Читать книгу Eclipse of Man - Charles T. Rubin - Страница 10
ОглавлениеTHE ASPIRATIONS of transhumanism are not entirely new because the human desires to change unsatisfactory aspects of our lives or to extend our powers are not new. Yet these deeper, perduring aspirations have gained a new force in the modern age, as the world has come increasingly to be defined by the ability of modern science and technology to change it significantly. It has become possible to think seriously about progress, about what it would mean if these achievements were increasingly to shape our lives, building one on another.
Progress does not inevitably have to point to the kind of future transhumanists envision. Science fiction authors, and others who think about the future in less overtly fictional ways, have had no trouble thinking about some pretty remarkable and very distant futures in which humanity persists in an eminently recognizable form. This does not represent a mere failure of imagination on the part of these futurists; in some ways, it arguably takes even more imagination to depict a future in which mankind has survived without becoming radically different.1
To understand why the transhumanists believe progress requires human extinction, we can study some of their intellectual forebears—authors who, while not all widely remembered today, were in their own time influential on the way people understood where science and technology might be taking us. We begin with one of the greatest of Enlightenment prophets of progress, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, the French aristocrat known as the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794).
Condorcet was a mathematician and philosopher, an abolitionist and advocate of women’s equality and religious toleration, an admirer and biographer of Voltaire, an economic liberal, and a genial enthusiast—an embodiment, in short, of all things enlightened.2 A prominent public intellectual, he was “one of the few Enlightenment thinkers to witness the [French] Revolution and to participate fully in its constitutional aftermath. . . . He was, in short, an outstanding disciple of the Enlightenment, uniquely located at the center of great events.”3 A leader in the early days of the French Revolution, he was forced into hiding as the political winds shifted.4 Concealed in the house of one Madame Vernet in 1793–94, he wrote his most influential work, a little book called Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. He was eventually arrested and thrown in prison, where he died the day after his arrest, under circumstances that “have been the subject of much speculation ever since.”5 But his final great work was published the next year, and it became a landmark of Enlightenment thinking and would shape how generations understood the idea of progress.
In the book, Condorcet is convinced that the progress of reason has gone too far to allow any future lapse into barbarism, but he is still chagrined at how little progress has been made to increase human happiness. “The friend of humanity,” he writes, “cannot receive unmixed pleasure but by abandoning himself to the endearing hope of the future.”6 And what a future Condorcet expects it to be:
May it not be expected that the human race will be meliorated by new discoveries in the sciences and arts, and, as an unavoidable consequence, in the means of individual and general prosperity; by farther progress in the principles of conduct, and in moral practice; and lastly by the real improvement of our faculties, moral, intellectual and physical, which may be the result either of improvement of the instruments which increase the power and direct the exercise of these faculties, or of the improvement of our natural organization itself?7
How is this “improvement of our faculties” and “natural organization” to take place? Growing liberty, equality, and prosperity within nations and among nations, Condorcet writes, will raise the general level of instruction, and that in itself will improve human ability. More instruction will in turn produce more knowledge, and Condorcet expects that as we come to understand the world better and improve our ability to teach that understanding, what once might have required genius to uncover or comprehend can become a subject of general knowledge. The result is that we advance the starting point for yet further attainments in the arts and sciences, which in turn increases our powers of action—an upward spiral of enlightenment. As a result, better food, better sanitation, and better medicine will extend the human lifespan, as will “the destruction of the two most active causes of deterioration, penury and wretchedness on the one hand, and enormous wealth on the other.”8 Likewise, Condorcet foresees that “contagious disorders” will be brought under control, as well as occupational and environmental illness. The net result:
Would it even be absurd to suppose this quality of melioration in the human species as susceptible of an indefinite advancement; to suppose that a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and this decay, will itself have no assignable limit? Certainly man will not become immortal; but may not the distance between the moment in which he draws his first breath, and the common term when, in the course of nature, without malady or accident, he finds it impossible any longer to exist, be necessarily protracted?9
Despite his denial of the possibility of immortality, Condorcet expects “that the mean duration of life will for ever increase.”10 It is one of the “laws of nature” that living things are subject to “perfectibility or deterioration.”11 The breeding of animals already shows that we could improve our own physical capacities and senses, but perhaps our “quality of melioration” suggests that a good deal more is possible for us by other means as well.12 Hence Condorcet wonders whether better-educated parents might not transmit the superior “organization” they have achieved directly to their children.13
Condorcet’s vision of the future, so familiar to those of us in the West who live it on a daily basis, is very much a reflection of the project laid out more than a century earlier by the English philosopher Francis Bacon for “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”14 Condorcet sees how the increase of our power over nature will soften the hard edges of the human condition by improving the material conditions of life, which will allow at the same time an improvement in the moral conditions. He adds an intimation of accelerating progress; one generation can build on the work of another. A smarter and healthier generation sets the stage for even greater achievement by the next generation. He may have hedged on the question of immortality, but as we shall see, not everyone who came after him was so modest.
Condorcet’s thesis—that mankind would improve and expand, growing wiser and healthier and much longer-lived—soon received a powerful rebuttal. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was a political economist whose Essay on the Principle of Population explicitly attacked Condorcet’s depiction of progress.15 Malthus believed that finite resources limit what human beings can ever hope to accomplish, and that because human reproduction always races ahead of available food, our future holds great misery and scarcity. Malthus’s ideas influenced many fields, including biology, where Charles Darwin (1809–1882) adapted them to help explain the workings of evolution, a kind of natural progress caused by competition for limited resources.16 Through to our own day, much of the debate about progress has arisen from tensions among these three men’s ideas: Condorcet’s optimism about human perfectibility, the Malthusian problem of resource scarcity, and the Darwinian conception of natural competition as a force for change over time. The transhumanists, as we shall see, reconcile and assimilate these ideas by advocating the end of humanity.
THE INVENTION OF IMMORTALITY
In 1872, the British author and adventurer William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) revisited the project of progress that Condorcet had laid out. Reade, born in Scotland, was a failure as a novelist but had modest success as an African explorer and war correspondent. He was in correspondence with Darwin, who is said to have used in The Descent of Man (1871) some information from Reade’s expedition to West Africa.17 While it seems like in his short life Reade never quite lived up to his own expectations for himself, his attempt at a universal history—an 1872 book called The Martyrdom of Man—was once highly regarded. W. E. B. Du Bois, Cecil Rhodes, H. G. Wells, and George Orwell all found reasons to praise it.18 Perhaps even the character Sherlock Holmes was a fan: in The Sign of the Four, Holmes says to Watson, “Let me recommend this book—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. I shall be back in an hour.”19 From its original publication to 1910 the book went through eighteen editions in England and seventeen in the United States; one can only imagine that many a Baker Street Irregular has felt compelled to track it down.
