This review was updated on the 19th of February, 2023. I would like to thank Ultimo Reducto and his partner in Naturaleza Indomita, A.Q., for their suggestions and corrections.
The book1 by Konrad Lorenz that I review in this paper was published originally in Germany nearly fifty years ago, in 1973. In it, Lorenz investigates eight problems that have been created by the human civilization and threaten its existence. As we will see during our investigation, modern technology is the common thread that links all of these problems together. We can see that these problems have become more widespread and intense as modern technology has continued to develop since 1973.
1. Overpopulation
Organic life, like a dam, is situated in the middle of the universal energy flux. Living things absorb energy to their metabolisms by taking advantage of the negative entropy, and this energy increases their mass. As their mass increases, their capacity for energy absorption also increases. That, in turn, accelerates their rate of enlargement. This process is an example of a positive feedback loop, and if positive feedback loops don’t end up in a catastrophe, it is thanks to negative feedback loops that balance them. Some relentless physics and probability laws counter this energy absorption and enlargement tendency inherent in organic beings. Thanks to these laws, living things and ecosystems reach homeostasis. But according to Lorenz, men, due to their technology, surpass the boundaries these laws set, and increase their mass with a positive feedback loop unchecked by a balancing negative feedback loop.
Overpopulation forces people to live as big masses in enormous cities. Men aren’t adapted to live in close physical proximity with hundreds and thousands of people. For this reason, modern man is inclined to ignore people whom he doesn’t know personally. Moreover, being in perpetual and close proximity to many people diminishes his capacity to care even for his close ones. According to Lorenz, some of the pathological behaviors modern city dweller exhibits are due to this crowded and unnatural environment. Lorenz refers here, especially, to some pathological violent acts we see in metropolises. Experiments on animals and observations on people have demonstrated that crowded environments increase aggression.
However, Lorenz doesn’t mention that overpopulation is one of the most influential factors in the destruction of wild Nature. The construction of the buildings that are necessary to accommodate milliards of people, the clearance of wild lands for agriculture, the extraction of the resources that those humans need, etc. result inevitably in the destruction or subjugation of wild Nature.
Today, many people think that anxieties about overpopulation that were much more common during the 60s and 70s turned out false, and overpopulation isn’t a problem anymore. During the 70s, when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb came out, the main concern was that the expected population increase would render food sources insufficient, cause global famines, and social upheavals or wars would follow. As it is well known, the world population of 3,5 milliards in the 1970s is approaching today to 8 milliards. But this doesn’t mean that there is no overpopulation problem today. As Lorenz indicates, humanity has continued to increase its population by suspending the negative feedback loops that would normally act on this population. This has been achieved thanks to new technological developments in agriculture: the widespread adoption of more efficient crop types, artificial fertilizers, and chemical pesticides. Therefore, the overpopulation problem as Lorenz defines it in this book has continued unabated: a positive feedback loop unchecked by natural limits that have been suspended by technological means. But this can be done only so long, and as Lorenz also indicates in his book, unchecked positive feedback loops in Nature generally end in a catastrophe. Besides, the toll exacted on wild things to sustain this population boom has been enormous and is getting bigger as the population continues to grow.
2. Devastation of the Environment
The species that constitute an ecosystem have very complex relations of interdependency among each other. Predators and preys are dependent on each other. Ecosystems have reached their current equilibria by passing through long evolutionary processes. Though some relatively rare natural events might destroy or radically alter some ecosystems quickly, the evolution of ecosystems, like the evolution of species, happens very slowly.
But humans, due to their technology, have an ecosystem that changes very rapidly.2 The exponential growth of technology causes rapid and deep transformations in natural ecosystems that humanity depends on for survival. Here Lorenz is speaking about both the rapid and deep transformations humanity causes in Nature and the rapid and fundamental changes that occur in the artificial environments (cities, countryside, etc.) which are created by the human civilization. These transformations, according to Lorenz, are detrimental to the health of the ecosystems: to “humanity’s ecosystem” and also to wild ecosystems. Exponential growth in technology changes cities physically and demographically in a rapid fashion. This rapid change also affects the routines of everyday life (from the forms of work to free time activities), and the relations among people (the structure of the family, the relations between men and women, etc.)
Lorenz focuses specifically on the aesthetics of the cities. According to him, the rapid geographical spread of the cities devastates the aesthetic quality of the living environment of humans. He compares the cities that were built during the Middle Ages with the recent development of the suburbs, and remarks that the latter have no aesthetic quality. The lack of aesthetics in these recent developments stems from the fact that they are mass-produced. They spread rapidly like cancerous cells. The living environment of humans changes so rapidly that the equilibrium that takes for Nature a long time to be reached is no longer present in human ecosystems. Lorenz attributes the beauty of Nature to this equilibrium which is created only through a long evolutionary process. Modern cities have lost their aesthetic quality because only a similar evolutionary process can create a functional and healthy whole.
