12 The Myth of Progress
12
The Myth of Progress: Reshaping Humanity
‘Amid arts forgotten, commerce annihilated, fragmentary literatures and populations destroyed, the European talks of progress because by an ingenious application of some scientific acquirements he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.’1
Benjamin Disraeli
The dominant narrative of Western culture is that of progress. Things are not simply changing; they are getting better. We thus move from an undeniable empirical observation to a contestable value judgement, which has assumed the status of an unquestioned and unquestionable dogma, serving functions that are in some ways similar to those of religious beliefs.2 This all too easily collapses into the Panglossian view that all change is good, no matter what is being changed or who is changing things. Anyone who suggests otherwise is dismissed as wallowing in nostalgia, longing wistfully for a misremembered and idealised past.
Any attempt to explore these issues needs to engage with the question of what the word ‘progress’ means. Most understandings of progress incorporate three core themes.3
Improvements in objectively measurable qualities, such as life expectancy, perinatal mortality or gross domestic product.
An improvement in the human situation, such as the growth of virtues such as tolerance, freedom or equality. (This, of course, depends on a consensus about which of these non-empirical qualities actually count as ‘virtues’.)
An improved understanding of our world, particularly through scientific progress, as a result of which our ways of depicting and speaking about the world become more reliable.
None of these can be considered adequate on its own as a measure of progress, and they are best seen as threads that are to be woven into a greater narrative.
Yet there are difficulties here. Perhaps the most challenging is that ‘progress’ is an ideologically freighted notion, not a simple description of events. We observe that things change; we judge that these changes are progressive or regressive. A development which seems regressive within a moral framework of one ideology appears as progressive within another. This can be seen from English reactions to the French Revolution of 1789. Some people, like the young Wordsworth, saw this as socially transformative and liberating.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!4
Others at the time, however, saw it as leading to social chaos and instability, threatening the future. Progress is the way we refer to change that we deem to be good. But just who are ‘we’? All too often, ‘we’ refers to the judgements of some privileged and powerful elite, who presume to speak for all right-thinking people, and tell the rest of us what we ought to think. In the end, whether something or someone is ‘progressive’ is determined by what the philosopher John Dewey termed ‘ends-in-view’ – the goals that people believe to be desirable.5
The ideal of ‘progress’ is clearly dependent on certain assumed moral values. It is not an empirical notion (such as ‘change’), but is rather an evaluation of the merits and significance of these changes. These values are determined by interest groups. The importance of this point is easily grasped when considering the colonial expansion of European nations in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 European colonial powers all too easily thought of ‘progress’ as civilising savages through benevolently imposing their own self-evidently correct set of moral and social values on conquered cultures, implicitly regarding this as cultural ‘progress’.
Certain groups of thinkers define themselves as ‘progressive’. It is, however, a notoriously ambivalent term, grounded in some conspiratorially unspoken and unacknowledged understanding of how history should develop. This is particularly clear within both Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, conceptually obese systems which try to force every historical event into some theoretical hole. Both these bloated worldviews held the essentially determinist belief that the inevitable outcome of the historical process was the triumph of socialism. The difficulty with Marxism was not so much that it was an ‘elaborately sophisticated structure erected on the foundation of a primitive misconception’,7 but that it rested on the precarious thesis of inevitable historical ‘progress’ towards a predetermined and knowable goal, which history itself seemed unable to confirm.
Given this ideological precommitment to the historical inevitability of socialism, it was natural for Marxists to speak of the ‘progressive forces of socialism and the degenerate forces of capitalism’.8 Progressives were those who went with the flow of history, reactionaries those who sought to prevent history reaching its intended goal, or even tried to reverse the historical process through counter-revolution. The difficulty, however, was that history itself did not seem to know about the rules that governed its supposed unfolding.9 And furthermore, just why should the inevitable be deemed to be right?
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr rightly pointed out the moral and intellectual vulnerability of liberal theories of progress, which so often seemed to elicit admiration from those who hoped that they were right, despite their blatant failure to face up to the human potential to choose and create evil.
