Political compass for the21st century

[Blazkovitz]

(05-09-2020, 06:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Technically, entropy is the exhaustion of energy and the deconcentration of resources. Progress is anything but natural. It may begin with the random luck of noticing some phenomenon that one can exploit once for good effect and keep exploiting it. But all in all, anything worth achieving requires some effort... and even maintaining things require effort -- energy and natural resources. Everything tends to rot or dissipate over time.

I say this as I contemplate the pessimistic view that Arnold Toynbee has for all civilizations over time. Entropy ultimately overpowers effort. Such may take a long time or a short time, depending on how well the civilization does things. Once entropy overpowers effort for an extended time it is over for that civilization. 

OK, entropy in our world with respect to the Sun consuming its hydrogen in fusion will take billion years, and all human life will be in deep trouble should it be around in a billion. The sun seems to radiate more heat each billion years, and it won't take much more solar radiation to make human life first unpleasant (a summer like that of Dallas about where Edmonton is), then difficult (summer in Riyadh), then impossible (about 55 C, or 131 F, when proteins start to gelatinize). At 70 C the moist greenhouse effect becomes a runaway situation and temperatures over a few million years become like those of Venus. But even that is far off, and we have another Ice Age on the way as Africa slams into Europe and drives the Mediterranean Basin high and dry like the Himalayas and Australia slams into southeast Asia or into Siberia and Alaska -- also raising a mountain range similar to the Himalayas. An ice age wouldn't be so great either; at the last glacial maximum there wasn't enough food to support the current canine population, let alone the human population. 

But even without those long-term horrors, Humanity has shown eminent capacity to much things up. Toynbee's final stage of life for a civilization is the Universal State, the political entity that absorbs a whole civilization and becomes hierarchical, corrupt, unimaginative, and repressive. Civilizations thrive when they are able to innovate their way out of trouble, give a stake in the system to the proles, do the unglamorous but necessary maintenance, constrain cults of personality, and recruit talented people to solve problems. The Universal State  -- think of the Roman Empire as the prime example for being best known  -- became increasingly hierarchical over time. It tried to solve all its problems with brute force, which proves as destructive as it is temporarily effective. Its slave system ensured that there would be no middle class capable of entrepreneurial or technological solutions to social distress. Government got bigger, but no more effective except at devouring and wasting resources. The government failed to promote human investment in education, so even the Latin language underwent changes that created linguistic chaos that mas literacy might have prevented. I can think of innovations that would have pushed classical civilization into something much like the modern world: steam power and a printing press. (A Greek tinkerer had invented a primitive steam engine around the time of Christ, and that tinkerer bragged that it would do the work of fifty slaves. "So what would we do with the slaves?"

Gutenberg's first printing press was in fact a grape press for pressing the juice out of wine -- the Romans had plenty of those. Anyone who can carve can make wooden type, and the Romans had plenty of wood. The Romans had a sophisticated mass society; they just did not know how to use it.The Venetians, Florentines, and Dutch had mass societies and allowed those to promote progress. That made all the difference in the world.

Think of the concept of extropy not as reverse entropy, but as a measure of complexity. Life always led to growing complexity, from bacteria to worms to fishes to mice to humans. But it requires some sort of equilibrium in terms of entropy, very low entropy, rigid order like a crystal is not conducive to life, and so is very high entropy, like the chaos of plasma. Progress is natural, but not guaranteed. The horseshoe crab has existed for 10^8 years and it did not develop consciousness or social organisation. Tapeworms lost complexity and became more primitive because they found an environment that is too comfortable inside mammals' bellies. This might be the end of developed interstellar society if they go post-scarcity and lose the sense of challenge in life, they do nothing but uselessly wallow in pleasures.