Why Do Libertopians Love Science Fiction So Much?

At the heart of the "market" libertarian worldview is a deep incomprehension of and acid hostility to the basic ineradicable fact of human social interdependence.

Peak everything eco-catastrophe scenarios notwithstanding, facile pastoral fantasies of pre-democratic orders in which elites are sufficiently insulated by a vast ritual and institutional artifice from the sprawling majorities of "expendable" "infrahuman" fellow-humans on whom they depend for their prosperity no longer seem quite so viable in an era of global media immersion coupled with relentless, likewise global, niche-marketing and exploitation (yes, "everything solid melts into air"). Therefore, nowadays the antidemocratic mindset often turns instead to a pining for a prosthetic encrustation and empowerment of select individuals with which to circumvent this social interdependence -- since disavowing it usually isn't adequately sustainable for long.

More often than not, though, libertopians can be counted upon to drift ineluctably back into straightforward feudalist fantasias in any case, even in their more stridently technofuturist modes. They can't seem to help themselves (contemplate, if you dare, Ayn Rand's whole crappy corpus, Robert Heinlein's famous middle-works, the early Vernor Vinge, and so on), and it rarely takes a particularly careful or sophisticated reader to discern the bloody vestigial trace of antidemocratic self-appointed aristocratic self-congratulation in between the stiff efficacious men, the robot sex-slaves, and the scary alien invaders.

And in case you hadn't noticed, techno-immortalist fantasies about medical progress are used by Republicans to justify decreasing benefits and delaying the retirement age of people who work for a living and for whom life expectancy at retirement age is not factually increasing in ways that justify these anti-equitable anti-governmental fantasies, just as the NRA and ALEC fantasy of ruggedly hyper-individualized white racist cyborg gun warriors "standing their ground" in Thunderdome anarcho-scapes are a real-world implementation of still more market libertopian assumptions and aspirations that belong in the science fiction aisle but are finding their way instead into laws with which our lives are menaced for real.

This Should Go Without Saying

I was frankly flabbergasted to see that someone for whom I have a good deal of respect and who I count as a friend (and of course I still do despite my frustration with them at the moment) actually made some sympathetic noises about Bush's recent rhetorical line about "Islamic Fascism." This is a person who shares my atheism and I think finds it appealing in some abstract way to think that religious fundamentalism is being connected in a very public way with totalitarian ideology. All this provokes in me an almost unbearable wearying desolation.

Look, this should go without saying, but Bush is grotesquely obviously using the term "fascism" here to create a visceral emotional connection between his catastrophic unending and unendable "global war on terror" (by means of state terror) and the apparently morally unimpeachable Second World War.

Now, fascism historically is an authoritarian formation of corporatism -- and, it should go without saying, the United States is considerably closer to that formation than are most of the regimes Bush selectively attacks in his disgusting criminal oil grab.

If you get taken in by the general frame that Bush is circulating here, it simply doesn't matter how often you go on to make your sad inevitable ritual genuflection to the effect that "now, of course I know not all Muslims are terrorists" or what have you. It should go without saying, but this is exactly as tired as the creaky clumsy inevitability with which a racist comment always follows immediately after the preamble protestation, "now, I'm not racist, but..." Bush's multiply ignorant, endlessly cynical "islamofascist" rhetoric circulates to inculcate a universalizing connection between Islam and totalitarianism (via the iconography of the bleak disastrous "glory days" of muscular Cold War conservatism) and everybody knows it by now and, hence, again, all this should really go without saying by now, too.

You know, this really should go without saying, but, once again, only a vanishingly small minority of the world's Muslims are terrorists, and the vast majority of the ones who are terrorists have been radicalized by social insecurity, hopelessness, and exploitation (usually, it should go without saying, faciliated directly by US and North Atlantic foreign and trade policy) and not at all by their Islamic faith or practice.

Now, I'm an atheist and, it should go without saying, fundamentalism (which is a sociopolitical formation rather than a metaphysical one) scares me as much as it does anybody here. As an atheist feminist faggot democrat I know quite well what my life is worth in a theocracy. But neoconservatives have been wreaking havoc on the planet throwing glib crapola around about "fascism" "the Muslim World" (there is no such monolithic thing) "the clash of Civilizations" and so on -- and the people who come to my friend's website to discuss technoscientific topics are too smart and earnest to be robotically repeating still these bloodsoaked know-nothing soundbites after so many years of stupid appalling devastation.

All this should go without saying.

This isn't a tea party conversation, people. This rhetoric is doing real material work in the world. It is pulling triggers and dropping bombs and radicalizing sprawling populations of people who have little to lose and with whom we will be sharing the world for the rest of our lives. Things can actually get much worse if intelligent people of good will get too lazy to understand what is afoot here. There is certainly important political work to do to secularize this multicultural world in which we find ourselves, to make the world safer for atheists as well as for folks who practice marginal spiritual creeds, or what have you. But it should go without saying that we have to be incredibly sensitive to the ways in which American fundamentalists (of the Christian and market varieties) eagerly appropriate anti-fundamentalist militancy in the service of their own gunslinging moralizing in the clash of contemporary fundamentalisms, killing numberless innocents in our name.

The Politics of Morphological Freedom

Morphological freedom (or prosthetic self-determination) is a discourse which designates and elaborates the idea that human beings have the right either to maintain or to modify their own bodies, on their own terms, through informed, nonduressed, consensual recourse to -- or refusal of -- available remedial or modification medicine.

The politics of morphological freedom expresses commitments to the value, standing, and social legibility of the widest possible (and an ever-expanding) variety of desired morphologies and lifeways. These politics tend to become especially controversial when they defend the preservation of actually desired atypical capacities and lifeways that are stigmatized as "disability" or otherwise "suboptimal," or when they defend actually desired modifications that constitute the introduction of atypical capacities and lifeways that are stigmatized as "perverse" or otherwise "unnatural."

