I look at my hands

I'm working on a short deadline, on a talk I'm giving next week, and decided to take a break to read a little. In a New York Times essay by a mother whose infant son had been diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, and would die by the age of three, I read this line:

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice.

Involuntarily I begin to hear myself breathing. I start huffing as my chest expands beyond the vertical plane of my downward-angled chin. My eyes become wet. I feel my lips pursing, my teeth locking, and my countenance turning sour. I pick up a hand, turning it over and back, studying it like foreign object, a baffling attribute: what sort of creature am I, are we? Why do I feel this?

I look up at Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic, which is stacked on other books in my tiny office, and I am confused. This is the place where I come to work and to worry about matters pertaining to my future. The only thing I'm supposed to feel in here is crushing anxiety, profound self-centeredness, and the need to advance my professional career. And yet, despite how future-oriented I must be at this stage in my life, I have been moved by a story about a person who has no future at all.

In these moments I look at my hands, because they are the parts of me that I can see that remind me of my humanity. When I look at my hands I can also see my brother's hands when he was just born and, at three years old, I was deeply afraid of losing my relevance. And I can see my mother's hands, and my father's hands, my grandparents' hands, the hands of women I've loved; all the hands I've held in my hands. My favorite parts are the tops of the palms, just before the fingers take form, which are slightly puffy, and resemble pads or paws. I can look at my pads and see that this is precisely the type of creature I am: like every other creature that has once crawled: finite.

Fund My Study on Aliens?

A fascinating op-ed by Notre Dame professor of philosophy Gary Gutting discusses a Penn State and NASA study about the potential outcomes--good, bad, or neutral--of making contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life forms. Gutting makes a good argument against such pursuits, noting the strong possibility (as he sees it) that extraterrestrials won't be the nice kind of aliens, but the nasty kind that may want to enslave us or use us, like lab rats, for research purposes. Gutting's essay prompts some important questions.

For one, what's the difference between doing a study on what aliens might be like and doing a study on what god might be like? Gutting draws the comparison between the question of the existence of a good or evil god and that of good or evil aliens, and frames the question of whether to pursue contact with aliens in terms of Pascal's wager about the existence and temperament of god. But the opening line of Gutting's essay is suspect, especially for a philosophy professor. He writes:

The probability that there is intelligent life somewhere other than earth increases as we discover more and more solar systems that seem capable of sustaining life.

Is this statement true? Whether it's god or aliens, to what extent can we calculate the probability of great unknowns? Within the sphere of human knowledge, which understands there to be certain conditions for producing life, knowing that there are worlds out there that could theoretically sustain life as we know it might convince us that this increases the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life. But what if life exists other than we know it? Or, what exists out there that isn't life at all?

Tied to these questions is the smaller question of whether it makes sense to fund such studies that rely so substantially on things we already know enough to recognize as wild speculations. Would we fund a study aimed at determining whether we're watched over by a benevolent or evil god? Of course this comparison is flawed--while we have no evidence that would lead us to the existence of a supreme being of any sort, but do have some evidence that places beyond our planet could theoretically sustain life--the great leap from the mere existence of extraterrestrial life to assumption that such life would be not only particularly advanced, but also positively or negatively interested in humans, is not terribly different from leaping from the possibility of god (the question of god is unfalsifiable) to the notion that if there is a god, it would be an anthropomorphized one who has positive or negative interest in humans.

What is most interesting about Gutting's article, however, is the way he frames the relationship between technological advancement and cruelty. Gutting writes:

But we do know this: for the foreseeable future, contact with ETI would have to result from their coming here, which would in all likelihood mean that they far surpassed us technologically. They would be able to enslave us, hunt us as prey, torture us as objects of scientific experiments, or even exterminate us and leave no trace of our civilization. They would, in other words, be able to treat us as we treat animals — or as our technologically more advanced societies have often treated less advanced ones.

The argument here is difficult to deny: an observable characteristic of technological advancement is its ability to move us in various directions away from our humanity, whether in a transhumanist sense, or by replacing human labor with mechanized labor, or by replacing human contact with digital contact, or by replacing human reasoning with automated reasoning, etc. While technological advancement benefits humans in uncountable ways, it also comes with a potentially dark externality: a tendency to replace and sometimes overshadow humanity. Many argue rightly that we have the ability to humanize technology, rather than simply allowing technology to 'technologize' (cyborgify?) humanity; but as we progress technologically, will we be able to sustain our ability to retain humanity through technological advancement? This is a legitimate and important question. It raises the attendant question of whether, as the transhumanists have it, transcending our humanity somehow, or becoming something different, would be beneficial, or whether this would be the calamitous end of humanity as we know it.

