Negotiating the Ends of Diversity and Objectivity in Technoprogressive Policy Discourse

Technoprogressive folks have to negotiate an interesting and really tricky quandary, it seems to me. We have to find ways to coherently affirm, at one and the same time

[one] the force of warranted consensus scientific results in determining the proper responsibilities of accountable elected representatives and unelected administrators in relatively democratic societies, on the one hand, while on the other hand affirming

[two] the prior and ongoing force of the expressed ends and concerns of the actual diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific change in such relatively democratic societies.

It's too easy for utilitarian/technocratic discourses to prioritize what they take to be expressions of scientific objectivity over expressions of democratic diversity.

Too often the language of utility will trump the language of freedom when intuitions about general welfare are getting mobilized by technocentric discourses:

Consider how the language of "optimality" or even, simply, "health" can circumvent concerns about informed nonduressed consent, plurality, and so on in biomedical policy formulations. Consider how the language of "urgency" and "existential threat" can circumvent concerns about public deliberation, secrecy, budgetary priorities, and so on in security policy formulations.

And these examples can be endlessly multiplied where mainstream corporate-militarist futurist and/or superlative technophiliac discourses are concerned, I'm afraid.

I must say, it is intriguing indeed to note just how often the accomplishment of these technocentric circumventions of the political (sometimes expressed in the ugly gutteral tonalities of libertopian ecstasy, sometimes with the wheedling "reluctance" of technocratic elites who "wish" that the masses could be equal to the complexities they themselves prioritize, but, sigh, it is just not so), will be followed thereupon by formulations that seem always only endlessly to bolster incumbent interests (usually the proximate profits of the major stockholders in and officers of certain multinational corporations which rather mysteriously come to represent "science," "progress," "free markets," "civilization" and so on) over actually available and widely desired alternatives, and hence to connect almost always only to de facto conservative politics.

Technocentric readers tempted here to launch into boo hoo protestations about their own good intentions note well, if you please, that "de facto" there. The force of my point is not -- necesssarily -- to attribute malign explicitly anti-democratizing intentions to all futurists and technophiliacs (only to some), nor would the demonstrable niceness and earnest well-meaningness of particular futurists and technophiliacs insulate them -- necessarily -- from this critique (only for some). The point is to elaborate some of the structural tendencies of technocentric analyses and policy language, given the specific histories of authoritative technoscientific discourses, given the corporate-militarist context that articulates contemporary technodevelopmental discourses, and so on.

Nanosantalogical Feasibility

Over on infeasible.org's endlessly amusing (in a good way) "Refuting Transhumanism" blog, Eric Drexler was described by the author in a post from a couple of days ago as having "proudly claimed that no one has ever disproved his ideas on molecular nanotechnology and that this means that his ideas are feasible."

I wish that a link to this specific claim had been provided if such a thing exists. But be that as it may, if it is true that Drexler actually seriously made an argument of the form cited in the complaint, then that appears to be an awfully straightforward example of the fallacy ad ignorantiam (sorry to be a pedant), mistaking the lack of a refutation as a substantiation of a claim, and I daresay even partisans for Drexlerian nanotechnology would strongly prefer arguments of his that aren't fallacious in this way.

I enjoyed reading Drexler's Engines of Creation back in the mid-eighties, right when it was published and when I was still something of a kid. To this day I may well personally find Eric Drexler's ideas more worthy of serious consideration in some respects than infeasible's author does. But I do share his perfectly proper disdain for the handwaving of technophiliacs in what I call the Nanosantalogical Variation of Superlative Technology Discourse.

Friend of Blog Michael Anissimov posted a comment to infeasible's post, asking the author, "Can you explain how the existence of living organisms doesn't validate Drexler's ideas? All he is really talking about are artificial, programmable ribosomes." Needless to say, I can't speak for the blogger, but I did have a response, and one that seemed helpful as a way of getting at what I mean by Superlative Technology Discourse more particularly.

