Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of die Letzte Mensch and die Übermensch – the last man, and the ultimate man. The last man is the impulse, both in society and in individuals, to stagnate, to fail to desire, and to seek the cheap half-pleasure that comes from thinking the same things as others and as one’s temporally-static self. The ultimate man represents the burning willingness to seek betterment, to desire more, and to live.
On first reading, the notion that societies and/or the people within them could actively strive against their own betterment seems preposterous. It is certainly counterintuitive. But it’s actually very prominent – in some ways, the rule, not the exception. This post is an exploration of the factors that might go into creating real world last men.
Every society and every individual is either engaged in an internal struggle between these two impulses or in a state of utter concession to the last man. One of the most beautiful aspects of the film Interstellar is this struggle’s centrality to its plot. Nietzsche’s Letzte Mensch is embodied in the citizens of Earth, who insist that the Moon landings were faked, who are content to practice agriculture, and who fail to be capable of saving themselves from self-wrought existential calamity. Die Übermensch is represented not even by any particular character, but by the overriding spirit with which the main characters carry out their mission of redeeming those on Earth (it is important to note that every character involved in the saving of humanity makes a crucial, self-defeating error at some point.) One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is that there is no public support for the space program which eventually saves humanity. Thus, Earth’s citizens are in many ways already dead at the beginning of the film, and NASA’s saving of humanity is tantamount to their resurrection.
Real-world humanity, of course, is embroiled in its own instance of climate change which threatens to (at the very least) necessitate significant modifications to the way in which humans survive. Interstellar’s elegance, however, lies not so much in its parallels to real-world climate change so much as in the analogical framework it provides with which to assess many areas of humanity’s being. Read between the lines just a little, and it’s disturbingly clear the extent to which the day-to-day actions/thoughts of even the most scientifically-minded of us mirror those of Interstellar’s plebeians. The latter’s insistence on the Moon landings’ fraudulence, for instance, could be viewed as similar to many real-world humans’ belief in entirely empirically unjustified superstitions, such as: the (shockingly pervasive) aversion to human-genetically modified foods, belief in conspiracy theories like that of the flat Earth (to cite a particularly widely ~circulated~ example), or belief in self-abnegating health fads, such as many diets, fat jigglers, etc. Meanwhile, the blindness to existential catastrophe exhibited by Interstellar’s plebeians can be compared not only to real-world humanity’s considerable ambivalence to climate change, but to blindness to smaller-scale detrimental phenomena such as the Victorian era fad for arsenic-laced wallpaper, antibiotic resistance, or the truly, purely illogical aversion to civilian nuclear power. In short, we tend to care about avoiding GMOs instead of avoiding antibiotic resistance and about saving the whales instead of saving the humans. A particularly spectacular moment of such silliness was on display during a webcast Tesla shareholders’ meeting when a PETA activist asked executives from the company doing the single most to save humanity from climate change if leather would be removed from their cars’ seats anytime soon.*
Ultimately, however, what appears to be a monumental defect in humanity’s brain programming when viewed from a macroscopic perspective turns out to be actually quite understandable when viewed microscopically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, issues like nuclear power, GMOs, and saving the whales take precedence in the public forum simply because they present more concrete bogeymen than do the other issues mentioned. Because these fallacious views are powered by nothing other than the evolutionary brain programming inherent in every human, perhaps the only way to improve matters along these lines in the short term is providing better science education.
The crux of the problem of public attitudes towards scientific/technological progress therefore resides not even in anything anthropogenic so much as in the natural selection-designed reward functions upon which our brains operate. Firstly, this should serve as a reminder that enlightenment (e.g., sentience) is a retroactive hack applied to very primitive biological structures. Further, there seem to be a very narrow set of parameters under which this hack can even be applied – enlightenment has historically flamed up and died down again many times (compare the inhabitants of classical Athens to those in 1000 AD, or consider the fact that China had vast ocean-faring capabilities during its early dynastic period and then proceeded to lose it, or the fact that the Vikings reached North America in the pre-Medieval period and then proceeded to never return.) It is by no means unthinkable that the unmistakable current batch of enlightenment should die out, perhaps permanently (as noted above, unenlightenment of some form or another is constantly brewing in every corner of human society.) Therefore, if the barrier to permanent enlightenment is ultimately the structure of the human brain, why not change said structure?
This could be accomplished in one of several ways. For instance, one could enable the human brain to have instant auto-installing access to all of the world’s information via a brain-computer interface (Wikipedia is a trove of the world’s information, but it must be manually installed by the user via the process of what we term learning, which is difficult, tedious, and time-consuming.) It also bears reiterating that since intelligence (e.g., learning) was never really a selected-for trait in humans’ evolutionary history, humans’ brains’ reward function doesn’t give out direct hits for participating in as much. If one changed the human brain’s reward function (either crudely or subtly) so that humans got a hit of dopamine whenever they learned something new, one could vastly change the ways that humans spend their time and energy.
Of course, to do so is to make an implicit (or maybe explicit) value judgement about the value of the ways in which we should spend our time. While this is obviously something that many a Luddite will bemoan, it’s really worth noting that if we don’t make those value judgements for ourselves, they’ll be made for us – either in the form of sensory input manipulation a la social media (go on Instagram and try to avoid being told how to spend your time!) or in the form of time value incentivization (something that’s always been done by every economy, pre- or post-capital.) Indeed, giving humans the ability to change that for which what their brain’s reward function selects might eventually be viewed as the point at which humans became fully human! (Or, at least viewed as a significant milestone before which living would seem incomprehensible to someone born after, just like the evolution of brains greater than the limbic system, for instance.)
Until then, however, I’m not actually terribly optimistic about the ways in which human society will progress, given the increasing manipulation of the empirically experienceable world by many of the platforms through which we choose to look at it. I think there’s often a sort of zeitgeist of every invention, in which its specific solution becomes increasingly necessary/obvious only in the years preceding its release. Consider (for example) the rise of electric vehicles – the problem they solve has slowly gone from bad but not urgent (and therefore something that only holier-than-thou hippies care about) to dire. Correspondingly, the proposed solutions have gone from absurd and moralistic (“save the whales!”) to legit (electric vehicles, solar power.) I think the problem of sensory input manipulation is probably just getting to the stage of absurd/moralistic solutions (GDPR, “you own your data”.) The zeitgeist for climate change solutions is just beginning (insofar as real solutions will be deployed at scale starting now and running through the next 10-20 years) and the zeitgeist of sensory input manipulation is still a good 30-40 years away, at least. Within those 30-40 years, any number of very problematic things could happen, made worse by the only proposed solutions being the absurd/moralistic ones. (On a related note: I’d really love it if the era of brain input awareness brought an end to people’s affinity for absurd/moralistic solutions. This seems like it’d be possible with the tech necessary to bring about brain input awareness, but I feel like it’s almost too much to hope for. Maybe that’s just me being old, though.)
*I’ve always cringed when people refer to Millennials as “cynical”, because the only justification you could possibly have for this claim is entirely superficial. I guess you could say that someone is cynical (albeit wrong) who insists that the moon landings were faked, or that GMO foods are inherently bad for you. But, especially in the case of the slightly more plausible latter example, “cynicism” is really not much more than a repudiation of the values espoused by previous generations. This is only really cynicism when viewed from the perspective of someone older. On the contrary, I think many millennials who gladly participate in what I’ll term bougie activism are very credulous. Cynicism is by definition contrarian, so a generation with strong, uniform moral views (like Millennials) cannot possibly be cynical. Victorian morality was cynical, until it wasn’t.