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

Introduction. Learning to Love in a Posthuman World

1 Introduction Learning to Love in a Posthuman World Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” In 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay called “Nature ” that is not about nature at all. It is about how the triumphant American self should interact with the received world, with whatever it perceives as limitations, and that is by refusing those limitations. Americans must believe that “Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it.” Americans must build our own worlds, must shape our lives to fit our greatest aspirations. If we do that, promises Emerson, the physical world will follow suit. “A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances , swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen.”1 The language here is exaggerated, of course, and easy to mock. But it achieves its hortatory purpose. Americans have always been idealistic, and Emerson knew that to attain a better life one must be able to envision it. A lot of good has come from individuals refusing to accept 2 Prophets of the Posthuman disagreeable realities; some of the greatest social reformers lived in Emerson ’s time. After all, everyone can agree that the fewer snakes, spiders, and enemies we have to deal with, the better. But contemporary Americans also live in a time separated from Emerson’s by two revolutions: the industrial and the technological. Something pernicious happened to Emerson’s idealism as it lingered into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It narrowed, coupled with technological optimism, and morphed into something quite different. Contemporary biotechnological advances make Emerson ’s “revolution in things” more literally possible than ever. Through what some are calling “superbiology,” techno-utopians promise an actual end to anything that gets in our way: prisons will disappear once we find the genetic markers for criminal behavior, pests will be under control once we find a way to safely kill them, our cantankerous spouses will love us better once we perfect mood-altering drugs, and even death will no longer be a limit once we find the biological keys to aging. Idealism has now met the age of DNA. When they merge, these new idealists promise us, we will become completely posthuman and completely free. To choose just one example from among many, in 2006 Simon Young published a book entitled Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto. Transhumanists are a loosely organized group of people who believe that science and technology can and should be used to overcome all human limitations. Although his prose is much less elegant, Young’s ideas sound very similar to Emerson’s: “Why must we age and die? Why must our brains and bodies be so fragile, subject to inevitable decay— programmed for self-destruction? I believe in seeking to overcome the mental and physical limitations that restrict our freedom. Science offers the only serious possibility of succeeding. Therefore, I believe in science .”2 The most significant difference here, of course, is that whereas Emerson gave the human imagination the power to transcend all earthly limitations, Young gives that power to applied science alone. He even coins the word “Neuromanticism” to describe how his is the same goal with different means. Neuromanticism, with its focus on altering the brain and securing genetic perfection, seems in many ways to be the ultimate answer to the problems Emerson outlined in his late essay “Fate,” Introduction 3 in which he bemoans how quickly we run into limitations that are truly immovable. Emerson ponders how we want to reform humans, but when we try to educate some children, “we can make nothing of them. We decide that they are not of good stock. We must begin our reform earlier still,—at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or laws of the world.”3 Emerson saw these “laws of the world” as a more or less impassable barrier, and he died in despair. But for Young, conquering the laws of the world is simply the next step. Young believes that technology will allow us to re-create humanity, to fix “butterfingered” Nature’s mistakes once and for all: “Where Homo sapiens was the slave of his selfish genes, Homo cyberneticus will be the steersman of his own destiny.”4...