Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, Part 1

Human Nature

Two initial admissions. First, this part of the film rests on presuppositions which I do not hold. Second, all constructions of human nature are just that, abstract constructions.

That said, the construction given in Z3 (my abbreviation for the film) is nothing if not relevant to the zeitgeist. It is atheistic, but wants to be optimistic. It is deterministic, but tries to be so in a sensitively nuanced way. Also, it is systems-based. This last facet will become more important as the film progresses, but it is important to notice here.

It is not the task of the film at this point to determine if there is or is not a concrete human nature. Further, the film is innocent with respect to any elaborate theory of human origins. They assume evolutionary origin and the film's eschatology is peculiar. Here I will give my first criticism. The film chooses, at this point of looking forward toward the nature of humanity 2.0, only to imagine societies rather than individuals. I am sure that there are many factors which influence this decision. First, statistics limit what can be said about individuals. Second, most of the problems being attacked in the film are societal. Thus, it follows naturally that they begin with righting those wrongs in their model of the future. But what is striking to me, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is that they don't speculate with the individual along transhumanistic lines.

Why is this point so striking? Two reasons. First, the film admits that human need precedes human nature. Second, one of the films fundamental principles is the limitations of material resources.

Looking at the first reason, the film seeks to adjust the conventional idea of human nature as a concrete form. One of the talking heads opines, "the nature of human nature is to not be overly confined by human nature", or something very close. Then, another head adds that, while human nature evolves or is dynamic, there are fundamental human needs. Now, this is a very interesting assertion. If you watch the film, you'll notice that the force of the argument to this moment is to assert the importance of healthy social and environmental stimuli in the early development of humans. The talking heads spend a lot of breath emphasizing how we are not absolutely determined by our genetics, but rather our particular genetic expression emerges from a calculus of nature and nurture. Our brains demonstrate certain amounts of plasticity, especially when they're very new. It is speculated that our DNA, as we come to understand it better, will show the same kind of plasticity to external stimuli. But the biggest point at this moment is to adjust our sights to focus on the health and happiness of the soul. This is more an effect than explicitly stated, but the argument is that aberrations of human behavior are effects of genetic dispositions which are triggered by environmental events.

That is, there aren't any people born with "addictive personalities". Strikingly, neither are there any substances which are inherently addictive. There are no simply violent people, nor really any simple people in any regard. There are those who are genetically susceptible, however. When these individuals are contacted with certain stimuli, especially when young, they can develop addictive personalities. This contact is made through the chemical exchange in utero, skin to skin contact as an infant, and in early social exchange. Thus, although we are not tabula rasa, there are no genetic deficits which cannot be environmentally counteracted. All ills which effect human interactions can be cured, or so says Joseph and the Talking Heads (there's a band name for you!).

Ok, now I'm going to start my fundamentalist criticisms. First, obviously I disagree that human nature is thoroughly plastic. Further, that all human behavior can be advantageously formed through social engineering. Further, that we are all born innocent. I believe in original sin. I think that this is one of the most highly attested assertions of Scripture. The talking head reasons that since not all humans are addicted by cigarettes, neither human nature nor cigarettes are inherently attached to addictive behavior. But, he's only right about the cigarettes. On pain of sounding absurd, there is a constant in every formula of addiction. There is always a human involved. Further, I would assert that everyone who's alive for at least 5 years has a history of addiction. Addiction is a psychologism for idolatry. There are not some who have a penchant for it; we all do.

Now that you catch my drift on this point, what does it mean for the bigger picture? Well, it pervades the whole systems-based argument, at the very least. If we are all born evil, then no matter how clever the system is, humans will still find a way to worship ourselves within it. And if there's one thing that goes without saying with regard to social dynamics it's that megalomania is not conducive to a healthy social environment for all parties involved.

Now, before I labor that point too much, let's turn to the second point I mentioned above, that the film operates on the fundamental belief that we have access to limited resources. I'll work in my loose thread about transhumanism and human need as well. First, if we can (and we can) and are willing to (Ray Kurzweil seems willing) change our bodies through radical technological alteration, then the needs of the human body become increasingly less certain. Think of how many times you hear people allude to our evolutionary biology, wishing that we could overcome our tribal thought patterns or our hunter-gatherer diet. If we assume evolutionary history as surmised, then our brains and bodies have certain needs because they were at one time advantageous to our survival. But now, it is theorized, our relation to the environment is changing so quickly due to the evolution of technology that our programming is obsolete. Not only should we, they say, update our operating system, but why not change the hardware to better fit our environment while we're at it?

Now, this is a great question, but for this post, consider it only in relation to the fundamentalism of human needs as espoused by the film. When it is all boiled down, it is conceivable that all we really need is energy. That is the only necessary input for life. How fundamental is social interaction? This is an impossible question. We may know that humans, unaltered, tend to go crazy when socially deprived, but this obviously says nothing about a brain in a vat. Besides, what is an unadulterated and unaltered human? The film is based on the need for positive social alterations. As a personal favor at this point, try to avoid arguing semantics about what is or isn't human. We can argue about the ship of Theseus at another time. The point is, the only real fundamental of human nature is that we need to consume in order to live. The modes and substances involved are not fixed necessarily, unless we intend to invent a new term for Ray Kurzweil after the technological singularity, when his consciousness has been uploaded into the matrix where he communes at a million gigahertz with his harem of AI personalities....I think you get my point. (And if you think I've started waxing looney like the moon, get out there on the net and listen to what people are saying about the rate of technological advancement, the possibility of an AI singularity, etc. I'm not saying it isn't frightening...)

So, let's simply assume that we will always have needs of consumption, what ever that comes to mean. The problem is that there's only so much stuff to consume. Isn't society a way to control access to those resources? What would Howard Zinn have to add at this point? This will dovetail into my next post, which will be about economics. But for now, I will close this post by simply agreeing that coming to terms with the finite boundary of human habitation is essential to our future as a species. But, some of the most astonishing leaps of faith popular in our Western culture is the doe-eyed-yet-blind faith that the experts will "come up" with a way for us to spend more money each year than the value of everything on earth, continue to live our lives with millions of virtual hydrocarbon slaves, continue to have an effect on our environment which is aptly described in any of the following metaphors: weed-like, virus-like, parasitic. Perhaps the molten core of the earth is mostly crude oil. Perhaps we'll tap a limitless source of multi-dimensional string energy. Perhaps we'll figure out how to change the way we digest plant protein and learn to graze. My issue with all of this supposition is that none of it changes our ever growing capacity to use whatever resources that we can access and exploit. Faith that will only get you to the next fix, the next high, the next orgasm, the next trip...is an ill-founded faith. And a system-based faith which denies the existence of sin is likewise ill-founded. What the world needs is a form of humanity which knows how to live within the will of God, within the dimensions of habitation given, in the light of the sun and the shade of the tree.