\r\n Houghton Mifflin ~ 2005
240 pp. ~ $24 (cloth) <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
The book chronicles his experiences learning how to use the hardware\/software that allows him to hear, and how to re-learn it when the system is upgraded. Along the way, he deftly conveys a great deal of information about hearing, deafness, and the technology behind the implant. But even more tellingly, Chorost describes the intellectual and emotional changes wrought by seeing himself as a cyborg, particularly in relationship to his rather fragile love life. If, in the process, some readers may learn more than they wish to know about this wistful tale, there are rewards in Chorost\u2019s gentle wit and honest introspection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet honest introspection is not necessarily the same as deep introspection. While he has a strong sense of the richness of human experience and the limits of the capabilities of computers, there remains something troubling about Chorost\u2019s insistence that the emotional changes he undergoes post-implant are the result of his new cyborg status. For example, when a woman to whom he is very attracted admits she doesn\u2019t \u201cfeel the chemistry,\u201d he is proud of himself for not kicking her out of his house, getting angry, or trying to make her feel guilty. He gives three different explanations for this new self-control. First, he had learned in a previous relationship, which he had broken off resentfully, that \u201clove is like grace. It\u2019s not something you can demand or even earn.\u201d Second, while a man\u2019s pressuring a woman to get what he wants could have survival value, as a cyborg \u201cperhaps I am so new that the species just doesn\u2019t know what to do with me…. I just do not know what the universe thinks my survival value is.\u201d Finally, therefore, he should be \u201cwilling to lose with honor\u201d because one day he may \u201cwin with honor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chorost\u2019s mention of honor suggests that his life experience is teaching him to behave like a gentleman in the face of rejection. One could also say that he is learning something of the nature of love \u2014 a theme that is important to the book. But Chorost reflects far less on these perennial aspects of being human than he does on the arcane and ideologically driven debates over what it means to be a cyborg. Even as he tellingly describes the human workings of his psyche, he cannot break free of the ideological lens \u2014 \u201cI am a cyborg\u201d \u2014 through which he sees and understands all his experiences. At an early stage of his implant experience, Chorost is unable to decide whether Donna Haraway\u2019s essay \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto\u201d is \u201cpostmodernist bullshit, socialist rant, manic Nietzschean poetry, sly parody, brilliant cultural theory, or (quite possibly) all of the above.\u201d But later he sees it as a \u201cstraightforward description of my life,\u201d because of its postmodern emphasis on the abandonment of \u201cmaster narratives\u201d and \u201cunitary identity.\u201d \u201cIt is not that I had acquired a postmodern way of thinking. It was that I had acquired a postmodern body<\/em>.\u201d His story is a powerful example of how a technological mindset, not just the technologies themselves, can transform the experience of being human.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOf course, Chorost is entitled to his self-understanding. But he has put it before the public in a book. Given his sensible inclinations and the fact that life crises (such as his suddenly worsened deafness) can alter the shape of anyone\u2019s life, we are entitled to wonder why it is so important for him to see himself as a cyborg rather than as a human being whose life is enriched by a new tool. Is this really the deepest reservoir of self-knowledge and moral wisdom available to him in modern times? Or does the self-creation and open-endedness he associates with being a cyborg appeal to him precisely because he lacks the intellectual tools to reflect on the constraining elements of a moral life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This moral thinness lies at the center of the rhetoric of extinction, the thread that ties together all these books. Faced with the inadequacies of human life, we are promised something better \u2014 and told that resistance is probably futile. And faced with an inadequate understanding of what is good about human life, we accept these prophesies with either an ignorant shrug or an excessive enthusiasm.<\/p>\n\n\n
