 I would like to invite James to come up and also Lincoln, who has traditionally been our panel moderator here to spend a few minutes with both of them. Who has the most provocative question to start us out? Go ahead, Caleb. So the question was in early Utah Mormon history, were there women that drew on heavenly mother in the way that they advocated for their positions? Suffrage, et cetera? Yeah, it's a great question. I think I have this. Yes, so I can just use this. I will say, so I think two data points. So the quick answer is, we haven't come across anything that explicitly relies on the doctrine of heavenly mother to justify or to support their suffrage claims. What's interesting is, you may have noticed, I didn't mention Eliza R. Snow today. Eliza, of course, it was the ground-dome of her generation of Mormon women in terms of those that were of age and leading the pioneer entrance. Some of you may know that Eliza, who of course penned on my father, was actually not unequivocally pro-suffrage. She was a great mentor to a number of the women that we've been talking about. But she also held a very fine line between supporting the development of women through her restoration of the Relief Society here in 1862, and also holding very fast to a patriarchal observance. You know, there have been a lot of theories that have been put out about Eliza's experiences being sealed to such powerful men in her drive as a childless woman to support their power, to uphold their power. The experiences that she had had with men in Missouri. I think we have to take all of that into account when we look at Eliza's position on this. She was first and foremost dedicated to the patriarchal line of revelation through her prophet husbands. So we have statements from her in which she, for instance, chastises Emma Lyne who's younger generation, but she chastises Emma Lyne for being subject to the causes of men rather than the causes of God. So I think Eliza's fascinating. I haven't studied Eliza personally as much as I've studied Emma Lyne because I get very frustrated with her. She really was trying to have it both ways. I understand that impulse, right? As somebody who works in the contemporary church, as a bridge-builder trying to bring more. Somebody said to me today that I'm the person that their parents can talk about with them, and I love being in that position. I'm very much of a middle-roader, and so while I understand why Eliza was the way she was, it's also frustrating to me that she didn't grasp onto that Heavenly Mother concept. That said, she probably had a vision of Heavenly Mother that was very patriarchally deferential, right? I mean, there's nothing in my father where she says they're equal beings. She just says she exists, right? We don't know what the relationship is, and Eliza never expounds on that. I will say, however, that in May of 1895, after Eliza's been dead for eight years, Susan B. Anthony comes to Salt Lake. She comes as part of a Western tour, and the timing is really fortuitous because the Utah Constitutional Convention has just happened, and they've just decided to include suffrage in the Utah State Constitution. Susan comes as part of this Western tour to congratulate the people of Utah for being the third state to enter the nation. Emeline organizes a conference where she brings in women from Colorado and Idaho and Wyoming, and entertains Susan and Anna Howard Shaw for three days, and what is the opening hymn that they sing at the beginning of that conference? It's on my father. I have to think that somewhere in Emeline's mind, I just think that there's something significant there that she picked that hymn as the great leader of women in Utah at that time, maybe as a differential gesture to Eliza, but I also think, of course, that that doctrine did mean something to them, and she wanted to put that doctrine out there as a kind of, maybe in knowing Emeline, she probably wanted to put a little say, hey, not only are we not the oppressed polygamous women that you thought we were for the past 25 years, but we also believe in Heavenly Mother. I just like the image of her choosing that hymn for very deliberate reasons. James, you're a cultural observer that I admire. What's your reaction to what Nyland has been talking about, both in her response now and her general presentation, and secondarily, beyond just your initial gut reaction to this stuff. As somebody who knows what the MTA is about and stands for, how would you recommend that we leverage this aspect of our culture? The aspect of gender politics, and the history that we've inherited? Well, I was just reflecting on this question about how theology affects the status of women, or vice versa in society. I remember when I was a teenager, when I became a feminist and started reading radical feminist literature in the late 70s, there was a theory prevalent at the time that there used to be a matriarchy and that it was overthrown by the patriarchy, and you could tell this by looking at statues of women, goddesses, and things like that. And I think the dominant view, probably then and today, is that that's really not the case, that the majority of all hunter-gatherer societies have been patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal. And if you look around the world, India, every god has a female consort, and some of them are quite powerful. Kali is a very powerful goddess. Didn't seem to have very much of an impact on Indian patriarchy. Chinese gods and ancient ones have female counterparts. Didn't seem to have much impact on their patriarchy. Depending on how you look at Europe, Europe is probably the most feminist part of the world, and it's either Christian or secular. If it's secular, then the answers get rid of religion, but if it's a patriarchal religion, Protestantism there seems to have given birth to a society that's relatively egalitarian for women. So I think there's a very, if there is a relationship, it's a really complicated relationship between how we think about gods and heavens and all of that. I, in Buddhism, I grappled with this because Buddhism is the first Indian religion that allowed women to leave the householder life and become renunciate mendicants. But when they joined the Buddhist order, the Buddha put 17 extra rules on them that they had to be subordinate to the monks that they had, that there were menstruation things, things that were