The Heaven Clause

I’m sitting in my apartment drinking milkshake from a rug. It’s the year 2055 and forty years have passed since my last post. You probably think I’m producing this post via some direct neural interface. Sorry to disappoint, but these words are being chicken-pecked into a keyboard beneath a ‘curved, ultra-wide monitor’. Not much has changed, apart from maybe the fad for drinking milkshakes through rugs. These are made especially to be desirable.

You may ask why am I writing this from the future and should’t there be an entire Bruce WIllis of hurt for the time-space continuum? Well, I’m no expert.

Another question you may ask is “Future John, why at the grand age of seventy are you returning to post in a blog that you abandoned once your readership tired of your dense wordmanship and sesquipedalian excess?”

Since you asked, I’m here to warn you of the Heaven Clause. 

You will no doubt be familiar with the inexorable onward sprint-march of technology and its implications for society. Automation has afforded us the freedom to outsource all tasks too mundane for our attentions to our better-understood, mechanically-obvious counterparts. And this trend is now close to reaching its logical conclusion. We’re close to Utopia. Machines - and I should note that they are pretty damn sophisticated - have been babysitting the least fun aspects of our humanity for some time now. 

Our laurels bear the imprint of our collective buttocks. The steady stream of dystopic sci-fi novels stressed that we wouldn’t reach this point, that there would be some underlying dark conspiracy to get our teeth stuck into. But there really isnt. Life is just great now and the robots are not going to rebel. We didn’t really solve climate change and a lot of people have largely stopped being alive but ultimately, civilisation got its shit together. These rug milkshakes come in so many different flavours.

But I still think you should know about the Heaven Clause.

The heaven clause has never been codified, it’s more a catch-all name for a few general principles.  It concerns a critique of the concept of heaven. Many people when asked about whether they would like to go heaven will say ‘No, I will get bored.” While they may have a more religion-inflected conception of heaven, the more philsophically neat concept of ‘a place where you will be happy’ could not admit of your boredom, unless it was necessary for happiness. The heaven clause is that heaven is a happy place, you have no choice in the matter.

Another interesting thing about heaven is that the entrance fee will cost you your arms, legs and all other essential body parts. When we have achieved utopia on earth we will have created a more immediate kind of heaven, one in which admission is more affordable. And it will be a happy place, you will have no choice in the matter.

So, why am I warning you about an ideal? 

Because as I mop-up these last few remaining droplets of this chocolate jute I nonetheless feel that something is missing. What’s worse is that deep down I know that this is probably the ideal, that I wring sustenance from this feeling that I have this essential part of my humanity that is being denied by the perfect material circumstances. Thats a dystopia I can get behind.

So, seriously, what is the heaven clause?

The heaven clause  - in my aged and withering view - stipulates that we can progress to the point where each of our human needs are answered and attended to yet in some way you will be dead, no matter how much you’re enjoying yourself.

It’s probably ridiculous to even get worked up about it but it’s been forty years since I posted and everything else was just too perfect to mention.