Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by Wright, John C.

  But then again, even among Hard SF writers, we find their most famous works steeped in magic as much as any tale of King Arthur or Achilles; it is merely called by other names. The powers of Paul Muad’Dib or Michael Valentine Smith or the prophecies of Hari Seldon or the luck of Teela Brown are not called magic, but they are. These characters hail from Hard SF classics of the genre. Nor does this differ for softer science fiction: Darth Vader from Star Wars can read minds as easily as can Mr. Spock, and can levitate objects as easily as Bill Bixby’s uncle from My Favorite Martian.

  In Science Fiction the role of magic is ambiguous, and this reflects the ambiguous attitude of the modern age toward all things supernatural.

  To be sure, we all tell ourselves that no modern enlightened man believes in magic, and many an enlightened modern treats science as a useful tool by which means he can make for himself what sort of life he pleases: but then again, an unusual number of we modern men substitute an attitude toward science which is indistinguishable from a cult belief, as if science will discover laws of history or psychiatry and tell us the truth about human nature that will set us free; or else it is indistinguishable from an occult belief, as if new discoveries will harness parapsychological or psionic powers, and a New Age will dawn of mystic revelation, or an expression of some life-force or evolutionary end-purpose moving us down the channels of time toward Utopia; or else it is indistinguishable from devil worship, as if science justified or required the extermination of the unfit, the unborn, the unwanted, or the genocide of lesser races in the name of dry-eyed and ice-hearted Darwinism, or looks upon mankind as an expendable raw material out of which to build the superman.

  These four types represent the four stages of a path of decay toward the nihilist abyss: the Worldly Man, the Cultist, the Occultist, the Anarchist.

  In sum, science fiction precisely reflects both the exhilaration and also the discontent of man in his modern world, particularly his attitude toward the magical and supernatural.

  The exhilaration comes from one source: the greater liberty, knowledge, technology, and wealth we enjoy than our medieval and ancient forefathers. The discontent comes from the same source as the discontent of our forefathers, which our greater liberty, knowledge, technology, and wealth cannot assuage, and indeed quite aggravates, namely, the depraved, corrupt and self-destructive nature of human nature.

  The writings of Robert Heinlein serve as a perfect example of the Worldly Man, that is, the man who rejects Revelation, and seeks truths nowhere but in practical morals and empirical facts. The attitude portrayed in his writings toward religion is ecumenical neglect and contempt. Christianity is a source of a threat to liberty, as personified by Nehemiah Scudder (who is overdue, since he was predicted to be elected in 2012) but never depicted as a source of any goodness, charity, or beneficial reform.

  Other religions, particularly esoteric or even Martian, are worthy of respectful disbelief. The attitude tolerates religion provided it is castrated and kept as a private pastime for lesser beings. One day we will outgrow it.

  The Worldly Man is content to mind his own business and seek his own pleasures after his own fashion, and demands his neighbors do the same. The business he minds is to maintain the public peace (as in Starship Troopers) and to get laid (as in Stranger in a Strange Land).

  The virtues needed to accomplish this can be lauded — no one waxes more poetic in his praise of the sacrifices of servicemen than Mr. Heinlein — but those virtues have no metaphysical or theological foundation. For the Worldly Man, “absolute truth” is a question for folk with too much time on their hands.

  Ayn Rand does not display this avuncular tolerance for Christianity: the religion is condemned as an unambiguous evil, and its practitioners as hatred-eaten mystics. (Other religions, one assumes, find no more favor in her eyes, but there is only one she condemns.) This is not the impatience of a Worldly Man for the mirage called absolute truth; this is the odium of one who defends an absolute truth against its rivals, or, to be precise, the hatred of a heresiarch for orthodoxy.

