Pulse
15 July 2024
In a recent article, I examined the technologism of the Transhumanist movement, especially the naïve confidence it places in what technoscience can do to shape the future of the human species. I explained that transhumanists are sanguine about the achievements of technology because their entire outlook is premised upon an idea of progress whose roots can be traced to the Enlightenment.
In this article, I would like to examine the notion of human progress further, especially as it relates to how transhumanists have understood and appropriated this idea. I would then offer a critique of this concept from the perspective of the Christian faith and show that it suffers from a dangerous naïveté which must be properly acknowledged and addressed.
It must be noted that the notion of human progress did not originate with transhumanism, or even with the Enlightenment. Some scholars have traced it to the period of great cultural, artistic and political flourishing in 15th and 16th century Europe called the Renaissance.
Others have traced its origins to the philosophers of ancient Greece in the sixth century BC. The idea of progress is epitomized by Xenophanes, when he famously declared: ‘The gods did not reveal to men all things in the beginning, but men through their own search find in the course of time that which is better.’
However, the accounts of civilizational progress that are tied to modern technoscience are clearly intertwined with the narrative that came out of the Enlightenment. And it is with such accounts that transhumanism is most closely associated.
Some writers have appropriately described the modern narrative of progress as a myth. Some may wonder how anything related to science and technology may be considered as myth. But as the eminent British philosopher Mary Midgley reminds us: ‘We are accustomed to think of myths as the opposite of science. But in fact they are a central part of it: the part that decides its significance in our lives.’
Midgley also clarifies that myths are not mere fabrications about reality. They contain the truth about the world even if that truth is accompanied by a society’s way of imagining and making sense of the world. She writes:
Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.
With this in mind, we turn our attention to the transhumanist dream: the idea of human progress towards utopia aided by technoscience.
THE MYTHOS OF PROGRESS
The transhumanist understanding of human progress is best captured by the utopias imagined by its adherents.
For example, Nick Bostrom, the Director of the Future of Humanities Institute at the Oxford University states: ‘I want to help make the world a better place’. He goes on to speculate how radically enhanced post-human beings can enjoy ‘lives wonderful beyond imagination.’
In a similar vein, the distinguished British bioethicist, John Harris, believes that ‘taking control of evolution and our future development to the point, and indeed beyond the point, where we humans will have changed, perhaps into a new and certainly into a better species altogether’ is ‘nothing short of a clear imperative to make the world a better place.’
David Pearce, who drafted the ‘Transhumanist Declaration’ with Nick Bostrom and a few others, prophesied that ‘Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrates of suffering will be eradicated completely.’ As a consequence, he adds, the ‘states of mind of our descendants (…) will share at least one common feature: a sublime and all-pervasive happiness.’
The anthropocentrism of the transhumanist account of progress is clearly evident. But what is pertinent to note is that there is nothing peculiar or extraordinary with this idea of progress, as it shares many of the features of the Enlightenment narrative.
Most importantly, just as the Enlightenment notion of progress brings together the advancement of technoscience and societal progress such that the latter is dependent on the former, so does the transhumanist account.
This coupling of technoscience and civilizational progress must be credited to Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who in his Instauratio Magna envisioned the restoration of Adamic capacities lost after the Fall through the intervention of science (Baconian science, of course!).
Be that as it may, what is of note here is that the transhumanist notion of progress depends largely upon and extends this already-existing and robust myth associated with the Enlightenment. Both accounts are based on achieving an imagined or projected ideal, and both prize the crucial role that science and technology will play in achieving this ideal.
According to Michael Burdett, Postdoctoral Fellow in Religion, Science and Technology at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford, such myths are based on faith or embedded in beliefs. Because they are so deeply entrenched in a system of beliefs, Burdett explains, ‘[s]imple extirpation or jettisoning at a moment’s notice is just not possible with myths.’
