Utopia

Every now and then I change my mind about something important. That doesn't happen a lot—indeed it is an unusual event in the vast majority of people—but it does happen. When it happens, it seldom announces itself in obvious ways, though I suspect that if I'd known what signs to look out for I would have noticed them. That usually means that such changes of mind appear to happen suddenly; overnight, from one instant to another, between starting to read something and finishing it, driving back home from work, thinking about things apparently completely unconnected to the issue at hand, and so on.

The change of mind I'm talking about has to do with my attitude toward 'Utopias'. Anybody who knows me more than fleetingly, and certainly anybody who's read my novels, will realize that I think utopias are unattainable and that, more to the point, any attempt to establish them will eventually result not just in failure, but in a plethora of, usually unpleasant-to-horrific, unforeseen consequences. And that's ignoring what is likely to happen along the way to the utopia, which may eclipse, in terms of horror, the unforeseen outcomes.

As Nick Bostrom writes, rather poetically, in Letter from Utopia:
"I fear that the pursuit of Utopia will bring out the worst in you."But he also continues:

"Seek the light! But approach with care, and swerve if you smell your wingtips singeing. [alluding to the moth-light/flame metaphor] Light is for seeing, not dying."

And, maybe most tellingly—and I think this is the sentence that tipped the scales into another path of thought:

"...go easy on your paradise-engineering until you have the wisdom to do it right."

Letter from Utopia is written as a plea to the reader from a writer in a possible transhumanist 'future'; a utopia that might or might not be, but which the writer clearly considers attainable—with a whole bunch of provisos and cautions like the ones above attached. But attainable.

It could be argued, and indeed I have done so at length and I will continue to do so, that, given 'human nature' as-it-is, utopias will not only be unattainable, but attempts to achieve them will invariably and inevitably cause more harm than good. This is the way things are and that's that.

However, I have been inconsistent; and, looking back I'm wondering why I was living in denial of the glaringly obvious. I suspect it had to do with a) being cautious and b) not seeing something else that was glaringly obvious, and again it took a Nick Bostrom article, The Future of Human Evolution, to make clear what should have been clear much sooner. But, hey, nobody's perfect, and even I sometimes miss that which dangles right in my field of view. The point here is that having said what I said in the previous paragraph (...given 'human nature' as-it-is...etc), how the hell could I possibly miss the point here?

I'm going to come back to the human evolution thing in another blog, but right now let's focus on the 'Utopia' issue. The 'point' is that you can't be an emortalist/immortalist without being a Utopian. Somehow you've got to be thinking, believing, theorizing that the world would be a better place if we didn't have to die shortly after the time when many of us—not all, because some never do—figure out some important things about what's important in life and what matters and what's bullshit.

And so, yes, the first step toward getting to a point where we know and have experienced and thought enough to even be able to consider what a 'better world' could actually look and be like has to be what in Letter from Utopia is called the 'first 'transformation' required to get us there; and it is this:

Secure life.

Meaning, of course, just what I said earlier: stop people from having to die, except by choice. This is the basic driving ambition and focus of the emortalist/immortalist movement.

The second 'transformation' called for is:

Upgrade cognition.

Yeah, I can relate to that. And anybody who's read Kluge will probably have gained a fairly good understanding of just what a hotch-potch, cobbled-together, duct-taped construction our 'mind' is; and how much it could so with some serious 'upgrading'.

That doesn't mean actually replacing it with something that will deprive us of our humanity—like the horror stuff that went on in Serenity—but we're 'upgrading', or are trying to, our minds all the time anyway; every time we, for example, learn or learn-to-do 'special' things that people ordinarily aren't able to do, or interested in doing for that matter. 'Education' is an attempt at 'upgrading' the mind—though by and large I think 'education' as practiced does a lousy job of it, and maybe that's why we don't notice the 'upgrade'. Thing is that education is designed and delivered by people who really need some serious upgrading themselves, so that's a serious problem with unfulfilled prerequisites...

The third 'transformation':

Elevate well-being.

A double-edged sword, no question. Unwell-being (a.k.a. 'suffering') fulfills a purpose, too. But there are many kinds of 'suffering', and those inflicted on the innocent who cannot defend themselves against it, but have it imposed on them through starvation, disease, oldage, war and similar contingencies, hardly qualify as 'necessary' for human existence. They just are. Indeed, people go out of their way to alleviate that kind of suffering in others.

But 'suffering' is also a motivator. For example, the presence of all those kinds of suffering mentioned above in ourselves or in people with empathize with leads us to make efforts to improve things; and, when you come to think about it, all of science, for all it pretensions to 'knowledge' is really about alleviating and preferably abolishing that kind of suffering.

