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elfsLast night, I was at a public event with a lot of public dignitaries, the kinds of people running for high, middle, and low office: Everything from Governor to Manager of the Sewers is up for a vote around here. (I often wonder what someone campaigning for Sewer Manager uses as a campaign slogan. "Vote for me and the shit will flow freely?" Wouldn't the constituent response be, "So, what else is new?")
I was talking to a woman who's the campaign manager for a colorful fellow running for a seat on some city somewhere nearby. I asked about an especially colorful badge he had, "Leader of all Generals of Washington State." She described the "Generals of Washington State" as a small bastion of male privilege devoted to the sorts of do-good meddling the post-aspirational high-middle-class retirees of activist Washington go in for.
She said, "Oh, you know, we only go around this life once, and you may as well make the most of it." She paused for a moment, misreading my expression, and said, "Unless you're a Buddhist. Or Hindu. Or Pagan, I guess."
What I was looking so consternated about was adding, "Or Transhumanist." Because opening up that can of worms was going to be more trouble than it was worth, at least at that moment.
Transhumanism isn't-- quite-- a religion. It doesn't have holy texts, rituals, or belief in an afterlife. (No, believing there is no afterlife is not a belief in the afterlife; it's a belief about reality, namely, that this is all there is.) It doesn't have a quintessential statement about what Huxley called "ultimate questions." But it does have hypotheses (that's what they are, because they can-- and will-- be tested) about how much life we human beings get to have, hypotheses that are more robust (in the scientific sense) than the beliefs of Buddhists or Christians.
I was talking to a woman who's the campaign manager for a colorful fellow running for a seat on some city somewhere nearby. I asked about an especially colorful badge he had, "Leader of all Generals of Washington State." She described the "Generals of Washington State" as a small bastion of male privilege devoted to the sorts of do-good meddling the post-aspirational high-middle-class retirees of activist Washington go in for.
She said, "Oh, you know, we only go around this life once, and you may as well make the most of it." She paused for a moment, misreading my expression, and said, "Unless you're a Buddhist. Or Hindu. Or Pagan, I guess."
What I was looking so consternated about was adding, "Or Transhumanist." Because opening up that can of worms was going to be more trouble than it was worth, at least at that moment.
Transhumanism isn't-- quite-- a religion. It doesn't have holy texts, rituals, or belief in an afterlife. (No, believing there is no afterlife is not a belief in the afterlife; it's a belief about reality, namely, that this is all there is.) It doesn't have a quintessential statement about what Huxley called "ultimate questions." But it does have hypotheses (that's what they are, because they can-- and will-- be tested) about how much life we human beings get to have, hypotheses that are more robust (in the scientific sense) than the beliefs of Buddhists or Christians.
