Eclipse of Man. Charles T. Rubin

these thinkers might have influenced one another, or to prove their influence on today’s transhumanists. But I trust it is reasonably clear that between Condorcet and Bernal the idea of progress itself has traveled quite a distance. Where for Condorcet the friend of humanity can find reason to think that in the world to come people will be more humane to each other, when Bernal looks to the future he sees “the progress of dehumanization”: human extinction at worst, and at best human irrelevance to the progressive development of intelligence and power over the natural world—an evolutionary “dead end.” As we will discuss later, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association and the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, thinks we can have it both ways, expressing the hope that our posthuman replacements will be designed to be more humane than we are. Everyone seems to agree that the kinder, gentler world that Condorcet imagines could indeed come into being; but for Haldane it would amount to a short-sighted squandering of nature’s potential, while for Bernal we humans would be likely to live in it as subjects to powers so far beyond our control as to make historical aristocracies seem models of egalitarianism. Today, David Pearce, another founder of the World Transhumanist Association, cuts through the problem of needing some to rule others in order to keep them happy by suggesting that we can redesign ourselves so that we are always experiencing “a sublime and all-pervasive happiness.”¹⁴⁰ Condorcet’s expectation that people will be better fed becomes the revolt in Fedorov and Flammarion against the “absurd” need to eat at all, while today’s transhumanists likewise find it unacceptable that we eat and excrete as we do.¹⁴¹ Condorcet suggests the possibility of accelerating progress toward the conquest of nature here on Earth, but for Haldane and Bernal what is at stake is the aesthetic recreation of the universe itself. Today, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, the most widely known of the transhumanists, wonders if posthuman superintelligence might not be able to overcome entropy itself, thereby preventing the now-expected eventual end to the possibility of life in the universe and overcoming the last challenge to the immortality that Condorcet was only willing to hint at.

      There is no single arc that connects all of our authors in such a way as to account for this significant transformation in the understanding of progress. But each lays part of the foundation for the change, a foundation on which is built the edifice that is contemporary transhumanism. Let us try to identify some of the key points.

      The main line of Condorcet’s argument is the most familiar. Perhaps building off Rousseau’s notion of human “perfectibility,”¹⁴² Condorcet asserts that we possess a (unique?) “quality of melioration” that allows us to improve ourselves, primarily through the conquest of nature. As that project succeeds, many of the longstanding, seemingly given conditions of human life—poverty, hunger, disease, vice, and other pervasive disabilities that have stood in the way of a good human life—become problems that can be solved. By solving them, we make better human beings, human beings who are physically more fit, mentally more capable, morally improved. The rate of progress accelerates with this new starting point, but Condorcet seems to believe that people will remain human beings.

      Yet Condorcet’s own ideas about life extension, combined with the possibility of accelerating progress, begin to suggest something more radical. Initially life extension seems of a piece with the other improvements he speaks of. After all, as we become healthier and eat better, longer life would seem to follow as a matter of course. One could say that Condorcet is merely pointing out how we can reduce the incidence of premature death. But when he starts talking about an indefinite extension of lifespan, the door is opened to the possibility of a significantly more fundamental change in the terms of human existence. It does not seem as if Condorcet wishes to open the door very wide. Yes, he looks forward to a time when death becomes something that is chosen, but note that it is chosen “in the course of nature,” as if there is in this respect at least some part of nature that human beings will not or should not master.¹⁴³

      This limit is one that our other authors are not nearly so inclined to respect, and their overt desire for immortality is of a piece with a far stronger inclination to imagine the development out of humanity of some completely new kind of superior being. Perhaps Condorcet did not understand, or chose not to highlight, the more radical consequences of his own picture of accelerating progress. But it seems more likely that something had to be added to Condorcet in order to promote this shift in the imagination. What might that be?

      First, as Fedorov explicitly highlighted, there is the Malthusian dilemma of resource scarcity. Malthus wrote in direct response to Condorcet’s hopes for the future, arguing that the melioration Condorcet imagined would be self-defeating. More people living materially more comfortable lives will simply produce resource scarcity, which in turn will bring back all the ills of human life. Perpetual progress understood as an ongoing improvement in the material conditions of life for all is thus simply impossible since population will grow faster than available resources. For Fedorov, the conquest of space is in part a solution to the Malthusian dilemma of resource exhaustion, a solution that becomes the more plausible as the sense grows that the Earth is but a tiny speck in a very large universe.¹⁴⁴ Of course, as the hostility of the extraterrestrial environment came to be better understood, this prospect may have seemed more daunting. But Haldane and Bernal are there with a solution to this part of the problem: the radical reconstruction of humanity in a way that makes mankind better suited for life away from Earth.

      As we have seen, once you have taken that step, the promise of effectively infinite worlds in infinite space makes anything seem possible; both Haldane and Bernal take us to the very limits of the human imagination, Haldane by suggesting that all the matter in the galaxy available to life should be used by it before moving on to other galaxies, Bernal by suggesting that our distant descendants will remake the universe with a new “let there be light.” Perhaps these beings that conquer space will also conquer time and entropy, a route to the eternity promised by Flammarion and the end to death promised by Fedorov.

      The resource scarcity that Condorcet did not worry about implies ongoing competition among human beings rather than an ever more cooperative world, and by the late nineteenth century that ongoing competition was firmly associated with Darwinian evolution. This intellectual revolution is the second change that has pushed Condorcet’s successors in a more radical direction. Condorcet could assert that living things must be on a course of either perfection or decline; human beings in the future could change, but the result would be perfected or degraded human beings. From a Darwinian point of view, as Reade highlights, why should there not be changes in the future that correspond in magnitude to the changes that produced man as we now observe him? After Darwin, it becomes possible, if not downright necessary, to think that future human descendants will not be human.

      Scholars disagree about whether Darwin himself conceived that the evolutionary changes that brought about human beings (and other species) should be called “progress” or merely change. There is agreement that some of his writings point in one direction, some in another. At present, the “mainstream” scholarly view is that Darwin’s statements implying that there is an ascent to humanity were mere concessions to the progressive spirit of his Victorian times, and that Darwin himself understood that his principles allowed him to speak of evolutionary change but not progress. Yet there is also an impressive body of arguments and evidence to suggest that Darwin did believe in evolutionary progress, so long as we take sufficient care to define what that phrase means.¹⁴⁵ In either case, it seems indisputable that a great many of those who, like Reade, were influenced by Darwin’s ideas took him to be pointing to an evolutionary ascent to humankind. And if so, why should that process not continue to produce yet higher forms of life? After all, even the penultimate words of Darwin’s Descent of Man suggest that man may be excused for “feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale,” which in turn may give “hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”¹⁴⁶

      Yet all of our thinkers would agree that there will be a difference between the blind evolution that produced humanity and the future evolution driven by human beings and then posthumans, precisely because our “own exertions” can now play a part. If evolution is the law of life, and at the same time if evolution has brought about human beings who can take hold of evolution