In the posted quote (presumably) authored or paraphrased by Drexler, he obviously isn't claiming that the existence of living organisms means that the era of nanotechnology (in the "robust" Drexlerian sense of human specified and controlled, replicative molecular manufacturing) has already arrived, does he? That's surely the force of the "artificial" in Michael's own formulation of his question. And the gap between actually existing organisms and desired Drexlerian nanotechnologies is of course the same gap that distinguishes this analogy from a valid deduction. This obviously doesn't mean the analogy hasn't anything to recommend it, just that the analogy can't bear the weight with which Superlative Technology Discourse in its Nanosantalogical Variation would want to freight it.

I must say I do think it is interesting how technophiliacs often seem to treat philosophical arguments by analogy that properly function to illuminate incredibly broad theses as if they likewise constitute arguments demonstrating practical viability, or even inevitability, or even the technodevelopmental imminence of some superlative technology they are enthused about at the moment.

Thus polemicists for the Strong Program of Artificial Intelligence regularly seem to leap from the reasonable enough philosophical notion that [1] if human consciousness is not supernatural then it should be susceptible in principle to instrumentally adequate scientifically warranted description, to the radically different idea that [2] within 20 years (a time-frame thus far always deferred yet curiously never revoked with each failure of the prediction) human beings will have overcome all the practical, theoretical, and sociocultural hurdles that currently frustrate ongoing projects to create artificial intelligence.

As with the gap between living organisms and Drexlerian nanotech (not to mention the fantasies of a circumvention of the deep and abiding barriers to utopian, often literally libertopian, construals of a post-political abundance that characterize too much nanosantalogical discourse), hype-notized handwavers tend to discover that the historical, infrastructural, sociocultural complexities, as well as the caveats that tend to freight real-world lab results, all radically frustrate the superlative formulations that might seem logically compatible with general thought experiments and proofs of concept.

(For those who are interested in these things: Other variations of Superlative Technology Discourse include, in my view, the Singularitarian Variation, the Immortalist Variation, and the Technocratic Variation. These Variations of Superlative Technology Discourse are very much not to be confused with reasonable and urgently needed technoprogressive stakeholder discourses on actual and emerging quandaries of nanoscale toxicity, actual and emerging quandaries of molecular biotechnology, actual and emerging quandaries of network and software security, actual and emerging quandaries of genetic, prosthetic, cognitive, and longevity medicine, actual and emerging quandaries of accountability of elected representatives to warranted scientific consensus, and so on. The differences between Superlative Technology Discourses and Technoprogressive Discourses are complicated to analyze, but, honestly, pretty easy to spot. Some rules of thumb: Precisely to the contrary of Superlative Technology Discourses, Technoprogressive Discourses tend to [1] resist transcendental formulations, [2] emphasize the concrete social and historical contexts of technoscientific change, [3] stress the existence of a diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific research and development [4] as well as the priority of democratic institutions and accountable processes to ensure the proper regulation of and fairest distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific changes, [5] reflect the caveats of actual experimental science, and [6] provide little support or inducement for the formation of personal sub(cult)ural identifications with particular technodevelopmental forecasts, scenarios, or fetishized technologies, either existing or projected, nor for the curiously marginalizing and defensive membership organizations that seem to arise from such abstract identifications.)

Thinking More About Morphological Freedom and Prosthetic Self-Determination

I have revised my short essay The Politics of Morphological Freedom and welcome comments and criticisms.

The Real Galt's Gulch

Regular readers of Amor Mundi know that I cannot resist poking fun occasionally at Galt's Gulch, the incomparably silly "utopian" enclave of entrepreneurial supermen at the shriveled Grinch heart of Ayn Rand's sprawling awful offal of a novel, Atlas Shrugged.

No doubt many of you have given Rand's phonebook-scaled tome a shrug at last rather than a read when you noticed at the bookstore, among other details, that the thing may as well have been scrawled with a stubby orange crayon for all the emotional depth and stylistic nuance on exhibit therein. Or maybe you've noticed the grim set of the mouth each one of the book's legion of earnest white undergraduate fans tends to assume when they are about to quote one of its earthshattering profundities, only to be told, thereupon, that "A is A." Uh-huh.

