Transhumanism and
Unitarian Universalism:
Beginning the Dialogue
James Hughes
Sometimes when I’m asked how the coming
technological transformation of humanity could be consistent with
spirituality I think about people in the “locked-in” state. One of
our oldest nightmares is of being buried alive, being totally
conscious, and yet thought dead. That’s what being locked-in is. It
is a state of total paralysis, usually the result of a long, slow
degeneration of nerve and muscle control, until you can’t even blink
or puff to communicate, even though you can still hear and see, and
are fully conscious. People with conditions leading to locked-in
state, like Lou Gehrig’s disease, were often advised to make
advanced directives to have their feeding tubes removed if they
didn’t want to spend a decade or more in this state.
But last year a company began putting computer
chips in the motor cortices of locked in people, chips which pick up
their thoughts about moving arms or fingers, and send them as radio
signals to an external computer. The recipients can type out emails,
surf the web, control wheelchairs and eventually move prosthetic
limbs and exoskeletons. Now people facing the breakdown of their
bodies can anticipate that they will still have some measure of
control over their lives, some ability to communicate. These
micro-neural prostheses also now allow the deaf to hear, the blind
to see, they are giving those without arms and legs control of
powerful new limbs, and are being used to suppress epilepsy and
depression.
What a profound affirmation of the inherent
worth and dignity of every person, an affirmation that we can
provide because of the miracle of human reason, applied to nature,
manifested as science and technology. It is the celebration of this
miracle of human intelligence that is the core of our humanist
creed, that is the common root between the two belief systems of
transhumanism and Unitarian Universalism.
Those chips are also an apt symbol for this
dialogue between ideological cousins because those locked-in cyborgs
are the test pilots for the nano-neural interfaces that our children
will take for granted, interfaces which will allow us all to access
the Internet at the speed of thought, to remember all the events and
thoughts in our lives with perfect fidelity, to share and
communicate with one another in currently unimaginable intimacy, and
to explore the spiritual potential of the brain. Those chips are
John the Baptist to the coming of a dramatic change in human
experience, a change in which we use reason and science to fully
transcend the limitations of the human condition.
In that shift I believe we UUs have a special
calling to help infuse that change with our values and to be a
shelter for refugees from more rigid faiths shaken by these changes.
We have a unique gift because of our uniquely humanist
understanding, whether theist or non-theist, that humanity is called
to be co-Creator of our own future. We UUs do not see a bright
shining line drawn by God around our genitals, our genomes, or our
governments, that proscribes the limits of our creativity. We are,
as the humanist Julian Huxley said when he first coined the term
transhumanism in the 1920s, a species that can transcend itself.
This desire to transcend the human condition is
one of the most fundamental spiritual drives we know. We are
hard-wired to seek out dances and chants, sweat lodges and fasts,
fermented berries and bitter mushrooms, that scramble our routine
modes of perception. Since the invention of symbolic culture we have
been praying, making offerings, going on pilgrimages, in search of
healing, eternal youth, transcendent knowledge, the power of flight
and transformation. The oldest surviving written text, the
Gilgamesh saga from ancient Sumeria, is about a man searching for a
way to stay young forever. Our religious traditions are full of
visions of better worlds to come, sometimes heavens, and sometimes a
better world here, a New Zion where people are perfected, ennobled,
long-lived and blessed.
The Buddhist tradition predicts that, repulsed
by the horrors of apocalyptic war, we will build a utopian
civilization in the time before the coming of the next Buddha, in
which Earth will be thickly populated with billions of happy,
healthy people who live for thousands of years in harmony with one
another and nature. The average age at marriage will be five hundred
years. The climate will always be good, neither too hot nor too
cold. Wishing trees in the public squares will provide anything you
need, and the government will dissolve as people turn to spiritual
pursuits. And we do all that before the next Buddha gets
here.
These are our ancient hopes and dreams, the Yin
waiting for the Yang of modernity and the European Enlightenment for
fulfillment. Both transhumanism and UUism were born from the
marriage of spiritual aspiration with reason, humanism, science and
democracy. The European Enlightenment gave the world a systematic
understanding of the natural and social world, a means to achieve
our dreams. It gave us the idea that social relations should be
based on justice and deliberation, and a vision of individual
liberty free of natural law and divine authority. The European
Enlightenment gave us the free and responsible search for truth and
meaning, the right of conscience, and a tradition of iconoclastic
science, willing to cut open bodies to see how they work, to
experiment and theorize in ways the Church thought ungodly.
