ONE IMPORTANT REASON WHY “the new economy” seems so mysterious is that people generally, and economists in particular, have had such vague notions about how “the old economy” worked. Political ideologies and the social sciences that developed when the universities were granted a central position close to power in the capitalist paradigm obstinately followed the totalistic path, as we have already seen. National economists created sophisticated models that were impressive from every respect apart from the decisive fact that they gave a misrepresentative and useless image of economic reality. Their very starting-point was erroneous. Whether they represented the right or left of the political spectrum, the overriding goal was always the same: to build an all-encompassing theory that reduced the economy to an admittedly complicated, but coherent and manageable zero-sum game. Someone wins and someone loses, one presupposes the other, and all that was needed to avoid unnecessary friction and/or social injustice was distribution and regulation. Wishful-thinking about balance and order was mistakenly applied to a system whose normal state is characterised by constant change and a sizeable measure of destruction and annihilation.
Under feudalism the economy, or even the handling of money, were not things that serious people participated in. The production of goods and trade were consequently not regarded as sufficiently elevated or interesting to warrant philosophical analysis. Peasants grew crops and nurtured livestock, tradesmen engaged in bartering and aristocrats exacted tax in the form of goods and services. But when industrialisation, mechanisation and the transition from exchange of goods to coins and notes had reached a critical level, they brought with them dramatic social changes that gave rise to an entirely new set of questions. For instance, should the rapidly growing population be fed with the help of imported agricultural goods, or was it better to be self-sufficient in foodstuffs? Was it wise to protect your own country’s peasants with the help of import tariffs? The rate of change was unparalleled, and the whole of the old rulebook was quickly outdated. So the first economic theory, the creed of wealth, was born, with the task of returning society to the harmonious social order which was supposed to have been lost.
The pattern for thought within the social sciences during the late 1700s and early 1800s was provided by the natural sciences in general, and physics in particular. The prestige of Newtonian physics was enormous, its achievements grandiose: uncovering the regulated mechanisms that governed the mysterious movements of the celestial bodies. What was required was an economic Newton, a philosopher who could ‘discover’ a law of gravity for economics, and uncover the eternal principles governing the divine order that was assumed to exist behind the apparent chaos. This was an impossible task, as economist Michael Rothschild and others have noted, for the simple reason that Newtonian physics was an unusable model, since it lacked a historical dimension. Time, or, to put it another way, a direction for physical processes, did not make its appearance in the natural sciences until the advent of thermodynamics later in the 1800s. For Newton, the universe is an unchanging perpetual motion machine, a sort of cosmic clock whose regulated movements never vary. This eternal, mechanical repetition was the whole point with Newton. His theory does not allow for qualitative change, and every economic model constructed with Newton as its pattern is consequently concerned with finding excuses for changes instead of understanding them. The goal was to achieve balance in the system, using suitable means, which is why the change that lies in the nature of things was regarded as unpleasant disruption.
Science finds what it seeks. The Scottish professor of philosophy Adam Smith, the central figure of classical national economics, consequently found an economic law of gravity: self-interest. When every individual is concerned with his own self-interest, the result, paradoxically, is the optimal state for social economics, according to Smith. Different people obviously have different talents and abilities, and it is when they have complete freedom to develop their talents and offer their services that the economy is maximised, to the good of everyone. Therefore regulations and import tariffs were bad, because the system was self-regulating. Expanding markets meant increased productivity, ran the optimistic gospel of laissez-faire liberalism. But even Smith did not accommodate change within the equation. His theory describes an imagined state of equilibrium, a liberal utopia, rather than the turbulence of reality. The system would automatically achieve balance and manage all possible disturbances internally if only it was left alone. But the idea that the system itself might undergo any decisive changes formed no part of Smith’s calculations. That was a thought that could not be contemplated unless the illustrious Newtonian structure was abandoned, which it itself was unthinkable.
Smith’s view of the economy as a well-oiled machine attracted many eager disciples. But not his optimism. David Ricardo worked from the theory that the amount of resources and goods in circulation on the market was finite. When the population is expanding and the number of consumers increases, increased demand leads to higher prices, especially of food. Hence equilibrium is disturbed in favour of wealthy land-owners; their profit corresponds to the consumers’ and employees’ loss in a desperate zero-sum game. There is no alternative way of keeping profits up other than keeping wages down, so strong social tension was to be expected. Fascination for the new economic science, thanks to Ricardo’s theses, grew so large that national economics was believed to be capable of explaining everything. To a large extent it replaced philosophy, which was in a state of paralysis, as the meta-science, the explanatory model for everything.
