Although wildfire burn down the suburbs of Los Angeles as never before and are larger than ever, nobody is protesting against climate change anymore on the streets. No Fridays for Future demonstrations, no civic actions to protect the environment, and no climate activists who glue themselves to the streets. As if people have given up. Paralyzed by the events in the USA where the new president denies climate change altogether everyone is in a state of shock. But the problem is still there. And it is bigger than ever.

It is even worse than we used to think. Here is why. Discussions about global warming and climate change are often-dimensional: can we limit global warming to 1, 2 or 3 degrees? And what happens if the world warms by 1, 2 or 3 degrees? [1] Then politicians come together, agree on a certain number, and hope that things change for the better, while in reality nothing happens. As if all we need is to tweak a single number in one dimension. Global warming is just one aspect of a much bigger set of problems. The first problem is that small policy changes are not enough if the root problem is the economic system of modern society which demands constant growth. The second problem is the fundamental “limits to growth” problem described by Dennis Meadows et al 50 years ago [2].

Dennis Meadows et al have shown that exponential growth based on non-renewable resources in a finite world eventually leads to a collapse of the whole system. While resources decline, population and pollution go up, until they reach a peak and the system starts to collapse. The wildfires we haven seen in recent years in increasing frequency and intensity are only first signs of a changing climate. While the rise in global temperatures caused by burning of fossil fuel remains certainly one of the biggest problems, there are other problems caused by our non-sustainable lifestyle, including plastic pollution, overfishing, overpopulation, deforestation, ocean acidification, waste disposal, etc. The problem is unlimited growth is not possible in a limited system, and yet our economic system is based on it. The 50 year old predictions are unfortunately still accurate [3]. They say on the business as usual path that we are on resources will plunge, pollution will increase and eventually civilization as we know it will collapse. You can experiment with the world3 model here.

How close are we to a total collapse of human civilization? Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens argue it is not far ahead. They predict everything can and will collapse soon, simply because infinite growth is not possible in a finite world where resources are limited. Soon means in the next one or two decades, but certainly in this century. Their book “Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times” [4] mentions two models that predict and describe the collapse of civilization: the classic World3 model from “The Limits to Growth” and the “HANDY” model which describes human and nature dynamics by simple Lotka-Volterra equations which are so common in ecology. Both models are already older but still relevant. Somehow people have forgotten what they predict if we do business as usual. Climate change is only a part of it.

I believe the 2nd Trump government is a sign that the collapse of civilization and the subsequent looting have already started. The 43th U.S. president George W. Bush admitted the country is addicted to oil. The 45th & 47th U.S. president is a sympton of a society addicted to fossil fuels which has reached peak oil and started to realize that resources are depleted but is unwilling or unable to change and has severe withdrawal symptoms. The models predict that it will go downhill from here until civilization collapses- – which has happened before on a smaller scale [5].

Where did it all start? Now that we are reaching “limits to growth” worldwide some of us are wondering where the imperative for growth which is so destructive and devastating for nature comes from. Stock markets, corporations and their relentless desire for constant growth have their roots in European colonialism and imperalism. Joint-stock companies like the East India Company, the Virginia Company, the British South Africa Company or the South Sea Company helped to build the British empire as Philip J. Stern describes in his book [6].

This joint-stock venture colonialism laid the foundation for modern corporations and stock markets. The British East India Company, French Mississippi Company, Dutch East India Company, and German Brandenburg African Company were the first European stock corporations. Investment in joint-stock companies allowed investors including the royal family itself to gain large profits at high risks, similar to investors in whaling ventures which shared risks and profits. Modern venture capital was born, and venture colonialism turned over time into venture capitalism [7].

In this sense colonialism enabled imperialism and led to capitalism. Capitalism won against communism, because communism robs personal motivation and stifles innovation, but as we begin to see now, it has drawbacks too. Unchecked capitalism will apparently lead to the collapse of civilization and to a total demise of Earth’s ecosystem – the only habitable place for humans we know.

[1] The Uninhabitable Earth – Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells, Crown Publishing Group, 2019

[2] Limits to Growth, Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Potomac Associates – Universe Books, 1972

[3] Limits and Beyond: 50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what’s next? Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alvarez Pereira, Exapt Press, 2022

[4] How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, Polity Books, 2020

[5] Goliath’s Curse – The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Luke Kemp, Knopf Publishing Group, 2025

[6] Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism, Philip J. Stern, Harvard University Press, 2023

[7] VC: An American History, Tom Nicholas, Harvard University Press, 2019

Unsplash photos: vehicle escaping wildfire by Marcus Kauffman and road to wildfire smoke plume by Malachi Brooks

Last year we lost sadly Daniel Dennett (1942 – 2024), the influential American philosopher who wrote so many fascinating books. The library finally has notified me that Daniel Dennett’s last book and autobiography “I’ve been thinking” is ready to borrow. So I went to the library and got it. As expected it is an interesting book. He writes about his time in Oxford and his mentor Gilbert Ryle, his approach to philosophy and his little life hacks. His books are popular because he has done ordinary-language philosophy like his adviser Ryle, as he writes in his chapter about his time in Oxford.

