No Mercy in Nature; Euphenics and Witch Hat Atelier
hes back on his weird eugenics shit again - avoid! avoid!
Witch-Hat Atelier is an ongoing fantasy Manga series by Kamome Shirahama, notable for being a really elegant work of comics craft (the Ennie award was well-deserved), and for basing the moral axis of its conflicts around the exploitation and control of post-human abilities, and the sometimes dark, paradoxical or irreconcilable moral mazes this creates.
A brief description;
A young girl, (Coco), lives in a soft high fantasy world. Magic-using 'Witches' exist but not just anyone can become a Witch, you must be born with inherent magical potential. After barely surviving a magical accident cause by a mysterious figure idly handing out very dangerous magical tools to curious young girls for dark reasons, or heroine is rescued and inducted into Witch Society, where she discovers, either quickly or gradually;
· Magic isn't even slightly inherent, quite the opposite.
· It’s a skill which most, (or many), could learn, provided you have the magical ink required, which is expensive, but not exactly plutonium-rare.
· The entirety of Witch society is a massive conspiracy created to control the use and development of magic.
· Magic can do way more insane and crazy stuff than any current Witch is allowed to do.
· If a Witch betrays the conspiracy they may be killed, or have the entirety of their magical memory wiped, (which includes most of their adult life).
· There was a Witch World-War type event or era, which nearly fractured reality.
· Most of the strange 'enchanted' places and wonders lying around are more like bomb sites or even torched holocaust factories.
· The Witch World War never actually fully ended are there are an entire cult of 'terroristic' Witches, (the ‘Brimmed Hats’) who's deal is; unrestricted magic for all! We’ll FUCKING DO IT AGAIN!
This is Harry Potter if Voldemort actually had a point; “Harry, you must let me heal this child’s cancer!”
Core Conflicts
Witch Hat Atelier is a really warm, emotional, tender and absolutely gorgeously drawn series with some anti-progressive values at its core, a curiosity it shares with Frieren, another beautiful and deeply humanistic, tender series, which has at its base, the fundamental inhumanity of the Other and how you are better of either avoiding them forever or wiping them out.
But that's a metatextual artefact, and a curious piece of 'steam-engine time' synchronicity, mainly I'm talking about the imagined world of Witch Hat Atelier and its implications.
All the Magic Witches do must affect 'objects' only; things you could hold in your handlike capes, shoes or staves. They can affect bigger things like carts, even houses, even castles. When you get to the scale of a city, or an environment, such magics are carefully controlled and largely not used.
Witches cannot do medicine or magic that effects the body. This means characters in Witch Hat Atelier can suffer traumatising physical harm and Witches will basically accept this. They may provide tools for assistance but no more. One of the leaders of Witch society rides around in a hooved magical wheelchair;
Likewise they cannot effect the mind, except for the memory-wiping thing, which is magic they keep for themselves, used only by the Witch Morality-Cops.
All Witches must maintain the lie, in fact training to be a Witch is as much training in deception over the source and nature of your abilities as it is training in magic itself, and ethical and moral indoctrination in the necessity of maintaining it, even in the most morally extreme circumstances. If you can't save people from a disaster without dropping the lie; maintain the lie and watch them burn. If you can't fix the legs of this crippled child without dropping the lie, or the principals, then he stays crippled. 'Positive' Witchcraft is the skill of providing the greatest possible good while still maintaining the deception, and while still abiding by the principals. This process is really what 'Witch Hat Atelier' is about; the moral maze that Coco falls into, driven by her earnest desire to save her mother and help others, and coming time and time again into conflict with a charming, beautiful, perhaps necessary, but oppressive and controlling society.
That Coco is drive by mercy, that her desire to help is very pure, is the source of her anguish, and makes her perhaps the perfect fulcrum to crack open the laws and morals of the Witches. That may be why the Mysterious Figure at the start was casually handing out magical grenades to passing children.
In most post-war 20th Century western fictions, the Society of Witch Hat Atelier would be the villains of the story. They may be the villains of this story. The question is an open one and considering that is part of the tale.
