|
|
|
Christus
Rex
The Cyborgs Are Coming! The Cyborgs Are Coming!
Maurice Hagar
The moral battleground of the 21st century is biotechnology. And by all accounts, the Church is once again ill-prepared for battle. Most of us are ambivalent towards the myriad of bioethical issues swirling about us, while too many of our kids, raised on Transformers and X-Men, show an alarming fascination with one biotech project in particular, cybernetics.
Cybernetics, the science of controlling biological organisms, and the related cyborg, an acronym for “cybernetic organism,” which refers to the melding of biological life with “machine life,” grew out of early work on the space program. A 1963 NASA report, “Engineering Man for Space: The Cyborg Study,” encouraged mankind “to take an active part in his own biological evolution” by reengineering the human species “to create man-machine hybrids” fit for space travel (Clark 1-2). The first, modest step was to fit a lab rat with an automated drug delivery system. Small steps soon gave way to giant strides and today monkeys manipulate robotic arms via neural transmitters. Insects are remote-controlled via brain implants. The brainstem of a lamprey, preserved alive in a nutrient solution, controls a detached robotic body—evocative of the monstrous Head in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. And in humans, artificial vision systems transmit signals directly to the visual cortex of the blind while the paralyzed navigate computers by thought alone. Australian “cyber-artist” Stelarc demonstrates the mind-boggling potential of cyber-technology by plugging in a third arm that he manipulates with enough precision to produce handwriting and then turns his entire body over to audience members with remote controls in a “performance” he calls “The Involuntary Body.”
Cybernetic research now underway includes neural control of mechanical devices from wheelchairs to fighter jets, soldiers with “bionic senses” such as electronic eyes that see infrared radiation and synthetic skins that feel presence and motion, extensions of human bodies in virtual space as remote limbs and eyes are linked over the Internet, enhanced mental capacities such as memory and mood chips, and even neural-neural human communication networks. Linking humans together “opens unimaginable possibilities…who knows what new modes of communication, control, and intimacy we might achieve?” fancies neuroscientist Andy Clark (127).
A related technology, nanotechnology, enables “assimilation…from within, as the body is remodeled, literally cell by cell and sometimes molecule by molecule by microscopic nanorobots.” Nanotechnology is “a real and growing field,” reports John Kilner, director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, dedicated to destroying malignant cells, repairing genetic mutations, replacing cellular structures with stronger and more efficient materials, replacing damaged tissue, augmenting physiologic and psychological functions, and removing plaque from arteries (55-8). Biotech consultant Marie O’Mahony adds that a future application of nanotechnology will be “replacing the organic brain with a machine duplicate” (29).
Such “nightmarish scenarios” are “not the musings of an isolated techno-geek,” warns C. Christopher Hook, director of Ethics Education at the Mayo Clinic and Graduate School of Medicine. “Rather, it has become the vision of our National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce” as “government investment in this project will be second only to the NASA moon-landing program (14-5).” Indeed, “transhumanism,” or “posthumanism,” is “now mainstream stuff,” says Wired magazine’s Brian Alexander (244-5).
It goes without saying that the notion of human engineering provokes profound moral and ethical questions—religious questions—as the posthumanists recognize:
As the border between mainstream science and what was once considered the wacky fringe began to blur, a new religion was forming [… bio-technologists] were busy dismantling religion and the social order that supported it […] religion had to be usurped by reason [in the] ongoing project of the perfectibility of man [… quoting biologist John Haldane:] ‘We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously […] there can be no truce between science and religion’ (Alexander, 11-7).
Traditional religions are, as Oxford’s Richard Dawkins is fond of saying, “viruses and worms” to be eradicated. Biotechnology is the “new religion [with] the answer to the big questions surrounding death, disease, and human transcendence” (Alexander, 126). “If you don’t believe in God,” explains Alexander, “and you don’t believe in heaven, then what are you supposed to do when you stare into [the] ‘darkness of the grave’?”
The human loathing of death and longing for immortality are clearly “the subtext of science and biotechnology,” admits Alexander (102). “The transhumanists weren’t just afraid of death, they were pissed off by it because death was a pickpocket on a grand scale…an outrage!” (194). Take, for instance, biotech entrepreneur Michael West:
As he sat eating his burger, he looked out the window and saw the town cemetery across the street. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, he was whacked by a revelation: everybody he knew, everybody he loved, would wind up in that ground someday. Then, boom! Just like that, defiance welled up inside him, a determination that such a future could not be allowed to happen. Death had to be stopped. (Alexander, 105-6).