The Martyrdom of Man began, Reade says, as an effort to give the hitherto neglected story of “Inner Africa” its due place within European history.20 But in the writing, the book became very much more: an effort to place human history within a larger natural history that eventually takes Reade right back to the development of the solar system and the origins of life.21 He adopts his own version of a Darwinian perspective, along with the theories about a geologically dynamic Earth, which were still rather recent in his day. Reade’s naturalism is particularly deployed in extensive efforts to provide non-supernatural explanations for the rise of religions.
But there is one crucial aspect of his argument that distinguishes it from most similar presentations in our own day: Reade believes that nature is purposive—and indeed, that something like a cunning of nature is evident in human history.22 That is to say, human activities like war and religion, or conditions like inequality, serve developmental purposes within a natural scheme of things beyond what is intended by the human beings participating in those activities.23 “Thus when Nature selects a people to endow them with glory and with wealth her first proceeding is to massacre their bodies, her second, to debauch their minds. She begins with famine, pestilence, and war; next, force and rapacity above; chains and slavery below. She uses evil as the raw material of good; though her aim is always noble, her earliest means are base and cruel. But, as soon as a certain point is reached, she washes her black and bloody hands, and uses agents of a higher kind.”24
To put it another way, Reade believes that there is a natural imperative for higher abilities and capacities to grow out of lower ones: “The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness. Loyalty and piety, the reverential virtues, are developed from filial love. Benevolence and magnanimity, the generous virtues, from parental love. The sense of decorum proceeds from the sense of cleanliness; and that from the instinct of sexual display.”25 Reade’s claim that the higher derives from the lower does not just apply to human beings. It is a characteristic of life itself, indeed a characteristic of matter, which he regards as inseparable from mind.26
We ought not to think there is anything degrading about thus understanding the higher in light of the lower, Reade argues. Indeed, his reductionism opens the door to remarkable possibilities:
It is Nature’s method to take something which is in itself paltry, repulsive, and grotesque, and thence to construct a masterpiece by means of general and gradual laws; those laws themselves being often vile and cruel. This method is applied not only to single individuals, but also to the whole animated world; not only to physical but also to mental forms. And when it is fully realised and understood that the genius of man has been developed along a line of unbroken descent from the simple tendencies which inhabited the primeval cell, and that in its later stages this development has been assisted by the efforts of man himself, what a glorious futurity will open to the human race! It may well be that our minds have not done growing, and that we may rise as high above our present state as that is removed from the condition of the insect and the worm.27
That we can assist in our own uplift and greatly transcend what we are today is crucial to Reade’s picture of the future, as it is to today’s transhumanists. In the natural order of things, the individual human life has limited potential, precisely because by nature we are parts of a whole with at least potentially greater significance:
As the atoms are to the human unit, so the human units are to the human whole. . . . Nature does not recognise their individual existence. But each atom is conscious of its life; each atom can improve itself in beauty and in strength; each atom can therefore, in an infinitesimal degree, assist the development of the Human Mind. If we take the life of a single atom, that is to say of a single man, or if we look only at a single group, all appears to be cruelty and confusion; but when we survey mankind as One, we find it becoming more and more noble, more and more divine, slowly ripening towards perfection.28
That Reade believes mankind is “slowly ripening towards perfection” implies that he is tolerably certain he understands the immediate project that faces humanity, and at least some of its longer-term consequences. Although he claims that he does not mean to suggest that humanity will ever understand the ultimate purpose of creation,29 he feels confident enough to assert that man was
not sent upon the earth to prepare himself for existence in another world; he was sent upon earth that he might beautify it as a dwelling, and subdue it to his use; that he might exalt his intellectual and moral powers until he had attained perfection, and had raised himself to that ideal which he now expresses by the name of God, but which, however sublime it may appear to our weak and imperfect minds, is far below the splendour and majesty of that Power by whom the universe was made.30
By the power of science rather than prayer, Earth, “which is now a purgatory, will be made a paradise.”31 The genuinely “Sacred Cause” is “the extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, the perfection of genius, the perfection of love, the invention of immortality, the exploration of the infinite, the conquest of creation.”32
So by making men mortal and immoral, nature points humanity in the direction of immortality and morality so long as we exercise our intelligence.33 Reade could already see signs of progress in this direction: “Life is full of hope and consolation; we observe that crime is on the decrease, and that men are becoming more humane. The virtues as well as the vices are inherited; in every succeeding generation the old ferocious impulses of our race will become fainter and fainter, and at length they will finally die away.”34 Delusions about an immortal soul will only stand in the way of such efforts; Christianity, which Reade treats under general headings such as “Religion” and “superstition,” will have eventually done the work intended of it as a tool of nature, and at that point can and must be destroyed, for it is in the nature of these tools to become obstructions once they have brought life to the next level.35 While human beings may never rival the great Creator of all things, there is a long way to go before that would become an issue.36 Echoing Francis Bacon,37 Reade notes that “we can conquer Nature only by obeying her laws, and in order to obey her laws we must first learn what they are. When we have ascertained, by means of Science, the method of Nature’s operations, we shall be able to take her place and to perform them for ourselves.”38 Nature intends that we rebel against being the serfs of nature.39
Having placed immortality explicitly on the agenda of the future, Reade considers space travel a necessary consequence:
Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe.40
When human beings “invent” immortality we press beyond the natural order of things in which we are mere cells in a larger whole, and when we die are dead forever. In similar fashion, with space travel we will also have proven the essentially mundane character of the once-transmundane heavens. Yet Reade’s imaginative assurance about the great things ahead for humanity puts in high relief the ignorance and miseries of humanity today.
These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained to us, we could not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam.41
This is a glorious future, one in which men will be “perfect,” having the power of “what the vulgar worship as a god.”42 But Reade recognizes—more so than did Condorcet—that this vision is not entirely consoling. In a prayer-like passage, he acknowledges that it makes the ills of the present look all the more terrible, and the past a yet darker place:
You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream; you pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth; when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beasts, tortured by pains, and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of Nature which yet holds us in her bonds; when you read of us in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur, to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms and work-shops are preparing the materials of the human growth. And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago.43
The fact that he calls his book The Martyrdom of Man indicates that Reade is well aware of the tragic side of his progressivism. But “in each generation the human race has been tortured that their children might profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come?”44 Until men become immortal, the only satisfaction to be found is in the superiority of the present to the past, and the chance of making one’s own infinitesimal contribution to the future.
