A Perfect Vacuum (18 page)

What has culture to do with all of this? queries Klopper. Culture is an instrument of adaptation of a new type, for it does not so much
itself
arise from accident as it serves this purpose, to wit, that everything which in our condition is de facto
accidental
stand bathed in the light of a higher, ultimate necessity. And therefore: culture acts through established religion, through custom, law, interdiction and injunction, in order to convert
insufficiencies
into
idealities
, minuses into pluses, shortcomings into acmes of perfection, defects into virtues. Suffering is distressful? Yes, but it ennobles and even redeems. Life is short? Yes, but the life beyond is everlasting. Childhood is toilsome and inane? Yes, but for all that—halcyon, idyllic, positively sacred. Old age is horrid? Yes, but this is the preparation for eternity, and besides, old people are to be respected, by virtue of the fact that they are old. Man is a monster? Yes, but he is not to blame; it was his primogenitors who brought on the evil—or else a demon interfered in the Divine Act. Man does not know what to want, he seeks the meaning of life, he is unhappy? Yes, but this is the consequence of freedom, which is the highest value; that one must pay through the nose for its possession is therefore of no great significance: a man deprived of freedom would be more unhappy than if he were not! Animals, Klopper observes, make no distinction between feces and carrion: they steer clear of both the one and the other as the evacuations of life. For a consistent materialist the equating of a corpse with excrement ought to be just as valid; but the latter we dispose of furtively, and the former with pomp, loftily, equipping the remains with a number of costly and complicated wrappings. This is required by culture, as a system of appearances that help us reconcile ourselves to the despicable facts. The solemn ceremony of burial serves as a sedative for the natural outrage and revolt roused in us by the infamy of mortality. For it
is
an infamy, that the mind, filled in the course of a lifetime with ever more extensive knowledge, should come to this, that it dissolves into a putrid puddle of corruption.

Thus culture is the mitigator of all the objections, indignations, grievances that man might address to natural evolution, to those physical characteristics haphazardly created, haphazardly fatal, which he—without being asked for his opinion or consent—has inherited from a billion-year process of ad hoc accommodations. To all that vile patrimony, to that ragtag-and-bobtail mob of infirmities and blemishes inserted into the cells themselves, knit into the bones, sewn into the sinews and the muscles—culture, wearing its picturesque toga of appointed public defender, attempts to reconcile us. It uses innumerable weasel words, it resorts to arguments that contradict themselves internally, that appeal now to the feelings, now to the reason, for any and all methods of persuasion are acceptable to culture, so long as it achieves its goal—the transformation of negative quantities into positive, of our wretchedness, our deformity, our frailty, into virtue, perfection, and manifest necessity.

With a monumental diapason of style, in measure sublime, in measure professorial, concludes the first part of the treatise of Dozent Klopper, here given fairly laconically by us. The second part explains the vital importance of understanding the true function of culture, so that man may be able properly to receive the portents of the future, a future he has prepared for himself by building a science-and-technology civilization.

Culture is a mistake! announces Klopper, and the brevity of this assertion brings to mind the Schopenhauerian
“Die Welt ist Wille!”
Culture is a mistake, not in the sense or to suggest that it arose by chance; no, it arose by necessity, for—as shown in Part One—it serves adaptation. But it serves adaptation only
mentally
: surely it does not, with its dogmas of faith and its precepts, transform man into an
actually
immortal being; it does not tack onto accidental man,
homini fortuito,
a
real
Creator-Deity; it does not
really
annul a single atom of an individual's sufferings, griefs, agonies (here, too, Klopper is true to Schopenhauer! )—what it does, it does entirely on the plane of the spirit, on the level of interpretation, making meaning out of that which in immanence has no meaning; it divides sin from virtue, grace from damnation, humiliation from exaltation.

But now technological civilization, in steps imperceptible at first, creeping along with its scrap iron of primitive machines, has worked its way underneath culture. The building is shaken, the walls of the crystal rectifier crack: for technological civilization promises to
correct
man, both his body and his brain, and quite literally to
optimize
his soul. This tremendous and unexpectedly welling force (of the information, stored up for centuries, which in the twentieth century exploded) heralds a chance for long life, with the limit, perhaps, in immortality; a chance for swift maturation and no senescence; a chance for a legion of physical pleasures and a reduction to zero of torments, of tribulations both “natural” (senility) and “accidental” (disease) ; it heralds the chance for
freedom
where previously hazard was wed to inevitability (freedom meaning the power to choose the qualities of human nature; meaning the possibility of amplifying talent, knowledge, intelligence; meaning the opportunity to give to human limbs, the face, the body, the senses, whatever forms and functions one desires, even those that are well-nigh everlasting, etc. ).

