Introducing the MTA’s new podcast: Pioneers

Young people today don’t need more reminders of what’s wrong with the world. They need visions of what could go right. They need frontiers to explore and causes that demand their best selves.

We live in an age of peak cringe. Not because we’re too earnest, but because we’re ashamed of earnestness itself. We’ve become allergic to sincerity. We’re embarrassed by anyone who cares too much about anything.

Our young people are drowning in cynicism. Every day brings new reminders of how bleak the outlook is, how doomed the planet is, how corrupt our institutions are. The message is relentless. Why try? Why care? Why believe?

But something is stirring. A new generation is discovering what their great-great-grandparents knew: you can just do things. You can build something. You can push into the unknown. They’re rediscovering what William James called the strenuous mood, that deep human need to struggle for something greater than comfort and safety.

I’m your host, Carl Youngblood, President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. This is Pioneers, and this first episode is about why we’re doing it.

Writing in nineteen forty about the appeal of totalitarianism, George Orwell observed that people don’t only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, and, in general, common sense. They also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades. Where the progressives of his day offered a good time, the dictators offered struggle, danger, and death, and entire nations eagerly volunteered.

This is a dangerous truth. The human need for meaning, for struggle, for something worth sacrificing for, can be channeled toward creation or toward destruction. It doesn’t go away when we refuse to feed it. It just finds worse food. So the question isn’t whether we’ll embrace the strenuous mood. The question is what we’ll do with it.

Jason Crawford puts it this way: We have energy. It must be directed. We have indomitable will. It needs a goal. We have fighting spirit. It needs an object. We have aspiration to greatness. It needs a form.

Conventional morality, prudence, temperance, charity, tolerance. These are important virtues that we practice along the way. But they can’t, by themselves, provide a sense of purpose. Purpose needs an object. It needs a frontier.

Joseph Smith understood this. He warned against vain and trifling spirits, against conversations too low, too mean, too vulgar, too condescending for the dignified characters of the called and chosen of God. The things of God, he taught, are of deep import. To lead a soul unto salvation, the mind must stretch as high as the utmost heavens and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss and the broad expanse of eternity.

That is the strenuous mood in its highest form, not the drums and flags of earthly conquest, but the reach toward divine possibility.

William James saw it, too. Even without metaphysical grounds, he wrote, people would postulate a god simply as a pretext for living hard and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.

Our pioneer ancestors lived this. They were builders of the nation, blazing trails along the way. Service was their watchcry, love their guiding star, courage their beacon. They pushed on the wild frontier, forging onward, ever onward. They didn’t just survive out here. They built Zion in a desert. They turned struggle into glory.

So, where is our frontier? Where is our wilderness to make blossom as the rose?

The Mormon Transhumanist Association believes the frontier never closed. It expanded beyond Earth into the cosmos, beyond biology into transformation, beyond death into resurrection. We see science and technology as means ordained of God to enable exaltation, to realize the prophetic visions of transfiguration, immortality, resurrection, the renewal of this world, and the discovery and creation of worlds without end.

This isn’t naive optimism. We take seriously the risks and responsibilities that come with advancing technology. We also take seriously our duty to engage with it, to prepare for it, and to persuade others to use it with wisdom and inspiration.

The strenuous mood needs worthy objects. Young people today don’t need more reminders of what’s wrong with the world. They need visions of what could go right. They need frontiers to explore and causes that demand their best selves. That’s why Pioneers exists.

In the episodes ahead, we’ll sit down with the people pushing on today’s wild frontiers: scientists working on consciousness, engineers designing solutions to global challenges, researchers at the edge of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and space exploration. We’ll also sit down with philosophers and theologians, not as a change of pace from the real work, but because this is where the MTA has made some of its most distinctive contributions, bridging Mormon theology with the philosophy of mind, of ethics, and of cosmology.

We’ve sometimes said that theology stands to the science of superintelligence roughly as alchemy stood to chemistry. The alchemists were wrong about nearly everything, and yet without them there is no chemistry, because they were the first to insist, against all the evidence, that matter could be transformed. We think theology deserves the same patience and the same ambition.

Our tradition has spent 200 years asking what a mind becomes when it becomes godlike. We’d like to keep asking, now with better instruments.

With every guest, though, we won’t just be talking about the work. We’ll be asking what drives them, what childhood moment sparked their curiosity, what moral conviction guides their research? How do they hold ambition and responsibility together? What vision of the future pulls them forward through difficulty and doubt?

Because the how of a breakthrough fits in a paper. The why fits only in a life. And it’s the life that we’re after.

These are the pioneers of our age. They aren’t conquering physical wilderness. They’re exploring the frontiers of what humanity can become, and they’re finding that the strenuous mood, properly directed, doesn’t have to serve destruction. It can serve creation and the long project of human flourishing.

We’ll talk about the risks of progress and about the far greater risks of stagnation. Plenty of people are focused on what could go wrong; we’ll be just as interested in what could go magnificently right.

So join us. Subscribe to Pioneers wherever you get your podcasts. The future doesn’t arrive on its own. It gets built by people who decided it was worth the struggle. And we want you to meet them.

The frontier is open. The strenuous mood is stirring. Welcome to Pioneers.

[Music: “They, the Builders of the Nation”]