Doc Logic points out that "to exist" is to be "susceptible of observation," and that since god in most construals is unobservable by definition, then both the commonplace claims that god exists or doesn't are nonsensical.
In light of this observation I find it interesting that the term "atheist" is widely defined as precisely the claim he rightly worries is a nonsensical one -- namely, a denial of the existence of (a) god. But etymologically, of course, "atheist" is simply a- theist, "without god."
I think of myself as atheist, but I mean by the term little more than to point out that I do without god in my own life.
Of course the "nonsensical" character of these claims that have exercised Doc Logic's notice are perfectly characteristic of all manner of theological discourse -- and its adherents are as likely to say so as its detractors. To say "god exists" (or not) always seems to really mean something on the order of "god exists, but in a way of existing that isn't like the way common or garden variety things exist otherwise at all but which I'll call existing nonetheless."
See how this gesture is re-enacted among other places in the descriptive omni-predicates by means of which god is presumably articulated for fallen earthbound-types: Omniscience, or a knowing that in being all-knowing isn't like any knowing we know of -- Omnipotence, or power that in being all powerful squares with no phenomenological experience of power available to us -- Omnibenevolence, or a good that calls good things that by any standard are not at all good -- but which somehow are kinds of knowing, power, or goodness after all.
Or, heck, no need to get fancy, it's like the quintessential analogical grappling of a kid hankering after a grasp on godhood who decides god is an old man with a long grey beard in a big stone chair, only, you know, god, so I guess not so much like any old man who has ever existed after all...
Theological discourse is catachretic, there are always only disanalogies at its disposal...
I quite understand that this opens the door for some for some powerful personal practices of creativity and meaning-making.
But for me, if it's all the same to you, I do plenty fine without god: Atheist.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Listen, Transhumanist!
My close friend and ally, the socialist-feminist technoprogressive bioethicist James Hughes recently published a marvellous book, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. An abbreviated version of the technoprogressive program he advocates at the close of his book contains the following recommendations, among others:
There is quite a lot to chew on there, of course (and there is still much more to say about peer-to-peer media formations, strengthening commons formations, facilitating renewable energy and decentralizing basic infrastructure), and I strongly recommend that any readers of Amor Mundi who have not yet done so go out right now and scoop up James's book.
Although I have a few wee quibbles about terminology and formulations and would supplement or differently emphasize some of his recommendations (some suggestions about this appear parenthetically) the fact is I find it very easy to endorse his program, both in its specifics and its spirit. I think it is very important for technoprogressives to think as Hughes does of the ways these different recommendations relate to and depend on one another, and on the ways emerging and disruptive technological developments must change how progressives talk about our values in general.
Radical and social democrats and democratic socialists and others of the democratic left must emphasize what is newly possible, newly dangerous, newly destabilizing in ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle. We must re-think what consent, equity, diversity, fairness, safety, and freedom might come to mean in the ongoing flow of radical technoscientific churn.
But you may have noticed that the program I have quoted here begins with agenda item number [2.0]. Before I quote Hughes's own [1.0], which I have omitted so far, let me say first that I have described James Hughes as a "socialist-feminist technoprogressive bioethicist," but that this is not how James describes himself. This is not to say that James would take umbrage at my characterization of him, particularly, but just that this isn't his own self-description. What James thinks of himself as first of all is what he calls a "democratic transhumanist."
Now, since I think of James as something of a kindred spirit and a very close ally I find it congenial to describe him as technoprogressive because I think of myself that way. But it causes me great discomfort and annoyance to describe him as a "democratic transhumanist" because I wouldn't describe myself in those terms in a million years.
That said, here is the Item of James Hughes' program that I have not yet quoted:
I imagine it goes without saying, but I will say anyway that this is not a part of James's program I can endorse personally. Honestly, I cannot say I even understand it, entirely. Certainly it is hard for me to connect this Item of his program to the urgency of the Items that follow it, nor can I quite get a handle on how it is supposed to make much of a contribution to the work that would facilitate the other Items.
Now, "transhumanists" are technophiles who entertain some wonderfully off-the-wall notions about emerging and projected technologies. In the years since I first read about them I have regularly found that some of the speculations that seemed the most off-the-wall in "transhumanist" conversation ended up migrating in breathtakingly short order to the front pages of mainstream newspapers and scientific journals as very proximate real-world concerns. It is hard not to feel real fondness for "transhumanists" for their knack for this sort of thing.
I've always been attracted to the vitality of marginal intellectual movements like that of the "transhumanists" -- sex radicals, vegans, pacifists, zerowork advocates, militant atheists and the like. Intellectual edge-cities like these are a spur to my own thinking, a check on complacency and orthodoxy, a source of real pleasure, inspiration, provocation, and an endless archive of unexpected insights and perceptions. And as a life-long geek and sf enthusiast the "transhumanists" appeal to many facets of my personality even while many of them have always jarred violently against other facets just as deeply.
I discovered the "transhumanists" (or at any rate some of them) about fifteen years ago, while I was writing my Master's Thesis in Georgia on connections between queer theory and technocultural theory. I have long observed many of the strands of and strains within "transhumanist" discourse since then. I have pondered them with ethnographic fascination, and sometimes with something of a psychotherapist's eye (it is very hard to resist this at times). I have regularly sparred with "transhumanists," especially on a vast range of political questions.
What follows is adapted from something of an open letter I recently posted in an online "transhumanist" forum, on the subject of "movement transhumanism" and the "democratic transhumanism" of its most reasonable variation:
To James Hughes and the other "democratic transhumanists," to my CybDemite colleagues, allies, and friends, and to other presumably "transhumanist"-identified or "transhumanist"-sympathetic technocentrics, technocritics, technoethicists, technophiles and technowhosits here assembled: Listen up!
It seems to me that there is never more than a modest portion of the people who are actually "transhumanist"-identified who actually agree with James Hughes's reasonable published program of "Democratic Transhumanism," especially as a programmatic whole or in the actual sense he intends these recommendations. No doubt some "transhumanist"-types might genuflect in the direction of some of the Items in it, but most will mean in "endorsing" them quite different things than Hughes does himself.
Bring most of Hughes' programmatic Items up in actual "transhumanist"-fora and, as night follows day, the libertopian noise brigade will start barking and whining about Socialists Among Us! Next up, a host of self-described "apolitical" types who will quiescently purr while the most outrageous market fundamentalist pieties and genetic determinist apologias for bigotry are disgorged will then suddenly rise to their feet and pout and stamp about how the "socialists" (by which term they seem to denote anybody to the left of or including the neoliberal free-marketeer Bill Clinton) are perniciously "politicizing" their forum.
Even more crucial than the fact that few actual "transhumanist"-identified people would endorse Hughes's "transhumanist" program is the fact that an incomparably smaller fraction of the people actively participating in the various actually-existing movements to implement versions of Items [2.0 through 5.3] of his program are "transhumanist"-identified themselves or even would -- be honest! -- so identify if anybody made that option available and clear to them.
This is more than a terminological problem. The terminological trouble testifies to deeper conceptual confusions, demographic realities, and poisonous historical legacies.
Do you know what I'm talking about here, "democratic transhumanists" out there? Am I wrong about this? I keep looking and looking but I fear I'm plenty reality-based enough to worry that the numbers just don't seem to add up for a workable consistently unrepentent technoprogressive "transhumanist" caucus, especially so long as "democratic transhumanists" endlessly have to deliver handjobs to the free marketeers and reductionists among them to get anything done at all.
This is nothing against James Hughes himself -- or at least I hate the thought that he would take it that way. As I have often said and will continue to say, I agree with James Hughes on any number of issues. He is right-on with his right-on. And I love the ragtag fugitive fleet of CybDemites and DemTrans types he has gathered together largely by the sweat of his brow...