I’m not saying that rationalist humanism,
scientific exploration, democracy and free thought can’t be found in
other cultures. But it was in the European Enlightenment that our
aspirations to be liberated from the human condition turned from
spiritual means, to self-liberation through science and reason. In
the 17th century Francis Bacon proposes a radical utopian
society, a “New Atlantis,” which will use reason and science to
improve human beings and master nature. Robert Hooke turns from his
microscope to suggest that one day we might improve eyes by
embedding them with telescopes and microscopes. In the 18th
century the French revolutionary Marquis de Condorcet and the
British anarchist William Godwin both predict that, through
scientific progress, we will eventually have unlimited lifespans and
free ourselves from work.
The same historical rivers that were converging
to create religious liberalism in the 19th and 20th
centuries generated the utopian projects of Owen, Fourier, Saint
Simon and Oneida, all seeking human betterment by replacing faith
with reason. As Darwinism and genetics entered the public
consciousness, biblical literalism was shattered, and Unitarians and
Universalists began to drift from their Christian roots towards
secular humanism, and ideas of human improvement turned to biology.
When British genetics pioneer and Marxist
agitator JBS Haldane championed extra-uterine gestation and genetic
engineering in 1923, he inspired fellow biologist and humanist
Julian Huxley to coin the term transhumanism for the notion that
human beings could and should throw off the shackles of dogma and
use cultural and biological means to evolve further. Julian wrote
“Human life …could be transcended by a state of existence based on
the illumination of knowledge and comprehension.....The human
species can, if it wishes, transcend itself…in its entirety, as
humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps
transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending
himself.”
But Haldane’s projections inspired horror in
Julian’s brother Aldous, who wrote Brave New World in
response. As Stalinism and fascism unfolded utopian visions of the
future were met with increasingly dystopian visions. After World War
II the atom bomb and Nazi eugenics, the growing awareness of
ecological damage and the genocides of European colonialism, of
thalidomide and traffic deaths, all contributed to a new suspicion
of technology among progressives and humanists. How could
technologies born of big profit-driven corporations, administered by
a male medical profession, commissioned by a military-industrial
complex, and born of White man’s alienated fantasies of mastery ever
be used to build a better world? Better to return to compost
toilets and bicycles, garden-grown food and homeopathy.
Nonetheless techno-utopianism continued to
percolate. The space program suggested that we might soon colonize
other planets. The condom, pill and penicillin ushered in a sexual
revolution, and the counterculture discovered better living through
chemistry. Around the corner were certain cures for cancer and a
computer in every house. Leftists generally anticipated that
automation would lead to a 30 hour work week and feminists
anticipated that artificial wombs would help liberate women from
patriarchy.
In 1972, in Man into Superman, Robert
Ettinger, the founder of the cryonics movement which freezes people
for reanimation, proposed that we would have easy gender
re-assignment, redesigned digestive tracts, bodies adapted to
extreme climates, and a transition to what he termed
“transhumanity.”
In the 1980s these
technoutopian trends coalesce in Southern California, especially in
Silicon Valley in the technolibertarian culture that birthed the
Internet. The “extropians” and transhumanists of the early 1990s net
culture began to argue that there would soon emerge a greater than
human intelligence, an event they called the Singularity, which
would be cataclysmic. Once computers that can perform as many
calculations as a human brain are on all our desks, which will
happen in about fifteen years, they believe the emergence of
self-aware intelligence is inevitable. To avoid the Terminator
scenario, and ensure a good TechnoRapture, human beings need to
become as intelligent as our machines, with genes, drugs and
nanoneural implants. Transhuman apotheosis is the only way to avoid
being swept aside by our robotic children. We simply don’t have time
to wait for the FDA or social reform, we need brain jacks now!
At that point, the
links between humanists and progressives, on the one hand, and these
techno-utopians on the other had grown pretty distant. But not all
transhumanists shared the often self-involved and anti-spiritual
ethos of Southern California libertarianism. European transhumanists
tended to be much more interested in questions of regulated risks
and social justice, and in 1996 the
World Transhumanist Association,
the organization I now run, was founded in London in an effort to
define a broader base for transhumanism, affirming the core idea of
transcending the human condition, but broadening the parameters to
include progressive concerns. The founder and chair of the WTA is
the Swedish philosopher, now Oxford professor, Nick Bostrom. In 2001
I became the Secretary, and in 2004 the Executive Director. We now
have about two dozen chapters around the world, from Toronto,
Montreal, NYC, San Francisco, London, Berlin, and Moscow to Kampala,
Nairobi, and Calcutta.
