Brave New World

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Aldous Huxley : Brave New World
BRAVE NEW WORLD ?
A Defence Of Paradise-Engineering
Brave New World (1932) is one of the most insidious works of literature
ever written.
An exaggeration?
Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false
symbol for any regime of universal happiness.
For sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not
scientific prophecy. Hence to treat his writing as ill-conceived
futurology rather than a work of great literature might seem to miss the
point. Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New World!" to any
blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into
paradise-engineering for all sentient life.
So how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy
into the archetypal dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong
with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?
Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister
place. This is because Huxley deliberately endows his "ideal" society with
features likely to alienate his audience. Typically, reading BNW elicits
the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it
depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation.
Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just
how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were rewritten. Let's
say our DNA will be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long
bliss, awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good
designer-drugs. Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the
life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime
of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If you think it does, then you
enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For
it's all sugar-coated pseudo-realism.
In Brave New World, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of
his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American
capitalism. He taps into, and then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style
behavioural conditioning and eugenics. Worse, it is suggested that the
price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed
shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom",
even "love". The exchange yields an insipid happiness that's unworthy of
the name. Its evocation arouses our unease and distaste.
In BNW, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods,
sport, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and most famously of all, a
supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.
As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. It's not really a
utopian wonderdrug at all. It does make you high. Yet it's more akin to a
hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate - or a psychic anaesthetising SSRI
like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. Third-millennium
neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer product-range
of designer-drugs to order.
For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives
rise to only a shallow, unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting
well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesn't give Bernard Marx, the
disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor does
it make him happy with his station in life. John the Savage commits
suicide soon after taking soma [guilt and despair born of serotonin
depletion!?]. The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous) sex - the
only sex the brave new worlders practise. But a regimen of soma doesn't
deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesn't catalyse any
mystical epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or life-defining insights.
It doesn't in any way promote personal growth. Instead, it provides a
mindless, inauthentic "imbecile happiness" - a vacuous escapism which
makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom.
If Huxley had wished to tantalise, rather than repel, emotional
primitives like us with the biological nirvana soon in prospect, then he
could have envisaged utopian wonderdrugs which reinforced or enriched our
most cherished ideals. In our imaginations, perhaps we might have been
allowed - via chemically-enriched brave new worlders - to turn ourselves
into idealised versions of the sort of people we'd most like to be. In
this scenario, behavioural conditioning, too, could have been used by the
utopians to sustain, rather than undermine, a more sympathetic ethos of
civilised society and a life well led. Likewise, biotechnology could have
been exploited in BNW to encode life-long fulfilment and super-intellects
for everyone - instead of manufacturing a rigid hierarchy of
genetically-preordained castes.
Huxley, however, has an altogether different agenda in mind. He is
seeking to warn us against scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too
well. Although we tend to see other people, not least the notional brave
new worlders, as the hapless victims of propaganda and disinformation, we
may find it is we ourselves who have been the manipulated dupes.
For Huxley does an effective hatchet-job on the very sort of
"unnatural" hedonic engineering that most of us so urgently need. One
practical consequence has been to heighten our already exaggerated fears
of state-sanctioned mood-drugs. Hence millions of screwed-up minds,
improvable even today by clinically-tested mood-boosters and anti-anxiety
agents, just suffer in silence instead. In part this is because people
worry they might become zombified addicts; and in part because they are
unwilling to cast themselves as humble supplicants of the medical
profession by taking state-rationed "antidepressants". Either way, the
human cost in fruitless ill-being is immense.
Fortunately, the Net is opening up a vast trans-national
free-market in psychotropics. It will eventually sweep away the
restrictive practices of old medical drug cartels and their allies in the
pharmaceutical industry. The liberatory potential of the Net as a global
drug-delivery and information network has only just begun.
Of course, Huxley can't personally be blamed for prolonging the
pain of the old biological order. Citing the ill-effects of Brave New
World is not the same as impugning its author's motives. Aldous Huxley was
a deeply humane person as well as a brilliant polymath. He himself
suffered terribly after the death of his adored mother. But death and
suffering will be cured only by the application of bioscience. They won't
be abolished by spirituality, prophetic sci-fi, or literary
intellectualism.
So what form will this cure take?
In the future, it will be feasible technically - at the very least
- for pharmacotherapy and genetic science to re-engineer us so that we can
become - to take one example among billions - a cross between Jesus and
Einstein. Transhumans will be endowed with a greater capacity for love,
empathy and emotional depth than anything neurochemically accessible
today. Our selfish-gene-driven ancestors - in common with the cartoonish
brave new worlders - will strike posterity as functional psychopaths by
comparison; and posterity will be right.
In contrast to Brave New World, however, the death of ageing won't
be followed by our swift demise after a sixty-odd year life-span. We'll
have to reconcile ourselves to the prospect of living happily ever after.
Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a life of unremitting
bliss isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.
The good news gets better. Drugs - not least the magical trinity
of empathogens, entactogens and entheogens - and eventually genetic
engineering will open up revolutionary new state spaces of thought and
emotion. Such modes of consciousness are simply unimaginable to the
drug-innocent psyche. Today, their metabolic pathways lie across forbidden
gaps in the evolutionary fitness landscape. They have previously been
hidden by the pressure of natural selection: for Nature has no power of
anticipation. Open such spaces up, however, and new modes of selfhood and
introspection become accessible. The Dark Age of primordial Darwinian life
is about to pass into history.
In later life, Huxley himself modified his antipathy to
drug-assisted paradise. Island, Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was
modelled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until we get the
biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded
genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of
paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be
exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness and
the unpredictability of its agents. Thus mescaline, and certainly LSD and
its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of
nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way
our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA. Uncontrolled
eruptions within the psyche must be replaced by the precision-engineering
of emotional tone, if nothing else. If rational design is good enough for
robots, then it's good enough for us.
In Brave New World, of course, there are no freak-outs on soma.
One suspects that this is partly because BNW's emotionally stunted
inhabitants don't have the imagination to have a bad trip. But mainly it's
because the effects of soma are no more intellectually illuminating than
getting a bit drunk. In BNW, our already limited repertoire of
hunter-gatherer emotions has been constricted still further. Creative and
destructive impulses alike have been purged. The capacity for spirituality
has been extinguished. The utopians' pleasure-pain axis has indeed been
shifted. But it's flattened at both ends.
To cap it all, in Brave New World life-long emotional well-being
is not genetically pre-programmed as part of everyday mental health. It
isn't even assured from birth by euphoriant drugs. For example, juvenile
brave new worlders are traumatised with electric shocks as part of the
behaviorist-inspired conditioning process in childhood. Toddlers from the
lower orders are terrorised with loud noises. This sort of
aversion-therapy serves to condition them against liking books. We are
told the inhabitants of Brave New World are happy. Yet they periodically
experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings and emotions. They just banish
them with soma: "One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments".
Even then, none of the utopians of any caste come across as very
happy. This seems credible: more-or-less chronic happiness sounds so
uninteresting that it's easy to believe it must feel a bit uninteresting
too. For sure, the utopians are mostly docile and contented. Yet their
emotions have been deliberately blunted and repressed. Life is nice - but
somehow a bit flat. In the words of the Resident Controller of Western
Europe: "No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy -
to preserve you, as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all."
A more ambitious target would be to make the world's last
unpleasant experience a precisely dateable event; and from this minimum
baseline start aiming higher. "Every day, and in every way, I am getting
better and better". Coué's mantra of therapeutic self-deception needn't
depend on the cultivation of beautiful thoughts. If harnessed to the
synthesis of smarter mood-enrichers and genetically-enhanced brains, it
might even come true.
Of course, it's easy today to write (mood-congruent) tomes on how
everything could go wrong. This review essay is an exploration of what it
might be like if they go right. So it's worth contrasting the attributes
of Brave New World with the sorts of biological paradise that may be
enjoyed by our ecstatic descendants.
S t a s i s
Brave New World is a benevolent dictatorship: a static, efficient,
totalitarian welfare-state. There is no war, poverty or crime. Society is
stratified by genetically-predestined caste. Intellectually superior
Alphas are the top-dogs. Servile, purposely brain-damaged Gammas, Deltas
and Epsilons toil away at the bottom. The lower orders are necessary in
BNW because Alphas - even soma-fuelled Alphas - could allegedly never be
happy doing menial jobs. It is not explained why doing menial work is
inconsistent - if you're an Alpha - with a life pharmacological hedonism -
nor, for that matter, with genetically-precoded wetware of invincible
bliss. In any case, our descendants are likely to automate menial drudgery
out of existence; that's what robots are for.
Notionally, BNW is set in the year 632 AF (After Ford). Its
biotechnology is highly advanced. Yet the society itself has no historical
dynamic: "History is bunk". It is curious to find a utopia where knowledge
of the past is banned by the Controllers to prevent invidious comparisons.
One might imagine history lessons would be encouraged instead. They would
uncover a blood-stained horror-story.
Perhaps the Controllers fear historical awareness would stir
dissatisfaction with the "utopian" present. Yet this is itself revealing.
