This is a blog about ‘beginnings’. Why am I committing valuable café time to this concept? For three reasons: (a) it is a significant notion with an extended reach and multiple reference points; (b) it is of sociological import in several respects, and (c) it is fascinating in its own right.
The beginnings I’ve opted to discuss here get to the heart of things. They are: (i) the beginning of time and space; (ii) the beginning of life; (iii) the beginning of humankind (and reflexivity), (iv) the beginning of the anthropocene, and (v) the beginning of the novocene. I draw explicitly on three recent texts: Stephen Hawking’s posthumous study, Brief Answers to the Big Questions; James Lovelock’s Novacene: the Coming Age of Hyperintelligence; and Edward Wilson’s Genesis.
The beginning of time and space
A big issue this, and worthy of a few paragraphs. A guesstimate puts the timespan of the cosmos at 13.8 billion years. Well, maybe (the nature of the science involved here almost lends credence to Comte’s privileging of the all-embracing field of sociology over lesser fields like astrophysics). But it’s Lovelock’s ballpark figure. Hawking gives a mathematically based but accessible account of the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the origin of the universe. We humans have an urge to ask, Hawking suggests, ‘If the universe had a beginning, then what was going on before that?’ Little wonder we resort to myths and gods! But:
‘ … in 1915 Einstein introduced his revolutionary general theory of relativity. In this space and time were no longer absolute, no longer a fixed background to events. Instead they were dynamic quantities that were shaped by the matter and energy in the universe. They were defined only within the universe, so it made no sense to talk of a time before the universe began. It would be like asking for a point south of the South Pole. It is not defined.’
So far, so good. However, Einstein’s theory breaks down near the Big Bang.
What is required to enhance our understanding, according to Hawking, is the incorporation of, reconciliation with, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle’ and Feynman’s notion of ‘multiple histories’ (not yet accomplished though Hawking is optimistic ). The search is on for a ‘unified theory’, which will tell us more about how the universe began and how it has evolved and will evolve. Hawking’s approach is to support the so-called ‘Anthropic Principle’, which draws on both Heisenberg and Feynman to suggest that ‘the universe has to be more or less as we see it, because if it were different there wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it.’ Hawking writes positively on ‘M-theory’, which he regards as the best option for achieving a unified theory. M-theory allows for a large number of histories of the universe, but acknowledges that many of these are ‘unsuitable for the development of intelligent life’:
‘we don’t really care how many histories there may be that don’t contain intelligent beings. We are interested only in the subset of histories in whch intelligent life develops.’
Intelligent life here doesn’t have to be human. In fact, ‘the human race doesn’t have a very good record of intelligent behaviour’ (a point to which I return later).
Hawking again:
‘the beginning of the universe itself in the Hot Big Bang is the ultimate high-energy laboratory for testing M-theory, and our ideas about building blocks of space-time and matter. Different theories leave behind different fingerprints in the current structure of the universe, so astrophysical data can give us clues about the unification of all the forces of nature. So there may well be other universes, but unfortunately we eill never be able to explore them.’
And the future of the universe (as we know it)? Maybe two scenarios: either the gravitational attraction between the galaxies will slow down the current expansion and they will start ‘falling towards each other’, resulting in a ‘Big Crunch’, or the density of the universe will remain below the critical level and gravity will be too weak to stop the galaxies flying apart for ever. In any event, we have a few billion years to go.
To be brutally frank, my ‘additional maths’ O-level in the mid-1960s inhibits me at this point and I must forego any right to adjudicate.
The beginning of life
In the particular universe – one of a multiplicity of possible universes – in which life emerged on what we see as planet Earth, Lovelock suggests, living species evolved approximately 3.7 billion years ago. Homo Sapiens, a latecomer, dates back only some 300,000 years. In such ways are perspectives established and/or underlined.
The beginning of human life (and reflexivity)
This is where Wilson comes in. He purports to show how ‘similar’ humans and human societies are to those formed by other – pre-existing and consociate – species on Earth. Humans, we are reminded, are just another species, and as such they/we might be expected to, and in fact do, display ‘similar’ – evolved – patterns of behaviour. I should add here that this important acknowledgement of the causal efficacy of biological structures need not, and in fact does not, warrant the reductionist claims of some evolutionary psychologists.
Humankind, Lovelock argues, introduced reflexivity: for the first time, an evolved life form was able to observe, reflect upon and gain a sense of perspective and proportion. It was a species with novel potential (personally, I have always ruminated on ‘our’ somewhat smug inclination to superiority, wondering whether the likes of insects in general and ants in particular might be wise to and despairing of us and waiting in the wings to assert or assume planetary hegemony). So what price homo sapiens?
The beginning of the anthropocene
As Hawking perspicuously observed, humans have proven less intelligent than they/we routinely assume (one-up for the ants). The anthropocene, which Lovelock somewhat arbitrarily dates from the introduction in the late eighteenth-century of Newcomen’s steam pump, marks the era in which humans gained a capacity to ‘make a difference’ to their planetary habitat. (On sociology’s part, Giddens has written of modernity’s ‘recent’ human intrusion into a hitherto given ‘external’ environment, and Habermas of an equivalent and potentially even more threatening human participation in, or invasive colonisation of, another given, namely, human nature.) Humans, in a nutshell, became part of the planetary environment, as is reflected in Lovelock’s illuminating concept of ‘Gaia’. A word of qualification here: while planet Earth – and its multi-species incumbents – might reasonably be considered part and parcel of an inter-related, interdependent and living ecological system or habitat, risks are attendant on the over-inflation of this insight. ‘Our’ species emergent tendency to self-destruct is neither original nor of particular significance (except to ‘us’ of course).
The beginning of the novacene
The novacene is Lovelock’s concept. It refers to a transition that he argues is already underway from the anthropcene. Moreover he sees it as ‘evolutionary’. What does it entail?
‘The revolution that has just begun may be understood as a continuation of the process whereby the Earth nurtures the understanders, the beings that will lead the cosmos to self-knowledge.’
His contention is: (a) that (we) humans are transmuting into cyborgs (a concept he traces back to Clynes and Kline in 1960), and (b) that this is appropriately and best regarded as an evolutionary process:
‘I like this word and definition because it could apply to anything ranging in size from a micro-organism to a pachyderm, from a microchip to an omnibus. It is now commonly taken to mean an entity that is part flesh, part machine. I use it here to emphasize that the new intelligent beings will have arisen, like us, from Darwinian evolution. They will not, at first, be separate from us; indeed, they will be our offspring because the systems we made turned out to be their precursors.’
In a way Lovelock’s perspective marries with that of Hawking, who argues that within a century human’s successors might well, indeed will almost certainly be, unrecognisable as the same species. Capitalist or market oriented robotics, AI and genetic engineering are affording sci-fi futures beyond popular cognisance and democratic control.
There are obvious ways in which all this, notwithstanding its ‘natural’ attraction to citizens’ curiosity, has pertinence for sociology. I will restrict myself here to a handful of comments. First, it affords perspective. This may seem obvious to some, but we are engaged in the study of the sociality of a species with a finite lifespan. Second, and relatedly, it reminds us that social mechanisms are both salient, and urgently so, for our species’ future. Third, it is no less of a reminder that non-social mechanisms – biological and psychological, but extending also to physical and chemical – are no lesser parts of the jigsaw that is the ecology of the planet. Fourth, it is surely a wake-up call to sociology not only to embrace and experiment with interdisciplinarity but to turn with serious research intent to the study of the changing and fragile ecology of planet Earth. And fifth, sociology needs to acknowledge its limitations (just a few pieces to slot into place in the ‘open system’ of a jigsaw representing the cosmos).