But I have to wonder just why do libertarians and free-marketeers end up cropping up even in the modest scattered spaces that get built to provide progressive "transhumanish" alternatives to them? Why do retro-futurists and neoconmen end up getting treated as respectable intellectuals in even these more progressive salons where everybody presumably knows better?
Given the conceptual and demographic realities that appear to be in play (and canoodling around with "transhumanist" organizational membership surveys that split market fundamentalists into libertarians, conservatives, upwingers, and the rest doesn't eliminate the underlying reality of right-wing ideological commonalities that conjoin them), most of what it will actually mean to try to implement Hughes's programmatic Item [1.0] on the ground is that:
(One) Any relatively reasonable liberal, moderate, social, and radical democratic technology critics and advocates who actually find their way to and long remain among the "transhumanists" will have to patiently pretend the market libertarians and retro-futurist neoconservatives among them aren't really clueless marauding sociopaths even though we know that they are.
(Two) These democrats will provide the thugs and dupes a respectability among our own academic and activist allies they could never acquire for themselves in a million years.
(Three) The democrats will endlessly dilute their own critiiques and recommendations for the sake of the free marketeers and reductionists even though the democrats know full well there isn't really time for shilly-shallying given the mad-urgency of the issues we are addressing, eg, climate-change, world poverty and malnutrition, imperiled reproductive freedom, digital surveillance, intellectual property regimes, weapons proliferation, etc.
(Four) Democrats will endlessly squander their time explaining political basics to the libertopians (eg, "free trade" is a slogan not a law of nature, since the state is indispensable justice demands that it be democratized not smashed, taxes aren't the same thing as slavery, the US is not a market but a planned economy that stealths its planning under the heading of defense spending and is a welfare state providing welfare mostly for the already rich, etc. etc. etc.) all the while working themselves into incomprehensible explanatory knots to avoid offending wingnuts even when the democrats are making the most manifestly reasonable and obvious sorts of recommendations imaginable.
(Five) Democrats will alienate most sensible allies who have to wonder just why anybody would waste their time with a clatch of clueless smug know-nothing techie-boys who want to bring back the McKinley Adminsitration but this time, you know, with robots so they might have some small chance of actually getting laid occasionally, and
(Six) Democrats will inevitably blunt their own political instincts and best insights through their ongoing association with these reactionaries.
Here's an easy-to-remember rule for technoprogressives whose standards have been scrambled and ears have been tinned by overlong association with technophiliac free-marketeers: No panel or committee with more than one market libertarian or neoliberal/neoconservative market fundamentalist on it for every four members on it in total will reflect anything but the most irrelevantly parochial perspective imaginable for a task force that would address its recommendations to the world beyond American technophilia. You'll have to pay close attention in making these determinations, since many free marketeers won't actually admit to their market fundamentalism in mixed company. You will actually have to read what they say before you decide they belong on your panel, or editorial board, or task force. I know that's a lot to ask....
Look, techno-progressive sensibilities in the "transhumanist movement" have Stockholm Syndrome.
There is an undeniable widespread technophobia across the political and cultural left that has been inspired, reasonably enough, by the real and relentless corporatism, militarism, harmful health-hyping, and environmental catastrophe with which technological development has come to be freighted the long twentieth century through. This has made it quite difficult to make the traditional revolutionary left case for the emancipatory power of science and technology.
In the 80s and 90s it seemed that only a few sf geeks and socially alienated types took things like space elevators, rejuvination medicine and replicative nanoscale technology seriously.
I know. I was there.
Finding a person who even knew what these things were practically ensured you were talking to someone who thinks Ayn Rand is a serious writer. (Newsflash: She isn't. She is instead a manifestly, terminally, howlingly, embarrasingly, in fact earthshatteringly bad writer. Please make a note of it.)
All this was, you know, just a terrible historical accident. It was a specific conjunction of disaffected temperaments, fatally exacerbated by the irrational exuberance of the dot.com era, when WIRED-culture embraced libertopia and extropia and momentarily made it look like short-sighted stupidity conjoined with uncritical technophilia and bottomless brainless greed might manage for once to build a house worth living in. (Newsflash: It didn't. And it never will. Please make a note of it.)
Technoprogressive sensibilities lurking and making-do among the "transhumanists" can put all of that behind them now. You really can, people.
The digital, biomedical, nanoscale developments you've been worried about and planning for and trying to explain to your well-meaning but wrongheaded uncritically technophobic peers are now so proximate that everybody is talking about them now. Many people are making the connections that have long enthralled lefty technocentrics and sent them into the cold comfort of the bomb builders, statisticians, and market ideologues of libertechian "transhumanism."
These aborning conversations appear largely to be bypassing the "transhumanists" altogether, except for occasionally using them as rhetorical straw men to torch.
And why wouldn't they?
So many among the "transhumanist"-identified were and remain market fundamentalists, facile genetic determinists, climate-change deniars, corporate-military apologists, boys-with-toys, parochial know-nothings. Due to the efforts of amazing people like James Hughes (whose theoretical work and tireless organizational efforts many Old School "transhumanists" heatedly bemoan and disdain, even as -- it seems to me -- he more or less single-handedly keeps their tired asses on the cultural radar-screen in the first place) "transhumanism" is in fact more than it once was, is more than I thought it could be, and has something more of a chance at making a positive mark on a future worth living in than I thought possible.
But I don't think it was worth it, and I don't think it is enough.
I want to talk about technology and development in places where there are lots of women around, where many languages are spoken, where there are Greens, and skeptics, and nonjudgmental people of faith, and perverts, and poets, and punks, and policy-wonks, and pacifists, and folks with small modest businesses they love, and veteran activists, and theory-heads. I like to be around people who think of themselves as citizens of the world already. The left has no problem bringing scientists, atheists, activists, queers, witches, wonks, graphic artists, and drug-experimentalists together already. Progressives in "transhumanist" spaces are more welcome than ever before, but they are still endlessly careful and defensive. Why? Progressives invented progress, you know? Progress already defines us. There is just no reason to make nicey-nice with the libertopian libertechian sociopaths anymore.
Those "transhumanish"-types with more genial temperaments than my own will recoil at my bluntness. They will puzzle over my "negativity" as they hum blandly along into irrelevance or worse. They will scowl at my incivility in refusing to be civil with the uncivilized.
I'm sorry. I honestly am. I don't mean to be forever griping at and upsetting most the people who I actually like best among "transhumanist"-identified folks. But there are only so many obvious stumbles and disappointments I can take.
Too many of my disappointments are coming from the best among the "transhumanist"-identified people I know, while so many of my pleasant surprises are coming from academics and activists on the left who are growing more literate in and sympathetic to radical science and technology discourse, all without the endless garbage and oafishness of the "transhumanist" default culture.
The fact that I'm writing this down and not just walking out on you all given all these worries and complaints should tell you how committed I feel to my friendship with some among you....
So. Listen, "transhumanist":
Show me what I'm missing here. Show me how I'm wrong. Show me why "transhumanism" with all its pathologies and troubled legacies and weirdnesses really is the most fertile soil in which to plant the seeds that need planting, to organize and mobilize the energies that would implement Items [2.0-5.3] of Hughes's program. I agree with James that something like his program is precisely where we need to be going if emerging and ongoing disruptive technological development is to fulfill many of its emancipatory promises.
So, reassure me. You better believe if I need this reassurance then almost anybody else you'd want in your corner will need it, too. If you can't, cut bait and start again. I'm telling you, the world is changing. Different conversations, different coalitions are possible now.
