Condorcet was a mathematician and philosopher, an abolitionist and advocate of women’s equality and religious toleration, an admirer and biographer of Voltaire, an economic liberal, and a genial enthusiast—an embodiment, in short, of all things enlightened.2 A prominent public intellectual, he was “one of the few Enlightenment thinkers to witness the [French] Revolution and to participate fully in its constitutional aftermath. . . . He was, in short, an outstanding disciple of the Enlightenment, uniquely located at the center of great events.”3 A leader in the early days of the French Revolution, he was forced into hiding as the political winds shifted.4 Concealed in the house of one Madame Vernet in 1793–94, he wrote his most influential work, a little book called Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. He was eventually arrested and thrown in prison, where he died the day after his arrest, under circumstances that “have been the subject of much speculation ever since.”5 But his final great work was published the next year, and it became a landmark of Enlightenment thinking and would shape how generations understood the idea of progress.
In the book, Condorcet is convinced that the progress of reason has gone too far to allow any future lapse into barbarism, but he is still chagrined at how little progress has been made to increase human happiness. “The friend of humanity,” he writes, “cannot receive unmixed pleasure but by abandoning himself to the endearing hope of the future.”6 And what a future Condorcet expects it to be:
May it not be expected that the human race will be meliorated by new discoveries in the sciences and arts, and, as an unavoidable consequence, in the means of individual and general prosperity; by farther progress in the principles of conduct, and in moral practice; and lastly by the real improvement of our faculties, moral, intellectual and physical, which may be the result either of improvement of the instruments which increase the power and direct the exercise of these faculties, or of the improvement of our natural organization itself?7
How is this “improvement of our faculties” and “natural organization” to take place? Growing liberty, equality, and prosperity within nations and among nations, Condorcet writes, will raise the general level of instruction, and that in itself will improve human ability. More instruction will in turn produce more knowledge, and Condorcet expects that as we come to understand the world better and improve our ability to teach that understanding, what once might have required genius to uncover or comprehend can become a subject of general knowledge. The result is that we advance the starting point for yet further attainments in the arts and sciences, which in turn increases our powers of action—an upward spiral of enlightenment. As a result, better food, better sanitation, and better medicine will extend the human lifespan, as will “the destruction of the two most active causes of deterioration, penury and wretchedness on the one hand, and enormous wealth on the other.”8 Likewise, Condorcet foresees that “contagious disorders” will be brought under control, as well as occupational and environmental illness. The net result:
Would it even be absurd to suppose this quality of melioration in the human species as susceptible of an indefinite advancement; to suppose that a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and this decay, will itself have no assignable limit? Certainly man will not become immortal; but may not the distance between the moment in which he draws his first breath, and the common term when, in the course of nature, without malady or accident, he finds it impossible any longer to exist, be necessarily protracted?9
Despite his denial of the possibility of immortality, Condorcet expects “that the mean duration of life will for ever increase.”10 It is one of the “laws of nature” that living things are subject to “perfectibility or deterioration.”11 The breeding of animals already shows that we could improve our own physical capacities and senses, but perhaps our “quality of melioration” suggests that a good deal more is possible for us by other means as well.12 Hence Condorcet wonders whether better-educated parents might not transmit the superior “organization” they have achieved directly to their children.13
Condorcet’s vision of the future, so familiar to those of us in the West who live it on a daily basis, is very much a reflection of the project laid out more than a century earlier by the English philosopher Francis Bacon for “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”14 Condorcet sees how the increase of our power over nature will soften the hard edges of the human condition by improving the material conditions of life, which will allow at the same time an improvement in the moral conditions. He adds an intimation of accelerating progress; one generation can build on the work of another. A smarter and healthier generation sets the stage for even greater achievement by the next generation. He may have hedged on the question of immortality, but as we shall see, not everyone who came after him was so modest.
Condorcet’s thesis—that mankind would improve and expand, growing wiser and healthier and much longer-lived—soon received a powerful rebuttal. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was a political economist whose Essay on the Principle of Population explicitly attacked Condorcet’s depiction of progress.15 Malthus believed that finite resources limit what human beings can ever hope to accomplish, and that because human reproduction always races ahead of available food, our future holds great misery and scarcity. Malthus’s ideas influenced many fields, including biology, where Charles Darwin (1809–1882) adapted them to help explain the workings of evolution, a kind of natural progress caused by competition for limited resources.16 Through to our own day, much of the debate about progress has arisen from tensions among these three men’s ideas: Condorcet’s optimism about human perfectibility, the Malthusian problem of resource scarcity, and the Darwinian conception of natural competition as a force for change over time. The transhumanists, as we shall see, reconcile and assimilate these ideas by advocating the end of humanity.
THE INVENTION OF IMMORTALITY
In 1872, the British author and adventurer William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) revisited the project of progress that Condorcet had laid out. Reade, born in Scotland, was a failure as a novelist but had modest success as an African explorer and war correspondent. He was in correspondence with Darwin, who is said to have used in The Descent of Man (1871) some information from Reade’s expedition to West Africa.17 While it seems like in his short life Reade never quite lived up to his own expectations for himself, his attempt at a universal history—an 1872 book called The Martyrdom of Man—was once highly regarded. W. E. B. Du Bois, Cecil Rhodes, H. G. Wells, and George Orwell all found reasons to praise it.18 Perhaps even the character Sherlock Holmes was a fan: in The Sign of the Four, Holmes says to Watson, “Let me recommend this book—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. I shall be back in an hour.”19 From its original publication to 1910 the book went through eighteen editions in England and seventeen in the United States; one can only imagine that many a Baker Street Irregular has felt compelled to track it down.
The Martyrdom of Man began, Reade says, as an effort to give the hitherto neglected story of “Inner Africa” its due place within European history.20 But in the writing, the book became very much more: an effort to place human history within a larger natural history that eventually takes Reade right back to the development of the solar system and the origins of life.21 He adopts his own version of a Darwinian perspective, along with the theories about a geologically dynamic Earth, which were still rather recent in his day. Reade’s naturalism is particularly deployed in extensive efforts to provide non-supernatural explanations for the rise of religions.
But