Smash hit

That doesn’t stop us from hankering. McKibben pays tribute to the impulse: “Objecting even slightly to immortality,” he rightly says, “is a little like arguing against ice cream — eternal life has only been humanity’s great dream since the moment we became conscious.” But unlike all previous generations, ours might be able to achieve it. This would alter us beyond recognition. We’d become a different species — one living in eternal bliss, in the eyes of its proponents; sort of like — well, angels. It would certainly mean an end to narrative. If life is endless, why tell stories? No more beginnings and middles, because there will be no more endings. No Shakespeare for us, or Dante, or, well, any art, really. It’s all infested with mortality. Our new angel-selves will no longer need or understand our art. They might have other art, though it will be pretty — well, pretty bloodless.

There are some very clever people at work on the parts that will go into making up our immortality, and what they’re doing is on some levels fascinating — like playing with the biggest toy box you’ve ever seen — but they are not the people who should be deciding our future. Asking these kinds of scientists what improved human nature should be like is like asking ants what you should have in your back yard. Of course they would say “more ants”.

And while we’re on the subject, who exactly is “we”? The “we”, that is, who are promised all these goodies. “We” will be the “GenRich”, the rich in genes. “We” are certainly not the six billion people already on the planet, nor the ten billion projected for the year 2050 — those will be the “GenPoor”.

The agenda of those who visualise themselves as the GenRich — like Past Lifers, Future Lifers never see themselves playing the role of ditch-digger — is being pushed in the name of that magic duo, Progress and Inevitability, the twins that always make an appearance when quite a few potential shareholders smell megabucks in the air. “Progress” has deluded many, but surely its pretensions as a rallying slogan have been exploded by now: progress is not the same as change.

As for “inevitability”, it’s the rapist’s argument: the thing is going to happen anyway, so why not just lie back and enjoy it? Resistance is futile. (That was the old advice: now you’re told to scream and vomit, thus influencing the outcome. Times change.) McKibben takes on both of the magic twins, and is particularly moving on “inevitability”. We still have choice, he says. Just because a thing has been invented doesn’t mean you have to use it. He offers as exempla the atomic bomb, the Japanese samurais’ rejection of guns, the Chinese abandonment of advanced sea power, and the Amish, who examine each new technology and accept or reject according to social and spiritual criteria. We too, he says, can accept or reject according to social and spiritual criteria. We can, and we should. We must decide as ourselves — as who we already are as human beings. We must decide from the fullness of our present humanity, flawed though it may be.

The fact is — and this is not an argument McKibben uses explicitly — that the argument for the perfectability of mankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: Man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect. And imperfect beings cannot make perfect decisions. The decision about what constitutes human perfection would have to be a perfect decision: otherwise the result would be not perfection, but imperfection. As witness the desire for several different mouths.

Perhaps our striving for perfection should take a different, more Blakean, form. Perhaps Infinity can be seen in a grain of sand, and Eternity in an hour. Perhaps happiness is not a goal but a road. Perhaps the pursuit of happiness is that happiness. Perhaps we should take a clue from Tennyson, and separate wisdom and knowledge, and admit that wisdom cannot be cloned or manufactured. Perhaps that admission is wisdom. Perhaps enough should be enough for us.

Perhaps we should leave well enough alone.

• A version of this article appeared in The New York Review of Books. Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel is Oryx and Crake (Bloomsbury).

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