Albert Mohler, President of the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, has
coughed up a bit of pre-modern outrage
today at the advancing tide of medical
knowledge and technologies.



We are living in an age of radical
transformations in science, technology,
and worldview, writes Mohler in a


short commentary today
entitled (genuflecting in the direction
of fellow bioconservative Francis
Fukuyama) Our Posthuman Future.

Standing at the center of the
worldview now dominant in our
society is an affirmation that human
beings have the right, if not the
responsibility, to "improve"
themselves in every way.



In a culture that celebrates youth,
attractiveness, and achievement, the

idea of personal improvement is now
being stretched beyond what previous

generations could have imagined.

It is difficult to imagine just how
Mohler could offer a compelling argument
as to why it would be a
bad
thing particularly if medical advances

succeeded in providing more
youthfulness, attractiveness, and
capacities for achievement for all. And
so, Mohler is appealing instead to the
reasonable suspicions many of us have
come to feel about the superficiality
and disastrous distractedness of
contemporary preoccupations with youth,
appearance, and endless achievement.



For too many people in contemporary
society aging brings isolation and
infirmity. Few actual people today
embody ideal standards of
attractiveness, while many suffer
feelings of devastating inadequacy as
they judge themselves against those
standards. Too often the language of
success and "achievement ignores the
extent to which individual success
results from dumb luck misdiagnosed as
destiny, or depends on the work of
people who gain little of the benefit or
credit for it.



But Mohlers criticism does not seem to
be that emerging technologies will
continue to inspire unrealistic
standards and hopes, while imposing
unfair costs and distracting us from
real problems. Mohler seems to worry
that medicine might in fact
succeed
in improving health, lengthening lives,
increasing youthfulness, expanding
capacities, providing worldly hope, and
widening the secular scope of human
happiness and meaning.



Mohler warns against the emerging idea
that human beings have the right, if
not the responsibility, to improve
themselves in every way. But does he
really want to commit us to the contrary
proposition that the efforts of human
beings to improve themselves as they see
fit should be

forbidden, then?



We are all of us already the
beneficiaries of prosthetic practices,
we are already rewriting ourselves in
the image of our desires, we are already
weaving technologies into our bodies and
into the stories of our lives.



Would Mohler really want to argue that
contact lenses or hearing aids are
dehumanizing? How about prosthetic
limbs? Would genetic therapies in which
limbs or eyes or rotten teeth regenerate
where they were lost to the vicissitudes
of life be dehumanizing, then? Are we
dehumanized by vaccinations or
multivitamin supplements?



I was going to add, are women
dehumanized by their access to
reproductive technologies, or are
children dehumanized by their exposure
to scientific knowledge, critical
thinking skills, or human diversity
through literature? - And since Mohler
is a conservative Southern Baptist I
suspect his answer here might be
revealing indeed.



By scare-quoting the word improve
Mohler seems to suggest either that new
technologies will impose changes on us
that we would not otherwise choose for
ourselves or that they will re-make us
in an image we would disdain or from
which we would suffer impoverishment.
Certainly I agree with Mohler that
modification and rejuvenation and other
radical therapeutic interventions must
always be consensual, rarely-to-never
mandated, rarely-to-never banned. And I
agree that there should be considerably
greater cultural sensitivity about
manipulative and unrealistic marketing
claims that impair peoples capacity to
make informed decisions with reasonable
expectations about the effects of
medical interventions.



But it is hard to see how such
reasonable concerns could have inspired
the sweeping wholesale condemnation of
science and medicine and the very idea
of human improvement in Mohlers short
diatribe, or in the many bioconservative
panic-button editorials that are
pimpling the cultural landscape in this
moment of roiling technoconstituted
change.



Mohler sputters: Some even talk of a
posthuman or transhuman future in
which humans can redefine themselves.
Just think what it means to denigrate
such a hope altogether.



Where human beings are treated as
incapable of defining themselves you can
be sure there are self-appointed
authorities who feel that it is their
own job to define human beings for them,
and on their own parochial terms and for
their own purposes.



Mohler flings out the usual
disasterbatory scare-tactics and
hyperbolic superlative fantasies,
designer babies, superhuman
competitor species, and the rest. But
preimplantation genetic screening for
diseases, for example, yields anything
but superbabies on the streets where
we actually live. It just gives women
more information on the basis of which
to make informed choices about
biological processes taking place in
their own bodies.



We must not displace crucial
deliberation about emerging technologies
with wild-eyed speculation about
superlative outcomes that will eventuate
or not from developmental processes of
many steps, each one involving a complex
and unpredictable interplay of
political, cultural, and technical
factors.



Proliferating opportunities for medical
intervention will little likely yield
some competitor species of supermen
but an overwhelming abundance of ways of
being in the world, too diverse in its
forms and values and lifeways for
anybody to define themselves
realistically as more "elite" than all
the others. (I suspect in fact that it
is this appealing overabundant diversity
that truly frightens bioconservatives,
rather than the specters of clone armies
and super robots they continually
conjure up to frighten their
footsoldiers.)



If some peoples choices end up being
superficial, unrealistic, or harmful,
then this should inspire deeper
critiques of culture rather than a
superficial policing of consequent
conduct, especially when this policing
would frustrate choices that are
beneficial as well and not harmful,
informed as well and not unrealistic,
deeply personal and enriching to some
humans as well even if they are at odds
with the prejudices of other humans who
happen to inhabit the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary.



Where is the outcry? demands Mohler.




Well, I venture to propose, it is
confined largely to the noisy brigade of
bioconservatives like Mohler himself,
who would rather cling to backward
prejudices, self-serving pieties, and
uncritical platitudes so as to retain
the privileges and position these have
conferred on him and his fellows, rather
than work to develop technologies that
will redress suffering and widen the
sphere of freedom open to human address.




Mohler concludes, somewhat more
sensibly, that [w]hat's clear is that
we can no longer count on the scientists
to police themselves... It's time for
tougher laws and closer supervision --
and fast.



I can easily agree with him here, as
would most reasonable people. We do need
to regulate the marketing of therapies
so that there will be fewer unrealistic
and fraudulent claims made in the name
of these emerging technologies. We also
need to ensure that new medical
interventions are neither forbidden nor
their use mandated by authorities, but
that consensual prosthetic practices are
truly informed, universally available
where their benefits contribute to the
general welfare, and regulated to ensure
their safety and to ensure that they
impose no undue public harms, risks, or
costs.



But to agree to such deliberation about
the development of radical technologies
and the distribution of their effects
requires as a point of departure that we
grant the reality of this emerging
technoconstituted transformation of
human life and the consequent shake up
of received wisdom, traditional
assumptions, and the customary terrain
of institutional and cultural authority.



It is too late to disinvent
civilization, or, one hopes, to stall
technology in its tracks. People of good
will must collaborate together now to
ensure that the course of technological
development in which we are all
irredeemable immersed be as fair, as
sustainable, and as universally
emancipatory as possible.