Can the Problem of How Human Beings Find Meaning Be Alleviated in the Future?
The lessons of history seem to highlight a stubborn fact: that great benefits can bring about serious dilemmas. Until recent years in human evolution, we have mostly lived on renewable resources, like the energy of photosynthesis. But the explosion of cultural evolution has now meant that we live mostly on expendable resources — fossil fuels.1 Modern advancements have occurred so quickly, that we don’t have the ability to prepare ourselves — our biology seems ill fitted to adapt quick enough to the disclosure of this new world.2 And the toll on our planet as a result of what we call progress, is not exactly getting better either. Climate concerns are an ever-looming threat. But it’s not all gloomy is it. Remarkable things lay on the horizon which plan to modify the current meaning of our lives. According to Michio Kaku, the future may be dominated by AI, gene editing, designer children, bio-enhancement and reverse aging.3 These profound developments could entirely change our lives, giving us the ability to play God in our own creation. This could alleviate all the handicaps people suffer from inherited dispositions towards mental illness, disabilities, and even our own lagging intelligence. Surely this means we can escape our biological and environmental destiny to a large extent? We could programme ourselves to be that chirpy optimist we always wished we could be. In this way, the problem of finding happiness may not be so important anymore. But it’s not exactly clear this picture is possible yet. There may, for example, be an ‘Achilles’ heel’, hidden in the creatures that have so far been tested on to hypothesize this future — there is reason to think this already.4 Moreover, even if we reversed aging, or lived forever, we might find that life loses its shine, and motivation declines.4 In other words, we may pay some unknown price for tinkering with what nature developed over millions of years — like playing God. If this is right, then perhaps there is double the concern given our prior worry about cultural evolution having flown the perch of our biological adaptations. And unleashing these powers into the world is hardly a self-evident good — not all we currently have is so. Anxiety and depression are largely diseases of modernity, it is said.5 This may of course be due to a more liberal diagnosis by clinicians,6 but other factors, some of which already discussed, conspire to legitimise the phenomena. We don’t see, by the same metric, people outside our Western sphere, like the rural villages of Samoa, or New Guinea, with anxiety and depression.6 The problem may be internal to how society is structured. Technological advances merged with a capitalist economy in the mid eighteenth century.7 This has allowed for technological consumption to rise exponentially in a largely unregulated fashion. We are ever beholden to our technological dream. The dream that had once seen itself as working with nature, then harnessing and controlling nature increasingly, and now one that is harnessing and controlling us. Indeed, our vulnerability moving into the future is our largely unconscious relationship to all this progress.8 We never stop to ask, ‘what for’? Where is all this going? Come to think of it, what is technology? We are heading into an abyss blindfolded, with our hands behind our backs. This is not a pessimistic outlook: this is the reality of it.
We have no more shamans or institutions to impart wisdom. We have no guardians to look on over us whilst we wield this new power. Advertisers and transnational corporations light the road ahead now. You might argue that we have always had greed and manipulation. I would agree. But usually, our countervailing forces had enough time to catch up and disarm it. Our options are dwindling now that cultural evolution has accumulated such momentum.9 Could we really stop using our phones, for example?
This brings me to a distinction between short and long-term happiness. Most of this unconscious progress is focused on short term developments, which thwart a more sustainable form of happiness for expendable momentary pleasures — technology isn’t made to last. Given that much of our modern ingenuity is designed around making us feel good — and our feelings are fleeting — culture is forced to come up with more and more ways to harness our attention. But that makes responding to social ills generated by them all the more complex, since we simply don’t know the the long term effects of these new developments. And that doesn't just mean during your lifetime, it means hundreds of years into the future too. Points of no return are likely happening all the time, whether we know it or not. As we move increasingly into a virtual life, its not clear what the escape button would be. Modifications to our biology seem to fall in line with our other unconscious developments too. If the ethical scientists don’t develop it, others will, so we can’t necessarily say these profound creations will receive special ethical treatment — least so by the consumers.[1]10 More of what we want, less of what we need. Even if all of Kaku’s prophecies come true, without an ethical guidebook prompting us into collective self-awareness and deep reflection, we could unwittingly commit ourselves to ruin. And the prevailing western economic model — Capitalism — seems at odds with a community spirit or collective identification needed to sponge away the threat. And yet the only thing that guards against inevitability is a common cause and social solidarity.10 To echo a famous song by Cat Stevens, “where do the children play?”.11 It may be that most kids will be in a virtual environment in the future — playing on the streets a thing of the past. To say we may evade our genetic and environmental constraints is to have a limited awareness of the ever-narrower path we are winding ourselves down. It may be that biological modification do work out in the long run, but the long run is a hypothetical world we do not live in. We live in the world 24-hour amazon delivery service. We couldn’t care less about long term consequences, so long as catastrophes don’t happen in our individual lifetimes — or perhaps on our doorsteps. Of course, that logic does not extend to the future. The problem of meaning may in this sense be even more of a problem in the future. For science to save us, we have to already know what is worth saving? Do we? What use is a science that stands idle in its tendency to make ordinary people think of themselves in a disembodied and reductive way? By this I intend not to blame science, but to blame the ideology that would have us believe that science is not in the values game — dualism. It is. Before something is used as a tool, it being revealed to us as a possibility is already a consequence for us. Saying guns don't kill people — people kill people, misses the fact that guns already — by simply being in the world — disclose certain possibilities for humans, which in turn shape our world. Maybe we need to think what world we ought to be revealing, and whether our scientific/technological pursuits are delivering it or not.
1 Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, New World New Mind: Moving Towards Conscious Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 45.
2 Ibid, p. 43.
3 Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Anchor, 2011), p. 157–165.
4 Ibid, p. 162–163
4 David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (USA: Vintage, 2009), p. 47–49.
5 Robert Wright, The Evolution of Despair, time mag, p. 3.
6 Gregg Easterbrook, How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 181.
6 Wright, p. 2.
7 Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, New World New Mind: Moving Towards Conscious Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 58–59.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Kaku, p. 192–194.
10 Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc, 1991), p. 66.
11 Yusef Islam, Where Do the Children Play? Cat Stevens, in YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDjnPvnDyE&ab_channel=CatStevens-Topic) Accessed 09/12/2021.
Bibliography
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc, 1991).
David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (USA: Vintage, 2009)
Gregg Easterbrook, How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2003)
Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, New World New Mind: Moving Towards Conscious Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000)
Robert Wright, The Evolution of Despair, time mag.
Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Anchor, 2011)
Yusef Islam, Where Do the Children Play? Cat Stevens, in YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDjnPvnDyE&ab_channel=CatStevens-Topic) Accessed 09/12/2021.
