This may be Chief Skeptic Michael Shermer’s best book yet. For those wary of his theory in the Moral Arc, this one will be reassuring. Heavens on Earth is wide-ranging rather than deep-drilling, entertaining rather than compelling, thoughtful instead of brilliant, and full of targets of opportunity in lieu of a single objective. Very Shermer! He’s a fine guide to how the scientific set thinks about reality.
There are two main foci and several ancillary ones. The first half is a fascinating tour through all the various ways people try to outwit death, from paradises to mind-uploading and immortality pills. Shermer isn’t impressed by any of them, although some have more scientific merit than others. They’re mostly infantile: some humans are so impressed with their own minds they think it should live forever in some future techno-Eden. Take the singularitarians: Ray Kurzweil is firmly convinced of his own immortality. But what would you say if, say, a fish decided to cheat death by uploading its mind into some corner of yours? It’s nothing against Ray’s brain, but the far future is likely to think that it’s served its purpose.
This points to the internal contradiction of immortalism: it is the moral equivalent of death by stopping time. Either you die and life goes on, or neither. Shermer is on to this in his observation of the genetic necessity of death, or at least the continuous renewal of life. Another variant of this truth is the reported fact that in Heaven, everyone sooner or later asks to be allowed to just die – they can’t stand waking up to another perfectly perfect day in that giant cruise ship in the sky. Life’s about struggle.
Shermer makes a dog-leg in the middle of the book, railing against fashionable declinism with a hyper-optimistic, Panglossian ode to progress and the idea that this is the most perfect of all possible times. Here he continues the cheerful theme of the Moral Arc, again building on Steven Pinker’s irrational exuberance with “how things are going these days.” You can cherry-pick a lot of facts and numbers to support this, and Shermer does. But there are so many issues here that it’s hard to know where to begin.
Yes, the fraction of people living in desperate conditions has declined rapidly recently. But there are probably more of them than ever, because the total population is exploding. Yes, chattel slavery has nominally been outlawed. But slavery is a universal human institution; it simply takes new forms. There are far more real slaves today than ever before. Yes, we defeat one disease after another. New ones take their place. Yes, humans live longer – because they enslave and extinguish other species.
The problem with the Pollyanna-Cassandra spectrum is obvious: Good and bad don’t exist except in our heads; they’re mere opinions. And, a rope has two ends; to say that one end is longer makes no sense. So the real skeptic would say only: things change; deal with it. Not once is Shermer (at least here) troubled by the real probability that humanity is self-destructing and taking most of creation with it; like rafters on the Niagara River, we are making terrific progress now! Don’t worry about the roar ahead!
Shermer indulges in the materialist fallacy: that economic growth, or TVs and PCs and SUVs make for a better world. Our standard of living is, say, 10,000 times that of cave-man’s – but we are not 10,000 times happier than in the Stone Age, if at all. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. We minimize suffering by inclusive and respectful culture. Shermer surely knows this, but it is critical to point our that poverty is not the problem; material excess is.
In transition, Shermer (whose job is to pop peoples’ balloons) promotes the Copernican Principle: that we are not “special.” Not the center of the universe; not God’s gift to same, deputized by Him to stomp on all the rest. There’s no Santa Claus, and we have no “rights.” Here Shermer is on to an even more fundamental principle we can call the Particularist Illusion: the notion that I/we, or our tribe/race/species/planet is “special.” (Overlaps with the controversial anthropic principle in physics.) It’s easy to see how the immortalists fall into this trap. But so do the human triumphalists, like Elon Musk, who wants to make “us” a multiplanetary species. He’d better take about a million other species with him – for as Shermer notes, even a human is merely trillions of ever-changing cells in close formation, not even, by far, of the same species!
The Particularist Illusion also applies on the macro level: however much someone refuses to die, we are all increasingly minute cells in a global consciousness that is rapidly changing from a DNA to a technical substrate. Obviously, technical connectivity is the new neurological system; and while it’s hard to pin down where consciousness arises in the global superorganism, it’s equally hard to find in the human brain!
Point is, life is all one chaotic process, one blob. Death doesn’t exist per se – leaves fall from the tree and new ones take their place. This macro-view is also why Shermer is wrong when he mocks the rising warnings against Artificial Intelligence. We are not really afraid that our Roombas are plotting against us. We recognize that everything, even down to the lightbulbs, are increasingly networked and subject to outside manipulation. Have we not already seen people’s minds taken over by forces they don’t understand? In contrast, Stephen Hawking is dead-on warning about this, but we can probably do nothing about it. If humans are obsolete, resistance is futile.
The book’s second focus is a tour of utopias, which invariably turn into dystopias instead of the protopia sensible folks like Shermer advocate (incremental progress by trial and error). There are no revolutionary insights here, but a lot of amusing vignettes. Shermer gets around to quite a few fun places, from Fristad Christiania to Jonestown. Oddly, he doesn’t cite the kibbutzim, surely a critical proving ground of socialist utopianism. And he doesn’t mention the biggest and most successful utopia, the United States, a daring Enlightenment experiment. People are always trying to create their own utopias, large and small. They are bound to fail because they cannot outrun human nature.
Here we get into genetics and eugenics. Critics, Shermer included, are keen to point out how foolishly provincial were early racial theorists. But folks like Darwin and Galton were on to a more fundamental insight: that the only way to improve the human condition in the long run is through genetic policing. It doesn’t mean killing those you don’t like; it means, for example, discouraging genetic diseases. Again, Hawking has said for decades that our best hope is in creating a genetically engineered brainy post-human species less inclined to mayhem than ours. (Perhaps a lot like Hawking sans ALS!)
Shermer’s last section, How to Find Meaning where there is None, is his most heartfelt, serious and strenuous effort. It is also the least logical and persuasive. Most readers will probably nod in agreement with his long list of warm fuzzies that give “meaning” to life (meaning that Mike likes them). He gets quite Aynrandian in promoting self-actualization, Shakespearian in “to thine own self be true,” pastorial in emphasizing peace, love and compassion. Well, Hitler was true to himself. Allah is merciful; can’t always say the same for his followers.
There is no better way to make smart people flail than by asking them the meaning of life, because it’s like asking them to divide by zero. The temptation is for a skeptic or scientist to indulge in ersatz-religious pontification. No animals ask this question: they know. The Tao nailed it: the meaning that can be described is not the true meaning.
Shermer is not wrong, but people, not to mention other species, run different programs. So his challenge is to distill the essence and find the Ur-meaning. What distinguishes life from not-life? Agency. Life acts. Each organism is a middle finger against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s the same for a fungus, a fruit fly, and Dr. Shermer: The world tries to kill you, you try to stay alive. If life has meaning, it lies in autonomy: acting at your own behest.
This is a well-argued and -written, fun- and thought-provoking book. The perfect gift if you know someone who's fixin' to check out!
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Has led me to become an Atheist
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