Gnostics saw the material world as a cage in which the spirit was trapped. Christianity (like other religions) has been preoccupied with the idea of the soul needing to free itself from base, animal instincts.
But oddly at the same time as characterizing our animal nature as something to be struggled against, Christianity has insisted that ‘unnatural’ behaviour is wrong: homosexuality, contraception, feminism have all been portrayed as going against the natural order of things.
Progressive liberal morality, which sees itself as supplanting those old moral codes, is nevertheless their heir. It is no longer stern about sexual continence. It sees sexual diversity as something to be celebrated, and gender, or the roles to be played by people of each biological sex, as a choice, rather than something to be imposed or enforced. But there is still, in progressive liberal morality, that same sense that our animal nature is something to be fought against. It’s just that other aspects of our biological nature are now the focus: our tendency to form hierarchies, our tendency to favour our own family and our own tribe.
Progressive liberal morality still expects people to struggle against what comes naturally to them. Any morality must, I suppose.
And liberal moralists get confused, tied in knots, just like the old moralists. There are tribes of anti-tribalists, who look out in contempt at the tribalists beyond their circle. There are hierarchies of anti-hierarchalists, with powerful opinion-formers at the top who lay down the anti-hierarchical doctrine, and armies of followers below to hound those who do not conform.
(History shows how easily the religion of the God of Love turned its hand to torture and murder, and how quickly the political doctrine of equality created its own godlike despots.)
These days people fight human biology on its own ground, by modifying bodies and body chemistry with surgery and medicine, and even altering the genetic code. We now have alternative bodies too in the form of thinking machines which one day may have souls of their own. Some people, weary of the endless struggle between humanity and itself, speak of evolving a new a better kind of being: superhumans, robot saints.
But I don’t believe that a self-reflecting being could exist that didn’t experience the conditions of its own existence in the same ambivalent way that we do. Is a human being happier than a lark, or kinder than a lark is to its fellow creatures? If not why would we expect a superhuman to be happier or kinder than we are?