One thing is sure: technological progress has no intrinsic ethics, and is only regulated by the ethical limitations we, as humans, impose upon it. Removing the human component from technological advancement means necessarily removing ethical guidance. From such a scenario, it is not at all difficult to understand why Gutting assumes that, because it would take a much more technologically advanced society to travel with facility between universes to make contact with humans on earth, and because technological advancement, conceived of in this extreme, bears no trace of what we understand as human ethical concerns, it's sensible to assume that such aliens would indeed be, in human terms, cruel, with a propensity to enslave us, hunt us, or use us experimentally to further their scientific and technological advancement beyond us. Though we possess, as humans, an understandable drive to transcend our human frailties, and see technology as a means of such transcendence, we should be careful about what we bargain for. Absent our humanity and the ethical concerns that come with it, we open ourselves up to the possibility of unthinkable worlds of suffering. What sense does it make to alienate our own species?

The Emptiness of 'Technology, Math, and Science'...and Poetry

Yes, the title is deliberately provocative. The point of this essay is not to suggest that technology, math, and science are themselves empty (I'm not even sure what it would mean to suggest as much), but to note the sheer emptiness with which 'technology, math, and science' are invoked by politicians and media types as buzzwords and panaceas.

You get the sense that something must be wrong when the latest way to allay fears about unstable and failing economies, joblessness, social uprising, terrorist threats, and natural disasters is to deliver some kind of bromide about math and science. When Elmo appears on TV encouraging children to learn their math and science, or Obama pins the future of US global leadership on math and science, we're given the impression that math and science are kind of like comic-book superheroes, who, once adequately funded and foisted upon every child born in the naughties, will rid the world of all its problems, leading us into an enlightened future. Curiously, math and science are evoked by politicians with little more substance than the stating of the words themselves, such that these varied and complex fields of study have become the most trivial of talking points.

While math and science are popularly understood as panaceas for the world's problems, technology is understood more like a god, or a divine muse. Perhaps the dumbest article I've ever read appears in today's edition of the Independent. The ridiculous title, 'Facebook is Muse to Today's Young Poets,' draws a sweeping conclusion based on a single, uninformed quote from a woman named Judith Palmer, who the chair of something called the Poetry Society. Commenting on an increase in entries for a young persons' poetry contest sponsored by the Society, Palmer suggests offhandedly that...

Teenagers have always written poetry but I think there's something to do with the familiarity with Facebook and Twitter that gives a confidence in sharing your thoughts and feelings publicly.

Well, Judith, that's an interesting opinion. But if I were a decently responsible journalist interested in writing about something other than hideous platitudes, I wouldn't take such an uninformed opinion as a basis to assert, as the article's author Jonathan Owen has, that...

Modern technology, rather than literary history, is fueling an upsurge in poetry.

Nor would I be pleased if my editors took Palmer's offhanded comment to draw the entirely fallacious and unsupported conclusion, stated in the kicker, that...

Record number of entries to competition shows new generation finding inspiration in technology.

In fact, the 'record number of entries' could plausibly be the result of any number of things in addition to or instead of the existence of Facebook and Twitter, random proxies here for 'technology.'

What's going on here, of course, is that a journalist has decided to take an unsupported opinion and convert it into a mask of support for a causal link between an increase in applicants to a poetry contest and the 'muse' of technology. Why, I ask, would anyone draw such an arbitrary and absurd conclusion, and treat it as fact? Certainly it's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be making young people more comfortable with sharing their poetry (though I'm, not surprisingly, skeptical); but there is absolutely no demonstration in the article that this is true, no attempt whatsoever to demonstrate a link (as opposed to simply declaring one) between the increase in poetry submissions this year and Facebook and Twitter. Questions abound: why only an increase this year when Facebook and Twitter have been around for years? Is the quality of the submissions higher overall? What are the submission numbers over the last 10 years, and is this year an outlier? Beyond these, Owen's article happily cites 'only one' young poet who cites a 'classic poet' as a poetic inspiration (she cites John Donne, ha); yet Owen includes precisely zero quotes from young poets who entered the contest and cited Facebook or Twitter as their muses. If Facebook and Twitter have so revolutionized the poetry contest, surely Palmer and Owen could have found at least one or two quotes from contestants who were inspired by social media? No? So then, last I checked, my superb math and science education enables me to observe that 'only one' is actually a greater quantity than ZERO.

This is just another instance of a reflexive obsession with the likes of 'technology,' which stands in most pathetically for first-grade-level descriptors such as 'good' or 'nice.' Not only is this misleading, shoddy, irresponsible journalism; it's also an example of, in my estimation, one of the biggest contributions to our problems (and not a story about one of the solutions): people are so bad at basic literacy, textual analysis, and reasoning that we're happy to draw laughably false conclusions based on allusion, suggestion, and coincidence. For example, it's a wonderful coincidence that an article lauding the generalized, blanket greatness of technology--even in the arcane sphere of poetry--stands itself as an example of how not technology, but a better understanding of text would have solved the interpretive problem at hand. I need not get into the specifics, I hope, of the grave dangers of mis-or un-guided scientific or technological pursuit; but I will close with a warning: once something, however important, becomes reduced to a daily buzzword in the mouths of politicians and journalists, it's time to take a closer look between the lines.