Nothing Justifies the Mass Murder of Civilians

Israel is at it again: killing unarmed and defenceless Palestinians en masse. No matter where they go, an Israeli rocket may always find them. The bombardment is indiscriminate. There is no safe haven for anyone in Gaza. More than 700 Palestinian civilians have been killed during the past few weeks, most of them women and children, compared to two (!) Israeli civilians. 

Given these numbers, it is utterly ludicrous when Israeli politicians brazenly claim that they have no choice, that they are just defending their own people against Hamas terrorists, who, regrettably and “demonically”, now use their own population as “human shields” and try to get international support for their cause by piling up lots of “telegenically dead” Palestinians. In all seriousness Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is styled as a “war between good and evil” (Daniel Abraham, writing in Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz, July 24^th), which of course leaves no room for negotiation. You cannot, and more importantly should not, negotiate with the devil. A compromise is out of the question. The good must prevail and evil needs to be eradicated, wiped out completely, no matter what the costs are. 

Whoever doubts that interpretation, whoever dares criticize Israel’s actions, can only be an “Israel-hater” and “anti-Semite”. How convenient that must be: always to be able to remind the world of the Holocaust, to claim a permanent victim status that gives you the licence to do whatever you damn well please. It’s the oldest defence in the world, which throughout history has helped to justify countless wars and mass killings. The Nazis also claimed that they were only defending themselves when they started killing Jews. And that it was necessary to save the world from a great evil. Not that any of this is even remotely convincing. There is always a choice, and nothing can justify the mass murder of civilians. Yes, Hamas is attacking Israel, but with very limited success. Yes, they may well want to see Israel destroyed, but that is quite understandable given how Israel has treated the Palestinians in the land they have occupied for nearly 50 years now. No matter what they say, Israel is not the victim in this conflict. If you rob a people of their freedom, if you trample on their rights and deny them a life in dignity, then it is no wonder that they fight back in an attempt to regain what has been taken away from them. 

Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies in the Israeli government are war criminals, not only because they violate international conventions that forbid targeting civilians, but because they don’t give a damn how many people die as long as they are not Israelis. Their actions are thoroughly despicable.  

Sex and the Posthuman Condition

Some of the readers of this blog may be interested to learn that I have now incorporated many of my previous blog posts in a book that Palgrave Macmillan are going to publish next month. It is called Sex and the Posthuman Condition. The book looks at the way sexuality is framed in enhancement scenarios and descriptions of the resulting posthuman future and how those representations are informed by mythological and other historical and literary paradigms. I examine the glorious sex life that we are allegedly going to enjoy, due to greater control of our emotions, a vastly improved capacity for experiencing pleasure, and, most importantly, the ready availability of sex robots that are willing and able to fulfill all our dreams and desires. Through a series of philosophical and literary explorations, questions are raised about both the replacement of the real flesh-and-blood human lover with a machine or other kind of artefact (from Ovid's Pygmalion to the soon-to-be-perfected sexbots) and the mechanization of the process of love (from De Sade to neurotechnological manipulations of our love-related emotions and attitudes), as well as the values that underlie such ideas and developments.

Compulsory Scientific Service for the Fully Alive

Like many other transhumanists, the American sociologist Steve Fuller who currently holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, UK, doesn’t think much of the precautionary principle (Steve Fuller, Towards a Proactionary Welfare State). All it does is hamper progress by unnecessarily restricting our choices. Basically, it turns us all into cowards, and this cowardice deprives us of all the great goods that we would be likely to achieve if we weren’t so damned careful all the time. We should therefore discard the principle and live instead by the proactionary principle, which encourages us to take (even considerable) risks if the expected gain is large enough. And this should of course be reflected in the law, which currently is far too restrictive. Of course there will be victims, people who are going to be “violated in the process”, but that is a price worth paying. We can also find ways to compensate those victims for their noble sacrifice (undertaken in the name of science and the progress of humanity), presumably by progressing ourselves and thus benefiting from their bravery. The value of our individual lives is overrated anyway. We should realise that our own personal survival is of little importance, given what is at stake here. “This is the largest and most difficult lesson because it calls on people to consider everything they value as negotiable, including their own lives. A proactionary welfare state would remove the taboo that locates the value of life primarily in the body of one’s birth. The legacy of decisions taken in one’s life would play a larger role, as risk-takers are rewarded in ways that keep their spirit alive even if their material existence undergoes radical transformation.”

