Persons are more than their properties

I just finished Robert Spaemann's wonderful book: Persons: the difference between someone and something. It is a difficult read, but worth it, as his argument that persons are constituted by their membership in humanity is one of the best answers I can find to the arguments of utilitarians such as Peter Singer. There is a lot at stake here, but my favorite part of the book was the last chapter, when he explained how the severely disabled give more to human society than they require from it. They do this by being an "acid test" for our humanity--they force society to think of persons as more than the sum total of their properties.

“In fact, however, they give more than they get. They receive help at the level of sustaining life. But for the hale and hearty portion of mankind giving this help is of fundamental importance. It brings to light the deepest meaning of a community of persons. Love or recognition directed to a human being is not, as we have seen, directed merely to personal properties, though it is the personal properties that allow us to grasp that a person is there. Friendship and erotic love develop mainly in response to the beloved’s individual personal properties. A disabled person may lack such properties, and it is by lacking them that they constitute the paradigm for a human community of recognizing selves, rather than simply valuing useful or attractive properties. They evoke the best in human beings; they evoke the true ground of human self-respect. So what they give to humanity in this way by the demands they make upon it is more than what they receive.” (244)

Ethics in action

This book is more fluff than serious engagement, but it is high concept. What can be more difficult than being a daughter that you know was brought into existence to be a potential donor/life-saver for your sister? I wish Jodi Picoult was able to frame the ethical questions in more interesting ways, but still, the story is a powerful one, and will get readers to stop and think about seeing life from a utilitarian perspective.

Amazon Black Friday!

I know where I'll be shopping on Friday after Thanksgiving! Forget the mall; amazon is having specials all day. Click the link above to join in!

Love for the future is self-love

It would be difficult to find a writer who more cleanly hits the nail on the head of the truth than Wendell Berry. His essay "Standing by Words" may be one of the best attacks against the excesses of the contemporary love for technological progress that I have ever seen. Berry explains that the disintegration of language and the disintegration of persons and communities go hand in hand. Precision in language forces a kind of responsibility to that which is external to us. Precision in language forces us to go beyond the fantasies inside our mind and into the realm of things.

I'm skipping through a lot here, but what interests me is that Berry illustrates clearly how people who dream about the future and how everything will be fixed by technology are not really loving other people. Love cannot be abstract, but must be for particular people and creatures. So love for the future is self love. Listen to the wisdom here:

“Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else. Love for the future is self-love—love for the present self, projected and magnified into the future, and it is an irremediable loneliness.”

Wendell Berry is one of this country's best essayists. Buy this book and read it all. You will not be sorry.

Brilliant satire

I've been reading George Saunders' collection of short stories called In Persuasion Nation. Wow. Let me just say how grateful I am that a former student of mine introduced me to Saunders by recommending the lead story in this collection, "I Can Speak!" I don't think I've ever read anything quite as original (as far as short stories go) as these stories. Please read them for yourself.

Why? Because it is nearly impossible to simply describe these stories. They combine the critique of Don DeLillo with the moral heart of Andre Dubus. There is one story called "brad carrigan, american" that moves seamlessly from tv simulacra to American life, and ends up critiquing both for their utter soulessness. When a tv show begins to develop a real conscience, it has to be eliminated. Another moving story, "Jon" is set sometime in some possible future, in which certain unwanted children are made into conduits for advertisements; the brilliance of the story is that the children have no language for anything other than that language and those images that have been supplied to them by commericials. The result is a hilarious but utterly moving look at how dehumanizing that can be. I cannot describe these stories. Buy them, read them, enjoy.