  Rand is an example of a Cultist amid the science fiction community (and do not tell me Ayn Rand is not a science fiction writer: an inventor discovers the secret of a self-generating power source from atmospheric electricity, and combines in a secret society with other inventors of supermetals and voice-activated locks and mirage-casting ray-screens and with masters of pirate battleships to overthrow the evil world masters who control a sound-wave disintegration ray? John Galt is cut from the same pattern as Doc Savage or the Gray Lensman).

  The Cultist takes the science and industry which affords the Worldly Man his pleasures, and scorns his pursuit of mere pleasure: truth, hard truth, absolute truth is the object of the Cultist’s search. Nothing exists but matter and hard facts, and the question of how to organize human life on earth is a deduction from facts. Any opposition or lack of enthusiasm is seen as treason.

  Don’t be misled by my example to think I am singling out libertarian writers for scorn. Socialists like H.G. Wells and atheists like Philip Pullman would serve just as well. What gives the Cultist his particular flavor is the humorlessness, the intolerance, and the zeal of his pursuit. I call it Cultic because the poor fool is trying to place a simplistic or mechanistic understanding of the universe in the place of divine revelation: he serves an idol.

  The Cultist believes he has discovered the secret to a life of happiness on Earth, and the discoveries always retain an eerie simplicity. I remember hearing one science fiction writer once saying how everything in life would be better if only religion were abolished. Really? Everything? Religion is the source of all evils? Cultists of other breeds select a different one, a simple scapegoat whose abolition will usher in the Utopia: for Ayn Rand, eliminating altruism is the panacea; for H.G. Wells, eliminating private property. I can think of at least one feminist SF writer who thinks the abolition of men would do it, or, at least, of all masculinity.

  The Cultist, whether he wishes it or not, is always an enemy of virtue. This is because the nature of virtue is a matter of the careful balancing of extremes between two relative evils, and the extreme repudiation of absolute evils. The Cultist is an absolutist, and admits of no balance, no median. The Cultist is bedeviled by the alluring simplicity of his panacea, his one idea, and so compromises with absolute evils as if they were matters of taste. It is no accident that both Heinlein and Rand praise keeping one’s oaths in their writings, and both portray favorably the violation of matrimonial oaths by fornications and adulteries.

  In the same way the Cultist rebels against the worldliness of the Worldly Man, the Occultist rebels against the Cultist, and insists that there is more than just a material world and one brief and stoical life lived within it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin seems to me to be the most famous and most articulate representative of this stance within the science fiction community: while her books have favorably portrayed an anarchist utopia (as in The Dispossessed), she lacks the grinding dogmatism of an Ayn Rand. Note the gentle parable of Lathe of Heaven, that no direct solution to problems actually solves them, or the explicit teaching of the relativity of all truth in Four Ways to Forgiveness.

  I don’t mean the word Occultist here to mean a palmist armed with Tarot cards. I am using the word in its original sense. I mean it is one who believes in a hidden reality, a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear.

  In the modern world, the Occultist is more likely to select Evolution or the Life-Force as this occult object of reverence, rather than the Tao. Occultists, in the sense I am using the word, explicitly denounce no religion nor way of life except the religion of Abraham, whose God is jealous and does not permit the belief in many gods, nor the belief in many views of the world each no better than the next.

  Postmodernism, which rejects the concept of one overarching explanation for reality, is explicitly Occultic: the truth is hidden and never can be known.

  Occultists tend to be more wary of the progress of scie
nce and technology than Cultists or Worldlies. They see the drawbacks, the danger to the environment, and the psychological danger of treating the world as a mere resource to be exploited, rather than as living thing, or a sacred thing.

  The Occultists believe in undemanding virtues, such as tolerance and a certain civic duty, but even these are relative and partial. There is beauty in his world, indeed, the beauty of nature is often his only approach to the supernal, but that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no absolute truth and very little goodness aside from good manners and political correctness.

  Of the final stage, the pure nihilism I here call Anarchy, I can think of only one representative in science fiction, Peter Watts, and at that only one of his books, Blindsight. As with Heinlein, I am not speaking of the author himself, whose opinions I do not know and refuse to guess. I am merely speaking of the worldview as portrayed in his fiction.