Whatever the reason you decided to give it a pass, the gist of Atlas Shrugged is this: Once upon a time, a few dozen promethean industrialists of the haves and have-mores variety graced a planet (presumably, Earth, but one has to wonder) while alongside them its otherwise teeming billions of mooching mediocrities (many of them slated to purchase bestselling books like Atlas Shrugged, ironically enough) just kept taking taking taking from these Rushmore scaled innovative giants, buying their products and doing their bidding all the livelong day, sure, but also siccing jackbooted regulators on them incessantly for treating their employees like "slaves" just for wanting them to work a decent fourteen hour day to survive, letting mercury get into the drinking water of the unwary (caveat emptor, losers!), getting their kids addicted to the safe cigarettes their liberty craves, selling bombs to tyrant-fighting would-be tyrants who will have to be bombed later with new bombs, and all the other life-affirming activities that preoccupy their attention.

Rand's chisel-faced investor-class exemplars decide that having all the money and clout and trophy wives and sycophants in the world isn't, come to think of it, an adequate register of gratitude when all is said and done considering their indispensability and general awesomeness. And so, the whole troop adjourns to the secret hideout of the world's biggest brained soopergenius, a mad scientist named John Galt, who, like, has invented a heat ray and a perpetual motion machine and all sorts of other things capitalism would provide us instead of the Big Gulps and crappy teevee shows it gives us now on account of Big Brother and stuff.

The heroes wallow joyfully around in one another's superior company while the world outside is, they can only assume, going to hell in a handbasket for want of their helpful handholding and once in a lifetime offers of investment opportunities and so forth. I think at one point a slightly older guy named Hank seems to get it on with a hunky younger Latin guy named Francisco, but unfortunately this isn't a line Rand saw fit to develop beyond the sketchiest suggestion.

At the end, the hero John Galt makes the sign of the dollar in the air, presumably for the benefit of the studio audience that is always there for him in his own mind. This is his way of announcing that the industrialists are going to return at last to restore order to the world, since clearly jungle vines will have encroached and obliterated all the malls and putt-putt golf courses and everything without them around to keep things tidy (because, of course, if there's one thing billionaire industrialists can be expected to do above all others it's to keep the grounds trimmed and the fields tilled).

That's the end of the book, inasmuch as Rand saw fit to neglect the inevitable next episode of the narrative in which these absurd megalomaniacs stumble out of their hidden valley into a fully functioning world that didn't notice they had even left. Then as each self-suffused stuffed Suit tries to resume his life in the real world everybody treats them like a clueless asshole, and so at the very end they reconvene to decide whether or not they should "go on strike" for a while longer until the world finally must recognize their genius and, you know, finally kiss their asses to their satisfaction.

Anyway, I like to say things like post-Katrina New Orleans is Galt's Gulch, or Iraq under Occupation is Galt's Gulch, because these catastrophic human-made hells on earth represent real-world implementations of the neoliberal policies that are in fact as close to the realization of the market fundamentalist pieties of the Randroids and the Mont Pelerinists as one can ever actually get on planet earth.

Imagine, then, my surprise at discovering that Ayn Rand was inspired to write her Galt's Gulch fantasia by a real-world place, Ouray, Colorado. Although I daresay it is surely a lovely place filled with perfectly lovely people, it is difficult not to wonder at the fact that the utopian inspiration for Rand's retrofuturist magnum opus is a town with about 800 people in it -- 97.54% of whom are white -- filled with buildings from the 1800s, looking for all the world like the high kitsch Americana of Disneyland's "Mainstreet, U.S.A."

Could there be a more perfect vision of the neoliberal reality beneath the libertopian handwaving of the Randroid Right? The world as a septic sewer dotted with gated enclaves in which moneyed whites pretend to live in the McKinley era. You people do realize that A Boy and His Dog is, like, dystopian don't you?

More Rorty

Jonah Lehrer, in his blog The Frontal Cortex definitely speaks for me when he says "I've never understood why, exactly, Rorty got such a vehement anti-science reputation. I always thought Rorty's views on science were simple common sense."

You can say that again!

"To put it simply," Lehrer continues, "Rorty thought we should stop thinking of scientific theories as mirrors of nature. Instead, we should see our facts as tools, which, as William James put it, "help us get into a satisfactory relation with experience."

He goes on to provide a few choice quotes from Rorty that are lovely to re-read (Indeed, what a pleasure it is to read peoples' favorite quotes among the many tributes, and to stumble upon only half-remembered but once-cherished bits!):

There is nothing wrong with science, there is only something wrong with the attempt to divinize it.

and this:

My rejection of traditional notions of rationality can be summed up by saying that the only sense in which science is exemplary is that it is a model of human solidarity.

