X-Men

Dear Diarrhea,

to start off, I would like to mention a couple pieces of pop culture that contain elements of post- or transhuman philosophy. This first post will be concerned with the incredibly prolific and widely known comic series about mutants in a contemporary world: X-Men.

It's easy to dismiss X-Men as a childish fantasy of buff men and big breasted women in tight spandex battling Evil with ridiculous superhuman powers, but while it's undeniable that there's a certain element of all that involved, the series has always had considerable depth, even from the early beginnings. We of the Y generation have largely thought of the Golden Age of comics as silly and vapid, and of the darker and grittier nineties and aughties reboots like Batman, Superman and plenty others as the true art of this genre in contrast, but perhaps there's more to some of the early stuff than one might bother to think.

Since everyone knows at least the bare minimum about the X-Men franchise, I'm not going to bother with a thorough introduction of its past and present. The long and short of it is this: in the Marvel multiverse (the collection of fictional parallel universes told of in the comics of Marvel Worldwide, Inc.), a subset of humanity has started to exhibit skills and traits that set them apart from society: telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation--a lot of stuff with the tele- prefix, basically--and society is beginning to become aware of this phenomenon, resulting in complex scenarios involving plenty of violence and politics and strong emotions.

Let us consider just the story of Professor Xavier and Magneto, to get some idea of why these comics are more potent social commentary than one might imagine. The conflict of two ideologies is at the root of their disagreement. Professor X claims that the mutants, having evolved beyond homo sapiens sapiens, should strive above all else to achieve peaceful cohabitation instead of reacting to their inevitable banishment from society with aggression in kind. Meanwhile, Magneto is the strongest advocate among mutants of darwinism, no longer really merely social, as true evolutionary boundaries have been crossed, saying that humanity is obsolete and should be exterminated or enslaved.

Of course, while one philosophy advocates ponderous inaction, and the other radical and immediate action, there's a definite power imbalance toward the darwinists: as long as they kill everyone the cohabitationists are trying to make peace with, the resulting situation will only prove them right--from the standpoint of conventional society, it's far too easy to bunch the two factions of mutants together and blame both groups for the actions of one, and from there, the logical conclusion is to eliminate mutants altogether.

Ultimately, transhumans will be defined by the common people only as evil, and by themselves according to the position they take in a single issue; the belief system of a fringe group can hijack public discourse altogether and derail social progress until they are removed from the equation. The series of X-Men is essentially an ongoing documentation of the attempts at removing that fringe group.

With that insightful wonder of a realization, I conclude today's post, my dear diarrhea.

May hugs and kisses rain on your face until my next post,
-Márton Körtesi.