Unsuspecting Souls Read online

  On the other hand, and in the other direction, the computer has a memory—which most people consider more powerful and accurate than their own—and has a command of language far wider than our own. Under the command of the machine, we slowly begin to feel powerless. Young people in particular push the on button and instantly know the power resides not with them but inside that mysterious box. People conceive of themselves as fabricated, like machines, out of replaceable parts. I can trade in my worn-out hardware—knees, hips, rotator cuffs, even retinas. Our software, our memory and consciousness, is harder to fix.

  Recall the way the dead entered heaven during those years of the Civil War: Christians did not really die, but instead sailed over an invisible divide to enter into a blissful and eternal hereafter. In the new technologically driven regime of the twenty-first century, a group of brave new worlders have come to believe that they can control their inevitable destiny by eradicating it. This new breed laughs at the idea of euthanasia, because there is no more Thanatos. For them, death is only a lingering nuisance. In that new scheme, people will live forever on this plane, free of debilitating illness. Through genomic assaying, engineers can determine not only who we are but also who we want to become. Which means that human beings can finally dispense with those ultimately disabling professions of medicine and psychiatry—under this scheme rendered totally obsolete—since we can now pursue our lives free of any illnesses—including that most dreaded of all illnesses, our own mortality—that might await us. Insurance companies rest easy, for the new person will know that his or her life will proceed without medical trauma from the moment of birth to an end that continually approaches the horizon but that never arrives.

  A disembodied life—a state in which people do not live and refuse to die—makes us today into a modern perversion of a nineteenth-century vampire. We find ourselves confronting the strangest kind of issues and ideas, like gene splicing, stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, cloning, abortion rights, right-to-life laws, pro-choice laws, mercy killing, euthanasia, do-not-resuscitate orders, the saving of premature infants, “partial birth” abortions, snowflake babies, embryo research, and organ transplants and donations. Just discussing the possibility of the prolongation of life automatically makes the sentence of life in prison a harsher punishment. It should cause us to rethink the death penalty itself, and in particular the death penalty for minors. With bioengineering, we could extend the sentence of a “lifer” nearly forever, taking punishment to a most bizarre level. This may constitute torture under the posthuman conditions of bioengineering.

  The new life is also not necessarily directed by technology, but one in which leading-edge technology has thoroughly incorporated itself into life’s every fiber. I offer as example the strange case of Doctor Dan Stoicescu, a multimillionaire, and only the second person in the world to purchase the full sequence of his own genetic code. For that picture of his deeply inner dimension, Stoicescu paid a private research laboratory the fairly hefty price of $350,000. He is not alone in his quest for individual identity. In fact, so many wealthy individuals now desire to carry their personal genome sequences in their wallets, like another ID card, that two private companies, Knome (pronounced in a revealing way as “know-me”), of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Illumina (perhaps an echo of the Bavarian Illuminati of the Enlightenment), in San Diego, specialize in genetic cartography.

  Illumina, which boasts of its ability to provide whole genome sequencing “to the rich and famous,” has a goal of “applying innovative technologies and revolutionary assays to the analysis of genetic variation and function.” An individual can then have the freedom to indulge in what the company calls “personalized medicine,” utilizing the dimensions of what Illumina refers to as “genomics” and “proteometics.” These two companies have gone well beyond the rather gruesome-sounding practice of “organ harvesting,” providing seriously ill people with, say, a new liver or heart. Within the regime of this advanced personalized medicine, the genome laboratory can implant a chip under a person’s skin that will regulate the variations in his or her particular gene sequencing over the years: human being as processor ?14

  Notice that I use the phrase “over the years.” I cannot use the usual phrase here, “over the course of his or her life,” for life may simply continue for as long as the client desires. Say goodbye to aberrations from birth, irregularities of this or that organ, incidence of various kinds of cancer, the onset of adult diabetes, or the most invasive restriction of human design—life expectancy. Say farewell forever, that is, to the human being, to everything you thought about the human being. Under the influence of the genome project, people will become living programs—pure and simple. Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher and cultural critic, points to an essential irony in the current fascination with longevity: “By warding off death at all costs (burdensome medical treatment, genetics, cloning), we’re being turned, through security, into living dead. On the pretext of immortality, we’re moving towards slow extermination.”15

  Without actually referring to it, Baudrillard sees the transhuman transformation, in which social engineers use technology to improve human mental and physical capacities, as the logical conclusion to the nineteenth-century idea of vampirism. But while he says we are “being turned into,” I see instead that we are allowing ourselves to be turned into. We are the actors, responsible for our own demise. And that means we can do something about it. But first we need to have some idea of just what is happening to us and who is doing it.

  Baudrillard envisions, correctly, a system that goes well beyond managing life from the beginning, say, by monitoring the career of the fetus in utero by way of ultrasound pictures, diet, and exercise regimens. With gene sequencing, a laboratory like Illumina will reshape the resulting project of sperm fertilizing ovum, which, as we well know, never turns out perfectly. After all, people fall ill early in life, or die midlife because of some unexpected and unseen disease. To hell, then, with the rather sloppy work of creation or even of evolution. Intelligent design is dumb. Prayer is for dupes; faith for fools.