specific to women. And so you can either look at it as, well, that was a step forward because these women, and they wrote wonderful poems, the Terigata as a text of women who had achieved enlightenment under the tutelage of the Buddha. And they said, I used to just cook and clean all day and my kids were driving me crazy and then the Buddha came along and he said, leave your household and come join me. And then I did and now I'm free. And I achieved enlightenment. So you can either look at it as a movement that liberated women or a movement that just subordinated them in a different way. And I think it is an incredibly complicated thing. At any rate, your question about the MTA, I mean, I've been thinking about it. I'm a sociologist and been long fascinated by religion, obviously. And I think one of the dynamics that's been going on for the last 300 years is that every faith tradition has been grappling with the enlightenment. It's been grappling with the question of equality, the question of democracy, the question of science, empiricism, you know, and in many different ways and in many different little strands of conflict, you see this gradual modernization. You see the gradual weakening of biblical literalism and the adoption of metaphorical understandings and you see the equality between men and women and the getting rid of the notion of inherent differences between the races and so forth as we gradually modernize all of our faiths. So I see the MTA as a part of that tradition and you know, my take on transhumanism is that this is basically a modern enlightenment movement. It's enlightenment applied to questions of biopolitics and human technology. And to the extent that you represent that modernizing tendency within the LDS, I think it's fascinating and wonderful. And I see myself as a partisan of the same kind of arguments within Buddhism where, you know, it needs a lot of modernizing too. 2,500 years of modernizing. Thank you. Next question, Kathy, I think you had one. I'll repeat it. Okay, digital arts in the community now and yet we honor these people but there's a huge disconnect between them and now because we're not even teaching fine art in the schools anymore. We have a very limitedized program in the schools and so I just like to know how each of you feel about them and now. So to summarize the question, it seems, if I have understood it correctly and stopped me if I repeat any of this summary inaccurately, we are neglecting our history of arts in our state and what should we do to rectify that? Is there something we can do to rectify that? Is that a fair assessment of the implication? And generally. And I'll add to that a little bit. We've talked today about the importance of these artifacts as we look forward to the redemption of our relationships and redemption even of persons and communities in the future and so this question about what are we doing with this neglect of our arts feeds into a transhumanist vision of the future and our ability to redeem it. Thoughts on that? Well, I'll answer by trumping your story with an even worse example. Who's driven on I-15 and seeing the welfare grain silos west of downtown, right? There's a reason why we included wheat in our illustration of Emmeline Wells which is that Brigham Young asked her to create a wheat gathering program where she collected wheat from members of the church and she did this so well that it resulted in the largest sale of grain to the U.S. government during World War I. It also resulted in the creation of the welfare department of the church. So the gathering of wheat as an exercise of LDS women is now no longer identified as something that was either started or cared for by LDS women. It's now part of course the welfare department which lives under the priesthood department in the church administrative hierarchy. So when you drive past those grain silos you can think of Emmeline but her legacy and her influence in that particular area has been completely lost. Sharon Eubank actually from the Relief Society Presidency has been talking about that legacy in some church publications which has been heartening but I completely agree. I mean I think it goes to this example also of like the Richmond Park that mentioned this idea that we're not connecting the exercise of these legacy projects to their origins, to the people of their origins, to the intent of their origins. And I think it's the whole meaning and whole drive behind Better Days 2020 is that we feel like we need to have a greater stewardship over those projects and return to their roots and return to the impulses that drove them and the original intent of those collections whether they be of art or of wheat or of political discourse. So I think that's exactly what I feel passionate about and I am sorry about the, I mean they guess they renamed it but it doesn't really mean much if they've sold off a lot of the artwork so it's too bad about the Alice Merrill Horne collection. My wife would love to answer your question because she is a fine artist and a sculptor, teaches at University of Connecticut and she certainly thinks that we need more attention to the arts at all levels of education. I guess one of the things that has stuck in my mind from the anthropological literature is that the distinction between art and life didn't used to be much of a distinction. Just as the distinction between religion and science didn't used to be much of a distinction that it was basically the way that things work and the things that we do and some of the things that we do are what we would now call artistic but they had purposes. They were seen as meaningful in those societies. I think part of what we're living in now is that we've separated out these different kinds of activity because of the commercial nature, that you had to be an artist is to make something that then you can sell as art and if you don't get that kind of validation from the market, oh really what's the point? It's just a hobby, you know. And I think we have to really go back to that kind of unified world view that we had as hunter-gatherers and one of the reasons is that we probably are at the end of the last stages of having to work for our living as human beings. I mean we were talking this morning about technological unemployment. As we move towards a future in which work will slowly decline or the necessity to work to live will slowly decline. Many