Humanity, which destroys Nature’s spontaneous aesthetics, is forced to live in an awful and ugly artificial environment. Lorenz states that this situation destroys man’s moral and aesthetic sense. Modern living environments, with their mass-produced sameness, ignore people’s individuality and stifle it in the end. Modern cities are comprised of millions of people who are stuffed in identical cages that are stockpiled on top of each other. Lorenz remarks that a person who endures this misery is inclined to isolate himself from his neighbor who suffers from the same conditions. According to Lorenz, this inclination is caused by the desire to run away from one’s own misery that is reflected from a neighbor. But I think there is a more fundamental desire in this inclination. Modern man is inclined to avoid his neighbors who happen to live just above, below, or next to him because, essentially, his neighbors are strangers to him. These people are generally neither his relatives nor they are part of a small group through which they engage together in a practical and meaningful activity. Even being relatives or close friends is losing gradually its practical meaning nowadays. The modern individual can only function as a replaceable component of a giant social organization which makes him disappear in a giant crowd of millions of people. Friends and relatives are mostly for passing away their “free time.” That is why an average modern individual is becoming lonely and isolated in practical terms.
Lorenz’s position is environmentalism. Environmentalism concerns itself with the devastation of wild Nature only to the extent that it affects “humanity’s ecosystem.” It is concerned that Nature wouldn’t be able to sustain the services it gives to human societies such as supplying clean air and water, absorbing their waste, and providing various resources. Environmentalism’s attitude towards wild Nature is instrumental. It doesn’t see wild Nature as valuable in itself. Even though Lorenz mentions the devastation that the rapid advance of technology brings to wild Nature, he is more concerned about the effects of this on the “humans’ ecosystem.” He focuses on the aesthetic misery of modern cities. His attitude on this issue is reminiscent of the humanist anti-industrialists (Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, etc.) who lament the old cities, old monuments, and old cultural achievements that, according to them, were so magnificent before technological development passed some optimum threshold. According to them, technology, up to a certain level of development, was conducive to the process of humanization. It was helping humanity to elaborate and refine its sense of aesthetics, and sense of morality. It was making Homo sapiens more human by refining those qualities which distinguished him from other animal species. Once this optimum threshold has been passed by technological development, it began to have the opposite effect. It started to dull humanity’s sense of morality and aesthetics. Cities started to lose their old beauty, people started to be more concerned with the practical aspects of things rather than with their beauty, they became the victims of a banal and vulgar popular culture, the residents of the metropolitan areas became less concerned with one another, they became more prone to senseless violence or other unnatural bizarre acts.
Humanist anti-industrialism’s lamentations about the old cultural achievements of humanity are no more than romantic nostalgia. And its main concern (the process of “humanization:” making humans more human, refining their aesthetics and sense of morality, etc.) reflects its progressivist stance. What this concern about “humanization” amounts to is to try to “improve” humans through cultural conditioning, to stifle or subjugate their wild nature. How can we differentiate this aim from the technophiles’ dreams about trans-humanity, integrating humans with machines, modifying their genes, or some other disgusting projects that purportedly aim to improve humanity too? These aims are, qualitatively speaking, the same. Technophiles and anti-industrialist humanists see humans in their natural condition as something unachieved, unfinished, and something that needs to be “improved” through cultural means. So, they both try to “improve” humans by artificial means. We can only avoid falling into this trap by making the wild human nature as our reference point. No “improvements” can be made artificially on what Nature (the evolutionary process) has made us during our long existence as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Lorenz focuses on the developments since the Industrial Revolution. However, when it comes to the devastation that has been brought on the “humans’ ecosystem” (the artificial environment humans live in), at least since the advent of sedentary life and the Agricultural Revolution, there hasn’t been a qualitative shift in this domain. Humans have been living in unnatural environments that they are not evolutionarily adapted to since they moved to a sedentary lifestyle. These sedentary living environments, since their beginning, have been much more crowded than small natural human groups, destroyed the beauty of Nature, subjected humans to unhygienic conditions and infectious diseases, stratified people to strict social hierarchies, and tried to restrict the spontaneous expression of human nature through various mechanisms. Of course, they have become worse in nearly all of these aspects as technology has advanced. As Lorenz also remarks, since the Industrial Revolution, the spread of these artificial environments has become cancerous. But this is not due to some change of mentality in humans because they’ve lost their sense of aesthetics or morals. This is simply because human societies have at their disposal much larger amounts of energy and material resources since the Industrial Revolution. That is why they are getting bigger and transforming larger areas of wilderness into artificial environments more rapidly, trapping more and more people in close proximity to each other and isolating them more firmly from wild Nature. Because of this, people are living in conditions that are becoming remoter each day from the conditions that they evolved in. Though it may be to some extent a subjective assessment, this stricter isolation from wild Nature might be the reason why the artificial environments have lost their aesthetic qualities compared to their historic precedents. Our aesthetic sense evolved as well during our long nomadic hunter-gatherer existence, and it must have been attuned to the sounds, smells, and views of Nature. In most of the cities or towns of the past, the existence of wild Nature was palpable. They were surrounded by wild Nature, and their residents could feel and even experience wild Nature to a certain degree. They could see it around human settlements and reach it by walking, and they weren’t as isolated from it as the inhabitants of modern metropolises.