Ricardo’s system was the theory used and incorporated by Karl Marx in his historical philosophy: economic and social oppositions, with their basis in the fact that the masses were being relentlessly sucked dry by the ruling class, escalate to the critical point where it becomes necessary at all costs to carry out a radical transformation of society, followed by a planned economy. For Marx, the economy was also a machine, but not well-oiled and self-generating as it was for Adam Smith, but a machine in real need of constant supervision and ideological direction. The political goal was a static economy, a regularly ticking clock. This is also in all essential respects the view of national economics that has been dominant during its two-hundred-year history, which has left concrete evidence in the form of various political programmes for regulation of the markets and for distribution. Buttons and levers have been pushed and pulled in the vain hope of achieving permanent stability in the system.
The various political camps have only differed from each other in emphasis. For liberals and conservatives, the right to private ownership has been sacred. The right’s alternative to the monopoly scare of the left has been competition, but the fundamental problematics have remained the same: limited resources and an expanding population. Of course it is possible to increase productivity in, for instance, agriculture, but not in proportion to the increased manpower required, according to the law of diminishing returns which John Stuart Mill, one of the central figures of liberalism, formulated at about the same time as Marx and Engels were writing The Communist Manifesto. Increased welfare would never increase enough to satisfy the growing population. The best that could be hoped for was that a socio-economic status quo would be achieved, by appealing to the people’s better nature and keeping the birth-rate down that way.
These ideas of the economy as a zero-sum game, and the curse of population growth came mostly from the cleric, economist and historian Thomas Malthus, whose influence on thought during the 1800s and early 1900s can scarcely be exaggerated. It was the fear of the terrible consequences of over-population that Malthus managed to inspire in his contemporaries which eventually led to birth-control measures being made available for a larger market, even if Malthus himself preached abstinence, and marriage later in life. His theory was based upon the necessary balance between the number of individuals and the amount of resources. According to Malthus’s merciless principle, the population increases at a dramatically higher rate (“geometrically” or “exponentially”) than the production of food does (“arithmetically”). This imbalance is unsustainable in the long run, and the excess must be removed one way or another. In nature this was regulated by famine and other catastrophes, and for human beings war was another option. Suffering and misery are inevitable anyway, and progress is a chimera. Helping the poor with handouts only makes things worse, because it will only lead to even more mouths to feed.
One of the greatest ironies in the history of ideas is that Malthus, the gloomy godfather of zero-sum philosophy, was also the great facilitator of evolution – in other words: the theory of change, development and process. The cul-de-sac which Malthus manoeuvred into made a whole new way of thinking possible. What Charles Darwin did was to apply history to history. He showed that change is not a deviation from any divine order, or a disturbance of any equilibrium in nature, but that constant change is itself the natural state. The species which had hitherto been regarded as eternal and constant, like perfect geometric figures, are actually historical products of other, extinct species. They are developed and adapt themselves according to circumstances. The problem for Darwin was that for a long time he lacked a driving-force in the process, an idea of the reasons for and mechanisms of change. He was clear about the idea of evolution, which was itself revolutionary, but did not understand how evolution itself actually functioned. Every peasant already knew that it was possible to evolve, to “improve” livestock and crops. It was a question of using specimens with the necessary characteristics for breeding and cultivation. But who was in charge of breeding and cultivation in nature? Who was responsible for the selection, and how did it take place? This was the big question.
To begin with, Darwin imagined that the same laws applied to species as to individuals; that they are born, mature, and die of biological necessity. After spending a year and several months getting lost in hopeless dead-ends, almost by chance he happened to read Malthus’s theory of population. “For entertainment”, he wrote in his diary. Suddenly everything fell into place. It was nature itself that oversaw selection. If more individuals are born into a population than the available food can sustain, the consequence is that many of these individuals die prematurely, without having had time to breed. Those who survive anyway, and, in the next step, go on to breed, are those individuals who are best suited to circumstances. The same process repeats itself for generation after generation. The cumulative result of this process is, eventually, the evolution of the species: natural selection rewards only very few of all possible variants. At the same time, the surrounding environment is continually changing, partly as a result of geological and climatic factors, partly as a result of its own internal dynamic. The altered species influence their own and others’ circumstances, which in turn fuels further changes within the various species. There is no natural balance. The process never ends.