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\r\n \r\n\t\tA Disabled Species\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n The case for extinction begins by focusing our attention on the miseries of disability. Disability is at the core of Chorost\u2019s story, the beginning of most of Naam\u2019s chapters, throughout Hughes\u2019s polemic, and the frame for Garreau\u2019s book. Stories about how cutting-edge research can help disabled people lead fuller lives, or help sick people survive, engage our sympathy not only for the individuals who need help, but for those who are trying to help them. Garreau makes a point, for example, of how a one-time director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was motivated to advance research on direct man\/machine interfaces out of a desire to help his daughter with cerebral palsy. As he says in the last line of his book, \u201cWho could argue with that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leading with disability not only appears to give transhumanism the moral high ground of compassion; it offers a preemptive defense against the \u201cgiggle\u201d and \u201cyuck\u201d factors, or the man-on-the-street reaction that some of this research is too \u201cfar out\u201d or too unpleasant to contemplate. Who would really want to have a port in his head to plug in a computer? People who otherwise couldn\u2019t move or communicate, that\u2019s who. Naam says bluntly that the cost\/benefit ratio for new procedures is quite different for someone who is ill or disabled than it is for a healthy person, and he finds that a comforting thought in relation to the great risks being run by experimental subjects. Likewise, Hughes is quite confident that the first candidates for brain-control implants will be criminals \u2014 though \u201cwe will have to carefully balance liberty against the public good,\u201d he says piously. There is a great utilitarian convergence between the needs of scientific and technical advancement, the hopes of the ill, and the availability of the criminal. And if things don\u2019t work out quite as planned, we can be comforted by the words of Jesse Gelsinger, a victim of experimental gene-therapy: \u201cWhat\u2019s the worst that can happen to me? I die, and it\u2019s for the babies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But concern for the ill and disabled is really only an entry point for the real arguments of the transhumanists, who of course seek a world where there will be no such people to be concerned for. One of their key premises is that anything that can be used to treat an illness or overcome a disability is likely to be equally useful for the creation of enhancements. If, as Naam points out, it is possible to create computer-assisted sight for the blind, then it will also be possible to extend the capacities of sight for the healthy, allowing anyone to see parts of the spectrum now invisible to us. The knowledge we get by treating disease gives us the power to improve minds, enhance bodies, and reconstruct human beings. For Hughes, the only thing that can explain public resistance to plunging enthusiastically \u201cbeyond therapy\u201d is a \u201cdeep Puritan strain that runs through the emerging BioLuddite movement … Puritan anxiety that control over the body will facilitate sin.\u201d (Of course, he does not bother to ask whether there is a grain of truth in this \u2014 that too much control of our bodies, treating them as mere objects of the will, might in fact facilitate something once called sin.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the advocates of post-humanity have a larger problem within the framework of their own argument. By beginning with disability and illness, they tacitly posit the existence of a norm of health and wholeness. Even Chorost, who professes to delight in the un-limitedness of his cyborg identity, is happy to achieve hearing that is closer to normal <\/em>than he ever had before; he does not lament that his implant does not allow him to hear dog highs or whale lows. Yet if there is indeed such a norm that governs our embrace of technology, then it could also be the basis for saying no to uses of knowledge which transcend or violate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen Naam or Hughes come to some problem in the deployment of enhancement technologies that they are willing to acknowledge \u2014 such as issues of safety or equality of access \u2014 they are only too happy to posit that \u201cwe as a society\u201d will somehow have to deal with it. As Hughes points out, transhumanists may disagree about the best mechanisms for solving these problems: Naam is a great believer in the marketplace, and expects that inequalities of access will be moderated over time as the cost of enhancement technologies declines. Hughes seems to find government intervention more to his progressive tastes. But these solutions miss or ignore the real problems we will face if our emerging enhancement technologies are as radical as the transhumanists believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Will we be able to separate those technological advances that serve good ends from those that do not? How will we try to ensure that beneficial advances are used only for beneficial purposes? Will fulfilling some desires make us worse, not better? Are some powers with good uses so potentially destructive that a wise society might choose not to develop them in the first place? Will the inequalities between the enhanced and unenhanced lead to new forms of political tyranny or political unrest? By reducing the challenges we face to issues of safety and distribution, the transhumanists reveal their underlying lack of moral and political seriousness. And even on these narrow issues, the transhumanists seem na\u00efve. It is one thing to note, as Naam does, how the price of LASIK eye surgery has declined steeply as the supply of providers has increased. But when some life-prolongation technique comes along, availability will be a matter of life and death \u2014 or stand as a dividing line between the still human and the post-human. Who will be satisfied to be told: \u201cWait awhile and the price will come down?