Tag Archives: Nicolas de Condorcet

Auguries of Immortality, Malthus and the Verge

Hindu Goddess Tara

Sometimes, if you want to see something in the present clearly it’s best to go back to its origins. This is especially true when dealing with some monumental historical change, a phase transition from one stage to the next. The reason I think this is helpful is that those lucky enough to live at the beginning of such events have no historical or cultural baggage to obscure their forward view. When you live in the middle, or at the end of an era, you find yourself surrounded, sometimes suffocated, by all the good and bad that has come as a result. As a consequence, understanding the true contours of your surroundings or ultimate destination is almost impossible, your nose is stuck to the glass.

Question is, are we ourselves in the beginning of such an era, in the middle, or at an end? How would we even know?

If I were to make the case that we find ourselves in either the middle or the end of an era, I know exactly where I would start. In 1793 the eccentric English writer William Godwin published his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, a book which few people remember. What Godwin is remembered for instead is his famous daughter Mary Shelley, and her even more famous monster, though I should add that if you like thrillers you can thank Godwin for having invented them.

Godwin’s Enquiry, however, was a different kind of book. It grew out of the environment of a time which, in Godwin’s eyes at least, seemed pregnant with once unimaginable hope. The scientific revolution had brought about a fuller understanding of nature and her laws than anything achieved by the ancients, the superstitions of earlier eras were abandoned for a new age of enlightenment, the American Revolution had brought into the world a whole new form of government based on Enlightenment principles, and, as Godwin wrote, a much more important similar revolution had overthrown the monarchy in France.

All this along with the first manifestations of what would become the industrial revolution led Godwin to speculate in the Enquiry that mankind had entered a new era of perpetual progress. Where then could such progress and mastery over nature ultimately lead? Jumping off of a comment by his friend Ben Franklin, Godwin wrote:

 Let us here return to the sublime conjecture of Franklin, that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.” If over all other matter, why not over the matter of our own bodies? If over matter at ever so great a distance, why not over matter which, however ignorant we may be of the tie that connects it with the thinking principle, we always carry about with us, and which is in all cases the medium of communication between that principle and the external universe? In a word, why may not man be one day immortal?

Here then we can find evidence for the recent claim of Yuval Harari that “The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.” (268)  In later editions of the Enquiry, however, Godwin dropped the suggestion of immortality, though it seems he did it not so much because of the criticism that followed from such comments, or the fact that he stopped believing in it, but rather that it seemed too much a termination point for his notion of progress that he now thought really would extend forever into the future for his key point was that the growing understanding by the mind would result in an ever increasing power of the mind over the material world in a process that would literally never end.

Almost at the exact same time as Godwin was writing his Enquiry another figure was making almost the exact same argument including the idea that scientific progress would eventually result in indefinite human lifespans. The Marquis de Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit was a book written by a courageous man while on the run from a French Revolutionary government that wanted to cut off his head. Amazingly, even while hunted down during the Terror, Condorcet retained his long term optimism regarding the ultimate fate of humankind.

A young English parson with a knack for the just emerging science of economics, not only wasn’t buying it, he wanted to actually scientifically prove (though I am using the term loosely) exactly why  such optimism should not be believed. This was Thomas Malthus, whose name, quite mistakenly, has spawned its own adjective, Malthusian, which means essentially environmental disaster caused by our own human hands and faults.

As is commonly known, Malthus’ argument was that historically there has been a mismatch between the growth of population and the production of food which sooner or later has led to famine and decline. It was Godwin’s and Condorcet’s claims regarding future human immortality that, in part, was responsible for Malthus stumbling upon his specific argument centered on population. For the obvious rejoinder to those claiming that the human lifespan would increase forever was-  what would we do will all of these people?

Both Godwin and Condorcet thought they had answered this question by claiming that in the future the birth rate would decline to zero. Stunningly, this has actually proven to be correct- that population growth rates have declined in parallel with increases in longevity. Though, rather than declining due to the victory of “reason” and the conquest of the “passions” as both Godwin and Condorcet thought they declined because sex was, for the first time in human history, decoupled from reproduction through the creation of effective forms of birth control.

So far, at least, it seems it has been Godwin and Condorcet that have gotten the better side of the argument. Since the  Enquiry we have experienced nearly 250 years of uninterrupted progress where mind has gained increasing mastery over the material world. And though,we are little closer to the optimists’ dream of “immortality” their prescient guess that longevity would be coupled with a declining birth rate would seem to clear the goal of increased longevity from being self-defeating on Malthusian grounds.