Despite his hands-on approach he always dared to tackle the big questions. Dennett’s law of philosophy for me is that for every big, fundamental question in philosophy there is at least one Daniel Dennett book:

• Consciousnes Explained (1991) about consciousness
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) about evolution
• Freedom Evolves (2003) about free will
• Breaking the spell (2006) about religion

I have discussed all four questions with friends fron the FRIAM group in Santa Fe, New Mexico: consciousness, evolution, free will and religion. After a lot of discussions I have the impression that the solutions to the biggest questions can be found in the most ordinary things hiding in plain sight:

• For subjective consciousness humans have built tools to solve the “what it is like to be” question of subjective consciousness. The tools are simply the cinemas and movie theaters which show the stuff that Hollywood produces. Recently the GoPro cameras which show what it is like to be a hero fulfill a similar purpose
• Regarding the spell of religion we have built tools too. Churches, mosques, synagogues and temples are places where the magic of religion is used to form groups out of loosely coupled individuals. And the magic is nothing else but gene expression, as I tried to explain in the book from 5 years ago
• For the question of free will there is a tool which makes it possible too: ordinary language which enables “to be or not to be” thinking, and ordinary things such as notes and calendars help us to remember what we want to do, thereby guiding our decision making

Daniel Dennett argues in his book “Freedom Evolves” [4] that we have the free will that matters: the free will to make decisions without duress. He uses free here in the common-sense of free of being forced to do something: we have free will when no outer force compels our actions.

Why we have this free will at all is an in interesting, difficult question. On the lowest molecular and cellular level actions and decisions are deterministic [1], which could lead to the conclusion that free will is an illusion [2]. And yet most of us would agree with Kevin Mitchell that “we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose” [3]. So when does this deterministic behavior turn into unpredictable, indeterministic behavior? The basic question in every moment for a living being is: where does it want to go? What should it do next?

There is no easy answer to this complex question. How we decide what to do depends on a number of factors. Our decisions and choices are influenced by internal and external factors and by the wiring of neural circuits in our heads. Internal factors include the chemistry of the brain and the current mood. The large number of possible combinations of internal and external factors that influence our decisions leads to a combinatorial explosion of possible actions which offers room for the “free will” of many different personalities and distinct characters. The free will of a living being consists in the possibility to choose a specific action from a range of different options. The choice reflects the will – what the living being wants to do at that moment. A living being will primarily make decisions that correspond to its own intentions and will lead in the current situation to the best results based on personal experience. Even if we have the free will to make decisions without duress we can not change the wiring in our heads immediately (which reflects our character and personality, our likes and dislikes, and our general preferences). We can try to change our habits, and the habits in turn are able to change the wiring. We can also try to learn new things which change our perspective and influence our decisions. So it is fair to say that the situation is complicated.

Maybe it is more helpful to approach the problem from the other side and ask when are we free of external influences and how can we avoid acting under duress? Free will means people could have done otherwise and could have acted differently – if they would have made different decisions in the same circumstances. It is primarily language and consciousness that enable us to act different. Our language gives us the freedom of choice to act in one way or another, because it allows us to think about different options and outcomes, and it allows us to realize that others are trying to influence us. Daniel explains that imagining and reflecting on the outcomes of possible actions are the key here. In his autobiography “I’ve been thinking” he says [5]

Free will […] is an achievement, not a metphysical feature, of normal human beings who have learned how to control their many degrees of freedom – and to keep others from remotely controlling them – be developing such habits of self-stimulation as imagining and reflecting on the outcomes of possible actions.

Daniel describes free will as an achievement. Free will is indeed a valuable asset, because if it is manipulated then people can be influenced to do what others want: join a group, vote for a party, or buy a product. On a larger scale this manipulation is invaluable for religious groups, political parties and economic companies. Free will is the treasure island that everybody wants to own. Free will is the treasure that everybody wants to take away. Religious groups want to manipulate our free will to do whatever they preach. Parties want to manipulate our free will to vote for them. Companies want to manipulate our free will to buy their products.

There is in fact a whole 100 year old industry which has evolved to manipulate our free will: since Edward Bernays wrote his book about propaganda and PR in 1928, the emerging PR/advertising/marketing industry tries to influence our decisions in order to do what the advertisers want: follow their movements, join their groups, vote for their parties, buy their products, etc. This is similar to the hard problem of consciousness. There is a whole 100 year industry which has evolved to solve the hard problem of consciousness: the film industry and all forms of show business which earn money by showing us what it is like to be someone.

It turned out that the solution to the biggest questions in philosophy can not only be found in the most ordinary things, the big problems of philosophy have led to giant industries over the last century. Show business grants us a glimpse what it is like to be someone else (whether Indiana Jones hero or Han Solo rebel) and the advertising industry constantly tries to take away our free will. The best argument that we have free will is the existence of a whole industry that tries to influence it, isn’t it?

[1] Robert Sapolsky, “Determined”, Penguin Press, 2023
[2] Sam Harris, Free Will, Simon & Schuster, 2012
[3] Kevin J. Michell, “Free Agents: How Evolution gave us Free Will”, Princeton University Press, 2023
[4] Daniel C. Dennett, “Freedom Evolves”, Viking Books, 2003
[5] Daniel C. Dennett, “I’ve been thinking”, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2023

( The Unsplash photo of a trail is from user Erin O’Brien, and the Unsplash photo of a pile of gold is from user Zlatáky )

Daniel Goleman starts his book “emotional intelligence” [1] with the observation that many emotions are in fact adaptations to challenging situations where instant plans are required to act in order to protect the interests of the individual.

