Becoming Human by Design
April 2013
Tony Fry / Bloomsbury
In the age of climate change and the short-sighted reign of capitalism to which we are more-or-less all subject, how is it that humanity can travel intact into the future?
The most orthodox answer shares the views of the French resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor and member of the committee responsible for drafting the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the late Stéphane Hessel. In 2010 Hessel published ‘Time for Outrage’, the pamphlet that helped inspire the Indignados and Occupy movements in Europe and the US and in which he re-affirmed his faith in the agency of a cornerstone of western Enlightenment thinking over the last three centuries: the dream of the universal human subject. ‘I am convinced,’ wrote Hessel, ‘that the future belongs to non-violence, to the reconciliation of different cultures. It is along this path that humanity will clear its next hurdle.’
In Becoming Human by Design, Tony Fry makes a bold and provocative challenge to this humanist orthodoxy, spurred into thinking by the onset of changes to the climate that he takes as given will undo much of the political and social order of the world in its present state. Fry’s dystopically-minded treatise imagines humanity into a third age of existence, a post-nomadic, post-settlement epoch of self-imagined evolution in what he calls an age of ‘unsettlement’.
Fry proposes that if humanity is to continue to exist through this period in a state of ‘sustainment’ it will be necessary for it to make a great imaginative leap and exceed its own anthropocentrism. The project that could achieve this, one that in Fry’s thinking exceeds the Enlightenment itself in scope, is what he calls ‘ontological design’: a very conscious rethinking of human subjectivity that recognises that ‘we are born into animality and become human.’ The ‘world-within-a-world’ that we operate in is basically a work of the imagination, an instrumental fiction that has allowed us to believe that our capacity for expansion and growth are limitless. It’s a fatal flaw.
Through a philosophical framework informed by Nietzsche and Heidegger, Fry is concerned with some potentially very dangerous questions about the politics of ‘futuring’ humanity. While a great deal of what he has to say deserves to filter past the sometimes heavy-going prose, and into public discourse, some of the ideas he allows himself to imagine seem as if they have emerged from the worst political excesses of the twentieth century. Most disturbingly Fry envisages a future period of inevitable human ‘culling’, a provocative term that to me suggests something more menacingly active than a passive dying off of large numbers of people in conditions of environmental degradation. More central to Fry’s argument is his proposal of a successor to Nietzsche’s tainted übermensch, the awkwardly named ‘humax’, effectively a class of elite design leaders, monkish and isolated perhaps, who are tasked with the work of reshaping human self-understanding.
The vision Fry has for humanity is perhaps more grimly practical than Hessel’s indignant idealism, yet it is in that practicality, its imagining of a fragmented, sad, and sometimes fanciful reality that it is most convincing.
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