Best Life? Really?

Musings on Transhumanism and Transfigured Humanity

For several days now, I have been trying to write about my vehement and often vociferous (apologies to my husband for my many outraged pontifications) opposition to anything that smacks of the idea of “living one’s best life.” Whether it’s a new health trend or some kind of life hack, olive oil and egg shells in your coffee to help reverse your cellular age for instance, it doesn’t matter. All of it drives me around the bend and back again, and I wanted to figure out why. The problem was that every time I tried to sit down and write about it, my words sounded like I never wanted anyone to feel better or do better or enjoy life in any way. Then, I got thinking about whether I envy people who can cook really healthy and interesting meals or who make Kombucha from scratch or yes, always have the absolutely correct type of olive oil for those long-chain fatty acids to make their coffee bullet-proof. Heck! I might even envy my friend her large cast iron skillet! Maybe that’s why all these things make me cranky.

However, my thoughts began to crystallize just recently. All the stuff we talk about, all the trends and special vacations, the healthy drinks and perfect workouts, all of it is just ripples from a larger stone being dropped into our collective pond of humanity. All of it is nothing compared to the actual philosophies of Transhumanism and Longtermism, philosophies which are actively being made practical, little by little, with each passing year. The basic view of Transhumanism is that what makes us human can be transcended, can be made more perfect, perhaps immortal, possibly via evolution but more likely via technology. Think Cryogenics here. Longtermism, as I understand it, has to do with launching out from our burning earth into the stars, living long enough to build huge computers the size of planets, and uploading ourselves into various virtual realities, creating purely digital beings as well whose numbers would far exceed those of merely corporeal humanity, so that even if the old humans went extinct (obsolete?) the value of humanity would be preserved and added to exponentially and all, I guess, would be well somehow.

The trouble with these philosophies taking hold in actual political policy-making circles is that a lot of problems here and now could be taken as nothing compared to this idea of creating an almost-infinite number of digital post-humans which would keep our spark alive far into an unknown future and an ever-expanding universe. What’s one point two billion poor in the world? That doesn’t present an existential risk to this new type of human. So, maybe don’t put money into helping people, but put it into AI and Mars projects and the like. What are wars? They won’t pose a threat to this glorious vision. Let the puny ancient humans fight it out. We’re going to be better. We’re going to go beyond all that as long as we build and then bow down to The Singularity! Of course, we’ll only pretend to bow down to it. We’re really going to shape it to our own ends, our own “ridiculously-rich-people” ends of course.

Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End is a story I’ve always found fascinating. In it, aliens come to earth who look pretty demonic as far as their appearance goes. In fact, they do not show themselves to humans for some years, but they do try their best to re-engineer human society, creating peace by threat of force, in order that the tendency that was already going on in humans could be allowed to evolve before humans themselves destroyed earth. This was a tendency to extrasensory perception. The story ends with a group of children from all over the world who are ready to achieve transcendence, and the energy of their transcending their physical bodies burns up the earth and all the unevolved humans with it. Whatever they become, it is far beyond any sort of digital avatar.

When I was a child, I was told by my parents that humans are divided into two parts: the body, which is the shell, and the soul, which is the part that makes you you and that gets to fly off when you die. Kids have to be told something when confronted with death, and I don’t begrudge that story in the least. But if the story stays that simple, you wind up with the meat-me duality. The meat is nothing and me is what counts. The meat is why all the crap happens in the world. Everything we do is being traced to evolution, which is, really, a very meat-centred process. too often, the me gets caught up in the meat’s drives, and that’s why we’re such jerks. So, if the me is divorced from the meat, somehow, all will be well, I guess. If the me can be uploaded, or even created, by an AI God who has itself been created, (I’m not exaggerating here,) then we will no longer have to contend with the meat and its ridiculously ancient and outmoded ways of dealing with life. Somehow, as I say, all will be well, I guess.

So, to come back to the bullet-proof coffee and biohacking stuff I mentioned before, this is all to preserve the meat which is necessary for a little while longer, so the thinking part of the meat, which may bear some relation to the me, (but the jury’s still out on that), can get busy and create The Singularity and then surrender to its inevitable superiority. Meat-me humans will get this ball rolling, but then it will pick up speed and momentum, and will no longer need the meat-me combination. Or will it? Will it still need meat-me humans to keep all these huge computerized environments mechanically running? I don’t think the tech-bros talk about that part much.

