by Josef Steiff
This emphasis is not surprising since in American culture there has been a long history of racism, homophobia, and other types of social exclusion. In addition, most of the debates surrounding evolution have tended to focus on matters of origins. The well-rehearsed spat between evolution and creationism is entirely concerned with the origins of life, such that these debates are generally backward looking. They are retrospective, matters of history. While these debates are important, the theory of evolution also raises a host of questions about the future, questions about where life on this planet is headed.
In many of the anime and manga mentioned above, there are worries about social exclusion and alienation as well, but these themes are not always tied directly to evolution. Also, unlike a lot of American pop culture, they do not emphasize the ways that evolution per se is dangerous, like the big scary mutant out to destroy humanity.
Instead, what these manga and anime consistently emphasize is humanity’s responses to the enigmatic promise of transformation. The way humans react to evolution is the fundamental problem. Everything circles back to how certain people respond to these challenges. For example, as Misato explains in End of Evangelion, Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion (Eva) can be understood in this way:You see Shinji, mankind was spawned by a being called Lilith, just like Adam was. We are the eighteenth Angel. The other Angels are just different possibilities of what we could have become. Sadly, we can’t coexist even though we’re fundamentally the same creatures.21
Furthermore, it is strongly implied that the Angels were deliberately sent by other humans.22 In which case, the big scary creatures hell-bent on attacking the Earth are intimately connected to humans. The alien is us . . . almost. This sort of move is common in the manga and anime mentioned above: a significant part of the perils facing humanity always involve a healthy dollop of human agency, both in creating and resolving the danger.
Two of the most important anime in the last twenty-five years, the television series Eva, along with the first two theatrical releases, and the movie Akira, demonstrate why there is reason to be anxious about the future of human evolution, and how emphasizing the role of agency reshapes considerations about such futures. While the latter point might appear trivial, thinking in the American context about humanity’s future is rather muddled, and the anime Eva and Akira present a way of wrestling with these possibilities in a more productive manner.23
Future Shock
To begin, why worry over the future of our evolution?
The clearest reason is that there might be no future: humankind may go extinct. There will be no more us, at least as we’ve grown accustomed to. Perhaps the most plausible cause of such a future is the damage humans have wrought to the environment, in particular global climate change. But worldwide pandemics, the depletion of natural resources, nuclear war, and even collision with asteroids have also been considered as possible causes of our annihilation. 24 Extinction marks the end of the species. This is an important part of life’s history on Earth, so it is a reasonable worry.
But another and even more fascinating reason is the potential transition of our species into something new. Thus far, the evolution of species has taken place on very large time scales. Evolution tends to be slow. However, it has been argued that humans have shortened this time frame dramatically. One strand in the philosophy of technology claims that technology is an extension of evolution. The human body is at once limited, but adaptable. One way in which humans adapt to their environments involves the use of tools. Through tools, humans have been able to live longer, healthier, and safer lives all across the planet, as well as in outer space. What humans lack biologically, we make up for through our technologies.25
There’s room for debate here about whether such tool use should in fact be considered an evolutionary adaptation. Regardless of one’s stance on that, clearly there are new technologies we possess now or which are anticipated to arrive shortly that could unambiguously accelerate human evolution. The clearest examples involve biotechnologies like human genetic engineering, the use of stem cells, and cloning. We could also add computing, information technology, nanotechnology, robotics, and cybernetics here as well. As Francis Fukuyama and others argue, biotechnologies provide ways to rewrite the human genome, allowing for the production of new human-like species. Other sorts of technologies could conceivably allow for the construction of radically “posthuman” species that are no longer dependent on organic, biological bodies (cyborgs, robots, the Puppeteer, and the like).
This is dangerous territory. Biological evolution has taken a long time. Technological development is much quicker. Consider Moore’s Law which claims that computing power doubles each generation; that it increases exponentially. This Law goes a fair distance in explaining the explosion of information technology in the last thirty years. Yet, while we can map in a fairly clear way the increases in computing capacity and predict where the strictly technical applications might go, it is much more difficult to guess how this will transform society. Put simply, when dealing with the technologies mentioned above (and others like them), we only have a dim idea what we are doing. There is no adequate baseline to understand exactly how this technology will affect us. Given the presumed potency of these technologies, there are genuine risks here.
Manufacturing Evolution
Neon Genesis Evangelion is all about anxiety. The most obvious example is Shinji’s angst about his relations with his father, his mother, women in his life, friends, and EVA Unit 1. While the series is more concerned with deftly exploring Shinji’s psychological problems, the plot itself is important to our discussion. The basic set up of the story is that three (briefly four) teenagers pilot EVAs, gigantic mecha consisting of armor that restrains some sort of hybrid organic/mechanical body, to fight different Angels of various shapes, sizes, and abstract forms. As we shall see, the plot itself is the product of a specific anxiety.
It’s strongly implied that a group called SEELE instigated the Angels’ invasion and has some sort of control of them. SEELE is the shadowy committee that engineered the experimentation on Adam, the first Angel. This experimentation produced the “Second Impact” in 2000 that wreaked havoc on the Earth’s environment, in turn upsetting world politics and setting the story itself into motion. They are also the initial sponsors of Gehirn, the organization that preceded the founding of NERV in 2010. NERV then takes the lead in fighting the Angels.
What then is SEELE’s purpose in all this? Simple: to restart human evolution. The reason that they are willing to destroy the world twice, first partially with the Second Impact, then totally with the Third Impact shown in End of Evangelion, is because of a very potent anxiety. SEELE sees humanity as having run the course of its evolutionary possibilities. From now on, we will not change, remaining separate, miserable individuals. To avoid this fate, they create a scenario using Shinji’s EVA in which all of humanity will be forced together into one organism. Misato puts it the following way:So mankind, a race of flawed and incomplete separate entities, has reached the end of its evolutionary potential. The Instrumentality Project will manufacture the evolution of man’s separate entities into a single consummate being.
This is SEELE’s goal in developing the EVAs and the Angels: To start human evolution over through this “Human Instrumentality Project.”
The anxiety that motivates SEELE’s Project intertwines two different points. First, that modern humanity is alienated from each other and the attempt to forge intimate relationships inevitably inflicts harm on those involved—Shinji’s relationships throughout the series work to illustrate this problem. Second, that for whatever reasons, some have lost faith not so much in the possibility of the future itself, but in our potential to create a better one for ourselves. The Eva series grounds this latter fear in biology, while others like Bill Joy or Martin Heidegger see it in technological advancement.26 Humanity has become lost to itself and has no future worth hoping for.
I Feel Sick
How then should we understand this “anxiety?” Many existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Heidegger have emphasized the philosophical significance of anxiety. As Heidegger developed the concept in Being and Time, anxiety involves a state-of-mind (something more than a feeling and closer to a way of living in the world) of uneasiness.
Unlike emotions such as love and fear, anxiety is not connected to any specific object. I might love someone and fear dogs, but this is not the case with anxiety. The world itself makes us anxious. We do not feel at home in the world. For Heidegger, anxiety is not a typical part of our lives. Usually, we follow along with the crowd, what he refers to as “the They.” But when some event causes us to break away from “the They,” we sense that there might be nothing beyond this sort of life. Heidegger calls this experience “anxiety.”
When anxiety is genuine, really felt, we do not feel at home. The hollowness of the everyday lives we lead becomes clear. Following Heidegger, when faced with this situation, we can turn away from it and return to hiding in our everyday existence, go back to “the They,” or we can embrace the anxiety and the questions it raises. At this point, anxiety can be productive because it forces the person to wrestle with her or his freedom to choose what it is he or she will do. Heidegger prefers the latter because it opens up the possibility for what he refers to as authentic existence, the specifics of which do not concern us here.
Anxiety opens up space for questioning the manner in which we live. Regardless of whether one accepts Heidegger’s larger argument about authenticity as a way to work through anxiety, the primordial experience about not feeling at home in the world remains a definitive part of human existence. This anxiety is always latent within human existence.
It is precisely this state-of-mind that drives SEELE’s Instrumentality Project. Given the apocalyptic imagery presented in End of Evangelion, the viewer might assume that this is perhaps not the best way to resolve one’s anxieties. Only Shinji and Asuka appear to retain human form after Third Impact. Every other living thing has been taken into the Sea of LCL, the primordial stuff of life.
What in our lives might produce anxiety so terrifying that it leads SEELE to pursue Third Impact? While there’s no clear consensus within American culture, or among philosophers, about science, technology or evolution, there is one persistent and worrisome strain: a tendency towards what Mary Midgley calls “fatalism.” Midgley uses this word rather than the more typical “determinism” because the latter is unhelpfully ambiguous. The meanings of “determinism” range from the strict laws of causality to a much softer sense of directing things in one way or another. Her claim is that when people worry about, say, genetic determinism, it is really “fatalism” that drives concerns: The idea that human choice plays no role in the universe. Everything is fated to happen.
At first glance, to be a fatalist about evolution might seem a bit odd. Part of Darwin’s genius was demonstrating the importance of chance and open-endedness in the development of species. The reply to such readings of Darwin is to say that what appears open-ended to us is a matter of our lack of knowledge. All things, including the development of various life-forms on Earth, have been fated by the laws of the universe. That it looks unpredictable is our problem, not the universe’s. Such strong claims make more sense against the backdrop of genetic reductionism. For example Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene argues that all life can be explained in terms of genes. The genes operate much like computer programs that try to pass themselves on to future generations, using organisms as mere vehicles. Evolution is thus the story of these competing genes trying to survive. Humans have no real agency in this story, since we are, in effect, nothing but flesh bags for propagating genes.
