“JD Bernal’s 1929 warning about “human dimorphism”: Bernal wondered about a future in which “mechanizers” would live an enhanced, technoscientifically-evolved form of life, separated from the “humanizers,” the masses whose physical needs would be equally gratified thanks to scientific advancements—but who would prefer to exist in an atavistic human way, enjoying mundanities such as friendliness, poetry, dancing, drinking, singing, and art.”
“The word transhumanist was, in fact, coined by Bernal’s more famous acquaintance, Julian Huxley—Julian was Aldous’ socialist brother, who had his own visions of a quasi-eugenicist utopia.”
“There are alternative and instructive histories, as well as an important present, buried in these entanglements with utopia, science, and the left.”
“I wonder whether, in our over-determined rejection of utopianism, we have not also thrown out something valuable, or maybe simply useful. In putting forward a “recombinant tale of social and scientific consciousness” (a phrase I steal from Debbora Battaglia), I am especially interested in utopianism and forms of teleology [rationalization based on end-goals], because telos seems to matter, somehow, and I am interested in finding out not so much why it matters, but how it matters in thinking politically and morally.”
“Perhaps we have been scared off utopianism, teleologies and questions of purpose for too long now.”
“The discrediting of utopianism through the 20th century has had much to do with the discrediting of teleologies—both social and scientific.”
“The well-worn story here is the former, the one about the failure of social or historical teleologies, which came to hold sway with critiques of colonial Western notions of progress and superiority and the miseries of state-led communist projects.”
“By the 50s, most liberals and leftists vilified theories of history and teleological social dreaming (i.e., utopias), marking them as dangerous—pace Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper.”
“Other world events didn’t help utopian visions: the communalist experiments of the 60s drained out into consumerism and/or the spirituality of new age and self-help movements, the Iranian revolution morphed from a leftist to a theocratic movement and the Berlin Wall fell, leaving the world open to a directionless, Hobbesian-Scorcesian capitalism: homo wall street, homini lupus.”
“it had become easier to imagine the end of the world than the possibility of a better one, as a number of people came to observe.”
“In the sciences, the discrediting of a transcendent teleology may have started with the secular elimination of god as explanatory force in the 17th century, but the idea of human-directed progress took over nicely, at least for a while. Only in the 19th century did the optimistic armor of progress begin to show some end-time cracks.”
“Teleology gets further banished from the halls of science after Darwin. But as philosophers of science like Spyridon Koutroufinis have claimed, this in itself does not do away with teleology within science altogether; questions of direction and purpose continue to inform crucial discussions, especially in biology, though often by way of their negation. Cleaving strictly to the agreed-upon view, that the universe had laws and regularities but no greater purpose towards which it moved, required, and continues to require, the repression of much intuition on part of scientists, and of general ideas regarding progress.”
“Indeed, that repression, as Weber advocated in his famous essay Science as a Vocation, is de rigeur for scientists working in a disenchanted age. Their duty is not to give in to the temptations of metaphysics, and keep working with their nose to the grindstone even if the direction and purpose of either the universe or their own work is not clear at all.”
“Science and technological prediction were already part of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1627, with its vision of an advanced state in which humans live longer and can use efficient tools to procure their needs. Similarly, Mercier’s L’An 2400, published in 1771, envisions the world as it might appear centuries later. But Bacon’s is a lost city and Mercier’s a future city found or imagined; neither comes with a theory of history or stages of progress. It’s probably with Turgot’s 1750 Universal History and Condorcet’s 1792 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, written at the end of his life while in hiding, that we get the first systematic displays of progressivism.”
“Condorcet consciously produced his stages of progress by stating that an examination of the past allows the formulation of laws based on which we can infer—and plan for—a future.”
“Thus, he outlines ten epochs of mankind, ending with a future one he calls Epoch of the Future Progress of Mankind, during which, thanks to the growth of scientific knowledge, inequality would end and human moral progress would start on its final path.”
