IN OTHERWORDS

By David Rieff

I OOD BOOKS TRANSCEND their times; bad books reflect them. One reads Ma-dame Bovary for its sublime writing and exploration of the human conditionin all its tortuous complexity. But if you really want to understand 19th-century bourgeois France, you would be far better served by plowing throughthe literarily mediocre but historically informative novels of Gustave Flau-bert's journeyman contemporary, F.ugcne Sue. What has always been true of

literature is even more so with regard to nonHction, especially by authors who claimto know what the future holds in store for us. The history of financial predictionsmade at the height of stock market booms is a well-known illustration, whether itwas the great economist Irving Fisher insisting shortly before the crash of 1929 thatstock prices had reached "a permanently high plateau" or the not-so-great econo-mist Kevin A. Hassett heralding Dow 36,000—the 1999 book he wrote with JamesK. Glassman—a little more than a year before the dot-eöm bubble burst.

But financial manias pale (at least for those who have not bet their 401 (k)s onsuch fanatically rosy assumptions) when compared with the techno-utopias that,at least since the middle of the 19th century, have pe^odically captured the col-lective imagination of the general public in the West—^d today litter bookstoreswith their rah-rah optimism. Too bad few remember Cicero's tart observation thathe did not understand why, when two soothsayers me#in the street, both did notburst out laughing. But if the history of Utopian fantasies has taught us anything,it is that people find it hard to accept the fact of their unreality, preferring insteadto hew to their hopes, whether profound, as with Marxisni, or preposterous (andcommercially self-interested), as with the vision of thegcarefully ordered futuristiccities famously laid out for a receptive public at the Geijeral Motors pavilion at the

tePâïf—just as Adolf Hitler walkabout to blitzkrieg Poland.

IN OTHER WORDS

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If Utopia has always been a kind of escape clause from thehuman condition, contemporary techno-utopianism repre-sents a radical upping of the ante. For entrepreneur PeterDiamandis, creator of the X Prize to spur the developmentof passenger-carrying private spaceships and other inno-vations, not only will technology make it so that "duringour lifetime ... we're moving off this planet," but it willsolve even the gravest problems that confront humanity—climate change, species extinction, water and energyshortages. For futurist Ray Kurzweil, "nonbiological intel-ligence will match the range and subtlety of human intel-ligence" by 2030, making it possible to "go beyond thelimits of biology, and replace [an individual's] current 'hu-man body version 1.0' with a dramatically upgraded ver-sion 2.0, providing radical life extension."

Even comparative moderates in the futurological sweep-stakes tend to swoon when the subject is the pace of technology-led change. Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT'S Center forCivic Media, argues in his new book. Rewire: Digital Cosmo-politans in the Age of Connection, that it is an entirely realis-tic goal for humans to "take control of our technologies anduse them to build the world we want rather than the world wefear." The present moment, Zuckerman asserts in his book'sconcluding sentence, offers "an opportunity to start the pro-cess of rewiring the world."

In his own new book. To Save Everything, Click Here: TheFolly of Technological Solutionism, cyber-utopianism's sever-est and most eloquent critic, Evgeny Morozov, has dubbedsuch grand assertions about the mastery that we, with orwithout the help of intelligent machines, can exert over thefuture of the species the "Superhuman Condition." (Full dis-closure: I blurbed Morozov's book.)

Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Centerat Bard College, has described this mindset somewhat moreunderstanding^, analyzing people's "growing desire to havetechnology oversee what once belonged exclusively to theprovince of the individual mind: man's capacity to judge."

To me, though, what is most striking about the claims madeby techno-utopians (though most, including Kurzweil andZuckerman, reject the label) is the way assertions about theinevitability of unstoppable, exponential technological prog-ress are combined with claims that human beings can, for thefirst time in history, take their fate into their own hands—oreven defy mortality itself. As Morozov remarks tartly, "Sili-con Valley is guilty of many sins, but lack of ambition is notone of them."

A glance at some of the titles in the growing techno-utopiancanon suggests that, if anything, he understates the case.Apart from Zuckerman's Rewire, there is Diamandis's Abun-dance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Kurzweil's TheAge of Spiritual Machines, and U.S. Interior Department ana-lyst Indur Goklany's The Improving State of the World: WhyWe're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives ona Cleaner Planet, to name only a few. By far the worst ofthese is Byron Reese's new Infinite Progress: How the Inter-net and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty,Hunger, and War. Reese is a self-described "inventor, tech-nologist, historian, author, speaker, entrepreneur, and philan-thropist" who created such websites as HappyNews.com andnow serves as chief innovation officer for Demand Media, thecompany that has brought us such sites as DailyPuppy.com.

