Having failed at humanism, secular modernity now moves on to trans-humanism. Father Tad Pacholczyk, director of Education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center explains transhumanism’s ethical problems.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and in the area of bioethics, in the area of biological technologies and the integrating of our own biology with other kinds of technology, things are moving fast and are likely to start moving faster. That’s just how technological breakthroughs work. So the habit that the Catholic Church has is when there are new things to be dealt with, the church is usually ready to deal with them with clarity and precision about 100 years after they happen. And we probably should probably not do that with this. We’re going to need to be ready a bit quicker than that.
So to help us talk about the ethical dimension, the ethical considerations we’re going to need to have as transhumanist solutions and ideas and projects are proposed to us in coming decades, what should we be thinking about as those things come up? How should we be talking about them with our neighbors, both Catholic and not Catholic? Father Tad Pacholczyk is our guest. He’s the director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. Father, thanks for being with us.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Cy, great to be able to join you. Thanks so much for having me on. Your opening comment there about the fact that it sometimes seems like the church is a step or two behind these new developments, I know that’s how it appears to the world a lot of times, but I like to remind people, look, way before in vitro fertilization ever came on the scene, the church had already evaluated it. Same thing for human cloning. What happens typically is that the church stays ahead of the curve here, but the problem is you don’t have a lot of people with ears to hear what the church is offering many times.
Cy Kellett:
That’s very helpful.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
So I suspect in this transhumanist area, it’s a similar phenomenon.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I mean, the science fiction side of it, which is entertaining. It makes for good storytelling and all of that. And you can sort of suspend the, I suppose, the ethical considerations for the sake of the story and enjoy them. But the truth is, many of the things that are depicted in science fiction as innocuous are not at all in innocuous as far as changing biology and interfering with our biology.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Absolutely. I think the transhumanist, if you want to call it a project, because I think that’s fair, really does raise some huge conceptual questions. And I think for Christians in particular, in other words, it’s almost a competing system to what Christianity has to offer. And I think it’s important to lay it out in precisely that way. So I mean, one of the starting points that I’ve noticed around the transhumanist project is basically this idea that the human species as it is now in its current form, doesn’t represent a kind of final state or the end of our development.
So in other words, we’re in the middle of something, it’s a kind of evolutionary view of things and who knows how far we are along the evolutionary path, and shouldn’t we step in and start doing the evolution ourselves through technology. And that’s because the human species is ripe and ready to be turned into something vastly superior to what it currently is, a whole different redesign, if you will. So I think that kind of a vision of who we are as humans is in profound tension with Christianity. At the end of the day, I think what we’re looking at here is a real alternative view of human nature. And in Christianity, clearly we have a sense that there are aspects of our own humanity that are very much given and willed by God and that we’re not authorized to seek to change those aspects of our humanity.
Cy Kellett:
It sometimes maybe seems like a kind of eschatology within the world that we as Christians, we do believe that we will be transformed. We don’t believe that the resurrection, for example, is just a restoration to the frailness that I experience now. But all of this is in God’s plan. This seems almost like a tower of babble kind of I don’t want to wait for God’s plan, I’ll get there myself without God’s help.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Exactly. I think that’s a good way to put it. It’s a question of do we turn to a salvific message from another or do we presume that we have to hoist it upon our own shoulders and kind of march forward here and make things happen? So many of these transhumanists and these people who are pushing towards what they call posthuman persons, I mean, they have a whole range of tools in their quiver that they’re drawing on, whether it’s figuring out how to make our bodies resistant to disease and not able to age anymore, or whether to have a kind of unlimited youth and vigor.
I think things like mood control through pharmacological means, exercising control therefore over our desires and our mental states, avoiding feeling too tired. And then they’ll even go further and kind of get moral sounding in the sense of saying, “Well, we have to be able to develop humans who aren’t hateful and who don’t get irritated about things and who have an increased capacity for love and artistic appreciation and greater serenity about them,” these kinds of things. And they’ll even say, “As humans, we have some kind of capacity to experience novel states of consciousness, and we just have to figure out how to trigger those novel states of consciousness that the human brain right now is not able to access. But after we start tinkering around with it, sure enough, we’re going to be able to do that.
