The Transhumanist ‘Threat’

The Jesuits’ America magazine is a somewhat overwrought publication, and a recent article (“Who’s afraid of Transhumanism? (We all should be)”) it ran on the ‘threat’ posed by ‘Transhumanism’ was no exception. If I had to guess, Transhumanism, a fancy word for an over-excited philosophy and technologies that have yet to exist, will turn into something largely prosaic: Continuous, often undramatic improvement.

This is a concept  that, back in the day, management consultants used to call ‘Kaizen’ for the reason that it was thought to be one of the many secret sauces in Japan’s postwar economic boom. It also sounded more sophisticated with a Japanese name, however inaccurately used  (in reality ‘Kaizen’ means any sort of improvement, continuous or otherwise).

Applied to our species, Kaizen could involve pharmaceuticals, elective surgery, some (who knows?) six million man dollar style upgrades and, yes, a spot of genetic engineering.   Nothing much to worry about, in other words.

It is when we turn away from the objections that the author of the article, John Conley, a priest and an academic, has to some of the loopier aspects of Transhumanism (a sort of Ayn Rand plus plus philosophy) to the core of his argument, that a  familiar picture emerges, that of the glorification of suffering as a positive good. This is a morbid outgrowth of the Christian tradition that can, as I noted here, be detected in other areas, such as in some of the opposition to assisted suicide.

Conley asks:

Why would we want to abolish aging and dying, essential constituents of the human drama, the fountainhead of our art and literature?

Why would we not (although I doubt that we  will get there any time soon – if ever)?

A  few years back I posted an extract from an article by New Yorker writer Aleksander Hemon, whose daughter was diagnosed with cancer at 9 months old. The terribly bereaved father had this to say:

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling—that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.

Quite

And the idea that by killing off death or ‘abolishing’ aging, we would kill off art and literature, is a curious one. Art would doubtless change as the ‘human drama’ changed, but the idea that artistic expression would wither away when we did not is ludicrous. Mankind is a creative species. The spirit of Lascaux is not so easily extinguished.