The Transhumanist Dream
‘Humanity will be radically changed by technology 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 the planet earth’ (Transhumanist Declaration, 1998).
‘Transhumanism’ is still a rather unusual word but the original Transhumanist Declaration gives a sense of what it means. At it’s root, it’s a desire to use technology to escape from human suffering, weakness and limitation.
At one level it’s an attractive dream. Think what it feels like to live for weeks without enough sleep; or how easy it is to be winded and wounded by careless words or unkind actions; or how hard it is to be lonely and isolated from those you love; or how much you worry about your children and their future; or the effects of ageing – that growing army of aches, pains, wrinkles, stiffness, minor maladies and more serious diagnoses.
Weakness and vulnerability is fundamental to human experience. It’s painful and we live in a society that doesn’t cope well with frailty and limitation. Here’s where technology kicks in.
The promise of technology
All cultures and societies use technologies, from crude stone age tools to sophisticated farming machines; from bows and arrows to Apache helicopters; from pens and paper to printing presses, iPads and the internet. Technology is just part of what it means to be human, and it’s a great gift of God!
Our relationship with technology underwent a step-change during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, and then again with the information revolution in the 20th and 21st centuries. We no longer live in societies that have (small-scale, limited) technologies. We now live in what the French sociologist Jacques Ellul called, ‘the technological society’. Technology is just the water we swim in.
Can you remember what it was like to wake up and spend a day without a phone? Or the last time you got lost without Google Maps to direct you? According to Ellul, modern technological societies are governed by ‘technique’, an all-encompassing pursuit of efficiency. We seek the best, most frictionless way of living. We seek to avoid our limitations as much as possible and increasingly technology promises not just to help our weakness. It promises to overcome our frailty and mortality completely. That’s the transhumanist dream.
The transhumanist dream
Transhumanism promises us a future world without suffering, and even without death, where technology can give us perfect humans, perfect children and a perfect world. Just as you might upgrade an old and slow phone to a faster, more powerful model, so transhumanism promises us a complete human upgrade. This would happen through GRIN technologies: Genetics, Robotics, Information technology and Nanotechnology. In his best-selling book, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari explains that this unfolds in three stages.
The first stage is biological engineering. Based on the assumption that we have evolved over millions of years, this assumes that we can aid that evolution by making changes to things like our DNA, hormonal system and brain structure. For example, last year scientists genetically modified human T-cells (a type of white blood cell), to get them to attack tumours. This is an incredible advance that would allow our own immune systems to treat cancer.
The second stage is cyborg engineering, providing us with bionic hands, artificial eyes and nanorobots in our bloodstream that can diagnose problems and repair damage to our bodies before we even know about it. As Harari says, ‘This may sound like science fiction, but it’s already a reality.’ Governments, universities and companies are pouring huge resources into developing it further.
The final stage (which is hypothetical at the moment) is the development of completely non-organic beings. Cyborg technology still assumes that our brains are ‘the command-and-control centres of life’. Yet some people dream of a day when AI can take over completely, and erase biological life altogether.
In his book 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, John Lennox argues that this last stage will prove impossible but however sceptical we are about the limits of the transhumanist dream, we should pay close attention to what drives it.
The end of death?
At the root of transhumanism is the desire to overcome human weakness, to end human suffering and to defeat even death itself. It is a refusal of our God-given limits. Beyond that, transhumanism denies that death is a moral and spiritual problem. Rather, it is just a technical challenge that we can overcome. As Harari says, for modern science and modern culture, ‘death is a technical problem that we can and should solve’. He claims that people don’t die because God decrees it. ‘Humans always die due to some technical glitch’, like the heart stopping pumping and, he says, ‘every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death.’
Viewed in this light, the title of Harari’s book illustrates the transhumanist promise. We can move one step further in the process of evolution: from Homo sapiens to Homo deus; from thinking man to god-man. At it’s root, transhumanism is a false gospel with a chilling ambition: ‘You shall not surely die … you shall be like God …’ (Gen. 3:4-5).
Yet think how weak you are: how vulnerable to suffering and pain; how easily and unexpectedly things go wrong in life, for you and for those you love; how frustrating it is when your desires are not met and your ambitions are thwarted.
As weak sinners in a suffering world, of course we long to transcend our limitations. The temptation to seek a technical fix to all our problems is strong. Yet the problem of death and suffering is far more than a technical problem. It’s a moral problem and its root is the very desire that transhumanism seeks to meet. Rather than depending on God, loving and obeying him, we seek to become like him, and solve all our problems by ourselves.
The humble God
Because we are the problem, we cannot provide the solution. The answer is not for us to become like God. The answer is that God became man. Christ didn’t avoid weakness, limitation and death by clinging to the equality with God that’s his by nature. Instead, he humbled himself and became a small, weak, dying man in order to deliver us from death and restore us to God (Phil. 2:5-8).
Christ alone can save us and offer comfort and hope but in the face of our hubris in seeking to conquer death, the humility of the Son of God also asks a searching question. Looking back to the time before his conversion, Augustine wrote in his Confessions, ‘To possess my God, the humble Jesus, I was not yet humble enough. I did not know what his weakness was meant to teach.’
Christ’s humility calls us not to avoid weakness and suffering, but to embrace it, trusting the God who raises the dead. The humility of Jesus asks each one of us: are you humble enough to learn from him? In your weakness and fear of death, will you learn the lessons that his weakness was meant to teach?
