Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins explains how some UFO enthusiasts are a bit beyond the pale (“The UFO Crowd Wants an Alien Invasion for Christmas,” December 23, 2022). He reports how, after a previous column critical of the UFO sect, a reader emailed him:
He asks some questions, though: “How much did they pay you to write this trash? Do you still have a gag reflex or did they take that along with the journalistic integrity?” He closes with a scatological insult, which, in an undeserved favor to him, I don’t repeat.
The hope of the UFO crowd is that extraterrestrials from an “advanced civilization” will soon establish contact with us earthlings, if they have not already done so. My question is, does political economy allow some reasonable conjectures about such a civilization?
Interstellar aliens would certainly come from a technologically advanced civilization. If they depart from an exoplanet orbiting around the star closer to us, Proxima Centauri, and travel at the same speed as we have reached in space, their spacecraft would take 6,300 years to reach Earth (see “This Is How Many People We’d Have to Send to Proxima Centauri to Make Sure Somebody Actually Arrives,” MIT Technology Review, June 22, 2018). If they travel at the speed of light, our visitors from the Proxima Centauri solar system would be here in a bit more than four years. Can we speculate on the kind of society where the required technology has a chance to develop?
If the understanding that classical liberal economists have developed since the 18th century is correct, our visitors’ society or civilization—that is their beliefs and institutions—cannot be centralized and authoritarian. If it were “run” by an authoritarian government or by some “social organism” of which individuals are mere cells, a technology appropriate to interstellar travel could not have been developed and sustained. An “advanced civilization” cannot be based on central planning or even on any serious industrial policy. It must be neither collectivist of the left (socialist) or of the right (fascist). Scientific progress requires free speech, open discussion, and constant criticism. Scientific and technological development also require efficient markets and trade. The economy must be rich, which requires entrepreneurship and competition. In brief, an advanced civilization requires the sort of spontaneous social order that Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek conceived, with an efficient use of the dispersed knowledge in society. It must be the sort of “ordered anarchy” that James Buchanan advocated. Perhaps the traveling aliens’ advanced civilization has even discovered, after tens or hundreds of millennia, institutions that have allowed the withering away of the state and the birth of a liberal anarchy.
In other words, compounded technological advances are not only a matter of technology.
Note that I am assuming that our interstellar visitors are somewhat similar to us in the sense that they come from within our universe and are subject to the same scientific and social-scientific laws as we are.
If all that is correct, the aliens who would land on Earth would not be military men regimented in a tight hierarchy, but free men and women (of at least two sexes appear to be an evolutionary necessity) used to independence and liberty, that is, to a truly advanced civilization. At worst, it seems, they could be banned outlaws or escapees from such a society. The earthlings who hope that aliens will come with a ready-made model of socialist or fascist nirvana will be disappointed.
PS: The featured image of this post shows a UFO I sighted a few days after reading Jenkins’s column, right above the corn field where I regularly walk and hunt. Things do happen in Maine.
READER COMMENTS
Matthias
Jan 7 2023 at 7:40am
That’s interesting speculation, but I don’t buy it.
Yes, it you take humans as a building block, they work best in a free society. But compare social insects: individual ants in a colony lives in something much more restrictive, but also harmonious, than any attempt as communism or fascism on earth ever dared.
There might be a free society where entire ant colonies are the building blocks, though. Compare also how our immune system severely polices cells in our body and expects cells to commit suicide for even minor deviations from orthodoxy (ans ruthlessly kills any cell that refuses to kill itself).
Have a look at Naked Mole-rats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat for an example of eusociality in mammals.
It is conceivable that even humans might engage in these extreme forms of cooperation in the future. Eg imagine a humanity made up of small colonies of clones. (Perhaps those colonies would live in one space habitatsl each, if you want more of a science fiction flavour.)
Or just imagine what might happen if AI takes over. AIs might find much stronger ways to pre-commit themselves to contracts and promises than humans are capable of doing. A society with truly binding oaths would look very different anything humans ever tried or could try.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 7 2023 at 11:08am
Matthias: One thing you are forgetting is that individuals (at least a large number of them, or all of them if you take the Enlightenment perspective) don’t like to be mainly “building blocks.” The best I can do to summarize this idea is to quote Hayek in Vol. 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
Imagine the organism telling Elon Musk: “Now, cell Musk1138, go back to your assigned place in my big toe.”
