Transcendence

Anyone whose read my blog knows that I have an interest in the field of “futurism”-that group of folks like Michio Kaku and Ray Kurzweil, who are either exceptional visionaries or crackpots (or perhaps both).  Futurism is where one discusses all kinds of dreams about the human future-ranging from the Singularity and mind-uploading to radical forms of genetic engineering that make Jurassic Park look like child’s play to forms of Artificial Intelligence with godlike sentience.  I and others before have noted that the movement in general has an almost religious flavor to it (John Polkinghorne has used the helpful phrase “physicalist eschatology”), and it is rather telling that many atheists seem to take a dim view of it (PZ Meyers being one good example).

I myself, FWIW, am somewhere between a skeptic and an agnostic on the claims of futurism.  Personally, I rather doubt the more extravagant claims made by its proponents will come to pass; but I always hesitate on this one because the future can never be seen with certainty (to quote A Christmas Carol “if man’s courses be departed from the ends may change”) and it is presumptuous to declare what is and what is not possible-after all, 50 years ago no one could have foreseen the Internet and the never-ending supply of smart devices that plug into it (as Fr. Barron once noted it appears Teilhard de Chardin was right about the noosphere after all).  One can easily make the same mistake as Charles Duell, a Director of the U.S. Patent Office, who asserted in 1899 that “everything that can be invented has been invented”; or Lord Kelvin, who insisted in 1895 that “heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”  Hindsight may be 20/20, but given our general lack of prophetic capabilities in this sphere no one should be confident enough to insist all these things will never-or can’t-happen.

My real concern here, though, isn’t over the technical feasibility of the futurist vision per se.  Its more over the rather bizarre view that technology is always the answer, that the salvation of our species lies in an ever deeper embrace of our own inventions.  This is a rather dubious proposition-that technology has improved the material lot of our species (especially in terms of climate adaptation, medicine and general comfort) is beyond doubt.  That it has somehow elevated our species to a higher state of being…not so much.  Despite vast increases in knowledge we possess the same general brain structure as our cavemen ancestors (a point oddly recognized by both Stephen Jay Gould and CS Lewis-strange bedfellows if there ever were any), and despite a boon in material comforts real happiness seems as elusive as ever in contemporary American society, where the anesthetized societal vision of Huxley’s Brave New World seems positively appealing to many (a fellow law student told me exactly this just a few weeks ago).

Moreover, the technocratic vision of human advancement sits uneasily alongside two other competing visions that are frequently found today: On the one hand, there are views of AI that essentially suggest that humanity will be transfigured/transformed (framed positively) or destroyed/subsumed (negatively) by our own inventions, intelligences that will be our posterity and our legacy, but also our undoing.  It baffles me as to exactly what is supposed to be appealing about this vision-or, for that matter, why if there really is a danger of the “machines rising up” why we continue to keep building them (if religion has any job here it is to remind the purveyors of progress that just because our species can build something it does not follow that we should-technical progress is not a fixed law that we must obey).  Then again, since when is species all that rational?  But more of this anon.

The second vision is the exact opposite-it is an excessively pessimistic vision of humanity, that regards our species as a pox upon the earth that is best eradicated.  In its extreme forms one thinks of George Carlin, gleefully declaring that AIDS or some other “immune response” from the planet will take the species out.  One may also think of those who suggest that the human race take charge of its future by making itself extinct-to those who suggest that the human race stop reproducing a friend of mine once cracked that these proponents could reduce the population themselves by one at any time by lying down in traffic.  This extreme view also manifests in bizarre statements like those made by my family law professor, who (I’m not making this up) declared he had a “problem with conception” because it “imposed life on people without their consent.”  Pope Emeritus Benedict once noted with worry the increasing attitude among the young that they had not asked-or wished-to be born.

Not all that many people have such a depressing attitude when it comes to practical existentialism (by which I mean our attitude towards existence in daily life, without the philosophical reflections on it).  Nonetheless, it intrigues me that alongside the futurist impulses of Kurzweil & Co. we also find a spike in primitivism, with its generally dim view of technological progress and a yearning to return to the simple times of the past.  There is much to be admired here-who could argue with the beauty of the Native American way of life for example.  But this movement harbors, on some level, the same general problem as its opposite bookend: A loss of a healthy sense of anthropology-what it is to be human.  This may be driven by confusion, but at seems to me that everyone from the emo teenager to the transhumanist visionary-nut to the environmentalist who wants to see humanity reabsorbed into the dirt seems to deeply resent being human.