3. Man’s Race against Himself
The competition among the members of a species might reach a point that could damage the survival capabilities of that species. Lorenz gives Argusianus bird as an example to explain this phenomenon. The females of Argusianus choose their mating partners according to the attractiveness of their tails. This sexual selection pressure causes male Argusianus birds to develop enormous tails. If this sexual selection pressure which makes males to develop big tails hadn’t been balanced by an opposite selective pressure from the predators dwelling on the ground, males of Argusianus might have lost their ability to fly. The existence of ground-dwelling predators creates a negative feedback pressure that balances the sexual selection pressure.
Lorenz says that in humans as well there are intra-species selection pressures. But with some important distinctions: In humans, intra-species pressures foster cultural development (the total production of human civilization which is not transferred by genetic inheritance), and there isn’t a counter-balancing selection pressure that would balance intra-species selection pressures. For this reason, humanity’s cultural development, in the absence of a counter-balancing force (a negative feedback loop) is marching towards a catastrophic point.
What Lorenz means by human intra-species selection pressure is the economic competition among humans: Producing more and newer materials and selling them to outmaneuver competitors. This indicates that Lorenz sees human intra-species competition as something unique to a specific economic model: an ideology or system that regards producing and consuming more as something divine, an ideology or system that values material welfare as something supreme. But, human intra-species competition is something much broader and deeper than what Lorenz seems to think. Because Darwinian selection, which is the main mechanism of biological evolution, also operates at the level of human groups (states, corporations, criminal gangs, political parties, etc.) There is an unconscious, automatic, and spontaneous competition between these groups. Darwinian selection picks from these human groups which have qualities that make them better at surviving and propagating themselves than their rivals. And these qualities are, fundamentally, the ones that make some human groups better at reaching and efficiently absorbing energy and material resources. Lorenz’s economic competition is only a special occasion of this broader Darwinian competition. This competition’s speed and ferocity, and its impact on wild Nature, increase with the development of technology. Because technology enables human groups to draw ever more resources from their environment in ever shorter time frames. Thus, they become able to transform their environment and wild Nature much more rapidly and intensely. The results of this are the ever more rapid and intense subjugation and destruction of wild Nature, as well as the rapid transformation of the artificial environment that humanity lives in. The changes that technological development brings to society have become so rapid and intense that, in 15-20 years, our living environment is altered beyond recognition in many aspects (physical, demographical, cultural, etc.) This abnormal transformation creates in people the sensation that time passes rapidly and space shrinks enormously. According to Lorenz, this creates in humans a generalized feeling of stress and dissatisfaction.
Lorenz remarks that modern individuals are in perpetual fear of lagging behind, fear of being unable to adjust to changes, and being unsuccessful. Of course, the result of this is a generalized feeling of stress and constant agitation. Lorenz sees in this constant state of agitation the reason for modern man’s inability to remain calm with himself and with his thoughts. Modern man, since he dreads to face himself and his thoughts, tries to drown them in a perpetual image and sound bombardment.
4. Entropy of Feeling
There are some mechanisms that motivate animals to undertake actions that would keep them alive. These mechanisms, in simplistic terms, motivate animals to flee from pain and chase pleasure. Pain constitutes punishment, and pleasure constitutes a reward. Punishment and reward condition animals to avoid pain and reach for the things that give them pleasure. Evolution created this mechanism of award and punishment in order to motivate animals to perform the behaviors that would keep them alive. This mechanism also motivates animals to carry out behaviors that involve hardships which, in the end, will bring them greater rewards than the hardships they endure. For example, a wolf-pack may cover great distances, cross a cold river by swimming, and put themselves in lethal danger in order to hunt a bison. The reward of the meat is big enough to motivate them to endure those hardships. Animals, in accordance with the relative weights of the rewards and punishments, risk some dangers and endure some hardships, or avoid them altogether. In environments where rewards are plenty and easily accessible, the attractiveness of the rewards and their potential to motivate animals decreases. Because constant repetition of stimuli causes desensitization.
