Technology

Reading Frankenstein: Chapters 7 and 8

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Earlier posts in this series: Walton’s Letters, Chapters 1 & 2, Chapters 3 & 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6. 

_____________________________________________________

“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god,” Freud famously observed. But, he was quick to add, “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Writing in 1968, Edmund Leach appealed to the same rhetorical trope, only with a bit more confidence and panache: “Men have become like gods. Isn’t it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid. Why should this be? How might these fears be resolved?” Leach’s comments inspired the opening line of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Mary Shelley’s genius lay in vividly materializing, in the form of the Creature, the anxieties that must always attend such aims and aspirations. Whenever mortals fancy themselves gods, Frankenstein’s Creature lurks in the shadows, troubling all such fantasies.

In chapter seven, the doom that has been so frequently foreshadowed finally begins to unfold. The chapter opens with yet another letter, this one from Frankenstein’s father reporting that William, the youngest and most idealized of the Frankenstein children, has been murdered. Frankenstein is devastated, and he immediately departs for Geneva after a six year absence. As he approaches the city, he revels in the grandeur of the Swiss Alps and the surrounding lakes, but even this sublime experience of nature cannot disperse his apprehension.

When he arrives, he finds the city gates locked, so he decides to pass the night in a nearby village. Unable to sleep, he wanders through the night and is caught in a lightning storm that ominously illuminates the surrounding mountain peaks. Then one of the flashes reveals to him the outline of an unmistakeable figure, “the wretch, the filthy daemon.” It had been two years since he’d last seen it, but immediately Frankenstein is convinced that his Creature was responsible for his brother’s murder.

At this juncture, Frankenstein considers once again whether or not he ought to tell his story, but he dissuades himself. He is sure that he would not be taken seriously and would only succeed in casting himself as a raving maniac. Even if he was believed, who could succeed in capturing the creature of preternatural strength and agility (another aspect of the Creature that the films always get wrong). He had after all just witnessed the Creature scaling the “perpendicular ascent of Mont Salêve.” So he convinces himself to keep silent as he approaches his father’s home.

Upon his arrival, he is greeted by his brother Ernest who informs him that the murderer has been apprehended. Frankenstein is stunned to learn that Justine Moritz, the Frankenstein’s faithful servant and friend, has been charged with the murder and is soon to stand trial. Twice he protests that it cannot be and alludes to some knowledge of the murderer’s identity, but his claim seems not to register and, when he learns that compelling evidence has been presented against Justine, he convinces himself once more to remain silent. “My tale was not one to announce publicly,” since no one, he conveniently assures himself, would believe him. Elizabeth is the only one with the courage to insist publicly on Justine’s innocence, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

It is in the eighth chapter that we begin to perceive the depth of Frankenstein’s craven self-interest. Perhaps that is putting it too strongly, but his own deeds convict him. He sits through the trial and says not a word. Only Elizabeth takes the stand in Justine’s defense. He claims again and again to be wracked by guilt for William’s death and Justine’s plight. He even goes so far as to say to Walton (remember the framing) that he would have confessed to the murder himself rather than see Justine found guilty if only his known whereabouts in Ingolstadt had not rendered such a claim conveniently implausible. What he does not do is reveal the Creature’s existence.

If we are tempted to take his rationalizations at face value, his claim to be suffering more than Justine should convince us otherwise. “The tortures of the accused,” he insists with a straight face, “did not equal mine.” Such is the claim of a deeply self-absorbed man, one who is still suffering from blinding hubris. For the remainder of the chapter he goes on and on insufferably about his own despair and tribulation, even as he accompanies Elizabeth to visit Justine in prison on the eve of her execution.

It’s worth noting that Justine had admitted to making a false confession under pressure from her confessor. In explaining to Elizabeth why she had done so, she says that her confessor “threatened and menaced, until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was.” This is the first time monster is used in reference to someone other than Frankenstein’s Creature, and it leads us to ask who, indeed, is the true monster in this story.

While Frankenstein watches on, Elizabeth commiserates with Justine. “I wish that I were to die with you,” she declares, “I cannot live in this world of misery.” Elizabeth here sounds a note that will become ever more pronounced, particularly in the Creature’s narrative: Frankenstein is just one instantiation of the tragedy at the core of human civilization. She and Justine have been let down by the institutions of justice and by their would-be advocates, especially Frankenstein, who had it in his power to save Justine. But he does not act.