On one level, this may be a resentment of finitude-a bitterness that we are “spirits who must excrete”, self-conscious creatures who aspire to great things but are weighed down by the chains of space, time and matter, trending inexorably towards death.  David Bentley Hart has noted that very often the human project of religion has been an effort through various systems of sacrifice to lobotomize ourselves from this conscious awareness and plunge back into the cycle of life from which we have been estranged.  [I would contend, by the way, is one aspect of the primal religions that needed correction by Christianity] Today, of course, those who would eliminate the species are channeling this attitude-and so indeed are some of the New Atheists when they argue that the human thirst for purpose, meaning and vocation is just an evolutionary delusion and hence meaningless.  As Fr. William O’Malley put it, this is to dismiss the core feature of humanity as being as useless as our appendix.

It is all the more odd, given that most of the New Atheists are hardly the type to favor dissolving back into the matrix of the earth.  Many of them, Richard Dawkins included, have taken the position that natural selection “blundered into its own negation” with us and that it is our imperative to take responsibility from here on out, to create purpose and to emerge from the shackles of nature, rather than be bound by them.  This is not far from the way Judaism has always understood the human condition as being, in some sense, against nature (in the sense of transcending and perfecting it).  Generally speaking, when I listen to folks like Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss and Christopher Hitchens speak, their general attitude on the human project is-as Jonathan Sacks has pointed out-not far away from the Stoic vision of ancient Greece.  We may resigned to ultimate futility, but that doesn’t mean one cannot live a good, moral and responsible life while we have it.

This is infinitely preferable to the deeply resentful view of the “eco-nuts” (sorry I had to use the term once), but it still leaves me cold at least…for as I have pointed out before, this understanding-as workable as it may be on a practical level-is ultimately nihilistic.  After all, any “meaning” or “purpose” here is really self-created, and as Benedict warned in Introduction to Christianity meaning that is self-made is ultimately, in the end, no meaning at all.  Moreover, CS Lewis realized that such an ex-nihilo view of humanity is illogical, because human beings are part of nature too, and if we really are nothing more than exceptionally smart apes with rational skills that emerged as a by-blow from evolution it is rather difficult to speak of the uniqueness of our species and its attendant call to responsibility as really having any objective meaning at the end of the day.  Nice rhetoric perhaps, but nothing more.

This brings me, at last, to Transcendence-by which I mean the film starring Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman.  I have not yet seen the film (it slipped out of theaters almost immediately and I haven’t yet succeeded in making it to my local dollar theater), but the story sounds absolutely fascinating.  In any case, I recently read a blurb from The Washington Post that outlined the vision behind AI that has been put forward by many including, it turns out, Stephen Hawking: The notion that technology will result in an explosion of knowledge that will catapult humanity to the “next stage of evolution” (whatever the hell that means), and thereby open the door to a great and glorious future.  The tone of this is strikingly Teilhardian-and the brief line “We’re stuck with a dystopian future no matter what we do with computers” sounds rather similar to the same impatience that Teilhard’s disciples have tended to show towards those of us who refuse to relinquish the traditional understanding of original sin.

Does this make us unduly pessimistic?  Maybe.  But this can’t stop us from recognizing that human beings are immensely fallible creatures-a point known as much by Carlin and Hitchens as St. Augustine.  In the words of Rowan Williams “bodily life aware of its own frailty or finitude is a proper vehicle of spirit, whereas ‘flesh’ as an absolute term means finite life forgetful of its vulnerability.”  The mistake of Teilhard and transhumanism alike is perhaps not so much to forget the vulnerability and finitude of humanity, but to think that we could somehow overcome-transcend-it ourselves.  This hubris is coupled with an understandable resentment of human finitude, but as Fr. Andrew Greeley once explained it is also one of the roots of original sin:

The sin of the human race is the sin of distrust-of cosmic distrust; it is the sin of refusing to believe that the universe in which we find ourselves is trustworthy, and therefore the sin of refusing to believe that the power that produced the universe and place us in it is trustworthy.  Since we cannot trust the cosmos or its creator we cannot trust anyone but ourselves and hence our driven to put our security and our confidence solely in our own power and abilities.

And hence the understandable frustration with human nature turns into the absurd and self-refuting notion that the fallible and finite could somehow truly transcend itself under its own power; the delusion that a stream could somehow rise above its source.