The idea of progress is the underlying presupposition of what may be broadly defined as ‘liberal’ culture. If that assumption is challenged, the whole structure of meaning in the liberal world is imperilled. For this reason the liberal world is intolerant in regard to this article of its creed. It does not argue about its validity, precisely because it has lost every degree of scepticism in regard to it.10
Yet, as Niebuhr pointed out, this liberal ‘creed’ was ‘highly dubious’, not least because ‘all historical processes are ambiguous’.
Now Marx may have chosen the wrong goal. Yet with crystalline acuity, he realised that progress is a teleological notion. It is about identifying the right goal, and doing what is necessary to move ourselves and others towards it. If progress, though, is indeed about attaining a goal, it must include a critical capacity for reflection and a willingness to change direction if the evidence suggests that our present trajectory is not bringing us closer to that goal – or that we have chosen the wrong goal in the first place. It’s an obvious point, made with characteristic clarity by C.S. Lewis:
Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road . . . I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.11
The Need for Realism, Not Optimism
It is becoming much more difficult to sustain an uncritical metanarrative of progress in the West, as the manifest failings of Western liberalism have become increasingly clear.12 This inadequate metanarrative is one of the chief targets of Terry Eagleton’s withering critique of the ‘New Atheism’, which he regards as uncritically reflecting this ‘myth of progress’.13 Eagleton regards the ‘dream of untrammelled human progress’ as a ‘bright-eyed superstition’ which lacks any rigorous evidential base. ‘If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, apart from a few wrong turns, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.’14 Eagleton dismisses this myth as a demonstrably false pastiche, a luminous example of an infantile ‘blind faith’. What rational thinker could conceivably sign up to such a secular myth, which is obliged to treat such human-created catastrophes as Hiroshima, Auschwitz and apartheid as ‘a few local hiccups’ which in no way disrupted the steady upward progress of history?15
Underlying this ‘myth of progress’, Eagleton argued, was a naïve optimism which sorely needs to be challenged and reconstructed. For a start, we need to acknowledge the presence of a powerful and thoroughly authoritarian current in Enlightenment thought, evident in more radical elements of the French Revolution, which supported and practised methodical violence as a means of improving society. A classic example of this can be found in Eugene Lyons’s account of a period he spent in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, when repressive measures were defended on the basis of the degree of economic progress they helped to facilitate. ‘Every new statistical success gave another justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved.’16 The first and greatest casualty of this obsession with optimism is not so much truth, but any attempt to be realistic. ‘Reality is a pessimist to whose treasonable talk one must shut one’s ears. Since the truth is often enough unpleasant, it must be trumped by the unflinching will. It is a vein of optimism not easy to distinguish from mental illness.’17
For Eagleton, one of the most pressing difficulties with this optimistic view of human progress is the troubling persistence of evil.18 The cosmic optimism of the eighteenth century proclaimed the rationality and harmony of the universe, and the elevated position of human beings as rational interpreters and inhabitants of this ordered paradise. Although indifferent towards theology, the problem that arose from this naïve cosmic optimism was thoroughly theological: how can evil arise within paradise? ‘Such cosmic optimism tends to be self-defeating, since it throws into relief what it finds hardest to accommodate.’ The difficulty, in my view, can be traced back to Descartes and the origins of the Enlightenment. Descartes’ unwise emphasis on divine perfection merely accentuated the dissonance between theory and observation,19 creating an intellectual crisis where previously there had been merely some slight mental discomfort, which was perfectly capable of being accommodated within its leading metanarratives.
Thinkers of the nineteenth century, Eagleton suggests, adopted a somewhat different approach to the problem of evil. Though the bien pensants of that age were prepared to admit that evil was clearly an experienced reality within the world, they nevertheless countered that evil was in the process of being eliminated through human progress. This served the purpose of holding realism and optimism together in a rather delicate balance, allowing the irritating presence of evil to be conceded, while accentuating the upbeat and optimistic belief that evil was well on the way to being eradicated by an enhanced human wisdom and knowledge, and technological capacity to alter our environment. Humanity would ultimately triumph over evil! Curiously, the idea that humanity might be the agent – and not merely the victim – of evil remained largely unexamined by such enthusiastic social progressives.