SALVATION IN SPACE
We turn next to another thinker who concluded early on that humanity, in order to preserve itself, would have to venture into outer space. Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829–1903), the illegitimate son of a Russian prince, was an intense but retiring Moscow librarian who was “reputed to have read all the books he catalogued.”45 Unlike all the other figures discussed in this chapter, Fedorov was not widely known during his own lifetime. The posthumous publication of two volumes of his work did not change that situation a great deal, even though the publisher made them available free of charge, in accord with Fedorov’s beliefs about property.46 But the quality of those who admired his work makes up for the lack of quantity: he was known and respected by both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And Fedorov had one yet more important connection: he assisted, and some think passed his ideas on to, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, among the greatest of the pioneers of space travel.47
In a work composed sometime after a famine in 1891, Fedorov writes that the “learned” have neglected their obligation to the “unlearned” to improve the conditions of their lives, particularly the lives of agricultural workers.48 He is mightily impressed by reports of using explosives to create rain. He regards using the tools of war for peaceful purposes as literally providential, a sign of what God expects of man.49 He is much more skeptical than Reade about the cunning of nature, asserting that it is “extreme childishness” to expect that the “blind force” of nature will produce just good results. It is only when human beings put their will behind their common task—to understand and control that force—that it will be turned to the good by our conscious control.50
Fedorov is well aware that such control as we currently possess is far from guaranteed to be used for the benefit of mankind. What is lacking, he believes, is the necessary sense of human kinship.51 “Unbrotherly relations” make life the “struggle” that has hitherto been definitive of human civilization.52 They also lead to a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the true meaning of progress. Progress, Fedorov claims, is not to be seen in the superiority of man over beast, the superiority of the present generation over past generations (as Reade would say), or the superiority in this generation of the young over the old.53 Indeed, such a picture of progress has its tragic tone because it is inherently divisive: “Progress makes fathers and ancestors into the accused and the sons and descendants into judges; historians are judges over the deceased, that is, those who have already endured capital punishment (the death penalty), while the sons sit in judgment over those who have not yet died.”54
In contrast, Fedorov—a devout if unconventional adherent of Russian Orthodoxy—writes that we should take our cue from “true religion,” which is “the cult of ancestors, the cult of all the fathers as one father inseparable from the Triune God, yet not merged with him.”55 On this basis Fedorov imagines the single, common task of mankind as a union of sons bent on overcoming the blind forces of nature—not only to defeat hunger, disease, and death for the living, but to achieve the resurrection of all of their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, etc.56 In a passage that could have been written by a number of today’s transhumanists, he says, “Death has become a general organic evil, a monstrosity, which we no longer notice and no longer regard as an evil and a monstrosity.”57 But we will learn to bring the dead back to life, “substituting resurrection for birth”; we will thereby eliminate the need for sexual reproduction, which is just another example of the blind operation of nature.58 We will solve hunger, too, substituting “creativity for nutrition”: we will not need to eat, but will produce ourselves “out of the very basic elements into which the human body can be decomposed.”59
Even so, Fedorov is not unconcerned about the Malthusian problem of eventual exhaustion of resources here on Earth. He has his own, to us familiar, apocalyptic vision:
The extinction of stars (sudden or slow) is an instructive example, a terrifying warning. The growing exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, distortions of the meteorological process manifested in floods and droughts—all this forebodes ‘famines and plagues’ and prompts us to heed the warning. Apart from a slowly advancing end, we cannot be certain whether a sudden catastrophe may not befall the Earth, this tiny grain of sand in the vastness of the Universe.60
For such reasons resurrection will not suffice; the exploration of outer space is also absolutely necessary to prepare the “future homes of the ancestors.”61 God has arranged that “the Earth itself has become conscious of its fate through man” and this consciousness would be useless were we simply to stand by and observe “the slow destruction of our home and graveyard” at the hands of purposeless nature.62 Rather, “God is the king who does everything for man but also through man” and he intends that humanity not be “idle passengers” but “the crew of its terrestrial craft”63—a remarkable prefiguration of the space-age/environmentalist idea of “Spaceship Earth.”
The reasons for developing space travel transcend the merely practical necessities of overcoming resource exhaustion (“the economic problem posed by Malthus”64) and finding a place for resurrected ancestors. Space travel will also deeply affect our moral nature. Is it more fantastic, Fedorov asks, to believe in the Christian understanding of heaven and the afterlife—“to create a moral society by postulating the existence of other beings in other worlds and envisioning the emigration thither of souls, the existence of which cannot be proven”—or to believe that we might visit other worlds ourselves someday?65 Moreover, to “inhabit all heavenly bodies” would
unite all the worlds of the Universe into an artistic whole, a work of art, the innumerable artists of which, in the image of the Triune Creator, will be the entire human race . . . attaining divine perfection in the cause, the work of restoring the world to the sublime incorruptibility it had before the fall. Then, united, science and art will become ethics and aesthetics; they will become a natural universal technology of their work of art.66
It is through human efforts, then, that a cosmos—an ordered universe—comes to exist, rather than the purposeless chaos, the mere raw materials given us by God, that exists prior to human intervention. We will see a similar point being made many times in the pages that follow.
Both Fedorov and Reade seem to assume that outer space is entirely available for human colonization. In so doing they are taking a position on the question of the existence of life on other worlds, which was in fact already much debated in their day. Developments in astronomy, geology, and biology, in particular the thinking of Darwin, were leading many to consider that there was no reason to expect Earth to be the sole abode of life—and if life could exist elsewhere, so too intelligence may have evolved. We turn to one such thinker next.
EDIFYING ALIENS
French astronomer and spiritualist Nicolas Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) ranks high among the great popularizers of science, particularly astronomy—the Carl Sagan of his time. Owner of a private observatory and author of some seventy books, he was particularly interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and was among the first to imagine it in thoroughly alien terms, an idea he presented in both his popular science writing and science fiction. A sense of his contribution can be gauged by the fact that he has craters named for him on both the moon and Mars. Into the 1960s, decades after his death, his name remained on a popular, if by that time much updated, introduction to astronomy. And he garnered all this recognition despite the fact (perhaps in his own time because of the fact?) that he considered spiritualism to rank among his scientific interests.
