I am not ungrateful to Issues in Science and Technology for presenting, in its spring 2016 issue, a review (available here) of my book Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress. I wish it were not such a negative review. But as negative reviews go, this one is easy on the ego, even if unsatisfying to the intellect, because so little of it speaks to the book I wrote.
The reviewer gets some things right. He correctly points out, for some reason or other, that I teach at a Catholic university, and also notes that the book does not conform to the narrow dogma of diversity that says that in intellectual endeavors one must always include discussion of people other than dead or living white males. All true.
On the other hand, the reviewer also claims that “a good third of the book is devoted to lovingly detailed but digressive plot summaries.” He also speaks of my “synopses” of Engines of Creation and The Diamond Age. This is a very telling error. Actually, about 4 percent of the book (9 of 215 pages, by a generous count) is devoted to plot summaries of the fictional works that play a large role in my argument. How do we get from 4 percent to 33 percent? The reviewer apparently cannot discern the difference between a plot summary and an analysis of a work of literature or film. These analyses are indeed “lovingly detailed” because they involve a close reading of the texts, and a careful effort to understand and respond to the issues raised by the authors of the works in question. The same goes for my reading of Drexler; it is an analysis, not a summary or general survey of his book, as is asserted by calling it a synopsis.
Now, it may be my failure as an author that I could not interest the reviewer in my arguments as they emerged from such analyses, and of course those arguments may be wrong or in need of revision in a host of ways that a serious review might highlight. But my reviewer avoids mentioning that the book has any arguments at all. For example, a key theme of the book, announced early on (page 15), is that if we want to understand transhumanism, we need to see how it emerged out of an ongoing intellectual crisis that faced Enlightenment views of material progress when they had to face the challenge of Malthusianism and Darwinism. This point is right on the surface, consistently alluded to, and is one of the main threads holding the book together. Yet you would know nothing of it from the Issues in Science and Technology review.
There is one point raised by the reviewer which is substantive and worth thinking about. He accuses me of recommending modesty when I should have recommended humility. Oddly, he does so in a mocking way (“Are we to establish a federal modesty commission to enforce a humble red line…?”) when of course his own suggestion could just as easily be made to look unserious (Are we to establish a federal humility commission?).
But here at least there seems to be a real issue between us. By speaking of modesty I highlighted that moral choices are both central to our visions of the future and inescapable. The reviewer bows in this direction, but his notion of humility is actually an effort at avoiding moral questions in favor of supposed lessons drawn from a particular take on the history and philosophy of science. By “humility,” the reviewer means that we need to acknowledge that we never know as much as we think we know when we project the utopian/dystopian possibilities for the future in the manner of transhumanism:
Every major technical advance or scientific insight leads to the opening up of a vast world of undreamed-of complexity that mocks the understanding we thought we’d achieved and dwarfs the power we hoped we’d acquired.
This is a beautiful, poetic sentiment. But it is quite irrelevant to the crucial question of how to deploy the new knowledge and powers that we are plainly achieving. Self-directed genetic evolution, for example, may indeed be far more difficult to achieve than was once thought, but that does not at all mean that we are not on path to gaining the knowledge and ability to undertake it. Even if it were true that we always overstate our powers, that does not mean we are not becoming more powerful, and in such a way as to encourage us to think that more power is coming. And it certainly does not mean that, as a moral question, there are not many who, eschewing both modesty and humility, are anxious to travel that road.
Charlie, you show commendable graciousness and restraint in your response to Nathaniel Comfort’s review of Eclipse of Man. He fails in the first duty of a reviewer: to accurately present the book on its own terms. Indeed, you treat his review more charitably than he treats your book, insofar as you do him the kindness of actually engaging with his argument (such as it is).
Maybe part of the problem is methodological. Comfort is a historian who often writes on matters that overlap with bioethics, but (as you suggest) he seems unfamiliar with the method you use in the book: close reading of texts in the search for moral and political wisdom. For a guy who counsels humility, he sure doesn’t show much of it in his rush to snarkiness.
As your book’s editor I am not an impartial observer, but on my printout of Comfort’s review I started circling its asininities and counted more than a dozen. You mention a few of them; here are some of the others that jumped out at me:
• Comfort evinces no understanding of the conservative critique of transhumanism. He name-drops Leon Kass in a way that suggests he’s heard of the debate about Kass’s ideas but hasn’t read Kass’s writing itself, and then he implies that your book makes a “yuck” argument — which it does not.
• Comfort says that you start your book with the Enlightenment and then “move[] on to the Progressive era.” Nope. You discuss the meaning of progress and refer to the “progressive spirit” of Darwin’s day, but you don’t say anything about the Progressive era.
• Comfort writes: “Among the many risks of transhumanism that Rubin discusses, one will not find the loss of diversity.” This, too, is simply wrong. Diversity is a recurring theme in the book, coming up especially in chapter 3 (and your discussion is not confined to sex and race, the only aspects of diversity that Comfort mentions).
• Because Comfort doesn’t do much quoting from your book, his characterization of your argument drifts from what you actually say. This is especially true in his discussion of finitude and the “empty materialism” of transhumanism, where he criticizes you for making arguments that you don’t make.
• And — this is the funniest whopper — the one time that Comfort does quote at any length from the book, he gives a few sentences of your prose that he doesn’t like. He offers it as an example of how you write with “strings of passive-voice clauses.” Except the passage he quotes doesn’t include a single example of the passive voice. In his rush to play gotcha, he trips on his own shoelaces.
There are several other failings in the piece, but you get the gist. Very disappointing.