people are worried, what are we gonna do? We're just gonna sit around and take methamphetamine and watch Netflix all day 24 seven. No, I think we're gonna have a human impulse to do things, meaningful things with our lives and part of that will be creativity and art. And so that also reflects on the kind of education that we need. In the short term, yes, we probably need some education that's still specific to job skills, especially if you're paying 70 grand a year to send your kid to university, you wanna make sure that they come out with something that will make something back. But we also want to have education for life. We want education to be meaningful so that they understand themselves as human beings and have those creative capacities. We know that that's important, too. Thank you. Pleasure, Andy. No, intentionally so. I didn't think about it. I know, I know. It would be solved by transhumanism. We just don't have a population anymore. We just have pleasure. We have relationships between individuals, who are individuals, whatever they want. What they want from us, right? Pardon? No. No. No. No, no, no, no. It's all optional. It's everything's optional. It's totally optional. You have things that way if you want. So I decided to radical, optional, social, consistent. I think this is a very religious idea. A very transhumanist idea. I think we're facing it now. Who got it? Yeah, please do. My simple question for you, like what you asked was, why did she leave family, children as big as the great legacy of women? Did I get transhumanly moving on from whatever a casual state where we're radically thinking about very relationship and social life being changed, not directly improving our lives? All right, so to repeat, I'm going to narrow this down to two things and you tell me if this is fair. A question to Nyland about why did you leave out the legacy of children from your list of ways for women to sustain their legacy? And then I'm going to translate a question to James and that is James, Randy has proposed a characterization of transhumanism and maybe even a characterization of certain concepts of heaven that gets beyond messiness to summarize. What do you think about that? So we'll go Nyland first and then James. Well, let's start with James. Oh, okay, let's do that. Well, I'm very sympathetic with your question. I argued strenuously with my wife and my daughter that when my daughter was 12 or whatever it was, that she didn't have to menstruate and I showed them the research that showed that the majority of our ancestors for millions of years probably did not menstruate that often because as soon as they were able to menstruate, they were sexually active, they would get pregnant, then they would lactate for the children and that would suppress their menstruation and then they would get pregnant again and so they may have menstruated half a dozen times in their life before they died at 35 or whatever and that the consequence of continuous menstruation for contemporary women is a higher rate of endometriosis, cervical ovarian cancer and it's uncomfortable for many. So I argued with them and they said, I want to menstruate because it's a rite of passage, it's a, you know, Mark, it's not, it's natural whatever the arguments are. Now, that argument's neither here nor there but I will point to an essay that George Dwarfsky and I wrote 10 years ago called Post-Genderism. The basic argument was there's only so much that you can do as long as we are a sexually dimorphic species, there's only so much that we can do to overcome the gender inequalities that exist and I was influenced and think about this by a woman named Shula Mith Firestone who wrote a book, The Dialectic of Sex. She argued that the oldest form of inequality in human society is the inequality between men and women and that it arises from the vulnerability that women experience during pregnancy. I think it arises because men can beat women up and have done so for millions of years but yes, they're even more vulnerable during pregnancy and they were pregnant a lot and she argued that the way to overcome that was to create artificial wombs so that women wouldn't have to bear that particular burden. I took her argument in Post-Genderism one step further and said, we're in a period where we can imagine making analog all of the digital differences between men and women, how we dress, how our bodies work, what kinds of appendages we have and even theoretically what kinds of brains we have if there are gendered brains, there's a lot of debate about the gendered brain but if there are gendered brains we could probably fix that in the future too and go in directions that we can't even imagine, have alternatives to this gender binary that we're trapped in today and I think that's the most challenging because you talk to a lot of transhumanist guys around today, they're mostly guys and you say, oh, what's your vision of the transhumanist future? I wanna turn the universe into beer cans and dance at the heat death of the universe and it's like, okay, so you will still exist and what do you think you will be like? Well, I'll still be me, I'll be a dude, I mean, I'll still have a penis and in two trillion years you're still gonna be a person with a penis so I think we really need to liberate ourselves and liberate our imagination about what the future of the human race could be and it doesn't necessarily involve this gender binary that we're trapped in right now. This is much more exciting than a history conference. You know what, Randy's my neighbor, he knows where to find me. I'm gonna take a stab but it's not gonna be nearly as interesting. I think by thinking was that the literal transfer of genes has both, it's been used as the justification for leaving women out of history first and foremost and it's also the way women are left out of history in our official records and so I didn't really want to give it anymore, I didn't want to feed that beast anymore by saying I wanted to look beyond that rationale and look at other ways that we can live beyond our lifetimes and what I mean by that is that as we've talked about the genealogical records that don't include women at all, I mean part of the reason that they do that is because the idea of gene transfer has been in some cultures and in some times thought of as entirely, is patrilineal, right? So it only depends on who the father