The ironic thing is that Darwin completely misunderstood Malthus. Or, if you want to take a more generous view of the matter: he made a breath-takingly original and ingenious interpretation of Malthus’s utterly pessimistic reasoning, so that it fitted in better with his own thoughts. The struggle for survival which, for Malthus, was the root of all the world’s ills, was for Darwin the mechanism which gave evolution a power and a direction towards increasingly sophisticated organisms. Thus biology took a decisive influence from economic philosophy, while economic thinking rejected biology and its historical perspective in favour of Newtonian physics and its static world-view. The same thing applied generally to sociology and the other new social sciences; Newton’s cosmic perpetual motion machine formed the basic pattern for the creation of models under capitalism. The study of society took as its starting point a fictitious system in an artificial state of rest, and change was regarded as a disruptive anomaly. Thought was trapped within fixed, totalistic structures.
When Newton presented his theory he was hailed as the leading light of his age. When Darwin presented his theory he was practically treated as a criminal, and the theory of evolution has remained, outside the world of the natural sciences, extremely controversial for a remarkable length of time. Resistance to the theory of evolution was emotional rather than intellectual. The eternal and predictable, with its roots in Judeo-Christian religion and totalistic philosophy, always appealed to self-indulgent western dreams of Man’s control and omnipotence. So change and coincidence were regarded with terror. This is why classical Newtonian physics has remained the model for natural sciences and continued to provide the model for the general world-view during the whole of the capitalist paradigm, even after physics itself had moved on from Newton, incorporated a historical dimension (with the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics), and become programmatically unpredictable, virtual, and generally exotic (thanks to quantum mechanics). We can therefore draw the conclusion that the old economics, like the old sociology and everything else scientifically “old”, has been old for a very long time.
To a large degree, Darwin turned everything regarded as sacred on its head. The beautiful tableau of nature is not complete, but a permanent work in progress, and the question is whether it is actually particularly beautiful. The species alive now are neither original nor constant, and merely constitute a phase of the long development from simple to more complex organisms. The infinite wealth of variety and complexity in nature presupposes no divine creator, or any hidden intelligence of any kind, not even a plan; all that is needed are oceans of time. Evolution is a sort of algorithm, a numerical operation of immense scale applied to real life. Or a computer programme, if you like. Its function is to sift out the losers.
The American philosopher Daniel C Dennett has compared this process to a tennis tournament: two players meet, one survives and goes on to the next round, while the other is lost to oblivion. All knockout championships produce one winner, who has the qualities most favoured by the rules. If we are talking about tennis, then skill is largely decisive, but coin-tossing is purely about luck, or, to put it another way, the ability to avoid bad luck. It is obviously extremely unlikely that anyone would win at coin-tossing twenty times in a row, but if we organise a coin-tossing tournament with 1,048,575 participants, then there will certainly be someone who manages this. This sort of algorithm also does what it is supposed to: they unfailingly pick out a winner irrespective of how large the number of participants. Evolution is a form of knockout tournament whose rules are not only extremely complicated and full of previously unpredicted elements of chance; they are also changing the whole time. One round of coin-tossing, the next round a backwards, blindfolded, slalom sack-race. There will always be someone who wins and many, many losers. We are all winners: we who are writing this, you who are reading it, your friends and pets and houseplants, the trees in the woods and the worms in the soil, everything that is alive here and now. The losers are all the others. 99.99 per cent of all the species that have ever existed are now extinct. They were, quite simply, knocked out of the tournament.
We use a parallel logic when we pose classic hypothetical questions about how our lives would have looked if one event or other had never taken place, or if we had taken important decisions differently. What is this but a meme-Darwinian equivalent to Dennett’s gene-Darwinian analysis? The other selves that we imagine we might have become instead of our current self, if the course of events had been different, could be said to be examples of inferior meme-Darwinian mutations, compared to the “I” who “survived”, and who therefore enjoys the advantage of posing the hypothetical reasoning at the cost of “the extinct selves”. This is the basis of the Foucauldian process of subjectification which is replacing individualism in netocratic society, and we shall return to this in the next chapter.
