becoming post-human christians

Immediately after Quinn's lungs were cleared she was incubated, stabilized and flown, with the Neonate Team, by way of helicopter ambulance, to the Special Care Nursery at the British Columbia Children's Hospital in Vancouver. We got to see her for a minute, tangled beneath the cords of her life support machines.

February 2, 2003 — A pump pushes breast milk down her throat, through a tube that goes into her belly. Sixty-five breaths per minute are administered by a Drager 2000 Ventilator. She receives extra nutrition through an artificial umbilical line, blood-products and medications through an Intra Venous. Electrodes cover her body, measure her breaths and heart beats, her temperature, oxygen saturation and blood pressure.

via CTheory.net.

Think for a moment of the ways that we protect, stabilize, heal, and prolong the persistence of the body as a vehicle of human consciousness. From intubated babies in incubators, to fake knees and artificial hearts, to various drug therapies, to palliative care procedures to keep the heart pumping for as long as possible – humans are cyborgs.

Normally if you think of a cyborg you might think of Schwarzenegger's "Terminator", "RoboCop", or Star Trek's aptly named "Borg." We normally think of human and technological components where the technology actually reduces the signs of humanity that the person now exhibits. Emotion, empathy, reproduction, and the need for food all seem to disappear along with individuation and the need for others in order to survive. Technology replaces basic survival needs that are linked to the notion of what it means to be human all the way down to an emotionless and purely instinctualal brain. This is a very hard and caricatured understanding of cyborg, which is short for "cybernetic organism" in which the organic and that non-organic fuse together in cooperation to make a human being.

The softer definition of cyborg is the world of humanity in which we live. From breast implants to psychotropic drugs, we infuse and integrate artifacts of human invention into the very structure of the human body and the human mind regularly in a seemingly normative process. The entire biotechnology field is designed and supported with billions of dollars in order to fuse technology with humanity for the purpose of regulating and preserving human biological systems that are failing in some function of self-support. That we fuse technology with the very fabric of our physical being is not much of a hot issue here. But at what point with the fusion of invention and the flesh does the human being no longer become human?

In many religions the seat of the human self is in the heart and the blood. In various aboriginal religions blood is the seat of life, blood is considered impure and a forbidden substance in Hebrew and Muslim traditions, Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions, etc. Then there are legends of vampires in which blood is the transfer of life from the living to the undead. Another source of life is the breath which is associated with spirit especially among the three Abrahamic faiths. In this sense, a transfusion of blood from the human body, the use of a bypass machine during surgery, or the use of iron lungs and ventilators render the human body something less than or at least other than truly human.

While these views might seem a little anachronistic or even "primitive" for the modern Western consciousness, there is still a set of unexamined assumptions about what the body means to be human. If we focus on Christianity, let's pick two understandings of the human and the body. The first is the most referenced and found in Genesis – "‘Let us make humankind^* in our image, according to our likeness." While this is clearly an anthropomorphic image of God, you will not find many, even amojng the most devoutly conservative or literal interpretations, who understand God to be a literal man. The second is in other theological traditions, especially described by Barth, that Jesus Christ is the true human being – what human being should be and ought to be without sin and rebellion from its true source of life in God. So we are begged to ask what the body has to do with being made in the image of God the body is only a metaphor for that image.

The problem with the human being is that these embodied minds are the seat of rebellion and the body itself is not a symbol of the sublime, but a symbol of the grotesque. As Jesus' brutalized body became a symbol of redemption, so with various gnostic traditions the brutalization of the body became a means to cleanse one of impurity. The mind was the seat of godliness and the body only trapped the mind in what Paul even called his "body of death." Thus it was not a renewal of the body that would lead to purity, but a renewal of the mind which was closer to the being of God as it was. The body is an afterthought at best, a source of evil at its worst.

Christianity, perhaps because of its scriptural roots continues to see the body as a form of grotesquery even as the focus of sin is primarily on what the body does. A clear example of this view is in current discussions about same gender sex. Those that accept same gender attraction as something that is not a choice often reject acting on that attraction with the body. Covering the body, maintaining decency, not discussing bodily functions al symbolize the various profanities that the body produces. Baptism is itself a washing – the metaphor for justification before God. Mystical union with God is an out of body experience once again showing the body as a the great barrier between God and human being.

It's is often curious when you start down the slippery slope of dis-embodiment of humanity. Let's say that I am paralyzed where my body is there only as a container to keep my mind alive. What if we could transplant that same mind in another body? Would I be less human? Doubtful right? What if we transplant that mind into a synthetic body? Does this mean that I am less human now? Is it less human to be tied to tubes and circuitry that have to keep a flesh and bone body alive? This is why it is so curious that with bodies that religions cannot but find grotesque become somewhat sacred as soon as the boundary of the body is breached. It is more sacred to keep a flesh and bone body pumping blood and respirating even if that body has a good percentage of synthetic parts integrated with it than allow a fully synthetic body perform the same functions to keep the mind stable.

So what hat the body has to do with being fully human? Religions in the West have traditionally not accepted the body for what it is as a biological organism with all it's profanity in the midst of its beauty. Yet when faced with the bodies limitations, it becomes something sacred as a source of life. I am not saying that we should not embrace our frailties and understand the limits of human being in the world. However, as our biotechnology is able to fabricate more and more of the human physical nature, a more nuanced discussion of human being needs to happen for theology to have something constructive to say in the next several decades. That we integrate these inventions to sustain our flesh and blood is normative. The question is: On what rational grounds to we set a limit for this sort of re-creation of the human being as a post-human cyborg?

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