This would not be, of course, the first time Malthus has been shown to be wrong. Yet his ideas, or a caricature of his ideas, have a long history of retaining their hold over our imagination.  Exactly why this is the case is a question  explored in detail by Robert J. Mayhew in his excellent, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet, Malthus’ argument in his famous if rarely actually read An Essay on the Principle of Population has become a sort of secular version of armageddon, his views latched onto by figures both sinister and benign over the two centuries since his essay’s publication.

Malthus’ argument was used against laws to alleviate the burdens of poverty, which it was argued would only increase population growth and an ultimate reckoning (and this view, at least, was close to that of Malthus himself). They were used by anti-immigrant and racist groups in the 19th and early 20th century. Hitler’s expansionist and genocidal policy in eastern Europe was justified on Malthusian grounds.

On a more benign side, Malthusian arguments were used as a spur to the Green Revolution in Agriculture in the 1960’s (though Mayhew thinks the warnings of pending famine were political -arising from the cold war- and overdone.) Malthusianism was found in the 1970’s by Paul Ehrlich to warn of a “population bomb” that never came, during the Oil Crisis slid into the fear over resource constraints, and can now be found in predictions about the coming “resource” and “water” wars. There is also a case where Malthus really may have his revenge, though more on that in a little bit.

And yet, we would be highly remiss were we to not take the question Malthus posed seriously. For what he was really inquiring about is whether or not their might be ultimate limits on the ability of the human mind to shape the world in which it found itself. What Malthus was  looking for was the boundary or verge of our limits as established by the laws of nature as he understood them. Those whose espoused the new human perfectionism, such as Godwin and Condorcet, faced what appeared to Malthus to be an insurmountable barrier to their theories being considered scientific, no matter how much they attached themselves to the language and symbols of the recent success of science. For what they were predicting would happen had no empirical basis- it had never happened before. Given that knowledge did indeed seem to increase through history, if merely as a consequence of having the time to do so, it was still the case that the kind of radical and perpetual progress that Godwin and Condorcet predicted was absent from human history. Malthus set out to provide a scientific argument for why.

In philosophical terms Malthus’ Essay is best read as a theodicy, an attempt like that of Leibniz before him, to argue that even in light of the world’s suffering we live in the “best of all possible world’s”. Like Newton did for falling objects, Malthus sought the laws of nature as designed by his God that explained the development of human society. Technological and social progress had remained static in the past even as human knowledge regarding the world accumulated over generations because the gap between mind and matter was what made us uniquely human. What caused us to most directly experience this gap and caused progress to remain static? Malthus thought he pinned the source of stasis in famine and population decline.

As is the case with any other physical system, for human societies, the question boiled down to how much energy was available to do meaningful work. Given that the vast majority of work during Malthus’ day was done by things that required energy in the form of food whether humans or animals, the limited amount of land that could be efficiently tilled presented an upper bound to the size, complexity, and progress of any human society.

What Malthus missed, of course, was the fact that the relationship between food and work was about to be severed. Or rather, the new machines did consume a form of processed “food” organic material that had been chemically “constructed” and accumulated over the eons, in the form of fossil fuels that offered an easily accessible type of energy that was different in kind from anything that had come before it.

The sheer force of the age of machines Malthus had failed to foresee did indeed break with the flatline of human history he had identified in every prior age. A fact that has never perhaps been more clearly than in Ian Morris’ simple graph below.

Ian Morris Great Divergence Graph

What made this breaking of the pattern between all of past human history and the last few centuries is the thing that could possibly, and tragically, prove Malthus right after all- fossil fuels.  For any society before 1800 the majority of energy other than that derived from food came in the form of wood- whether as timber itself or charcoal. But as Lewis Dartnell pointed out in a recent piece in AEON the world before fossil fuels posed a seemingly unsurmountable (should I say Malthusian?) dilemma; namely:

The central problem is that woodland, even when it is well-managed, competes with other land uses, principally agriculture. The double-whammy of development is that, as a society’s population grows, it requires more farmland to provide enough food and also greater timber production for energy. The two needs compete for largely the same land areas.

