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"It swelled in him then, like some wildfire cancer; a rapid disgust, a total allergy syndrome directed at everything around him; at the filthy, eviscerated mundanity of it all, the sheer crawling awfulness of existence; all the lies and the pain, the legalised murder, the privileged theft, the genocides and the hatreds and the stupefying human cruelties, all the starveling beauty of the burgeoning poor and the crippled in body and brain, all the life defying squalor of the cities and the camps, all the sweltering frenetics of the creeds and faiths, all the torturingly ingenious, carefully civilised savagery of the technology of pain and the economics of greed: all the hollow, ringing, bullshitting words used to justify and explain the utter howling grief of our own cruelty and stupidity... " Ian Banks - Walking on Glass
That was almost ten years ago
and things are not any better. It is patently obvious that the social context into which Humanity evolved, namely the small nomadic tribes of the Savannah, is not suitable for what we have become. And what we have become is a global technological society of billions wielding the power to destroy life on Earth, including ourselves. There is something wrong with Humanity en masse that no amount of reasoning, indoctrination or education is going to fix. There are very few
alternatives remaining. The present course is to let things run 'as normal' and hope that it is all for the best, just like the last few millennia. That history will continue in the same vein with its ups and downs. However, this is not going to happen for reasons explained below. It is even more optimistic and unrealistic than the Green scenario above. The final choice is one that has never been tried because it has never been available before, namely, to transform Humanity and Human consciousness via technological means. To make fluid 'Human Nature'. The author Fukuyama was right - one way or another it is the end of history. So what is this about? What thinking lies behind the Consensus and the Essentia? One thing we are most definitely not is just another turn of the political wheel. If I believed that I would not be doing any of this, even if I knew it would be successful (which I do not). The essence or raison d'être of the Consensus is that we are currently racing towards the greatest event in history - and no political entity on the planet recognises this fact, let alone is prepared or is preparing for it. The event has several names - 'the Singularity', 'the Spike', and 'the Techno-Rapture' - to name the three most common terms. [For those who cannot access this site here is the article in text format - if you read nothing else read this]. It stems from the fact that the change instituted by science and technology is both vastly accelerating and about to enter a phase where the change wrought on life, society and Humanity is not merely quantitative but qualitative. Most knowledgeable observers place the event approximately a generation away, somewhere between the years 2020 and 2050 with most opting for around the year 2030. It will be the result of a convergence of technological factors including computer technology, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering (Human and non-Human) and nanotechnology leading to what has been termed Transhumanity and later Posthumanity. Although these are relatively recent terms the ideas that underlie them have been 'floating around' for more than thirty years. Probably the most wellknown expression grew out of the Hippy era and LSD experiences, with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson coining the acronym SMIILE - Space Migration Intelligence Increase Life Extension as the roadmap to the future of our species. However, it has only been within the past decade that advances on all the fronts necessary for this enterprise have begun to appear with increasing regularity. As to what these two terms mean in detail, nobody knows, but speculation suggests an evolutionary advance over common Humanity comparable to the differential between ourselves and the apes. We are on the verge of acquiring the capability of transforming the nature of Humanity from our genetic base upwards. On a day to day basis this change of capability is not easily visible. One major reason is that most of these advances are taking place on a scale too small to be seen by the human eye. As a result the mass media does not focus on news that is of interest only to the tiny fraction of the population that is scientifically literate. Another is that it is far easier to focus on 'Human interest' stories that are essentially as old as history e.g. sports, celebrities, royalty, sex, politics etc. It makes the world seem 'normal' and stable and masks quite remarkable changes to the fundamental powerhouse of our civilisation. However the result of the accumulation of such changes is that 'historical events' are arriving at a faster and faster rate - history is speeding up. Of course, this might not happen. Some factor may intervene to halt the onward march of the science and technology that has become the driving force of our civilisation. Which brings us to the other contestant in the race - global disaster on a scale never before seen - because that is the only alternative realistically on offer. Of course, this all seems like science fiction. And it is, until it happens. If you are middle aged then there are other things that you will remember being science fiction. The list, in no particular order and far from exhaustive, includes cloning, test tube babies, acid rain, the Internet, global warming, Plutonium smuggling, genetically engineered children, personal computers, aberrant weather patterns, the hole in the ozone layer, the current mass extinction of life, the collapse of Communism and the kind of terrorism that was once found only in comic books and James Bond