Enhanced

Did you follow the news about the Enhanced Games? This week in Las Vegas, there was an international sporting event with a twist – athletes were encouraged to use FDA-approved performance-enhancing drugs. The competitors look incredible (which, I guess, they are). The event, it is claimed, is ultimately less about the sports – it’s about showcasing an upgraded humanity. Not merely athletes enhanced, but humanity enhanced.

Now to many of us this’ll just sound like cheating, or at least… not Cricket! The thought of athletes proudly doping is enough to make our monocles fall out into our teacups. But then, isn’t a monocle (and the caffeine in the tea) a human enhancement? If you’ve ever cut your fingernails, taken antibiotics, worn clothes or googled whether magnesium glycinate might finally fix your sleep, congratulations, you are already pro-enhancement. It’s sort of a matter of degree. The event organisers believe the IOC is too puritanical, and this plucky little project is going to liberate human potential.

But that aspect of Enhanced Games is, for me, the more interesting aspect of it - why are we so allergic to being ordinary humans?

Canberra is unusually good at optimisation. We are a city of professional tweakers and nudgers. Our veins course with ambition. We optimise productivity, and somewhere along the line, self-improvement became a moral duty. To quote my favourite band Radiohead - you should be fitter, happier and more productive. Some of this is genuinely good. Human beings cultivate things. Christians can be very relaxed about medicine and technology for the betterment of people.

But the gospel does add an important post-script. The Bible has a positive view of limits. We are creatures, which means we are finite. We get tired and age. We sleep! We are literally unconscious for between a quarter and a third of our lives.

In fact, salvation did not arrive when humans became more godlike.

It arrived when God became human. And Jesus didn’t come as a ripped and enhanced-human, but a human-human. Jesus did not overcome humanity. He dignified it.

Which makes me wonder whether some of our exhaustion comes not from having limits, but from spending our lives pretending we do not. There is something a little ironic about a vision of humanity obsessed with enhancement. Some of the very things that promise to make us faster, stronger or more limitless may, in the end, leave us more fragile. Bodies have a habit of eventually presenting the invoice. The enhancement that squeezes another second off the stopwatch at 28 may take something back at 58.

And perhaps that is the deeper problem with our culture of optimisation. It trains us to think our humanity is a bug to overcome rather than a gift to inhabit.

You are allowed to be a creature. The deepest hope of the Christian faith is not escape from creatureliness, but redemption within it.

Grace and Peace,

Steve