A tall, silver-haired man in a dark suit appeared in the doorway, and Hank excused himself to go and speak to him. The professor of Systematic Theology and the Buddhist transhumanist glanced at one another knowingly, as if to acknowledge the falling into place of some crucial element. They spoke among themselves for a moment, and I took out my phone, wondering whether it would be bad form to just start recording conversations at this point on my phone’s voice recorder app. Hank was now helping the silver-haired gentleman to set himself up at a trestle table at the very back of the room, some distance behind the last row of seats.
The professor of Systematic Theology canted himself toward me, sidemouthed a name: “Wesley J. Smith.”
I nodded, more knowingly than I had any right to be nodding, given that I’d never heard of the man.
Smith, Mike informed me, was a regular contributor to National Review. He was a religious man, a convert to the Eastern Orthodox faith, who had in recent years been carving out a niche for himself as a conservative commentator on questions of bioethics, which is how he’d wound up writing on transhumanism. He was here to report on the conference for an interfaith journal called First Things.
In 2013, he’d published a piece there called “The Materialists’ Rapture,” in which he’d criticized transhumanism on the grounds that it was essentially a religion, an odd point of attack from a guy who presumably sees religion as basically a good thing. “Proselytizers for ‘transhumanism,’ ” he writes, “claim that through the wonders of technology you or your children will live forever. Not only that, but within decades you will be able to transform your body and consciousness into an infinite variety of designs and purposes, with self-directed evolution leading to the development of ‘post human species’ possessing comic book character-like super abilities. Indeed, one day we will be god-like.” He points out the parallels between transhumanism and Christianity in a way that seems to me to be perfectly accurate, drawing a particular comparison between the Rapture of Christian eschatology and the concept of the Singularity. Both are projected to occur at a specific time; both will ultimately lead to the final defeat of death; both will usher in an Edenic age of harmony in a “New Jerusalem”—respectively, in heaven and here on earth; both Christians and Singularitarian transhumanists expect to be furnished with brand-new “glorified” bodies, and so on.
I didn’t see much to take issue with in any of this, aside from the implication that these links with religion somehow discredited transhumanism. It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology. Wesley J. Smith saw transhumanism as an abomination, a perversion, a shallow and grotesque parody of religion. I saw it as a new expression of these same immemorial yearnings and frustrations.
Smith was established now with his laptop and trestle table at the rear of the room, a setup that gave off the impression of a kind of journalistic rampart, behind which he had cordoned himself off from the people and ideas he was here to cover, to report on. I was fascinated by the frank and easygoing hostility of this gesture, the bluntness with which it announced Smith’s detachment from the proceedings.
Back at the apartment that night, after I’d spent ten or fifteen minutes looking anxiously through my notes, wondering what if anything they amounted to, I checked my email and saw, via the Google News Alert I had set up for the word “transhumanism,” that Smith had already published a piece on the conference, a blogpost for National Review that had been posted at 7:33 p.m., while he was still sitting at his desk at the back of the conference hall. It was no masterpiece, certainly, and did little to advance or develop the position he’d already taken on transhumanism. “For now,” he wrote, “I have to say that my previous opinion of transhumanism as a materialistic religion—or perhaps better stated, a worldview that seeks to obtain the benefits of religion without submitting to concepts of sin or the humility of believing in a Higher Being—are being substantially borne out.” (From a career perspective, I thought, perhaps there was something to be said for knowing what you thought about things, for seeing the world in such a way as your opinions were always being substantially borne out.)
Hank’s introduction to the event was a characteristically strange and meandering oration. (His background was in the Bay Area punk scene, where he had made a name in the 1990s as a performance poet with the pseudonym Hank Hyena. His work, he’d told me, tended toward a kind of erotic absurdism.) Hank talked at some length about his own complex history of religious association, something in which he seemed to take a counterintuitive pride. A few years back, he’d taken his family to live in a Quaker community. He soon “got waylaid by doubts” and briefly became a militant atheist, and then got turned off by the militance of militant atheism, and became a transhumanist. This happened more or less by chance, he said, when an editor he’d worked with in the past got a new job with a transhumanist publication called H+ and asked him to do some writing. He agreed, and even though he’d never heard of transhumanism, he got involved in the movement almost immediately, realizing, as he put it, that he had always instinctively been a transhumanist but just never knew it was an established thing. He was now, he said, in the middle of an on-and-off flirtation with Judaism.
“I’m a sperm donor to a lesbian couple,” he explained, “one of whom is a rabbi. I may convert for the sake of my biological son. I’m still thinking it over.”
—
I went on to hear a great many strange things spoken that day, by a great variety of people.
I heard a sex shop proprietor who’d written a guide to strap-on penetration called Bend Over Boyfriend speak of her spiritual development as a Wiccan.
I heard one of the Mormon transhumanists speak of how he was a transhumanist because of and not despite his Mormonism.