What, then, ought to be done in the face of these promises, promises verified by fulfillments already brought about? Why, throw oneself into a triumphal dance! Culture, that cane of the lame, crutch of the crippled, wheelchair for the paralytic, that system of patches placed over the shame of our body, over the deformity of our toilsome condition, culture, that helpmate that has seen much service and outserved, ought to be pronounced an anachronism and nothing but. For are artificial limbs necessary to those who can grow new? Must a blind man clutch the white cane to his breast, when we return him his sight? Is he to request benightedness anew who has had the scales lifted from his eyes? Should not one, rather, lay to rest that useless lumber in the museum of the past, and set out with a springing step toward the awaiting, difficult yet magnificent tasks and goals ahead? So long as the nature of our bodies, of their sluggish growth and all-too-swift decay, was an impervious wall, an implacable barrier, the limit of existence—for that long did culture facilitate, unto the thousandth generation, our adaptation to this wretched
status quo.
It reconciled us to it; more, as the author shows, it actually converted the flaws into merits, the drawbacks into advantages. It is as if someone condemned to a broken-down, ugly, and worthless vehicle were gradually to conceive an affection for its failings, to find in its ungainliness evidence of a higher ideal, and in its endless defects a Law of Nature, of Creation; he perceives the hand of the Lord God Himself in the sputtering carburetor and the chattering gears. So long as there is not another vehicle in sight, this is perfectly proper, very suitable, the only right and even sensible policy, one should think. But now, when a new vehicle gleams on the horizon? To cling to the broken spokes, bewail the ugliness with which it will be necessary soon to part, cry out “Help, save me!” from the streamlined beauty of the new model? Understandable psychologically, indeed yes. For too long—millennia!—has the process been going on of man's bending himself to his own evolutionarily piecemeal nature, that colossal straining—from century to century—to love the given condition in all its misery, squalor, unattractiveness, in its destitutions and physiological nooks and crannies.

So much has man, in all his successive cultural formations, slaved away at this, so much has he striven to sway himself, to have himself believe in the absolute necessity, supremity, uniqueness, and most of all the inalterability of his fate, that now, at the sight of his deliverance, he recoils, quakes, hides his eyes, utters cries of terror, turns away from the technological Saviour, wishing to flee somewhere, anywhere, even to the forest on all fours, wishing he could take that flower of knowledge, that wonder of science, and smash it with his own two hands, trample it underfoot, if only not to surrender his ancient values to the junk heap, values he nourished with his own blood, nurtured waking and sleeping, till he forced upon himself ... love for them! But such absurd conduct, this shock, this panic, is above all, from any rational standpoint, stupidity.

Yes, culture is a mistake! But only in the sense that it is a mistake to shut the eyes to the light, to push away medicine in illness, to call for incense and magic spells when an enlightened doctor is standing by the bed. This mistake did not exist at all until the moment when our knowledge, growing, reached the required level; this mistake—it is the resistance, the balky, mulish, pigheaded opposition, the obstinate aversion, it is the tremor of dread our modern “thinkers” like to call an intellectual assessment of the present changes in the world. Culture, that system of prostheses, must be discarded, so that we may entrust ourselves to the knowledge that will remake us, endow us with perfection; nor will the perfection be Active, a thing we are talked into or sold, a thing educed from the sophistry of tortuous, self-contradictory establishings and dogmas. It will be purely material, factual, a perfectly objective perfection: existence
itself
will be perfect—not merely its exposition, not merely its interpretation! Culture, defender of Evolution's Causal Imbecilities, shifty pettifogger of a lost cause, shyster mouthpiece of primitivism and somatic slapdashery, must remove itself, since man's case is entering other, higher courts, since the wall of inviolable necessity, inviolable only hitherto, now crumbles. Technological development means the ruin of culture? It provides freedom where hitherto reigned the constraint of biology? But of course it does! And instead of shedding tears over the loss of our captivity, we should hasten our step to leave its dark house. And therefore (the finale begins, in cadenced conclusions): everything that has been said about the threat to time-honored culture by the new technology is true. But one need not be concerned about this threat; one need not patch together a culture coining apart at the seams, or fasten down its dogmas with clamps, or hold out valiantly against the invasion of our bodies and our lives by superior knowledge. Culture, still a value today, will tomorrow become another value: namely, anachronistic. For culture was the great hatchery, the womb, the incubator in which discoveries bred and gave agonizing birth to science. Indeed, just as the developing embryo consumes the inert, passive substance of the egg white, so does the developing technology consume, digest, and turn into its own stuff—culture. Such is the way of embryos and eggs.