  (The nihilist viewpoint is more often seen in fantasy or horror, as in H.P. Lovecraft, where the universe has literally nothing but roaring madness at its core, with crawling chaos serving it).

  The Anarchist rebels against the soft mysticism of the Occultist and against the zealous dogmatism of the Cultist, but he also despises the Worldly as weak and inconsequential, if not an enemy.

  For the Anarchist, the only truth is that there is no truth, no absolute truth, and even the few virtues maintained by the Worldly as necessary to maintain the social order are despised. Contrast the soldier Amanda Bates in Blindsight with Juan Rico in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The virtue of loyalty which forms the core of Rico’s character is utterly lacking in Bates.

  There is no discussion of morality in Blindsight: all decisions are at first merely a matter of expedience, and then, after the universe eliminates the uselessness of human consciousness as an evolutionary excrescence, no decisions whatever are made. The meat machines merely carry out their inbuilt programming.

  The aliens turn out to be unintelligent in the sense of being non-self-aware, but more intelligent than man in terms of being more highly organized. They are the ‘Chinese Rooms’ of Searle’s famous thought experiment brought to life, and, in this tale, the Chinese Room is better organized than the human brain and can outthink it. The entire Earth at the end of Blindsight is overrun with vampires the human race created itself, (a bizarrely meaningless and self-destructive act), and society fails when too many humans enter the artificial paradise of electronic nirvana, uploaded into worlds of their own dream-stuff, so that the remaining real life population cannot maintain the machinery, (a bizarrely selfish and self-destructive act).

  This is pure quill nihilism. For the Anarchist, life is meaningless, and destruction is the only creative act. The destruction of human life on Earth is part of the necessary evolutionary process to eliminate the ineffectiveness called the soul. Only the vampires are left, sleek and efficient and not human in any sense of the word, not even self-aware.

  In the Anarchist world, (1) the only truth is that there is no truth, (2) vice and virtue are interchangeable, equally meaningless, and human action is an epiphenomenon of biological motions, (3) beauty is ugly and ugliness is beautiful. Here we have reached the mere opposite of the world of High Fantasy.

  Here we have reached the abyss. In the anarchist world, no act is meaningful except to throw a bomb, and blow up the innocent. Man is lost in a despair so huge that it does not even seem like despair any longer.

  If you wish to see a visual metaphor of this state of mind, stroll through any modern art museum, and look at the distortions and aberrations of the human form displayed there. All of modern art is nothing but propaganda for one Anarchist principle, namely, that beauty does not exist, and that ugliness can be made beauty merely by all of us agreeing it is so. The proposition is false, and cannot be made true, no more than modern art can be made free of technical defects, much less aesthetic ones.

  Now we can see what the modern world is missing, aided by the admirable clarity of the blindsight of Blindsight. The Anarchist is rightfully devoted to destroying everything in the world, including himself; for if in fact there were no truth, goodness, nor beauty in the world, or no way to achieve them, then destruction is desirable. If we were all just programmed meat machines, suicide is the noblest option.

  But if there is beauty, even it is ineffable, something never to be captured in words, a mystic feeling elusive as a ghost, then the Occultist is right to eschew all talk of truth and virtue, and is right to tolerate any man’s approach to the inapproachable thing called beauty.

  But if there is truth, even if it is hard and cold and tinged with bronze, the Cultist is right to impose it on the world, no matter the cost in human suffering, and let all competing truths and claims of other virtues be damned. The only beauty is what serves the Cause.

  But if there is virtue, then men must get along with each other, and also go along with each other just enough to maintain the public weal. The talk of truth can be tolerated as long as no violence is done in its name, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

  But if there is magic, then there is a force in the world which sets the standard of truth and beauty and goodness, and bright magic is both more fair than dark magic, and merits our loyalty. Each man must find that light for himself, because no authority is to be trusted.

