Saturday, October 15, 2011

Are we becoming "The Happy Breed"?

Still working my way through the Harlan Ellison edited anthology Dangerous Visions (highly recommended reading, by the way), and I’ve come across a story that stopped me cold in my tracks, because it concerns a subject about which I’ve given a lot of thought and worry. Namely, the problem of pain.

“The Happy Breed” by John Sladek tells of a theoretical future (amusingly, 1989—Dangerous Visions was written in 1967, and many of its entries err on the side of overestimating the proliferation of technology) in which machines will take away all our pain. It’s a world in which machines constantly analyze our bodies and minds and offer tranquilizers to still our troubling thoughts, and painless surgical intervention for every physical ailment. So what’s left for humanity in this future?

Sladek posits that with every machine we come to depend on, we surrender a bit of our freedom. What would happen to us if we no longer had any of life’s ailments to worry about? What would it do to our psyche, our creativity? What if we were theoretically able to conquer death itself? Would we be recognizably human any longer? Would we need God in this future?
Says Sladek:

…without evil or pain, preference and choice are meaningless; personality blurs; figures merge with their backgrounds, and thinking becomes superfluous and disappears. I believe these are the inevitable results of achieving Utopia, if we make the mistake of assuming the Utopia equals perfect happiness. There is, after all, a pleasure center in everyone’s head. Plant an electrode there, and presumably we could be constantly, perfectly happy on a dime’s worth of electricity a day.

Are we destined to become “The Happy Breed?” What do you think?

5 comments:

Falze said...

Interesting vision of a Utopian future that achieves a similar result to Huxley's via different means than ABNW...neural soma, anyone?

"and thinking becomes superfluous and disappears"

But who is maintaining the machines? Do they not need to be maintained? If so, why are there people? Wouldn't we just die out if we just sat flopped on the ground with our pleasure centers stimulated? In ABNW people had to keep working at least to keep the world moving.

It’s a world in which machines constantly analyze our bodies and minds and offer tranquilizers to still our troubling thoughts, and painless surgical intervention for every physical ailment.

Come visit - Albany is pretty much taking the lead in nanotechnology for the nation.

anarchist said...

I hope so, but I doubt it.

Brian Murphy said...

But who is maintaining the machines? Do they not need to be maintained? If so, why are there people? Wouldn't we just die out if we just sat flopped on the ground with our pleasure centers stimulated? In ABNW people had to keep working at least to keep the world moving.

"Who maintains the machines?" is a good question; "The Happy Breed" seems to infer that the supercomputer running the show has been programmed with artificial intelligence. I'm not entirely sure how plausible AI is, myself. But yes, in the story people are pretty much rendered infantile and extraneous, and the ending is pretty grim.

Anarchist: You hope so? If you haven't read the story already, you might want to rethink that (warning: spoilers follow):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happy_Breed

Spawn of Endra said...

"Would we need God in this future?"

Funny you should say that. I was just watched the "Classic Albums" doco on the making of Plastic Ono Band, and so the idea 'God is a concept by which we measure our pain' is fresh in my head, and would seem to be one answer to that question.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the human apparatuses that surround beliefs in God, so I wouldn't miss the widespread the belief in it. If we got to the state of never feeling any pain, and everything blurred together FOR EVERYONE, and there were no anaesthetized underclasses being exploited by the few pain-feelers left, no one would know the difference and it wouldn't matter. Presumably a steady state, like death.

For another musical reference, the Talking Heads: 'Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.'

Andy said...

Seems to me that this is kind of the whole point of the Garden of Eden story: If man lives in a perfect place in which nothing bad ever happens, then there's no way to understand how good you have it until you lose it. Pain and sorrow is the price we pay for self-awareness.