Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
humans remains perhaps the most powerful anchor for ethical conduct
and wise policy in global politics, even among those who disagree on
specific steps. Are there similar anchors in today's inflated rhetoric about
posthumans—moral lessons derived from “our common cyborgity”
perhaps? I think not. Indeed, most of the benefit from such discourse
appears to be career development for well-heeled intellectuals in Paris,
Santa Cruz, Cambridge, and other R & D hubs.
What can one say about the actual condition of the humans living on
Earth at present? For anyone who cares to examine them, the data are
chilling. According to the 2001 edition of the UN
Human Development
Report
, 1.2 billion people on the planet suffer in extreme poverty,
surviving on less than $1 a day, while a total of 2.8 billion (roughly
half the world's population) live on less than $2 a day. Some 2.4 billion
people are without access to basic sanitation. Of the world's children,
325 million are out of school at the primary and secondary levels. For
children under the age of five, 11 million die annually from preventa-
ble causes.
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Perhaps those now enthralled with cyborgs, hybrids,
extropians, and posthumans will find such information insufficiently
novel or thrilling to deflect their ambitious philosophical and research
agendas. But the rest of us should take notice.
It is interesting to imagine what humanity as a whole might become
if the best of moral understandings, personal sympathies, and practices
of democracy were universally applied. One promising approach has
never been tried—evening out the wealth available to human individu-
als, including redistributing worldwide much of the wealth now com-
manded by the most prosperous states of Europe and North America. If
undertaken with sufficient concern for the health of the world's ecosys-
tems and the diverse species that coinhabit the planet with us, this seems
a far more promising policy than that of breeding exotic posthuman
hybrids. In fact, it is well overdue for scientists and intellectuals in the
North to focus strongly on all present and future members of human
species, seeking to improve understandings of and connections with
them—matters that have, by all accounts, remained woefully underap-
preciated with the creation of a modern, industrial society and today's
global economy. To set aside this effort may be simply the latest stage of
colonization, even among those who label themselves postcolonialist
thinkers. Yet many seem eager to announce to persons living on less than
