In the past few years, new technological horizons seem to be opening before us and new realities may soon be possible. While many political and cultural leaders tend toward the pessimistic, tech leaders are optimistic and excited about the vision of the future that they are selling. That vision, despite slight variations, is largely shared among those leaders.
We are invited to imagine and anticipate a future in which humans labor much less, maybe barely at all. In some ways, this is the acceleration of a trend. For centuries, the West has been relentless in our mechanization, and for decades we have reduced domestic labor through outsourcing. For many Americans, the objective is to retire early. Our tech leaders promise more than that, even a new kind of world in which humans do not labor. Even those who are uncertain about technocracy share the vision of a dramatic rise in leisure with a dramatic decline in work. Outside of personal ambitions, we see it in advocacy for shorter work weeks or minimum basic income.
Technology may soon free us from some of the shackles of biology, we are told. In some circles, conventional procreation is considered undesirable. The future will be brighter when we have more control over the nature of our progeny. There is an openly expressed desire in America to have the freedom to create designer babies, human clones, and human-machine hybrids. The possibilities are at hand. Our ambitions for adults are also grand. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is on a quest for immortality. Already, we are implanting computer chips in human brains. Many of today’s tech leaders believe our quest to perfect the human being or transform society should not be bound by conventions or conventional morality. Consider Elon Musk’s unconventional pronatalism.
This new world will also leave behind the archaic cultural goods of human civilization and community. AI will free us from reading and writing books. Enthusiasts are eager to enjoy movies and music made by AI. We are urged to imagine ourselves with AI friends and family and cloned pets and lab-grown meat, all believing we are Player One and feeling nostalgic about Wall-E and Tron while possibly being part of a Mars colonization program. What earthly reference points will remain? It is no wonder we cannot escape Huxley’s Brave New World or Shakespeare’s Tempest these days: “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”
Of course, the brave new world that we are being offered has something of the old new world about it. It may seem that we have nothing to prepare us for this unwritten future, but we have the past. In the Age of Exploration, the first New World upset many things in the Old World. If culture and morality could be so different on another continent, what was the natural order of things? What was divinely ordained, if anything? Everyday life in the Old World was transformed, even for people who never undertook overseas travel. The New World had incomprehensible amounts of gold and silver. The taking of it transformed the international economy. There were previously unknown foods that became staple crops elsewhere on earth.
What could and should be done in this new paradigm? What were the limits to the new possibilities? What were the effects of the discoveries? The people and places discovered in the Age of Exploration were so unlike what Europeans knew and expected that it became easy to believe almost anything about the New World and its possibilities. Early accounts of the Americas included people with heads in their torsos. More’s Utopia was believed by some to be a factual account. It has been believed by others to be a realistic proposal for the reorganization of society. Even Gulliver’s Travels, 200 years later, could fool a few people.
Among the travel literature and utopias from the early modern period is a less well-known work which speaks especially to our moment. In 1668, Henry Neville published a small book titled The Isle of Pines. Its seeming utopia is not entirely unlike the one we are being offered today.
The story of the Pines begins with a shipwreck. An Englishman, George Pine, is the sole male survivor, on an otherwise uninhabited island. With him are four women, representing three different levels of society: one is his master’s teenage daughter, two are servants, one is a Black enslaved woman. The island has a mild climate and is so filled with breadfruit and native birds and fish that no one need labor. Chickens have also survived the shipwreck and multiply abundantly on the island. George Pine is the master of an island that requires no husbandry.
With nothing but leisure, Pine turns his attention toward the women. In a document he left for his descendants, he says, “Idleness and a fullness of everything begot in me a desire for enjoying the women.” At first, he only has relations with the servants, discreetly, but soon he is sleeping with all the women, without shame and even in public. They are freed from conventional morality. “For we wanted no food, and living idly, and seeing us at liberty to do our wills, without hope of ever returning home made us thus bold.” They are as fertile as the land. Pine becomes a patriarch to four “tribes” of his offspring. By the time he is 80, he has 1,789 descendants.
