My colleague has written about Fukuyama’s absurd thesis, that transhumanism is the “most dangerous idea in the world today” – and to his intense credit, dismantled it down to the planks, bolts and screws. Here is my view why transhumanism is an absolute necessity of transhumanism, if religion is to be vanquished.
There is a certain kind of atheist who seems to seriously believe, or at least able to convince himself, that by offering a number of condescending arguments will break the spine of religions. Basically they think that this:
Can trump this:
Yeah. Good luck with that.
The problem with this is – well, there’s a lot of them. But what it boils down to is that you win if you can convince people to fight for what you want. If you’re not willing to fight, it doesn’t matter how smart your arguments are – you are going to loose.
Now, there are two ways of inspiring people to stand up for something. The first is to appeal to a shared past. The second is to appeal to a shared future.
The first one is just not an option for atheists – or at least not largely an option. The past is ruled by religion. The best you could hope for is to go neoconservative and believe in religion and not in God, and appeal to, I don’t know, “shared Judeo-Christian heritage” to keep the masses in line.
When it comes to option 2, appealing to a shared future, there is a problem for many in the current atheist scene. Sam Harris was once asked why it was that so many “liberals” (read: US centre lefties) were useless when it came to facing down the jihad. His response was “liberals, almost by definition, don’t know what it is like to really believe in God.” That’s almost right, but wrong enough. The real answer is that “liberals” don’t believe in shit.
The whole ‘modern, centre-left’ thing needs to be stressed here. The old-school left would have known what to make of the jihad. This is one of things that pisses me off when US conservatives call President Obama a “socialist”. I wish. A true socialist, whether of the stripe of Orwell or Lenin would have know how to deal with the jihadists. Does anyone think that for one second that if a man like Trotsky or Gramsci had been in the white house he would have permitted any fiasco like Benghazi?
That’s also the reason why a lot of old lefties have been great in the big fight. People like the late great Christopher Hitchens and the currently alive Nick Cohen remember what it is like to fight for an ideal – and why they didn’t and don’t get on with the modern lot.
I digress only slightly.
Long before there was something called “skepticism” there was something called the Enlightenment. That cast down kings and priests and built a world unlike anything that has ever been seen before. It was able to do this because it had a vision of a future worth having.
If anyone out there has not read Les Miserables – not the musical but the real, unexpurgated book – do so now. Then follow it up with Ninety Three. Then go and read some more of the authors of that age. You will not believe the sheer optimism and hope that they reflect. Read Condorcet’s shining vision of the future and try to name me someone in the modern atheist movement who writes and talks like this:
The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free man who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking on their excesses; and to learn how to recognize and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear among us.
Take your time.
Even as recently as the early twentieth century, this mood was the norm amongst the educated. here is a frontpiece from Harmsworth Popular Science:
In my copy this front piece is subtitled: The conqueror of the earth. Will he master the sun?
Try to imagine any modern publication writing like that. Realize its impossibility. Weep.
Is it surprising that the world has been going backwards? That, say, Afghanistan has gone from this:
To this?
The great religious revival hasn’t come out of nowhere. It has poured into the vacuum that the retreat of Reason – capital ‘R’ is intentional and essential – has left.
That is why it is absolutely necessary not just to critique the menace that religious fanaticism undoubtedly is. The critiques are valid – but so what? Serious people go to God not because they think that there’s a life after this, or that the world was created in seven days – but because they don’t want a life where everything is relative and nothing is worth believing in. Frankly, I don’t blame them there, even as I have to fight them.
We need a vision, a serious, moral and practical goal of the future. And believe you me, that vision will be some form of transhumanism. It will have to be some form of techno-utopianism. Whether it’s statist or libertarian, whether it’s “light and broad” (humans basically the same, but biotech cleaning out problems like mass starvation etc.) or “small and intense” (human uploading, physical immortality etc.), or both – this is the only practical vision of the future that we can offer that has any sort of hope of success.
Again, reread men like Victor Hugo and Benjamin Franklin. They were absolutely techno-utopians. Many of their ideas would be considered radical and progressive today, let alone when they wrote.
As someone once said, “If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”
The big question atheists need to face is: What do you stand for?