"2.1 Defend the rights of all human beings oppressed because of their bodies
2.1a Support rights for great apes, dolphins and whales
2.1b Guarantee the right of all persons to control our own bodies and minds
We need not only a broader concept of the citizen, the bearers of rights, but also a more radical understanding of the rights those citizens can claim. Self-ownership should include the right of sane adults to change and enhance their bodies and brains, to own their own genes, to take recreational drugs, and to control their own deaths. Procreative liberty, an extension of the right to control our body and life, should include the right to use germinal choice technologies to ensure the best possible life [one must add: on terms arising out of a scene of informed, nonduressed decision, rather than on terms imposed by elites in the name of some parochial conception of "optimality" --ndc] for our children. Strong democratic government is required not only to protect these rights, but to ensure that the technologies are tested for safety, and that consumers understand their risks and benefits. We need to ensure all citizens have access to these options, not just the affluent....
3.1 Support science education and federal research into transhuman technologies
3.2 Promote rigorous, independent safety testing of [emerging -- ndc] technologies, rejecting both free-market laissez-faire and Luddite bans.... International agencies should be empowered to enforce global regulations on the safety of industrial and medical technologies. The U.S. Congress should re-establish the Office of Technology Assessment, and the size and mandate of the EPA and FDA should be expanded to rapidly vet the safety of new industrial materials, drugs and medical devices.... [one must add: we should facilitate the democratization of this deliberative development by using peer-to-peer (p2p) architectures to implement citizen juries and impact assessments as well as access to knowledge (a2k) mandates to abolish secrets of state and proprietary secrets that distort the scene of informed, nonduressed consent in matters of technoscientific oversight -- ndc]
3.3 Protect genetic self-ownership, and the genetic and intellectual commons from patent madness....
4.1 Build and defend universal health systems with choices....
4.2 Establish a guaranteed basic income and expand the social wage....
5.1 We need global agreements not just to expand "free trade," but also to protect worker rights and set environmental and safety standards for agriculture, industry and medicine. The United Nations needs the authority to tax corporations and nations, and the power to collect those taxes. We need to add a second chamber to the United Nations that represents the world on a population basis, not just as nation-states. We need a permanent, standing international army with a clear mandate to enforce world law, starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and reform the UN Security Council to make it a more legitimate body for governing world force.
5.2 We need to strengthen the capacity of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Program to disseminate new technologies to the developing world. Agencies in the developed world should expand research into technologies appropriate to the needs of the developing world, and support programs of technology transfer to the developing world. International institutions such as WHO, FAO, UNCTAD, UNDP, and UNESCO [I would add: the ILO -- ndc] should be expanded to support technological diffusion in the developing world....
5.3 The world needs international bodies like the International Atomic Energy Agency to be expanded into a global infrastructure of technological and industrial regulation capable of controlling the health and environmental risks from new technologies. We need to expand programs like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the British and American programs monitoring near earth objects into global programs to monitor the health of ecosystem and the threat from asteroids.
There is quite a lot to chew on there, of course (and there is still much more to say about peer-to-peer media formations, strengthening commons formations, facilitating renewable energy and decentralizing basic infrastructure), and I strongly recommend that any readers of Amor Mundi who have not yet done so go out right now and scoop up James's book.
Although I have a few wee quibbles about terminology and formulations and would supplement or differently emphasize some of his recommendations (some suggestions about this appear parenthetically) the fact is I find it very easy to endorse his program, both in its specifics and its spirit. I think it is very important for technoprogressives to think as Hughes does of the ways these different recommendations relate to and depend on one another, and on the ways emerging and disruptive technological developments must change how progressives talk about our values in general.
Radical and social democrats and democratic socialists and others of the democratic left must emphasize what is newly possible, newly dangerous, newly destabilizing in ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle. We must re-think what consent, equity, diversity, fairness, safety, and freedom might come to mean in the ongoing flow of radical technoscientific churn.
But you may have noticed that the program I have quoted here begins with agenda item number [2.0]. Before I quote Hughes's own [1.0], which I have omitted so far, let me say first that I have described James Hughes as a "socialist-feminist technoprogressive bioethicist," but that this is not how James describes himself. This is not to say that James would take umbrage at my characterization of him, particularly, but just that this isn't his own self-description. What James thinks of himself as first of all is what he calls a "democratic transhumanist."
Now, since I think of James as something of a kindred spirit and a very close ally I find it congenial to describe him as technoprogressive because I think of myself that way. But it causes me great discomfort and annoyance to describe him as a "democratic transhumanist" because I wouldn't describe myself in those terms in a million years.
That said, here is the Item of James Hughes' program that I have not yet quoted:
1.0 Build the Transhumanist Movement
We need transhumanist think tanks, journals, conferences and lobbyists. We need transhumanists meeting the bioLuddites toe-to-toe in the public square, defending the rights of persons to use reason to control their own affairs. We need transhumanist clubs and study groups on the campuses, and in every city in every country, educating the public about the threats and promises to come. We need a movement fighting for a positive future, and not just fighting the future.
I imagine it goes without saying, but I will say anyway that this is not a part of James's program I can endorse personally. Honestly, I cannot say I even understand it, entirely. Certainly it is hard for me to connect this Item of his program to the urgency of the Items that follow it, nor can I quite get a handle on how it is supposed to make much of a contribution to the work that would facilitate the other Items.
Now, "transhumanists" are technophiles who entertain some wonderfully off-the-wall notions about emerging and projected technologies. In the years since I first read about them I have regularly found that some of the speculations that seemed the most off-the-wall in "transhumanist" conversation ended up migrating in breathtakingly short order to the front pages of mainstream newspapers and scientific journals as very proximate real-world concerns. It is hard not to feel real fondness for "transhumanists" for their knack for this sort of thing.
I've always been attracted to the vitality of marginal intellectual movements like that of the "transhumanists" -- sex radicals, vegans, pacifists, zerowork advocates, militant atheists and the like. Intellectual edge-cities like these are a spur to my own thinking, a check on complacency and orthodoxy, a source of real pleasure, inspiration, provocation, and an endless archive of unexpected insights and perceptions. And as a life-long geek and sf enthusiast the "transhumanists" appeal to many facets of my personality even while many of them have always jarred violently against other facets just as deeply.
I discovered the "transhumanists" (or at any rate some of them) about fifteen years ago, while I was writing my Master's Thesis in Georgia on connections between queer theory and technocultural theory. I have long observed many of the strands of and strains within "transhumanist" discourse since then. I have pondered them with ethnographic fascination, and sometimes with something of a psychotherapist's eye (it is very hard to resist this at times). I have regularly sparred with "transhumanists," especially on a vast range of political questions.
What follows is adapted from something of an open letter I recently posted in an online "transhumanist" forum, on the subject of "movement transhumanism" and the "democratic transhumanism" of its most reasonable variation:
To James Hughes and the other "democratic transhumanists," to my CybDemite colleagues, allies, and friends, and to other presumably "transhumanist"-identified or "transhumanist"-sympathetic technocentrics, technocritics, technoethicists, technophiles and technowhosits here assembled: Listen up!
It seems to me that there is never more than a modest portion of the people who are actually "transhumanist"-identified who actually agree with James Hughes's reasonable published program of "Democratic Transhumanism," especially as a programmatic whole or in the actual sense he intends these recommendations. No doubt some "transhumanist"-types might genuflect in the direction of some of the Items in it, but most will mean in "endorsing" them quite different things than Hughes does himself.
