Enough: Staying human in an engineered age by Bill McKibben, Times Books/Henry Holt, $25, ISBN 0805070966
IF YOU get all your genes from your parents, your struggles to make the best of life have some meaning. But if they add a few bits tweaked in the lab, that meaning disappears because, all of a sudden, you have been designed.
We鈥檙e going to hear a lot of this kind of argument, if Bill McKibben鈥檚 heartfelt plea to renounce technologies like this is anything to go by. And this is a shame. Maybe it deserves a name 鈥� call it the existential non sequitur. The argument makes no sense because it assumes we have the freedom to negotiate with our genes if they are the result of the traditional random shuffle (which we don鈥檛), but not if a technician intervened. Yet if we regular humans are not bound by our base pairs, then it is hard to figure out why our destiny should suddenly lie in our DNA if we change it. Why would someone who is born after germ-line genetic alteration be an 鈥渁utomaton鈥� (his words).
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It鈥檚 a shame because genetic manipulation is much the most plausible of the three new technologies he sees as putting humanity at risk, and this is his strongest argument against it.
Like computer scientist Bill Joy, he believes that genetic engineering, nanotechnology and super-intelligent robots pose qualitatively new threats to human life as we know it. And like Francis Fukuyama, whose recent book Our Posthuman Future explores similar issues, he thinks they must be strongly regulated, if not completely ruled out.
As McKibben points out, the bad things these technologies might bring have been exhaustively detailed in science fiction. But now, he discerns, they are real, not fictional, prospects, and they add up to a big 21st-century question. Do we pursue technological paths that could radically alter the human condition? And what if they alter it so much that humans as we know them are supplanted by a species whose lives we hardly recognise?
As he makes clear, this new question tracks back to a much older one: what constitutes a good life or, for that matter, a good death? For McKibben, it is one pretty much like that available to the more fortunate citizens of the developed countries today 鈥� well fed, mostly healthy, and culturally rich. Most of these people, most of the time, live to help raise their grandchildren, find worthwhile work, and love long and well. And they have some reason to believe that this kind of life, with the population bomb defused and suitable environmental reforms in place, can be sustained, or even improved, and eventually extended to everyone else. Surely, he asks, this ought to be enough?
The tangle over genes aside, he makes a good case in Enough: Staying human in an engineered age. But the forces ranged against him are formidable. There is global capitalism as an engine of discontent, and the growing obsession with cultivation of the self. There is a leaching away of traditional religious belief, and a turn to promises of redemption or transcendence in this life. There is the ever-present fact that humans are aware of their mortality, and don鈥檛 care for it very much. And there is set of familiar evolutionary narratives which suggest that we must eventually deal with human imperfections by changing our basic design.
McKibben knows all this, and is good at diagnosing, for example, the self-loathing of some of the most enthusiastic advocates of futures in which we all download our minds into supercomputers. But for all his eloquence he comes across as a pretty contented soul, and this makes it hard for him to engage convincingly with the legion of humans who find life as we know it less pleasing than he does. He believes passionately that these technologies could lead to a radical loss of meaning. But he has too little to say to those who already find meaning lacking in their lives. More importantly, he is unlikely to persuade those who find meaning precisely in working to realise the technological dreams he finds so unappealing.