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Sept. 11, 2006 Various individuals have written articles about humanism and transhumanism and invariably, our resident New Age mystic, John Waters, responds. Humanism is a belief system which strives for dogma-free morality and a reason based approach to truth. Transhumanism is the idea that humanity can alter its own evolution, improve its health and therefore, the human lifespan, and so on. John Waters spends much time and many words making humanism out to be scourge, likely because his own Yogic-superpowers wouldn't stand up to scrutiny; neither would faith healing, ghost “research” and numerology. He also expends much effort to cast transhumanism into some Orwellian, master-race creating, art destroying, evil force. John makes many errors during our exchanges, mistakes made mostly due to his ignorance of the matters involved. One of his articles asked many specific questions. When I answered them, he dropped that thread of discussion. Yet, in other articles, he insinuates that we should, in our exchanges, concentrate on the “important points” instead of attacking each other. Debating with John is a bit like debating an eight year old. Can one win a debate against an eight year old? I'll go into more detail about the important issues that John forgot about or ignored in future articles. For example, I've asked him several times if he eats lobster – that seemingly silly question has significant relevance to one of our debate items. During our many exchanges, I've referred to John as being neo-Amish and anti-science. John repeatedly claims that he is neither. I'll also show in future articles that John is in fact a Luddite and dislikes not just the institution of science, but those folks who work in scientific endeavors. For this article, however, I'd like to reply and expand on this bit, which is from one of his recent articles: Fred Smith is trying to be a proselytizer for secular humanism but instead of doing that, in his last few articles Fred is being a verbal pretzelitizer. For example, Fred cannily (or should I say con-nily?) twists and bends the meaning of the central topic as he writes, "Transhumanism.... began eons ago with farming, the domestication of animals and plants and the first cities." In this sentence Fred’s doing an Orwellian 1984 grand word distortion of the meaning of the word "transhumanism" given on the website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism which states, "Transhumanism (sometimes abbreviated >H or H+) is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human cognitive and physical abilities and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disease and aging. Transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Possible dangers, as well as benefits, of powerful new technologies that might radically change the conditions of human life are also of concern to the transhumanist movement." That definition isn't describing farming, domestication, or achitecture. Perhaps those 75 credits of college that John said he took didn't cover the concepts in and around the miracle of farming. When man learned how to farm, when that was a “new science”, it was a phenomenal change – one of the most radical changes to human destiny. Growing food and storing it allowed, for the first time, folk in the group who could practice trades and arts not directly related to food gathering in a full time capacity. This very quickly and very directly lead to very advanced technology. Take the Amish, for example. The Amish farm, they domesticate animals and they have within their communities various highly skilled artisans in a variety of fields including the melting of metal. The Amish are, compared to most of human history, an incredibly advanced society! Ironically, they have decided to stop advancing. John Waters, in comparison with the vast expanse of human history, lives in a slightly more advanced society, though like the Amish, he'd like to halt research that he misunderstands or objects too for metaphysical reasons. In any case, of course ancient farming humans didn't use terms like “transhumanism”. That word in modern times is forward thinking, accepting where we are now and projecting new possibilities ahead. However, man now enjoys a lifespan three times longer than nature originally provided – that's a heck of a transhumanist jump. Consider if we repeated that feat – this would mean living to 250 years, give or take! Farming and cities did for us in the past, what artificial organs and other advances promise to do for us in the future. Why John draws magic lines in the sand, as it were, is beyond me. A lack of imagination, perhaps? I realize that farming isn't as evil sounding as Nazi-like transhumanist soldiers conquering and homogenizing the Earth, or evil robots with human-like AI minds torturing all poets and creative or eccentric people, two silly ideas that John has put forth (more or less). Where does he come up with these plots for second rate, B-class, Sci-fi movies? Certainly not from anything futurists such as Kurzweil say when they speculate on where current trends might take us. In any case, was farming “good”? Well, it did set us on the path towards civilization. It did give us more insurance against the whims of nature, the seasons and the animals that we used to follow. It did allow us to play God to a rather considerable extent, over the lives of the animals we domesticated, for example. Like any new technology, farming is neither bad nor good. Overall, it has improved the human condition considerably but as with anything, there are downsides. Would returning to the hunter gatherer life-style be beneficial to the planet and to ourselves? No, for two reasons. First, advanced technology is required to save us from inevitable death in the form of asteroid collision from space and/or the eventual end of the Solar System as the Sun dies (or global warming and possibly many other as yet unforeseen dangers). Returning to the simple life en mass will guarantee our own annihilation. Second, the hunter gatherer lifestyle is actually pretty hard on the environment. Any given area can support far fewer humans living in this manner compared with farming. In order to bring the population down to a level where we can embrace that lifestyle we'd have to somehow do away with billions of people. In other words, turning the clock back to a point where we haven't adopted any new technology and associated evils would require a mass disaster on a scale greater than anything yet caused by the “evils” of technology! This is a point that Carl Sagan makes eloquently in, “Pale Blue Dot”. I'm not arguing that John wants to return to such primitive roots, I mention this to address the greater picture painted by the issues involved. After all, I have ideas I'd like to discuss – I can't spend the entire article swatting mosquitoes ;) And now let me end on a humorous note. Above I quoted John; in that bit, he used these two neologisms: “pretzelitizer” and “con-nily”. This is what John has to say about neologims: The fact is often a neologism is coined and employed by someone who has lost intellectual clarity and has become more or less irrational. --- Resources: The articles of John Waters, the thread of back and forth articles that the above refers too starts roughly with the one titled, “Secular Humanism As a Modern Scourge”, though his attack of these issues goes much further back. The earth has a population of more than 6.5 billion people. However, if everyone lived as a hunter-gather, according to critics, the earth would be able to support many fewer people. Primitivists point out that the earth has long been overpopulated and that there is no possible way to support everyone that is alive today. A population crash is inevitable, they say, as can be observed by looking at any other animal population which consumes all of its resources and destroys its living environment. Critics are curious as to the fate of the other billions that will be left without food if such a way of life was adopted. Primitivists point out that they will probably die of starvation, as most people without food do, but that as mentioned above, this is inevitable for any animal population whose consumption exceeds the amount of resources available. Is John Waters a Primitivist who wants to see billions starve? I tend to doubt this from his writings, however, he does share some important commonalities with them. Basic tenets of humanism. Ray Kurweil. Go here to listen to an interview with Ray. Ray confronts questions about scary sci-fi movies (perhaps not unlike what John Waters loses sleep over at night), and dismisses the idea that his vision of the future is a “utopia”. Two end of the world situations that we will need to confront with very advanced technology in order to survive sooner or later: End of civilization - An impact event is commonly seen as a scenario that would bring about the end of civilization. In 2000, Discover Magazine published a list of 20 likely end of the world scenarios with impact event listed as the number one most likely to occur. Until the 1980s this idea was not taken seriously, but all that changed after the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater which was further reinforced by witness to the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 event. Since then there has been a lot more interest and funding of studies. The changing of the Sun and the bad things this means for us. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@gmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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