This is related to the more general and crucial problem of how to use the dispersed knowledge in society. For a quick summary, see my review of the above quoted work by Hayek as well as of his latest book, The Fatal Conceit.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 7 2023 at 4:50pm
According to Wikipedia, ants first appeared on Earth around 100 million years ago. Modern ants arrived roughly 20 to 30 million years later. Not much has changed since then, so I’m not anticipating ant space travel anytime soon. Homo sapiens, by contrast, appeared only 300,000 years ago. Sexual reproduction probably had a lot to do with our relatively rapid rate of evolution. No doubt opposable thumbs helped, too.
Craig
Jan 9 2023 at 8:22am
Apparently Mr. Fullmer has forgotten about the arachnid threat which destroyed Buenos Aires last year.
In any event I am led to believe that insects, and I think spiders would be included in this, is that the exoskeleton doesn’t scale, it gets too heavy. But given the vastness of the universe a queen-oriented species of some sort is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Mactoul
Jan 7 2023 at 8:36am
Ancient Egypt had pretty advanced technology for the time without being a liberal, free-market society. Same going for China and in fact any society previous to 19c.
And any liberal society can evolve into an illiberal one, without losing the technology, in fact can coast on for arbitrary long time.
As witness present day America, fast moving to extreme liberalism with is curiously not distinguishable from illiberalism.
The evolution of liberalism was accurately predicted by Dostoevsky in The Possessed– “Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism. ”
This a character speaks in reference to Fourierism type social schemes popular in 19c liberalism.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 7 2023 at 11:59am
Mactoul: One thing you are forgetting is that nobody (except Cleopatras and their fellow looters) wants to live in a non-consumer-oriented society. A mere illustration from Jacques Jouanna, Hippocrates (p. 21): “Gentleness in treatment was taken to be one of the characteristics of Greek medicine that distinguished it from Egyptian medicine.” (Even kings preferred Greek medicine, as illustrated when Darius dislocated his ankle and, bypassing the Egyptian physicians in his court, called in a Greek one.)
As for China and why the Great Enrichment did not happen there (or elsewhere than in Western Europe and some British colonies or ex-colonies), the book to read is one I recommended to you before: Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth. Note that my review, “From the Republic of Letters to the Great Enrichment,” is just a teaser. This historical perspective is essential. If you are under 30 (to heed Keynes’s warning that people rarely change their fundamental opinions over that age–see the end of Chap. 24 of the General Theory), this book will change your view on the adventure of mankind. Another essential history book is Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome (again my review, “Let’s Travel That Road Again,” should just serve as an introduction).
Jim Glass
Jan 7 2023 at 5:14pm
nobody (except Cleopatras and their fellow looters) wants to live in a non-consumer-oriented society. A mere illustration from Jacques Jouanna, Hippocrates (p. 21): “Gentleness in treatment…”
Yet looters can happily do very well for a very long time – enjoying providing gentle treatment to each other while looting everyone else into the ground, whether the latter want it or not. Hippocrates himself would have known this well.
Athens obtained its wealth and power by working slaves to death en masse in its silver mines, and using the extracted riches to build its naval forces and the Delian League, which it used as a ‘protection racket’ to extort wealth from ~300 other city states … which lead to the Peloponnesian War.
(Hippocrates was there. There is no record of him ever treating any of the slaves in the silver mines.)
If a starship ever arrives from Planet Athens and offers us a “Melian Peace“, I’m going to be the first one out in the street to welcome our new overlords!
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 7 2023 at 6:03pm
Jim: Iconoclastic, as always? You write: “Hippocrates was there. There is no record of him ever treating any of the slaves in the silver mines.” I don’t know about the silver mines in particular, but there is apparently evidence that Hippocratic physicians did treat slaves without discrimination:
And recall what the Hippocratic Oath itself says (text in Jouanna, p. 369):
Jim Glass
Jan 7 2023 at 10:07pm
I don’t know about the silver mines in particular.
Look ’em up. Without them, and the slaves who worked them, Athens as we know it would never have existed. No democracy for us! Here’s a start — yeah, it’s only Wikipedia, but we have to start somewhere.
In Classical times there were slaves and there were slaves. Athens was very much a slave state, slaves were about 25% of the population. The subsidy for the rise of Democracy.
The slaves typically were craftsmen and household servants — the average non-poor Athenian household might have two, three, four of them — and also ‘slaves of the state’ who performed public functions and could even have political influence. (In Rome, the Emperor’s slaves could be powerful indeed.) These slaves got food, housing, medical care, human treatment, more or less, depending.
The slaves were criminals, prisoners of war, political enemies of the state, captured populations of defeated enemies (like of Menos after it didn’t take the deal). The slaves of Athens were sent to their fates in the silver mines. There were no bedsides down there.
