by Joel Garreau
This second form of happiness involves the full exercise of your vital powers. If our vital powers and our scope are dramatically, almost unimaginably transformed, it’s hard to see how this pursuit of happiness will not be enhanced in a measurable way.
The third form of happiness that is inevitably sought by humans is the pursuit of a meaningful life. “There is one thing we know about meaning,” says Seligman, “that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life. Aristotle said the two noblest professions are teaching and politics, and I believe that as well. Raising children, and projecting a positive human future through your children, is a meaningful form of life. Saving the whales is a meaningful form of life. Fighting in Iraq is a meaningful form of life. Being an Arab terrorist is a meaningful form of life. Notice this isn’t a distinction between good and evil. That’s not part of this. This isn’t a theory of everything. This is a theory of meaning, and the theory says, joining and serving in things larger than you that you believe in while using your highest strengths is a recipe for meaning. One of the things people don’t like about my theory is that suicide bombers and the firemen who saved lives and lost their lives both had meaningful lives. I would condemn one as evil and the other as good, but not on the grounds of meaning.”
It’s impossible that there will be a drug for meaning, Seligman says. But if meaning suggests deploying your greatest strengths in the service of something you believe is larger than you are—pursuing the infinite game—that would seem to go to the heart of the measure of The Prevail Scenario: increased human connections. “Religion isn’t about believing things,” Armstrong says. “It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness. It doesn’t really matter what you believe as long as it leads you to practical compassion. If your belief in a traditional God makes you come out imbued with a desire to feel with your fellow human beings, to make a place for them in your heart, to work to end suffering in the world, then it’s good.”
Introducing compassion into the equation is at the core of meaning. “Without more kindliness in the world, technological power would mainly serve to increase men’s capacity to inflict harm on one another,” Bertrand Russell once wrote. Compassion may thus be at the core of successfully managing transcendence—of coming up with a practical way to Prevail over the blind forces of change.
“Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and more of other abstract and subtle attributes, such as love,” observes Ray Kurzweil. “And God has been called all these things, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never quite reaching this ideal. Thus the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form may be regarded as an essential spiritual quest.”
“Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love,” writes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire.”
ONCE UPON A TIME, drifting through the eternal magic lands of New Mexico, Jaron Lanier got to musing about meaning, ceremony and ritual.
He reflected on the time he was speaking at a conference and the subject of the use of embryonic stem cells came up. He recalls a man of the cloth getting up and ripping into the panelists. “Even if it’s just some little speck on a petri dish, if it’s human, it deserves dignity and you guys are taking away our dignity—you’re just a bunch of boys with technological toys. You have no knowledge of life—you are a disgrace,” Lanier remembers him saying.
This denunciation started Lanier thinking.
“I turned around,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘What kind of dignity do we care about? Do we care about dignity that is just granted? Or do we care about dignity that is earned?’
“So I’m Jewish. If there is one thing in life that is not dignified, it’s entering adolescence. So we have this thing called a bar mitzvah. The bar mitzvah is a ritual that is kind of a nuisance. It’s kind of expensive. It requires a lot of people to participate. And you know what? It creates a little bit of dignity. Not always enough. But it does have a function. It creates some awareness, some community involvement and some responsibility and a little bit of pride, and there you get dignity.
“Dignity is something people have to create. So I said, ‘You religious people, instead of sitting on your duffs and watching us and then critiquing, you should be the ones figuring out where the dignity comes from for all this. Why is it that when medicine changed and we started to have operations, that the religious people weren’t there with new rituals to try to lend some sense of comfort, dignity, meaning and community connection when somebody has an operation? Why is it still only the same old birth, marriage and death? Why are you guys sitting on the sidelines? So I challenge you. I don’t want to be living in a world in 20 years where this is a nonritualistic way to do stem cell research. There is a way to turn this around, to bust through, and that’s my third way. My way through these things is, instead of sitting back and assessing, you have to actively create new culture.’” The most important thing is not to leave it to the scientists.
I like Lanier’s notion. It resonates with my sense of human nature. As Ray Kurzweil says, “The essence of being human is being creative.” If culture and values are ever going to shape our technological evolution, we will need to mark our transcendence at every point, to show that we’re treating it seriously and taking responsibility. The nice thing about ceremony and ritual is that while churches can and should get involved—with their vestments and their sanctuaries—it can start from the bottom up. It can start with individuals and small groups—including those who describe themselves as spiritual if not religious—taking ownership of their future and inviting others to stand and witness. At these rituals we can deliberately seek patterns and tell stories—stories that perhaps can begin to contribute to the master narrative of what is happening to us. Our new Axial Age, if it is to come to pass, has got to start somewhere. Might as well be around our campfires.
George Bernard Shaw, who in his time was called the British Nietzsche, was so fascinated by the transcendent that he wrote a play called Man and Superman, in which he argues that the reason to never stop attempting to Prevail is to avoid the disease that most dangerously afflicts humankind:
DON JUAN: . . . My brain is the organ by which nature strives to understand itself. . . .
DEVIL: What is the use of knowing?
DON JUAN: . . . To be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? . . . And there you have our difference: To be in Hell is to drift; to be in Heaven is to steer. . . . At least I shall not be bored.
Perhaps it is with our devotions that we can start choosing to steer. Right now the stories we tell do not match the facts. You can see it in the way we handle our first primitive enhancements—our face-lifts, our Botox injections, our Viagra prescriptions, even our knee replacements and pacemaker implants. We still seem to be a little embarrassed about them, even while the number of procedures soars every year at double-digit rates. Will we forever keep mum about our obviously intense desire to break the bonds of mortality? Or should we lift the taboo and start dealing with it?
Shall we be bashful about these lines we are crossing because we do not have a way to make them meaningful? Or should we start marking these rites of passage as an important part of the future of human nature? Think about what happens when the first-grader whose hand you are holding
is old enough to take her SATs. By then there long will have been several means on the market to improve her score by 200 points or more. They no longer seem remarkable. “Those pharmaceuticals she takes? They simply help her express her natural abilities,” you say. “Like vitamins. They’re no different from the memory pills the boomers gobble up to banish their ‘senior moments.’ Her attachments and implants? So now she is always connected to Google. Big deal. It’s just simpler this way. Without her laptop, her enormous backpack bends her over that much less. She was hell bent and determined to have herself pierced anyway. Might as well have those damn things do something useful, like help her think faster. Hey, maybe these will help her get into Yale. Stranger things have happened. It worked for that babysitter she used to have, and he was thick as a brick. Now if they could just invent a new way to pay the tuition. . . . ”
Can we picture devotions marking the great significance of a young person getting her first cognition piercing—awakening her mind directly to the Web of all meaning? What about a rite of maturity in which someone is formally recognized as knowing enough worth keeping that the larger society marks the occasion of his well-deserved first memory upgrade? Should we have a liturgy of life everlasting as a person receives her first cellular age-reversal workup?
These rituals could have important content, important aspects of story. They could say, “Never forget who you were; always respect what you’ve become. You are a part of us, no matter how far you roam.” They could include a formal admonition to use these new powers only for good. They could include the observation that we may be playing for the highest stakes. We cannot detect any other intelligence in the universe. Maybe that’s because every other species in the cosmos has flunked this transcendence test horribly, leaving no trace behind. The playwright and former president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel sees “transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.” This is serious. This may be the ultimate final exam.
Will these rituals do any good?
I don’t know. Do baptisms, marriages and funerals—sanctifying birth, copulation and death—do any good? My experience says yes. At the very least they are celebrations of transformation where people cross barriers—barriers of class, gender, region, race and religion. They bring us together by officially marking and embracing critical moments. On these occasions, human connections that are rarely achieved elsewhere routinely occur.
If we are embarking on a path in which we stand to transform ourselves more than at any brief period in our species’ time on earth, we are creating new critical moments. Perhaps we might start formally marking the occasions.
If we did, inviting those we know from all walks of life and all levels of ability to these ceremonies, it would continue to knit together the fabrics of all the different kinds of human natures to come.
It would be about creating the third happiness, the happiness of being part of something much larger than us.
It would be about continuing to march up the ramp of human connectedness.
That, after all, might just possibly be the ultimate transcendence.
It might be the point of this final exam.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Epilogue
Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future is not ours to see. Que sera, sera.
—Doris Day, 1956
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
—Alan Turing, 1960
ACCORDING TO ancient Washington lore, a flap occurs when somebody inadvertently tells the truth.
In the early 21st century, there were several flaps involving DARPA. Admiral John Poindexter had created no end of trouble, distress and woe by pursuing a plan to mine databases that would enable the government to collect vast information on the citizenry in the name of fighting terrorism. Just when that was dying down, a DARPA plan surfaced that would have mapped information about expected futures. It would have allowed savvy people to make financial bets revealing their anticipations of events in the Middle East, such as prospective assassinations of various countries’ leaders. The balloon went up again. For his previous involvement in the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan administration, Poindexter had always been a lightning rod. But for these flaps, Poindexter finally was canned.
