Editors note: Published on August 16, 1945,C. S. LewissThat Hideous Strengthis a dystopian novel that eerily reflects the realities of 2020, putting into a memorable fictional form ideas expressed in Lewiss non-fiction work, The Abolition of Man. To mark the former books three-quarter century anniversary,Evolution Newspresents a series of essays, reflections, and videos about its themes and legacy.

James A. Herrick is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College in Holland, MI. His books include The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition.

This post is adapted from Chapter 10 ofThe Magicians Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, edited by John G. West. See also,

C. S. Lewiss prophetic appraisal of certain scientific trends in The Abolition of Man finds confirmation in todays discourse of our biotechnological future. The vision of technologically enhanced posthumanity arises out of a synthesis of scientific cultures most robust mythologies progress, evolution, the superman, and the power of collective intellect. Technology will conquer death, space, and human nature, and deliver us into the future as highly evolved demigods. The Internet is humanitys first major step toward a unified web of consciousness Teilhard de Chardins noosphere that will first blanket the earth and then pervade the universe.1 The objections of bio-conservatives will be silenced through popular argument and public art, and the way opened to unlimited progress, miraculous technologies and visionary ethics. Then comes posthumanity and Bertrand Russells world of shining beauty and transcendent glory.2 Transhumanism affirms that the time has arrived to make good on such prophecies by crafting a technologically enhanced, globally connected and immortal race Stapledons splendid race.

Contemporary Transhumanism draws inspiration from Utopianism, Renaissance Humanism, Enlightenment Rationalism, nineteenth-century Russian Cosmism, New Age Gnosticism, science fiction, speculative techno-futurism, and apocalyptic themes in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nick Bostrom, Oxford University philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary Transhumanism, captures the movements fundamental orientation:

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means, we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.3

Evolving humanity, long a theme in popular scientific writing and science fiction, has now emerged as a major topic in bioethics, philosophy and religion.4 Ongoing evolution will eventually produce a unified cooperative organization of living processes that spans and manages the universe as a whole.5 Evolution is now a process in which human beings may actively participate by technological means. The present human being is not the crown of evolutions creative work as a step toward something grander the posthuman. But, even posthumanity is not the ultimate goal. Inexorable evolution is producing, by means of its human and posthuman surrogates, ever more advanced technologies as part of its plan to achieve omniscience and omnipotence. Ambitious evolution is merely using us and our descendents as its cats paw to snatch technological divinity from the cosmoss chaotic flames.

The specific characteristics of posthumanity are debated; what is crucial is the conviction that the posthumans are near, that they will represent a profound improvement over our present condition, and that we ought to work diligently for their arrival. One Transhumanist advocate affirms:

Trust in our posthuman potential is the essence of Transhumanism. We trust that we can become posthumans, extrapolating technological trends into futures consistent with contemporary science, and acting pragmatically to hasten opportunities and mitigate risks. We trust that we should become posthumans, embracing a radical humanism that dignifies the ancient and enduring work to overcome and extend our humanity.6

The posthuman future is not limited by biology but will involve human beings merging with machines, at first by simply mechanically augmenting the body but eventually by depositing human consciousness in mechanical devices. Thus will we achieve immortality, universal knowledge, and unified global consciousness.

The process of creating posthumanity is fundamentally evolutionary, but with an important difference when contrasted to the old Darwinian model. As Lewis speculated in The Abolition of Man, biotechnologies will permit us to be active participants in our own evolution.7 Transhumanist leader James Hughes writes that we must accommodate the posthumans that will be created by genetic and cybernetic technologies.8 This vision, in broad strokes, affirms Oxfords Bostrom, is to create the opportunity to live much longer and healthier lives, to enhance our memory and other intellectual faculties, to refine our emotional experiences and increase our subjective sense of well-being, and generally to achieve a greater degree of control over our own lives. According to Bostrom, the aggressive pursuit of biotechnology is a radical reaction against current convention, an alternative to customary injunctions against playing God, messing with nature, tampering with our human essence, or displaying punishable hubris.9 Efforts to coax the public to embrace the ideology of posthumanity, however, will surely provoke a contest. Thus, Hughes predicts that the human races use of genetic engineering to evolve beyond our current limitations would be a central political issue of the next century.10

More may be ahead than domestic political debate, however. According to some experts, the near future will usher in a global culture enabled by a massively more powerful Internet. Computer engineer Hugo de Garis takes as simple matters of fact that the exponential rate of technical progress will create within 40 years an Internet that is a trillion times faster than todays, a global media, a global education system, a global language, and a globally homogenized culture which will constitute the basis of a global democratic state. This new order of things, which de Garis calls Globa, will rid the world of war, the arms trade, ignorance, and poverty.11 The coming transformation of the human race and the world it inhabits is nothing short of an apocalypse the Kingdom arrives via the Internet.

