Fleshy stuff

The contemporary designation of the body as ‘meat machine’ is merely the latest iteration of a long tradition of self-loathing.

Blame Christianity, if you like. Better still, blame the Enlightenment. But western societies have, historically, been so skewed towards favouring the mind over the body, consciousness over mere matter, spirit over flesh, that we’ve practically forgotten what our bodies are for. A lot of the time we seem to desire to not have them at all. The transhumanist dream of leaving behind our cumbersome bodies in order to exist primarily online has been more or less realised, instrumentally, if not literally (the ultimate goal of transhumanists is to upload human consciousness to the cloud, doing away with materiality altogether), while the contemporary designation of the body as ‘meat machine’ is merely