Human “Nature” and Fantasies of Control

May 19th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 1:44 pm

Because of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, the concept of human nature is being bounced around again. Aside from the vital arguments over whether we should allow the restrictions on the provision of abortion to be decided by a collection of idiots and liars, what we’re being treated to here over the issue of hybrid embryos is a full blown collision between essentialism, and with it, the commitment to drawing a final boundary between the given and “natural” on the one hand, and the constructed or artificial on the other, and something else, which is generally very ill-defined, but which has the support of scientists together with anti-religious polemicists.

The Catholic insistence that the human embryo incarnates a unique, ensouled natural kind seems to base itself upon assumptions that no longer count for much among huge swathes of the populations of consumer societies. Consumerism ingrains varieties of cod-existentialism within popular forms of self-understanding, focusing on central doctrines such as “it’s up to you what you make of your life” (therefore buy X) or alternatively “be all you can be” (by buying X). The assumptions that these doctrines rest upon are shared by philosophical existentialism, namely, that God is dead, and with him, the existential support provided by a fixed human essence. Human nature as such is a theological concern, the truth of human being as known only to God. Once the existence of such an essence is accepted, then it’s necessary to come up with laws designed to protect it, although to understand what is being protected it’s necessary to fall back on empty concepts like “intrinsic value”, which largely defeat the object, being really only gestures towards a sacred “something” known only to God (and, implicitly, the Vatican).

Is the counterpart of the religious view therefore a kind of existentialism shared by scientists and self-proclaimed rationalist polemicists alike? Most often, the justifications for hybrid embryo research appear to rest on utilitarian assumptions (experiment now for future benefits) which are supported by a familiar sort of technological determinism (experiments will produce technologies which will cure specific conditions). But go one level further down, as it were, and there are presuppositions about human freedom at work which demonstrate how the consumer and philosophical forms that existentialism can take are intimately related, both to each other and indeed to the theological position on human nature.

Although the hybrid embryo research programme is modest by comparison, it nevertheless shares some background with the arguments in favour of “human performance” improvement (everything from brain implants to enhance memory to unlimited longevity) presented by writers like Kurzweil, Bainbridge & Roco and so on, who are congenial to a general transhumanist agenda. The principle is one of control: that technologies (for Kurzweil and Co., nanotech and biotech above all) have the capacity to make everything that is given to us into something that can be freely reconstructed. There are no boundaries between nature and artifice, and this means that everything can, eventually, be remade in line with whatever we desire. Nanotechnology is currently the area of research that this fantasy has latched onto most voraciously: control over the “building blocks of life” implies that the “essential” can be finally replaced with the constructed. God can finally be killed, or rather, can be killed again and again: the actuality of increased “performance” (something quantifiable, by definition) will bring, with the attainment of every new goal, a fresh reassurance that God is, indeed, dead. Performers, being only as good as their last performance, are notoriously insecure individuals.

The difference between the defenders of the theological view and their opponents is therefore an opposition based on mutual dependence. Whereas the theological assumption is that the boundary protecting the essentially human should never be crossed, the technoexistentialist assumes that technology can reach the point where this boundary can be crossed with the aid of a perfectible form of expertise, and that the control provided by this expertise obviates the need for theologically-supported moralities. But conversely, the worries of the theologically-inclined rest on the assumption that the technoexistentialist is right, and that the level of control attainable by humans is such that all given boundaries between nature and artifice can successfully be crossed. This is the assumption that drives the objections of right-wing bioethicists like Leon Kass to Kurzweilian visions for bio- and nanotechnologies.

Both views are fundamentally mistaken, for the reason that (as the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy has pointed out) it is the concept of a human condition, not a human nature, that forms a key limiting concept for post-religious ethics. This stems from Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas (Kass claims Jonas as his chief inspiration, but habitually misreads him), referring not to the inherent sinfulness of human beings, but to the illusion of control that tends to accompany the mastery of technical ways of manipulating the world, and which tempts us to assume that the biological and historically given conditions under which we strive to understand and transform the world are ones which we can entirely overcome. Givenness in this sense has nothing to do with the theological idea that there are certain boundaries which the activities of human beings cannot cross. But it does have to do with the limitations of human foresight, and the fact that knowledge drags behind action, rather than driving it onwards: like Marx said, people make history, but don’t do so under circumstances of their own choosing.

The fantasy of control, which drives both the theological repulsion against radical technologies and the technoexistentialist exultation of them, remains a fantasy whoever believes it, one which disavows the real finitude of human beings, their embeddedness within the given, the world which precedes them and which they are fated to endlessly remake and strive ceaselessly to overleap.