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.

Population Decline in Alien Civilizations

Population decline has to eventually happen in all alien civilizations. Sooner or later, growth in population must cease, if only for the reason that all resources have been consumed and there is no way to continue to support the existing population, much less allow it to grow. This may be many centuries after asymptotic technology has been passed, and material substitution may have provided more centuries of growth, but eventually all of these ideas are found, exploited, and the end is reached.

Population decline can happen for many reasons other than resource shortages. There could be many types of calamities, that might, for example, render part of the planet uninhabitable, such as basaltic flooding. Epidemics would not be a cause, as once medical technology reaches a certain point, infections would be easily cured and prevented from spreading. An asteroid that impacts the planet could make part of it uninhabitable for a long time following the impact.

Population decline does not have to be involuntary, as it could come from a decision made by the governance to discourage population growth, or if population is generated by industrial gestation, rather than by the means which served the population well until that time, there could simply be a decision to produce less new aliens each year that ones which died. If the population is generated, at least partially, by the original biological means, there might be a decision on the part of the population involved in that process to restrict the numbers. For example, if the alien civilization is like our insect species, and only a few individuals are genetic sources for succeeding generations, then those individuals could simply decide to cooperate in generating less individuals than currently die each year, so the population numbers would go down.

Population decline might happen before asymptotic technology has been reached. At this point in the progress of an alien civilization, many other reasons can exist for population decline. There might be factions, dividing the population in a variety of ways, regionally, by some genetic factors, in a caste system or whatever. Conflict between two factions might reduce population.

Whatever the cause, one question that can be asked, is population decline in an advanced civilization destabilizing? There might be at least two mechanisms by which destabilization could happen. One exists where the civilization has different roles for individuals, based on their age. Perhaps the first quarter of each member's life is education and physical and mental growth, the second involves some critical work tasks, the third is involved with monitoring and managing, and the fourth is leisure-oriented. If the ratios of the population in the different quarters of age is critical to the functioning of the civilization, some destabilization might conceivably occur. This does not seem to be a likely possibility as the problem could simply be solved by moving the thresholds between the four sectors of the population a bit each year to adjust it to the demographics. If the civilization had no way to do this, for example, it was composed of a species that metamorphosed at a precise age, then this mechanism might be relevant. This would only be the case if the tasks were likewise immutable, or something like working hours could not be adjusted to cope with the demographic change. It is hard to see how a civilization could be so constrained by age-related functions that it would destabilize following a decision to reduce population.

The other mechanism, or set of mechanisms, might be when the functioning of the society is dependent on the continual growth of numbers of members within the civilization. This would seem to be a very unlikely situation, except that such arrangements exist on Earth, and therefore could conceivably exist elsewhere. One process by which a society could arrange itself to be dependent on growth involves the society having a hierarchy or some gradation of worth in the society, and individual members rise in the hierarchy as they grow older, provided that there are sufficient numbers in the hierarchical levels beneath them. This is called a pyramid scheme. Could an alien society arrange itself so that there was such a hierarchy, and elevation in it was principally dependent on increasing numbers? Possibly, in the pre-asymptotic technology era.

Once technology expands beyond the hard sciences, the easiest ones to figure out and organize, into those related to social organization, psychology, and others, such schemes would be recognized as undesirable in a long-term sense, and would cease to exist. Thus, only a society in its earlier stages could fall prey to such a social arrangement. Population decline would have to appear very early in the civilization’s history in order to find an era in which such a social structure would be allowed to exist.

Another Earth scheme in which continual growth is the only way to stabilize it is referred to as the Ponzi scheme. This occurs on small scales on Earth, and can be recognized as a means of deception to allow the perpetrators of such a scheme to obtain benefits which continue as long as the membership count in the Ponzi scheme participant list increases. An entire society could be structured around such a concept if there was a division of the population into two factions, one, probably quite small, which receives benefits from the larger one based on the promise that such benefits will be returned to the larger one later on, and in larger quantities. This is impossible, except if the number of participants continues to increase, or the time of payoff is pushed out further, or the amount of required contributed benefits is increased. Sooner or later there will be an unfolding of these promises, and if a large part of an alien society was involved in it, it could destabilize it. This would be part of that alien civilization’s learning experiences in the field of economics and social organization.

Are there other mechanisms by which an alien society might decide on population reduction and find that it had inadvertently destabilized itself? Perhaps it will be necessary to monitor the deceptive devices developed here on Earth to learn of some new scheme.