Nature is no picnic. Ruthless pruning promotes what is functional under the existing circumstances. Even our aesthetic comprehension of the existence which has survived with us, nature itself, is based upon the ingrained survival strategy of our genes. The beauty that we believe that we see in the colours of an orchid or the gaudy feathers of a peacock, and the fascination we feel at the giraffe’s long neck, only become “beauty” and “fascination” to us because they confirm and underline evolutionary adaptability in our own great brain. Aesthetics are also a built-in genetic warning lamp. We appreciate a small child’s attempts to walk and speak, or a dog’s loyalty towards his master or mistress; the child and the dog are both useful and pleasurable to us, the usefulness and pleasure are mutual, the child and the dog appear to be aesthetically attractive, and we seem the same to them. At the same time we retreat from poisonous rattlesnakes and dustbins reeking of bacteria, because these phenomena are a threat to our own survival and have therefore been programmed into our genes as aesthetically repulsive.
Darwin’s theory was far from watertight. One significant gap was the absence of a satisfactory explanation of how the winning characteristics were inherited from one generation to the next. A child generally shows a clear resemblance to its parents, but even children are not an even mixture of their parents’ characteristics. One white and one black cat do not get a uniformly grey litter of kittens. If the parents’ disposition to certain characteristics was completely mixed, the result would be an smoothing-out of all spectacular distinctive features, an even and uniform mass of bio-matter. But instead nature exhibits a constantly increasing level of complexity, variation and specialisation. How can this multiplicity and colourful display be explained?
The answer was given in a series of ground-breaking scientific discoveries in the latter half of the 1900s. In 1953 the researchers Francis Crick and James Watson described the unique structure of the DNA-molecule for the first time. By the beginning of the 1960s it was possible to read individual words written in genetic code, and by the middle of the same decade the whole of the code had been cracked, and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the whole of the human genome has been mapped. The whole of our biological past, all the genetic preconditions for our future will be an open book. Quite literally. All the words in the book are written with the four chemical letters: A, C, G and T (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thiamine) in various combinations. Every living organism that has ever existed is created according to similar, now easily-read, instructions, all of them written in the same language.
The new genetics is one of the greatest intellectual revolutions ever. Suddenly biology is entirely digital. Life itself, the reproduction of cells and their creation of ordered systems of varying complexity, is a process which basically stems from information management. Life is fundamentally a question of the dispersal of information. Our genetic constitution is a collection of recipes, or programmes, for the production of proteins, which in turn regulate the body’s chemistry. The body is the vessel of tissue which biological information has chosen to use. Thanks to pre-programmed information, the cells of the body know where they are and what they are supposed to do. No-one has to teach the egg how to become a chicken, the egg already knows. So the ancient information theorists were right in principle. It is information that breathes life into matter. One of the Nobel Prize-winners for medicine in 1969, Max Delbruck, suggested, possibly as a joke, that Aristotle ought to be awarded the same prize posthumously for the discovery of DNA. The old philosopher was right in that the form of the hen is already innate within the egg.
But genetic information does not merely constitute a recipe for anatomy, but also for behaviour. Classical humanists do not want to believe this, and insist that man has a soul, and that this soul and all spiritual phenomena are in some way independent of both the body and biology. Only soulless animals have instincts, we humans are above such things. Committed behaviourists are also sceptical, they claim that reflexes and behaviour are learned. Nature, and society, are regarded as one vast educational establishment, a sophisticated system of punishment and reward which forms the individual by encouraging certain behaviours and suppressing others. Man is, according to this view, an unwritten page. But the new genetics has smashed this way of seeing things. We can never learn things which we cannot learn. We will never be able to learn things that we lack the genetic predisposition for, however much we are rewarded or punished.
The brain is pre-programmed to be able to handle certain determined types of problem with the help of certain determined processes. The acquisition of language is one obvious example: our ability to understand and use grammar is innate, and research has localised one of the genes that is central in this context in chromosome number seven. A deviant “spelling” of this gene, what you might call a spelling mistake, means markedly lower linguistic capabilities (SLI, Specific Language Impairment) in otherwise entirely normally intelligent people: they lack the capacity to internalise grammatical structures. This means that every new word they encounter really is new to them; for every verb, for instance, they must learn each conjugated form separately, along with every plural form of each new noun, and so on. Quite simply, the pattern is not instinctively clear to them.
