Eclipse of Man

“Mankind will surely destroy itself.”

Whether predicted in a thunderous denunciation of our flaws or with mild worldly regret, an apocalyptic future has become a cliché. Will it be global warming or global cooling? Radiation poisoning or nuclear winter? Famine due to overpopulation, or pollution-induced sterility? These, at any rate, are some of the possibilities I grew up with. But today, it is becoming increasingly common to hear of another route to the demise of humanity: we will destroy what we are now in the process of making something better of ourselves. We have this opportunity because science and technology are giving us the power to control human evolution, turning it from a natural process based on chance to one guided by our own intelligence and will.

The primary sources for thinking like this today are people who call themselves variously transhumanists, posthumanists, extropianians, advocates of H+, or singularitarians. The essential insight that defines transhumanism was expressed in an entirely different context by Stewart Brand, when he chose as the epigraph for the Whole Earth Catalog the phrase, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Transhumanists argue not only that modern science and technology are giving human beings the power to take evolution into our own hands to improve the human species, and then to create some new species entirely, but also the ability to improve on all of the naturally given. Thus, its vision of the end is not so different from the older apocalyptic visions. Man as we know him and nature as we know it are on their way out in both instances; but for transhumanists, that is the deliberate goal sought, not a consequence of our hubris to be avoided. To put it another way, if the mere destruction of the more common apocalyptic visions is to be avoided (as opposed to transhumanism’s creative destruction), it will be by redesigning humanity so that the very flaws that might otherwise lead us to it can be eliminated.