Christianity, especially in the magnificent theological anthropology presented by the Fathers and represented in our own time by figures such as Vladimir Lossky and Olivier Clement (James Arraj made a good case that Jacques Maritain and Emile Mersch did the same in the Catholic realm), offers a different vision of the future.  It is a magnificent vision, but a vision that recognizes the inescapable bondage of sin and the inability of the finite to reach the infinite of its own accord.  The Christian vision places its trust in the power of God to make us agents in the fulfillment of the Divine purpose for creation.  Christianity is neither “primitivist”, nor “futurist”-it recognizes the value of living in harmony with creation but at the same time sees humanity as being tasked with a responsible kingship over nature.  Christianity calls for the acceptance of the human condition as being finite (though it does not deny the role of say medical technology to improve life).  And yet it offers a deeper vision than any trans-humanism ever could: The union of the created with the Uncreated, a share in God’s own life, deification.

The Christian vision of what it truly means to be human is more coherent, and far more magnificent, than anything transhumanism could possibly offer.  It recognizes that hope-real hope-lies outside the sphere of our world.  I do not, I regret to say, have any specific responses to the “challenge” of futurism (it isn’t quite strong enough to be a real challenge yet I don’t think), but I would exhort Christians of all stripes to realize that Christianity must recover and emphasize about all else its distinctive anthropology.  This has eminently practicable aspects (such as Rene Girard’s insights) but the theo-anthropological vision of Patristic Christianity is the horizon against which these practicable aspects must be seen.  This is no minor matter either, for Christianity’s anthropological vision is under assault.

I end, then, with a powerful quote from the Pope Emeritus, again from Introduction to Christianity, that drives this point home.  Regretfully I do not believe that Ratzinger ever revisited this particular subject, which is a real shame for he truly captured the heart of the heart of the matter in this very nearly prophetic commentary on humanity’s future.  Here it is:

If before, perhaps through the conclusions implicit in the doctrine of the origin of species, he [Man] might have resignedly noted that so far as his past was concerned he was just earth, a mere chance development, if he was disillusioned by such knowledge and felt degraded, he does not need to be disturbed by this any longer, for now, wherever he comes from, he can look his future in the eye with the determination to make himself whatever he wishes; he does not need to regard it as impossible to make himself into the God who now stands at the end as faciendum, as something makeable, not at the beginning, as logos, meaning.  This is already working itself out concretely today in the form of the anthropological approach.  What already seems more important than the theory of evolution, which for practical purposes already lies behind us as something self-evident, is cybernetics, the “planability” of the newly to be created man, so that theologically too, the manipulation of man by his own planning is beginning to represent a more important problem than the question of man’s past.

NOTES:

• I’m not quite sure how the general public feels about futurism-my own, unscientific, polling of friends indicates a mixture of hopeful optimism that some things might be true with the equally hard to shake sense that there is plenty of “hocus pocus” out there.  Regardless, they all do seem to understand that technological progress does not take place in a vacuum but instead in the context of the economy, various social trends, etc-this in itself is rather encouraging, given that futurists often overlook this point.
• One skeptic recently noted a rather compelling reason for taking a dim view of AI and the Singularity.  He notes “Technological progress is constant, but it is stunning how unevenly distributed it is. This leads to complaints of the type “they can put a man on the moon but they can’t make a deoderant that lasts past 2 PM.” This crops up in specific fields all the time. There’s been a well-documented problem in personal electronics where battery development has not kept pace with development in processors, leading to lower effective usage time thanks to the increased power requirement of faster processors.”  This is probably the biggest reason I myself am skeptical about many futurist dreams.
• I admit that I am being unusually harsh to Teilhard in this post, but the fact remains that as right as Teilhard may have been on some things he seriously missed the boat on others.  His insights are still, I think, vitally important but his overly optimistic view of evolution needs to be tempered.  One needs the lens of faith to see “purpose” in evolution, and ultimately to speak of “purpose” or “accident” in this context is to bring in philosophical constructs not directly warranted by the science.  In any case, it is a mistake to assume that his theological theories, when they diverged from traditional understandings of original sin, are somehow more scientifically grounded said traditional approaches.  They are not.
• Conversely, Richard Dawkins has exhibited some real wisdom in this arena.  In a Big Think interview he notes that there is a degree of arrogance in seeking “immortality” and that it would be arrogant and presumptive for one generation to determine that it would be the last to reproduce.  This argument, incidentally, is not far off from a point made in Lewis’s classic The Abolition of Man, representing another example of strange bedfellows.  That book, by the way, is a must-read, as relevant now as it ever was.