*It always cheers me up to see visionary geeks taken seriously.
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2283/gloom-merchant
"...however, in a host of ways we make the life of reason easy for ourselves, by ploys and fallacies that feed our false hopes. In The Uses of Pessimism I explore some of these ploys and fallacies, and show the devastating effect they have had on modern societies.
"For example, there is the “born free” fallacy that has dominated educational thinking since Rousseau. This tells us that human freedom is a natural gift, that we are born to enjoy it, and that we lose it through the laws, rules and hierarchies of social life. That, in my view, is the opposite of the truth. Human freedom is an artefact. Societies have built laws, institutions and forms of collective discipline precisely in order that the individual can live freely. To believe that we are born free makes it easier to bear our frustrations, to blame others for our woes, and to dignify our inadequacies with the colours of a justified rebellion. It enables us to discard all knowledge that it is painful to acquire, and to believe that idleness is virtue. And the effect of this belief on education has been devastating, leading everywhere to the loss of discipline and culture.
"Equally devastating in my view has been the “zero sum” fallacy, the belief that every benefit received by one person is a loss felt by another. If John is rich it is because Mary is poor. If one part of the world is flourishing it is because some other part is declining. According to the zero sum fallacy all good things must be paid for, and the art of society is to pass the cost to someone else. That fallacy underlies Marx’s theory of surplus value; it inspired the revolutions conducted in Marx’s name, and gave resentment a scientific face. In fact, however, social cooperation is not a zero sum game, and the art of society is to discover the ways in which one person’s good is a good for the rest of us.
(((So much for Rousseau and Marx; you're next, transhumanists!)))
"Such fallacies have led to disastrous results on account of the false hopes that are built on them. Many of these false hopes have fizzled out. But there is truth in the view that hope springs eternal in the human breast, and false hope is no exception. In the world that we are now entering there is a striking new source of false hope, in the “trans-humanism” of people like Ray Kurzweil, Max More and their followers. The transhumanists believe that we will replace ourselves with immortal cyborgs, who will emerge from the discarded shell of humanity like the blessed souls from the grave in some medieval Last Judgement.
"The transhumanists don’t worry about Huxley’s Brave New World: they don’t believe that the old-fashioned virtues and emotions lamented by Huxley have much of a future in any case. The important thing, they tell us, is the promise of increasing power, increasing scope, increasing ability to vanquish the long-term enemies of mankind, such as disease, ageing, incapacity and death.
"But to whom are they addressing their argument? (((Not to medieval theologians, that's for sure. For one thing, they only wrote Latin))) If it is addressed to you and me, why should we consider it? (((Maybe for the same reason I went out and got a vaccination against yellow fever when I might have had the exciting, deeply human experience of catching yellow fever. You know: stone-dead of yellow fever, like some husk in a medieval grave. Not that I don't take our pessimistic philosopher's point here, but he's attacking straw men. Huxley's prophetic scifi book came to complete dystopic fruition sometime in the Reagan era, and by now we've actually gotten some of our suffering back. This guy needs to debate Max More, who, for whatever his apparent eccentricity, is a genuine philosopher, who can speak real philosopher-ese when he feels like it.)))
"Why should we be working for a future in which creatures like us won’t exist, (((Probably because we don't get a choice about nonexistence as the clock ticks))) and in which human happiness as we know it will no longer be obtainable? And are those things that spilled from Pandora’s box really our enemies – greater enemies, that is, than the false hope that wars with them? ((("Love your enemies, especially smallpox")))
"We rational beings depend for our fulfilment upon love and friendship. Our happiness is of a piece with our freedom, and cannot be separated from the constraints that make freedom possible – real, concrete freedom, as opposed to the abstract freedom of the utopians. Everything deep in us depends upon our mortal condition, and while we can solve our problems and live in peace with our neighbours we can do so only through compromise and sacrifice. We are not, and cannot be, the kind of posthuman cyborgs that rejoice in eternal life..."