This means it is not possible to replace instincts with learning. Of course, someone with SLI can learn to communicate with the outside world, albeit with certain difficulties in understanding and making him- or herself understood, but he or she can never learn to think grammatically. That we humans, in contrast to our close relatives among the apes, have learned to use grammatically constructed language is not because we have been more industrious and have tried harder than they have, but that, thanks to genetic changes, we have developed new, species-specific instincts. Language – which in its spoken and, later, written forms has been the dominant means of cultural transfer and development – has, without any doubt, its roots in biology. We have learned what we have been able to learn. On a fundamental level, it is the information in our genes that determines “who we are”.
The consequence of this is that there really is a “human nature”, and that this influences to a high degree not just our capacity for language acquisition, but our behaviour and our culture generally. A new-born child is not a blank page, but the carrier of a programme that admittedly allows for an enormous amount of development, learning and interactivity with the surrounding world, but which, in spite of this, has its special structures and its special limitations which are ultimately determined by biological history. The brain is a product of evolution, and from this follows a whole succession of collective, fundamental thought-patterns. Genes keep culture on a leash, as Edward O Wilson suggested.
But the idea that there is a connection between biology and society is still met with bitter opposition from many directions. The same ideas are often summed up, in a semantically dubious way, as “reductionism” or “determinism”. This opposition is largely politically motivated: one basic thesis in Marxism is that society entirely shapes the citizen’s consciousness, and that a new society would mean the creation of a completely new person. If it turns out that biology is the ultimate determinant, then the Marxist left will have to think again. But even within the social and human sciences, the accepted stand-point of the entire twentieth century was that biological evolution and cultural development are two separate phenomena with no points of contact. What has been of interest for research has consequently been questions about how the social environment has shaped human behaviour, rather than how man’s social instincts have shaped society.
Even this point of view has its ideological causes, mainly the fact that coarse misinterpretations of the theory of evolution, together with other quasi-sciences, have been used by a long succession of charlatans to legitimise various racist and other suspect ideologies. “Lower standing cultures” have been “explained” with reference to a supposed innate refinement, and so on. The desire to dissociate from such “vulgar biologisms” is in itself quite understandable, but any consequent attitude of “guilt by association” constitutes just as destructive an act of intellectually blinkered thinking in the other direction. Blinkers are always blinkers, no matter how noble the reason for wearing them.
The fundamental idea of the theory of evolution, that it is chance which is decisive, is the complete opposite of the starting-point of vulgar biologisms. All talk of different races and their varying genetic disposition for highly developed culture is complete nonsense. The fact that people in the fertile crescent of the Middle East abandoned life as hunter-gatherers at an early stage and built the first agricultural society was purely the result of the fact that circumstances there were right. The climate was favourable, and, above all, there were plants which were suited to domestication and cultivation on a large scale. One led to the other in an increasingly advanced feedback loop. Increased access to food and fixed dwellings led to population growth, which in turn created dramatically improved conditions for increased specialisation and a more advanced social structure. Which in turn generated even more economic growth, and, later on, cathedrals, sonnets and string quartets.
But the right conditions alone are not sufficient as an explanation. Any friend of order might ask: the conditions for what? It is not possible to avoid biology and social instincts any more. The humanist bourgeoisie were passionate about the refinement of culture that they saw as characteristic of Man, and which raised him above beasts and the law of the jungle. Like a fundamentalist sect, humanism insisted on Man’s unique position, sort of floating just above the rest of nature. That culture had its roots in biology, and was an indivisible part of it, was unthinkable. But what possible alternative is there? If the construction of society and culture do not have an evolutionary basis, what sort of origin might it have? The answer can be found among the absolutes of religion and myth: culture as miraculous creation, a gift to humanity from God knows who. For the netocracy which is now assuming power, these metaphysical bolt-holes lack intellectual credibility. So the wall between nature and culture is being torn down and humanism is going to its grave.
When we compare cultural evolution with biological, this is not only a matter of a spectacular metaphor. It is a question of a scientific and socio-philosophical earthquake. The Newtonian/static/mechanical view of society, culture and the economy is finally relinquishing is cast-iron grip on thought now that the capitalist paradigm is drawing to its close. Physics, in particular Newtonian physics, is no longer the model science. The twenty-first century belongs to biology. An entirely new world-view is taking shape before our eyes. We are talking about a world beyond humanism, trans-humanism.