Writing early in the twentieth century, Flammarion articulates what is often called the “assumption of mediocrity”: that there is nothing special about Earth’s place in the universe, and so life likely exists elsewhere. “On what pretext could one suppose that our little globe which, as we have seen, has received no privileges from Nature, is the exception; and that the entire Universe, save for one insignificant isle, is devoted to vacancy, solitude, and death?”67 If outer space looks unfriendly to life at first glance, we learn even from terrestrial observation that the environment that is hostile to one form of life is favorable to another. So the fact that extraterrestrial conditions may appear hostile to life as we know it is no warrant that life is impossible.
Furthermore, Flammarion argues that extraterrestrial life will likely be different from life as we know it, perhaps with a different chemical basis and very different capabilities. Perhaps it will in some respects be superior to us. Might not nature
have given to certain beings an electrical sense, a magnetic sense, a sense of orientation, an organ able to perceive the ethereal vibrations of the infra-red or ultra-violet, or permitted them to hear at a distance, or to see through walls? We eat and digest like coarse animals, we are slaves to our digestive tube: may there not be worlds in which a nutritive atmosphere enables its fortunate inhabitants to dispense with this absurd process? The least sparrow, even the dusky bat, has an advantage over us in that it can fly through the air. Think how inferior are our conditions, since the man of greatest genius, the most exquisite woman, are nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar before its metamorphosis! Would it be a disadvantage to inhabit a world in which we might fly whither we would; a world of scented luxury, full of animated flowers; a world where the winds would be incapable of exciting a tempest, where several suns of different colors—the diamond glowing with the ruby, or the emerald with the sapphire—would burn night and day (azure nights and scarlet days) in the glory of an eternal spring; with multi-colored moons sleeping in the mirror of the waters, phosphorescent mountains, aerial inhabitants—men, women, or perhaps of other sexes—perfect in their forms, gifted with multiple sensibilities, luminous at will, incombustible as asbestos, perhaps immortal, unless they commit suicide out of curiosity?68
For Flammarion, the possibility of life elsewhere—indeed, life everywhere—raises the question of the ultimate destiny of human life. For it is life, he believes, not matter, that is the key to understanding the universe, yet life eventually seems to give way to mere matter; individually we are built on death and proceed unto death ourselves, and the same is true for our planet as a whole. Hence “Let no one talk of the Progress of Humanity as an end! That would be too gross a decoy.”69 Flammarion believes that progress is the law of life,70 but, as Fedorov also suggested, material progress alone would mean that in the end we would still fall prey to entropy itself—that each of our lives, and that human life as a whole, will be extinguished. We reject this gloomy possibility, he says, as being “incompatible with the sublime grandeur of the spectacle of the universe.”71 So while “Creation does not seem to concern itself with us,”72 this appearance may be deceiving. He even goes so far as to ask if “distant and unknown Humanities”—that is, alien races—might not be “attached to us by mysterious cords, if our life, which will assuredly be extinguished at some definite moment here below, will not be prolonged into the regions of Eternity.”73
One would be hard pressed today to find a popularizer of science who, like Flammarion in this poetic and confusing passage, seems to hover between a fairly traditional notion of heaven and a suggestion of interstellar reincarnation. But he seems to have felt that our intuition that our lives cannot end had support from his astronomy: “As our planet is only a province of the Infinite Heavens, so our actual existence is only a stage in Eternal Life. Astronomy, by giving us wings, conducts us to the sanctuary of truth. The specter of death has departed from our Heaven. The beams of every star shed a ray of hope into our hearts.”74
For Reade and Fedorov, the prospect of a universe that can be enlivened by human action, which involves transcending the natural order even to the point of inventing immortality, gives hope and meaning to the human future. For Flammarion, on the other hand, the conclusion that alien life is already omnipresent and diverse calls attention to the parochialism of our own view of ourselves, fostering scientific imagination of beings different from and even superior to us. We see the limitations on our own lives by imagining beings with different capacities, and in that light our own limits appear simply arbitrary. Yet at the same time, the likelihood of alien life suggests to him the insignificance of brute matter. The ascendance of life that he imagines we will see in the universe as a whole opens the door to a hope for the yet greater victory for life that would be personal immortality.
BECOMING ALIENS
Our next thinker shared Fedorov’s and Flammarion’s concern about the limited prospects for material progress if we are confined to Earth, and so believed that humanity was destined to explore outer space—but that, in the long term, we would become something no longer recognizably human at all. J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) was a distinguished scientist, a major public intellectual, and an outspoken Marxist. His main contributions to science were in quantitative analysis of genetics and evolutionary biology—from which one would not necessarily adduce the humor, imagination, and charm of his popular writing. His influence was such that he helped inspire two of the greatest works of anti-utopian literature of the twentieth century: his acquaintance Aldous Huxley based some of Brave New World on Haldane’s ideas, and C. S. Lewis is said to have had Haldane in mind for various speeches and characters in his space trilogy.75
Haldane most vividly sketched out his vision of the human future in “The Last Judgment,” a piece of writing from 1927 that is part essay, part science fiction story.76 (Lewis considered it “brilliant, though to my mind depraved.”77) Haldane begins by looking at how the Earth and our sun might come to their natural ends. He soon turns to consider a theme that we will see become increasingly common, how we might destroy the Earth ourselves, imagining an account of the last millennia of human life on Earth as it might be told by a distant descendant living on Venus.78 The premise of this story is that as a consequence of having “ridiculously squandered” tidal power over a period of some five million years, humans have changed the moon’s orbit until it comes so close to Earth that it is pulled apart, in the process making Earth uninhabitable.79
While this result was long predictable, humans “never looked more than a million years ahead” so few were ever concerned with this consequence of using tidal power.80 Instead, in the course of their three-thousand-year-long lives, most people concentrated on “the development of personal relationships” and on “art and music, that is to say, the production of objects, sounds, and patterns of events gratifying to the individual.”81 Natural selection having ceased, the only substantial change to humanity was “the almost complete abolition of the pain sense.”82 Real advances in science came to a halt; rather than try to develop the human race, attention was paid to breeding beautiful flowers.
Having foreseen what was to come, however, a few did what they could to assure the existence of life elsewhere after the anticipated disaster. That is no small task as Haldane paints it; even simple steps like managing to land explorers successfully on the moon, Mars, and Venus takes a couple of million years. The technical difficulties of landing and return are compounded by the disinclination of individualistic humans to give up their long lives on what amount to suicide missions. Those who finally land alive on Mars are destroyed by sentient alien life already established there, as Flammarion might have expected. Those who land on Venus find extremely hostile environmental conditions under which humans cannot possibly survive. Efforts at further exploration are dropped for the time being.
