Wizard And The Prophet

Scott Young had Book Club: This month we read The Wizard And The Prophet by Charles C. Mann. It’s a story of two men: Norman Borlaug and William Vogt with different visions of the world

On a second level it’s about two different ideologies: Wizards and Prophets. Wizards believe in technological and overcoming our problems via innovation. Prophets argue this is foolhardy–we need to cut back immediately to save ourselves from disaster.

On a third level, however, this book is really about ideas. How ideologies come to form, how they attract allies and coalesce around certain judgements of the world.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet

This is the seventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader

The Wizard and the Prophet is meant to outline the origin of two opposing attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature through their genesis in the work and thought of two men: William Vogt, the "Prophet" polemicist who founded modern-day environmentalism, and Norman Borlaug, the "Wizard" agronomist who spearheaded the Green Revolution.

Though Mann insists from the start that the book is not meant to advocate for or condemn either side, it was initially difficult for me to read it as anything but two-and-three-quarters cheers for Wizardry

Two Men

Vogt’s life begins in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, New York

the sudden dwindling in local bird populations

launches a polemical campaign against what he believes to be the culprit: government-sponsored public works projects to drain ditches and marshes and spray pesticides to control the mosquito population, intended to curb the spread of malaria.

Mann goes out of his way to show that Vogt’s influences and contemporary members of the environmentalist milieu – for example, Madison Grant, co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, organizer of the United States national park system, and author of the charmingly named The Passing of the Great Race, beloved by Hitler – were, to put in mildly, extremely uninterested in the wellbeing of all humankind. Instead, they were obsessed by fears of an unchecked Malthusian population explosion, race mixing, and a resultant societal degeneration that could only be stopped by halting (read: starving out) population growth

Were he to live in an age of Facebook and Twitter, he would definitely be that guy reposting memes that COVID is finally letting our planet "heal."

Borlaug’s section, in contrast, begins not in the rarefied world of middle-class New York, but on the unforgiving prairie of Saude, Iowa, which his poor Norwegian immigrant family tries to farm. He comes of age at roughly the same time as Vogt, but his early life may as well be mid-1800s Little House on the Prairie

In college, Borlaug first studies forestry, then gets seduced by plant biologist Elvin Charles Stakman’s personal crusade against stem rust, a fungus that blights wheat crops and, at the time, critically endangered the global wheat supply

after seeing that rust and variability in growing conditions would hamper any attempt to increase wheat crop yields in Mexico, he begins a series of years-long Mendelian cross-breeding pilots in four different locations of Mexico to find a prodigious, hardy wheat strain that is not only immune to rust, but can survive and thrive virtually no matter the location or growing conditions.

After years of painstakingly cross-breeding hundreds of wheat strains from all around the world by hand, he finally stumbles on his miracle wheat, which sextuples the yield of the previous wheat cultivars in Mexico and turns the country into a wheat exporter virtually overnight.

Four Elements

The second half of The Wizard and the Prophet explores four areas where humankind faces major dilemmas and needs some form of action (whether Wizardry or Prophetry) in order to survive. Mann names each chapter after one of the four elements: Earth (food), Water (self-explanatory), Fire (energy), and Air (climate change).

Each chapter sees the Wizards demonstrate over and over that carrying capacity in these spheres is not fixed and can be altered by science and technology

In "Earth," Mann focuses on the problem of how to continue to scale food production to meet the needs of an exponentially growing population.

For the future, the Wizards look to upgrade staple food crops to C4 photosynthesis

At the time Mann was writing The Wizard and the Prophet, C4 was still considered a whacky moonshot, but more recently it’s looking like we’re getting closer to making it happen

In "Water," again, the Wizards have a solid track record

In "Fire," the line between Wizardry and Prophetry seems the most slippery – is solar power an example of a cutting-edge technological solution to a seemingly intractable growth problem (in which case it would be firmly in the Wizard camp) or an environmentally-friendly alternative to "dirty" Wizard technology like fracking and nuclear power plants (in which case, it should belong to the Prophets)? Mann places it more in the Prophet category

Finally, in "Air," we get to the most (in my view, the only) ambivalent section of the book.

Three years and countless Integrated Assessment Models later, and it seems like it’s still unclear, except that "‘[w]e’ve ruled out ‘We’ll be fine,’ and we don’t think ‘doom’ is very likely.’"

If you had asked me before March 2020 whether I thought we could science our way out of a slow-grind, long-term disaster scenario like climate change, I would have said categorically yes

But, uh, I’m no longer so sure.

everyone in every country, state, and Holy See didn’t adopt masks, close the borders, roll out tests, or vaccinate quickly and effectively enough, and the blood of 2 million people and counting (not to mention the global loss of jobs, social activities, educational quality, and basic human connection) is on our hands.

If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. I don’t think it’s from a lack of trying; I think we may have hit a carrying capacity limit on our ability to deal with complexity

In Caliban’s War, the second book in The Expanse series, there’s an excellent metaphor for how having more smart people working on problems fails in an atmosphere of increased complexity

If there’s one thing we can take from the Prophets, it’s their focus on trying to understand complex systems holistically, Chesterton’s Fence style, instead of as piecemeal problem-boxes in a hundred siloed experts’ rooms

A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs