I experienced my first magnitude 7.0-7.5 earthquake when I was 22 months old. It almost knocked me to the ground. That 1946 Vancouver Island earthquake struck Vancouver Island on June 23 at 10:15 a.m.[1] with a magnitude estimated at 7.0 Ms[2] and 7.5 Mw.[6] The main shock epicenter occurred in the Forbidden Plateau area northwest of Courtenay. While most of the large earthquakes in the Vancouver area occur at tectonic plate boundaries, the 1946 Vancouver Island earthquake was a crustal event. Shaking was felt from Portland, Oregon, to Prince Rupert, British Columbia. This is one of the most damaging earthquakes in the history of British Columbia, but damage was restricted because there were no heavily populated areas near the epicentre, where severe shaking occurred. There were, however, a whole series of landslides in the Forbidden Plateau area there were a whole series of landslides blocked streams and rivers to create lakes. The first hikers into the area gave them great names, Landslide Lake, Rock Fall Lake, Earthquake Lake etc.; over time these natural dams were eroded to nothing, leaving nothing but fading memories of those lakes. This earthquake is Canada's largest historic onshore earthquake.[1]
Three years later, an earthquake, an M8.1, struck at 8:01 p.m. PDT on August 2, 1949 in Haida Gwaii [formerly Queen Charlotte Islands], an interplate earthquake that occurred on the ocean bottom just off the west coast of the main south island [Graham Island]. The shock had a surface wave magnitude of 8.1 and a maximum Mercalli Intensity of VIII (Severe).
br />
.
Earthquake Drill
3rd Thursday in October 19, 2023 at 10:20 AM Pacific
I grew up in small towns and in the North where the rule is share and share alike. So, I'm a Creative Commons type of guy. Copy and paste ANY OF MY MATERIAL anywhere you want. Hyperlinks to your own Social Media are at the bottom of each post. This work is licensed under my Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
.
SOUND ON >> TO WATCH VIDEOS FULL SCREEN start the video and click on the YouTube Icon at the bottom, expanding there. Later When you close that window you will be brought back here.
I'll be part of your posse for some of
this if you wish. Mind you, I'm very busy right now, trying to save
some Wood
Ducks. ~ Stan G. Webb [supposed to be In Retirement]
July 24, 2021
Granny Darkly
Re: Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo , et al
Without even asking my permission
Microsoft downloaded Microsoft Edge and OneDrive.
All of the forums I've looked at also
say it is impossible to remove Microsoft Edge.
Probably downloaded with a Windows 10
and / or a Defender update.
Bill Gates has made $100,000+ dollars
from me since I started using some of their products in 1972.
They are stealing not only my bandwidth
(I pay for it all) but my precious digital storage space.
Some of it getting into the Dark Web
where I've had my ID stolen. Thank you Marissa Ann Mayer1
Chairperson of Yahoo for letting all of the information get hacked in
2012 and most egregiously bad for not telling everyone about it until
2015. 500 Million.
Stan G. Webb [supposed to be In Retirement]
1Marissa
Ann Mayer (/ˈmaɪ.ər/; born May 30, 1975) is an American
businesswoman and investor. She is an information technology
executive, and co-founder of Sunshine Contact. Mayer formerly served
as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, a position
she held from July 2012. It was announced in January 2017 that she
would step down from the company's board upon the sale of Yahoo!'s
operating business to Verizon Communications[5] for $4.8 billion.[6]
She would not join the newly combined company, now called Verizon
Media (formerly Oath), and announced her resignation on June 13,
2017.[6][7] She is a graduate of Stanford University and was a
long-time executive, usability leader, and key spokeswoman for Google
(employee #20).[8][9][10]
Dave
Rubin of The Rubin Report talks about how Facebook has found a new
way to be more Orwellian with the rollout of their disclaimers
warning users that they may have been exposed to extremist ideas. In
the name of countering violent extremism Facebook wants to know if
any of your friends are sharing “extremist” ideas or thoughts.
What could possibly go wrong? Watch Dave's FULL DIRECT MESSAGE here:
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correctness, it’s only by having calm rational conversations about
these issues that can help de-escalate the political polarization and
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Breaking Dawn Over A World of Scammers, It is time to round up and train our posse [a body of people, typically armed, summoned by a sheriff to enforce the law].
Scammer Drained My Bank Account So I Called His Victims
This refund scammer pretends
like he is working for a "Charity" of some sorts as he
wants to drain all of the money out of my account... After I'm done
messing with him I call up victims in real time and save them from
being scammed. What to expect to see on Scammer Payback Channel
Scammer files deleted, Scambaiter - Scambaiting, Scammer gets
glitterbomb, IRS Scam - Refund Scam, Amazon Scams, Apple Scam, iphone
order scam, India scammers, Scammer arrest, Mark Rober collaboration,
Jim Browning Collaboration, Ransomware, Fraud videos, Scam
operations, Scammer money mules, File deletion, Virus, Syskey scams,
Speaking with scam victims and much more! Make sure you check us
stopping scams at all of these places! Become a member:
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The YouTube Text below the line is not showing on this post ? Go directly to YouTube Link (above) and read it there https://youtu.be/-by7to8JVvw [12:05 minutes]
14-year-old Amelia considers herself a philosopher and futurist, especially after she read Aldous Huxley’s book, “A Brave New World”. It opened her eyes and made her see where civilization might be leading towards. Her talk revolves around the idea of living in a brave new world – a Huxleyan World – as depicted in the story, as well as what led us to it, and how civilization will be like once we are living in it. Could a world like this really become our reality soon?
Amelia is a student Binus School Simprugat in Jakarta.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Perhaps we will have brighter days ahead. Perhaps.
Those who think that we will have brighter days ahead may be sorrowfully disappointed Perhaps we will have brighter days ahead. 14-year-old Amelia considers herself a philosopher and futurist, especially after she read Aldous Huxley’s book, “A Brave New World”. It opened her eyes and made her see where civilization might be leading towards. Her talk revolves around the idea of living in a brave new world – a Huxleyan World – as depicted in the story, as well as what led us to it, and how civilization will be like once we are living in it. Could a world like this really become our reality soon? []
"If
you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the
consent of the ruled"
- Aldous Huxley* Interview by Mike Wallace on May 18, 1958, from the
Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin "This
is Aldous Huxley, a man haunted by a vision of hell on earth.
Home
Page of Aldous
Leonard Huxley(26
July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and
philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books—both novels and non-fiction
...
What
in 2021 would be called a 'podcast' Brave
New World (1956) – is read by Aldous Huxley as Narrator
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. An Episode of the CBS Radio
Workshop - The Theatre of the Mind. Featuring Aldous Huxley as
Narrator. Broadcast on 27 January and on 3 February 1956.
Brave
New World
(1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of
literature ever written.
An
exaggeration?
Tragically,
no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any
regime of universal
happiness.
For
sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific
prophecy. Hence to treat his masterpiece as ill-conceived futurology
rather than a work of great literature might seem to miss the point.
Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New World!" to
any
blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into
paradise-engineering
for all
sentient life.
So
how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy into
the archetypal dystopia?
If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology
to get rid of mental pain
altogether?
Brave
New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is
because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features
calculated to alienate his audience. Typically, reading BNW elicits
the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it
depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful
anticipation. In Brave
New World Revisited
(1958) Huxley himself describes BNW as a "nightmare".
Thus
BNW doesn't,
and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful
our lives could be if the human genome were intelligently rewritten.
In the era of post-genomic
medicine, our DNA is likely to be spliced and edited so we can all
enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak
experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs.
Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of
the Savage on
the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease
and unhappiness can be. If you think it does, then you enjoy an
enviably
sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For it's all
sugar-coated pseudo-realism.
In
Brave New World, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his
bourgeois audience about both
Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. He taps into, and
then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning
andeugenics.
Worse, it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be
the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture:
"motherhood", "home", "family",
"freedom", even "love". The exchange yields an
insipid happiness that's unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses
our unease and distaste.
In
BNW, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sports
such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex,
"the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly
perfect pleasure-drug, soma.
As
perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma
underwhelms. It's not really a utopian wonderdrug at all. Soma does
make you high. Yet it's more akin to a hangoverless tranquilliser or
an opiate - or a
psychic anaesthetising SSRI
like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. Third-millennium
neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer
product-range
of designer-drugs to order.
For
a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to
only a shallow, unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting
well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesn't give Bernard
Marx, the disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a
cheap thrill. Nor does it make him happy with his station in life.
John the Savage commits suicide soon after taking soma [guilt and
despair born of serotonin
depletion!?]. The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous) sex -
the only sex brave new worlders practise. But a regimen of soma
doesn't deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesn't
catalyse any mystical epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or
life-defining insights. It doesn't in any way promote personal
growth. Instead, soma provides a mindless, inauthentic "imbecile
happiness" - a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable
with their lack of freedom. The drug heightens suggestibility,
leaving its users vulnerable to government propaganda. Soma is a
narcotic that raises "a quite impenetrable wall between the
actual universe and their minds."
If
Huxley had wished to tantalise, rather than repel, emotional
primitives like us with the biological nirvana
soon in prospect, then he could have envisaged utopian wonderdrugs
which reinforced
or enriched our most cherished ideals. In our imaginations, perhaps
we might have been allowed - via chemically-enriched brave new
worlders - to turn ourselves into idealised versions of the sort of
people we'd most like to be. In this scenario, behavioural
conditioning, too, could have been used by the utopians to sustain,
rather than undermine, a more sympathetic ethos of civilised society
and a life well led. Likewise, biotechnology could
have been exploited in BNW to encode life-long fulfilment,
information-sensitive gradients of bliss, and super-intellects for
everyone - instead of manufacturing a rigid hierarchy of
genetically-preordained castes.
Huxley,
however, has an altogether different agenda in mind. He is seeking to
warn us against scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too well.
Although we tend to see other
people, not least the notional brave new worlders, as the hapless
victims of propaganda and disinformation, we may find it is we
ourselves who have been the manipulated dupes.
For
Huxley does an effective hatchet-job on the very sort of "unnatural"
hedonic engineering that most of us so urgently need. One practical
consequence has been to heighten our already exaggerated fears of
state-sanctioned mood-drugs.
Hence millions of screwed-up minds, improvable even today by
clinically-tested mood-boosters and anti-anxiety agents, just suffer
in silence instead. In part this is because people worry they might
become zombified addicts; and in part because they are unwilling to
cast themselves as humble supplicants of the medical profession by
taking state-rationed "antidepressants". Either way, the
human cost in fruitless ill-being is immense.
