Suzy McKee Charnas: Toto, We're Not in SF-land Any More

Diatribe #1:
Toto, We're Not in SF-land Any More

Bill McKibben (author of a new nonfiction book called "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age" -- Times Books, 2003) would like us to do something: not a little thing, but a huge one, as he well knows. Talking on NPR's "Prime Time" recently, he touched on the rapid changes already begun in advanced technology, particularly nanotechnology and genetic engineering. He said that humans as a species need to pause now, look about ourselves, declare that the world is "good enough", and quit tinkering with it in such fundamental ways. Only this, he said, might pull us back from the brink of making the quantum leap (blindly, as usual) into developing various forms of individual immortality and creating designer children -- that is, taking control of evolution and using it -- as we use everything -- for our own ends.

My thoughts now, not Mr. McKibben's:

First of all, regardless of all the assurances out of our official big, smart mouths we mostly don't have a clue as to the wider implications of what we're doing, which is in itself a cause for grave concern since we inevitably insist on doing it anyway.

Further, it's obvious that the "advances" most eagerly sought after are destined to benefit only the very rich. This is not a matter of morality or policy but of money, which in modern America trumps every other consideration, in matters great or small, with depressing frequency. Certainly only profit counts in deciding the larger issues, since most of the decision makers never really consider anything else -- lest profit (their own and their cronies') be in some way inconvenienced or curtailed.

I can't speak for the rest of the world, though I suspect a different ethic at work -- or should I say, an ethic, period -- when the Dutch, for example, decide not to enclose more seabed to make additional land because they have enough land to work with and do not wish to lose the Zuider Zee. Imagine that: they said, "We have enough."

What a statement! What a concept!

It will never fly here; not "sexy" enough.

So, going on the basis of the record so far, we're headed for the creation of an aristocracy of literal super-people, with superiority graven into the DNA of the elite but denied to the increasingly impoverished, exploited, and (by design) less gifted majority. The beneficiaries will be super-rich, of course, or they could not afford the technology to become super-long-lived, super-trim and strong and handsome, super-smart, super-talented, super-impervious to empathy (to protect their nerves and their wealth), and genetically encoded to be super-happy all the super-time.

Given today's increasingly, horrifically, lopsided maldistribution of wealth (which continues to increase), these will of course be mostly White people, mostly European/Western, maybe even mostly American. Mostly "us": naively arrogant, unrepentantly dominant, endlessly greedy, expansive, and ruthless in our destruction or subversion of anything that even appears to block our way.

What chance will we have for positive communication, let alone life-affirming intimacy (no, I'm not talking about sex, I am talking about love, respect, and acceptance), between the majority of merely evolutionarily produced humans and the self-exalted minority, already ahead by lengths and pulling away as fast as they can?

What about our future as one species?

Well, the guys who are doing the engineering, the inventing, the pioneering, funded by corporations in pursuit of more and bigger executive fortunes, will not wait for meaningful consideration of any of this. Discussion of the real issues and possibilities might move the majority to try to say "no". "We" (ie the corporate boss club) can't have that. "Nay-saying" is un-American.

An aside here: I am grateful to Mr. McKibben for noting, out loud and on the air, that the one place in the U.S. where he found intelligent people giving serious consideration to implications was in the literature of Science Fiction.

"Oh yeah, high tech guns and black leather, bug-eyed monsters and sexy babes, space adventure for teenaged boys," runs the common cultural assessment; which is a judgment that was never entirely true and in any case has been badly outdated for the past forty years or more. SF, that despised and dismissed genre ("Don't be silly, that's just science fiction!"), is the one place where people did not look at each other in horror and cry "Oh my god look they've cloned a sheep whatever can this mean?" when poor, sickly Dolly's existence was first announced.

SF writers and readers looked at each other with wry smiles and helpless shrugs. In our fiction we've been working out thought-experiments about just this kind of capability for decades. But would the mass media so much as acknowledge this, let alone report on some of the issues raised and conclusions reached in the work of the SF community? Not that I saw. Better to run about shrieking that the sky is falling than to actually sit down and think, or, God forbid, turn to the work of those who have been thinking about the sky all along.

To return, however, to the basic problem of "Enough".

The problem is us.

Most male humans (who are still largely in ultimate and controlling charge of how our societies' resources get spent) get their greatest charge -- after orgasm, of course -- not from thinking ahead but from "monkeying with" things here at hand. That means monkeying with everything, from car engines to genetics to the electrical balances in the earth's high atmosphere; it means monkeying compulsively, competitively, and sometimes with active malice (have a look at some of the futuristic weapon projects detailed in a recent article in the Sunday New York Times). Nothing from within will stop us from this monkeying, because it is what we (particularly Western we, male variety) are: restless, curious, dexterous primates, with opposable thumb and big brains largely incapable of actual foresight or caution.

To be fair some (like Bill McKibben) do look ahead and try to draw back from the precipice, attempt to put on the brakes, demand that we think about it first, for God's sake! They are outgunned, outspent, ridiculed and shouted down, and the monkeying goes on, encouraged in the name of profit and promoted by monkey-politicians salivating for more personal bananas than even they and their families and their cronies could consume in six artificially extended monkey lifetimes.

