a working thesis on what's wrong with Christian transhumanist Christology

The final chapter of Cyborg Selves is a briefly sketched foray into Christology, a sort of preliminary attempt to move out of the locus of theological anthropology into the systematic implications for Christology, focused on the notion of "cyborg Christ." As others have correctly pointed out in engaging with the text, this is the least developed chapter of the book. (It was however one of the most fun bits to write--I remember working on this chapter fondly, second only to the little section riff on cyborgs in the Garden. And for the record I super regret that I did not fight for the much better title Cyborgs in the Garden but I was much younger and unsure of myself and it was my first (to date, still only) book publication, and I had no idea what sort of things one could and could not advocate for. I was also busy with a preschooler and a 3 month old infant, so standing up for myself was basically last on every daily to-do list. Anyway, I digress, as is my right, here on this blog that is essentially just for me.)

So, anyhow: yes, this posthuman stuff has some systematic theological implications for Christology, and I have been aware of this all along, and participating in the recent Global Network for Digital Theology conference has had me thinking about this stuff again in between the advising meetings and orientation sessions and schedule-building that fill my summertime routine as academic advisor. 

This morning, as I was sitting on my porch sitting with the cat in my lap drinking my first cup of coffee, I realized that the right way to get at what is so entirely wrong with the attempt at Christian Transhumanism has to be gotten at through Christology, and that what I ought to be doing is working through, carefully, why and how cyborg Christ is a different Christological construct than the transhuman Christ. 

This is part of how that final chapter of Cyborg Selves deviates from the overall project of the book: what it does not do, at any point, is the work of contrasting a critical posthuman ctborg Christ with a transhumanist Christology. I suppose it didn't occur to me at the time, partly because, in my own mind, I was simply engaging in some constructive theological play, and also partly because there probably wasn't anything to engage with on this. The CTA did not yet exist as an organization, and transhumanism as a movement was basically profoundly uninterested in dialogue with religion and theologies of any sort. And, frankly, no one suggested it to me as a critical gap in the chapter. So--it's not there.

But now this gap is crucial. 

So maybe this is the next project. Ideally, this is a book and certainly it feels as if Cyborg Selves has set this up as the natural next step. (I would still love, someday, to write the book on birthing and gender and sexuality and reproductive technologies and critical posthumanism that I've been dreaming about doing, and the current Christotechnofascist regime makes this feel more urgent all the time, alhtough when I start thinking about that I really think what I ought to be doing is birth doula work or start certifying as a midwife. But without some sort of reconfiguration of my professional circumstances to make space for this I truly do not see how to make any sort of scholarship happen. It might be as simple as getting the workload whittled back down to a level that doesn't have me burnt out to the point that I spent most Saturdays simply sleeping all day as a means of physical recovery and mental escape from feeling like every single waking moment I am on the hook to answer everyone's requests about literally everything. Again, I digress. As is my right.)

My basic intuition on this is that kenosis is the right concept for articulating the contrast. Transhumanism is, in my judgment, an articulation of a desire for the endless expansion of the self, and (truly unfortunately) I do not see this basic desire eliminated or transformed in Christian transhumanism. Rather, what Christian transhumanism does is take this desire and map it back on to Christianity, providing a kind of moral justification and even a theological mandate for this desire. But this is jarringly inconsistent if kenosis is at the center of Christology--and so, the depiction of Christ is not a kenotic one, but the glorified, ascended, triumphant Christ, and it is this Christ we are invited to pattern ourselves and our desires after. Ultimately this means we aspire to that same glorified, ascendant, triumphant embodied and exemplified in Christ that is also our destiny--Christ is forerunner, Christ is foretaste of our destined glory, Christ is our future perfection personified. This is the Christ who has returned to fullness, and we are not dwelling on Christ who did not find all of this worth grasping on to, but emptied himself to take on--yes, exactly, y'all--a merely human existence in solidarity, in identity-with, us. 

But a cyborg Christology absolutely depends upon this moment, this decision, this identity-with. Otherwise there is nothing cyborg-y happening, at all. Or to put it a more theology-forward way, a kenotic Christology can be articulated through the cyborg figure.

This also connects back to Brent Waters' work on a theological notion of hospitality, as making room for the other. This is in direct tension with transhumanist desire for the endless expansion of self. And then is a great invitation to go back to his early work, of which I am highly critical in Cyborg Selves, and see what revisiting this might yield. I fully anticipate I still disagree with some of that articulation, but he has always been a fantastic interlocutor (and, in person, truly gracious and collegial). 

