In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [55]
There’s been quite a lot of chat about the shortcomings we’ve had to put up with due to Mother Nature, the dirty, treacherous cow, and this is the not-so-cleverly-hidden subtext of a lot of Brave New World–type thinking. These folks hate Nature, and they hate themselves as part of it, or her. McKibben cites an amazing speech given by Max More (last name chosen by himself) to the Extropian Convention (“extropy,” coined as the opposite to “entropy”). This speech took the form of a dissing of Mother Nature, and said, essentially, thanks for nothing and goodbye. Nature has made so many mistakes, the chief one being death. Why do we have to get old and die? Why is man the one creature that foresees his own death?
As in many religions—and the energy propelling the wilder fringes of this “more” enterprise is religious in essence—there has to be a second birth, one that gets around the indignity of having come out of a body—a female body—and, come to think of it, of having a body yourself. All that guck and blood and cells and death. Why do we have to eat? And, by implication, defecate. So messy. Maybe we can fix our digestive tracts so we just slip out a little pellet—say, once a month. Maybe we can be born again, this time out of an artificial head instead of a natural body, and download the contents of our brains into machines, and linger around in cyberspace, as in William Gibson’s novels. Though if you’ve read William Gibson, you’ll know the place is a queasy nightmare.
All the enhancements McKibben discusses are converging on the biggie, which is none other than the final nose-thumb at Nature—immortality. Immortality doesn’t fare so well in myth and story. Either you get it but forget to request eternal youth too and become a crumbling horror (Tithonus, the Sibyl of Cumae, Swift’s Struldbrugs), or you seize the immortality and the vitality but lose your soul and must live by feeding on the blood of the innocent (Melmoth the Wanderer, vampires, and so forth). The stories are clear: gods are immortal, men die, try to change it and you’ll end up worse off.
That doesn’t stop us from hankering. McKibben recognizes the impulse: “Objecting even slightly to immortality,” he rightly says, “is a little like arguing against ice cream—eternal life has only been humanity’s great dream since the moment we became conscious.” But unlike all previous generations, ours might be able to achieve it. This would alter us beyond recognition. We’d become a different species—one living in eternal bliss, in the eyes of its proponents; sort of like—well, angels, or superhuman beings, anyway. It would certainly mean an end to narrative. If life is endless, why tell stories? No more beginnings and middles because there will be no more endings. No Shakespeare for us, or Dante, or, well, any art, really. It’s all infested with mortality and reeks of earthiness. Our new angel-selves will no longer need or understand our art. They might have other art, though it would be pretty bloodless.
But once we’re well and truly immortal, what would we do all day? Wouldn’t we get tired of the endlessness, the monotony, the lack of meaningful event? Wouldn’t we get bored? Nope. We’d sit around and contemplate problems such as: “Where did the universe come from?” “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “What is the meaning of conscious existence?” Is that to be the result of all this admittedly fascinating science—a tedious first-year philosophy seminar? “Not to be impolite,” says McKibben, “but for this we trade our humanity?”
That’s the good version of the immortal mind. I encountered the bad version in a paperback I received through a high school book-a-month club.