“All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us”
~ Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

Most emotions can be seen as adaptations to the adaptive challenges of the past. As Turner & Machalek say “any evolved features of the human brain/mind that contribute to the production of behavior, including social behavior, are the product of previous, archaic environments in which hominin ancestors lived. Accordingly, all such evolved adaptations represent solutions to ‘yesterday’s adaptive challenges.'” [7].

We have discussed earlier that bad feelings have an evolutionary purpose. There are “good reaons for bad feelings”, as the book from Randolph Nesse suggests [2]. For example the purpose of disgust is to tell us that we should avoid something because it might make us ill, the purpose of fear is to tell us that we should avoid something because it is dangerous, the purpose of pain is to tell us that we need to protect our body because it has been damaged and the purpose of depression is to tell us that we should stop doing what we do and try something different.

Disgust helps to get rid of potential poisonous food while suprise makes it easier to figure out what exactly is going on: “the lifting of the eyebrows in surprise allows the taking in of a larger visual sweep and also permits more light to strike the retina” [1]. Love facilitates cooperation and obviously increases reproductive success, while outrage helps to reveal defectors and anger prepares for vigorous action to prevent damage by offenses. Interestingly very similar adaptations can be found in cultural evolution, as Robert Boyd noticed [3].

Just like disgust in individual actors, food rules help to select the right food among the countless varieties of food. This helps to avoid food poisioning. Well known examples for such food rules are for example rules for kosher food or halal food that define what is allowed to eat and what is not. Pork is for instance neither kosher nor halal. Pigs ate everything including filth which could lead to parasitic infections. Therefore Pork was probably considered as unclean in ancient civilizations.

The prohibition of alcohol in the United States was led by pietistic Protestants and can be considered as a food rule in the Christian world. Alcoholic drinks are indeed toxic to a certain degree. Therefore the prohibition can be seen as a rule to avoid alcohol poisioning – which can indeed be deadly.

In general we can consider this kind of rules as a convergent adaptation to an environment which contains toxic substances. In biological and cultural evolution two different systems developed rules to avoid poisioning by bad and infected food. For outrage and pillory rules it is similar: both can be considered as an adaptation against defectors and defection. Two different systems which develop similar mechanisms.

These examples of convergent adaptations are remarkable because they happen in different evolutionary systems: one in the system of biological evolution which is based on the genetic code, and one in the system of cultural evolution which is based on culture and language. We know of course convergent traits can be observed in the same evolutionary system. In biological evolution the streamlined bodies and fins of dolphins and sharks evolved separately, but they are both adaptations for swimming in their aquatic environment and are considered as convergent traits in the same evolutionary system.

Apparently similar adaptations can happen in different evolutionary systems too, not only in biological evolution, but also in cultural evolution. Boyd and Richerson define culture as “information that people acquire from others by teaching, imitation, and other forms of social learning” [4]. They see social learning as an adaptation of a cultural group to its environment where people acquire skills, beliefs and values which in turn affect behavior.

Robert Boyd argues in his book “A different kind of animal” [3] that cultural evolution helped in the accumulation of locally adaptive knowledge, and that we are successful as a species because we have access to a huge amount of culturally transmitted knowledge including many adaptive rules that helped us to survive. He gives the concrete example of a Fiji island where pregnant women are traditionally not allowed to eat large predatory fish which have indeed often higher levels of toxic substances that can cause poisoning. Boyd writes “the evolution of cultural adaptation was an essential ingredient in both our ecologigcal success and our ability to cooperate” [3].

As a result of cultural adaptation the group follows a shared set of common rules how to act which is passed on to the next generation by social learning. More important than food rules that determine what to eat are rules about how to cooperate, or as Charles Stanish says, how to “co-operate” [5] in “coordinated operations”. These cooperation rules help to reduce conflicts inside the group, and they are the foundation of religious groups too. The ability to cooperate over generations is the secret of our success, as Joseph Henrich says [6].

Even if a group is well adapted to its environment, has a cohesive form and passes its rules orally to the next generation, it is not necessarily permanent. Stateless societies made of tribes and family clans are like lakes of water made of droplets. They can combine to larger groups, change their form and shape, and they can dissolve again. Only if they obtain a shell of written rules they become more durable, like a drop of water which becomes a hard sphere. Durability requires a written code or codex which need to be taught frequently. Once stateless societies have developed a writing system and start to practice high-frequency rituals which can help to standardize a body of beliefs and practices in a larger population, they can pass the threshold to higher forms of complexity. Harvey Whitehouse calls this “doctrinal” mode [8]. If the high-frequency rituals involve the teaching of moral rules, a new kind of entity can emerge: a religious entity which can be seen as a life-form. These archaic life-forms are a first step towards states and institutions.

References:

[1] Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Bantam Books, 1995
[2] Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings – Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, Penguin, 2020
[3] Robert Boyd, A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species, Princeton University Press, 2017
[4] Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, Oxford University Press, 2005
[5] Charles Stanish, The Evolution of Human Co-operation. Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies, Cambridge Universitry Press, 2017
[6] Joeseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Princeton University Press, 2016
[7] Jonathan Turner and Richard Machalek, The New Evolutionary Sociology: Recent and Revitalized Theoretical Approaches, Routledge, 2018
[8] Harvey Whitehouse, The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity, Oxford University Press, 2021

Images:

• Vegetable image is from Unsplash user Dan Gold
• Dolphin image is from Unsplash user Yannick Menard

During the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Europe the Christian church split into two slightly different branches, the old Catholic church and the new Protestant one. This division was accompanied for decades by wars and bloodshed. Originally all of this – the violent conflict and the foundation of a new church – was unintended by Martin Luther, as Brad S. Gregory argues in his book “Rebel in the Ranks” (2018), but it was nevertheless a consequence of his work.