I heard a man who ran an independent publishing house dedicated to topics of extremely niche esoteric interest speak at considerable length about The Urantia Book, a gigantic work of cosmogony, supposedly dictated to its authors by the ancient aliens who created the human race; I heard him speak of the rebellion of Lucifer, of his own personal conviction that the Nephilim are the source of the Illuminati bloodlines, and I thought how strange it was to hear these things being spoken by a man in boat shoes, comfortable jeans, and a smart blue sport jacket; I heard him speak, finally, of his part in an expedition to find the sunken land that was the location of both Atlantis and the Garden of Eden, but he was cut off by Hank on the grounds of having already spoken for far too long, and so I never heard him speak of whether he had in fact discovered this sunken land.
I heard the Buddhist transhumanist, whose name was Mike LaTorra, speak of his belief that he was in fact already living eternally through reincarnation, and of how he simply wished to do so in a body superior to the one he currently possessed.
I heard a Seventh Day Adventist pastor with the pleasingly literary name Robert Walden Kurtz, who knew something of cults (having been personally acquainted with a guy who died at Waco after joining David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect in the 1990s), speak of how transhumanism could easily lend itself to such extreme and eccentric spiritual offshoots.
I heard a man named Felix Clairvoyant, a certified massage therapist with a PhD from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality—who wore a semitranslucent crepe shirt and black slip-on shoes with no socks—speak of his belief as a Raëlian that the human race was the creation of scientists who came here in UFOs thousands of years ago.
And I could not but be impressed by the richly ecumenical vibe of all of this, by the extent to which these people wished to learn about the beliefs of the others, incompatible though they may have been with their own. The Mormon transhumanists seemed surprisingly well informed about the practices and beliefs of Wiccans; the A
dventists were keen to engage the Buddhist in friendly and sophisticated colloquy; even the Raëlian massage therapist was engaged in a spirit of respectful curiosity by the Atlantis expedition guy in the sport jacket and boat shoes.
These things took many hours to hear, and to hear them I was obliged to sit in a steel-framed chair, much like the sort of chair I sat in as a schoolboy, and which was now causing my lower back to hurt, and my buttocks to become somehow both painful and numb, and my legs to become stiff, and my thoughts to turn to the inevitable decline of the body—to mortality itself, and to the many other disadvantages of being fastened to a dying animal.
—
During an afternoon break in the conference, I walked with Mike LaTorra to a sandwich shop around the corner from the veterans hall. We sat outside in the warm California afternoon, and he spoke about the various ways in which his Buddhism and his transhumanism complemented and contradicted one another. In a rich and soothing baritone, with an air of oceanic and slightly sad tranquillity, he explained that Buddhism, and the practice of meditation specifically, were oriented toward the relief of pain, toward the attainment of a plane of consciousness beyond and above the striving and anxiety and misery of normal human experience.
“Life is suffering,” said Mike, calmly and methodically working his way through a small bag of organic beetroot chips. “If you survey any group of people at any point of history, the vast majority would tell you that, yeah, things could definitely be better. We’re not in hell, but you might think of the world as being one elevator floor up from hell.”
The Buddha’s message, said Mike, was in some sense a transhumanist one: life is suffering, yes, but there is a path that leads to the end of suffering. He saw Buddhism and transhumanism, in this sense, as differing approaches to the overall problem of life being basically unsatisfactory. He spoke about the esoteric idea of spiritual ascent within Buddhism, the four stages that a person passes through on the way toward full enlightenment. This notion of attaining a higher plane of personhood, he said, was one that he found to be deeply compatible with the transhumanist ideal of transcending the condition of humanity through technology.
I was curious about the extent to which the transhumanist belief that the mind could exist separately from the body was at odds with the Buddhist idea of embodied existence—that the self is not some rarefied entity distinct from the animal in which it is contained.
“Well, there’s more than one school of thought on that within Buddhism,” he said. “In Zen Buddhism, which is what you’re thinking of, there is no separation between me and my body. There is no ghost in the machine. But in Theravada Buddhism, which is the oldest form of the tradition, we are not the body; the body is something to be rejected and held in contempt. To be transcended.”
He spoke about affirmations that the newly ordained Theravada monks were made to recite, in which the body was rejected as a site of corruption and decay. “There’s a kind of revulsion there,” he said, “in those early Buddhist texts. A revulsion against the human body, against biology.”
—
They fucked us up, our first mum and dad. That decision to eat from the tree of knowledge, to heed the serpent’s counsel that doing so would make them as gods: that was the moment when everything got shot to hell. As far as the Judeo-Christian tradition is concerned, the whole human condition is a punishment for an audacious infringement, way back in those early days: that first disruption of the knowledge economy.
