One might imagine that progress in automation technology would eliminate the menial, repetitive tasks so unsuitable for big-brained Alphas. But apparently this would leave the lower castes disaffected and without a role: allegedly a good reason for freezing scientific progress where it is. It might be imagined, too, that one solution here would be to stop producing oxygen-starved morons altogether. Why not stick to churning out Alphas? The Controller Mustapha Mond informs us that an all-Alpha society was once tried on an island. The result of the experiment was civil war. 19 000 of the 22 000 Alphas perished. Thus the lower castes are needed indefinitely. The happiness that they derive from their routine-bound lives guarantees stability for society as a whole. "The optimum population", the Controller observes, "is modelled on the iceberg - eight-ninths below the waterline, one-ninth above".

        There are evidently (strong!) counter-arguments and rebuttals that could be delivered against any specific variant of this scenario. But Huxley isn't interested in details. BNW is a deeply pessimistic blanket-warning against all forms of genetic engineering and eugenics. Shouldn't we keep the status quo and ban them altogether? Let's play safe. In the last analysis, Nature Knows Best.

        As it stands, this argument is horribly facile. The ways in which bioscience can be abused are certainly manifold. Bioethics deserves to become a mainstream academic discipline. But the idea that a living world organised on principles of blind genetic selfishness - the bedrock of the Darwinian Era - is inherently better than anything based on rational design is surely specious. Selfishness, whether in the technical or overlapping popular sense, is a spectacularly awful principle on which to base any civilisation. Sooner or later, simple means-ends-analysis, if nothing else, will dictate the use of genetic engineering to manufacture constitutionally happy mind/brains. Reams of philosophical sophistry and complication aside, that's what we're all after, obliquely and under another description or otherwise; and biotechnology is the only effective way to get it.

        For despite how frequently irrational we may be in satisfying our desires, we're all slaves to the pleasure-principle. No one ever leaves a well-functioning pleasure-machine because they get bored: unlike the derivative joys of food, drink and sex, the delightfulness of intra-cranial self-stimulation of the pleasure-centres shows no tolerance. Natural selection has "encephalised" emotion to disguise our dependence on the mesolimbic dopamine circuitry of reward. Since raw, unfocused emotion is blind and impotent, its axonal and dendritic processes have been recruited into innervating the neocortex. All our layers of cortical complexity conspire to help self-replicating DNA leave more copies of itself. Thus we fetishise all sorts of irrelevant cerebral bric-a-brac ["intentional objects": loosely, what we're happy or upset "about"] that has come to be associated with adaptively nice and nasty experiences in our past. But the attributes of power, status and money, for instance, however obviously nice they seem today, aren't inherently pleasurable. They yield only a derivative kick that can be chemically edited out of existence. Their cortical representations have to be innervated by limbically-generated emotions in the right way - or the wrong way - for them to seem nice at all.

        Rationally, then, if we want to modulate our happiness so that it's safe and socially sustainable, we must code genetically pre-programmed well-being in a way that shuts down the old dominance-and-submission circuits too. Such a shut-down is crudely feasible today on serotonergics, both recreational and clinical. But the shut-down can be comprehensive and permanent. Germ-line gene therapy is better than drugs.

        Is this sort of major genetic re-write likely?

        Yes, probably. In the interim, any unreconstructed power-trippers can get a far bigger kick in immersive VR than they can playing primate party-politics. If one wants to be Master Of The Universe, then so be it: a chacun son gout. The narrative software which supports such virtual worlds can even be pharmacologically enhanced in the user so that virtual world mastery is always better than The Real Thing - relegated one day, perhaps, to a fading antiquarian relic. The fusion of drugs and computer-generated worlds will yield greater verisimilitude than anything possible in recalcitrant old organic VR - the dynamic simulations which perceptual naive realists call the world. For we live in a messy and frustrating regime which passes itself off as The Real World, but is actually a species-specific construct coded by DNA.

        OK. But can power-games really be confined exclusively to VR? Won't tomorrow's Alphas want to dominate both?

        This question needs a book, not the obiter dicta of a literary essay. But if one can enjoy champagne, why drink meths, or even be tempted to try it in the first place? In common with non-human animals, we respond most powerfully to hot-button supernormal stimuli. Getting turned-on by the heightened verisimilitude of drugs-plus-VR from a very young age is likely to eclipse anything else on offer.

        This isn't to deny that in any transitional era to a mature post-Darwinian paradise, there will have to be huge safeguards - no less elaborate than the multiple failsafe procedures surrounding the launch codes for today's nuclear weaponry. In the near future, for instance, prospective candidates for political leadership in The Real World will probably have their DNA profiles scrutinised no less exhaustively than their sexual peccadillos. For it will be imprudent to elect unenriched primitives endowed with potentially dangerous genotypes. If one is going to put oneself and one's children into, say, ecstasy-like states of loving empathy and trust, then one is potentially more vulnerable to genetic cavemen. But this is all the more reason to design beautifully enhanced analogues of ecstasy and coke which fuse the best features of both.