Protestantism is based on a new understanding of the same old holy text. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli created 500 years ago a new interpretation, not a new scripture. For Protestants the path to eternal salvation is different. They argue that the script alone matters (“Sola scriptura“). Protestants believe that individuals can be saved only by personal faith in Jesus (“Sola fide“) and the grace of God (“Sola gratia“). They dismiss the traditions of pilgrimages, the sale of indulgences to obtain forgiveness, worship of saints and prayers addressed to saints (“Solus Christus“).

The Catholic church holds on to established traditions which is supported by verses like 1. Corinthians 11:1-2, while the Protestant church abandons them and emphasize verses like 1. Corinthians 4:6. Catholics interpret verses like 1. Corinthians 3:13 as an indication for the existence of a purgatory while Protestants reject such an interpretation. The Catholic church uses Matthew 16:18 to argue that the Pope has ultimate authority while the Protestant church rejects it.

Thus both church branches use the same holy text, but a different interpretation of certain key parts. It is the interpretation that shapes significantly our worldview and determines the form of the religious organization. These differences can be considered as epigenetic variations in the expression of the same genetic code (in biology epigenetics is the study of heritable phenotype changes that do not involve alterations in the genetic code or DNA sequence). A small number of different interpretations can have a large impact.

References

h/t to Ash Jogalekar for the Brad S. Gregory book references

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History, Penguin Books, 2005
• Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Belknap Press, 2015
• Brad S. Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World, HarperOne, 2018
• Richard Rex, The Making of Martin Luther, Princeton University Press, 2019

Oracles were sacred places to the ancient Greeks. Examples are the oracles at Dodona and Delphi. An oracle was a place of communication where divine knowledge was magically transferred to humans. The process is known as divination. Why were oracles used in some cultures, like ancient Greece and ancient China, but not in others? First of all they are ancient. In ancient China oracle bones were alread used 3000 years ago in the Shang Dynasty. The characters carved on animal bones which were used for divination are the oldest known form of Chinese writing. The Oracle of Delphi is 3400 years old. Therefore they must have a fundamental purpose.

One theory how the oracle at Delphi worked is that the priestess spoke more or less nonsense in a feverish state caused by toxic vapors and hallucinogenic gases rising from a chasm in the rocks. This legend goes back to the Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch. If true, this would add an element of randomness which can also be found in the Chinese method of divination.

Anthropologist Pascal Boyer has examined divination and has found that a typical feature of divination is “ostensive detachment”, which is “a demonstration that the diviners are not the authors of the statements they utter” (Boyer, 2020). The oracle of Delphi is no exception. As a National Geopgrahic article about Delphi says “people could only pose questions to the Pythia, the priestess, on the seventh day of each month [..] Pythia would go to the inner sanctum of the temple, the adytum. She would sit on a tripod, and Apollo would speak through her. Priests would stand near her and interpret her answers from the god.”

The last part is important: the anwser comes from god (i.e. in a sociological sense from the group) but it is also an interpretation of the priests. Interpretation which gives guidance in situations is a form of cultural gene expression as we have discussed earlier. The priests were able to make useful interpretations because temples were centers of knowledge where the knowledge of the time was collected in form of scripts and scrolls, or simply in form of recollected knowledge the priests had assembled over time. They got many visitors from all parts of the country and thus received “divine” knowledge from the whole collective group, which they could use in the interpretation process.

I think divination in oracles was therefore a kind of “on demand” gene expression to guide the behavior in challenging situations, as opposed to normal gene expression in religious assemblies at regular intervals in churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. If a church or shabbath service is a gene expression, then an oracle reply is an “on demand” gene expression. Because there was no holy script in very ancient times which was readable for the general population, and no regular holy day in the week where priests would read the holy scripts in order to tell the people what to do, people needed a place where they could ask what to do in challenging times. They consulted the oracle to get guidance in difficult situations, when they needed information how and when to seed crops, what to do in case of family problems, how the weather will be, how to fight battles, if a war should be declared, or what the fate of the ruling family will be, and so on. In this sense oracles predated churches, synagogues, mosques and our mighty medieval cathredrals.

References

Pascal Boyer, “Why divination? Evolved psychology and strategic interaction in the production of truth”, in Current Anthropology, vol 61, no 1, 2020, p. 100-123

Hugo Mercier, Pascal Boyer, “Truth-making institutions: From divination, oaths, and ordeals to judicial torture and trial by jury”, Evolution and Human Behavior, 42(3) (2020) 259-267.

National Geographic:

Once sacred, the Oracle at Delphi was lost for a millennium. See how it was found.
Delphic Oracle’s Lips May Have Been Loosened by Gas Vapors

Images:

Image of the scroll from Taylor Wilcox at Unslpash
Image of the temple from christian hardi on Pixabay

A recent discussion at the FRIAM list with Nicholas S. Thompson and others made me think about the strange phenomenon of consciousness again, the favorite topics of all retired professors (including none less than the discoverer of the DNA, Francis Crick). It is real, and yet it is not real. It is an existential insight, and yet it causes ultimate confusion. The biggest insight into the own existence seems to be linked to the largest confusion. Is the self a thought, an idea or a person? Can a thought be a person? Can my own thought be me? If we can understand our self, does it mean the fish is equal to the net that it catches (Ryle, 1949) ?