And there’s a bright and sunny horizon here that’s just waiting for us.” That’s the kind of message that is offered as salvation through technology, through technocratic manipulations, et cetera. And I think that’s a very powerful temptation. I think we got to be honest that a lot of people will be drawn in by that. We just witnessed the amazing transformation of the world around us through technology, and it seems like, yeah, maybe indeed we could do something like this by our own wits and by our own elbow grease as it were.
Cy Kellett:
The moral implications just go on and on and on from the personal individual to the social historical implications. And there’s no way that we could unlock all of them. But there is a kind of giddiness among transhumanists that we’re just on the doorway of super long and super kind of pleasant lives as if that’s the solution to whatever we think our problem is.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Yeah, it’s so interesting to me that the term is transhuman because you think of trans and you think of transcendent.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
So you’re hitting the nail on the head here that there’s something about our nature, like it or not guys, that aspires to transcendence and it’s just rooted deep within us. And so somebody comes along and preaches this kind of transhumanist vision of things, and you’re going to get disciples, you’re going to get followers, you’re going to get devotees who want to see this kind of thing actualized. So it does speak to us about the kinds of creatures that we are. It does say to us that we have some kind of capacity, genuine capacity for transcendence, but we got to be very, very careful there and make sure that we don’t turn in the wrong way here towards a false transcendence. I think we have to recognize what’s at the root of our difficulties. We don’t need, so to speak, salvation from our bodies through nanotechnology and genetic engineering of our bodies.
We need instead to have salvation from sin and wrongdoing. And so even if we modify our bodies in significant ways, if we do genetic engineering and we change how we look and make all kinds of modifications, there’s still going to be the inner reality of who we are and our struggles that we face. I sometimes point out to people, look, if you’re going to, for example, go in the direction of longevity and you want to aim for, I don’t know, 500 years that a human being can live, then I’ll say to them, “Well, all right, 500 years. So sounds kind of good, but I mean, right now most people are sitting at home channel surfing. They have 250 channels available. Are they just going to sit for 500 years and go through all those channels of nothingness?” There’s a bigger kind of unsettledness at the heart of who we are and simple longevity and life extension isn’t going to address that at its core.
Cy Kellett:
Now, the thing is, this is not merely a thing where we can say, however, there’s a set of technologies that we would say no to. It’s the application of the technologies in many ways. I’m sure that there are some technologies you would have to say or techniques that you would say no, because they would violate this or that moral principle. But what I mean is often we get a kind of, people talk about a kind of continuum and they go, “Well, you were reading books and now you’re getting the information directly from a computer,” and the next thing is it’ll just do an implant into the brain and you go, “Wait a second. It seems like we crossed a horizon here and we acted like this was just a pure continuum,” but it’s not a continuum. There’s a break here.
So we need to establish where are the moral boundaries in that sense. But I also want to say, father, there’s another moral boundary there, which is if I say, “Well, don’t develop those brain implants that might allow this or that, well, maybe the cure for blindness is in there or the cure for deafness or epilepsy or something like that.” So it seems to me that these will be dual use or multi-use technologies, and it’s not going to be a matter of just the church saying no on technologies, but on kind of mediating for people how they can and cannot be used.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
I think that’s absolutely correct. You mentioned epilepsy. I mean, things like Parkinson’s right now, they’re putting deep brain stimulators into these patients and it’s helping restore movement, and there are cochlear implants that help the death. These things are amazing and wonderful developments that clearly are a form of healing. So I think that becomes a key angle that we need in order to evaluate this. Are we looking at some kind of restorative function through neural implant [inaudible 00:12:33] so forth other circuitry that may be utilized? And to the extent that it is restorative for lost function ethically, it’s going to probably be a good development and the church is going to be right behind it as she always has been. I mean, the church runs the major healing reality of Catholic hospitals and was the first really to come up with that. Healing is our business, so to speak, at its core.
