The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (70 page)

The Ascent of Man
had been commissioned by the naturalist David Attenborough, then controller of the British television channel BBC2. A quarter of a century later Attenborough – who had by then become the doyen of natural-history film-making – led another film crew to Easter Island, to film another television series,
The State of the Planet
. He too chose those grim-faced statues as a backdrop, for his closing scene. Alas, his message was almost exactly the opposite of Bronowski’s.

The philosophical difference between these two great broadcasters – so alike in their infectious sense of wonder, their clarity of exposition, and their humanity – was immediately evident in their different attitudes towards those statues. Attenborough called them ‘astonishing stone sculptures . . . vivid evidence of the technological and artistic skills of the people who once lived here’. Now, I wonder whether Attenborough was really all that impressed by the islanders’ skills, which had been exceeded millennia earlier in other Stone Age societies. I expect he was being polite, for it is de rigueur in our culture to heap praise upon any achievement of a primitive society. But Bronowski refused to conform to that convention. He remarked, ‘People often ask about Easter Island, How did men come here? They came here by accident: that is not in question. The question is, Why could they not get off?’ And why, he might have added, did others not follow to trade with them (there was a great deal of trade among Polynesians other than Easter Islanders), or to rob them, or to learn from them? Because they did not know how.

As for the statues being ‘vivid evidence of . . . artistic skills’, Bronowski
was having none of that either. To him they were vivid evidence of failure, not success:

The critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made
alike
? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition . . . These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge.

The Ascent of Man
(1973)

The statues were all made alike because Easter Island was a static society. It never took that first step in the ascent of man – the beginning of infinity.

Of the hundreds of statues on the island, built over the course of several centuries, fewer than half are at their intended destinations. The rest, including the largest, are in various stages of completion, with as many as 10 per cent already in transit on specially built roads. Again there are conflicting explanations, but, according to the prevailing theory, it is because there was a large increase in the rate of statue-building just before it stopped for ever. In other words, as disaster loomed, the islanders diverted ever more effort not into addressing the problem – for they did not know how to do that – but into making ever more and bigger (but very rarely better) monuments to their ancestors. And what were those roads made of? Trees.

When Bronowski made his documentary, there were as yet no detailed theories of how the Easter Island civilization fell. But, unlike Attenborough, he was not interested in that, because his whole purpose in going to Easter Island was to point out the profound
difference
between our civilization and civilizations like the one that built those
statues.
We are not like them
was his message. We have taken the step that they did not. Attenborough’s argument rests on the opposite claim:
we are like them
and are following headlong in their footsteps. And so he drew an extended analogy between the Easter Island civilization and ours, feature for feature, and danger for danger:

A warning of what the future could hold can be seen on one of the remotest places on Earth . . . When the first Polynesian settlers landed here they found a miniature world that had ample resources to sustain them. They lived well . . .

The State of the Planet
(BBC TV, 2000)

A miniature world
: there, in three words, is Attenborough’s reason for travelling all the way to Easter Island and telling its story. He believed that it holds a warning for the world because Easter Island was itself a miniature world – a Spaceship Earth – that went wrong. It had ‘ample resources’ to sustain its population, just as the Earth has seemingly ample resources to sustain us. (Imagine how amazed Malthus would have been had he known that the Earth’s resources would still be called ‘ample’ by pessimists in the year 2000.) Its inhabitants ‘lived well’, just as we do. And yet they were doomed, just as we are doomed unless we change our ways. If we do not, here is ‘what the future could hold’:

The old culture that had sustained them was abandoned and the statues toppled. What had been a rich, fertile world in miniature had become a barren desert.

Again, Attenborough puts in a good word for the old culture: it ‘sustained’ the islanders (just as the ample resources did, until the islanders failed to use them
sustainably
). He uses the toppling of the statues to symbolize the fall of that culture, as if to warn of future disaster for ours, and he reiterates his world-in-miniature analogy between the society and technology of ancient Easter Island and that of our whole planet today.

Thus Attenborough’s Easter Island is a variant of Spaceship Earth: humans are sustained
jointly
by the ‘rich, fertile’ biosphere
and
the cultural knowledge of a static society. In this context, ‘sustain’ is an interestingly ambiguous word. It can mean providing someone with
what they need. But it can also mean preventing things from changing – which can be almost the opposite meaning, for the suppression of change is seldom what human beings need.

The knowledge that currently sustains human life in Oxfordshire does so only in the first sense: it does not make us enact the same, traditional way of life in every generation. In fact it prevents us from doing so. For comparison: if your way of life merely makes you build a new, giant statue, you can continue to live afterwards exactly as you did before. That is
sustainable
. But if your way of life leads you to invent a more efficient method of farming, and to cure a disease that has been killing many children, that is
unsustainable
. The population grows because children who would have died survive; meanwhile, fewer of them are needed to work in the fields. And so there is no way to continue as before. You have to live the solution, and to set about solving the new problems that this creates. It is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain, with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had at its zenith, and at an enormously higher standard of living. Appropriately enough, this civilization has knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain.

