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Chapter Twelve Transcendence, Technological Enhancement, and Christian Theology gerald฀mckenny In an essay published in 2004 Francis Fukuyama famously (or for some, notoriously) identified transhumanism as “the world’s most dangerous idea.”1 Many Christians would agree with Fukuyama’s condemnation of any program that has as its goal, or at least as a welcome prospect, the transformation of humans into “future beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards.”2 Christians who share Fukuyama’s concern often align themselves with a position, prominently represented on the President’s Council on Bioethics during the administration of George W. Bush, that is often suspicious of robust forms of transcendence. The topic of transhumanism and transcendence is therefore an apt one for Christian theology. In this chapter I argue that a proper Christian approach to the prospect of human technological enhancement should, in partial opposition to Fukuyama and others who share his position, acknowledge the legitimacy of some degree of dissatisfaction with the limits of human nature as it is but should not confuse a Christian conception of transcendence with a transhumanist one. The Dilemma of Transcendence In A Secular Age the philosopher Charles Taylor discusses a central dilemma faced by reflective people in modern Western societies. On the one hand, the moral self-understanding of these societies is strongly marked by the critique of certain forms of transcendence that originated in the premodern West. According to one version of the modern critique, traditional Christianity denigrates ordinary human desires and fulfillments, valorizing their renunciation in favor of the love of God. According to another version, which has found an eloquent voice in Martha Nussbaum, Western culture has been marked by the aspiration to transcend human vulnerabilities, neediness , and particular attachments, promoting the ideal of a life that is free of these limitations. In both cases, it is argued, the aspiration to transcendence 178฀ gerald฀mckenny diminishes our humanity and diverts us from the pursuit of properly human goods. A genuinely human life, so the argument goes, would seek meaning and fulfillment in ordinary attachments and attainments conditioned by our finitude, vulnerability, and bodily nature rather than attempting to renounce or overcome these characteristics and limitations. On the other hand, Taylor argues, the refusal of every aspiration to transcendence also seems to diminish us. Indeed, modernity itself is as strongly marked by its own forms of transcendence as it is by its critiques of transcendence . Love that extends beyond erotic attachment to embrace a universal concern, the disciplining of tendencies to aggression and violence, and forms of self-overcoming promoted by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Foucault are all characteristic features of modern ethical life. It is difficult, Taylor asserts, to imagine how a life devoid of these or some other forms of transcendence could be genuinely fulfilling.3 Two especially salient points emerge from Taylor’s account. First, modernity is not characterized by a rejection of transcendence in favor of immanence , which would mean, in this context, a life lived entirely within the horizon of ordinary desires and natural ends. Aspirations to transcendence do not disappear but take new forms in the face of the critique of previous forms (even as these older forms of transcendence persist). As Taylor implicitly suggests, this is apparent in the case of Nietzsche, who is at once the most vociferous critic of what he sees as Christian transcendence of the body and sensual desire and the great exhorter to self-overcoming. Second , this modern condition poses an ongoing problem for modern people because it is by no means easy to draw the line between those aspirations to transcendence that diminish us and those without which our lives would be impoverished. Taylor’s discussion of ordinary human life and its transcendence focuses almost exclusively on ethical activity and social reform, omitting the role of technology in modern forms of transcendence. Yet one of the most significant sites for the enactment of the dilemma he describes is technological enhancement. (By technological enhancement I mean the use of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, nanotechnology, information technology, and neural interface technology, among others, to alter human characteristics.) On the one side are transhumanists such as Nick Bostrom, James Hughes, and Ray Kurzweil (or, reaching further back, Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) who, in the words of the organization Humanity+ (formerly known as the World Transhumanist Association ), hold “that the human species in its...

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