To defeat evil, we need to triumph over ourselves. Human beings create and cause evil. It makes no sense to speak of an earthquake as a ‘natural evil’. It’s just a natural process, which happens to have unfortunate implications for human beings who are unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it makes perfect sense to speak of human evil – as seen in the great genocides of the twentieth century, which have no parallels in the animal world. If we are to avoid evil, we need to change. So how might that happen? In what follows, we’ll look at some proposed solutions and their potential downsides.
Technology and Progress
The Enlightenment’s narrative of progress affirms the improvement of human society and social conditions through advances in scientific understanding and technological application. Reason and science lead to the progressive improvement of the human condition through the erosion of religious superstition, and the emancipation of humanity from all taboos and arbitrary limits. The coupling of technological development and social progress was anticipated in the writings of Francis Bacon (1561–1626),20 and remains a dominant theme in modern thinking on progress. Scientific advance is inextricably linked to social progress.
Now let’s be clear. In many ways, human beings have improved the conditions under which they live. Medical advances have unquestionably led to an extension of life expectancy. Diseases that once wiped out populations can now be controlled. Technological advances have led to greater crop yields, thus increasing the world’s food resources. Yet these are always part of a complex picture. Just as a conveniently selective attention to only part of this picture creates the semblance of uniform progress, focusing on other parts creates the equally unreliable appearance of collapse and degeneration. Advances in one area mask retreats in others. Technology has changed things for the better – and for the worse.
The history of the twentieth century is perhaps the greatest obstacle that the metanarrative of secular progress has to overcome, not least because of its sacred mythology of the unique capacity of religion to generate violence. The First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War all raised awkward questions about the plausibility of this narrative. We were told that if we got rid of religion – or at least neutralised it, pulling out its teeth – then the likelihood of war would be drastically reduced, since religion was a key element in causing global conflict. Yet as far as scholars can see, there were no significant religious motivations for either the First World War (death toll around 16 million) or the Second World War (death toll around 60 million). We need to face up to the fact that, as a species, human beings are animals that use violence to achieve their ends, and technology to extend the reach of that violence. Religion doesn’t cause this tendency; it merely reflects it.
That was certainly the judgement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who served as a British infantry officer during the First World War. He experienced there the terrifying reality of modern technological warfare, in which machines hurled an impersonal death from a distance towards their targets.21 Tolkien came to see the ‘machine’ as a symbol of the lust for power – above all, for power over others. Where some might see machines as devices that liberate people from servility, Tolkien saw them not as a means of liberation but rather as tools of coercion, domination and enslavement.22
Some will rightly suggest that this is an excessively negative view, reflecting Tolkien’s traumatic experiences of a technologically enhanced warfare. Yet we cannot entirely dismiss his concerns. In his The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien contrasts the hobbits, who used simple technology to help them stay close to the natural world and enjoy a simple life, with human beings, who used technology as a means of domination and exploitation.
Artificial Breeding: Eugenics and the Human Gene Pool
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) argued that the standard stockbreeding practice of ‘artificial selection’ offers an insight into a corresponding process which takes place within the world of nature.23 Darwin extended his analysis in The Descent of Man (1871), arguing that human beings are also an outcome of this process of ‘natural selection’. It was not long before some leading figures in Victorian culture, anxious to safeguard both the future of the human race in general, and the cultural supremacy of Great Britain in particular, suggested that the same principles used in stockbreeding should be applied to human beings. Why not breed humans selectively, to ensure that those with desirable physical or temperamental qualities dominated?
