Abstract
The primary goal of transhumanism is for individuals to attain immortality in a “better than well” state. Seeking a kind of transcendence that humans were never meant to attain, this goal works at cross purposes with both the Christian conception of persons made in the image of God and with the ability to tell a good story. Zoltan Istvan’s novel The Transhumanist Wager fails in ways that are specific to the problems that arise when humans seek immortality through technoscience rather than through divine direction. The kind of transcendence promised by transhumanism is thus revealed as incomprehensible for human beings and incompatible with the Christian understanding of human flourishing.
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Notes
- 1.
Messerly , “Jaron Lanier on Transhumanism.”
- 2.
Margaret Atwood writes that “perhaps he meant to indicate that although his Utopia made more rational sense than the England of his day, it was unlikely to be found anywhere outside a book.” (Atwood , Negotiating with the Dead, 93).
- 3.
My characterization of “earnest” utopian fiction distinguishes these idealistic texts from the “critical utopias” that flourished in the mid to late twentieth century. As Tom Moylan argues, these novels, including a number of feminist utopias such as The Female Man by Joanna Russ and Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy preserved the “subversive imaging of utopian society and the radical negativity of dystopian perception.” Utopian writing was thereby “saved by its own destruction and transformation into the ‘critical utopia.’” (Moylan , Demand the Impossible, 10).
- 4.
“By defining human dignity in terms of ceaseless self-overcoming, the transhumanists open the door to an incomprehensible human future.” Charles Rubin, “Human Dignity and the Future of Man,” 160.
- 5.
The closest thing to it is the Culture series by Iain Banks and Glasshouse by Charles Stross, neither of which actually inhabits a future enhanced-to-perfect world, and so cannot be called utopian. The Culture series imagines a “post-scarcity” world run by artificial intelligence (AI). In it, the AI are chosen to be leaders precisely because they are “good”—defined, notably, as not “bad,” that is, they cannot be corrupted. The society has supposedly conquered suffering, death, and other ills. But when a society is perfect, nothing can really happen, so all the conflict comes from the Culture’s interactions with the outside world, and the “perfect” world is usually only referenced, not visited. Stross’s Glasshouse references a similar world; people born in 2050 can live forever by downloading their consciousness into new bodies. But to generate the conflict necessary for a novel, Stross sets all the action in a “glasshouse experiment” in which people from this future world are transported into a world that resembles the “dark ages.” In other words, they are put in a world that looks like ours, so that things can begin to happen.
- 6.
Bostrom , “Letter from Utopia,” 1–7.
- 7.
De Grey and Rae , Ending Aging. For a response, see Gilbert Meilaender “Thinking About Aging.”
- 8.
Istvan , The Transhumanist Wager.
- 9.
For example, there is quite a bit of poor writing. In a scene designed to depict what happens to a preacher after the woman he is lusting for mentions her husband, Istvan writes that “the courtship dance halted for Belinas. The word ‘husband’ was like a dagger in his cranium. He felt the sexual edge in him rescind, the fuel in his groin ooze away, the world around him instantly deflate” (Ibid., 143).
- 10.
Young , Designer Evolution, 246.
- 11.
Istvan , The Transhumanist Wager, 4.
- 12.
Nussbaum , Love’s Knowledge, 381.
- 13.
Gadamer , Truth and Method, 365.
- 14.
Berry , Standing by Words, 61.
- 15.
Istvan , The Transhumanist Wager, 179.
- 16.
Ibid., 127.
- 17.
Ibid., 226.
- 18.
O’Connor , Collected Works, 831.
- 19.
Rubin, Charles. “Human Dignity and the Future of Man,” 162.
- 20.
De Paus , “Transhumanists vs Fake Singularitarians.”
- 21.
The recent films Lucy and Transcendence reveal this fantasy very well.
- 22.
Peter Harrison (Territories of Science and Religion) explains how the Baconian revolution led to a new definition of Christian charity as the benefit and relief of man’s state on earth.
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Lake, C.B. (2018). The Failed Fictions of Transhumanism. In: Donaldson, S., Cole-Turner, R. (eds) Christian Perspectives on Transhumanism and the Church. Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90323-1_8
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