This sort of fatalism extends to the technologically mediated senses of evolution discussed above. To call Moore’s Law a “law” is not wholly innocent. While within science calling something a “law” is more of an honorific than an indication that the given theory is immutable, there are still echoes of absoluteness. Similar claims can be made about human endeavors, specifically laws of economics which drive these technologies that might produce posthumanity. The frequent battle-cry of “let the Market decide!” speaks to this fatalism. We assume we are powerless to stop the march of progress, technological development, or what-ever-you-want-to-call-it.
In the face of such fatalism, drastic measures are called for. If humanity can no longer evolve, the only option is to force the issue by becoming something radically different. Given the inevitability that humans will remain sad, isolated organisms, our future really is no future at all. In this situation, anxiety is a reasonable response. We are faced with the hollowness of the human endeavor. There is no point.
The Human Instrumentality Project attempts to resolve this anxious situation. But the cost is steep. Humans lose their individual bodies, which is the ultimate form of falling in to Heidegger’s “the They.” Everyone is forced into this “single, consummate being,” without any possibility of escape, either in the sense of opting out or retaining the capacity to be anxious. This decision amounts to giving up the game of being human. Faced with pain and alienation, SEELE opts, in a very undemocratic manner, to end a distinctive human sort of evolution in favor of a collective existence.
Men, We’re Going to the Apocalypse
After the rather disheartening ending of Eva, Akira presents a different response to a similar worry. The story begins in the late 1980s, when a group of children awaken to their immense psychic powers and extensive testing by the Japanese Government. There are at least twenty-eight of them, though of the original children, only Numbers 25 (Kiyoko), 26 (Takashi), and 27 (Masaru) are met in the flesh. The most powerful of these children is Number 28 (Akira). For reasons not made clear in the movie, Akira’s power goes out of control in 1988, destroying most of Tokyo. The remains of Akira are then cytogenetically entombed for later scientists to research.
The film then picks up in 2019, in the rebuilt Neo-Tokyo. A teenage biker punk named Tetsuo Shima has a chance encounter with Takashi, thus triggering Tetsuo’s own latent psychic abilities. Because of Tetsuo’s own potential, combined with some experiments and drugs provided by the government, his power goes out of control, threatening to totally destroy Neo-Tokyo. The film ends with a final intervention on the part of Kiyoko, Takashi, and Masaru that prevents the absolute worst from actually happening. Neo-Tokyo is decimated, but the world does not end.
In the context of our discussion, the most important aspect of Akira is the Numbered Children because they mark an enormous evolutionary leap. As Kei explains to Kaneda, Akira is like energy that emerged through evolution. There is a certain power that exists in all living things (and perhaps all matter), and Akira unleashed that power. Kei uses the analogy that it is like giving an amoeba a human’s capacity to build things.
Of course, this evolutionary leap is immensely dangerous. Akira’s power destroyed Tokyo and, through coming into contact with Takashi, Tetsuo manifests abilities no less devastating. But what make the situation truly worrisome is that this sort of power might be in all of humanity’s future—one day all of our descendents might manifest this energy. As the Scientist notes to the Colonel:The other day, a young researcher asked me something. He wondered if their power was the form the next stage of evolution was taking, and that perhaps that we’ll all be able to control it some day.
More bluntly, Kiyoko states:
Akira’s power exists within everyone.
And then the Numbers say at the end of the film that:
But someday, we’ll also be able to . . . You see, it’s already begun.
This is not as heavy-handed as the fatalism in Eva, but it seems that the writing is on the wall for humanity. We will become extinct or superseded. The wheels are in motion for a very different future than that we are accustomed to.
A Grotesque Kindergarten
Among other things that the film taps into is a fear of the dangers of evolution, th
ough in way different from Eva. The anxiety buried in Akira is the two-fold worry discussed earlier. On the one hand, the power of Akira and Tetsuo could potentially make humanity extinct or life very difficult (as Katsushiro Otomo depicts it in Volumes 4-6 of the manga). On the other hand, the Numbers represent the next stage of our evolution, in which case these children are the future, a future where the human species as we know it might be regarded as we now regard the Neanderthal. Homo sapiens is a species that had its moment and then left the evolutionary stage. Taking these points together, the Numbers become a threat not simply to continued human existence, but to the very meaning of human existence.
Akira does not depict humans as powerless, at least not entirely, in the face of such anxiety. Instead, the powers that the Numbers possess force everyone to make choices about how to respond. The Japanese government responds to the emergence of the first children in the 1980s by deciding to tap into the Numbers’ abilities. The Colonel puts the desire quite honestly:Maybe we shouldn’t touch that power . . . But we have to. We have to touch it and control it.
On the one hand, this impulse is totally understandable. The power of Akira and the other Numbers is enticing. On the other hand, indulging this desire led to annihilation of old Tokyo. After that, according to the Colonel, the scientists involved froze the remains of Akira, buried him deep underground, and planned to wait until humanity was better prepared.