Fortunately,
the Net is opening up a vast trans-national free-market in
psychotropics. Online pharmaceutical markets will eventually sweep
away the restrictive practices of old medical drug cartels and their
allies in the pharmaceutical industry. The liberatory potential of
the Net as a global
drug-delivery and information network has only just begun.
Of
course, Huxley can't personally
be blamed for prolonging the pain of the old Darwinian order of
natural selection. Citing the ill-effects of Brave
New World
is not the same as impugning its author's motives. Aldous Huxley was
a deeply humane person as well as a brilliant polymath. He himself
suffered terribly after the death of his adored mother. But death and
suffering will be cured only by the application of bioscience. They
won't be abolished by spirituality, prophetic sci-fi, or literary
intellectualism.
So
what form might this cure take?
In
the future, it will be feasible technically
- at the very least - for pharmacotherapy
and genetic
medicine to re-engineer us so that we can become - to take one
example among billions - a cross between Jesus
and Einstein.
Potentially, transhumans
will be endowed with a greater capacity for love,
empathy and
emotional depth
than anything neurochemically accessible today. Our
selfish-gene-driven ancestors - in common with the cartoonish brave
new worlders - will strike posterity as functional psychopaths
by comparison; and posterity will be right.
In
contrast to Brave New World, however, the death of ageing
won't be followed by our swift demise after a sixty-odd year
life-span. We'll
have to reconcile ourselves to the prospect of living happily ever
after. Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a life of
unremitting bliss isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.
The
good news gets better. Drugs - not least the magical trinity of
empathogens, entactogens
and entheogens - and
eventually genetic engineering will open up revolutionary new state
spaces
of thought and emotion. Such modes of consciousness are simply
unimaginable
to the drug-innocent psyche. Today, their metabolic pathways lie
across forbidden gaps in the evolutionary fitness landscape. They
have previously been hidden by the pressure of natural selection: for
Nature has no power of anticipation. Open such spaces up, however,
and new modes of selfhood and introspection become accessible. The
Dark Age of primordial Darwinian
life is about to pass into history.
In
later life, Huxley himself modified his antipathy to drug-assisted
paradise. Island
(1962), Huxley's conception of a real
utopia, was modelled on his experiences of mescaline
and LSD. But until
we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being
securely encoded genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits
for the purposes of paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual
significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither
can its ineffable weirdness
and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus drugs such as mescaline,
and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants.
The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional
Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a
regime of selfish-DNA. Uncontrolled eruptions within the psyche must
be replaced by the precision-engineering of emotional tone, if
nothing else. If rational design is good enough for inorganic robots,
then it's good enough for us.
In
Brave New World, of course, there are no freak-outs on soma. One
suspects that this is partly because BNW's emotionally stunted
inhabitants don't have the imagination to have a bad trip. But mainly
it's because the effects of soma are no more intellectually
illuminating than getting a bit drunk.
In BNW, our already limited repertoire of hunter-gatherer emotions
has been constricted still further. Creative and destructive impulses
alike have been purged. The capacity for spirituality has been
extinguished. The utopians' "set-point"
on the pleasure-pain
axis has indeed been shifted. But the axis is flattened at both
ends.
To
cap it all, in Brave New World life-long emotional well-being is not
genetically pre-programmed as part of everyday mental health.
Emotional well-being isn't even assured from birth by euphoriant
drugs. For example, juvenile brave new worlders are traumatised with
electric shocks as part of the behaviorist-inspired conditioning
process in childhood. Toddlers from the lower orders are terrorised
with loud noises. This sort of aversion-therapy serves to condition
them against liking books. We are told the inhabitants of Brave New
World are happy. Yet they periodically experience unpleasant
thoughts, feelings and emotions. They just banish them with soma:
"One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments".
Even
then, none of the utopians of any caste come across as very happy.
This seems all too credible: more-or-less chronic happiness sounds
so uninteresting that it's easy to believe it must feel
uninteresting too. For sure, the utopians are mostly docile and
contented. Yet their emotions have been deliberately blunted and
repressed. Life is nice - but somehow a bit flat. In the words of the
Resident Controller of Western Europe: "No pains have been
spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, as far
as that is possible, from having emotions at all."
A
more ambitious target would be to make the world's
last unpleasant experience a precisely dateable event some time
next century; and from this minimum hedonic baseline, start aiming
higher. "Every day, and in every way, I am getting better and
better". Coué's mantra of therapeutic self-deception needn't
depend on the cultivation of beautiful thoughts. If harnessed to the
synthesis of smarter mood-enrichers and genetically-enhanced brains,
it might even come true.
Of
course, it's easy today to write mood-congruent tomes on how
everything could go wrong. This review essay is an exploration of
what it might be like if they go right. So it's worth contrasting the
attributes of Brave New World with the sorts of biological paradise
that may
be enjoyed by our ecstatic
descendants.
S t a s i s
Brave
New World is a benevolent dictatorship: a static, efficient,
totalitarian welfare-state. There is no war, poverty or crime.
Society is stratified by genetically-predestined caste.
Intellectually superior Alphas are the top-dogs. Servile, purposely
brain-damaged Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the bottom.
The lower orders are necessary in BNW because Alphas - even
soma-fuelled Alphas - could allegedly never be happy doing menial
jobs. It is not explained why doing menial work is inconsistent - if
you're an Alpha - with a life pharmacological hedonism
- nor, for that matter, with genetically-precoded wetware of
invincible bliss. In any case, our descendants are likely to automate
menial drudgery out of existence; that's what robots are for.
Notionally,
BNW is set in the year 632 AF (After Ford). Its biotechnology is
highly advanced. Yet the society itself has no historical dynamic:
"History is bunk". It is curious to find a utopia where
knowledge of the past is banned by the Controllers to prevent
invidious comparisons. One might imagine history lessons would be
encouraged instead. They would uncover a blood-stained horror-story.
Perhaps
the Controllers fear historical awareness would stir dissatisfaction
with the "utopian" present. Yet this is itself revealing.
For Brave New World is not an exciting
place to live in. It is a sterile, productivist utopia geared to the
consumption of
mass-produced goods: "Ending is better than mending".
Society is shaped by a single all-embracing political ideology. The
motto of the world state is "Community, Identity, Stability."
In
Brave New World, there is no depth of feeling, no ferment of ideas,
and no artistic creativity. Individuality is suppressed. Intellectual
excitement and discovery have been abolished. Its inhabitants are
laboratory-grown clones,
bottled and standardised from the hatchery. They are conditioned and
indoctrinated, and even brainwashed in their sleep. The utopians are
never educated to prize thinking for themselves. In Brave New World,
the twin goals of happiness and stability - both social and personal
- are not just prized but effectively equated.
This
surprisingly common notion is ill-conceived. The impregnable
well-being of our transhuman descendants is more likely to promote
greater diversity, both personal and societal, not stagnation. This
is because greater happiness, and in particular enhanced dopamine
function, doesn't merely extend the depth of one's motivation
to act: the hyper-dopaminergic sense of things
to be done.
It also broadens the range
of stimuli an organism finds rewarding. By expanding
the range of potential activities we enjoy, enhanced dopamine
function will ensure we will be less
likely to get stuck in a depressive rut. This rut leads to the kind
of learned helplessness that says nothing will do any good, Nature
will take its revenge, and utopias will always go wrong.
In
Brave New World, things do occasionally go wrong. But more to the
point, we are led to feel the whole social enterprise that BNW
represents is horribly misconceived from the outset. In BNW, nothing
much really changes. It is an alien world, but scarcely a rich or
inexhaustibly diverse one. Tellingly, the monotony of its pleasures
mirrors the poverty of our own imaginations in conceiving of
radically different ways to be happy. Today, we've barely even begun
to conceptualise the range of things it's possible to be happy about.
For our brains aren't blessed with the neurochemical substrates to do
so. Time spent counting one's blessings is rarely good for one's
genes.
BNW
is often taken as a pessimistic warning of the dangers of runaway
science and technology. Scientific progress, however, was apparently
frozen with the advent of a world state. Thus ironically it's not
perverse to interpret BNW as a warning of what happens when
scientific inquiry is suppressed. One of the reasons why many
relatively robust optimists - including some dopamine-driven
transhumanists - dislike Brave New World, and accordingly distrust
the prospect of universal happiness it symbolises, is that their
primary source of everyday aversive experience is boredom. BNW comes
across as a stagnant civilisation. It's got immovably stuck in a
severely sub-optimal state. Its inhabitants are too contented living
in their rut to extricate themselves and progress to higher things.
Superficially, yes, Brave New World is a technocratic society. Yet
the free flow of ideas and criticism central to science is absent.
Moreover the humanities have withered too. Subversive works of
literature are banned. Subtly but inexorably, BNW enforces conformity
in innumerable different ways. Its conformism feeds the popular
misconception that a life-time of happiness will [somehow] be boring
- even when the biochemical substrates of boredom have vanished.
Controller
Mustapha Mond
himself obliquely acknowledges the dystopian
sterility of BNW when he reflects on Bernard's tearful plea not to be
exiled to Iceland: "One would think he was going to have his
throat cut. Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand
that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island.
That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most
interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world.
All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too
self-consciously individual to fit into community life. All the
people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent
ideas of their own. Everyone, in a word, who's anyone..."
Admittedly,
Huxley's BNW enforces a much more benign conformism than Orwell's
terrifying 1984.
There's no Room 101, no torture, and no war. Early child-rearing
practices aside, it's not a study of physically
violent totalitarianism. Its riot-police use soma-vaporisers,
not tear-gas and truncheons. Yet its society is as dominated by caste
as any historical Eastern despotism. BNW recapitulates all Heaven's
hierarchies (recall all those angels, archangels, seraphim, etc.) and
few of its promised pleasures. Its satirical grotesqueries and
fundamental joylessness are far more memorably captured than its
delights - with one pregnant exception, soma.
Unlike
the residents of Heaven, BNW's inhabitants don't worship God.
Instead, they are brainwashed into revering a scarcely less abstract
and remote community. Formally, the community is presided over by the
spirit of the apostle of mass-production, Henry Ford. He is
worshipped as a god: Alphas and Betas attend soma-consecrated
"solidarity services" which culminate in an orgy. But
history has been abolished, salvation has already occurred, and the
utopians aren't going anywhere.