And it could all have been so different. In the seventeenth century, in the first blush of Enlightenment’s dawn, Adam was a kind of proto-transhumanist ideal. According to the philosopher and clergyman Joseph Glanvill, the first man was blessed, among other things, with superhuman sight: He “needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks…shew’d him much of Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Gallileo’s tube.” The occultist and herbalist Simon Forman claimed that the forbidden fruit had introduced a lethal toxicity into the bodies of our first parents, causing a degeneration that worsened through the ages. Adam, he wrote, “becam monstrous and lost his first form and shape divine and heavenly and becam earthy full of sores and sickness for evermore.” The apothecary Sir Robert Talbor wrote that the soul and body of man “have deviated from the first perfection,” and that “the Memory is subject to fail, the Judgement given to erre, and the Will often known to rebel, and become a voluntary slave to passion; so is his Body subject to so many infirmities.”
In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon, who is often seen as the founder of the modern scientific method, addressed the ancient shame that haunted the idea of knowledge in the Judeo-Christian imagination, the original unity of learning and sin. He writes of hearing learned men “say that knowledge is of those things that which are to be accepted of with great limitation and caution; that the aspiring to overmuch knowledge was the original temptation and sin whereupon ensued the fall of man; that knowledge hath in it somewhat of the serpent, and, therefore, where it entereth into a man it makes him swell.”
But Bacon believed that we could reclaim something like our prelapsarian perfection—our original state of immortality and divine wisdom and peace—through the application of science. The way back to Eden, in other words, could only be found by continuing along the path of our first divergence. Toward the end of his life, he was given to wondering about the possibility of reversing, through science, the consequences of original sin. The prolongation of life was one of the foundational aims of Bacon’s “Great Instauration,” his proposed reformation of scientific knowledge, itself modeled after the divine work of the six days of creation. Despite Bacon’s apparent millenarian belief that the earth was approaching its final age, writes the cultural historian David Boyd Haycock, he “rejected pessimistic views of natural history. If this was the earth’s dotage, for Bacon it was to be a mature old age of profound wisdom and learning, in which European scholars would pluck the final fruits of God’s benevolent creation. Natural philosophers would take full advantage of all that had gone before them, restoring the greatness that had once been Adam’s. Only then, when this last great age of progress had been fulfilled, would the world be fit for Doomsday.”
Bacon died in his mid-sixties, by no means a bad run in those days. But he died a death whose cheap irony was beneath him: according to his contemporary John Aubrey, he caught pneumonia while burying with his bare hands a freshly slaughtered chicken in the snow, thereby proving that freezing could preserve the flesh of animals and men.
We are always trying to get back to that state of wholeness that preceded the Fall, the split, the loss. It is knowledge that we feel will return us to innocence. As the eighteenth-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist puts it in his strange and brilliant essay “On the Marionette Theatre”:
We see in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god….But that’s the final chapter in the history of the world.
—
The conference’s last panel had just ended. I was gathering my effects, wondering how I was going to get back across the bay to San Francisco, when Hank came by to let me know about something that was about to happen, something he thought I might be interested in. Jason Xu, the Silicon Valley community organizer for Terasem, was setting up for a little gathering in a room off the main hall. I had read about Terasem, and it seemed to be the closest that transhumanism had come to generating a genuine religious offshoot. It was a faith, or “movement,” based in the idea of “personal cyberconsciousness,” in the spiritual dimension of things like
mind uploading and radical life extension. I had read about Jason Xu, too—about a protest he’d helped to organize recently, the first-ever transhumanist street action in the U.S. Outside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, he and a small group of fellow transhumanists had stood with placards reading “IMMORTALITY NOW” and “GOOGLE, PLEASE SOLVE DEATH.” The idea of the protest seemed counterintuitive, given that solving the notoriously awkward problem of death was precisely what Google, having just pumped hundreds of millions into its biotech research and development group Calico, was now setting out to do. (In this sense, it wasn’t so much a protest as an organized encouragement that Google keep up the good work; either way, they were still ejected from the premises by security.)
I hadn’t known that Jason was going to be holding an actual meeting at the conference, and so I was excited to get to sit in on it. I would, however, be lying if I told you that the offer of free pizza had not had its own attractions. And I was not alone in this motivation. None of us in this little group that had assembled for the Terasem meeting—me, Mike LaTorra, Bryce Lynch, some guy called Tom—had yet been liberated from the brute imperatives of our animal bodies. And so each of us was, for now, bowed in silent communion with his own slice of pepperoni pizza.
Jason suggested that we all say something about ourselves and why we had come here. He pointed to Tom, and asked if he’d like to start us off, and Tom gave it a go, but it quickly became apparent that he had too much pizza in his mouth to really pull off a coherent self-introduction, so Jason then nodded at Bryce, who was sitting next to Tom, but Bryce shook his head and gestured face-ward to indicate that his own mouth was also too committed to pizza to really convey any kind of useful autobiographical particulars at this juncture, and so then Jason looked at his watch and acknowledged that we should probably just wait until we were all finished chewing before we started the meeting proper. In this time, he handed each of us a bound booklet of photocopied pages entitled THE TRUTHS OF TERASEM: A Transreligion for Technological Times.
To Be a Machine Page 18