Bring most of Hughes' programmatic Items up in actual "transhumanist"-fora and, as night follows day, the libertopian noise brigade will start barking and whining about Socialists Among Us! Next up, a host of self-described "apolitical" types who will quiescently purr while the most outrageous market fundamentalist pieties and genetic determinist apologias for bigotry are disgorged will then suddenly rise to their feet and pout and stamp about how the "socialists" (by which term they seem to denote anybody to the left of or including the neoliberal free-marketeer Bill Clinton) are perniciously "politicizing" their forum.
Even more crucial than the fact that few actual "transhumanist"-identified people would endorse Hughes's "transhumanist" program is the fact that an incomparably smaller fraction of the people actively participating in the various actually-existing movements to implement versions of Items [2.0 through 5.3] of his program are "transhumanist"-identified themselves or even would -- be honest! -- so identify if anybody made that option available and clear to them.
This is more than a terminological problem. The terminological trouble testifies to deeper conceptual confusions, demographic realities, and poisonous historical legacies.
Do you know what I'm talking about here, "democratic transhumanists" out there? Am I wrong about this? I keep looking and looking but I fear I'm plenty reality-based enough to worry that the numbers just don't seem to add up for a workable consistently unrepentent technoprogressive "transhumanist" caucus, especially so long as "democratic transhumanists" endlessly have to deliver handjobs to the free marketeers and reductionists among them to get anything done at all.
This is nothing against James Hughes himself -- or at least I hate the thought that he would take it that way. As I have often said and will continue to say, I agree with James Hughes on any number of issues. He is right-on with his right-on. And I love the ragtag fugitive fleet of CybDemites and DemTrans types he has gathered together largely by the sweat of his brow...
But I have to wonder just why do libertarians and free-marketeers end up cropping up even in the modest scattered spaces that get built to provide progressive "transhumanish" alternatives to them? Why do retro-futurists and neoconmen end up getting treated as respectable intellectuals in even these more progressive salons where everybody presumably knows better?
Given the conceptual and demographic realities that appear to be in play (and canoodling around with "transhumanist" organizational membership surveys that split market fundamentalists into libertarians, conservatives, upwingers, and the rest doesn't eliminate the underlying reality of right-wing ideological commonalities that conjoin them), most of what it will actually mean to try to implement Hughes's programmatic Item [1.0] on the ground is that:
(One) Any relatively reasonable liberal, moderate, social, and radical democratic technology critics and advocates who actually find their way to and long remain among the "transhumanists" will have to patiently pretend the market libertarians and retro-futurist neoconservatives among them aren't really clueless marauding sociopaths even though we know that they are.
(Two) These democrats will provide the thugs and dupes a respectability among our own academic and activist allies they could never acquire for themselves in a million years.
(Three) The democrats will endlessly dilute their own critiiques and recommendations for the sake of the free marketeers and reductionists even though the democrats know full well there isn't really time for shilly-shallying given the mad-urgency of the issues we are addressing, eg, climate-change, world poverty and malnutrition, imperiled reproductive freedom, digital surveillance, intellectual property regimes, weapons proliferation, etc.
(Four) Democrats will endlessly squander their time explaining political basics to the libertopians (eg, "free trade" is a slogan not a law of nature, since the state is indispensable justice demands that it be democratized not smashed, taxes aren't the same thing as slavery, the US is not a market but a planned economy that stealths its planning under the heading of defense spending and is a welfare state providing welfare mostly for the already rich, etc. etc. etc.) all the while working themselves into incomprehensible explanatory knots to avoid offending wingnuts even when the democrats are making the most manifestly reasonable and obvious sorts of recommendations imaginable.
(Five) Democrats will alienate most sensible allies who have to wonder just why anybody would waste their time with a clatch of clueless smug know-nothing techie-boys who want to bring back the McKinley Adminsitration but this time, you know, with robots so they might have some small chance of actually getting laid occasionally, and
(Six) Democrats will inevitably blunt their own political instincts and best insights through their ongoing association with these reactionaries.
Here's an easy-to-remember rule for technoprogressives whose standards have been scrambled and ears have been tinned by overlong association with technophiliac free-marketeers: No panel or committee with more than one market libertarian or neoliberal/neoconservative market fundamentalist on it for every four members on it in total will reflect anything but the most irrelevantly parochial perspective imaginable for a task force that would address its recommendations to the world beyond American technophilia. You'll have to pay close attention in making these determinations, since many free marketeers won't actually admit to their market fundamentalism in mixed company. You will actually have to read what they say before you decide they belong on your panel, or editorial board, or task force. I know that's a lot to ask....
Look, techno-progressive sensibilities in the "transhumanist movement" have Stockholm Syndrome.
There is an undeniable widespread technophobia across the political and cultural left that has been inspired, reasonably enough, by the real and relentless corporatism, militarism, harmful health-hyping, and environmental catastrophe with which technological development has come to be freighted the long twentieth century through. This has made it quite difficult to make the traditional revolutionary left case for the emancipatory power of science and technology.
In the 80s and 90s it seemed that only a few sf geeks and socially alienated types took things like space elevators, rejuvination medicine and replicative nanoscale technology seriously.
I know. I was there.
Finding a person who even knew what these things were practically ensured you were talking to someone who thinks Ayn Rand is a serious writer. (Newsflash: She isn't. She is instead a manifestly, terminally, howlingly, embarrasingly, in fact earthshatteringly bad writer. Please make a note of it.)
All this was, you know, just a terrible historical accident. It was a specific conjunction of disaffected temperaments, fatally exacerbated by the irrational exuberance of the dot.com era, when WIRED-culture embraced libertopia and extropia and momentarily made it look like short-sighted stupidity conjoined with uncritical technophilia and bottomless brainless greed might manage for once to build a house worth living in. (Newsflash: It didn't. And it never will. Please make a note of it.)
Technoprogressive sensibilities lurking and making-do among the "transhumanists" can put all of that behind them now. You really can, people.
The digital, biomedical, nanoscale developments you've been worried about and planning for and trying to explain to your well-meaning but wrongheaded uncritically technophobic peers are now so proximate that everybody is talking about them now. Many people are making the connections that have long enthralled lefty technocentrics and sent them into the cold comfort of the bomb builders, statisticians, and market ideologues of libertechian "transhumanism."
These aborning conversations appear largely to be bypassing the "transhumanists" altogether, except for occasionally using them as rhetorical straw men to torch.
And why wouldn't they?
So many among the "transhumanist"-identified were and remain market fundamentalists, facile genetic determinists, climate-change deniars, corporate-military apologists, boys-with-toys, parochial know-nothings. Due to the efforts of amazing people like James Hughes (whose theoretical work and tireless organizational efforts many Old School "transhumanists" heatedly bemoan and disdain, even as -- it seems to me -- he more or less single-handedly keeps their tired asses on the cultural radar-screen in the first place) "transhumanism" is in fact more than it once was, is more than I thought it could be, and has something more of a chance at making a positive mark on a future worth living in than I thought possible.
But I don't think it was worth it, and I don't think it is enough.
I want to talk about technology and development in places where there are lots of women around, where many languages are spoken, where there are Greens, and skeptics, and nonjudgmental people of faith, and perverts, and poets, and punks, and policy-wonks, and pacifists, and folks with small modest businesses they love, and veteran activists, and theory-heads. I like to be around people who think of themselves as citizens of the world already. The left has no problem bringing scientists, atheists, activists, queers, witches, wonks, graphic artists, and drug-experimentalists together already. Progressives in "transhumanist" spaces are more welcome than ever before, but they are still endlessly careful and defensive. Why? Progressives invented progress, you know? Progress already defines us. There is just no reason to make nicey-nice with the libertopian libertechian sociopaths anymore.
Those "transhumanish"-types with more genial temperaments than my own will recoil at my bluntness. They will puzzle over my "negativity" as they hum blandly along into irrelevance or worse. They will scowl at my incivility in refusing to be civil with the uncivilized.