\u201d At the same time, providing \u201csafe\u201d enhancements to everybody could involve a good deal of saying \u201cno,\u201d if current regulatory practices are any indication. Yet thinking about limits is not really part of the transhumanist project.<\/p>\n\n\n
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\r\n \r\n\t\tBlind Optimism and Cheap Liberty\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n The rhetoric of extinction has many clever ways of avoiding these deeper issues. The first is an optimism that would make Pollyanna blush, an optimism only highlighted by the lip-service given to the problems that might arise in the post-human future. Such downsides are mentioned, usually in passing, only to provide further assurance that unmolested and uninhibited science can surmount them. The great depth of this false optimism is seen in one of the few loud false notes of Garreau\u2019s book. His \u201cHell\u201d scenario is derived from the belief that the interrelated \u201cGRIN\u201d technologies (genetics, robotics, information- and nano-technology) will not work right or not work as expected or get out of control. Hell is a result of failure. Yet Heaven (much like the Prevail scenario and his Transcend speculations that come to resemble it) is a result of success; GRIN technologies fulfill all of their advocates\u2019 hopes. Garreau gives scant attention to the possibility that such success could, from some points of view, be hellish. Surely it is the height of folly to think that things will work out for the best if everybody gets what he wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But by presenting a Hell scenario at all, Garreau is a model of probity compared with Hughes or Naam. One looks in vain in their books for any systematic consideration of what a bad person might do with the remarkable technological abilities that they see coming. In the rhetoric of extinction, it seems that the only bad people are those who would prohibit the development of these new technologies. Yet if there is a slippery slope between treatment and enhancement, then surely there is one between enhancement and manipulation. Extolling the virtues of mood alteration at the touch of a button, Naam does not pause to consider the commercial possibilities that pimps might appreciate in an implant that could turn sexual desire on and off, or the military uses of inducing rage. Speaking of the development of cybernetic super-egos, it is all one to Hughes whether it has \u201csettings for Kohlberg\u2019s Stage Six, Islamic Sharia, or Ayn Randian selfishness.\u201d Death Camp Guard apparently escapes his notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mindless optimism of this sort is vital to the rhetoric of extinction, intimately bound up as it is with the effort to define the issue of the future of science and technology as entirely a question of individual choice. It starts with something that sounds so sensible: who would not want a longer, healthier, happier life? The modern world has long been committed to this goal. But then we\u2019re off to the enhancement races. If you don\u2019t want an implant that allows you to feel the feelings of your sexual partner, or that gives you a direct feed to your brain of whatever the Internet will become, or if you don\u2019t want to design children with a genetic leg up in the world, fine \u2014 nobody is going to make you. But don\u2019t try to tell me that if I do want it, I can\u2019t have it. Don\u2019t tell me that the longer, healthier, happier life being promised is nothing more than a hedonic treadmill. And, as Garreau gently suggests at the beginning of his book, if you choose to remain a \u201cNatural,\u201d don\u2019t expect much consideration from the ranks of the \u201cEnhanced.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To the rhetoric of extinction, questioning the results of free choice is a rejection of liberty. But it is an old observation that liberty degenerates into license if it means anything goes. Transhumanists did not create our contemporary forgetfulness of virtues and vices, our eroded standards of comportment, our debunking of moral excellence, and our culture of immediate gratification. The rhetoric of extinction did not create the conditions of our society that help turn liberty into license. But its relentless focus on individually defined satisfaction depends on and accelerates these moral and cultural trends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, liberty is a crucial element of any decent human life. But