Stop death? Psychologist Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera approvingly summarizes the roadmap sketched by Hans Moravec, founder of the world’s largest robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, in his MIND Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence:
This technological discourse at last implies […] the possibility and desirability of the transmigration of the mind [soul] into a synthetic body […] The image of eternal life also survives here, since we would no longer suffer the physical limitations of the flesh, and in a kind of reworking of the Paradise Lost myth, here and now, on earth, not in some vague ‘hereafter.’ […] There is no doubt that there is a negative valuation of the biological body […] the cerebral tissue—now simulated—is disposable and can be sucked up by a vacuum […] The disappearance of the body and the externalization of the mind are […] inevitable phenomena in the evolutionary process […] there emerges a new self, one that transcends biological limits via a post-biological self” (Gray 131-4).
Alas, “our end is inevitable,” concludes Ollivier Dyens of Montreal’s Concordia University (94). And UCLA’s N. Katherine Hayles spitefully adds: “I do not mourn the passing of a concept so deeply entwined with projects of domination and oppression” (5).
“Do you feel an identity crisis looming?” jests Clark. “What is the self anyway?” To “hallucinate a central self, some spiritual or neural point wherein our special individual essence resides,” we make “a profound mistake” (Clark 136-9). Hayles explains: “The presumption that there is an agency, desire, or will belonging to the self and clearly distinguished from the ‘wills of others’ is undercut in the posthuman, for the posthuman’s collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another […] If ‘human essence is freedom from the wills of others,’ the posthuman is ‘post’ […] because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will” (2-5). In such a world, each of us will maintain multiple personas (Clark, 183-4), free from “guilt, sexual repression, and frustration” (Dyens, 82-3), to be whatever we choose “from nonsexual to multi-sexual,” for example (Paul and Cox, 357).
As we learn more about such possibilities, Clark argues, “it should become clearer and clearer in what ways the goalposts of ‘good behavior’ must be moved […] our work-a-day morals and expectations need to change and shift […] to become more liberal and open-hearted” (Clark 174). Cyborg morals and ethics, of course, will be determined by cyborgs rather than by their human creators,” adds Kevin Warwick, professor of Cybernetics at England’s University of Reading (307). “Clearly it will not be beyond good and evil,” assures Chris Hables Gray, University of Great Falls professor and former NASA Fellow, “but new constructions of good and evil […] are inevitable” (12). “Cyber-artist” Orlan ruminates on such new constructions: “We are still ‘formatted’ by Christianity, which always asks us to chose between good or evil; the ‘or’ permits a designation of the guilty one and a demonization of the other […] Currently the ‘and’ seems to me to be the only honourable and productive choice!” (Zylinska 168). “It is daring,” boasts physicist Erwin Schrodinger, to give all this “the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology, to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic.’ Nevertheless, the ability to exert such control could be condensed in the phrase: Deus factus sum (I have become God)” (Alexander 31).
And what of the “bio-Luddites” who oppose posthuman evolution? “Only people who count” will “migrate”—and, by the way, one of the advantages of migrating will be “better sex uninhibited by pointless taboos” such as the prohibition of incest (50). Warwick speculates that those left behind will become a human “subspecies still living a wild, uncivilized existence […] a lesser animal [with] more in common with chimpanzees and cows,” and will eventually die out as slaves and criminals (300-4). Thankfully, cybernetics pioneer Manfred Clynes is not so pessimistic, likening posthumans to “those adventurous fish who ventured unto land” and those left behind to “their less adventurous cousins” who “still survive today, in water” (Gray 53).
All this, cautions Hook, “is forging ahead, mostly unknown to the public […] assuming […] that re-engineering humankind is completely right” (14-5). Ethical questions are dismissed as insulting and offensive. The “moralizing” of the President’s bioethics advisory council, for example, is “idiotic” and “laughably stupid.” And Alexander reports on an outburst by Douglas Melton, chairman of the department of molecular and cell biology at Harvard University: “This business about announcing you are a bioethicist and you will comment on what is moral and what is not, which real philosophers would never do [one wonders what, then, do real philosophers do?] […] Why can’t scientists comment on bioethicists! […] The arrogance of this is shocking!”
Alexander says researchers deeply resent accusations that they are “somehow less moral than congressmen or columnists or the bio-Luddites.” After all, they, too, “have wives and husbands, golden retrievers, mortgages, and cars they’d like to trade in for a new Audi” in addition to “a long history of policing themselves” (146-7). Somehow, though, these nice people failed to discern the immorality inherent in what Alexander calls “the most radical biology of the century:”
They could do pretty much any damn thing they wanted […] just for grins, some swabbed the inside of their own cheeks to get a cell sample. They cultured these cells, shoved them into cow eggs, and stood back to see what would happen. Sometimes, the cow eggs turned the human cells into embryos. ‘It was really fun,’ one would-be cloner recalled” (116-20).