If we truly view the meat and the me as separate and distinct parts of ourselves, then we’re in trouble. thankfully, in a number of circles, many people are discussing The Enlightenment and its often-mechanical views of reality as a problem, where before, well, it was being called The Enlightenment for a reason. At last, we had been delivered from the tyranny of magical thinking and ignorant religious superstition! Now reason could prevail! Well, look where that’s gotten us! Canadian thinker Charles Taylor believes that a familiarization with Romantic poetry can help to re-enchant the disenchanted human mind, and others out there are looking to ancient wisdoms and concepts of humanity and nature to try to solve some of our most pressing problems. I think that some of the health and self-care stuff out there is well-intended, but it too often promises less pain, more pleasure, and simply longer life as ends in themselves.

As a little person trying to live with, or have formed in me, a Christ-centred worldview, I have to come to terms with the dualisms in my own thinking. First, I think you’ve figured out by now that I am not a Transhumanist, but I think there was a time when I viewed Christianity in a Transhumanist way. It was one of the reasons I became a Pagan for a time. I thought that Christianity was too much a faith of the head and not of the heart, a faith of abstracts with nothing concrete about it. How I came to this conclusion now baffles me, because what is more concrete than the bloody corpse of a crucified Jew? What is more concrete than that same corpse now resurrected, His wounds still examinable by Thomas? Of course, if this is a myth to you, dear reader, none of this will make much sense. But the point I’m trying to make is that Christ is concrete both in His Divinity and in His humanity. There’s nothing abstract about a God who acts in the world. He is the door through which time and eternity can touch. That’s my view of things anyway.Therefore, the shell and the soul are not divisible the way milk and cream are. The soul is the life of the shell and will be its life again when the human person, shell and soul, is resurrected and glorified. That is our childhood’s end, when the cosmos is renewed and all creation with it. All creation! If that renewed cosmos is heaven or hell to us, it depends on what we have done here, in the cradle of renewed humanity.

Here is all we have! Now is all we have! This life, whatever it is for us, is what we have! We can either wait in self-satisfied assurance that all will be well, or we can live as though all is already being well, all the while being alive to the injustices and unfairnesses of our still-fallen world. if we have truly been renewed by baptism and are being renewed every day, then somehow, mysteriously, even though all around us is crap, still, all shall be well. Living in the mystery, the tension between these two things, is what’s called for. We do have hope in the resurrection, but that should not mean that we should fall into the Transhumanist trap of sacrificing everything here and now in order to manipulate it or speed it up or something. We can’t do that, even if we think we can. The last enemy is death, but how can the dying conquer it? Whatever will live in The Singularity will not be human. It will be data.

A friend of mine and I joke about my persistent negativity toward Chat GPT and its ilk. It isn’t that I don’t use these things at times and that they aren’t helpful. It’s that a little piece of me seems to die every time I use them. They are the scouts, the outriders, the first hints of what’s coming. Does this mean that I am a technophobe? Obviously not, if I’m writing here, but I do think that the more we embrace this stuff, the more the Transhumanist ideas get wired into our brains. We have to do everything we can to keep the human heart alive, the seat of emotion I mean, where flesh and spirit meet and are united, where joy can be grasped even in the midst of sorrow, where life is complicated and weird and messy, where true humanity sings with possibility and creativity. We are made for joy, but we cannot make joy. It comes as a gift, as a unicorn which will flee if we pursue it too close. Joy isn’t absence of pain, I don’t think. At least here and now, joy comes when pain is transfigured. Perhaps joy is transfigured pain.

This has been a long one. I thank you for making it this far. Again, I do not advocate some sort of artificial abandonment of technology or some time in the past when everything was great. I just know that the sort of future that a lot of the tech-bros are actively pursuing will not be good for us. I don’t yet know how all of this thinking is going to manifest in my own life, but I hope it’s as simple as taking joy in daily things like cooking or sweeping the floor or something. That’s at least a start. Whatever happens, may God help!