Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
Just a brief reminder: I regard bioconservatives like Leon Kass as quite as wrongheaded and damaging to sensible deliberation about healthcare quandaries as the transhumanists and other assorted Robot Cultists I've been deriding the last few days.
Whenever one's talk turns superlative in the manner of the transhumanists, singularitarians, and techno-immortalists, one has undoubtedly shifted from science proper into heady hyperbolizations of science parochially identified with "the future" but always functioning as and endorsing expressions of anxiety, greed, envy and so on that are actually, substantially in and about the present. But the same is true when one's talk turns supernative in the manner of the bioconservatives, anti-choice theocrats, and neo-primitivists.
Medical technoscience does indeed seem to me to be located at an enormously interesting and provocative developmental inflection point right about now, a point at which at least some healthcare is becoming non-normativizing in ways that trouble conventional universalizing language progressives have tended to use when they try to frame positions on healthcare and social justice.
In my view, questions of informed nonduressed consent have to come to the fore under such circumstances (the at least partial non-normativizaton of therapy) for democratically-minded progressive people.
(Although, by the way, I tend to make the case that this universalizing language ill serves democratic aspirations under changing therapeutic circumstances, it isn't a bad idea to recall that neither has this language actually ever managed to really deliver what it promised in the way of real equity or an equity that also respected diversity, and that it has also always exacted high costs of the kind that Foucault and Fanon, among others, describe so powerfully in their work.)
Look: Terry Schiavo isn't science fiction. Deaf parents wanting deaf kids isn't science fiction. Administering non-psychotic drugs to get deranged Death Row prisoners sane enough just long enough to execute them isn't science fiction. Misleading drug claims on commercial television designed to undermine legitimate doctor-patient relationships isn't science fiction. Giving people fertility drugs that cause multiple births with health problems few people are informed about, all because this is cheaper than safer alternatives isn't science fiction. Pathologizing discussions of actually flourishing neuro-atypical persons isn't science fiction. Refugees from over-exploited regions of the world struggling to survive as illegals or quasi-legals in "the developed world" through the relinquishment of their own vital organs isn't science fiction.
Progressives need consent -- truly informed, truly non-duressed consent -- to trump ideologies of optimality, whether bioconservative indulgences in "naturalizing" reactionary would-be nostalgia or transhumanist indulgences in "enhancing" eugenic would-be optimality.
Kass's bioconservative definition of therapy as only those interventions that police the diversity of actually-wanted capacities, morphologies, and lifeways into conformity with a parochial ideal he identifies as "the natural human" is no more nor less eugenic than the transhumanists who would encourage the emergence "enhanced post-humans" according to no less parochial ideals.
Of course, the transhumanists will argue that this makes me a secret bioconservative just as bioconservatives will argue that this makes me a secret transhumanist, which is pretty much just because they are all not only barking mad but co-dependent on the equal extremity of their imagined antagonists.
All of this would be neither here nor there, really, if it weren't for the rather startling fact that transhumanists and bioconservatives have managed through the facile simplicity, hyperbolic drama, and easy emotionalism of their formulations to commandeer much of the rhetorical terrain on which talk about healthcare provision is playing out in this truly fraught moment of transition into non-normitivizing genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic therapy.
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7 comments:
One of the first things that started to tip me off that something was weird about self-identified "transhumanism", in addition to the fact that it seemed so insulated from mainstream discourses, was that the self-identified "transhumanists" seemed to insist on drawing what to me looked like an absolutely arbitrary distinction between "enhancement" and the standard concerns of the rest of us about commonwealth and the generally recognised and accepted left-progressive ideal of allowing people to lead happier, more fulfilled, less delimited lives.
What's remarkable to me is how prevalent these normativising rhetorical tendencies are outside of the hyperbolic formulations you're here criticising, Dale, and how strongly they seem (in my own, narrow, experience of the matter) to reflect an underlying misunderstanding of the idea of informed, non-duressed consent. I'm often surprised at how many liberal, progressive-minded people don't understand, without explanation, what I'm talking about when I insist on drawing a distinction between "the common good", of more-or-less universal remedies to universal problems and needs, and "the indiscriminate good" of enabling self-remediation of personalised, individualised, atypical problems and needs. I think this is, just a drastically under-examined issue among progressives and liberals. Unfortunately, much of the left is somewhat less than desirably responsive to the ongoing project of facilitating the diversity and diversification of lives and life-ways, instead all-too-often simply waiting for a self-identified group or movement to emerge demanding recognition and equality, when the whole project would and could be advanced that much more rapidly simply by admitting that the differences between groups (however defined) are less important than the freedom associated with the recognition of diversity freed from arbitrary discrimination altogether.
