The Transhumanist Program
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s recent
volume on transhumanism opens with the statement of purpose “This anthology
takes transhumanism seriously not because it is a significant social movement,
which it is not, but because the transhumanist vision compels us to think about
ourselves in light of current technological and scientific advances and to
reflect on the society in which we wish to live.” I disagreed with many of the
essays in the books, but not with this statement. Transhumanism is, based on my participation
in and observation of its organizations over the past five years or so,
definitely a fringe vision, but Francis Fukuyama called it “the most
dangerous idea of the 21st century” for a good reason. ‘Dangerous’
is a unwarranted judgment, but what is it about transhumanism that merits
further reflection?*
On the surface, transhumanism is just another glossy
scifi future. The basic idea is that through science and technology, we can
take control of our biological destinies, both as individuals and as a species,
and engineer away such inconvenient facets of human existence like disease,
unhappiness, stupidity, aging, and death. In novels, and in more serious works
of futurism like Eric Drexler’s Engines
of Creation and the 2002 National Nanotechnology blueprint, this image of
the future is one where Silicon Valley gadgetry meets biomedicine to put humanity
on a perennial upgrade path guided by turtle-necked tech gurus with enthusiastic
product launches. This view of transhumanism is the most common one, and is
easy to mock, but underneath this shallow gee-whiz techno-utopianism, transhumanism
poses a radical answer to a very old question: “What is our place in the
universe?”
The oldest and most universal answer to this question of
existence is divine creation: some greater force made the universe, put
humanity on this Earth, and imbued us with special purpose. All faiths emphasis
the importance of Obedience, Transcendence, and Redemption: Obedience to moral
laws of divine origin, the possibility of personal Transcendence from a mundane
world of suffering to a divine world of perfection in this lifetime, and the
future Redemption of the entire world to state of perfection when the divine
will is finally enacted. The combination of these elements and their exact
details vary significantly across faiths, but their divine origins and
importance to everyday life are the foundations of all religion.
The problems with divine solutions to this question of
existence are twofold. First, there is no “Universal Religion”, no single true
divine law on which all humans agree. There are multiple religions, which differ
not just on minor points of the revealed word of God, but on basic theological
issues. Attempts to convert others to the ‘true faith’ have caused bloody wars
and left syncretistic intrusions of older myths in the new faith.
Moreover, divine revelation is one of the most disruptive
and dangerous forces in history. I am an atheist, and while I personally don’t
believe in god, I recognize that people can feel a very strong connection to
some higher power. Institutionalize churches and theological governments, with
their legitimacy based in both interpretation of the arcana of past revelations
and worldly political power, are threatened whenever people can start to
directly experience the divine. Look at
difficulties of the Catholic Church in containing evangelical movements like
that of St. Francis of Assiz, or the more contemporary problems of the Mormon
faith transitioning from the personal revelation of Joseph Smith to an
institution lead by Brigham Young and his successors. Religion can rule, but it
loses its sacred power in the mess of politics.
With the decline of supreme religious power, codified in
the west in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which reestablished freedom of
(Christian) worship as a European right, people began looking for answers to
this existential question outside the structure of divine revelation. Enlightenment
humanism established the idea of the rational individual engaged in reasoned
discourse to create progress in a naturalistic universe as a new foundation of
order. Human beings were uniquely endowed with intellectual faculties:
primarily logic, language, and empathy; which could be used to engage with
others across space and time to discover and clarify moral laws and progress
towards a state of perfection. The universe was taken as an external fact,
objective and the same for all observers, the nature of which could be
understood through empirical inquiry.
Humanism is at the center of Western philosophy, but it
has taken quite a beating in the 20th century. Major ideologies like
Fascism and Communism were flatly anti-humanist, dealing in masses rather than
individuals. Disciplines such as economics and ecology replace the individual
with larger abstractions, like the market or the environment. Academic elites
used post-modernism, post-colonialism, and feminism to critique the humanist tradition
as arbitrary and exclusive, gutting it from within. The horrors of the
Holocaust and the world-ending threat of the atom bomb made the idea of the
perfection of human wisdom through intellectual achievement laughably obsolete.
And on a gut level, the past 150 years of rapid technological change have
orchestrated greater changes in the human condition than the previous 1,500
years, or possibly even the previous 15,000 years. Marx was right: All that was
solid has melted into air. We post-moderns feel profoundly disconnected from
the humanist tradition.
The transhumanist program is based on an idea of human beings as an evolved biological
system, with a lineage that can be traced back billions of years to the first
self-replicating bits of RNA, and then onto simple cells, multicellular
organisms, and so on. Modern humans are unique among the animals because we
coexist with a second evolved system, which are broadly speaking encompassed by
the categories of culture and technology.
What distinguishes transhumanism from a naturalistic
reading of history is the transhumanist teleology. Transhumanists see humanity
merging with its tools, becoming a cybernetic species—one capable of regulating
its individual bodies, and its collective environment. The classical cyborg was
an idealized astronaut, designed for exploring the cosmos, and the transhuman
goal is the expansion of human-descended beings through time and space. Mere
biology and a single planet is too frail to guarantee our survival. Avoiding
extinction over deep times means we need to turn our intelligence to the
problems of existence, durability, and change.
There is a lot that I take issue with within the
transhumanist program. Their theory of evolution is shallow and based more on
hearsay than any kind of actual science. On an individual level, the disposable
gadget orientation towards biology doesn’t have much relevance to real bodies,
which are stubborn and recalcitrant things. On a larger scale, if
transhumanists are serious about embarking on a project of radical
evolution, they’ll need to engage and win over a skeptical public. Currently, “responsible” policy-makers have
set themselves up the direct antithesis of transhumanists, defending an intrinsic
human nature from gene-hackers and insane AIs, among other existential threats.
But for all the flaws of transhumanism, the reason why I
call myself a transhumanist is that it is the only ideology which is attempting
to grapple seriously with the problems of our future as a technological
species. We’ve already altered our planet; the new word in conservation is the anthropocene.
The wonders of modern medicine have increased healthcare costs more than they’ve
extended life; we need to move beyond curing death one organ at a time towards
a holistic rejuvenation approach. The
weakening of social cohesion, widespread increases in psychological
instability, and the inexplicable nature of contemporary violence, can be laid
on the rise of greed as the only universal value. Money is a useful tool, but
there must be other ways to find value and purpose in the world. And finally we
need to begin looking seriously at the fragility of our technological networks,
and ways in which they can be made more resilient. These problems are wicked;
fraught with irreconcilable conflicts over values and the basic terms of the
debate, but I believe that debate and action are necessary.
Transhumanists may be committing the crime of hubris, but
hubris is better than willful irresponsibility. The overwhelming public
dissatisfaction that the status quo is breaking down can only be met with new
ways of seeing, thinking, and being in the world.
*This essay is the companion to January’s Three Faces
of Transhumanism