I’m not entirely sure what that is supposed to mean, but in the given context we must assume that the radical transformation Fuller talks about includes what is commonly called the death of the individual. But Fuller is not content to demand that people be free to take great personal risks in order to speed up scientific progress, should they be willing to do so. He also believes that, if they prove unwilling, we (that is the law of the state) should actually compel them to offer their services to science and thus (at least potentially) sacrifice their own health and well-being, perhaps even their lives, for the greater good of humanity’s progress to posthuman glories. Just like the precautionary principle and the value of individual, embodied life, or life as we know it, Fuller argues that patient choice is much overrated (Steve Fuller, Suspended Ethics). It is in fact an absurd idea. Why do we have to be nearly dead to make it permissible for us to be subjected to risky and largely untested medical procedures? Why do we not use the “fully alive”?

Fuller appears to be puzzled by this “absurdity”, despite the fact that the answer is pretty obvious: because the nearly dead don’t have much to lose. If the procedure kills them, then they are not really worse off than they would have been if it had not been tried on them. Yet if you’re fully alive and healthy, then one should think that the prospect of being seriously harmed or killed as a result of the experiment (whose purpose remains obscure in Fuller’s article, but presumably would be some kind of enhancement) provides you with an excellent reason not to take part in it – unless of course you don’t put much value on your own health and survival. Not putting much value on our health and survival is of course exactly what Fuller expects us to do, but as far as I can see he doesn’t provide any good argument for it. I can only imagine that it is some murky notion of the common good that is meant to justify the demanded revision of our attitude towards our own lives. But just in case we remain unwilling to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good, the law should see to it that we do anyway. Although it would certainly be best if people made that sacrifice knowingly and willingly, the safest course of action is to make sure that they do by introducing a compulsory “scientific service”: “I see this very much on the model of compulsory national military service. Just as people are expected to bear arms when their lives are threatened (a la US Constitution 2nd amendment), they should also be compelled to participate in military service, if only to understand better all that is involved and at stake in maintaining one's life. Indeed, I would welcome compulsory ‘scientific service’ replacing compulsory military service in the long term.”

For me, this is the stuff of dystopian nightmares, and I am rather worried about the ease and nonchalance with which essentially totalitarian ideas like these are being accepted and promoted by academics and public intellectuals who really should know better.

Notes on Dickens: David Copperfield Remembering His Mother’s Face

David Copperfield (which I’m currently reading) is a fictional autobiography. The narrator, David, is a man who tries to reconstruct, and perhaps to recover, his life through memory. In this, he resembles Proust’s Marcel, being, like him, in search of lost time. In the second chapter of the book he recalls events that occurred when he was still a little boy of perhaps six years old and his mother still a very young and handsome woman. David’s father had died shortly before he was born, and David and his mother had been very close until she met a new man whom she would soon marry. The man turns out to be a tyrant, his mother is too weak to oppose him, and David is sent away to a boarding school in another part of the country. Yet the adult David, looking back on his life, remembers his mother as she was before that time, shortly after she had met that man and when she still dared to show her son how much she loved him. And it is in his memory that the person that she once was is kept alive:

“Can I say of her face – altered as I have reason to remember it, perished as I know it is – that it is gone, when here it comes before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that I may choose to look on in a crowded street? Can I say of her innocent and girlish beauty, that it faded, and was no more, when its breath falls on my cheek now, as it fell that night? Can I say she ever changed, when my remembrance brings her back to life, thus only; and, truer to its loving youth than I have been, or man ever is, still holds fast what it cherished then?”

David’s mother is of course long gone, and even if she were still alive, she would be old now and no longer innocent and girlishly beautiful. Yet in his memory she still is and will always be, as long as he is there to remember her. What interests me in David’s account is the suggestion that the past is not really gone, that it is not really past at all, except in the sense that we can no longer fully access it, no longer go there. It is rather like a place that we once lived in, but now have been barred from ever visiting again, and which is still out there, somewhere, unchanged. Like a Garden of Eden (though not necessarily a nice one), whose gates have been slammed shut in our faces and are now guarded by a couple of cherubim to make sure that we can never go back there again. It suggests that time is just another form of space, and that is exactly what I feel when I look back at my own life. (I suppose you could say it is a B-Series experience of time, which knows no past or future, but only earlier and later.) It feels as if I had lived in different temporal worlds, as if the boy that I once was still existed in a parallel universe, and the troubled teenager in another, and the student, and the young father in yet another. It is phases of my life (not moments) that each seem to have created their own universe. Each of these phases is connected to particular places, which today are of course no longer the same places, not because they have changed so much, but because I no longer belong there. They would no longer know me. Those creations are not possible worlds of events that have never occurred because I didn’t act in such a way that they would occur (but which could have occurred if I had), but actual worlds, of events that did occur, which my memory (and a strange sort of longing) presents to me as worlds that still co-exist with the world that I am currently inhabiting.

