Unlike many countries, the United States of America was founded as a secular nation, with legal statutes aimed at keeping religion and government forever separate. The While there is a small but vocal minority who advocate posting the Ten Commandments prominently in government buildings, who want Christian prayer to begin each day in public schools, and who would gladly have religious doctrines on sexual and other behavior enshrined in our laws, most Americans oppose such dangerous nonsense and recognize the wisdom and value behind Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state.
Nearly all technoprogressives endorse secularism without hesitation. Most of us are atheists or agnostics and some are believers, but we are unanimous in supporting the need to keep faith apart from governance. That is a central tenet of both progressive and technoprogressive philosophy.
Now, however, comes a really interesting question for us to ponder:
Does the Wall Still Stand?
The Implications of Transhumanism for the Separation of Church and State
That's the title of a speech given in March 2009 by Steven Goldberg, a Law Professor at Georgetown University. It lays out a fascinating and important challenge to transhumanists, especially relevant to those of us who aspire to think deeply about the meaning of transhumanism and its proper place in the world.
Goldberg opens by posing this hypothetical situation:
Suppose that twenty years from now transhumanists make up the bulk of the population in a small Massachusetts town. They persuade the elected school board to offer a required course in the public high school on transhumanism. The course teaches how nanotechnology can improve brain functioning, how human consciousness might someday be downloadable into computers, and similar topics. The course also surveys earlier steps in the fusing of man and his technology, and it takes a positive, optimistic perspective on the past, present, and future of transhumanism. Its essential theme would be, in the words appearing on the website of the transhumanist Anders Sandberg, that “humans can and should continue to develop … [our] bodies and minds … using science and technology…. In the long run, we will no longer be human anymore, but posthuman beings.”
And then he adds:
Suppose further that a resident of the town who is not a transhumanist argues that this is an unconstitutional establishment of religion. How would such a case be resolved? How ought it to be resolved?
Goldberg asks:
Why does the Constitution forbid establishing religion while allowing the teaching and funding of science? Part of the reason is historical; religion incited passions and led to conflicts incompatible with a diverse democratic society. A modern version of this concern is the worry some have that religious arguments are “conservation stoppers” that do not work well in public policy disputes.
And this is where he brings in the key questions: Do transhumanists hold a set of beliefs that effectively offer an alternative to traditional religions? And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Before offering his own thoughts on the matter, Goldberg provides a quick review of legal cases and rulings that over the years have helped to define and clarify these issues.
So how do the Courts decide if something is “religion” for the purposes of the First Amendment? Remarkably, the United States Supreme Court has never set forth a constitutional definition. It’s never been necessary for resolving the cases before it. The Supreme Court did have a series of Vietnam-era cases in which it had to interpret the statutory requirement that conscientious objection to military service be religiously based. The Court, in cases like Seeger and Welsh read the requirement broadly, allowing conscientious objector status for young men who traced their deepest ethical beliefs not to traditional religious teachings, but rather to their study of thinkers like Plato and Spinoza. The Court said that “religion” in the statute was broad enough to extend to a belief which “occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by the God” of traditional religions. The Court relied in part on the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich in identifying religion with “your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.”
If you identify as a transhumanist, do you regard it as your ultimate concern? Do you accept its central statements seriously without any reservation?
[P]erhaps transhumanist beliefs about the proper relationship between technology and mankind really do occupy a “place parallel” to that occupied by God in traditional religion. Perhaps transhumanism is a “conservation stopper” in the sense that adherents cannot really engage in debate with non-adherents because the underlying assumptions of the two groups are too different about what it is to be human. Thus it is not like a science course taught in public schools which offers a set of observations about the natural world that can be used or ignored by society in a variety of ways. Transhumanism embodies much more.
Most transhumanists would, I think, have a rather strong reaction to this assertion. We would be quick to deny that our philosophy holds a place for us parallel to that occupied by God in traditional religion and would insist that transhumanism is much more closely aligned with science than with spirituality.
But before we reject Goldberg's proposition out of hand, let's reflect for a moment on his suggestion that the underlying assumptions of transhumanists about what it is to be human may be so divergent from those of "non-adherents" that we simply cannot engage with them in meaningful debate.
Does transhumanism actually go beyond science? Does it embody "much more" than "a set of observations about the natural world"? Do we offer not only descriptions but also prescriptions about the new era we are about to enter?
If that is the case -- if we see humans and human potential from such radically different, even orthogonal, perspectives, and if we have something to say about values in addition to vectors -- then maybe he is right that we should stop trying so hard to stay within the conversational framing of those who deny the probability of a near-future human to posthuman transition phase.
I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of this position yet, but I do think it is something important to talk about.
Goldberg goes on to state his ultimate thesis:
So perhaps a full-blown transhumanist movement should not resist being analogized to religion. It should embrace the analogy and struggle openly to be accepted as ultimate truth. Otherwise why is transhumanism worth taking seriously?
Under this approach transhumanists would forgo being in the public school curriculum in order to be in everyone’s hearts and minds. They would openly compete in the private sphere with Christianity and other faiths. Or to take a more radical perspective, adherents might argue that transhumanism forces us to change the Constitutional rules: we finally have a truth that ought to be established, that ought, in other words, to be publicly funded and taught in public schools. There should be no wall between transhumanism and the state.
To an outside observer like myself it seems that either of these approaches would be true to the actual claims of transhumanism. These approaches are more honest than claiming that the teachings of transhumanism are merely like the curriculum of a chemistry course or a survey course on Western philosophy. If transhumanism is really worthy of the attention of a non-transhumanist like me, it ought to be willing to take its place as a contender for America’s soul.
Well, that is quite a challenge, indeed, and not one that we should dismiss lightly.
If you accept Goldberg's premise that transhumanism stands for much more than what would normally be taught in a science or history or philosophy class, then it seems we may have arrived at a somewhat surprising fork in the road: we can either admit -- or rather celebrate -- our hoped-for ascension as a new foundational system of values for humanity and posthumanity (something like what Tim Dean calls for in this article), proudly offering a legitimate alternative to traditional religious belief; and our other choice, apparently, is to work toward a kind of H+ocracy -- not a theocracy, but also not a fully pluralistic democracy -- a decidedly unconstitutional establishment of a system of belief overlaying our governmental structure.
I'm certainly not prepared to go there, to embark on the second of two paths that Goldberg says we are confronting. It seems antithetical to all that technoprogressivism stands for. But don't be surprised if you hear other transhumanists make noises that sound uncomfortably close to that latter formulation. Michael Anissimov, for example, has written in a recent entry on his Accelerating Future weblog: "If superintelligence can have better ideas about politics that make the world better for everyone, and following them would be 'anti-democratic', then I am anti-democratic."
Before we reach a point where we have to choose between being democratic or anti-democratic, before we are asked to make a decision about turning over control of global governance to a greater-than-human intelligence, let's apply some of the human intelligence and ethics we now possess to thinking seriously about what transhumanism means and should mean in the world today, and in the world soon to come.