Conservatives, primitivists, traditionalists, and all the so-called "right" tend to favour the blanket solution to diversity, and the ongoing project of diversification, of attempting to enact policies the intentional, unintentional, acknowledged, unacknowledged but nevertheless omnipresent consequences of which would be the invariable flattening of diversity and asphyxiation of diversification regardless of the acknowledged or unacknowledged suffering and misery this would inflict on nearly all members of the effected societies in some degree or another. The laughably ironic part of all this is that right-conservatives inevitably end up curators of the past hard-won victories of the liberal-progressive left (construed in a decidedly loose way here), forever myopically nostalgic for the way things ought-to-used-to-be. However nearsighted the right is, though, the transhumanists are obscenely far-sighted; seeing only the primordial ooze from which we emerged and the supermagnificent superbeings we one day might be, while losing track of the actual point of all of this, the actual, real, and singularly important struggle of persons to make their own ways in life, as they see fit, as far as is possible without the mutual exclusion of others.
In summary, I think we should be more worried about fixing the progressive-liberal-left on this point than deflating the egos of a few defenders-of-hu(man)ity biocons and cyborg-liberation-votes-for-superchimps transhumanists.
WOW! I totally agree with JM Inc. :)
"transhumanism"... seem[s] so insulated from mainstream discourses
Oh, yes, definitely.
self-identified "transhumanists" [seem] to insist on drawing... an absolutely arbitrary distinction between "enhancement" and the standard concerns of the rest of us about... [enabling] people to lead happier, more fulfilled, less delimited lives.
I'm not sure that I agree that this distinction is arbitrary -- I think that the substance that renders superlative formulations plausible is already entirely subsumed within fairly conventional progressive support of universal access to consensual healthcare and support of public funding of regulated and accountable medical research and development. What superlativity then goes on to do is to invest this progressive-pragmatic substance with hyperbolic significance as a way of assuaging very particular sorts of fears and buttressing very particular sorts of fantasies of a kind that organized religions have traditionally exploited in general but actually which are susceptible of more specific analysis. I suspect we are in essential agreement here, but I just want to point out that the ethnographic peculiarities of superlative discourse and sub(cult)ures are actually quite explicable.
What's remarkable to me is how prevalent these normativising rhetorical tendencies are outside of the hyperbolic formulations you're here criticising,
Oh, yes, I agree, this is key. Superlativity is a particularly clear, extreme, symptomatic discourse but its elitism, reductionism, triumphalism, eugenicism prevail much more broadly and perniciously in mainstream discourses of neoliberal developmentalism.
they seem (in my own, narrow, experience of the matter) to reflect an underlying misunderstanding of the idea of informed, non-duressed consent.
This is my own emphasis -- but be aware, here we are wading into much deeper waters.
many liberal, progressive-minded people don't understand, without explanation, what I'm talking about when I insist on drawing a distinction between "the common good", of more-or-less universal remedies to universal problems and needs, and "the indiscriminate good" of enabling self-remediation of personalised, individualised, atypical problems and needs.
Well, I'm not sure I understand the distinction myself without explanation. Why is "the common good" the frame you want to use to describe universal needs? Why is "indiscriminate" the word you are using to describe what instead look more like matters of personal self-creation (which still yield universal values in aggregate, right? freedom, diversity, resilience, flexibility, fostering of creativity, atmosphere for more rapid testing of pragmatic impacts, and so on)? I have a real investment in the notion of ecosystem commons, genomic commons, cultural archive as creative commons, and on analogizing these commonses to a certain extent.
I am also invested in notions of common sense (as the intersubjective weaving together of input from the separate senses enabling our sense of reality, which is actually an enormous and delicate subject that supports some philosophical realist intuitions but also many social constructionist theses about reality that few but the American pragmatists, plus Arendt, Butler, and some STS-theorists have done justice to in my view) and the common good (which is even trickier, connecting up to the economics of externalities, scientific consensus, rights culture as against morality, and so on), but which don't necessarily connect to those other commonses in as elegant a way as I might like them to. I'm not sure I can agree with what you are saying until I know where you are coming down on a whole lot of tricky and really interesting questions first -- but clearly I sympathize with much of the thrust.