  Illumina offers a new, bold, and technologically enhanced alternative to the old entity called life. Illumina presents itself as all seeing and all knowing—a much better producer (and marketer) of created human life than anything religion might envision. Again, I feel compelled to quote Baudrillard here, for he gets under the surface of change with such wisdom and clarity: “It’s we who’ve undertaken to inflict the worst on ourselves, and to engineer our disappearance in an extremely complex and sophisticated way, in order to restore the world to the pure state it was in before we were in it.”16 And here I think Baudrillard speaks closer to the truth than in his previous comment, for he finally says we are responsible for engineering our own disappearance. We are doing it to ourselves. We should keep Baudrillard’s comments in mind, for at the end of the book we will need some solutions for a way out of our fix; we will have to have some way to recapture our humanness. And “that way”—the transhuman way—to appropriate a line from King Lear, “madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that.”

  As mad as he may seem, Doctor Stoicescu knows all this only too well. That’s why he chooses to place himself in a category that already lies beyond the human being, for only the old order of human being could care about such drivel as vitality, or potency, or agency. He calls himself a transhumanist, someone who believes that life (there is that commodity again, “life”) can be extended for a forbiddingly long time, not just through diet and something Stoicescu calls “lifestyle adaptations,” but through the more advanced and enlightened pursuits of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

  Stoicescu’s genome sequencing will permit him to know what illnesses he can be expected to contract and what adaptations at the level of genes he needs to undergo to rid his system of those potential illnesses. Transhumanists, and there are thousands like Stoicescu, walk about on this planet, like Kierkegaard’s knights of faith, unnoticed an
d unrecognized—not with the aim of enlightenment, however, but with the goal of beating death. They believe that such a move is absolutely possible, for they consider death merely an accident of faulty engineering, and consider suffering just the price we pay for imperfection.

  Stoicescu, a Romanian, sounds frighteningly like that other pale Romanian, Count Dracula. Recall that in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula has already beaten death at its own game; now he lives forever, condemned to a diet of that one rare delicacy, human blood. For Stoker, the count is a fantasy creation, a parody of the period’s search for eternal life, a search that drains it of the very lifeblood it so badly needs. Stoicescu holds onto no such fantasy. He believes that his investment has guaranteed him a terrifically good shot at eternal life. It’s all a matter of faith—in technology and gene manipulation. It’s all a matter of moving beyond even that socially constructed idea of life, to a day-by-day regime fully determined and regulated by leading-edge technology. The transhuman credo: Human beings have been created as weak and vulnerable subjects in the universe, thoroughly in need of support and vetting, which only technology can provide. We now have the technology. Why not use it? That’s what real evolution is all about. And that’s what true integration involves: machines merging with humans. Thus, another transhumanist, Ray Kurzweil, has plans to upgrade the “‘suboptimal software’ in your brain.”17 He describes something called “Singularity,” in which humans and machines evolve into immortal creatures with software that continually upgrades itself.

  For transhumanists, the future exists as a continually expanding present moment. While such a belief may sound like a description from Saint Augustine, it is not—it is anything but Augustinian. Under the aegis of the new bioethicists, life constitutes a product of engineering at the highest levels, like an Apple G5, or a Boeing 757, or perhaps, better yet, like some intergalactic spacecraft. In the grasp of the transhumanists, individuals or persons or human beings have become walking CAT scan machines who have their “systems” continually monitored for irregularities, and who also have those systems continually corrected for every fault and irregularity.

  Stoicescu describes himself as a prominent member of the World Transhumanist Association, a group that explores the full range of possibilities for what its members call the “posthuman future.” With this group, we arrive at a place monumental and gigantic leaps beyond the simple elimination of the idea of the human being. We have also gone well beyond what looks like a very tame concept called “life” or “a life.” The association proudly crows about having advanced in its thinking beyond the fragile and vulnerable human being to the new and improved, indomitable “posthuman.” We come face to face here with a new world of life drained of all of its essence in order for people to entertain the possibility of eternal life—even if such a dream turns out to be a remote possibility. Like Dracula, these new vampires also must continually feed. But it is not blood they crave. They derive their strength from the latest advance or innovation in the world of biotechnology.

  What does all this say about the already wounded and crippled and forgotten members of the population? What about the poor and those of color? Are we witnessing here the pseudoscience of racial inferiority and superiority so scarily popular in the nineteenth century, reinscribed in society as a nightmare of the technological revolution? After all, Stoicescu talks easily about a higher and more powerful breed of humans. It can only be a short step from that conception to talk about that most frightening Nazi phrase, the superior race. Technology applied to genetics may take us not into the future, as Stoicescu so optimistically promises, but all the way back to nineteenth-century eugenics and the perverse racial theories of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.