The Children of Men

I had the interesting experience of reading P.D. James's novel The Children of Men at the same time as I was reading Peter Singer's book Writings on an Ethical Life. Singer justifes infanticide with breathtaking ease, arguing that infants are "replaceable." I don't want to be unfair to his position; it is not as if he thinks it is simply ok to go around killing babies. But he is clear: if you do not want to care for a Down's syndrome child (because it will take away some of your happiness) it is ok in his ethical view to abort that child or to euthanize him. Then, just go on ahead and have the "normal" child you prefer to have. It is a replacement for the other.
Infants are not replaceable. In James's novel, she puts some pressure on Singer's position by imagining a world in which suddenly, inexplicably, humans are unable to have babies. The year of the last child is named "Omega." 25 years go by; soon humanity gives up hope on life. The novel makes you think again, and not at all sentimentally, about how precious human life really is. We simply take fertility for granted. The protagonist in the novel, Theo, learns to come outside of himself to fight for others. It is this kind of change in our way of thinking about others that will save us. Children are not primarily for our happiness (though certainly they give joy). They are the gift of God because life itself, in all its variety, is the gift of God.

Science fiction at its best

I am Orson Scott Card's newest fan. I don't know why it took me so long to find these amazing novels; but I am glad I did. I just finished the second novel in the Ender Wiggins saga called Speaker for the Dead.

But if you are going to read Card, start with the first: Ender's Game. I could not believe what an interesting and compelling novel this was. Sci-fi is panned by most readers of "serious fiction" because it tends to be scenario driven, rather than character driven. But truly great sci fi does both. It puts compelling characters into scenarios that force them to act in especially revelatory ways. Good sci fi reveals something about how what it means to be human is always going to be pressed against, depending upon the circumstance. And in Ender's Game, the circumstance is the conviction that the world is about to come to an end at the hand of the "buggers" an alien life form that looks like insects but are a lot more advanced than humans. I will say this: if this one line is all that I had heard about the novel, I would have thought that there was no way I could like it. It sounds about as trite as it comes. But then you open to the first page and you realize what a good writer can do with that scenario. He can put a child prodigy into it, a child who is the hope of his race, a child who is as deep emotionally as he is intellectually. Suddenly there's a story--and this one even has a great twist at the end. Read it. It's great.

Personhood

I am very interested in theological accounts of personhood that force us to rethink our individualistic orientation. That is why I picked up McFadyen's book. With the doctrine of the trinity as a foundation, he makes the case for the person as socially constituted, but not determined. “Human being is a relational structure (ontological aspect), and we are defined by the form our relationships, and thereby our individualities, take (ethical aspect)” (40). There is no stable essence to the human person; the person is known in relationship.
In general, I subscribe to this point of view, but McFadyen’s argument showed me some new problems. First, his identifying the person with communication in social relationships (which he defines as information processing of some sort), sounds too much like what N. Katherine Hayles reminds us is the definition of the posthuman—as that which is defined by information patterns. This way of thinking about the person is inherently disembodied, because the body does not really matter, except as it communicates more information. McFadyen would disagree with this, and spends several pages talking about the body, but his argumentation is not overly convincing. He makes a lot of assertions, not solid arguments. Second, if you define a person by communication within relationships, as a gift of society, then what of people who cannot communicate because of disability? This argument may not hold up, because it doesn’t mean that others are not related to the disabled person in a way that forms each of them. “Persons are a manifestation of their relations, formed through though not simply reducible to them” (40). Third, I have significant problems with the following statement: “The lone Adam is not truly human: life becomes human only when he greets and accepts Eve. Humanity is therefore equated with neither lone individuality nor masculinity. Adam and Eve become human only in relation to each other. Humanity is fully in the image of God only where it is a lived dialogical encounter” (32). Obviously, this argumentation borrows from Barth, but he still needs to prove this statement. Adam is not truly human? Just because God said it was not good for Adam to be alone? (as he goes on to suggest). This argument is not strong enough for me, but I don’t quite know how to keep the strong thesis of the relatedness of persons and not go down that path. I think we need to.

Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic world

I picked up Cormac McCarthy's new novel The Road and could not put it down. I can't remember the last time I read a novel in one sitting. It is dark, haunting, and brutal, just like all his fiction, and beautiful, just like all his fiction. When the world is destroyed by nuclear weapons and all is ash, humanity becomes simply a quest for survival. McCarthy has always been good at raw human nature, and so this scenario is ideal for him, and I think it yielded a masterpiece. The message is simple: life, in and of itself, is valuable. Even in an insane scenario, it is worth fighting for. It is the breath of God. The last two paragraphs are pure poetry, and worth the price of the book. But you should earn the right to read them by reading the rest of the novel first.

