Transhumanism: Huxley’s Brave New World and Altered Carbon

by

Hakan Mehmet Başak

İDE 466 Utopia and Dystopia

Asst. Prof. Dr. Emine Şentürk

27.05.2019
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Transhumanism: Huxley’s Brave New World and Altered Carbon

As the technology is taking over the torch of history, it will guide us to a new era. The

researches of scientists in the fields of genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, bionics, and

nanotechnology seem to be focusing for one goal and that is to transcend human limits with

the hopes of leading mankind to a transhuman age, an age in which more evolved ‘species’

will lead the rest. Brave New World and Altered Carbon are works that in fact portray

transhumanism as a theme in their futuristic dystopian worlds. Brave New World, in which

life is pain-free without any sickness and old age, is written by Aldous Huxley in 1931 and

published in 19321. On the other hand, Altered Carbon is a TV series show based on a book

series with the same name by Richard K. Morgan that is started to being aired in 2018 by

Netflix and adapted to the screen by Laeta Kalogridis2. Both of the works deal with

transhumanism which is the aim of this paper to analyse and portray the relationship between

transhumanism, Brave New World and Altered Carbon. Before going into the depths of

analysing the relation, firstly the term transhumanism and the difference between

posthumanism and transhumanism are to be explained to prevent any confusion.

Funny enough the term “transhumanism” is coined by Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian

Huxley, a great biologist and First Director-General of UNESCO, as he claims that he

believes “in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human

species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is

from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny" (13-17). The

definition of the term by Oxford dictionary is “the belief or theory that the human race can

evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and

1
Accessed online from Britannica, see full citation in Works Cited.
2
Accessed online from IMDB, see full citation in Works Cited.
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technology3”. Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explain in their introductory essay,

posthumanism and transhumanism are in fact very different from each other and the only

thing that is common about these movements is the fact that “both aim to think beyond

humanism” (7). To show the difference between the two terms this paper will focus on the

essay of Ranisch and Sorgner while giving references. Probably the most important difference

between transhumanism and posthumanism, as Ranisch and Sorgner explain, is that the

transhumanism is best understood as an intensification of humanism, as a form of hyper-

humanism embracing the classic ideals of Enlightenment (reason, science, individualism,

progress and self-perfection) yet intensified and ‘updated’ with both a strong belief in and a

clear affirmation of the use of advanced techno-scientific means to realize these ideals,

whereas posthumanism explicitly considers itself to represent a break with humanism,

therefore being emphatically a post-humanism (8). Transhumanists, in general, share the

opinion “that humans should take evolution in their own hands and undertake broad-scale

attempts to incorporate technologies into their lives” (13). Posthumanists, on the other hand,

are more in the business of questioning traditional concepts of the human and criticizing the

idea that “man is the measure of all things” (16). What is more, whilst transhumanism and

posthumanism are focusing to the human being’s engagement and interaction with

technologies and the co-evolution of human and technology, transhumanists believe in

technologically upgrading the human in every respect, while posthumanists consider the

increasing technologization of the human as a reason to question traditional humanist

conceptions. Thus, that is to say, the term ‘posthuman’ for transhumanists mean radically

enhanced human being where for posthumanists it means as a new concept of “the human that

explicitly consider its technical condition and that problematize metaphysical conceptions

(16).

3
Accessed online from Oxford Dictionaries.
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Brave New World was written between World War I and World War II which is seen

by many as the height of optimism in technological advancements in the world. However,

Huxley didn’t regard it as optimism since he took it and applied to his novel by taking it to

extremes to warn and to criticise and he wasn’t alone since by that time many have seen what

could advanced technology accomplish, the mass destruction of the newly developed

machinery. If to be compared with the TV show Altered Carbon, the TV show would

suppress Huxley’s novel regarding transhumanist thought however that doesn’t mean there

are various visible transhumanist thoughts that can clearly be seen in the novel which will be

brought to daylight and exemplified. The novel is set in 2540 CE, or as the novel suggests AF,

‘After Ford’, 632. The novel portrays a futuristic society, called the World State, which lays it

back generally on science since conditioning every ‘produced’ child is the most important

function of the society. The idea of creating children in a laboratory environment and cloning

them in order to control the population and conditioning them for an assigned class do possess

transhumanism at the basis, simply because of the reason that they use technology to create an

‘ideal human being’ for their society. As Carbonell puts it:

If we look closely at the types of humans in the novel, we see that with the rigid caste

system Huxley creates for the World State, as opposed to the “natural” individuals

who live in primitive villages, only the highest caste, the Alphas, exhibit the types of

enhancements we would consider transhuman. They are genetically developed to be

superior individuals in intelligence and health, while the other castes, in decreasing

order, share less enhanced mental capabilities. In fact, the very bottom caste, the

Epsilons, are nothing more than brutes designed for menial labor and, thus, have been

purposely stunted (the very opposite of the transhumanist project.) (49)

To clarify, the embryos, which exist within tubes and incubators, are provided with

differing amounts of chemicals and hormones in order to condition them into predetermined
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classes and embryos destined for the higher classes get chemicals to perfect them both

physically and mentally, whereas those of the lower classes are altered to be imperfect in

those respects, for example, the Alphas are conditioned to be leaders whereas the Epsilons are

conditioned to be menial labourers, as D.H.C. goes on and on explaining the scientific details

surrounding the development of the embryos and conditioning:

the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society…passed on to a

consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in

which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work

tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it

was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the

eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a

porous receptacle… (4)

Everything else that is in the novel that presents transhumanist thoughts are a result of

the development of the embryos and the conditioning of the children. Even though death is

still a part of the society, they have been successful at eliminating every disease that threatens

one’s life expectancy and preventing old-age, that is to say, no one gets old physically. Even

though they couldn’t stop death, they condition everyone to feel nothing against it, no fear, no

sadness, no mourning, nothing at all since “death conditioning begins at eighteen months.

Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept

there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of

course” (122).

On the other hand, Altered Carbon which takes place in the twenty-fifth century

completely deals with the idea of transhumanism. After the discovery of the ruins of an

ancient, extra-terrestrial civilisation on Mars and other planets, humanity has managed to
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successfully implement alien technology which, in turn, completely re-defined human life.

The major advancement is the digitalization of the human mind. All people are at birth

implanted with a cortical stack which stores all the person’s experiences, thoughts, feelings,

and memories, in other words, everything that we label as consciousness. This revolutionary

achievement is bound to alter dramatically one’s views on life and death itself, but also, exert

a tremendous influence on virtually all spheres of life, including social and economic

structure as well as religion. Since cortical stacks can be very simply extracted and re-

implanted in another body, a sort of practical immortality has been gained. After death, people

are usually ‘re-sleeved’ into new, cloned or artificially created and sometimes genetically

engineered or technologically/electronically enhanced bodies and the process is called

‘needlecasting’, which differs according to one’s status and economic position, as seen in the

show as the higher class who live above the clouds in their skyscrapers are called ‘Meths’.

Thus, there is a clear distinction between the ‘ordinary’ death, the termination of a particular

body or a ‘sleeve’ and the ‘real death’ when the cortical stack itself has been destroyed and

the victim’s personality is not retrievable, even though the rich and the powerful, apart from

their stacks, have sometimes additional back-ups of their selves stored in safe data-banks

which are updated regularly. The protagonist of the show is an ‘Envoy’ named Takeshi

Kovacs, a man who was part of the uprising against this new world, is awakened from prison

after 250 years by a wealthy man, a Meth, named Laurens Bancroft, who wants Kovacs to

solve his murder, which was actually real death since his cortical stack was destroyed,

however, since he regularly updates his consciousness he was able to put it in his exact

physical body, a clone.

To explain what is an “Envoy” to show how these transhumanist actions affect certain

individual on a greater scale. Envoy means a special breed of soldier used by the military

hundreds of years before the show takes place as they were trained in response to the
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development of Stacks, and needlecasting, to be able transferred from planet to planet and

into new bodies without the disorienting effects of needlecasting, meaning they could be

combat-ready within moments. This allowed the U.N. Protectorate, the government in the

universe, to quickly field armies on any planet to put down rebellions. But Takeshi later got

even better training after he joined an uprising against the Protectorate, led by a rebel named

Quellcrist Falconer, which sought to prevent a future in which immortality became available

only to the super-rich. During his training as a rebel, he gained several other capabilities such

as withstanding torture, heightening perception through pattern recognition and as seen in the

first episode Takeshi realizes he is about the get ambushed in his apartment through the walls

as if he has x-ray vision in his eyes, kind of like ‘Superman’. Even though everyone in the

show can be seen as a transhuman, Takeshi, when compared with the rest, is in a position of

greater power because of his training past.

Another important aspect to point out to show how transhumanism is at full effect is

that the bionic replacements one could get after one is severely injured and in ‘normal’, for

today’s world anyway, would lose their lives. Kristin Ortega, the detective who has a strange

relationship with Takeshi, in episode 6, after she is severely injured receives a bionic

replacement for her lost arm and this greatly enhances her strength and fighting ability putting

her in a dangerous position, since, at one point, she even damages the hospital bed she’s lying

in because she grips it too hard in anger.

However, there are also people who voluntarily reject the ‘blessings’ of resleeving

from religious reasons, which bring problems with it. It can clearly be seen in the show these

people are taken advantage of, like a young prostitute who is murdered because her

oppressors know that as a Catholic she will not be resleeved and consequently, will not testify

against them, which again shows inequality comes to life again and again. However, at the

final episode, it is revealed that a law is passed to prevent this problem since it enables
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officers to use to stack to see the last moments of the deceased to find out about their

murderer even if the deceased person is religious and doesn’t want to be resleveed.

All in all, in the works that have been studied, technology seems to have already taken

the torch to lead mankind into a ‘better’ future. Transhumanism as a term hasn’t been the on

forefront for so many years however that doesn’t change the fact it has been dealt with even

before the term was coined. As explained both Brave New World and Altered Carbon deal

with transhumanism and try to portray what might become of mankind in the future and even

warn us in their own ways how things might get out of control as every dystopia does.

However, as long as mankind exists transhumanism will be a part of our history since we are

eager to push the limits in order to become the best version of ourselves.
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Works Cited

Altered Carbon. Created by Laeta Kalogridis, performances by Chris Conner, Renee Elise

Goldsberry, Joel Kinnaman and Martha Higareda, 2018.

Carbonell, Curtis D. Brave New World. Academia,

www.academia.edu/10728195/Brave_New_World

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Vintage, 2007.

Huxley, Julian. “New Bottles for New Wine: Ideology and Scientific Knowledge.” The

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 80, no. 1/2,

1950, pp. 7–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2844485.

Lohnes, Kate. “Brave New World” Britannica, 02 July 2018. Britannica,

www.britannica.com/topic/Brave-New-World

Ranish, Robert and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction. Peter

Lang, 2014. Google Books,

books.google.com.tr/books/about/Post_and_Transhumanism.html?id=YKy_oQEACA

AJ&redir_esc=y