Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  This slowdown seems to be affecting our brains as much as our bodies, which will come as a shock to many. Steven Pinker devoted a sizeable chunk of his optimistic book Enlightenment Now to demonstrating that IQs were surging. “Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable, but actually smarter?” he asked with trademark perkiness. “Amazingly, the answer is yes. IQ scores have been rising for more than a century in every part of the world, at a rate of about 3 IQ points per decade.” This Flynn effect (named for its discoverer) provided what Pinker called a “tailwind in life,” “a gateway to compassion and ethics.”9 So that makes it tough to read the new data that emerged in 2018 showing the Flynn effect now running in reverse, with IQ “hitting its peak for people born in the 1970s and significantly declining ever since.” A review of seven hundred thousand IQ records in Norway showed that IQs were now dropping by seven points per generation, and the same kind of declines were seen in the six other nations studied. “It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people,” said one of the researchers. “It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families.”10

  Taken all together, the results suggest that instead of dreaming about utopia, we should be fixated on keeping dystopia at bay. And a team of scientists who performed the biggest global meta-study of this data on human performance ended their report with precisely this suggestion: our task now should be to somehow maintain the gains of the past. “Care should be taken,” these researchers concluded, “to prevent regression even if remaining close to upper limits may become more costly. This aim will be one of the most intense challenges of this century, especially with the new pressure of anthropocentric activities responsible for deleterious effects” on our health and well-being.11 That is to say, we’re at something like peak human right now, and it would be a worthy task to try to stay there—to spread the benefits of the last hundred years in diet and public health across geography and class, and to try to ward off the side effects of twentieth-century progress before it compromises twenty-first-century lives.

  * * *

  Clearly there are plenty of places that need to catch up, whole continents full of people who haven’t benefited much from the long, hot streak in the casino. Such places supplied much of the labor and raw material that made those winnings possible, often not by choice; and they’re paying the early price for our overreach as their oceans swell, crops wither, and forests burn—or as their jobs disappear with the rise of robots. And even as we’ve gotten taller, healthier, and longer-lived, there are of course people who still get sick. And all of us still die.

  These inequities can be used to promote the current way of doing business: think of all those coal executives, for instance, who developed a sudden interest in “energy poverty” when the developed world began to balk at burning more of their product. Even those philosophers who think we’re solving most of the world’s troubles believe that we should double down on business as usual to mop up the remaining woes: Pinker, for instance, refuses to brook even momentary slowdowns or limits; his prescription “for today’s bioethicists can be summarized in a single sentence: Get out of the way.”12

  It’s true that one way to deal with our remaining troubles, with the inequality and the remaining underdevelopment, is to try to amp up the growth machine again: If we cut the taxes of the rich, it will theoretically generate prosperity. If we unleash industry from environmental rules, it could produce jobs. If we pay no attention to the atmosphere, coal-fired power could conceivably bring prosperity to Africa, not to mention West Virginia. These are the promises of Trumpism and Kochism, and they’re not so far removed from the idea that if we plunge full speed ahead with artificial intelligence, it, too, will “grow our economy.” This approach has the advantage of being just like the past: it’s obviously easiest to keep doing what we’ve been doing. As the French journalist Hervé Kempf observed, growth “creates a surplus of apparent wealth that allows the system to be lubricated without modifying its structure.”13 But as this book has pointed out, that growth now comes with enormous levels of risk. Indeed, it risks ending the game of being human. Even with all that lubrication, the gears have begun to grind.

  And so, it makes sense to remember that those who helped define our current worldview have themselves imagined other possibilities. Adam Smith, who with The Wealth of Nations fired the gun that set off the race we’re still running, nonetheless predicted that the time would come when “a country which had acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its soil and climate, and its situation with regard to other countries, allowed it to acquire; which could, therefore, advance no farther, and which was not going backward.”14 This stationary state was the inevitable destiny of societies, he believed, even if no one had gotten there yet. The great philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill, revered by many libertarians for his classic essay On Liberty, could scarcely wait for such a steady-state economy. “A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement,” he wrote. “There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the art of living, and much more likelihood of it being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.”15 And, in living memory, it was John Maynard Keynes who hoped that “the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and human relations.”16

  * * *

  Which is why I keep flashing back to one of the most interesting people I met in my travels for this book. Her name is Nicole Poindexter and she’s African American. Raised in Texas, where her father was a surgeon, she was schooled at all the right places: Yale, Harvard Business School. She spent her time on the trading desks of the investment banks, playing with the derivatives that helped crater the economy, and then at Opower, a software platform for utility customers that was acquired not long ago by the tech giant Oracle. “I was an early employee there, and eventually it went public. I love what they’re doing, but there was a nagging sense that that was not what gave me purpose,” she said.

