Imago DEI

Conservatism and the Problem of Technology

Shortly before Christmas I was honoured to publish an essay as part of the Heritage Foundation’s First Principles series, that may be of interest to many of my readers here.

In Imago DEI: Human Nature, Technology, and the Progress Dilemma I explore the long history of technology and politics, from William of Ockham to the transhumanist revolution, and the particular problems technological “progress” poses for conservatives. For the Right often embrace the benefits of innovation, without also seeing the solvent effect new technologies can have on dearly-held conservative principles, institutions, forms, and limits:

To be a conservative in the age of science and innovation has always meant something a little paradoxical. On the one hand, conservatives usually accept technological innovation and often celebrate it, but on the other, doing so requires at least qualified acceptance of a political, economic, and technological paradigm that is fundamentally predicated on downplaying and eventually disavowing both given-ness and meaning: two core conditions without which it cannot easily be said that there even is anything to “conserve” as such. Historically, the aggregate effect of this stance has amounted to an ambivalent and often tragic rearguard defense of the natural order.

In Imago DEI I argue that this tech-enabled war on forms of all kinds has reached a point where the principal form that remains to be dissolved in the name of “progress” is now human nature itself. Classically: a war on imago dei, the belief that humans are made in the image of God. And a vocal contingent within the Right itself defends this as inevitable, good, and necessary for ongoing “progress” - even as a legitimate path for our evolution into some kind of supermen.

But, I argue, setting out to rewrite our own form will only ever reproduce the formless grey-goo leftism I call “imago DEI”.

Since the Pill, the tech-enabled dissolution of biological boundaries has proceeded apace, and has afforded fertile new ground for the modern, secularized left-wing pursuit of radical material equality. In particular, it has opened the possibility of extending this pursuit from equality between bodies, as in the early labor movement’s call for a more equal distribution of the fruits of economic growth, to equality within bodies. Now differences of physiology itself—starting with but not limited to sex difference—come to be seen not as givens of the human condition, but as optional and hence as a form of injustice amenable to remedy.

There is thus no tech-enabled assault on normative human physiology that doesn’t end up sawing off the branch it’s sitting on:

To the extent that such a project can succeed in pursuing human excellence, it can do so only with reference to the existing template. But it measures its own success in how effectively it is able to rewrite that template. Then, because the ground and reference for our values is inextricable from that template, success in that project implies a new set of moral values. Success thus invalidates its own original rationale. More plainly, there is no reason to assume that a hypothetical race of humans genetically modified for superintelligence would see the world as we do. Perhaps they would even conclude that their own superintelligence was not an improvement. Certainly, the well-established negative correlation between IQ and human fertility^.suggests that optimizing humans for this specific trait might have unlooked-for side effects, whose appearance could be anticipated only via a more holistic grasp of the very human template whose persistence is treated by such engineering projects as the problem to be solved.

But there’s hope. The Right doesn’t need to be afraid of technology. And there is abundant common ground for Christian conservatives and tech optimists beyond a thin pursuit of “anti-woke”. But we can only adhere to this common ground, and make genuine progress, provided we refrain from waging war on human nature:

Competing strains of American thought are vying for predominance. From the first settlers, the Founding, and America’s subsequent emergence as global hegemon, the Land of the Free has combined appeals to natural law and divine providence with an intensely practical spirit of radical innovation. It is reasonable to infer that these impulses are too deeply interwoven even with conservative accounts of America’s national story for the tech-optimist streak to be rejected wholesale. Nonetheless, conservatives on both Christian and modernist sides must seek common cause in disavowing any politics of technology that extends this legacy to repudiating an account of the human. The endpoint of such a repudiation will inevitably be the bio-leftism of imago DEI, whether attained accidentally through the self-inflicted degradation of our capacity to evaluate human excellence, a mass bioegalitarian backlash against “super-racism,” or both.

Instead, the aim must be to forge ahead with technologies, provided these remain ordered to our human nature, and to the pursuit of its flourishing.

A lot of you will know me as a trenchant critic of technology and transhumanism; here I set out to show how there is a middle path between abandoning our technologies altogether, and abandoning ourselves to our technologies.

If we can follow that narrow path, there is no reason not to have immeasurable hope for the future.

So with that, I wish you all a Happy New Year!

Read the full essay here.