Gilbert Ryle, Daniel Dennett (1991) and Jay Garfield (2022) have argued that we do not have a self, at least no self in the sense of an actor in a Cartesian theater. And yet the self is the one subject which we recognize during moments of self-awareness and self-consciousness. How can we experience something which is not real? Consciousness of the own self is not only a fundamental insight, it is also a real experience. It is like an insight (I exist!) in confusion (who am I?) and belief (I think therefore I am!) in doubt (Is this me?).

Consciousness is one of the problems that perplexes people. It is not the only one, as Searle (1984) noticed, but it is a certainly an insight which causes perplexity the more we think about it. It causes perplexity like the magician which draws a rabbit out of his hat. We experience something real but know it can not be real. Do we exist or not? Sartre (1943) says yes, but we have to construct ourselves. Daniel Dennett thinks the self can at best be compared to a rainbow. He recently posted on Twitter a link to a nice article from Keith Frankish : perceiving a rainbow is a real experience of a colored arc, but also an illusion because there is of course no real physical arc at the place where we see it.

Maybe the illusion of the self works indeed in the same way? As whole persons who have bodies and brains we are real, just as raindrops in the sky are real. But when the billions of neurons start to sparkle in the light of conscious thoughts, the experience of a self emerges for a short time like a rainbow which emerges shortly from a million raindrops that bend the light towards the observer.

The paradox thing is that the confusing insight of self-awareness where we perceive an own self (although a thinking self does not exist) can lead ultimately to the construction of the self in form of a personality. I believe Sartre and Garfield are right when they say that we are able to construct ourselves. If we consider a person from a 3rd person point of view, then the personality of a person certainly determines its behavior. Everyone has a self in form of a character or personality. Even if it is illusionary or an unreachable ideal to be a certain type of person, such a type can be approximated through constant training and life-long learning. Our personalities can be considered as embedded abstract person types that we acquire and approximate in the course of time. In this sense we can say we have a self that guides our actions. And this abstract type is independent from us, since it could also be implemented in a sophisticated robot, android or AI in the future.

References

– Francis Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Scribner, 1994
– Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self, Princeton University Press, 2022
– Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Co., 1991
– György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out, Oxford University Press, 2019
– Gilbert Ryle, The concept of mind, University Of Chicago Press, 1949
– Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Routledge, 1943
– John Searle, Minds, Brain and Science, Harvard University Press, 1984

Photo by Guillermo Casales on Unsplash

Anger can be destructive. In modern life and at work getting angry is normally avoided, for good reasons. It can be destructive and corrosive for social groups. Positive emotions like love are cherished, negative ones like anger are frowned upon. Yet both are rooted in our biological nature.

John Tooby and his wife Leda Cosmides who are known for their work in pioneering the field of evolutionary psychology [1] have argued that anger can have benefits too: anger in general has for selfish individuals like us the benefit of helping to remove obstacles that reduce the ability to reach our goals and therefore our fitness [2]. In a social context – and usually we are always in some kind of social group – it has the benefit to enhance our bargaining power. By showing our strength and threatening to inflict costs or withholding benefits anger allows cost effective bargaining for better treatment by our adversaries. Tooby and Cosmides call this the recalibrational theory of anger [3].

Anger is often triggered by demeaning offenses against oneself which happen behind our back, by secret intrigues that violate our status in the social hierarchy. Clearly mechanisms to eliminate socially demeaning offenses increase the fitness of social animals. By raising our voice anger draws the attention of the group to the adversary and helps to uncover secret intrigues. By showing our status or strength to others it reminds others of fair behavior. By making threats anger helps to ward off demeaning offenses against ourselves. It helps to bring unfair social behavior to light, just as moral outrage helps to uncover defection.

Thus as bad as bad feelings and negative emotions might be, bad feelings can be good for us too: fear helps to avoid dangers, disgust helps to expell dangerous substances, pain tells us to avoid movement in order to prevent further damage. And anger helps to reduce or eliminate socially demeaning offenses. Emotions have a purpose, and their purpose is to fullfill the primary directive of our genes. For biological organisms, animals and royal families the primary directive means “survive! and reproduce!”. Emotions are the control mechnanism used by the genes to control their survival vehicles.

Myisha Cherry even argues (Cherry, 2021) that anger does not deserve its bad reputation at all because it can help to reduce (racial) injustice, which would be a good thing. She says anti-racist anger could help to reduce racism. I am not sure if I agree, but the mechanism which triggers anger here is the same: a demeaning offense.

References

[1] Jerome H. Barkow, Ledea Cosmides, John Tooby (Eds.),
The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture
1992, Oxford University Press

[2] John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, Groups in Mind: The Coalitional
Roots of War and Morality (2010). Chapter 8 in “Human Morality and Sociality:
Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives” edited by Henrik Høgh-Olesen,
Palgrave MacMillan, 2010

[3] Aaron Sell, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, Formidability and the logic of human anger,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) August 2009.