Aristotle said: Slavery will be necessary until statues do the work of men “and the shuttle will weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them.”
And he was right! That’s exactly what happened. Smart guy.
Mactoul
Jan 7 2023 at 11:28pm
The link isn’t going to your Enrichment review but to a Henderson review of Steve Pinker’s Enlightenment.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 8 2023 at 12:21am
Mactoul: You have to scroll down to p. 57 if your browser doesn’t do it for you. Chrome does it for me.
Jon Murphy
Jan 7 2023 at 11:28am
To parse a course between Pierre’s point and the objections raised by Matthias and Mactoul, I think a distinction between the short run and the long run needs to be made.
In the short run, a totalitarian society (like elements of Ancient Egypt and the Soviet Union) can accomplish amazing feats. The Soviets did beat us into space, after all. And let us not forget that Germany during WW2 was generally more technologically advanced than the Allies.
But totalitarianism doesn’t create resources. It merely reallocates them. Once the massive amounts of resources are consumed, the totalitarian system collapses.
Meanwhile, a liberal society creates resources (this is, as I see it, Pierre’s point). For a society to consistently acieve greatness, it needs to be more liberal.
A totalitarian alien civilization could visit Earth, but that would likely be its one great hurrah. The resources requried for such an undertaking would be absorbed and destroyed. (This even holds if the alien force were colonizers. Look at the lifespan of the relatively liberal colonial empires of Britain and France versus the relatively illiberal colonial empires of Japan, Germany, or the Soviet Union.)
Mactoul
Jan 7 2023 at 8:37pm
Short run? Ancient Egypt??
Ancient Egypt was technology leader for probably thousands of years.
In any case, it is distinctly odd to label any ancient society liberal. They were all illiberal to a lesser or greater degree.
Interesting question is to what extent a liberal society can coast on the social capital accumulated previous to liberalism.
Jon Murphy
Jan 8 2023 at 7:09am
No. They often weren’t that different from their neighbors like the Nubians. Recall there wasn’t much technological change prior to the 1500s or so.
While your sentence is unrelated to my point, I disagree. Larry Seidentop has an excellent book called “Inventing the Individual,” and he highlights many fairly liberal societies.
That question has already been answered. Liberalism fosters the construction of social capital. Illiberalism destroys or stagnates it.
Craig
Jan 7 2023 at 1:13pm
Professor L “Can we speculate on the kind of society where the required technology has a chance to develop?”
We can speculate of course and humans definitely enjoy the speculation, but I’d suggest that the speculation should leave our preexisting biases at the door. Your speculation, and
it obviously could turn out to be true
, I’d suggest contains within it a certain human hubris, perhaps a form of libertarian universalism?
@ Professor M – “But totalitarianism doesn’t create resources. It merely reallocates them. Once the massive amounts of resources are consumed, the totalitarian system collapses.
Meanwhile, a liberal society creates resources (this is, as I see it, Pierre’s point). For a society to consistently acieve greatness, it needs to be more liberal.”
Let’s assume what you’re saying is true. Can’t your speculation take the form of an Independence Day-esque Raubtwirtschaft oriented alien species?
Or perhaps another human vision would be the Borg from Star Trek?
@Professor L: “their beliefs and institutions—cannot be centralized and authoritarian.”
You also write: “nobody (except Cleopatras and their fellow looters) wants to live in a non-consumer-oriented society”
Well, I don’t and you don’t but we’re humans and it is in our nature to do certain things. But can we presuppose a society of intelligent ants? Let’s not forget that there is a biological genetic drive to reproduce. Sure humans do more than just procreate and some obviously willfully abstain from having children, but life generally does seem to want to survive and proliferate. Individual consumption serves that purpose by allowing you consume resources to survive yourself and also to invest resources towards your children.
Also let’s not assume that any interstellar visitor would be biologically based at all. Its easy to envision a society consumed by AI and machines and we might not even be able to understand its motivations.
Craig
Jan 7 2023 at 1:26pm
“Can we speculate on the kind of society where the required technology has a chance to develop?”
And one final thought, to be honest I can envision, given the vastness of the universe, the possibility that there are various kinds of societies that could give rise to a society capable of engaging in interstellar travel.
Though, at the moment, I’d suggest its not this one!