I’m not even sure this idea makes sense, but then again, it is time itself, and not any particular account of it, that seems to defy understanding. How can we understand that there once was a time, not long ago, when we didn’t exist, and that there will be a time, very soon, when we no longer exist? How can we understand that we might easily have not existed at all, and generally, that something that exists at one moment can at some other moment not exist? How can anything ever be lost for good, simply disappear from the world? How can the world itself have a beginning, and how an end? And how can it not have? Perhaps those philosophers, from Parmenides to John McTaggart, who have claimed that there is, ultimately, no time, that time is an illusion, are right after all.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Agar’s Identity and Moral Status Objections, and the Posthuman Condition

It had been a long time since I last read Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, which tells the story of a man called Gregor Samsa, who one morning finds himself transformed into a giant roach-like insect. Now that I’ve read the story again, I was struck by its possible relevance for the discussion of the relationship that is likely to arise between radically enhanced humans or post-humans on the one hand and “normal”, unenhanced humans on the other (always assuming there will be any of them left).

Nicholas Agar, in his latest book, Truly Human Enhancement, argues that posthumans will be so radically different from us that they will soon forget what it was like to be us. They will also have very different interests and values. For this reason, Agar believes, we have nothing to gain by becoming posthuman, even if being posthuman were intrinsically and instrumentally good. Radical enhancement may be good for the posthuman, but it isn’t good for us, simply because they will no longer be us. As long as we only enhance ourselves modestly, we will remain the same person, but once we have undergone radical enhancement we will have become something else entirely.

Another reason why we shouldn’t pursue radical enhancement is that, according to Agar, it is likely to result in an erosion of moral status for those who remain unenhanced (i.e., us). Just as we have a higher moral status now than animals, which gives us the right to sacrifice them for our well-being, posthumans may well have a higher moral status than we, so that they will then be justified in sacrificing us for their well-being. Personally, I don’t find Agar’s moral status argument particularly convincing, but I have voiced my criticisms elsewhere and do not want to repeat myself here. If you are interested, here’s a link to my response to Agar, The Moral Status of Post-Persons.

In this context, we can now read Kafka’s story as an allegory of the transformation of a human into a posthuman. (And if had been written now rather than almost exactly 100 years ago, it would be almost inevitable that we read it as such – compare Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). Of course, the giant roach into which Gregor finds himself transformed is rather unlike the radically enhanced posthuman as we tend to imagine them. But the point is that is definitely a sudden radical transformation of a human being into something that is (in some, though not all respects) very different from what it used to be. The transformation does not only affect Gregor’s body, but also his interests, appetites, sensibilities, and needs. At one point in the story he realises that he finds it increasingly difficult to remember his life prior to his transformation and how it was to be human, and to still care for what he cared for while he was still human. And that is perfectly plausible: the world of a giant cockroach, even one that used to be human, is so different from that of a human that we can understand how everything human must fade away very quickly in such a creature’s mind. A cockroach’s body demands (and creates) a cockroach’s mind. So if the transformation of a human into a radically enhanced human or posthuman is anything like Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant insect, then we should indeed expect, as Agar argues, that they will very soon no longer remember much, or anything at all, of their human life. The question is if that is indeed a good reason not to pursue such a transformation. I suspect that the reason why we would not want to find ourselves in the same predicament as Gregor Samsa is not that he forgets his humanity, but rather that he has turned into an animal that we tend to find disgusting and that is not known for its superior intellect. Perhaps we wouldn’t mind much losing connection to our previous self if what we gain in exchange for it is a richer and (intrinsically and extrinsically) more rewarding life.

Yet Kafka’s story also highlights another aspect of the relationship between the enhanced and the unenhanced. It is usually assumed that if the future will see society divided in two groups or classes, the enhanced and the unenhanced (or, if you like, the radically enhanced and the only moderately enhanced), then this is likely to cause problems for the unenhanced. They may be denied equal rights, or equal opportunities; they might be treated like inferior creatures, or like slaves; they might even be harmed or killed if that benefits the enhanced. Agar goes so far as to claim that the radically enhanced might even be morally justified (due to their higher moral status) to use the unenhanced in all these ways and to generally treat them as inferior. In such scenarios it is always assumed that the enhanced will be more powerful than the unenhanced, that it is in their power to grant or deny the unenhanced (us?) rights. But that is not necessarily the case. It will depend on the kind of enhancement that they have undergone, and also on how many of them will be enhanced and how many unenhanced. It is quite possible that the enhanced will be regarded and treated as freaks by normal, unenhanced humans, as monsters rather than gods. And then it will be the unenhanced that are likely to oppress and enslave the enhanced, or simply cast out of the human community, just as Gregor Samsa is cast out of his when his family decides that they no longer want anything to do with him.