With the subjugation of wild Nature, humanity has stepped out of the natural pain-pleasure balance. Humans, in their recently created artificial environment, have decreased to a great extent the frequency of the occasions that they need to exert effort or endure physical hardships in order to reach some rewards. In today’s modern world, people can reach comfort and pleasure or they can satisfy their basic physical necessities without having to toil under hardships. Modern men develop desensitization against rewarding stimuli, because easily reachable and constantly repeating stimuli lose their satisfactory power. Besides, the possibility to reach rewards without enduring hardships erodes the modern individual’s capacity for delayed gratification. This means that a great number of people have lost their capacity to endure hardships here and now in order to reach a reward that would await them at the end of a demanding process. People have been losing their ability to undertake projects that would require enduring labor, concentration, or attention. As a result, they can’t experience the satisfaction that finishing successfully a demanding job used to give people.
The evolutionarily adapted reward-punishment mechanism goes haywire in modern life because the conditions this mechanism evolved in are quite different from the conditions modern people find themselves in today. Because people lived a physically demanding life during their long nomadic hunter-gatherer existence when Homo sapiens as we know it today took shape. They were living in wild Nature, and they had to exert their physical and intellectual capabilities in a demanding fashion in order to satisfy their most important physical necessities. They could face such dangers as hunger, being attacked by wild animals or other human groups, etc. For this reason, avoiding expending energy as much as conditions allowed it (laziness), gorging with food when it was available (gluttony), and avoiding dangers as much as possible (cowardice) were, considering the circumstances of the time, logical strategies that evolution bestowed on humans as default inclinations. Most humans need the enforcement of the circumstances in order to override these inclinations and behave industriously, frugally, and bravely. And circumstances in paleolithic times forced them frequently to behave industriously, frugally, and bravely. So, it is easy to imagine the problems that would ensue in modern comfortable conditions because of a behavioral repertoire that evolved under the circumstances of paleolithic times.
Lorenz says that we can see the consequences of the disruption of the reward-punishment mechanism in such diverse manifestations as the consumption craze to the shallowness of human relations. Since there is no need to undertake a task that would require hard work, people immerse themselves in consumption which would satisfy their desires immediately. But as the dimensions of this consumption increase, the amount of satisfaction it gives decreases, and this is tried to be remedied by ever more consumption. This problem also affects the relations between humans. What makes human relations (familial and conjugal relations, friendships, etc.) intense and meaningful are not only the positive or happy feelings that we get from these relations but also the responsibilities and conflicts that these relations bring. But humans are losing their power to carry these responsibilities and endure these conflicts. Lorenz remarks that relations with the opposite sex are turning into mere sexual pleasure without the responsibilities that Nature and tradition bestow on them: sexuality is being stripped from the familial roles and the responsibilities of child-rearing and is being turned into mere pleasure.
Remember that Lorenz was making these observations at the beginning of the 70s. The conditions that disrupt the award-punishment mechanism in humans have intensified significantly since then. Human relations, which according to Lorenz have lost their intensity, have greatly moved to the digital realm (social media) after the total destruction of small-scale communities and isolation of individuals in amorphous masses. Due to online pornography, more and more people experience sexuality with pixels on a screen instead of real humans. Because it is much easier to send a digital message or play a video by pressing a button than directly deal with real physical people. Lorenz was seeing consumption as an effortless way to reach pleasure. Today, with the advent of online shopping, it is possible to consume without even moving one step physically and without interacting with anybody. Digital communication technologies which purportedly connect people are in fact the means to prevent real physical face-to-face contact. They isolate people from each other and the outside world. Modern individuals’ need to escape from effort has reached such proportions that, sometimes, they can’t even tolerate the most minuscule residues of physical contact. That is the reason why, even if they’re not forced to do so by their circumstances, they sometimes choose to communicate via digital text messages and try to reflect their emotions with “emojis.”
It is clear that Lorenz’s observations regarding the reward-punishment mechanism and its disruption in modern conditions are quite similar to Ted Kaczynski’s concept of the “power process.”3 But unlike Kaczynski, Lorenz misses the fundamental reason for this problem. The technological system, forcing humans to live in circumstances that are radically different from the ones in which they evolved in, deprives them of the possibility of undertaking a concrete and purposeful task that is directly related to their physical existence. Therefore, modern man finds himself in a huge void of meaninglessness, and this void is tried to be filled with consumption, entertainment industry and hedonist pleasures.
