Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth Read Free Page B

civic duty, but even these are relative and partial. There is beauty in his world, indeed, the beauty of nature is often his only approach to the supernal, but that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no absolute truth and very little goodness aside from good manners and political correctness.
    Of the final stage, the pure nihilism I here call Anarchy, I can think of only one representative in science fiction, Peter Watts, and at that only one of his books,
Blindsight
. As with Heinlein, I am not speaking of the author himself, whose opinions I do not know and refuse to guess. I am merely speaking of the worldview as portrayed in his fiction.
    (The nihilist viewpoint is more often seen in fantasy or horror, as in H.P. Lovecraft, where the universe has literally nothing but roaring madness at its core, with crawling chaos serving it).
    The Anarchist rebels against the soft mysticism of the Occultist and against the zealous dogmatism of the Cultist, but he also despises the Worldly as weak and inconsequential, if not an enemy.
    For the Anarchist, the only truth is that there is no truth, no absolute truth, and even the few virtues maintained by the Worldly as necessary to maintain the social order are despised. Contrast the soldier Amanda Bates in
Blindsight
with Juan Rico in Heinlein’s
Starship Troopers
. The virtue of loyalty which forms the core of Rico’s character is utterly lacking in Bates.
    There is no discussion of morality in
Blindsight
: all decisions are at first merely a matter of expedience, and then, after the universe eliminates the uselessness of human consciousness as an evolutionary excrescence, no decisions whatever are made. The meat machines merely carry out their inbuilt programming.
    The aliens turn out to be unintelligent in the sense of being non-self-aware, but more intelligent than man in terms of being more highly organized. They are the ‘Chinese Rooms’ of Searle’s famous thought experiment brought to life, and, in this tale, the Chinese Room is better organized than the human brain and can outthink it. The entire Earth at the end of
Blindsight
is overrun with vampires the human race created itself, (a bizarrely meaningless and self-destructive act), and society fails when too many humans enter the artificial paradise of electronic nirvana, uploaded into worlds of their own dream-stuff, so that the remaining real life population cannot maintain the machinery, (a bizarrely selfish and self-destructive act).
    This is pure quill nihilism. For the Anarchist, life is meaningless, and destruction is the only creative act. The destruction of human life on Earth is part of the necessary evolutionary process to eliminate the ineffectiveness called the soul. Only the vampires are left, sleek and efficient and not human in any sense of the word, not even self-aware.
    In the Anarchist world, (1) the only truth is that there is no truth, (2) vice and virtue are interchangeable, equally meaningless, and human action is an epiphenomenon of biological motions, (3) beauty is ugly and ugliness is beautiful. Here we have reached the mere opposite of the world of High Fantasy.
    Here we have reached the abyss. In the anarchist world, no act is meaningful except to throw a bomb, and blow up the innocent. Man is lost in a despair so huge that it does not even seem like despair any longer.
    If you wish to see a visual metaphor of this state of mind, stroll through any modern art museum, and look at the distortions and aberrations of the human form displayed there. All of modern art is nothing but propaganda for one Anarchist principle, namely, that beauty does not exist, and that ugliness can be made beauty merely by all of us agreeing it is so. The proposition is false, and cannot be made true, no more than modern art can be made free of technical defects, much less aesthetic ones.
    Now we can see what the modern world is missing, aided by the admirable clarity of the blindsight of
Blindsight
. The