same basic template, bringing together top-level business executives and holders of hereditary wealth with politicians and bureaucrats to push events in accord with their shared interests. One consequence of this common heredity is that no matter what the problem is, the only solution these organizations can recognize is going further in the same direction they’ve been pushing all along. Global coordination by vast bureaucratic structures that erase the lines between government, corporate, and nonprofit sectors: that’s the one remedy they have to offer, and the mere fact that it hasn’t worked yet does nothing to slow them down.
The Club of Rome is a good example here. I noted several years ago in an essay here that The Limits to Growth, the one Club of Rome publication everybody’s heard of, was only the first of a long string of books, and the rest of these all pushed global coordination by vast bureaucracies as the solution to the problems delineated in the first book. What’s fascinating about this obsession is that the problems discussed in The Limits to Growth can’t be solved through global coordination by vast bureaucracies. They can’t actually be solved at all.
What The Limits to Growth showed is that if economic growth is pursued far enough, the costs of growth rise faster than the benefits and force the global economy to its knees. Global bureaucracies can no more change that than they can amend the law of gravity. In point of fact, as the costs of growth begin to bite, one of the few options that offers any hope for improving conditions is to cut back sharply on bureaucracies of all kinds, since bureaucracy consumes resources, energy, and other goods and services, and produces remarkably little in return.
A viable world on the far side of peak growth is thus not a world of global managers running vast bureaucratic systems. It’s less resource- and energy-intensive, and therefore a world where local, community-scale politics and economics replace the hugely expensive global systems that sprang up during the last extravagant blowoff of the age of unchecked growth. Yet you can read all those studies churned out by the Club of Rome and never see a word about this.
That the world of the future will inevitably have less room for global management is something that would-be global managers can’t even begin to conceive. Still, there’s another factor to take into account. If there’s one thing our would-be global managers have demonstrated to a fare-thee-well, it’s that global management—or at least the kind of global management they prefer, with themselves settled comfortably at the helm—is stunningly incompetent in practice.
Take a look at the global climate change situation if you want a good example. For decades now, doing something about climate change has been one of the central projects of the Davos set. All along we’ve had an ongoing stream of protests and conferences and loudly praised international agreements which were supposed to do something about the rate at which CO2 gets dumped into the atmosphere. None of it has had any measurable effect, as the graph below demonstrates. If this is the best that global management can do, the world is better off without their efforts.
There are plenty of other examples—the total failure of the economic sanctions that were supposed to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one I’ve discussed here already—but a broader view may be more useful. For a century now we’ve been told by the corporate press that global management by qualified experts will bring us a better world. For a century now, we’ve had no shortage of global management by qualified experts. Has it brought us a better world? Not a bit. Especially over the last fifty years, as the grip of those qualified experts has tightened on the levers of control, conditions for most people in the industrial world have gotten steadily worse, and so have the crises the global managers claimed they would solve.
It’s become quite popular in some circles to insist that the panoply of cascading failures set in motion by the Davos set and other groupings of our would-be lords and masters prove that the global managers we’re discussing are evil masterminds who deliberately intend to cause the dismal outcomes their pet policies have so reliably brought about. A somewhat less popular opinion, though arguably a more accurate one, holds that these same global managers belong to a decadent aristocracy so sheltered from the consequences of its own actions and so caught up in a world of vapid abstractions that it’s a marvel they haven’t caused even worse disasters. I’d like to suggest that another factor may explain a good deal more, however: the world we live in happens to be far too complex for global management to be a viable option.
This shouldn’t be surprising, all things considered. From the perspective of modern scientific materialism, after all, human intelligence is not some kind of nature-transcending superpower; it is simply the set of cognitive processes our ancestors evolved through Darwinian selection as they pursued the tasks of finding food and mates and avoiding predators down the long ages of our prehistoric past—important tasks, to be sure, but not especially intellectually demanding ones. From the perspective of any religion you care to name, in turn, humans are simply one class of created beings, irremediably finite and fallible. It’s only in the hubristic delusions typified by Harari’s book Homo Deus, which jumble misunderstood scientific and religious ideas together into a kind of crackpot anthropolatry, that these obvious realities get mislaid. The fact that our current caste of global managers have fallen into such stupidities goes a long way, I think, to explain the pervasive failures that result from their efforts to manage the world.
