“We are living in an age of radical transformations in science, technology, and worldview,” writes Mohler in a short commentary today entitled (genuflecting in the direction of fellow bioconservative Francis Fukuyama) “Our Posthuman Future.”
Standing at the center of the worldview now dominant in our society is an affirmation that human beings have the right, if not the responsibility, to "improve" themselves in every way.
In a culture that celebrates youth, attractiveness, and achievement, the
idea of personal improvement is now being stretched beyond what previous
generations could have imagined.
It is difficult to imagine just how Mohler could offer a compelling argument as to why it would be a bad thing particularly if medical advances succeeded in providing more youthfulness, attractiveness, and capacities for achievement for all. And so, Mohler is appealing instead to the reasonable suspicions many of us have come to entertain about the superficiality and disastrous distractedness of (and cynical manipulations enabled by) unrealistic idealizations of youth, appearance, and endless achievement.
For too many people in contemporary society aging brings isolation and infirmity. Few actual people today embody ideal standards of attractiveness, while many suffer feelings of devastating inadequacy as they judge themselves against those standards. Too often the language of “success” and "achievement” ignores the extent to which individual success results from dumb luck misdiagnosed as destiny, or depends on the work of people who gain little of the benefit or credit for it.
But Mohler’s criticism does not seem to be that emerging technologies will continue to inspire unrealistic standards and hopes, while imposing unfair costs and distracting us from real problems. Mohler seems to worry that medicine might in fact succeed in improving health, lengthening lives, increasing youthfulness, expanding capacities, providing worldly hope, and widening the secular scope of human happiness and meaning.
Mohler warns against the emerging idea that “human beings have the right, if not the responsibility, to ‘improve’ themselves in every way.” But does he really want to commit us to the contrary proposition that the efforts of human beings to improve themselves as they see fit should be forbidden, then?
We are all of us already the beneficiaries of prosthetic practices, we are already rewriting ourselves in the image of our desires, we are already weaving technologies into our bodies and into the stories of our lives.
Would Mohler really want to argue that contact lenses or hearing aids are dehumanizing? How about prosthetic limbs? Would genetic therapies in which limbs or eyes or rotten teeth regenerate where they were lost to the vicissitudes of life be dehumanizing, then? Are we “dehumanized” by vaccinations or multivitamin supplements?
I was going to add, are women “dehumanized” by their access to reproductive technologies, or are children “dehumanized” by their exposure to scientific knowledge, critical thinking skills, or human diversity through literature? –- And since Mohler is a conservative Southern Baptist I suspect his answer here might be revealing indeed.
By scare-quoting the word “improve” Mohler seems to suggest either that new technologies will impose changes on us that we would not otherwise choose for ourselves or that they will re-make us in an image we would disdain or from which we would suffer impoverishment. Certainly I agree with Mohler that modification and rejuvenation and other radical therapeutic interventions must always be consensual, rarely-to-never mandated, rarely-to-never banned. And I agree that there should be considerably greater cultural sensitivity about manipulative and unrealistic marketing claims that impair people’s capacity to make informed decisions with reasonable expectations about the effects of medical interventions.
But it is hard to see how such reasonable concerns could have inspired the sweeping wholesale condemnation of science and medicine and the very idea of human improvement in Mohler’s short diatribe, or in the many bioconservative panic-button editorials that are pimpling the cultural landscape in this moment of roiling technoconstituted change.
Mohler sputters: ”Some even talk of a ‘posthuman’ or ‘transhuman’ future in which humans can redefine themselves.” Just think what it means to denigrate such a hope altogether.
Where human beings are treated as incapable of defining themselves you can be sure there are self-appointed authorities who feel that it is their own job to define human beings for them, and on their own parochial terms and for their own purposes.
Mohler flings out the usual disasterbatory scare-tactics and hyperbolic superlative fantasies, “designer babies,” “superhuman competitor species,” and the rest. But preimplantation genetic screening for diseases, for example, yields anything but “superbabies” on the streets where we actually live. It just gives women more information on the basis of which to make informed choices about biological processes taking place in their own bodies.
We must not displace crucial deliberation about emerging technologies with wild-eyed speculation about superlative outcomes that will eventuate or not from developmental processes of many steps, each one involving a complex and unpredictable interplay of political, cultural, and technical factors.
Proliferating opportunities for medical intervention will little likely yield some competitor species of “supermen” but an overwhelming abundance of ways of being in the world, too diverse in its forms and values and lifeways for anybody to define themelves realistically as more "elite" than all the others. (I suspect in fact that it is this appealing overabundant diversity that truly frightens bioconservatives, rather than the specters of clone armies and super robots they continually conjure up to frighten their footsoldiers.)
If some people’s choices end up being superficial, unrealistic, or harmful, then this should inspire deeper critiques of culture rather than a superficial policing of consequent conduct, especially when this policing would frustrate choices that are beneficial as well and not harmful, informed as well and not unrealistic, deeply personal and enriching to some humans as well even if they are at odds with the prejudices of other humans who happen to inhabit the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“Where is the outcry?” demands Mohler.
Well, I venture to propose, it is confined largely to the noisy brigade of bioconservatives like Mohler himself, who would rather cling to backward prejudices, self-serving pieties, and uncritical platitudes so as to retain the privileges and position these have conferred on him and his fellows, rather than work to develop technologies that will redress suffering and widen the sphere of freedom open to human address.
Mohler concludes, somewhat more sensibly, that ”[w]hat's clear is that we can no longer count on the scientists to police themselves... It's time for tougher laws and closer supervision -- and fast.”
I can easily agree with him here, as would most reasonable people. We do need to regulate the marketing of therapies so that there will be fewer unrealistic and fraudulent claims made in the name of these emerging technologies. We also need to ensure that new medical interventions are neither forbidden nor their use mandated by authorities, but that consensual prosthetic practices are truly informed, universally available where their benefits contribute to the general welfare, and regulated to ensure their safety and to ensure that they impose no undue public harms, risks, or costs.
But to agree to such deliberation about the development of radical technologies and the distribution of their effects requires as a point of departure that we grant the reality of this emerging technoconstituted transformation of human life and the consequent shake up of received wisdom, traditional assumptions, and the customary terrain of institutional and cultural authority.
It is too late to disinvent civilization, or, one hopes, to stall technology in its tracks. People of good will must collaborate together now to ensure that the course of technological development in which we are all irredeemably immersed be as fair, as sustainable, and as universally emancipatory as possible.
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