What was previously sought through magic and mysticism, writes Hughes, will now be pursued technologically.12 Bostrom imagines a utopia in which posthumans enjoy aesthetic and contemplative pleasures whose blissfulness vastly exceeds what any human being has yet experienced. The new people will experience a much greater level of personal development and maturity than current human beings do, because they have the opportunity to live for hundreds or thousands of years with full bodily and psychic vigor. He continues:

We can conceive of beings that are much smarter than us, that can read books in seconds, that are much more brilliant philosophers than we are, that can create artworks, which, even if we could understand them only on the most superficial level, would strike us as wonderful masterpieces. We can imagine love that is stronger, purer, and more secure than any human being has yet harbored.13

Bostrom and Hughes strike a winsome note in their predictions of the posthuman future. However, at what cost does the New Era arrive? Will we forego individual rights, as Lewis feared, in the pursuit of a greater collective good? Science writer Ronald Bailey contends that democratic majorities often oppose avant-gardes minorities. If the transhuman future we are all hoping for is to be achieved, it may require efforts more aggressive than those suggested by Bostroms irenic reverie. Regrettably, democracy often has placed limits on cutting-edge scientific research. Bailey argues that in some benighted jurisdictions promising research agendas can be stopped in their tracks by majoritarian tyranny. Despite the apparent lessons of history regarding programs for improving humanity, Bailey looks hopefully toward the day when an emerging posthuman race will transform the world that is, if democracy doesnt get in the way.14 Perhaps Lewiss fears about religious devotion to inevitable processes were well founded.

Considerably more reassuring to wary audiences is the central figure in the contemporary human enhancement movement, inventor Ray Kurzweil, best known for his theory of exponential technological progress culminating in the Singularity. At a moment in time not more than a few decades away, a technological explosion will change everything permanently. Kurzweils vision of a transformative human future has recently captured public attention in books such as The Singularity Is Near and movies such as Transcendent Man.15 He confidently affirms that exponential progress in the biological sciences will soon allow us to reprogram the information processes underlying biology.16 While the idea here is vague and expressed for a lay audience, the planned reprogramming of foundational human biology is the specific goal of Lewiss Conditioners. For Kurzweil and other techno-futurists, the future will reveal unimaginable improvements to the human condition. Nature will yield to technology; the battle will have been won.

Kurzweil has become the public face of human enhancement, an affable front man with an accountants demeanor. The heavy theoretical lifting, however, is done by others. Philosopher John Harris, among the four or five leading apologists for human enhancement, argues that assisting evolution is a moral obligation. He writes, The progress of evolution is unlikely to be achieved accidentally or by letting nature take its course. Joining Savulescu in urging the necessity of enhanced evolution, Harris argues that if illness and poverty are indeed to become rare misfortunes, this is unlikely to occur by chance It may be that a nudge or two is needed: nudges that will start the process of replacing natural selection with deliberate selection, Darwinian evolution with enhancement evolution.17 While Harriss metaphor suggests a gentle technological push along coordinates of improvement already plotted out by nature, it would be wide of the mark to imagine that science has identified such an evolutionary trajectory for future humanity. It is more likely that educated guesses grounded in hopeful narratives about progress substitute for actual knowledge in this and similar scenarios.

