On Olaf Stapledon's Moral Rationalism

Promotional image for the 2020 film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's novel 

directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and narrated by Tilda Swinton

Click here to view the trailer 

 

 

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) [1] sets out the future history of mankind divided into eighteen distinct species of human being across a period of some 2000,000,000 years. The narrator of the work is supposed to be channelling a text dictated to him by one of the last men. 

 

If Stapledon's cyclical (whilst progressive) theory of history, complete with rising and falling civilisations, owes something to Spengler and the Hegelian dialectic, his theory of a universal supermind (i.e., a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals) arguably has its origins in religious mysticism.

 

That's bad enough. But, in a sense, my main problem with this essay in myth creation, is that, ironically, it remains very much of its own time. Stapledon is clearly not all that interested in a posthuman future; his real concern is with the politics of the post-War world and the "earnest movement for peace and international unity" [xv] that he hopes will triumph. 

 

At its core, then, this work is less one of speculative fiction and more a piece of propaganda on behalf of universal moral rationalism. A form of communism, which helps explain its aggressive anti-Americanism. As more than one critic has pointed out, this is what makes the book - particularly in its opening chapters - seem "awkward and naive" [2].        

 

But, actually, the end of the work is just as ridiculous: the Last Men, we are told, have finally achieved "spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind" [xviii] - a sort of mix of Socrates and Jesus, whom the Last Men think highly of, as the very first page of chapter one makes clear:

 

"Socrates delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in the flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of eighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionte intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.

      Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable. For many centuries these twin stars enticed the more precociously human of human animals, in vain. And the failure to put these ideals in practice helped to engender in the race a cynical lassitude which was one cause of its decay." 

 

It's passages like this that, unfortunately, make it impossible for me to read this novel from start to finish - even though I've tried to do so numerous times - and which kind of make me happy to discover at the end of the work that the sun is about to explode!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004). All page references to this edition will be given directly in the text. 

[2] Gregory Benford, Foreword to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, ibid., p. ix. 

      As Benford reminds us, Stapledon was a Marxist with a strong dislike of capitalism - particularly American capitalism. Unfortunately, this causes him to give a reading of his own times and the near future that has proved to be completely mistaken. Thus Benford advises readers to skip the first four chapters. 

 

Contrasting Visions of the Last Man in Nietzsche and Olaf Stapledon

 

 

 

Nietzsche and Olaf Stapledon both had a vision of the last humans ...

 

I. 

 

For Nietzsche, der letzter Mensch is the antithesis of a superior being. 

 

And yet, despite all his flaws and shortcomings, the last man is self-content and represents the culmination of humanity's desire to become the perfect domestic animal: passive, apathetic, averse to risk taking or living dangerously, in favour of all those things beginning with the letter C that Zarathustra so despises; comfort, convenience, and conformity, for example. 

 

The last man simply wants to earn a reasonable living and secure his own health and safety; i.e., self-preservation not self-overcoming is his goal and he cares more about walking the dog than exercising his will to power. He is small and he makes everything around him feel smaller. All that is different from himself - everything alien, queer, or superior - appears to him as criminal, insane, or obscene (in a word, evil).      

 

And yet, for all his profession of happiness, the last man is full of resentment and the lust for revenge; he is compelled to seek out those individuals who manifest this difference so that he may cut them down to size and bring them into line, thereby negating the chaos which generates dancing stars in the name of love, peace, equality, and justice.

 

The last man's dream is of belonging to a one great reconciled herd of humanity in which everyone wants the same and is the same and whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse. Or, indeed, to the Vernichtungslager.*

 

 

II. 

 

For the British philosopher and sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon, on the other hand, the Last Men - whom he imagines living on Neptune 2000,000,000 years from now - are very much Übermenschen (though not in the Nietzschean sense).

 

As the eighteenth and final species of human being, these Neptunian Last Men are a perfected version of the relatively short-lived Seventeenth Men (created by the Sixteenth Men to succeed them and with an ability for mental fusion between individual minds resulting in an altogether new mode of consciousness).  

 

Essentially, the Last Men are a race of genderfluid polyamorous philosophers and artists with a penchant for ceremonial cannibalism. They are also potentially immortal; that is to say, whilst they can still have fatal accidents, be murdered by others, or die via suicide, they needn't worry about sickness or old age.   

 

Stapledon writes:

"If one of the First Men could enter the world of the Last Men, he would find many things familiar and much that would seem strangely distorted and perverse. [...] 

