When we walk into the house, we encounter all the warmth and disorder of a busy and wildly ambitious family. Homer-Dixon has only recently surfaced from the intensive period of writing that resulted in his new book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; his wife is just days away from defending her doctoral dissertation; and they have a rambunctious eighteen-monthold son. The walls are decorated pellmell with framed colour photographs taken by Homer-Dixon over the years during extensive travels in India and Africa, rooms are littered with toys,and Homer-Dixon’s spacious first-floor office is congested with books and documents stacked on the floor, twin computer monitors glowing.
After completing his doctorate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, Thomas Homer-Dixon came to the public’s attention with research that resulted in 1999’s Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. A synthesis of the findings of an international, multidisciplinary team, the book investigates the claim that shortages of renewable natural resources like clean water and fertile soil are directly linked to violent social unrest— guerrilla insurrections, civil war, terrorism, riots. “Developing countries face increasingly complex, fast-moving, and interacting environmental scarcities, “Homer-Dixon writes. “These scarcities can overwhelm efforts to produce constructive change and can actually reduce a country’s ability to deliver reform. Consequently, environmental
scarcity sometimes helps drive societies into a self-reinforcing spiral of violence, institutional dysfunction, and social fragmentation.” Societies
like Haiti, with the most irremediably devastated environments, are consequently at the greatest risk of violence and are also the least able to create the ingenuity needed to reform.
“I have an engineering mentality,” Homer-Dixon tells me. “I’m not one to sit around wondering about the nature of truth. I like to solve problems.” We are sitting at a picnic table in his backyard, a full acre that includes a swimming pool, an English-style garden, and a small, struggling orchard. I ask him about his call for humility in our relationship to nature in The Ingenuity Gap, in which he argues that the potential catastrophes arising in the ecological, political, and economic systems of our globalized world are so complex and unpredictable that we will be unable to muster the ingenuity needed to solve them. He replies, “This loss of humility and humbleness
is a recent phenomenon, and I think it’s one of the explanations of our current situation.”
According to Homer-Dixon, ingenuity can be thought of as “sets of instructions that tell us how to arrange the constituent parts of our social and physical worlds in ways that help us achieve our goals.” “Technical ingenuity” involves the creation of technologies or approaches that solve relatively specific problems — the vaccine that eradicated polio, the plant hybrids and synthetic fertilizers that have dramatically increased crop yields. “Social ingenuity,” on the other hand, is the creation of social conditions that allow for the emergence of technical ingenuity when needed. Examples include fair and efficient markets, which provide incentives to invent, as well as research centres and universities. These two forms of ingenuity are closely related: without social ingenuity, useful and sophisticated technical ingenuity is unlikely to emerge.
The Ingenuity Gap is largely an account of how the unstable character of complex, interlocking systems like climate, ecology, and international finance pose serious and poorly understood challenges to our ingenuity and to our societies as a whole. We are accustomed to the slow and predictable evolution of significant developments, but changes in complex systems, especially in a world where speed and connectivity are paramount, are often rapid and dramatic, the result of gradually accumulating changes that suddenly cross a critical threshold. Complex systems tend to spiral into turbulence, fed by “positive feedback loops” that amplify initial conditions. Homer-Dixon’s principal examples are global climate change, the run on Wall Street in 1987, and the sudden collapse of Asian currencies in the late 1990s.
“When things are going well, as they were for most people in the 1990s, it’s easy to forget that we live in a world of unknown unknowns,” Homer-Dixon writes. “Not only are we often ignorant of critical components, processes, and possibilities in the complex systems surrounding us, we’re also often ignorant of our ignorance.” In what he refers to as our new, human-created world, a world without frontiers whose every facet is influenced by the presence of human beings and whose natural, social, and technological systems are closely intertwined, “unknown unknowns” abound. While we may know that the thermohaline current, the great conveyor belt of heat that courses through the North Atlantic, is crucial to the temperate climate of Europe and will potentially be affected by the melting of the polar ice sheets, that system is too complex for scientists to model even with the best computers. The presence of unknown unknowns means that we often do not know what kind of ingenuity we need because we don’t comprehend the nature and extent of the problem. We may have created a world whose complexity and speed have outpaced the capacities of the human brain.
The Ingenuity Gap hearkens back to Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, but takes a global perspective: increasing populations, environmental scarcity, and a rising ingenuity gap may trigger widespread social unrest and violence. “In recent decades, humankind has created, without paying much attention, a dangerous world of tightly coupled and sometimes highly unstable political, economic, technological, and ecological systems,” Homer-Dixon remarks in an afterword, written in light of 9/11, to the 2002 edition of The Ingenuity Gap. “These include an international financial system prone to flip between stable and turbulent modes, a perturbed climate that may be on the cusp of dramatically new patterns of behavior, and a global political-economic regime that’s generating immense stresses and potential for mass violence.” Given the scale of our problems, it is unlikely that we will be able to reduce the ingenuity gap directly by inventing new and better technologies, but we can reduce the need for ingenuity by setting up an international banking system less vulnerable to sudden collapse, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and living more humble and prudent lives. We can cultivate the kind of humility in the face of the awesome power of the natural world that Homer-Dixon believes would serve us well. Above all else, we need a “change in our values and in our perception of ourselves.”
It is late afternoon, and we are sitting on lawn chairs having coffee on the far side of Homer-Dixon’s property. Some of the young trees in his orchard, he tells me, are already looking withered and will have to be moved because the roots of an enormous nearby walnut tree actually poison the soil around it. He designed and assembled the elegant wooden jungle gym we are seated beside. Thomas Homer-Dixon is a pragmatic man. He has a preference for problems that can be identified and solved; he likes clear sets of instructions. And practically everything about the world we now live in goes against that.
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