Nanotechnology must read

If you read only one book on nanotechnology, it should definitely be Drexler's Engines of Creation. It is well written, rational, persuasive, and overwhelmingly interesting. Most people who write about new technologies seem to do so either out of fear or naive utopianism; Drexler walks the line between these positions. He's not afraid of nanotech but he knows that Bill Joy is right: it could render life as we know it extinct if we are not careful. I think all policy makers should read this book.

Why the MLA does not speak for me

I’ve been a member of the MLA (Modern Language Association) for over ten years. It has rarely spoken for me. The only publication I truly look forward to is the annual Profession magazine, which is a collection of essays on the state of the profession. So I was excited to see that there were several essays on the role of the intellectual in the 21st century, including one by Julia Kristeva.

Students of mine know that I take psychoanalytic theory such as that discussed by Lacan and Kristeva seriously. But every now and again I’m reminded that I take them perhaps more seriously than I should. In a piece entitled “Thinking in Dark Times” she writes:

“Contrary to what we’re led to believe, the clash of religions is in fact merely a surface phenomenon. The problem we’re facing at the beginning of this new millennium is not one of religious wars but rather the rift that separates those who want to know that God is unconscious and those who prefer not to, so as to be pleasured by the show that announces he exists” (16).

The rest of the paragraph clearly indicates (though it’s debatable that Kristeva is ever clear) that the only place to be in this dichotomy is with those who “want to know that God is unconscious” and not with those who “prefer not to”. Now, what kind of choice is this, really? What does it mean to want to know that God is unconscious? Best I can make out, it is to believe, contra gut instincts maybe, that God is only a force in our psyches, not external to us, a force we made up that is powerful nonetheless. The second choice is to know this (perhaps in your unconscious) but to prefer not to believe it, to choose an unenlightened state, so as to receive a kind of sexual pleasure from consumer capitalism’s promise of goods “guaranteed by the promise of superior good” in an endless Lacanian god-is-the-phallus-in-the-box deferral. Quite simply, this is ridiculous. I pulled out this paragraph to discuss it with my husband (who is a philosopher), and it reminded me how often I just let this kind of reasoning sneak by me, because of the way people like Kristeva write. The fact that the MLA would publish this without hesitancy is not surprising to me. Nor am I surprised that no one in its upper echelons can see (or care about) how truly contemptuous this kind of thinking is to the “other”---in this case, people with genuine belief. We have been reduced to self-pleasuring infants who never want to grow up. And because we are infantile, it is also our fault that things like 9/11 happen. If the MLA wants to be relevant, it needs to back away from this kind of self-serving contempt.

Science, technology, and the promise of liberation

“Scientific progress can at most be liberation from; it can never constitute or provide the thing that it is a liberation for.”

These memorable words are from Albert Borgmann's insightful book: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Though this quote is about the notion of scientific progress, this book is much more about the way technology changes our lives. Borgmann draws a distinction between science and technology in order to argue how technology is changing the way we deal with the concrete world, which has enormous ramifications. Specifically, technology tends to commodify our lives by transforming things into devices. A violin is a thing; it requires mastery to play it, it is more of a focal point for us; in other words, it is not just about the music it produces. A stereo, on the other hand, is a device that produces only the commodity of the music it plays. While we seem to be getting the "freedom" from the burdens of our lives, Borgmann warns us that the transformation of things into devices can thin the quality of our lives.

Rudolph, Peter Singer, and the question of dignity

Blogs are excellent for completely random thoughts, and here's mine for the day. I was changing my son's diaper this morning, a task that requires constant singing if you don't want him to cry. So for some reason I was singing Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, and I was stuck on the part when Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh tonight. "Then all the reindeer loved him, and they shouted out with glee, 'Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, you'll go down in history.'" And it occurred to me that this little song nicely demonstrates the problem with the rule of technique in society when it comes to others. Rudolph was a misfit, unloved by the others until his nose became useful. Then he was lauded as a hero. The lesson can only be that you will be valued only if what others perceive as freaky proves to be valuable. Forget about inherent dignity in this world. It is a Peter Singer paradise. It's pull a sleigh exceptionally well, or don't expect to participate in our reindeer games, chump.

