A n t h r o p o c e n t r i c
Brave New World is a utopia conceived on the basis of species-self-interest masquerading as a universal paradise. Most of the inhabitants of our planet don't get a look-in, any more than they do today.
        Strong words? Not really. Statistically, most of the suffering in the contemporary world isn't undergone by human beings. It is sometimes supposed that intensity and degree of consciousness - between if not within species - is inseparably bound up with intelligence. Accordingly, humans are prone to credit themselves with a "higher" consciousness than members of other taxa, as well as - sometimes more justifiably - sharper intellects. Non-human animals aren't treated as morally and functionally akin to human infants and toddlers i.e. in need of looking after. Instead, they are wantonly abused, exploited, and killed.

        Yet it is a striking fact that our most primitive experiences - both phylogenetically and ontogenetically - are also the most vivid. For physical suffering probably has more to do with the number and synaptic density of pain cells than a hypertrophied neocortex. The extremes of pain and thirst, for example, are excruciatingly intense. By contrast, the kinds of experience most associated with the acme of human intellectual endeavour, namely thought-episodes in the pre-frontal region, are phenomenologically so anaemic that it is hard to introspect their properties at all.

        Hardcore paradise-engineering - and not the brittle parody of paradise served up in BNW - will eradicate such nastiness from the living world altogether. None of Huxley's implicit criticism of the utopians can conceivably apply to the rest of the animal kingdom. For by no stretch of the imagination could the most ardent misery-monger claim animal suffering is essential for the production of great art and literature - a common rationale for its preservation and alleged redeeming value in humans. Nor would its loss lead to great spiritual emptiness. Animal suffering is just savage, empty and pointless. So we'll probably scrap it when it becomes easy enough to do so.

        Whether pain takes the form of the eternal Treblinka of our Fordist factory farms and conveyor-belt killing factories, or whether it's manifested as the cruelties of a living world still governed by natural selection, the sheer viciousness of the Darwinian Era is likely to horrify our morally saner near-descendants. A few centuries hence - the chronological details are sketchy - hordes of self-replicating nanorobots armed with retroviral vectors and the power of on-board quantum supercomputers will hunt out the biomolecular signature of aversive experience all the way down the phylogenetic tree; and genetically eliminate it. Meanwhile, depot-contraception, not merciless predation, will control population in our wildlife parks. Carnivorous killing-machines - and that includes dear misunderstood kitty, a beautiful sociopath - will be reprogrammed or phased out. Down on the farm, tasty, genetically-engineered ambrosia will replace abused sentience. For paradise-engineering entails global veganism. Utopia cannot be built on top of an ecosystem of pain and fear. Unfortunately, this is an issue on which Brave New World is silent.

        How is it possible to make such predictions with any confidence?

        Properly speaking, one can't, or at least not without a heap of caveats. But as science progressively gives us the power to remould matter and energy to suit our desires - or whims - it would take an extraordinary degree of malice for us to sustain the painfulness of Darwinian life indefinitely. For as our power increases, so does our complicity in its persistence.

        Even unregenerate humans don't tend to be sustainably ill-natured. So when genetically-engineered vat-food tastes as good as dead meat, we may muster enough moral courage to bring the animal holocaust to an end.
 

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