The story drew national attention in part because it came on the heels of the Flint water crisis, which President Obama had declared a state of emergency in January. All the horrific anecdotes coming out of Flint are by now well known: the bureaucratic apathy, the government cover-ups. The water was so polluted with lead that all children under the age of six were declared poisoned, and a local pastor stopped using it for baptisms.
In light of this, it’s tempting to view the Pure Michigan ads as a particularly Orwellian form of propaganda—or, at the very least, a deft act of corporate whitewashing. The poetic irony has not been lost on the residents of Michigan, some of whom have made parody videos of the travel ads, focused on places like Flint and Detroit. In the comments section of a local news site, one resident offered up an acronym to describe “pure” Michigan under Governor Rick Snyder: “Pillaged, Upended, Raided, Emaciated.”
Both pollution scandals took place on the southeast side of the state, a region that frequently makes the national headlines for pollution, corruption, and crime; Pure Michigan lies conveniently elsewhere. Tim Allen is from the Detroit area and has been an occasional booster for the city’s revival, but when he was asked whether the Pure Michigan ads could lure millennials back to the state, he diverted attention to the coastline. “You have to show them some of the boardwalk, beach type of communities, like Saugatuck. And the National Cherry Festival in Traverse City,” he said. Unlike the old Say Yes campaign, which appealed to a sense of political obligation, the Pure Michigan ads ask only for aesthetic appreciation. If the children are to return, it will not be to rebuild the state’s moribund cities but to retreat into its bucolic peripheries.
If the pollution scandals have failed to tarnish the Pure Michigan brand, it’s because they don’t in any way disrupt the foundational myth of the ads: that the world can be neatly divided into two kinds of places. There are the fast-paced centers of industry and greed, where we are forced to do others’ bidding, and there are the pastoral retreats where we can find ourselves and, perhaps, be forgiven. The dichotomy is implicit in the ads’ many appeals to viewers who are blinded by the fog—real or metaphorical—that pervades our cities. “As life starts moving faster and faster,” says Allen, “we need to make a choice: to move faster with it, or to step off every now and then.”
This idea that one can simply “step off” the path of modernity and retreat into the wilderness bears a long lineage in the American imagination, from the transcendental creeds of Walden to the Romantic allure of primitivism in all its forms. In his formative history of Chicago, Nature’s Metropolis, William Cronon notes that the Midwest has often been characterized by a false division between the Fair Country and the Dark City, “the one pristine and unfallen, the other corrupt and unredeemed.” Late nineteenth-century novelists like Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Robert Herrick wrote about the rite of passage by which young people would leave their rural homelands to find work in Chicago, amid the stale air, the smoke, and the slaughterhouses, only to find themselves longing for the purity of the lands of their youth. Because they were disconnected from the natural world, Cronon argues, it became necessary for these urban transplants to maintain the myth that it was possible to escape into the wilderness—and in doing so, exculpate themselves from the dirty business of modernity.
To believe in this myth, though, is to ignore the actual extent to which human activity reshapes the natural world. The Great Lakes, which provide drinking water to more than 40 million people, are hardly wellsprings of purity. Over the past decade, loopholes in the Clean Water Act have turned the waters of Lake Michigan into what one environmental report referred to as “a witch’s brew of pollutants.” Temperatures in the Great Lakes have been warming since the late 1990s, and environmentalists predict lower water levels, drought, and a decline in biodiversity.
There was a time when I loved the Pure Michigan ads because they mirrored the way the terrain of my childhood existed in my imagination. But when you live here year-round, it’s difficult to sustain the illusion. You begin to notice things: the frequent beach closings due to E. coli, the toxic algal blooms that marbleize the shallows of lakes with neon green foam. When I was a child, Lake Michigan would freeze each winter far into the perceivable distance. The ice covered more than half the lake and was thick enough that you could walk for miles toward the horizon, from which vantage the entire Earth resembled the tundra of Antarctica or the surface of the moon. This past winter, only a thin lip of ice extended over the shoreline and was gone by early February.
Unlike the scandals in Flint and Detroit, which can be pinned on corruption and corporate greed, reports about drought and dead zones point to no clear villain. It’s difficult to read about them without feeling implicated. Still, these observable fluctuations are subtle, and it’s easy to dismiss them as the product of El Niño, or the meteorological fickleness that has always characterized this part of the country. As summer approaches, there are still days when the landscape resembles the image of itself reflected in the Pure Michigan ads, when sunrise finds the beaches empty and the water along the shoreline a serene and crystalline blue. In the light of a glorious morning, it’s tempting to believe that this is a place set apart: that the water itself is redemptive, that it will make us clean.