This is where the wolves mentioned earlier come loping back into sight. As some of my readers may have guessed, the landscape in which they spend their days is the Chernobyl exclusion zone on the northern border of Ukraine, abandoned half a century ago after the worst nuclear power plant disaster so far. Back when the zone was first evacuated, plenty of people speculated that it would become a radioactive desert, devoid of life or populated solely by a scattering of hideously crippled mutant life forms.
As we now know, that didn’t happen. Instead, the eastern European forest of an earlier time promptly reestablished itself in the exclusion zone, shouldering aside the crumbling remains of human presence and coping easily with the increased radiation flux. Deer found their way there promptly; horses abandoned by their owners shook off centuries of domestication, found mates, and gave rise to herds of wild horses. Where there are herbivores, there will be carnivores, and wolves slipped through the thickly inhabited countryside to either side of the zone, formed packs, and began keeping deer, horses, and other tasty prey animals from overpopulating the area.
Since they are at the top of the food chain, the wolves of Chernobyl necessarily absorb more radionuclides than anything else in the area. Under ordinary circumstances this would make them horribly vulnerable to cancer. Wildlife biologists researching the wolf packs, however, recently discovered something unnerving: the wolves have evolved robust resistance to cancer. Nobody understands the biochemistry yet, and it’s possible that nobody ever will. The fact remains that the wolves responded to a lethal danger by quietly evolving around it. In the process, they have achieved something that modern medicine has tried to do for more than a century, without any noticeable success.
Impressive though this is, it’s by no means unique. Nature does such things all the time. There are bacteria and algae that thrive in the water that circulates through nuclear reactors, basking in streams of high-intensity gamma rays that would fry you and me on the spot. There are living things that grow on the outside of spacecraft in orbit, handling the hard vacuum, lethal cold, and sizzling radiation of outer space with perfect aplomb. There are fungi that eat carcinogen-laced toxic waste and go back for second helpings. We can’t do any of these things. Nature chuckles at our incompetence and shows us how it’s done.
Then there’s Ascension Island. Most of two centuries ago, when HMS Beagle dropped anchor there, it was a barren little cinder of volcanic rock in the middle of the South Atlantic, so far from any other scrap of land and so devoid of water that the only living things on it were sea birds and a few species of fern whose spores were light enough to blow there across the ocean. On board the Beagle was the ship’s naturalist, a young man named Charles Darwin, then at the beginning of his career. While he’s most famous for his theory of natural selection, Darwin was interested in every other feature of biology and ecology; he’s the guy who figured out how tropical atolls form, and also the guy who first showed how earthworms create soil. He’s also the only person in history to invent a tropical forest, and he did it more or less by accident.
It’s a remarkable story. After his visit to Ascension Island, Darwin wrote to the British Admiralty and suggested that if somebody got around to planting trees on the island, the increased water vapor the trees would put in the air would change the local climate enough to make it suitable for a naval base. The Admiralty, with the sort of bluff blundering enthusiasm for which Britain has long been famous, took him up on it in the stupidest possible way: they ordered any ship that meant to pass Ascension Island to pick up some plants at the last harbor they left and plant them once they got there. British captains making port calls all over the globe obediently sent someone ashore to get a random assortment of plants, kept them more or less alive on shipboard thereafter, and then sent a second lieutenant and a longboat full of Jack Tars ashore to stick them in the ground as soon as they dropped anchor. So the island ended up with a dog’s breakfast of invasive species scooped up all anyhow from half the world’s coastal ecosystems.
