Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress

by Charles T. Rubin

Tomorrow has never looked better. Breakthroughs in fields like genetic engineering and nanotechnology promise to give us unprecedented power to redesign our bodies and our world. Futurists and activists tell us that we are drawing ever closer to a day when we will be as smart as computers, will be able to link our minds telepathically, and will live for centuries—or maybe forever. The perfection of a “posthuman” future awaits us.

Or so the story goes. In reality, the rush toward a posthuman destiny amounts to an ideology of human extinction, an ideology that sees little of value in humanity except the raw material for producing whatever might come next.

In Eclipse of Man , Charles T. Rubin traces the intellectual origins of the movement to perfect and replace the human race. He shows how today’s advocates of radical enhancement are—like their forebears—deeply dissatisfied with given human nature and fixated on grand visions of a future shaped by technological progress.

Moreover, Rubin argues that this myopic vision of the future is not confined to charlatans and cheerleaders promoting this or that it also runs through much of modern science and contemporary progressivism. By exploring and criticizing the dreams of post humanity, Rubin defends a more modest vision of the future, one that takes seriously both the limitations and the inherent dignity of our given nature.

Genres: Philosophy, Futurism, Nonfiction, Technology, Climate Change, Science

200 pages, Hardcover

First published July 22, 2014

Reviews

[Kitap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly enjoyable academic critique of the transhumanist "movement" informed by a deep reading both of the transhumanist (and proto-transhumanist) literature and of human nature. Rubin presents what is sometimes called a "bioconservative" perspective (a perspective, perhaps, of someone who has learned from the mistakes of past technoscientific hubris and who seeks to look before the next instance of leaping.)

As others have noted, Rubin presents a warning without much of a prescription for preventive political action, but the warning he presents is pretty clear: we haven't figured out yet how to be humane to one another as human beings, so let's not bullshit ourselves into thinking that godlike tech will somehow make us angels. Best we figure that out before we attempt to remake ourselves into deities.

As Santayana suggested, the kind of “absolute” change in the human being imagined by [J.D.] Bernal and [J.B.S.] Haldane, along with today’s transhumanists, really precludes the use of the term “progress.” It becomes harder and harder for our authors to imagine what will be retained, hence where change will start from. And if the rate of change is accelerating, that simply means we are headed the more rapidly from one unknown to another, while the recognizable old standards for judging whether the changes are progressive are overthrown along with our humanity. (p. 43)

The abandonment of central aspects of human civilization is really only to be expected if we are also to abolish hitherto central aspects of the human condition. That may not be such a big deal if we are as spiritually primitive as SETI popularizers seem to imagine, if as Haldane suggested we are an infection hardly worth sterilizing, or if we are, as anthropologist Ashley Montagu once suggested in some remarks about SETI, a cosmic version of “rabies or cancer or cholera.” It is true that humans have long abased themselves in the face of Divinity, but [Seth] Shostak’s concern about hubris seems almost quaint in this race to use the authority of science to diminish our sense of what it means to be human. (pp. 63–4)

The CryptNet view—the idea that technological advancement equals inevitable social improvement—fails to appreciate what seems to be a key lesson of The Diamond Age: the complexly mixed human motivations that produce a given world-altering technological development do not vanish as that development works its changes upon the world. Born of desires for independence and control, of curiosity and mastery, the Seed technology that China and CryptNet desire for essentially contradictory reasons will not supersede or nullify such motives. Rather, its use will be conditioned by them, and by the myriad other sources of human actions that come into play as a result of its employment by real people….

[Neal] Stephenson goes beyond [K. Eric] Drexler’s acknowledgement of human failings to think about a future where a full measure of human motivations, noble and ignoble, continue to exist. Our frailties are not problems to be solved but are built into what we are and how we are placed in relation to each other, guaranteeing that perpetuation will remain a challenge. The Diamond Age begins and ends with the bells of St. Mark’s Cathedral in New Chusan—perhaps a reminder that godlike powers will not make us gods, let alone God….