Isle of Pines presents a fantasy. George Pine has unimaginable sexual liberty, unheard of amounts of leisure, and rises in status to become a ruler of his own kingdom. It is a kingdom without labor and initially without laws. Though Pine insists on monthly gatherings of all his descendants, at which the Bible is read, the island is largely ungoverned and has been peopled by relationships between siblings.
In so many ways, the island is what we are being sold today. It is a world in which no one works, conventional morality is weakened, and appetites are all easily met. Little stands between the people and pleasure. Many men, especially, might envy George Pine.
But by the time a Dutch captain and crew happen upon the island decades later, it is not as idyllic. The people have never developed tool making. The Dutch relate that they gave them knives and “an axe or hatchet to fell wood (which was very acceptable unto him, the only one which was cast on shore at the first, and the only one which they ever had, being now quite so blunt and dulled that it would not cut at all).” The Pines have no means of making clothing and wear leaves and branches. The complete liberty practiced by the father continued as license. The island is plagued by rape and murder. The racial hierarchy has led to division, enmity, and warfare. The chaos and cruelty inspired new laws, but they have not been effective. There is an insurrection while the Dutch are visiting.
The Isle of Pines is a critique of colonialism. It especially highlights the racial hierarchies of the colonies and the problems associated with the indeterminate status of colonial creoles. The island’s lack of governance and near total liberty are also identified as problems. As one of Pine’s grandchildren relates, “the stronger seeking to oppress the weaker” and “no tie of religion being strong enough to chain up the depraved nature of mankind,” very soon “mischief began to arise.” The monthly meetings and Bible reading were neglected. The insufficient political structure was incapable of managing the distorted social structure that George Pine established by disregarding conventional morality. After all, Pine was something of a pronatalist who wanted to make real as many versions of himself as possible. The island was peopled because he took all the women as sexual partners and his children partnered with siblings. Others wanted his life for their own—“what my grandfather was forced to for necessity, they did for wantonness.”
We can expect as much perfection from our promised utopia as we see in The Isle of Pines. Work is more than a punishment to be escaped. While we do not have to value work in every form or imagine Sisyphus happy, we know that work offers meaning and pleasure to human existence, not just income. In Isle of Pines, the lack of labor causes people to lose the ability to make basic tools and the islanders mistakenly believe that a set of bagpipes is a living creature. The Dutch find them scantily clad not by choice but because they lack the ability to clothe themselves well even if they wanted. Complete leisure caused civilizational regression. Knowledge and abilities were lost.
The license and leisure of the island led to violence and chaos. Pine gave his children, initially, complete freedom. This mistake was not easily corrected. The six laws of the island came after terrible violence and epidemic levels of rape. The problems continued after the laws. As James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But we are not angels. A world in which we are unbound by conventional morality, and perhaps governance, would be dangerous. And without work, people have nothing but time to give to their bad impulses. In Notes from the Underground, the narrator observes that it was excessive leisure, leading to boredom, that inspired Cleopatra to stick pins into people for entertainment.
The very things that made the Isle of Pines an instance of regression are being sold to us as progress in the present. We are offered the opportunity to throw off the shackles of labor and conventional morality. We are encouraged to imagine a future with reduced governance and without the strictures of biology. We are told that we will have increased liberty and leisure and that it will make us happier.
But this is a recipe for deskilled and dissipated people. In his letter to his descendants, George Pine writes: “So that this place, had it the culture that skillful people might bestow on it, would prove a paradise.” The Isle of Pines was not a paradise, because the society he created could not supply skillful people. In the end, it had nothing worthy of being called culture and is in no way enviable.
The future is famously difficult to predict. Which of the promises offered by tech visionaries will be realized? We do not know. Yet we know enough from the past to evaluate the vision we are being sold for the future. The promised future utopia, without human labor and with freedom from conventional biology and morality, would be experienced as a dystopia. We also know that the current vision for the future is not inevitable: it is being actively sold to us (and those who profit the most from its progress are considered the “leaders”). We retain the ability to buy that vision or to opt for an alternative, one in which we are not deskilled people, one in which we retain the virtues needed to pursue the happiness that comes from meaningful participation in a community and culture.
Image via Freerange.