Why is it liberals you focus on as missing the bus here, though? Is it just because we all know what bad faith conservatives exhibit here and so they aren't even under discussion? Because, whatever their flaws, popular liberal discourse has a rich tradition of theory and practice under the heading of Choice, while academic liberal policy and activism has a rich "harm-reduction" approach, both of which provide the richest archive of rhetorical and practical available to the likes of us, it seems to me.
I think this is, just a drastically under-examined issue among progressives and liberals.
I can readily agree to much of this, I suppose, but I wonder if you have an "as opposed to what" in mind here. It just seems to me you might be overlooking progressive and liberal resources available to those of us who would locate our fight in informed non-duressed consensual self-determination, peer-to-peer, in a sustainable planetary multiculture, like I do and I am hearing you do do too.
much of the left is somewhat less than desirably responsive to the ongoing project of facilitating the diversity and diversification of lives and life-ways,
Again, I agree that there are flaws and problems, but isn't all most all discussion of multiculturalism, post-colonial cosmopolitanism, and lifeway diversity coming from the progressive left? I don't get why they are getting the bad-guy treatment here. Again, this is not my way of denying problems in too much undercritical and complacent left discourse. For me, a useful touchstone writer is Paul Gilroy -- who has plenty of criticism for liberal discourse certainly -- and his anti-race convivialism. But your barbs feel a little skewed in their targets.
instead all-too-often simply waiting for a self-identified group or movement to emerge demanding recognition and equality, when the whole project would and could be advanced that much more rapidly simply by admitting that the differences between groups (however defined) are less important than the freedom associated with the recognition of diversity freed from arbitrary discrimination altogether.
See, I'm not sure I agree with you on this -- but I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding you very well either. "Freed from arbitrary discrimination altogether" sounds a bit like an insubstantial generality that gets fleshed out on the ground by precisely the sorts of "demands for recognition and equality from actually emerging groups" that you seem to distrust a bit. If that is true, then it is hard to see how a wanted flourishing of equitable, consensual, diverse lifeways will be more rapidly achieved through the evacuation of those terms of their content, on the ground, in the interminable give and take of stakeholder struggle. After all, diversity, like freedom, like democracy are all ongoing processes, more than destinations we arrive at more or less rapidly, at least that's how I see them.
Conservatives, primitivists, traditionalists, and all the so-called "right" tend to favour the blanket solution to diversity, and the ongoing project of diversification... invariabl[y the] flattening of diversity and asphyxiation of diversification
To the extent that conservatives care about diversity at all, you are right they tend to want to be curators of a diversity of the dead, a museum of preserved, closed-off, non-communicating, non-dynamic displays of difference catalogued in their differences to which incumbents can remain comfortably indifferent because they are disconnected from these differences precisely by the terms of their actually obliterative preservation.
The laughably ironic part of all this is that right-conservatives inevitably end up curators of the past hard-won victories of the liberal-progressive left (construed in a decidedly loose way here), forever myopically nostalgic for the way things ought-to-used-to-be.
It's true that there is a lot of this, but I don't think we should assume that this is always the case, or overstate the significance of the case. The right is essentially anti-democratic, it is a reaction against democratizing forces in history, it is literally reactionary, right? Of course, this is because the right is essentially the politics of incumbency, an expression of the prejudices and parochial interests of established elites and customary attitudes, the positions, privileges, and institutes that are most threatened by democratic educational, agitational, and organization forces abroad in history. Sometimes, incumbency serves outcomes achieved by particular vicissitudes in a longer struggle of democratization, but don't get seduced into a hasty overgeneralization. One needs to look at the concrete interests of incumbents as they testify to them to know exactly what the right will fight and fight for in its service to incumbency and fight against democratization. We've just lived through a weird period in which, at least in some ways, actually progressive democratizing forces were "conservatively" defending accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society against the "revolutionary" fervor of radical anti-democratic elitists peddling market fundamentalism backed by US military might.
transhumanists are obscenely far-sighted
I sympathize with what you are after here, but I really disagree with you. I think the key to superlativity is to understand that there is nothing actually futural about "the future" with which they presumably identify. "The Future" is a commentary on that in the present from which they are alienated, about which they are most anxious, or from which some of them are provoked to especially egregious kinds of opportunistic greed (this third reaction usually amounting to an infantile disavowal of the alienation and anxiety I mentioned first).
Futurity is radically open -- it is a register of freedom -- it is, crucially, out of our control, dangerous, pleasurable, empowering, and risky, again, what one would expect from a register of freedom. Futurity emerges out of presence just as the past reverberates into presence. I cannot stress enough how non-futural our superlative futurists really, finally are. Their projected futures tend not only to be funhouse mirrors into which they project their alienation and anxiety about the present, but disavowals of the openness of futurity in its actual substance, as much the futurity in our actual present as in the future-presents onto which our present is actually opening in that futurity.