2016, The Awl
GHOST IN THE CLOUD
“I do plan to bring back my father,” Ray Kurzweil says. He is standing in the anemic light of a storage unit, his frame dwarfed by towers of cardboard boxes and oblong plastic bins. He wears tinted eyeglasses. He is in his early sixties, but something about the light or his posture makes him seem older. Kurzweil is now a director of engineering at Google, but this documentary was filmed in 2009, back when it was still possible to regard him as a lone visionary with eccentric ideas about the future. The boxes in the storage unit contain the remnants of his father’s life: photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and financial documents. For decades, he has been compiling these artifacts and storing them in this sepulcher he maintains near his house in Newton, Massachusetts. He takes out a notebook filled with his father’s handwriting and shows it to the camera. His father passed away in 1970, but Kurzweil believes that, one day, artificial intelligence will be able to use the memorabilia, along with DNA samples, to resurrect him. “People do live on in our memories, and in the creative works they leave behind,” he muses, “so we can gather up all those vibrations and bring them back, I believe.”
Technology, Kurzweil has conceded, is still a long way from bringing back the dead. His only hope of seeing his father resurrected is to live to see the singularity—the moment when computing power reaches an “intelligence explosion.” At this point, according to transhumanists such as Kurzweil, people who are merged with this technology will undergo a radical transformation. They will become posthuman: immortal, limitless, changed beyond recognition. Kurzweil predicts this will happen by the year 2045. Unlike his father, he, along with those of us who are lucky enough to survive into the middle of this century, will achieve immortality without ever tasting death.
But perhaps the apostle Paul put it more poetically: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
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I first read Kurzweil’s 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago’s southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the specter of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass. When I was not working, or drinking, time slipped away from me. The hours before my shifts were a wash of benzo breakfasts and listless afternoons spent at the kitchen window, watching seagulls circle the la
ndfill and men hustling dollies up and down the docks of an electrical plant.
At Bible school, I had studied a branch of dispensational theology that divided all of history into successive stages by which God revealed his truth: the Dispensation of Innocence, the Dispensation of Conscience, the Dispensation of Human Government…We were told we were living in the Dispensation of Grace, the penultimate era, which precedes that glorious culmination, the Millennial Kingdom, when the clouds part and Christ returns and life is altered beyond comprehension. But I no longer believed in this future. More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this teleological narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending assuredly toward a moment of final redemption. It was a loss that had fractured even my subjective experience of time. My hours had become non-hours. Days seemed to unravel and circle back on themselves.
The Kurzweil book belonged to a bartender at the jazz club where I worked. He was a physics student who whistled Steely Dan songs while counting his register and constantly jotted equations on the backs of cocktail napkins. He lent me the book a couple of weeks after I’d seen him reading it and asked—more out of boredom than genuine curiosity—what it was about. (“Computers,” he’d replied, after an unnaturally long pause.) I read the first pages on the train home from work, in the gray and spectral hours before dawn. “The twenty-first century will be different,” Kurzweil wrote. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems…and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future.”
Kurzweil had his own historical narrative. He divided all of evolution into successive epochs: the Epoch of Physics and Chemistry, the Epoch of Biology and DNA, the Epoch of Brains. We were living in the fifth epoch, when human intelligence begins to merge with technology. Soon we would reach the singularity, the point at which we would be transformed into what Kurzweil called “spiritual machines.” We would transfer or “resurrect” our minds onto supercomputers, allowing us to live forever. Our bodies would become incorruptible, immune to disease and decay, and we would acquire knowledge by uploading it to our brains. Nanotechnology would allow us to remake Earth into a terrestrial paradise, and then we would migrate to space, terraforming other planets. Our powers, in short, would be limitless.
It’s difficult to account for the totemic power I ascribed to the book. Its cover was made from some kind of holographic material that shimmered with unexpected colors when it caught the light. I carried it with me everywhere, tucked in the recesses of my backpack, though I was paranoid about being seen with it in public. It seemed to me a work of alchemy or a secret gospel. It’s strange, in retrospect, that I was not more skeptical of these promises. I’d grown up in the kind of millenarian sect of Christianity where pastors were always throwing out new dates for the Rapture. But Kurzweil’s prophecies seemed different because they were bolstered by science. Moore’s law held that computer processing power doubled every two years, meaning that technology was developing at an exponential rate. Thirty years ago, a computer chip contained 3,500 transistors. Today it has more than one billion. By 2045, the technology would be inside our bodies, and the arc of progress would curve into a vertical line.