Once again I'm back to my basic sense that the problem with Christian transhumanism is that transhumanism amplifies the worst Christian theological mistakes.

Anyhow, this is a serious project and certainly would mean a return to the world of real systematic theology and y'all, it feels like it's been awhile. Mostly I think about other things now, and those things are mostly boring, institutional things like, "why don't we ever have enough BUS 101 seats for incoming Business majors?" and my confidence is shot. And time, time, I need time.

my therapist said, that sounds like trauma

Memory:

I'm 22 years old. I'm in Wuhan, China, sitting on a plasticky faux leather couch in my apartment on the campus of the teacher's college where I am a Foreign Teacher. I'm listening to a man in his 50's, a fellow American missionary, tell a girl of 16 or so why she isn't a Real Christian yet, while she cries but gamely tries to hold her own during his theological interrogation. I am seething. I try to interrupt, ask critical questions of my own, point out the inconsistencies and the absurd hermeneutics at work in his shoddy argumentation. I'm shut down, and finally, simply ignored. It's like my voice makes no sound. I invited this man. I let him into my apartment, and introduced my friend to him. He's now theologically terrorizing her in my living room. Later, after he has forced her, all of us, into submission, he will baptize her in a hotel swimming pool, laying his hands on her in a mockery of a sacred ritual. I stand by and witness. This is my fault.

When I described this event to my first therapist years ago, I wasn't trying to process feelings, I was just trying to convey what being from my church tradition was like. When she responded that this memory sounded like trauma, I laughed. That's just what it's like, I said. That's what I need you to understand.

new publication: "Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism" chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Digital Theology

Over the next couple of days, I'm participating remotely in an online conference in part to celebrate/promote the publication of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Theology, to which I contributed a chapter titled "Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism." Available for pre-order here!

In this chapter, I reiterate my now-familiar (well, familiar to anyone who has read anything I've ever published) that Transhumanism and critical posthumanism are not the same thing at all. I rehease briefly the different origins of these dicourses, their different underlying philosophical assumptions, and their different motivating concerns and goals. 

I then argue that the benefit of theological engagement with both discourses is that critical posthumanism, as a dialogue partner, is a resource for critical analysis of both H+ and Christian theology. Critical posthumanism helps us guard against bad theological constructions just as much as it helps reveal the impoverished philosophical and moral assumptions of H+. To be blunt (which I will be, here, because this is my blog and who cares), there are bad theological reasons to Just Say No to H+, and there are good ones, and critical posthumanism assists in articulating the good ones.

This claim, it now seems to me, requires taking an explicit stance against the formulation of "Christian Transhumanism." You can read my previous blog rant, born of frustration with Christian Transhumanism's apparently complete reticence to critique or distance itself at all from the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and their public alliance with fascism, white supremacy, and violence, here. As I mentioned in that post, for a long time I have existed on the fringe of this movement, as an intentional and critical lurker, and it seemed important to me back in the 2010's to be generous about potential engagements between theology and the subset of transhumanism variously labeled "democratic transhumanism" or"technoprogressivism." I am no longer inclined to be generous. 

So, let's make it official: I do not think that "Christian" Transhumanism is possible. If it's Christian, it's not Transhumanism. Not because of God-given "Human Nature" or natural limits as inherently good or immutable, or cautions against hubristic "playing God," or any of the reactionary bullshit theological objections that partake, just as much as H+ itself does, in assumptions of hierarchical ontological value. Rather, because the central motivating vision of transhumanism is endless individualistic self-expansion, and this is simply the opposite of anything Jesus ever taught or modeled. This is not WWJD. This is not What Jesus Would have us Do, either.

This isn't about attitudes toward technology as a category or technologies as specific applications! It has nothing at all to do with technology! This is why having critical posthumanism in the conversation is so important--it belies the claim that all theological rejections of transhumanism are somehow reactionary traditionalist Luddite mistakes (also: Luddites weren't simplistic anti-tech either anyhow). I want a Christian theology that embraces technology and even a posthuman ontology, and therefore I require technology to be anti-fascist and oriented toward the actual common good, for humans and nonhumans and posthumans of all sorts.

So, a great big emphatic NO to ChristoTechnoFascism from me. 

Cyborgs for a Liveable World.