By
contrast, one factor of life spent with even mildly euphoric
hypomanic people is pretty constant. The tempo of life, the flow of
ideas, and the drama of events speeds up. In a Post-Darwinian Era of
universal life-long bliss, the possibility of stasis is remote; in
fact one can't rule out an ethos of permanent revolution. But however
great the intellectual ferment of ecstatic existence, the nastiness
of Darwinian life will have passed into oblivion with the molecular
machinery that sustained it.
I m b e c i l
i t y
Some drugs
dull, stupefy and sedate. Others sharpen, animate and intensify.
After
taking soma, one can apparently drift pleasantly off to sleep.
Bernard Marx, for instance, takes four tablets of soma to pass away a
long plane journey to the Reservation in New Mexico. When they arrive
at the Reservation, Bernard's companion, Lenina,
swallows half a gramme of soma when she begins to tire of the
Warden's
lecture, "with the result that she could now sit, serenely not
listening, thinking of nothing at all". Such a response suggests
the user's sensibilities are numbed rather than heightened. In BNW,
people resort to soma when they feel depressed, angry or have
intrusive negative thoughts. They take it because their lives, like
society itself, are empty of spirituality or higher meaning. Soma
keeps the population comfortable with their lot.
Soma
also shows physiological tolerance. Linda,
the Savage's mother, takes too much: up to twenty grammes a day.
Taken in excess, soma acts as a respiratory depressant. Linda
eventually dies of an overdose. This again suggests that Huxley
models soma more on opiates
than the sort of clinically valuable mood-brightener which subverts
and recalibrates the hedonic treadmill of negative feedback
mechanisms in the CNS. The parallel to be drawn with opiates is
admittedly far from exact. Unlike soma, good old-fashioned heroin
is bad news for your sex life. But like soma, it won't sharpen your
wits.
Even
today, the idea that chemically-driven happiness must dull and pacify
is demonstrably false. Mood-boosting psychostimulants
are likely to heighten awareness. They increase self-assertiveness.
On some indices, and in low doses, stimulants can improve
intellectual performance. Combat-troops on both sides in World War
Two, for instance, were regularly given amphetamines.
This didn't make them nicer or gentler or dumber. Dopaminergic
power-drugs tend to increase willpower, wakefulness and action.
"Serenics", by contrast, have
been researched by the military and the pharmaceutical industry. They
may indeed exert a quiescent effect - ideally on the enemy. But
variants could also be used on, or by, one's own troops to induce
fearlessness.
A
second and less warlike corrective to the dumb-and-docile stereotype
is provided by so-called manic-depressives. One reason that many
victims of bipolar
disorder, notably those who experience the euphoric sub-type of
(hypo-)mania, skip out on their lithium
is that when "euthymic" they can still partially recall
just how wonderfully intense
and euphoric life can be in its manic phase. Life on lithium is
flatter. For it's the havoc wrought on the lives of others which
makes the uncontrolled
exuberance of frank euphoric mania
so disastrous. Depressed or nominally euthymic people are easier for
the authorities to control than exuberant life-lovers.
Thus
one of the tasks facing a mature fusion of biological psychiatry and
psychogenetic medicine will be to deliver enriched well-being and
lucid intelligence to anyone who wants it without
running the risk of triggering ungovernable mania. MDMA(Ecstasy)
briefly offers a glimpse of what full-blooded mental
health might be like. Like soma, MDMA induces both happiness and
serenity. Unlike soma, MDMA is neurotoxic.
But used sparingly, it can also be profound, empathetic and soulfully
intense.
Drugs
which commonly induce dysphoria,
on the other hand, are truly sinister instruments of social control.
They are far more likely to induce the "infantile decorum"
demanded of BNW utopians than euphoriants. The major tranquillisers,
including the archetypal "chemical cosh" chlorpromazine
(Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as dopamine antagonists.
At high dosages, willpower is blunted, affect is flattened, and mood
is typically depressed. The subject becomes sedated. Intellectual
acuity is dulled. They are a widely-used tool in some penal systems.
A m o r a l i
t y
Soma doesn't
merely stupefy. At face value, the happiness it offers is amoral;
it's "hedonistic" in the baser sense. Soma-fuelled highs
aren't a function of the well-being of others. A synthetic high
doesn't force you to be happy for a reason: unlike people, a
good drug will never let you down. True, soma-consumption doesn't
actively promote anti-social behaviour. Yet the drug is all about
instant personal gratification.
Drug-naïve
John the Savage, by contrast, has a firm code of conduct. His
happiness - and sorrows - don't derive from taking a soul-corrupting
chemical. His emotional responses are apparently based on reasons -
though these reasons themselves presumably have a neurochemical
basis. Justified or unjustified, his happiness, like our own today,
will always be vulnerable to disappointment. Huxley clearly feels
that if a loved one dies, for instance, then one will not merely
grieve: it is appropriate
that one grieves, and there is good reason to do so. It would be
wrong
not to go into mourning. A friend who said he might be sad if you
died, but he wouldn't let it spoil his whole day - for instance -
might strike us as quite unfeeling, if rather droll: not much of a
friend at all.
By
our lights, the utopians show equally poor taste. They don't ever
grieve or treat each others' existence as special.
They are conditioned to treat death as natural and even pleasant. As
children, they are given sweets to eat when they go to watch the
process of dying in hospital. Their greatest kick comes from taking a
drug. Life on soma, together with early behavioural conditioning,
leaves them oblivious to the true welfare of others. The utopians are
blind to the tragedy of death; and to its pathos.
Surely
this is a powerful indictment of all
synthetic pleasures? Shouldn't we echo the Savage's denunciation of
soma to the Deltas: "Don't take that horrible stuff. It's
poison, it's poison...Poison to the soul as well as the body...Throw
it all away, that horrible poison". Likewise, don't all chemical
euphoriants rob us of our humanity?
Not
really; or only on the most malaise-sodden conception of what it
means to be human. Media stereotypes
of today's crude psychopharmacy are not a reliable guide to the next
few million years. It is sometimes supposed that all
psychoactive drug-taking must inherently be egotistical. This egotism
is exemplified in the contemporary world by the effects of
power-drugs such as cocaine
and the amphetamines, or
by the warm cocoon of emotional self-sufficiency acutely afforded by
opium and its more
potent analogues
and derivatives.
Yet drugs - not least the empathogens such as Ecstasy - and genetic
engineering can in principle be customised to let us be nicer;
to reinforce
our idealised codes of conduct. The complex pro-social role of
oxytocin,
the “trust hormone”, the "civilising neurotransmitter"
serotonin
and its multiple receptor sub-types,
is hugely instructive - if still poorly understood. If we genetically
re-regulate their function, we can make ourselves kinder as well as
happier.
The
crucial point is that, potentially, long-acting designer-drugs
needn't supplant our moral codes, but chemically predispose us to act
them out in the very way we would wish. Biotechnology allows us to
conquer what classical antiquity called akrasia
[literally, "bad mixture"]. This was a Greek term for the
character flaw of weakness of the will where an agent is unable to
perform an action that s/he knows to be right. Tomorrow's
"personality pills" permit us to become the kind of people
we'd most like to be - to fulfil our second-order desires. Such
self-reinvention is an option that our genetic constitution today
frequently precludes. Altruism and self-sacrifice for the benefit of
anonymous strangers - including starving Third World orphans whom we
acknowledge need resources desperately
more than we do - is extraordinarily hard to practise consistently.
Sometimes it's impossible, even for the most benevolent-minded of the
affluent planetary elite. Self-referential altruism is easier; but
it's also different - narrow and small-scale. Unfortunately, the true
altruists among our (non-)ancestors got eaten or outbred. Their genes
perished with them.
More
specifically; in chemical terms, very crudely, dopaminergics
fortify one's will-power, mu-opioids
enhance one's happiness, oxytocingergics enhance trust, while certain
serotonergics
can deepen one's empathy and social conscience. Safe, long-lasting
site-specific hybrids will do both.
Richer designer cocktails spiced with added ingredients will be far
better still. It is tempting to conceptualise such cocktails in terms
of our current knowledge of, say, oxytocin,
phenylethylamine,
substance P
antagonists, selective mu-opioid
agonists and
enkephalinase-inhibitors
etc. But this is probably naïve. Post-synaptic receptor antagonists
block their psychoactive effects, suggesting it's the post-synaptic
intra-cellular cascades they trigger which form the heartlands of the
soul. Our inner depths haven't yet been properly explored, let alone
genetically re-regulated.
Yet
our ignorance and inertia are receding fast. Molecular neuroscience
and behavioural genetics are proceeding at dizzying pace. Better
Living Through Chemistry doesn't have to be just a snappy slogan.
Take it seriously, and we can bootstrap our way into becoming smart
and happy while biologically deepening our social conscience too.
Hopefully, the need for manifestos
and ideological propaganda will pass. They must be replaced by an
international biomedical research program of paradise-engineering.
The fun hasn't even begun. The moral urgency is immense.
It's
true that morality in the contemporary sense may no longer be needed
when suffering has been cured. The distinction between value and
happiness has distinctively moral significance only in the Darwinian
Era where the fissure originated. Here, in the short-run, good
feelings and good conduct may conflict. Gratifying one's immediate
impulses sometimes leads to heartache in the longer term, both to
oneself and others. When suffering has been eliminated, however,
specifically moral
codes of conduct become redundant. On any negative
utilitarian analysis, at least, acts of immorality become
impossible. The values of our descendants will be predicated on
immense emotional well-being, but they won't necessarily be focused
on it; happiness may
have become part of the innate texture of sentient existence.
In
Brave New World, by contrast, unpleasantness hasn't
been eradicated. That's one reason its citizens' behaviour is so
shocking, and one reason they take soma. BNW's outright immorality
is all too conceivable by the reader.
Typically,
we are indignant when we see the callous way in which John the Savage
is treated, or when we witness the revulsion provoked in the Director
by the sight of John's ageing mother - the companion whom he had long
ago abandoned for dead after an ill-fated trip to the Reservation.
Above and beyond such nasty incidents, all sorts of sour
undercurrents are endemic to the society as a whole. Bernard is
chronically discontented, even "melancholy". The Alpha
misfits in Iceland are condemned to a bleak exile. Feely-author
Helmholtz
Watson is frustrated by a sense that he is capable of greater
things than authoring repetitive propaganda. The Director of
Hatcheries is humiliated
by the understandably aggrieved Bernard. Boastful Bernard is himself
reduced to tears of despair when the Savage refuses to be paraded in
front of assorted dignitaries and the Arch-Community-Songster of
Canterbury. Lesser problems and unpleasantnesses are commonplace. And
appallingly, the utopians come to gawp at John in his hermit's exile
and watch his suffering for
fun.
