Does the level of enlightenment about Transhumanism and Immortalism in the state of Oklahoma depend on whether I am standing on the ground there or not?
I was thinking about this during an 11-day visit to my home town of Tulsa in August of 2002 as I had to help my 75-year-old father, who had been hospitalized for a few days, move out of his apartment and into an assisted living community. I live in California, and I had not been to Tulsa since 1990. I last saw my father in 1995, and while I kept in touch with him by telephone, I was shocked and disturbed to see how vulnerable he has gotten in recent years because of multiple chronic health problems.
I was also surprised at how much Tulsa has changed since I last lived there. Tulsa is starting to resemble Southern California in that it now has a significant Latino presence, additional freeways, and chain stores new to the area but long established in the Southland, like Circuit City, Home Depot, an IMAX theater and Pac Sun. The public library near where I lived as a teen, in addition to offering free Internet use, now has several stacks of books and magazines in Spanish. A shopping center down the street from the library, which I remembered as a bowling alley, now has stores catering to a Spanish-speaking clientele. The Anglo teens and twenty-somethings I overheard in the mall didn't even sound like Okies any more, but almost like Californians.
At the same time, Tulsa's famous fundamentalist Christian religiosity seems largely unchanged. The cable system at the motel where I stayed has several religious channels. I heard campaign commercials where one of the candidates for governor referenced his Website where you could read about his "spiritual journey." And the concert appearance in town of some apparently well known Christian pop singer was getting a lot of publicity.
While I was driving around this environment combining elements both strange and familiar, I was wondering why as a society we still tolerate letting decent people like my father age and die when we now have the resources and knowledge to do something about this enormity. Why do so many people in America find it more important to build new churches, shopping malls and retirement homes instead of research centers to employ scientists studying anti-aging and reversible cryotransport?
And then it struck me: Unless there are some cryonicists living in Oklahoma I don't know about, I was probably the only person there who has those kinds of thoughts, at least at that time. Does the level of enlightenment about Transhumanism and Immortalism in Oklahoma depend on my visits to that state?
Tulsa shows the problem facing Transhumanism in becoming an effective social movement. People can adopt new technologies and products -- I saw plenty of cellphones, PC's, Web addresses, Chrysler PT Cruisers and the like -- but they don't automatically feel the need to adopt any sort of "progressive" or "enlightened" outlook to correspond with the values implicit in such technologies (pace FM-2030, who argued otherwise). Saint Francis Hospital, where my father was being medically evaluated by pretty much state-of-the-art techniques, has a display in the lobby about Francis and what Catholics believe about the healing power of "saints." (Renaming it "Mister Francis" hospital would constitute progress.) No doubt religiously enthusiastic youngsters in Tulsa use their cellphones and e-mail to exchange messages about how much they love Jesus, in addition to trying to arrange courtship opportunities. However, I doubt many Tulsans, of any age, hook up to discuss nanotechnology, mind uploading and immortality through scientific means.
In the age of the Web it's certainly not hard any more to find out about these ideas, if you know the right keywords. Tulsa also now has Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores, so the odds of a Tulsan stumbling across the right books and magazines have greatly increased. But accessibility doesn't necessarily translate into acceptance of Transhumanism as a better way to organize one's life. I don't see where Transhumanism is supposed to find its natural constituency if geography and culture are no longer barriers to learning about it. The meme doesn't seem to be propagating itself effectively.