The Easter Islanders’ culture sustained them in both senses. This is the hallmark of a functioning static society. It provided them with a way of life; but it also inhibited change: it sustained their determination to enact and re-enact the same behaviours for generations. It sustained the values that placed forests – literally – beneath statues. And it sustained the shapes of those statues, and the pointless project of building ever more of them.

Moreover, the portion of the culture that sustained them in the sense of providing for their needs was not especially impressive. Other Stone Age societies have managed to take fish from the sea and sow crops without wasting their efforts in endless monument-building. And, if the prevailing theory is true, the Easter Islanders started to starve
before
the fall of their civilization. In other words, even after it had stopped providing for them, it retained its fatal proficiency at sustaining a fixed pattern of behaviour. And so it remained effective at preventing them from addressing the problem by the only means that could possibly have been effective:
creative thought and innovation. Attenborough regards the culture as having been very valuable and its fall as a tragedy. Bronowski’s view was closer to mine, which is that since the culture never improved, its
survival
for many centuries was a tragedy, like that of all static societies.

Attenborough is not alone in drawing frightening lessons from the history of Easter Island. It has become a widely adduced version of the Spaceship Earth metaphor. But what exactly is the analogy behind the lesson? The idea that civilization depends on good
forest
management has little reach. But the broader interpretation, that survival depends on good
resource
management, has almost no content:
any
physical object can be deemed a ‘resource’. And, since problems are soluble, all disasters are caused by ‘poor resource management’. The ancient Roman ruler Julius Caesar was stabbed to death, so one could summarize his mistake as ‘imprudent iron management, resulting in an excessive build-up of iron in his body’. It is true that if he had succeeded in keeping iron away from his body he would not have died in the (exact) way he did, yet, as an explanation of how and why he died, that ludicrously misses the point. The interesting question is not what he was stabbed with, but how it came about that other politicians plotted to remove him violently from office and that they succeeded. A Popperian analysis would focus on the fact that Caesar had taken vigorous steps to ensure that he could not be removed
without
violence. And then on the fact that his removal did not rectify, but actually entrenched, this progress-suppressing innovation. To understand such events and their wider significance, one has to understand the politics of the situation, the psychology, the philosophy, sometimes the theology. Not the cutlery. The Easter Islanders may or may not have suffered a forest-management fiasco. But, if they did, the explanation would not be about why they made mistakes – problems are inevitable – but why they failed to correct them.

I have argued that the laws of nature cannot possibly impose any bound on progress: by the argument of
Chapters 1
and
3
, denying this is tantamount to invoking the supernatural. In other words, progress is
sustainable
, indefinitely. But only by people who engage in a particular kind of thinking and behaviour – the problem-solving and problem-creating kind characteristic of the Enlightenment. And that requires the optimism of a dynamic society.

One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one’s own and others’. But the idea that our civilization has something to learn from the Easter Islanders’ alleged forestry failure is not derived from any structural resemblance between our situation and theirs. For they failed to make progress in practically every area. No one expects the Easter Islanders’ failures in, say, medicine to explain our difficulties in curing cancer, or their failure to understand the night sky to explain why a quantum theory of gravity is elusive to us. The Easter Islanders’ errors, both methodological and substantive, were simply too elementary to be relevant to us, and their imprudent forestry, if that is really what destroyed their civilization, would merely be typical of their lack of problem-solving ability across the board. We should do much better to study their many small successes than their entirely commonplace failures. If we could discover their rules of thumb (such as ‘stone mulching’ to help grow crops on poor soil), we might find valuable fragments of historical and ethnological knowledge, or perhaps even something of practical use. But one cannot draw general conclusions from rules of thumb. It would be astonishing if the details of a primitive, static society’s collapse had any relevance to hidden dangers that may be facing our open, dynamic and scientific society, let alone what we should do about them.

The knowledge that would have saved the Easter Islanders’ civilization has already been in our possession for centuries. A sextant would have allowed them to explore their ocean and bring back the seeds of new forests and of new ideas. Greater wealth, and a written culture, would have enabled them to recover after a devastating plague. But, most of all, they would have been better at solving problems of all kinds if they had known some of our ideas about how to do that, such as the rudiments of a scientific outlook. Such knowledge would not have guaranteed their welfare, any more than it guarantees ours. Nevertheless, the fact that their civilization failed for lack of what ours discovered long ago cannot be an ominous ‘warning of what the future could hold’ for us.

This knowledge-based approach to explaining human events follows from the general arguments of this book. We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing
how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations. We also know that whether a particular attempt to make progress will succeed or not is profoundly unpredictable. It can be understood in retrospect, but not in terms of factors that could have been known in advance. Thus we now understand why alchemists never succeeded at transmutation: because they would have had to understand some nuclear physics first. But this could not have been known at the time. And the progress that they did make – which led to the science of chemistry – depended strongly on how individual alchemists
thought
, and only peripherally on factors like which chemicals could be found nearby. The conditions for a beginning of infinity exist in almost every human habitation on Earth.