For Brave New World is not an exciting place to live in. It is a sterile,
productivist utopia geared to the consumption of mass-produced goods:
"Ending is better than mending". Society is shaped by a single
all-embracing political ideology. The motto of the world state is
"Community, Identity, Stability."
In Brave New World, there is no depth of feeling, no ferment of
ideas, and no artistic creativity. Individuality is suppressed.
Intellectual excitement and discovery have been abolished. Its inhabitants
are laboratory-grown clones, bottled and standardised from the hatchery.
They are conditioned and indoctrinated, and even brainwashed in their
sleep. The utopians are never educated to prize thinking for themselves.
In Brave New World, the twin goals of happiness and stability - both
social and personal - are not just prized but effectively equated.
This surprisingly common notion is ill-conceived. The impregnable
well-being of our transhuman descendants is more likely to promote greater
diversity, both personal and societal, not stagnation. This is because
greater happiness, and in particular enhanced dopamine function, doesn't
merely extend the depth of one's motivation to act: the hyper-dopaminergic
sense of things to be done. It also broadens the range of stimuli an
organism finds rewarding. By expanding the range of potential activities
we enjoy, enhanced dopamine function will ensure we will be less likely to
get stuck in a depressive rut. This rut leads to the kind of learned
helplessness that says nothing will do any good, Nature will take its
revenge, and utopias will always go wrong.
In Brave New World, things do occasionally go wrong. But more to
the point, we are led to feel the whole social enterprise that BNW
represents is horribly misconceived from the outset. In BNW, nothing much
really changes. It is an alien world, but scarcely a rich or inexhaustibly
diverse one. Tellingly, the monotony of its pleasures mirrors the poverty
of our own imaginations in conceiving of radically different ways to be
happy. Today, we've barely even begun to conceptualise the range of things
it's possible to be happy about. For our brains aren't blessed with the
neurochemical substrates to do so. Time spent counting one's blessings is
rarely good for one's genes.
BNW is often taken as a pessimistic warning of the dangers of
runaway science and technology. Scientific progress, however, was
apparently frozen with the advent of world state. Thus ironically it's not
perverse to interpret BNW as a warning of what happens when scientific
inquiry is suppressed. One of the reasons why many relatively robust
optimists - including some dopamine-driven transhumanists - dislike Brave
New World, and accordingly distrust the prospect of universal happiness it
symbolises, is that their primary source of everyday aversive experience
is boredom. BNW comes across as a stagnant civilisation. It's got
immovably stuck in a severely sub-optimal state. Its inhabitants are too
contented living in their rut to extricate themselves and progress to
higher things. Superficially, yes, Brave New World is a technocratic
society. Yet the free flow of ideas and criticism central to science is
absent. Moreover the humanities have withered too. Subversive works of
literature are banned. Subtly but inexorably, BNW enforces conformity in
innumerable different ways. Its conformism feeds the popular misconception
that a life-time of happiness will [somehow] be boring - even when the
biochemical substrates of boredom have vanished.
As Controller Mustapha Mond himself observes after Bernard's
tearful plea not to be exiled to Iceland: "One would think he was going to
have his throat cut. Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd
understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an
island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the
most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world.
All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too
self-consciously individual to fit into community life. All the people who
aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their
own. Everyone, in a word, who's anyone..."
Admittedly, Huxley's BNW enforces a much more benign conformism
than Orwell's terrifying 1984. There's no Room 101, no torture, and no
war. Early child-rearing practices aside, it's not a study of physically
violent totalitarianism. Its riot-police use soma-vaporisers, not tear-gas
and trucheons. Yet its society is as dominated by caste as any historical
Eastern despotism. BNW recapitulates all Heaven's hierarchies (recall all
those angels, archangels, seraphim, etc.) and few of its promised
pleasures. Its satirical grotesqueries and fundamental joylessness are far
more memorably captured than its delights - with one pregnant exception,
soma.
Unlike the residents of Heaven, BNW's inhabitants don't worship
God. Instead, they are brainwashed into revering a scarcely less abstract
and remote community. Formally, the community is presided over by the
spirit of the apostle of mass-production, Henry Ford. He is worshipped as
a god: Alphas and Betas attend soma-consecrated "solidarity services"
which culminate in an orgy. But history has been abolished, salvation has
already occurred, and the utopians aren't going anywhere.
By contrast, one factor of life spent with even mildly euphoric
hypomanic people is pretty constant. The tempo of life, the flow of ideas,
and the drama of events speeds up. In a Post-Darwinian Era of universal
life-long bliss, the possibility of stasis is remote; in fact one can't
rule out an ethos of permanent revolution. But however great the
intellectual ferment of ecstatic existence, the nastiness of Darwinian
life will have passed into oblivion.
I m b e c i l i t y
Some drugs dull, stupefy and sedate. Others sharpen, animate and
intensify.
After taking soma, one can apparently drift pleasantly off to
sleep. Bernard Marx, for instance, takes four tablets of soma to pass away
a long plane journey to the Reservation in New Mexico. When they arrive at
the Reservation, Bernard's companion, Lenina, swallows half a gramme of
soma when she begins to tire of the Warden's lecture, "with the result
that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at
all". Such a response suggests the user's sensibilities are numbed rather
than heightened. In BNW, people resort to soma when they feel depressed,
angry or have intrusive negative thoughts. They take it because their
lives, like society itself, are empty of spirituality or higher meaning.
Soma keeps the population comfortable with their lot.
Soma also shows physiological tolerance. Linda, the Savage's
mother, takes too much: up to twenty grammes a day. Taken in excess, soma
acts as a respiratory depressant. Linda eventually dies of an overdose.
This again suggests that Huxley models soma more on opiates than the sort
of clinically valuable mood-brightener which subverts the hedonic
treadmill of negative feedback mechanisms in the CNS. The parallel to be
drawn with opiates is admittedly far from exact. Unlike soma, good
old-fashioned heroin is bad news for your sex life. But like soma, it
won't sharpen your wits.
Even today, the idea that chemically-driven happiness must dull
and pacify is demonstrably false. Mood-boosting psychostimulants are
likely to heighten awareness. They increase self-assertiveness. On some
indices, and in low doses, stimulants can improve intellectual
performance. Combat-troops on both sides in World War Two, for instance,
were regularly given amphetamines. This didn't make them nicer or gentler
or dumber. Dopaminergic power-drugs tend to increase willpower,
wakefulness and action. "Serenics", by contrast, have been researched by
the military and the pharmaceutical industry. They may indeed exert a
quiescent effect - ideally on the enemy. But variants could also be used
on, or by, one's own troops to induce fearlessness.
A second and less warlike corrective to the dumb-and-docile
stereotype is provided by so-called manic-depressives. One reason that
many victims of bipolar disorder, notably those who experience the
euphoric sub-type of (hypo-)mania, skip out on their lithium is that when
"euthymic" they can still partially recall just how wonderfully intense
and euphoric life can be in its manic phase. Life on lithium is flatter.
For it's the havoc wrought on the lives of others which makes the
uncontrolled exuberance of frank mania so disastrous. Depressed or
nominally euthymic people are easier for the authorities to control than
exuberant life-lovers.
Thus one of the tasks facing a mature fusion of biological
psychiatry and psychogenetic medicine will be to deliver enriched
well-being and lucid intelligence to anyone who wants it without running
the risk of triggering ungovernable mania. MDMA(ecstasy) briefly offers a
glimpse of what full-blooded mental health might be like. Like soma, it
induces both happiness and serenity. Unlike soma, it is neurotoxic. But
used sparingly, it can also be profound, empathetic and soulfully intense.
Drugs which commonly induce dysphoria, on the other hand, are
truly sinister instruments of social control. They are far more likely to
induce the "infantile decorum" demanded of BNW utopians than euphoriants.
The major tranquillisers, including the archetypal "chemical cosh"
chlorpromazine (Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as dopamine
antagonists. At high dosages, willpower is blunted, affect is flattened,
and mood is typically depressed. The subject becomes sedated. Intellectual
acuity is dulled. They are a widely-used tool in some penal systems.
A m o r a l i t y
Soma doesn't merely stupefy. At face value, the happiness it offers is
amoral; it's "hedonistic" in the baser sense. Soma-fuelled highs aren't a
function of the well-being of others. A synthetic high doesn't force you
to be happy for a reason: unlike people, a good drug will never let you
down. True, soma-consumption doesn't actively promote anti-social
behaviour. Yet the drug is all about instant gratification.
Drug-naive John the Savage, by contrast, has a firm code of
conduct. His happiness - and sorrow - don't derive from taking a
soul-corrupting chemical. It is based on reasons - though these reasons
themselves presumably have a neurochemical basis. Justified or
unjustified, his happiness, like our own today, will always be vulnerable
to disappointment. Huxley clearly feels that if a loved one dies, for
instance, then one will not merely grieve: it is appropriate that one
grieves, and there is good reason to do so. It would be wrong not to go
into mourning. A friend who said he might be sad if you died, but he
wouldn't let it spoil his whole day - for instance - might strike us as
quite unfeeling, if rather droll: not much of a friend at all.
