The Fallen World and the World to Come; Or, Techno-Utopians Give 'Em That New-Fangled Religion

Reader FrF in the Moot directed my attention to an editorial I would not otherwise have read, from the Superlative Techno-Immortalist (and also, rather predictably, market libertarian) blog Fight Aging!

In it, the editorialist, "Reason" (of course) declares that "[w]e are all doomed unless we dig ourselves out of the hole of aging via the future of medical technology."

By "doomed" the author means to point out (for those of you not paying attention in the back row) that all human beings now living, like all human beings who have ever lived, are, indeed, mortal.

While there is of course an enormous literature spanning millennia devoted to the ways in which human beings individually and human societies collectively have struggled to work through (or not) the existential dilemmas introduced by the inescapable fact of human mortality, it does seem to me that there is something more than usually alienated happening in the conjuration of doom in this piece and in comparable pieces by Superlative Techno-Immortalists.

The proximate inspiration for this editorial was the recent spate of studies and articles like a recent New York Times piece noting "disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades," as well as other recent studies pointing to the impact of diet and exercise on healthy lifespan also correlated in complicated ways to socioeconomic status, access to information, lifeway precarity and stress, and so on.

About all this, "Reason," The Techno-Immortalist wants to know: "What does it matter that some of us are a handful of percentage points more or less doomed than others…? It's still doom, and we'll all be just as rescued by technologies capable of repairing the damage that is aging."

There are a couple of things I want to direct your attention to in this extraordinary statement. First of all, in this formulation wealth disparities, differences in access to knowledge, distinctions of status, actual exhibitions of lifeway diversity are regarded as a matter of an utterly negligible "handful of percentage points more or less doomed than others."

That is to say, seen against the backdrop of the epic conflict of "Immortalism" Versus "Deathism" on which the Superlative Techno-Warrior imagines himself to be fighting, almost every difference that makes a difference in the actually existing texture of pleasure, danger, suffering, opportunity, awareness, exploitation, resistance of all the actually-existing people who have ever lived or are now living on earth is handwaved away as a near irrelevance.

Of course, I don't doubt that these textures assume their more proper importance in "Reason's" actual everyday life. I don't mean to suggest that just because he seems indifferent to and even dismissive of most of the actual differences that make a difference to the overabundant majority of human beings on earth the overabundant majority of the time they spend on earth in the context of contemplating the stakes of a particularly urgent problem, that this means he feels this way all the time or in some more fundamental way. But it still bears scrutiny to think just what it means to think this way under any circumstances, even if in strictly delimited contexts, especially if these are the contexts to which one devotes considerable public attention.

The fact is, I personally believe that there is something brutally obliterative that happens to anyone who would assume such a vantage, even if only selectively. And just so readers don't think I am merely seeking to demonize and so trivialize a perspective with which I disagree, let me say that I think there is something about the harsh worldly indifference "Reason" exhibits when he is thinking about his "doom" here that is deeply akin to the occupational hazards of theorists and philosophers to assume bloodless abstract vantages from which to survey the dynamic befuddling and too often threatening complexities of history and culture, a temperamental tendency to consoling abstraction to which I no doubt am no less deeply prone myself than other philosophically-inclined people are.

I think that one's arrival at such perspectives risks a derangement of one's inhabitation of the world in a way that skews both perceptions and priorities more generally. But also, and more to the point for the partisans of alienated techno-utopian perspectives in particular, surely this calls into question the ability of such people to assume the role of architects for the glorious futures they presumably disdain the present world for in the first place?

To what weird and alienated preoccupations would such coming futures presumably be most or even exclusively answerable?

Who, to be blunt, really wants to live forever in a future articulated by people who seem to disdain, in their thinking of that devoutly longed-for future, everything and everybody and every way of life and every actually wanted merely mortal pleasure and meaning and struggle playing out in the world as it is?

After all, isn't there something just plain worrisome about someone who wants to say of mortality that it is not just something that, well, sucks rather and something it can be difficult to come to terms with, but actually something from which we need urgently to be "rescued," something that means we are all of us now in some "hole" we must dig our way out of?

Again, my point is not to pretend that illness, vulnerability, and death are particularly thrilling prospects for me.

But I will admit that I feel a certain responsibility to the demands of basic legibility in the world of which I am a part to speak of meaning and dignity and human value in ways that don't manage deeply to disrespect the actual gorgeous beauty and genius and courage and significance of every human life that has happened always to be mortal so far and remains always mortal here and now by insisting of these mortal lives that somehow they were and are only utterly doomed or disastrous or insignificant just for the fact of their mortality.

To lose sight of the value of lives as they are actually lived is not the courageous affirmation of life the Techno-Immortalist sometimes try to sell it as -- often in the hyperbolic tonalities of salesmen sharking around some ignorant mark -- but to affirm what amounts to a falsifying idealization of a "life" that actually denigrates those lives actually lived in the world. And while I definitely do not mean to attribute this particular attitude to the editorialist "Reason," I will say that part of what makes me nervous in reading arguments like his is that I know how often the assumption of a vantage of indifference to worldly complexities coupled with a pining for personal transcendence and an evangelical fervor to be part of a movement that "sweeps the world" is to embark on a puritanical rampage of revenge against the vulnerability and variety of life as it is lived in its diversity, a frankly infantile and finally doomed (but no less dangerous for that) existential revolt against the perceived threat of too uncontrollably delicate and too unpredictably diverse worldly human lifeways in what amounts to a hostile and hysterical authoritarian rage for control and for order.

It is no surprise at all that the editorialist -- who goes by the moniker "Reason" because, you know, that is what he has more of than you do, which is why no doubt he keeps saying all these awful curious things so incessantly presumably -- disdains the very notion of paying attention to "the general pattern of wealth, use of medical resources, good health practices, and all that other fun stuff that fits in with 'socio-economic status,'" saying all this amounts in the end to what he calls "playing the game called 'who has more.'" As is usually the case with right wing market libertarians the question "who has more" does indeed feel like a "game" to those who are or would be situated closer to what George W. Bush once admitted to be his real political "base," that is to say, "the haves and the have-mores" than it does to other people.

The editorialist is certainly not averse to playing his own games in this area, taking pains to frame these disparities as mostly a matter of "exercise habits and excess body fat... all sorts of ways in which we can choose to damage ourselves, or let damage continue at a greater rate due to circumstances we can control." (Emphases added by me.) That is to say, once we disdain the idea of taking the palpable impact of lived socioeconomic disparities into account we then are perfectly predictably encouraged to hyper-inflate the role of individual responsibility for both personal success or misfortune, absolving the privileged from attending to their actual dependency for their success on majorities who fail to benefit from their own contribution to the outcomes enjoyed by privileged minorities while adding insult to injury, endlessly harassing the vulnerable for their suffering which is largely a consequence of public decisions in which they have little real say.

But it seems to me that the socially alienated perspective that "Reason" exhibits in his indifference to social injustice and individual suffering is less interesting than the deeper alienation of his perspective on the "doom" of mortality, what is palpably for him an incomparably deeper form of injustice and suffering, one that is actually underwriting in its depth and intensity his socially alienated perspective otherwise.

Of those who are preoccupied with actually-existing worldly lifeway differences and their impacts on actually-existing suffering, opportunity, health, and so on, "Reason" admonishes that "[t]hey are the voice of the shiny trinkets of the now…." Against these voices from the Fallen World, he counterposes the voices of those who see the World to Come: "All of this is irrelevant and unimportant, however, when compared to the speed with which medical technologies for the repair of aging are developed."

Understand this clearly: Techno-Immortalists like "Reason" demand we disdain the address here and now of actually-existing disparities that contribute to actually-addressable suffering in the world, the better to invest our energies in the programmatic faith in non-existing "medical technologies" that would presumably deliver us from this despised world unto salvation in techno-utopian Heaven.

It does not seem to me the least bit accidental that this disdain of worldly concerns is couched in terms of a repudiation of "shiny trinkets," the same hostility to the present world of flesh and diversity and desire that reappears in every generation's would-be ascetic priests and cult gurus and Dear Leaders.

"Reason" offers up this consummating juxtaposition: "If we can make that happen rapidly enough, we're all rescued. If not, we're all doomed."

But what if we fail to feel doomed in our lives just because we are finite and vulnerable and error-prone and mortal?

What if we are eager to contribute to the collaborative solution of shared problems (including problems of disease and avoidable suffering) and to the sum of lifeway multiculture, but see this as an embrace of the finitude and plurality of a humanity forever in reformation? What if we are altogether unmoved by denialist repudiations of that finitude and plurality, what if we abhor the insistence that this open humanity must instead be junked to make way for some parochial fantasy of a "post-human" species soliciting the identification here and now of a handful of privileged sociopaths who are scared of death and contingency?

I will be as happy to contribute my support to a technoscientifically and socially progressive democracy devoted to the funding, regulation, and fair distribution of expanding medical knowledge and techniques to expand thereby the scene of informed consensual prosthetic self-determination, including championing non-normalizing modifications and interventions into hitherto customary capacities, morphologies, and so on.

But I don't see this as a need for rescue so much as an embrace of the collective genius and diverse beauty of an ever-more consensual sustainable democratic human planetary multiculture.

The world doesn't need saving or leading or controlling or rescue from your Robot Cult, thanks very much.

Worldliness is contribution to the collaborative solution of shared problems and contribution to the sum of creative expressivity, peer-to-peer.

Finite, mortal, vulnerable, this-worldly, but open, consensual, critical, fair, and free.

Peer-to-peer.