Jon Murphy
Jan 7 2023 at 1:34pm
Can you be more specific? I’ve seen those movies but not enough to know the details of your references
Dylan
Jan 7 2023 at 8:31pm
I don’t know what Craig is going for with the first one, but the Borg are what I first thought of when reading Pierre’s post. I only know my Borg from episodes of Star Trek: TNG, and I think the species has been fleshed out quite a bit since then, so this might no longer be fully canon, but I think you can think of the Borg as the ultimate collectivist society. All Borg are connected to one another, see what each one sees, feels what each feels, and doesn’t really even have the capacity for independent thought. They travel through the universe and assimilate any intelligent species they come across into the collective consciousness. In true Star Trek fashion, that lack of individualism is ultimately their undoing, but I see no reason why, in the vastness of space, a society like that couldn’t evolve and be technologically superior to ours.
Jon Murphy
Jan 8 2023 at 1:46pm
Thanks Dylan. Your description brought back memories of the movie.
Let me ask this: were the Borg more technologically advanced than the Federation? I remember them being for technological, but not necessarily more advanced.
Dylan
Jan 8 2023 at 3:07pm
Generally speaking, much more advanced. They were the biggest threat to the Federation, and a single ship was shown as being capable of wiping out the earth. But, their mission of assimilation was primarily one of adding new and distinctive technology to their civilization. They has assimilated thousands of other civilizations into their cybernetic collective by the time they met the Federation.
Back to the thrust of Pierre’s post, I do think that some sort of sentient AI likely makes the most sense for exploring the galaxy, and I’d like to think that if humans were to program an AI, they would try to leave out some of the worst aspects of humanity. What would an AI civilization look like that was entirely motivated by altruism? Not just a philosophical question, I work with some companies that are trying to build incentive systems into the next generation of AI and thinking deeply about what are the best (and least dangerous) forms of motivation.
Craig
Jan 9 2023 at 8:19am
In Independence Day Will Smith and the alien are in a dogfight which results in both crashing. Will Smith pulls the alien out of the craft and the alien is then a POW. He brings it to the Area 51 where Bill Pullman playing the President is attacked mentally by the alien. The humans kill the alien. After that Bill Pullman says that he was able to see their plan and that they are like locusts: “I saw… its thoughts. I saw what they’re planning to do. They’re like locusts. They’re moving from planet to planet… their whole civilization. After they’ve consumed every natural resource they move on… and we’re next. Nuke ’em. Let’s nuke the bastards.” {And of course nuking them doesn’t work because of the shielding}
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 7 2023 at 5:42pm
Craig: You write: “I’d suggest that the speculation should leave our preexisting biases at the door.” Agreed. But any rational (in the sense of logical or scientific) speculation cannot leave our theories at the door, lest it becomes intuitive rêveries.
As opposed to mere rêveries, poetry (as well as music and other arts) is also an entry door to knowledge or at least to its sensual or spiritual dimension. To speak of interstellar space, I would quote Guillaume Apollinaire ‘s fantastic stanza and its singing by Léo Ferré):
But this would not be the rational speculation based on economics that I was after!
BC
Jan 7 2023 at 3:08pm
“Note that I am assuming that our interstellar visitors are somewhat similar to us in the sense that they come from within our universe and are subject to the same scientific and social-scientific laws as we are.”
While aliens would be subject to the same (physical) scientific laws, our social-scientific laws reflect human nature, not necessarily non-human extraterrestrial nature. For example, much of central planning’s deficiencies stem from information problems. Humans need markets and prices to efficiently coordinate activities among large numbers of humans. That’s not necessarily true among sub-Dunbar numbers of humans, e.g., within families, and may not be true for all alien species nor for autonomous robots that they might have built. Some computer networks benefit from distributed processing but others benefit from centralized processing, for example.
“individuals…don’t like to be mainly ‘building blocks.'”
Again, that’s true about human nature. Humans are endowed by their Creator, whatever the metaphysical nature of that Creator, with free will and a (human) natural desire for liberty. That doesn’t necessarily apply even to non-human animals on Earth, let alone alien beings.
Presumably, alien nature will derive from the physical environment in which those aliens evolved, along with any metaphysical factors that affect their sentience, free will, and souls. It took many centuries (at least) of careful study to develop our current understanding of human nature and “social-scientific laws”. We probably don’t know enough about extraterrestrial evolution and metaphysics right now to understand which aspects of human nature apply to alien nature.
Mactoul
Jan 7 2023 at 10:47pm
Presumably, the same Creator created the aliens. And it is reasonable that the aliens would reflect the Creator as the humans do. And thus the metaphysical nature–free will etc would be common to the aliens and humans. In that case, Lemieux’s argument may be expected to carry.
Jose Pablo
Jan 8 2023 at 9:19am
“would not be military men regimented in a tight hierarchy, but free men and women”
They will, very likely, be wealthy clients of an start up in the intergalactic traveling business.