By our lights, the utopians equally show poor taste. They don't
ever grieve or treat each others' existence as special. They are
conditioned to treat death as natural and even pleasant. As children, they
are given sweets to eat when they go to watch the process of dying in
hospital. Their greatest kick comes from taking a drug. Life on soma,
together with early behavioural conditioning, leaves them oblivious to the
true welfare of others. The utopians are blind to the tragedy of death;
and to its pathos.
Surely this is a powerful indictment of all synthetic pleasures?
Shouldn't we echo the Savage's denunciation of soma to the Deltas: "Don't
take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's poison...Poison to the soul as
well as the body...Throw it all away, that horrible poison". Don't all
chemical euphoriants rob us of our humanity?
Not really; or only on the most malaise-sodden conception of what
it means to be human. Media stereotypes of today's crude psychopharmacy
are not a reliable guide to the next few million years. It is sometimes
supposed that all psychoactive drug-taking must inherently be egotistical.
This egotism is exemplified in the contemporary world by the effects of
power-drugs such as cocaine and the amphetamines, or by the warm cocoon of
emotional self-sufficiency afforded by opium and its more potent analogues
and derivatives. Yet drugs - not least the empathogens such as ecstasy -
and genetic engineering can in principle be customised to let us be nicer;
to reinforce our idealised codes of conduct. The complex role of the
"civilising neurotransmitter" serotonin, and its multiple receptor
sub-types, is hugely instructive - if still poorly understood. If we
genetically re-regulate its receptors, we can make ourselves kinder as
well as happier.
The crucial point is that, potentially, long-acting designer-drugs
needn't supplant our moral codes, but chemically predispose us to act them
out in the very way we would wish. "Personality pills" permit us to become
the kind of people we'd most like to be - to fulfil our second-order
desires. Such self-reinvention is an option that our genetic constitution
today frequently precludes. Altruism and self-sacrifice for the benefit of
anonymous strangers - including starving Third World orphans whom we
acknowledge need resources desperately more than we do - is
extraordinarily hard to practise consistently. Sometimes it's impossible,
even for the most benevolent-minded of the affluent planetary elite.
Self-referential altruism is easier; but it's also different - narrow and
small-scale. Unfortunately, the true altruists among our (non-)ancestors
got eaten or outbred. Their genes perished with them.
More specifically; in chemical terms, very crudely, dopaminergics
fortify one's will-power, while certain serotonergics can deepen one's
empathy and social conscience. Safe, long-lasting site-specific hybrids
will do both. Richer designer cocktails spiced with added ingredients will
be far better still. It is tempting to conceptualise such cocktails in
terms of our current knowledge of, say, oxytocin, phenylethylamine,
substance P antagonists, selective mu-opioid agonists and
enkephalinase-inhibitors etc. But this is probably naive. Post-synaptic
receptor antagonists block their psychoactive effects, suggesting it's the
post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades they trigger which form the
heartlands of the soul. Our inner depths haven't yet been properly
explored, let alone genetically re-regulated.
But our ignorance and inertia are receding fast. Molecular
neuroscience and behavioural genetics are proceeding at dizzying pace.
Better Living Through Chemistry doesn't have to be just a snappy slogan.
Take it seriously, and we can bootstrap our way into becoming smart and
happy while biologically deepening our social conscience too. Hopefully,
the need for manifestos and ideological propaganda will pass. They must be
replaced by an international biomedical research program of
paradise-engineering. The fun hasn't even begun. The moral urgency is
immense.
It's true that morality in the contemporary sense may no longer be
needed when suffering has been cured. The distinction between value and
happiness has distinctively moral significance only in the Darwinian Era
where the fissure originated. Here, in the short-run, good feelings and
good conduct may conflict. Gratifying one's immediate impulses sometimes
leads to heartache in the longer term, both to oneself and others. When
suffering has been eliminated, however, specifically moral codes of
conduct become redundant. On any utilitarian analysis, at least, acts of
immorality become impossible. The values of our descendants will be
predicated on immense emotional well-being, but they won't necessarily be
focused on it; happiness may have become part of the innate texture of
sentient existence.
In Brave New World, by contrast, unpleasantness hasn't been
eradicated. That's one reason its citizens' behaviour is so shocking, and
one reason they take soma. BNW's outright immorality is all too
conceivable by the reader.
Typically, we are indignant when we see the callous way in which
John the Savage is treated, or when we witness the revulsion provoked in
the Director by the sight of John's ageing mother - the companion he had
himself long ago abandoned for dead after an ill-fated trip to the
Reservation. Above and beyond this, all sorts of sour undercurrents are
endemic to the society as a whole. Bernard is chronically discontented.
The Alpha misfits in Iceland are condemned to a bleak exile. Feely-author
Helmholz is frustrated by a sense that he is capable of greater things
than authoring repetitive propaganda. The Director of Hatcheries is
utterly humiliated by the understandably aggrieved Bernard. Boastful
Bernard is himself reduced to tears of despair when the Savage refuses to
be paraded in front of assorted dignitaries and the
Arch-Community-Songster of Canturbury. Lesser problems and
unpleasantnesses are commonplace. And appallingly, the utopians come to
gawp at John in his hermit's exile and watch his suffering for fun.
Brave New World is a patently sub-standard utopia in need of some
true moral imagination - and indignation - to sort it out.
F a l s e H a p p i n e s s
Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental pain, the brave new
worlders have got rid of the most profound and sublime experiences that
life can offer as well. Most notably, they have sacrificed a mysterious
deeper happiness which is implied, but not stated, to be pharmacologically
inaccessible to the utopians. The metaphysical basis of this presumption
is obscure.
There are hints, too, that some of the utopians may feel an
ill-defined sense of dissatisfaction, an intermittent sense that their
lives are meaningless. It is implied, further, that if we are to find true
fulfilment and meaning in our own lives, then we must be able to contrast
the good parts of life with the bad parts, to feel both joy and despair.
As rationalisations go, it's a good one.
But it's still wrong-headed. If pressed, we must concede that the
victims of chronic depression or pain today don't need interludes of
happiness or anaesthesia to know they are suffering horribly. Moreover, if
the mere relativity of pain and pleasure were true, then one might imagine
that pseudo-memories in the form of neurochemical artefacts imbued with
the texture of "pastness" would do the job of contrast just as well as raw
nastiness. The neurochemical signatures of deja vu and jamais vu provide
us with clues on how the re-engineering could be done. But this sort of
stratagem isn't on Huxley's agenda. The clear implication of Brave New
World is that any kind of drug-delivered happiness is "false" or
inauthentic. In similar fashion, all forms of human genetic engineering
and overt behavioural conditioning are to be tarred with the same brush.
Conversely, the natural happiness of the Savage on the Reservation is
portrayed as more real and authentic, albeit transient and sometimes
interspersed with sorrow.
The contrast between true and false happiness, however, is itself
problematic. Even if the notion is both intelligible and potentially
referential, it's not clear that "natural", selfish-DNA-sculpted minds
offer a more authentic consciousness than precision-engineered euphoria.
Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs [and, ultimately,
genetic engineering] won't make things seem weird or alien. On the
contrary, they can deliver a greater sense of realism, verisimilitude and
emotional depth to raw states of biochemical bliss than today's parochial
conception of Real Life. Future generations will "re-encephalise" emotion
to serve us, sentient genetic vehicles, rather than selfish DNA. Our
well-being will feel utterly natural; and in common with most things in
the natural world, it will be.
If desired, too, designer drugs can be used to trigger paroxysms
of spiritual enlightenment - or at least the phenomenology thereof -
transcending the ecstasies of the holiest mystic or the hyper-religiosity
of a temporal-lobe epileptic. So future psychoactives needn't yield only
the ersatz happiness of a brave new worlder, nor will their use be
followed by the proverbial Dark Night Of The Soul. Just so long as
neurotransmitter activation of the right sub-receptors triggers the right
post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades regulated by the right alleles of
the right genes in the right way indefinitely - and this is a technical
problem with a technical solution - then we have paradise everlasting, at
worst. If we want it, we can enjoy a liquid intensity of awareness far
more compelling than our mundane existence as contemporary sleepwalking
Homo sapiens. It will be vastly more enjoyable to boot.
If sustained, such modes of consciousness can furnish a far more
potent definition of reality than the psychiatric slumlands of the past.
Subtly or otherwise, today's unenriched textures of consciousness express
feelings of depersonalisation and derealisation. Such feelings are
frequently nameless - though still all too real - because they are without
proper contrast: anonymous angst-ridden modes of selfhood that, in time,
will best be forgotten. "True" happiness, on the other hand, will feel
totally "real". Authenticity should be a design-specification of conscious
mind, not the fleeting and incidental by-product of the workings of
selfish DNA.
Tomorrow's neuropharmacology, then, offers incalculably greater
riches than souped-up soma. True, drugs can also deliver neurochemical
wastelands of silliness and shallowness. A lot of the state-spaces
currently beyond our mental horizons may be nasty or uninteresting or
both. Statistically, most are probably just psychotic. But a lot aren't.
