On Humans

Season 1 is over. Season 2 is coming. In the meanwhile, please enjoy some highlights from the archives.

This highlight revisits episode four, where Ilari talks with psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns about his recent book, Self Delusion.  In this flashback, Berns explains why he thinks psychiatry has been led astray by "medicine envy" and why we misunderstand many of the root causes of mental illness.

For more show notes and links, see the original episode.

In the final episode of season 1, Ilari addresses one of the underlying themes in many of the season's episodes: Darwinism. Is Darwinism dangerous? Is Darwinism linked to vicious ideologies? Does Darwinism prove that we are all selfish?

These questions have been addressed in many of this season's episodes (most notably episodes 1 and 2, but also 6, 8, and 11). In this short solo episode, Ilari connects some dots by reading his essay Distorting Darwinism, published in the Skeptic Magazine. Topics include:

• The early links between Darwinism and far-right ideologies

• Why do even professional evolutionists make rookie mistakes when explaining human behaviour.

• Richard Dawkin's U-turn on human nature

• Are all males naturally inclined to mate with a harem of females?

• Why human desires come in “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”

• The problem with “scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed”

• Survival of the friendliest: from silver foxes to human self-domestication

• Conclusions: ”Not everything evolution teaches us is nice and jolly. But we must stay alert at the perilous ease in which selfishness, ruthlessness, and deceptiveness seep into evolutionary theorising, even when not appropriate.”

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Names mentioned

Charles Darwin / Herbert Spencer / William Jennings Bryan / Richard Dawkins / Edward Fox / Robert Sapolsky (author of Behave, 2017) / Michael Ghiselin / Jonathan Haidt / Frans de Waal / Dmitri Belyaev / Lyudmila Trut / Brian Hare / Richard Wrangham

Technical terms

Scopes Monkey Trial (famous legal case in 1925 regarding the teaching of evolution in Tennessee high schools) / Social Darwinism / Self-Domestication 

The idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is simple: Everyone should have an income. And that they should have it whether they work or not. Indeed, its simplicity has made UBI an attractive policy suggestion for many on both the left and the right. But sometimes the practical virtues of UBI can distract us from the deeper significance of this idea.

Karl Widerquist is an economist and political philosopher who has campaigned for UBI since the 90s. And he thinks that it is a practical idea. But he also thinks that it can remedy something deeper than government bureaucracies. He thinks that it can remedy our social contract. For Widerquist, UBI is our best tool to navigate the difficult waters between elitist liberalism and oppressive communism. Yet somewhere beyond those waters lies a genuinely free society. And he thinks we can get there very soon. 

This is an important argument. But it is also a very stimulating one. Indeed, Widerquist‘s treatment of the topic takes us from the biases of John Locke to the hunting grounds of medieval peasants.

In this discussion, Dr Widerquist and Ilari discuss topics such as:

• Why UBI has friends on both sides of the political divide
• Why UBI is needed for a (genuinely) free society
• Modern poverty and the problem with "negative vs positive freedoms"
• Why modernity is not a land of the free (or how the masses lost access to the means of food production)
• The freedoms of our ancestors, from hunter-gatherers to peasants
• The problem with "owning" natural resources
• John Locke's mistake
• The role of the enclosure movements (in Europe) and colonialism (outside of Europe)
• Why Widerquist is not a Marxist
• UBI vs the Nordic welfare state
• What happened in Finland when the government tested a UBI
• Why UBI promotes respect, kindness, and unselfishness.

_________

Please consider becoming a supporter of On Humans. Even small monthly donations can make a huge impact on the long-term sustainability of the program.

Visit: ⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans ⁠

Get in touch: [email protected]

_________

Technical terms mentioned

Universal basic income or UBI (also known as Basic Income Guarantee) / Negative income tax (similar in outcome to a UBI) / Positive vs negative freedoms / The enclosure movement

Names mentioned

Milton Friedman / Isaiah Berlin / Thomas Paine / Henry George / Herbert Spencer / Gerald Allan Cohen / Michael Otsuka / John Locke / Thomas Hobbes / Jean-Jacques Rousseau / David Hume

Mentioned work

• Isaiah Berlin lectures
• Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Theory (Widerquist & McCall 2017)
• Prehistory of Private Property (Widerquist & McCall 2021)

Most histories of the 20th century focus on world wars and ideological conflicts. Others focus on the fall of European empires. Yet others focus on the slow but inevitable progress of social justice movements.

Important themes.

