HUMANITY 2.0:A 21ST CENTURY VIEW OF

‘THE TWO CULTURES’ PROBLEM 

Steve FullerProfessor of Sociology University of Warwick

s.w.fuller@warwick.ac.uk

Have we always, sometimes or never been human?

Four things to think about when answering this question:

 1. There has always been some ambiguity about where to draw the line between humans and non-humans, starting with Linnaeus’ definition of Homo sapiens.

 2. There has always been recognition of the diversity of physical and mental qualities of beings that might qualify as humans.

 

Have we always, sometimes or never been human?

Four things to think about when answering this question:

 3. There has always been an understanding that not everything about humans makes us human and that we might improve our humanity if we gained or lost a few qualities.

 4. There has always been recognition that genuine humanity is precious and elusive, and hence ‘projects’ and ‘disciplines’ for its promotion and maintenance.

 

Humanity as Artificial To be human is to engage in an activity whose purpose goes

beyond the promotion and maintenance of the animal natures of those qualified to be human.

1.  1.   Ancient Artifice = Paideia (Inhabiting the right mental space to deal with others and the world, e.g.. ‘the humanistic world-view’.)

2. 2.      Mediaeval Artifice = Universitas (Incorporating yourself in a social entity with a greater purpose: e.g. ‘the project of humanity’)

3. 3.      Modern Artifice = Engineering (Redesigning the environment, including one’s body, to enable a certain desirable form of existence with less effort: e.g. ‘transhumanism’)

 

 

 

 

Humanity as Not Necessarily Good for All Humans

• In the West at least, Christianity is largely responsible for inducing cultural guilt about the failure of all humans to be treated as humans.

• This opened a long discussion about ‘human potential’ and how it may be realized.

• The late 18th century witnessed the first systematic efforts to raise ‘the overall level of humanity’ by the redistribution of wealth (and sentiment), and later mass education, health care and more general presumptions of welfare entitlement.

 

 

Humanity as Not Necessarily Good for All Humans

However, nowadays skepticism about all these efforts comes from many quarters, and very often from various self-avowed members of ‘The Left’.

For the critics ‘humanity’ remains a fantasy whose risks are outweighed only by its hypocrisy.

1.  Michel Foucault’s ‘death of man’ thesis: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud showed that we are exotic apes suffering from ‘God delusion’.

2. The generic postmodern academic critique: ‘Humanity’ is a mask for hegemonic male elites.

3. The Neo-liberal (and neo-conservative) critique: Humanity costs too much and delivers too little (aka race and gender are ‘really real’).

 

The Six Arguments against Humanity

 

The Six Arguments against Humanity

4. The Ecological critique: The projects associated with humanity are depleting natural resources, if not endangering the entire biosphere.

5. The Animal Rights critique: Humanity’s self-privileging is based on pre-Darwinian theological ideas that cause other creatures needless suffering.

6. The Posthumanist critique: Not even humans want to associate with other humans anymore – they prefer other animals and the ‘second selves’ they can create on their computers.

Why All the Anti-Humanism?

• Foucault saw the problem clearly enough: Western theology poses the question of humanity in terms of whether we are more like gods or apes.  

• Whatever your answer, you end up devaluing what most normal human beings do, or at least what they believe about what they do.  

The Emerging Two Cultures Problem of Humanity 2.0

For today’s version of the ‘gods’ versus ‘apes’ option, think Ray Kurzweil (‘spiritual machines’) and Peter Singer (‘animal liberation’) as advocates of radically alternative ‘posthuman’ ideals of what humans should be about.

Despite their rhetorical novelty, Kurzweil and Singer are reproducing a carbon-silicon divide that can be found in the history of the West’s self-understanding of humanity, starting with the respective university foundations in Paris and Oxford in the 13th century.

 

 

The Emerging Two Cultures Problem of Humanity 2.0

Those stressing our nearness to the gods are eager to discipline, replace, if not outright, eliminate the animal character of humanity in order to rise to some purer, more efficient means to God. Their signature science is optics.

 In contrast, those stressing our nearness to the apes

are eager to show our continuities with the rest of the animal kingdom as a form of worship and submission to God. Their signature science is natural history.