Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Bioconservative Bait and Switch

I've begun to notice an ever stronger anti-corporatist slant emerging in the popular public rhetoric of bioconservatives on a number of fronts lately. I believe that this shift registers their dawning realization that arguments relying on fundamentalist conceptions of "nature" are not now prevailing, nor are they likely anytime soon to prevail, in the technoscientific cultures to which they are addressing themselves.

However uncomfortable they may feel in the abstract about the disruptive and dangerous impact of emerging biomedical interventions into basic human capacities, morphologies, and lifespans, few people are eager to ban medical research and development -- all in order to defend a conception of human "dignity" that demands they suffer and die needlessly from potentially treatable conditions. However tragic they may find these personal decisions sometimes to be, few people are eager to demand actual prison terms for women or the doctors with whom they consult to decide how best to safely end unwanted pregnancies occuring in their own bodies -- all in order to defend a conception of human "life" that inevitably eventuates in countless literal deaths and incomparably more countless diminishments of lives.

These argumentative failures are beginning to impel the bioconservatives to whistle a different tune.

Now, the terrain of technodevelopmental politics is a shifting quicksand, and the labels we deploy to make sense of the positions and alliances on that terrain are sometimes forced to become shape-shifters if they are to retain any usefulness at all. And so, before I throw terms around with which you might happen to identify yourselves and then attribute to these terms positions with which you personally passionately disagree, understand that these words are very much on the move. So let me be clear: I certainly know that not all people of faith are socially conservative and that in fact most of the really interesting ones are not, just as I also certainly know that not all Greens are luddites and that in fact most of the really interesting ones are not. I even know that some bioconservatives really are long-time defenders of the project of deepening democracy and the struggle for social justice, rather than just cynical newcomers casting about for a new rhetorical hook to hang their reactionary politics on.

Nevertheless, there can be little doubt at all about the antidemocratic assumptions of social conservatives and the genocidal nostalgia of luddite eco-conservatives that still drive no small measure of the curious contemporary bioconservative alliance to defend "nature," "dignity," and "life" in their own parochial and moralizing construals of them. What concerns me as a technoprogressive in this moment is that people of the left who would strive to facilitate progressive technodevelopmental outcomes must understand that reactionary "naturalist" conceptions of dignity and life are in fact beginning to be stealthed under cover of a more appealing rhetoric of democratic "solidarity." I happen to think this shift represents a real challenge as well as a real occasion for growth for technoprogressive criticism and advocacy. But it is crucial for us to understand just what will be appealing (for good reason) in this particular bioconservative discourse and just why technoprogressive discourse might be especially vulnerable to attack (again, for good reason) from this bioconservative strain.

There is little doubt that the core naturalism of the bioconservative viewpoint will nourish the profound and proper anxieties of people living in an era of disruptive change. What the bioconservatives are coming to learn, however, is that this naturalism cannot be foregrounded in the various cases they make to constrain research and development because naturalism in its nostalgia inevitably yields an authoritarianism in its practice on the ground that most of these very same anxious people will reject, and for precisely the same reason: Namely, people want to maintain some measure of personal control in an era of disruptive change and being dictated to by impersonal authorities in their personal choices in the midst of this technoconstituted perplexity and distress provokes strong and understandable resistance.

This is largely the reason why the bioconservatives are changing tracks in the first place, of course. However, an anti-corporatist framing of these arguments will appeal to real resentment and sensible skepticism about developmental elitism and authoritarianism in a conspicuously unjust world, resentment and skepticism that is likely to be exacerbated yet again by this very same disruptive change.

Doubt what I'm saying? Try these slogans on for size: "Will you let multinational corporations decide who lives and who dies?" "Will you allow global playboys to determine for you what constitutes a fair and proper life?" "Will you permit greedy and short-sighted businesspeople to determine for themselves what standards should govern the safety of corporate development and the fair distribution of its technological accomplishments?" Believe me, this is unquestionably a potent location from which to launch a new chapter in bioconservative advocacy.

Technoprogressives will have to expose the authoritarian implications of bioconservative naturalism while uncompromisingly taking up the anti-corporatist banner ourselves. This should not really be so difficult, since the anti-authoritarianism of even the few truly socially-conscious bioconservatives is ultimately more compromised due to its nostalgia than our own, and in a way that will inevitably play out symptomatically in their arguments, policy recommendations and, especially, in their alliances.

The problem for me is that altogether too many technocentric progressives really are too much in bed with corporatists, in my opinion, so that we are too likely to be the ones who appear the more compromised at the moment. Too many of us still treat corporate-conservatives as allies just so long as they are insistently anti-technophobic. And don't get me started about how some "technoprogressives" actually treat sociopathic market libertopians as if they are in any remote sense allies!

Honestly, what could be more surely and conspicuously anti-progressive than some corporatist's greed for likely R&D profits without a steadfast commitment to democracy and social justice to ensure that the costs, risks, and benefits of R&D are all fairly distributed among all the stakeholders to that development? Such an attitude should seem even worse than technophobia from a technoprogressive standpoint. And this is especially true given that what passes for "technophobia" among intelligent people of good will so often amounts either to sensible skepticism about the uses to which technologies will be put when democracies are not strong, or to ignorance about particular scientific facts that can be communicated easily enough if everybody proceeds in an atmosphere of good faith of the kind, again, that democracies are most likely to foster.

Meanwhile, despite the interesting and tireless work of some of the best among us, too many technocentric progressives sometimes still seem to me peculiarly focused on facilitating the accumulation of a technological toypile rather than on the regulation of, deliberation about, and proper distribution of all the costs, risks, and benefits of development to all its stakeholders.

And further, too many technocentric progressives still seem to hope that the sudden emergence of "superlative" technologies like molecular manufacturing, postbiological intelligence, or longevity medicine will enable humanity to simply leapfrog the political and social impasses that presently bedevil us. This sort of left-libertopian "Tech Bloom" California Ideology seems to me quite as wrongheaded -- although I must admit I find it considerably more congenial at a personal level -- as the right-libertopian "Spontaneous Order" market fundamentalism I tend to berate most often in my writing.

However we may actually feel about them, the truth is that unless technoprogressives insistently foreground the democratizing demand in our own critiques and campaigns we will be providing solace to corporate-futurists, military-industrialists, and market libertarian technophiles and so we will be vulnerable to (honestly, pretty fair) charges of political naivete from bioconservatives. Technological development is social struggle. Politics freights and articulates technological change and defines the outcomes that we will take to be and advocate for as progressive ones. As bioconservatives begin to reinvent their reactionary politics in the image of a selective antiauthoritarianism it is crucial for technoprogressives to be more clear than ever that democracy is finally indispensable to any future worth fighting for.

TechnoProgressive: "Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

(Yes, it's been a long time since I've commented here. Apologies. You might also note that my own site has been in stasis for the last 3 months. I've been busy.)

Dale,

I wonder you are aware of proposed legislation in the state of Missouri to amend that state's constitution to ban transhumanism? I mention it here on your bait and switch essay because I think it's relevent. Maybe you're already aware of this and are cooking up a post about it, but maybe you can comment here too.