INTELLIGENT DESIGN

full size 140k

In the beginning was the word and from that moment on there was no turning back. We are no longer apes, yet not quite gods. We are more like frightened children, trapped in a story about the world that we recite aloud to ourselves, over and over in the darkness. We want to go back to the garden. We want to go back to the womb. We want to go back. But our ambiguous future keeps calling to us and its time to grow up. Homo-technicus is waiting.

Simone de Beauvoir believed it to be the height of irresponsibility for any serious thinker to attempt to make the world seem less ambiguous. Our most precious gift is our freedom of choice. But choice entails commitment and responsibility and because individuals are free to choose their own path, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment through to wherever it leads. Therefore as Donna Haraway has similarly pointed out, commitment and ambiguity are intertwined. That is what grown-up thinking and commitment is all about, recognising the ambiguities of the world and of our positions within the world. There is no natural. There is no purity. There is no separateness. There is no turning back.

For many of us our concerns regarding either genetically modified food or the molecularly engineered machinery of nanotech or most of all the fusion of our own organic bodies with our own technologies, is "that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But..." as Haraway reminds us in her 'Cyborg Manifesto' "...illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential".

"This is an argument.." she says "for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction"

(originally published in dogmanet july 2004)