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73 Jean Bethke Elshtain is there A humAn nAture? An Argument against Modern Excarnation 4 Utopian dreams die hard, this despite the brutal debacles of the twentieth century, undertaken in the sure and certain promise that an earthly utopian order was available to us if we were dedicated and ruthless enough to do what was necessary to achieve it. The totalitarian impulse lies behind utopian visions—this impulse does not exhaust what utopian dreams are all about, but we dare not ignore that an impulse to achieve total control is a major part of the legacy of utopian dreams. if, at one point, the utopian ideal was a total transformation of human nature, we now live in an era when we are loath to concede that we have natures at all; we do well to take stock. We have lurched over time from one determinism to another. Biological determinists insisted we were what we were because biology made it so. (The so-called nature side of the bynow -antiquated and tedious nature-nurture argument.) Social determinists insisted that economics or politics or sociology or some combination made us who and what we are. it is the latter view—the more social determinist view—that took hold in the social sciences, so much so that sociologist Dennis Wrong in the 1970s penned a piece arguing against the “oversocialized” concept of human beings in the social sciences.1 At present we face an odd combination of positions. We are in the throes of a form of genetic obsession that can best be called genetic fundamentalism . As the controllers in the 1997 film Gattaca put it, “Genes tell all.” (Or “cells tell all.”) At the same time, there are those who see human bodies as raw material to be manipulated every which way. We do not really have a “nature,” so there is no problem with this ethically. The only frustration is 74 g After the Genome a practical one: how do we get as quickly as possible to full control over what sorts of entities we wish to be? in my most recent book, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, i develop the theme of modern excarnation, a concern for philosopher Charles Taylor as well in his masterful work A Secular Age.2 i first encountered notions of disincarnation , of disembodiment, in Albert Camus’ essay The Rebel, in which he notes that the French revolutionaries, in the name of entirely abstract ideas, slaughtered the bodies of those who did not fit into the new order with a specific, gruesome form of death—decapitation—if only because they harbored internal doubts about the course of the revolution.3 Because the revolutionaries saw themselves as creating a brand new world, they decided the king must be beheaded as well. in beheading the king, they aimed explicitly to sever the link between a corporal being and the incorporeal world of transcendence. As a result of this violent act, Camus suggests we now face only an “empty sky—it is no longer ‘peopled.’ i note that in ‘snapping the connection between the transcendent and the earthly,’ two things were accomplished . First, the transcendent becomes remote, gauzy, dematerialized, a vague gnosticism . . . presentist and based on a particular manifestation of the self. Second, the immanentist strand, rather than emerging chastened from the experience of ‘revolutionary virtue’ and less tempted toward sovereign excess and grandiosity, goes in the other direction and sacralizes a finite set of temporal arrangements”—this in reference to the French Revolution.4 De-peopling us seems to be a futurist fantasy. When i note some of the bizarre scenarios, it puts me in mind of Gnosticism, an earlier flight from the messiness of human embodiment into the realm of pure spirit. St. Augustine locked horns with the Manicheans—radical dualists who fueled Gnosticism—in large part because they could not come up with a satisfactory way of thinking about evil. This was tied to their view that earthy “matter,” the stuff of bodies, was polluted. Only mind, spirit, was pure. it was unfortunate , in this view, that our brains required a body in order to survive. Here it is fascinating that cryogenics—a kind of holding pattern until new means are devised—is a way many transhumanists “plan to have their bodies frozen at death until future science finds a way to revive them. Or, rather, manufacture a new body for them and then revive them—it is not common knowledge that . . . many people do not...

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