“On the morrow,” Frankenstein informs Walton, “Justine died.” A rather too convenient use of the passive voice. The chapter closes with a melodramatic prophetic soliloquy from Frankenstein delivered in the third person and addressed, in absentia, to his family.

It’s not insignificant that this portion of the story features the lives of two women undone by Frankenstein’s recklessness and self-serving cowardice. In his discussion of Frankenstein in Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, literary critic Roger Shattuck recalls the circumstances of Shelley’s life:

“[William Godwin] hardly knew how to take care of his daughter. She knew her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth, only by the stories of her dedication to feminism, revolutionary causes, and friends in need. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the stereotype of the Romantic poet, carried Mary off at seventeen to the Continent without marrying her, to live for a time in the irregular household of another Romantic poet, Lord Byron. Surrounded by illegitimate births and infant deaths, they subsisted on high ideals to remake the world through liberation and revolution. The men in the group were intent upon achieving glory through their genius; other concerns must not stand in their way.”

Further on, he adds of Frankenstein and the Creature, “The battle to which these awful adversaries commit themselves is the struggle for glory, the driving male condition that inspired Mary Shelley to write the book in horror and in protest.”

“The resolute moral stance of Frankenstein about observing our human limits can be seen now as exceptional,” Shattuck observes. In comparing Frankenstein to Goethe’s Faust, he writes, “The Romantics often did not seek harsh judgment of their scoundrel heroes. Apparently, it took a woman to inventory the destruction caused by the quest for knowledge and glory carried to excess ….”

Mary Shelley is often given credit for inventing Science Fiction with her writing of Frankenstein. I’d suggest as well that she be credited with composing the first work of tech criticism, and she does so, in part, because of her experience as one clear-sighted woman among men of genius in search of glory. It was her genius to anticipate how such a pursuit would play out not in the realm of letters, but in the increasingly potent realm of technology. Perhaps, then, we might also dub Mary Shelley the first woman in tech.

Reading Frankenstein: Chapter 6

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Earlier posts in this series: Walton’s Letters, Chapters 1 & 2, Chapters 3 & 4, Chapter 5. 

_____________________________________________________

Last month, in the Guardian’s “My Hero” series, Neil Gaiman chose to write about Mary Shelley. His brief reflections open by recalling the circumstances that led to the writing of Frankenstein: “The cold, wet summer of 1816, a night of ghost stories and a challenge allowed a young woman to delineate the darkness, and give us a way of looking at the world.” He concludes as follows:

“The glittering promise of science, offering life and miracles, and the nameless creature in the shadows, monster and miracle all in one, back from the dead, needing knowledge and love but able, in the end, only to destroy … it was Mary Shelley’s gift to us, and we would be infinitely poorer without it.”

I like this idea of the nameless creature as Shelley’s gift to us. But what exactly is the nature of this gift? I would suggest that what Shelley has bequeathed to us is nothing less than the gift of thought. The creature is, as I see it, what some have called an object to think with, only it is an object of the imagination. It materializes, in our mind’s eye, the power conferred upon us by our knowledge, and it does so that we might think about what we can do.

At the end of her Introduction to Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Sherry Turkle writes,

“Once we see life through the cyborg prism, becoming one with a machine is reduced to a technical problem of finding the right operating system to make it (that is, us) run smoothly. When we live with implanted chips, we will be on a different footing in our relationships with computers. When we share other people’s tissue and genetic material, we will be on a different footing with the bodies of others. Our theories tell us stories about the objects of our lives. As we begin to live with objects that challenge the boundaries between the born and created and between humans and everything else, we will need to tell ourselves different stories.”

It seems to me that, given the realities Turkle anticipates, Frankenstein is exactly the story we need. It helps us think about what we make, but primarily by helping us think about ourselves. The creature in this story is nothing if not a mirror on which we might see ourselves. Of course, so too is Frankenstein.

The sixth chapter of Shelley’s novel opens with a letter from Elizabeth. It’s worth noting, briefly, the multiple layers of narration at this point in the story. Ostensibly, we are reading Elizabeth’s words to Frankenstein relayed by Frankenstein to Walton, who is in turn relaying them to his sister, Margaret. It’s easy to lose sight of this, but keeping this framework in mind, I think, is key to interpreting Frankenstein’s self-representation. It helps us sustain a healthy suspicion of Frankenstein’s framing of the events and, by extension, to also cast a critical eye on the rationalizations and justifications we offer for our own actions and motives.