An inevitable force with motives of its own, evolution is central to the techno-futurists vision of the posthuman future. Evolution produced us and through us, technology. It, not God and not the Tao, is also the source of the moral principles that have brought us to the point of transformation as a species, and that will ensure our continued evolution. Computer scientist Hugo de Garis affirms that because of our intelligence thats evolved over billions of years, we are now on the point of making a major transition away from biology to a new step. You could argue that maybe humanity, is just a stepping stone.18 Physicist Freeman Dyson agrees we will be transformed as many opportunities for experiments in the radical reconstruction of human beings present themselves.19 But there is more to our posthuman future than simply improving our lot here on earth: The new humanity, toward which the present human race represents a mere step along the way, will propagate itself throughout the cosmos. This was the cosmic vision of scientific planners and science fiction authors that prompted Lewiss skepticism about space exploration. Sounding a theme reminiscent of Wells, Dyson writes that when life and industrial activities are spread out over the solar system, there is no compelling reason for growth to stop.20 Technologically assisted evolutionism is becoming, as Lewis warned, a comprehensive narrative of an inevitable forces ultimate universal triumph.

Human enhancement advocates focus attention on four technologies nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science, or NBIC. But technology is not the whole story of the turn toward Transhumanism. The NBIC technologies, writes Hughes, will change how we work, how we travel, how we communicate, how we worship and how we cook.21 Whereas work, travel, and communication are perhaps expected in this list, and cooking seems trivial by comparison, how we worship is arresting. Traditional religion has been the bte noir of enhancement advocates, an anti-technological and anti-futurist force to be actively opposed. Hughess comment, however, hints at a new approach the re-imagining of religion along Transhumanist lines. For some in the movement posthumanity and advanced technologies are objects of worship, hope in the Singularity a religious faith. The new wine of Singularity religion will require the new wine skins of innovative religious expression; techno-futurism will discover transcendence in techno-religion.

Tomorrow, C.S. Lewis and Critical Reactions to Transhumanism.

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CS Lewis and Contemporary Transhumanism - Discovery Institute

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith

Red Pill Hari Kunzru

Knopf

September 2020

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe," Morpheus tells Neo in the Wachowski Bros.' 1999 film, The Matrix. "You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

It is with The Matrix that the term "red pill" entered our vocabulary and later memedom as we grew into our collective, online consciousness, but the dilemma between living in blissful ignorance and confronting the truth about reality is nothing new. Neither is the idea that our reality might be simulated, or at least manipulated. From Ren Descartes' Evil Demon to Gilbert Harman's Brain in a Vat, thought experiments have often sought to tease out whether it is possible to trust our perception of reality, to determine whether we can know with certainty that what we seem to experience with our senses is an accurate assessment of some larger truth.

It is this larger truth that the far-right, emboldened by the emergence of a reactionary political class all too willing to stoke the flames of panic and prejudice, have laid claim to in recent years, claiming also, in the process, the term "red pill" to describe their process of awakening to uncomfortable realities they accuse the left-leaning of not wanting to come face to face with. British-Indian novelist Hari Kunzru, author of five previous novels and PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist, addresses the intersection of such existential quandaries in his latest novel, aptly titled Red Pill.

The premise of Red Pill is simple enough; clichd, almost. The unnamed narrator, a struggling writer suffering a dry spell, embarks on a retreat to clear his mind and restore his creative faculties. Any overused tropes end here, though, as Kunzru weaves an intricate fabric from a multitude of seemingly disparate elements German romanticism, the legacy of the Third Reich, the Stasi, the European migrant crisis, the 2016 US presidential election all of which come together to create this haunted tale that merges questions of privacy, transhumanism, the political ascendency of the Right in Europe and the US, and moral responsibility, among others.

Water drop by qimono (Pixabay License / Pixabay)

Kunzru's protagonist a man of Indian heritage, married and father to a young daughter is awarded a fellowship at the Deuter Center in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. If that latter name sounds familiar, it is because it served as the location of the eponymous 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was discussed a tragic and macabre past that weighs on the setting in much the same way the cold, stark, unforgiving weather does. Rather than use his fellowship to any industrious effect and develop his work on the concept of the self in lyric poetry, however, the narrator finds he is unable to fall in step with the center's rather aggressive communal work policy, which dictates that he must research and write in the presence of others.

In between calls with his wife back in Brooklyn and visits to the grave of Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist, he binge-watches Blue Lives, a disturbingly violent police show that peppers its scenes of torture with obscure quotes, which the narrator believes might be intended as subtext.

