The Configuration of the Body

I've been reading the recent posts on The Joy of Autism, in which Estée shares her thoughts on dealing with cancer and surgery. She doesn't mourn the loss of her fertility, she writes; rather, she feels blessed to have her son and her stepchildren.

Frankly, I've never seen the point of society's expectation that we should mourn the changes and constraints of our bodies. That idea strikes me as a peculiarly modern form of narcissism, a consequence of an artificial airbrushed culture in which we're all expected to look like glamorous 20-year-old models and athletes while chattering glibly about the latest celebrity gossip and sporting events. If we can't meet this arbitrary ideal (and very few people can), we're then expected to bemoan our tragic physical and mental flaws, like a flock of devout medieval parishioners listing their sins in the confessional. Those of us who pay for enough indulgences, in the form of trendy therapies and diets and counseling groups and whatnot, can hope to buy their way out of social purgatory.

Many years ago, when people still lived in small villages and understood their bodies to be part of the natural world, they had a much more reasonable outlook on aging and on physical and mental differences, accepting them as an ordinary part of life. There's a Pagan ceremony called croning, in which a woman reaching midlife celebrates becoming a crone—that is, a wise elder who is fortunate to have lived long enough to share her knowledge and experience with the younger generation.

Granted, the average lifespan wasn't very long in our ancestors' villages, and I'm not suggesting that we ought to remain in a primitive state of nature and fatalistically accept whatever happens to our bodies. We live in an era of amazing advances in medical science, and I'm very much in favor of taking advantage of these new discoveries to make our lives longer and more pleasant. However, I also believe that we need to think very carefully about just what we're trying to accomplish when we seek to change our bodies and brains. Are we making informed decisions based on our own personal values and preferences, or are we mindlessly following the herd?

We shouldn't simply assume that anything that limits some of our abilities is an undesirable constraint. Abilities, by their very nature, are also constraints, in that they preclude a vast universe of possible alternatives. When a young person who has a talent for music decides to master an instrument, for example, the amount of time required is likely to foreclose the possibility of becoming a varsity athlete. We all have many roads not taken in the rear-view mirror.

Changes and bodily limitations are inevitable as we go through life. When I was a young child, I very much enjoyed climbing trees. I liked having a small body that could easily reach the top branches, perching confidently on the thinnest limbs while counting the blue speckled eggs in a bird's nest. But, like everyone else, I had to grow up. Rather than mourning my loss of the treetops as a tragic misfortune, I was, like most young people, busy discovering other new and interesting activities.

Someday, not too far in the future, advances in bioengineering will allow us to replace our body parts quickly and easily with new components grown or built in a laboratory. There will be new drugs and cybernetic plug-ins that enable us to do whatever we want to do with our brains. We need to consider whether these new technologies will be used to increase self-determination and to broaden the diversity of human experience, or whether social pressure will constrain us to inhabit an ever-narrowing range of acceptable variation such that the diversity of our species vanishes.

Life, in all of its different configurations, gives us new discoveries and experiences that should be embraced, not mourned.

What Our Culture Teaches

A recent post on Kevin Leitch's blog discussed autistics who say they want to be cured. The blog entry made the point that those who feel this way are entitled to make their own choices and to be treated with respect when they express their views. Several people commented that it should not be surprising that in a world where autism has been widely characterized as a medical problem, there are autistic people who view their existence and their difficulties in terms of this medical discourse, as our society has taught them to do.

Culture plays a very powerful role in how we define ourselves and our goals as we go through life. When we discuss whether or not there ought to be a cure for autism, this question itself arises from the constraints of our culture. That is to say, such a discussion could exist only in a society that has first defined a certain set of traits as comprising "autism" and has then placed this category of "autism" under the broader category of medical disorders.

Just a few generations ago, nobody was discussing whether autism ought to be cured because the concept of a medical disorder called "autism" did not exist. People who had traits that modern society would call "autistic" were taught to define their ways of interacting with the world in different terms. There were other groups of people who were categorized as mentally disordered on the basis of the cultural prejudices then existing. For example, women who sought equal rights were likely to be labeled as delusional and suffering from hysteria. Homosexuality was officially defined as a psychiatric disorder, and many gays went into therapy (voluntarily or otherwise) with the goal of curing them and making them socially acceptable.