By solidarity, Rorty meant that science had developed institutions that allowed it to engage in "free and open encounters":

"On this view, [continues Lehrer] there is no reason to praise scientists for being more 'objective' or 'logical' or 'methodical' or 'devoted to truth' than other people. But there is plenty of reason to praise the institutions that they have developed and within which they work, and to use these as models for the rest of culture. For these institutions give concreteness and detail to the idea of unforced agreement."

Lehrer concludes his comments nicely enough: "Finally, for those who would disparage Rorty as some kind of Derridean post-modernist who believed that there is no truth there are only texts [I'll leave aside whether or not it is exactly fair to disparage Derrida as saying this either. -- Dale], I can only offer this common-sense retort from Rorty himself":

To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth.

Lehrer, sums up: "The man could turn a phrase."

Could he ever!

To all this, let me add that Rorty was always quite happy to concede the conventional Jamesian line that some descriptions are better in the way of belief than others, and he would surely agree with the criteria and even the weightings of these criteria that tend to be mobilized by scientifically literate people in general when one wants to go about trying to discern just which among the descriptions presently on offer are the best candidates for our belief where, say, matters of prediction and control are concerned.

What Rorty disapproved were the priestly and patriarchal paraphernalia with which our truths tend to get freighted once we have settled into our warranted confidences in them. These, one can nicely summarize as:

Fantasies of Finality (which include models of scientific "progress" that rely stealthily on finality as when science is figured as an approach, sometimes asymtotic, sometimes not, toward "capture," correspondence, indefeasibility, and so on)

Fantasies of Certainty (which is, after all, a gun that shoots nothing but blanks, inasmuch as there is no single available criterion for warranted belief which has not, in the past, perfectly properly warranted beliefs that were nonetheless subsequently defeated for better alternatives)

Fantasies of Irresistibility (the delusive and hence dangerous dream of a compelling self-evidence that could insulate one's cherished beliefs from contest, from appealing attitudes about why democracy, charity, or reasonableness must finally prevail over elitism, greed, and aggression, for example, as well as to ugly parochial attitudes about the racial or religious or socioeconomic superiority of this or that corralling together of some among other human animals or what have you)

Fantasies of Hardness (as against, you know, the "soft" not-quite truths of the poor effete aesthetes of the humanities, for example, or the poor social scientists with their wannabe objective pie charts, and so on)

Fantasies of Objectivity (construed not as adherence to useful criteria of reasonableness hacked together through long centuries of hard-won collective experimentalist effort, but as some kind of correspondence between our own warranted knowledges of the world and the way the world itself would have us know it if it could somehow have and express opinions in the matter)

It is in this last formulation that one can see how Rorty's atheism put him at odds with the scientism of many other public atheists, who are liable to look from a Rortian perspective to have opted for curiously faithful construals of warranted belief, usually the better to preserve the authoritarian priestly formations that tend to accompany such construals.

This they do, perhaps, because they would like to arrive at or to preserve the prerogatives of such priestly authority themselves, or because they would prefer to obey the edicts of priests in certain matters of belief rather than undertake the effort of thinking for themselves, or of taking on the burden or responsibility for beliefs that one comes to hold on their own, or of facing the pleasures and dangers of a world in which there may not be an adequate partner or parent-surrogate to console them for the uncertainty, fragility, vulnerability, complexity, and betrayals of life as adults are compelled to grapple with these things.

No doubt most of the champions of science who disdain Rorty as some kind of clownish or menacing relativist feel quite assured that their own smug scientisms are free from such Fantasies as these, and that such formulations are truisms everybody already believes or perhaps facile straw men easily torched without giving pause to the triumphalist trajectory of human technoscience aspiring ecstatically in the direction of theology's omni-predicates.

To these I can only say that it is not by your occasional and tangential reassurances, nicely mindful of your finitude when the force of argument demands as much from you, but by your words and deeds in the main that you are best exposed in your narcissistic immodesties and ambitions. But beyond this, it seems to me that the reaction to Rorty's rather commonsensical formulations about truth, knowledge, progress, and shared hope (admittedly, complicated sometimes by a somewhat whimsical and also acerbic rhetorical streak that I would be the last person in the world to complain about) is itself as fine an indicator of one's susceptibility to authoritarianism and priggishness in matters of belief as anything else we've got on hand.