Interestingly, the fictional Blue Lives airs at a time in which another nihilistic group fixated with the brutalization of the body is filming its own horrors for the world to see. Although ISIS is not explicitly mentioned by name, the footage from "jihadi propaganda" videos is referenced in one of several instances in which the narrator juxtaposes death with spectacle, the dignity (and what he assumes to be the inherent human right) of privacy with violent and humiliating invasiveness. Meanwhile, his initial topic of investigation the lyric "I" suffers from his frustrated attempts to secure for himself isolation and, if he is being honest with himself, plain old disinterest.

"Deep down I had no real desire to understand how lyric poets had historically experienced their subjectivity. I wasn't that interested," he admits. "It was a piece of wishfulness, an expression of my own desire to be raised above the pleasures and pains of my life, to be free from the reigning coercions of a toddler, the relentless financial pressure of living in New York. I wanted to remain alone with myself as inwardness. I wanted, in short, to take a break."

Photo by Advait Jayant on Unsplash

His desire for solitude and clarity is inexorably thwarted, and he happens upon surveillance footage that leads him to believe that residents at the center are being watched, even in (what ought to be) the privacy of their own rooms. It is thus that his paranoia at being spied upon and his preoccupation with the creator of Blue Lives, Anton, and the show's underlying meaning converge to form the catalyst for his own descent into madness, mirrored, no less, by the poet Kleist, who also "had a crisis, brought about by reading Kant, who taught that the human senses are unreliable, and so we are unable to apprehend the truth that lies beneath the surface of things."

He begs his cleaning lady, Monika, to tell him the truth about whether the center is spying on its residents, which leads to a rather long aside in the novel in which she recounts her terrible experiences at the hands of the Stasi, little assuaging his general sense of malaise and imminent doom.

The world events that unfold around the narrator are no more helpful at staying this spiral into psychosis. At the very outset of the novel, he acknowledges the role of chance in determining whether one is born into wealth or war, comfort or mortal struggle, also acknowledging the fragility of one's current circumstances, tenuous and unpredictable. "Our very happiness made me uneasy," he confesses. "It was a time when the media was full of images of children hurt and displaced by war. I frequently found myself hunched over my laptop, my eyes welling with tears. I was distressed by what I saw, but also haunted by a more selfish question: if the world changed, would I be able to protect my family? Could I scale the fence with my little girl on my shoulders? Would I be able to keep hold of my wife's hand as the rubber boat overturned? Our life together was fragile. One day something would break."

His position as a member of an ethnic minority in a white man's world compounds this anxiety, which he sees reflected in a refugee father and daughter duo he meets at different intervals in the novel and desperately longs to help in some way. "It's always people like us who go first," he tells his wife.

When the narrator at last meets Anton, he is finally afforded the opportunity to ask the burning questions that have been consuming his thoughts only the answers he receives are far from placating. His obsession becomes manic, and he follows the mind behind the show across countries, refusing to accept the man's destructive vision of a future in which humankind is divided into two groups: one that fuses with technology to transcend animal limitations an updated version of the Nazi take on Nietzsche's bermensch and the other that is destined to slavery in service of the first.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Kunzru accomplishes several noteworthy things with Red Pill, not the least of which is following nihilistic philosophies (even those that do not designate themselves as such but instead, claim to hold a utopian vision for the future that involves culling 'undesirable' elements) to their logical endpoint. In striving to fabricate an artificial, 'perfectionist' version of ourselves, we ironically (or predictably, for anyone who is familiar with history) expose the very worst in our nature.

Kunzru also addresses the bedrock humanity hits in stretching philosophy that questions reality to the extent it renders any cooperation based on that reality impossible to its snapping point. If we cannot agree on basic premises and inalienable rights, what then?

The mental crisis that ensues from having the foundations of one's belief system shattered is likewise accurately depicted: the world becomes unrecognizable, a simulation as it were. "The streetscape wasn't real. The sidewalk, the passers-by, the cars, the clouds in the sky, all were elements in a giant simulation. The sunlight was not sunlight but code."