Brave
New World is a patently sub-standard utopia in need of some true
moral imagination - and indignation - to sort it out.
F a l s e H
a p p i n e s s
Huxley
implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental pain, the brave new
worlders have got rid of the most profound and sublime experiences
that life can offer as well. Most notably, brave new worlders have
sacrificed a mysterious deeper happiness which is implied, but not
stated, to be pharmacologically inaccessible to the utopians. The
metaphysical basis of this presumption is obscure.
There
are hints, too, that some of the utopians may feel an ill-defined
sense of dissatisfaction, an intermittent sense that their lives are
meaningless. It is implied, further, that if we are to find true
fulfilment and meaning in our own lives, then we must be able to
contrast the good parts of life with the bad parts, to feel both joy
and despair. As rationalisations go, it's a good one.
Yet
it's still wrong-headed. If pressed, we must concede that the victims
of chronic depression or pain today don't need interludes of
happiness or anaesthesia
to know they are suffering horribly. Moreover, if the mere relativity
of pain and pleasure were
true, then one might imagine that pseudo-memories in the form of
neurochemical artefacts imbued with the texture of "pastness"
would do the job of contrast just as well as raw nastiness. The
neurochemical signatures of deja
vu
and jamais
vu
provide us with clues on how the re-engineering could be done. But
this sort of stratagem isn't on Huxley's agenda. The clear
implication of Brave New World is that any
kind of drug-delivered happiness is "false" or inauthentic.
In similar fashion, all
forms of human genetic engineering and overt behavioural conditioning
are to be tarred with the same brush. Conversely, the natural
happiness of the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Savage on the
Reservation is portrayed as more real and authentic, albeit transient
and sometimes interspersed with sorrow.
The
contrast between true and false happiness, however, is itself
problematic. Even if the notion is both intelligible and potentially
referential, it's not clear that "natural",
selfish-DNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic consciousness than
precision-engineered gradients of information-sensitive euphoria.
Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs [and, ultimately,
genetic engineering] won't make things seem weird or alien. On the
contrary, they can deliver a greater
sense of realism, verisimilitude and emotional
depth to raw states of biochemical bliss than today's parochial
conception of Real Life. Future generations will "re-encephalise"
emotion to serve us,
sentient genetic vehicles, rather than selfish DNA. Our well-being
will feel utterly natural;
and in common with most things in the natural world, it will be so
too.
If
desired, too, designer drugs can be used to trigger paroxysms of
spiritual
enlightenment - or at least the phenomenology
thereof - transcending the ecstasies of the holiest mystic or the
hyper-religiosity of a temporal-lobe epileptic. So future
psychoactives needn't yield only the ersatz
happiness of a brave new worlder, nor will euphoriant abuse be
followed by the proverbial Dark Night Of The Soul. Just so long as
neurotransmitter activation of the right sub-receptors triggers the
right post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades regulated by the right
alleles of the right genes in the right way indefinitely - and this
is a technical
problem with a technical solution - then we have paradise
everlasting, at worst. If we want it, we can enjoy a liquid intensity
of awareness far more compelling than our mundane existence as
contemporary sleepwalking Homo
sapiens.
It will be vastly more enjoyable
to boot.
If
sustained, such modes of consciousness can furnish a far more potent
definition of reality than the psychiatric slumlands of the past.
Subtly or otherwise, today's unenriched textures of consciousness
express feelings of depersonalisation and derealisation. Such
feelings are frequently nameless - though still all too real -
because they are without proper contrast: anonymous angst-ridden
modes of selfhood that, in time, will best be forgotten. "True"
happiness, on the other hand, will feel totally "real".
Authenticity should be a design-specification of conscious mind, not
the fleeting and incidental by-product of the workings of selfish
DNA.
Tomorrow's
neuropharmacology,
then, offers incalculably greater riches than souped-up soma.
True, drugs can also deliver neurochemical wastelands of silliness
and shallowness. A lot of the state-spaces currently beyond our
mental horizons may be nasty or uninteresting or both. Statistically,
most are probably just psychotic. Yet a lot aren't. Entactogens,
say, [literally, to "touch within"] may eventually be as
big an industry as diet pills; and what they offer by way of a
capacity for self-love will be far more use in boosting personal
self-esteem.
"Entactogens",
"empathogens", "entheogens" - these are fancy
words. Until one is granted first-person experience of the states
they open up, the phraseology invoked to get some kind of
intellectual handle on Altered States may seem gobbledygook. to the
drug-naive. What on earth does it all mean?
But resort to such coinages isn't a retreat into obscurantism or
mystery-mongering. It's a bid to bring some kind of order to unmapped
exotica way beyond the drug-naïve imagination. One can try to hint
at the properties of even seriously
altered states by syntactically shuffling around the lexical husks of
the old order. But the kind of consciousness disclosed by these
extraordinary agents provides the basis for new primitive terms in
the language of a conceptual apparatus that hasn't yet been invented.
Such forms of what-it's-likeness can't properly be defined or evoked
within the state-specific resources of the old order. Ordinarily,
they're not neurochemically accessible to us at all. Genetically,
we're action-oriented hunter-gatherers, not introspective
psychonauts.
So
how well do we understand
the sort of happiness Huxley indicts?
Even
though we find the nature of BNW-issue "soma" as elusive as
its Vedic
ancestor, we think we can imagine, more-or-less, what taking "soma"
might be like; and judge accordingly. Within limits, plain "uppers"
and "downers" are intelligible to us in their effects,
though even here our semantic competence is debatable - right now,
it's hard to imagine what terms like "torture" and
"ecstasy" really denote. When talking about drugs with (in
one sense) more far-reaching effects, however, it's easy to lapse
into gibbering nonsense. If one has never taken a particular drug,
then one's conception of its distinctive nature derives from analogy
with familiar agents, or from its behavioural effects on other
people, not on the particular effects its use typically exerts on the
texture of consciousness. One may be confident that other people are
using the term in the same way only in virtue of their physiological
similarity to oneself, not through any set of operationally defined
criteria. Thus until one has tried a drug, it's hard to understand
what one is praising or condemning.
This
doesn't normally restrain us. Yet are we rationally
entitled to pass a judgement on any
drug-based civilisation based on one fictional model?
No,
surely not. Underground chemists and pharmaceutical companies alike
are likely to synthesise all sorts of "soma" in future.
Licitly or otherwise, we're going to explore what it's like; and
we'll like it a lot. But to suppose that the happiness of our
transhuman
descendants will thereby be "false" or shallow is naïve.
Post-humans are not going to get drunk and stoned. Their well-being
will infuse ideas, modes of introspection, varieties of selfhood,
structures of mentalese, and whole new sense modalities that haven't
even been dreamt of today.
Brave
New World-based soma-scenarios, by contrast, are highly conceivable.
This is one reason why they are so unrealistic.
T o t a l i t
a r i a n
BNW is a
benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for at
its pinnacle there are ten world-controllers. We get to meet its
spokesman, the donnish Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western
Europe. Mond governs a society where all aspects of an individual's
life, from conception and conveyor-belt reproduction onwards, are
determined by the state. The individuality of BNW's two billion
hatchlings is systematically stifled. A government bureau, the
Predestinators, decides a prospective citizen's role in the
hierarchy. Children are raised and conditioned by the state
bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families. There are only ten
thousand surnames. Value has been stripped away from the person as an
individual human being; respect belongs only to society as a whole.
Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. This
would seduce their allegiance away from the community as a whole by
providing a rival focus of affection. The individual's loyalty is
owed to the state alone. By getting rid of potential sources of
tension and anxiety - and dispelling residual discontents with soma -
the World State controls its populace no less than Big Brother.
Brave
New World, then, is centred around control and manipulation. As ever,
the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature and
Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus
controls both. Naturally, we find this control disquieting. One of
our deepest fears about the prospect of tampering with our natural
(i.e. selfish DNA-driven) biological endowment is that we will
ourselves be controlled and manipulated by others. Huxley plays on
these anxieties to devastating effect. He sows the fear that a future
world state may rob us of the right to be unhappy.
It
must be noted that this right is not immediately in jeopardy. Huxley,
however, evidently feels that the threat of compulsory well-being is
real. This is reflected in his choice of a quotation from Nicolas
Berdiaeff as BNW's epigraph. "Utopias appear to be much easier
to realize than one formerly believed. We currently face a question
that would otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid their
becoming definitively real?" Perhaps not all of the multiple
ironies here are intended by BNW's author.
Huxley
deftly coaxes us into siding with John the Savage as he defends the
right to suffer illness, pain, and fear against the arguments of the
indulgent Controller. The Savage claims the right to be unhappy. We
sympathise. Intuitively but obscurely, he shouldn't have to suffer
enforced bliss. We may claim, like the Savage, "the right to
grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and
cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy;
the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen
tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by
unspeakable pains of every kind". Yet the argument against
chemical enslavement cuts both ways. The point today - and at any
other time, surely - is that we should have the right not
to be unhappy. And above all, when suffering becomes truly optional,
we shouldn't force our toxic legacy wetware on others.
Yet
what will be the price of all this happiness?
It's
not what we might intuitively expect. Perhaps surprisingly, freedom
and individuality can potentially be enhanced
by chemically boosting personal well-being. Vulnerable and unhappy
people are probably more susceptible to brainwashing - and the
subtler sorts of mind-control - than active citizens who are happy
and psychologically robust. Happiness is empowering. In real life, it
is notable that mood- and resilience-enhancing drugs, such as the
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tend to reduce
submissiveness and subordinate behaviour. Rats and monkeys on SSRIs
climb the pecking order, or transcend it altogether. They don't seem
to try and dominate their fellows - loosely speaking, they just stop
letting themselves be messed around. If pharmacologically and
genetically enriched, we may all aspire to act likewise.
Admittedly,
this argument isn't decisive. It's a huge topic. Humans, a
philosopher once observed, are not rats.
Properly-controlled studies of altered serotonin function in humans
are lacking. The intra-cellular consequences of fifteen-plus
serotonin receptor
sub-types defy facile explanation. But we do know that a
dysfunctional serotonin system is correlated with low social-status.