In theory, that should have produced ecological chaos. In practice, in just a few decades, much of Ascension Island turned into a green tropic paradise with lush upland forests. Current theory insists that this is impossible, and that a stable tropical forest requires millions of years of slow adjustments on the part of the living things that make it up. Nobody told the plants about current theory, though, so they just went ahead and did it. Not only did Ascension Island get a tropical forest in an eyeblink of geological time, it got one of the more delicately balanced forms—a cloud forest, which thrives on water vapor condensing on the leaves of trees at high elevation. Oh, and Darwin was quite correct; the forest changed the local climate, yielding adequate water, and Ascension Island became an important naval base.
Scientists have tried repeatedly to plan and create ecosystems. Those attempts reliably fail, because ecosystems are too complex to plan rationally. It turns out that dumping random plants on a barren island and letting them sort things out for themselves works better. Scientists have also tried repeatedly to come up with some way to make people more resistant to cancer. Those attempts have also failed, and I suggest that the reason is that the biochemistry of cancer is too complex to understand rationally. Letting some wolves find their way into a radioactive exclusion zone, on the other hand, seems to work quite well.
I’d like to suggest that the same rule can be applied more generally, and that it explains the cascading failures of the managerial elite that claims just now in the teeth of the evidence to be able to lead the world to a better future. Those failures have happened, and are continuing to happen, because the world is too complex to understand rationally. It is so full of unpredictable variables and intricate feedback loops that no degree of human expertise, no set of abstract principles, no concept of world order can provide accurate predictions and allow the creation of a viable and productive order on a global scale.
That doesn’t mean that human beings can’t co-create a relatively stable, successful, thriving order in the world. It just means that this project is best pursued on a local level, relying on personal experience, folk wisdom, and close attention to local conditions. Those are exactly what the effete managerial aristocracy that thinks it runs the world can’t provide. Thus the more tightly the would-be global managers try to grip the world, the more of it slips through their fingers, because the world isn’t simpleminded enough for them to be able to control it.
This, in turn, is most of why Yuval Noah Harari is shrieking like an overwrought six-year-old. The world isn’t just refusing to follow the abstract models he brings to it, it’s refusing to follow any abstract models at all. Raised and educated to think of the world as a passive medium that privileged intellectuals can shape at will, he’s being confronted with the terrifying discovery that the world literally couldn’t care less about him, his credentials, or his ideas. Admittedly, he’s not handling it very well, but then few people can deal gracefully with the flat disconfirmation of the beliefs that provide them with whatever status and privilege they have in the world.
There’s more to his gyrations than that, of course, just as there’s more to the equally silly antics of other members of his privileged clique. Among the things the world contains, after all, is a great many ordinary people who are sick and tired of the pompous pretensions of the class for which Harari speaks. They know that when Harari talks about global order, what he means is that he wants them be ordered around by his rich friends according to some set of fashionable abstractions detached from local realities. They believe that letting ordinary people live their lives and pursue their own self-defined goals instead—like wolves in the Chernobyl exclusion zone or plants on Ascension Island—will have better results than leaving the world in the hands of an incompetent elite. What’s more, the evidence suggests that they’re right.
What gives all this teeth is that a great many of them are prepared to take matters into their own hands. As Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have said, wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is; revolutions happen when you figure it out for yourselves. Quite a few people in the United States have figured things out for themselves, and many of them seem quite willing to use Donald Trump’s monumental ego as a battering ram to knock some sense into a system that’s given them nothing but misery for too many decades. If that fails, in turn, they’ll simply reach for some other instrument, and it’s worth keeping in mind that their next choice may be even less welcome to Harari and his rich friends.
Meanwhile the wolves of the Chernobyl zone keep loping unharmed through a radioactive landscape. Those wolves are laughing at you, Mr. Harari, and at the whole delusion of elite omnipotence on which you’ve staked your career and your life. You may want to listen to them. Their laughter may be the only warning you get before they chase you down.
Source: Ecosophia
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