Human Dignity and Bioethics

236 | Peter Augustine Lawler
or ideological projects to radically transform the human condition.
The difference is that the individual never loses his focus on his own
freedom, his rights; communism, fascism, and so forth were all diversions
from what we really know, impossible efforts to transfer my
truthful sense of my individual significance to some impersonal or
ideological cause. The Europeans regard those efforts as the last and
worst vestiges of civil theology. That’s why they’ve apparently decided
to abandon both religious and political life on behalf of a humanitarian
concern for individual dignity. 9
But the modern self is even more than a humanitarian or a humanist;
he’s the very opposite of a materialist in his own case. My
mind is free to transform my body. The modern self identifies itself
with the mind (I think, therefore I am) liberating itself through technology
and enlightened education from the undignified drudgery of
material necessity and from the tyranny of the unconscious. The mind
frees the self from both material and moral repression for self-determination.
10 Our struggle for the rational control that would secure
our dignity really does point in the direction of transhumanism.* We
aim to use technology and biotechnology to overcome our human
limitations as embodied beings. We aim at the self-overcoming of
time, infirmity, death, and all the cruel indignities nature randomly
piles upon us. Our dignity, from this view, depends on the orders
we’re really capable of giving to ourselves, meaning to our natures.
Our dignity is in our awareness that what we’re given by nature is
worthless unless we bring it under our conscious control. So the individual
doesn’t really aim to secure himself as a biological being, because
he’s fully aware that he’s more or other than a biological being.
His biological dependence has already been lessened by his freedom,
and he recognizes no limits to how much his mind might take command
over his body and bodies. Nature has been and will be increasingly
shaped and limited by his free action on behalf of his individual
being. Impersonal natural evolution is being supplanted by personal
or conscious and volitional evolution.
* See the essay by Charles Rubin in this volume.