Darwin himself laid the foundations for this development. In his Descent of Man, he noted that primitive societies rapidly eliminated those who were ‘weak in body or mind’, so that those who survived were more healthy. For example, the ancient historian Plutarch told of how the city of Sparta identified weak infants, and eliminated them as a potential liability for the city.24 Civilised societies, Darwin remarked, hindered this ‘process of elimination’ through medical and social care, thus enabling ‘the weak members of civilised societies’ to reproduce – with negative implications for the health of future generations. Remedial action was clearly required.
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.25
Darwin here arguably offered nothing more than implicit support for the notion of selective breeding for humans, paralleling the best practices of stockbreeders. Others, however – such as Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of Darwin – saw how Darwin’s ideas opened the way to the preservation of the human race through selective human breeding.26 For the future good of the human race, certain types of human beings ought not to be allowed to reproduce.
Although we tend to think of such repressive policies as characteristic only of a degenerate Nazi Germany, they were in fact widely accepted within progressive circles in America and England during the 1920s. In fact, it is difficult to identify anything about eugenics that is specifically Nazi, despite its obvious potential for developing some aspects of its Aryan racial agendas.27 Race and class agendas dominated the concerns of most so-called ‘progressives’ of the 1920s and 1930s, who supported the practice of selective human breeding. For example, Marie Stopes (1880–1958), who founded the ‘Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress’ in 1921, aggressively advocated sterilisation (voluntary or forced) as a means of preventing the ‘rotten and racially diseased’ from endangering the ‘higher and more beautiful forms of the human race’.28 Programmes of artificial insemination were advocated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s as a means of social engineering; these were subsequently abandoned for ideological reasons.29
The appeal of eugenics to those inclined towards social engineering has never gone away, although it has long since lost any associations with progressive trends within Western culture, partly because of its associations with a discredited Nazi past, and partly because some of its core policies – such as forcible sterilisation – are alien to the fundamental values of a neo-liberal society. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to understand why some continue to find it attractive. If plants and animals can be bred selectively so that they are more resistant to disease, why not do the same with human beings? Selective breeding might easily eliminate those who would, in the eyes of some, be a ‘burden’ to society.30 A social ‘in-group’ could manipulate the genetic future of its rival ‘out-groups’.
The lure of the genetic reprogramming of humanity remains as powerful as ever. In his influential book On Aggression (1963), the ethologist Konrad Lorenz argued that while the human tendency to aggressiveness once served some important social roles, the advent of modern technology made this instinct fundamentally dangerous. It is no accident that Lorenz concluded his book by expressing the faint hope that human beings might one day find themselves subject to some form of genetic mutation that would turn them into affectionate creatures. For Lorenz, this would be a most welcome happenstance. But what if this were to be made to happen? What if we could take control of things?
Rebooting Humanity: Transhumanism and the Enhancement of Humans
Classic forms of humanism, expressed in works such as Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (34–36), emphasise the beauty and elegance of human nature, taking delight in the complexity of the human body and the range of human achievements. More recently, however, schools of thought have emerged which see human nature as a ‘work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remould in desirable ways’.31 If Milan Kundera is right in suggesting that our longing for paradise is actually a desire to escape from the limits of being human (4), might our dissatisfaction and restlessness cease if we could transcend our biological origins through technological enhancement? By becoming posthuman?
In the previous section, we noted the potential of selective breeding to ‘improve’ the human race – for example, by breeding out certain genetic deficiencies which make people more prone to disease. Yet there is another option for the transformation of humanity which avoids the social stigma that is now attached to eugenics – namely, the technological enhancement of humanity. The ‘transhumanist’ movement advocates ‘fundamentally improving the human condition’ through technology, thus allowing us to ‘eliminate ageing and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities’.32 Through the creation and application of technology, human beings now have the capacity to transcend their biological limits. Yet awkward questions remain. Nick Bostrom, one of the most significant and influential transhumanist philosophers, rightly queries the simplistic equation of technological advances with the notion of progress itself. ‘It may be tempting to refer to the expansion of technological capacities as “progress”. But this term has evaluative connotations – of things getting better – and it is far from a conceptual truth that expansion of technological capabilities makes things go better.’33
What sort of technological enhancements might this mean? Here’s one example.34 It will one day be possible to develop artificial red blood cells, capable of transporting oxygen and carbon dioxide in human blood. These artificial cells would not be limited by the materials and pressures that arise naturally, and would thus be capable of performing far beyond the range of natural red blood cells.
