Man and Superman

In the 1960s, two alternative visions of the future burst onto the popular landscape.  Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was co-written and based upon a short story by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, was released in 1968, and two years earlier, in September 1966, the American television series Star Trek debuted.  While both of these science fiction productions immediately captured widespread attention, their receptions were not universally positive at the time.  2001: A Space Odyssey opened to decidedly mixed reviews, with some critics praising its vision and scope, and others deriding it for its plodding length and the lack of an engaging or compelling story line.  Star Trek also premiered to mixed reviews, and had less than stellar ratings during its entire original three-year run.  It is probably safe to say that time has been kind to both of these productions, however, since today they are both generally regarded as groundbreaking works of science fiction.  I have always been fascinated by the similarities and contrasts of these respective visions of the future.

Both, for example, shared what in retrospect was clearly an overoptimistic assessment of where our technology would take us by the beginning of the twenty-first century: conducting manned explorations of our own solar system, and on the threshold of interstellar travel.  (While the Star Trek setting was more than two centuries into the future, it is clear from certain episodes that manned space exploration had begun in earnest by the end of the twentieth century.)  At the time, however, such optimism was certainly warranted by what had taken place over the previous century.  After all, one hundred years earlier, conveniences that were commonplace in the 1960’s, such as telephones, radio, television, automobiles, and atomic power, were completely unimaginable.  It had been just a little over sixty years since the Wright brothers had successfully lifted off of the ground in their heavier-than-air flying machine, and in the succeeding two generations, their simple design was transformed into the modern jet airplane that could ferry passengers across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean in just a matter of hours.  Advanced propulsion systems also powered rockets that could send manned capsules above the earth’s atmosphere into outer space, and by the end of the 1960s, one of these actually enabled the first landing of astronauts on the surface of the moon.

Small wonder, then, that science fiction writers in the middle of the 20^th century envisioned a 21^st century world that would be as different from their own as theirs was from that of a hundred years earlier.  While the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 must have provided an ecstatic confirmation that such visions of the future were coming to pass, I can only imagine the shock that most of these writers would have felt back then if they could have looked ahead half a century, and seen a world in which there had been no significant further advance to the planets and the stars, no apparent general interest or desire in even making such an advance, and in fact a skepticism evident among many that human beings had ever actually walked on the moon.

The future conquest of space, for 20^th century scientific visionaries such as Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Roddenberry (the creator of Star Trek), was a given.  It was part of our collective destiny, and the trajectory of scientific discoveries – particularly those of the past century – suggested that this destiny was an imminent one.  This was the shared vision of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek: that we were on the cusp of a great leap into a new, exciting level of civilization, and that this leap would involve a movement outward, into the limitless reaches of outer space.  But as intriguing as the similarities of these visions were, there was a much more intriguing, fundamental difference, and this involved human beings themselves, and how best they should accommodate themselves to the future. 

In the universe of 2001: A Space Odyssey, humanity, and human civilization, have come into being through a process of personal transformation, or rather, transmutation.  At the beginning of the movie, we are shown a sort of creation story explaining the rise of Homo sapiens: how a group of ape-like creatures were suddenly endowed with the ability to conceptualize the creation of tools and weapons after encountering a mysterious black obelisk.  It is assumed that this endowment involved more than simply the transmission of an idea, but also a genetic mutation that gave these creatures the latent ability to use and retain such information.  The saga then moves forward, to the future, where scientists have discovered another of these obelisks on the moon, and a mission of astronauts is sent to Jupiter to find the destination of a mysterious, directed, signal emitted by that lunar structure.  The movie concludes with an encounter by one of these astronauts with yet a third obelisk, orbiting Jupiter, which transmutes the astronaut into a higher being: a “star child”.  In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name, the story ends with this new entity contemplating how it will re-engage with the human race, the implication being that – as the transmuted ape-men had done millions of years earlier – he will have a direct role in moving humanity and human civilization into its next, higher phase of evolution.  Hence, in this vision of humanity’s evolution, each milestone in development is catalyzed (presumably, with the help of an advanced alien race) by the appearance of one or more “supermen”, who, through both their actions and their genes, advance the species upward to the next rung.