The staff on the crew will be more than willing to discuss accommodation arrangements on Earth.
Jose Pablo
Jan 8 2023 at 10:48am
Unfortunately the Federal government will (successfully) try to regulate this commerce very soon.
Afterall, the US Constitution grants the Federal government the power to regulate “intergalactic” commerce, doesn’t it?
johnson85
Jan 9 2023 at 10:29am
“It must be neither collectivist of the left (socialist) or of the right (fascist)”
Somewhat off topic, but how is fascism of the right today? I get historically they were on the left and right, but it seems to me to be confusing and inaccurate to refer to fascism as being on the right, at least from a US perspective of the left/right breakdown. The left has literally had jackbooted thugs committing violence against “enemies” on the right. While there is unfortunately a healthy authoritarian streak in most citizens regardless of whether they identify as left or right (with the exception people that explicitly consider themselves to be libertarian), it seems much more prevalent on the left. The left is the side of the spectrum that believes the government can mandate you to eat broccoli b/c it will lower the cost of providing healthcare. The left generally is more likely to think the government should be able to censor speech, particularly “hate speech”. They generally don’t want the federal government bound by the free exercise clause or the 2nd amendment (they do often want it bound by the most expansive interpretation of the establishment clause possible). While the right was more likely to be interventionist abroad and assert its interests physically, I’m not sure that’s true any more. The right is more likely to be protectionist than it used to be, but I’m not sure it’s more protectionist than the left? The left certainly used to be more skeptical of traditional police power, but now it seems pretty even, just depending on who they view as a political ally (i.e., local police are bad; state police may be bad depending on whether they are doing stuff related to safety and law and order or enforcing the dictates of the beauacracy, the federal LEOs are good provided it’s not drug law enforcement related).
I’m just having trouble coming up with an example where the right is clearly more authoritarian and views the state as supreme over the individual. The only argument I can make for fascism being of the american right is that the american right is much more likely to think of the United States as a good thing, but I’m not sure how that falls. Even if many on the left thinks that there should be open immigration and no effective border control and think the United States is bad, they still are more likely to want the government to be supreme and have unlimited powers.
Warren Platts
Jan 9 2023 at 1:27pm
Well, if Pierre is right, there is no need to worry about aliens, liberal, socialist, fascist, or otherwise. Because long before space travel becomes technologically feasible, superdangerous technologies like bioweapons, antimatter bombs, or evil AI codes or self-replicating nanobots will be able to be built by bright people in their garages. In order to prevent the inevitable, then, society will have to become 1984 on hyper-steroids where every individual is monitored constantly in order to prevent them from building weapons of mass destruction. And once that surveillance state is in place, there’s no way the state will be content with preventing WMDs from getting built.
Therefore, either alien civilizations will remain liberal in the classical sense, and then go extinct due to a few crazy radicals that were unable to be stopped, or alien civilizations will be extremely totalitarian, and hence the technological evolution necessary for interstellar space flight will never be developed.
Jim Glass
Jan 9 2023 at 10:20pm
Harry Turtledove years back wrote a SF novel about, IIRC, alien lizards who scout out Ukraine circa 1100, decide ‘this will be nice to own’, then return to invade it, landing in 1942 between the Nazi and Soviet armies. Who did not take kindly to them. They are shocked! shocked! that the resident monkeys could develop technology so quickly. Nowhere else in the galaxy had technology ever advanced so rapidly. (Liberal democratic capitalism being rare among the stars, apparently.)
The book posed some interesting economic questions. The lizards had colony ships of unarmed civilians following, so they were committed. Of course they had death rays and various super weapons — but only in limited amount because they weren’t expecting such a fight. Logistics, how to maximize resource use when your supply lines are 100s of light years long? Game theory, how to negotiate with an enemy when you have super weapons, but can run out of them? I don’t remember how it all turned out, but it was entertaining and pretty intelligent.
I’m glad there was no Libertarian Review of Science Fiction back then, because its review would have been the pan, “plot implausible because the alien invaders aren’t liberal democrats”, so I might not have read it. And it would have had the same review for every alien invasion SF story since H. G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’. I didn’t know that the arguers of the socialist calculation problem had extended it to exobiology. Spoilsports, ruining all our fun. 🙁
Warren Platts
Jan 10 2023 at 11:29am
The thing is, when A.I.’s get advanced enough, they probably will largely takeover the task of engineering new technology. So as long as totalitarian states have access to such A.I.’s their technology will be able to evolve apace.
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