About a year ago, I announced my intention to complete a major writing project that I had begun, and subsequently abandoned, two and a half years before. Publicly declaring my intention to finish this piece, “The Big Thing,” was a way to hold myself accountable. I was generously granted two weeks at a writers’ retreat and the necessary time off work to bring this project into being, and my failure to actually make something out of it, no matter how well justified, was a stain on my sense of self that all great Neptune’s ocean could not wash clean.
And besides, it was about stuff that’s really important to me.
Long story short, I buckled down and finished the damn thing, and it’s now the cover story for the April-May 2021 issue of Free Inquiry magazine. It’s 11,300 words-and-change comparing and weighing two views of humanity’s future: transhumanism (we’ll all be saved and improved by technology) and “collapsitarianism” (we’ve blown it and civilization will crumble).
Why these two? Because I feel pulled toward both so strongly, despite their disparate outlooks. It’s the longest piece ever published by Free Inquiry (for which I am immensely grateful) and its editor, Tom Flynn, says it “just might be one of the most profound” (for which I am immensely humbled).
In this post, I offer an excerpt from the main article, its opening “chapter,” as it were. I do ask that you’ll take some time and read the whole thing. It’s been made free to non-subscribers of Free Inquiry, so you are welcome to simply click over, read it in your browser, or add it to whatever read-it-later service you prefer (but please do actually read it later, don’t let it just be another link you totally intend to get to someday).
It begins like this:
Not too long ago, humans believed that the stars determined their fate. Some still do. It was a belief born of naïveté, misunderstanding the nature of those diamonds in the night sky. But it was also a sign of our hubris, to presume that those lights in the firmament could have any interest in us.
Rather than feel controlled by them, we now understand that the stars are not gods or arbiters of fate but places we now aspire to explore. The knowledge of what stars actually are, and how insignificant we are in comparison to the vastness of the cosmos, has humbled us. And yet we are brash enough to speculate that one day we will be determining the destinies of stars, not the other way around.
Today it’s pretty hard to see those stars. Pollution from smog and the spillage of light from our cities obscures our view of the heavens. The haze through which we must squint to glimpse the constellations reminds us, or reminds me anyway, that humanity’s upward trajectory is not a destiny but a story. A wish.
I am torn. I am stubbornly attached to the idea that one day we’ll all be living on starships, exploring the cosmos free of hunger, disease, poverty, and tribalistic conflict. Looking around at the pace of technological advances today, it still feels possible. I want it to be true.
But one only has to consider the speed and breadth of humanity’s destructiveness to have those dreams thoroughly dashed. Whether we look to the exhausted vitality of the natural world or the buckling integrity of our modern, enlightened societies, we can no longer deny the obvious. The world we made is crumbling.
I dread a global, systemic collapse for my own selfish reasons, of course. As much as I sometimes crave the solace and remoteness of a more rustic, pastoral life, I know that when the shit hits the fan, I’ll be one of the first to die of starvation or disease or be murdered by wandering marauders. I’m very much attached to, and a person of, the current age.
I dread it for my children even more. While they’re growing up faster than I can replace their socks, I can’t quite escape the guilt I feel for even bringing them into being when things are so dicey for the civilization they will have to make their way in. I desperately want them to thrive, not merely struggle to survive in a world their parents couldn’t keep.
Vacillating between hope and despair, I have somewhat paradoxically found myself captivated by two starkly divergent lines of thought, two seemingly opposing prophecies about the fate of humanity that at different times have seemed to me equally persuasive. One camp posits that human civilization is ripe for collapse and that industry, governments, society, and much of the ecology that sustains us will soon run aground, leaving the remainder of our species to cope with a blighted aftermath. The other proposes that despite the enormous challenges before us, human ingenuity will find solutions through technology and biological enhancement, defeating not just climate change but perhaps even death itself. I deeply yearn for the latter to be true. I am anguished that the former is much more likely.
In a more hopeful time, I was drawn to the optimism of transhumanism, the PhD-riddled intellectual movement that once excited my Star Trek–saturated imagination with its often-rapturous predictions of a humanity augmented with unimaginably sophisticated technology.
More recently, however, I have leaned away from utopian thoughts and into a palpable despondency. I have since recognized this feeling for what it is: grief. I am grieving for the world I once believed existed and the future I know never will.
Just as I was beginning to acknowledge this grief, I discovered a movement known as Dark Mountain. Not a formal association or ideology, Dark Mountain is a sort of cultural banner under which those who await the fall can gather. For me, it has served as a way to process what has become increasingly obvious: collapse is coming.
And yet, all the while I have been holding onto the wish that we are mourning prematurely and that there is still something better coming.
We might very well be capable of transcending our biological and corporeal limits and achieving wonders not yet dreamed of. Or we might soon be forced to reckon with all we have wrought upon this world and then struggle to find some way to atone and survive.
Transhumanist utopianism and collapsitarian despair. They may appear fundamentally at odds, but I think what attracts me to them both is their implications of inevitability. Both presume their vision of the future is inescapable, and their adherents suggest we not waste energy fighting that future; we should instead start preparing ourselves for it. It is the overlap of “the end is nigh” and “resistance is futile.”
What I need right now is clarity. I need an honest appraisal of where we are and where we are headed. Maybe you need it too. Are we doomed? If so, let’s face that hard truth and decide what to do from there. Are we going to save ourselves? If so, how will we do it and at what cost?
In either case, collapse or transcendence, who and what will we be when we come out on the other side? To answer that, we probably have to figure out who we are right now.
This is about more than trying to guess how things will look a century from now. This is about what it means to be human and deciding whether that, in itself, matters at all.
Read the whole thing right here. And thanks.
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