the more one observes the extreme libertarianism at the heart of the rhetoric of extinction, the harder it is to take seriously. As we saw in Chorost\u2019s account of himself, the free play of choice is what is left when the ability to think seriously about what is choiceworthy is lost. The rhetoric of extinction makes it seem as if we will no longer have to make choices based on scarcity of time or resources; it casts out faith and reason alike as grounds for universal norms that might direct choice; and it can hardly adduce tradition or human nature as compelling guides in the remanufactured world it imagines. When natural constraints are increasingly non-existent and moral constraints are entirely up to the individual, what can liberty be but choice for the sake of choice, or mere willfulness? Transhumanism is really just relativism of a hyper-modern sort, and being a card-carrying transhumanist, a renegade against all moral norms, is just as important as (and perhaps more important than) transhumanist science.<\/p>\n\n\n
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\r\n \r\n\t\tTriumph of the Will\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n In the real world, knowing that you can\u2019t always get what you want is a sign of maturity. In the real world, the power we already have from modern science and technology has shown ample evidence of creating dangers along with opportunities, of strengthening some of the fragile foundations of everyday decency even as it weakens others. Yet the rhetoric of extinction would have us believe that the restraints and controls of the past are of no value in relation to the post-human future. For if \u201cwe\u201d let them stop us, if \u201cwe\u201d don\u2019t develop the latest possible enhancement, somebody else will; if \u201cwe\u201d make these technologies illegal, they will just be forced underground. Better \u201cwe\u201d have them, and that they be in the open. The promises of more life and more autonomy are just too great for constraint. The power of necessity stands behind our drive to overcome necessity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The end result is, to say the least, curious. We are told that nothing should stand in the way of satisfying our most powerful desires by our most powerful technologies \u2014 not government, not religion, not custom, not even our common humanity. We are told that all decisions about these technologies should be left to individuals. It is useless to say that \u201cof course people will not be allowed to harm others,\u201d because this proviso assumes a human equality and solidarity that will no longer exist in practice and that will have fallen prey to post-human relativism in theory. It adds nothing to speak of the decisions \u201csociety\u201d will have to make, or the rituals that will make our choices meaningful, when the fundamental decisions are in principle completely private. On the basis of this uninhibited willfulness, power is the only common currency \u2014 not justice, not decency, not anything that is binding on human beings as such. Hughes and Naam opine that as people get more technology they will become freer and smarter. They better hope that our rising IQs correlate with greater wisdom and decency \u2014 for if they have their way, people will have more power and less direction than ever before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But of course, the dream may also prove to be a nightmare. Under such circumstances, in which the mere fact of a desire legitimates that desire, is it not more reasonable to believe that unconstrained wills will often come into conflict? Even in a world that looks to us to have nothing but plenty and promise, will its inhabitants not have unsatisfied desires, relative deprivation, and the ability to create new desires for the pleasure of satisfying them? Even in a world where we can all be tyrants in our own little virtual realities, will there not be those who prefer to dominate real bodies \u2014 and gain some advantage thereby? Whether the power of enhancement is distributed by a progressive government, or held by a small handful of \u201cControllers,\u201d or left entirely to the libertarian marketplace, what else but power will govern human relationships in this world of post-human demigods?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, the rhetoric of extinction proves to be a classic example of \u201cbait and switch.\u201d Lured by a compassionate drive to assist those in need, we find ourselves switched to a morality of \u201cme, me, me!\u201d Promised that technology will satisfy our desires and free us of \u201cmaster narratives,\u201d we find ourselves at the mercy of our own unconstrained desires and potentially subject to our neighbors\u2019 more powerfully restless wills. An enchanting picture of the technologically possible gives way, in the apotheosis of choice, to an impoverished understanding of the human. The party of post-humanity gives up on mankind, which it barely understands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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