Left Behind - Posthuman Edition

Personally, I’ve long held many similar views to PJ Manney when it comes to the interaction between Geeks, Nerds, and The Normals; particularly the view that We’re Already Ascending and that evolution is perhaps more active than ever and there’s a reasonable likelihood that we are participating in it more actively than ever. This week on The Speculist Blogcast Radio, PJ talks about what I’ll take the alliterative liberty to restate as the radical need for Enhanced Empathy among Enhanced Humans. There are already masses of Americans, not to mention global citizens being Left Behind, in droves. Is this just part of the process that we’ll have to learn to cope with and offer one another peer counseling to overcome Survivor’s Remorse? Do we owe a debt to ALL humanity to extend the opportunity of uplift? Some argue that this obligation reaches even to our primate kin, or others. Or is there a healthy balance of empathy, somewhere along the spectrum, which enables us to be benign, if not benevolent posthumans, moving forward? One practical place to start is the city of Detroit, which nature is rapidly reclaiming, all the way into the urban core. It’s not exaggeration that significant portions of the once great industrial city look like something out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction scene. Are people, industries, and civilizations just naturally nomadic and we therefore should assist others in moving on, or do we have some obligation to large industrial settlements to ensure some kind of commercial infrastructure, in perpetuity?

From the detroitblog:<blockquote>In the worst neighborhoods, much of the population is unemployed and illiterate, leaving them with scarce prospects in normal, productive society. Their fixed presence results in little enclaves — like so many others in the city — that are utterly hopeless, where the residents are consigned to living outside the world everyone else lives in, participating in a largely underground economy where crime festers.

Drugs saturate the area, with sales taking place in broad daylight in the middle of the road. Cars parked on Woodward on the neighborhood’s edge are reliably broken into, leaving shattered window glass glimmering along the curbsides. Gunfire is common.</blockquote>