  To be full and active members of society, transhumans, like the old humans, must have rights and must have them protected by the law. Even in the depths of the technological revolution, the law must define rights and provide safeguards. And so, in May 2008, Congress passed a bill prohibiting discrimination by employers and health insurers on the basis of genetic tests. Which means that whatever people find out about their genetic markers, they can feel free to reveal that information to a boss or fellow worker without being punished for those disclosures about possible disabilities. “This bill removes a significant obstacle to the advancement of personalized medicine,” said Edward Abrahams, executive director of a group called the Personalized Medicine Coalition, a group devoted to fostering preventive medicine tailored for each person’s known condition.18

  Posthumans come into their own by an intensified merging of their own beings with the highest levels of technology, through the power of bioengineering, cybernetics, and nanotechnology. The World Transhumanist Association derived its power from the imagination of someone who went by the name of FM-2030 (né F. M. Esfandiary), so called because he was born in 1930 and believed he would live one hundred years. Upon his death, in 2000, Esfandiary had his body cryogenically frozen, with the hope that doctors would find a cure for pancreatic cancer, the disease that eventually killed him. His body rests today in a vat of liquid nitrogen in Arizona—a high-tech embalming technique—awaiting its eventual but, according to the central transhumanist creed, inevitable awakening to eternal life.

  Esfandiary taught a class at the New School for Social Research, in New York City, in 1966, titled “New Concepts of the Human,” in which he formulated his ideas about the future of the human being. Transhumanism, Esfandiary explains, is shorthand for “transitory human,” in which transhumans provide living proof of the “earliest manifestations of the new evolutionary beings.” Transhumans are on their way to forging a new, twenty-first-century definition of human being. They hope to leave their mark in the Oxford English Dictionary. We have been witnessing signs of the coming of these revolutionary transhumans, Esfandiary argued, through developments in physical and mental augmentations, including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilization and cloning), the absence of religious beliefs and faith in general, and a rejection of traditional family values.

  I ended an earlier chapter with the story of Steve Fossett, whom a judge declared dead without ever having seen him alive, and without ever having known anything about him, either physically or emotionally or psychologically. A judge had to declare Fossett legally dead since no one could recover his remains. He died without a body. In this chapter, people move beyond that circumstance: No one will have bodies, in the traditional sense. We will walk around with technologically enhanced somas, straight out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. And this will match perfectly the transhuman idea of conception—without much or any intervention of the parents. The real and true transhumans begin in glass—in vitro, or in test tubes, or on glass slides, free of much traditional medical meddling, and ready for manipulation by a team of bioengineers and bioethicists.

  One of the heroes of the transhumanist movement is a person named Louise Brown, born on July 25, 1978, in Manchester, England, the world’s first so-called test tube baby. Some two million babies have now been born, around the world, in the same way as Louise Brown, without sexual intercourse, fertilized in a solution at the bottom of a petri dish, inside the sterile corridors of a laboratory. Dolly the sheep came into the world, in 1997, using the same techniques of artificial fertilization—inside a laboratory, in Scotland, without copulation between animals. Since the year 2000, the world has witnessed the cloning of five generations of mice; several calves in both Japan and in the United States; Tetra the monkey, cloned in Oregon; and five piglets cloned in Japan and the United States. An American and a South Korean scientist both admit to having created a human embryo, but both also confess to having immediately destroyed it.

  What would it mean to have exact copies of ourselves walking about, as if we were those photographic reproductions that Mathew Brady displayed? Certainly, such copies put the lie to the words unique or individua
l, and make problematic the concept of a personality. We might justifiably think of cloning as the exact opposite of reproduction: The cloned person finds himself or herself totally eliminated in the process of manufacture. Baudrillard thinks of laboratory duplication in exactly this way: “[C]loning can be said to be something like a slow-motion suicide. By that I mean not a sudden disappearance, but an innovative form of extinction of the species by . . . automatic doubling.”19 Notice that Baudrillard does not refer to the nineteenth-century double, or doppelgänger, the shadow self, but to an exact photographic copy, a cliché, in its original nineteenth-century sense of a “stereotyped reproduction.”

  The chant “pro-life” should sound a bit odd to us now, against the backdrop of all these posthuman genetic permutations. To be pro-life, in the context of this book, means to stand in support of the trumped-up, constructed entity that surfaces in the course of the nineteenth century. To adopt a pro-life stance, a person, or better yet the pro-life movement itself, has to decide on the exact nanosecond when life actually begins. That is, the entity “life” must have a discernable beginning and a recognizable end. The ancient idea of a “quickening in the womb” will simply not suffice. And the idea of agony, a confrontation with death, certainly will not serve as a signal of the end of things. And so, the struggle to find answers to such questions reveals the truly artificial nature of that construct called “life” or, as I have often repeated, “a life.”

  The transhumanists have employed a new phrase to refer to the new construction of life—“biocapital” or “genetic capital,” both a part of something that goes these days by the name of the new bioeconomy. These terms refer to the use of genetic engineering (nineteenth-century eugenics, as I have said, made technologically appealing) to raise the level of genetic capital of the entire country, ideas made popular first in stockbreeding. In terms of the transhuman, bioethical movement, “in advanced liberal ethics, each individual is urged to live his life as a kind of enterprise to maximize lifestyle or potential, to become a kind of entrepreneur of oneself and one’s family.”20 Companies like Genentech spend their time and money “patenting, sequencing, mapping, purifying, branding, marketing, and publicizing new life forms.”21