Genetics has one important characteristic which makes it irresistibly interesting: it works. Advances within plant and animal production have been spectacular in recent years. It is no longer possible to question seriously either the methods or the theoretical basis. At the same time, our knowledge about the human species is increasing at a dizzying rate. The mapping of the human genome means the identification of the circa 100,000 genes which, spread over 23 chromosomes, make up the chemical formula for a human being. The whole of this incomprehensibly long text – about a billion words, which is the equivalent of 800 Bibles – will be readable, which will give us detailed information about both our past and our future. Moreover, the text can be edited.
With knowledge of his genetic predispositions, man can, for the first time in his history, plan his life from genuinely fundamental information: he can choose an education and a career that suits him, create children with a partner who possesses a complementary set of genes, choose not to eat harmful foodstuffs, and so on. Employers and authorities will have access to aptitude tests worth the name. The meritocracy, as Swedish biologist Thorbjörn Fagerström has pointed out, will materialise in the entirely new form of a “genocracy”. This development will naturally be met with protests, not least from classical humanists who take offence at the fact that people’s inherited aptitudes are compared and ranked. But it will be difficult to claim that the process is not “natural”. Nothing could be more natural than comparisons and ranking, that is what natural selection is all about, and what principal of selection could be more “natural” than the genetic? This development will be unstoppable, for the simple reason that its application actually works, and that the principle of “right man, right job” is so valuable for the interested parties. It will be claimed that certain job categories are so important that for that particular case the end justifies the means. And that is where the dam will burst. When a taboo has been transgressed in one specific area, it is impossible to maintain this taboo for society in general. Particularly in a plurarchic society.
The connection between sexuality and reproduction is disappearing. Sex is becoming more of a hobby, an expression of identity, with neither desired nor undesired consequences. Instead, reproduction will be managed under orderly conditions in laboratories. Who is the parent of whom will be a complicated question when sex-cells, which in principle could come from anywhere, are installed in artificial wombs. “Pregnancies” will be carefully monitored. When it is time for the “birth”, the chance of surprises will be drastically reduced. As a result of gene-manipulation cancer, Alzheimer’s, allergies and a whole list of other illnesses will be preventable at the embryo stage. It will be possible, to a large extent, to shape, or rather programme, your “offspring”. And even to add qualities that we hardly used to think of as “human”.
This development is being hastened by the demise of the belief in a perfect “natural order” regulating how reproduction should happen. Means of reproduction have actually varied a lot during the evolutionary process. Our original forbears practised cell-budding. Later on they laid eggs and determined the sex of their offspring by regulating the temperature around the eggs. The reason why gender-determining genes got the upper-hand was that every individual, even at an early stage, needed to prepare for the gender-determined tasks that awaited after birth. So the only evolutionary “natural” is change itself. One humanistic argument against placing an artificially inseminated egg in an artificial womb is that this would be a typical example of interference in and assault on nature. The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it assumes that culture and nature are two essentially different phenomena in opposition to each other. But this schematic way of seeing things is completely outdated in the informationalist paradigm. Culture is a new version of nature: Nature 2.0.
The increasingly marginalised humanist institutions of power from capitalism will raise demands for restrictive laws governing genetic technology. They will demand observation and strict control by the state and academic experts of all research which comes into contact with the old taboos of the bourgeoisie. In many cases these demands will get a response from politicians, and in certain cases more or less extensive regulation of genetic experimentation has already come into force. But this is of little importance. The constantly weakening position of the nation-state in comparison to new, growing forces – such as the adventurous netocracy and the expansive multinational biotechnology companies – will impose insurmountable obstacles for these political efforts. The most advanced genetic research is already carried out in closed laboratories and under great secrecy on privately owned domains, which makes it extremely difficult to control. Besides, the West’s strongly Judeo-Christian-coloured attitudes about the sanctity of the unique individual is anything but universal. In other parts of the world, in Asia for instance, there is a far less sentimental view of the matter, and research carries on unhindered.
We can count on a shaky and conflict-filled process of acclimatisation. Radical biomedicinal advances have traditionally aroused feverish debate and met resistance from groups which believe their moral authority to be threatened. Corneal transplants are an instructive example. When it became medically possible to save people’s sight with the help of fresh corneas from the recently deceased, this met with strong resistance and the method was banned in Great Britain, amongst other countries. The method was classified as unethical on the basis of its use of body-parts from the deceased. Their dead bodies were regarded, ironically, both as sacred and impure at the same time. But today this method is a routine procedure. Saving the sight of the living became, as information about the procedure spread and superseded old moralisations, more important than maintaining the sanctity of the corpse.
