Radical Evolution
The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—
And What It Means to Be Human
by Joel Garreau
(Doubleday, 2005, hardcover $26.00)

In today’s rapidly changing world, to say that “science fact is stranger than science fiction” has become, well, trite. However, when many leading thinkers seriously suggest that near-future scenarios for our beleaguered species could easily include those depicted in the Terminator and Matrix movies, one has to wonder if we’ve actually taken that statement seriously enough. This is due to a spate of rapidly developing technologies that will both dramatically blur the line between human and machine and enable us to engineer our own evolution. The result? According to Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution, an impending transformation of human nature.

Garreau has discovered, for example, that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is currently working on what they call the “metabolically dominant soldier,” an unstoppable blend of man and machine coming soon to a war near you. DARPA hopes to be able to deploy this human weapon within the next decade. His impenetrable exoskeleton (read: bat suit) will amplify both his muscle movements and his thoughts via computerized implants; his digitally augmented eyes will see via a distant drone; his pain will be negated via vaccine; and his wounds will be healed via brain implants that enable him to simply will it. Add his chemically enhanced ability to discard sleep, and you have a 24/7 “lean, mean fighting machine.” All this, of course, begs the question: At what point is a half man/half machine more machine than man—or alternately, at what point is the machine more man than machine? Small wonder that a growing number of experts cited by Garreau now believe that within thirty years, the civil rights of artificial intelligence entities will be a hot domestic issue.

Garreau attempts to grapple objectively with scenarios such as these. He points out that we are presently at the “knee of a curve” of exponential technological growth that is approaching a rate of development beyond which it is impossible to predict future consequences. He outlines a staggering list of impending innovations and concludes that we are entering the “bio-intelligence” age by actively engineering our own evolution. The question of how best to deal with our inevitable “post-human” future is a primary drive behind this book.

Garreau discusses the three most popular scenarios proffered by those who deeply understand these things: the Heaven, Hell, and Prevail scenarios.

In the Heaven scenario, the near future will spawn undreamed-of technological marvels, healing the ills of our world and merging flesh and machine to create “post-humans” who will have the best of their “machineness” augmented by the best of their “bioheritage.” In the Hell scenario, we find its evil twin: mad scientists, white plagues, and the end of all life on the planet. The author meticulously examines the merits of both positions. In particular, he exhorts us to become intimately familiar with the real dangers of the Hell scenario so that we might still take measures to avoid them.

The Prevail scenario acknowledges that we cannot prevent these technologies from emerging and also acknowledges extreme perils because of them. However, it points out that humans have an uncanny history of muddling through in defiance of historical forces. This is credited to the ability of ordinary people facing overwhelming odds to rise to the occasion simply because it’s the right thing to do. “Prevail” holds that humans will be able to shape the impact of these technologies in unpredictable ways, creating a combination of “the marvelously ordinary and the utterly unprecedented.”

Were the book to finish at this point, it would be entirely worth reading simply for its sobering education. However, in its final pages, Radical Evolution truly soars. Here Garreau argues that the real cause of and solution to this crisis is spiritual, not technological. In fact, he believes that the increased interconnections between human beings, our increasing ability to engineer our own evolution, and the extremely dangerous waters we’re entering will force us to deal with existential questions of meaning and purpose in ways that nothing else could.

Using Nietzsche and Teilhard de Chardin as his philosophical backup, Garreau argues that our current humanity is not an endpoint but the bridge to an ongoing moral and spiritual development that is an expression of the universe becoming conscious. The next step for us, he believes, is the active creation of a new culture that will devote itself not only to mastering the forces of nature but to “harness[ing] the energies of love,” to paraphrase Teilhard. “That humans are uniquely rational, intellectual, spiritual, self-aware, creative, conscientious, moral, or godlike seems to be a myth . . . to which we cling in defiance of the evidence,” Garreau observes, quoting historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. “[However,] if . . . we want to stay human through the changes we face—we had better not discard the myth, but start trying to live up to it.”

Michael Wombacher

BABA
Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Yogi
by Rampuri
(Bell Tower, 2005, hardcover $23.00)

In 1969, nineteen-year-old William Gans of Beverly Hills left home and, like so many seekers of his generation, headed to India to find himself. Thirty-six years later, he gives us Baba, the true story of what happened when he arrived there with just twenty dollars in his pocket and a thirst to discover the Truth—“something so colossal that it wouldn’t even fit into the twentieth century.” Traveling the length and breadth of India, Gans visits many gurus, sadhus, and mahatmas until one day he finds himself sitting in a cave in Rajasthan at the feet of a revered master yogi named Hari Puri Baba. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” he says when Hari Puri Baba gives him a new name, Rampuri, and offers to make him his disciple. “You will never be ready for this,” the old man laughs. “This is not something you or anyone else is ever ready for.”

With that, Rampuri steps onto the path of his destiny, and the enthralling tale of a fifteen-year-long spiritual journey in the land of saints and sages begins to unfold. As the first foreigner ever to be initiated into the ancient sect of the Naga Babas—naked, ash-smeared, ganja-puffing Hindu holy men—he opens a remarkable window on the secretive world of India’s most famous order of renunciates. Detailing hidden practices and ceremonies, the rhythm of daily life and worship, and all the color and cacophony of grand pilgrimages and festivals like the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, Rampuri’s odyssey is an educational carousel ride through the history and affairs of the Naga Baba lineage. Later on, the book even starts reading like a nail-biting mystery novel, as Rampuri becomes entangled in politics and intrigue within the order—much of it surrounding him and the growing conflict between those sadhus who resent the presence of a Westerner in their midst and those who embrace it as a stepping stone to their ongoing survival in the modern world.

As both universal spiritual adventure story and chronicle of one man’s journey from the modern to the ancient world, Baba is good to the last page. “Magic happens anywhere worlds meet,” Rampuri writes, referring to Hindu sacred geography, but the thought applies equally well to the author himself. In order to truly meet India on its own terms, he eventually has to confront—and transcend—his identity and conditioning as an American. And more than anything else, it’s his authentic engagement with the disorienting clash of cultures in his own mind that makes his many meditations on Western and Eastern modes of thought, language, and consciousness so thought-provoking.

Ross Robertson