Radical Evolution

It is refreshing to read a book that accurately and interestingly names the various responses to "the singularity" that is an inevitable part of our future. That book is Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution. He lays out different scenarios predicted by people who care about posthumanism. They are: Heaven; Hell; Prevail; Transcend. The best thing about the book is his introduction to the personalities that are behind the scenarios. It is well worth your time to read, if only to learn about the nerds who will call the shots of all of our futures.

"Proficient delayers"

I just finished reading Brent Waters' book From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Posthuman World. In my opinion, its greatest strength lies in its analysis of the language of posthuman theology that tries to replace God with creativity. The creativity that posthumanism worships is one of infinite self re-creation that knows (it thinks) no limits. The holy grail of that pursuit is immortality, but Waters shows clearly how that immortality is not to be equated with eternity.

"Even if we grant that the posthuman dream of virtual immortality is feasible rather than fanciful, its twofold strategy of radical transformation fails, for the problem of finite and temporal necessity is not overcome, but merely displaced and denied. In the first instance, independence from ecological processes is achieved by shifting human dependence from nature to artifice. In deploying technology to become progressively less dependent on natural processes, humans will be using artifacts of their own design, and therefore subject to their control. Yet the eventual success of the posthuman project is predicated on the evolution of artificial life that is superior to humans, and therefore not under their control. Dependence is not so much overcome as displaced; natural necessity is exchanged for an artificial counterpart. [. . .] posthumans are ultimately not the masters of their own fate, but only proficient delayers."

This is so very true. And although Waters does not go on to argue this point, it strikes me with a new force (as it did Jonathan Swift and many other writers) that immortality on human terms (vis a vis human control) is not necessarily good, and may even be fundamentally bad. And yet our technophiles go on working for it, freezing their heads and hoping to live into the future that they think is going to be so very luminous.

Do individuals have a telos?

Have humans been created with a specific purpose? The more I think about the issue of the human in the posthuman world, the larger this question looms for me. One of the ways to begin to think about the question would be to make a distinction between Aristotelian telos and a Christian one. As far as I know (and I'm no philosopher), Aristotle believed that each species of creature has within in it certain potentialities, and the goal of an individual's life would be to reach the highest potential for your species. For humanity, it would be measured by the attainment of virtues. Christians (as St. Thomas pointed out) would agree a great deal with Aristotle, but it does change things to begin with a personal God. I believe that being created by such a God would mean a few things for certain: we are not the creator; we are, therefore, limited; and our relationship to God constitutes who we are fundamentally. But what does that mean exactly when it comes to the issue of purpose? Is it right to speak of God's specific purpose for my individual life? Or are his purposes general, with a wide range of possible outcomes? The reason why it matters is that if I were born with mental deficiencies, would my purpose be different? Is our telos so general (the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever) that any human person could fit it? I think it is essential for us to make room in our definition of the human for every person, from the child with Down's syndrome to smallest embryo. Clearly, God allows suffering; he also allows a wide range of abilities and disabilities in humanity. Do all of these exist for a purpose?

Ontological hygiene and The Bluest Eye

In my class the other night, we discussed Elaine Graham’s concept of “ontological hygiene”. Graham’s book: Representations of the Post/Human, borrows from Foucault’s critique of western definitions of “normal” to discuss how representations of monsters, cyborgs, and so on operate in our culture.

