Ross Douthat: preference

Transcript context

…To get back to the theme of your own decadence — you’ve written columns skeptical of the internet. You mentioned pornography a moment ago, which is usually now consumed over the internet. Presumably when it comes to CRISPR babies and transhumanism and genetic engineering, you’re at least partly skeptical, maybe very skeptical. But if you think those are the areas right now where we’re seeing the major advances, isn’t it the case that, to overcome decadence, you have to actually embrace the innovations that you yourself are not comfortable with? The printing press in its early days led to religious wars. The Catholic Church — I would have certainly been against the printing press, yes. Definitely, there are places where there is a tension between my Catholic or Christian moral commitments and my desire to escape decadence, and certainly I think elements of transhumanism are one of them. And I say as much in the book — you could imagine a real transhuman revolution that would not be decadent, that would mark the end of decadence as I’m describing it, but that I would not welcome. Decadence isn’t necessarily a moral judgment. I’m stealing my definition from Jacques Barzun, who said, “It’s not a slur, the term, it’s a technical label. ” And in that sense, to the extent that it’s a technical label, you have to be able to say things could happen that ended decadence and didn’t lead to collapse or catastrophe, that led to development, change, dynamism, that from a moral perspective I might find repellent. It’s also why I’m drawn much more to the older frontier, the idea of the space program and space as a frontier, because that’s a case that I think the idea of human beings, as they are, going exploring seems to me much more fundamentally appealing than the idea of human beings staying put and changing who we are. I can imagine someone with a different worldview having the opposite reaction, although Silicon Valley seems to have both reactions. You have both investment in space and investment in transhumanism, so they’re playing both sides of the escape-from-decadence scenario. You’ve argued at times that popes should never step down. Would you feel the same way if life extension meant that popes would live to the age of 140 or 150?…

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