A New Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future

"Jonas Salk was the great immunologist who developed the first polio vaccine in 1955 . But later, in the 1970s, he came to believe deeply that we humans need to expand our time horizons if we’re going to deal with the problems of our age. He said that the great question for our civilisation over the next century is this: are we being good ancestors? That’s where the title of my book comes from. The focus of A New Reality , which he co-wrote with his son Jonathan (and which was published in an updated edition in 2018) is on the most profound shape of the modern social sciences: the S, or sigmoid curve. The whole book is just page after page of sigmoid curves. Salk’s point is a very simple but profound one, which is that almost everything in human and natural systems follows this curve, whether it’s the growth of cancer cells in your body, your children’s feet or the growth of a forest. All these things have an accelerating growth rate to start with, but then they hit an inflection point at which growth starts to slow down and then evens off and then maybe declines. Salk points out this is what happens to whole civilisations too. “We’re not just short-term marshmallow-snatchers; we are long-term acorn planters!” Salk argues that we need to understand where we are on the curve. He splits it into two parts, what he calls Epoch A, which is the lower, accelerating part, and Epoch B, which is the upper, decelerating part—the top of the S, as it were. He says that for the last few thousand years we’ve been in Epoch A: our population has been growing and we’ve been using more and more resources, but the earth has basically been able to absorb our impact. However, as we now approach ten billion people and the ecological impacts of our fossil-fuel economies become pervasive, the Earth can no longer sustain our civilisation as we have built it to date. We have to shift our focus from the individualism and short-term growth of Epoch A to the more collective values and long-range thinking appropriate for Epoch B. He would say, ‘yes, of course we need to find a vaccine and focus on confronting the immediate threat of the virus. But actually, if we hope to deal with the long-term crises we are going to face over the next century – whether from future pandemics or technological threats or ecological breakdown – we will to need to make a profound shift as a species towards forging a more cooperative society based on long-term thinking.’ He was interested in the idea of cultural evolution (what he called ‘metabiological evolution’) and recognised that the next stage in our evolution as a species would be towards developing new values and institutions that embody ideals such as long-term thinking, interdependence and balance, rather than growth. In fact, his son Jonathan made pretty much this point in a recent article about his father’s likely response to COVID-19. I think the value of thinking long is becoming apparent in several ways. First, it’s clear that those countries which have been dealing most effectively with the virus have been ones that have had long-term planning for pandemics in place. South Korea and Taiwan are good examples. By contrast you’ve got the United States, where in 2018 Trump dissolved the National Security Council’s pandemic response unit. So we know that there’s an obvious kind of long-term thinking that matters at times like this. Second, it’s becoming clearer that this is not the only crisis we’re going to face, and if we are going to tackle these future ones, from climate risks to technological risks, we need to be thinking long, beyond the ups and downs of the stock market, beyond the next quarterly report and the next election. We need to be thinking, planning and budgeting decades ahead, beyond our own lifetimes. Third, the current situation makes me think a lot about the nature of crises. Crises are opportunities for change. As Milton Friedman said, only a crisis – real or perceived – produces real change. I don’t agree with Friedman on most things, but he’s right about this. Remember, though, that at any moment of crisis you can go in a number of directions. Out of the depression of the 1930s , some countries moved in the direction of social democracy whereas others went towards fascism . We are at an analogous moment in history, and we need to ask, ‘are we going to move towards more authoritarianism, or is this a moment for grassroots organizing, mutual aid and democratic renewal?’ Similarly, ‘are we going to simply reproduce and bolster the existing economic system of growth-addicted market capitalism, or are we going to shift in a more transformative direction towards a regenerative economy based on some kind of Green New Deal?’ Something else Milton Friedman said was people’s response to a crisis depends on the ideas that are lying around. What I would like to see is that the ideas of long-term thinking are the ones that are picked up as we move beyond this crisis—ideas like citizen assemblies and legal rights for future generations, circular economies, all these things which are part of the emerging movement of time rebels committed to the interests and welfare of tomorrow’s generations. We have a chance to do that now."