Brand's branding
Or, the secret link between woolly mammoths and 16th century Protestantism
Stewart Brand is a cult figure among longtermists. Given his rather chaotic Wikipedia entry, the reasons for this are, perhaps, not immediately obvious to outsiders. But helpfully Brand is now the subject of a fascinating feature-length Stripe Press documentary, We Are As Gods, which lays the case out more clearly. Brand, it shows:
successfully campaigned for a “photograph of the whole Earth” in 1966;
began the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968;
helped instigate hacker culture during the inception of the computer;
is building a 10,000 year clock, one of many projects of the Long Now Foundation, of which he is President;
wants to bring back the woolly mammoths;
and has befriended Brian Eno.
(What the film does not discuss, but is also a delight, is his recent essay for Works in Progress, The Maintenance Race.)
We Are As Gods explains Brand’s appeal roughly thus: at the onset of a series of social and technological revolutions over the past sixty years, Brand was somewhere nearby, inventing things — or advocating things — that either transformed public attitudes towards progress then, or have become central to the longtermist worldview now.
But in some ways I think this does him a disservice. Brand is an inventor of things, granted, but he is also something else entirely. He is a storyteller.
To my mind at least, the value of his most successful moments — his Catalog, his photograph campaign, and even, I think, his interest in woolly mammoths — is better captured in symbolic terms. Not as a product, but as something at least akin to a story.
Take the whole earth photograph campaign. In the 1940s, Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer, said:
“once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available … a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”
This ‘idea’ — the response we have to seeing the earth from the outside — is now called the ‘overview effect’. In 2016, researchers described it as the “overwhelming emotion and feelings of identification with humankind and the planet as a whole”. Astronauts felt it; Brand’s campaign helped ensure everyone else did, too. As Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell said later, viewers of the first whole earth photograph in 1967 gained:
“an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”
That photograph, made the cover of Brand’s first Whole Earth Catalog, had the effect, that is to say, of instilling what we would now consider longtermist values in many of those who saw it. In other words, the photograph packaged a story — about the shared fate of humanity — in a format people intuitively resonated with (and were, no less importantly, actually willing to ‘read’). It was, I dare suggest, one of the best examples of longtermist advocacy there is.
I bring all this up because I think longtermists could learn quite a lot from Brand’s example. Moreover, there is — whether Brand was explicitly conscious of it or not — a degree of theory that might help explain his successes. Drawing that theory out could, I hope, help longtermists think about how to approach political change again today.
Quentin Skinner on Protestantism
I want to turn briefly to an example of social action that I think structurally similar — albeit perhaps slightly different in scale — to the whole earth photograph campaign.
Max Weber’s 1905 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued, in short, that the Protestant way of life had helped capitalism take off. Over the 20th century, various historians, like Hugh Trevor-Roper, criticised Weber on the grounds that capitalism had actually preceded Protestantism. (From memory Acemoglu and Robinson make a similar criticism.) But in his truly brilliant commentary on the reception of Weber’s theory, Quentin Skinner argued historians like Trevor-Roper had missed the point:
“Capitalism predated Protestantism. What I have tried to show is that it does not follow from this fact – as Trevor-Roper seems to believe – that Protestantism had no causal role to play in the development of capitalism. This is to ignore the fact that the earliest capitalists lacked legitimacy in the moral climate in which they found themselves. They therefore needed, as a condition of flourishing, to find some means of legitimising their behaviour. As I have shown, one of the means they found was to appropriate the evaluative vocabulary of the Protestant religion – greatly to the horror of the religious, who saw themselves as the victims of a trick.”
“If it was a trick, however, it certainly worked. The distinctive moral vocabulary of Protestantism not only helped to increase the acceptability of capitalism, but arguably helped to channel its evolution in specific directions, and in particular towards an ethic of industriousness. The relative acceptability of this new pattern of social behaviour then helped in turn to ensure that the underlying economic system developed and flourished.”
What Skinner is saying, in short, is that innovative social action needs to be justified in an ethical framework — or ‘language’ — likely to grant it widespread social acceptance. The early capitalists lacked such a language to justify their profit-seeking inclinations, until they discovered that they could co-opt the vocabulary of Protestantism. Once they had done so, capitalism was able to really flourish.
In the same essay, Skinner offers a wonderful example of this in practice:
“Consider, for example, the two most important words in the religious vocabulary of the age, the word providence and the word religious itself. During the latter part of the sixteenth century, it began to be suggested by those who wished to commend the successful exercise of care and foresight in monetary affairs that this apparently miserly conduct ought instead to be seen as a commendable working of providence and hence as a provident form of behaviour. At the same time, those anxious to propagate these values began to suggest that their characteristic interest in punctuality and exactitude ought not to be condemned as excessively rigorous and severe, but ought instead to be recognised and commended as a genuinely religious form of commitment … The term providence began to be applied to refer simply to acting with foresight about practical affairs [and] the ideal of acting religiously began to be invoked simply to refer to instances of diligent and punctilious behaviour.”
I don’t want to quote too much from Skinner, who is well worth reading in his entirety. But he emphasises that the co-option of Protestant values was complimented by other rhetorical strategies too: devising, for example, entirely new terms (such as ‘frugality’), and reversing the moral judgements associated with other terms (such as ‘shrewd’ and ‘ambitious’, both of which became complimentary, not condemnatory).
Skinner calls those engaged in such rhetorical work ‘ideological innovators’. His wider point is that the success of any one particular ideology rarely occurs through sheer force of persuasion alone. The early capitalists did not simply extol their own virtues as they saw them, in the belief that everyone else would be awed into agreement.