5. Genetic Decay
Lorenz starts this chapter by discussing the altruism or cooperation problem. Some social behavior patterns are advantageous for the community but against the interests of the individual. So, how could mutation and selection explain the origin and retention of these altruistic behavior patterns? Because “anti-social elements” who were parasitic on the altruistic behaviors of other members of the community would reap the benefits of altruistic behaviors without themselves giving anything back. They would be at an advantage and outproduce altruistic individuals. “Anti-social” members would prevail in the end, and altruistic behaviors and cooperation would cease. Lorenz says that “we do not know what has prevented the pervasion of the society by social parasites.”4
It seems that Lorenz was not aware at the time he wrote this book of the theories that explain the evolution of altruistic and cooperative behavior: inclusive fitness, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and multilevel selection. According to the inclusive fitness theory, the reproductive success of an organism not only depends on its own survival and reproduction, but also on the survival and reproduction of its kin. Since an organism shares a certain amount of genes with its genetic relatives, the reproductive success (survival and reproduction) of its kin also contributes to the success of this organism’s genes. Genes of an organism might propagate themselves through its genetic relatives. Therefore, mutation and selection could create altruistic behaviors in organisms that would make them help genetic relatives to survive and reproduce. Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, explains how cooperation can evolve among the members of a community who are not genetic relatives. Mutually altruistic acts might increase the reproductive success of the participators. This was proven through the “tit for tat” strategy in game theory. In stable and long-term relations, it is better to act in kind. If your partner is cooperative, it is better to act cooperatively, because, in the long run, this increases the benefits for both parties. According to multilevel selection theory, Darwinian selection can also act on the group level in certain conditions. When the social group acts as a higher-level organism, between-group selection can dominate the within-group selection. In such a case, selection favors altruism because groups with members who behave altruistically for the benefit of the group can outproduce other groups that don’t have altruistic members.
According to Lorenz, humans have an innate sense of justice. Nearly all humans share fundamental intuitions about justice, and about what is right and wrong. The source of this intuition is innate. Lorenz acknowledges that these are speculations, and he cannot prove them. However, some experiments on babies would later show that humans really have innate notions of justice. These experiments showed that babies know that people have goals, they ascribe beliefs to people and can anticipate a person’s behavior based on his belief, they view the helping acts as positive and the hindering acts as negative, and they prefer helpful individuals to the hindering individuals.5
Lorenz claims that, throughout history, human societies prevented “anti-social” individuals from reproducing themselves using this universal intuition. He says that “normal” members of society have specific reaction patterns that make them respond negatively to “anti-social” behaviors. These reaction patterns, utilized by human societies, prevented the “anti-social genes” from spreading. According to Lorenz, modern society renounces the mechanisms that allow it selectively (genetic selection) to eliminate people who are genetically predisposed to “anti-social” inclinations and unable to accept the responsibilities society bestows upon them. Lorenz says that two characteristics of modern society are sabotaging this selection process. First is the belief that humans are “blank slates.” According to this wrong but quite common belief, an individual’s character and his behaviors are shaped, almost completely, by the circumstances of his environment. There aren’t any innate genetic determinants that shape an individual’s character, psychological inclinations, etc. Therefore, the behaviors of humans could be shaped from scratch by environmental cues such as education or any other indoctrination method. If an individual is acting “anti-socially,” the blame should be on his environment or on the society he lives in, never on him. This person can be educated and rehabilitated to society. According to Lorenz, this wrong belief is preventing society eliminating genetically anti-social people and thus, these genetic tendencies are becoming more common in society. The second feature is the fact that, as Lorenz also mentions in the previous problem, living conditions that are prevalent in modern society are fostering infantile inclinations and suppressing adult behavior patterns. According to Lorenz, “the impatient demand for instant gratification, the lack of any sense of responsibility and consideration for the feelings of others, are typical of little children...” And “the ability to work for a distant goal, a sense of responsibility for one’s own behavior, and consideration for the feelings of others are behavior norms characteristic of a mature person.”6 Lorenz observes that people who don’t have the characteristics that make an individual an adult aren’t ready for the roles that they should assume in society.
Lorenz’s attitude on this subject is quite simplistic. He doesn’t specify what he means by “anti-social” acts. Apart from some obvious pathological behaviors, not every behavior unapproved by a society is morally bad. Sometimes it is the society that is wrong, and a minority people who have some attitudes, behaviors, and ideas against the mainstream of the society who are right. Lorenz talks here as if the society is always right. Besides, he doesn’t specify which society he is talking about. He equates all types of societies from small-scale natural human groups to developed techno-industrial societies. Different societies have different rules and obligations, and their living conditions are not the same. Some of them (such as our modern society) force humans to live in conditions that they are not evolutionarily adapted to, because those behaviors generated by the adaptations to an ancient way of life may not necessarily be adaptive in the modern world.