films. It is this latter fact that was introduced to the world in such a shattering manner on 11 September 2001 and the follow-up anthrax attacks. The nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway by a religious cult some years earlier did provide a clue as to the changing nature and scale of terrorism but was largely ignored. At present we now embarked on 'The War Against Terror' (TWAT - such a lovely acronym!) that promises to be a never-ending escalation of strike and counterstrike. And the underlying fear factor is of science and technology placing increasingly destructive technologies into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of people who have a grievance while at the same time society becomes more complex, globally interlocked and fragile. The belated response of various governments has been to try and restrict or monitor potential sources of 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMDs), but it is recognised by most that it is now not a matter of prevention but of damage limitation. Yet the really damaging WMDs have not yet made an appearance, namely, nuclear and genetically engineered bioweapons in the short term and later perhaps nanotechnology - but they will. Another response to this is an unprecedented destruction of freedom in the West. Ancient Rights are disappearing by the day in the name of 'security' - itself a fiction - as we are turned by fear into a surveillance society with the powers of a police state. Coupled with this is an aggressive military posture willing to strike at anything it considers a threat to any Western interest anywhere in the world. Any suggestion that our enemies, the terrorists, are anything more than insane evil fanatics is viewed with suspicion. The notion that some of their grievances against us may be legitimate is seen almost as treason. And all of this even before we have lost a major city or taken casualties in excess of a few weeks of roadkill. We can only guess at the response when the inevitable happens. Meanwhile, in the world of 'business as usual' we have Earth being eaten alive by the only ideology left standing after the Cold War, namely the Western Global Capitalism usually simply called 'Globalisation'. It is an ideology of hypocrisy that worships the 'free market' while at the same time rigging it against the poor both at home and abroad. It is this that is a major factor in creating and maintaining TWAT. Forced inequality and inequity are the hallmarks of Globalisation in practice, even in the West, and it is these that will be the breeding ground for the coming waves of terrorism. Meanwhile the 'long term' trend of environmental destruction proceeds apace because our current economic system views Nature as inherently zero value. That is air, water, land, forests etc are 'free' to be used up and only acquire value once they are owned and their scarcity value (due to destructive exploitation) is raised to 'economic' levels. Politics has been reduced to a branch of economics. These are the concerns that underlie the Essentia. And the solutions, or at least a sketch of them, are outlined in the Principia. We must try to keep our societies as safe as possible while the technologies necessary for this Transhumanist undertaking mature. Simply put, in order to do this we must minimise the numbers of our enemies - and not by killing them. Briefly, we need to integrate our societies so that we do not have alienated minorities. In the medium term such characteristics as race and ethnicity will become designer choices. We need to decentralise and distribute power downward to those who are affected by that power and at the same time try to separate the political process from the domination of economic interests. Simultaneously we need to maximise personal freedom and responsibilities in order to balance what are inevitably going to be denials of freedom elsewhere as we try to protect ourselves from what will be an increasingly hostile and unpredictable world. And on the world stage we must implement a policy of armed neutrality coupled with a transparent and coherent foreign policy lacking the expediency and hypocrisy of the present governments. The aid we provide to the Third World should not be usurous loans that enslave and corrupt the people to whom we are 'giving' it, nor should it be handed to governments to despoil their own environment or fund their wars and repression, but to the people who need it most. At home, in order to preserve as much of the natural world as we possible, as well as safeguard our own nations, we need to switch to totally renewable resources. In Britain at least we must reduce our population, or at least stop it growing, to take the pressure off the environment and social infrastructure. Finally, we must become pro-active in the political arena with respect to the unprecedented technological change that is bearing down upon us largely unseen. We need to map a path to a future that is not controlled by any single entity, religion or ideology. This is crucial because we do not want a single 'government approved Transhumanity' to emerge, or worse, to be stopped. Instead we need a regulatory framework that encourages all benign paths to that end, does not restrict explorations in that direction and will hopefully ensure a relatively smooth emergence of enhanced consciousness and intelligence. Already the sides are being drawn in the muddled debates over cloning and stem cell research, not to mention an uneasy silence that considers genetic engineering on Humans legitimate purely for medical reasons but which refuses to look further until forced by circumstance. The temporal part of the Essentia is a pledge we make on behalf of what we will become. It is a pledge to undo the damage that is being done to life on Earth. It is a pledge that Humanity in its present form cannot fulfill. We have a generation to do this - no more. Dirk Bruere © The Consensus 2002 |