In a society without a central moral authority, even without a parliament, it will be this silent battle for power between these interest groups which will determine what is regarded as acceptable and, above all, what is practised. Something which is unethical today might well be totally accepted tomorrow. In spite of everything, people will willingly accept the new medicines offered by applied genetic technology. They might suddenly be able to accept the specially created organs of manipulated pigs for transplantation, if they or someone close to them is in dire need of them. And when they have the chance to choose, people would like to have well-formed children, without a known predisposition to cancer, for instance. Pragmatism directs medical ethics, not vice versa. Netocratic ethics are therefore a hyper-biological pragmatism.
It is hard to imagine that people would choose to do without the very possibility of choosing. From a historical point of view, the choice of forbidding choice is only applicable within extremely hard-line religious sects (like for instance the Amish people’s rejection of electricity). It is simply not in our genes, as the history of science clearly demonstrates. We are curious by nature, and extremely adaptable. On the basis of all available information, within the near-future it will be possible to create trans-genetic clones of ourselves, completely identical except in the aspects we choose to modify: not near-sighted, not bald, whatever we want. These lightly retouched copies could even be used as living stores of reserve parts; perhaps we will need, for instance, a fresh new liver to replace the old one that we sacrificed to drink?
The loss of any central political power makes this development entirely possible, even if a majority of citizens might be negative towards cloning, for instance. In informational society it is not the voter but the prosperous consumer who is in charge, a thought which has been proposed by the zoologist Matt Ridley. This was what happened with test-tube fertilisation. A sufficient number of childless couples showed themselves sufficiently keen and sufficiently wealthy, and the possibility was there. Today test-tube fertilisation is a routine procedure. Within the near future we will see numerous examples of this sort of “netocratic decision-making”; beyond the classical political model, and beyond the influence of the majority.
What is fundamental for all these rapid changes is that the concept of “natural” is completely losing its value-content. The more we learn about our biological history, and the more we learn about the history of culture and the construction of human society, the clearer it becomes that the oppositional relationship between these two phenomena, which has been held to be self-evident, is the only thing in this context which is genuinely artificial. Nature and culture are both fundamentally immensely complicated systems for the management of information. They both follow exactly the same law: natural selection. They both demonstrate the same inherent logic: a movement away from the simple and particular towards ever more sophisticated interaction on an increasingly large scale. In the new world-view which is rapidly taking shape – and here we are not talking about objective truths, it is the new paradigm which will ultimately determine what can be thought – nature and culture are two complementary sides of one and the same thing: evolution.
In the beginning the earth was an energy-filled soup where the simplest cells imaginable, the forefathers of our cells, drifted about and multiplied. The first step towards cathedrals and string quartets was taken when a number of these original cells bumped into what you might call a parasite, a bacterium, the forefather of our mitochondria (the organelle which manages the cells’ metabolism). The meeting was not friendly: either the cell tried to swallow the parasite but failed to digest it, or the parasite tried to invade the cell but failed to kill it. Either way, the result was a collaboration which benefited both parties: a new type of cell where different elements managed different tasks. This cell, which practised internal division of labour, was the precondition for an even more developed biological collaboration in the form of multi-celled organisms where different cells were given different roles. Since then natural selection has, incredibly slowly, created ever more complicated forms of collaboration between cells by deselecting competitors that were less prepared to collaborate. The genes which have been suitable for advanced integration have been favoured.
Increased specialisation and co-ordination made considerable advances in productivity possible. Together, the cells became “intelligent”. They constructed what the biologist Richard Dawkins has called “survival machines”: gradually more refined animal bodies which were instructed to do intelligent things in certain situations, for instance to seek out warmer places when there was a threat of frost. But size is not everything, as every businessman knows. A large amount of co-ordination also entailed costs in the form of increased use of energy. Natural selection weighed one against the other. For this reason, bigger and bigger organisms were not the obvious solution to all problems in the harsh environment of the genes, which explains why co-operation between cells has assumed other, even more ingenious forms, with collaboration between individuals, schools, flocks and societies. A society which looks after its members’ interests benefits the genes involved to the highest extent, increasing their possibility of surviving and reproducing.