Almost all contemporary techno-utopians extrapolate from Moore's Law,the hypothesis made by Gordon Moore,a co-founder of Intel, that the number oftransistors on integrated circuits doublesevery two years; such exponential im-provements, they argue, apply to virtu-ally all technology. But Reese's confi-dence is extreme even by those standards."[W]ith the Internet and associated tech-nologies flourishing in a Moore's-Law-likemanner," he writes, immense amounts ofwealth will be created. As a result, "thepoor will get richer^ and the rich will getvastly richer." In this post-scarcity world,"socialism can't even exist."

Well, that's a relief! This confidence thattechnological innovation will ensure thatliberal free market capitalism continues toreign supreme is a commonplace of techno-utopian writing. Zuckerman, for one,justifies his call for a new digital cosmo-politanism partly because it is a prudentway to cope with unexpected threats likethe SARS epidemic (whose seriousness hevastly overstates) or political upheavalslike the Arab Spring, but he is also at painsto emphasize how good the transforma-tions he heralds will be for capitalism. Forall the praise he lavishes on diversity andmulticulturalism, Zuckerman's notions

of politics are extraordinarily impover-ished and unicultural. He is obviouslymore than within his rights to reject thecritique of capitalism leveled by the anti-globalization movement, but he is not atliberty to write as if it scarcely existed. Toparaphrase Dorothy Parker on the emo-tional range of Katharine Hepburn's act-

If Utopia has always beena kind of escape clausefrom the human condition,contemporary techno-utopianism represents aradical upping of the ante.

ing, Zuckerman's runs the gamut of politi-cal possibility from A to B.

Reese doesn't even make it to B. Onthe future of culture, he insists that weare standing on the threshold of "a newGolden Age for humanity," where today's"Internet Renaissance" dwarfs its Ital-ian predecessor "a hundredfold, a thou-sandfold." Where medicine is concerned.

disease will become largely an artifact ofthe past. "Imagine," Reese writes, "if Hip-pocrates had a fraction of [what is avail-able to scientists today]. If Jenner had hade-mail, Pasteur an electron microscope,Salk a genetic sequencer.... I ask you again,does disease even have a chance?" I'm surethe researchers stymied by such terribleillnesses as ALS and bone cancer will berelieved to hear that victory is just somehigh-tech medical devices and a Googlesearch away.

In Reese's account, hunger and war areequally certain to disappear as well. Al-luding to the work of Norman Borlaug,the Iowa-born agronomist who was oneof the principal architects of the GreenRevolution, he declares, "One guy fromIowa came along with some garbage bagsand saved a billion lives. How much moreshould we be able to [do] with the Inter-net, computers, and other technology? Isay we can improve things not by 20 orso percent, but by twenty times or more."As for war, Reese begins by somewhathedging his bets, writing uncharacteristi-cally that "in making the case that warcan and will be ended, I have my work cutout for me." It soon turns out that therewas no real cause for alarm. "'But wait!'"he writes, "'Is that a distant bugle I hear?'

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Out of the blue, the cavalry comes to therescue. All right then, not the cavalry, buta marshaling of arguments and observa-tions that will show how the end of war isinevitable, or nearly so." If only there werean app for that.

It is easy, not to mention enjoyable, tomake fun of Reese. But at one point to-ward the end of Infinite Progress, he mar-shals the ubiquitous, omnipresent claimof techno-utopians past and present: ThisTime It's Different. "I know it has been thevanity of every age to think it represents ahigh point in history," writes Reese. Buttoday, he says, "this is no idle boast."Zuckerman makes a related point, thoughless assertively, insisting that it is "utihelp-ful to dismiss the ambitions of [the] tech-nological optimists ... simply because thefutures they hoped for haven't yet come topass." With optimism and the arc of histo-ry in their pockets, they bemoan the pov-erty of ideas among cynics and skeptics ofthis future-perfect, but it's the idea of pov-erty that brings odd bedfellows together.