It struck me again how Morrison’s brilliant novel The Bluest Eye displays ontological hygiene in action; in this case, in an African American community that internalizes white standards for beauty, and in the process, destroys much of its unique beauty by devaluing it. The story is about a little black girl, Pecola, who wants blue eyes, thinking that it will solve the problems that have come from her family’s failure (and everyone else’s failure) to love her. The sometime narrator of the novel, Claudia (a bit of a rendering of the young Toni Morrison) concludes her story by noticing how Pecola, now moved to the edge of town (itself symbolic), has pretty much lost her mind and is just wandering like a ghost. “The birdlike gesture are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew here—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (205).

Can you be you without a stable body or memory?

When the question of what it means to be human in an increasingly protean society comes up, the discussion almost always involves the body and memory and their place in constituting the self. And the novel Glasshouse (by British novelist Charles Stross) is interesting if only for the way it handles these issues. It takes place in the 25th century, where nanotech and biotech have advanced so far that there are “A-gates” that can assemble everything, and “T-Gates” that can transport you everywhere. People can live forever as long as they “back up” their consciousness so that it can be re-embodied if they are killed. And so you can become any kind of being you want: you can take on an “orthohuman” body of a traditional male or female, or a “xenohuman” body of other types (say, with four arms). You can also become a tank, made specifically for war—which we find out is one of the embodiments of our protagonist, Robin/Reeve. We start out with Robin, whose memory has been selectively erased, and we quickly discover that this seems to happen a lot in this world, where identity theft is taken more seriously than anything else. But I’m still left asking, what does constitute your identity in such a world? The only answer in this world is your neural map with its memories. But if those memories can be deleted, or altered, how can you ever count on your memories being accurate? I ask these questions because in the future that Stross creates, it seems to be a good thing to be so protean. Although he does not ring the liberty bell as often as some transhumanists sympathizers might, this world is nonetheless consistently contrasted with the “dark ages” of today’s time. The human interest of the story (I think) depends upon our believing that there is a “real” Robin, with a certain personality, a certain sense of humor, certain ways of looking at the world, and so on. But the question still remains for me: is it cheating even to give him those things, if the world in which he lives those things are up for grabs by anyone in power? The world of the future, as Stross sees it, is not utopian; it endures war after war, faction after faction trying to take over, the most powerful of these doing so by infecting the A gates (or T gates, can’t remember) with a virus called Curious Yellow, which basically creates a kind of chaos in what it touches. So can people truly survive that with any sense of themselves at all?

Another interesting thing about the novel is the role of love. As in many novels whose interest lies primarily with the tech and the plot, the definition of love is underdeveloped. Not to give anything away, there is a kind of happy ending love relationship here, but I find it only partly believable, and the ironic thing about it is that I do not think it could have developed at all if the two people (Robin/Reeve and you will see) were not stuck in the glasshouse experiment that is the novel’s plot device. The experiment is for the people to live in the “dark ages” and not be able to change their bodies or back themselves up and so on. So I find myself asking: is it possible to truly love if your memories can be erased, and have been erased, and you can’t know which you is here? Is it an act of loving self sacrifice to blow yourself up to save your lover, if you had backed yourself up before you did it? That I do not know. The meaning of acts of self-sacrifice seem to me, at least, to be on a sliding scale anyway. People in the western world today do not sacrifice much when they do sacrifice things for loved ones. Maybe this is just the next inevitable level.

By the way, I loved the novel--it was a lot of fun to read!

Need help with the bigger picture?

If you are looking for an accurate, readable, and useful summary of intellectual history as it pertains to the modern era, I have the book for you. Albert Borgmann's Crossing the Postmodern Divide provides all that and more. The "more" is his own critique of postmodernism's thin offerings in response to the crisis of modernism. He is especially interested in our individualized culture and in how our public celebrations are impoverished thereby. An enjoyable read.

The rule of technique

Although he is often careless and bombastic, Jacques Ellul is provocative. This book, The Technological Society, should not be missed by anyone interested in posthumanism. Ellul defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” His thesis is that in the modern world, technique rules everything. He even says that science is a slave to technique. This is an argument worthy of consideration; perhaps Ellu is right that scientists do not pursue knowledge for its own sake, but only for applicability. This idea certainly seems to jive with America's love affair with pragmatism. Check it out for yourself.