I realize that a post like the last one, and this one too, are pretty heavy sledding for readers without some background in philosophy, but it's where I think the fight for the future has to take place. Whoever tells the best story wins, but the story--or mythos-- has to make sense, and it has to organize our experience in ways more adequate than competing, alternative stories. I've been arguing that the Baconian Transhumanist mythos is the one that dominates in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. It may or may not be your personal mythos or meaning narrative, but it's the one that is shaping our global future until a more compelling one can crowd it out. The foundation for any such story has to be argued philosophically, it has to inspire, and then it must take hold of the collective imagination.
Now I realize how heavy a lift this is, and every time I become discouraged that I'm spitting into the wind, that we're too far gone into the "hell" of the TCM, I come across an essay, as I did this morning, like the one excerpted below by a kindred spirit, Lauren Spohn. It puts meat on the figure (inserted again below) that I posted in my last essay about Utopian Thinking. That diagram is Aristotelian through and through, except for its adding an historical, world-transforming dimension on the horizontal axis. Spohn's essay shows that she understands that it's all about which story is going to win--one that is open to transcendence, or the Transhumanist one that is closed to it:
It’s partly thanks to the success of Bacon’s program that we are here: paying attention to empirical reality worked so well that we have more or less forgotten to pay attention to anything else, especially the moral and spiritual realities that go unseen. But if it’s Bacon’s rejection of Aristotle that helped bring us to this point, maybe it’s the recovery of Aristotle, in some sense, that can help us get beyond it.
Here are three ideas for what that could look like.
First, transhumanism has to come to terms with the body. Are we minds trapped in lifeless matter? Or are we bodies, composites of matter organized and actualized by an immaterial soul, the source of our mind and will, which is not just another gear in the material system but the principle that accounts for that system’s organization in the first place? Answers to these questions will determine at what point transhumanist technologies either advance or destroy the human person. Contemporary developments in cognitive science and trauma psychology, not to mention Aristotelian revivals in analytic philosophy, are showing how the mind and body are more intimately united than most transhumanists presuppose. But if being an embodied soul is a crucial aspect of what it means to be human, what trajectory ought our drive toward freedom and self-creation take? Where do we go with this desire to slip the surly bonds of matter? Just to Mars?
Second, perfection of human nature is not just physical. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics describes “the human good” as the “activity of the soul in accord with virtue, and indeed with the best and most complete virtue,” all in the context of a full life. Can technology help us develop habits of temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude? Or make us better receptacles for the gifts of faith, hope, and love? Technology may help us live forever, but can it make us saints? If we have followed the natural human drive to transcend human nature so far that we have figured out how to transcend death, but we haven’t figured out how to transcend the ego, we will end where C. S. Lewis warns we will end in The Abolition of Man: nature will win over itself, and all possibility of transcendence will be foreclosed — in a monosyllable: Hell [aka, the Techno-Capitalist Matrix].
Third, I would hazard that the only hope for avoiding such a fate comes from where Bacon found it: from outside history. To take one last cue from Aristotle, what seems to be missing is the proper object, or end, of this desire in human nature to transcend nature. Would not the rational response be to look outsidenature to find it? What would “it” even be? Judging from the earlier parts of this essay, I suppose it would have to be some kind of grand meta-narrative that casts a comprehensive vision for moral and material progress, provides a practical program to realize that vision, grounds our demands for equality and human rights in an understanding of the human person as someone (not something) intrinsically valuable, implicates everyone, knits together body and soul, gathers up past and present and future, promises freedom for each person, redemption of all things, and a final transcendence into a life and world in and beyond this one — all ideally with an irresistible protagonist who sacrifices himself heroically for his friends and, against all odds, comes back to be with them again in the new world his love has made.
Item three is depicted in the diagram below. In the diagram's lower left, I have a list of four criteria that didn't comment on because the post was already too long, but it's an important aspect of what the diagram represents: It's the criteria by which we should judge which story--which 'mythos'--is the best one to take us into the future. Let me elaborate here:
(1) Scope: how broad is the scope of legitimated knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical axes does the mythos allow? Premodern societies lacked scope on the horizontal axis, and modern societies lack scope on the vertical. We need to be expanding the scope on both, but in ways that respect--
(2) Coherency: how coherent is the integration of its knowledge on both vertical self-transcendent and horizontal world-transforming dimensions? Premodern societies were deeply enriched by knowledge on the vertical axis that was at the same time deeply integrated with their knowledge and practices on the horizontal. We certainly see this in Native American societies. And in the West, the synthesis of Plato, Aristotle, and Christian revelation in Aquinas and Dante were magnificent artifacts of coherency in the high middle ages, a time of remarkable intellectual, artistic and spiritual fertility.
That coherency broke down because European cultural elites failed to integrate new knowledge that became available after Galileo on the horizontal axis with the knowledge established on the Vertical axis. Bacon and others saw Aristotle as an impediment to progress on the horizontal, and the vertical gradually became a private place for personal faith rather than an essential limb structuring our civilization. And so material progress, the Baconian Project, became the public mythos and moral progress as emodied in the Christian mythos went into the wilderness. It was just a matter of time before the vertical collapsed completely. Coherency and cross-fertilization between the horizontal and vertical axes is essential for any vital society, and in future we must find a way, first, to restore the vertical limb, and then, second, to reintegrate the two.
(3) Adaptability: So essential for any metaphysical imaginary is its ability to adapt and integrate new knowledge as the human project moves forward. In the 1600s and following, the cultural elites who were custodians of wisdom and knowledge on the vertical axis failed to adapt because their imaginary was to rigid to integrate new knowledge that became available on the horizontal axis after Galileo. The story is more complex--certainly the Baconians banning of Aristotle exemplified another kind of rigidity. But now it’s up to the knowledge authorities on the horizontal axis to find ways to adapt and integrate knowledge that comes from experience on the vertical axis. Knowledge in Physics seems to be the site where it has openings toward vertical knowledge. Biology less so, although there has been some progress with integrating vertical aspects of Asian medicine into the Western horizontal model.
(4) Richness: It matters deeply whether we live in a society where people can live rich, emotionally and spiritually rich, meaningful lives, and it’s pretty obvious, to me at least, that modern Liberal societies shaped by the Baconian Project fail in that regard. (Any society that has elected a figure like Trump as its leader and threatens to do so again is a failure. Do I need to argue the point further?) The political crisis we’re experiencing throughout the developed world is one powerful indicator, but the vulgarity that now passes for prestige culture is clearly another.
We mostly have no idea how spiritually impoverished we have become because if we are educated and affluent, we confuse our comfort, or entertainments, and the ease with which we satisfy our appetites as the “good life”. Aristotle is spinning in his grave. It’s important that our material needs be met, but more important that our spiritual needs be, and they’re just not. We can blame the churches, and they deserve much of it, but the churches are weak because they cannot flourish in a society that runs on a cultural operating system that has amputated the vertical axis in its public life. This isn’t just a problem for religion, but for the arts as well, which no longer connect us to vertical knowledge. The arts have become horizontalized.
In the next paragraph following the excerpt above, Spohn makes her case for the Christian narrative meeting these criteria:
The specifications for such an adequate narrative are steep. Should we expect otherwise? Perhaps the only story that could meet all of them would involve something like the Transcendent Cause of all things becoming man so that man could transcend all things. But to be truly transcendent, the narrative would have to be spun in such a way that our human logic could only recognize it, not expect it — a divine comedy, as it were, that would keep us guessing until the end. If something like that had happened, of course, the world would never be the same. It would have to be “the greatest story ever told,” as even writers like Tom Holland, speaking as historians and not true believers, are coming to see.
I, of course, find the Christian narrative compelling for these reasons and others, but there's too much negative Christian baggage for it to work effectively in America. We have to shed our Calvinism one way or the other--it's too deeply implicated in the Baconian Project.
So recovering Aristotle might be a good place to start.