I’ve read First Things for years, but somehow I missed Mark Shiffman's brilliant 2015 takedown of transhumanism “Humanity 4.5”. The essay aims particularly at transhumanist Steve Fuller, but is strong and concise enough to be considered almost a manifesto.
For decades, even since high school in the 1980s, I've been deeply suspicious of our culture's tendency to see science and technology as means of transcendence. For many years, not surprisingly, I was unable to articulate my unease. (If I learned anything in my twenties, it was how deeply all of us are enculturated, virtually incapable of thinking outside the patterns set in us.) Into adulthood I kept following that unease, always remaining something of a half-Luddite. For as long as I can remember, I've recoiled at the sight of gadgets and new technologies those around me flock to. I don't regret this, because now I see more clearly the demons I previously only suspected.
What's great about Shiffman's essay is that it puts a lot of my half-formulated inklings (re: Nominalism/Descartes/techno-gnosticism) into nutshell form. Thus, again: something like a manifesto.
Interesting to contemplate is the question of why some of us feel repulsed by the technological vision, almost as a matter of disposition, while others (most of my contemporaries) embrace it wholeheartedly. If I'm flattering myself, I might attribute it to a certain depth, a better bullshit detection system, whatever. But really, it may largely be just temperamental. Or is it perhaps, as I sometimes think, a gift of grace, a whispering of sorts, to steer me clear?
As I'm no genius, it must be either temperament or grace. Which then?
E.M.
Kudos to Rod Dreher for posting on Shiffman's piece at TAC.
Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.
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