Enhancing serotonin function - other things being equal - is likely
to leave an individual less
likely to submit to authority, not docile and emasculated. Brave New
World is exquisite satire, but the utopia it imagines is
sociologically and biologically implausible. Its happy conformists
are shallow cartoons.
Of
course, any
analysis of the state's role in future millennia is hugely
speculative. Both minimalist "night-watchman" states and
extreme totalitarian scenarios are conceivable. In some respects, any
future world government may indeed be far more intrusive than the
typical nation-state today. If the ageing
process and the inevitability of death is superseded, for
instance, then decisions about reproduction
- on Earth
at least - simply cannot be left to the discretion of individual
couples alone. This is because we'd soon be left with standing room
only. The imminence of widespread human cloning, too, makes increased
regulation and accountability inevitable - quite disturbingly so. But
challenges like population-control shouldn't overshadow the fact that
members of a happy, confident, psychologically robust citizenry are
far less likely to be the malleable pawns of a ruling elite than
contented fatalists. A chemically-enslaved underclass of happy helots
remains unlikely.
A n t h r o p
o c e n t r i c
Brave New
World is a utopia conceived on the basis of species-self-interest
masquerading as a universal paradise. Most of the inhabitants of our
planet don't get a look-in, any more than they do today.
Strong
words? Not really. Statistically, most of the suffering
in the contemporary world isn't undergone by human beings. It is
sometimes supposed that intensity and degree of consciousness -
between if not within species - is inseparably bound up with
intelligence. Accordingly, humans are prone to credit themselves with
a "higher" consciousness than members of other taxa, as
well as - sometimes more justifiably - sharper intellects. Non-human
animals aren't treated as morally and functionally akin to human
infants and toddlers, i.e. in need of looking after. Instead, they
are wantonly abused,
exploited, and
killed.
Yet
it is a striking fact that our most primitive experiences - both
phylogenetically and ontogenetically - are also the most vivid. For
physical
suffering probably has more to do with the number and synaptic
density of pain cells than a hypertrophied neocortex. The extremes of
pain and thirst, for example, are excruciatingly intense.
By contrast, the kinds of experience most associated with the acme of
human intellectual endeavour, namely thought-episodes in the
pre-frontal region of the brain, are phenomenologically so anaemic
that it is hard to introspect
their properties at all.
Hardcore
paradise-engineering - and not the brittle parody of paradise served
up in BNW - will eradicate such nastiness from the living world
altogether. None of Huxley's implicit criticism of the utopians can
conceivably apply to the rest of the animal
kingdom. For by no stretch of the imagination could the most
ardent misery-monger claim that non-human animal suffering is
essential for the production of great art and literature - a common
rationale for its preservation and alleged redeeming value in humans.
Nor would its loss lead to great spiritual emptiness. Animal
suffering is just savage, empty and pointless. So intelligent moral
agents will probably scrap it when high-tech
Jainism becomes computationally easy and cheap.
Whether
pain takes the form of the eternal Treblinka of our Fordist factory
farms and conveyor-belt killing
factories, or whether it's manifested as the cruelties of a
living world still governed by natural selection, the sheer
viciousness of the Darwinian Era is likely to horrify our morally
saner near-descendants. A few centuries hence - the chronological
details are sketchy - hordes of self-replicating nanorobots
armed with retroviral vectors and the power of on-board quantum
supercomputers may hunt out the biomolecular signature of aversive
experience all the way down the phylogenetic tree; and genetically
eliminate it. Meanwhile, cross-species depot-contraception, not
merciless predation,
will control population sizes in our wildlife parks. Carnivorous
killing-machines - and that includes dear misunderstood kitty,
a beautiful sociopath
- will be reprogrammed or phased out if the abolitionist
project is to be complete. Down on the farm,
tasty,
genetically-engineered ambrosia will replace abused sentience. For
paradise-engineering entails global
veganism and invitrotarianism. Utopia cannot be built on top of
an ecosystem of pain and fear. Unfortunately, this is an issue on
which Brave New World is silent.
How
is it possible to make such predictions with any confidence?
Properly
speaking, one can't, or at least not without a heap of caveats. The
details and chronology sketched here will most likely be mistaken;
and the neuroscience will soon date. Yet as technology progressively
gives intelligent agents the power to remould matter and energy to
suit our desires - or whims - only extraordinary malice
could induce us deliberately to sustain the painfulness of most
Darwinian life
indefinitely. For as our power increases, so does our complicity
in its persistence. Even unregenerate humans don't tend to be
sustainably ill-natured. So when genetically-engineered vat-food or
simple in
vitro meat tastes as good as butchered animal flesh, we may
muster enough moral courage to bring the animal holocaust to an end.
C a s t e - b
o u n d
In BNW,
genetic engineering isn't used straightforwardly to pre-code
happiness. Instead, it underwrites the subordination and inferiority
of the lower orders. In essence, Brave New World is a global caste
society. Social stratification is institutionalised in a five-way
genetic split. There is no social mobility. Alphas invariably rule,
Epsilons invariably toil. Genetic differences are reinforced by
systematic conditioning.
Historically,
dominance and winning have been associated with good, even manically
euphoric, mood; losing and submission
are associated with subdued spirits and depression. Rank
theory suggests that the far greater incidence of the
internalised correlate of the yielding sub-routine, depression,
reflects how low spirits were frequently more adaptive
among group-living organisms than manic
self-assertion. But in Brave New World, the correlation vanishes or
is even inverted. The lower orders are at
least
as happy as the Alphas thanks to soma, childhood conditioning and
their brain-damaged incapacity for original thought. Thus in
sleep-lessons on class consciousness, for instance, juvenile Betas
learn to love being Betas. They learn to respect Alphas who "work
much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever."
But they also learn to take pleasure in not being Gammas, Deltas, or
the even more witless Epsilons. "Oh no," the hypnopedia
tapes suggest, "I don't want to play with Delta children."
One
might imagine that progress in automation technology would eliminate
the menial, repetitive tasks so unsuitable for big-brained Alphas.
But apparently this would leave the lower castes disaffected and
without a role: allegedly a good reason for freezing scientific
progress where it is. It might be imagined, too, that one solution
here would be to stop producing oxygen-starved morons altogether. Why
not stick to churning out Alphas? The Controller Mustapha Mond
informs us that an all-Alpha society was once tried on an island. The
result of the experiment was civil war. 19 000 of the 22 000 Alphas
perished. Thus the lower castes are needed indefinitely. The
happiness that they derive from their routine-bound lives guarantees
stability for society as a whole. "The optimum population",
the Controller observes, "is modelled on the iceberg -
eight-ninths below the waterline, one-ninth above".
There
are strong counter-arguments and rebuttals that could be delivered
against any specific variant of this scenario. Yet Huxley isn't
interested in details. BNW is a deeply pessimistic blanket-warning
against all
forms of genetic engineering and eugenics. Shouldn't we keep the
status
quo
and ban them altogether? Let's play safe. In the last analysis,
Nature Knows Best.
As
it stands, this argument is horribly facile. The ways in which the
life sciences can be abused are certainly manifold. Bioethics
deserves to become a mainstream academic discipline. But the idea
that a living world organised on principles of blind genetic
selfishness - the bedrock of the Darwinian Era - is inherently better
than anything based on rational design is surely specious.
Selfishness,
whether in the technical or overlapping popular sense, is a
spectacularly
awful principle on which to base any civilisation. Sooner or later,
simple means-ends analysis, if nothing else, will dictate the use of
genetic engineering to manufacture constitutionally happy
mind/brains. Reams
of philosophical sophistry and complication aside, that's what we're
all after, obliquely
and under another description or otherwise; and biotechnology is the
only effective way to get it. For despite how frequently irrational
we may be in satisfying our desires, we're all slaves to the pleasure
principle. No one ever leaves a well-functioning pleasure-machine
because they get bored: unlike the derivative joys of food, drink and
sex, the delightfulness of intra-cranial self-stimulation of the
reward-centres shows no tolerance. Natural selection has
"encephalised" emotion to disguise our dependence on the
opioidergic and mesolimbic dopamine circuitry of reward.
Since raw, unfocused emotion is blind and impotent, its axonal and
dendritic processes have been recruited into innervating the
neocortex. All our layers of cortical complexity conspire to help
self-replicating DNA leave more copies of itself. Thus we fetishise
all sorts of irrelevant cerebral bric-a-brac ["intentional
objects": loosely, what we're happy or upset "about"]
that has come to be associated with adaptively nice and nasty
experiences in our past. But the attributes of power, status and
money, for instance, however obviously
nice they seem today, aren't inherently pleasurable. They yield only
a derivative kick that can be chemically edited out of existence.
Their cortical representations
have to be innervated by limbically-generated emotions in the right
way - or the wrong way - for them to seem nice at all.
Rationally,
then, if we want to modulate our happiness so that it's safe and
socially sustainable, we must genetically code pre-programmed
well-being in a way that shuts down the old dominance-and-submission
circuits too. Such a shut-down is crudely feasible today on
serotonergics, both recreational and clinical. Yet the shut-down can
be comprehensive and permanent. Germ-line gene therapy is better than
a lifetime on drugs.
Is
this sort of major genetic re-write likely?
Yes,
probably. A revolution in reproductive technologies is imminent.
Universal pre-implantation diagnosis may eventually become the norm.
But in the meantime, any unreconstructed power-trippers can get a far
bigger kick in immersive
VR than they can playing primate
party-politics. If one wants to be Master Of The Universe, then so be
it: a
chacun son gout.
The narrative software which supports such virtual worlds can even be
pharmacologically enhanced in the user so that virtual world mastery
is always better than The real thing - relegated one day, perhaps, to
a fading antiquarian relic. The fusion of drugs and
computer-generated worlds will yield greater verisimilitude than
anything possible in recalcitrant old organic
VR - the dynamic simulations which perceptual naïve realists
call the world. For we live in a messy and frustrating regime which
passes itself off as the real world, but is actually a
species-specific construct coded by DNA.
OK.
But can power-games really be confined exclusively to VR? Won't
tomorrow's Alphas want to dominate both?