It is never "truth" but the authoritarianism of certain flavors of truth-talk that is menaced, if anything at all can properly be said to be, by Richard Rorty's writing. We should bear this in mind when observing those who claim to discern a threat in Rorty's work on warranted scientific belief.

The Only Way to Stop War Is to Make It Unprofitable

[via ThinkProgress] This morning on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) strongly advocated a military strike against Iran: “I think we have to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.”

Bob Schieffer interrupted to get this clarification: “Let’s just stop right there. Because I think you probably made some news here, Senator Lieberman. You’re saying that if the Iranians don’t let up, that the United States should take military action?”

Lieberman's response: “I am.”

ThinkProgress continues with this utterly chilling (although not exactly unexpected) report from the Bunker: "Vice President Cheney… reportedly believes the diplomatic track with Iran is pointless, and is looking for ways to persuade Bush to confront Iran militarily.” Steve Clemons of the Washington Note wrote recently that “Cheney is planning to deploy an ‘end run strategy’ around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument” and is meeting with Iran war advocates at the American Enterprise Institute to piece together a coalition."

It doesn't matter how insane, how catastrophic, how overwhelmingly opposed by the people to whom they are in principle beholden, how deeply immoral, how literally criminal, how pointless, how obscenely wasteful all this is.

Those of us who oppose war as always only a defeat, those of us who know war to be a defeat of civilization even for those who presumably "prevail" in these bloodyminded contests, those of us who know war to be a brutal and, for everybody involved, on all sides, brutalizing indulgence in conceit, in wanton destructiveness, in sickening slaughter, I think we are simply too little capable of entering into the heads of those who eat war without end and draw some sick sustenance from it.

We are too little capable of grasping that there are some people who do not lose in war, by their lights. There are Americans for whom even Vietnam was not the loss that it was for America at large. Vietnam made some Americans filthy rich. And that matters enormously.

It is true that Iraq is in a significant sense "about oil," and this is, surely, bad enough. But it is crucial to remember that even without the oil Iraq has been a vast chaotic field in which billions have been looted and stolen, opportunistically as well as systematically, while it has been as well an epic engine of "legitimate" war profiteering, an inducement to hyperbolic corporate-militarist money-grabbing for half a decade.

There are winners in these wars and these winners are the worst people in the world.

These are the Evil Doers you don't hear about. These are people who don't care about people at all, they care only about profits. This is one of the truisms that happens also to be true, and it is crucial that we learn the lesson of it.

War is surely the greatest abomination set loose upon the world and I am a citizen of the country that is the monstrous face of War.

War, as Major General Smedley Butler put the point so eloquently in 1935, is a Racket. It is driven by a lust for filthy lucre by filthy war-criminals. There is no argument, no protest, no prick of conscience, no appeal to character nor to sympathy nor to sense, no vision of a different and better way that will constrain the lust for war's easy bloody money.

Literally the only way to stop war is to make it unprofitable.

Any commercial enterprise that devotes its energies to the needs of our Nation's proper defense should make only enough to repay its costs and then modestly and fairly to compensate its employees (and this modesty should conspicuously include those at the "top"). Military industries should be inspired to their work by their sense of the need to contribute to the just defense of democracy against palpable threat rather than by their taste for easy money stealthed under cover of "defense" in its present form as an elaborate impalpable abstraction.

After the nightmare of Vietnam, America ended the draft and shifted to a voluntary defensive force, in principle to provide a check on tyrannical militarist ambitions, to help ensure that only truly urgent truly just causes would attract volunteers to the dangers and demands of the armed forces. So, too, in the midst of our current distress we should make war production unprofitable and uncompetitive to provide the same check, to help ensure that industry sacrifices rather than succeeds when it turns its incomparable energies to death-dealing.

