ENOUGH, by Bill McKibben (Bloomsbury, £17.99; Buy the book), is a passionate, succinct, chilling, closely-argued, sometimes hilarious, touchingly well-intentioned and essential summary of the future proposed by “science” for the human race. This is the same Bill McKibben who wrote
The End of Nature, about how
homo sapiens has been rearranging the biosphere with the aid of genetically modified plans to suit what it believes is its own interests, and
Long Distance, about running marathons, and many essays for
The New Yorker,
The New York Times,
The Atlantic and others. In other words, he cannot simply be dismissed as a dull-normal Luddite too dumb to understand the nifty customised body-and-brain parts soon to be on offer to you and yours.
On offer for a price, of course. Ah yes, the price. The traditional fee for this kind of thing was your soul, but who pays any attention to that tattered theological rag any more, since it can’t be located with a brain probe? And hey, the Special Deal is a super package! How could you refuse? It contains so much that human dreams are made of. Those of us brought up on the back pages of comic books know the appeal. They’ll never laugh again when you sit down at the piano to play because now you’ll have X-Men fingers and Mozart’s genius; they won’t dare to kick sand in your face at the beach because you’ll be built like Hercules. Turning to more adult concerns such as death, you won’t have to invest in a cement coffin container, because not only will your loved one be safe tonight, he or she will still be alive, and forever! And so will you.
The line forms to the right, and it’ll be a long one. Anyone who thinks there won’t be a demand for what’s putatively on sale is hallucinating. But along comes Bill McKibben with his sidewalk-preacher’s sandwich board, denouncing the whole enterprise and prophesying doom. There will be catcalls of killjoy and spoilsport, not to mention troglodyte, nay-sayer and hand-wringer. Like the Prince of Wales, who’s just come out against nanotechnology on the ground that it could reduce the world to grey goo, McKibben will be told to keep his nose out of it because it’s none of his business. “Mankind was my business,” laments Marley’s ghost when it’s too late for him. And so too says Bill McKibben. Mankind is his business. He addresses the greedy little Scrooge in all of us, and points out to that greedy little Scrooge why he should not want more and more, and more, and just to top it off, more. The alternative to “more”, in McKibben’s book, is not “less”, but “enough”. Its epigraph might well be that old folk-saying: “Enough is as good as a feast.”
The “enough” of the title, seen rightly — McKibben infers — is already a feast. It’s us, as we are, with maybe a few allowable improvements. More than that is too much. These tempting “mores” — for there are many of them — grow on the more and more Trees of Knowledge that crowd the modern scientific landscape so thickly that you can’t see the forest for them. McKibben takes axe in hand and sets out to clear a path.
The items on the smorgasbord of human alteration divide roughly into three. First, genetic alteration, or gene splicing, whereby parents who are five feet tall and bald can give birth to a six-footer with long blonde hair who looks like the next door neighbour. Second, nanotechnology, or the development of single-atom-layer gizmos that can replicate themselves and assemble and disassemble matter. Third, cybernetics, or the melding of man with machine, like the bionic man. At least we’ll all be able to get the lids off jars.
There’s a fourth idea that’s glanced at — cryogenics, or getting yourself or your budget-version head flash-frozen until such time as the yellow-brick road to immortality has been built. Investing even a small amount of belief in this scheme puts you in the same league as those who happily buy the Brooklyn Bridge from shifty-looking men in overcoats, for the company — yes, it would be a company — in charge of your frozen head would need to be not only perennially solvent — bankruptcy would equal meltdown — but impeccably honest.
McKibben first tackles genetic engineering, already present in soybeans and not so far-off for Homo sapiens now that we have the luminous green rabbit and the goat/spider. Gene splicing is the modern answer to the eternal urge to make a more perfect model of ourselves. The novel of record is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: we just can’t stop tinkering, partly because it’s so interesting, and partly because we have a high opinion of our own abilities; but we risk creating monsters. Gene splicing depends on cloning — McKibben explains how — but is not the same. It involves inserting selected genes — of those other than the parents — into an egg, which is then implanted in the usual way. If we become genetically enhanced in this way — enhanced by our parents before we’re born — the joy and mystery will go out of life, says McKibben, because we won’t have to strive for mastery. We won’t be our unique selves, we’ll just be the sum totals of market whims. We truly will be the “meat machines” that some scientists already term us. Right now about all our parents can pick for us are our names, but what if they could pick everything about us? (And you thought your mother had bad taste in sofas!)
McKibben does not go on to explore the ultimate hell this situation could produce. Imagine the adolescent whining and sulking that will be visited upon the parents who have chosen their children’s features out of a catalogue, and — inevitably — will have chosen wrong. (The advocates of gene-enhancement might respond by saying that since you’ll be able to choose your child’s temperament as well, naturally you’ll pick a type that will never do any adolescent whining or sulking. Pay no attention: these people will not be talking about flesh-and-blood children, but about Stepford Kids.)
But what about heritable disease? you may reasonably ask. Why should any child get stuck with cerebral palsy, or autism, or schizophrenia, or Huntington’s chorea, or the many other maladies that genes are heir to? They shouldn’t if there’s a remedy, and there is. McKibben points out that these conditions can be eliminated without taking the final step. Once their genome has been analysed, parents at risk could be notified of any defects, and could go the in vitro route, with fertilised eggs lacking in the culpable gene chosen for implanting. This “somatic gene therapy” would not involve the addition of anyone else’s genes. Plastic surgery, hormones, vitamin pills, and somatic gene therapy are enough, says McKibben; gene splicing is too much.
Next, McKibben delves into nanotechnology, which is also well on the way. Just the other week, news dribbled out of a new technology that can assemble water from the oxygen and the hydrogen in the air, so useful in deserts. The applicable folktale for nanotechnology is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice — what if you get the process started, but the self-replicating nanobot escapes, and you can’t turn the darn thing off? This is where Prince Charles’s apprehension about “grey goo” comes in. It’s a real fear, and one discussed by McKibben.
Cybernetics and artificial intelligence also get a look-in, as man-and-machine combinations are occupying some of our better-paid minds. Visions of microchips implanted in your brain dance in their heads — well, we already have pacemakers, so what’s the difference?
There’s been quite a lot of chat about the shortcomings we’ve had to put up with thanks to Mother Nature, the dirty treacherous cow, and this is the not-so-cleverly-hidden subtext of a lot of brave-new-world thinking. These folks hate Nature, and they hate themselves as part of it, or her. McKibben cites an amazing speech given by Max More (last name chosen by himself) to the Extropian Society (“extropy”, coined as the opposite to entropy). This speech took the form of a dissing of Mother Nature, and said, essentially, thanks for nothing and goodbye. Nature has made so many mistakes, the chief one being death. Why do we have to get old and die? Why is Man the one creature that foresees its own death?
All the enhancements McKibben discusses are converging on the biggie, which is none other than the final nose-thumb at Nature — immortality. Immortality doesn’t fare so well in myth and story. Either you get it but forget to request eternal youth too, and become a crumbling horror (Tithonus, the Sibyl of Cumae, Swift’s Struldbrugs), or you seize the immortality and the vitality, but lose your soul and must live by feeding on the blood of the innocent (Melmoth the Wanderer, vampires, and so forth). The stories are clear: gods are immortal, men die. Try to change it and you’ll end up worse off.