Entactogens, say, [literally, to "touch within"] may eventually be as big
an industry as diet pills; and what they offer by way of a capacity for
self-love will be far more use in boosting personal self-esteem.
"Entactogens", "empathogens", "entheogens" - these are fancy
words. Until one is granted first-person experience of the states they
open up, the phraseology invoked to get some kind of intellectual handle
on Altered States may seem gobbledygook. What on earth does it all mean?
But resort to such coinages isn't a retreat into obscurantism or
mystery-mongering. It's a bid to bring some kind of order to unmapped
exotica way beyond the drug-naive imagination.
One can try to hint at the properties of even seriously altered
states by syntactically shuffling around the lexical husks of the old
order. But the kind of consciousness disclosed by these extraordinary
agents provides the basis for new primitive terms in the language of a
conceptual apparatus that hasn't yet been invented. Such forms of
what-it's-likeness can't properly be defined or evoked within the
state-specific resources of the old order. Ordinarily, they're not
neurochemically accessible to us at all. Genetically, we're
action-oriented hunter-gatherers, not introspective psychonauts.
So how well do we understand the sort of happiness Huxley indicts?
Even though we find the nature of BNW-issue "soma" as elusive as
its Vedic ancestor, we think we can imagine, more-or-less, what taking
"soma" might be like; and judge accordingly. Within limits, plain "uppers"
and "downers" are intelligible to us in their effects, though even here
our semantic competence is debatable - right now, it's hard to imagine
what terms like "torture" and "ecstasy" really denote. When talking about
drugs with (in one sense) more far-reaching effects, however, it's easy to
lapse into gibbering nonsense. If one has never taken a particular drug,
then one's conception of its distinctive nature derives from analogy with
familiar agents, or from its behavioural effects on other people, not on
the particular effects its use typically exerts on the texture of
consciousness. One may be confident that other people are using the term
in the same way only in virtue of their physiological similarity to
oneself, not through any set of operationally defined criteria. Thus until
one has tried a drug, it's hard to understand what one is praising or
condemning.
This doesn't normally restrain us. But are we rationally entitled
to pass a judgement on any drug-based civilisation based on one fictional
model?
No, surely not. Underground chemists and pharmaceutical companies
alike are likely to synthesise all sorts of "soma" in future. Licitly or
otherwise, we're going to explore what it's like; and we'll like it a lot.
But to suppose that the happiness of our transhuman descendants will
thereby be "false" or shallow is naive. Post-humans are not going to get
drunk and stoned. Their well-being will infuse ideas, modes of
introspection, varieties of selfhood, structures of mentalese, and whole
new sense modalities that haven't even been dreamt of today.
Brave New World-based soma-scenarios, by contrast, are highly
conceivable. This is one reason why they are so unrealistic.
T o t a l i t a r i a n
BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for
at its pinnacle there are ten world controllers. We get to meet its
spokesman, the donnish Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western
Europe. He governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life,
from conception and conveyor-belt reproduction onwards, are determined by
the state. The individuality of BNW's two billion hatchlings is
systematically stifled. A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides a
prospective citizen's role in the hierarchy. Children are raised and
conditioned by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families.
There are only ten thousand surnames. Value has been stripped away from
the person as an individual human being; respect belongs only to society
as a whole. Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids.
This would seduce their allegiance away from the community as a whole by
providing a rival focus of affection. The individual's loyalty is owed to
the state alone. By getting rid of potential sources of tension and
anxiety - and dispelling residual discontents with soma - the World State
controls its populace no less than Big Brother.
Brave New World, then, is centred around control and manipulation.
As ever, the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature and
Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus
controls both. Naturally, we find this control disquieting. One of our
deepest fears about the prospect of tampering with our natural (i.e.
selfish DNA-driven) biological endowment is that we will ourselves be
controlled and manipulated by others. Huxley plays on these anxieties to
devastating effect. He sows the fear that a future world state may rob us
of the right to be unhappy.
It must be noted that this right is not immediately in jeopardy.
Huxley, however, evidently feels that the threat of compulsory well-being
is real. This is reflected in his choice of a quotation from Nicolas
Berdiaeff as BNW's epigraph. "Utopias appear to be much easier to realize
than one formerly believed. We currently face a question that would
otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively
real?" Perhaps not all of the multiple ironies here are intended by BNW's
author.
Huxley deftly coaxes us into siding with John the Savage as he
defends the right to suffer illness, pain, and fear against the arguments
of the indulgent Controller. The Savage claims the right to be unhappy. We
sympathise. Intuitively but obscurely, he shouldn't have to suffer
enforced bliss. We may claim, like the Savage, "the right to grow old and
ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to
have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in
constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch
typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind". Yet
the argument against chemical enslavement cuts both ways. The point today
- and at any other time, surely - is that we should have the right not to
be unhappy. And above all, when suffering becomes truly optional, we
shouldn't force our toxic legacy wetware on others.
But what will be the price of all this happiness?
It's not what we might intuitively expect. Perhaps surprisingly,
freedom and individuality can potentially be enhanced by chemically
boosting personal well-being. Vulnerable and unhappy people are probably
more susceptible to brainwashing - and the subtler sorts of mind-control -
than active citizens who are happy and psychologically robust. Happiness
is empowering. In real life, it is notable that mood- and
resilience-enhancing drugs, such as the selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors, tend to reduce submissiveness and subordinate behaviour. Rats
and monkeys on SSRIs climb the pecking order, or transcend it altogether.
They don't seem to try and dominate their fellows - loosely speaking, they
just stop letting themselves be messed around. If pharmacologically and
genetically enriched, we may all aspire to act likewise.
Admittedly, this argument isn't decisive. It's a huge topic.
Humans, a philosopher once observed, are not rats. Properly-controlled
studies of altered serotonin function in humans are lacking. The
intra-cellular consequences of fifteen-plus serotonin receptor sub-types
defy facile explanation. But we do know that a dysfunctional serotonin
system is correlated with low social-status. Enhancing serotonin function
- other things being equal - is likely to leave an individual less likely
to submit to authority, not docile and emasculated. Brave New World is
exquisite satire, but the utopia it imagines is sociologically and
biologically implausible. Its happy conformists are shallow cartoons.
Of course, any analysis of the state's role in future millennia is
hugely speculative. Both minimalist "night-watchman" states and extreme
totalitarian scenarios are conceivable. In some respects, any future world
government may indeed be far more intrusive than the typical nation-state
today. If the ageing process and the inevitability of death is superseded,
for instance, then decisions about reproduction - on earth at least -
simply cannot be left to the discretion of individual couples alone. This
is because we'd soon be left with standing room only. The imminence of
widespread human cloning, too, makes increased regulation and
accountability inevitable - quite disturbingly so. But challenges like
population-control shouldn't overshadow the fact that members of a happy,
confident, psychologically robust citizenry are far less likely to be the
malleable pawns of a ruling elite than contented fatalists. A
chemically-enslaved underclass of happy helots remains unlikely.
A n t h r o p o c e n t r i c
Brave New World is a utopia conceived on the basis of
species-self-interest masquerading as a universal paradise. Most of the
inhabitants of our planet don't get a look-in, any more than they do
today.
Strong words? Not really. Statistically, most of the suffering in
the contemporary world isn't undergone by human beings. It is sometimes
supposed that intensity and degree of consciousness - between if not
within species - is inseparably bound up with intelligence. Accordingly,
humans are prone to credit themselves with a "higher" consciousness than
members of other taxa, as well as - sometimes more justifiably - sharper
intellects. Non-human animals aren't treated as morally and functionally
akin to human infants and toddlers i.e. in need of looking after. Instead,
they are wantonly abused, exploited, and killed.
Yet it is a striking fact that our most primitive experiences -
both phylogenetically and ontogenetically - are also the most vivid. For
physical suffering probably has more to do with the number and synaptic
density of pain cells than a hypertrophied neocortex. The extremes of pain
and thirst, for example, are excruciatingly intense. By contrast, the
kinds of experience most associated with the acme of human intellectual
endeavour, namely thought-episodes in the pre-frontal region, are
phenomenologically so anaemic that it is hard to introspect their
properties at all.
Hardcore paradise-engineering - and not the brittle parody of
paradise served up in BNW - will eradicate such nastiness from the living
world altogether. None of Huxley's implicit criticism of the utopians can
conceivably apply to the rest of the animal kingdom. For by no stretch of
the imagination could the most ardent misery-monger claim animal suffering
is essential for the production of great art and literature - a common
rationale for its preservation and alleged redeeming value in humans. Nor
would its loss lead to great spiritual emptiness. Animal suffering is just
savage, empty and pointless. So we'll probably scrap it when it becomes
easy enough to do so.