I think this may be what you are getting at when you speak of "primordial ooze" and the way superlativity loses track of the actual point, which is people coping together with the world.
I think we should be more worried about fixing the progressive-liberal-left on this point than deflating the egos of a few defenders-of-hu(man)ity biocons and cyborg-liberation-votes-for-superchimps transhumanists.
Again, the point of the critique of superlativity is less to humiliate spokepeople for marginal viewpoints, than to recognize the ways in which theses viewpoints sympomize and/or clarify more prevailing and dangerous developmental discourses, and to critique them in extremis, a task that is often best undertaken through responses to the actual formulations offered up by those spokespeople -- especially given the fact that these very formulations tend to exert a direct and disproportionate influence on the actual framing of the more prevailing discourses in any case. Not to mention, ridiculing the ridiculous is fun.
I think I agree with JM Inc too, especially his point that we need to fix the progressive-liberal-left, except I'm not sure exactly what he might mean by that. I assume he means their ideological knee-jerk support of anything that conservatives look askance at, without considering that sometimes (bio)-conservatives might have a point.
And let me say again that I am not in favor of a ban on GE'd children due to an irrational love for "the natural", but because I think that a ban on GE would make life better for people right now, and also make the world better for people in the long long term. I think it would secure rights that are being thwarted and coerced away right now, and also are threatened even more in the future. I have given specific examples of both of these immediate benefits, but you don't care, you prefer to make superlative claims for technologies that do not even exist and might never exist and ignore the problems that afflict people and threaten people's rights today. You misrepresent my argument into one that you can shoot down as being focused on the future while you pretend to be conserned about the present, but it's clear that you've got it reversed. You are jealously guarding your superlative future and your technologically dependent equality from my real-world immediate proposal to improve the lives of millions of people right now.
Remember, no ban is "in perpetuity", and I agree that if the democratic process decides we should allow same-sex conception some day, then by all means we should have same-sex marriage too. It just shouldn't be crypto, it shouldn't be snuck in via distractions about claims of "supernativity" or ridiculing the ridiculous. I'm asking you to look in the mirror and see who is making superlative claims and hindering real progress for the public good.
Their projected futures tend not only to be funhouse mirrors into which they project their alienation and anxiety about the present
And maybe your alienation and anxiety is that you and Eric are not really on equal footing to a male-female couple, you sublimate the fact that you don't have the same capabilities as you would have if you were with a woman. That causes anxiety, even anger. You claim to be equal but you know you're not. So, you funhouse mirror a future where you'd be able to conceive children together, and call anyone who says that's ridiculous a stuck-in-the-past bioconservative, and a bigot for good measure.
So, when I ask you to look in the mirror, I mean, look in an optically correct one this time.
I think I agree with JM Inc too, especially his point that we need to fix the progressive-liberal-left, except I'm not sure exactly what he might mean by that. I assume he means their ideological knee-jerk support of anything that conservatives look askance at, without considering that sometimes (bio)-conservatives might have a point.
You don't know what it means, but agree with it, especially if it means that libruls are wrong cause they are knee-jerk libruls and conservatives are right sometimes... Thanks for the brilliant contribution, John.
a ban on G[enetic]E[gineering] would make life better for people right now
God only knows what actually existing wanted safe therapies you would prohibit in the name of this ban, all the while handwaving about skeery non-existing crap like samesex reproduction and designer babies.
I have given specific examples of both of these immediate benefits, but you don't care, you prefer to make superlative claims
Lies, lies, lies, yeah.
if the democratic process decides we should allow same-sex conception some day, then by all means we should have same-sex marriage too.
Great! It will and we will, glad to hear you're on board. Can you please go away now?
It just shouldn't be crypto,
Crypto?
it shouldn't be snuck in via distractions about claims of "supernativity" or ridiculing the ridiculous.
Samesex marriage will be achieved without any significant reference to samesex reproduction or any of that crap only you keep introducing into the discussion, you freak. Nobody cares about that but you. Nobody talks about that but you. Nobody is inverting the terms of this discussion but you.
your alienation and anxiety is that you and Eric are not really on equal footing to a male-female couple, you sublimate the fact that you don't have the same capabilities as you would have if you were with a woman. That causes anxiety, even anger. You claim to be equal but you know you're not.
Say goodbye, John.
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