Our Alien Righteousness
Spielberg and the Humanmaxxers
The opening shots of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day put the audience on the floor mat of a wrestling match, our faces being stomped. It’s a decent way to open a film, and not a terrible metaphor for the way many people feel these days. A pro-wrestling curb stomp is brutal and savage, yet also fake and performative. So it is with much of modern life. There is pain and brutality real enough to be felt but somehow not real enough to be understood. It’s one thing to be beat down; it’s another to be in the dark.
That’s what Disclosure Day is really about: How it feels to be in the dark, whether about government secrets, our neighbors, or ourselves. It’s a handsome and thrilling film, saddled with a frustrating final act. In hindsight, perhaps this is inevitable, because Spielberg’s movie is not really a childlike expression of wonder, like E.T. It’s an appeal to heaven, a cry for help for a world that is beyond helping itself. Whether Spielberg sees his extraterrestrials as replacements or metaphors for God is hard to say. The movie raises some interesting theological questions, but seems afraid to answer them. Spielberg is far more confident about his fellow humans. And what he knows isn’t good.
The world in Disclosure Day is on the brink of collapse. Emily Blunt’s character is a weather reporter for a local TV news station. Whenever we are in the studio hearing the news reports in the background, words like “war” and “crisis” are prominent. Blunt’s own relationship is floundering, and by and by we’ll learn about a childhood trauma that has broken her. The trauma left her with a special gift to see into the minds of the people she meets, even her enemies. What she sees makes them more human to her, and hearing it spoken back to them makes her less threatening to them.
At some level Disclosure Day wants to be a preachy parable about empathy. But what’s tricky is that the empathy it treasures does not actually come from people. It is literally out of this world. Using Brett McCracken’s observations about modernism vs. postmodernism vs. metamodernism, I’m inclined to think of Disclosure Day as Spielberg’s first truly metamodern story. Its distrust of military and government institutions are passingly modernist, but the otherworldly source of virtue interrupts the postmodern “us vs. them” dialectic. Disclosure Day is a story meant to resonate with people who are OK with admitting that we might not be able to change the world after all. Maybe it’s not us who can.
Soon after seeing Disclosure Day, I listened to Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast with Christian Angermayer, an enormously wealthy “biotech engineer.” Angermayer is an eager proponent of “humanmaxxing,” slang for using science (both real and pseudo) and technology to forestall aging, accelerate human growth, and perhaps even defy death. It’s an absolutely fascinating conversation that covers everything from why men should inject testosterone to why everyone should go on magic mushrooms.
Ross’s great gift as a podcaster is letting his guests speak for themselves clearly and frequently enough so that eventually they (and the audience) have to own the logical implications of their worldview. In his dialogue with Angermayer, Ross gives listeners an opportunity to hear a gospel presentation from someone who very clearly believes that heaven is real and you’re standing right on it. Angermayer is not a BS’er. He believes everything he’s saying (even if, as he goes out of his way to remark a few times, he’s got a lot of wealth tied up in these products). Angermayer passionately lays out the case for constantly, relentlessly, and even sacrificially optimizing our bodies.
Angermayer’s biotech eschatology comes through clearest when Ross asks him about psychedelics. Angermayer says he has “met God” through his psilocybin trips and that users “cannot be a real atheist after” the experience. He believes they are so intensely renewing that they should be used in global peace negotiations. But Angermayer is very, very careful to go out of his way—at least five different times—to tell listeners to humanmaxx only with the consultation of their doctor.
By the end of the interview, I was struck how, for someone like Angermayer, the good life in a modern world essentially consists of a series of technological replacements. He believes these hacks are essential for happiness precisely because the things they replace are rendered implausible in the world today. Medications like GLP-1s replace self-control and moderation. Psychedelics replace religion. It’s not hard to extend the logic. You don’t need a lover if you’ve got AI bots. You don’t need books if you have autogenerated summaries. Our bodies and our minds haven’t and won’t stop wanting. But perhaps we can satisfy those wants with things more consumable, controllable, and customizable.
Both Spielberg and Christian Angermayer suggest, in very different ways of course, that the future of humanity is not human. To be fair, neither of them come off to me as cynical dislikers of the human race the way that certain technofuturists such as Peter Thiel or Elon Musk do. Spielberg is a great filmmaker precisely because he locates and centers the human soul in each story. Angermayer sounds to me like a genuinely optimistic person, a true evangelist for human (and transhuman) potential. But both the movie and the podcast feature urgency about fixing something broken with all of us. Both the genteel relativism of the 90s and the despair of the late 2000s are gone. In their place is spirituality. For Spielberg, it’s a spirituality of a mystical encounter with the Other. For Angermayer, it’s a spirituality of a biological revival of the Self. Either way, none of us are getting there on our own.
There is a moment in Disclosure Day that invites a ray of hope. When asked if God could really love both humans and alien creatures, a nun responds with cheerful confidence. “Why would God make such a big universe for only us,” she asks. Spielberg’s aliens are God’s children, too. But what about the other possible answer: That maybe, there is some vastness of the galaxies that isn’t meant to be useful to anyone? Maybe it’s just meant to bring pleasure and joy to the Maker who sees it, and humility to the creatures who don’t.
Imagine a small child wondering about the crawl space in his parent’s attic. There’s nothing in there for him—no food, no toys, no comfort. But the crawl space isn’t meant for that. The child’s inability to imagine why such a place would exist is about the child, not the place. He is too young and inexperienced to imagine why such a thing might be important to anyone not living there. While the child goes on blissfully unaware of the crawl space or its meaning, it serves the purpose its architect assigned to it.
This raises an uncomfortable question for the post-human futurists. How many different levels of reality may not actually exist for anyone’s usefulness? How much of life may be impossible to quantify or optimize? What if our imperfect, aging, sleepy, heavy, anxious, lonely bodies might not be problems to fix, but humbling truths to accept? What then? Does the un-maxxable human self become pointless or wicked? If human happiness depends on our escape velocity from our creaturely identities, the answer is yes. But Christianity does not think so.
It seems to me that only Christianity can love people as they really are. Only Christianity offers both the verdict that we know is true and the mercy our lives depend on. Christianity knows what to expect when it reads the headlines or opens the feed. It knows where human bodies go, how they decay and rot and are sown in dishonor. Christianity knows that the human heart wants more than this earth has ever or will ever give it. It knows that grace is everything, and that grace is only grace if it comes, like a UFO, from above.
“You are not your own; you have been bought with a price.” Turn this sentence over and it’s a kind of supernatural abduction story. “Therefore glorify God with your body.” There it is: God and the body do meet after all, through the incarnated Son. In the shadow of Christ, we are more than optimized selves. We glorify God, and the price he has paid to invade our world and rescue us. Righteousness turns out, in the end, to be the visitor we could never prepare for and the health we could never control. The hard part is the same it’s always been: Believing.
"Medications like GLP-1s replace self-control and moderation. Psychedelics replace religion. It’s not hard to extend the logic."
That reminds me of an old book, "The Cypresses Believe in God," about the Spanish Civil War. The main character talks with the local police chief who looks at the sin he sees in the world and says "we'll have an injection for that." Technology to replace virtue.