Dartnell’s point is that we have been both extremely lucky and unlucky in how accessible and potent fossil fuels have been. On the one hand fossil fuels gave us a rather short path to technological society, on the other, not only will it be difficult to wean ourselves from them, it is hard to imagine how we could reboot as a civilization should we suffer collapse and find ourselves having already used up most of the world’s most easily accessed forms of energy.

It is a useful exercise, then, to continue to take Malthus’ argument seriously, for even if we escape the second Malthusian trap- fossil fuel induced climate change- that allowed us to break free from the trap Malthus’ originally identified- our need to literally grow our energy- there are other predictable traps that likely lie in store.

One of these traps that interests me the most has to do with the “energy problem” that Malthus understood in terms of the production of food. As I’ve written about before, and as brought to my attention by the science writer Lee Billings in his book Five Billion Years of Solitude, there is a good and little discussed case from physics for thinking we might be closer to the end of an era that began with the industrial revolution rather than in the middle or even at the beginning.

This physics of civilizational limits comes from Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego who writes the blog Do The Math. Murphy’s argument, as profiled by the BBC, has some of the following points:

  • Assuming rising energy use and economic growth remain coupled, as they have in the past, confronts us with the absurdity of exponentials. At a 2.3 percent growth rate within 2,500 hundred years we would require all the energy from all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy to function.
  • At 3 percent growth, within four hundred years we will have boiled away the earth’s oceans, not because of global warming, but from the excess heat that is the normal product of energy production. (Even clean fusion leaves us burning away the world’s oceans for the same reason)
  • Renewables push out this reckoning, but not indefinitely. At a 3 percent growth rate, even if the solar efficiency was 100% we would need to capture all of the sunlight hitting the earth within three hundred years.

Will such limits prove to be correct and Malthus, in some sense, be shown to have been right all along? Who knows. The only way we’d have strong evidence to the contrary is if we came across evidence of civilizations with a much, much greater energy signature than our own. A recent project out of Penn State to do just that, which looked at 100,000 galaxies, found nothing, though this doesn’t mean the search is over.

Relating back to my last post: the universe may lean towards giving rise to complexity in the way the physicist Jeremy England suggests, but the landscape is littered with great canyons where evolution gets stuck for very long periods of time which explains its blindness as perceived by someone like Henry Gee. The scary thing is getting out of these canyons is a race against time: complex life could have been killed off by some disaster shortly after the Cambrian explosion, we could have remained hunter gatherers and failed to develop agriculture before another ice age did us in, some historical contingency could have prevented industrialization before some global catastrophe we are advanced enough now to respond to wiped us out.

If Tom Murphy is right we are now in a race to secure exponentially growing sources of energy, and it is a race we are destined to lose. The reason we don’t see any advanced civilizations out there is because the kind of growth we’ve extrapolated from the narrow slice of the past few centuries is indeed a finite thing as the amount of energy such growth requires reaches either terrestrial or cosmic limits. We simply won’t be able to gain access to enough energy fast enough to keep technological progress going at its current rate.

Of course, even if we believe that progress has some limit out there, that does not necessarily entail we shouldn’t pursue it, in many of its forms, until we hit the verge itself. Taking arguments that there might be limits to our technological progress is one thing, but to our moral progress, our efforts to address suffering in the world, they are quite another, for there accepting limits would mean accepting some level of suffering or injustice as just the “way things are”.  That we should not accept this Malthus himself nearly concluded:

 Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity. We are not patiently to submit to it, but to exert ourselves to avoid it. It is not only the interest but the duty of every individual to use his utmost efforts to remove evil from himself and from as large a circle as he can influence, and the more he exercises himself in this duty, the more wisely he directs his efforts, and the more successful these efforts are, the more he will probably improve and exalt his own mind and the more completely does he appear to fulfil the will of his Creator. (124-125)

The problem lies with the justification of the suffering of individual human beings in any particular form as “natural”. The crime at the heart of many versions of Malthusianism is this kind of aggregation of human beings into some kind of destructive force, which leads to the denial of the only scale where someone’s true humanity can be scene- at the level of the individual. Such a moral blindness that sees only the crowd can be found in the work the most famous piece of modern Malthusianism -Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb where he discusses his experience of Delhi.

The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to the buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the  dust, noise, heat, and the cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened. (p. 1)

Striped of this inability to see the that the value of human beings can only be grasped at the level of the individual and that suffering can only be assessed in a moral sense at this individual level, Malthus can help to remind us that our mind’s themselves emerge out of their confrontation and interaction with a material world where we constantly explore, overcome, and confront again its boundaries. That the world itself was probably “a mighty process for awakening matter into mind” and even the most ardent proponents of human perfectionism, modern day transhumanists or singularitarians, or just plain old humanists would agree with that.

