Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Agar’s Identity and Moral Status Objections, and the Posthuman Condition

It had been a long time since I last read Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, which tells the story of a man called Gregor Samsa, who one morning finds himself transformed into a giant roach-like insect. Now that I’ve read the story again, I was struck by its possible relevance for the discussion of the relationship that is likely to arise between radically enhanced humans or post-humans on the one hand and “normal”, unenhanced humans on the other (always assuming there will be any of them left).

Nicholas Agar, in his latest book, Truly Human Enhancement, argues that posthumans will be so radically different from us that they will soon forget what it was like to be us. They will also have very different interests and values. For this reason, Agar believes, we have nothing to gain by becoming posthuman, even if being posthuman were intrinsically and instrumentally good. Radical enhancement may be good for the posthuman, but it isn’t good for us, simply because they will no longer be us. As long as we only enhance ourselves modestly, we will remain the same person, but once we have undergone radical enhancement we will have become something else entirely.

Another reason why we shouldn’t pursue radical enhancement is that, according to Agar, it is likely to result in an erosion of moral status for those who remain unenhanced (i.e., us). Just as we have a higher moral status now than animals, which gives us the right to sacrifice them for our well-being, posthumans may well have a higher moral status than we, so that they will then be justified in sacrificing us for their well-being. Personally, I don’t find Agar’s moral status argument particularly convincing, but I have voiced my criticisms elsewhere and do not want to repeat myself here. If you are interested, here’s a link to my response to Agar, The Moral Status of Post-Persons.

In this context, we can now read Kafka’s story as an allegory of the transformation of a human into a posthuman. (And if had been written now rather than almost exactly 100 years ago, it would be almost inevitable that we read it as such – compare Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). Of course, the giant roach into which Gregor finds himself transformed is rather unlike the radically enhanced posthuman as we tend to imagine them. But the point is that is definitely a sudden radical transformation of a human being into something that is (in some, though not all respects) very different from what it used to be. The transformation does not only affect Gregor’s body, but also his interests, appetites, sensibilities, and needs. At one point in the story he realises that he finds it increasingly difficult to remember his life prior to his transformation and how it was to be human, and to still care for what he cared for while he was still human. And that is perfectly plausible: the world of a giant cockroach, even one that used to be human, is so different from that of a human that we can understand how everything human must fade away very quickly in such a creature’s mind. A cockroach’s body demands (and creates) a cockroach’s mind. So if the transformation of a human into a radically enhanced human or posthuman is anything like Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant insect, then we should indeed expect, as Agar argues, that they will very soon no longer remember much, or anything at all, of their human life. The question is if that is indeed a good reason not to pursue such a transformation. I suspect that the reason why we would not want to find ourselves in the same predicament as Gregor Samsa is not that he forgets his humanity, but rather that he has turned into an animal that we tend to find disgusting and that is not known for its superior intellect. Perhaps we wouldn’t mind much losing connection to our previous self if what we gain in exchange for it is a richer and (intrinsically and extrinsically) more rewarding life.

Yet Kafka’s story also highlights another aspect of the relationship between the enhanced and the unenhanced. It is usually assumed that if the future will see society divided in two groups or classes, the enhanced and the unenhanced (or, if you like, the radically enhanced and the only moderately enhanced), then this is likely to cause problems for the unenhanced. They may be denied equal rights, or equal opportunities; they might be treated like inferior creatures, or like slaves; they might even be harmed or killed if that benefits the enhanced. Agar goes so far as to claim that the radically enhanced might even be morally justified (due to their higher moral status) to use the unenhanced in all these ways and to generally treat them as inferior. In such scenarios it is always assumed that the enhanced will be more powerful than the unenhanced, that it is in their power to grant or deny the unenhanced (us?) rights. But that is not necessarily the case. It will depend on the kind of enhancement that they have undergone, and also on how many of them will be enhanced and how many unenhanced. It is quite possible that the enhanced will be regarded and treated as freaks by normal, unenhanced humans, as monsters rather than gods. And then it will be the unenhanced that are likely to oppress and enslave the enhanced, or simply cast out of the human community, just as Gregor Samsa is cast out of his when his family decides that they no longer want anything to do with him.