But I think the question when it goes further and you start to say, “Where is the line of enhancement and can you cross the line of enhancement here in ways that will be bad for individuals?” That’s where we’re going to have to be more carefully discerning. And I think for example, if you could put in some kind of implant into the brain that would basically eliminate the need for sleep and you could have a soldier that would fight continually then, there’s going to be definitely some circle back bad effects here, dangers that are lurking in those kinds of proposals to override who we are. And that’s where the church is going to say, “Wait, we’ve got to think this through much more carefully. We’ve got to be much more discerning around these types of questions.”
Cy Kellett:
Well, when I was a kid, we had the TV show the Bionic Man, and so he’s in a terrible accident and they give him his bionic limbs. So what can I say as the Catholic Christian person to the person who says, “What’s the real moral difference between he lost his limbs and they were restored to him with bionics, or I could just remove my limbs and now I would be bionic.” I mean, the end result is the same. We have bionic limbs, he and I. So why would there be any moral distinction between those two things?
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Well, I think there would be in the sense that in one case where you are providing limbs to somebody who lost them naturally because of an accident, you are going to say that this at first glance is restorative. Now that $6 million man, he had clearly capabilities that went beyond the capabilities of a typical set of limbs, so he could run 100 miles an hour or something with his legs. That’s something new and different. And so I think there’s another angle here, which is that if you’re going to step in and say, “I need to have my legs cut off so I can get the super running legs put on,” you are doing something that is in fact disordered by treating your good body as if it’s not a good to be safeguarded and protected.
You’re doing a surgery to take off healthy limbs to put on what you consider to be superior here. And this would involve a form of mutilation of the body and would be morally unacceptable to go down that path. Now, the question of the person who had the accident, is there a problem with receiving something like bionic legs that would give them super capacity? I mean, there would be some concerns in the sense of would such an individual be allowed to participate in sporting events, wouldn’t it tip scales unfairly, and there’d be a whole range of questions that would need to be pursued and sorted through.
Cy Kellett:
What about moving into new environments? That’s always like, well, we could persist for long periods in space if we altered our biology this way, or we could function under water for long periods if we altered our biology this way. Again, there are many people who say, “Look, it’s a continuum. There’s no bright line here. There’s a continuum because scuba equipment is perfectly fine and a space suit is perfectly fine. So where’s the problem if, I don’t think we’re going to turn people into fish, but I’m not saying that. But I mean there are capacities that could be increased by biological manipulation.”
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Yeah. And I think even though you say we’re not going to be turning people into fish, well, I mean think there are some in the transhumanist project who would say, “No, maybe not directly fish, but why not make people capable of being underwater for extended periods and maybe doing oxygen transfer like a fish would, having some kind of a assistive gills.” And if we were to do that by, for example, taking human embryos and fusing them with animal embryos to create hybrids or chimeras, that’s the kind of thing that some people are going to say, “Well, there’s some good at the end of that process that we should be aspiring to.” And I think that does raise the question, isn’t there a human nature that we have received, fallen as it is, but a genuine human nature that is at the end of the day good, and that is willed by the Lord God in its present state.
And that implies certain limitations on the types of manipulations and adjustments that we are going to make. And I think at the end of the day, the church is going to say yes clearly so. It is the case. And part of the reason for saying that is because when you want to say, “Well, what about this transcendence that we were talking about earlier that we all aspire after? How do we get to that?” We have the model and that’s Jesus Christ. He shows us what our humanity means, what the fullness of the human experience is intended to look like. And it involves the recognition that even in its fallen state, redemptive possibilities abound. And so even the project to get around human suffering, I always say to people, “Look, I understand the desire to control pain and limit suffering, and that’s good, and we should be doing that and our hospitals should be doing that.
But at the end of the day, there is and will always remain an element of suffering that each of us face, whether it’s depression, whether it’s internal struggles, that’s just part of our human path.” And the deeper question becomes, what are we going to do with that? Are we going to allow ourselves to be transformed through that challenging moment when we encounter it or not? Are we going to reject it and turn to false answers like assisted suicide, et cetera? So I think the transhumanist project hasn’t grappled maybe deeply enough with those questions. It’s drawn the boundaries much further out and said, “Happiness resides in just tinkering and making all these changes and turning ourselves into some kind of a vision of a superman.” But one more note maybe here, Cy, on I think another danger with this whole project I mentioned the embryos and modifications that can occur in a transhumanist direction.