* Image: Tara (Devi): Hindu goddess of the unquenchable hunger that compels all life.

Malthusian Fiction and Fact

Wind_Up_Girl_by_Raphael_Lacoste-big

Prophecies of doom, especially when they’re particularly frightening, have a way of sticking with us in a way more rosy scenarios never seem to do. We seem to be wired this way by evolution, and for good reason.  It’s the lions that almost ate you that you need to remember, not the ones you were lucky enough not to see. Our negative bias is something we need to be aware of, and where it seems called for, lean against, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss and ignore every chicken little as a false prophet even when his predictions turn out to be wrong, not just once, but multiple times. For we can never really discount completely the prospect that chicken little was right after all, and it just took the sky a long, long time to fall.

 The Book of Revelation is a doom prophecy like that, but it is not one that any secular or non-Christian person in their right mind would subscribe to. A better example is the prediction of Thomas Malthus who not only gave us a version of Armageddon compatible with natural science, but did so in the form of what was perhaps the most ill timed book in human history.

Malthus in his  An Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1798 was actually responding to one of history’s most wild-eyed optimist. While he had hidden himself away from French Revolutionary Jacobins who wanted to chop off his head, Nicolas de Condorcet had the balls to write his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit, which argued not only that the direction of history was one of continuous progress without limit, but that such progress might one day grant mankind biological immortality. Condorcet himself wouldn’t make it, dying just after being captured, and before he could be drug off to the Guillotine, whether from self-ingested poison or just exhaustion at being hunted we do not know.

The argument for the perpetual progress of mankind was too much for the pessimist Malthus to bear. Though no one knew how long we had been around it was obvious to anyone who knew their history that our numbers didn’t just continually increase let alone things get better in some linear fashion. Malthus thought he had fingered the culprit – famine. Periods of starvation, and therefore decreases in human numbers, were brought about whenever human beings exceeded their ability to feed themselves, which had a tendency to happen often. As Malthus observed the production of food grew in a linear fashion while human population increased geometrically or exponentially.  If you’re looking for the origins of today’s debate between environmentalists and proponents of endless growth from whatever side of the political ledger- here it is-with Condorcet and Malthus.

Malthus could not have been worse in terms of timing. The settlement of the interiors of North America and Eurasia along with the mechanization of agriculture were to add to the world untold tons of food. The 19th century was also when we discovered what proved to be the key to unleashing nature’s bounty- the nitrogen cycle- which we were able to start to take advantage of in large part because in Peru we had stumbled across a hell of a lot of bat poop.

Supplies of guano along with caliche deposits from the Atacama desert of Chile would provide the world with soil supercharging nitrogen up until the First World War when the always crafty Germans looking for ways to feed themselves and at the same time make poison gas to kill the allies discovered the Haber-Bosch process. Nitrogen rich fertilizer was henceforth to be made using fossil fuels. All of that really took off just in time to answer another Malthusian prophecy  Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb of 1968, which looked at the quite literally exploding human population and saw mass starvation. The so-called “Green Revolution” proved those predictions wrong through a mixture of nitrogen fertilizers, plant breeding and pesticides. We had dodged the bullet yet again.

Malthusians today don’t talk much about mass starvation, which seems to make sense in a world where even the developing world has a growing problem with obesity, but the underlying idea of Malthus, that the biological-system of the earth has systemic limits and humans have a tendency to grow towards exceeding them still has legs, and I would argue, we should take this view very seriously indeed.

We can be fairly certain there are limits out there, though we are in the dark as to what exactly those limits are. Limits to what? Limits to what we can do or take from the earth or subject it to before we make it unlivable the majority of creatures who evolved for its current environment- including ourselves- unless we want to live here under shells as we would on a dead planet like Mars or like in the 70s science-fiction classic Logan’s Run itself inspired by Malthusian fears about runaway population growth.

The reason why any particular Malthus is likely wrong is that the future is in essence unknowable. The retort to deterministic pessimism is often deterministic optimism, something has always saved us in the past, usually human inventiveness i.e. technology and will therefore save us in the future. I don’t believe in either sort of determinism we are not fated to destroy ourselves, but the silence of the universe shouldn’t fill us with confidence that we are fated to save ourselves either. Our future is in our hands.

