Technocultural Proliferation, Not "Perfection"

An article entitled "The New Perfectionism" by Austin Dacey, published recently in Free Inquiry magazine, and available in the online version of the issue, is generating a lot of comment among the various "transhumanist"-types and their fellow travellers (of whom, if googling my name is any kind of accurate indication of such things, I am myself one).

I found the article very thoughtful and sympathized with my sense of Dacey's perspective, even if occasionally I found some of his formulations perplexing. Here are some comments about the article, and about the "transhumanism" he is discussing.

He opens his article with a question:

"Suppose you were offered a photographic memory, perfect pitch,
ultraviolet-spectrum vision, heightened disease resistance, customized
skin and eye color, and a one-thousand-year life-expectancy. Would you
accept? Now suppose you were told that by doing so you would cease to
be human. Would this make you less willing to accept? If you're like
me, you'll answer Yes to the first question and No to the second."

The thing I don't understand about this way of framing the issue of technological development and its impact on humanity is, just why should we accept the second question as relevant to the first one? Who is it exactly who would "tell us" just when our many separate choices to enhance or modify our memories, senses, disease resistance, gross morphology, or what have you must then be tantamount to "ceasing to be human"?

If these changes threaten to terminate our humanity, how can we be sure we didn't lose our humanity with contact lenses or pacemakers or penicillin or the invention of writing? This is something only we can tell ourselves, surely.

"I could stand the improvements, and if they make me more than human, so
what? If you answer Yes to the first question but say that leaving
humanness behind would actually make you more willing to accept, you
may be a transhumanist, the new breed of perfectionists who aim at
collective self-improvement through direct modification of human
nature."

Again, Dacey's formulation puzzles me a bit. Is "different from" always inevitably "more than"? Why should we figure a project of genetic, prosthetic, or pharmacological therapy, modification, or enhancement, as necessarily a matter of becoming "more than human," or "less than human" (depending on how "leaving our humanity behind" is supposed to be read)?

It seems to me that "humanness" is an open-ended concept that we are collaborating on together, not something that many people would want to "leave behind" -- even those who seek to modify their capacities or morphology.

And what is it about the idea of using technology to engage in private practices of modification and re-invention that would make one think of "perfectionism," rather than simply self-creation and pluralism?

There seems to me no way that a rhetoric of "leaving behind humanity" would not seem to denigrate and so threaten the humans one would presumably "leave behind." Further, it is too easy for any doctrine of "perfectionism" to turn into and be read as a doctrine of prescriptionism and chauvinism.

I agree with Dacey that these versions of "transhumanist" sensibility are quite troubling. I wonder, though, whether there aren't after all far more appealling ways to think about what transhuman-type technology advocates and critics are up to, ways that might be foreclosed from view by his more suspicious formulations.

Definitely I disagree with him when he suggests there is something more radical inherently in the kinds of tools that interest "transhumanist"-types than the tools that have long been available to educators and disciplinarians for re-shaping the narratives of human selves.

But when Dacey turns his attention to the more ethnographic description of the actual communities of people who are likely to be self-identified "transhumanists," then his critique seems to me often very incisively on-target. He writes:

"One obstacle to discussion is that transhumanism is not just a
philosophy; it is also a grassroots movement."

Self-identified "transhumanists" should pay close attention to this observation. I think it is right, and worse, that to the extent that these "transhumanists" are primarily enthusiasts of and advocates for certain developmental outcomes in emerging technologies, they gain little for what they lose when they conceive of themselves as an "identity movement" of all things.

I do not agree that there is enough that is shared among people drawn to transhumanist formulations about technology development (either in understanding its broader human significance, or in the various specific projections about technological futures that preoccupy most radical futurists) to
coalesce as a coherent as well as a unique "movement."

Identity movements are so twentieth century, anyway, really.

Tell me just what transhumanists imagine they gain by thinking of themselves as a "movement" instead of, say, a network?

I would define "transhumanism" as one among a variety of post-humanist discourses. As a critical sensibility transhumanism is largely a suspicion of the normative and ideological claims that are made in the name of "nature," a suspicion inspired by an awareness of the destabilizing impact of technological development on what are widely taken as natural limits. As a programmatic sensibility, transhumanism is the hope that genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification can be paths of human self-creation, and that when it is regulated to ensure a fair distribution of costs, risks, and benefits, technological development is an emancipatory force.

To see transhumanist sensibilities and critical vocabularies incubating conversational and organizational networks seems to me considerably more productive than wasting energy policing conformity among a "membership" to provide some sense of shared-idenity or "belonging."

Transhumanism as a "movement" is a palpably cultish cul-de-sac. Transhumanism as a constellation of networks in broad affinity with one another can be a significant and useful force for good.

Dacey goes on to drive this point home, when he suggest transhumanism as a "movement"

"gathered force in the last ten years and coalesced around
organizations like the Extropy Institute, the online magazine
BetterHumans, and the World Transhumanist Association, is a motley
crew of serious academics, journalists, and scientists, cyber
self-help gurus, nanotech venture capitalists, polyamorists and
gender-benders, cryonics freaks, and artificial intelligence geeks.
Like other iconoclastic movements, organized transhumanism attracts
its share of sheer goofiness. The co-founder of Extropy Institute, a
Southern California body-builder and Ayn Randian named Max, had his
last name changed from O'Conner to More, because I was going to get
better at everything, become smarter, fitter, and healthier. The
co-mingling of serious theory and policy consideration with a grab bag
of techno-utopian projects makes for easy targets for the biocons,
diverting the debate from core substantive issues."

All this seems to me exactly right. First, the "goofiness factor" (and this is a kindly description) of the Randroid/Libertopian/Apocaloid elements in popular technophile cultures will forever marginalize this brand of "transhumanism" qua organized movement. Second, the concentration on distant quasi-transcendent projections of "superlative state" technology among "movement-transhumanists" over a more pragmatic concentration on proximate developments gives bioconservatives perfect targets to mobilize ignorance and fear in support of luddite bans, precisely the outcomes "transhumanist"-types would presumably most abhor.

The article goes on:

"It is bad philosophy to identify the human essence with the human
genome in its present state. To do so is to buy into the antiquated
notion that a creatures nature is immutable or unchanging."

Again, this seems exactly right -- and it also makes me think Dacey likely sympathizes with at least some more reasonable versions of "transhumanist" technology advocacy and critique.

"The hard task for transhumanists, then, is the one they havent yet
taken head-on: making a positive and widely appealing moral case for
their particular vision of the excellent person and the good society."

Central to making any widely appealing moral case of this kind would surely require that "transhumanisms" show themselves to be (1) compatible with in fact indefinitely many particular moral visions, to be (2) concerned with how communication and collaboration will still be possible in a world of techno-constituted plurality, and also how (3) emerging technological developments challenge even those of us who would continue to value what are now normatively "human" limits to understand those limits and their possiblities in new ways.