Whether pain takes the form of the eternal Treblinka of our
Fordist factory farms and conveyor-belt killing factories, or whether it's
manifested as the cruelties of a living world still governed by natural
selection, the sheer viciousness of the Darwinian Era is likely to horrify
our morally saner near-descendants. A few centuries hence - the
chronological details are sketchy - hordes of self-replicating nanorobots
armed with retroviral vectors and the power of on-board quantum
supercomputers will hunt out the biomolecular signature of aversive
experience all the way down the phylogenetic tree; and genetically
eliminate it. Meanwhile, depot-contraception, not merciless predation,
will control population in our wildlife parks. Carnivorous
killing-machines - and that includes dear misunderstood kitty, a beautiful
sociopath - will be reprogrammed or phased out. Down on the farm, tasty,
genetically-engineered ambrosia will replace abused sentience. For
paradise-engineering entails global veganism. Utopia cannot be built on
top of an ecosystem of pain and fear. Unfortunately, this is an issue on
which Brave New World is silent.
How is it possible to make such predictions with any confidence?
Properly speaking, one can't, or at least not without a heap of
caveats. But as science progressively gives us the power to remould matter
and energy to suit our desires - or whims - it would take an extraordinary
degree of malice for us to sustain the painfulness of Darwinian life
indefinitely. For as our power increases, so does our complicity in its
persistence.
Even unregenerate humans don't tend to be sustainably ill-natured.
So when genetically-engineered vat-food tastes as good as dead meat, we
may muster enough moral courage to bring the animal holocaust to an end.
C a s t e - b o u n d
In BNW, genetic engineering isn't used straightforwardly to pre-code
happiness. Instead, it underwrites the subordination and inferiority of
the lower orders. In essence, Brave New World is a global caste society.
Social stratification is institutionalised in a five-way genetic split.
There is no social mobility. Alphas invariably rule, Epsilons invariably
toil. Genetic differences are reinforced by systematic conditioning.
Historically, dominance and winning have been associated with
good, even manically euphoric, mood; losing and submission are associated
with subdued spirits and depression. Rank theory suggests that the far
greater incidence of the internalised correlate of the yielding
sub-routine, depression, reflects how low spirits were frequently more
adaptive among group-living organisms than manic self-assertion. But in
Brave New World, the correlation vanishes or is even inverted. The lower
orders are at least as happy as the Alphas thanks to soma, childhood
conditioning and their brain-damaged incapacity for original thought. Thus
in sleep-lessons on class consciousness, for instance, juvenile Betas
learn to love being Betas. They learn to respect Alphas who "work much
harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever." But they also
learn to take pleasure in not being Gammas, Deltas, or the even more
witless Epsilons. "Oh no," the hypnopedia tapes suggest, "I don't want to
play with Delta children."
One might imagine that progress in automation technology would
eliminate the menial, repetitive tasks so unsuitable for big-brained
Alphas. But apparently this would leave the lower castes disaffected and
without a role: allegedly a good reason for freezing scientific progress
where it is. It might be imagined, too, that one solution here would be to
stop producing oxygen-starved morons altogether. Why not stick to churning
out Alphas? The Controller Mustapha Mond informs us that an all-Alpha
society was once tried on an island. The result of the experiment was
civil war. 19 000 of the 22 000 Alphas perished. Thus the lower castes are
needed indefinitely. The happiness that they derive from their
routine-bound lives guarantees stability for society as a whole. "The
optimum population", the Controller observes, "is modelled on the iceberg
- eight-ninths below the waterline, one-ninth above".
There are evidently (strong!) counter-arguments and rebuttals that
could be delivered against any specific variant of this scenario. But
Huxley isn't interested in details. BNW is a deeply pessimistic
blanket-warning against all forms of genetic engineering and eugenics.
Shouldn't we keep the status quo and ban them altogether? Let's play safe.
In the last analysis, Nature Knows Best.
As it stands, this argument is horribly facile. The ways in which
bioscience can be abused are certainly manifold. Bioethics deserves to
become a mainstream academic discipline. But the idea that a living world
organised on principles of blind genetic selfishness - the bedrock of the
Darwinian Era - is inherently better than anything based on rational
design is surely specious. Selfishness, whether in the technical or
overlapping popular sense, is a spectacularly awful principle on which to
base any civilisation. Sooner or later, simple means-ends-analysis, if
nothing else, will dictate the use of genetic engineering to manufacture
constitutionally happy mind/brains. Reams of philosophical sophistry and
complication aside, that's what we're all after, obliquely and under
another description or otherwise; and biotechnology is the only effective
way to get it.
For despite how frequently irrational we may be in satisfying our
desires, we're all slaves to the pleasure-principle. No one ever leaves a
well-functioning pleasure-machine because they get bored: unlike the
derivative joys of food, drink and sex, the delightfulness of
intra-cranial self-stimulation of the pleasure-centres shows no tolerance.
Natural selection has "encephalised" emotion to disguise our dependence on
the mesolimbic dopamine circuitry of reward. Since raw, unfocused emotion
is blind and impotent, its axonal and dendritic processes have been
recruited into innervating the neocortex. All our layers of cortical
complexity conspire to help self-replicating DNA leave more copies of
itself. Thus we fetishise all sorts of irrelevant cerebral bric-a-brac
["intentional objects": loosely, what we're happy or upset "about"] that
has come to be associated with adaptively nice and nasty experiences in
our past. But the attributes of power, status and money, for instance,
however obviously nice they seem today, aren't inherently pleasurable.
They yield only a derivative kick that can be chemically edited out of
existence. Their cortical representations have to be innervated by
limbically-generated emotions in the right way - or the wrong way - for
them to seem nice at all.
Rationally, then, if we want to modulate our happiness so that
it's safe and socially sustainable, we must code genetically
pre-programmed well-being in a way that shuts down the old
dominance-and-submission circuits too. Such a shut-down is crudely
feasible today on serotonergics, both recreational and clinical. But the
shut-down can be comprehensive and permanent. Germ-line gene therapy is
better than drugs.
Is this sort of major genetic re-write likely?
Yes, probably. In the interim, any unreconstructed power-trippers
can get a far bigger kick in immersive VR than they can playing primate
party-politics. If one wants to be Master Of The Universe, then so be it:
a chacun son gout. The narrative software which supports such virtual
worlds can even be pharmacologically enhanced in the user so that virtual
world mastery is always better than The Real Thing - relegated one day,
perhaps, to a fading antiquarian relic. The fusion of drugs and
computer-generated worlds will yield greater verisimilitude than anything
possible in recalcitrant old organic VR - the dynamic simulations which
perceptual naive realists call the world. For we live in a messy and
frustrating regime which passes itself off as The Real World, but is
actually a species-specific construct coded by DNA.
OK. But can power-games really be confined exclusively to VR?
Won't tomorrow's Alphas want to dominate both?
This question needs a book, not the obiter dicta of a literary
essay. But if one can enjoy champagne, why drink meths, or even be tempted
to try it in the first place? In common with non-human animals, we respond
most powerfully to hot-button supernormal stimuli. Getting turned-on by
the heightened verisimilitude of drugs-plus-VR from a very young age is
likely to eclipse anything else on offer.
This isn't to deny that in any transitional era to a mature
post-Darwinian paradise, there will have to be huge safeguards - no less
elaborate than the multiple failsafe procedures surrounding the launch
codes for today's nuclear weaponry. In the near future, for instance,
prospective candidates for political leadership in The Real World will
probably have their DNA profiles scrutinised no less exhaustively than
their sexual peccadillos. For it will be imprudent to elect unenriched
primitives endowed with potentially dangerous genotypes. If one is going
to put oneself and one's children into, say, ecstasy-like states of loving
empathy and trust, then one is potentially more vulnerable to genetic
cavemen. But this is all the more reason to design beautifully enhanced
analogues of ecstasy and coke which fuse the best features of both.
Even if a power-tripper's fantasy wish-fulfilment is confined to
private universes, we are still likely it view it as an unnerving
prospect. One of the reasons we find the very thought of being dominated
and controlled and manipulated a la BNW so aversive is that we associate
such images with frustration, nastiness and depression. For sure, the
Brave New Worlders are typically happy rather than depressed. Yet they are
all, bar perhaps the Controllers, manipulated dupes. The worry that we
ourselves might ever suffer a similar fate is unsettling and depressing.
Brave New World gives happiness a bad name.
But it's misery that deserves to be stigmatised and stamped out.
Brave New World dignifies unpleasantness in the guise of noble savagery
just when it's poised to become biologically optional. And on occasion
unpleasantness really can be horrific - too bad to describe in words. Some
forms of extreme pain, for instance, are so terrible to experience that
one would sacrifice the whole world to get rid of the agony. Pain just
this bad is happening in the living world right now. It's misguided to ask
if such pain is really as bad as it seems to be - because the reality is
the very appearance one is trying vainly to describe. The extremes of
"mental" pain can be no less dreadful. They can embody suicidal despair
far beyond everyday ill-spirits. They are happening right now in the
living world as well. Their existence reflects the way our mind/brains are
built. Unless the vertebrate CNS is genetically recoded, there will be
traumas and malaise in utopia - any utopia - too.
No behavioural account of even moderately severe depression, for
instance, can do justice to its subjective awfulness. But a spectrum of
depressive states will persist within even a latter-day Garden of Eden in
the absence of good drugs and good genes. We can perhaps understand why
depressive states evolved on account of the selective advantage of
depressive behaviour in reinforcing adaptive patterns of dominance and
subordination, avoiding damaging physical fights with superior rivals, or
of inducing hypercholinergic frenzy of reflective thought when life goes
badly wrong - for one's genes. Likewise, intense and unpleasant social
anxiety was sometimes adaptive too. So was an involuntary capacity for the
torments of sexual jealousy, fear, terror, hunger, thirst and disgust.
Our notions of dominance and subordination are embedded within
this stew of emotions. They are clearly quite fundamental to our social
relationships. They pervade our whole conceptual scheme. When we try to
imagine the distant future, we may of course imagine hi-tech gee-whizzery.
Yet emotionally, we also think in primitive terms of dominance and
submission, of hierarchy and power structures, superiority and
inferiority. Even when we imagine future computers and robots, we are
liable to have simple-minded fantasies about being used, dominated, and
overthrown. Bug-eyed extra-terrestrials from the Planet Zog, too, and
their legion of hydra-headed sci-fi cousins, are implicitly assumed to
have the motivational structure of our vertebrate ancestors. Superficially
they may be alien - all those tentacles - but really they're just like us.
Surely they'll want to dominate us, control us, invade earth etc? Huxley's
vision of control and manipulation is (somewhat) subtler; but it belongs
to the same atavistic tradition.
For the foreseeable future, these concerns aren't idle. We may
rightly worry that if some of us - perhaps most of us - are destined to
get drugged-up, genetically-rewritten and plugged into designer worlds,
then might not invisible puppet-masters be controlling us for their own
ends, whatever their motives? Who'll be in charge of the basement
infrastructure which sustains all the multiple layers of VR - and thus
ultimately running the show? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? as we say here
in Brighton.
Admittedly, sophisticated and intellectually enriched post-humans
are unlikely to be naive realists about "perception"; so they'll recognise
that what their ancestors called "real life" was no more privileged than
what we might call, say, "the medieval world" - the virtual worlds
instantiated by medievals. But any unenriched primitives still living in
organic VR could still be potentially dangerous, because they could bring
everything else tumbling down. In certain limited respects, their virtual
worlds, like our own, would causally co-vary with the mind-independent
world in ways that blissed-up total-VR dwellers would typically lack. So
can it ever be safe to be totally nice and totally happy?
These topics deserve a book - many books - too. The fixations they
express are doubtless still of extreme interest to contemporary humans.
Sado-masochistic images of domination-and-submission loom large in a lot
of our fantasies too. The categories of experience they reflect were of
potent significance on the African savannah, where they bore on the
ability to get the "best" mates and leave most copies of one's genes. But
they won't persist for ever. A tendency to such dominance-and-control
syndromes is going to be written out of the genome - as soon we gain
mastery of rewriting the script. For on the whole, we want our kids to be
nice.
More generally, the whole "evolutionary environment of adaptation"
is poised for a revolution. This is important. When any particular suite
of alleles ceases to be the result of random mutation and blind natural
selection, and is instead pre-selected by intelligent agents in conscious
anticipation of their likely effects, then the criteria of genetic fitness
will change too. The sociobiological and popular senses of "selfish" will
progressively diverge rather than typically overlap. Allegedly "immutable"
human nature will change as well when the genetic-rewrite gathers
momentum. The classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a close.
Unfortunately, its death agonies may be prolonged. Knee-jerk
pessimism and outright cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the
press. They are common in literary academia. And of course any competent
doom-monger can glibly extrapolate the trends of the past into the future.
Yet anti-utopianism ignores even the foreseeable discontinuities that lie
ahead of us as we mature into post-humans. Most notably, it ignores the
major evolutionary transition now imminent in the future of life. This is
the era when we rewrite the genome in our own interest to make ourselves
happy. In the meantime, we just act out variations on dramas scripted by
selfish DNA.
P h i l i s t i n e
Brave New World is a stupid society. For the most part, even the Alphas
don't do anything more exalted than play Obstacle Golf. A handful of the
Alphas are well-delineated. They are truly clever. Huxley is far too
brilliant to write a novel with convincingly dim-witted lead characters.
The Savage, in particular, is an implausibly articulate vehicle for
Huxley's own sympathies. But in the main, brave new worlders are
empty-headed mental invalids in the grip of terminal mind-rot - happy pigs
rather than types of unhappy Socrates.
Since the utopians are (largely) contented with their lives, they
don't produce Great Art. Happiness and Great Art are allegedly
incompatible. Great Art and Great Literature are very dear to Huxley's
heart. But is artistic genius really stifled without inner torment? Is
paradise strictly for low-brows?
There is a great deal of ideological baggage that needs to be
picked apart here; or preferably slashed like a Gordian knot. The
existence of great art, unlike (controversially) great science, is not
state-neural fact about the world. Not least, "great art" depends on the
resonances it strikes in its audience. Today we're stuck with legacy
wetware and genetically-driven malaise. It's frequently nasty and
sometimes terrible. So we can currently appreciate only too well "great"
books and plays about murder, violence, treachery, child abuse, suicidal
despair etc. Such themes, especially when "well"-handled in classy prose,
strike us as more "authentic" than happy pap. Thus a (decaying) Oxbridge
literary intelligentsia can celebrate, say, the wonderful cathartic
experience offered by Greek tragedies - with their everyday tales of
bestiality, cannibalism, rape and murder among the Greek gods. It's good
to have one's baser appetites dressed up so intelligently.
Yet after the ecstatic phase-change ahead in our affective states
- the most important evolutionary transition in the future of life itself
- the classical literary canon may fall into obscurity. Enriched minds
with different emotions encephalised in different ways are unlikely to be
edified by the cultural artefacts of a bygone era. Conversely, we might
ourselves take a jaundiced view if we could inspect the artistic products
of a civilisation of native-born ecstatics. This is because any future art
which explores lives predicated on gradations of delight will seem pretty
vapid from here. We find it hard enough to imagine even one flavour of
sublimity, let alone a multitude.
The nagging question may persist: will posterity's Art and
Literature [or art-forms expressing modes of experience we haven't even
accessed yet] really be Great? To its creators, sure, their handiwork may
seem brilliant and beautiful, moving and profound. But might not its
blissed-out authors be simply conning themselves? Could they have lost
true critical insight, even if they retain its shadowy functional
analogues?
Such questions demand a treatise on the nature and objectivity of
value judgements. Yet perhaps asking whether we would appreciate ecstatic
art of 500 or 5000 years hence is futile in the first place. We simply
can't know what we're talking about. For we are unhappy pigs, and our own
arts are mood-congruent perversions. The real philistinism to worry about
lies in the emotional illiteracy of the present. Our genetically-enriched
posterity will have no need of our condescension.
T h i n g s G o W r o n g
Even by its own criteria, BNW is not a society where everyone is happy.
There are asylums in Iceland and the Falklands for Alpha-male misfits.
Bernard Marx is disaffected and emotionally insecure; a mistake in the
bottling-plant left him stunted. Lenina has lupus. If you run out of soma,
a fate which befalls Lenina when visiting the Reservation, you feel sick:
well-being is not truly genetically pre-programmed. On a global scale, the
whole society of the world state is an abomination - science gone mad - in
most people's eyes, at any rate.
Surely any utopia can go terribly wrong? One thinks of
Christianity; the Soviet experiment; The French Revolution; and Pol Pot.
All ideas and ideals get horribly perverted by power and its pursuit. So
what horrors might we be letting ourselves in for in a global
species-project to abolish the biological substrates of malaise?
There is an important distinction to be drawn here. In a future
civilisation where aversive experience is genetically impossible -
forbidden not by social diktat but because its biochemical substrates are
absent - then the notion of what it means for anything to go wrong will be
different from today. If this innovative usage is to be adopted, then
we're dealing with a separate and currently ill-defined - if not mystical
- concept; and we run a risk of conflating the two senses. For if we are
incapable of aversive experience, then the notion of things going wrong
with our lives - or anyone else's - doesn't apply in any but a Pickwickian
sense. "Going wrong" and "being terrible" as we understand such concepts
today are inseparable from the textures of nastiness in which they had
their origin. Their simple transposition to the Post-Darwinian Era doesn't
work.
Perhaps functional analogues of things going wrong will indeed
apply - even in a biological heaven where the phenomenology of nastiness
has been wiped out. So the idea isn't entirely fanciful. For the
foreseeable future, functional analogues of phenomenal pain will be needed
in early transhumans no less than in silicon robots to alert their bodies
to noxious tissue damage etc. Also, functional analogues of "things going
wrong", at least in one sense, are needed to produce great science and
technology, so that acuity of critical judgement is maintained;
uncontrolled euphoric mania is not a recipe for scientific genius in even
the most high-octane supermind. Yet directly or indirectly, the very
notion of "going wrong" in the contemporary sense seems bound up with a
distinctive and unpleasant phenomenology of consciousness: a deficiency of
well-being, not a surfeit.
