There’s been quite a lot of chat about the shortcomings we’ve had to put up with due to Mother Nature, the dirty, treacherous cow, and this is the not-so-cleverly-hidden subtext of a lot of Brave New World–type thinking. These folks hate Nature, and they hate themselves as part of it, or her. McKibben cites an amazing speech given by Max More (last name chosen by himself) to the Extropian Convention (“extropy,” coined as the opposite to “entropy”). This speech took the form of a dissing of Mother Nature, and said, essentially, thanks for nothing and goodbye. Nature has made so many mistakes, the chief one being death. Why do we have to get old and die? Why is man the one creature that foresees his own death?
As in many religions—and the energy propelling the wilder fringes of this “more” enterprise is religious in essence—there has to be a second birth, one that gets around the indignity of having come out of a body—a female body—and, come to think of it, of having a body yourself. All that guck and blood and cells and death. Why do we have to eat? And, by implication, defecate. So messy. Maybe we can fix our digestive tracts so we just slip out a little pellet—say, once a month. Maybe we can be born again, this time out of an artificial head instead of a natural body, and download the contents of our brains into machines, and linger around in cyberspace, as in William Gibson’s novels. Though if you’ve read William Gibson, you’ll know the place is a queasy nightmare.
All the enhancements McKibben discusses are converging on the biggie, which is none other than the final nose-thumb at Nature—immortality. Immortality doesn’t fare so well in myth and story. Either you get it but forget to request eternal youth too and become a crumbling horror (Tithonus, the Sibyl of Cumae, Swift’s Struldbrugs), or you seize the immortality and the vitality but lose your soul and must live by feeding on the blood of the innocent (Melmoth the Wanderer, vampires, and so forth). The stories are clear: gods are immortal, men die, try to change it and you’ll end up worse off.
That doesn’t stop us from hankering. McKibben recognizes the impulse: “Objecting even slightly to immortality,” he rightly says, “is a little like arguing against ice cream—eternal life has only been humanity’s great dream since the moment we became conscious.” But unlike all previous generations, ours might be able to achieve it. This would alter us beyond recognition. We’d become a different species—one living in eternal bliss, in the eyes of its proponents; sort of like—well, angels, or superhuman beings, anyway. It would certainly mean an end to narrative. If life is endless, why tell stories? No more beginnings and middles because there will be no more endings. No Shakespeare for us, or Dante, or, well, any art, really. It’s all infested with mortality and reeks of earthiness. Our new angel-selves will no longer need or understand our art. They might have other art, though it would be pretty bloodless.
But once we’re well and truly immortal, what would we do all day? Wouldn’t we get tired of the endlessness, the monotony, the lack of meaningful event? Wouldn’t we get bored? Nope. We’d sit around and contemplate problems such as: “Where did the universe come from?” “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “What is the meaning of conscious existence?” Is that to be the result of all this admittedly fascinating science—a tedious first-year philosophy seminar? “Not to be impolite,” says McKibben, “but for this we trade our humanity?”
That’s the good version of the immortal mind. I encountered the bad version in a paperback I received through a high school book-a-month club. Donovan’s Brain was its title, and the brain in question was being kept alive in a large fish tank and fed on brain food. The hope of the scientists doing this was that the brain would grow in power and strength, and solve problems, such as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and benefit humankind. But Donovan when he had a body was a stock manipulator or the equivalent, and he bent his newfound mind powers in the direction of world domination, zapping people who got in his way. A big brain does not mean a nice brain. This was made clear to me at the age of twelve, and it’s made even clearer in Enough. There are some very clever people at work on the parts that will go into making up our immortality, and what they’re doing is on some levels fascinating—like playing with the biggest toy box you’ve ever seen—but they are not the people who should be deciding our future. Asking these kinds of scientists what improved human nature should be like is like asking ants what you should have in your backyard. Of course they would say “more ants.”
And while we’re on the subject, who exactly is “we”? The “we,” that is, who are promised all these goodies. “We” will be the “GenRich,” the rich in genes. “We” are certainly not the six billion people already on the planet, nor the ten billion projected for the year 2050—those will be the “GenPoor.” “We,” when we appear, will be a select few, and since our enhanced genes and our immortality are going to be so expensive, and will not survive—for instance—being squashed flat by tanks, we will have to take steps to protect ourselves. Doubtless “we” will devise almost impenetrable walls, as in the Zamyatin novel of the same name, or “we” will live in a castle, with “them”—the serfs and peasants, the dimwits, the mortals—roiling around outside. We will talk like James Dewey Watson; we’ll say things like “It’s not much fun being around dumb people.” In fact, we’ll behave a lot like the aristocrats of old, convinced of our own divine right. The serfs and peasants will hate us. Not to throw cold water on it, but if the serfs and peasants are true to form, sooner or later they’ll get hold of some pitchforks and torches and storm the barricades. So to avoid the peasants, we’ll have to go into outer space. Having fun yet?