The transhumanist mythos is grounded in a particular understanding of the human being (anthropology), an estimate of the possibilities of science (scientism and technologism), and the ‘scientific’ account of onward progress based on an adaptation of the Darwinian evolutionary theory. This mythos is resilient because it is rooted in such grand metaphysical assumptions and commitments.
Burdett, like Midgley, recognizes the unique nature of myths. They are a special kind of story which present the ultimate concerns of a group of people, and therefore affects them existentially. As Burdett puts it: ‘They are connected to how we perceive the world around us, interpret it, and imbue existential meaning to it.’
This means that the power of the myth penetrates deep into the individual psyche as well as the collective psyche of the group. As Burdett explains,
It is better to say we trust in these myths than believe in them, for we engage them personally rather than assent to them in some disengaged way. We adhere to them with our lives, not just our minds.
QUESTIONING THE MYTH
This makes the exercise of interrogating the myth of progress – not to mention its demythologization – extremely difficult. Be that as it may, it is nonetheless important to do so if we are to prevent the myths that we construct from leading us astray.
The critical evaluation of the myths we live by is important because of the relationship between myths and truth. We recall Midgely’s terse and loaded statement: ‘Myths are not lies.’
The interrogation of myths assumes this important relationship, but it is also motivated by the recognition that myths can gradually become lies if they are not carefully curated. And when they deviate too far from the truth (or amplifies one aspect of it – which is the same thing), they spawn self-deception and disillusionment – precisely because of the unique powers they possess.
The Enlightenment version of the myth came under robust criticism especially in the works of prominent figures such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Kierkegaard couched his critique of the myth of progress in his wider critique of Hegelianism, especially its view of the triumphant advance of history.
Even from within the scientific community, there can be heard strong voices of dissent against the prevailing narrative of progress based on the advances of technoscience. Surveying the history of science, the theologian and philosopher of science, Stanley Jaki, could write:
A principal cliché in that historiography is that science is the saviour – a tragic absurdity if one considers the great, potential and actual, setbacks dealt to science by those who presented it as the ultimate and only truth available to man.
The turbulent and tragic events of the first half of the twentieth century inflicted an almost mortal wound on the Enlightenment myth of progress. The late sociologist at the University of California, Robert Nisbet describes the disenchantment with the idea thus:
It is often said that this vaunted faith is dead, in the West at least – killed by World War I, by the Great Depression, by World War II, by the spectacle of military despotism, under whatever ideological label, galloping across the earth at rising speed, by belief in the exhaustion of nature and her resources, by malaise compounded with boredom, apathy and disillusionment at one extreme and by consecration of mindless terror at the other, or by some other lethal force.
But in the second half of the last century, which witnessed mind-blowing advances in science and technology, the myth is given a new lease of life by the transhumanists, and re-emerged in a slightly different form.
However, the same criticisms which were leveled against the previous version – its naïveté, its according to science and technology god-like powers, and the titanism that undergirds its view of human beings – also apply to the new transhumanist version, for they are both, as it were, cut from the same cloth.
Almost a century ago, in the 1930s and 40s, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the parasitic nature of the Enlightenment view of progress, which is a thin secular version of biblical eschatology. The same can be said of the transhumanist vision.
In the biblical account, the remaking of this fallen world can only be accomplished by God – so marred it is due to human disobedience and hubris. Having taken God out of the picture, the architects of the Enlightenment and the gurus of the transhumanist movement have placed this remaking firmly in the hands of human beings, with their technoscientific creations.
But in making this move, they have failed to recognize one basic truth – clearly stated in the Christian worldview – namely, that human beings are fallen creatures. As rebellious creatures, humans have the propensity to use their God-given freedom (now distorted by sin) to satisfy their selfish desires and megalomania.
As such, the transhumanist view of history is too simplistic (hence naïve), oblivious to the complexities and contradictions which biblical eschatology addresses.
As Niebuhr observes:
[Progress] did not recognize that history is filled with endless possibilities of good and evil … It did not recognize that every new human potency may be an instrument of chaos as well as of order; and that history, therefore, has no solution of its own problem.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.