What Transhumanists Have in Common with Saint Augustine

Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who almost single-handedly brought about the cultural revolution (“Tune in, turn on, drop out!”) that America witnessed during the 1960s, once wondered how it was possible that we could control so many things, but not our own sexual bodies. Why couldn’t he have an erection whenever he wanted to (which was very often)? “Here was another unexplained, mysterious facet of adult life. Lindbergh could fly the Atlantic. We could put a man on the South Pole. But we couldn’t get control of the most important part of our body.” (Leary 1998, 86) So Leary set out to find a remedy, to bring the most important part of our body under our control. Various aphrodisiacs and of course LSD brought him closer to his goal, but he never found a means to gain complete control. But that may of course, like so many other things, be just a matter of time. We can imagine our posthuman successors to be able to erect their penises and moisten their vaginas at will, always assuming they will still have genitals. Curiously, if that happened, then we would actually have regained an ability that according to Christian legend we all used to have in the days before the Fall. The envisaged posthuman condition is strangely reminiscent of the human condition ante peccatum. Before we used our God-given powers to defy God, we lived in a state of innocence, which, as the church father Augustine tells us, does not mean that people had no sexual relations. They did, but only in order to reproduce themselves. It did not involve any lust and was just something you had to do in order to reproduce, just as you have to move your legs in order to walk. At that time the sexual organs could be used at will for the purpose of reproduction, and since that purpose was good there was nothing shameful about the sexual act. It only became shameful after the fall, after man had used his freedom to turn away from God and after he was punished for it. The punishment was that our bodies not only became mortal, but also unruly, working against us and no longer in harmony with our own reason-led will. Our own nature has thus become our worst enemy:

“They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God. For the soul, revelling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body. And because it had wilfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh subject, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God. Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit, in which strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh.” (Augustine, City of God XIII.13)

According to Augustine, nothing demonstrates to us so clearly and undeniably the fact that we are not in control over our own bodies, that is, our own nature, as the involuntary reactions of our sexual organs to external stimuli and the feelings of lust and desire that go with them. And precisely because it makes the loss of control so manifest, we feel ashamed about it. This is, according to Augustine, the reason why Adam and Eve covered their genitals: because they wanted to hide that they have lost control. There is nothing that is more shameful than that loss of control (City of God XIV.16). Our sexual desires serve as a constant reminder of that loss because it is by the means of those desires that control is taken away from us. In order to reproduce we need to give up control, we need to let us be controlled by an ungovernable power that subjects our will. For this reason, we are humiliated by our lust, which we experience as something that comes over us and which reduces us to a mere animal, driven and unfree:

“Although, therefore, lust may have many objects, yet when no object is specified, the word lust usually suggests to the mind the lustful excitement of the organs of generation. And this lust not only takes possession of the whole body and outward members, but also makes itself felt within, and moves the whole man with a passion in which mental emotion is mingled with bodily appetite, so that the pleasure which results is the greatest of all bodily pleasures. So possessing indeed is this pleasure, that at the moment of time in which it is consummated, all mental activity is suspended.” (Augustine, City of God XVI, 19)

Now, as readers of this blog will know, today’s transhumanists are not exactly opposed to sexual pleasure, so their outlook seems to be very different from that of Augustine and the Christian Church. Yet what they do have in common with Augustine is the view that human nature is defective and that its principal defect consists in the fact that we, instead of being able to control it, are being controlled by it. For Augustine we are no longer how we should be. We are all damaged goods. For a transhumanist we are not yet how we should be. We are botched goods. But both do agree on what we should be, namely in control, and that the present condition is not only deeply unsatisfactory, but also deeply shameful. And for this very reason transhumanists can embrace hedonism only to a certain extent. Pleasure is good, yes, but only as long as it does not conflict with our autonomy. Just like Augustine, transhumanists want to resume full control over their sexuality. They want sex, but only on their own terms. The need to give up control, to give oneself to another person, is found offensive. What is needed is controlled sex, and part of that is that we learn to control our emotions, what and whom and when we desire, what and when and whom we love.