This reflection focuses on the interaction
between technoscience in general and the Transhumanist movement in particular
on the one hand and African culture today on the other hand. Traditional
African culture can be considered as a bioconservative culture, what Tangwa
calls eco-bio-communitarianism. However, the ideology underlying the
Transhumanist revolution is Technoprogressism with a frantic taste for the
artefactual over the natural and the promotion of artificial intelligence. In
the face of the Transhumanist movement, can the African still remain
bioconservative? In this paper, relying on Godfrey B. Tangwa’s work on the
African perspective of bioethics and Jerome Mbih Tosam’s paper which analyses
African environmental ethics in view of sustainable development, I would like
to suggest a positive interaction between the African bioconservative or
prolife attitude and Western Technoprogressism in this era of Transhumanist
revolution. Africans, while inevitably opening up to the world, to the Promethean
spirit, must be able to preserve the traditional values which constitute the
soul of their culture and which participate in the protection of the
environment, the protection of life, the protection of human dignity at a time
when the world is experiencing an ecological and health crisis under the
effects of the omnivorous spirit of research that characterizes Western
culture.
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