On the other hand, Lorenz’s concerns about the spread of “anti-social” behaviors in modern conditions didn’t turn out to be true. On the contrary, behavior patterns have become more pro-social and collectivistic, and they have become more widespread during the interval. I think that Lorenz’s concerns should be seen in the context of the period he was writing this book. This book was written right after the student and youth revolts of 68. The ideology and values of this movement were quite popular at that time. The end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s were the times when the third-wave left7 was assuming the dominant position among modern ideologies. During this period, the following theories became quite popular: the rejection of traditional values (family roles; norms that were regulating manners, clothes, speech, etc.); theories that purported that criminals are the victims of the social system,8 that they are rebels who are revolting against a crooked society; etc. The popularity of these theories reflected itself in police and judiciary as a more lenient approach towards criminals. For this reason, the 60s and 70s were a period when violence and criminality increased in Western societies. 9
Of course, the increase in violence was affecting the social machine in a negative manner. This caused a counter-reaction beginning in the 80s. States became more harsh and effective against criminals, police organizations got bigger, and from the 80s on, there was an important increase in the numbers of incarcerated people.10 Those values and theories that fostered anti-social behaviors were mostly eliminated from the third-wave leftism. Violence, in all its forms, is regarded now as the most despicable thing. Third-wave leftism, by setting aside most of the economic goals of the second-wave leftism, focused aggressively on the issues of the “oppressed” (homosexuals, women, animals, minority ethnic or religious groups, etc.) Third-wave leftism has become the dominant ideology of modern society and thus, the concern about the issues of the “oppressed” has become mainstream. This ideology demonizes all forms of violence, and encourages empathy, social responsibility, and pity towards the “weak” and “oppressed.” It can be said that the social reaction against the rising violence and criminality of the 60s and 70s turned out to be successful. Contrary to Lorenz’s concerns, beginning in the 90s, the general population has internalized collective social norms more and more deeply, and a society that is more passive has been created. Those parts of the ideology of the 60s that embraced violence and rejected social norms on speech or clothing have become commodities for popular culture: in movies and music there is an exaggerated display of violence and sexuality, pornography is extremely widespread, and manners in clothing and speech aren’t subjected to the strict norms of the 50s anymore. This superficial relaxation in movies, television programs, music, video-games, etc. (i.e., the so-called “popular culture”) and everyday manners is actually a symptom of a much more internalized and deeper compliance. The social machine knows that the mere display of violence and extreme sexuality in popular culture will be limited to those virtual/fictional domains. It won’t lead astray its members to violent and anti-social dangerous real behaviors, on the contrary, this explicit content of the popular culture is relaxing its members who in fact are strictly surrounded by other and more important restrictions.11
However, the second characteristic Lorenz mentions is still relevant today: Modern conditions are fostering infantilization in individuals. In fact, this situation has been exacerbated since this book was written. The Internet, especially, has played a decisive role in this exacerbation. It has greatly intensified modern technological society’s tendency to eliminate effort from the daily lives of its members. Nowadays, the modern individual can reach consumption with one “click.” He can immerse himself, whenever and wherever he likes, in a bubble of sound and images in order to forget his miserable and meaningless existence. All these are decreasing the attention, concentration, and delayed gratification capacities of the modern individual. Consequently, his ability to perform in a useful and efficient manner is also decreasing. This might have, in the near future, negative consequences for the efficient functioning of the social machine. And remember that, these tendencies are occurring in parallel to the advancements in robotic and artificial intelligence. The quality of the functions people are performing in the social system is in constant decline due to ever more specialization, and machines are assuming ever more portions of the economic roles. These two tendencies that develop in tandem with each other might finally end up leading the technological system to substitute humans with machines.
Lorenz omits mentioning a more obvious source of genetic decay in modern societies. Modern conditions –modern medicinal techniques specifically– are putting humans out of natural selection’s reach. For example, a person with myopia would have fewer chances to reproduce in ancestral environments. His chances of falling from a precipice or becoming prey to a predator would be higher than someone with no visual impairment. Therefore, genes that contribute to this eye disorder tended to be eliminated by natural selection in ancestral environments. But today, even people with severe visual impairments don’t have any survival problems due to their visual disorders. They can remedy these defects using spectacles or going through surgery. And their genes contributing to this defect will continue to spread if they have progeny. Many other medical techniques like insulin treatment, Cesarean section, heart implants, vaccines, antibiotics, etc. produce similar consequences.
6. The Break with Tradition
Lorenz says that cultural phenomena evolve, in the Darwinian sense. Since cultural phenomena evolve through a long and complex process, and since they are part of a complex system (human society), it isn’t possible to understand completely the role cultural phenomena assume in the functioning of a society. Therefore, rapid and radical changes in cultural phenomena might create unforeseen consequences.
Human groups who belong to different cultures develop different languages, attitudes, clothes, etc. These differences turn into symbols that distinguish people who belong to such cultural groups. Every ethnicity is inclined to see themselves as the real humans and regards other ethnic/cultural groups as lesser than real humans. Therefore, they don’t include the members of other ethnic/cultural groups in the norms that regulate their intra-group relations.
Lorenz, based on the observations he made on the youth movement of 68, says that in Western societies different human groups have appeared who regard each other as belonging to different cultural/ethnic groups. According to Lorenz, what motivated the youth of 68 was the ethnic hatred that one ethnic group harbors against the other. Younger generations began to see themselves as members of a completely different human group than their seniors. For this reason, the seeming political protests of the 68’s youth, in fact, were against the older generations whom they saw as belonging to a different ethnic/cultural group.