The agenda of those who visualize themselves as the GenRich—like Past Lifers, Future Lifers never see themselves playing the role of ditch digger—is being pushed in the name of that magic duo, progress and inevitability, the twins that always make an appearance when quite a few potential shareholders smell megabucks in the air. (Along with them come the usual my-dick-is-bigger adjectives, as McKibben points out—guts and risk-taking and so forth—so if you don’t rush out and get your genes spliced and your head frozen, you’re some sort of a wuss.) “Progress” has deluded many, but surely its pretensions as a rallying slogan have been exploded by now. As for “inevitability,” it’s the rapist’s argument: the thing is going to happen anyway, so why not just lie back and enjoy it? Resistance is futile. (That was the old advice: now you’re told to scream and vomit, thus influencing the outcome. Times change.)
McKibben takes on both of the magic twins, and is particularly moving on “inevitability.” We still have choice, he says. Just because a thing has been invented doesn’t mean you have to use it. He offers as exempla the atomic bomb; the Japanese samurais’ rejection of guns; the Chinese abandonment of advanced sea power; and the Amish, who examine each new technology and accept or reject it according to social and spiritual criteria. We, too, he says, can accept or reject according to social and spiritual criteria. We can, and we should. We must decide as ourselves—as who we already are as human beings. We must decide from the fullness of our present humanity, flawed though it may be. As I’ve said, McKibben is an optimist. I agree with him about what we should do, but I’m not too sure we’ll do it.
The fact is—and this is not an argument McKibben uses explicitly—that the argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect. And imperfect beings cannot make perfect decisions. The decision about what constitutes human perfection would have to be a perfect decision; otherwise the result would be not perfection but imperfection. As witness the desire for several different mouths.
Perhaps our striving for perfection should take a different, more Blakean form. Perhaps Infinity can be seen in a grain of sand, and Eternity in an hour. Perhaps happiness is not a goal but a road. Perhaps the pursuit of happiness is that happiness. Perhaps we should take a clue from Tennyson,
and separate wisdom and knowledge, and admit that wisdom cannot be cloned or manufactured. Perhaps that admission is wisdom. Perhaps enough should be enough for us. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone.
George Orwell:
Some Personal
Connections
I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus I was able to read it at age nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like The Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book—the child’s version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead. So I gobbled up the adventures of Napoleon and Snowball, the smart, greedy, upwardly mobile pigs, and Squealer the spin-doctor, and Boxer the noble but thick-witted horse, and the easily led, slogan-chanting sheep, without making any connection with historical events.
To say that I was horrified by this book would be an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs were so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep were so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust. I cried my eyes out when Boxer the horse had an accident and was carted off to be made into dog food instead of being given the quiet corner of the pasture he’d been promised.
The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to George Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I’ve tried to watch out for since. In the world of Animal Farm, most speechifying and public palaver is bullshit and instigated lying, and though many characters are good-hearted and mean well, they can be frightened into closing their eyes to what’s really going on. The pigs browbeat the others with ideology, then twist that ideology to suit their own purposes: their language games were evident to me even at that age. As Orwell taught, it isn’t the labels—Christianity, socialism, Islam, democracy, Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good, the works—that are definitive, but the acts done in their names.
I could see, too, how easily those who have toppled an oppressive power take on its trappings and habits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right to warn us that democracy is the hardest form of government to maintain; Orwell knew that in the marrow of his bones because he’d seen it in action. How quickly the precept “All Animals Are Equal” is changed into “All Animals Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others.” What oily concern the pigs show for the welfare of the other animals, a concern that disguises their contempt for those they are manipulating. With what alacrity do they put on the once-despised uniforms of the tyrannous humans they have overthrown, and learn to use their whips. How self-righteously they justify their actions, helped by the verbal web-spinning of Squealer, their nimble-tongued press agent, until all power is in their trotters, and pretence is no longer necessary, and they rule by naked force. A revolution often means only that: a revolving, a turn of the wheel of fortune, by which those who were at the bottom mount to the top and assume the choice positions, crushing the former power-holders beneath them. We should beware of all those who plaster the landscape with large portraits of themselves, like the evil pig Napoleon.
Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the twentieth century, and it got George Orwell into trouble accordingly. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. I didn’t have all that figured out at the age of nine, of course—not in any conscious way. But we learn the patterns of stories before we learn their meanings, and Animal Farm has a very clear pattern.
Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Thus I read it in paperback a couple of years later, when I was in high school. Then I read it again, and again: it was right up there among my favourite books, along with Wuthering Heights. At the same time, I absorbed its two companions, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I was keen on all three of them, but I understood Darkness at Noon to be a tragedy about events that had already happened, and Brave New World to be a satirical comedy, with events that were unlikely to unfold in exactly that way. (“Orgy-Porgy,” indeed.) But Nineteen Eighty-Four struck me as more realistic, probably because Winston Smith was more like me, a skinny person who got tired a lot and was subjected to physical education under chilly conditions—this was a feature of my school—and who was silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons Nineteen Eighty-Four is best read when you are an adolescent; most adolescents feel like that.) I sympathized particularly with Winston Smith’s desire to write his forbidden thoughts down in a deliciously tempting secret blank book: I myself had not yet started to write, but I could see the attractions of it. I could also see the dangers because it’s this scribbling of his—along with illicit sex, another item with considerable allure for a teenager of the 1950s—that gets Winston into such a mess.
Animal Farm charts the progress of an idealistic movement of liberation toward a totalitarian dictatorship headed by a despotic tyrant; Nineteen Eighty-Four describes what it’s like to live entirely within such a system. Its hero, Winston Smith, has only fragmentary memories of what life was like before the present dreadful regime set in: he’s an orphan, a child of the collectivity. His father died in the war that has ushered in the repression, and his mother has disappeared, leaving him with only the reproachful glance she gave him as he betrayed her over a chocolate bar—a small betrayal that acts both as the key to Winston’s character and as a precursor to the many other betrayals in the book.
The government of Airstrip One, Winston’s “country,” is brutal. The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime’s need for enemies and wars—fictitious though both may be—which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole—these made a deep impression on me. Let me restate that: they frightened the stuffing out of me. Orwell was writing a satire about Stalin’s Soviet Union, a place about which I knew very little at the age of fourteen, but he did it so well that I could imagine such things happening anywhere.
There is no love interest in Animal Farm, but there is one in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston finds a soulmate in Julia, outwardly a devoted Party fanatic, secretly a girl who enjoys sex and makeup and other spots of decadence. But the two lovers are discovered, and Winston is tortured for thoughtcrime: inner disloyalty to the regime. He feels that if he can only remain faithful in his heart to Julia, his soul will be saved—a romantic concept, though one we are likely to endorse. But like all absolutist governments and religions, the Party demands that every personal loyalty be sacrificed to it and replaced with an absolute loyalty to Big Brother. Confronted with his worst fear in the dreaded Room 101, where there’s a nasty device involving a cage full of starving rats that can be fitted to the eyes, Winston breaks—“Don’t do it to me,” he pleads, “do it to Julia.” (This sentence has become shorthand in our household for the avoidance of onerous duties. Poor Julia—how hard we would make her life if she actually existed. She’d have to be on a lot of panel discussions, for instance.)
After his betrayal of Julia, Winston Smith becomes a handful of malleable goo. He truly believes that two and two make five and that he loves Big Brother. Our last glimpse of him shows him sitting drink-sodden at an outdoor café, knowing he’s a dead man walking and having learned that Julia has betrayed him too, while he listens to a popular refrain: “Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me.”
Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism—of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face forever. B
ut this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak—the doublethink language concocted by the regime. By expurgating all words that might be troublesome—“bad” is no longer permitted but becomes “double-plus-ungood”—and by making other words mean the opposite of what they used to mean—the place where people get tortured is the Ministry of Love, the building where the past is destroyed is the Ministry of Information—the rulers of Airstrip One wish to make it literally impossible for people to think straight. However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus it’s my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he’s usually been given credit for.
Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life—in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale. By that time I was forty-four, and I’d learned enough about real despotisms—through the reading of history, through travel, and through my membership in Amnesty International—that I didn’t need to rely on Orwell alone.
The majority of dystopias—Orwell’s included—have been written by men, and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them, they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who’ve defied the sex rules of the regime. They’ve acted as the temptresses of the male protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men themselves. Thus Julia, thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer of the Savage in Brave New World, thus the subversive femme fatale of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 seminal classic, We. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view—the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a “feminist dystopia,” except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered “feminist” by those who think women ought not to have these things.
In Other Worlds Page 13