  Poindexter and I were sitting in the back of a car bouncing along a dirt road near the Northern Ghanaian city of Kumasi—Ashanti country, hot as heck. A long way from Harvard. “I saw this one video; it was during the Ebola crisis,” she told me. “People were living in preindustrial conditions—I mean, they were pushing with their feet to power a forge. There was a lot of coughing in the background, and I was thinking, ‘That’s someone with Ebola.’ But it wasn’t—it was from the smoke in the room from the fire. So, that is unacceptable to me, not when we in our world have this abundance. And I put it together with the energy stuff that was in my mind from Opower, and I got on a plane.”

  Poindexter had a framework in mind different from that of most of the entrepreneurs I met. Where they were focused on selling individual customers single-panel systems, her idea was village-scale solar microgrids. She wanted to build small solar arrays on the edge of rural towns and then wire the huts, as if she were a miniature Con Edison. The model requires more capital up front for the company, and hence more risk, but it also means you can provide more power, enough to think beyond lights and televisions and toward moneymaking businesses. The financial model imagines that customers will start by using almost nothing, just a hundred kilowatt hours a month, but it assumes that in the course of a decade, as they figure out what to do with that electricity, they will end up using a thousand kilowatt hours.

  “What’s your evidence for the assumption that people will increase their usage like that?” I asked.

  “My evidence is just, oh, everything in history,” she said. “If people have access to power, they will make use of it.”

  The numbers worked—on paper, anyway. “One day I built the model,” Poindexter expla
ined. “I costed everything out, ran all the numbers. And at the end of the day, it showed that a system for a small village could provide two thousand dollars in profit. And I thought, that’s the most amount of work I’ve ever done to get two thousand dollars. But it was making money.” In fact, if people do increase their use as expected, she says her investors will get “a fifty-percent return, unleveraged.”

  With a colleague, Joe Philip, who is Indian American and had been working at the renewable energy start-up SunEdison, Poindexter put together a small round of financing in 2015, and they started their first project in the Kumasi region, under the Black Star Energy label. (Check out the Ghanaian flag and you’ll get the name.) None of it was easy. American-style smart meters, at fifty bucks a pop, were way too expensive, for instance, so Philip and his team built their own, at a buck apiece, with chips ordered from Amazon. Kumasi, the regional capital, where Black Star’s headquarters was located, had grid power as unreliable as everyplace else in Ghana, making the office almost impossible to work in. “You’d get twenty-four hours on, then twelve off,” said Philip. “Every time you came back to your apartment it would be off.” But that, of course, only increased his and Poindexter’s resolve, by reminding them what life was like for their potential customers. “If you don’t have lights, you’re always rushing,” Poindexter said. “You’re rushing home from the field to make dinner before it gets dark. Everything has to happen in a twelve-hour day.” And so, they worked quickly to wire their first community.

  Our car was now bumping to a stop outside one of these first-to-be-wired villages, Kofihuikrom. We got out and inspected the small, fenced-in array of solar panels and then walked to the most prominent building in the settlement, a cement-block clinic with a big poster on one wall showing Nelson Mandela talking about tuberculosis. The clinic’s director was there to shake our hands. “I always had to store vaccines in different villages—in a different district,” he said. “No refrigerator. Now—now I can make ice packs for people. When I came here, we were using flashlights to see patients. That had to stop. We were trying to deliver babies with flashlights. Not the good kind you wear on your head, but holding it in your mouth to see. Now we have night hours.” It used to be hard to hire a nurse: “People didn’t want the posting here. But the new nurse came to spy before he took the job. When he saw we had power, he said, ‘Okay.’”

  A few feet away, cacao nuts were drying on screens—we had arrived just at the April harvest. This is a very poor place. Poindexter guessed that the average income per household was about three dollars a day, and the average household had five members. So, the village needed power not just for light, but for moving farther up the supply chain. “I really like chocolate,” she said. “And I just bought some at the airport in Amsterdam for eighteen dollars a pound. And when I do the numbers on the back of an envelope, I think the farmers here, my customers, make about one cent a pound. But if they’re doing the winnowing, the roasting themselves—maybe a dollar a pound someday? Plus, then you’re shipping cacao nibs, not all the water that’s in this nut.”

  To wander through these newly electrified villages is to understand an awful lot about why the twentieth century was so amazing: its delayed arrival here lets one sense what it was like in America in the 1930s, as rural electrification rolled across the countryside; or in China in the 1990s. But to imagine power arriving without pollution is a nice twist: These communities in rural Ghana aren’t getting the oldest, cheapest technology. They’re getting the newest, cheapest technology, so new and so cheap that families who currently make three dollars a day can afford it. And this isn’t aid; it’s a business. When we meet Poindexter’s customers, they’re grateful but not obsequious, and she’s gracious but not sentimental. They ask about credit for refrigerators, about the possibility of streetlights, about other appliances. There’s not a Luddite in sight, nor a romantic. “I’m not a socialist,” said Poindexter. “I don’t think humans are wired that way. But I also think extractive capitalism has run its course.”