It is ironic, then, that Star Trek, which was first broadcast two years before 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered, constitutes a sort of rebuttal to that movie’s vision of civilization’s advancement.  Because a recurring theme in this television series is that the improvement of civilization comes about through making do with what we have, and who we are, rather than through some sort of profound transformational process.  In fact, in the Star Trek universe, the “star child” was always the nemesis of such a process.  In episode after episode, the appearance of a prodigy always signaled potential disaster, and it was only through the valiant efforts of the series’ main characters that such prodigies were eventually reined in or destroyed.  Here are just a few of the episodes that touched on that theme:

·        In the pilot episode for the series, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, a crew member of the Enterprise – the starship which is engaged in interplanetary exploration – attains nearly god-like powers after having been irradiated with some strange energy source at the edge of the galaxy.  (And in an interesting twist, the actor who portrayed this crew member, Gary Lockwood, was also in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, portraying the doomed fellow astronaut of the man who would become the “star child” at the end of that film.)  Rather than using these powers to shepherd humanity onto its next phase of evolution, the affected man becomes a narcissistic tyrant, and is only destroyed after the series’ main hero, Captain Kirk, enlists the aid of a woman who has also gained some of these powers in opposing him (Captain Kirk convinces her that the man will never tolerate a rival with similar powers: in the end, he warns, there will only be “one jealous god”) and she successfully does so at the cost of her own life.

·        In the original, failed pilot episode, “The Cage” (which was later incorporated into the series as “The Menagerie”), a race of beings called Talosians have evolved their mental faculties to such a high level that dreams and fantasies have become more important to them than reality, and they are desperately in search of some other, less-evolved species which can rebuild their world for them.

·        In “Charlie X”, a teenaged-boy who had gained telekinetic powers from a race of advanced aliens terrorizes the crew of the Enterprise, as he lashes out at them while struggling with the typical emotional upheavals and insecurities of adolescence.  The crew is only saved when the aliens return and take him away, explaining that because of his new powers he will never again be able to coexist with other human beings.

·        In “Space Seed”, the crew encounters a spaceship with human beings in suspended animation.  After reviving their leader, Khan, Captain Kirk learns that these people are survivors of a eugenics experiment in the late 20^th century: a plan to create a race of supermen and superwomen with heightened mental and physical capabilities.  Rather than saving the world, however, these super-beings had nearly destroyed it, as they behaved like marauders and conquerors, rather than sages and guides, until they were finally defeated and sent out into exile.  Captain Kirk is forced to defeat them again, and exile them again onto another planet.

These are just a few of the many variations of this theme that played out through the entire run of the series.  In Roddenberry’s vision of the future, the star-child, the superman, is the bane of humanity, not its savior.

Was Roddenberry right?  Is there no place for the superman or superwoman in our world?  They have certainly found a place in our mythologies, our popular dramas, and even our histories.  Perhaps a cursory inspection of some of these will help to shed light on the role, if any, of the superman.  And there is probably no better place to start than with the philosopher of the superman himself, Friedrich Nietzsche. 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche used a historical figure, the Persian sage Zoroaster, as the mouthpiece for his own philosophies about God, morality, power, and the purpose of existence.  The real Zoroaster had preached that existence consists of a struggle between truth and falsehood, and that the goal of life is to sustain truth through the practice of good works and constructive acts, and the shunning of ignorance.  Such behaviors increase the divine force within the world, while moving those who engage in them closer to union with God.  Nietzsche’s Zoroaster (Zarathustra) also preaches the pursuit of truth, but for this Zarathustra, truth comes from exposing the lie that is inherent in conventional concepts of morality.  “God is dead”, he declares, and man is merely a being in a precarious state of transition between ape and superman.  Ignorance and chaos are overcome, not by the practice of good works, but through self-mastery, courage, and enhancement of one’s power and abilities.  Nietzsche’s Zarathustra declares:

I teach you the superman.  Man is something that shall be overcome.  What have you done to overcome him?

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?  What is the ape to man?  A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.  And man shall be just that for the superman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.  You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.  Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. . . .

Behold, I teach you the superman!  The superman is the meaning of the earth.  Let your will say: the superman shall be the meaning of the earth!  I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!  Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not.  Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go!

