Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood

Chapter 8: The Lure of Transhumanism versus the Balm in Gilead. Marilynne Robinson’s Redemptive Alternative

168 C H A P T E R 8 The Lure of Transhumanism versus the Balm in Gilead Marilynne Robinson’s Redemptive Alternative Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. —Iris Murdoch Utopian fiction, when you can find the genuine article, is usually dreadful. Though aspects of Plato’s Republic are considered utopian, the genre began with Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, which is interesting largely because it is not really utopian in the way we use the term today. Novels that earnestly represent a perfect society did not exist until the reform-minded nineteenth century, which produced Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere, both socialist fantasies and both as dry as hay. Utopian novels took a new direction in the twentieth century, as in the behavioralist dream of B. F. Skinner’s Walden II and the nebulous reification of “Good Being” that comprises Aldous Huxley’s Island.1 These books are dissatisfying primarily because the citizens populating them are barely a step away The Lure of Transhumanism versus the Balm in Gilead 169 from cardboard cutouts, and none of the utopias provide blueprints that sane people would actually choose to pattern an ideal society around. These novelists seemed to have forgotten that Thomas More coined the word “utopia” sarcastically; it means “no place.”2 The problem with all efforts to imagine a perfect world is that they usually require writers to imagine perfect people, and we have never known any. This partly explains why, although there are many visions of the ideal transhumanist future, none of them have been fleshed out in fiction.3 Transhumanists are the twenty-first century’s most vocal utopians , believing that humanity can and should move on to the next stage in evolution, including, eventually, the attainment of perfect health and immortality. Although transhumanism should not be equated with certain articulations of posthumanism,4 it shares with them the view that human nature is plastic. In the words of Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute and one of the most articulate proponents of transhumanism, humanity is “a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post-human, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.”5 But when it comes to illustrating why it would necessarily be better to have these greater capacities, Bostrom’s descriptions remain abstract and theoretical; the closest thing he offers to an image of the future is his “Letter from Utopia ” written by “your possible future self.” The letter reads: “what you had in your best moment is not close to what I have now—a beckoning scintilla at most. If the distance between base and apex for you is eight kilometers, then to reach my dwellings would take a million light-year ascent. The altitude is outside moon and planets and all the stars your eyes can see. Beyond dreams. Beyond imagination. My consciousness is wide and deep, my life long.”6 The rest of the letter returns to explaining how to achieve that perfect self, which amounts to using technology to defeat mortality, suffering, and cognitive limitations. Other proponents of transhumanism are equally abstract. The World Transhumanist Association, now calling itself Humanity+, recruits members to join the effort with its logo: “Healthier. Smarter. 170 From Posthuman Individuals to Human Persons Happier.” By joining the organization, you will “show the world that there are lots of people who think that we can do better, that the current world is not the best that we can do, that there is room for improvement and that many human problems are solvable.”7 In other words, as the organization says on its website, “Humanity+ wants people to be better than well.”8 One of the principal members of Humanity+, a biogerontologist uncannily named Aubrey de Grey, has devoted his life to bioregeneration research, the goal of which is to end physiological aging. Although admittedly there is no reason for medical science not to treat cellular aging like any other disease, or even to defeat aging as he defines it, the surrounding utopian rhetoric promises much more than these goals suggest. De Grey dedicates his book...