Some will see this intervention in human development as ‘playing at being God’. This is a fair point, although it needs careful nuancing. After all, human beings already depend extensively on scientific interventions – such as drugs and surgery – to promote the quality and extend the range of their lives. The question under discussion is whether transhumanism represents an extension of existing practices, or a new approach altogether, moving us into unfamiliar and disturbing ethical and social territory.
Here’s another example. Transhumanists point out the importance of ‘evolutionary lag’ – the slow response of natural evolutionary processes to changes in our environment. Technology now allows us to insert certain genes for specific traits, thus bypassing evolutionary lag. A good example of this issue is lactose tolerance. While the development of lactose intolerance is adaptive for mammals since it makes weaning easier, increasing use of dairy products in human societies over the last five thousand years has given rise to a significant problem for many people. This development is so recent in evolutionary terms that genetic traits which deal with the problem have yet to diffuse to all human populations. So why not insert into the human genome a gene that has a desirable effect in this situation, or find some way of mimicking its effects?
Bostrom argues that such judicious technological enhancement of humanity might lead to the emergence of ‘posthumans’ with some or all of the following characteristics.
Individuals could expect to live for more than five hundred years.
A large section of the population would have cognitive capacities that are more than two standard deviations above the present human maximum.
Psychological suffering would become rare.35
There are obvious questions here. For example, is such a technologically enhanced human being actually something other than human? And are these technological enhancements capable of being transmitted genetically? If so, are we really talking about the emergence of a new species? Will ‘posthumans’ displace humans?
Transhumanists often assume that technological augmentation of natural human cognitive capacities will lead to moral excellence, in effect regarding selfishness and our innate tendencies towards destructive patterns of thought and action as due to mental retardation that will be remedied by boosting our cognitive capacities. It’s an interesting suggestion. Yet its status is that of an unevidenced belief, a charming aspiration, which may lack any grounding in reality. Victor Ferkiss expressed a deep-seated concern a generation ago that cannot be ignored, given the pace of technological development. ‘What if the new man combines the animal irrationality of primitive man with the calculated greed and power-lust of industrial man, while possessing the God-like powers granted him by technology? This would be the ultimate horror.’36
There are many issues to be debated, some of which are scientific. The most important is the ‘Weissman barrier’ – the basic principle that certain characteristics that are acquired by organisms in their lifetime cannot be transmitted genetically. For example, a woman who loses a hand in an accident does not produce children with only one hand, just as a man who develops his muscles through rigorous exercise regimes does not necessarily produce muscular offspring. At what point would a technologically enhanced humanity be able to transmit its enhancements genetically – if at all?
Yet most of the questions that arise do not concern how this could be done, but whether it should be done. Four concerns seem particularly significant here.
Technological enhancements are expensive, and their implementation will therefore merely increase global inequality. Those with the financial means will be able to extend their lifespans; everyone else has to continue as normal. The first posthumans may well turn out to be wealthy Americans.
A significant expansion of human lifespan immediately raises the concern noted by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Given that the earth has limited resources, it can only sustain a certain number of people. Although Malthus could not have foreseen the development of chemical fertilisers and genetically modified crops, giving enhanced yields, his point remains valid. Earth’s capacity to produce food limits the size of the population. If human life expectancy rises to 500 years, the overall population must be reduced. Otherwise, the harsh control mechanisms so grimly noted by Malthus – war and famine – would kick in.
The assumption that there is a direct correlation between cognitive capacity and moral discernment is contestable. What if technological enhancement merely assists and enables humanity’s seemingly inescapable and utterly irrational tendency to debase and destroy its own best achievements? To use more theological language, does the rise of transhumanism offer an escape from sin? Or does it make us even more vulnerable to it?