This
question needs a book, not the obiter
dicta
of a literary essay. But if one can enjoy champagne, why drink meths,
or even be tempted to try it in the first place? In common with
non-human animals, we respond most powerfully to hot-button
supernormal stimuli. Getting turned-on by the heightened
verisimilitude of drugs-plus-VR from a very young age is likely to
eclipse anything else on offer. This isn't to deny that in any
transitional era to a mature post-Darwinian
paradise, there will have to be huge
safeguards - no less elaborate than the multiple failsafe procedures
surrounding the launch codes for today's nuclear weaponry. In the
near future, for instance, prospective candidates for political
leadership in the real world will probably have their DNA profiles
scrutinised no less exhaustively than their sexual
peccadillos. For it will be imprudent to elect unenriched
primitives endowed with potentially dangerous genotypes. If one is
going to put oneself and one's children into, say, Ecstasy-like
states of loving empathy and trust, then one is potentially more
vulnerable to genetic cavemen. But this is all the more reason to
design beautifully enhanced analogues of Ecstasy and coke which fuse
the best features of both - safely, sustainably and responsibly.
Even
if a power-tripper's fantasy wish-fulfilment is confined to private
universes, we are still likely to view it as an unnerving prospect.
One of the reasons we find the very thought of being dominated and
controlled and manipulated à
la
BNW so aversive is that we associate such images with frustration,
nastiness and depression. For sure, the Brave New Worlders are
typically happy rather than depressed. Yet they are all, bar perhaps
the Controllers, manipulated dupes. The worry that we ourselves might
ever suffer a similar fate is unsettling and depressing.
Brave New World gives happiness a bad name.
Yet
it's misery that deserves to be stigmatised and stamped out. Brave
New World dignifies unpleasantness in the guise of noble savagery
just when it's poised to become biologically optional. And on
occasion unpleasantness really can be horrific
- too bad to describe in words. Some forms of extreme pain, for
instance, are so terrible to experience that one would sacrifice the
whole world to get rid of the agony. Pain just this bad is happening
in the living world right now. It's misguided to ask whether such
pain is really
as bad as it seems to be - because the reality is the very appearance
one is trying vainly to describe. The extremes of so-called "mental"
pain can be no less dreadful. They may embody suicidal
despair far beyond everyday ill-spirits. They are happening right now
in the living world as well. Their existence reflects the way our
mind/brains are built. Unless the vertebrate central nervous system
is genetically recoded, there will be traumas and malaise in utopia
- any
utopia - too.
No
behavioural account of even moderately severe depression, for
instance, can do justice to its subjective awfulness. But a spectrum
of depressive signs and symptoms will persist within even a
latter-day Garden of Eden - in the absence of good drugs and better
genes. We can understand why depressive states evolved
among social animals in terms of the selective advantage of
depressive behaviour
in reinforcing adaptive
patterns of dominance and subordination, avoiding damaging physical
fights with superior rivals, or of inducing hypercholinergic
frenzy of reflective thought when life goes badly wrong - for one's
genes. Likewise, intense and unpleasant social
anxiety was sometimes adaptive too. So was an involuntary
capacity for the torments of sexual jealousy,
fear, terror, hunger, thirst and disgust. Our notions of dominance
and subordination are embedded within this stew of emotions. They are
clearly quite fundamental to our social relationships. They pervade
our whole conceptual scheme. When we try to imagine the distant
future, we may of course imagine hi-tech gee-whizzery. Yet
emotionally, we also think in primitive terms of dominance and
submission, of hierarchy
and power structures, superiority and inferiority. Even when we
imagine future computers and robots, we are liable to have
simple-minded fantasies about being used,
dominated, and overthrown. Bug-eyed extra-terrestrials from the
Planet Zog, too, and their legion of hydra-headed sci-fi cousins, are
implicitly assumed to have the motivational structure of our
vertebrate ancestors. Superficially they may be alien - all those
tentacles - but really they're just like us.
Surely they'll want to dominate us, control us, invade Earth etc?
Huxley's vision of control and manipulation is (somewhat) subtler;
but it belongs to the same atavistic tradition.
For
the foreseeable future, these concerns aren't
idle. We may rightly worry that if some of us - perhaps most of us -
are destined to get drugged-up, genetically-rewritten and plugged
into designer worlds, then might not invisible puppet-masters be
controlling us for their own ends, whatever their motives? Who'll be
in charge of the basement infrastructure which sustains all the
multiple layers of VR - and thus ultimately running the show? Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes?
Admittedly,
sophisticated and intellectually enriched post-humans are unlikely to
be naïve realists
about "perception"; so they'll recognise that what their
ancestors called "real life" was no more privileged than
what we might call, say, "the medieval world" - the virtual
worlds instantiated by our medieval forebears. But any unenriched
primitives still living in organic VR could still be potentially
dangerous, because they could bring everything else tumbling down. In
certain limited respects, their virtual worlds, like our own, would
causally co-vary with the mind-independent world in ways that
blissed-up total-VR dwellers would typically lack. So can it ever
be safe to be totally nice and totally happy?
These
topics deserve a book - many books - too. The fixations they express
are doubtless still of extreme interest to contemporary humans.
Sado-masochistic images of domination-and-submission loom large in a
lot of our fantasies too. The categories of experience they reflect
were of potent significance on the African savannah, where they bore
on the ability to get the "best" mates and leave most
copies of one's genes. But they won't persist for ever. A tendency to
such dominance-and-control syndromes is going to be written out of
the genome - as soon we gain mastery of rewriting the script. For on
the whole, we want our kids to be nice.
More
generally, the whole evolutionary environment of adaptation is poised
for a revolution. This is important. When any particular suite of
alleles ceases to be the result of random mutation and blind natural
selection, and is instead pre-selected by intelligent agents in
conscious anticipation
of their likely effects, then the criteria of genetic fitness will
change too. The sociobiological and popular senses of "selfish"
will progressively diverge rather than typically overlap. Allegedly
"immutable" human nature will change as well when the
genetic-rewrite gathers momentum and the Reproductive
Revolution matures. The classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a
close.
Unfortunately,
its death agonies may be prolonged. Knee-jerk pessimism and outright
cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the press. They are
common in literary academia. And of course any competent doom-monger
can glibly extrapolate the trends of the past into the future. Yet
anti-utopianism ignores even the foreseeable
discontinuities that lie ahead of us as we mature into post-humans.
Most notably, it ignores the major evolutionary transition now
imminent in the future of life. This is the era when we rewrite the
genome in our own interest to make ourselves happy in the richest
sense of the term. In the meantime, we just act out variations on
dramas scripted by selfish DNA.
P h i l i s t
i n e
Brave
New World is a stupid society. For the most part, even the Alphas
don't do anything more exalted than play Obstacle Golf. A handful of
the Alphas are well-delineated: Bernard, Helmholtz, and Mustapha
Mond. They are truly clever. Huxley is far too brilliant to write a
novel with convincingly dim-witted lead characters. The Savage, in
particular, is an implausibly articulate vehicle for Huxley's own
sympathies. But in the main, brave new worlders are empty-headed
mental invalids in the grip of terminal mind-rot - happy
pigs rather than types of unhappy Socrates.
Since
the utopians are (largely) contented with their lives, they don't
produce Great Art. Happiness and Great Art are allegedly
incompatible. Great Art and Great Literature are very dear to
Huxley's heart. Yet is artistic genius really stifled without inner
torment? Is paradise
strictly for low-brows?
There
is a great deal of ideological baggage that needs to be picked apart
here; or preferably slashed like a Gordian knot. The existence of
great art, unlike (controversially) great science, is not a
state-neutral fact about the world. Not least, "great art"
depends on the resonances it strikes in its audience. Today we're
stuck with legacy wetware and genetically-driven malaise. It's
frequently nasty and sometimes terrible. So we can currently
appreciate only too well "great" novels
and plays about murder, violence, treachery, child abuse, suicidal
despair etc. Such themes, especially when well-handled in classy
prose, strike us as more "authentic" than happy pap. Thus a
(decaying) Oxbridge literary intelligentsia can celebrate, say, the
wonderful cathartic experience offered by Greek tragedies - with
their everyday tales of bestiality, cannibalism, rape and murder
among the Greek gods. It's good to have one's baser appetites dressed
up so intelligently.
Yet
after the ecstatic phase-change ahead in our affective states - the
most important
evolutionary transition in the future of life itself - the classical
literary canon may fall into obscurity. Enriched minds with different
emotions encephalised
in different ways are unlikely to be edified by the cultural
artefacts of a bygone era. Conversely, we might ourselves take a
jaundiced view if we could inspect the artistic products of a
civilisation of native-born ecstatics. This is because any future art
which explores lives predicated on gradations of delight will seem
pretty vapid from here. We find it hard enough to imagine even one
flavour of sublimity, let alone a multitude.
The
nagging question may persist: will posterity's Art and Literature [or
art-forms expressing modes of experience we haven't even accessed
yet] really
be Great? To its creators, sure, their handiwork may seem brilliant
and beautiful, moving and profound. But might not its blissed-out
authors be simply conning themselves? Could they have lost true
critical insight, even if they retain its shadowy functional
analogues?
Such
questions demand a treatise on the nature and objectivity of value
judgements. Yet perhaps asking whether we would appreciate ecstatic
art of 500 or 5000 years hence is futile in the first place. We
simply can't know what we're talking about. For we are unhappy
pigs, and our own arts are mood-congruent perversions. The real
philistinism to worry about lies in the emotional illiteracy of the
present. Our genetically-enriched posterity will have no need of our
condescension.
T h i n g s
G o W r o n g
Even
by its own criteria, BNW is not
a society where everyone is happy. There are asylums in Iceland and
the Falklands for Alpha-male misfits. Bernard Marx is disaffected and
emotionally insecure; a mistake in the bottling-plant left him
stunted. Lenina has lupus. If you run out of soma, a fate which
befalls Lenina when visiting the Reservation, you feel sick:
well-being is not truly genetically pre-programmed. Almost every page
of the novel is steeped in negative
vocabulary. Its idiom belongs to the era it has notionally
superseded. On a global scale, the whole society
of the world state is an abomination - science gone mad - in most
people's eyes, at any rate. In Brave
New World Revisited, Huxley clearly expects us to share his
repugnance.
Surely
any
utopia can go terribly wrong? One thinks of Christianity; the Soviet
experiment; The French Revolution; and Pol Pot's Democratic
Kampuchea. All ideas and ideals get horribly perverted by power and
its pursuit. So what horrors might we be letting ourselves in for in
a global species-project to abolish the biological substrates
of malaise?