This doesn't stop us today from dreaming up scenarios of
blissed-out utopias which strike us as distasteful - or even nightmarish -
when contemplated through the lens of our own darkened minds. This is
because chemically-unenriched consciousness is a medium which corrupts
anything which it seeks to express. The medium is not the message; but it
leaves its signature indelibly upon it. We may imagine future worlds in
which there is no great art, no real spirituality, no true humanity, no
personal growth through life-enriching traumas and tragedies, etc. We may
conjure up notional future worlds, too, whose belief-systems rest on a
false metaphysic: e.g. an ideal theocracy - is it a real utopia if it
transpires there's no God? But it's hard to escape the conclusion that
"ill-effects" from which no one ever suffers are ontological flights of
fancy. The spectre of happy dystopias may trouble some of us today rather
than strike us as a contradiction on terms. But like Huxley's Brave New
World, they are fantasies born of the very pathology that they to seek
warn us against.
This is not to deny that the transition to the new Post-Darwinian
Era will be stressful and conflict-ridden. We learn from the Controller
that the same was true of Brave New World - civilisation as we know it
today was destroyed in the Nine Years' War. One hopes, on rather limited
evidence, that the birth-pangs of the new genetic order will be less
traumatic. But the supposition that a society predicated on universal
bliss engineered by science is inherently wrong - as Huxley wants us to
believe - rests on obscure metaphysics as well as questionable ethics. Sin
is a concept best left to medieval theologians.
C o n s u m e r i s t
Brave New World is a "Fordist" utopia based on production and consumption.
It would seem, nonetheless, that there is no mandatory work-place
drug-testing for soma; if there were, its detection would presumably be
encouraged. In our own society, taking drugs may compromise a person's
work-role. Procuring illicit drugs may divert the user from an orthodox
consumer life-style. This is because the immediate rewards to be gained
from even trashy recreational euphoriants are more intense than the buzz
derived from acquiring more consumer fripperies. In BNW, however, the
production and consumption of manufactured goods is (somehow) harmoniously
integrated with a life-style of drugs-and-sex. Its inhabitants are given
no time for spiritual contemplation. Solitude is discouraged. The utopians
are purposely kept occupied and focused on working for yet more
consumption: "No leisure from pleasure".
Is this our destiny too?
Almost certainly not. Productivist visions of paradise are
unrealistic if they don't incorporate an all-important biological
revolution in hedonic engineering. Beyond a bare subsistence minimum,
there is no inherent positive long-term correlation between wealth and
happiness. Windfalls and spending-sprees do typically bring short-term
highs. Yet they don't subvert the hedonic treadmill of inhibitory feedback
mechanisms in the brain. Each of us tends to have a hedonic set-point
about which our "well"-being fluctuates. That set-point is hard to
recalibrate over a lifetime without pharmacological or genetic
intervention. Interlocking neurotransmitter systems in the CNS have been
selected to embody both short- and long-term negative feedback loops. They
are usually efficient. Unless they are chemically subverted, such
mechanisms stop most of us from being contented - or clinically depressed
- for very long. The endless cycle of ups and downs - our own private
re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus - is an "adaptation" that helps
selfish genes to leave more copies of themselves; in Nature, alas, the
restless malcontents genetically out-compete happy lotus-eaters. It's an
adaptation that won't go away just by messing around with our external
environment.
This is in no way to deny that our descendants will be
temperamentally ecstatic. They may well consume lots of material goods
too. Yet their well-being cannot depend on an unbridled orgy of personal
consumption. It depends on dismantling the hedonic treadmill itself.
So what sort of scenario can we expect? If we opt for genetically
pre-programmed bliss, just what, if anything, is our marvellous well-being
likely to focus on?
First, in a mature IT society, the harnessing of
psychopharmacology and biotechnology to ubiquitous virtual reality
software gives scope for unlimited good experiences for everyone. Any
sensory experience one wants, any experiential manifold one can imagine,
any narrative structure one desires, can be far better realised in VR than
in outmoded conceptions of Real Life.
At present, society is based on the assumption that goods and
services - and the good experiences they can generate - are a finite
scarce resource. But ubiquitous VR can generate (in effect) infinite
abundance. An IT society supersedes the old zero-sum paradigm and Fordist
mass-manufacture. It rewrites the orthodox laws of market economics. The
ability of immersive multi-modal VR to make one - depending on the
software title one opts for - Lord Of Creation, Cassanova The Insatiable
etc puts an entire universe at one's disposal. This can involve owning
"trillions of dollars", heaps of "status-goods", and unlimited wealth and
resources - in today's archaic terminology. In fact one will be able to
have all the material goods one wants, and any virtual world one wants -
and it can all seem as "unvirtual" as one desires. A few centuries hence,
we may rapidly take [im]material opulence for granted. And this virtual
cornucopia won't be the prerogative of a tiny elite. Information isn't
like that. Nor will it depend on masses of toiling workers. Information
isn't like that either. If we want it, nanotechnology promises
old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and outside synthetic VR.
Nanotechnology is not magic. The self-replicating molecular robots
it will spawn are probably more distant than their enthusiasts suppose,
perhaps by several decades. We may have to wait a century or more before
nanorobots can get to work remoulding the cosmos - to make it a home worth
living in and call our own. Details of how they'll be programmed, how
they'll navigate, how they'll be powered, how they'll locate all the atoms
they reconfigure, etc, are notoriously sketchy. But the fact remains: back
in the boring old mind-independent world, applied nanoscience will deliver
material superabundance beyond measure.
For the most part, admittedly, vast material opulence may not be
needed thanks to VR. This is because we can all have the option of living
in immersive designer-paradises of our own choosing. At first, our
customised virtual worlds may merely ape and augment organic VR. But the
classical prototype of an egocentric virtual world is parochial and
horribly restrictive; the body-image it gives us to work with, for
instance, is pretty shoddy and flawed by built-in obsolescence.
Unprogrammed organic VR can be hatefully cruel as well - Nature's genetic
algorithms are nastily written and very badly coded indeed. Ultimately,
artificial VR may effectively supersede its organic ancestor no less
(in)completely than classical macroscopic worlds emerged from their
quantum substrate. The transition is conceivable. Whether it will happen,
and to what extent, we simply don't know.
Heady stuff. But is it sociologically plausible? Doesn't such
prophecy just assume a naive technological determinism? For it might be
countered that synthetic drugs-and-VR experiences - whether interactive or
solipsistic, deeply soulful or fantasy wish-fulfilment - will always be
second-rate shadows of their organically-grown predecessors. Why will we
want them? After a while, won't we get bored? For surely Real Life is
better.
On the contrary, drugs-plus-VR can potentially yield a heightened
sense of verisimilitude; and exhilarating excitement. Virtual worlds can
potentially seem more real, more lifelike, more intense, and more
compelling than the lame definitions of reality on offer today. The
experience of this-is-real - like all our waking- or dreaming
consciousness - comprises a series of neurochemical events in the CNS like
any other. It can be amped-up or toned-down. Reality does not admit of
degrees; but our sense of it certainly does. Tone, channel and volume
controls will be at our disposal. But once we've chosen what we like, then
the authentic taste of paradise is indeed addictive.
Thus in an important sense Brave New World is wrong. Our
descendants may "consume" software, genetic enhancements and designer
drugs. But the future lies in bits and bytes, not as workers engaged in
factory mass-production or cast as victims of a consumer society. In some
ways, BNW is prescient science fiction - uncannily prophetic of advances
in genetic engineering and cloning. But in other ways, its depiction of
life in centuries to come is backward-looking and quaint. Our attempts to
envision distant eras always are. The future will be unrecognisably
better.
L o v e l e s s
BNW is an essentially loveless society. Both romantic love and love of
family are taboo. The family itself has been abolished throughout the
civilised world. We learn, however, that the priggish Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning was guilty of an indiscretion when visiting
the Reservation twenty years ago. When John the Savage falls on his knees
and greets him as "my father", the director puts his hands over his ears.
In vain, he tries to shut out the obscene word. He is embarrassed.
Publicly humiliated, he then flees the room. Pantomime scenes like this -
amusing but fanciful - contribute to our sense that a regime of universal
well-being would entail our losing something precious. Utopian happiness,
we are led to believe, is built on sacrifice: the loss of love, science,
art and religion. Authentic paradise-engineering, by contrast, can enhance
them all; not a bad payoff.
In BNW, romantic love is strongly discouraged as well. Brave new
worlders are conditioned to be sexually promiscuous: "Everyone belongs to
everyone else." Rather than touting the joys of sexual liberation, Huxley
seeks to show how sexual promiscuity cheapens love; it doesn't express it.
The Savage fancies lovely Lenina no less than she fancies him. But he
loves her too. He feels having sex would dishonour her. So when the poor
woman expresses her desire to have sex with him, she gets treated as
though she were a prostitute.
Thus Huxley doesn't offer a sympathetic exploration of the
possibility that prudery and sexual guilt has soured more lives than sex.
In a true utopia, the counterparts of John and Lenina will enjoy fantastic
love-making, undying mutual admiration, and live together happily ever
after.
Fantastical? The misappliance of science? No. It's just one
technically feasible biological option. In the light of what we do to
those we love today, it would be a kinder option too. At any rate, we
should be free to choose.