Will transhumanists end up treating humans as an inferior race? As Stephen Hawking points out, there is no compelling reason for believing that a technologically enhanced humanity will retain the same values and rationality as its originals.
None of these questions are easy to answer, yet they all need to be asked. It is far from clear that technological advance will lead us to wiser and better decisions than we have made in the recent past. Perhaps that helps us understand why some are suggesting that any possible enhancement of human technological capacity means that we also need a corresponding moral enhancement, if we are to cope with the new challenges that we will inevitably face.37 But who will reprogramme us? After all, these ‘moral enhancements’ will be developed and chosen by morally questionable human beings, who could easily adapt them to advance their own vested interests and concerns.
We might be on the threshold of a terrifying Orwellian world in which powerful groups reprogramme us to replicate their beliefs and values, making critique of these impossible through a redirection of human rational processes. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a troubling account of such a development, in which human beings were reprogrammed in ‘hatcheries and conditioning centres’ to conform to the will of their controllers, including the generation of people of lower intelligence in the ‘Social Predestination Room’, to facilitate their conformity to the needs of the World State. Instead of having to think for themselves, they would simply conform to the group-think of the State.
So would such moral rebooting actually change things? The sad truth is that humanity has messed up this world more than any other animal. We have managed to change global climates, with unpredictable and potentially damaging long-term results; we have developed nuclear and pathological weapons capable of wiping out entire populations; and we have conducted campaigns of genocide unparalleled elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
So can we be hopeful for the future of the human race? Given that 99.9 per cent of all species that ever existed on earth are now extinct, what are the chances of our survival? There seems to be an emerging consensus that there is a serious risk that humanity’s journey will come to a premature end – even if that consensus does not extend to any precise timeframe or probability judgement.38 We could be wiped out in a natural extinction event; we could wipe ourselves out; or we might be transformed into another species – but perhaps this time, as transhumanism suggests, by taking charge of our own evolutionary future. We just don’t know. And we have to live in the light of this lack of knowledge. But maybe that’s better than believing that the future is merely some kind of fantasy projection of the present. An uncritical belief in the uninterrupted upward trajectory of human progress can lead us into illusory and dystopian worlds, whose plausibility is sustained largely by the suppression of evidence and reflection.
Yet there is another point that needs to be made here. Earlier, we noted Einstein’s problem with the question of the ‘Now’. Viewing human life solely through the interpretative lens of relativity theory could not help him – or anyone – grasp the existential importance of the present moment in human experience. As we saw earlier in our reflections on meaning, human beings naturally consider this to be important. The same problem emerges with ideologies which focus on the theme of progress. Why? Terry Eagleton puts his finger on the point at issue: ‘For the ideology of progress . . . all moments are devalued by the fact that each of them is no more than a stepping-stone to a successor, the present a mere gangplank to the future. Every point of time is diminished in relation to an infinity of points still to come.’39
This ideology of progress holds that some point in the indeterminate future is thus held out as possessing value and significance; the present moment only has significance in that it contributes to this distant and invisible goal. The present is thus reduced to little more than an existential vacuum, empty of any intrinsic significance save as a stepping-stone to an imagined future that may turn out to be nothing more than an illusory promissory note. If such a controlling and limiting ideology allows us to have hope, it is for the transformation of the future. Yet human intellectual history is littered with the wrecks of aspirations that proved to be groundless, misguided or simply insane. Who knows if today’s cherished dreams will turn out to be tomorrow’s discarded illusions?
The Hope of Immortality: Technology or Theology?
John Gray had little doubt about one of the core human obsessions. ‘Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.’40 Yet even those who do not share this fixation on human mortality are obliged to recognise that there are limits placed on our lifespan. We may seek to extend our lives, yet this will simply add further to the stress on our planet’s limited resources, and make war or famine even more likely. So why this anxiety in the first place?