About eight million years later, the approaching moon having disrupted earth’s geology and ecosystems, a minority undertake renewed efforts to colonize Venus. “A few hundred thousand of the human race . . . determined that though men died, man should live forever.”83 By a ten-thousand-year-long effort at selective breeding, humans create a new race that can survive on Venus.84 These colonists are sent out in 1,734 ships; eleven manage to land.85 Such life as Venus already had, inimical to the colonists, is utterly destroyed by bacteria prepared for that purpose. From that point on, the settlement of Venus proceeds apace.
Our Venusian descendants were designed by the small minority of species-minded Earthlings to share a hive mind; they do not suffer from the selfish propensity for seeking individual happiness that led to Earth’s destruction. Two new senses contribute to the hive mind: at every moment they sense “the voice of the community,” and they also have a sort of built-in radio that can be turned on or off at will. They are also genetically predisposed to look to the future more than the past, unlike Earthlings whose strange backward-looking propensities are illustrated not only by their failure to act in the face of their destructive tendencies, but by their religious beliefs. The Venusians’ forward-looking characteristic also makes them more willing to sacrifice themselves.
The net result is that the Venusians see their potential extending far beyond anything humans ever could have accomplished; “we have settled down as members of a super-organism with no limits on its possible progress.”86 They plan to breed a version of themselves that will be able to settle Jupiter. Foreseeing in 250 million years an improved opportunity for interstellar travel, they think they can take it “if by that time the entire matter of the planets of the solar system is under conscious control.”87 Only a few of the millions of projectiles they send out might succeed. The Venusians are undaunted:
But in such a case waste of life is as inevitable as in the seeding of a plant or the discharge of spermatozoa or pollen. Moreover, it is possible that under the conditions of life in the outer planets the human brain may alter in such a way as to open up possibilities inconceivable to our own minds. Our galaxy has a probable life of at least eighty million million years. Before that time has elapsed it is our ideal that all the matter in it available for life should be within the power of the heirs of the species whose original home has just been destroyed. If that ideal is even approximately fulfilled, the end of the world which we have just witnessed was an episode of entirely negligible importance. And there are other galaxies.88
In his commentary on his story at the end of “The Last Judgment,” Haldane acknowledges that he is not really trying to predict the future—he is just engaging in an imaginative thought experiment, a “valuable spiritual exercise.”89 The future will certainly not conform to our present ideals, but thinking about it can illuminate “our emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole” that presumably is one source of those ideals.90 Traditionally, that attitude has been the province of religion. But modern science has taught us that the universe is far vaster in size and possibilities than religions ever knew, and so it is necessary to start using our imaginations in connection with these new realities. In effect, then, science fiction stands in for religion. The new scale of things we can begin to imagine should call forth a greater ambition among the most creative humans to develop (and for the rest of us to cooperate in) a plan that goes beyond traditional ideas of salvation, such as the assumption that the purpose of creation is to prepare some few for “so much perfection and happiness as is possible for them.”91
We can “only dimly conjecture” what this plan might be, but Haldane wonders whether it might be the “emergence of a new kind of being which will bear the same relation to mind as do mind to life and life to matter.”92 As we can already envision the end of our own world, some such transformation will be necessary. Only if the human race proves that “its destiny is eternity and infinity, and that the value of the individual is negligible in comparison with that destiny,” will “man and all his works” not “perish eternally.”93
The tension within this edifying conclusion is not hard to spot. In Haldane’s scheme, an eternal and infinite destiny can only be achieved by making man himself into one of the works of man, such that in fact human beings do perish eternally. Furthermore, the imagination of this superior progeny is really an exercise in elucidating all the reasons for which, by and large, we should not be missed. So Haldane’s substitute for religion embodies an “emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole” which is predicated on the assumption that whatever human beings do, “man’s little world will end.”94 The real choice is between ending it ourselves and having it ended for us, or perhaps between ending it accidentally and ending it deliberately.
MANKIND REMANUFACTURED
Haldane may have claimed he was not trying to predict the future, but our final author certainly was—and in the process, he lays out a rather specific path toward what he calls “the progress of dehumanization,” integrating many of the themes that our other authors developed.
The Irish-born J. D. Bernal (1901–1971) was, like Haldane and Flammarion, a scientist by training. He is probably best known for the development of the mathematics of X-ray crystallography, which quickly became a key technique of chemical analysis.95 (It was this technique that allowed the double-helix structure of DNA to be discovered, for example.) He did research that helped facilitate the D-Day landings, and made serious contributions to the sociology of science.96 A public intellectual of some note, Bernal was a dedicated communist and admirer of the Soviet Union; in 1953, he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize, a prominent Soviet prize for the country’s international supporters, and from 1959 to 1965 he was president of the World Peace Council, a Soviet-funded international activist group.97
Bernal’s first popular publication was a thin volume called The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929).98 In it, he proposes an objective effort to predict things to come. Bernal acknowledges that this task might be easier said than done, partly because it can be difficult to distinguish prediction and desire, partly because of all the complex interactions that make the world what it is, and partly because “all evidence” points “to ever increasing acceleration of change.”99 Nevertheless, it is reasonable to start by looking at what the trends are. Bernal projects the future in three areas: “the world,” or our power in relationship to the material world; “the flesh,” or our power over life, particularly our own bodies; and “the devil,” our power over our own psyches. He concludes his volume by attempting to see what might come of developments in these three areas taken together.