We live in an era of transition, says Klopper, and never is it so unutterably difficult to make out the road traveled and the road that extends into the future as in periods of transition, for they are times of conceptual confusion. However, the process is inexorably under way. One must not in any case think that the transition from the realm of biological captivity to the realm of self-creative freedom can be an act of a single moment. Man will not be able to perfect himself once and for all, and the process of self-alteration will go on through centuries.

“I make bold,” says Klopper, “to assure the reader that the dilemma over which the traditional thought of the humanist, flustered by the scientific revolution, lacerates itself, is the yearning of the dog for its removed collar. This dilemma boils down to the faith that man is a skein of contradictions which cannot be got rid of, not even were the ridding technologically possible. In other words, it is forbidden us to change the shape of the body, weaken the lust for aggression, strengthen the intellect, balance the emotions, rearrange sex, liberate man from old age, from the labors of procreation, and this is forbidden for the reason that it has never been done, and what has never been done must surely be, by that fact, most evil. The humanist is not allowed to conceive—a la science—of the present human mind and body as the resultant vector of a long series of random draws, intramillennial convulsions in the evolutionary process, a process that was hurled in all directions by geological upheavals, great glaciations, the explosions of stars, the changes of the magnetic poles, and countless other accidents. What the evolution of the lower animals first, and of the anthropoids later, deposited in lottery style, what then was swept into a single pile by selection, and what day by day was fixed in the genes as in dice thrown at the gaming table, we are to hold untouchable, sacrosanct, inviolable for all time, world without end—only without knowing why it has to be this way and not another. It is as if culture takes umbrage at our diagnosis of its work, noble at least in intent, and our exposure of that greatest, most difficult, most fantastic, and falsest of all the falsehoods Homo sapiens ever fashioned for himself—ever latched onto—he who was thrust suddenly into the open air of intelligent existence from out that murky gambling den where the cheating at genes still goes on, where the evolutionary process sets down its cardsharper's tricks in the chromosomes. That the game is a foul fraud, never guided by any higher value or goal, is shown by the fact that in that cave the thing is only to survive
today
—not giving one hoot in heaven or hell about what will become of the one who survives so compromisingly, so opportunistically, therefore dishonorably,
tomorrow.
But because everything is proceeding exactly in reverse of what our humanist, shaking in his boots, imagines to himself, that dimwit, that boob—he has no right to call himself a rationalist—culture will be cleared away, cleaned up, parceled out, pulled down, and drained, in step with the changes to which man shall submit. Where the hook and crook of genes, where adaptational opportunism decides existence, there is no mystery, there is only the
Katzenjammer
of the swindled, the awful hangover from the monkey ancestor, the climb skyward up that imaginary ladder from which you always end up falling, biology dragging you down by the seat of your pants, whether you tack onto yourself bird feathers, halos, or immaculate conceptions, or grit your teeth with homemade heroism. And so nothing vital-inevitable will be destroyed, but there will disappear, withering away bit by bit, the scaffolding of superstition, justification, equivocation, the pulling of the wool over the eyes—in a word, that whole sophistry to which the miserable human race has for ages resorted in order to make palatable its odious condition. In the next century, from out of the dust of the information explosion will emerge Homo optimisans se ipse, Autocreator, Self-Maker, who will laugh at our Cassandras (assuming he has with what to laugh). One ought to applaud such an opportunity, acclaim it an incredibly fortunate turn of cosmic-planetary events, and not tremble in the face of the power that will bring our species down from the scaffold and sunder the chains each of us drags with him, as he waits for the potential of his bodily forces to be finally exhausted, when he will know the self-strangling of the death agony. And even should the whole world still continue to acquiesce in that state with which evolution has branded us far worse than we brand the worst criminals, I personally shall never consent to it and yea even from my dying bed rasp out: Down with Evolution, Vivat Autocreation!”