Elizabeth’s letter functions chiefly to supply details that will render subsequent events more meaningful. We learn more, for instance, about the other Frankenstein siblings, the older Ernest and the younger William. We learn as well about Justine Moritz, a longstanding household servant in the Frankenstein household, who was beloved by all of the family.

There’s a curious digression in Elizabeth’s rehearsal of Justine’s history in which she notes how the nature of Swiss political culture has “produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it.” This is to assure us of Justine’s place in the family: “A servant in Geneva,” we are assured, “does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England. Justine, thus received in our family, learned the duties of a servant; a condition which, in our fortunate country, does not include the idea of ignorance, and a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being.”

Elizabeth goes on to speak glowingly of Ernest and, especially, of “little darling William.” All of this, of course, particularly in light of Frankenstein’s earlier claim to have lost everything, strikes us as preparation for a great tragedy.

The remainder of the chapter narrates Frankenstein’s continued recovery, which is sustained almost entirely by Henry Clerval’s loving attention. It was Clerval, Frankenstein tells us, who “called forth the better feelings of my heart; he again taught me to love the aspect of nature, and the cheerful faces of children.” Once again, well-being is presented as a kind of equilibrium between our urge to know and to do, on the one hand, and our acceptance of the world as a gift on the other. And, once again, this equilibrium is the product of friendship. Friendship is a kind of anchor that keeps us from sinking into the maelstrom of self-absorption, a victim of virtues which, unregulated, become our vices. Clerval’s particular influence on Frankenstein was twofold: he brought Frankenstein out of himself into the world, and he brought the liberal arts to bear on a scientific imagination.

But all is not well, of course. Once released into the world, our action does not simply dissipate into nothingness, whatever we might wish. The creature is still at large, and Frankenstein’s greater sin is his failure to accept responsibility for what he has made. This refusal of responsibility is reflected in the disgust Frankenstein had now developed toward his former passion: “I had conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy.” Just seeing the implements of his former work induced “the agony of my nervous symptoms.” While introducing Clerval to his professors, Frankenstein would become visibly agitated when they praised his talent and skill.

Shelley paints Frankenstein as a man who is racked by guilt but also unwilling to confront it. His “violent antipathy ” toward what he had previously pursued with obsessive zeal suggests profound shame and a deep desire to burry and repress his transgression. More worrisome still is his decision to keep knowledge of the creature secret, even from Clerval. It’s more than a little ironic that the man who would rip open nature’s secrets now carefully guards his own.

Nothing good follows from Frankenstein’s refusal of responsibility, only an accumulation of disasters. The question this leaves us with is this: What would it mean for us to accept responsibility for what we make and for what we do with what is made for us? Makers and users both, it seems that we are, like Frankenstein, hell-bent on refusing responsibility for what we do with the technologies that have been furnished for us. It would seem, in fact, that the general tendency of our making is to create conditions that undermine the possibility of either thoughtfulness or responsibility. Shelley’s story, however, her gift to us, provokes our thinking and may even rekindle our sense of moral responsibility.

Reading Frankenstein: Chapters 3 and 4

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Earlier posts in this series: Walton’s Letters, Chapters 1 & 2. 

_____________________________________________________

At the end of chapter two, Victor Frankenstein, who is narrating his story to Walton, left us with an ominous note of impending doom: “Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.” Having had his early fascination with the medieval alchemists shattered, Victor found that he was more at ease and better able to enjoy his days. But as he notes forebodingly, this was not to last.

In the first two chapters Victor recounted not only his fascination with the alchemists and their quest to unlock the secrets of nature and uncover the mysteries of life; he also recalled his idyllic childhood. In chapter three, he tells Walton of the first tragedy that befalls him and disturbs his earthly paradise, the death of his mother. He introduces this part of his story by framing it as “an omen, as it were, of my future misery.”

These instances of rather heavy-handed foreshadowing, and they are quite frequent, might come off as more than a little melodramatic and perhaps a fault of Shelley’s, but remembering that this is the voice of Frankenstein as he is relating his story to Walton suggests to me that these instances of ominous foreshadowing and invocations of dark fate operate instead as half-conscious justifications of his actions. It seems to me, in other words, that while he rues the desolation that has followed his actions, Victor is rather more resentful than repentant.

In any case, he tells of his mother’s untimely death from scarlet fever. She contracted the disease by attending, against the counsel of her loved ones, to Elizabeth, who had first fallen ill. Elizabeth recovers; Victor’s mother does not. Of course, she dies in the same saintly fashion that she lived, cheerfully resigned and thinking of others even in her last moments. Her parting words to Victor and Elizabeth reveal her long-held desire to see the two married. Soon thereafter she “died calmly.”