“Even scientists regarded as conservative,” Alexander continues, “saw nothing wrong with experiments like mixing human cells and cow eggs” (145). Therefore, he concludes, “it’s best to have as little as possible to do with politicians and moralists” (148)—God’s ordained arbiters of morality on earth. The “bigotry” of religion “should not be allowed to influence science, or even religion for that matter,” insists Warwick (239). And, what if someone cautions that we, as creatures made in the image of God, are headed down a dangerous road? “Just adopt a look of worried concern and reply, ‘Why, that poor deity’” banter Paul and Cox (277).
A few brave souls are erecting signs of caution on the superhighway to posthumanism. Sun Microsystems cofounder and chief scientist Bill Joy, for one, in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine: “It is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil.” And as early as 1944 C.S. Lewis penned these prophetic words:
I am only making clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really means […] The final stage is come when Man […] has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall […] be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? (59).
[…]
I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’, applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived […] It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all […] they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man” (63-4).
The irony of ironies is that, in this age of high-tech terrorism and weaponry of mass destruction, the abolition of God-less man is far more likely to come from his tripping over his own efforts to pull himself up by the bootstraps than from any religious zealot. If God is dead, as God-less man proclaims, then God-less man himself, created in the image of God, must also die.
Nonetheless, the beat goes on. Fifty-one percent of 12,650 respondents to a CNN Web poll indicated they would be willing to host cybernetic implants to improve themselves. “Resistance is futile” sounds the refrain of the Borg collective.
Is the Church prepared to meet this devilish onslaught? Beyond a “vague notion of the unnatural,” we are “at something of a loss to explain why, exactly,” the idea is so insidious, jeers Alexander (154). And Paul and Cox boast: “Theologians of the world, lift your noses from dated texts […] You are being forewarned and have no excuse for being surprised yet again […] We bring it to your attention that science and technology may be about to deliver the Big Show” (415).
Kilner tries to shake us awake with this incisive analysis:
This moment in history is a crucial point for the human race […] Most frightening about our day […] is not the development of new technologies. Rather, it is the fact that technologies with this much power are arising at a time when humanity may not be capable of developing them responsibly […] If humanity is to survive in the future, we must reverse the trends of the past. We cannot continue to be surprised by new technologies—forced to scramble to perform the ethical analysis and implement means of control. We must proactively engage technologies that are surely coming, doing the ethical analysis now and proposing and implementing the safeguards before the technology is unleashed (ix-x).
But never fear! God is still on His throne and we are not panicked by the doomsayers. Nevertheless, as the preserving salt and illuminating light in a dark and decaying world, more than ever we need “men of Issachar”—godly warriors who “understood the times” and “knew what Israel should do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). Let us recommit ourselves to loving the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, which excludes our usual intellectual sloppiness and ignorance. Then, and only then, let us boldly engage the enemy alongside the few warriors already on the front lines: the Council for Biotechnology Policy, the Center for Bioethics and Culture, the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, and the President’s Council on Bioethics, to name just a few. And, finally, let us sound ever louder the clarion call for all mankind to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” For only in the person of Jesus Christ is our imago Dei to be recovered.
Soli Deo Gloria
Works Cited
Alexander, Brian. Rapture: How Biotech Became
the New Religion. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Dyens, Ollivier. Metal and Flesh. Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1995.
Gray, Chris Hables, ed. The Cyborg Handbook.
New York: Routledge, 1995.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became
Posthuman. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1999.
Hook, C. Christopher. “The Gods of Small
Things?” Breakpoint Worldview April 2003.
Kilner, John F., Hook, C. Christopher, and Uustal,
Diann B., eds. Cutting-Edge Bioethics. Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002.
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. New York:
HarperCollins, 1974.
O’Mahony, Marie. Cyborg: The Man-Machine.
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
Paul, Gregory S., and Cox, Earl D., Beyond
Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds.
Rockland: Charles River Media, 1996.
Warwick, Kevin. I, Cyborg. London: Century,
2002.
Volume
Two - Issue Two
Theology: Satan Loves Proof Texts - Gregory Soderberg
Science & Culture: The Cyborgs Are Coming! - Maurice Hagar
Family: Time To Eat - Robert Nash
Literature: The Da Vinci Code - Maurice Hagar
Liturgy: Liturgical Thoughts and Musical Musings - Gregory Soderberg
Poetry: Tylwyth Teg (The Fair Folk) - Josh McInnis
|
|
|