Its Relevance to Us
We live on the boundary of a Transhuman age. Most of Elon Musks more recent children are probably the result of full-genome analysis and Embryo selection. (And the rightoid rumour mill suggests he has a LOT more children than we know about.)
With Embryo selection you run an IVF process, fertilise a whole bunch of eggs at once, let the embryo grow a bit, then take a sample and run a full genome sequence for all of them. Then have a computer compare the genomes for the traits you can predict and which you actually want, then just have the 'best' embryo brought to term. The result is a crude designer baby mill where your resulting living child is the 'genetically optimal' of all the twenty or so children you might have had.
We don't understand, at all, how the music of genetics produces highly complex traits, but was can monkey-bash the results none the less. Even the conception of the 'qualities' we are looking for is highly affected by concepts perceived from the human scale; something like 'I.Q. has less and less value and meaning the further away you get from a complex post-industrial society etc. But we can read the full genome, and do rough correlations of what music generally goes with what traits.
This has happened and is happening now. These children exist and will inherit millions. If people will burn a Tesla, what might they do to a Musk?
Embryo Selection isn’t even that strong a method, it might be easily possible to go much, much further; https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies? Modern geneticists tend to be broadly conservative, at least compared to the things they could be doing.
Beyond this point, most billionaires children will likely be the result of Embryo selection, then most millionaires, then most large business owners, and so on. We live in a new-Eugenic age.
Argument's over the prospective powers of neural network entities take place on a fundamentally different and constantly shifting landscape of possibilities. Drones are on, Robotics may be next. Elons attempts to save us from the A.I.'s means coring ape brains to create cyborgs. This is, and will be, the Transhuman century.
This means power. Staggering amounts and forms of power, long dreamed-of but previously unknown, delivered first to a minority and then, (perhaps), gradually to everyone.
This will likely melt the human soul. The changes too many and too fast, even the basic axioms of moral development becoming so different from that generations become strangers to each other. Humans given power means chaos. At least, that’s certainly what Witch Hat Atelier seems to think.
Its answer is; Tool Control*. Or Euphenics over Eugenics. Take all these amorphous, coagulating, growing and combining transhuman powers and savagely break them down into individual, single-use, tools. Into toys. The Witches of Shirahama-sans story, bend themselves ruthlessly to the production of saleable, scalable, helpful products.
*(Its other answers are; tyrannical power, total secrecy and mind-wipes, but we will go with the tools for now).
Atelerian Computers
There is slightly more "hope" of an Aetlerian "solution" to computing as the principals of 'Toolification' mesh quite well with those of rentier Capitalism, (which I think really regrets selling us those affordable 'anything machines' and is trying to invisibly roll back on that as quickly as it can).
An Atelerian 'Computer' would not exist. Rather, something like 'Dune', there would be things like books, or hyper-books, mathematical engines, hyper-maps, magical letter-writers etc. In short anything you might use a computer for, but with each potential use being its own distinct and singular thing, perhaps even, as in 'Dune' with each being a distinct physical thing.
The 'Appification' of devices and the relentless retreat and concealment of the functional engine of the computing device away from the access of the user, hidden behind a blizzard of glyphs, fits quite well with that tendency.
I am much more conflicted about this than I am with medicine. On the one hand I viscerally hate having the united powers I now possess taken from my hand, separated, hidden and multiply charged for. On the other hand, I do feel a combination of nostalgia and dreamy presentiment, for a reality not mediated by screens, were everything you do and everything you need is related to a particular physical object and more of the action of a human life is embodied and translated directly through the main physical world instead of the screen-world.
Would this actually be a bad place to live? Something like 1950's to 1970's Britain, with the only broadcast mass-media being the Radio and everything else being embodied. A magical map in the cupboard for when you need a map, a magical letter-desk for when you want to write to someone, (I would need to re-learn my cursive), a physical chemical camera for when you want to memorialise something. A digital, semi-intelligent Encyclopaedia Britannica 'book' for when you want to ask a specific question, (which are the only kinds it will answer, it doesn't 'chat'), and of course your Amazon tablet infinite library, which only has books and does nothing else. The house has one phone and it is plugged into the wall. One paper delivered to your paper glass, once a day.