Lorenz says that what transforms subsequent generations into different ethnic/cultural groups is the rapid advancement of technology. As the advancement of technology transforms society rapidly, the lifestyles, values, and world views of subsequent generations quickly diverge from each other. This rapid change breaks the tradition’s continuity. The existence of these different ethnic/cultural groups in one society creates enormous tensions.
Lorenz specifically underlines the erosion of familial ties in modern conditions. There is a widening gap between parents on the one side and parents and children on the other side. Lorenz talks about the problems the lack of a father figure creates in children, especially in boys. According to Lorenz, the structure of the family should be hierarchical. Children should feel respect and fear towards their parents in their formative years. Because a child who cannot take care of himself needs somebody who would lead him, whom he would take as an example of how to be an adult. Lorenz claims that pseudo-democratic12 ideas attack and damage the hierarchical structure of the family. They erode parents’ authority and relegate them to a position that makes it impossible for children to respect them. For this reason, these pseudo-democratic ideas have greatly contributed to the neurotic character of the young generations. According to Lorenz, as the technological development changes society, the family structure undergoes many alterations and one consequence of this is the loosening of the bonds between parents and children. This starts from the infant age. “The modern mother can hardly ever give her full time to her baby.”13 Lorenz remarks that “except among farmers and craftsmen, a boy almost never sees his father at work, nor does he have the opportunity of assisting him and coming to appreciate the father’s superiority.”14 If he were to write this book today, he would say that, especially in Western societies, many children cannot even see their father physically.15
7. Indoctrinability
Today, it has become possible to indoctrinate people on a mass scale due to the advancements in bureaucratic structures and communication technologies. Therefore, it is possible to keep a large number of people in a bubble of false ideas isolated from the realities. Moreover, attachment to false ideas becomes stronger as the number of people who believe in them increases. Lorenz gives an example: Behaviourism16, which had greater prestige when the book was written. Behaviorism played a big role in the spread of the false idea that human behavior can be shaped almost wholly by external conditioning. Lorenz sees Behaviourism as a pseudo-democratic ideology. Behaviourism is a totalitarian ideology that legitimizes and promotes the conditioning of human behavior by external intervention.
The belief that humans are blank slates and their behavior can be shaped from scratch through external intervention (education or any other indoctrination techniques) is still quite widespread. This belief is more common in leftist milieus, but it is shared by all the other humanistic ideologies. The main motivation behind the ideology of the blank slate –even if the promoters or passive accepters of this ideology don’t pursue this consciously– is the need to adjust humans to the complex societies that were born with the Agricultural Revolution. Humans’ behavioral repertoire evolved during our long nomadic hunter-gatherer existence when we lived in small bands. Complex sedentary societies that were born with the Agricultural Revolution forced on humans behaviors and lifestyles that don’t correspond to their evolutionarily adapted inclinations. A substantial part of human history since the Agricultural Revolution has also been the history of the problems that were created by this discrepancy. The belief that humans are blank slates that can be shaped by external conditioning keeps alive the hope that these age-old problems will be solved permanently someday: We will create a perfect society in which enlightened and educated people will fit perfectly. Humans will have the correct values and they will show no symptoms of disharmony such as depression, anxiety, drug addiction, etc. In this perfect society there won’t be aggression, violence, delinquency, etc. either. It is clear that the belief in the blank slate theory is one of the core tenets of the progressivist ideology.
Although it would be easier to shape thoughts than behavior, it is possible to shape human behavior as well up to a certain extent. Every society throughout history has tried to shape the thoughts and behaviors of its members with various degrees of success. But shaping human behavior and thought, without direct biological intervention, can only go so far. Precisely this human characteristic is what makes real freedom possible. Because how could one deem himself to be a free individual if the totality of his ideas, values, inclinations, and behaviors could be shaped by indoctrination, education, or coercion by large organizations? Real freedom in humans, just like in other wild animals, consists in freely expressing evolutionarily adapted inclinations.
The Internet has exacerbated in recent decades the phenomenon of isolation in a bubble of false ideas. While the vast majority of the Internet users are drowning in meaningless sounds and images which are getting shorter by the day (they have reduced to durations measured by seconds) to accommodate their diminishing attention spans, most of the people who think they’re dealing with “serious” things on-line are either chasing some sort of a conspiracy theory or concerning themselves with societal problems that are more typical of the 19th century than of the present day. Lorenz remarks that even scientists can be the victims of indoctrination. But it seems he himself was a victim of indoctrination, since he abstained from facing reality: Technological development is the root cause of all the problems that Lorenz investigates in this book; however, he never mentions technology itself as the main factor that underlies all of the problems he examines and beats around the bush throughout the book.