“It may be no coincidence, either, that his is the first utopian vision to not mention god at all. Condorcet’s influence on modernity and notions of progress as a whole cannot be underestimated. One might mention Hegel and then Marx as obvious descendants. Saint-Simon and then his student Comte followed Condorcet closely and it was out of this attempt at imagining a perfect human society of the future—the “New Social System”—that in fact Comte created his philosophy of mankind and society and termed it “sociology.””
“Progress towards the betterment of human life would come about through the Trinity of S’s: Science, Society and the State.”
“In his late utopian tract, New World Order (1940), HG Wells called that Trinity of S’s “the triangle of collectivisation, law and knowledge,” which, he added, “should embody the common purpose of all mankind,” thereby adding a teleological undercurrent to the project.”
“He takes seriously the thought that the path of contemporary science may be not part of the true “line of evolution” but just a kind of “pathology” and that it may come to be that what we as humans really need is simply the satisfaction of physical desires, “leading an idyllic, Melanesian existence of eating, drinking, friendliness, love-making, dancing and singing.” If that is the case, science will be led naturally back to the true evolutionary path of providing everyone with shelter and food and comfort and nothing more; thus “the golden age may settle permanently on the world.””
“However, he suspects that humans are made of and for higher things. His foil is Bertrand Russell’s pessimistic projection of science being defeated by the indolent masses in search of metaphysical hope or comfort, and besides, all that is futile anyway, given that everything shall crumble with the heat death of the universe.”
“Bernal thinks that “a sound intellectual humanity” inevitably tends towards “a real externalization,” and that its destiny from the get-go has been in “transforming the universe and itself.””
“JBS Haldane, a geneticist who delivered a lecture entitled “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” six years earlier at the Heretics Society; its content was inspired by HG Wells’ early book of predictions, Anticipations (1902).”
“Science is also seen as “man’s gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul.” Science is the conquest of the world, the flesh and the devil. But Haldane is no simple-minded futurist: “The future will be no primrose path.” Science is power and that has the tendency to “magnify injustices.””
“There has also been recent engagement from a number of artists and writers with another Russian utopian thinker, Nikolai Fedorov. Admired by Tolstoy as well as a host of revolutionaries and writers, Fedorov put his faith in reason and science, but was also a religious man, taken by the question of purpose—the title of his book, after all, was What was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task (1990).”
“Fedorov’s radical view of progress also required the unity of humanity and the universe through the human transformation of matter—to control not only “celestial bodies” but the very “composition of matter.” For one, this would transform “the blind force which brings hunger, disease and death” into a “life-giving force.” More importantly, it would transform “chaos” into “cosmos”—that is, an indifferent and meaningless arrangement of matter into a meaningful one.”
“Ultimately, this also means that humanity must defeat death, which is tantamount to meaninglessness. Indeed, science must be directed at “resurrection,” for not until all the dead are brought back to life will the purpose of human activity and the cosmos coincide in a fully meaningful way.”
“This may sound outlandish, but there is at least one reputable physicist at Tulane, Frank Tipler, who argues in his book The Physics of Immortality (1994) that resurrection will take place as the universe collapses, a singularity event which will produce infinite energy and computational power that would simulate the history of the entire universe.”
“But I read Fedorov’s cosmism as a trenchant critique of the kind of progress that leaves dead bodies in its wake and does not care about the true sense of “fellowship.” The dead who have gone before us cannot be treated merely as sacrificial bodies in the production of a future utopia that does not, ultimately, involve them. A good life cannot exist unless it exists for all humans, regardless of their position in space and time.”
“Engaging these alternative histories seems useful, in part, for reasons proposed by Wark: a forward-looking left must move forward with science and recuperate its alternative possibilities rather than retreat into escapist utopias or relativist futility. More than that, and pointing in the other direction, science in today’s world might re-engage its socialist past and turn it into a much more radical and moral present, loosened from the interests of the market and the state.”
“Although I might not fully share the same vision as libertarian transhumanists or some MIT physicists, it might be helpful to consider telos, ideas about a conscious universe, and questions of cosmic purpose, as these seem somehow to matter beyond empty transcendental metaphysics, sci-fi fantasy or formal speculative physics; they matter in imagining, thinking about and motivating a future we hope also to shape.”