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The Three Things this Week are the concepts of Meliorism, Wicked Problems, and Confidence Intervals. I really like the ramifications of thinking through conservation issues as a Wicked Problem. And I realized that I am a complete and total Meliorist. Meliorism In studying the philosophy of deviance in leisure this word kept appearing: meliorism. I’d never heard of it before. Meliorism: the belief that the world can be made better by human effort I guess I never thought about Meliorism. I’ve had the Hobbesian discussions with people about whether people are inherently good or bad but I suppose I’ve always assumed that focused and directed human effort toward making the world better can, in fact, make the world better. I’ve never thought anything different. My assumption has always been that most people aren’t striving to actively make the world a better place but are instead just trying to survive (e.g. make money, feed their family, provide for basic needs) or trying to build their life in accordance to the values they believe in (e.g. being a member of their family, of their community, of their church, etc). I’ve always assumed that our problems of pollution, overpopulation, overexploitation, and habitat destruction (let alone all social ills of crime, homelessness, etc) are repercussions of poor management of the commons and our basic desires for survival and maintaining the status quo. Additionally, I’ve always believed that there are people who try to meet those two basic desires while simultaneously choosing to direct their efforts toward betterment of the group. This can manifest itself as police officers, politicians, and priests or revolutionaries, social workers, and conservationists. Whether you feel you are helping the world or not is subjective and whether you actually are or not is difficult to quantify and dependent on your rubric. I’ve thought this way and apparently that is Meliorism. The opposite belief is that we can’t make the world better. Existentialism, nihilism, apathy, anomie and cultural subjectivity all play into this idea a little bit but the belief that you cannot objectively make the world a better place is so odd to me. Existentialism and nihilism as philosophies just say that you are choosing your moral structure and defining your own meaning and purpose. Apathy and anomie intuit that you just don’t care. Even Zen or Taoist acceptance are exercises in accepting the world as it is but make no reference to an inability at betterment. The conscious belief that the world cannot be made better ignores these personal choices and extends beyond the idea of checking out. It is an idea that presupposes an objective standard of what better is that will never be met. The best I can wrap my head around this is as a cultural entropy. All cultural expression is loss. I don’t think this a great analogy but I can’t imagine a belief system that actively believes that something, anything anywhere is getting better. I guess I am a meliorist. Wicked problems This is a concept that I believe contains the environmental issues we have. A Wicked Problem is vastly more complex than a normal problem. A normal problem, even a difficult problem, has at least one solution, a set of standards and examples in which to compare it to, and can be clearly identified before attempting to solve it. How to get to the moon and finding the Higgs Boson are difficult problems. How do you protect wildlife and rare habitats is an especially difficult problem. How do you feed and provide basic and above-basic needs for 7 billion problem with limited resources is, I think, a very very difficult problem. But, how do you feed and provide for the human population while simultaneously protecting non-human nature and ensuring a habitable global climate with the ability to still explore off-planet and sub-atomic levels? This is a wicked problem. Here are the characteristics of a wicked problem:
I’m reminded of the Kardashev Scale and Robert Wright’s Non-Zero in thinking about wicked problems. Kardashev says that we have three types of civilizations (type 1 uses the energy of the sun that hits the earth, 2 uses the actual energy of the sun, and 3 uses the energy of the galaxy) and that we are currently a Type .85. He says that transcending from a .99 to a 1.01 will the most difficult of all the transitions ever because it requires a change in every level of existence (how we think, how we consume, what we value, etc). Other theorists have said that this means this transition has the greatest opportunity for collapse. And this is what Wright says in Non-Zero. The more complex our society gets the better we become because we develop more and more answers that are Non-Zero, as in not a zero sum conclusion where one party wins and one party loses. When you have a non-zero sum conclusion both parties gain something. This is the idea of trade versus war. When you war, one party comes out ahead and the other does not but the whole population stays the same. When you trade, both parties get something and the whole population is that much further ahead. But, maintaining these non-zero sum relationships requires a lot of resources and as you grow larger and more successful the greater the opportunity for collapse. This is where I believe we are. Globally, I think we are very near developing the necessary thought processes and technologies to transcend to a Type 1 Civilization through more and more Non-Zero sum solutions. But! Pushing us past that last hurdle is a Wicked Problem. This is the best I’ve been able to state the problem but I have left out so many aspects of humanity (i.e. cultural expression and the utilitarian values of non-consumption species) that I don’t think we fully understand our problem. Also, we wont be able to recognize what is right or wrong but only trajectories of appropriateness. Further, if we fail and sea levels rise 10 ft or 30-60% of the planet’s biodiversity is lost, then we cannot reverse that. That makes it a ‘one shot operation’ with no alternative solutions. We have figure this out as we go and every temporary solution we develop has novel problems that have to also be solved timely. Developing the statistical probability that an alternative hypothesis is within the Confidence Interval you determine.  I learned this however I am angry at it because I have a test coming up and it is taking me too long to apply what I’ve learned. So, my revenge is to not dignify this concept with any more page space.
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