And I think there is another temptation lurking in the shadows, which is that if somebody defines this transhumanist project as the future that we need to be going after, then there becomes an element of dominion and in fact domination over others where it becomes, okay, this is such a good thing. We need to construct a society that looks this way. We’re going to start creating humans, creating embryos who have these new characteristics. And then think about it, these embryos grow up, they’re born and they have a whole set of features that they had nothing to say about. No control over how they came into the world, and this is a radical kind of injustice that is foisted upon them. But when we know so well as some presume to know what the real vision is supposed to be, then that temptation really does lurk in the background.
Cy Kellett:
And that does bring us to the kind of more social consequences of this kind of tinkering, this kind of adventurism when it comes to human biology. I do think, and because this is just the way people talk, father, if you don’t want this transhumanist stuff and if you want to do all that Jesus stuff that you just talked about, fine, but that doesn’t mean you get to stop me from doing it. This hyper individualism will be the language I think that will justify it for a lot of people.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
I think you’re right. I think the hyper individualism is likely to have a lot of traction here. It’s interesting to me when I see that kind of hyper individualism take hold. Let me just give you one example of an area, tattoos. I see people make a statement, I ought to be able to do whatever I want with my body. And they go into radical piercing and implanting of horns and things like that, and pretty soon you look at them and you say, “Wow, this is a sad, almost caricature of humanity that’s emanating out of this person. And it indicates some kind of deeper disorder where they thought their individualism was the name of the game that was a sure path to satisfaction, to happiness, to peace.”
And instead you realize there’s all this turmoil and just you can’t get enough tattoos. It keeps going and feeds into itself in a destructive fashion. So hyper individualism, I think you’re right. That’s a disorder, and we’ve got to name it as such until we’re clear that individualism means responsibilities that connect us to others and to the broader community, then we’re not looking at something that’s healthy and wholesome, but something that’s ultimately damaging.
Cy Kellett:
Is it also possible that we might talk to our neighbors about this, especially those who are enthusiastic for it as you already spoke about the inequality, the injustice that comes from, for example, treating embryonic human beings as if they can just be manipulated at someone else’s will. But there are also disparities that will come, for example, the wealthy will be able to afford things that many other people will not. The divides that we have now will not be, they’ll become just unmanageable. They’ll just flourish. What you’re really doing is creating a world in which the distance between those who have and those who have not is just incalculably large.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
I think that is a real danger. And commentators on transhumanism have already pointed this out, and in fact, I think they’ve coined some terms. How do they call it? They refer to the gene rich and the naturals, the gene rich and the naturals. So the naturals are the ones that kind of get left behind, and the gene rich are those who just have everything done to them and marching ahead and leaving behind the rest. So I mean, it’s a little bit like in Huxley’s Brave New World where you have the kind of division that just runs down the center of society and again, creates other forms of injustice. I think that is indeed the danger here that remains part of this transhumanist or post-human type of thinking.
Cy Kellett:
And then the things that we now recognize as social structures or institutions, they’re meaning changes if I have extraordinarily long life or I have abilities that other people don’t have. Certainly, I can’t imagine what the meaning of marriage would be if you can live 200 years. I’m very happy in my marriage, but there is something about marriage that is all, I mean, and I don’t mean this to be flip, but as much as it’s a great comfort, it’s also something to be endured like much of life is. So who’s going to endure for 200 years in faithful marriage?
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Boy, that’s a great question. I think, yeah, you’ve tapped into something important here that we’re likely to introduce stresses and strains on multiple institutions within our world and our society, and we hardly have the wisdom to understand what that’s going to look like, how that’s going to affect us, what kinds of potential troubles and flashpoints and difficulties and incongruencies are going to come up when we go down that path. So I think this is a very, very valid concern, and we need to be so careful and recognize again, there are limits to what we should be attempting to do. There is a kind of, and we refer to it sometimes as the natural law, which refers to the natural order that we encounter in reality around us that demands a certain respect from us.