[4] Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle, Oxford University Press, 2021

( Unsplash image of two angry bisons from Uriel Soberanes )

One of the most pressing political issue of our time is the rise of authoritarian populism and democratic backsliding in democratic societies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Authoritarian rulers, strongmen and self-proclaimed saviors destroy democracies (Ben-Ghiat, 2020) while populism is on the rise (Müller, 2016). Sarah Kendzior argued it can also happened in a democratic country like the USA (Kendzior, 2020). This is concerning because historically democracies have a tendency not to go to war with one another. More authoritarian systems means war becomes more likely.

On the other hand we see attempts in Eastern Europe of the people to overthrow their authoritarian goverments who fake elections and enrich themselves, especially in Ukraine and Belarus (Wilson, 2021). A political system can apparently develop in both directions: from democratic to authoritarian, as we witness in democratic backsliding, or from authoritarian to democratic. David Waldner and Ellen Lust (2018) argue that “despite a rich and diverse literature, we lack readily available theories to explain backsliding”.

So how do democracies backslide into authoritarian regimes? Can we model it? Robinson and Acemoglu argue in their book “Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy” (2012) that different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and obtain resources. This aspect alone results in interesting dynamics:

In an (aspiring) autocracy demagogues, corrupt oligarchs and wannabe autocrats who care only about their clan, tribe or family and who are involved in shady or corrupt business deals have clearly an incentive to weaken political institutions, to restrict freedom of speech and to manipulate elections to remain in power, because they have to fear independent courts, investigative journalism and free elections. If they stop doing it, they risk changes that might lead to an early end of their regime. Once an autocracy has been firmly established, the autocrat can no longer voted out of office. Elections can not be lost for the incumbent anymore. People living in it have therefore a strong incentive to avoid cricizing the autocratic ruler and his family (or in totalitarian systems his party) if they do not want to be imprisoned or killed.

Democrats in a democracy have an incentive to strengthen institutions to remain in power because independent courts, freedom of speech and free elections enable them to obtain power in democratic elections in the first place. Stronger political institutions in turn lead to less power for those who are not democrats. Elections create an incentive for politicians to act in favor of the public if they want to be reelected. People in a democracy have as democratic citizens an incentive to raise their voice to criticize the government. Criminals and conmen have an incentive to remain silent to avoid persecution.

Therefore autocracy and democracy are like two fix points. These fix points are the stable states to which the system returns to after any pertubation. If a country is democratic, i.e. conducts fair elections, protects basic freedoms and holds elected leaders accountable, then it will remain democratic, even if it is disturbed slightly by unrests and protests. If a country is authoritarian, i.e. has fradulent or no elections, ignores basic freedoms and does not hold elected leaders accountable, then it will remain authoritarian, even if there are unrests. If we use a kind of “democracy score” from 0 to 1 to measure fair elections, public checks and accountability (similar to Hyde, 2020), the system has two fix points at 0 and 1.

The Model

In evolutionary game theory which has been known for more than 40 years (John Maynard Smith, 1982) two fix points can be found in the stag-hunt game or the coordination game, and we can try to use the well-known replicator equations for these games to model the transition between an autocracy and a democracy. Normally the system returns to a stable democracy, but if the system is pertubed and a certain tipping point is crossed, then the system moves inevitably towards an autocracy (and vice versa). For a symmetric coordination game or the stag hunt game the mixed Nash equilibrium is in the middle. Both have similar dynamics – two fixed points, and one instable equilibrium between. As Brian Skyrms (2012) as argued, these kind of games can be applied to model cooperation and the evolution of social structure.

If the reward for not deviating from the majority increases dramatically (or alternatively the punishment for a strategy that deviates from the majority), then the equilibrium shifts accordingly. The idea is that we can model this democratic erosion by shifting the instable fixpoint in a coordination game model, which represents the equilibrium between those who cooperate to support autocracy and those who support democracy.

Backsliding as Transitions between Fix Points

Bermeo (2016) argues that democratic backsliding happens in different ways – coups d’état, election-day vote fraud, and in recent years in slightly more sophisticated forms suchs as promissory coups, executive aggrandizement, and strategic manipulation of elections. There are many types of election manupulation and election fraud in order to rig elections.

Although coups take place by definition suddenly and violenty, and can certainly be seen as the climax of democratic backsliding, democratic institutions like independent courts, and critical media can prevent them. Democratic erosion is necessary for coups to be successful because it eliminates these safeguards. Courts in authoritarian systems are special (Ginsburg & Moustafa, 2008).

A process of democratic erosion can begin slowly and can take a long time. Democracies erode and finally disappear step by step by

• manipulation of fair elections (=> no accountability)
• manipulation of the judiciary (=> no accountability)
• manipulation of critical media (=> no public checks)

Therefore Levitsky & Ziblatt (2018) propose a three stage model of the democratic backsliding: attacking referees (esp. the judicial system), targeting opponents (political opponents, critical media outlets), and changing the rules of the game (changing constitutions, legislative bodies and electoral systems to consolidate power).

But if we see the group of people which has a special role like police officers, judges, opponents, and journalists and their extended families and friends as part of the population, we can model such a transition simply by counting the number of people who cooperate with the aspiring autocrat. The number of people who cooperate can be described by the replicator equation of the coordination game.