In each realm Bernal expects remarkable things. His chapter “The World” focuses primarily on “the conquest of space.”100 He anticipates some developments that we have only recently achieved, like the use of huge sails to propel ships using solar wind,101 but his most extended discussion is of what it would take to create ten-mile-diameter spherical habitations with tens of thousands of inhabitants.102 With the necessary propulsion systems added, these communities in space would eventually allow for the long voyages that interstellar travel would require—voyages that will be necessary as our sun begins to fail.103
The chapter “The Flesh” starts from the bald assertion that “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.”104 Bernal expects the increasing substitution of mechanical for biological systems in the human body, with all the augmentation of physical and sensory abilities that implies—for example, “we badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies.”105 People have always wanted longer lives and more opportunities “to learn and understand.”106 But achieving such goals is now in sight:
Sooner or later some eminent physiologist will have his neck broken in a super-civilized accident or find his body cells worn beyond capacity for repair. He will then be forced to decide whether to abandon his body or his life. After all it is brain that counts, and to have a brain suffused by fresh and correctly prescribed blood is to be alive—to think. The experiment is not impossible; it has already been done on a dog and that is three-quarters of the way towards achieving it with a human subject.107
Bernal expects that once some men were thus transformed, they would be most able at transforming others.108 Humans will have a “larval” stage of six to twelve decades in our current bodies, then we will pass into “chrysalis, a complicated and rather unpleasant process of transforming the already existing organs and grafting on all the new sensory and motor mechanisms.”109 Of course, unlike a butterfly, the end result of the human transformation will be capable of constant upgrade and modification—and indeed there will be no one form into which people will change themselves in any case, as the mechanical body will be readily customizable.110
“Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution.”111 Bernal envisions each of these mechanical men as looking something like a crustacean, with the brain protected in a rigid framework and a system of appendages and antennae attached for sensing and manipulating the world.112 He freely acknowledges that, to us, these beings would appear “strange, monstrous and inhuman.”113 But he claims that such monsters are “only the logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present.”114
In any case, beings so designed would quickly become progressively more different from us. Their brains would be readily linked together electronically to become a kind of group mind. Thus, while the original individual organic brain itself would still have a limited lifespan (perhaps three hundred to a thousand years, Bernal estimates), sharing its feelings, knowledge, and experience with other brains would be a way of “cheating death.”115 Bernal ends the chapter with the speculation that these inhuman beings would invent whole new materials and forms of life out of which to constitute themselves, so that even organic brain cells could be replaced with more diffuse materials with more complex interconnections, thus ensuring itself “a practical eternity of existence.”116 They might transcend physical embodiment altogether, becoming completely etherealized, atoms in space communicating by radiation, ultimately perhaps resolving entirely into light. “That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”117
These first chapters lay out what would become an agenda for decades of science fiction and a fair amount of actual research and development. The next chapter, “The Devil,” is one that Bernal himself expressed dissatisfaction with nearly four decades after the book was published; he admitted that it was too much written under the influence of Freud.118 But the issue it discusses remains one that is debated, even if not precisely on Bernal’s terms. The main question is whether continued progress in science will be able to overcome the problem posed by the new (that is, Freudian) insight that “the intellectual life” is not “the vocation of the rational mind, but . . . a compensation . . . a perversion of more primitive, unsatisfied desires.”119 That is, science requires an ongoing supply of “perverted individuals capable of more than average performance.”120 Should our psychology and our power over nature combine to make the satisfaction of our desires the norm, we could settle into a “Melanesian” life of “eating, drinking, friendliness, love-making, dancing and singing, and the golden age may settle permanently on the world” without any desire for further progress at all.121 (Note the similarity here with Haldane’s flower breeders.) On the other hand, it could also be that we might be able to live lives that are both “more fully human and fully intellectual” if “a full adult sexuality would be balanced with objective activity.”122
The question of whether all this progress will eliminate the desire for further progress has another side as well, given the “distaste” that Bernal acknowledges he feels, and others are likely to feel, about what the future holds “especially in relation to the bodily changes.”123 It may even be that people will not have a chance to get used to such changes gradually, given the accelerating rate of change. Bernal does not pretend to predict whether repugnance, combined with satisfaction, will ultimately triumph over the increasing power that will be in the hands of those who advance the cause of science and mechanization. But one result might be the “splitting of the human race” into two branches: a stagnant because “fully balanced humanity” and another branch “groping unsteadily beyond it.”124 Seeing how that outcome might arise is the point of the book’s concluding chapters.
Bernal’s basic thought here is that the mechanical men he envisions would be very well suited for colonizing and exploiting space, as their life-support requirements would be far less than what human beings require and their capacities would be wider.125 He imagines these transhumans as “connected together by a complex of ethereal intercommunication” and spread out across space and time.126 But he is brought up short by the recognition that the human mind had hitherto “evolved always in the company of the human body.”127 The radical change he anticipates to “the delicate balance between physiological and psychological factors” will create “dangerous turning points and pitfalls.”128 What will happen to the sexual drive, for example? Perhaps it will require yet more thoroughgoing sublimation into research or, even more likely, into “aesthetic creation.”129 As these new beings come ever more completely to understand the world around them, and ever more capable of manipulating it, their primary purpose is likely to become determining “the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more nor less than art.”130
After much consideration about how the possibility of “permanent plenty” might transform society, Bernal settles on the thought that the future is likely to hold de facto or even de jure rule by a scientific elite that could be the first stable aristocracy.131 This elite would have the means to assure that the masses engage in “harmless occupations” in a state of “perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom.”132 “A happy prosperous humanity enjoying their bodies, exercising the arts, patronizing the religions, may be well content to leave the machine, by which their desires are satisfied, in other and more efficient hands.”133
Since Bernal thinks that those who tend the machines will increasingly be machines themselves, we now see why he thinks the human race might split into two branches. Yet whereas it seems very likely, as he has suggested, that the distinction between machine-men and men would also be the distinction between ruler and ruled, perhaps that would not have to be the case. For as Bernal notes, science depends on the supportive routine work of non-scientists, and on the recruitment from the many of the few most capable minds. Furthermore, he claims, scientists themselves tend to have a strong identification with humanity. So the first stable aristocracy could be a meritocracy that might at least recruit (or should one say harvest?) fresh brains from the most promising of humans. Still, characteristics that might bind the two groups will likely diminish with time, allowing the underlying processes producing dimorphism to hold sway.134 At that point it is quite possible that “the old mechanism of extinction will come into play. The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them.”135 The main hope for a different outcome is once again the prospect that the more advanced beings will settle in space, leaving Earth to the old-fashioned model in “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.”136 So decades before today’s transhumanists, Bernal predicts the survival of humanity as a curiosity (at best).
Bernal is not certain his vision will prevail,137 nor does he hold that the developments he lays out will produce a perfect world:
the dangers to the whole structure of humanity and its successors will not decrease as their wisdom increases, because, knowing more and wanting more they will dare more, and in daring will risk their own destruction. But this daring, this experimentation, is really the essential quality of life.138
Bernal’s predictions are not so millennial as Fedorov’s, nor as overtly tragic as Reade’s. But they do contain tensions. He recognizes that his scientifically driven “progress of dehumanization” is motivated by an ultimately unfulfillable desire for the mysterious and supernatural.139 Those who push the boundaries of knowledge outward will create a world that, for them at least, will be ever more prosaic, and therefore of less interest. Even if this process is infinite, it retains a Sisyphean character, and one might wonder: why bother? It turns out, however, that this “daring” effort to transcend one’s time and control one’s life is nothing other than an expression of life itself that is beyond our control. There is a natural fatality to our effort to control nature.