The politics of morphological freedom and prosthetic self-determination seem legible as emerging from standard attitudes and problems associated with liberal pluralism, secularism, progressive cosmopolitanism, and (post)humanist multiculturalisms, but applied to an era of disruptive planetary technoscientific change, and especially to the ongoing and palpably upcoming transformation of the understanding of medical practice from one of conventional remedy to one of consensual self-creation, via genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification.

I first encountered the term “morphological freedom” in a short paper by neuroscientist Anders Sandberg, and I have taken up and extended the term (for example here and here) myself in ways that may well differ in some respects from Sandberg’s initial formulation.

Sandberg defines morphological freedom quite simply as "the right to modify oneself according to one’s desires." In Sandberg’s formulation, the right to morphological freedom derives from a conventional liberal doctrine of bodily self-ownership and amounts, more or less, to a straightforward application of negative liberty to the situation of modification medicine. The political force of such a commitment under contemporary conditions of disruptive technoscientific change is quite clear: It appeals to widely affirmed liberal intuitions about individual liberty, choice, and autonomy in order to trump bioconservative agendas that seek to slow, limit, or altogether prohibit potentially desirable medical research and individually valued therapeutic practices, usually because they are taken to threaten established social and cultural norms.

But I worry that this formulation of morphological freedom, however initially appealing and sensible it may seem, is fraught with the quandaries that bedevil all exclusively negative libertarian accounts of freedom. The visceral, universal and hence foundational force of our intuitions about the undeniability of our own bodily “self-ownership,” for example, never actually seamlessly nor unproblematically map onto the historically specific entitlements and protocols that will claim to be derived from the foundation of this bodily self-certainty.

That we own our aging abled vulnerable pleasurable painful bodily selves incontrovertibly may be a well-nigh universally asserted insight. But just what is entailed in that assertion in the way of capacities, responsibilities, entitlements, significances will vary enormously from society to society, from place to place, from generation to generation. Such foundational gestures will tend to mobilize compensatory rhetorical projects to deny and disavow the many possible (some of them desired) alternate available formulations of entitlements and protocols compatible with the selfsame foundation. These projects to “naturalize” and hence depoliticize what are in fact historically contingent conventions through reference to the indubitability of bodily self-ownership inevitably privilege certain morphologies and lifeways and their correlated constituencies over others, and so just as inevitably eventuate in some form or other of conservative politics.

In my own understanding of the term, then, a commitment to morphological freedom should derives primarily or at any rate equally from positive commitments to diversity and to consent, conceived as public values, public goods, and, crucially, as public scenes that depend for their continued existence on supportive normative, legal, and institutional contexts the maintenance of which exact costs that must be fairly borne by all their beneficiaries.

The force of the commitment to diversity implies that the politics of morphological freedom and prosthetic self-determination will properly apply as much to those who would make consensual recourse to desired remedial or modification medicine as it does to those who would refrain from such medicine. I disapprove of the strong bias in favor of intervention and modification at the heart of many current formulations of the principle of morphological freedom. While this bias is quite understandable given the precisely contrary bias of the bioconservative politics the principle is intended to combat, I worry that an interventionist bias will threaten to circumscribe the range of morphological and lifeway diversity supported by the politics of morphological freedom. I suspect that some will take my own foregrounding of the commitment to diversity as an effort to hijack the politics of morphological freedom with the politics of “postmodern relativism” or some such nonsense. But the simple truth is that any understanding of “morphological freedom” that prioritizes intervention over diversity will threaten to underwrite eugenicist projects prone to imagine themselves emancipatory even when they are nonconsensual, and will police desired variation into a conformity that calls itself “optimal health,” stress management, or the most “efficient” possible allocation of scarce resources (whatever wealth disparities happen to prevail at the time). Whenever the term "enhancement," for example, is treated as neutral or objective, rather than a term to express an actually desired capacity or lifeway by some one among others, in respect to some end among others, it risks underwriting parochial perfectionisms stealthed as "objective optimality."

The force of the commitment to consent seems to me to imply that the politics of morphological freedom and prosthetic self-determination are of a piece with democratic left politics. I disapprove of the strong bias in favor of negative libertarian formulations of freedom at the heart of many current discussions of the idea of morphological freedom. Although neoliberal, neoconservative, and market libertarian formulations often appear content to describe any “contractual” or so-called “market” outcome as consensual by definition it is quite clear that in actuality such outcomes are regularly and conspicuously duressed by the threat or fact of physical force, by fraud and mis-information, and by basic unfairness. And so, whenever I speak of my own commitment to a culture of consent I mean to indicate very specifically a commitment to what I call substantiated rather than what I would reject as vacuous consent. A commitment to substantiated consent demands universal access to trustworthy information, to a basic guaranteed income, and to universal healthcare (actually, democratically-minded people of good will may well offer up competing bundles of entitlements to satisfy the commitment to substantiated consent, just as I have offered up a simplified version of my own here), all to ensure that socially legible performances of consent are always both as informed and nonduressed as may be. I suspect that some will take my own foregrounding of the commitment to substantiated consent as an effort to hijack the politics of morphological freedom with the politics of social democracy (or democratic socialism). But the simple truth is that any understanding of “morphological freedom” that demands anything less than democratically accountable and socially substantiated scenes of informed, nonduressed consent will function on the one hand to encourage the exposure of vulnerable people to risky and costly experimental procedures in the service of corporate profit and military competitiveness, while on the other hand it will function to underwrite the efforts of authoritarian moralists with unprecedented technological powers at their disposal who would impose their parochial perfectionisms on a planetary scale, quite satisfied to retroactively rationalize the righteousness of even mass slaughters and mass capitulations.