There
is an important distinction to be drawn here. In a future
civilisation where aversive experience is genetically impossible -
forbidden not by social diktat
but because its biochemical substrates are absent - then the notion
of what it means
for anything to go
wrong will be different from today. If this innovative usage is
to be adopted, then we're dealing with a separate and currently
ill-defined - if not mystical - concept; and we run a risk of
conflating the two senses. For if we are incapable of aversive
experience, then the notion of things
going wrong
with our lives - or anyone else's - doesn't apply in any but a
Pickwickian sense. "Going wrong" and "being terrible"
as we understand such concepts today are inseparable from the
textures of nastiness in which they had their origin. Their simple
transposition to the Post-Darwinian Era doesn't work.
Perhaps
functional analogues
of things going wrong will indeed apply - even in a secular
biological heaven where the phenomenology of nastiness has been wiped
out. So the idea isn't entirely fanciful. For the foreseeable future,
functional analogues of phenomenal pain will be needed in early
transhumans no less than in silicon robots to alert their bodies to
noxious tissue damage etc. Also, functional analogues of "things
going wrong", at least in one sense, are needed to produce great
science and technology, so that acuity of critical judgement is
maintained; uncontrolled euphoric mania is not a recipe for
scientific genius in even the most high-octane supermind. Yet
directly or indirectly, the very notion of "going wrong" in
the contemporary sense seems bound up with a distinctive and
unpleasant phenomenology of consciousness: a deficiency of
well-being, not a surfeit.
This
doesn't stop us today from dreaming up scenarios of blissed-out
utopias which strike us as distasteful - or even nightmarish - when
contemplated through the lens of our own darkened minds. This is
because chemically-unenriched consciousness is a medium which
corrupts anything that it seeks to express. The medium is not the
message; but it leaves its signature indelibly upon it. We may
imagine
future worlds in which there is no great art, no real spirituality,
no true humanity, no personal growth through life-enriching traumas
and tragedies, etc. We may conjure up notional future worlds, too,
whose belief-systems rest on a false metaphysic: e.g. an ideal
theocracy - is it a real utopia if it transpires there's no God? Yet
it's hard to escape the conclusion that "ill-effects" from
which no one ever suffers
are ontological flights of fancy. The spectre of happy dystopias
may trouble some of us today rather than strike us as a contradiction
in terms. But like Huxley's Brave New World, they are fantasies born
of the very pathology that they seek to warn us against.
This
is not to deny that the transition
to the new Post-Darwinian Era will be stressful and conflict-ridden.
We learn from the Controller that the same was true of Brave New
World - civilisation as we know it today was destroyed in the Nine
Years' War. One hopes, on rather limited evidence, that the
birth-pangs of the new
genetic order will be less traumatic. Yet the supposition that a
society predicated on universal bliss engineered by science is
inherently
wrong - as Huxley wants us to believe - rests on obscure metaphysics
as well as questionable ethics. Sin
is a concept best left to medieval theologians.
C o n s u m e
r i s t
Brave
New World is a "Fordist" utopia based on production and
consumption. It would seem, nonetheless, that there is no mandatory
work-place drug-testing
for soma; if there were, its detection would presumably be
encouraged. In our own society, taking drugs may compromise a
person's work-role. Procuring illicit
drugs may divert the user from an orthodox consumer life-style. This
is because the immediate rewards to be gained from even trashy
recreational euphoriants are more intense than the buzz derived from
acquiring more consumer fripperies. In BNW, however, the production
and consumption of manufactured goods is (somehow) harmoniously
integrated with a life-style of drugs-and-sex. Its inhabitants are
given no time for spiritual contemplation. Solitude is discouraged.
The utopians are purposely kept occupied and focused on working for
yet more consumption: "No leisure from pleasure".
Is
this our destiny too?
Almost
certainly not. Productivist visions of paradise are unrealistic if
they don't incorporate an all-important genomic
revolution in hedonic
engineering. Beyond a bare subsistence minimum, there is no
inherent positive long-term correlation between wealth
and happiness. Windfalls and spending-sprees do typically bring
short-term highs. Yet they don't subvert the hedonic treadmill of
inhibitory feedback mechanisms in the brain. Each of us tends to have
a hedonic
set-point about which our "well"-being fluctuates. That
set-point is hard to recalibrate over a lifetime without
pharmacological
or genetic
intervention. Interlocking neurotransmitter systems in the CNS have
been selected to embody both short- and long-term negative feedback
loops. They are usually efficient. Unless they are chemically
subverted, such mechanisms stop most of us from being contented - or
clinically depressed - for very long. The endless cycle of ups and
downs - our own private re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus - is an
"adaptation" that helps selfish genes to leave more copies
of themselves; in Nature, alas, the restless malcontents genetically
out-compete happy lotus-eaters. It's an adaptation that won't go away
just by messing around with our external environment. This is in no
way to deny the distinct possibility that our descendants will be
temperamentally ecstatic. They may well consume lots of material
goods too - if they don't spend their whole lives in fantasy VR. Yet
their well-being cannot derive from an unbridled orgy of personal
consumption. Authentic mental health depends on dismantling the
hedonic treadmill itself; or more strictly, recalibrating its axis to
endow its bearers with a motivational system based on gradients
of immense well-being.
So
what sort of scenario can we expect? If we opt for gradations of
genetically pre-programmed bliss, just what, if anything, is our
marvellous well-being likely to focus on?
First,
in a mature IT
society, the harnessing of psychopharmacology and biotechnology to
ubiquitous virtual reality software gives scope for unlimited
good experiences for everyone. Any sensory experience one wants, any
experiential manifold one can imagine, any narrative structure one
desires, can be far better realised in VR than in outmoded
conceptions of Real Life.
At
present, society is based on the assumption that goods and services -
and the good experiences they can generate - are a finite scarce
resource. But ubiquitous VR can generate (in effect) infinite
abundance. An IT society supersedes the old zero-sum paradigm and
Fordist mass-manufacture. It rewrites the orthodox laws of market
economics. The ability of immersive multi-modal VR to make one -
depending on the software title one opts for - Lord Of Creation,
Casanova The Insatiable (etc) - puts an entire universe at one's
disposal. This can involve owning "trillions of dollars",
heaps of "status-goods", and unlimited wealth and resources
- in today's archaic terminology. In fact one will be able to have
all the material goods one wants, and any virtual world one wants -
and it can all seem as "unvirtual" as one desires. A few
centuries hence, we may rapidly take [im]material opulence for
granted. And this virtual cornucopia won't be the prerogative of a
tiny elite. Information isn't like that. Nor will it depend on masses
of toiling workers. Information isn't like that either. If we want
it, nanotechnology
promises old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and outside
synthetic VR.
Nanotechnology
is not magic. The self-replicating molecular robots it will spawn are
probably more distant than their enthusiasts suppose, perhaps by
several decades. We may have to wait a century or more before
nanorobots can get to work remoulding the cosmos
- to make it a home worth living in and call our own. Details of how
they'll be programmed, how they'll navigate, how they'll be powered,
how they'll locate all the atoms they reconfigure, etc, are
notoriously sketchy. But the fact remains: back in the boring old
mind-independent world, applied nanoscience
will deliver material superabundance beyond measure.
For
the most part, admittedly, vast material opulence may not be needed
thanks to VR. This is because we can all have the option of living in
immersive designer-paradises of our own choosing. At first, our
customised virtual worlds may merely ape and augment organic VR. Yet
the classical prototype of an egocentric virtual world is parochial
and horribly restrictive; the body-image it gives us to work with,
for instance, is pretty shoddy and flawed by built-in obsolescence.
Unprogrammed organic VR can be hatefully cruel as well - Nature's
genetic algorithms are nastily written and very badly coded indeed.
Ultimately, artificial VR may effectively supersede its organic
ancestor no less (in)completely than quasi-classical macroscopic
worlds
emerged from their quantum substrate. The transition is conceivable.
Whether it will happen, and to what extent, we simply don't know.
Heady
stuff. But is it sociologically plausible? Doesn't such prophecy just
assume a naïve technological determinism? For it might be countered
that synthetic drugs-and-VR experiences - whether interactive or
solipsistic, deeply soulful or fantasy wish-fulfilment - will always
be second-rate shadows of their organically-grown predecessors. Why
will we want them? After a while, won't we get bored? For surely Real
Life is better.
On
the contrary, drugs-plus-VR can potentially yield a heightened
sense of verisimilitude; and exhilarating excitement. Virtual worlds
can potentially seem more real, more lifelike, more intense, and more
compelling
than the comparatively lame definitions of reality on offer today.
The experience of this-is-real
- like all our waking- or dreaming consciousness - comprises a series
of neurochemical events in the CNS. Like any other experience, it can
be amped-up or toned-down. Reality does not admit of degrees; but our
sense of it certainly does. Tone, channel and volume controls will be
at our disposal. But once we've chosen what we like, then the
authentic taste of paradise
is indeed addictive.
Thus
in an important sense Brave New World is wrong. Our descendants
may "consume" software, genetic enhancements and designer
drugs. But the future lies in bits and bytes, not as workers engaged
in factory mass-production or cast as victims of a consumer society.
In some ways, BNW is prescient science fiction - uncannily prophetic
of advances in genetic engineering and cloning.
But in other ways, its depiction of life in centuries to come is
backward-looking and quaint. Our attempts to envision distant eras
always are. The future will be unrecognisably
better.
L o v e l e s
s
BNW is an
essentially loveless society. Both romantic love and love of family
are taboo. The family itself has been abolished throughout the
civilised world. We learn, however, that the priggish Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning was guilty of an indiscretion with a
Beta-minus when visiting the Reservation twenty years ago. When John
the Savage falls on his knees and greets him as "my father",
the director puts his hands over his ears. In vain, he tries to shut
out the obscene word. He is embarrassed. Publicly humiliated,
he then flees the room. Pantomime scenes like this - amusing but
fanciful - contribute to our sense that a regime of universal
well-being would entail our losing something precious. Utopian
happiness, we are led to believe, is built on sacrifice: the loss
of love, science, art and religion. Authentic paradise-engineering,
by contrast, can enhance them all; not a bad payoff.
In
BNW, romantic love is strongly discouraged as well. Brave new
worlders are conditioned to be sexually promiscuous: "Everyone
belongs to everyone else." Rather than touting the joys of
sexual liberation, Huxley seeks to show how sexual promiscuity
cheapens love; it doesn't express it. The Savage fancies lovely
Lenina no less than she fancies him. But he loves
her too. He feels having sex would dishonour her. So when the poor
woman expresses her desire to have sex with him, she gets treated as
though she were a prostitute.