The concept of cure fits into the broader expectation that we must always strive to improve ourselves. Modern society has taken industry's objective of continuous improvement and has applied it to the human body and mind, seeking to develop an efficient system for producing a new and improved population according to the experts' specifications. In a relatively short time, this cultural paradigm has largely replaced the old ways of humbly following ancient traditions and believing that God or the pagan gods intended us to be as we are.

For better or worse, this is the culture we live in now, and I'm certainly not arguing that we should all go back to living in traditional villages. The modern quest to improve ourselves and our children has brought about many good things, including widespread literacy, public sanitation, environmental protection, a decrease in vaccine-preventable diseases, and a health care system that (while still primitive in many ways) has played a major role in increasing the average human lifespan significantly.

Indeed, it is now within the realm of possibility that longevity research may enable people to live hundreds or even thousands of years, with a wide variety of artificial body parts and enhancements. It's a fascinating topic to contemplate; and while I haven't taken up transhumanism as a political cause or a personal philosophy, I see this as the direction in which our society is moving, and I believe it is imperative that we address the ethical issues associated with a culture of continuous improvement of the self.

The most vital issue, as I see it, is this: Who gets to decide what an improvement is? In this rapidly approaching future, will we respect the right of individuals to choose their own preferred ways of configuring their bodies and their brains, creating a vibrant kaleidoscope of human diversity as we evolve in ways as yet unimagined? Or are we heading toward a sci-fi nightmare where, in addition to having cosmetic procedures such as breast implants for the sake of popularity, each of us will be expected (or required) to get implants for our brains so that we can conform to a narrow range of socially acceptable thought patterns?

On Cyborgs, Cures, and Choices

Whilst wandering around the Web a few days ago, I came across an article that contrasts neurodiversity and transhumanism. The author seems to be arguing that neurodiversity is about celebrating one's natural brain configuration and that it is diametrically opposed to transhumanism, which, according to the author, increases disability prejudice by treating species typical cognitive functioning as a disease.

I think he's wrong on both counts. As I see it, both neurodiversity and transhumanism are primarily about self-determination. When I write about neurodiversity, I am asserting that cognitive diversity is beneficial to the human species, just as other forms of diversity are valuable, and that people should never be forced to conform to some arbitrary concept of the ideal brain (whatever that might be) or treated as second-class citizens if they do not.

Whether or not a person's brain configuration is "natural" isn't the issue here. To me, neurodiversity means that every one of us is worthy of respect, acceptance, and equality—regardless of whether we were born with our current set of cognitive traits, or decided to take medication to alter some trait (such as to reduce anxiety), or chose to get some sort of cybernetic enhancement of the brain, or whatever. In a world that truly valued human diversity, a person wouldn't be judged as more or less valuable based on whether his or her brain was in its "natural" state, and there wouldn't be any coercion one way or the other.

As for the complaint that transhumanism views the natural body as diseased (which it does, to some extent, in seeking to cure the aging process), mainstream medicine already treats the degenerative conditions of old age as diseases—just not very successfully! There's a lot of research being done to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, for instance, which is a major killer of the elderly. If we're including Alzheimer's and other age-related dementia in our definition of species typical cognitive functioning (as we should, because it is typical to develop some form of dementia in old age), the disease model is commonly applied. Not all that long ago, however, people took it for granted that "senility" was natural and inevitable. The recent change in society's attitude toward dementia didn't come from widespread acceptance of transhumanist philosophy; rather, it came from discovering the medical facts.

Although our scientific knowledge is still quite primitive in many areas, we already have reached a point where no citizen of a modern industrialized nation goes through life with his or her body in a natural, unaltered state. We have our teeth repaired with various artificial materials when they decay or are damaged, instead of believing it natural (as our ancestors did) to end up toothless in old age. Many of us choose to control our fertility with synthetic hormones. We wear contact lenses or have surgery to correct our nearsightedness, and if we develop cataracts as we age, we are likely to have artificial lenses implanted in our eyes.

I expect the vast majority of us would consider the availability of these modern medical technologies to be a significant advance for humankind, rather than lamenting that we're no longer constrained to live in a state of nature. While we do need to be vigilant to ensure that no medical procedures are performed against a person's will and to prevent discrimination on the basis of a person's mental or physical configuration (and I'm not just referring to disability discrimination here, but to all coercive expectations regarding the human body), there's no inherent contradiction between the values of neurodiversity and transhumanism. Both seek to expand our options in life and the diversity of our species.