But according to Brad DeLong, the real story of “the long 20th century” (1870-2010) is an economic story. It is the story of how humanity, for the first time in its existence, was able to generate prosperity for the masses–so much so that it became technically possible to eradicate poverty altogether.

DeLong is an economic historian and the author of the magisterial “Slouching Towards Utopia”. In the book, he argues that the so-called “2nd Industrial Revolution” of 1870 changed the human condition in unprecedented ways. During the course of the long 20th century, fewer and fewer humans had to stay on the farm. More and more humans could enjoy a comfortable life. And the speedy development of new technologies meant that most humans saw their professions undergo a revolution in every generation–something that caused great material prosperity, but also social dislocation and a search for ideologies to confront the changing social realities.

In many ways, DeLong tells a happy story of unprecedented victories for humanity at large. Yet humanity did not reach utopia. And alas, DeLong argues that the material boom ended in 2010. (The episode doesn’t discuss this latter claim. But if you are curious: DeLong’s argues that 2010 was marked by a sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, a looming climate catastrophe, and a populist turn against the ideologies that had energised the economic growth of the long 20th century.)

In this discussion, Prof DeLong and Ilari discuss questions such as:

• Why 1870 was a landmark moment for the humanity
• How poor was the average person before 1870?
• What allowed the economic revolution of 1870 - and how Nikola Tesla symbolises the era.
• Did the world become less exploitative after 1870?
• The difficulties in judging the merits of “capitalism”
• What did Marx and Engels get right? And what not?
• Was imperialism a fuel or a drag on the economic boom in Europe and US?
• Why global inequalities became so large throughout the 20th Century?
• Why local inequalities (within rich countries) became smaller throughout the 20th Century - until 1970s.
• How economics explains the rise of ideologies from socialism to fascism and from civil rights to feminism

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Please consider becoming a supporter of On Humans. Even small monthly donations can make a huge impact on the long-term sustainability of the program.

Visit: ⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans ⁠

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Names mentioned

Eric Hobsbaum / Francis Fukuyama / Jason Hickel / Dylan Sullivan Marshall Sahlsin / John Maynard Keynes / Oded Galor / Nate Rosenberg / Nikola Tesla, inventor / George Westinghouse / Eli Whitney, inventor / Friedrich Engels / Karl Marx / Friedrich von Hayek / Milton Friedman / Gary Gerstle / Ronald Reagan / Margaret Thatcher

Papers mentioned

Capitalism and Extreme Poverty (Sullivan & Hick 2023)

Technical terms

Malthusianism / Demographic transition / Creative destruction (after the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter) / The Kuznets curve / Elastic and inelastic supply and demand 

Our mental lives are full of purpose and feeling. Yet the world is governed by laws of physics which seem to lack a sense of either purpose or feeling. So how do we explain consciousness in terms of matter? 

The problem of consciousness is at the forefront of many dialogues between philosophy and science. So how deep is it?

Dr Bernardo Kastrup argues that it is very deep indeed. Or rather, it is a pseudo-problem that arises from us attacking it incorrectly. 

Kastrup's argument is as surprising as it is simple. He claims that we should never have tried to explain consciousness in terms of matter.  After all, the only thing we really know is that consciousness exists. "Matter" is but a concept we create to explain some aspects of our empirical experiences. So we should take consciousness as the starting point. 

What follows is a radical reimagining of much of common philosophical sense. It can feel challenging and mind-bending. Maybe it is the wrong path. But it is a path that for too long has been neglected as an unscientific option at the fringes of rational sanity. Kastrup is well-positioned to defend this "idealist" position with scientific rigour. Before becoming a professional philosopher he worked as a computer scientist at CERN - the world’s leading research institute in fundamental physics. Kastrup is pro-science and pro-empiricism. But he believes that to be genuinely empirical, we have to accept that all we ever know about the world is how the world looks, feels, or appears. It is here that our theory of everything should start from.

Dr Kastrup and Ilari discuss topics such as:

• What is metaphysical materialism?
• Why materialism was historically useful?
• Why materialism is not nearly as intuitive as it sounds like?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• Is materialism compatible with quantum physics?
• Is materialism compatible with neuroscience of altered states (e.g. psychedelics)?
• Making sense of idealism 
• Idealism does not mean that the world is all “my” imagining (cf. Berkeley)
• Does the world have a Will? (cf Schopenhauer)
• What about neutral monism (often associated with so-called “panpsychism”)?
• Why the world is meaningful (according to idealism)
• Why rocks and lakes are not conscious (even according to idealism)
• Is there anything special about human consciousness?