  But if there are miracles, and I mean miracles from God, then there is an authority, a divine and loving Father who has both the natural authority of a parent and of a creator and of a king. If one of those miracles is the Resurrection, then to all these other claims of authority, the divine can also claim the most romantic authority of all: the authority earned by merit. Christ has authority because he earned it by suffering the quest to the bitter end, and rescuing the fair bride from the red dragon. The crown of thorns is his reward.

  If there are miracles, there is at once truth and beauty and goodness, for all these flow from the same source.

  The question, finally, is one of philosophy, and, all drollery aside, it cannot be reduced to an analogy to science fiction. The philosophical question is whether Revelation is Truth? Unfortunately, without going into a long discussion of how Descartes and Hume and Kant attempted to ground philosophy on an epistemology of rationalism or empiricism, and failed to produce a coherent account of life, that last question cannot be answered.

  That question must wait for another day. We asked what is wrong with the world. What is wrong is that modern thought is caught in the disease of nihilism, the idea that there is no revelation.

  That disease causes the worldliness of sophisticates who wish religion would not bother them. They say that whatever truth there is or is not, it is not central to the business of life.

  That disease causes the stiff ferocity of zealots in any number of political movements with semi-religious or cultic overtones, from libertarianism to totalitarianism. They say truth is what the Cause says it is.

  That disease causes the tiresome vagueness and severe intellectual disorganization of moral relativism and postmodernism. They say truth is private, partial, relative, ineffable.

  That disease causes the madness of nihilism. They say truth is not truth.

  The rise of science and technology did not cause this disease, but the prestige of science aggravated it, because theology and philosophy cannot be reduced to algorithms, nor can skeptics willing to bow to the results of an experiment be persuaded to bow to virtues, powers and principalities they cannot see. There is a scientific method and a Socratic method, but there is no method for making revealed truths a living part of your soul.

  Transhumanism, beyond its near-term goals of improving human life through medicine and expanded human life span, has a long-term goal of abolishing human mortality. This is a worldly doctrine carried to an extreme.

  Immortal humans would be devils, since we would decay in our sins over the centuries, becoming ever more selfish and arrogant. Ah, but another long-term goal of transhumanism is to eliminate human sin and se
lfishness through technological manipulations of whatever bodies or housings our thought happen to occupy in the days after the Singularity. The Transhumanists, with childlike faith, merely assume the technology to redact, edit, program and condition human thoughts and personalities one day will exist, and we can turn our leaden souls to gold.

  The problem of who would program whom, and who conditions the conditioners, can only be solved by reversion to the Cultic frame of mind. Simplistic absolutes are the only things the Thought Police can impose on the human cattle. Sinners themselves, their ability to envision, much less create sinless epigones, is no greater than the ability of men and women now, here in this era, to raise perfect children. We cannot even picture what such Perfect People would be like, unless we picture a simplistic caricature: the John Galt of the Libertarians, or the New Man of the Marxists.

  The Perfect People would, of course, assuming anyone survived the perfection operations and the surrounding wars and genocides, still retain the mind-conditioning technology. Now there are only two possible options: first, they would retain enough of their human nature to be discontent with life. Seeking contentment, and not finding it in perfection, they must of course turn to what I call Occultism, the search for hidden things that cannot be put into words. By the mere process of trial and error, some other form of being will eventually be created, perhaps intelligent, perhaps self-aware, but not human in any sense that we mean the word.

  The second option is that the Perfect People would not retain their human nature. Creatures without souls but with intellects capable of free will are devils. The only thing they can do is destroy. At that point, eventually, the great anarchy will reign, and the only thing these heirs to the once-great human race will find to occupy their immortal and endless and meaningless time is discovering ways to destroy themselves and each other.

  That is why I am skeptical of the Transhumanist ambitions.

  The Hobbit, or, The Desolation of Tolkien