His mother’s death had postponed Victor’s departure for the university of Ingolstadt, but, after an appropriate time of mourning, Victor prepares once again to leave. He makes his goodbyes to Henry, Elizabeth, and his father. Henry, we are told, “deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education” by a merchant father who saw little to be gained from it; however, he remained resolved “not to be chained to the miserable details of commerce.”

Upon arriving at Ingolstadt, Victor introduces himself to a professor of natural philosophy named M. Krempe. Krempe informs Victor that the time he devoted to studying the old alchemists had been entirely wasted. Victor, of course, already suspected as much. Krempe tells Victor that he needs to start from scratch with his scientific education and gives him the name of a series of books with which to do so.

But Victor is disenchanted. He was contemptuous of the “uses of modern natural philosophy.” “It was very different,” he explains, “when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed.” And, in his view, obviously not for the better. The earlier unattainable but grand ambitions of the alchemists fired his imagination; the viable but mundane workings of contemporary science were like a wet blanket. “I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur,” he complains, “for realities of little worth.”

This is an interesting passage in light of contemporary debates about the state of technological innovation. Frankenstein’s laments faintly echo the Techno Stagnation Angst of critics like Peter Thiel. Like Frankenstein, Thiel and others like him worry that we’ve lost our ability to imagine and actualize grand technological projects. And they’re disappointed with what we have accomplished, like the Internet, say.

But Victor is not disappointed for long. He meets another professor at Ingolstadt, one M. Waldman, who, while an accomplished practitioner of modern science, is not nearly so dismissive of the old alchemists as Krempe had been. Victor attends one of Waldman’s lectures and hears him praise the achievements of modern science in a way that manages to rekindle Victor’s imagination. He speaks, in a lingo we would readily recognize, of the “miracles” of modern science: “They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”

This is enough to reawaken Frankenstein’s ambitions: “So much has been done … more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” Frankenstein went on to meet with Waldman, who was happy to have “gained a disciple” and furnished Victor with all the books he required. Thus the day ended–a day that “decided my future destiny,” Victor proclaims.

In chapter four, we learn that over the course of the next two years, Frankenstein made astonishing progress in the sciences owing to his obsessive work ethic, easily eclipsing his fellow students and matching his professors in knowledge and skill. During this time, we also learn, Waldman became a “true friend” to Frankenstein. But it is the obsessive nature of Frankenstein’s work that is the focus of this chapter. He was eager and ardent in the pursuit of knowledge and frequently greeted the dawn still hard at work in his laboratory.

For a brief moment he considers returning home to visit his friends, but as he approaches a particular breakthrough, he changes his mind and remains at Ingolstadt. The breakthrough involved the origins of the “principle of life.” In order to explore this mystery, Frankenstein delves into the macabre: “To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.” He makes a study of human decomposition and of the forces of decay, and, in the midst of that darkness, “a sudden light” broke upon him, “a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple.”

Assuring Walton that these were not the recollections of a “madman,” he proclaims, “I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” But, of course, he will not reveal the nature of his discovery to Walton, even though, or especially because, he notices Walton’s eagerness, wonder, and hope. Instead, he reaffirms his call for Walton to take his experience as a cautionary tale: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

Frankenstein goes on to tell Walton about how he decided to create a human body so that he might animate it and become the father of a new species. “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through … A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” And, he adds, “I might, in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” Frankenstein sought the powers of creation and resurrection, and once again he set to his task obsessively.

With “breathless eagerness,” he “pursued nature to her hiding places.” He goes on to describe his dabbling among graves, torturing living animals, collecting bones, disturbing the “secrets of the human frame,” and all of this in isolation. Seasons came and went and he did not mark their beauty. The same urgency which made him unresponsive to the natural world led him to forget his friends and family. Only with preemptive defensiveness did he consider how his father might chide him for not writing.

Recalling this time, Frankenstein concludes,

“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.”

Interestingly, Shelley has Frankenstein add to this advice the following consideration: “If this rule were always observed […] Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.” A reminder perhaps, that Shelley is after something more here than simply a critique of technology (to put it anachronistically). Shelley, I think, is articulating a tragic vision of civilization’s unfolding. But, as I’m reading her at this juncture in the story, she is also suggesting that the root of this tragedy is a fragmentation of our knowledge of the world (and perhaps especially our “know-how”), our political or moral sense, and our aesthetic sense. Frankenstein’s descent, after all, coincides with an increasing isolation from both a community of friendship wherein the moral sense might be sustained and an increasing alienation from the beauty of the world around him.