I'm sorry. I honestly am. I don't mean to be forever griping at and upsetting most the people who I actually like best among "transhumanist"-identified folks. But there are only so many obvious stumbles and disappointments I can take.
Too many of my disappointments are coming from the best among the "transhumanist"-identified people I know, while so many of my pleasant surprises are coming from academics and activists on the left who are growing more literate in and sympathetic to radical science and technology discourse, all without the endless garbage and oafishness of the "transhumanist" default culture.
The fact that I'm writing this down and not just walking out on you all given all these worries and complaints should tell you how committed I feel to my friendship with some among you....
So. Listen, "transhumanist":
Show me what I'm missing here. Show me how I'm wrong. Show me why "transhumanism" with all its pathologies and troubled legacies and weirdnesses really is the most fertile soil in which to plant the seeds that need planting, to organize and mobilize the energies that would implement Items [2.0-5.3] of Hughes's program. I agree with James that something like his program is precisely where we need to be going if emerging and ongoing disruptive technological development is to fulfill many of its emancipatory promises.
So, reassure me. You better believe if I need this reassurance then almost anybody else you'd want in your corner will need it, too. If you can't, cut bait and start again. I'm telling you, the world is changing. Different conversations, different coalitions are possible now.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Saving My Bacon
I've been a cheerful vegetarian for twenty years now, and at this point the very thought of eating most meat actually wrinkles up my nose involuntarily in distaste... But I have to admit that to this day for some reason the smell of bacon frying in a skillet stands the hairs up on the back of my neck with lust and something like heartbreak.
So, when I read an article about the near-term prospect of meat grown in vats from a single animal cell "When Meat Is Not Murder," by Ian Sample in yesterday's UK Guardian my very first thought was... Ethical bacon? Sign me up!
Of course, the idea of "vat-grown" meat will have been a staple of science fiction for long decades before it manages finally to become a staple in everyday diets, if it ever does (with futurological crystal balls, it is good to remember that, in general, they always seem to foresee developments "twenty years from now," a twenty year horizon that curiously adjusts forward with the passage of present years). The notion of scaling up a single animal cell into a petri dish's worth of meat-mush and onward thence to a veritable mush-zeppelin of mystery meat with a fork in it ready to feed a hungry grateful world has been deliriously chewed over by futurologists mouthing off ever since I was a kid reading Omni Magazine, even as it never seems actually to arrive at the actual mouths actually chewing stage.
Among the delirious thought-experiments one stumbles onto now, in an era in which puppies can be made to glow in the dark and human ears sprout from the backs of mice, is that vat-grown bacon might not just be less offensive to the ethical allergies of vegetarians like me, but even gengineered to circumvent conventional allergies as well, not to mention, say, reduce the awful fat-content of natural varieties presently on offer or be infused like Froot Loops with who knows what sorts of lovely unexpected nutritional benefits besides?
As always, it is probably more sensible to remember, as futurologists themselves rarely manage to do, the distinctions between science fiction and science proper, and to treat the former as meditations on the hopes and anxieties and problems occasioned by the latter rather than some kind of predictive, policy-making, or promotional literature to which the latter is in any important sense indebted.
Now, I've been eating various veggie-burgers and tofu-pups on offer since the day I became a vegetarian, and I'll admit that for a while there neither the cost nor the taste of the products exactly thrilled me. But these days alternative quasi-sausage (quausage?) patties and veggie crumble and fungi-based non-soy chicken patties have me eating more meat-substitute than I ever ate of the real thing back when I ate it at all. Not only do all these products manage often enough to be delicious and reasonably cheap, but they tend to be rich in protein and have a fraction of the fat of the meats for which they presumably substitute. Maybe my memory of the originals is no longer exactly reliable, but my partner Eric isn't a vegetarian but even he prefers veggie corn-dogs, to the real ones...
Anyway, even if ethical vat-grown versions of sausage or beef or chicken were to arrive on the scene one day I wouldn't feel much of an itch myself to make the switch to them, for the lack of any reason to do so and because I like the nutritional profile of the substitutes already on offer. If the vat-grown versions also managed to improve the nutritional profile, though, I do want to emphasize that the ethical concerns that make me an ethical vegetarian now would inspire not a split-second's hesitation in this ethical vegetarian.
And frankly, even without nutritional tweaking I would leap at the chance to eat ethical bacon, if only occasionally. Nobody has quite figured out the veggie bacon thing yet, sad to say.
In the Guardian article linked above Kerry Bennett, a spokesperson for the Vegetarian Society points out that "this [development] has the potential to decrease the number of meat-producing animals in factory farms." One has to worry about taking futurological handwaving too seriously in the here-and-now so that it becomes a pretext for dismissing actually urgent problems requiring fraught political struggles in the present, fancying that techo-fixes promised by futurologists with their fingers permanently crossed will effortlessly sublime these struggles away in the immediate future, but it is easy to see why the prospect of meat-construction from insensitive cells rather than the present horror of meat-processing of sensitive animals might be foremost in the minds of ethical vegetarians and animal rights activists.
I do find it curious that despite her concession of these promising implications, Bennett goes on to emphasize instead that vat-grown meat "won't appeal to someone who gave up meat because they think it's morally wrong to eat flesh or someone who doesn't want to eat anything unnatural." If eating meat grown in a vat from a single cell of an animal (one who, in principle, would not even have to be killed to provide the cell) rather than from an actual corpse would still constitute an immoral consumption of flesh it is very difficult to see how eating seitan prepared to emulate flesh would not as well, not to mention things like wearing a wool sweater, or taking a non-digital photograph (all film contains gelatin), using most toothbrushes or anti-freeze, flipping through the pages of a leather-bound book, or the use of indefinitely many other commonplace objects that rarely attract the attention of any but the most ferociously committed activist vegans should not likewise inspire Bennett's disdain... Do they? And if not, why not?
As for the curious suggestion that vat-grown meat would not be "natural," one wonders if Bennett suspects that cell-cultures somehow constitute a supernatural procedure? I concede we're talking about futurological fancies, but we're talking cells here, people, not ectoplasm!
Certainly I agree with Bennett that there would be "a number of question marks regarding the origins of the cells and the method of harvesting," and that one would want a lot of study and regulation by legitimate accountable authorities (and you better believe I don't mean the companies themselves that stand to profit most from these developments offering us "every assurance" as to the health and safety of their profits, er, I mean, products). Even many of the most popular already-existing readily-available meat-substitute products mass marketed to vegetarians trouble me ethically when I contemplate their wasteful packaging, their sodium and preservative contents, the conditions of laborers working in the context of extractive-industrial-petrochemical factory farms and food processing and transportation systems.
If these products were ever actually to arrive on the scene (by no means an assured thing, whatever the apparent assurance of futurologists), approved by legitimate consensus science and their production and circulation regulated by legitimate accountable authorities it is difficult to see why another layer of concern about the "naturalness" or not of these products should enter into our speculations. I'm always mordantly amused by the "back to nature" types among the vegetarians I know. Most of these seem either blandly oblivious or even quite willfully to refuse to think too hard about what it means to live an "all natural" lifestyle made possible by faux-meat substitute foods, faux-fur and synthetic-material jackets, faux-leather shoes, and nutritional supplements. All culture is prosthetic, all ritual is artifice, including cultures devoted to the ritual disavowal of their artifactuality.
Scratch a vegetarian, find a cyborg.
So, when I read an article about the near-term prospect of meat grown in vats from a single animal cell "When Meat Is Not Murder," by Ian Sample in yesterday's UK Guardian my very first thought was... Ethical bacon? Sign me up!