In 1896, less than a decade after Nietzsche published his novel, Richard Strauss composed the musical tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which had been inspired by that work.  It is the opening bars of this musical composition which are heard at the beginning and the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Of course, for those who have been alive within the past half century, and particularly for Americans, the word “superman” probably produces a very distinct image, which seems to have little connection to the Nietzschean one.  It is of the tall man with the red cape and the letter “S” on his chest, the Superman of the comic books.  His story is actually not that far removed from that of Kubrick’s movie:  He was a “star child” in his own right, sent by a benign, advanced extraterrestrial civilization to improve the lot of humanity.  In probably the best and most memorable depiction of this story, the 1978 movie Superman, with Christopher Reeve, Kal-El, the alien, receives an explanation in recordings from his long-dead father, Jor-El, of why he has been sent to earth:

Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and where your power are needed. . . . They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be.  They only lack the light to show the way.  For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you . . . my only son.

Now this speech of Jor-El’s in the 1978 movie, along with the presentation in that movie of Superman’s early life history – evidence of precocious abilities as a child, his apparent withdrawal from the world during his late adolescence and early adulthood, followed by his return at the age of thirty with a clear sense of his mission – brings to mind another “star-child” who has played a major role as a religious figure in western civilization, but more on that later.  Those who have seen this or any of the Superman movies, or read the comic books, while marveling at his powers and admiring his heroism, must be left wondering exactly what sort of lasting legacy to the human race he was supposed to leave.  Because, quite frankly, it seems that he spends all of his time doing good deeds – fighting crime, saving people from natural catastrophes, playing the role of valiant knight for his fair lady and occasional damsel in distress, Lois Lane, and dispatching the occasional megalomaniacal evil genius – but doing nothing else of consequence that will move humanity onto a higher plane of being.  One can only imagine that after spending a lifetime of putting out fires, rescuing cats from trees, and chasing down felons and petty criminals, this super being would be left asking himself what it all amounted to.  I am reminded of a comedy sketch in which the comedian Jerry Seinfeld portrays Superman in an interview.  The interviewer asks if he might consider helping out with garbage collection while the garbage workers’ strike is going on, to which he angrily replies that he will do no such thing, regardless of how easy it would be for him to do it.  But really, what Superman does do to occupy his time does not seem that much more consequential, in the grand scheme of things.  What is the lasting, world-changing, lesson that his life would impart to us: that we should all devote a greater amount of our time to civic activities, such as joining the volunteer fire department?

Perhaps, like the transmuted ape men in Kubrick’s movie, he would leave us with an improved genetic heritage, after marrying Lois Lane and fathering children with her.  But what guarantee would there be that all of his descendants, each of whom would have at least a part of his remarkable powers, will be as high-minded as he was, with the same sense of mission?  What if one or more of them chose to use their powers strictly for their own self-aggrandizement, possibly in very brutal ways?  And isn’t there a real danger that this lineage of supermen and superwomen would merely set themselves aside as an upper caste of superior beings, and run roughshod over the rest of humanity?

This darker vision of the star child was presented in the 1995 science fiction film Species, in which scientists receive instructions from an extraterrestrial intelligence on how to use gene splicing in order to create a genetically-enhanced human being.  The female that is produced becomes ruthlessly fixated on propagating this new, superior, line, and the unfortunate human males that she attempts to enlist in achieving this end are given the same treatment as the mate of a female preying mantis or black widow spider – a reflection of the general contempt and complete disregard that she holds for ordinary humans.

In mythology, the intermixing of superman and man, or rather god and man, is not uncommon, and, with some exceptions, such as in the Old Testament, where when “the sons of god came unto the daughters of men” the result was a race of giants, these unions did not generally produce disruptive consequences.  Many of the royal lines of ancient civilizations, such as the pharaohs of Egypt, believed that they were descendants of divine beings.  And many of the heroes and heroines of Greek and Roman mythology were god/human hybrids, such as Achilles, Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, and even Helen of Troy.  Aeneas, the legendary Trojan ancestor of the Romans, was the son of a human father and the goddess Venus.   Often, the supermen and superwomen of mythology – the gods and demigods – became the center of mystery cults, where secret knowledge was passed on to initiates.  A particularly interesting example is that of Dionysus, another god/human hybrid.  He became associated with wine, dance, and theatrical entertainments, and his cultic followers were reputed to be driven into ecstatic frenzies during their nightly gatherings.  Dionysus became the symbol of self-expressive, impulsive freedom, along with a contempt for oppressive, conventional mores and standards.  Nietzsche’s Zarathustra preached just such a Dionysian approach to living.

And lest one be tempted to think that the manic ecstasies that overcame the followers of Dionysus – the “Bacchanalia” – were purely the stuff of myth and legend, one need only look to the modern incarnations of Dionysus that appeared in the 20-century, such as Elvis Presley, whose fans screamed, swooned, and fainted during his performances.  It became customary for an Elvis concert to begin with the opening bars of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and for the same reason that it was used in Kubrick’s film: to herald the imminent appearance of the superman.  Elvis’s impact on his audience was soon rivaled by the Beatles, and here, too, an almost supernatural aura eventually haloed these artists.  More than a few devotees of the band pored over the lyrics of their songs, hoping to tease out of them answers to the riddle of life.  The Beatles’ meteoric rise was nearly aborted when one of its members, John Lennon, declared that the band was “bigger than Jesus”, which created a firestorm of controversy that only subsided after Lennon subsequently distanced himself from the remark in a display of public contrition.  And this brings us to that most famous “star child” of religion, Jesus Christ.

Jesus has all the classic hallmarks of a “superman”: with extraordinary powers, an unnatural origin, and a sense of a personal mission.  He is linked with the Judeo-Christian god, but he is not a demigod like those of classical mythology: a hybrid between god and man.  Rather he is presented as God and man both, and his birth is not attributed to any sort of intercourse between his mother and a supernatural being.  And yet, in his incarnation as a human, he faces many of the same dilemmas and challenges as the other supermen described above.  In the first public miracle that he performed as an adult (as reported in the Gospel of John), he and his mother had been attending a wedding, and his mother informs him that the host has run out of wine.  With probably more than a little irritation (his mother’s implied request brings to mind Jerry Seinfeld’s Superman being asked to help out during the garbage strike), he replies “O Woman, what have I to do with you?” and then proceeds to turn water into wine.  The miracles that follow in his career are of a decidedly more altruistic bent, as he heals the crippled, the sick, and the insane, and even restores life to persons who had recently passed away.  But within the physical limitations of a man’s body, he can only do so much, regardless of his supernatural abilities.  This is tellingly portrayed in the rock opera Jesus Christ, Superstar, when, at one point, when he is mobbed by an overwhelming throng of people begging to be healed, he shouts “Stop . . . stop!”  There is simply not enough time and opportunity to heal everybody who needs healing, even for a God incarnate. 

One is tempted to wonder, had Jesus lived a long life, wandering about Judea healing the sick and the lame, if he would also have had an existential crisis, asking himself what enduring legacy his lifetime of good works had produced, if any.  I suspect not.  It seems that for Jesus, his real mission, all along, had been to leave the world with a new idea, about how one should relate to God and to one’s fellow human beings.  Clearly, there was no intent to leave some sort of genetic legacy (The Da Vinci Code novel notwithstanding) by producing a new priest caste with a supernatural lineage, although, according to some early church histories, the Romans actually had suspected that Jesus’ intent was to produce a sort of messianic or royal lineage in Judea, and so set about exterminating all of his living relatives, including those who had never been associated with his movement.  Nor did he ever seem to involve himself in the political revolt of Judeans against the abuses of the occupying Romans.  No, this particular superman always had a spiritual legacy in sight, never a hereditary or a political one.

Some religious scholars have attempted to draw parallels – or even links – between the Jesus story and the myth of Dionysus, with the special role of wine (and its symbolic relationship to blood) in the rituals of both of their followers, the mystical process of infusion of the spirit of God (or of a god) into devotees, and the common motif of the god-man that dies and is reborn.  But the morality of Jesus – or at least that of his later Christian followers – was distinctly anti-Dionysian, and it is this morality that Nietzsche directs most of his wrath against in his own philosophy of the superman.  For Nietzsche, Christianity – or rather his interpretation of it – was a slave morality, a religion of resentment, in which the weak and oppressed could look forward to a better life in the next world, while those who had been bold enough and/or powerful enough to savor life and its possibilities in this one would be punished for their impetuosity and advantages in the afterlife.  Clearly, all supermen do not sing from the same songbook.