In the next chapter, the Monster is born and things get interesting.

Technology and “The Human Condition”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 12 Comments

If you’re a regular reader, you know that increasingly my attention has been turning toward the work of Hannah Arendt. My interest in Arendt’s work, particularly as it speaks to technology, was sparked a few years ago when I began reading The Human Condition. Below are some comments, prepared for another context, discussing Arendt’s Prologue to that book. 

________________________

In the Prologue to The Human Condition, Arendt wrote, “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears.” In her framing, these newest experiences and most recent fears were born out of technological developments that had come about within Arendt’s own lifetime, particularly those that had transpired in the two decades that preceded the writing of The Human Condition. Among the more notable of these developments were the successful harnessing of atomic power and the launching, just one year prior to the publication of Arendt’s book, of the first manmade object into earth’s orbit. These two developments powerfully signaled the end of one age of human history and the opening of another. Positioned in this liminal space, Arendt explained that her purpose was “to trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the earth in the universe and from the world into the self, to its origins, in order to arrive at an understanding of the nature of society as it had developed and presented itself at the very moment when it was overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age.”

It is striking how similar Arendt’s concerns are to our own experiences and fears nearly sixty years later. Arendt, for instance, wrote about the advent of automation, which threatened to “empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring” just at the point when human beings had lost sight of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.” In our own day, we are told “robots will—and must—take our jobs.” [Arendt, by the way, wasn’t the only worried about automation.]

Similarly, Arendt spoke forebodingly of scientific aspirations that are today associated with advocates of Transhumanism. These aspirations include the prospect of radical human enhancement, the creation of artificial life, and the achievement of super-longevity. “This future man, whom scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years,” Arendt suggests, “seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.” We should not doubt the capability of scientists to make good on this claim, Arendt tells us, “just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth.” Sixty years later, the Transhumanist vision moves from the fringes of public discussion to the mainstream, and we still retain the power to destroy all organic life on earth, although this is not much discussed any longer.

It was in the context of such fears and such experiences that Arendt wrote, “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.” The simplicity of the proposal, of course, masks the astounding complexity against which the task must unfold. Even in her own day, Arendt feared that we could not rise to the challenge. “[I]t could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.” A similar concern had been registered by the poet W.H. Auden, who, in 1945, wrote of the modern mind,

“Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.”

For her part, Arendt continued, “it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.” With that Arendt spoke more than she knew; she anticipated the computer age. But Arendt did not look warmly upon the prospect of thinking and speaking supported by artificial machines. She reckoned the prospect a form of slavery, not to the machines but to our “know-how,” a form of knowledge which Arendt opposed to thought. (Arendt would go on to expand her thinking about thought in an unfinished and posthumously published work, The Life of the Mind.)

Moreover, Arendt contended that the question of technology is also a political question; it is, in other words, a question of how human beings live and act together. It is, consequently, a matter of meaningful speech. In Arendt’s view, and it is hard to imagine the case being otherwise, politics is premised on the ability of human beings to “talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.” These considerations raise the further question of action. Even if we were able to think what we were doing with regard to technology, would it be possible to act meaningfully on the deliberations of such thought? What is the relationship, in other words, not only of technology to thought but of technology to the character of political communities? Finally, returning to the question of machine-assisted thinking, would such thought be politically consequential given that politics depends on meaningful speech?

Already, in 1958, Arendt perceived that the advances of scientific knowledge were secured in the rarefied language of advanced mathematics, a language that was not susceptible to translation into the more ordinary forms of human speech. Today, some forms of machine-assisted thinking, particularly those collected under the concept of Big Data, promise knowledge without understanding. Such knowledge may be useful, but it may also prove difficult to incorporate into the deliberative discourse of political communities.

In a few pages, then, Arendt managed to present a series of concerns and questions that remain vital today. Can we think what we are doing, particularly with the Promethean powers of modern technology? Can our technology help us with such thinking? Can we act in politically meaningful ways on the basis of such thought?