Cormac McCarthy Buries a World

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, published in 2006, is a bleak tale about a father and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic America. Only a few humans are left, and most of them would eat you alive if they got the slightest chance. No animals, no living plants, at least none that one could live on, all dust and ashes, empty and hopeless, a bit like the world that the traveller in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine encounters when he travels on to the far future when humanity has disappeared from the planet. We don’t get any explanation for why the world has become that way; it just has. And McCarthy makes it pretty clear that there really is no hope left, nothing to live for. The world is a literally god-forsaken place and is quickly grinding to a halt. “The frailty of everything revealed at last.” The few people left are not survivors, because there is no world left for them to live in. Instead, they are the walking dead. But despite this utter hopelessness, and without knowing why, the man carries on, trying to protect his son, to keep him alive and to keep him human. Still, in the end he dies, because die he must, and his son lives on, for a while, having found new protectors in a man and a woman who take him under their wing. But of course the world is still the same empty place, so it seems only a matter of time before they too must succumb to the hostile world that can no longer be a home to them.

The strange thing about this story is that although the world is ending and there really is nothing left to hope for, the main protagonist, the unnamed man, stubbornly, almost defiantly, keeps on protecting his son, pushing him forward to a non-existing future. His actions betray a hope that persists against all hope, a hope that cannot be extinguished, not even by the greatest despair. And desperate he certainly is, cursing the God that has let this happen. “He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.” But God doesn’t answer. He, too, has left, has abandoned his creation. Or perhaps he has never been there in the first place. Perhaps it has always been an illusion, the crazy idea that the universe has eyes and ears to see and listen to our pain and sorrows and, somewhere, somehow, a compassionate heart to feel for us and with us. Perhaps the world has revealed its true nature at last.

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

The revealed emptiness is almost unbearable. “There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.” So why carry on? Why not die with the rest of the world? Maybe because there is still some beauty left, which appears even more precious, far more precious, when it is in danger of vanishing forever, when it has become the rarest thing imaginable. Beauty in the human heart that loves, and beauty in the human form that is being loved.

“No list of things to be done. The day providential itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.”

The man tells the boy that they are the good guys and that they “carry the fire”. It seems important to the boy. What fire? The fire of humanity. The fire of what is, or ever was, good and true and beautiful in the world. This fire is also the breath of God. There is even a suggestion, on the very last page of the book, that the fire will always be there. Before his father dies he tells the boy that even when he will be dead the boy could still talk to him. But the woman who then finds him tells him about God, so he tries to “talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time.”

However, the very last paragraph once again emphasises the impossibility to turn things around, to repair what cannot be repaired. That once things are lost, things that ought to be precious to us, they cannot be retrieved. Once they are lost, they are lost forever. And we are reminded of the beauty of this world and how important it is to take good care of it, so that it does not go away and leaves us behind in an empty world. We, not God, are this beauty’s guardians.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

The Old Wells and the Young Wells

The Time Machine was published in 1895 when Wells was a young man of just 28. And as I pointed out in my last post, the picture that Wells draws here of the future of humanity is pretty bleak.  However, I was surprised to find that when a new edition of The Time Machine was published in 1931, thirty-six years later, Wells, now 65, wrote a preface in which he all but denigrates his youthful endeavour. Not only does he now find his description of the social differentiation of humanity into Eloi and Morlocks rather crude, he is also quite apologetic about what he calls the “naïve pessimism” of the book, which he blames on the influence that Jonathan Swift had on his younger self and on the “dreadful lies” fabricated by late Victorian geologists who made everyone believe that in a million years or so everything will be over for life on earth because the entire planet will be frozen over. But science, Wells believes, has progressed enormously during the last thirty years, and now assures us with more authority than ever that in fact we’ve got “millions of millions of years” of further human development to look forward to. Assuming this to be true, “man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, and the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour of regret that one was born so soon. And even from that distress modern psychological and biological philosophy offers ways of escape.”

