Godlike ?
A good discussion last night on the topic of “violence.” I continue to mull over the concluding idea of the evening,–a reversal of the common place notion of “the good.” Here is a quote from Zizek,
“According to the traditional ideological commonplace, immortality is linked to the good and mortality to evil: what makes us good is awareness of immortality (of God, of our soul, of the sublime ethical striving….), while the root of evil is the resignation to our mortality (we shall all die so it really doesn’t matter, just grab what you can, indulge your darkest whims….). What however if one turns this commonplace around and wages the hypothesis that the primal immortality is that of evil……This is why the victory of good over evil is the ability to die, to regain the innocence of nature, to find peace in getting rid of the obscene infinity of evil.”
The great human projects of the twentieth century—overcoming famine, plague and war—aimed to safeguard a universal norm of abundance, health and peace for all people without exception. The new projects of the twenty-first century—achieving immortality, bliss and divinity—also hope to serve the whole of mankind. However, because these projects aim at surpassing rather than safeguarding the norm, they may well result in the creation of a new superhuman caste that will abandon its liberal roots and treat normal humans no better than nineteenth-century humans treated Africans.
If scientific discoveries and technological developments split humankind into a mass of useless humans and a small elite of upgraded superhumans, or if authority shifts altogether away from human beings into the hands of highly intelligent algorithms, then liberalism will collapse.
What new religions or ideologies might fill the resulting vacuum and guide the subsequent evolution of our godlike descendants?
–Yuval Harari, Homo Deus