FROM BETTER HUMANS TO BEYOND HUMANITY
My purpose in presenting these examples of thinkers who anticipated today’s transhumanism is not to suggest how these thinkers might have influenced one another, or to prove their influence on today’s transhumanists. But I trust it is reasonably clear that between Condorcet and Bernal the idea of progress itself has traveled quite a distance. Where for Condorcet the friend of humanity can find reason to think that in the world to come people will be more humane to each other, when Bernal looks to the future he sees “the progress of dehumanization”: human extinction at worst, and at best human irrelevance to the progressive development of intelligence and power over the natural world—an evolutionary “dead end.” As we will discuss later, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association and the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, thinks we can have it both ways, expressing the hope that our posthuman replacements will be designed to be more humane than we are. Everyone seems to agree that the kinder, gentler world that Condorcet imagines could indeed come into being; but for Haldane it would amount to a short-sighted squandering of nature’s potential, while for Bernal we humans would be likely to live in it as subjects to powers so far beyond our control as to make historical aristocracies seem models of egalitarianism. Today, David Pearce, another founder of the World Transhumanist Association, cuts through the problem of needing some to rule others in order to keep them happy by suggesting that we can redesign ourselves so that we are always experiencing “a sublime and all-pervasive happiness.”140 Condorcet’s expectation that people will be better fed becomes the revolt in Fedorov and Flammarion against the “absurd” need to eat at all, while today’s transhumanists likewise find it unacceptable that we eat and excrete as we do.141 Condorcet suggests the possibility of accelerating progress toward the conquest of nature here on Earth, but for Haldane and Bernal what is at stake is the aesthetic recreation of the universe itself. Today, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, the most widely known of the transhumanists, wonders if posthuman superintelligence might not be able to overcome entropy itself, thereby preventing the now-expected eventual end to the possibility of life in the universe and overcoming the last challenge to the immortality that Condorcet was only willing to hint at.
There is no single arc that connects all of our authors in such a way as to account for this significant transformation in the understanding of progress. But each lays part of the foundation for the change, a foundation on which is built the edifice that is contemporary transhumanism. Let us try to identify some of the key points.
The main line of Condorcet’s argument is the most familiar. Perhaps building off Rousseau’s notion of human “perfectibility,”142 Condorcet asserts that we possess a (unique?) “quality of melioration” that allows us to improve ourselves, primarily through the conquest of nature. As that project succeeds, many of the longstanding, seemingly given conditions of human life—poverty, hunger, disease, vice, and other pervasive disabilities that have stood in the way of a good human life—become problems that can be solved. By solving them, we make better human beings, human beings who are physically more fit, mentally more capable, morally improved. The rate of progress accelerates with this new starting point, but Condorcet seems to believe that people will remain human beings.
Yet Condorcet’s own ideas about life extension, combined with the possibility of accelerating progress, begin to suggest something more radical. Initially life extension seems of a piece with the other improvements he speaks of. After all, as we become healthier and eat better, longer life would seem to follow as a matter of course. One could say that Condorcet is merely pointing out how we can reduce the incidence of premature death. But when he starts talking about an indefinite extension of lifespan, the door is opened to the possibility of a significantly more fundamental change in the terms of human existence. It does not seem as if Condorcet wishes to open the door very wide. Yes, he looks forward to a time when death becomes something that is chosen, but note that it is chosen “in the course of nature,” as if there is in this respect at least some part of nature that human beings will not or should not master.143
This limit is one that our other authors are not nearly so inclined to respect, and their overt desire for immortality is of a piece with a far stronger inclination to imagine the development out of humanity of some completely new kind of superior being. Perhaps Condorcet did not understand, or chose not to highlight, the more radical consequences of his own picture of accelerating progress. But it seems more likely that something had to be added to Condorcet in order to promote this shift in the imagination. What might that be?
First, as Fedorov explicitly highlighted, there is the Malthusian dilemma of resource scarcity. Malthus wrote in direct response to Condorcet’s hopes for the future, arguing that the melioration Condorcet imagined would be self-defeating. More people living materially more comfortable lives will simply produce resource scarcity, which in turn will bring back all the ills of human life. Perpetual progress understood as an ongoing improvement in the material conditions of life for all is thus simply impossible since population will grow faster than available resources. For Fedorov, the conquest of space is in part a solution to the Malthusian dilemma of resource exhaustion, a solution that becomes the more plausible as the sense grows that the Earth is but a tiny speck in a very large universe.144 Of course, as the hostility of the extraterrestrial environment came to be better understood, this prospect may have seemed more daunting. But Haldane and Bernal are there with a solution to this part of the problem: the radical reconstruction of humanity in a way that makes mankind better suited for life away from Earth.
As we have seen, once you have taken that step, the promise of effectively infinite worlds in infinite space makes anything seem possible; both Haldane and Bernal take us to the very limits of the human imagination, Haldane by suggesting that all the matter in the galaxy available to life should be used by it before moving on to other galaxies, Bernal by suggesting that our distant descendants will remake the universe with a new “let there be light.” Perhaps these beings that conquer space will also conquer time and entropy, a route to the eternity promised by Flammarion and the end to death promised by Fedorov.
The resource scarcity that Condorcet did not worry about implies ongoing competition among human beings rather than an ever more cooperative world, and by the late nineteenth century that ongoing competition was firmly associated with Darwinian evolution. This intellectual revolution is the second change that has pushed Condorcet’s successors in a more radical direction. Condorcet could assert that living things must be on a course of either perfection or decline; human beings in the future could change, but the result would be perfected or degraded human beings. From a Darwinian point of view, as Reade highlights, why should there not be changes in the future that correspond in magnitude to the changes that produced man as we now observe him? After Darwin, it becomes possible, if not downright necessary, to think that future human descendants will not be human.