The utopians have no such choice. And they aren't merely
personally unloved. They aren't individually respected either. Ageing has
been abolished; but when the utopians die - quickly, not through a long
process of senescence - their bodies are recycled as useful sources of
phosphorus. Thus Brave New World is a grotesque parody of a utilitarian
society in both a practical as well as a philosophical sense.
This is all good knockabout stuff. The problem is that some of it
has been taken seriously.
Science is usually portrayed as dehumanising. Brave New World
epitomises this fear. "The more we understand the world, the more it seems
completely pointless" (Steven Weinberg). Certainly science can seem
chilling when conceived in the abstract as a metaphysical world-picture.
We may seem to find ourselves living in a universe with all the human
meaning stripped out: participants in a soulless dance of molecules, or
harmonics of pointlessly waggling superstrings. Nature seems loveless and
indifferent to our lives. What right have we to be happy?
Yet what right have we to sneeze? If suffering has been medically
eradicated, does happiness have to be justified any more than the colour
green or the taste of peppermint? Is there some deep metaphysical sense in
which we ought to be weighed down by the momentous gravity of the human
predicament?
Only if it will do anyone any good. The evidence is lacking.
Paradise-engineering, by contrast, can deliver an enchanted
pleasure-garden of otherworldly delights for everyone. Providentially, the
appliance of biotechnology offers us the unprecedented prospect of
enhancing our humanity - and the biological capacity for spiritual
experience. When genetically-enriched, our pursuit of such delights won't
be an escape from some inner sense of futility, a gnawing existential
angst which disfigures so many lives at present. Quite the opposite: life
will feel self-intimatingly wonderful. Wholesale genetic-rewrites tweaked
by rational drug-design give us the chance to enhance willpower and
motivation. We'll be able to enjoy a hugely greater sense of purpose in
our lives than our characteristically malfunctioning dopamine systems
allow today. Moreover this transformation of the living world, and
eventually of the whole cosmos, into a heavenly meaning-steeped nirvana
will in no way be "unnatural". It is simply a disguised consequence of the
laws of physics playing themselves out.
And it will be a loving world. Until now, selection pressure has
ensured we're cursed with a genome that leaves us mostly as callous
brutes, albeit brutes with intermittently honourable intentions. We are
selfish in the popular as well as the technical genetic sense. Love and
affection are often strained even among friends and relatives. The
quasi-psychopathic indifference we feel toward most other creatures on the
planet is a by-product of selfish DNA. Sociobiology allied to evolutionary
psychology shows how genetic dispositions to conflict are latent in every
relationship that isn't between genetically identical clones. Such
potential conflicts frequently erupt in overt form. The cost is immense
suffering and sometimes suicidal anguish.
This isn't to deny that love is real. But its contemporary
wellsprings have been poisoned from the outset. Only the sort of love that
helps selfish DNA to leave more copies of itself - which enable it to
"maximise its inclusive fitness" - can presently flourish. It is fleeting,
inconstant, and shaped by cruelly arbitrary criteria of physical
appearance which serve as badges of reproductive potential. If we value
it, love should be rescued from the genes that have recruited and
perverted the states which mediate its expression in blind pursuit of
reproductive success. Contra Brave New World, love is not biologically
inconsistent with lasting happiness.
This is because good genes and good drugs allow us, potentially,
to love everyone more deeply, more empathetically and more sustainably
than has ever been possible before. Indeed, there is no fundamental
biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow
everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so chose. But
simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably
suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological
reality.
Love is versatile; so we needn't turn ourselves into celibate
angels either. True love does not entail that we become disembodied souls
communing with each other all day. "Promiscuous" sex doesn't have to be
loveless. Bonobos ("pygmy chimps") are a case in point; they would
appreciate a "Solidarity Service" rather better than we do. When sexual
guilt and jealousy - a pervasive disorder of serotonin function - are
cured, then bed-hopping will no longer be as morally reckless as it is
today. Better still, designer love-philtres and smarter sex-drugs can
transform our concept of intimacy. Today's ill-educated fumblings will
seem inept by comparison. Sensualists may opt for whole-body orgasms of a
frequency, duration and variety that transcends the limp foreplay of their
natural ancestors. Whether the sexual adventures of our descendants will
be mainly auto-erotic, interpersonal, or take guises we can't currently
imagine is a topic for another night.
Profound love of many forms - both of oneself and all others - is
at least as feasible as the impersonal emotional wasteland occupied by
Huxley's utopians.
Gene-Splicers Versus Glue-Sniffers
The molecular biology of paradise
The prospect of a lifetime of genetically-engineered sublimity
strikes some contemporary Savages as no less appalling than getting high
with drugs. The traditional conception of living happily-ever-after in
Heaven probably hasn't thrilled them unduly either; but the unusual
eminence of its Author has discouraged overt criticism. In any event, the
consensus seems to be that God's PR representatives did a poor job in
selling The Other Place to his acolytes. Today, many people find the idea
of winning the national lottery far more appealing; and in fairness, it
probably offers better odds. Possibly His representatives on earth should
have tried harder to make Heaven sound more appealing. One worries that an
eternity spent worshipping Him might begin to pall.
But the Death Of God, or at least his discreet departure to a
backstage role, shouldn't mean we're doomed to abandon any notion of
heaven, and certainly not on earth. Suffering, whether it's irksome or too
terrible for words, doesn't have to be part of life at all.
Unfortunately, the proposal that aversive experience should be
eliminated in toto via biotechnology tends to find itself assimilated to
two stereotypes.
the image of an intra-cranially self-stimulating rat. Its degraded
frenzy of lever-pressing is eventually followed by death from inanition
and self-neglect.
soma and visions of Brave New World.
And just as during much of the Twentieth Century, any plea for greater
social justice could be successfully damned as Communist, likewise today,
any strategy to eradicate suffering is likely to be condemned in similar
reactionary terms: either wirehead hedonism or revamped Brave New World.
This response is not just facile and simplistic. If it gains currency, the
result is morally catastrophic.
Of course, the abolitionist issue rarely arises. Typically,
universal bliss is still more-or-less unthinkingly dismissed as
technically impossible. Insofar as the prospect is even contemplated -
grudgingly - it is usually assumed that the new regime would be
underwritten day-by-day with drugs or, more crudely, electrodes in the
pleasure-centres.
These techniques have their uses. Yet in the medium-to-long-term,
stopgaps won't be enough. All use of psychoactive drugs may be conceived
as an attempt to correct something pathological with one's state of
consciousness. There's something deeply wrong with our brains. If what we
had now was OK, we wouldn't try to change it. But it isn't, so we do.
Mature biological psychiatry will recognise inadequate bliss as a pandemic
form of mental ill-health: good for selfish DNA in the ancestral
environment where the adaptation arose, but bad for its throwaway
vehicles, notably us. The whole gamut of behavioural conditioning,
socio-economic reform, talk-therapies - and even euphoriant superdrugs -
are just palliatives, not cures, for a festering global illness. Its
existence demands a global eradication program, not idle philosophical
manifestos and scientific belles lettres.
But one does one's best. The ideological obstacles to genetically
pre-programmed mental super-health are actually more daunting than the
technical challenges. To be cured, hypo-hedonia must be recognised as a
primarily genetic deficiency-disorder. Designer mood-brighteners and
anti-anxiety agents to alleviate it are sometimes branded
"lifestyle-drugs"; but this is to trivialise a serious medical condition
which must be corrected at source. Happily, our hereditary
neuropsychiatric disorder is likely to become extinct within a few
generations. Aversive experience, and the poisonous metabolic pathways
that mediate its textures, will become physiologically impossible once the
genes coding its neural substrates have been eliminated. We won't miss its
corrupting effect when it's gone.
In the medium-term, the functional equivalent of aversive
experience can help animate us instead. Late in the Third Millennium and
beyond, its functional successor will be expressed as gradients of
majestic well-being. Our descendants will enjoy a civilisation based on
pleasure-gradients: whether steep or shallow, we simply don't know. Such a
global species-project does not have the desperate moral urgency of
eliminating the phenomenon of pain - both "mental" and "physical", human
and non-human alike. Abolishing raw nastiness - sometimes vile beyond
belief - remains the over-riding ethical priority. One doesn't have to be
an outright negative utilitarian to acknowledge that getting rid of agony
takes moral precedence over maximising pleasure. But both genetic
fundamentalists and gung-ho advocates of Better Living Through Chemistry
today agree on one crucial issue. There is no sense in sustaining a legacy
of mood-darkening metabolic pathways out of superstitious deference to our
savage past.
* * *
When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure
Permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, John is
Initially pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda in The Tempest, he
Exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Heavy irony.
Like innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of life he neither
Knows or understands. And of course he comes unstuck. Yet if we swallow
Such fancy literary conceits, then ultimately the joke is on us. It is
Only funny in the sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is
Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A
utopian society in which we are sublimely happy will be far better than we
can presently imagine, not worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional
squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity, who neither know nor understand the
lives of the god-like super-beings we are destined to become.