Would I have the courage to live there myself; probably not. Would I be willing to force my children to live there, (if I had any)? I think probably yes. I would take the hit in that case and cut them off from the ambient disease of the unceasing digital world.
What about the A.I.s? (Currently the latest versions of the Large Language Models are the biggest possibility/threat). Perhaps ‘Toolification’ or ‘Euphenic Technology’ might be slightly less vulnerable to a rampant AI, and the cognitive melting effect of being in continual contact with a corporate-owned butler/educator might be reduced; it would have less windows to peek in at you through, and since every piece of technology is single-use, it might be harder to manipulate you, and would be easier to replace that use with a non-Digital equivalent.
Atelerian Medicine
A maximally-Aetlierian position would mean ending most genetic analysis and even reversing some medical technology and ability, adopting a hyper-conservative position to the body and to the meaning of the body, which is the real thing we are talking about when we talk about Transhumanism.
Because when the thing we alter is our own bodily selves, we change not only the object, (as we would if we were carving wood), but the agent which decides the meaning of the object and of the work done about it. It is a blade that carves itself.
Its easy to see how fast, how nuts, this gets. We are barely in control of our ideas or technology, both of which constantly spiral out beyond our sight. When the wood we carve is us, the curve of the spiral tightens in. The ‘Super-Babies’ may not at all agree, with each other, or with you, about their purpose and nature. When they make their own ‘Super Babies’, their ideas may be even more inconceivable.
And it is mercy that opens the door to all of this. When He Jiankui made the first ever gene edited embryos in 2018. (They are currently seven, and doing fine.) He did so for the noblest of reasons; a fair amount of AIDS/HIV in China was spread through an infected blood scandal. Those who ended up with HIV from this incident were simply banned from having children. The babies He Jiankui engineered came from a parent with HIV. They had no legal right to exist but He Jiankui simply engineered immunity into them. He literally cured original sin, allowing ‘innocent’ children to be born of ‘unclean’ parents. What could be more purely merciful than that?
An Aetlerian medical position might be; "This body is you, it’s how you were made and we will not fundamentally alter it. If you break it, or suffer, we can provide techne that can amend or sustain, but we will not alter the flesh itself."
How far would this go? If you lose an eye, will they give you a new false eye? It’s a single-use artefact but it does integrate with the flesh directly. How about Alzheimer’s or dementia? An Aetlerian medicine could provide an automaton assistant, and clever tools and magical mirrors to remind and sustain, but would they allow direct interference with the brains decay? Probably not. If you lose a limb perhaps they will replace that particular limb, but what if you just twist or mangle it? If you have a genetic disorder, well that’s who you are. Will they provide palliative care?
This may sound crazy, primitive or like it makes no sense, but understand, our current relationship with the body, the mind and our genes also makes no sense. We do not alter or amend based on some well-regarded general principal or universal ideal. We are winging it, and as we wing it our very values and assumptions change along with our abilities.
I'm not complaining. Winging it fits my values and assumption better than an imagined Aetlerian world, but I can't deny it is probably going to run into some kind of limit, or go off some unseen cliff at some point and I just have to hope that when that happens enough of standard-issue humanity survives to learn some kind of lesson from whatever we screwed up.
Euphenics
A term coined in the 1960’s by Joshua Lederberg to describe an alternative to Eugenics. Instead of re-engineering life at its core, the methods of Genetic Engineering would be used to change phenotypes after birth.
The term has spread and lessened since, not because it is not useful, but I would contend, because it simply describes the way we use medicine. The post-2020 mRNA Sars/Covid vaccines were essentially, genetically-engineered. No-one was actually selling them with those terms but really they were direct products of Gene Editing technology. A perfect representation of ‘Euphenics’, Atelierian Medicine – the use of a paradigm shifting meta-technology as a simple tool.
So many people all over the world relentlessly losing their shit and they have no idea just how utterly conservative 90% of geneticists actually are.
This ‘semi taming’ of the power of Genetics might not be perfectly Atelerian, (it effects the body), but it’s certainly quasi-Atelerian. The magic has been tamed and its origin, (and its implications), hidden.
