Posthumanism and Secularity

I noted in my recent post about posthumanism that uploaded consciousness should not rate an improvement over our current embodied, social nature.  But what accounts for the yearning of posthumanists to move consciousness from its carbon-based organic form to the inorganic world of silicon?  Reading Charles Taylor’s magisterial “A Secular Age” suggests an answer.  (Why is “A Secular Age” “magisterial?”  Well, it won the 2007 Templeton prize and weighs in at 874 pages but it should have been shorter; didn’t Taylor have an editor?)  Taylor observes that “secularism” (in the West) has three meanings: (1) God has been displaced from the center of social life (“secularized public places”), (2) faith in God is in decline among the populace (“the decline of belief and practice”), and (3) a move from a society where belief in God was unchallenged to one in which it is merely an option (“naïve to reflective”).

Life in a secular age in the sense of #3 suggests that “we have moved from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or ‘beyond’ human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it . . . ‘within’ human life.” (15)  Taylor’s understanding  of “fullness” is that place where life is “fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more what it should be.” (5)  Of course, for all but a very few believers most of life is not lived in such a place; rather, a “middle place,” or ordinary time, is a stable condition where a routine order of life somehow maintains a sense of contact with the place of fullness.  But where can one who does not believe in God find a “place of fullness?”  For many unbelievers, writes Taylor, there is no place of fullness.  The middle condition of routine stability is all there is because nothing more is conceived.  The place of fullness comes to believers from outside and provides direction for life in the middle; for most unbelievers, the power to maintain life in the middle must come from within because there is no “outside.”

Or is there?  Taylor observes that there are current modes of unbelief that find an outside place, not in a transcendent God but in Nature (with a capital “N”).  Deep ecology can function as the source of power and direction for life in the middle.  “There is a condition of lived experience, where what we might call a construal of the moral/spiritual live is lived not as such, but as immediate reality, like stones, rivers, and mountains.” (12)  In the balance of “A Secular Age” Taylor explains the “why” of the massive change in Western civilization but it seems that posthumanism, like deep ecology, is another attempt to find a place of fullness.  Hope for enhanced life beyond the middle place provides a sense of power and direction for the posthumanist but it comes from within, not from a transcendent God.  Posthumanism is now one of the many options in this secular age.