Of course, the idea of "vat-grown" meat will have been a staple of science fiction for long decades before it manages finally to become a staple in everyday diets, if it ever does (with futurological crystal balls, it is good to remember that, in general, they always seem to foresee developments "twenty years from now," a twenty year horizon that curiously adjusts forward with the passage of present years). The notion of scaling up a single animal cell into a petri dish's worth of meat-mush and onward thence to a veritable mush-zeppelin of mystery meat with a fork in it ready to feed a hungry grateful world has been deliriously chewed over by futurologists mouthing off ever since I was a kid reading Omni Magazine, even as it never seems actually to arrive at the actual mouths actually chewing stage.
Among the delirious thought-experiments one stumbles onto now, in an era in which puppies can be made to glow in the dark and human ears sprout from the backs of mice, is that vat-grown bacon might not just be less offensive to the ethical allergies of vegetarians like me, but even gengineered to circumvent conventional allergies as well, not to mention, say, reduce the awful fat-content of natural varieties presently on offer or be infused like Froot Loops with who knows what sorts of lovely unexpected nutritional benefits besides?
As always, it is probably more sensible to remember, as futurologists themselves rarely manage to do, the distinctions between science fiction and science proper, and to treat the former as meditations on the hopes and anxieties and problems occasioned by the latter rather than some kind of predictive, policy-making, or promotional literature to which the latter is in any important sense indebted.
Now, I've been eating various veggie-burgers and tofu-pups on offer since the day I became a vegetarian, and I'll admit that for a while there neither the cost nor the taste of the products exactly thrilled me. But these days alternative quasi-sausage (quausage?) patties and veggie crumble and fungi-based non-soy chicken patties have me eating more meat-substitute than I ever ate of the real thing back when I ate it at all. Not only do all these products manage often enough to be delicious and reasonably cheap, but they tend to be rich in protein and have a fraction of the fat of the meats for which they presumably substitute. Maybe my memory of the originals is no longer exactly reliable, but my partner Eric isn't a vegetarian but even he prefers veggie corn-dogs, to the real ones...
Anyway, even if ethical vat-grown versions of sausage or beef or chicken were to arrive on the scene one day I wouldn't feel much of an itch myself to make the switch to them, for the lack of any reason to do so and because I like the nutritional profile of the substitutes already on offer. If the vat-grown versions also managed to improve the nutritional profile, though, I do want to emphasize that the ethical concerns that make me an ethical vegetarian now would inspire not a split-second's hesitation in this ethical vegetarian.
And frankly, even without nutritional tweaking I would leap at the chance to eat ethical bacon, if only occasionally. Nobody has quite figured out the veggie bacon thing yet, sad to say.
In the Guardian article linked above Kerry Bennett, a spokesperson for the Vegetarian Society points out that "this [development] has the potential to decrease the number of meat-producing animals in factory farms." One has to worry about taking futurological handwaving too seriously in the here-and-now so that it becomes a pretext for dismissing actually urgent problems requiring fraught political struggles in the present, fancying that techo-fixes promised by futurologists with their fingers permanently crossed will effortlessly sublime these struggles away in the immediate future, but it is easy to see why the prospect of meat-construction from insensitive cells rather than the present horror of meat-processing of sensitive animals might be foremost in the minds of ethical vegetarians and animal rights activists.
I do find it curious that despite her concession of these promising implications, Bennett goes on to emphasize instead that vat-grown meat "won't appeal to someone who gave up meat because they think it's morally wrong to eat flesh or someone who doesn't want to eat anything unnatural." If eating meat grown in a vat from a single cell of an animal (one who, in principle, would not even have to be killed to provide the cell) rather than from an actual corpse would still constitute an immoral consumption of flesh it is very difficult to see how eating seitan prepared to emulate flesh would not as well, not to mention things like wearing a wool sweater, or taking a non-digital photograph (all film contains gelatin), using most toothbrushes or anti-freeze, flipping through the pages of a leather-bound book, or the use of indefinitely many other commonplace objects that rarely attract the attention of any but the most ferociously committed activist vegans should not likewise inspire Bennett's disdain... Do they? And if not, why not?
As for the curious suggestion that vat-grown meat would not be "natural," one wonders if Bennett suspects that cell-cultures somehow constitute a supernatural procedure? I concede we're talking about futurological fancies, but we're talking cells here, people, not ectoplasm!
Certainly I agree with Bennett that there would be "a number of question marks regarding the origins of the cells and the method of harvesting," and that one would want a lot of study and regulation by legitimate accountable authorities (and you better believe I don't mean the companies themselves that stand to profit most from these developments offering us "every assurance" as to the health and safety of their profits, er, I mean, products). Even many of the most popular already-existing readily-available meat-substitute products mass marketed to vegetarians trouble me ethically when I contemplate their wasteful packaging, their sodium and preservative contents, the conditions of laborers working in the context of extractive-industrial-petrochemical factory farms and food processing and transportation systems.
If these products were ever actually to arrive on the scene (by no means an assured thing, whatever the apparent assurance of futurologists), approved by legitimate consensus science and their production and circulation regulated by legitimate accountable authorities it is difficult to see why another layer of concern about the "naturalness" or not of these products should enter into our speculations. I'm always mordantly amused by the "back to nature" types among the vegetarians I know. Most of these seem either blandly oblivious or even quite willfully to refuse to think too hard about what it means to live an "all natural" lifestyle made possible by faux-meat substitute foods, faux-fur and synthetic-material jackets, faux-leather shoes, and nutritional supplements. All culture is prosthetic, all ritual is artifice, including cultures devoted to the ritual disavowal of their artifactuality.
Scratch a vegetarian, find a cyborg.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Bigotry's New Frontier: The Latest Bioconservative Campaign
In a new public relations campaign, the Christian bioconservative Center for Bioethics and Culture is now encouraging its supporters to purchase and sport blue wristbands emblazoned with the words "THE HUMAN FUTURE."
What, you may be wondering, do these bioconservatives mean by the human future?
Well, one thing we can say of it from the outset is that there would appear to be only one future that is a "human" one for the CBC.
How fortunate for us all that there are bioconservatives on hand to let the rest of us know all the many kinds of humans that fail now and will come to fail in the future to pass muster as proper humans.
Wearing this bracelet, say the organizers of “The Human Future” campaign, is “raising the red flag” [this despite the fact that the bracelet is blue] “when human dignity is at stake.”
Always remember that there is a decisive family resemblance between the conventional anti-choice politics of social conservatives, which would hijack the concept of "life" in the service of projects to take away every woman’s right to make informed healthcare choices -- and the efforts of bioconservatives to hijack the concept of human "dignity" in the service of projects to ban and restrict therapeutic choices and avenues of medical research for everyone. And all this just to better reflect their own parochial interests and tastes. (And usually it is literally the same people who are making these parallel arguments.)
"The Human Future" campaign, the CBC continues "is about celebrating the beauty and complexity of human life in all of its various stages from the zygote to the death bed." The enthusiasm of bioconservatives for fetal not-quite-yet persons and vegetative no-longer-quite-still persons is, of course, too well known. No doubt it is a matter of coincidence that in speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves bioconservatives can multiply their own voices incomparably, especially in an era when fewer and fewer people otherwise seem to make choices and voice opinions these bioconservatives approve of.
True to form, the promised bioconservative "celebration of complexity" turns its attentions soon enough to the policing of every trait, every capacity, every technique, every value, every lifeway that nudges the least bit outside the straightjacket of customs and norms that define "dignity" for bioconservatives in particular. Apparently this is the sort of "celebration" that is possible only so long as everybody is attending exactly the same party, whether they want to or not. One recalls H.L. Mencken’s definition of "puritanism" as "[t]he haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
"CBC is about equipping people to face the challenges of the 21st Century and we use all the tools necessary to raise awareness about these issues," declare the campaign’s organizers. Permit me a moment to relish the rich commonplace hypocrisy of bioconservative technophobes enthusing even figuratively about "equip[ment]" and "tools"… and now let’s look a bit more closely at "the issues" about which the CBC would raise our awareness.
