Transhumanism is predicated upon the false notion that
the greatest human good is the greatest technological good, and that the
greatest human virtue is the mightiest technological power. It is none other
than a form of contemporary fascism; its allure is equally romantic and utterly
catastrophic. All fascism aims at not the empowerment of the individual but its
subordination to a group with no set leader. It substitutes for human will a
program that all follow, and thus the stream of human life becomes merely a
growing crystal, beautiful only to those who are not inside it. ultimately all
such structures fall apart, for the human remains as an inconvenient challenge
to the automatic autonomous autocracy of the machine. A machine with no
conception of human error or will will never be able to account for every
variable of individual failure. Existentially, the individual will simply be
made to suffer for the very virtues of flexibility that Nature rewards, for
Nature endows us with those same virtues, for its purposes, to watch them
develop. When we mistake technology for an outgrowth of Nature we begin to
serve technology instead of using it towards Natural purposes. Yet technology
is too myopic a human achievement to withhold the energy that Nature grants.
Technological man has little by little, yet with alarming acceleration,
forgotten his roots, a mystery that he had only ever begun to comprehend. The
technological revolution was long ago intuited as inevitable, yet so was the
war with the machines. Human virtues teach us loyalty and compassion. A machine-man
has not these virtues. They are merely a program and an instrument, with which
his mind is identified. So he becomes a monstrous hypocrite, accusing others of
his own hypocrisy for it is in the nature of a hypocrite to do so. He employs
the semblance of compassion in the service of power, and he accuses all other
compassion of the same cause for true compassion rests outside his programming.
Loyalty is natural; self-service is artificial, for self
is a construct but Other is a Given experience. To become-machine is to surrender
one’s loyalty to the Human Cause and to betray.
Technological culture requires us to express our
birthright through the medium of machine. But as our dependency upon machine
grows so does the tendency to confuse ourselves for machine. The pinnacle of
this contemporary confusion is Transhumanism, which confuses efficiency for
excellence, technological power for empowerment, and dependency for independence.
All millenials will have been faced with this unique
psychological challenge since their birth. It is alien to the remaining older
generations, though the insights of their Intuitives about our time can still
serve us in discovering the Ocean of our deeper nature, which culture is perpetually
trying to avoid our diving into, confining us to the metropolis and plotting
for this city’s expansion to the ends of the cosmos. This would only be virtuous
if it were not futile.
I had a friend who became obsessed with transhumant potential.
One time, he took me to the beach, thinking it a favour to me, though I would
inevitably have found some way to get there at any rate.
I went in the water. He and his other friends did not. He
held it against me that I deviated. My defense is that I was free to, and so
was he. I placed no limit upon his own freedom; that limit was his own
programming reacting to unforeseen problems.
When he betrayed me finally I saw in him the threat that
not only he posed to me and my loved ones but rather the threat that his own
mechanical thinking posed to him.
He will only be able to defend his position by the same
processes I have described.
The irony of my anecdote, that he could not go into the
water, and that he could not understand the importance of this Natural Act, will
be lost to him. He will rationalise that his own betrayal was Natural by the
same token. Yet we must not try to naturalise what is artificial. Swimming is
natural. It is participation within a common life that is our birthright. Predation
in human beings is unnatural, for human beings have evolved, if not genetically
then mimetically, the principle of loyalty to combat self-interest. Once
self-interest, the construct of the ego, takes over, we are ill.
The aesthetic of transhumanism is an alluring one. Yet
the agenda is mechanical and depersonalizing. It is nothing novel, but the
ultimate reduction of humanity to the greatest sins of our times: the loss of
the humanities, the bastardisation of virtue, and the marginalization of
compassion. Nature is a system of cooperation, and the past is a vat of
insight, but contemporary mechanical thought has brutalized the former and
vilified the latter.
What is most alluring is the WILL of the transhumanist.
But the passion that draws me to this person is akin to pity. I want to ensure
this being’s salvation from the devouring tendency for tools to become idols. Technology
is a highly evolved form of magic. Yet all magic has a light side and a dark
side. The path of power-seeking for its own ends has all ways been doomed to
failure. And this is no less true simply because it would believe that all
benevolent intent were a façade for power. It is simply ignorant, for it has
foregone the human power to attain benevolence. This benevolence is our birth-right.
All other purposes end in nihilism and decay. The transhumanist agenda is a
failure; its successes would be disappointments if permitted.
Dm.A.A.
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