The Road to The Machine-Man, Pt. 1

The transhumanist desire seeks to do away with the limitations that protect us and cause us to flourish

Contemplating the future is an exercise in uncertainty. Staring into the abyss of the unknown, we are confronted with rumours of wars or declarations of peace, growing inflation or economic growth, future pandemics or miracle cures. Which of these scenarios will happen we simply cannot tell. Very few things are known with certainty about the future. But for those of us looking to the future with a critical eye, there seems to be an ominous figure rising on the horizon, one who if he comes to us will force us to make an ethical decision of the highest order - about what it means to be a human. This figure, a mixture of man and machine, is the creation of transhumanism - he is a posthuman¹, and there are some who say his coming is certain.

Transhumanism might be an alien word to you now, but soon it won’t be. As an ideology, Transhumanism has been around since at least 1998, but the technologies needed to achieve its visions are only now becoming available - and the pace of this technological progress is picking up speed. What the transhumanist desires is the merging of man and technology, to create something that is more than human - a posthuman. This posthuman is an enhanced human, who is able to transcend the current limitations our biology and genes impose on humanity. This vision is clearly articulated in the first statement of the Transhumanist Declaration²:

“Humanity will be radically changed in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of ageing, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to planet earth.”

This all may seem improbable and abstract, the domain of science fiction perhaps. But, to dismiss this ideology is naive to the extreme. The transhumanist movement is slowly but surely gathering momentum and is working hard at priming us through our current use of technology to accept the changes they are envisioning³. And they have powerful allies - the giants of Silicon Valley are throwing their influence and investment behind this vision:

They are dedicating billions of dollars and the greatest minds in science and engineering to develop a range of human-enhancing innovations. Virtual reality promises to transport us anywhere. Wearable devices put us closer to connecting the human brain to the digital cloud. Genome editing allows us to design our babies and cure any disease or disability, up to and including death itself.⁴

With the weight of this much power and research behind the movement, you can be assured that change is afoot, and change in the modern era tends to be rapid. Perhaps sooner than we realise, we will all be confronted with the choice of surrendering a part of our humanness in exchange for becoming an enhanced human and thus part machine or resisting and being left at a disadvantage as the world embraces the transhumanist future.⁵ To quote Wendell Berry, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines.”⁶

Like Wendell Berry, I am convinced that the issue of transhumanism poses one of the greatest and most challenging ethical questions and battlegrounds of the 21st Century. It gets to the heart of issues such as what it means to be a human, and what it means to be made in the image of God. It forces us to ask questions such as “do we have the right as creatures, to recreate ourselves in our own image guided by our own desires and individual freedom?” It poses huge threats to our communities, natural environments, and ourselves through the limitlessness that it promises. And it threatens the Good Life - the life of long, quiet and slow love of a place, with its traditions, environments, and people which features prominently in what I have written about before.

So, seeing that what I love and cherish is under threat I have decided to write in response. Sadly, a pencil and paper won’t do, and I will have to use a computer to get my thoughts across, but such a compromise I am willing to make. Over a series of three essays (with breaks for other essays in between), I will be addressing this impending issue of our modern age. I will look at how the transhumanist vision conflicts with the goodness of our limitations, how it misunderstands death, and how the trajectory it is heading on is actually towards dehumanisation, not the enhanced post-human future it envisions.

So to start with, I shall look at an issue I have written much on lately - the goodness of human limitations and how the transhumanist future threatens these limitations and the good life our limitations enable.

No limits!

A core tenet of transhumanist belief is that the limitations our bodies impose on us are worth fighting against and ultimately transcending - and for some adherents that includes all our limitations. They desire “life expansion” - a rejection of the finitude, frailty, and limitedness of human life and in its place an unbounded unlimited future.⁷ They believe "we have been made glorious, yet deeply flawed", and that "it is time to amend the human constitution."⁸ The reason for this hatred of limitations is due to their total embrace of the potential of human beings to create what is in their vision the Enhanced Life - one of unprecedented and unlimited freedom, creativity, richness, and growth⁹. To them, only this life is worth living, and enjoying - and it must be achieved¹⁰. Standing in the way of achieving this ‘Good Life’ are our human limitations. Therefore, our limitations have to be dispensed with and removed, no matter how much man needs to become a machine in order to accomplish this.