Consider someone like Stephen Hawking, who, in that pathetic body of his, is a mind concerned with 'pure knowledge'—for whatever else could he possibly want, except maybe relief from his disease...

But it this really so?

"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet. Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe.

"There isn't anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star."

That's Stephen Hawking speaking, using some very nifty technology, because he can't really 'speak'. He obviously considers that the risky research from CERN's LHC is worth it. An interesting point of view, because it doesn't appear to come from someone blinded by the prospect of 'knowledge for its own sake'.

Back to suffering. It isn't the only motivator for human agency; just the most obvious. And the abolition of the most distasteful forms of suffering need not imply the cessation of striving, investigation, curiosity, purpose. If it did, then we'd be very misguided right now to alleviate them whenever they appear! And we certainly should not apply medical science as we do now to avert misery, illness and dying; or even to delay the latter.

The 'other motivators' for human agency do not have a concrete name, and I suspect that a current visions of all utopias suffer from a lack of imagination and ability to grasp the notion of motivators-that-are-not-suffering. Well, I think, while they may not have a name, they all will have to have something in common and it is this:

Engagement.

What I mean by that is a connection of the individual with the world and the remainder of humanity and that thing we know as 'life', whatever that is.

Criticisms of even a benign and what you might call 'successful' Utopia—a Utopia we don't actually know yet, and could not even begin to know or conceive until we have gone a long way with those 'transformations' mentioned above—almost always involve a claim that somehow these transformations will remove from individuals the ability/desire/motivation to maintain this engagement or connection. That they would make us somehow inhuman.

They also usually assume, without justification, that in a future of emortal, cognition-updated and joyfully-alive humans all problems of existence have disappeared. Or that it'll make all people into 'good people'. That being emortal and cognitively enhanced and full of joy-of-life won't allow one to be a rogue and do things that whatever society there is won't condone. Also, there's no reason to suggest that conflict will become a thing of the past. And it is not even certain that all people would be willing to live without death and dying. People do and think and believe lots of very strange things and act on those beliefs; if only becaus they may find in them meaning and purpose, no matter how incomprehensibly dim-witted that purpose may appear to others.

So, to equate 'Utopia' with 'perfection' is foolish, and indeed Letter from Utopia says also:

"Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good that we come across from time to time in our lives can be put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life."

Whatever that shape is: who knows? I certainly don't. But does that mean that it isn't worth trying to start those transformations to see where they lead us? Can it really be so bad? What twisted kind of mind—excepting that of some religioid or ideologue—would consider the suffering of the innocent to have any 'value'—or be it to prompt those who do have a choice into action to choose and act on those choices. But, much as I'm for choice, this price is too high.

Insofar as visions go, Letter from Utopia offers this:

• What is Tragedy in Utopia? There is tragedy in Mr. Snowman’s melting. Mass murders, we have found,are not required.
• What is Weakness in Utopia? Weakness is spending a day gazing into your beloved’s eyes.
• What is Imperfection in Utopia? Imperfection is the measure of our love for things as they are.
• What is Dignity in Utopia? Dignity is the affirming power of “No” said discriminately.
• What is Suffering in Utopia? Suffering is the salt trace left on the cheeks of those who were around before.
• What is Courage in Utopia? Courage is the monarchy of the self, here constrained by a constitution.
• What is Solemnity in Utopia? Solemnity is the appreciation of the mystery of being.
• What is Body in Utopia? Body is a pair of legs, a pair of arms, a trunk and a head, all made of flesh. Or not, as the case may be.
• What is Society in Utopia? Society is a never-finished tapestry, its weavers equal to its threads; the parts and patterns an inexhaustible bourne of beauty.
• What is Death in Utopia? Death is the darkness that enshrouds all life, and our guilt for not having created Utopia as soon as we could have.

Like all utopian visions it's as-seen-from-today, sounding a bit naive and woolly-imagined, and based on ignorance about what will be or what might lie beyond the horizon imposed by the fog that lies between us and the future. It's not a bad start though. Not a bad start at all.

Utopia is a process, not an end. Where it ends nobody knows. Yet the Absurdist creed that the only thing that matters is what we do today, here and now, remains truer than ever before; because only if the here and now and today is a part of that process, can we and/or our descendants ever hope to get there. That not only makes the Absurdist creed into a serious option, but indeed it may lead the Absurdist to choose it to become an obligation—to him- or herself and the whole human race.

I think that the effect of the transformations on human individuals is going to be like that of Global Warming (sorry, GLOBAL WARMING!). Far from flattening individual attributes to creating a goal-less blah-society, it is instead going to emphasize the extremes: the good will become better and the bad more evil.

There, how's that for a prediction? Utopia promises to be very interesting indeed.