“Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution.”111 Bernal envisions each of these mechanical men as looking something like a crustacean, with the brain protected in a rigid framework and a system of appendages and antennae attached for sensing and manipulating the world.112 He freely acknowledges that, to us, these beings would appear “strange, monstrous and inhuman.”113 But he claims that such monsters are “only the logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present.”114
In any case, beings so designed would quickly become progressively more different from us. Their brains would be readily linked together electronically to become a kind of group mind. Thus, while the original individual organic brain itself would still have a limited lifespan (perhaps three hundred to a thousand years, Bernal estimates), sharing its feelings, knowledge, and experience with other brains would be a way of “cheating death.”115 Bernal ends the chapter with the speculation that these inhuman beings would invent whole new materials and forms of life out of which to constitute themselves, so that even organic brain cells could be replaced with more diffuse materials with more complex interconnections, thus ensuring itself “a practical eternity of existence.”116 They might transcend physical embodiment altogether, becoming completely etherealized, atoms in space communicating by radiation, ultimately perhaps resolving entirely into light. “That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”117
These first chapters lay out what would become an agenda for decades of science fiction and a fair amount of actual research and development. The next chapter, “The Devil,” is one that Bernal himself expressed dissatisfaction with nearly four decades after the book was published; he admitted that it was too much written under the influence of Freud.118 But the issue it discusses remains one that is debated, even if not precisely on Bernal’s terms. The main question is whether continued progress in science will be able to overcome the problem posed by the new (that is, Freudian) insight that “the intellectual life” is not “the vocation of the rational mind, but . . . a compensation . . . a perversion of more primitive, unsatisfied desires.”119 That is, science requires an ongoing supply of “perverted individuals capable of more than average performance.”120 Should our psychology and our power over nature combine to make the satisfaction of our desires the norm, we could settle into a “Melanesian” life of “eating, drinking, friendliness, love-making, dancing and singing, and the golden age may settle permanently on the world” without any desire for further progress at all.121 (Note the similarity here with Haldane’s flower breeders.) On the other hand, it could also be that we might be able to live lives that are both “more fully human and fully intellectual” if “a full adult sexuality would be balanced with objective activity.”122
The question of whether all this progress will eliminate the desire for further progress has another side as well, given the “distaste” that Bernal acknowledges he feels, and others are likely to feel, about what the future holds “especially in relation to the bodily changes.”123 It may even be that people will not have a chance to get used to such changes gradually, given the accelerating rate of change. Bernal does not pretend to predict whether repugnance, combined with satisfaction, will ultimately triumph over the increasing power that will be in the hands of those who advance the cause of science and mechanization. But one result might be the “splitting of the human race” into two branches: a stagnant because “fully balanced humanity” and another branch “groping unsteadily beyond it.”124 Seeing how that outcome might arise is the point of the book’s concluding chapters.
Bernal’s basic thought here is that the mechanical men he envisions would be very well suited for colonizing and exploiting space, as their life-support requirements would be far less than what human beings require and their capacities would be wider.125 He imagines these transhumans as “connected together by a complex of ethereal intercommunication” and spread out across space and time.126 But he is brought up short by the recognition that the human mind had hitherto “evolved always in the company of the human body.”127 The radical change he anticipates to “the delicate balance between physiological and psychological factors” will create “dangerous turning points and pitfalls.”128 What will happen to the sexual drive, for example? Perhaps it will require yet more thoroughgoing sublimation into research or, even more likely, into “aesthetic creation.”129 As these new beings come ever more completely to understand the world around them, and ever more capable of manipulating it, their primary purpose is likely to become determining “the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more nor less than art.”130
After much consideration about how the possibility of “permanent plenty” might transform society, Bernal settles on the thought that the future is likely to hold de facto or even de jure rule by a scientific elite that could be the first stable aristocracy.131 This elite would have the means to assure that the masses engage in “harmless occupations” in a state of “perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom.”132 “A happy prosperous humanity enjoying their bodies, exercising the arts, patronizing the religions, may be well content to leave the machine, by which their desires are satisfied, in other and more efficient hands.”133
Since Bernal thinks that those who tend the machines will increasingly be machines themselves, we now see why he thinks the human race might split into two branches. Yet whereas it seems very likely, as he has suggested, that the distinction between machine-men and men would also be the distinction between ruler and ruled, perhaps that would not have to be the case. For as Bernal notes, science depends on the supportive routine work of non-scientists, and on the recruitment from the many of the few most capable minds. Furthermore, he claims, scientists themselves tend to have a strong identification with humanity. So the first stable aristocracy could be a meritocracy that might at least recruit (or should one say harvest?) fresh brains from the most promising of humans. Still, characteristics that might bind the two groups will likely diminish with time, allowing the underlying processes producing dimorphism to hold sway.134 At that point it is quite possible that “the old mechanism of extinction will come into play. The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them.”135 The main hope for a different outcome is once again the prospect that the more advanced beings will settle in space, leaving Earth to the old-fashioned model in “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.”136 So decades before today’s transhumanists, Bernal predicts the survival of humanity as a curiosity (at best).
Bernal is not certain his vision will prevail,137 nor does he hold that the developments he lays out will produce a perfect world:
the dangers to the whole structure of humanity and its successors will not decrease as their wisdom increases, because, knowing more and wanting more they will dare more, and in daring will risk their own destruction. But this daring, this experimentation, is really the essential quality of life.138
Bernal’s predictions are not so millennial as Fedorov’s, nor as overtly tragic as Reade’s. But they do contain tensions. He recognizes that his scientifically driven “progress of dehumanization” is motivated by an ultimately unfulfillable desire for the mysterious and supernatural.139 Those who push the boundaries of knowledge outward will create a world that, for them at least, will be ever more prosaic, and therefore of less interest. Even if this process is infinite, it retains a Sisyphean character, and one might wonder: why bother? It turns out, however, that this “daring” effort to transcend one’s time and control one’s life is nothing other than an expression of life itself that is beyond our control. There is a natural fatality to our effort to control nature.
FROM BETTER HUMANS TO BEYOND HUMANITY
My purpose in presenting