If a major part of the population supports democracy and it is well established and well protected by stable institutions like independent parliaments and courts, then the systems returns after an pertubation towards autocracy to a stable state (for instance the United States Capitol attack on Jan 6 2021 by Trump supporters where the institutions remained strong enough and the courts rejected attempts to manipulate the elections). If the magnitude of the unrest is high enough and the system is in a general crises, then it is possible to cross a tipping point towards an authoritarian regime.

In this model the tipping point which corresponds to the nash equilibrium represents the fraction of people which support autocracy or democracy. If a majority of people (in the model 67%) in an autocracy cooperate, i.e. by avoiding criticism of the autocratic ruler, it will remain one even for large pertubations which represent unrests. If such a system is disturbed by anti-government protests, then the system returns after a short pertubation to a stable state (for example the Arabic Spring uprisings). This makes sense because once an authoritarian regime is firmly establised, a major part of the population has an incentive to support the autocracy by silent agreement if the autocracy persecutes dissidents with the full power of the state.

If a only a minority of people in an autocracy cooperate (in the model 33%), while even many police officers, politicians, judges, and journalists are against it, then already small pertubations can lead to a regime change if the conditions are right.

If a majority of people (in the model 67%) in an democracy cooperate, i.e. by supporting the political institutions and fighting for fair elections, it will remain one even for large pertubations. If such a system is disturbed by riots or right-wing movements, then the system returns after a short pertubation to a stable state (for example the unsuccessful Capital Riot Jan 6 in the US). This makes sense because once an democratic regime is firmly establised, a major part of the population has an incentive to support the democracy and to obey the law since the regime persecutes criminals with the full power of the state.

The situation looks different if a democracy is severely weakened, for example by a heavy economic crisis. If only a minority of people in an democracy still cooperate (in the model 33%), while even many police officers, politicians, judges, and journalists are against it, then already small pertubations can lead to a rapid regime change if the conditions are right.

Since the model is symmetric, the same argument can be applied to the opposite situation where the system moves from an autocracy to a democracy.

References

Thanks to Glen Ropella for helpful comments how to improve the simulations & notebooks

Code

• Jupyter notebook for modeling democratic backsliding 1 (with replicator equation)
• Jupyter notebook for modeling democratic backsliding 2 (with agent-based model)

Articles

• Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding” Journal of Democracy 27(1) (2016) 5-19
• David Waldner and Ellen Lust, Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding, Annual Review of Political Science Vol. 21:1 (2018) 93-113
• Armin Schäfer, (2021). Cultural Backlash? How (Not) to Explain the Rise of Authoritarian Populism. British Journal of Political Science, 1-17.
• Ross Cressman and Yi Tao, The replicator equation and other game dynamics, PNAS July 22, 2014 111 (Supplement 3) 10810-10817
• Eliassi-Rad, T., Farrell, H., Garcia, D. et al. What science can do for democracy: a complexity science approach. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 7, 30 (2020)
• Susan D. Hyde, Democracy’s backsliding in the international environment, Science Vol. 369, No. 6508 (2020) 1192-1196

Books

• John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the theory of games, Cambridge University Press, 1982
• Josef Hofbauer and Karl Sigmund, Evolutionary games and population dynamics, Cambridge University Press, 1998
• Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
• Martin A. Nowak, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life, Harvard University Press, 2006
• Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa, Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes, Cambridge University Press, 2008
• William H. Sandholm, Population Games and Evolutionary Dynamics, MIT Press, 2010
• Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 2012
• Brian Skyrms, The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure, Cambridge University Press, 2012
• Jan-Werner Müller, What is populism?, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016
• Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, Penguin Random House, 2018
• Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge University Press, 2019
• Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020
• Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, Flariron Books, 2020
• Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Doubleday, 2020
• Andrew Wilson, Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship, Yale University Press, 2021

In my first book “The emergence of complexity” I have tried to find answers to the question how complex systems can emerge from simple rules and parts. Where does the marvellous complexity we see in the world around us come from? The answer is of course life and evolution. The rules of evolution are well known. What we can do is nevertheless finding interdisciplinary connections to increase our understanding of evolution in general. One thing I have tried is for instance to apply concepts from physics like tunneling in Quantum Mechanics to evolutionary fitness landscapes.

Quantum tunneling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon where a wave function can propagate through a potential barrier. Unlike a classical particle which can not pass through such a barrier a particle in quantum mechanics can tunnel through a potential barrier. The wave function of a quantum particle describes the probability of finding the particle in this place. Inside of the barrier it is exponentially decreasing. The larger the barrier, the lower the probability that it can tunnel through it. We can indeed apply the concept of tunneling through a barrier to complex adaptive systems. For example a startup which tries to find a way to generate revenue is like a quantum particle that moves through a barrier. The longer it takes, the lower the probability it can make it. It needs to borrow enough venture capital to pass the barrier and to invent new technologies. If the startup is successful, it leads to the emergence of new companies.

The emergence of religions and nations can be similar: as a proto-state a colony depends for a long time on the occupying colonizer and often borrows ideas from them. In ancient Israel, people borrowed ideas from the Babylonian (law codes), Egyptian (temples) and Phoenician (alphabets) cultures to invent their own religion, which eventually lead to the evolutionary transition from tribalism to “scribalism” [1]. Can we model this transition from tribalism to scribalism and eventually to nationalism by an agent-based model, even if the real history is based on a complex narrative [2] ?