        Even if a power-tripper's fantasy wish-fulfilment is confined to private universes, we are still likely to view it as an unnerving prospect. One of the reasons we find the very thought of being dominated and controlled and manipulated a la BNW so aversive is that we associate such images with frustration, nastiness and depression. For sure, the Brave New Worlders are typically happy rather than depressed. Yet they are all, bar perhaps the Controllers, manipulated dupes. The worry that we ourselves might ever suffer a similar fate is unsettling and depressing. Brave New World gives happiness a bad name.

        But it's misery that deserves to be stigmatised and stamped out. Brave New World dignifies unpleasantness in the guise of noble savagery just when it's poised to become biologically optional. And on occasion unpleasantness really can be horrific - too bad to describe in words. Some forms of extreme pain, for instance, are so terrible to experience that one would sacrifice the whole world to get rid of the agony. Pain just this bad is happening in the living world right now. It's misguided to ask if such pain is really as bad as it seems to be - because the reality is the very appearance one is trying vainly to describe. The extremes of "mental" pain can be no less dreadful. They can embody suicidal despair far beyond everyday ill-spirits. They are happening right now in the living world as well. Their existence reflects the way our mind/brains are built. Unless the vertebrate CNS is genetically recoded, there will be traumas and malaise in utopia - any utopia - too.
 

        No behavioural account of even moderately severe depression, for instance, can do justice to its subjective awfulness. But a spectrum of depressive states will persist within even a latter-day Garden of Eden in the absence of good drugs and good genes. We can perhaps understand why depressive states evolved on account of the selective advantage of depressive behaviour in reinforcing adaptive patterns of dominance and subordination, avoiding damaging physical fights with superior rivals, or of inducing hypercholinergic frenzy of reflective thought when life goes badly wrong - for one's genes. Likewise, intense and unpleasant social anxiety was sometimes adaptive too. So was an involuntary capacity for the torments of sexual jealousy, fear, terror, hunger, thirst and disgust.

        Our notions of dominance and subordination are embedded within this stew of emotions. They are clearly quite fundamental to our social relationships. They pervade our whole conceptual scheme. When we try to imagine the distant future, we may of course imagine hi-tech gee-whizzery. Yet emotionally, we also think in primitive terms of dominance and submission, of hierarchy and power structures, superiority and inferiority. Even when we imagine future computers and robots, we are liable to have simple-minded fantasies about being used, dominated, and overthrown. Bug-eyed extra-terrestrials from the Planet Zog, too, and their legion of hydra-headed sci-fi cousins, are implicitly assumed to have the motivational structure of our vertebrate ancestors. Superficially they may be alien - all those tentacles - but really they're just like us. Surely they'll want to dominate us, control us, invade earth etc? Huxley's vision of control and manipulation is (somewhat) subtler; but it belongs to the same atavistic tradition.

        For the foreseeable future, these concerns aren't idle. We may rightly worry that if some of us - perhaps most of us - are destined to get drugged-up, genetically-rewritten and plugged into designer worlds, then might not invisible puppet-masters be controlling us for their own ends, whatever their motives? Who'll be in charge of the basement infrastructure which sustains all the multiple layers of VR - and thus ultimately running the show? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? as we say here in Brighton.

        Admittedly, sophisticated and intellectually enriched post-humans are unlikely to be naive realists about "perception"; so they'll recognise that what their ancestors called "real life" was no more privileged than what we might call, say, "the medieval world" - the virtual worlds instantiated by medievals. But any unenriched primitives still living in organic VR could still be potentially dangerous, because they could bring everything else tumbling down. In certain limited respects, their virtual worlds, like our own, would causally co-vary with the mind-independent world in ways that blissed-up total-VR dwellers would typically lack. So can it ever be safe to be totally nice and totally happy?

        These topics deserve a book - many books - too. The fixations they express are doubtless still of extreme interest to contemporary humans. Sado-masochistic images of domination-and-submission loom large in a lot of our fantasies too. The categories of experience they reflect were of potent significance on the African savannah, where they bore on the ability to get the "best" mates and leave most copies of one's genes. But they won't persist for ever. A tendency to such dominance-and-control syndromes is going to be written out of the genome - as soon we gain mastery of rewriting the script. For on the whole, we want our kids to be nice.

        More generally, the whole "evolutionary environment of adaptation" is poised for a revolution. This is important. When any particular suite of alleles ceases to be the result of random mutation and blind natural selection, and is instead pre-selected by intelligent agents in conscious anticipation of their likely effects, then the criteria of genetic fitness will change too. The sociobiological and popular senses of "selfish" will progressively diverge rather than typically overlap. Allegedly "immutable" human nature will change as well when the genetic-rewrite gathers momentum. The classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a close.

        Unfortunately, its death agonies may be prolonged. Knee-jerk pessimism and outright cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the press. They are common in literary academia. And of course any competent doom-monger can glibly extrapolate the trends of the past into the future. Yet anti-utopianism ignores even the foreseeable discontinuities that lie ahead of us as we mature into post-humans. Most notably, it ignores the major evolutionary transition now imminent in the future of life. This is the era when we rewrite the genome in our own interest to make ourselves happy. In the meantime, we just act out variations on dramas scripted by selfish DNA.
 

http://www.huxley.net/