On Soft Transhumanism

I’ll begin with what I hope are some uncontroversial propositions about respiratory illness. Respiratory illness can have several types of causes. It can be the result of physical or genetic predisposition, individual choices (such as smoking), or one’s environment (such as air pollution).

This same pattern plays out in other areas of health where sensitivities are greater, such as mental health or obesity. Depression or anxiety may be the result of physical predisposition, one’s own choices and behavior, or an unhealthy environment.

Oftentimes, the causes of ones suffering will involve some combination of physical/genetic, behavioral, and environmental, and the three causes can come to reinforce one another. The causes of any one person’s suffering will fall along a spectrum, and it is usually exceedingly difficult to tell where.

Potential remedies mirror these causes along a similar spectrum: medication or other medical interventions, changes in individual behavior, or changes in the environment (whether through collective action or removing oneself).¹

Among these possible remedies, the benefit to medical intervention is that it can alleviate suffering regardless of the cause, and that its effects are more easily measurable and predictable. This does not automatically make them superior, however. Seeking to understand the conditions — individual and collective — from which our suffering arises has benefits beyond alleviating the suffering itself, however difficult they are to measure or prove.

Given the difficulty in diagnosing the causes of suffering with precision, it it tempting to prioritize medical interventions given that they can alleviate suffering regardless of the cause and their success or failure is measurable and predictable. If a pill exists to alleviate a particular kind of suffering and we cannot tell who could alleviate their own suffering through changes in their behavior, isn’t it best to simply recommend the pill to everyone? Is it not cruel to the people who could not solve their problems on their own if we tell them not to take the pill or stigmatize them for it?

That this line of thinking fits neatly into ad campaigns and works to the benefit of megacorporations does not automatically disqualify it, but it is cause for caution and skepticism. The things that move human existence beyond bearable or survivable into meaningful do not fit neatly into 30 second advertisements. What is lost if we sacrifice seeking to understand our condition, the good and the bad, in favor of managing pleasure and pain?

We must necessarily err in seeking to resolve this dilemma. Which side we err on has dire consequences either way. If we err too much on the side of stiff upper lip and personal responsibility, this is cruel at the individual level, asking those suffering because of bad genetic luck or environmental forces beyond their control to do the impossible or continue suffering. If we err too much on the side of “take a pill” then at both the individual and collective level we allow to atrophy our ability to improve our own fate or to endure what cannot be changed. Defaulting too much to “take a pill” means being compassionate at the individual level but building a society that is less virtuous, less resilient, and more in thrall to corporations and advertising.

I do not seek to resolve this dilemma of which side to err on — it will be with us as long as humans remain conscious and embodied. I do seek, however, to offer a warning against those who claim it is easily and obviously resolved in favor of taking pills, a tendency that can be called “soft transhumanism”.

Unlike true transhumanists, soft transhumanists are not seeking to become machines or upload their consciousness to the cloud. They do, however, see human frailty as nothing but a problem to solve. This is misguided because human frailty will always be with us, and there is a point at which efforts to avoid it become counterproductive. If we cannot totally eliminate rough surfaces from the world, we must have enough contact with them to develop calluses.² As Hemingway wrote: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

That is where much of life lies: growing stronger in the broken places. There is tragedy in this, as we are not all born equally strong and the world does not break us equally. Soft transhumanism responds to this injustice by saying “we must never let anyone be broken.” To quote Hemingway again — “isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Soft transhumanism conflates the moral realism that never letting anyone be broken is not possible with an indifference to people’s suffering. It is the product of too many veils of ignorance and trolley problems conditioning us to think that our opinions about the world must be formed from an assumption of having control over it.

If we stop recognizing the need to strive to become stronger in the broken places, we are reduced to a combination of victim and consumer. We become a species incapable of heroism, incapable of producing music and poetry. This is not to say that we should choose to have some suffer so others can enjoy beauty and meaning, but rather that we must recognize the limits of our power to choose, that despite our best efforts suffering and beauty will always coexist and will never be equally distributed. We should not lay down the tools we have developed over millennia to deal with the harshness of life in the misguided hope that our new tools can solve all our problems without creating new ones. Our ability to create beauty out of suffering is why the world is, to quote Hemingway one last time, “a fine place, and worth the fighting for.”

1. And for some there may be no solution, and they must learn resilience and endurance.

2. In The Palliative Society, Byung-Chul Han writes:

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairly tale The Princess and the Pea can be read as an allegory of the hypersensitivity of the late-modern subject. The pea underneath the mattress causes the future princess so much pain that she has a sleepless night. Many people today are probably ill with “princess-and-the-pea syndrome”. The paradox of the syndrome is that our increasing suffering is the result of fewer and fewer causes. Pain is a subjective sensation, not something that can be measured objectively. Our increasing expectations regarding the power of medicine, couple with the meaninglessness of pain, make even minor pain unbearable. And we lack networks of meaning, narration, and higher authorities and purposes that could capture our pain and make it bearable. Once the pea is taken away, the mattress will begin to chafe. What is painful, after all, is the persisting meaninglessness of life itself.