A couple of years back I read Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens. Great read. On one hand, I am completely on board with his evolutionary metaphysic. I think part of our Divine nature is to evolve more fully into the potential God has placed within us by making us "in God's image". This is actually a fairly common reformed Jewish and secular Jewish viewpoint (cf. Erich Fromm's 1966 book "You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament"). I've also written and preached this idea. I even embrace much of what Harari says about Transhumanism as the immediate goal of human self-evolution. And there are Christian theologians such as Keith Ward and Ted Peters who have a fairly robust acceptance of Transhumanism as well. After all, I figure my great grandchildren will all be cyborgs, and it doesn’t actually worry me that much.
But what bothered me was in chapter 12...
In the final paragraph of that chapter, Harari says this: "Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable, which gives meaning to the world, and which is the source of all ethical and political authority. This is a reincarnation of the traditional Christian belief in a free and eternal soul that resides within each individual. Yet over the last 200 years, the life sciences have thoroughly undermined this belief. Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will – the same forces that determine the behaviour of chimpanzees, wolves, and ants. Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries under the carpet. But in all frankness, how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?"
Thus when writing about the evolution of religion and morality, Harari uses very urbane and polite and innovative language to subtly slip in a very utilitarian, transactional view of human worth. Note that this is NOT me criticizing the idea that religion evolves. This developmental view of religion is key to all the religion classes I teach. Rather, what is problematic is Harari's largely implicit ethical values: Humans are only valuable insofar as they produce value, namely economic or technological value. Those that don’t, in Harari’s analysis, should be left behind. This ethical viewpoint is also an embodiment of the naturalistic logical fallacy: Just because something is done in nature, or can be done by technology, doesn't mean it should be done. What "is" or "can be" cannot justify what "ought" to be. And this idea obviously can easily tie into an ethical narrative that justifies racism, eugenics, predatory economics, and even genocide. It will only take a demagogue who can weaponize this to make it an ethical recipe for disaster.
Or to put it in more concrete terms: Let’s talk about an individual person named Sally. Harari would think Sally is valuable only if Sally contributes to the goal of helping humanity evolve into transhuman superhumans. And if Sally no longer contributes to that goal, Sally is dead weight, evolutionarily speaking. But I think a better view would be that Sally is an evolutionary end in herself, and is infinitely valuable because 14 billion years of cosmic evolution led to Sally’s existence and her unique set of experiences, and there will never be a person exactly like her ever again. And if there is a Transcendent Source from which we all come, to whom we all return, then Sally is one of countless temporal and finite embodiments of that Eternal and Infinite Life. She is a unique lens which focuses the Uncreated Light into creative forms of expression. She an irreplaceable artwork of the Divine Artist. And this is still true even if there is no Artist!
This leads to a better vision of evolutionary ethics and religion than what Harari proposes. The value of the "soul" or "self" does not reside in it being a separate "substance" or "essence" which can be empirically studied, efficiently controlled, and economically commodified. Rather, the self is the totality of a person, the unique and irreducible pattern of information processing, interconnected experiences, and intentional decisions, which can never be reduplicated again. Each sentient being is sacred and worthy of respect and dignity for the same reason each work of art, each ecosystem, and each sunset is beautiful and worthy to be savored and admired. What matters is not how "high" or "low" someone is on the scale of evolution and usefulness; It doesn't even matter how much of our behavior is determined by nature or nurture; What matters is the unique and non-reduplicatable beauty and complexity of what and who each person is.
With this in mind, we can instead evolve into a society that treats every single life as sacred and valuable for the diversity it brings to the whole of existence, rather than viewing people, animals, and ecosystems through the lens of "utility". We don't have to ask of others and our world "what's in it for me?" or even "what's in it for us?" We can look at every sentient being as an expression of the Divine Life and affirm the absolute value of their life. We can, with Dr. Seuss, say "A person's a person no matter how small". Or to use Christian terms, we can continually evolve into, and constantly strive for, Christlikeness. And we can evolve into our ability to enjoy and participate in the diversity and elegance of the life we encounter. We could even evolve into a society of beings who seeks to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no person has gone before!"
Of course Star Trek has already dealt with this conflict between communitarian evolutionary ethics and predatory evolutionary ethics in "The Wrath of Khan". So...
No comments:
Post a Comment