Scholars disagree about whether Darwin himself conceived that the evolutionary changes that brought about human beings (and other species) should be called “progress” or merely change. There is agreement that some of his writings point in one direction, some in another. At present, the “mainstream” scholarly view is that Darwin’s statements implying that there is an ascent to humanity were mere concessions to the progressive spirit of his Victorian times, and that Darwin himself understood that his principles allowed him to speak of evolutionary change but not progress. Yet there is also an impressive body of arguments and evidence to suggest that Darwin did believe in evolutionary progress, so long as we take sufficient care to define what that phrase means.145 In either case, it seems indisputable that a great many of those who, like Reade, were influenced by Darwin’s ideas took him to be pointing to an evolutionary ascent to humankind. And if so, why should that process not continue to produce yet higher forms of life? After all, even the penultimate words of Darwin’s Descent of Man suggest that man may be excused for “feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale,” which in turn may give “hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”146
Yet all of our thinkers would agree that there will be a difference between the blind evolution that produced humanity and the future evolution driven by human beings and then posthumans, precisely because our “own exertions” can now play a part. If evolution is the law of life, and at the same time if evolution has brought about human beings who can take hold of evolution and direct it as one more aspect of our control over nature, then a grand narrative of free human creativity becomes possible. Our conquest of nature is no longer a local affair but takes on a cosmic significance. For Reade, Fedorov, or Haldane’s Venusians, the creation of new forms of life, the enlivening of the cosmos, is the goal of goals, the highest good. We transform the universe by transforming ourselves.
Flammarion may be the superior Darwinian here, thinking that it is at least short-sighted and at worst completely inconsistent to think that all this marvelous development of matter into life and life into intelligence should be a process confined to one planet alone. Yet he does not highlight the tougher Darwinian consequences of this line of thought. What if the cosmos is not ours to do whatever we want with, because other forms of life have already staked a claim? Haldane seems to understand the situation best of all our thinkers: he extends the realm of competition beyond our world, with the expected consequences of extraterrestrial winners (the Martians in Haldane’s tale) and losers (the aboriginal Venusians). At some point, the Martians, victorious over mere human beings, will have to deal with the greater abilities of the human-created Venusians, or vice versa. Still, even if it’s a harsh universe, we come to the same kind of conclusion about the imperative of creative, self-directed evolution. For we had best be prepared to meet it coming from “out there,” or else (as Haldane might say) suffer the fate of the first Venusians, or indeed of earthly human life, for our folly.
Flammarion presents what is probably just the prettier side of the same coin. One might have thought that to the scientific mind any life beyond Earth would be interesting enough—surely any intelligent life. But the alien forms Flammarion imagines all have some wonderful advantage over mere human beings, so wonderful as to make us look pretty grubby by comparison, “like coarse animals . . . nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar.”147 Should we not then aspire to be more like those superior alien beings? Such evolutionary fitness as human beings might exhibit is relative only to the conditions of our place and time, and perhaps (as Haldane would suggest) we are not suited well enough even for that. We should not expect to persist into the far future, or on worlds beyond our own, without becoming alien to what we are now. But here again the key point is that this change counts as progress. Haldane’s Venusians are clearly presented as superior to the humans who created them, and against all squeamishness about crustaceans, Bernal would in effect have us will to become Flammarion’s aliens “gifted with multiple sensibilities, luminous at will, incombustible as asbestos, perhaps immortal.”148
The grand narrative of material progress and self-overcoming has one final twist that again links the materialist-minded Bernal with Fedorov’s faith and Flammarion’s spiritualism: material progress is itself something to be overcome. Bernal imagines that the ultimate destiny of intelligence may be to resolve itself into light. Whatever that might mean, how different is it from imagining spirits that might be communicated with or resurrected into bodies? Matter can be raised up into life and life raised up into intelligence; why should there not be further extensions of the sequence, however beyond our comprehension they might be? The progress of dehumanization runs from vile bodies to healthy bodies to redesigned bodies to no bodies at all.
THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS
This last transformation into the luminous, if not the numinous, raises in the most acute form a problem has become increasingly obvious as we have proceeded through these lines of thought. In the lead-up to one of his most widely quoted aphorisms, philosopher George Santayana says,
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.149
As Santayana suggested, the kind of “absolute” change in the human being imagined by Bernal and Haldane, along with today’s transhumanists, really precludes the use of the term “progress.” It becomes harder and harder for our authors to imagine what will be retained, hence where change will start from. And if the rate of change is accelerating, that simply means we are headed the more rapidly from one unknown to another, while the recognizable old standards for judging whether the changes are progressive are overthrown along with our humanity.
In today’s world, a vision of progress like that laid out by Condorcet remains very much alive. The easing of human life through universal education, reduction in disease, increased sanitation, improved agricultural productivity, and a rising material standard of living is an established fact for much of the world, and the main questions involve how most rapidly and “sustainably” to extend these benefits more widely and how to improve upon what we already have. Likewise, we take increased life expectancy for granted, and worry only about continuing a well-established trend.
Beyond that, even though the thinkers we have examined did not anticipate some of the technological advances that today’s transhumanists hang their hopes on—none foresaw the rise of digital computing, for example—some elements of the dehumanization they envisioned are already in place around us. Genetic engineering means that we would not necessarily require generations of careful breeding to create our Venusians. The “conquest of space” is in principle at least an established fact, and if the prospects for space colonies, planetary exploration, and interstellar travel still seem distant, that is less because of what we don’t know or can’t do than because of how we choose to arrange our funding priorities. Increasingly sophisticated and intimate man-machine interfaces are being developed; we are seeing impressive, if admittedly still early, advances in artificial ears, eyes, and limbs.150 We may not yet have the organ that Bernal imagined for detecting radio waves, but we do have t-shirts that can display the presence of wi-fi signals.151
It is not just what we do that links us with the authors we have looked at, but what we expect. We don’t yet know there is alien life, let alone intelligence, but the idea is widely accepted by scientist and layman alike—if not always for the same reasons. It is likewise a commonplace that we live in a world with an accelerating rate of change.
We might not yet normally place these ideas and achievements within a framework of efforts to overcome the merely human—but they are there to be placed. The eclipse of man is underway. However amazing our present might look from the perspective of a not-so-distant past, there remain those who look down on the human because they can imagine something far better, whether it involves immortality or resurrection of the dead or brains transplanted into machines.152 Even if, as Bernal warns, we should also be wary of thinking that the future is going to work out just as we envision it today, it would certainly be the height of folly to assume whatever in these visions has not yet happened could never happen. Some (like Malthus) would have said that what we have today is impossible.
The main home for the hopes and fears that define the eclipse of man as we have examined it from the past may be transhumanism, but as we will see in the chapters that follow they are also at work elsewhere—including in the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, to which we turn next. The general public is fascinated by hostile alien invaders. The scientists who look for extraterrestrials are fascinated by contact with advanced, benevolent intelligence. Some transhumanists would be surprised if there are any aliens at all. All these prospects are working out the consequences of ideas about human-alien relations that we have seen in this chapter. The differences among them are not so great as they might first appear.