At first glance, it would be difficult toimagine views further from those of aReese, a Kurzweil, or a Diamandis thanthose of the international developmentcommunity. To put it mildly, transhuman-ism and poverty reduction are the unlikeh-est couple. Yet if one views both groupsthrough an ideological lens, what is strik-ing is not what separates them but ratherwhat unites them—first and foremost, therigidity of their optimism. From Reese thisis probably to be expected because insideInfinite Progress there is a perfectly re-spectable self-help book screaming to getout. But when Reese states, "I believe inthe future I describe... not out of a child-ish wish, but because it seems the obviousand natural progression of history," he isbeing no more categorical than Microsoftfounder and billionaire philanthrocapital-ist Bill Gates, who wrote in late 2012 that"a realistic appraisal of the human condi-tion compels an optimistic worldview."Compels! Compared with that kind ofdeterminism, Ethan Zuckerman starts tosound like Hannah Arendt.

T IS A CONCEIT, at least, with a dis-tinguished philosophical pedigree. Asphilosopher Tzvetan Todorov put it inhis fine polemic In Defence of the En-lightenment, a central assumption ofEnlightenment thinking was that hu-

man life would be "guided henceforth by aproject for the future, not by an authority

from the past." French legal scholar Fré-déric Rouvillois has argued that this proj-ect for the fumre represented nothing lessthan "the invention of progress," notingits hypnotic and powerful appeal eversince to the Western imagination. Today,this secular progress narrative so thor-oughly pervades global thinking that itcan be difficult to remember how radicala break it represented from all major reli-gions, which, however committed to char-ity, have seen poverty as an immutablegiven of the human condition.

In contrast, almost all contemporaryheirs of the Enlightenment, be they techno-utopians, secular humanitarians, or devel-opment workers, take the diametricallyopposing view. Consider the definingidea of Doctors Without Borders when

Gates, Sachs, and the rest ofthe "end of poverty" hngadethink they have the answers.But what if they don't?

it was founded in the 1970s: "Man wasnot made to suffer." Today, the develop-ment world has taken this new moral un-derstanding of human possibility and hasdrawn from it the conclusion not just thatpoverty and hunger can be alleviated, butthat they can be ended forever.

Few people have upheld this view moreenergetically and adamantly than econo-mist Jeffrey Sachs. In both his 2005 book.The End of Poverty, and his leadership inthe implementation of the U.N. Millenni-um Development Goals (MDGS)—a set ofbenchmarks, from universal primary edu-cation to reducing child mortality, with adeadline set for 2015—he has insisted thatending poverty is not a dream. It is, rather,a goal that no reasonably open-mindedperson should doubt can be accomplishedshould this generation of human beings"choose," as Sachs puts it, to commit todoing so. Why is this realistic? "It is ourbreathtaking opportunity," he writes, "tobe able to advance the Enlightenment vi-sion of Jefferson, Smith, Kant, and Con-dorcet. Our generation's work can be de-fined in Enlightenment terms." For Sachs,the new tools of science and technologywill foster political systems that promotepeace, rationality, and human well-being."The agenda is broad and bold, as it has

been for two centuries," he writes, "butmany of its sweetest fruits are just withinour reach."

Unlike Reese, Sachs does not talk as ifsuch a future were predetermined. But hisvision of that future is only marginally lessUtopian. The world, he believes, stands onthe cusp of eradicating poverty, war, andeven political systems (other than thosededicated to promoting equality and allthose other good things that humanity de-serves). Like Gates, Sachs asserts that heis not being Utopian or even optimistic somuch as simply realistic. "We can realis-tically envision a world without extremepoverty by the year 2025," he writes,"because technological progress [finally]enables us to meet basic human needson a global scale and to achieve a marginabove basic needs unprecedented in histo-ry. [This] technological progress has beenfueled by the ongoing revolutions of basicscience and spread by the power of globalmarkets and public investments in health,education, and infrastructure."

If this sounds familiar, it should. Forwhat Sachs is prophesying is in effect theuniversalization of modern liberal capital-ist democracy—but this time it's different.It will be more equitably arranged so thateveryone in the world, rather than onlypeople in rich countries, benefits from it.This, as British philosopher John Grayonce said of the predictions of Ameri-can political scientist Francis Fukuyama,sounds like nothing so much as "an ideal-ized version of American government." Tobe clear, Sachs is not claiming any of thisis inevitable, but it is difficult to read himas saying anything other than that every-thing is within our grasp, if only we havethe courage and the moral conviction toseize it. (In the Soviet Union, this used bereferred to as svetloye budushcheye, the"radiant future.")