Thus
Huxley doesn't offer a sympathetic exploration of the possibility
that prudery and sexual guilt has soured more lives than sex.
In a true utopia, the counterparts of John and Lenina will enjoy
fantastic love-making, undying mutual admiration, and, if desired,
live together happily ever after too.
Fantastical?
The misappliance of science? No. It's just one technically feasible
biological option. In the light of what we do to those we love
today, it would be a kinder option too. At any rate, we should be
free to choose.
The
utopians have no such choice. And they aren't merely personally
unloved. They aren't individually respected either. Ageing has been
abolished; but when the utopians die - quickly, not through a long
process of senescence - their bodies are recycled as useful sources
of phosphorus. Thus Brave New World is a grotesque parody of a
utilitarian
society in both a practical as well as a philosophical
sense.
This
is all good knockabout stuff. The problem is that some of it has been
taken seriously.
Science
is usually portrayed as dehumanising. Brave New World epitomises this
fear. "The more we understand the world, the more it seems
completely pointless" (Steven Weinberg). Certainly science can
seem chilling when conceived in the abstract as a metaphysical
world-picture. We may seem to find ourselves living in a universe
with all the human meaning stripped out: participants in a soulless
dance of molecules, or harmonics of pointlessly waggling superstrings
and their braneworld cousins. Nature seems loveless and indifferent
to our lives. What right have we to be happy?
Yet
what right have we to sneeze? If suffering has been medically
eradicated, does happiness have to be justified any more than the
colour green or the taste of peppermint? Is there some deep
metaphysical sense in which we ought
to be weighed down by the momentous gravity of the human predicament?
Only
if it will do anyone any good. The evidence is lacking.
Paradise-engineering, by contrast, can deliver an enchanted
pleasure-garden of
otherworldly delights for everyone. Providentially, the appliance of
biotechnology offers us the unprecedented prospect of enhancing
our humanity - and the biological capacity for spiritual experience.
When genetically-enriched, our pursuit of such delights won't be an
escape from some inner sense of futility, a gnawing existential angst
which disfigures so many lives at present. Quite the opposite: life
will feel self-intimatingly wonderful.
Wholesale genetic-rewrites tweaked by rational drug-design give us
the chance to enhance willpower and motivation.
We'll be able to enjoy a hugely greater sense of purpose
in our lives than our characteristically malfunctioning dopamine
systems allow today. Moreover this transformation of the living
world, and eventually of the whole cosmos, into a heavenly
meaning-steeped nirvana will in no way be "unnatural". It
is simply a disguised consequence of the laws of physics playing
themselves out.
And,
conceivably, it will be a loving world. Until now, selection pressure
has ensured we're cursed with a genome that leaves us mostly as
callous brutes, albeit brutes with intermittently honourable
intentions. We are selfish in the popular as well as the technical
genetic sense. Love and affection are often strained even among
friends and relatives. The quasi-psychopathic indifference we feel
toward most other creatures on the planet is a by-product of selfish
DNA. Sociobiology allied to evolutionary psychology shows how genetic
dispositions to conflict are latent in every relationship that isn't
between genetically identical clones. Such potential conflicts
frequently erupt in overt form. The cost is immense suffering and
sometimes suicidal anguish.
This
isn't to deny that love is real. But its contemporary wellsprings
have been poisoned from the outset. Only the sort of love
that helps selfish DNA to leave more copies of itself - which enable
it to "maximise its inclusive fitness" - can presently
flourish. Love is fleeting, inconstant, and shaped by cruelly
arbitrary criteria of physical
appearance which serve as badges of reproductive
potential. If we value it, love should be rescued from the genes
that have recruited and perverted the states which mediate its
expression in blind pursuit of reproductive
success. Contra
Brave New World, love is not biologically inconsistent with lasting
happiness.
This
is because good genes and good drugs allow us, potentially, to love
everyone more deeply, more empathetically and more sustainably than
has ever been possible before. Indeed, there is no fundamental
biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow
everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should
so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough;
and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be
transformed into a biological reality.
Love
is versatile; so we needn't turn ourselves into celibate angels
either. True love does not entail that we become disembodied souls
communing with each other all day. "Promiscuous" sex
doesn't have to be loveless. Bonobos
("pygmy chimps") are a case in point; they would appreciate
a "Solidarity Service" rather better than we do. When
sexual guilt and jealousy
- a pervasive disorder of serotonin function - are cured,
then bed-hopping will no longer be as morally reckless as it is
today. Better still, designer love-philtres
and smarter sex-drugs
can transform our concept of intimacy. Today's ill-educated fumblings
will seem inept by comparison. Sensualists
may opt for whole-body orgasms of a frequency, duration and variety
that transcends the limp foreplay of their natural ancestors. Whether
the sexual adventures of our descendants will be mainly auto-erotic,
interpersonal, or take guises we can't currently imagine is a topic
for another night.
Profound
love of many forms - both of oneself and all others - is at least as
feasible as the impersonal emotional wasteland occupied by Huxley's
utopians.
Gene-Splicers
Versus Glue-Sniffers The molecular biology of
paradise
The
prospect of a lifetime of genetically-engineered
sublimity strikes some contemporary Savages as no less appalling than
getting high with drugs. The traditional conception of living
happily-ever-after in Heaven probably hasn't thrilled them unduly
either; but the unusual eminence of its Author has discouraged overt
criticism. In any event, the consensus seems to be that God's PR
representatives did a poor job in selling The Other Place to his
acolytes. Today, many people find the idea of winning the national
lottery far more appealing; and in fairness, it probably offers
better odds. Possibly His representatives on Earth should have tried
harder to make Heaven sound more appealing. One worries that an
eternity spent worshipping Him might begin to pall.
But
the Death Of God, or at least his discreet departure to a backstage
role, shouldn't mean we're doomed to abandon any notion of heaven,
and certainly not on Earth. Suffering, whether it's merely irksome or
too terrible
for words, doesn't have to be part of life at all.
Unfortunately,
the proposal that aversive experience should be eliminated in
toto
via biotechnology tends to find itself assimilated to two
stereotypes:
The
image of an intra-cranially self-stimulating rat.
Its degraded frenzy of lever-pressing is eventually followed by
death from inanition and self-neglect.
And
just as during much of the Twentieth Century, any plea for greater
social justice could be successfully damned as Communist, likewise
today, any strategy to eradicate suffering is likely to be condemned
in similar reactionary terms: either wirehead
hedonism or revamped Brave New World. This response is not just
facile and simplistic. If it gains currency, the result is morally
catastrophic.
Of
course, the abolitionist issue rarely arises. Typically, universal
bliss is still more-or-less unthinkingly dismissed as technically
impossible. Insofar as the prospect is even contemplated - grudgingly
- it is usually assumed that the new regime would be underwritten
day-by-day with drugs or, more crudely, electrodes in the
pleasure-centres.
These
techniques have their uses. Yet in the medium-to-long-term, stopgaps
won't be enough. All
use of psychoactive drugs may be conceived as an attempt to correct
something pathological with one's state of consciousness. There's
something deeply wrong with our brains. If what we had now was OK, we
wouldn't try to change it. But it isn't, so we do. Mature biological
psychiatry will recognise inadequate innate bliss as a pandemic form
of mental ill-health: good for selfish DNA in the ancestral
environment where the adaptation arose, but bad for its throwaway
vehicles, notably us. The whole gamut of behavioural conditioning,
socio-economic reform, talk-therapies - and even euphoriant
superdrugs - are just palliatives, not cures, for a festering global
illness. Its existence demands a global eradication program, not idle
philosophical manifestos and scientific belles
lettres.
That
said, the ideological obstacles to genetically pre-programmed mental
super-health are actually more daunting than the technical
challenges. To be cured, hypo-hedonia must be recognised as a
primarily genetic
deficiency-disorder. Designer mood-brighteners and anti-anxiety
agents to alleviate it are sometimes branded "lifestyle-drugs";
but this is to trivialise a serious medical condition which must be
corrected at source. Happily, our hereditary neuropsychiatric
disorder is likely to become extinct within a few generations as the
Reproductive
Revolution unfolds. Aversive experience, and the poisonous
metabolic pathways that mediate its textures, will become
physiologically impossible once the genes coding its neural
substrates have been eliminated. We won't miss its corrupting effect
when it's gone.
In
the medium-term, the functional
equivalent of aversive
experience can help animate us instead. Late in the Third Millennium
and beyond, its functional successors may be expressed as gradients
of majestic well-being. On this scenario, our descendants will enjoy
a civilisation based on information-bearing pleasure-gradients:
whether steep or shallow, we simply don't know. Such a global
species-project does not have the desperate moral
urgency of eliminating the phenomenon of Darwinian pain
- both "mental" and
"physical",
human and non-human alike. Abolishing raw nastiness - sometimes vile
beyond belief - remains the over-riding ethical
priority. One doesn't have to be a negative
utilitarian to acknowledge that getting rid of agony takes moral
precedence over maximising pleasure. But both genetic fundamentalists
and gung-ho advocates of Better
Living Through Chemistry today agree on one crucial issue. There
is no sense in sustaining a legacy of mood-darkening metabolic
pathways out of superstitious deference to our savage past.
* * *
When
Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for
him and his mother to visit the Other Place, John is initially
pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda
in The
Tempest,
he exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it."
Heavy irony. Like innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of
life he neither knows nor understands. And of course he comes
unstuck. Yet if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then
ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the sense there are
"jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is Huxley who neither knows
nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A utopian
society in which we are sublimely
happy will be far better than we can presently imagine, not
worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional squalor of
late-Darwinian antiquity, who neither know nor understand the lives
of the god-like
super-beings we are destined to become.
Mr.
Huxley wrote a Brave New World, a novel that predicted that some day
the entire world would live under a frightful dictatorship. Today Mr.
Huxley says that his fictional world of horror is probably just
around the corner for all of us." - Mike Wallace In this
remarkable interview, Huxley foretells a future when telegenic
presidential hopefuls use television to rise to power, technology
takes over, drugs grab hold, and frightful dictatorships rule us all.
Enjoy the journey and tell us in the comments whether he was right.
Credits
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER David Gerlach ANIMATOR Patrick Smith PRODUCER Amy
Drozdowska COLORIST Jennifer Yoo Music via APM "Pathways"
Stephen James Root "Das Funtfe Streichquartett" Viera
Janarcekova "Frozen Wonder" Marc Frederick Teitler Help us
caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/ViJ3/