Wednesday, 21 August 1996
Post No. 8 of 8
by Paulina Borsook

Christopher Reeve is still Christopher Reeve; would he still be, or feel so, in Michael J. Fox's body?

Max, you and I are really asking: "What is the irreducible essence (some might call it soul) of an individual? What makes us human, and not something else?"

The notion of "species" is as hard to demarcate as that of sexual orientation. It's easy to remark the difference in speciation between a loris and the sacred hamadrayad baboon; less so between a Texas red wolf and a Canadian timber wolf. Which is to say by analogy, Max, that you and I are on different points, perhaps on the semantic continuum, of where we define what Homo sapiens is - and where it leaves off to become something else.

Aldous Huxley had it right with Brave New World's monthly mandated, chemically induced Violent Passion Surrogates.

Finally, it is a real question whether sucking jowls, enlarging breasts, straightening noses to fiddle with genetic endowment and ethnic origins (the Extropian equivs would be more profound surgical interventions: changing the mix of slow-twitch vs. fast-twitch muscle fibers, brain shunts for the MDA of the future) are acts of self-love or self-loathing. Is it self-mutilation, self-annihilation - a sense of fundamentally not being all right the way you are - or merely reaching for the stars?