Elon Musk: Prophet of Cosmic Manifest Destiny

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 9 Comments

There’s a well-known story about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s agreement to write stories about Space and Time. Dissatisfied with the state of Space/Time stories in the 1930s, the two decided to write the kind of stories they wanted to read. Lewis agreed to write a story focused on Space, and Tolkien agreed to write a story focused on Time. Ultimately, Lewis followed through and produced the three books popularly known as his Space Trilogy. Tolkien never quite got around to writing his story about Time, he was too busy finishing some business about a ring.

SpaceXI relate that story because I was reminded of it as I read about SpaceX and Tesla founder, Elon Musk. I’ve written about Peter Thiel a time or two recently, but Thiel isn’t the only tech entrepreneur with an expansive vision for the future. Whereas Thiel’s interests seem to gravitate toward technologies associated with Transhumanism, however, fellow PayPal alum Elon Musk’s interests are interplanetary in scope. It is as if, not unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Musk and Thiel decided to split up Space and Time between them. They, of course, would do more than write–they would seek to conquer their respective fields. Thiel sets out to conquer Time through the radical human enhancement and Musk sets out to conquer Space through interplanetary colonization. Interestingly enough, the ultimate success of their wildest dreams rather depend on one another.

Musk was recently interviewed by Ross Anderson for Aeon. Anderson’s title for his nearly 7,000 word essay that resulted, “Exodus,” is apt on at least two counts. It encompasses both the central theme of the interview–interplanetary migration for the sake of species survival–and the religious themes evoked by Anderson.

It’s a long, interesting piece, but here are some of the highlights, particularly in light of recent posts considering technological innovation, culture, and the religion of technology.

First, a snapshot of Musk’s stated vision for space travel:

“I had come to SpaceX to talk to Musk about his vision for the future of space exploration, and I opened our conversation by asking him an old question: why do we spend so much money in space, when Earth is rife with misery, human and otherwise? It might seem like an unfair question. Musk is a private businessman, not a publicly funded space agency. But he is also a special case. His biggest customer is NASA and, more importantly, Musk is someone who says he wants to influence the future of humanity. He will tell you so at the slightest prompting, without so much as flinching at the grandiosity of it, or the track record of people who have used this language in the past. Musk enjoys making money, of course, and he seems to relish the billionaire lifestyle, but he is more than just a capitalist. Whatever else might be said about him, Musk has staked his fortune on businesses that address fundamental human concerns. And so I wondered, why space?

Musk did not give me the usual reasons. He did not claim that we need space to inspire people. He did not sell space as an R & D lab, a font for spin-off technologies like astronaut food and wilderness blankets. He did not say that space is the ultimate testing ground for the human intellect. Instead, he said that going to Mars is as urgent and crucial as lifting billions out of poverty, or eradicating deadly disease.

‘I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary,’ he told me, ‘in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct.”

While discussing our failure, thus far, to find intelligent life, Musk observed:

“At our current rate of technological growth, humanity is on a path to be godlike in its capabilities.”

He then went on to explain why he thinks we’ve not yet encountered intelligent life:

“Musk has a more sinister theory. ‘The absence of any noticeable life may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. ‘Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mould in a petri dish.’ Musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’”

A reminder dropped in by Anderson of the pedigree of Musk’s ambitions:

“In 1610, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, in a letter to Galileo: ‘Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies.'”

And then, toward the end of the piece, Anderson begins to play up the religion of technology jargon (emphasis mine):

“But a million people on Mars sounds like a techno-futurist fantasy, one that would make Ray Kurzweil blush. And yet, the very existence of SpaceX is fantasy. After talking with Musk, I took a stroll through his cathedral-like rocket factory.”

….

“This fear, that the sacred mission of SpaceX could be compromised, resurfaced when I asked Musk if he would one day go to Mars himself.  ‘I’d like to go, but if there is a high risk of death, I wouldn’t want to put the company in jeopardy,’ he told me. ‘I only want to go when I could be confident that my death wouldn’t result in the primary mission of the company falling away.’ It’s possible to read Musk as a Noah figure, a man obsessed with building a great vessel, one that will safeguard humankind against global catastrophe. But he seems to see himself as a Moses, someone who makes it possible to pass through the wilderness – the ‘empty wastes,’ as Kepler put it to Galileo – but never sets foot in the Promised Land.”

….

You can see why NASA has given Musk a shot at human spaceflight. He makes a great rocket but, more than that, he has the old vision in him. He is a revivalist, for those of us who still buy into cosmic manifest destiny. And he can preach. He says we are doomed if we stay here. He says we will suffer fire and brimstone, and even extinction. He says we should go with him, to that darkest and most treacherous of shores. He promises a miracle.