Many transhumanists like Kurzweil contend that they are carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment—that theirs is a philosophy grounded in reason and empiricism, even if they do lapse occasionally into metaphysical language about “transcendence” and “eternal life.” As I read more about the movement, I learned that most transhumanists are atheists who, if they engage at all with monotheistic faith, defer to the familiar antagonisms between science and religion. Many regard Christianity in particular with hostility and argue that Christians are the greatest obstacle to the implementation of their ideas. In his novel, The Transhumanist Wager (2013), Zoltan Istvan, the founder of the Transhumanist political party, imagines Christians will be the ones to oppose the coming cybernetic revolution. Few Christians have shown much interest in transhumanism (or even awareness of it), but the Religious Right’s record of opposing stem cell research and genetic engineering suggests it would resist technological modifications to the body. “The greatest threat to humanity’s continuing evolution,” writes transhumanist Simon Young, “is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence.”
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Though few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology. The word “transhuman” first appeared not in a work of science or technology but in Henry Francis Cary’s 1814 translation of Dante’s Paradiso, the final book of the Divine Comedy. Dante has completed his journey through Paradise and is ascending into the spheres of heaven when his human flesh is suddenly transformed. He is vague about the nature of his new body. In fact, the metamorphosis leaves the poet, who has hardly paused for breath over the span of some sixty cantos, speechless. “Words may not tell of that transhuman change.”
Dante, in this passage, is dramatizing the resurrection, the moment when, according to Christian prophecies, the dead will rise from their graves and the living will be granted immortal flesh. There is a common misunderstanding today that the Christian’s soul is supposed to fly up to heaven after death, but the resurrection described in the New Testament is a mass, onetime eschatological event. For centuries, Christians believed that everyone who had ever died was being held in their graves in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be resuscitated at the Resurrection. The apostle Paul—who believed he would live to see the day—describes it as the moment when God “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” Much later, Augustine meditated on the “universal knowledge” that would be available to resurrected man: “Think how great, how beautiful, how certain, how unerring, how easily acquired this knowledge then will be.” According to the prophecies, Earth itself would be “resurrected,” returned to its prelapsarian state. The curses of the fall—death and degeneration—would be reversed and all would be permitted to eat from the tree of life, granting immortality.
The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have believed these prophecies would happen supernaturally. God would bring them about, when the time came. But since the medieval period, there has also persisted a tradition of Christians who believed that humanity could enact the resurrection through material means: namely, through science and technology. The first efforts of this sort were taken up by alchemists. Roger Bacon, a thirteenth-century friar who is often considered the first Western scientist, tried to develop an elixir of life that would mimic the effects of the resurrection as described in Paul’s epistles. The potion would make humans “immortal” and “uncorrupted,” granting them the four dowries that would infuse the resurrected body: claritas (luminosity), agilitas (travel at the speed of thought), subtilitas (the ability to pass through physical matter), and impassibilitas (strength and freedom from suffering).
The Enlightenment failed to eradicate projects of this sort. If anything, modern science provided more varied and creative ways for Christians to envision these prophecies. In the late nineteenth century, a Russian Orthodox ascetic named Nikolai Fedorov was inspired by Darwinism to argue that humans could direct their own evolution to bring about the resurrection. Up to this point, natural selection had been a random phenomenon, but now, thanks to technology, humans could intervene in this process. “Our body,” as he put it, “will be our business.” He suggested that the central task of humanity should be resurrecting everyone who had ever died. Calling on biblical prophecies, he wrote: “This day will be divine, awesome, but not miraculous, for resurrection will be a task not of miracle but of knowledge and common labor.” He speculated that technology could be harnessed to return Earth to its Edenic state. Space travel was also necessary, since as Earth became more and more
populated by the resurrected dead, we would have to inhabit other planets.
Fedorov had ideas about how science could enact the resurrection, but the details were opaque. The universe, he mused, was full of “dust” that had been left behind by our ancestors, and one day scientists would be able to gather up this dust to reconstruct the departed. Another option he floated was hereditary resurrection: sons and daughters could use their bodies to resurrect their parents, and the parents, once reborn, could bring back their own parents. Despite the archaic wording, it’s difficult to ignore the prescience underlying these ideas. Ancestral “dust” anticipates the discovery of DNA. Hereditary resurrection prefigures genetic cloning.
This theory was carried into the twentieth century by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit paleontologist who, like Fedorov, believed that evolution would lead to the Kingdom of God. In 1949, Teilhard proposed that in the future all machines would be linked to a vast global network that would enable human minds to merge. Over time, this unification of consciousness would lead to an intelligence explosion—the Omega point—enabling humanity to “break through the material framework of Time and Space” and merge seamlessly with the divine. The Omega point is an obvious precursor to Kurzweil’s singularity, but in Teilhard’s mind, it was how the biblical resurrection would take place. Christ was guiding evolution toward a state of glorification so that humanity could finally merge with God in eternal perfection. By this point, humans would no longer be human. Perhaps the priest had Dante in mind when he described these beings as “some sort of Trans-Human at the ultimate heart of things.”
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