Rather, rhetorical techniques, like paradiastole (the painting of vices as virtues), are often what actually win people round to new ideas, sometimes without those people even being entirely conscious they are being converted. Politics is not a collective search for an enlightened consensus about what constitutes good or evil, but rather an endless conflict over concepts as basic as the meanings of words themselves.
Explicitly or not, the early capitalists understood this, so Skinner claims, and they played the game well.
So that’s all well and good. But what has this got to do with Stewart Brand?
What this has got to do with Stewart Brand
Basically, my contention is that Brand is to longtermism what some of the earliest 16th century capitalist writers, like John Wheeler, Lewes Roberts, and William Alexander, were to capitalism. (Again, not necessarily to claim an affinity of scale.)
What Brand’s most famous and successful works do is frame an essentially political project, longtermism, in a language that almost everyone finds appealing. In Brand’s case, I think we can conceive of it as something like the language of ‘wonder’.
The whole earth photograph is a brilliant example. It is the sense of wonder provided by the overview effect that led people towards the longtermist conclusions Edgar Mitchell described.
The pattern repeats itself across Brand’s other work, too.
The woolly mammoth campaign, though perhaps only insofar as I grasp its admittedly somewhat elaborate logic, seems to be about countering ecological fatalism, and reviving a ‘can-do spirit’ (forgive the Americanism) on climate change. And it does so by entertaining a question straight out of science fiction: what if we could bring a species back from the dead? And if we could do that, what else could we do too?
The point is not to ‘debate’ or ‘persuade’ those new to longtermism, but to bring them along a train of thought with us, instead. To begin with something genuinely curious or challenging, and then to show that to be really just one subsidiary of a much larger question about the long-term fate of the planet and humanity writ large.
Take the 10,000 year clock. As Brand explains in the documentary, the clock is expressly designed to encourage reflection about our long-term future. What would it take for a clock to last that long? What will the world look like when the last gong rings out? Will there still be a planet — let alone a clock — in 10,000 years’ time?
This is rhetorical work as Skinner conceived of it only in a loose sense — often capturing a pre-existing feeling more than repurposing pre-existing terminology. But that hardly makes Brand any less of an ideological innovator.
Longtermism, in Brand’s world, is, of course, sometimes best sold through rational debate. But often it isn’t. Brand is not, at least in his most popular work, defending longtermism on its full merits, or writing moralistic arguments for why the future really matters. Rather, he is captivating his audience by demonstrating his alignment with a set of values they already share — exploration, science, and the imagination — and using that to show them that really, they already are thinking like longtermists: they just haven’t realised it yet. Just like Wheeler, Roberts and Alexander claimed that 17th-century Protestants already were capitalists: they just hadn’t realised that, either.
Longtermist advocacy today
There is a long-running criticism of longtermism (and effective altruism) that goes something like this. ‘To be a longtermist or an effective altruist is to think about far-away strangers or ultra-distant future relatives as equally as important as one’s own family. Laudable though that may be, we are biologically hardwired against this sort of thinking. Although you might manage to think in these terms, most people never will.’
I have always thought there was some potency to this criticism. That version of longtermism — call it ‘calculative longtermism’ — would seem to contradict the wisdom of Edmund Burke, the man whose work gives this blog its name. Saying anything remotely analogous to ‘you care about the short-term and the nearby, but that’s just a cognitive bias’ has always struck me as a doomed enterprise. It is a direct attack on how people actually think and on what they want to hear.
But Brand’s rhetorical strategy shows there is another way — that this critique of calculative longtermism can be side-stepped entirely. Brand’s most important lesson is that longtermists can encourage others to care about the long-term future by the act of aligning their values with how people do think, not how they ‘should’. Just as how capitalism began as another form of existing religious sentiment, not a challenger to it.
Brand’s particular contribution has been to connect longtermism to our innate sense of wonder and curiosity. In this he has opened up a rhetorical possibility that is surely not yet exhausted: much more should be done to further align the two. But I dare suggest there must be other rhetorical opportunities for longtermists to pursue, too.
‘Progress Studies’, in seeking to claim ‘progress’ as a term of longtermism’s own, is a good example of an essentially similar strategy in a different key. And I wonder whether the obvious links between longtermism and solving climate change might present a mutually-beneficial value overlap there, too. The opportunities, in short, are rich and varied, and there should surely be further effort going into working out exactly what they are.
But there is also a cautionary lesson to draw from Brand’s work, one that I think puts into clear view the real value of his approach.
That Brand has been so successful suggests — at least to me — that simply making the case for the long-term future without thinking seriously about symbolism, rhetoric, and value-alignment is relatively unlikely to succeed. There are lots of straightforward arguments for longtermism from first principles out there, but all too often they blindly fall into the trap of calculative longtermism, as outlined above. For an especially egregious example of this, see these comments by Sam Bankman-Fried:
That is the exact opposite of how people should talk about longtermism if they genuinely want bring people on board. It makes the entire movement seem cold and heartless, when the truth is anything but. It is ludicrously counterproductive.
While calculating expected value from a given investment is an inescapable part of the longtermist approach to philanthropy, it should be remembered that relatively few are acquainted with the ins-and-outs of the community and its ethical norms. Beyond its bounds, such calculations seem, entirely logically, alien and immoral. Longtermism should not be defended according to the values and standards of its insiders, but by those of its strangers.
Stewart Brand’s life seems to me to be a wholehearted embodiment of that truism. Brand has shown, ever since his whole earth photograph campaign in 1966, that it is possible to put the heart (back) into longtermism. It is from him, and maybe a handful of 16th-and-17th century Protestants, that longtermists should take guidance today.