[S]o long as humans remained flawed in ways Drexler acknowledges, and in others he does not, as the realm of choice widens we will only have more reason to think about responsible choice—choice made with an eye to the technical facts, but also the messy complications of individual and collective moral life. (pp. 117–9)

The transhumanists would say that they are far less interested in asserting what human beings could be than in encouraging diverse explorations into what we might become, including of course not being human at all. Moreover, the argument goes, transhumanists are strictly speaking not like eugenicists because they are not interested only in making better human beings—not even superman, really. For to be merely human is by definition to be defective. It is this view of human things that makes the transhumanists de facto advocates of human extinction. Their dissatisfaction with the merely human is so great that they can barely bring themselves to imagine why anyone would make a rational decision to remain an unenhanced human, or human at all, once given a choice. (p. 128)

[O]n the one hand, the motive force for transforming ourselves is a deep dissatisfaction with the merely human. On the other hand, this dissatisfaction, and the efforts at transformation it produces are presented as quintessentially human. We are all to be free to make choices about enhancements, but radical inequalities may lead some to be freer than others. To raise our hopes, the transhumanists urge overcoming human limitations. To quiet our fears, they claim there could be continuities between us and the superior beings to come. Specific human characteristics are treated as if they were merely contingent with respect to all the alternative ways we can imagine intelligence might be embodied, but however embodied we are told there is no reason that think that intelligence could not still be humane. Yet even the continuity of the humane gives way to the absolute discontinuity of the Singularity. (p. 140)

Enhancement is no longer a matter of becoming the best one can be when there is no core or stable self to enhance; perpetual change is equivalent to destruction….

There is some irony, then, in defenses of enhancement in the name of liberty. To be a truly free human being, to make one’s own choices, implies accepting responsibility. It makes sense to advocate liberty if there is such a strong, responsible, moral self waiting to be free. But if, following… today’s transhumanists, we think that there is no such morally responsible self, we are left with only the willful or passionate choices of the moment, rationalized or otherwise, thee expression of which is hardly liberty at all but license… [I]n the transhumanist world of the right to choose without responsibility, the power that our future [transhumanists] will have over nature, and the power that they will therefore have over human beings, will be not so much about the trump card, but the only card to play when doubts arise about where our knowledge is taking us. Paradoxically, the world recreated by human beings will be predicated on the law of the jungle; our technological might will make right. (pp. 157–8)

[T]ranshumanists slight the power of the everyday, instead projecting our hopes and fears for the future onto what is essentially a blank canvas. Hoping to overcome the merely human, they look at the present from the point of view of their projection—judging the world around us as though they already understand the future—in order to give meaning and direction to present human activities. So what is important to them are the real or imagine innovations that serve as a prelude to this future whose own meaning will be beyond us…. If the transhumanists bother to look at anything in the past or present at all, it is only the as-yet-unrealized dreams of things like immortality or super powers. The godlike capacities that have long been wished for, and yet traditionally have been regarded as at least as much curse as blessing, if not far more curse, are turned into unambiguously normative aspirations. Such wishes become human essentials rather than aberrations. (p. 177)

[W]e begin to see why the problem of benevolence that has arisen in these pages looms so large. It can be hard enough to know what is genuinely benevolent when human beings are relating to human beings under the best of circumstances. When we start talking about benevolence directed to us by beings of unimaginable power and knowledge, the only intellectual experience we have is summarized in theodicy, the effort to understand God’s goodness in light of the manifest evils of the world. That effort, which has occupied many a great mind over many centuries, is, shall we say, ongoing. Why it would be any easier to settle it were we to start having to talk about artificial superintelligence or advanced aliens is far from clear. (p. 181)

[Gary Schroeder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rambling, generally unfocused examination of transhumanism and its proponents. Half philosophical treatise, half scholarly examination of a few classic science fiction novels, this is an odd book. Diverting for a few train rides. Written in a stilted, formal prose that juttered and stopped like a skater on rough ice. Tough sledding though mercifully brief at just 180 pages.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rubin explains the transhuman movement and its plans through technology to enable humans to move beyond humanity. The introduction exposes the roots of this move back into the 18th and 19th centuries. There follows three chapters and topics, with a brilliant concluding chapter, which challenges the movement through the device of three paintings.

[Ian Mackey-Piccolo · Rating 1 out of 5]

summarizes other more interesting books

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rubin's analysis and critique of transhumanism is excellent, from tracing its roots in enlightenment ideas of progress, through Malthus' focus on resource scarcity, to recent attempts to bridge the gap through futuristic evolution. His conclusion, that a future shaped by galactic competition is incomprehensible, is well supported by a range of elements. My reservation turn on his reluctance or inability to offer ideas on how human society should move forward in the face of so many devotees of technological determinism and take-charge evolution.

See my review on the Social Epistemology Review & Reply Collective.