"[I]ssues related to the taking, making, and faking of human life are the issues that will dominate the 21st Century," the CBC assures us.
One is disappointed to discover that lives lost to back alley abortions, lives lost to sexually transmitted diseases left unaddressed in "abstinence only" sex-education programs, lives lost to treatable diseases left untreated among uninsured Americans and among countless people in the developing world due to the impact of intellectual property regimes beholden to the profits of Big Pharma, lives lost to starvation in the midst of abundance, lives of soldiers and civilians lost in illegal wars, lives lost to deliriously proliferating handguns, lives lost to deteriorating environmental standards, safety standards, healthcare standards, lives lost to multiplying Greenhouse storms… that none of these lives lost would appear to represent the sort of takings of life that exercise the bioconservative imagination, particularly, if the CBC website is any kind of guide to their preoccupations. Now, aborted fetuses… well, boy, that’s another matter!
As for makings of life that represent 21st Century "issues," assisted reproductive techniques are apparently very troubling, even when they eventuate in perfectly recognizable fetuses. For issue that is not "an issue," what is wanted, don’t you know, are very particularly the fetuses that conventional couples arrive at through coupling conventionally. Also, cloned kittens as pets are a problem. Designer super babies and clone armies are also unexpectedly something to worry about quite a bit, even if you are not a writer of dystopian science fiction novels. Curiously enough, worrying about such B-movie monsters turns out to provide all sorts of otherwise counterintuitive insight as to why a pregnant woman shouldn’t be able to know whether or not the fetus she is carrying has phenylketonuria and why we shouldn’t spend money to cure Parkinson’s Disease if embryonic stem-cells are involved. I had no idea!
Most intriguing of all, of course, is the suggestion that in the 21st Century one burning "issue" will be that some apparently living humans will be, in fact, just “faking human life.” Clearly, the bioconsevatives are trying to get out ahead of the 21st Century Cylon Problem. One hesitates to ask just what kinds of genetic and prosthetic medical therapies will be enough to nudge some humans toward the status of "fake human life." Perhaps I should rethink that Lasik treatment, especially since I've already got that whole queer problem happening (why, I'm probably just a fake human just fake living already!).
I wonder, will these 21st Century fake humans know that they’re fakes themselves or will only the bioconservatives know? Just think how terrible it would be to be living your life, muddling along with your modest hopes and pleasures and frustrations, thinking all along you’re a human being with, you know, a human life, and then discover all the sudden that because you’re a medically delayed twin (clone), or the product of some other assisted reproduction technique, or the beneficiary of some genetic therapy or whatever that therefore you’re not a human at all, not living at all, not a rights-bearing, dignity-inhering human at all, but a fake after all! If only more people had donned the bioconservative blue bracelets while there was still time!
This bioconservative campaign looks like to me like something of an historical first: A declaration of pre-emptive bigotry against certain kinds of human beings who don't even exist yet.
One would have thought their hostility to people of other faiths or too-different versions of their own faith, to gay people, to scientifically-literate people, to cheerful nonconformists, to anybody who thinks poor people and women are actually already proper human beings, and to anybody anywhere on earth with scarce oil or other resources they happen to be entitled to by virtue of wanting them would be quite exhausting and time-consuming enough for conservatives without adding to the enemies list as well "all people who may undergo life-enhancing consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medical therapies that bioconservatives are unfamiliar with or otherwise scared of at the moment."
Of course, one expects American social conservatives to treat the humans they disapprove of as subhumans. The soldiers of the Christian American “culture of life” can always be counted on to declare their bigotry loud and proud (and at considerable length) in this way. But you have to hand it to them this time, getting ahead of the curve like this, joining hearts and hands to extend their antipathy to people who haven't even managed to arrive yet on the scene.
Bioconservative bigotry has found a New Frontier. I have no doubt at all that there will be many more to come.
What, you may be wondering, do these bioconservatives mean by the human future?
Well, one thing we can say of it from the outset is that there would appear to be only one future that is a "human" one for the CBC.
How fortunate for us all that there are bioconservatives on hand to let the rest of us know all the many kinds of humans that fail now and will come to fail in the future to pass muster as proper humans.
Wearing this bracelet, say the organizers of “The Human Future” campaign, is “raising the red flag” [this despite the fact that the bracelet is blue] “when human dignity is at stake.”
Always remember that there is a decisive family resemblance between the conventional anti-choice politics of social conservatives, which would hijack the concept of "life" in the service of projects to take away every woman’s right to make informed healthcare choices -- and the efforts of bioconservatives to hijack the concept of human "dignity" in the service of projects to ban and restrict therapeutic choices and avenues of medical research for everyone. And all this just to better reflect their own parochial interests and tastes. (And usually it is literally the same people who are making these parallel arguments.)
"The Human Future" campaign, the CBC continues "is about celebrating the beauty and complexity of human life in all of its various stages from the zygote to the death bed." The enthusiasm of bioconservatives for fetal not-quite-yet persons and vegetative no-longer-quite-still persons is, of course, too well known. No doubt it is a matter of coincidence that in speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves bioconservatives can multiply their own voices incomparably, especially in an era when fewer and fewer people otherwise seem to make choices and voice opinions these bioconservatives approve of.
True to form, the promised bioconservative "celebration of complexity" turns its attentions soon enough to the policing of every trait, every capacity, every technique, every value, every lifeway that nudges the least bit outside the straightjacket of customs and norms that define "dignity" for bioconservatives in particular. Apparently this is the sort of "celebration" that is possible only so long as everybody is attending exactly the same party, whether they want to or not. One recalls H.L. Mencken’s definition of "puritanism" as "[t]he haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
"CBC is about equipping people to face the challenges of the 21st Century and we use all the tools necessary to raise awareness about these issues," declare the campaign’s organizers. Permit me a moment to relish the rich commonplace hypocrisy of bioconservative technophobes enthusing even figuratively about "equip[ment]" and "tools"… and now let’s look a bit more closely at "the issues" about which the CBC would raise our awareness.
"[I]ssues related to the taking, making, and faking of human life are the issues that will dominate the 21st Century," the CBC assures us.
One is disappointed to discover that lives lost to back alley abortions, lives lost to sexually transmitted diseases left unaddressed in "abstinence only" sex-education programs, lives lost to treatable diseases left untreated among uninsured Americans and among countless people in the developing world due to the impact of intellectual property regimes beholden to the profits of Big Pharma, lives lost to starvation in the midst of abundance, lives of soldiers and civilians lost in illegal wars, lives lost to deliriously proliferating handguns, lives lost to deteriorating environmental standards, safety standards, healthcare standards, lives lost to multiplying Greenhouse storms… that none of these lives lost would appear to represent the sort of takings of life that exercise the bioconservative imagination, particularly, if the CBC website is any kind of guide to their preoccupations. Now, aborted fetuses… well, boy, that’s another matter!
As for makings of life that represent 21st Century "issues," assisted reproductive techniques are apparently very troubling, even when they eventuate in perfectly recognizable fetuses. For issue that is not "an issue," what is wanted, don’t you know, are very particularly the fetuses that conventional couples arrive at through coupling conventionally. Also, cloned kittens as pets are a problem. Designer super babies and clone armies are also unexpectedly something to worry about quite a bit, even if you are not a writer of dystopian science fiction novels. Curiously enough, worrying about such B-movie monsters turns out to provide all sorts of otherwise counterintuitive insight as to why a pregnant woman shouldn’t be able to know whether or not the fetus she is carrying has phenylketonuria and why we shouldn’t spend money to cure Parkinson’s Disease if embryonic stem-cells are involved. I had no idea!