  How are humans wired? Where’s the sweet spot, the balance, the right scale? “On my very first trip to Ghana, I was certain of many things,” said Poindexter. “Like, these were communal societies; we can have one meter for each village. ‘No, no,’ everyone said. ‘That won’t work. We’ll fight over who used the most power.’ So, we have individual meters.” Score one for Ayn Rand. But Poindexter’s system is nonetheless based on communities. “If we have a village with a hundred households, we need sixty of them to sign up before we go forward. Every individual needs to choose whether they want it, but they also have to work together as a community. We meet with the chiefs first, we sign a memorandum of understanding with the chief or the queen mother. We’re a utility. The unit is the community.”

  It’s also the community that changes, doubtless some for the better and some for the worse. In Côte d’Ivoire, I met a farmer who said his life was much improved by the new power. “In the old time, you had to go outside and talk. Now my neighbor has his TV, I have my TV, and we stay inside”—which to me sounds like the first sad step toward Atlas Shrugged, but people have a right to figure this out on their own. I sat with a chief in the Ghanaian village of Daban, sipping ice-cold water and listening to him talk about the advent of power. “On the third day we had it, all the youths went to the city to bring back a sound system,” he said. “We played music all night. Even that old man there, he has been playing music.”

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  Which brings me back to a point I’ve been making in the margins all along. The human game is a team sport.

  Or, at least, so it seems to me. If the antigovernment conservatives are right instead, and individuals are all that really matter, if “there is no such thing as society,” then we do not stand a chance. We won’t be able to mount a real common effort against climate change. We’ll stand and watch, slack-jawed, as the latest inventions roll out of Silicon Valley.

  But I’m pretty sure they’re wrong. The human project has long been a group effort. We’re born big-brained but unformed and vulnerable. It took a tribe, a band, a clan, a community to raise humans to adulthood. We hunted together in groups. With our complex language, we’re able to gossip, to keep track of one another. And everything we learn about the human animal, now that we can stick people in MRIs or analyze their hormones, leads us to think that we’re still not that far removed from the creatures who sat on the floor of the savanna picking lice from one another’s fur.

  In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control released startling new statistics on suicide in America: since 1999, it has gone up by 25 percent “across most ethnic and age groups.”1 Those are astonishing numbers, and hard at first to explain: during these same years, far more people have been able to find treatment for depression and anxiety. Clay Routledge is a behavioral scientist at the state university in North Dakota, which saw a 58 percent rise in suicides, the largest in any state. Humans, he wrote recently, require not just food and shelter but “meaning and purpose.” We can’t easily manufacture it on our own—“the psychological literature suggests that close relationships with other people are our greatest existential resource”—but we live in a world where families form later in life, if at all; where the religious institutions that once brought us together have begun to wither; and where screen-bound people “are less likely to know and interact with their neighbors.” This is hideously bad news because “studies have shown that the more people feel a strong sense of belongingness, the more they perceive life as meaningful”2—meaningful enough for them to keep on living it.

  Some of these modern woes might yield to political changes. Because Scandinavian countries provide the child care that makes it easy to be a parent, for instance, their citizens form larger families. Quite likely, progressives should pour less scorn on churches, if only because they provide a place for people to gather. The basic question of whether society really matters: that could transcend left and right.

  It doesn’t, howe
ver, transcend politics. The antigovernment impulse currently runs our world. It’s expressed by all those cabinet officials who keep The Fountainhead on the bedside table, all those billionaires who gather with the Koch brothers to figure out the course of our politics, all those Silicon Valley moguls who want nothing standing in the way of their next inventions. These are people who, at some level, hate the idea of society, who organize campaigns against public transit, who try to dismantle public schools and national parks, who instinctively head for the gated enclave. I don’t think their rule will last forever, but as I’ve said, they currently possess a savage leverage, perhaps power enough to end the human game. Certainly, they’re trying their best. The endless efforts to gerrymander districts, suppress voting, race-bait, gin up cynicism in our politics, confuse us about issues such as climate change—these are nothing more than efforts to weaken society so it can’t exert power over its most dominant individuals. Polling shows that “the poor are now democracy’s strongest fans, the rich its biggest skeptics.”3

  Another way of saying this: one reason that some powerful people like robots is precisely because they come without the human impulse toward solidarity—they didn’t need a society to rear them; they are immaculately self-possessed. Andy Puzder, Trump’s first candidate for secretary of labor, devotes “much of his free time” to reading Ayn Rand. His day job was running the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast-food emporiums, and in that role, he bitterly opposed raising the minimum wage; people who wanted fifteen dollars an hour, he said, “should really think about what they’re doing.” Instead, he yearned for a future of greater automation at his chains, because robots are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”4