Of course,
transhumanist ideas are meeting with stiff resistance, and the
critics are now often addressing transhumanism by name. On the one
hand are the religious conservatives who see transhuman ambitions as
hubris, “playing god.” The Christian Right is pouring millions into
conservative bioethics organizations to counter what they see -
correctly - as creeping transhumanism in liberal bioethics. The
Vatican newspaper attacked transhumanism twice this Spring, and
transhumanism has joined secular humanism and the gay agenda on the
fundamentalist hit parade.
In 2001 President
Bush appeased anxious religious conservatives by appointing a
staunch opponent of human enhancement, Leon Kass, to chair the
President’s Council on Bioethics. Kass in turn has loaded the PCB
with other opponents of stem cell cloning, reproductive technology,
psychiatric drugs and genetic engineering, such as Francis Fukuyama,
author of Our Posthuman Future, who last year proclaimed
transhumanism the most dangerous ideology in the world. In 2003 the
PCB issued its report calling for strict regulation and limitation
of access to human enhancement and reproductive technologies.
There is also a
left-wing bioconservative movement growing out of anti-technology
deep ecologists, feminist opponents of reproductive medicine,
leftist critics of corporate control of biotech and radical
disability rights activists. These left bioconservatives are
reaching out to build alliances with the religious right to promote
bans on surrogate motherhood, genetically modified food, stem cell
cloning and human genetic enhancement.
Clearly there are
and will be Unitarian Universalists on both sides of the
transhumanist/bioconservative dialogue. Many UUs feel an initial
sympathy with the bioconservative critique because of our concerns
with equity, safety and the commodification of the body. But I
believe that as these biopolitical issues emerge with increasing
frequency, from Terri Schiavo to stem cells to drug law reform, UUs
will increasingly see that we side more with technological
self-determination, with the free and responsible use of these
technologies in a free society, and not with knee-jerk yuck factor
bans based on sacred or natural boundaries. That’s why we embrace
gays and transgender folks, instead of agreeing that that just isn’t
the way folks are supposed to do it.
UUs, seeking the inherent worth of all beings
in the interdependent web, are also unlikely to affirm the central
dogma of the bioconservatives, a dogma I call “human- racism” – that
the only form of intelligence that is of value is homo-sapien, and
that all homo-sapiens are full citizens from conception to heart
death. Like white supremacists before them, bioconservatives believe
social solidarity is founded on biological similarity, and that it
will be impossible for humans and posthumans to live together in
mutual respect. They believe that acknowledging our continuity with
animals and giving them rights degrades respect for human beings.
Rather, transhumanists and UUs look for the value of life in the
capacity for thought and feeling. Focusing on the subjective being
in each us, we may then recognize it looking back at us from the
eyes of great apes, posthumans and even machines minds.
While I think UUs will have more in common with
transhumanists, UUs also will bring welcome concerns to biopolitics,
concerns about equal access to the benefits of technology, and to
their effects on the lives of the people who use them. I expect UUs
to be critical transhumanists, pushing technoutopians to remember
the current needs of the world’s poor, for clean water, adequate
shelter and decent wages.
I also expect UUs to engage with and be
critical of the embarrassingly religious dimensions of the
transhumanist idea – at least embarrassing for the largely secular
transhumanists – with its promises of immortality, magical
abilities, a coming TechnoRapture. These are themes to which we UUs
are uniquely tuned to respond, as they are wrapped this time in
science and reason, but also to respond to critically because we see
millennialism in its pancultural context, and we understand the
excesses to which it has led in other faiths.
In order to promote this transhumanist-UU
dialogue, and the broader conversation about the application of
brain science to spirituality, we have created the
Transhumanist UU
Network and the
Trans-Spirit
discussion groups on the web, and you are welcome to join the
conversation.
In closing, think again about the people
trapped in locked-in state, and the liberation becoming cyborgs has
offered them. In the future, as our vistas are broadened by bio- and
nanotechnologies, by longer, richer lives, I think we will all look
back in awe at the locked-in states we are all in now, just as we
are awestruck by the hardships of our ancestors.
In 1928 H.G. Wells
wrote:
Not one of us is yet
as clear and free and happy within himself as most men will some day
be….A graver humanity, stronger, more lovely, longer lived, will
learn and develop the ever enlarging possibilities of its destiny.
For the first time, the full beauty of this world will be revealed
to its unhurried eyes. Its thoughts will be to our thoughts as the
thoughts of a man to the troubled mental experimenting of a child….
How far can we
anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and adventures, the
mighty employments, the ever increasing knowledge and power of the
days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper and its
box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings of its adult
years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy
and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like
victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a
nightmare in the dawn….The light of day thrusts between our eyelids,
and the multitudinous sounds of morning clamour in our ears. A time
will come when men will sit with history before them or with some
old newspaper before them and ask incredulously, “Was there ever
such a world?” |