The Posthuman Future

The term “posthuman” is gaining a certain cachet. There is, for instance, Francis Fukuyama’s recent book, Our Posthuman Future, and now Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution gives further currency to the term. Garreau quotes a “professor of innovation” who says, “My son today wakes up in the morning certain of one thing. And that’s that the world will be different by nightfall. He expects it. Humans didn’t use to live that way.” Really? From time immemorial, I expect boys have been jumping out of bed expecting the world to be different by nightfall, maybe by virtue of what they’ll do that day. There have always been people, some of them passing as deep thinkers, who have suffered from the excessive excitability that makes it intolerable to believe their moment in history is not unprecedented.

They are called “neophiliacs,” people infatuated by the new or by what they imagine to be new. Was it only a few years ago that “futurists” were a big item on the bestseller lists? Asked their profession, they answered “futurist,” and got away with it. Futurists we will always have with us. Please do not misunderstand: Of course we should be thinking about the future, and of course new things happen. Pharmacological mood enhancers, pills to slow aging or increase SAT scores by two hundred points, plus cloning and creating human-animal life forms—these are among the things we should be thinking hard about.

The inventor Ray Kurzweil is a big name in this near-fantasy world of speculation. The author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, he writes: “We will be part of this very rapid explosion of intelligence, and beauty, and a very rapid acceleration of this evolutionary process. And that, to me, is what God is.” There you have “process theology” of a low order. Predictably, the government is getting in on the game. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on techniques that will enable men to fight for weeks, both night and day, without eating or sleeping. There is a federal document called “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance” which concludes: “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.”

Not everybody is so sanguine. Bill Joy, also a name to reckon with in these discussions, is anything but joyful. “I think it is no exaggeration to say,” says he, “that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil.” One false step and we’re finished. The engineering of evolution will produce warring human species, and “nanobots” that will take over from human beings entirely. One slip in a laboratory and “gray goo” could annihilate us all. Against Mr. Joy, Peter Pettus suggests a dose of positive thinking. Concluding his review of the Garreau book he writes, “I think Mr. Garreau is right, and I see a parallel here with democracy itself. The aggregate of voters often reaches levels of electoral wisdom hard to predict. So here, despite the undeniable threats looming, humans on earth with their increasing interconnectivity and commonality might just deal with this evolutionary crisis in surprisingly creative ways. It’s that or the gray goo.” We might just muddle through to a human future after all, at least for a while.

Most of the futuristic literature, both the more sober and fantastical, is on a continuum with the tainted history of eugenics. In April 1988 I wrote an article in Commentary entitled “The Return of Eugenics.” Some thought it alarmist at the time, but it hardly seems so today. From the end of the nineteenth century up through the end of World War II, eugenics was all the rage among many of the brightest and best. After the revelation of the nasty things the Nazis did in the name of eugenics, the movement kept a low profile for a while, but it hardly went away. In fact, American programs of eugenic sterilization were much admired by Hitler, and American foundations, notably those associated with the Rockefeller family, supported German eugenics both before and after Hitler came to power.

This doleful history is recounted in Rebecca Messall’s essay “The Long Road of Eugenics: From Rockefeller to Roe v. Wade,” in the Fall 2004 issue of the invaluable Human Life Review. Some may think the title is a reach too far, but it takes no imagination—only a measure of alertness—to connect the dots. Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the Roe decision, is helpful. In footnote 62 of that decision, he favorably cited an article called “The New Biology and the Future of Man.” The article says:

Taken together, [artificial gestation, genetic engineering, suspended animation] constitute a new phase in human life in which man takes over deliberate control of his own evolution. And the consequence is arresting: There is a qualitative change to progress when man learns to create himself. . . . For our appropriate guidance in this new era, a reworking of values is required, which will take into account the new, and which will be as rapid and effective in its evolution as are the new techniques. . . . Our task will be easier if we regard value systems as complex adaptations to specific sets of realities, which adaptations must change when the realities change. . . . Chastity is not particularly adaptive to a world of effective contraception. . . . Respect for elders is less and less adaptive to a world in which life-spans greatly exceed the period during which great-grandchildren find their senior progenitor’s wisdom of any interest. Submission to supernatural power is not adaptive to a world in which man himself controls even his own biological future. . . . High regard for the dignity of the individual may prove difficult to maintain when new biologic techniques blur his very identity. . . . What counts is awareness of the unmistakable new fact that in general new biology is handing over to us the wheel with which to steer directly the future evolution of man.

From “the future of man” to the “posthuman future” is a relatively short distance on “the long road of eugenics.” In fairness, one notes that Blackmun and the Supreme Court were not necessarily endorsing everything in the article cited. But the citation occurs in a section of the majority opinion that is discussing the “theory of life” and criticizing the position that life begins at conception. “Substantial problems for precise definition of this view are posed, however, by new embryological data that purport to indicate that conception is a ‘process’ over time, rather than an event, and by new medical techniques such as menstrual extraction, the ‘morning-after’ pill, implantation of embryos, artificial insemination, and even artificial wombs.” Both the citation of the article and the Court’s own argument put Roe decisively on the side of plasticity in defining the humanum both in its beginning and possible future.

Of course there are necessary distinctions to be made. The very term “eugenics” is susceptible to different definitions. There is, for instance, a great difference between alleviating human suffering and redefining by redesigning the human. On the latter score, the classic and ever-relevant text is C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, and the pertinent depiction of the society we may become is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The latter-day futurists who are set upon turning science fiction into reality claim such texts are laughably outdated. We have, they say, already entered the world against which Lewis and Huxley warned, and there is no turning back on the long road traveled. The authentic humanism of biblical religion, inseparably joined to the civilizational tradition that is ours to preserve, rejects this dismal conclusion in proposing a better way forward.