Many answers have been given. The sociologist Peter Berger suggested that human mortality was the ultimate unbearable truth, pointing to the terrifying meaninglessness and chaos which characterised human existence in this world. Society tried to defend and protect people from this unbearable knowledge, shielding them against this terror by asserting the existence of meaning and order in a seemingly meaningless and chaotic universe.41 Human beings need to be protected by illusions of meaning against this meaningless, chaotic realm of disorder, disintegration and death. J.R.R. Tolkien spoke of human beings spinning ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ to console and cheat ‘our timid hearts’, while seeing this human instinct as a sign of some greater horizon that called out to be explored.42 This human reluctance to accept our own mortality also stood at the heart of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning monograph The Denial of Death (1973). For Becker, human beings are driven by the desire to deny death, transcend it, or create meaning in its face.
History is generous in its benevolent provision of amusing examples to illustrate human attempts to deny, cheat or conquer death. One of the most entertaining is the attempt made by the Soviet ‘Immortalization Commission’ to preserve Lenin’s body after his death in 1924 – not merely as a potent symbol of the Russian Revolution, but as an assertion of the human capacity to achieve immortality under Marxism-Leninism.43 Leonid Krasin was an engineer who believed that the dead could be technologically resurrected. Who more than Lenin deserved to be the first to share this privilege? In a series of remarkable experiments, Krasin used refrigeration to preserve Lenin’s body, not merely so that its public display might edify the Soviet masses, but as a demonstration of the Soviet capacity to vanquish death. After all, the Soviet Union arose through the forceful overthrow of imperial Russia. Why not end the tyranny of death in the same way?
Sadly, Krasin’s primitive cryogenic experiments were doomed to failure. Lenin’s body soon began to show unmistakeable signs of decay. Krasin demanded that a better refrigerator should be imported from Germany to stop this process of deterioration. Yet it continued unabated and irresistibly. In his death, Lenin demonstrated his true humanity. His nose began to lose its shape, and his eyes began to recede into their sockets. In the end, the only solution was to embalm Lenin’s body regularly, and hope nobody would notice that death had neither been defeated nor transfigured.
Yet there was a clear ideological motivation for this procedure. Marxism-Leninism proclaimed itself as having displaced an outdated and outmoded Christianity. This, unfortunately, had been achieved largely through force of arms, rather than force of argument. Churches were closed or destroyed, often by dynamiting; priests were imprisoned, exiled or executed. On the eve of the Second World War there were only 6,376 clergy remaining in the Russian Orthodox Church, compared with the pre-revolutionary figure of 66,140. In 1917, there were 39,530 churches in Russia; by 1940, only 950 remained functional.44
A key player in this atheist crusade was the League of Militant Atheists, a semi-official coalition of various political forces which operated within the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1947.45 With the slogan, ‘The Struggle against Religion is a Struggle for Socialism’, the group set out to destroy the credibility of religion through social, cultural and intellectual manipulation. Its carefully orchestrated campaigns involved using newspapers, journals, lectures and films to persuade Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were irrational and destructive. Good Soviet citizens, they declared, ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic worldview. The good citizens of the Soviet Union nevertheless clung obstinately to their Christian faith – not as a mark of intellectual backwardness, but because they preferred to trust this narrative rather than its more recent and untested rival, which already seemed to them to be in trouble.
Christianity proclaimed the resurrection of the body, and offered the hope of eternal life. Marxism-Leninism thought that it could do better than that: it could overcome death itself, and offer a secular hope. The advance of knowledge within a technocratic Soviet Union would make it possible for humanity to conquer death without the need for divine assistance. Although most Soviet ideologists were emphatic that Marxism-Leninism was not a religion, its vision for human immortality certain made it seem so to its secular admirers. The problem, of course, was that it failed to deliver on this core promise. Transhumanism has taken up this challenge, with a promise to extend human life. Yet there is no talk of immortality. Wisely, transhumanism has limited itself to the postponement of the inevitable, rather than promising the impossible.
There is much more that needs to be explored in this book. Yet it is time to bring these brief reflections on human beings to an end.