IVF and the Ideology of the Eternal Present

“Your Uber Driver has Crashed, Another Will Arrive Shortly”

The IVF wars are back. It’s a ferocious fight. Despite that, both sides still think the other is closer to them than they really are.

By some twists of life, I happen to know many people on both extremes of the IVF debate – self-identified ‘trads’ and ‘transhumanists’. In reality, their core premises are incompatible at the most fundamental level. Their core disagreement is about human essence — whether there is something immeasurable and particular to a human person that cannot be replaced by someone with similar or ‘better’ characteristics.

By ignoring the fundamental difference in belief and assuming that all people hold the same assumptions as themselves, each side is blindly wading into what could become an all-out war.

The core assumption of the transhumanists is that no such essence exists, or that biological augmentation, selection, and creation will have no negative effect on such an essence. Whether you think that’s true or not, it is a grave error not to realize that many people believe the opposite.

Now, I see once again that the gap in core premises is much wider than initially thought. I came to this while thinking over the core premises of the transhumanist argument and spotting an exchange on Twitter.

Ari: To wit: the wish is not that her mother had won the genetic lottery *but that her mother had never been born*.

Andy: This argument is straightforwardly true on its own terms, but it insists on a maximalist interpretation of the conditional past that we don't employ generally. Almost any wish about the past entails annihilation. If that's unacceptable, so be it, but it's not relevant overall

Ari: This isn't a Star Trek multiverse scenario, or Sliding Doors, or "what if I'd gone to med school," or whatever. It's extremely simple!

Embryo selection takes a specific individual human organism that already exists, tests it, and then either ends its life or lets it continue.

Your older brother is not your younger brother. I am not Taylor Swift.

There is an actual person who is Noor Siddiqui's mother. Had Orchid been used to treat that person's blindness, her life would have been ended before she was born. No metaphysics required to get this!

I had a hunch about Ari's mistaken assumption. I spoke to a friend who is a self-identified transhumanist who asked not to be named, who confirmed this hunch. Ari is assuming that straightforward personhood —the difference between your older brother and your younger brother — is still of essential importance to the transhumanist. For the transhumanist, not even that is true. It is indeed simply of no consequence if you were murdered and replaced by your unborn brother who's given the same experiences and the same ways of life, especially if he grew up to be a 10% ‘better’ person. The same is true for various Lazarus-like augmentations and de-novo creations of life. The point is not simply that embryos have no essence, but that none of us have essence. “Why would we have essence?” That's the question they're asking.

To be fair to the transhumanists, their worldview is an extension of the everyday logic of high modernism. We call an Uber driver and they're completely undifferentiated. If an Uber driver dies in a crash, it's of no importance to you. You never knew the guy and another Uber driver will be on the way. Most modern processes are abstracted in this way — your groceries, your coffee, your packages, your appliances, and so on. Social convention might lead some, but not all, to say that they would still grieve for this Uber driver. But that's the fading convention of a dead world.

What’s fascinating is that both the trads or human essentialists and the transhumanists diagnose this problem of disenchantment — of the gray, mundane, bureaucratic world we're surrounded by — but they have opposite solutions. Trads argue that defending the human essence, most of all from transhumanists, is what's necessary to overcome this world, rescue humanity from dystopia and restore our past greatness. Transhumanists argue that the only way out is through. That far from a capitulation to the grey world, discarding these fading conventions is awesome, healthy, and will take us to greater places.

You might step back and notice these are two completely mutually incompatible ways of life. In the classic Schmittian definition, this is a precursor to war, or at least political conflict. Plan your futures accordingly.

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Ari Schulman has appeared on the From the New World podcast to discuss these issue at a great depth.