The pattern in history is the same: one plus one equals more than two, co-operation benefits all parties involved. Natural selection prefers people and societies that learn to play non-zero-sum games (in contrast to zero-sum games) together. What happens when nomadic hunter/gatherer tribes settle down and begin to work the earth is that the conditions for a successful non-zero-sum game are radically improved. Over time a constructive spiral develops: technological and economic progress gives rise to population growth, which in turn means better conditions for further technological and economic progress. The towns which eventually develop are sufficiently tightly populated to support functioning markets, and economic growth gains still more speed. Contact between the different towns leads to the organisation of a more comprehensive system of co-operation. Thanks to ground-breaking technological breakthroughs, man is able to cross difficult thresholds and develop ever more advanced forms of non-zero-sum game.
But every force has a counter-force. History demonstrates an intricate dynamic between zero-sum games and non-zero-sum games. All the wars which have laid waste empires and cost countless human lives are excellent examples of explicit zero-sum games, or even minus-sum games. What someone wins is lost by someone else, at the same time as enormous resources go to waste. This does not stop the final number from actually being a positive. The threat of war unites a society and leads to the establishment of alliances with other societies, such as when the Greek city-states united to combat the Persians. The journalist Robert Wright, who wrote Non Zero, one of the books in which the biologically-influenced world view appears most clearly, suggested that war has a sort of coagulating effect by forcing people into organic solidarity; war provides an external threat which necessitates various forms of close co-operation. This is a thesis which can be seen as a parallel to the mobilistics idea that man’s knowledge of his ultimate death (war against illness and ageing) has a central function in the creation of his individual identity.
The actual situation, at the transition between an old and a new paradigm, is ambiguous. On the one hand we can see in the collapse of the nation state a tribalisation: how larger entities are broken up into smaller ones where identity and loyalty are bound to different subcultures. On the other hand the declining nation state is being replaced by supra-state institutions, in politics, economics and culture. On the one hand fragmentation, on the other integration. Wright calls this phenomenon “fragmegration”. But the new information technology which is driving development has its own programme, it offers co-operation and non-zero-sum games. The struggling indigenous population, fighting for increased rights and varying degrees of self-determination, co-operates with other groups in the same situation in world-wide electronic networks. Isolation is not a strategy with a future; the tension between local and global is only apparent in the virtual world. For Wright and others, the current situation is bringing to the fore the old question of a global state, a matter we will address in more detail in our next book.
Of course, what is relevant for the evolutionary development of society and culture is also valid for the economy, as Michael Rothschild insists. The market economy is “natural”: an unplanned but still highly structured ecological system in a state of constant change. There is no equilibrium, no lasting state of repose. Even here the laws of natural selection apply, favouring the actors who are skilful non-zero-sum players with the capacity to build strategic alliances. Poorly organised companies that cannot learn new methods and therefore cannot cope with competition under the rules which apply within their particular niche of the market are sifted out, which gives more space for new players. Even conspicuous consumption of luxuries has its evolutionary logic: the sexiest people attract a partner most successfully, and sexiness in nature is often synonymous with big horns or colourful tail-feathers – an extravagant waste of resources, in other words. Just as rationality is not always most rational, so effectivity is not always most effective, either in nature or culture. The netocrats’ imploitative consumption expresses the same thing, but in another way: consumption as a mark of status or seductive artistry. We are talking about an intuitively guided, trans-rational economy which plays upon the exhibition of exaggerated resources, an economy which would drive classically educated accountants and stock exchange analysts mad with its playfulness and transgressions against the laws of rationalism.
This means that the mythical concept “the new economy”, like “globalisation”, is actually two completely different things. To begin with, it is the old economy appearing in an entirely new light, as a result of old models and thought-processes being replaced for new ones as a consequence of the current paradigm shift. The new models which are constructed on the basis of these new insights are likely to be considerably more clarifying than the old ones, as far as both new and old are concerned. And secondly, the new information technology gives willing learners the chance to play entirely new non-zero-sum games with each other. Co-operation is seeking out unexpected paths, completely new categories of information are becoming valuable, strategic alliances are becoming increasingly extensive and transgressive of boundaries. Producers, suppliers, distributors and consumers are being bound ever tighter into digital networks. A genuine understanding of the former will dispel much of the confusion surrounding the latter. And power in informational society will end up with those who understand, and manage to dispel the confusion.