Übermensch of the early 21st century
What Kind of a Person
“What kind of a person are you,” I heard them say to me.
I’m a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.
I’m a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I’m not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.
I’m not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.
Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.
Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.
I’m not a car, I’m a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.
– Yehuda Amichai
Scary other people
About a week ago, a friend posted a clip on “muslim demographics” on his Facebook-feed which, quite predictably, really got me going. It is 7 minutes of ominous-looking illustrative computer graphics with even more ominous-sounding voiceover that aims to demonstrate how Europe in particular and the Western world in general is facing a muslim onslaught and is about to be engulfed by the tidal wave of hostile culture within next couple of decades, lest we, the people of the free and enlightened world, start reproducing like rabbits and preaching gospel to infidels.
Not surprisingly, the source of this “call to action” is religious itself. One of the underlying assumptions of the grand and dark picture that emerges from the clip is that – while christians seem to be giving birth to people who are endowed with reason and capacity of free choice, and who can subsequently become not only christians but also citizens of the state they live in, doctors, drivers, writers, athletes, and yes, sometimes even muslims – muslims are begetting only muslims, always and over many generations. So if christianity (or belonging into Western culture) is a, supposedly enlightened, state of mind, being a muslim is akin to dominant gene. Many claims that are being made in the clip do not of course stand any closer scrutiny (here is an excellent recent article from FT that deals with most of this stuff), but that’s the thing – most of the people watching it and then forwarding it to others apparently do not feel that there’s a need for any closer scrutiny to something that is already evidently clear. After all, isn’t that what Spengler and Huntington said? Who cares of details such as muslim birth rates in Europe plummeting way faster than average western ones? Isn’t it a lot easier to talk of “muslim crime” than deal with the cultural and racial discrimination of immigrant population in European countries?
This, however, led me to reflect back upon something that we ended up discussing with students in a seminar a couple of weeks ago – and namely, why is it that we feel threatened by people who are somehow markedly different from us? Of course, we may perceive them as a threat to our way of life, we may feel that if church bells tolling are being taken over by prayer calls from mosques then our worlds will be changed too. But in many cases, this doesn’t go very far to explain our fears. Why, for instance, do many heterosexual people feel threatened by homosexuality? After all, their fertility rates should lead us to believe that the threat of homosexuals taking over the world is non-existant and indeed, that the mere fact of their survival thus far is nothing short of miraculous. Why can’t we, free people, tolerate someone’s choice to wear ḥijāb? Why is the only way to make sense out of such choice that the person so choosing must be deluded in that being her own free will – and should be subsequently forcibly liberated from such tradition?
But maybe it is because the existence and presence of someone markedly different simply undermines the notion of our world being the best or even the only possible one? This is what Judith Butler has argued with gender and sexuality – as long as gender is defined through the discourse of heterosexual practices (such as woman being defined as an object of heterosexual male desire, or marriage being a union between man and a woman), a homosexual person stands as a challenge to the clear and unambiguous notion of gender of everyone so defined. Similarly with muslims – the presence of people in our midst who do not necessarily adhere to our deeply held notions of what it means to be free or what constitutes a life worth living, but appear, against all odds, still be able to lead fulfilling lives, is a threat to our way of life in a way that runs much deeper than we would like to acknowledge.
Why so few?
A couple of days ago I happened to stumble upon a lecture by Nick Bostrom, the director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and probably the world’s foremost transhumanist. If you don’t know who he is, or haven’t heard of transhumanism before, I suppose it’s an interesting viewing – kind of TED stuff that so many people seem to really like (and sure enough, Bostrom has several lectures available there as well).
In the lecture, Bostrom explains in about 20 minutes his well-known view of existential risk for humanity and outlines a “possibility space” for human species, along with his threefold model of future of human development (extinction/stagnation/posthuman). I have in fact all sorts of different problems with Bostrom’s approach, but now I suddenly realised that they don’t even matter. Bostrom argues that what defines us as human, compared against animals for instance, is our superior mental, cognitive or whatever other capabilities, and argues quite persuasively that there is no reason to believe that the limits we currently face in those terms should be considered as somehow final and unsurpassable. Therefore it follows that if we were to increase those capabilities (for instance, by increasing our brain volume) we would likely become able to think thoughts that are currently impossible, and indeed, unimaginable for us. And I don’t really even disagree with that.
Where I do disagree though (and, as I said earlier, this is quite apart from all kinds of different ethical objections) is that I honestly don’t believe that things such as brain volume or our current cognitive capacities (such as ability to hear only within certain frequency range or see within certain spectral range, and so on) could honestly be considered serious limitations for “most of the people, most of the time”. I would maintain that for vast, vast majority of us those limits are never came nowhere near of. Apart from very select few we all live our lives well below what we would actually be capable of, by virtue of being humans. And this sentiment is, for me, perfectly captured in this small episode in a wonderful movie “Waking Life”:
