On Not Changing Humanity

In Octavia Butler’s short story, “The Book of Martha,” God offers a novelist named Martha Bes the power to enact one fundamental change to the human species to keep us from destroying ourselves. The prompt for this course asks a similar question: If you could change one thing about humanity that would ensure that we all survive and thrive in the future, what would it be and why?

I would not change anything about humanity, and think almost any change would likely be fairly disastrous.

I suspect a lot of the replies to this question will, similarly to Butler, be that humanity should be kinder, or more empathetic—in short, many people will say humanity should be more like them. But precisely the opposite traits—ambition, greed, cruelty, brutality, hierarchy—have been responsible for much of humanity's real success. This is what I felt Butler was blind to in her narrative: the greatest successes of our civilization are linked to these traits. Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, which provide extreme material abundance and convenience, are the products of greed, competition, and corporate hierarchy. People criticize these companies for these traits without considering whether those same traits are responsible for their ability to exist in the first place.

Likewise, the jewels of our political system—due process, equal rights under the law, separation of powers—were only made possible by multiple millennia of tribalism, suspicion towards outsiders and alien ideas, and cynical militarism against potential enemies. The nasty impulses nobody likes are what have kept humanity safe and well-fed. As James Madison famously noted in Federalist No. 51, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition... If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Our rights exist because we did not trust human power.

It is tempting to think that we could engineer humanity, get rid of prejudice, and educate the people with the wrong ideas. But more likely, the people with the wrong ideas hold those ideas as expressions of latent, fossilized instincts that allowed our species to overcome every external threat we have faced. We tend to think that the reason people hold opposite views from us is prejudice, ignorance, or lack of education, but these instincts are more likely the natural and inherent byproducts of human evolution—of natural selection weeding out people who may have been overly empathetic, understanding, and trusting toward people unlike them.

Butler's "The Book of Martha" shares a lot of the problems of the view I am criticizing. God—who, by blind chance, holds progressive politics—says to Martha: “You will help humankind to survive its greedy, murderous, wasteful adolescence. Help it to find less destructive, more peaceful, sustainable ways to live... They’re well on the way to destroying billions of themselves by greatly changing the ability of the earth to sustain them. That’s why they need help. That’s why you will help them.”

This sounds all well and good, but in real life, the greedy, murderous, wasteful humans are actually doing a pretty good job of dealing with climate change: fossil-fuel CO2 emissions in the US have fallen in absolute numbers almost every year since 2007, down 20% from 6.12 billion tons in 2007 to 4.9 billion tons in 2024. The reason many people so badly want industrialized countries to be failing at fighting climate change is that it expresses the same uncritical fantasy Butler's story expresses—that finally, greedy humanity will be saved by the soft, caring, empathetic people they have belittled for so long. The impulse behind that story is actually the same impulse of the "greedy, murderous, wasteful humans": the impulse to be dominant, to be the master who shows the ignorant the truth.

Martha's final wish—“a private, perfect utopia every night”—though meant to be a conservative change, is also probably a pretty bad idea. Human civilization is possible almost exclusively because people do not actually get what they want. A lot of people's perfect private utopias, rather than being small wish-fulfillments that make them nicer, would involve self-aggrandizing fantasies. You can imagine a creepy, disgruntled coworker who, when he goes to bed, becomes king of the company for eight hours, worshiped and respected by all the people who normally don't speak to him, and then wakes up and is himself again. Having dreams like that every night would probably negatively affect the people around him. Most of humanity dreams of nightmares for others.

Regarding Emergent Strategy, I think a lot of the text actually lines up with what I have argued here, though maybe with somewhat different conclusions than adrienne maree brown would like. She speaks of emergence as: “It is another way of speaking about the connective tissue of all that exists—the way, the Tao, the force, change, God/dess, life. Birds flocking, cells splitting, fungi whispering underground.”

This is a beautiful image, and it connects to my broader point: humanity's best and worst traits—good and evil—can be viewed, rather than as a strict binary, as two halves of a broader picture, two sides of a complex evolutionary history, a Yin and a Yang that make up a harmonious Dao. In nature, ecosystems require predation, decay, and forest fires just as much as mutual aid.

Miro Mindmap

The conceptual mindmap tracking the tensions between Butler's narrative, brown's emergence, evolutionary biology, and institutional design: