On Medium: Big Tech’s Incomplete Reverence for Star Trek

Here's an article about Silicon Valley, Star Trek, and the travesty of technological progress without secular humanist enlightenment.

On Medium: There Will be No Manly Transhumans

Here's an article about whether technological progress is opposed to manly virtues, so that power and manliness are inversely related, and there will be no manly transhumans.

On Medium: Apocalyptic Revelations and the UFO Coverup

Here's an article about why the most plausible reason for the coverup of UFOs would also be the most terrifying, assuming for the sake of argument that there's been such a coverup.

On Medium: Techno-Toys Don’t Make the Transhuman

Read on about the message of transhumanist science fiction that hides in plain sight since these stories are about secular humanism's impact on us and the planet here and now.

On Medium: The Fictions of Moralists and Hypocrites

This article is about the inevitable unworkability of moral or religious principles, because of their basis in myths and fictions. So if we're moral, we end up lying to ourselves and if we're unprincipled, we lie to others to avoid being cast out of society. Either way, fictions rule.

The Vileness of Guns and "Just Wars"

The Newtown school massacre has already begun to fade from North American news, as the NRA had anticipated. There’s probably a satanic magic number of child shootings in a single massacre that would galvanize Americans to ride the NRA out of town, but apparently twenty doesn’t rise to that level. As it stands, though, American gun enthusiasts are more passionate than American gun control advocates, and so there likely won’t be meaningful restriction of gun ownership in that country. One reason for the asymmetry is that guns work so well whereas laws alone don’t. If you pick up a gun, you have the power of God to take a life in the blink of an eye. Only if the gun jams or is very old and it no longer works may you miss that frisson from holding godlike power in the palm of your hand. By contrast, outlawing some practice on paper may or may not succeed, depending on the strength of the demand for that practice. Thus, prohibition of alcohol failed in the US and gun control would surely fare no better, because alcohol and guns are so potent; if outlawed, they flourish underground. Like guns, alcohol works immediately and universally: anyone can get drunk from just a few shots or several beers, and anyone can kill or maim with nearly any gun. The demand for those products can’t be curtailed just with legislation.

The deep question, then, is why Americans love guns more than do, say, Canadians, Europeans, or the Japanese. Gun control works in those other countries because the demand there isn’t off the chart; nevertheless, guns obviously work just as well there as they do in the US. One well-known reason for the differences in demand is historical, and it’s just the one I give elsewhere, that the US has a bloody anarchical history, which bred Americans to value individualism and self-reliance. Americans love guns for the same reason they love cars, because these technologies empower the individual.

But that reason is insufficient, because lots of other countries have violent pasts, and individualism also has a genetic and thus a universal basis. I think a more complete reason emerges when we consider the dubious but oft heard platitude that guns are morally neutral instruments, that guns by themselves don’t kill people and can be used for good or for ill depending on the user’s intention. On the contrary, Marshal McLuhan was right: technologies have unexpected background effects rather than just the obvious foreground ones. Of course guns don’t pick themselves up, walk around, and shoot people; guns aren’t artificially intelligent (yet). But to contrast this wild scenario with the moral neutrality of guns is to set up a false dichotomy.

Why Guns are for Sissies

To see the background effect of guns on users and nonusers alike, compare projectile weapons with nonprojectile ones like the sword, club, or axe. These latter weapons are armaments in the strict sense that they’re extensions of the arm; they’re limited by the human arm’s strength and length. As a consequence, to kill with a sword, for example, you have to put yourself in danger since you have to get close to your enemy. Of course, if that enemy is unarmed, the person with the sword has the advantage, but even such a fight is more equal than that between a shooter and an unarmed person. A bow can kill from a greater distance than the sword, ensuring the killer’s safety even when the bow threatens the targeted person. The point is that you can’t kill with a sword without putting yourself at some risk, whereas there’s at least a possibility of killing with a projectile weapon from a position of complete safety.

Woody Allen’s Curious Intellectualism

Woody Allen films are famous for their existential comedy. On the one hand, these films tend to feature the Woody Allen character, a hyper-rational, neurotic atheist and existentialist who fears death and regards life as absurdly unfair. On the other hand, this character is highly sexual and instead of ascetically retreating from life, he finds humour in tragic situations, expressing that humour in wry one-liners. Most of his films mine this paradox, but Whatever Works, starring Larry David as the Woody Allen character, called Boris, neatly summarizes what seems Allen’s personal philosophy. No familiarity with this particular movie’s plot is needed to understand Boris’ concluding speech, since this speech could have been inserted into nearly any of his movies.

Boris says, “I totally lucked out. It just shows what meaningless blind chance the universe is. Everybody schemes and dreams to meet the right person, and I jump out a window and land on her [his soul mate]. And a psychic yet! I mean, come on, talk about the irrational heart [Boris is a hyper-rationalist physicist who loves her in spite of himself]...I happen to hate New year's celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun. Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the grave? That's why I can't say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself, it's by no means all up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck than you'd like to admit. Christ, you know the odds of your father's one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you? Don't think about it, you'll have a panic attack.” (Whatever Works script)

This speech refers both to dark existentialism (the inevitability of death) and to the need for happiness and sexuality, to life’s unfairness (success’ dependence on luck) and to the possibility of grace. Evidently, the film’s title, “Whatever Works,” is meant to call to mind a pragmatic amoralist’s libertinism, the license to exploit nature’s inhumanity, not for evil but for good--which Allen assumes to be mainly the pursuit of personal pleasure with a life partner. As evidenced by his cerebral, philosophical humour and his scandalous love life, Woody Allen’s movies seem vehicles for preaching his personal wisdom, if not autobiographies.

The Rich, Full Life

Among the throngs of shiny, happy people, there’s an upper tier in which are seated those renowned for their more monumental contentment: not only are these blessed few pleased with their lot and so unmoved by empathy for the suffering masses and undisturbed by knowledge of our existential predicament, but they’ve managed to accrue for themselves what we dub a Rich, Full Life (RFL). (See Happiness.) These champions of egotism are personally fulfilled, to be sure, but that understates the completeness of their triumph, since they’re happy many times over, as it were. The happiness of a hundred ordinary folks doesn’t equal that of a single hero who’s blessed with an RFL, who has traveled the whole world, garnered a bewildering variety of experiences, succeeded in numerous fields, loved and been loved by countless life partners.

Enduring their torments far beyond that upper tier and the herd of cheerful consumers and pragmatists, the inured losers moan in agony, crying in despair, trembling in horror. The worst of these are said to be cursed with the opposite of the RFL, namely with an Empty, Wasted one (EWL). Sometimes intentionally withdrawing from the race to flourish, these self-tortured existentialists, mystical ascetics, and assorted omega men and women are unhappy, to be sure; but time also passes them by, as do opportunities for advancement, and so their mind comes to resemble a barren echo chamber filled by their harping inner voice, bereft of memories of mountains climbed, friends and lovers enjoyed, conventional challenges met, or luxuries consumed. All the struggles of their ancestors have led, pitifully and tragically, to their withdrawal, to their dropping of the torch. (See Procreation for Ancestors.)

Such is my dramatic way of drawing the politically correct distinction between the happiest and unhappiest people. But let’s look closer at this pair of categories. Much of the meaning of an RFL and of an EWL is relative: the person with a wide variety of enjoyments and successes is deemed all the happier by comparison with the person with few if any of them. An RFL is praised and an EWL is pitied because they’re so far apart from each other: the happiest people have won the race only by leaving far behind the losers, and the unhappiest are those who can regret that they haven’t seen or done as much as the winners. Another way to frame the distinction is to rank each life next to the plethora of potential experiences that humans can have, in which case the happiest are those who have at least a representative sample of those total experiences, while the unhappiest are subhuman in that their accomplishments fall below that threshold.

Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion

In a few rants here I’ve hinted at the Nietzschean view that one of the major problems with secular society, after the death of God, is the lack of an obvious replacement that we can feel in our bones to be sacred. (See Nietzsche.) When scientists discovered the universe’s true inhuman scale and the full animalistic nature of our bodies and of our evolutionary history, the result was a disenchantment of the world that threatens to burst the delusions that sustain our sanity. Postmodern cynics contend that no such nontheistic religion is needed, that we can live with infinite layers of irony, turning our culture into a giant Stephen Colbert skit in which every public statement is at best a white lie and we applaud each other’s savvy pragmatism, our disdain for philosophical questioning, and our nihilistic poses. 

These cynics may fool themselves but they don’t fool me. Hold a gun to the head of a postmodern poseur’s family member and see whether that erstwhile cynic retains her quasi-Buddhist detachment and truly holds nothing on Earth sacred. Naturally, as the animal she is, the postmodernist would sacrifice herself for her loved ones. Her religion is thus biochemically determined. She’s used as a puppet not by a transcendent Creator of all, but by mindlessly replicating genes which cause each of us to care a lot about those who most share our genetic material. The question to ask the postmodernist is whether some feelings can be judged superior to others according to ideals that aren’t lost with the premodern, theistic worldviews. Nietzsche believed that although traditional morality is rendered dubious by the death of theism, aesthetic standards are still compelling. The problem with the emotional defense of our immediate family members, then, or of our instinctive replacement of traditional deities with naturally selected idols, is that aesthetically speaking, such a primitive religious impulse has surely by now, after millions of generations, become a god-awful cliché.

Can we postmodern nontheists do better? Given that religions are inevitable in human societies, because we’re emotionally driven to identify something as sacred, as a radiant good that uplifts us despite our profane lives filled with disappointment, angst, or delusion, can we create a more beautiful religion that’s viable even after modern secular humanism has given way to postmodern hyper-skepticism? Had I such a religion fully worked out, perhaps I’d be on television hawking T-shirts adorned with the creed’s associated slogans. Needless to say, I know of no such religion. However, I’d like to speak of some themes that do inspire me and that sketch, at least, the sort of religion I’d like to see. Some of these themes are found in the closing speech of Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 science fictional novel Last and First Men. This novel is found in its entirety online, hosted in Australia, so I’d like to quote the whole speech after I summarize the context, and then I propose to analyze the speech. However, if you haven’t read the novel and don’t want its ending spoiled, you should skip the next section and perhaps even put aside this philosophical rant of mine for another day. Fair warning then...

We're the Squishy Monsters!

In myths, movies, and other forms of fiction, there are two prominent kinds of monsters: pointy and squishy ones. The pointy ones, with fangs, claws, or other sharp edges, represent the insect and the alien, the nonhuman that crawls out of its lair from elsewhere, creeps up your arm and bites you (werewolves, vampires, Giger's aliens, etc). Insects have the archetypal alien form, with their nonhuman body size, population, number of limbs, and exoskeleton that gives them sharp outer edges. The meaning of squishy monsters, like blobs of jelly, large and bulbous octopi bodies, or aliens with oversized heads and no sharp edges, is more complicated. Superficially, these monsters too scare us because of their inhumanity, but this depends on an identification of us with our seemingly immaterial consciousness. Ghosts and godlike intelligences of pure energy might then represent our own immaterial essence, our so-called spirit. To the extent that we think of ourselves as immaterial spirits, manifesting as consciousness, Plato’s hierarchy comes into play, in which the ideal Forms of imperfect, material copies reside in heaven while the copies swarm in the material plane, distracting intelligent beings and imprisoning them in the cave of ignorance. The squishy monster would thus be as alien to our true form as would the sharp-edged monster, since in the Gnostic scheme either would represent the Platonic baseness of materiality and either would be equally loathsome as a symbol of our jailer.

After the Scientific Revolution and the waning of anthropocentric teleology, according to which all of nature is objectively subject to a plan that's laid out in a heaven of ideal models, we’re led to think of ourselves in more corporeal terms. Moreover, scientists confirmed that the brain is our control center and that our eyes are extensions of our brains. The brain and eyes are quintessentially squishy organs, and although the brain is protected by a hard skull, by itself the brain is a pitifully fragile vessel. One of our predominant postmodern fears, then, is of the evident mismatch between the godlike powers of our intelligence, freedom, and consciousness, and our incarnation in fragile bodies with delicate internal organs. That is, we fear that assuming we're identical with our physical bodies, these bodies must not be prisons, after all, since there would be no captive spirit, no ghost in the machine, no traveler from a heavenly dimension who's lost among the cages of incarnated forms. Instead, the spilling of our blood and the rotting of our organs would terminate our life, in which case our intelligence, freedom, and consciousness must have misled us to assume otherwise. The postmodern fear, then, is that we’re godlike only in our delusions of grandeur, that we’re actually absurd animals whose life is sustained by eminently vulnerable bodies, next to what natural forces can throw at us. True, we dominate the planet with our own exoskeletons of skyscrapers, vehicles, weapons, and other hard-edged technologies. But at the core of our planetary power, at the helm of our army of machines, we’re naked apes who need to mitigate the curse of reason with escapist fantasies.