Peter Frase’s Four Potential Futures of Humanity
It is similar to Robert Costanza’s, but both become obsolete in light of free-energy technology.
Robert Costanza’s “Star Trek” potential future is also called post-scarcity. In 2011, Peter Frase wrote on four post-capitalist futures for the leftist Jacobin, and he made it into a book years later. Whereas Costanza’s four futures are Star Trek, Mad Max, Big Government, and Ecotopia, Frase’s are:
1. Egalitarianism and Abundance: Communism;
2. Hierarchy and Abundance: Rentism;
3. Egalitarianism and Scarcity: Socialism; and
4. Hierarchy and Scarcity: Exterminism.
Costanza’s framework was technological optimism or skepticism, while Frase’s was based on dyads of abundance/scarcity and egalitarianism/hierarchy.
Frase used Star Trek as his example of his first future of egalitarianism and abundance, and both Costanza and Frase understood that those scenarios depended on a clean and abundant energy source. Both Costanza’s and Frase’s first examples, based on Star Trek, were the most positive, in my opinion, and both were the closest that either author came to describing what I call the Fifth Epoch.
Costanza’s Mad Max was essentially Frase’s last category of hierarchy and scarcity, in which elites lived in enclaves of relative abundance, but the one-percenters either left the unwashed 99% to their grim fates or elites actively exterminated them.
Frase’s hierarchy-and-abundance scenario of Rentism was bizarre, and Frase admitted how absurd it was, writing, “But an economy based on artificial scarcity is not only irrational, it is also dysfunctional.” Seeking status and building and maintaining hierarchies only make sense in a world of scarcity. That scenario had people inventing new kinds of scarcities around status to then invent hierarchies around, as if people would have nothing better to do. Frase’s hierarchy-and-abundance scenario is utter nonsense, as if people would never grow up if given the chance.
Frase’s egalitarianism and scarcity, which he called socialism, was most similar to Costanza’s Ecotopia, which are both austerity visions, in which Mad Max and Exterminism are avoided through mass action to keep elites in line or eliminate them, while somehow not wrecking the environment and eking by on low-energy use. As Mark noted, it is strange to choose that over abundance, but as I state, people are generally addicted to scarcity and very few people can really comprehend abundance.
Both authors are to be commended for even engaging these subjects. First and foremost, they understood that it all depended on the energy issue, at its root, but I found that both Costanza’s and Frase’s frameworks could have benefitted from a more comprehensive perspective.
Social species are social because sociality enhances the survival and reproductive prospects of its members. As Azar Gat stated, social animals have three basic modes of interaction: cooperation, competition, and conflict. Gat also observed that the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence. That is as succinct as I have seen it, and I doubt that it can be improved on.
Social insects can have great specialization, with reproducing queens, disposable drones, sterile workers and soldiers, and the like. Apes are dimorphic, which largely reflects the battles that males have over reproductive opportunities. Human politics is obviously rooted in chimpanzee politics, which is often lethal. Human warfare is only a more sophisticated version of chimp warfare, as chimps and hunter-gatherers had the same objectives: slaughter adult males and infants and take the fertile females and the territory of the vanquished. Bonobos are the great exception, as chimps found themselves isolated from their gorilla competitors. Their food supply thereby doubled, foraging parties became stable, females banded together and overthrew male dominance, and those are the most peaceful apes, including pre-industrial humans, even though the males still will be violent when they can. Humans have socially created similar functions to what social insects developed via evolution.
Everything other than their abundance scenarios was some kind of reshuffling the deck of scarcity, which is what all politics is based on, as Bucky Fuller noted. Reshuffling the deck of scarcity is no answer. The only true solution is abundance. To the credit of socialists in the late 1940s, they immediately understood the importance of a new energy source, after the USA atom-bombed Japan.
One aspect of the human journey that my Epochal framework tried to make clear was that humanity’s big social changes were a reaction to new energy sources, not a cause. The appearance of humans on the evolutionary scene, their conquest of Earth, sedentism, civilization, and industrialization were all made possible by energy breakthroughs. Humans adapted their societies and even their biologies to the new energy levels. To a great degree, our tools made us, so technological “skepticism” is an odd stance. Trying to restructure the social order, in the absence of an energy breakthrough, has a faint chance of success, if any at all.
Of course, I have the great advantage of knowing that Star-Trek-like energy technologies have been on the planet longer than I have. If Costanza and Frase knew that, they would have instantly understood how their analyses were obsolete in the face of that, which I would expect them to welcome.