What might the world look like if today’s Malthusian fears prove true, if we don’t stumble upon or find the will and means to address the problems of what people are now calling the Anthropocene, the era when humanity itself has become the predominant biological, and geochemical force on earth? The problems are not hard to identify and are very real. We are heating up the earth with the carbon output of our technological civilization, and despite all the progress in solar power generation, demon coal is still king. Through our very success as a species we appear to be unleashing the sixth great extinction upon life on earth, akin to the cataclysmic events that almost destroyed life on earth in the deep past. Life and the geography of the planet will bear our scars.

Paolo Bacigalupi is a novelist of the Anthropocene bringing to life dystopian visions of what the coming centuries might look like if we have failed to solve our current Malthusian challenges. The 23rd century Bacigalupi presents in his novel The Windup Girl is not one any of us would want to live in, inheriting the worst of all worlds. Global warming has caused a catastrophic level of sea rise, yet the age of cheap and abundant energy is also over. We are in an era with a strange mixture of the pre-industrial and the post industrial- dirigibles rather than planes ply the air, sailing ships have returned. Power is once again a matter of simple machines and animals with huge biologically engineered elephants turning vast springs to produce energy which for all that is painfully scarce. Those living in the 23rd century look back to our age of abundance, what they call the Expansion, as a golden age.

What has most changed in the 23rd century is our relationship to the living world and especially to food. Bacigalupi has said that the role of science-fiction authors is to take some set of elements of the present and extrapolate them to see where they lead. Or, as William Gibson said “The future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed.” What Bacigalupi was especially interested in extrapolating was the way biotechnology and agribusiness seem to be trying to take ownership over food. Copyrighting genes, preventing farmers from re-using, engaging in bioprospecting. The latter becomes biopiracy when companies copyright genetic samples and leverage indigenous knowledge without compensating the peoples from whom this biological knowledge and material has been gleaned.

In the neo-medieval world of The Windup Girl agribusinesses known as “calorie companies” with names like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar don’t just steal indigenous knowledge and foreign plants, and hide this theft under the cloak of copyright, they hire mercenaries to topple governments, unleash famines, engage in a sophisticated form of biological warfare. It as if today’s patent obsessed and abusing pharmaceutical companies started to deliberately create and release diseases in order to reap the profits when they swept in and offered cures. A very frightening possible future indeed.

Genetic engineering, whether deliberately or by accident, has brought into being new creatures that outcompete the other forms of life. There are cats called cheshires that roam everywhere and  possess chameleon like camouflaging capabilities. There are all sorts of diseases, mostly deadly, diseases that make the trans-genetic jump from plants to humans.

Congruent with the current Malthusianism, The Windup Girl is really not focused on population as our primary problem. Indeed, the humanoid windups, a people whose condition and fate take center stage in the novel were created not because of population growth, but in response to population decline. In a world without abundant energy robots are a non-starter. Facing collapsing population the Japanese have bred a race of infertile servants called windups for their mechanical like motions. Just one of the many examples where Bacigalupi is able to turn underlying cultural assumptions into a futuristic reality the windups are “more  Japanese than the Japanese” and combine elements of robots and geishas.

The novel is the story of one of these windups, Emiko, who has been abandoned by her owner in Thailand coming to find her soul in a world that considers her soulless. She is forced to live as a sexual slave and is barbarically brutalized by Somdet Chaopraya’ the regent of the child queen, and murders him as a result. Emiko had become involved with a Westerner, Anderson Lake working for AgriGen who is searching out the Thais most valuable resource, their seed bank, the Norwegian seed bank of Svalbard having been destroyed in an act of industrial terrorism by the calorie companies, along with a mysterious scientist called Gibbons who keeps the Thais one step ahead of whatever genetic plague nature or the calorie companies can throw at them.

Anderson and the calories companies are preparing a sort of coup to unseat the powerful Environment Ministry once lead by a murdered figure named Jaidee to open up trade and especially access to the genetic wealth of Thailand. The coup is eventually undone,  Bangkok flooded and Emiko living in hiding the deserted city offered the chance to create more of her own kind by Gibbons who relishes playing God.

What I found most amazing about The Windup Girl wasn’t just the fact that Bacigalupi made such a strange world utterly believable, but that he played out the story in a cosmology that is Buddhist, which gives a certain depth to how the characters understand their own suffering.