Most intriguing of all, of course, is the suggestion that in the 21st Century one burning "issue" will be that some apparently living humans will be, in fact, just “faking human life.” Clearly, the bioconsevatives are trying to get out ahead of the 21st Century Cylon Problem. One hesitates to ask just what kinds of genetic and prosthetic medical therapies will be enough to nudge some humans toward the status of "fake human life." Perhaps I should rethink that Lasik treatment, especially since I've already got that whole queer problem happening (why, I'm probably just a fake human just fake living already!).
I wonder, will these 21st Century fake humans know that they’re fakes themselves or will only the bioconservatives know? Just think how terrible it would be to be living your life, muddling along with your modest hopes and pleasures and frustrations, thinking all along you’re a human being with, you know, a human life, and then discover all the sudden that because you’re a medically delayed twin (clone), or the product of some other assisted reproduction technique, or the beneficiary of some genetic therapy or whatever that therefore you’re not a human at all, not living at all, not a rights-bearing, dignity-inhering human at all, but a fake after all! If only more people had donned the bioconservative blue bracelets while there was still time!
This bioconservative campaign looks like to me like something of an historical first: A declaration of pre-emptive bigotry against certain kinds of human beings who don't even exist yet.
One would have thought their hostility to people of other faiths or too-different versions of their own faith, to gay people, to scientifically-literate people, to cheerful nonconformists, to anybody who thinks poor people and women are actually already proper human beings, and to anybody anywhere on earth with scarce oil or other resources they happen to be entitled to by virtue of wanting them would be quite exhausting and time-consuming enough for conservatives without adding to the enemies list as well "all people who may undergo life-enhancing consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medical therapies that bioconservatives are unfamiliar with or otherwise scared of at the moment."
Of course, one expects American social conservatives to treat the humans they disapprove of as subhumans. The soldiers of the Christian American “culture of life” can always be counted on to declare their bigotry loud and proud (and at considerable length) in this way. But you have to hand it to them this time, getting ahead of the curve like this, joining hearts and hands to extend their antipathy to people who haven't even managed to arrive yet on the scene.
Bioconservative bigotry has found a New Frontier. I have no doubt at all that there will be many more to come.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Anti-Authoritarianism and the Very Idea of Government
Promoted and Adapted from the Comments
I've been a fan of Oscar Wilde's work since I was a kid. Newcomers to the blog should know that The Random Wilde has become one of the "occasional features" here, a place where I regularly offer up various Wildean jokes, paradoxes, brickbats, eruptions of wit, usually without comment. I don't necessarily agree with all of the Random Wildeisms I post here. I can't claim even to have a firm grasp on the full meaning of some of them. I just publish them here because I appreciate their humor, their provocation and often, unexpectedly, their wisdom.
I deeply love Wilde's anti-authoritarianism, but I do not agree with him in those moments when his anti-authoritarianism seems to take the form of a blanket repudiation of the very idea of government. Such blanket repudiations seem to me to be wrongheaded whether they arise from libertarian socialist sensibilities like Noam Chomsky's or from market libertarian sensibilities like David Friedman's (one of whom I still like despite his libertarianism, the other of whom I dislike for more than his libertarianism).
I personally consider both the ideal and the ongoing on-the-ground struggle to implement legitimate, accountable, multilateral, working democratic governance indispensable to any serious anti-authoritarian culture. And so, when one discerns an all too common authoritarian concentration of power in a particular government institution it seems to me this should mobilize projects to reform government and address its abuses, but never to inspire dreams of smashing the state altogether. An anti-authoritarian state (always fragile, often failing) seems to me the indispensable instrument of any plausible radical democratization of human society.
For me, the genius of the democratic idea as it is often actually but imperfectly implemented is that
[1] elections create an institutional alternative to violent contests for power among elites, just as
[2] the separation of powers and the multilateralism of civic society redirect inevitable conflicts among public organizations into projects to improve the responsiveness and check the abuses of these organizations, just as
[3] the tight coupling of taxation to representation helps assure that relatively more powerful people are still accountable to relatively less powerful people, etc.
All the same, though, it is true that these implementations often invite their own abuses, domesticate real opposition, frustrate reform in a mulch of endless complexities, etc.
Despite the fact that I am a champion of democracy I always hesitate to express that support in the form of a self-congratulatory affirmation of democracy as it has been accomplished so far, but rather affirm it as a struggle that will continue from now on.
Gandhi once famously responded to a question about what he thought of western civilization by saying it sounded like a good idea. I guess that's roughly the way I feel about democracy.
I've been a fan of Oscar Wilde's work since I was a kid. Newcomers to the blog should know that The Random Wilde has become one of the "occasional features" here, a place where I regularly offer up various Wildean jokes, paradoxes, brickbats, eruptions of wit, usually without comment. I don't necessarily agree with all of the Random Wildeisms I post here. I can't claim even to have a firm grasp on the full meaning of some of them. I just publish them here because I appreciate their humor, their provocation and often, unexpectedly, their wisdom.
I deeply love Wilde's anti-authoritarianism, but I do not agree with him in those moments when his anti-authoritarianism seems to take the form of a blanket repudiation of the very idea of government. Such blanket repudiations seem to me to be wrongheaded whether they arise from libertarian socialist sensibilities like Noam Chomsky's or from market libertarian sensibilities like David Friedman's (one of whom I still like despite his libertarianism, the other of whom I dislike for more than his libertarianism).
I personally consider both the ideal and the ongoing on-the-ground struggle to implement legitimate, accountable, multilateral, working democratic governance indispensable to any serious anti-authoritarian culture. And so, when one discerns an all too common authoritarian concentration of power in a particular government institution it seems to me this should mobilize projects to reform government and address its abuses, but never to inspire dreams of smashing the state altogether. An anti-authoritarian state (always fragile, often failing) seems to me the indispensable instrument of any plausible radical democratization of human society.
For me, the genius of the democratic idea as it is often actually but imperfectly implemented is that
[1] elections create an institutional alternative to violent contests for power among elites, just as
[2] the separation of powers and the multilateralism of civic society redirect inevitable conflicts among public organizations into projects to improve the responsiveness and check the abuses of these organizations, just as
[3] the tight coupling of taxation to representation helps assure that relatively more powerful people are still accountable to relatively less powerful people, etc.
All the same, though, it is true that these implementations often invite their own abuses, domesticate real opposition, frustrate reform in a mulch of endless complexities, etc.
Despite the fact that I am a champion of democracy I always hesitate to express that support in the form of a self-congratulatory affirmation of democracy as it has been accomplished so far, but rather affirm it as a struggle that will continue from now on.
Gandhi once famously responded to a question about what he thought of western civilization by saying it sounded like a good idea. I guess that's roughly the way I feel about democracy.
Monday, August 01, 2005
New Slogans for the Liber-techians, Ayn Raelians, and Retro-Futurists Among Us
The McKinley Administration + Robots. Now, doesn't that sound fun?
The Future. Same As It Ever Was.
Sure it sounds like feudalism, only... it's the future!
Working for the Singularity. And by "Singularity," I Mean Me
All Your Gene Are Belong to Us
Bow before Zod!
The Future. Same As It Ever Was.
Sure it sounds like feudalism, only... it's the future!
Working for the Singularity. And by "Singularity," I Mean Me
All Your Gene Are Belong to Us
Bow before Zod!
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