Carlyle’s Theory of Great Men

Carlyle was an English historian who, in 1840, wrote an explanation of his view of history as the biography of great men. He felt that all history is determined by the actions of a small number of great men, and that these men were created by their heredity and upbringing, and then tried to find an opportunity to lead others and essentially write history. It gained a wide acceptance, but there was an opposing theory, started by Spencer in 1860, that society develops in a way that provides opportunities for great leaders and there is a pool of them in the population so that when an opportunity arises, one steps in.

Neither side stated that great men did not accomplish history-changing things, whether they were political or military gains, breakthroughs in technology, epochal writing, or something else. The basic difference is that Carlyle thought that there were potential great men who looked for a spot to fill, an opportunity for their greatness to fulfill itself, and Spencer who through there were great potential great men who were called by an opportunity for greatness. The former thought the men would do something to create the opportunity and the latter felt that the opportunity would beckon to someone who was waiting in the wings for one. There does not seem to be a great deal of difference between then.

The essence is that, in modern terms, there are individuals who have the right genetics and training, and social dynamics creates opportunities or allows opportunities to be exploited in which some great acts can be accomplished. Carlyle thought there were few potential great men and they would often be able to find an opportunity and Spencer felt there were many potential great men and few opportunities so that when one arose, there would be someone to utilize it. Not a lot of difference, considering the fuzziness of the definition of a great man and a great accomplishment. There might be more or less of one or the other depending on how one defines the set.

In an alien civilization, the same thing should happen, except it might be a great crustacean or a great octopus instead of a great man who does the history-changing action. Civilization progresses as long as there are great individuals who find great opportunities. Civilization does not progress if there are no great individuals anymore or there are no great opportunities anymore. This is the unavoidable conclusion of either Carlyle’s or Spencer’s theory of Great Men and history.

So, if we are asking why alien spaceships have not made it to Earth, we might consider one explanation is that in all alien civilizations, they either run out of potential great men, or have no great opportunities. The latter seems impossible, as technology will continue to have breakthroughs until it exhausts itself in asymptotic regions, and society will continue to have openings for change until a final asymptotic form is reached. In these asymptotic times, space travel would be possible, rather than any other, so that a failure of great individuals to do their tasks prior to reaching the stage where space travel is conceivable. Thus the question to be asked is, what might cause, perhaps universally across all alien civilization, the pool of potential great men to dry up and disappear in pre-asymptotic technology eras?

One answer is that genetic shifts in the gene pool lead to no potential great individuals being born (or hatched or whatever). This possibility depends on the genetics necessary to produce a great individual. If it is combination of multiple genes, which seems infinitely more likely that a single ‘great man gene’, it would mean that the probability of an individual being conceived with the whole set of necessary genes gets lower and lower and eventually becomes so small that in the population, none are produced at some particular time. It is very easy to see how this could happen. Suppose there is a subpopulation which mostly breeds within itself, and has some distribution of all the genes that are necessary. For an example, suppose there are ten genes required, and the distribution of the population is such that each one is present, randomly, in 20% of the population. This means that each new individual has 0.2 to the tenth power chance of having them all, or 1 in 10 million chance. If the subpopulation has 100 million people, 10 of them would be potential great men. Now suppose the subpopulation is absorbed in a population of 1 billion, ten times as large, and the absorbing population does not have any of the ten required genes. Now the probability of an individual having all ten required genes is 0.02 to the tenth power, or 1 in 100 quadrillion. For reference, a quadrillion is a million billion. This means the whole population, after the absorption of the subpopulation and assuming random breeding, has a one in a hundred million chance of having a single great individual.

The point of this example is not the numbers, but that it is very easy to lose any chance of a combination of genes occurring if the population is absorbed by one without them. A hundred different variants of the example could be quantified, but the point does not change. An alien civilization can lose its ability to progress by simply merging populations. Things in real life probably don’t happen suddenly but take generations to happen, but if there are enough generations, the conclusion would be inescapable.

The other side of the coin is upbringing or training of those individuals who do have the right genetics. Training is not something that is composed of nice neat discrete parts, like genes, but that actually makes the alternative example possible. Suppose that universal affluence has a corrosive effect on the upbringing of great individuals. This does not mean that affluence in one parental group or family, or the equivalent in a different form of reproduction, causes the halt of raising great individuals, but universal affluence does, in that it causes effects on the social environment which deter the parental group from following the precepts and protocols necessary to produce a great individual.

To summarize, it is easy to see how an alien civilization could cut off its own progress, by either merging of populations or of being successful in providing affluence to the large masses of population. There are probably other easy examples of how either of these detrimental effects could happen. Thus, here is a possibility for alien invisibility that needs to be considered.