The prayers of the monks are all that can sometimes be done in what are otherwise hopeless situation. The ancient temples to faith have survived better than the temples to money- the skyscrapers built during the age of expansion. Kamma (karma) gives the Asian characters in the novel a shared explanatory framework, one not possessed by foreigners (the farang). It is the moral conscience that haunts their decisions and betrayals. They have souls and what they do here and not do will decide the fate of the their soul in the next life.

The possession of a soul is a boundary against the windups. Genetic creations are considered somehow soulless not subject to the laws of kamma and therefore outside of the moral universe, inherently evil. This belief is driven home with particular power in a scene in which the character Kanya comes across a butterfly. It is beautiful, bejeweled a fragile thing that has traveled great distances and survived great hardships. It lands on her finger and she studies it. She lets it sit on her finger and then she shepherds it into the palm of her hand. She crushes it into dust. Remorseless. “Windups have no souls. But they are beautiful.”  (241)

It isn’t only a manufactured pollinator like the butterfly that are considered soulless and treated accordingly. Engineered humans like Emiko are treated in such a way as well. They exist either as commodities to be used or as something demonic to be destroyed. But we know different. Emiko is no sexual toy she is a person, genetically engineered or not, which means, among much else, that she can be scarred by abuse.

 In the privacy of the open air and the setting sun she bathes. It is a ritual process, a careful cleansing. The bucket of water, a fingering of soap. She squats beside the bucket and ladles the warm water over herself. It is a precise thing, a scripted act as deliberate as Jo No Mai, each move choreographed, a worship of scarcity.

Animals bathe to remove dirt. Only humans, only something inhabiting a moral universe, possessing a moral memory both of which might be the best materialist way of understanding the soul, bathe in the hope of removing emotional scars. If others could see into Emiko, or her into the hearts of other human beings, then both would see that she has a soul to the extent that human beings might be said to have one. The American farang Anderson thinks:

 She is an animal. Servile as a dog.

He wonders if she were a real person if he would feel more incensed at the abuse she suffers. It’s an odd thing, being with a manufactured creature, built and trained to serve.

She admits herself that her soul wars with herself. That she does not rightly know which parts of her are hers alone and which have been inbuilt genetically. Does her eagerness to serve come from some portion of canine DNA that makes her assume that natural people outrank her for pack loyalty? Or is it simply the training she has spoken of? (184)

As we ask of ourselves- nature or nurture? Both are part of our kamma as is what we do or fail to do with them.

The scientist, Gibbons who saves the Thais from the genetic assaults of the the calorie companies and holds the keys to their invaluable seed bank is not a hero, but himself a Promethean monster surrounding himself with genetically engineered beings he treats as sexual toys, his body rotting from disease. To Kanya’s assertion that his disease is his kamma, Gibbons shouts:

Karma? Did you say karma? And what sort of karma is it that ties your entire country to me, my rotting body.  (245)

Gibbons is coming from a quite different religious tradition, a Christian tradition, or rather the Promethean scientific religion which emerged from it in which we play the role of god.

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.

I want to shake you sometimes. If you would just let me, I could be your god and shape you to the Eden that beckons us.

To which Kanya replies: “I’m Buddhist.”

Gibbons:

 And we all know windups have no soul. No rebirth for them. They will have to find their own gods protect them. Their own gods to pray for their dead. Perhaps I will be that one, and your windup children will pray to me for salvation.(243)

This indeed is the world that open up at the end of the novel, with Gibbons becoming Emiko’s “God” promising to make her fertile and her race plentiful. One get the sense that the rise of the windups will not bode well for humanity our far future kamma eventually tracing itself back to the inhuman way we treated Emiko.

Bacigalupi has written an amazing book, even if it has its limitations. The Windup Girl managed to avoid being didactic but is nonetheless polemical- it has political points to score. It’s heroes are either Malthusian or carried by events with all the bad guys wearing Promethean attire. In this sense it doesn’t take full advantage of the capacity of fiction for political and philosophical insight which can only be accomplished when one humanizes all sides, not just ones own.

Still, it was an incredible novel, one of the best to come out of our new century. Unlike most works of fiction, however, we can only hope that by the time we reach the 23rd century the novel represents it will be forgotten. For otherwise, the implication would be that after many false alarms Malthusian fiction has after a long history of false alarms, become Malthusian fact.