Anxiety in a Post-Human World

What does it mean to be human? Western, largely Christian understandings of what it means to be human were deeply challenged by the Enlightenment. That challenge is written into the founding documents of modern nation states like the United States, and is reflected everywhere in popular drama, literature, film, and television. 

The classical Christian understanding of what it means to be human has been defined in terms of a relationship to a transcendent creator of humanity and the world, and of kinship relationships within clans, tribes, or ethnic nations, and of an inherited status, class, or gender. In the modern era what it means to be human is defined in terms of the immanent frame, citizenship in a nation state, and the responsibility to create one self, one’s social world, and even the natural world in the company of fellow humans, fellow citizens, and fellow creatures.

People who might once be called nomads are now defined in terms of citizenship, and become migrants, immigrants, or more likely illegal-immigrants. Even the term "undocumented" points toward the definitive role of the nation-state and its bureaucracy. Humans whose humanity was understood in terms of possessing specific roles and responsibilities based on cast, class, and gender are now understood in terms of their universal human rights.

A great deal of the anxiety in American society today has come about because the reality that what it means to be human has changed is just now being realized by the majority of Americans. After having battled over secondary issues like evolution, the authority of the scripture, abortion, and LGBTQ rights Americans are finally realizing that they bought into many aspects of the modern understanding of what it means to be human without realizing that this modern understanding is incompatible with the pre-modern understandings to which they cling. 

Small wonder that in-vitro fertilization has become a flash point and crisis. It is a medical procedure that is possible only within a modern framework of understanding what it means to be human, and it directly conflicts with the pre-modern idea that humanity is created by God through coitus.

If kinship, ethnicity, status, class, or gender roles and responsibilities are more vital to our understanding of what  it means to be human than citizenship, self-determination, and universal human rights then there is a conflict between our understanding of what it means to be human and that of modernity. 

If living a life determined by God’s will toward a God-given destiny is more important to our humanity than being a personal agent determining one’s own personal future then our understanding of being human is in conflict with modernity. If we participated in the kind of revival religion that assured us that our personal decision would determine whether we went to heaven or hell, then we were participating in a fundamentally conflicted form of religion that tried to include within itself both the modern and premodern. It tried to imagine the personal freedom to determine one’s destiny at the same time as a believing that human destiny is given by a transcendentGod.  

It appears to me that the conflicts within and about Calvinism come from the fact that one cannot be both a Calvinist and a modern person. It appears that the conflicts within and about Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy come from the fact that one cannot be faithful to Catholic and Orthodox teaching and be modern. It is small wonder that evangelicals and Roman Catholics find themselves as allies in a hundred secondary matters stemming from their shared desire to preserve a pre-modern understanding of what it means to be human into the 21st century. 

In the end we cannot have it both ways. Either God creates the human person by God’s ordained means, or we create human persons with the dust and breath bequeathed us by God on the sixth day of creation. Coitus is one way, but there are clearly others involving pipettes and test tubes. Either God is in charge of our future, or God has put us in charge of our future. Either we live in an ordered framework of ethnicity, status, class, and gender dictated by God, or we are responsible for ordering our social lives and relationships. Either God has dictated the transcendent end of human personhood, or we as humans are charged with transcending ourselves. 

We are at a turning point, or perhaps reaching a peak of anxiety, because in the last few years this fundamental incoherence is finally sinking in within American society. Particularly for those of us who are religious people it is the reason that we are so very anxious. 

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence in the last decade, but particularly in the last four years, has only clarified the change in our understanding of what it means to be human and thus increased our anxiety. When we look in the mirror we now see not merely humans who might have been created in a test tube, but also biological machines in competition with silicone based machines of our own making; machines that are capable of transcending us in many of the ways we believe define our humanity. 

We no longer have a choice about whether we will embrace our vocation of self-creation and self-transcendence. The only choice left to us in the age of AI is to determine whether the machines we create will transcend us in just the ways that we've chosen to define our humanity, or whether we will choose a different self-understanding and destiny.

This does not mean, by the way, that God is dead. It means that for most of us the old understanding of humanity is dying. It cannot be resuscitated, and it will not be resurrected, so we are going to have to embrace both the one true God, and our newly discovered humanity, or perhaps better post-humanity. 

God will either become for us a partner in seeking transcendence, the partner that God has always revealed God‘s self to be, or we will find ourselves truly on our own having only our machines as partners. For better or worse. Till our death, not theirs, do us part.