      Among the familiar things that he would encounter would be creatures recognizably human yet in his view grotesque. [...] Some of these fantastic men and women he would find covered in fur, hirsute, or mole-velvet, revealing the underlying muscles. Others would display bronze, yellow or ruddy skin, and yet others a transluscent ash-green, warmed by the underflowing blood. As a species, though we are all human, we are extremely variable in body and mind, so variable that superficially we seem to be not one species but many. [...] The traveller might perhaps be surprised by the large yet sensitive hands which are universal, both in men and women. [...] The pair of occipital eyes, too, would shock him; so would the upward-looking astronomical eye on the crown, which is peculiar to the Last Men. [...] Apart from such special features as these, there is nothing definitely novel about us [...] We are both more human and more animal. [...] Yet our general proportions are definitely human in the ancient manner. [...] Moreover, if our observer were himself at all sensitive to facial expression, he would come to recognize in every one of our innumerable physiognomic types an indescribable but distinctively human look, the visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace which is not wholly absent from his own species."**   

 

These multi-racial and bestial-bodied god-men with faces that remain (depressingly) all-too-human, habitually wander around in the nip, only wearing clothes for special occasions or for when they wish to fly (made possible thanks to a pair of overalls fitted with gravity-defying radiation-generators). They live a happy communal form of life, growing vegetables, observing the stars, pottering about in their garden, or home decorating.

 

What really sets them apart from all earlier human beings, we are told, is their unique love life; the Last Men are futuristic swingers in small multisexual groups that form the basis of super-individuality in which single brains become mere nodes within a giant network of mind:

 

"Of course the mental unity of the sexual group is not the direct outcome of the sexual intercourse of its members. Such intercourse does occur. Groups differ from one another very greatly in this respect; but in most groups all the members of the male sexes have intercourse with all the members of the female sexes. Thus sex is with us essentially social. It is impossible for me to give any idea of the great range and intensity of experience afforded by these diverse types of union. Apart from this emotional enrichment of the individuals, the importance of sexual activity in the group lies in its bringing individuals into that extreme intimacy, temperamental harmony and complementariness, without which no emergence into higher experience would be possible." [272]         

 

Ultimately, Stapledon's Last Men, rather like Nietzsche's letzter Mensch, form theselves into a perfect herd and the individual discovers his truest self as part of a transhuman collective made up from a million million brains and bodies. I don't know if any one objects to this process - or if there would be any point, for one suspects that resistance would be futile: 

 

"Ours is in fact a society dominated [...] by a single racial purpose which is in a sense religious [...] in each mind of man or woman the racial purpose presides absolutely; and hence it is the unquestioned motive of all social policy." [280]   

 

Stapledon regards this as the ultimate form of democracy: free of all serious conflict, as individuals learn to increasingly trust in the judgements and dictates of the hive mind. Nietzsche would despise such mystical-spiritual-utopian twaddle. And I despise it too: such cosmic idealism is just another form of fascism at last: Ein Volk, ein Welt, ein Geist ...      

 

 

Notes

 

* See Nietzsche, 'Zarathustra's Prologue' (5), in Part 1 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) on which I base this summary.  

** See Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004), pp. 262-63. Further page references to this text will be given directly in the post. 

 

For a related post to this one, contrasting the thought of Nietzsche and Stapledon on the death of man, click here.

Nietzsche Contra Olaf Stapledon on the Death of Man

The nihilist and the transcendental idealist

 

 

Recently, I started exploring the speculative writings of British philosopher and sci-fi author Olaf Stapledon, whose fame rests mostly on two hugely influential works: Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937). 

 

So far, however, I've not been terribly impressed: for no matter how vast the range of material covered by Stapledon - how numerous the ideas or how sensational the imaginative experience offered - there is, as D. H. Lawrence would say, no sense of release. One comes away from his work feeling that one is still trapped within the same old moral-rational universe full of spiritual values and, behind it all, a disembodied consciousness or cosmic supermind.

 

And, even after 2000,000,000 years and eighteen distinct species of human being, when Stapledon decides the game is up and a death sentence can finally be passed on mankind via solar catastrophe, he can't help hoping that we might yet find some way to spunk our essence into the wider galaxy and thus disseminate among the stars the seeds of a new humanity. 

 

And nor can he help coming to the final conclusion: 

 

"Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievment, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things." [1]

Obviously, as a Nietzschean and as a nihilist, I can't let that pass and I would refer readers (once more) to the little story that Nietzsche tells us:

 

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history', but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die." [2]

 

Nietzsche comments:

 

"One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life." [3]     

 

Push comes to shove, I think Nietzsche is on the money and that Stapledon - like all idealists - is kidding himself. As Ray Brassier notes: 

 

"Nietzsche's 'fable' perfectly distils nihilism's most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing will have happened'. Neither knowing nor feeling, neither living nor dying, amounts to a difference that makes a difference – 'becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing'. [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004), pp. 303-304. 

[2] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

 

[3] Ibid. 

 

[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 205-206. 

 

For a sister post to this one, on visions of the last men in Nietzsche and Stapledon, click here.