Agent-based models of the different *-isms like tribalism, communism, nationalism, authoritarianism or fascism would require multi-dimensional evolutionary models which describe how large collective entities like states and nations develop and dissolve on multiple levels. This is difficult because even one-dimensional evolutionary models can exhibit complex predator-prey dynamics. But if we succeed, we can gain valuable insights from these modeling attempts [3] using the toolbox of complex adaptive systems [4].

As far as I know there are no agent-based models of fascism so far, although it can be understood like cancer as a social dysfunction. Like cancer, fascism can be seen as an aggressive selfish rebellion of an entity that does not want to obey the social contracts in the community of other entities. Cancer cells are rule-breaking cheaters in a multi-cellular organism [5] which applies to dictators in authoritarian and totalitarian systems as well. They relentlessly break and bend the rules: they lie, steal, murder or invade neighboring countries. Nevertheless they also depend on cooperation, but not necessarily the same cooperation which is common in the multilateral world they live in. If cancer can be described in general as a broken social contract, how can we model this social dysfunction within a community by a generic agent-based model that is applicable to social forms of cancer like fascism?

We have developed complex models of cooperation [6], but we still need to understand how selfish entities can break and bend the rules of cooperation that enable the existence of large-scale multi-cellular organisms [7]. If they use a form of cooperation, how does this cooperation differ from the cooperation in the original organism? Do they use a more ancient form of cooperation which lacks differentiation and is no longer in use but still available? Agent-based models of cancer (in biology) and fascism (in society) could help us to answer these questions and to untangle the complex systems which result from evolution.

When I read a blog post from Marion Blute (who wrote the book “Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution” [8]) it struck me that we can use another term from Quantum Mechanics for evolution: in humans biological and cultural evolution are “entangled”. It is this entanglement that makes us human, and which produces on a larger scale the various *-isms that cause so much trouble. Can we untangle the mysteries by using agent-based models? I would like to work on these questions in my remaining time.

[1] Mark Leuchter (Ed.), Scribes and Scribalism, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020

[2] Jacob L. Wright, War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible, Cambridge University Press, 2020

[3] Lars-Erik Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve, Princeton University Press, 1997

[4] John H. Miller, Scott E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems, Princeton University Press, 2009

[5] Athena Aktipis, The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer, Princeton University Press, 2020

[6] Robert Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation, Princeton University Press 1997

[7] Robert Axelrod, David E. Axelrod, and Kenneth J. Pienta, Evolution of cooperation among tumor cells, PNAS September 5, 2006 103 (36) 13474-13479

[8] Marion Blute, Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution: Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2010

(Image from Gerd Altmann on Pixabay)

This week a podcast episode where David Sloan Wilson and Elliot Sober discuss multilevel selection made me wonder if moral outrage could be a mechanism which has evolved to reveal rule breakers and to discover selfish individuals in a group of altruists. What is moral outrage?

American neuroscientist Molly J. Crockett defines moral outrage as “a powerful emotion that motivates people to shame and punish wrongdoers”. She says moral outrage would be at least as old as civilization itself [1]. Outrage itself could be older since it is based on anger, and even monkeys and chimpanzees can express anger and outrage over inequity and unfair behavior. It begins with the offspring that protests if a sibling has received more maternal care. The classic example is the wrongdoer who steals food from a companion. Primates will protest against defectors who steal their food and punish them [2]

In human groups who adhere to social and moral norms which we learn from our parents outrage about unfair personal behavior of deceivers and defectors has apparently evolved into moral outrage which is triggered when a moral norm has been violated [1]. Moral outrage could be a mechanism which has evolved over time to reveal rule breakers and to discover selfish individuals in a group of altruists. Punishing defectors clearly increases the fitness of altruistic groups [4]. But before defectors can be punished the culprits must be identified, the members of a group must be aware of them and they must be aroused enough so that they are ready to punish the defector which has been unnoticed so far. This is the function of outrage.

In this sense moral outrage can be seen as an adaptation to defectors in altruistic groups. Just like disgust helps the body to get rid of toxic substances and fear helps to avoid external threats, moral outrage can help a group to identify defectors so that overly selfish individuals which violate social norms can be expelled or punished. Social norms can be as simple as “do not steal food from your companion” or “do not make secret plans to harm someone”, which even chimpanzees understand well (as we know since Frans de Waal’s book “Chimpanzee Politics” [3]).

Molly J. Crockett writes that moral outrage is indeed a powerful emotion that motivates people to shame and punish wrongdoers [1]. The problem is in the modern age of the 21st century the world has changed. The Internet can amplify this ancient mechanism on a global scale and result in things like “Cancel Culture” and “Wokeism”, where we get trapped in escalating conflicts characterized by righteous anger [5,6]. Paradoxically, an emotion that has evolved to ensure cooperation in small groups and tribes can lead to endless conflict and polarization in a globally connected society.

[1] Molly J. Crockett, Moral outrage in the digital age, Nature Human Behaviour, 1(11) (2017) 769-771
[2] Frans B.M. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Harvard Univesity Press, 1996
[3] Frans B.M. de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (25th Anniversary edition), Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
[4] Ernst Fehr, Simon Gächter, Altruistic punishment in humans, Nature Vol. 415 (2002) 137–140
[5] Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, Simon & Schuster, 2021
[6] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Vintage, 2012

(Chimpanzee image from Pixabay user suju-foto)