Are there objections in Europe to US Frankencrops? George W. Bush has signed a law directing that poor nations be pressured to accept food aid from us in the form of the genetically engineered foodstuffs that richer countries are strong enough to refuse. Are there efforts to control auto emissions to try to preserve the atmosphere in usable form? Never mind, we'll make sure trucks are exempt and then throw all our efforts into making and promoting gas-guzzling SUV's and put them in that exempt category. What, we still have National forests with old growth trees in them? Quick, blaze in some roads on the excuse that they are for equipment for fighting forest fires, and then help the timber industry muscle their way in on those roads to take those huge old trees and sell them for a nickel apiece so the Japanese can make them into chopsticks.

The pressure for profit is omnipresent, ruthless, and inexorable; resistance is brave and laudable but seems, at best, a delaying action. When public outcry does manage to put a spoke in the wheels of destructive and exploitive "progress", the money just waits a bit, diverted to some other ruinous activity-for-profit in the meantime. Once the protesters are exhausted, put down or scared off by brutal repression, overwhelmed by the increasing array of fronts opened against humanity by ruthless operators on all levels, or simply broke or dead of old age and despair, the waiting big money just picks up where it left off and proceeds to make a few rich people richer at the expense of everyone and everything else, as originally planned.

We will continue to monkey; we, corporate America and its captive "democracy", will continue to force the results, no matter how dire, down other countries' throats for profit's sake and without the slightest consideration of the long-term costs, even to our own children and grandchildren, in whose reality we apparently don't really believe (or how could we leave them this mess?).

This what SF author Ted Sturgeon meant when he wrote that what will bring us down as a species is what he called the "Stupidity Problem".

What, stupid? Us, the West, America? With our prosperity that is the envy of the world?

Yes, disastrously so. "We" don't keep "our" females in purdah; we don't practice FGM or skin dogs alive to take home and make tasty stew out of them, as some folks do; but we are savages all the same, eager little monkeys, gluttonous, shortsighted, egotistical, aggressive, and (in the case of corporate America) powered by a mindless hunger for dominance -- over other nations, over humane values and behavior, over anybody with less firepower than our own, and ultimately over Nature herself, so that profit can proceed unimpeded anywhere by anything.

Traditional societies everywhere crumble before us, our guns, and our promises of lotsa cheap stuff (pay no attention to the hidden costs, which are cumulative, lethal, and in many cases irreversible). We forge ahead destroying not just tribal peoples' regressive superstitions and casual cruelty (atrocities like FGM) but also their ideals of vital connection -- to each other, to their posterity, and to the earth that ultimately supports us all.

The only connection the corporate "vision" permits is a monetary one; how else can we go on turning the good things of the earth into the ultimately worthless coins that stream ceaselessly into fewer and fewer pockets?

I don't know about McKibben, but I personally do not foresee human survival beyond this millennium; but I'm not crying about it.

At home I see a valiant, intelligent few struggling vainly against thoughtless, smug, naive triumphalism and endless manipulation of consumer greed. Abroad I see weakness, compliance or outright imitation, or else deeply reactionary, fanatical, and ultimately doomed resistance grounded in rigid fundamentalism of all stripes -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, the lot.

Our clever techno-monkeys reassure us that there is, or will be, a "technical fix" for everything -- although still they can't accurately agree on, let alone predict, the course of climate change, and there is still no cure for cancer, for AIDS, or for escalating shortages of potable water. Some believe what they're saying; most are whistling in the dark, or lying outright to keep the grant money, government support, and company funding flowing. Meantime, we are busily corrupting or exterminating all cultures that preserve into modern times the skills and knowledge required to survive, let alone flourish, in pre-industrial (or post-collapse) conditions.

Not that even those skills would be enough -- not now.

Suppose we were to die off tomorrow in large enough numbers (from, say, the next round of SARS, or the one after that) so that the dominator-culture of the West fails beyond repair? We have stuffed the earth, sea and air with lethal detritus, mechanical, chemical and atomic. We've altered the climate itself in ways that encourage the proliferation and spread of our worst natural enemies -- parasites, infectious diseases and their carriers, deserts of feeble soil and debilitating heat. It's going to take a hell of a lot more than folk wisdom to survive on a degraded planet where maps of where the nuclear waste dumps lie, supposing any such maps survive, have been lost or can no longer be interpreted.

One way or another, our legacy to our children and grandchildren is already set up as a grim affair (except for the very rich, of course, as usual; but even for them the bill will come due, in time).

I'm feeling homesick, just a little prematurely, for the "human race". I'm homesick for the sweetness, beauty, creativity, and vast potentiality of the human species as creators, as social peers and companions, as mutually supporting generations, and as stewards of a magnificent planet. I'm homesick for times when individuals of vastly different backgrounds could and would reach across gulfs of cultural variation, enriching each life in passing with experiences of mutual respect, acceptance, and love (viz., Nowhere in Africa).

In casual conversation about the destruction of the world's fish stocks (by -- what else? -- human overfishing, basically caused by a willful refusal to limit our own numbers, which we are perfectly capable of doing), I hear myself say: "The earth can't shake itself free of us too soon."

I think I've really come to believe this. It's simple economics: Earth cannot afford us as we are now, let alone a doubled population in a few more decades. We are costing her literally everything else. Even in the language of profit and loss, we humans are too expensive an indulgence for our planet to maintain, moreso with every passing moment.

The future, our future, the future created by us for ourselves and our posterity, looks frightening to Bill McKibben. To me it looks damned; and unfortunately, that bleak prospect is not "just science fiction" any more.

--SMC

21 July 2003