But what kind of morality exactly doesSachs uphold? Not the religious kind,that's for sure—there is literally no entryfor "religion" in the index to The End ofPoverty. Likewise, Gates, who through hisfoundation arguably is doing more to ridthe world of poverty and disease than anyother human being alive today, once tolda reporter that "just in terms of allocationof time resources, religion is not very ef-ficient. There's a lot more I could be doingon a Sunday morning." For Gates, Sachs,and their legions, the emphasis on technol-ogy is the central explanatory key for whywhat has never been remotely possible for

100 FOREIGN POLU

almost all of recorded history is eminentlydoable today. It's messianic, without theMessiah.

As an atheist myself, in purely moralterms I have no strong objection to this.But two obvious problems present them-selves. First, such an approach seems a bitawkward when in much of the poor worlda great religious revival seems to be takingplace among Muslims, Christians, and Hin-dus alike. As the head of the World FaithsDevelopment Dialogue, Katherine Marshall,has wisely pointed out, "The link betweencore religious teachings and attitudes to-wards poverty is important as a factor thatexplains in part the somewhat tepid sup-port for the MDGs" by religious leaders. Ifanything, Marshall is being too tactful. Inmuch of the Arab world at least, the publichealth MDGS (not to mention those sectionsconcerning the emancipation of women and,heaven forbid, gender equality) have stirredup fierce opposition. Unanticipated setbacksin Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan to theglobal effort to eradicate polio (28 percentof whose total budget, nearly $1.5 billionoverall, has since 2008 come from the GatesFoundation) have been a horrific demonstra-tion of this, as religious extremists have un-dertaken a targeted campaign killing healthworkers who administer the polio vaccine.But even in less extreme contexts, ignoringreligion—or, possibly worse, deluding one-self into thinking that religion in the devel-oping world will inevitably evolve into aversion of secularish Western liberalism—ishardly likely to be successful.

An even deeper problem is the assump-tion that has become unchallengeable con-ventional wisdom in the mainstream de-velopment world: that everyone with goodintentions has already reached agreement onthe broad outlines of what decent societiesand a decent international order should looklike. There was a tremendous backlash inthe 1990s to Fukuyama's The End of His-tory, when it was rightfully dismissed aspost-Cold War triumphalist nonsense. Butthe reality is that all optimistic thinking onhuman rights and the end of poverty (not tomention the Sachs/Reese-like overreach ofpredicting perpetual peace in some foresee-able future) rests on the conviction that theuniversalization of Western liberal democra-cy is the final form of human government. Ifyou believe that, then it makes sense to treatpoverty reduction not as a moral or politi-cal problem, but as an essentially technicalexercise, except perhaps in some small num-ber of corrupt spoiler states that sooner or

later are bound to see the light. (Well, if notfrom above, then from somewhere.)

But what if ideology is not dead and pes-simism is as rational a stance as optimism?What if Gates's "creative capitalism" isnot enough to mitigate climate change, letalone bridge the growing gap between theincreasingly gated and demographicallychallenged West and the poor world, soyoung and hungry? Do we even know howto think about this, let alone what to doabout it?

Clearly Gates, Sachs, and the rest of the"end of poverty" brigade think they havethe answers. But what if they don't? It isanything but clear that liberalism will pre-vail in the 21st century, as the recent de-cline of democratic governance in manyparts of the world should make clear. Reli-gion may be disappearing like war from theconsciousness of Western Europeans andNorth Americans, but, also like war, it isstaging a comeback in great swaths of thepoor world. And the obituaries written forcommunism and dictatorship over the past25 years haven't been quite as prescient asthey seemed at the time of the Soviet em-pire's collapse. The rise of an authoritarian,illiberal capitalism may prove to be just as

successful as the liberal variant of the sys-tem. As that great sage Yogi Berra famous-ly said, "Prediction is very hard, especiallyabout the future."

If anything, the impatient optimists andtechno-utopians may be predicting an as-sured victory precisely at the moment whenthe global ideological consensus on bothpolitics and economics is beginning to fray.Perhaps human beings always will oscillatebetween giddiness and despair. But whena belief that some Internet-based deus exmachina will come along to fix the most in-tractable of humanity's problems becomesthe consensus view, and that the most pro-found moral and political challenges thatconfront humanity in the 21st century arein fact not moral or political at all, butrather largely technical, then there is amplecause for alarm.

The problem is not optimism per se. Justas the Marxist writer August Bebel calledanti-Semitism "the socialism of fools," to-day's headlong rush to believe in technology,Utopian or otherwise, seems like nothing somuch as the optimism of fools.

David Rieffis author, most recently, ofAgainst Remembrance.

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