The author excels in capturing the geist in alt-right circles, down to the language used. "Cultural Marxism has filled your brain with worms," Anton tells the narrator, after the latter confronts the Blue Lives creator and accuses him of being on the wrong side of history with his morbid masterplan for the future. Using a term favored by conspiracy theorists who allege that progressives are using psychological manipulation to topple the natural order of the world, Anton essentially equates the narrator's opposition to the erosion of basic human values with erosion of the values he personally believes to be enlightened. For that is what cultural Marxists do, according to the alt-right: They promote atheism, gay rights, feminism, all through the humanities faculties in universities and the media and all at the expense of the status quo.

Noteworthy is the Nazi preoccupation with the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, most of whom were Jewish. Another gem of an exchange between narrator and Anton: "Why are you promoting a future in which some people are treated like raw material? That's a disgusting vision," the narrator says, to which Anton responds, laughing: "I'm sorry it gives you sad feels."

Perhaps the most remarkable features of this novel are its relevance to current events and the questions it raises with regard to the ethical frameworks we take for granted and within which we operate. If "privacy is the exclusive property of the gods," as the narrator posits, is the impending class struggle between spies and those who are spied upon? Where will our steady handover of privacy in exchange for security lead to down the road?

If, again, privacy is the demarcating factor between the ruling and subordinate classes, what does it say about refugees on dinghies in the Mediterranean, whose lives and bodies are battlegrounds for political figures to build their platforms on? Is little Alan Kurdi, lying face down on a beach in Turkey, the ultimate spectacle, the ultimate "mockery of human dignity" that is simultaneously relished as a symbol, as the sacrificial animal on which humanity's sins may be pinned, and disdained for its inconvenience?

In the novel, as in reality, the very real flesh-and-blood human lives of refugee father and daughter occupy a space in the background as the theoretical tug of war between Anton and the narrator occupies the foreground, and the parallels between a past that is never too far behind and a present that threatens to rouse those ugly ghosts are all too evident.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog [By Caspar David Friedrich - The photographic reproduction was done by Cybershot800i. (Diff). Public Domain / Wikipedia]

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Privacy and Alt-Right Transhumanism in Hari Kunzru's 'Red Pill' - PopMatters

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith

Elon Musk, our real-life Tony Stark, plans to announce this week the progress of his company Neuralink, which is dedicated to developing a Body Machine Interface (BMI); specifically, implanting a computer connection into the human brain.

Musk has described how robotic surgery will sew ultra-fine filaments into the cerebral cortex, which will be able tostream full broadband electrophysiology data into a computer, whereupon asingle USB-C cable provides full-bandwidth data streaming from the device.

So reports Claudia Glover, in Computer Business Review, in her article Your Brain, With a USB Port in It: Elon Musks Neuralink Vision Divides Experts.

The ambitions of those working closely on BMI include, for some, the hope that technology could eventually to be used to connect the human race via a bona fide neural network; allowing people to communicate using thoughts and images rather than words, and even give over their motor function to others, with their consent*. The ideas behind this have their roots in a dizzying transhumanism. . . .

Ideally in the next 50 years some BMI advocates hope to equip those who can afford it with tech that will ostensibly enable them to communicate without speaking, access a hive mind for any information they need and sense their houses and the appliances in them as easily as if they were on their bodies: no more Alexa, do this, or Hey Google You just think it and it happens: an Internet of Things in which you are at one with the things.

Glover interviews those who have high hopes for this technology, but also those who throw cold water on those hopes, explaining why it is dangerous (e.g., the brain doesnt heal like the rest of the body, so sticking things into it can have dire consequences), premature (we arent close to understanding how the brain works), or impossible (even if we did understand how the brain works, plugging it into a computer would do nothing).

Glover comes around to this, more fundamental difficulty. She quotes Oliver Armitage, who himself is working on BMI technologies (my bolds):

Armitage summed up the complexity of the human brain with what he called a theoretically intractable problem: Famously, there arent enough atoms in the universe to build a full model of what every cell is doing [in the brain]. Its a theoretically intractable problem, you cant even conceive of a computer large enough because there isnt enough material in the universe to make it.

We sometimes feel overwhelmed at how small we are in the vastness of the universe. But it appears that as vast as the universe is, your brain is vaster still.That is to say, you are vaster still.

Image byGerd AltmannfromPixabay

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Not Enough Atoms in the Universe to Model Your Brain - Patheos

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith