Term Paper on "Dick / Garreau / Lanier"

Term Paper 8 pages (3534 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

" In other words, Garreau already thinks that empathy is, in some way, artificial, an added enhancement to basic human nature. We must return again to this moment in Garreau's text, but for now it may serve as a contrast to the much more centralized role that empathy plays in Dick's definition of the human. Empathy is, of course, what Dick's fictional "Voight-Kampff Empathy Test" is designed to measure -- empathy is what the andys lack, and also pivotally is why "an android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism," the religion for which the "empathy box" serves as household altar (28). It is worth noting that Garreau's similar test for identifying a human -- the "Shakespeare Test" -- also contains the elements of empathy and the sense of empathy as something that has been redefined and strengthened over time: Garreau claims that anything Shakespeare could imagine as human somehow "passes the human nature test" while at the same time insisting that "some habits of millennia ago, such as eye gouging, are now regarded as pathological and monstrous" (Garreau 158). Dick's idea of a Voight-Kampff test likewise hinges on the fact that some behavior might innately seem cruel and monstrous -- yet it is somewhat bizarre that the test in the novel involve cruelty to animals, particularly insects. Rachel Rosen and Luba Luft both give the wrong answer to Deckard's Voight-Kampff inquiry about killing a wasp (47, 100-1), just as Isidore must watch the android Pris pull the legs off a spider (205-9). Given how routinely the average reader of Do Androids Dream may have swatted a fly or stepped on an ant, it is hard to understand this as a viable test of empathy, but it seems like the real point may life in the fact that both the Voight-Kampff and the Shakespeare Tests are ultimately versions of the original Turing Test -- something that can distinguish a man from a machine. A human killing a wasp might have a motivation (to prevent the wasp from stinging) -- but perhaps Dick thinks there is something innately terrifying in the idea of a sentient machine, which presumably has nothing to fear from a wasp's sting, taking the initiative to end the life of something that is not a machine.

Death seems to be the limit to empathy here, and it returns us to the all-important role of religion in Dick's novel: to remind us of the centrality, it is worth noting that the book's conclusion hinges not upon the androids of the title, but the fictional religion of Mercerism. Yet what is the central element of Mercerism? We have noted that it is defined as a religion based on an empathetic sense of union -- the one thing that the technologically-created androids cannot achieve -- yet it is also a religion that requires technology to achieve, with an "empathy box." What the Mercerist empathizes with is the via dolorosa of Wilbur Mercer, and uses the box to follow Mercer's journey and "move along with life, going where it goes, to death" (240). But Mercer identifies himself with all organic biological life -- he is like a Christ-figure for the post-nuclear mass extinction -- and the negative forces of the universe in Mercerism are known as "The Killers" (30). Mercerism in the novel also has its shadowy antagonist in the nonstop 23-hour television program hosted by Buster Friendly, who is also (by the novel's close) revealed to be an android. Indeed the chickenhead Isidore sees Mercer and Buster Friendly as being like God and the Devil, two competing quasi-religious forces:

…the American and Soviet police had publicly stated that Mercerism reduced crime by making citizens more concerned about the plight of their neighbors. Mankind needs more empathy, Titus Corning, the U.N. Secretary General, had declared several times. Maybe Buster is jealous, Isidore conjectured. Sure, that would explain it; he and Wilbur Mercer are in competition. But for what? Our minds, Isidore decided. They're fighting for control of our psychic selves; the empathy box on the one hand, Buster's guffaws and off- the-cuff jibes on the other (73)

This makes a claim for the social utility of empathy and religion, but is there really nothing more to religion than empathy? For a start, it's worth noting that Mercerism entails more than empathy -- it is also a communal experience that androids cannot partake of. In this it resembles Jaron Lanier's notion of "swarming" described by Garreau: the "interesting growth in human social connection Lanier has in mind…called 'swarming'… the unintended consequence of people, cell phones in hand, learning that they can coordinate instantly and leaderlessly….Swarming is a classic example of how once-isolated individuals discover a new way to organize order out of chaos" (Garreau 215). Yet the order that is organized here is one in which the ego is subsumed into a collective identity -- this is presumably how Lanier's "swarming" resembles Dick's Mercerism. Of course Mercerism is only "leaderless" because its adherents re-enact the life of Mercer, thinking he is dead. It becomes even more leaderless when Buster Friendly exposes Mercer as a fiction -- until that point, Mercer is understood as a kind of Christ-figure who suffers for the environmental devastation of the planet. (Although the world of the novel is a consequence of nuclear devastation, it is clear that more larger questions of environmentalism are behind the idea of Mercerism -- in particular, the absence of birds as the defining aspect of the post-nuclear environment sounds like it derives from Rachel Carson's pioneering 1950s environmentalist bestseller Silent Spring, a book Dick must surely have heard of.) But even if Mercer is seen as fraudulent by the end of the book, he does not -- in Deckard's eyes or in Dick's -- become unnecessary. Instead, the fictional empathy encouraged by Mercer seems all the more necessary by the novel's close. In some sense, this is not far off from Garreau's explicit analysis of religion in Radical Evolution, where he notes that

The desire to believe goes way back in evolutionary history. "At the start of the 20th century, sociologists said religiosity would decline because of public education and the rise of science; instead it got bigger," notes Michael Shermer… (Garreau 259)

In some sense, it is the increase in technology that leads to the increase in religion in Dick's novel. Dick's genius is to show a future where everything, including religion, depends upon technology: whether it is the mental state of Iran Deckard, the nonstop propaganda of Buster Friendly, or the religious agape for non-technological life that is preached by Mercer. We do not learn what happens to Mercerism after Buster Friendly's revelation at the end of Dick's novel -- instead, we end with Rick Deckard's sense that Mercerism remains necessary. But the fact that Mercerism is itself a product of technology does not mean it is not a religion. Lanier himself notes in You Are Not A Gadget that his own virtual reality machines are capable of a religious interpretation (even though he himself rejects it):

I sometimes think of cybernetic totalist culture as a new religion. The designation is much more than an approximate metaphor, since it includes a new kind of quest for an afterlife. It's so weird to me that Ray Kurzweil wants the global computing cloud to scoop up the contents of our brains so we can live forever in virtual reality. When my friends and I built the first virtual reality machines, the whole point was to make this world more creative, expressive, empathic, and interesting. It was not to escape it. (Lanier 32-3).

It is worth mentioning Lanier because his virtual reality machines are probably the closest existing technology we have to what is described by Dick as the Mercerism "empathy box." It is no accident that Lanier describes his machines as a way to "make this world more…empathic." But Lanier does not think that the increase in empathy necessarily should lead to religious thinking, and suggests Kurzweil goes too far. But of course Jaron Lanier knows that virtual reality isn't actually reality -- whereas Rick Deckard's religious tendency goes in the other direction. "Mercer isn't a fake," Deckard says, "unless reality is a fake." (232).

The tangled interaction between technology and religion and empathy, as seen in both Dick and Garreau, may ultimately have a solution. For Dick, and for Deckard, the empathy at the heart of Mercerism is no more "fake" than reality itself. And Garreau after all devotes some time to Karen Armstrong's concept of religion: "She sees religion as a universal search for meaning and values. She believes… READ MORE

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