Of course, even setting aside the ominous question of the recent rise of mercenary armies helmed by religious and market fundamentalist ideologues with no love of our democratic freedoms, our voluntary armed forces are too much a slick sad sham, since permanent poverty creates conditions that direct by design great numbers of criminally neglected, vulnerable young people into harm's way as their only chance for a better future in contemporary America. This obscenity is abetted by the very corporate-militarist system that profits from the unending bloodletting in the first place.

The concentration of wealth at the very sites that supply the War Machine with its destructive tools and own the media outlets that whomp up the War Machine's hysterical calls for violence over dialogue, likewise drains the living world of energy and possibility, maintaining the barren hopeless moonscape of poverty that supplies the War Machine with the hands to hold its bloody tools, the ears to hear the call to kill to fill the pockets of the rich.

Only when the law comes properly to regard every single dollar's profit from warmaking a filthy, bloody, criminal dollar stolen from America's peaceful future and general welfare, only then will war become the last resort lying politicians claim it to be as now they interminably beat the drum for wars without end as they greedily contemplate profits without end.

Richard Rorty, October 4, 1931 -- June 8, 2007

Richard Rorty has died. If I had never read his work, I would quite literally not be the person writing these words.

I still viscerally remember the experience of reading Contingency, Irony and Solidarity when it was first published in 1989. I felt utterly overwhelmed and inadequate in the face of the text and read it from the first page through to the last and then, without a second's pause, flipped back to the first page and read it again to the end. Then, still unsatisfied with myself, I started again right away and re-read it a third time after that.

For me, Richard Rorty remains the definitive anti-authoritarian writer. His notorious diatribes against conventional philosophical "truth-talk" were hardly the glib or vacuous celebrations of relativism they were regularly derided as, but constituted an affirmation of that which is good in the way of belief and so stands up to the tests of experience, testifies to the urgencies of personal perfection, and facilitates the conversation of peers, but while at once decisively repudiating the transcendentalizing seductions of Priestly authority -- the false assurances of certainty, finality, purity, and ease, whether in the name of God or of Science or of Convention. When Rorty insisted that there was no "truthful" language available to us in which we might say the way the world is in a way the world would prefer to be described in he managed to imagine a world that was truly without even the vestigial scientistic trace of faithfulness in false gods, false idols, false forces of history, in the false priestly pieties that interminably demand our obedience or our worship. This godless world Rorty testified to was scarcely an arid or barren landscape, but one that he filled instead with the clamorous conversation of a free and expressive humankind, a world of creative and collaborative peers. His was a world that deserved and demanded the democracy which, Rorty always insisted, had firm priority over even the philosophy to which he dedicated his life.

Richard Rorty, democrat, secularist, progressive has vanished from the world.

I will remember him, I will read him, I will teach him, and I will write in the tug of his gravity until I vanish from the world myself.

"Overcoming the Limits"

Transhumanism advocates using technology to overcome the limitations of the human body and mind.

Okay, transhumanists, please explain this to me. I am genuinely curious about this very regularly reiterated definition/slogan of transhumanism.

When you refer to "the limitations" in this sense:

Are there any traits on the basis of which one would recognize a thing as a body or a mind in the first place that are not among "the limitations" transhumanists want to overcome? That is to say, is there any actual incarnation that does not count as a perniciously "limited" one in the sense that inspires transhumanist movements?

If the answer to the above is "no," then how is this attitude distinguishable in a way that matters from a conventional ascetic or puritanical hostility to embodied life as such? Many critics of technophiliac "futurist" discourses like transhumanism accuse it of digital utopianism and a disdain of what Cyberpunks call the "meat" body, an attitude that conduces to a certain hostility toward embodied life as it is actually lived and sometimes to actually variously embodied people. I will assume, for the sake of argument, for now, that these critics are wrong to say such things about you transhumanists. Nevertheless, can you see what might lead honest people of good will to worry about such an entailment in the transhumanist disdain of bodily limits as such? What are such critics getting wrong about your attitudes? How would you reassure them on this score?

If the answer to the above is "yes," on the other hand, then do you assume that there is either a working consensus as to what these key limits we should overcome consist of, or perhaps absent such consensus some objective criterion on the basis of which you are making your determination about the actual limits to be overcome?