This is the typical attitude of today’s scientists or public intellectuals. When they talk about climate change, habitat destruction, collapse in biodiversity, chemical or nuclear pollution, psychological problems, addictions (from Internet-related addictions to substance abuse), malaise and meaninglessness that afflict a large number of people, ever more ubiquitous surveillance, extreme political polarization, the loss of objective truth in public discussion, the threat of nuclear annihilation, mass unemployment due to artificial intelligence, etc. they never see and show technology itself as a problem. They often remark that the “correct” application of technology or more advances in technology will solve these problems. More importantly, nearly nobody mentions the looming dangers that lie ahead of us in the context of the technology problem: the complete destruction of the biosphere’s functions that make complex life on Earth possible, transforming Homo sapiens through genetic engineering to a completely different organism, supersedence of humans by intelligent machines, the complete subjugation of wild Nature on Earth, etc. These will surely make all our mainstream political bickerings meaningless trivialities. The vast majority of scientists and public intellectuals are unable to face these problems in the broader context of the technology problem. They might mention one or two of these problems, and they might even offer some “solutions” to some of these problems, but none of them discusses these matters in their real context while pointing towards their real cause. They can’t do this either due to social pressure or because they themselves are victims or parts of indoctrination. And meanwhile, humanity goes towards these dreadful outcomes like a sleepwalker.
8. Nuclear Weapons
The last problem Lorenz investigates is nuclear weapons. According to Lorenz, the problem of nuclear weapons is more concrete, less complex, and easier to understand than the other problems he investigates. For this reason, it is the easiest one to solve. “We” just need to convince “people” not to use and produce these weapons, and to eliminate the existing stockpiles. These beliefs are extremely naive. No assurance, no argument will convince the states to forego these weapons. As long as nuclear technology exists, some states will want to keep this extremely potent weapon in their arsenal. Moreover, the current war in Ukraine and the crises over Taiwan are demonstrating that nuclear war isn’t such a faraway possibility as it was believed immediately afterward of the Cold War. Fifty years later the publication of Lorenz’s book, the danger of nuclear war is still looming over us.
Notes
1Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, Harcourt Brace, 1974.
2 By “humanity’s ecosystem,” Lorenz means the integration of two things: natural ecosystems that humanity depends on and the artificial environment that is built on these natural ecosystems by humans.
3 For the concept of the power process, see: Theodore John Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, ¶¶ 33 – 37, in Technological Slavery: Volume One, Fitch & Madison Publishers, 2019, pp. 31–32.
4Lorenz, ibid., p. 44.
5 For a detailed discussion of this subject see, Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Crown, 2013.
6 Lorenz, ibid, p. 56. Lorenz enumerates here, without any qualification, the “consideration for the feelings of others” as a characteristic of a mature person. However, humans are naturally concerned mainly about the close circle of kin and friends. Human societies, as they get bigger and more crowded, try to instill in individuals concern for a much larger circle of people (nation, humanity, etc.) in order to foster social cohesion. So, “consideration for the feelings of others” regardless of who they are, even if it could be achieved, would be greatly the result of a collectivistic indoctrination.
7 For the historical development of leftism and the definitions of first, second, and third-wave leftism see: https://vahsikaracam.blogspot.com/2020/12/solculuk-tekno-endustriyel-sistem-ve.html
8 Modern living conditions might be causing some pathological behaviors in people. But we can’t attribute every criminal, self-sabotaging, pathological, or anti-social act to the circumstances prevalent in modern society. As Lorenz mentions, some people are genetically inclined to these behaviors, and their inclinations can’t be attributed to any circumstance of modern society.
9 Steven Pinker makes this case in The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin Books, 2012.
10 See the chart at the following link for the United States: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/11/9497161/incarceration-history.
11 For example, any display of aggressive behavior or violence is banned by law or by the new third-wave leftist social norms, and the set of behaviors, words, or styles of speech that is considered offensive and inappropriate is getting larger day by day.
12 Pseudo-democratic ideas, according to Lorenz, are ideas that regard natural rank order (based on age and experience, talent, strength, intelligence, etc.) between two people as something always bad. These ideas also manifest themselves in the belief that the differences among people are, for the most part, the products of the external environment, so people would be equal if they could develop under the same external conditions.
13 Lorenz, ibid., p. 71.
14 Ibid., p. 71.
15 In the US, 25 percent of the children are being raised in fatherless households. “Even for children with a father present in the home, the average school-age boy only spends about 30 minutes per week in one-on-one conversations with his father.” https://americafirstpolicy.com/latest/20220215-fatherlessness-and-its-effects-on-american-society#
16 Behaviourism is a psychological theory which claims that human behavior is determined completely or mainly by the stimuli from the environment. This is very similar to the other humanist ideologies’ belief that humans are blank slates and genetic factors play a negligible part in shaping human behavior compared to environmental factors.
