Causal Anthropocentrism

There is a pattern of thinking that has annoyed me. Today I found the name for it: "causal anthropocentrism".

What triggered this post is a quote by Xi Jinping:

There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.

The Thucydides Trap describes this unhappy pattern: as a hegemonic power grows weaker relative to an emerging power, war often results. This concept worried Graham Allison a lot, and you can find him talking about it in books and lectures. This does not concern this post.

What annoyed me about Xi's quote is the part

they might create such traps for themselves

No it doesn't. If a war between America and China happens, it would not be purely by human methods and human thinking. Such complex outcomes have complex causes, and human thinking is merely one part of many. Other causes include solar radiation, soil fertility, atmospheric circulation of water, secret patterns in the global flow of steel production, the relative abundance of uranium-235 in earth's crust, and many many others.

If a war breaks out, the thoughts and behaviors of the modern humans is just one part of the cause. The ancestors are also responsible. The sun, the crust, the atmosphere, the immutable laws of mathematics and physics. They all come together.

I like to joke that humans are no more intelligent than a logical AND gate, because they keep trying to find "the root cause" of things that do not have root causes. If {A and B and C} causes D, then which of {A, B, C} is the root cause? The mathematical answer is simply "the root cause is undefined in such a situation". The human answer is "the root cause is whichever is most amenable to human intervention".

And thus, if climate change is the problem, then human society is the root cause, not the atmospheric chemistry, or biological history of earth (without the carboniferous period, there would not be so much cheap coal for humans to burn up rapidly), or the universal scaling laws of social metabolism, even if they are all parts of the complex cause of the complex effect of climate change.

This is what I call "causal anthropocentrism". It might be the most practical, motivating, and moral, but it's wrong.

All root causes are egocentric. Without a personal viewpoint, there are only causes, but not any root cause.