[extropy-chat] ENOUGH again

[Damien Broderick]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bryan Moss" <bryan.moss at dsl.pipex.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 9:15 PM

> It's only necessary, I think, to highlight that the
> choice is personal, certainly not something that should be subject to
public
> policy, and that life is not the fear of death, that we do not choose to
go
> on living because we fear dying.  The rest should take care of itself.

Sorry, no. We transhumanist are greedy, grasping and immature, and that's
that:

`Most of us mature only partway: we learn--it's to be hoped that we
learn--to place our family or our community or our deity nearer the center
of our lives, but only in rare cases do we fully vanquish that compulsive
striving, that grasping for more. And in recent centuries we've come to
embrace our selfishness--our hyperindividuality--with an almost religious
fervor... The choice between Enough and More has always been a choice we
could put off a little longer, both in our own lives and in the life of our
civilization.

`But now the hour draws near.' (210)

What we're headed toward, McKibben asserts (in his wooly confusion), is a
regime of `programmed' lives, known totally in advance, which will be
`ineradicable' (because by then, even if the prowess remains, our will shall
have been sapped; we'll be contented Stepford Hive drones). Incredibly,
given where he's avowedly coming from, he writes as a simple-minded genetic
determinist. Once those devilish genes are locked in place, we'll march
forever to their drumming, without passion or challenge or the poignancy of
death and its rewarding, decent return to the embrace of Nature.

He thinks we're *afraid* of dying, rather than outraged by its waste. He
calls me and Gregory Stock and Robert Freitas `unhinged by death' when we
point out that sometime in the future mortality will become optional--and
yet elsewhere he does not dispute this technical possibility. To wish not to
senesce and then die (at 80 or so, presumably, not the traditional 25 or 35)
is ipso facto to be `unhinged'. It offends against `gut feelings'.

McKibben closes by describing the autumnal run he'd just had, which
echoes his hard-won marathon run at the book's opening, and then points out
that we don't need no steenking technofutures; no, we can just get by with
Enough. Fuck you, I thought. Yeah, when I was your age I could run too, it
was lovely. Now I have trouble getting up the stairs (knees clapped out,
ironically, from running, and inherited arthritis) or just walking the dog
fast. I muttered as I shut the book: Don't talk to me about Enough, you
sanctimonious prick.

Damien Broderick