Technical terms

• Metaphysical materialism and physicalism (treated here as synonyms)
• Idealism (in metaphysics)
• Dualism (in metaphysics)
• The hard problem of consciousness
• Occam’s razor (“make your theory as simple as possible”)
• Einstein’s razor (“make your theory as simple as possible, but not simpler”)
• Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, previously known as Dissociative Personality Disorder)

Work mentioned

• You can find links to all mentioned work and more on Kastrup's columns on DID, psychedelics, and fundamental physics, published by the Scientific American.

Why do we care about equality? Is it an invention of the European Enlightenment? Or is it something rooted in human nature? If so, why does equality require constant fighting for?

Elizabeth Anderson is a philosopher at the University of Michigan. She is one of the essential egalitarian theorists of our times. Her essay What's the Point of Equality is one of the must-reads of the contemporary philosophy of political equality. And her recent essay on the history of equality and social justice is a tour-de-force on using the long view of history to shed light on our contemporary condition. 

In this episode, Prof Anderson talks with Ilari about topics such as:

• Are humans a naturally egalitarian species?
• Can human nature explain the logic of social justice movements?
• The ancient roots of democracy (beyond Athens)
• How Native American critique of European society shaped the French Enlightenment

The conversation then turns to the question of modernity. The 2nd half touches upon topics from 19th Century utopian communes to 20th Century Marxism, including:

• Challenges with anarchism, communalism, and Marxism.
• Is social democracy the answer?
• Are social benefits about pitying the poor?
• Are taxes on the rich about envying the rich?
• Economic equality versus other forms of equality

Names and work mentioned

• Christopher Boehm (author of Hierarchy in the Forest)
• David Graeber & David Wengrow (authors of Dawn of Everything)
• Kent Flannery & Joyce Marcus (authors of The Creation of Inequality)
• David Stasavage (author of The Decline and Rise of Democracy)
• Adam Smith (18th Century Scottish philosopher)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne & Louisa May Alcott (19th Century American authors)
• Thomas Piketty (author of Capital & Ideology, A Brief History of Equality, and Capital in the 21st Century)
• Väinö Linna (author of Under The North Star)
• Isabel Ferrares (author of Firms as Political Entities)
• John Rawls (20th Century American philosopher)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (18th Century Swiss philosopher)

What was life like before agriculture? Was it "nasty, brutish, and short?" Or was it quite peaceful and relaxing, making agriculture the "worst mistake in human history"? 

There are plenty of theories about our ancestral lives. And these are not just neutral hypotheses about a past epoch. They are often used as an origin story of our species. They shape the way we think of ourselves, our natural inclinations, and the virtues or vices of civilisation. 

But how can we go beyond origin myths? Is there a science of the past? 

For a long-time, it was common to use modern-day hunter-gatherers as a model of the past. This method has been popularised by books such as Sapiens. But recently, this method came under serious attack by another bestseller, Dawn of Everything, whose authors argue that the project is largely futile. But is it? Are there any methods to study our ancestral past?

Dr Vivek V. Venkataraman is a hunter-gatherer expert who recently wrote a clarifying piece on this for The Conversation. He joins Ilari to discuss topics such as:

• What books like Sapiens or Dawn of Everything get right and wrong
• Why there is no such a thing as a “hunter-gatherer lifestyle” - but we can still learn something from modern-day hunter-gatherers.
• Dr Venkataraman’s experience of living with an egalitarian hunter-gatherer community (the Batek in Malaysia)
• Were our ancestors egalitarian?
• How archaeology helps anthropology
• Beyond the "story of the seed": How climate change and population density explain more than agriculture
• Some speculation about war and violence in the Pleistocene (see also episode 8)

Names mentioned:

• Thomas Hobbes & Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Richard Wrangham (author of The Goodness Paradox)
• Christopher Boehm (author of Hierarchy in the Forest)
• Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, & Steel)
• Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens)
• David Wengrow and David Graeber (authors of Dawn of Everything)
• Marshall Sahlins (author of the essay, The Original Affluent Society)
• Karen & Kirk Endicott (author of The Headman Was A Woman)
• Peter Turchin (referenced paper on complexity)
• Douglas P. Fry (see episode 8)
• Richard Dawkins (author of God Delusion)
• John McPhee (author)
• Kim Sterelny (philosopher of science)

Terms

• Göbekli Tepe
• Pleistocene (the era ending c. 11 700 years ago, starting c 2 million years ago)
• Intensification
• Scalar stress
• Self-domestication (see e.g. Survival of the Friendliest)

Hunter-gatherer groups mentioned:

• !Kung (a group of San Bushmen, also known Ju/’hoansi) in the Kalahari Desert
• The Hadza in Tanzania
• The Ache in Paraguay
• The Batek in Malaysia
• The Northwestern Pacific hunter-gatherers of US and Canada
• The Calousa of Florida

Wealth on planet Earth is not evenly distributed. Indeed, our country of birth predicts a huge amount of our access to food and technology. 

