Experiencing a bit of insomnia tonight. Reading. Thought I'd share an excerpt from Becker's 'The Denial of Death'...
Again, the modern utopians continue the one-sided Enlightenment dream. Condorcet had already had the identical vision in 1794:
...a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers: and that the duration of the interval between the birth of man and his decay will have itself no assignable limit.
But Choron offers a caution on this vision that goes right to the heart of it and demolishes it: that the "postponement of death is not a solution to the problem of the fear of death...there still will remain the fear of dying prematurely." The smallest virus or the stupidest accident would deprive a man not of 90 years but of 900-and would be then 10 times more absurd...if something is 10 times more absurd it is 10 times more threatening. In other words, death would be "hyperfetishized" as a source of danger, and men in the utopia of longevity would be even less expansive and peaceful than they are today!
And a little farther down-
Utopian man might live in the same "eternal now" of the primitives, but undoubtedly too with the same real compulsivity and phobia. Unless one is talking about real immortality one is talking merely about an intensification of the character defenses and superstitions of man.
How might people act in a world of greatly enhanced longevity where there is even more at stake, more to lose? Might the fulfillment of this ploy to alleviate death anxiety actually magnify the problem? What horrors could be unleashed upon the 'new human' whose lifespan encompassed centuries-or millennia!-instead of mere decades, all in the name of personal security, or even for the attempted relief of ever-increasing ennui amongst the uber-set? Who the ants scorched under the magnifying glasses of eternity's children?
Showing posts with label Transhumanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transhumanism. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Drawing Distinctions
Heads up for an interesting taxonomic approach to the antinatalism question. Sister Y has classified the major positions thusly-
1: Pronatalism. "All reproduction is morally innocent (or morally required)."
2: Situational context-dependent antinatalism. "Everybody should have babies except starving people in the third world, drug addicts, and AIDS patients."
3: Universal context-dependent antinatalism. "Our world is so bad that no one living in it should reproduce; but if things got much better, it might be okay."
4: Pure antinatalism. "No beings should ever be brought into existence if they will suffer at all - which they will."
Obviously, 1 and 2 are off the table as far as I'm concerned. 3 is no more tempting for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that life exists in a constant state of existential flux. Having achieved utopia, what possible guarantees of everlasting prolongation can be secured? Shit happens. Beyond the question of endurance, there's the matter of those lives brought into being between then and now- how can the coercion and sacrifices ever be justified within a normative moral framework? There's also the problem of varying subjective standards to deal with. How can we know that our little utopia will measure up to somebody else's future measuring stick, unless everybody is exactly the same? It's been tried before.
Now onto number 4, and a question that's never really occurred to me before. What IF, in a far distant future, some paradise is manufactured which is somehow guaranteed to be both sufficient for all and sustainable throughout eternity. Imagine a day when suffering of any sort is abolished once and forever, swept out of the universe like a herd of unwelcome dust bunnies. Under these conditions, would procreation automatically become a moral act? Why? Perhaps it could be said to be not an immoral act, but I'm not so sure this is the same thing. Is a harmless act automatically a moral one? Or does a moral act entail some substance or form of moral necessity, no matter how oblique? I may be splitting hairs here, but equating non-immorality with morality is leaving me just a little bit queasy...perhaps for no good reason, I'll confess. It's an open question, and I invite debate.
UPDATE: The reason I bring this up is because it occurs to me that all purposeful action requires, or is impelled by, SOME sort of necessity. In a theistic context, the question has always been IF God is entirely sufficient unto Himself, what could possibly provoke Him to an act of creation? The pat answer has always been that He does such for His own pleasure; but of course, wasn't He always perfectly 'pleased' to begin with?
Pursuing this line of inquiry to its outer limits, I am logically persuaded to conclude that absolute perfection- or purity, if you will- when defined under the aegis of unalloyed non-necessity, doesn't look a whole lot different from non-existence to me. If, indeed, there's any difference at all. It seems to me that a positive moral action is always conceived to fill a gap, the kind of gap which just doesn't exist in a fundamentally ideal state (or non-state, in the case of non-existence). Which brings us full circle to the concept of Negative Bliss. The place where we started. The place we're all headed back to, eventually. In this light, existence seems to be nothing more than sediment temporally shaken up from the bottom of a crystal clear lake otherwise untroubled by any eddies, or winds of chance. Why muddy the waters?
1: Pronatalism. "All reproduction is morally innocent (or morally required)."
2: Situational context-dependent antinatalism. "Everybody should have babies except starving people in the third world, drug addicts, and AIDS patients."
3: Universal context-dependent antinatalism. "Our world is so bad that no one living in it should reproduce; but if things got much better, it might be okay."
4: Pure antinatalism. "No beings should ever be brought into existence if they will suffer at all - which they will."
Obviously, 1 and 2 are off the table as far as I'm concerned. 3 is no more tempting for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that life exists in a constant state of existential flux. Having achieved utopia, what possible guarantees of everlasting prolongation can be secured? Shit happens. Beyond the question of endurance, there's the matter of those lives brought into being between then and now- how can the coercion and sacrifices ever be justified within a normative moral framework? There's also the problem of varying subjective standards to deal with. How can we know that our little utopia will measure up to somebody else's future measuring stick, unless everybody is exactly the same? It's been tried before.
Now onto number 4, and a question that's never really occurred to me before. What IF, in a far distant future, some paradise is manufactured which is somehow guaranteed to be both sufficient for all and sustainable throughout eternity. Imagine a day when suffering of any sort is abolished once and forever, swept out of the universe like a herd of unwelcome dust bunnies. Under these conditions, would procreation automatically become a moral act? Why? Perhaps it could be said to be not an immoral act, but I'm not so sure this is the same thing. Is a harmless act automatically a moral one? Or does a moral act entail some substance or form of moral necessity, no matter how oblique? I may be splitting hairs here, but equating non-immorality with morality is leaving me just a little bit queasy...perhaps for no good reason, I'll confess. It's an open question, and I invite debate.
UPDATE: The reason I bring this up is because it occurs to me that all purposeful action requires, or is impelled by, SOME sort of necessity. In a theistic context, the question has always been IF God is entirely sufficient unto Himself, what could possibly provoke Him to an act of creation? The pat answer has always been that He does such for His own pleasure; but of course, wasn't He always perfectly 'pleased' to begin with?
Pursuing this line of inquiry to its outer limits, I am logically persuaded to conclude that absolute perfection- or purity, if you will- when defined under the aegis of unalloyed non-necessity, doesn't look a whole lot different from non-existence to me. If, indeed, there's any difference at all. It seems to me that a positive moral action is always conceived to fill a gap, the kind of gap which just doesn't exist in a fundamentally ideal state (or non-state, in the case of non-existence). Which brings us full circle to the concept of Negative Bliss. The place where we started. The place we're all headed back to, eventually. In this light, existence seems to be nothing more than sediment temporally shaken up from the bottom of a crystal clear lake otherwise untroubled by any eddies, or winds of chance. Why muddy the waters?
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