Reflecting on the latest Batman movie it occurred to me that the darkness, war and suffering portrayed in such movies provides far more intensity and drama than peace-time movies such as Woody Allen’s beautiful and hilarious, but arguably less exhilarating (and surely less box office-rich), “To Rome With Love.”



But this creates a dilemma, because it suggests that we can only be truly happy when we are surrounded by misery and suffering.

A similar dichotomy can help to explain the perverse joy that so many of us get from considering various disaster scenarios, and threats to civilization. It’s not that those risks are not real, or that we should not focus on them from time to time (the better to avoid them), but sometimes it seems that we almost yearn for such things to come to pass, to lift us from the dreary boredom of daily life.

But what if the problem is not the absence of Pure Evil, but rather the absence of utopic visions? What if the problem is that we lack the courage to believe in dramatically positive visions of the future? And if we could find such courage, would this help us to find the drama that we crave, but without the tears that come with war and suffering?

The reliance on war and suffering to make a good story is clear from the opening scenes of Batman. Gotham is at peace, no longer in the grip of organized crime. But while there are indeed spoilers ahead, we know from the beginning that this will have to change in order for Batman to come out of hiding, and even in this benign beginning we are supposed to empathise with Commission Gordon’s guilt trip about the fact that—shock, horror—he has been deceiving the people with regard to the truth about Batman and Harvey Dent. Clearly, Gotham doesn’t have sufficiently serious problems to worry about.

Admittedly, there are also utopic elements to the plot. A cold fusion project promises to deliver clean and sustainable energy to the town, and thus pave the way for a sustainable future for the entire planet. (If only it were that simple!) But of course, technology cannot be seen as a saviour: the good news story is just a cover to expose its risks, and in the end the core has to be transported dramatically away from the city (by Batman, of course) so that the resulting mushroom cloud can be viewed at a safe distance from Brooklyn (or should that be Gothlyn?) Bridge. As Wayne says to Tate, perhaps the world is just not ready for a sustainable future…and it is Tate, not Wayne, who turns out to be the villain.

Now it is clear that we are drawn to blood and suffering. It just seems more real and believable than utopic visions, so it is that much easier to connect with it at the visceral, emotional level that brings people out for an evening’s good entertainment. But I believe that this tendency to find drama exclusively in narrowly-averted disasters also reflects a failure in contemporary culture to portray utopic visions in sufficiently vivid detail that they, too, become believable, and a continuation of the humdrum, mediocre existence that we call “peace-time” starts to be seen not as the goal, but as a tragically missed opportunity.



Transhumanism to the Rescue!

I first came across transhumanism after googling “threats to civilization” (as one does) during a quiet afternoon in the office, and coming across an article by Nick Bostrom. What struck me about Bostrom’s article was how his benchmark was radically different from mine. The threats that I had been aware of were all what Bostrom described as “bangs”: sudden or rapidly-evolving disaster scenarios that brought the business-as-usual existence that we know today to an abrupt end. By contrast, a good half of the threats that Bostrom were considered were what he called “whimpers”: scenarios in which civilization didn’t end abruptly, but just failed to progress to the next level. This was the first time I really considered the extent to which life could be much, much better than we currently knew, and not only much, much worse.

It often takes a while for these ideas to filter through. It was a year or two later that I finally got round to buying The Singularity is Near, having seen it on the shelf of the local English bookstore several times previously but feeling that it somehow had a whiff of sulphur about it, and even today the technology-fuelled, utopic scenarios that we talk about at IEET and elsewhere still feel a bit too weird to be entirely real. It’s still that much easier to imagine that some sadistic villain takes over the city, and be relieved when at least some of the inhabitants are alive, and buildings standing, by the end.

But the reality is that the future contains some truly wonderful possibilities, and transhumanists are, in my experience, among the very few who understand its full potential. And the more these ideas catch on, the more we will be able to see failure to achieve it, whether through abrupt crisis or the less dramatic “whimper” of consolidated business-as-usual, as the real disaster, and we will be able to find the intensity and thrill of war-time, without the tears and suffering that comes along with it.