An agrarian look at TED

The TED conference is a get-together of self-anointed great minds, who talk with one other about their ideas. There is a design and consumer slant to everything, which is understandable given the conference's Silicon Valley roots. It is the type of slick mindset that thinks the whole world is like Silicon Valley, that is to say a frenetically-mutating place churning out new consumer junk all the time. (Note the slick, futuristic BMW ads sandwiching any TED video on Youtube). This vision of life seems totally misled to an agrarian thinker, who believes that human experience is essentially rooted in relationships with the natural world and with other people. Happiness and goodness for an agrarianist are based on unchanging things like honesty, contact with people and nature, conversations, meals, natural cycles, the seasons. Hardly sexy new world-changing ideas, but we're not trying to fundamentally alter the world.

This is a video from a transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom at one such TED conference. He purportedly discusses the three big problems facing humanity.

The first problem is death. He considers it a problem for the pain it causes as well as the economic and intellectual ramifications of "losing" the knowledge that a person accumulates in a lifetime. I predictably have a problem with this line of reasoning. First off, death is a part of life, for which I see no reason to consider it a problem. The philosopher, Bostrom, seems to consider life and knowledge as if they were consumer goods, ever to be improved and accumulated by individuals. But what if we looked to the traditions and teachings of the ages to tell us a bit about death and life? We would then realize that a person's influence, a person's knowledge, even a person's life, do not end with death. Even if one doesn't believe in a traditionally-depicted afterlife, it's clear that people live on in their progeny, in the memory of those who have known them, and that the experience and knowledge of our predecessors are passed on through stories, traditions, books, customs. Indeed, I think that the ancient Greeks had an interesting insight into immortality. They tell us of Tithonus, who was granted immortality but not eternal youth. He lived forever but aged unstoppably, eventually shriveling into a cricket. This story seems to me to have an underlying message that death is a part of life. Not a bad part, not something ugly, but something intimately and innately associated with life, the altering of which would surely have the tragic consequences the Greeks always attach to the hubris of trying to change organic, fundamental things.

The second problem he discusses is the existential threat to the human race. That is, the chance that we will eliminate ourselves as a species in the next century, be it through nuclear war, environmental disaster, or maybe even the genetic and biochemical tinkering that thinkers like Bostrom espouse. I agree that the possibility of human annihilation is a problem, though I feel that his quantification of the lives "saved" by a one percent decrease in the probability of annihilation to be a silly confusion between real things and theoretical constructs. First off, the idea of calculating a percent chance of humans' eliminating themselves in the next century sounds like pseudoscience to me, especially considering that even the worst crises in human history tend to destroy civilizations but not to eliminate all people. But furthermore, even if it were possible to calculate such a probability, decreasing it would not represent a real saving of human lives. Whatever the theoretical probability of an apocalypse, in the real world either it happens or it doesn't, destroying all people or no one. Discussions of the theoretical probability of annihilation, and the assignment of a "lives saved" value to each percentage point of that probability, are a shell game better-suited to the financial conmen of Goldman Sachs, not to a serious scientist. Finally, Bostrom's calculation of the potential future human lives resulting from present-day people"saved" by a decrease in the probability of annihilation, is again a fancy-looking but empty numbers game.

Bostrom's last and biggest problem is that life isn't always as great as it sometimes is. I would paraphrase this as, "Having an orgasm is great, so having a permanent orgasm would be even better". It's again a treatment of life and happiness as if they were mainly just the sum of accumulated pleasures and kicks. I think the Ancients or any other reflective person might point out the likelihood that certain experiences in life are wonderful precisely because they are occasional and not ever-present. Continuing the thread of his consumerist vision of life, Bostrom seems to feel like he's always missing out on something, like there must be some product, some technology, some gimmick that can radically change the nature of human existence, which he finds profoundly inadequate. He maps human experience as a subset of animal experience (as if our biological "limitations" allowed us to experience an existence no more rich than that of any other animal), and then aspires to a much greater range of as-yet-undefined values. But if the past century's forays into consumerist existence are any indication, the constant pursuit of new "enhancements and improvements" leaves individuals and societies unfulfilled, directionless, existentially unhappy. And if the thrill of buying a new microwave or flat-screen TV quickly wears off and often gives way to mild unhappiness, what would be the follow-up emotional crash to the initial high of expanding your five senses or modifying your brain?!

I will add a concern that Bostrom doesn't touch on, though I feel it underlies any discussion of transhumanism or other fora in which elite decision-makers and thinkers prescribe radical, value-laden changes for society without consulting the plebe. One could argue that if someone like Bostrom wants to fundamentally change his body and his mind in a given way to "enhance" his experience, that's his prerogative as long as it doesn't affect others. But the nature of the TED conference types is that they tend to have the ears of big political and commercial actors that profoundly affect large numbers of people. So if the vision of thinkers like Bostrom were made reality, it would undoubtedly touch even those of us who didn't think it was a good idea. If these people are playing with fundamental biological and chemical phenomena, the consequences won't stop at those of us who don't want a part of it. I would draw the analogy of many Native American groups, who didn't want to buy into the Western industrial model of exploitation of resources and people, but were compelled to by the West's predominance, power, and insidious nature. The alcohol, the land degradation, the diseases, the cultural homogenization of the Western cultures surrounding them affected and infected the Native groups, and now many indigenous people are irrevocably worse-off for it. I don't want to be the hapless Native American destroyed by the hubris of Bostrom and his ilk.

My agrarian challenge to thinkers like Bostrom who would forever chase the banner of newer, better, and bigger, not just in consumer products but in the human experience itself, is:

What if the general model of life as lived from the beginnings of humanity is good enough? What if changing the things that define us doesn't enhance our experience but rather degrades it? From whence derives the moral or intellectual argument or authority to declare that we should change the very nature of human existence?