Shakespeare vs. the Transhumanists - Andrew Klavin

[Geee]

City Journal

I find these days that even friends with no religion have begun to speak in religious terms. Recently, within a single week, I heard the word “demonic” used five times, four times by people who don’t believe in demons. Stranger still, and not long after, I found myself in two separate conversations in which the sort of men who would never speculate upon the coming of the “end of days” began, with some embarrassment, to do exactly that.

The subject, in each case, was transhumanism: transgenderism, artificial intelligence, artificial wombs, the melding of man and medication, man and machine. There was a sense that we were arriving at a moment of choosing—choosing, each of us, whether we would continue to be what we were originally made, male and female, mortal, fallible, passionate, irrational, seemingly random in our individual qualities and yet recognizable, even if only in metaphor, as the image of God. Or would we, through medication, surgery, implants, and the like, become whatever it is we would: happier presumably, smarter in some sense, maybe even eternal in some sense, free in form, no mere image of God, but electric gods ourselves?

Believers and unbelievers both, we wondered in these conversations, sometimes ironically (or maybe irony was simply a form of mental self-defense): Was it possible that this choice we were approaching, between a human or a cyborg future, was the final sorting of sheep and goat, sinner and saint, saved and damned, that the Bible foretold?

Faith is, after all, a matter of interpretation, a decision to believe in a certain meaning of things. Does the body’s journey from cradle to grave express the odyssey of a sovereign self, or is it a random fandango of forces, ghost dancing with deluded ghost then gone? This man, this woman, this embrace—are they making love or merely having sex? Even these words right now—are they rough tools for passing insights from mind to mind, or lies that we tell ourselves to give human shape to nothingness? If we do decide to carve and medicate and modify our brains and bodies until we leave our created selves behind, will we be losing anything that was ever really there?

So, yes, an aspect of these questions is decidedly religious, even if only in metaphor. The resurrected Christ met his disciples on the road to Emmaus for the specific purpose of interpretation. He interpreted their scripture for them to show that history was prophecy, events were parables and that every law, every ritual spoke of him, of God. For 1,500 years of Christendom, the world was infused with that interpretive revelation. Then the process went into reverse. We began to interpret the spiritual as an emanation of the material. What had seemed the labor of angels became a kind of clockwork. The mysterious ways of a man and a maid became the ephemeral emanation of hormones and instinct. Morality, gender, the life of the self—all were just social arrangements, brain interacting with brain in an unconscious evolutionary strategy game of power and advantage.