if the sources of our misery have not changed over time, the way we think about them has certainly changed between the ancient world and ours. What was once simply a fact of life to which we could only resign ourselves has become for us a problem to be solved. When and why the ancient outlook began to go into eclipse in the West is something scholars love to discuss, but that a fundamental change has occurred seems undeniable. Somewhere along the line, with thinkers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes playing a major role, people began to believe that misery, poverty, illness, and even death itself were not permanent facts of life that link us to the transcendent but rather challenges to our ingenuity in the here and now. And that outlook has had marvelous success where it has taken hold, allowing more people to live longer, wealthier, and healthier lives than ever before.
So the transhumanists are correct to point out that the desire to alter the human condition runs deep in us, and that attempts to alter it have a long history. But even starting from our perennial dissatisfaction, and from our ever-growing power to do something about the causes of our dissatisfaction, it is not obvious how we get from seeking to improve the prospects for human flourishing to rejecting our humanity altogether. If the former impulse is philanthropic, is the latter not obviously misanthropic? Do we want to look forward to a future where man is absent, to make that goal our normative vision of how we would like the world to be?
DREAMS OF THE FUTURE AS MORAL VISIONS
My previous book culminated in a discussion of deep ecology, a form of radical environmentalism that adopts the principle of “ecoegalitarianism”: no one species has any moral priority over another. Because technological man so consistently violates this stricture, some of the deep ecologists look forward to a day when human beings will have been replaced by a new human-like species that lives more at one with nature. I criticized that view for its profoundly anti-human character, but even then I noted that the same threat could come from the direction of technological utopianism.17 Deliberately seeking our own extinction represents the extreme limit of how far we could want to go to overcome our given circumstances and raises in an obvious way a question that is always lurking in our rapidly changing world: What kind of future are we trying to create?
It is very likely that the world we will have in the future will not be exactly the one laid out by today’s transhumanists. Still, our utter dependence on continuing scientific and technological development makes it impossible to dismiss the broad goals of transhumanism outright; indeed, it is hard to imagine how we will avoid making choices that could provide building blocks for a project of human extinction. Even if in most instances these choices will actually be made with a view to the contingencies of the moment—arising from scientific curiosity, engineering creativity, military necessity, or commercial possibility—the transhumanist grand vision of the eclipse of man will be there to influence, rationalize, and justify favoring certain alternatives. It provides a narrative that takes those alternatives beyond contingency and presents them in a way that intentionally creates dissatisfaction with any merely human account of how we live and treat each other now. If it is the only story going, it is all the more likely to provide the moral meaning behind the scientific and technological future.18
An argument could be made that we should avoid taking too seriously such grand visions of the future. In his book In the Shadow of Progress, Eric Cohen warns, speaking specifically of genetics, that in order “to think clearly” and avoid the twin vices of over-prediction (assuming that our worst fears or greatest hopes will come to pass) and under-prediction (failure to acknowledge where present developments might go), “we must put aside the grand dreams and great nightmares of the genetic future to consider the moral meaning of the genetic present,” instead exploring “what these new genetic possibilities might mean for how we live, what we value, and how we treat one another.”19
Cohen’s caution is well taken, and the questions he poses ought indeed to be where thoughtful people begin to confront the apparently ceaseless innovations of our technological society. But it may be harder than it looks to separate how we think about the present from how we think about the future. Whether in secular or religious terms, it is not unusual for people to define “the moral meaning of the present” in terms of the future, judging what is against what they hope (or fear) will be. After all, it is moral choice in the present that creates a future, so such visions influence how we live and treat each other today.
Cohen is doubtless right that a more sober and serious moral world would have less place for “grand dreams and great nightmares.” Yet given that we cannot but be influenced by such visions, we must come to grips with them on their own terms; there have to be reasons for putting them aside. People were not unaware of problems with capitalism before Marx, but Marxism became a sufficiently powerful grand vision that it had just the effect Cohen fears, blinding people to the truth of their present circumstances and of their obligations to those around them. Facing up to the defects of Marxism was easier said than done and remains an incompletely accomplished task. But one part of doing so was intellectual confrontation with it as a grand vision. None of the specific transhumanist visions of the future have as yet anything like the intellectual or political power of Marxism at its height. But if we are to eschew them, a similar intellectual confrontation will be necessary.
CONFRONTING THE EXTINCTIONISTS
It can be difficult to find a footing for criticism of transhumanism, given the broad scope of the transhumanist vision, the variety of (sometimes conflicting) transhumanist ideas, and of course the fact that we cannot yet know precisely what direction and shape transhumanist ideas will take in the real world. That is why the focus of this volume will be on transhumanism’s moral vision of the future, rather than its technological or scientific content. We will approach transhumanism sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. While we will analyze the ideas of some of the most provocative and controversial transhumanist thinkers, we will also look at a wide range of other materials. We will journey from the invisibly tiny scale of molecular engineering to the far reaches of outer space. We will discuss ancient myths and recent science fiction, centuries-old paintings and Hollywood movies. And we will explore some forgotten byways, learning from long-neglected stories that can teach us about our desires for the future. Several of the chapters will also begin with prologues, short fictional stories I have written to help bring to life some of the ideas addressed in those chapters.
Why the emphasis on fiction? When compared to the works of nonfiction by experts and specialists in transhumanism, very often fictional works present us with a far more realistic and morally nuanced picture of the issues at stake in human self-overcoming. This should not surprise us. After all, excellent fiction requires a serious understanding of human things, and to tell a great story about scientific and technological possibilities, fiction writers have to start from a convincing human world—which of course is the world out of which the scientific and technological developments that will allow human redesign will actually emerge. Those who start instead from the imagination of technological possibilities often suffer a kind of tunnel vision, a narrow focus that makes them assume that whatever they are writing about will be the center around which everything else will revolve. Indeed, that outlook helps to account for the moral weakness of the transhumanist project.
When you get beyond transhumanism’s fascination with the technological cutting edge, it becomes evident that its hopes are not new. To separate the question of what kind of future is technologically likely from the question of what is a morally desirable future, it is useful to look closely at some of the earlier thinkers who developed ideas that are important to transhumanism—even if the transhumanists do not realize the debt they owe them. While we will not attempt to offer a complete intellectual history of such ideas, in the chapter that follows we will look at a selection of particularly influential presentations of the theme of overcoming humanity, stretching back to the late eighteenth century. As we shall see, these thinkers lay down some of the key foundations upon which today’s transhumanists build. We turn there first in order to answer a fundamental question: Why