(It should be noted, however, that the Christianity which Nietzsche rails against bears little resemblance to the actual sayings of Jesus.  The Jesus of the gospels is a vocal critic of an overly structured and legalistic approach to religion and ethics, advocating instead a positive morality grounded in love and compassion which is organic rather than rigid, and which could even be considered - according to the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev - as a dynamic, creative morality.  In this respect, the morality of Jesus, if not that of formal Christianity, might not be so "anti-Dionysian" after all.)

What role, if any, has the superman played in the recorded history of civilization?  If we leave aside the supernatural, and the extraterrestrial, then what we are left with are prodigies – human beings with special gifts that allowed them to leave a lasting impact upon posterity.  These are almost invariably intellectual gifts, associated with philosophical or scientific geniuses who lighted the way to material advances in civilization, men such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.  We might also include great artists, architects, musical composers, and industrialists.  Perhaps we could also include political or military geniuses, who founded or overthrew empires, and created new systems of government. 

Interestingly, few if any of these prodigies, I think, would have regarded themselves as supermen, or would have espoused a philosophy of the superman.  (Although the popular 20^th century philosopher Ayn Rand, in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, promulgated a philosophy that celebrated the gifted engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, architects, and artists of the world, and which suggested that the bane of civilization has been those who have attempted to undermine or even sabotage their achievements and contributions under the banner of altruism.)  There were, of course, notable exceptions, most memorably in the twentieth century: men such as Hitler, and Stalin (a name that he gave himself, which means “man of steel”).  Whatever genuine personal abilities that these men possessed, they certainly were the architects of ambitious programs among their respective peoples to try to achieve greatness, with horrifying consequences.  At the height of his popularity, Hitler had that same Dionysian quality of the 1960s rock stars which enabled him to stir his audiences into a hysterical, ecstatic, frenzy.  Many have even suggested that – with his intent to create the “master race” – he drew direct inspiration from the Nietzschean philosophy, but if so, it was a garbled application of it, since Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would have abhorred the conformist and regimented society of Nazi Germany as antithetical to the impulsive, self-expressive personality of the superman he envisioned.

In fact, many if not most of the authentic benefactors of our civilization would probably have regarded themselves as very ordinary human beings who simply answered a higher calling.  In some cases, this calling was thrust upon them, as in the case of the Old Testament’s Moses.  For persons such as he, there is often an initial reluctance to answer the call, because they are certain that there must be somebody else out there, infinitely more qualified than them, to answer it.  I am reminded of one of my favorite movies, Zulu, which depicts the true story of the desperate resistance put up by British soldiers in a solitary outpost in Africa against several thousand Zulu warriors who had recently defeated and massacred a British army that had greatly outnumbered them.  There are only about one hundred and fifty soldiers stationed at this fort, and so the odds of their survival – let alone victory – against this Zulu army seem overwhelmingly low.  In one particular scene in this movie, as the occupants in the fort are preparing to fend off an assault by the Zulu warriors, a young British soldier, frightened, weary, and very distraught, turns to his sergeant and says, “Why is it us?  Why us?”  The sergeant replies, stoically, “Because we’re here, lad.  Nobody else.  Just us.”  The British soldiers ultimately prevail, fending off wave after wave of attacks by the Zulus, until the native warriors finally give up on their assault, salute the occupants of the fort as fellow braves, and leave them in peace.  At the end of the movie, a narrator (the actor Richard Burton) reads the names of the British soldiers who received the Victoria Cross for valor in this battle, and what impresses the viewer is that some of these soldiers, before they had been thrown into this conflict, had been most conspicuously un-heroic characters.  It was the extraordinary circumstances that they had been compelled to face that had made them great, by meeting and overcoming these challenges.

Other ordinary people found their greatness by actively seeking out some great calling to answer in their lives: persons such as Winston Churchill, who had shown himself to be a most unremarkable and unpromising student as a youth, but who went on to become one of the most legendary statesmen of the 20^th century because of his personal passion for engaging in the affairs of the world.  The American inventor Thomas Edison had received little formal education in his youth, and one of those who had attempted to educate him considered him “addled”, with a wandering, undisciplined mind.  But he devoted himself to scientific innovation and the creation of new things by addressing problems with an open mind, avoiding preconceived notions on how to solve them.  Had anyone called Edison a genius, he probably would have protested that his accomplishments came about from his commitment to look at the world in creative, unconventional ways, and not from any innate, superior abilities.  Even many if not most of the spiritual innovators in our history, such as the man who would eventually come to be known as the Buddha, did not possess innate talents or gifts that predisposed them to their insights, but instead came to these insights through a devoted, intensive search for truth and revelation.

And, too, many of the most accomplished persons in our history have actually been handicapped human beings: blind, deaf, disabled, or with other limitations that would seem to make them the opposite of “supermen”.  Yet, in spite of these limitations, or perhaps because of them, they made great, lasting accomplishments in the world.  Thomas Edison and Ludwig Van Beethoven both had to contend with deafness before the end of their lives.  Steven J. Hawking, one of the greatest physicists of our time, has been crippled for much of his life with Lou Gehrig’s disease.  Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, two very popular composers of the past century, are both blind.  Look at just about any noteworthy artist or innovator in human history, and you will probably find something about them that was conspicuously imperfect.

This, really, is the mark of the hero, as opposed to the superman.  The hero is somebody who is ordinary, or less than ordinary, but who finds their inner greatness by rising to meet extraordinary challenges.  This process of confronting the extraordinary might change them – and usually does – but only because it forces them to rise above themselves and what they had perceived to be their own limitations, and to find ways to draw upon inexhaustible resources within and without them to achieve what had once seemed impossible.

Of course, often the lines have been blurred between the superman and the hero: between those who have accomplished great things because they felt that they had the innate ability to do so (and perhaps felt an obligation to manifest their talent), and those who addressed great problems simply because they felt that these needed to be faced or overcome.  (Who for example, would not call the comic book Superman a hero?)  Was Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superman really a call for a new, superior line of human beings, or merely an exhortation to all of us to embrace the Dionysian spirit of courageous self-expression, and by doing so move closer to that brand of behavior that might actually be characteristic of the hero?  And sometimes, those who have applied themselves to great trials or undertakings actually discover that they do possess talents or abilities that they never dreamed of.  (One wonders how many potential chess masters never came to be, simply because they were never introduced to the game, or how many great pieces of music were never written, because the geniuses that would have composed them had never learned how to play a musical instrument.)  On the other hand, many persons who have accomplished remarkable things by boldly engaging with the world have subsequently succumbed to the temptation to falsely believe that they are “supermen”, or at least men of destiny, such as Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte, with ultimately disastrous consequences.

The hero and the superman:  Perhaps our civilization actually has benefited from them both.  I believe, however, that the hero’s course has always been the harder one, because it compels one to face challenges and to abandon preconceived notions of oneself and the world that one is facing.  On the other hand, the ideal of the superman has always been a lure, a temptation, a hope.  We want to be saved by supermen: each of us may even want to be a superman.  And in the coming generation, gene technology may actually provide us with the means to make this possible.  We may have the capability to change – if not ourselves, then our descendants – in ways that will present advantages in the future world.  Like plastic surgery, we might be presented with a menu of such improvement options.  But I cannot help but wonder if recourse to such technologies – which may only be available to those who can afford them – will only serve to deepen the already growing gulf that we are experiencing between the haves and the have-nots.

And it is for this reason that I tend to rest my hopes for the progress of civilization on the hero, rather than the superman or star child.  I think that the vision inherent in the Star Trek series is the more compelling one than in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey:  we will find our future destiny by facing the challenges of an evolving technological civilization with the capabilities and limitations that we currently have.  By accepting and embracing our humanity, with all of its latent potentials, but also its inherent and inescapable shortcomings, we will best be able to continue this progress of civilization, and bring out the greatness that is within all of us.