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.