is, right? I mean you've got naming rights that come through patriarchal lines, you've got property rights that come through patriarchal lines, in many cases that woman's genetic fingerprint is not on that person at all, right? In the way that they function in the world, now my mind isn't going to three trillion years in the future, so I'm just thinking like the way women function in the world, their genetic fingerprint has not been on their progeny in the way that we record history in the way that we record a woman's impact on our communities and so I think it's unfair then to say that she does have this big advantage by passing on her traits, it's not any more of an advantage that a man has and he gets all of the, he's had all of the property rights and the naming rights and the financial rights on top of that. So it's really nothing special for a woman to be able to pass on her genetic code because it does benefit the man equally. Of course we do have exceptions to that, the Jewish matriarchal line, for example, but I just think women have been trapped so for so long in this idea that it is their domestic and reproductive abilities that have imprinted the next generation and give them claim on the next generation that I just wanted to move beyond that. That was really it. Let me. I understand that, but how does a woman transfer more valuable or more influential genes than a man? She doesn't. Well, you can put that under mentoring, Randy. But like I said, I didn't want to, I didn't want to, we're at a place in the discipline of women's history where we have to look beyond that influence because we've just relied on, we've just fallen back on that as an argument for women's influence for too long. And it's not to diminish it at all, obviously, but I just think we need to challenge ourselves to look at other ways women are alive in our communities beyond just there. Just briefly on your question of will we poop in heaven or in the future? And I think you're onto something that most people's conception of the divine life, whatever it might be, does not involve going to the bathroom. I mean, Read out a miller. But there aren't very many transhumanists who are thinking about solving that particular problem yet, maybe they should. But I think when you think about what it might mean to upload into a more durable body than the biological meat sack that we have to carry around and that we definitely can't go to space in because it will just get cancer and fall apart immediately. So we will have to come up with something better than this meat sack and that probably won't involve pooping, but it will have some kind of waste because it's hard to imagine a living system without waste, waste heat maybe. I've been given permission for one final question for both of you and because we wanna move on, I'm hoping that you'll give us a punchy short response. So here's the question. Imagine yourself 1,000 years in the future. Do you as an identifiable person exist in some way? Yes or no? And if so, how do you imagine or hope that your sex and or gender will be expressed? Yeah, I need a... Well, I kind of... I don't live in this world as much. And I gotta think about that one. I think I touched on that this morning that for me as a Buddhist, which the fundamental philosophical thrust of Buddhism is to deconstruct the notion that there is a continuous discrete self that once you let go of that illusion that that's a liberating thing to let go of and that you can be a lot happier when you do. And so I think a lot of transhumanists carry around this notion that they can rescue the notion of personal identity in the future, that there's some way to lock it down, reinforce it. And they may try, but there's the inevitability of change and the erosion and death of some kind. If it's the heat death of the universe or something sooner. So I don't think... So for me, it's not about... I'm not gonna commit suicide anytime soon and if I live to be 2,000, I'll be perfectly happy and that's because I'm not enlightened. But for me, it's not about... The whole project is not about the persistence of my personal identity. And it's really not about the persistence of my personal gender identity. I mean, if I had my druthers, I'd rather look like Christina Aguilera. I'm just too lazy to do it and too poor. But I think hopefully in the future we'll be able to play with all kinds of identities and gender expressions. And already we are. I mean, the number of people who are non-binary in our society are growing exponentially, so. I don't know what to say. I'm stuck. Well, I'm just real. I mean, I'm realizing being exposed to your expanded philosophies here today. My vision of myself, my vision of my independent soul is shaped almost exclusively by LDS doctrine. But at the same time, when I think about it, it doesn't have that intensive agenda component. So I love the idea of the perpetuation of relationships after our death. And I believe that I hope that I have an identity. I like myself enough, I think, that I like the idea of having a consistent identity and a perpetuated identity. But when I think about my role in a community in the future, it's not necessarily gendered. And I don't think of myself, first and foremost, as a mother of future souls, for instance. That doesn't hold a lot of interest or weight for me. I want to be with my children that I have now. And I want to be with my family, but I don't, my husband always says that his great philosophical question about the afterlife is, are we a mosh pit or are we sitting around a dinner table? So in other words, do we have a discrete family unit with our relationships intact or are we just kind of this interconnected web, kind of like a chain mail where we're linked together by similar bonds that create a network in which individual family units are not as discreet as we may think they are. And I definitely fall into the mosh pit category or the chain mail category or whatever analogy you want to use. But within that, when I envision that, I don't know, I'll have to think, I'll come back and report. I'll come back and report. So I guess the first part is I definitely see myself as myself in a thousand years, but I hope I put more credence on, I put more hope and weight in my communal relationships than I do particularly in my gendered, binary gendered relationships. Thank you both. And thanks, Lincoln, for moderating. Thanks.