Although such differences have always existed, they have become dramatically accentuated in the past two centuries. During the early 1800s, the average income of a person living in the richest region of the world was 3 times higher than that of a person living in the poorest region. Today, it is 15 times, or even 100 times higher.*

To understand the human condition today, we have to understand our economic geography. This is the theme of the 2nd part of Oded Galor’s remarkable book, Journey of Humanity (see also episode 12). 

In this 2nd episode on Journey of Humanity, Ilari and Professor Galor discuss topics such as:

• The deep impact of colonialism
• Could Europe have industrialised without oppressing the rest of the world?
• Why are some colonial "spinoffs" rich (e.g. the US) and others are not (e.g. Brazil)?
• Political institutions (e.g. capitalism, liberal democracy), especially the differences between inclusive vs extractive institutions
• How the Black Death transformed Europe.
• How cultural norms are shaped by geography (e.g. the quality of the soil)
• The costs and benefits of a diverse society

The conversation also explores:

• How to use this historical outlook to build a better future: solutions for low- and middle-income countries.
• What to do about the current inequalities within nations?
• Will we survive the 21st century?

Technical terms

• Malthusian trap (where increases in wealth are “eaten away” by increases in population size)
• Human capital (i.e. investment in the skills of the population)
• Extractive vs inclusive institutions (terms popularised in economics by the work of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail)
• Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights in England (1688)
• The middle-income trap (based on the observation that only 14 countries have been able to go from "middle-income" to "high-income" status since 1960. In 2019, these were dominated by the East Asian economies of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but joined by Chile, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Malaysia, Malta, Portugal, Seychelles, and Spain [e.g. Lee 2019])

Names

• Kenneth Pomerantz (author of The Great Divergence)
• James II of England, Louis XIV of France, William of Orange
• Karl Marx
• Thomas Piketty

Get in touch

• Feedback? Guest suggestions? Just want to say "hi"? It would be great to hear from you! Feel free to drop a casual line anytime to makela dot ilari at outlook dot com.

* The exact number depends on how we define an "area". The estimates are from Journey of Humanity and are discussed in episode 12.

If you take a moment to reflect on the economic condition of our species, you are likely to be puzzled over two mysteries. 

One is the mystery of wealth: How is it that humanity has been able to generate such a dramatic increase in wealth (e.g. in access to food, transportation, and medical technology)?

The other is the mystery of inequality: Why is this wealth so unevenly distributed? Why are certain countries able to offer historically unprecedented standards of wealth to the majority of their population, while some countries still struggle with dire poverty? 

In his truly remarkable book Journey of Humanity - the Origins of Wealth and Inequality, economist Oded Galor sets out to explain both of these mysteries.

There will be two On Humans -episodes dedicated to this topic. The first one focuses on the grand story of economic growth in human history, searching for an explanation for the recent boom in humanity’s overall wealth. This will be followed by another episode, which searches for the reasons behind the global inequalities that plague the modern world - and asks what to do about them.

In this first episode, Ilari and Prof Galor discuss:

• The long stagnation: Why humans did not get much richer (or poorer) for many millennia
• The modern growth regime: How the overall wealth in the world has increased dramatically but unevenly
• Was agriculture the "worst mistake in human history"?
• How and why did humans escape the Malthusian trap?
• The surprising effects of the industrial revolution on education, child labour, and fertility

Names Mentioned

• Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel)
• Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens)
• David Graeber (co-author of Dawn of Everything)
• Robert Solow (author of Growth Theory)
• Daron Acemoglu (co-author of Why Nations Fail)
• Thomas Piketty (author of Capital in the 21st Century)
• Thomas Robert Malthus (British clergyman and economist, 1766-1834)

Terms Mentioned

• Neolithic Revolution (i.e. the beginning of agriculture)
• Phase transition (e.g. water heating gradually but reaching a “phase transition” at 100 degrees Celsius)
• Potato blight (leading to the Irish Potato Famine, 1845-1852)