All of this had nothing to do with human enhancement, but the Defense Sciences Office took the fall. Powerful staffers of the Senate Appropriations Committee went looking for a way to rap DARPA’s knuckles. (You thought people elected to Congress made our laws? How quaint.) The staffers went down the list of DARPA’s projects, found the ones with titles that sounded frighteningly as though they involved the creation of a master race of superhumans, and zeroed out their budgets from the defense appropriations bill. There is scant evidence they knew much, if anything, about these projects. But we will probably never know the details, because significant people are determined that the whole affair be forever shrouded in mystery. The levels of secrecy were remarkable even for DARPA; they were astounding by the standards of the notoriously leaky Senate. Even insiders said it was hard to get a feel for what the facts really were. It took months of reporting and questioning, poking and prodding, even to get a formal “no comment” either from the leadership of the Senate Appropriations Committee or from Anthony J. Tether, the director of DARPA.
A careful study of DARPA’s programs a year later, however, showed little change. Considerable creative budgetary maneuvering ensued. The peas of quite a few programs now reside under new, and much better camouflaged, shells. “They’re saying, ‘Okay, this is the second strike. Do we have to go three strikes?’” one manager said. “It doesn’t stop anything. We’ll be smarter about how we position things.” Meanwhile, he said, new human enhancement programs are in the pipeline, “as bold or bolder” than the ones that preceded them. The slap by the Senate staffers did get DARPA’s attention, however. Tether reportedly is “covering his tracks. He wants paper. It’s like now he’s insisting on documentation. Before we move ahead, he wants somebody in the Army to say, ‘If you do this, we will use it.’ Which makes it somewhat more difficult. But you can always find somebody with stars who is willing to say, ‘Yes, if you can demonstrate that this is safe and effective, we’d use it in a heartbeat.’”
In the course of all this, the four-year hitch of Michael Goldblatt, the head of the Defense Sciences Office, came to its scheduled end. Goldblatt is the fellow whose enthusiasm for spending millions on human enhancement—including the creation of the celebrated telekinetic monkey—is fueled by the plight of his daughter, Gina, who is wheelchair-bound by her cerebral palsy.
The timing of his departure was convenient. “I’ve given Tony the ammunition,” Goldblatt says. “What I suggested he do is to tell the Senate staffers when the next briefing season starts soon, ‘We got rid of that crazy Goldblatt. He was out of control, a cowboy, looking for a way to kill us all, pump us full of drugs.’ ” Referring to the two men succeeding him, Goldblatt says he told Tether to add, “‘We’ve got in his place not only a consummately loyal U.S. Air Force officer, Steven Wax, but a world-famous pediatrician and critical-care specialist who ran one of the biggest and most prestigious hospitals in the country, Brett Giroir, chief medical officer for the Children’s Medical Center of Dallas. He will address all of the issues of ethics and everything else. He is a man who has dedicated his life to not only doing no harm but to doing no harm in the most innocent population—children. He’ll be the watchdog and the filter and et cetera, et cetera.’”
Relaxing in his Virginia living room, I chide Goldblatt for the incredible naïveté he and the Defense Sciences Office displayed in not thinking its plans to enhance humans would arouse controversy. If it were my agenda to carve you guys a new one, I told him, I could do it with one word: Frankenstein. Didn’t it occur to anybody that you were playing with fire?
“Only in jest. We are a community that talks to ourselves. It lives in a world of technically co
mpetent and astute people talking to other technically competent and astute people talking about potential and possibility.”
He rises and gets a copy of a small poster. On the left is a quote from The New York Times dated October 9, 1903. It says, “The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians in from one million to ten million years.” On the right is a quote from Orville Wright’s diary, dated October 9, 1903. “We started assembly today,” it says. The caption reads “DSO vs. others.”
“The very nature of the people who work in DARPA—they are not good at political gamesmanship,” Goldblatt says. “For the most part, people live in their own worlds. They start the day with the scientific journals, not the newspapers. To define them as nerds would be wrong. They are very bright, very broad. Maybe innocent would be a better word. The average program manager at DARPA will tell you, ‘I’m gonna make the world a better place based on my knowledge. I’m gonna give people capabilities they never thought they could get. I’m gonna push technology along.’ And when you do that, then you get the Bill Joys of the world saying, ‘Do you understand the consequences of this technology?’