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Chapter Ten Human or Vulcan? Theological Consideration of Emotional Control Enhancement michael฀l.฀spezio Failures, things going wrong, can’t shake the world’s confidence in the necessity of its course and its development; such things are accepted with fortitude and sobriety as part of the bargain. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 3/161, 426 Be all that you can be—and a lot more. —Motto, Defense Sciences Office, US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration Transhumanism encompasses a wide variety of views generally oriented toward “the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”1 So claims Nick Bostrom, the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, now known as Humanity+ (www.humanityplus.org). Bostrom, a professor of applied ethics at Oxford and the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, is one of the original cofounders of the World Transhumanist Association and is currently on its board of directors as founding chair. Depending upon which understanding of “human” one endorses , transhumanist visions either involve a stark contradiction in terms (for how can one improve the human condition by a project that seeks to bring about a posthuman future?) or the only logical result of a coherent if limited view of what is meant by “human.” Ray Kurzweil, for example, believes that there is no contradiction in terms because humans are defined by “our ability to reach beyond our limitations,” and so becoming posthuman is a very human thing to do. In this respect, Kurzweil’s view is widely shared by transhumanists. Though often overlooked, a significant transhumanist goal involves enhancing psychological capacities and “mental energy.”2 Often, such 146฀ michael฀l.฀spezio advocacy of psychological enhancement by transhumanists explicitly means complete or partial control of one’s emotional life. Sometimes this means eliminating or controlling negative emotions, and sometimes it refers to the full, willful regulation of emotions of all kinds. So-called negative emotions, such as guilt, sadness, fear, and grief, are seen as unwanted, with no beneficial role. These negative emotions are often the focus of transhumanist projects and are slated for either elimination or full control in order to achieve the complete elimination of all suffering. Though most transhumanists no longer claim that all suffering can be eliminated, they are sure that negative emotions have no good role to play in a posthuman future. These positions about the largely maladaptive role of emotion in relation to the human condition can be called “eliminationist” if they want to eliminate most or all emotional life, or “hemiemotionalist” if they want to only suppress or control the negative emotions. Both types are familiar to viewers of the original television series Star Trek, with its portrayal of the character of Spock, the first officer of the starship Enterprise. Spock is a “Vulcan,” a humanoid species from a distant planet. As the story goes, the Vulcans barely survived a period of destruction due to their failure to control intense negative emotions, particularly grief and anger. To preserve their civilization , the Vulcans learned to suppress their emotions almost completely so that all situations and relations could be seen in the light of cold reason alone. Spock, however, is the son of a human mother and Vulcan father, a transhuman who successfully learned to be a Vulcan. His struggle to maintain a truly Vulcan emotional life, which is a challenge because of his human heritage via his very human mother, is a theme throughout the series and the later films. “Vulcanized” humans, then, would be those whose emotions have been significantly or completely eliminated. The series’ association of emotion with weakness of will and a lack of rationality, and the association of such “weakness” with women and motherhood, is reflective of perspectives that, sadly, still shape current discourse about emotion in human life. One might think that such antifeminist, antiwomanist, and antiemotionalist biases would be rejected out of hand. This is not true, however, and so this chapter seeks to engage, both theologically and scientifically, the strongly eliminationist and/or hemiemotionalist transhumanist project of emotional control enhancement currently being advanced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA). DARPA has made many public statements about the need to eliminate or strictly control negative emotions during war as it pursues its mission to develop what has been termed a “guilt-free soldier.”3 The case I argue...

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