Techno-Utopias

 In one of his essays, George Orwell remarks that even a socialist utopia would never be perfect—because it would still have toothache. 

Which always stuck me as funny. Because just a few decades after Orwell wrote, we had all but abolished toothache from the face of the Earth—at least in advanced industrial economies. 

What Orwell saw as an eternal fact of the human condition was really just the product of poor dentistry. A very postwar-England problem; rather than a universal human problem. 

Many of our techno-optimists tell us today that every human problem is like that. There is no such thing as a "human condition" they say; merely temporary technological challenges to overcome. 

Eventually, they say, we may even live forever. Maybe because we will penetrate the causes of aging. Or maybe because we will upload our consciousnesses to the new AI overlords. 

Faced with such a prospect, I suddenly find myself nostalgic for Orwell's toothache. I rack my brain for some utterly immutable human problem that the techno-creeps could not take from us. 

Walter Pater, in his Marius the Epicurean, observes at one point that—even if all cruelty were abolished and no one ever died—one would still have to shed a tear over the fate of flowers. 

But maybe they'll inject the flowers with artificial preservative. And anyway—if one is forced to resort to such a claim as that—then one suspects—as Samuel Butler once put it: 

"[T]hey who fret upon such grounds as this must be in so much want of a grievance that it were a cruelty to rob them of one."

But Butler, in the same essay—God the Known and God the Unknown (what about God the Unknown Known? Rumsfeld might ask)—says part of the consolation of life is knowing it will end: 

"[I]f people could live for ever so as to suffer from no such regret, there would be no growth nor development in life[,]" he writes. 

The limitation of mortality is part of what makes life livable. "[I]f there were not an absolute, utter forgetting [...] how terrible life would be!" as D.H. Lawrence once put it. 

So, please don't touch us, techno-utopians. Leave our mortality alone! The fact that we must die is indeed the sort of grievance that "it were a cruelty to rob" us of. 

Let us at least not touch that final refuge—the knowledge, as Swinburne put it—that "even the weariest river/ Winds somewhere safe to sea."