One of Eduardo Kac’s exhibits, “Genesis,” is built on a verse from the Bible: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The meaning of our dominion, and perhaps our accountability, is changing. With mankind’s history in the dog/human partnership, it is not clear that we are up to the task.
And what of ourselves? These technologies will eventually be transferable to the human species. The same ease of use and speed of implementation will eventually apply. Then the challenge will be both legal and practical. Constraints and laws now being debated in the press may become moot. Modifications may be so easy to do that law enforcement may be impossible. The complex ethical issues could be resolved by practices of the population not debate. Our dealings with dogs foreshadow how we will form ourselves. It will be an opportunity with no small risk and, again, it is not clear that we will be up to the task.
*Note
Proto-Dogs
In spite of centuries of specialized breeding, prized conformations vanish when a pure breeds “return to the wild.” Highly developed traits disappear as dogs mongrelize and the sleek, athletic shape of the ancient proto-dog breeds through. You see these dogs wild on the streets of Bombay, Nairobi and Austin. Short hair, ginger colored, they have long, runners’ bodies with curved, undocked tails. The wild dogs, the dhole of Asia, the dingo of Australia and the Carolina dog of North America, the singing dog of New Guinea all have the same look. This proto-dog shape returns as sure as if it had been hiding somewhere in a secret genetic basement, held in check only by the constant vigilance of the breeding community, waiting to come home.
* * * *
Dan Derby is a product designer by training and a writer/consultant by vocation. He’s designed and patented hi-tech gear, fixed dysfunctional organizations, and lectured at Stanford University. A southerner by birth, he’s lived on both coasts as well as overseas, and is now dug in on a hill in rural New Hampshire where it’s warm, snowy, and the people are strong and true. Dan’s previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archive.
Links and Further Reading
Books
Abrantes, Roger. The Evolution of Canine Social Behavior.
Budiansky, Stephen. The Truth About Dogs : An Inquiry into the Ancestry, Social Conventions, Mental Habits, and Moral Fiber of Canis Familiaris.
Coppinger, Raymond, and Laura Coppinger. Dogs : A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution.
Scott, John Paul, and John L. Fuller, Eds. Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog.
Online Articles and Websites
Bioengineering For Dummies
FDA on bioengineering
Genomics
How Transgenics Are Produced
Primitive Dogs
Wolf to Woof: The Evolution of Dogs
Animal Rights Organizations
Animal Aid
National Humane Education Society
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Canada)
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (US)
Culture Clash: Ambivalent Heroes and the Ambiguous Utopia in the Work of Iain M. Banks
By David Horwich
1/21/01
[The Culture] could easily grow for ever, because it was not governed by natural limitations. Like a rogue cell, a cancer with no “off” switch in its genetic composition, the Culture would go on expanding for as long as it was allowed to. (Consider Phlebas)
Iain M. Banks is one of the most noteworthy authors to appear on the SF scene in the last two decades. His eight SF novels and one story collection feature a fertile, fervid imagination and supple writing style. Most of Banks’ SF work (he also publishes non-SF under the name Iain Banks) is set in the universe of the Culture, an unusual variation on the tropes of both galactic empire and utopia.
Banks’ Culture stories—Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, The State of the Art, Excession, and Look to Windward—are set in different periods of Culture history, covering (so far) about an 800-year span of the Culture’s millennia-long existence. By showing the Culture from a variety of perspectives—from inside and outside, through characters who range from happily integrated Culture citizens to the Culture’s direst enemies—Banks raises a number of thought-provoking questions about the potential for the perfectibility of human society.
What is the Culture?
No laws or written regulations at all, but so many little … observances, sets of manners, ways of behaving politely. And fashions. They had fashions in so many things, from the most trivial to the most momentous. (Look to Windward)
The Culture is, essentially, a paradise. Wielding a highly advanced level of technology, the multispecies Culture enjoys a postmonetary economy of abundance, with virtually unlimited resources of matter and energy at its disposal. The Culture’s achievements are mind-bendingly awesome. Sophisticated bioengineering has provided Culture citizens with wide-ranging control over their anatomy; for example, Culture citizens can change their gender by an act of will over a period of time; most Culture citizens switch back and forth several times in the course of their centuries-long lives. They choose whether or not to become pregnant, and can even stop and restart an embryo’s growth in the womb. Culture citizens have drug glands, which allow them to modify their neurochemistry for a variety of purposes, from increased alertness and mental functioning to pure hedonistic pleasure. Culture citizens can achieve virtual immortality (although most choose a life span of about 350-400 years) through the Culture’s medical capabilities, which include the abilities to heal almost any injury (one character manages to survive a beheading, being regrown from the neck down) and to store brain patterns in a computer matrix for later reawakening and insertion into a new body.
The Culture’s economy of abundance and high technology also allows many other impressive feats of engineering. Most of the Culture’s population live in constructed environments, primarily on gigantic Orbitals, a la Niven’s Ringworld, or on enormous starships tens of kilometers long and carrying, in some cases, several billion inhabitants. The scale of the Culture is almost beyond comprehension.
The linchpin to both the Culture’s technology and its internal cohesion are the Minds, extremely sophisticated Artificial Intelligences in full partnership with the Culture’s biological members. Every starship has its own Mind, giving each ship a distinct personality; other Minds run Orbitals and other Culture habitats. The Minds, which far exceed biological life forms in their cognitive abilities, run the Culture, as much as anything can be said to “run” the Culture:
…a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental level than did any single human or group of humans within the society. (Consider Phlebas)
Politically, the Culture is basically an anarchy, albeit a surprisingly resilient one. Banks implicitly suggests that an economy of abundance is incompatible with the continued existence of hierarchical structures. The Culture doesn’t suffer from any significant internal political unrest; small groups occasionally splinter off from it, and new groups join, but the fundamental ethos of the Culture—tolerant, benevolent, pacifistic—provides an underlying value structure that holds the Culture together over time. With the Minds seeing to all the conceivable material needs, the Culture’s human citizenry is free to play in its protected paradise. In some ways, the Culture’s humans live in an extended childhood, freed of any real responsibility:
Perhaps that was even why they had handed over so much of the running of their civilization to the machines in the first place; they didn’t trust themselves with the colossal powers and energies their science and technology had provided them with. (Look to Windward)
The Culture’s egalitarian and libertarian ethos often seems inherently threatening to other civilizations built on hierarchical structures. In addition, many other cultures, not sharing the Culture’s respect for artificial intelligences, find the Culture’s dependence on the Minds abhorrent. Most of Banks’ Culture stories revolve, in one way or another, around the conflict between the values of the Culture and another civilization’s values; sometimes this conflict is played out internally (in the mind of a character), and at other times externally (in sabotage or war), and sometimes in both ways simultaneously. These conflicts highlight the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the Culture, its appeal and its less endearing qualities.
Decadence and Relevance: The Ambiguous Utopia
“They spend time. That’s just it….The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives.” (Look to Windward)
“…it’s an obsession with flexibility and variety that makes this so-called Culture so boring.” (“The State of the Art”)
The Culture’s technological prowess and political stability allows its citizens almost unlimited freedom to pursue their interests in an atmosphere of near-total security—security from both outside threats as well as illness or injury. However marvelous this sounds in principle, it does promote a pronounced strain of decadence in the Culture’s culture. Furthermore, the absence of threat or risk can make life seem meaningless to its citizens, or at least to the more restless or less easily satisfied types among them. From the Minds’ point of view, the health and security of its biological wards may be sufficient reason for the Culture to exist, but for the rather coddled humans this justification cannot suffice.