So the young pessimist has turned into an old optimist, which I should think is rather unusual. Normally we start out as optimists, until life experience gradually transforms us into pessimists. And normally it is the optimists who strike us as naïve. “Naïve pessimism” seems almost a contradiction in terms. But I guess we can just as easily be naïve pessimists as we can be naïve optimists if our respective attitudes are rooted in prejudice and are expressive of our fears or hopes rather than an accurate assessment of probabilities based on a clear understanding of the facts. Yet if Wells’s early pessimism appears naïve to the old Wells, would not the old Wells’s optimism have appeared equally naïve to the young Wells? Not always do we become wiser when we get older, although we may always think we do. Is it really more informed, more astute and showing a firmer grasp of reality, to believe that eventually we “will be able to do anything and go anywhere”? That a completely limitless existence lies ahead of us? That even if this is all going to happen not now, but at some time in the future, science will find a way to help us survive until then, to “escape” from the present in which all those wonderful things that we will be able to do in the future are not possible yet? Life extension as the new time machine, an elevator to the future? Of course, before we really get there we won’t know who is more naïve: those who tend to believe that the scientific and technological advancement of humanity will eventually lead to a paradise on earth, or those who worry that it might end in some catastrophe or another.

But be that as it may, it appears that at the very end of his life Wells, now in his late seventies, went full circle when he once again changed his mind about the future prospects of humanity and became more pessimistic even than “that needy and cheerful namesake of his, who lived back along the time dimension, six and thirty years ago”, and whom he remembers, slightly embarrassed, but also with a certain fondness, in the 1931 preface to the new edition of The Time Machine. On the eve of his departure from this world, it seems to him that instead of evolving any further, it might be, all things considered, much better if humanity simply ceased to exist.

H.G. Wells’s Time Machine and the Future of Humanity

I must have been seven or eight years old when I first met the time traveller. My parents and I were spending the day at my grandparents’, as we did on most Sundays, and as usual I was bored stiff because nobody would talk to me, my grandparents didn’t have any games or toys, and there were no books that invited me to read them. All they had was a mean old dog who barked madly and threatened to bite me whenever I tried to get up from the sofa or made a movement that alerted him to the fact that I was still alive. He seemed determined to change that. But on this particular day I was lucky. Not only was the dog exhausted from a long walk in the park and for the time being showed no interest in harassing me any further, I was also granted permission to switch on the television. They were showing a film, and it had just started. It was “The Time Machine”, the 1960 version with Rod Taylor, and for the next ninety minutes or so I was lost to the world.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that impressed me as much as this one. I was not only fascinated by the idea of time travelling, but also utterly enthralled by the story woven around it and the images that brought the story to life. For many weeks after, I had recurring, nightmarish dreams of the beautiful and gentle, but rather dumb Eloi and the creepy, demonic Morlocks with their greenish skin and red eyes, who scared the hell out of me.

It was many years later that I finally read the book by H.G. Wells on which the film was based. I was already in my twenties, and by then the idea of time travel had lost some of its early fascination for me. The Morlocks, too, were rather disappointing. So I can’t really say that at that time the book made a lasting impression on me. However, last night, more than twenty years later, I read it again, and I was surprised to see what a marvellous writer Wells actually was. And the future of humanity that he shows us is a far cry from the superglossed one that transhumanists and other enhancement enthusiasts keep dangling in front of our noses. What awaits us in his vision is not an “engineered Paradise” (David Pearce), nor “lives wonderful beyond imagination” (Nick Bostrom), even though at first glance it looks like a paradise and it was actually meant to be one. It’s a dystopia that started out as a eutopia, and that still disguises itself as one. But Wells shows us that every paradise has a dark side, that there’s always a price to pay, and that what seems to be progress may well prove to be humanity’s downfall. It is quite likely that as a species we will develop further, and it’s even possible that we are able to steer that development in the direction that appears most desirable to us. But that doesn’t mean that we will like what we will get. We tend to think of the posthuman as something that is better than a mere human, more advanced, an improved human. But the posthuman may just as well turn out to be in some important respect less than human.

But of course, for Wells it’s even worse than that. Wells’s time traveller travels further and further into the future until eventually even those shrunken versions of our present selves have vanished. Wells allows us a glimpse at a time when we’ll all be gone for good, and there will be nothing left. It will be as if we had never existed, the world an empty, desolate place. No humans, no posthumans, nothing, just tohu wa-bohu. It’s a truly chilling prospect, masterly set on scene by Wells:

“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.”

Surprisingly, however, the novel ends on an optimistic note. The time traveller has brought home from his journey two flowers from the pre-desolation future and passes them on to the story’s narrator before he leaves once more, never to return again. Those two flowers provide some comfort to the narrator, despite everything that is going to happen, because they remind him of what truly matters in life:

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”

In the longest run our prospects may be very bleak indeed, but as long as we can hold on to that “mutual tenderness”, all is not lost.