And the wise man will be attuned to that and make decisions in accord with that natural law, that natural structure that he recognizes to be part of the givenness of his human condition. So the church always reminds us of that, and thankfully, she’s there as a kind of voice of sanity when sometimes there are other temptations and directions that may look very, very appealing on first glance.
Cy Kellett:
I’m comforted to speak with you because there does seem to be the moral kind of problems can look almost insurmountable, but when you return us to principles and that you apply certain principles among them, this principle that restoration is a different activity. It has different moral meaning than enhancement, for example. These are principles that make it a little easier to do this moral calculus.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Yes, I think those principles, it’s very important to clarify them and to recognize that they will be points of debate as the transhumanist project unfolds. So in a sense, the church needs to establish, again, a sense of a bulwark here that this is something that’s not negotiable at the end of the day. That there are certain goods that really must be trumpeted all the time, and that’s sometimes hard to do. I think we may lose energy sometimes if the other side is offering enough gold and glitz and kind of temptation.
Cy Kellett:
Exactly, and-
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
It sounds a little boring.
Cy Kellett:
And as we’ve seen in recent years with the very sudden changes in public opinion about moral issues, they can quite suddenly though an entire society can turn and it that doesn’t seem to be, I mean, the suddenness with which the transgender movement became the center of our moral conversation was really surprising. But also, this does not seem like one that people are willing to just surrender without some consideration, but just the history of this gives me the sense, and I imagine, I wonder if you have this as well, that when transhumanism has its moment, when the media decides and academia decides, and big business decides, this is the thing, it will happen very quickly and you better be prepared for it.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Precisely, I think to recognize the power of those who hold the media, what you’ve described around the transgender movement. I think we had a blitz in the media that has been very, very effective, and it’s a reminder of our own susceptibility when certain things are packaged and framed in a certain way, often under the heading of compassion and other goods that we all respond to, then you can also slip in sideways some very nefarious and troublesome projects, and I think the transhumanist direction, we have to watch this for precisely the same tendency. It will arise, and I agree, especially when money and corporations become part of the equation, you are going to be dealing with some very, very powerful forces that will be swaying public opinion. No question.
Cy Kellett:
Right. When they have Transhuman Pride month at Target, you’ll know the moment has arrived. Father Tad Pacholczyk from the National Catholic Bioethics Center, it’s NC, no ncbcenter.org. Yes, ncbcenter.org. You should check out their work. It’s magnificent work. You’re always helpful with us on the cutting edge of things because that’s what you do. I suppose some of that must come from people asking you questions so that you go, “Oh, this is something we’ve got to start thinking about now.” So they tried this at some university somewhere, and now we’ve got to make a moral case one way or the other.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Yeah, that’s right. I think the fact that we do so many consultations with where people are coming to us with their questions, it does frame our ability to process these questions and to try to think ever more deeply with the heart and mind of the church. So yes, again, our website, ncbcenter.org. Also, fathertad.com. I have a number of essays that people may find of interest there as well.
Cy Kellett:
Thanks for doing this with us. Thanks for taking the time to talk about this topic with us. I don’t know who else we would’ve gone to.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:
Really a delight. Thanks. Oh, yeah. Thank you so much. Really a delight to be able to do it with you and to kind of go in a new direction. I think this is an area that is unfolding really as we move forward.
Cy Kellett:
I wish they’d keep it folded. Just don’t. We don’t need to unfold. We’ve been unfolding so many innovations. I’m tired. Showing my age there. Father Tad Pacholczyk is our guest, as he said, check him out at fathertad.com or at ncbcenter.org. If you want to get in touch with us, you can always send us an email, focus@catholic.com. Maybe you want to comment on this episode, maybe you have an idea for a future episode, focus@catholic.com. If you want to support us financially, you can do that at givecatholic.com. It takes a few dollars to do this, and if you’d like to share a few dollars, you can do that there at givecatholic.com. As always, five stars and a few nice words wherever you listen to the podcast. That helps us to grow the podcast, share it with other people. We’re grateful if you do that. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time. God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.