It seems to me personally that transhumanists taking to this track often end up

EITHER [1] defending a fairly mainstream (or what looks to me very mainstreamable) sense of the "limits" to be overcome -- in which case they are just defending a slightly more imaginative version of "healthcare as public good," making it hard to see, in turn, what special contribution transhumanism in particular is presumably making to the discussion. (I can defend cognitive liberty and the longevity dividend, for example, without taking up any of the more sweeping, superlative, transcendentalizing, sub(cult)ural transhumanist claims and probably advocate a high percentage of the realizable, proximate policy recommendations supported by more reasonably informed democratic transhumanists);

OR [2] defending a thick conception of "optimality" that will strongly prefer particular morphologies, capacities, and lifeways over others, whatever the outcomes of informed, nonduressed consent in matters of actually desired morphologies, capacities, and lifeways -- in which case it is hard to see how these views do not risk becoming a de facto "enhancement" perfectionism which, at its worst, will look too close to eugenicism for comfort (by which I do not mean to accuse anybody of eugenicism, since I am assuming, for the sake of argument, for now, that such a resemblance would also trouble most transhumanist-identified people, whatever their specific stand on enforceable health standards and whatever their specific stand on best practices of enforcement).

The Anti-Governmentality Will Never Govern Well

Kos is one of the growing number of progressives who are coming, at long last, to "get it," and to say it loud and proud: Republican cronyism, incompetence, theft, fraud, and war-profiteering are not unfortunate accidents. On the contrary, they arise directly and inevitably from the anti-government ethos of Movement Conservatism itself, from the defining market libertarian philosophy that has ruthlessly taken over the Republican party from the Reagan era to the present epoch of the Killer Clowns... ever more resolutely driving America off the cliff, all the while.

I recommend his recent posts describing the quixotic efforts of poor wingnut Newt Gingrich to salvage electoral viability for the Republican Revolution (you know, the one with his own irrationally exuberant libertechian fingerprints all over it) by insisting on some shred of commitment to competent governance from Republicans while the demon spawn of the Movement, grinning grubs like Tom DeLay, respond like clockwork by accusing Newt of Lurving Big Gu'ment for his efforts (see today's "Government Is Not Working" as well as Kos's earlier "Republican Implosion" for more).

Of course, all this is just a straightforward application of my regularly reiterated point that the failure of Movement Conservatism is likewise a failure of market libertarian ideology. (For my shrill market fundamentalist peanut gallery I refer, mind you, to the real world failure of market libertarian ideology. You are quite right, as True Believers always are, that the never realized never realizable abstract ideals of libertopianism from which you derive your statuesque certitude remain as intact as ever. They are, after all, in stricto senso incapable of "failure" inasmuch as failure requires some actual connection to reality.)

As always, for me, the key lesson here is that the democratic left must be especially vigilant as the smoking Hindenburg of Movement Conservatism becomes a mushroom cloud. We cannot allow Republicans to run for the "cover" of professed "libertarianism" when it is market libertarian slogans and arguments that fueled Movement Conservatism from the get-go. America's native anti-intellectualism, conformism, exceptionalism, privilege, complacent acquiescence to elite mismanagement will offer up endless inducements to the most superficial change and reform, to looking the other way as the cast of corrupt characters changes party rather than corruption itself suffering defeat, from earnest elite professions of "lessons learned" conjoined with stealthy consolidations of the status quo, and so on.

To argue, as Movement Conservatives have always done, that "government is the problem" (when the problem has always been unaccountable unresponsive undemocratic governance) and that "privatization" and "deregulation" and "tax cuts" without end are the "answer" (which always translates to welfare for the rich and bullets for the vulnerable, even when advocated by otherwise perfectly nice people) is to express an outlook and rhetoric and policy that is absolutely continuous with the most extreme and marginal market fundamentalist ideology of the anarcho-capitalist. And hence to retreat from Republicanism into market fundamentalism is not to learn from one's mistakes but to retreat into the Bunker. The democratic left cannot let the Right (including the neoliberals in notionally "left" partisan formations, the neoconservatives, the free market ideologists, the corporate globalists, and so on) get away with this kind of facile bait and switch.

One hopes that all of this is a lesson Kos himself is taking to heart, and that his occasional genuflections to "Libertarian Dems" are at an end.

Technocentricity and Faith-Based True Belief

Upgraded and adapted from the Comments.
James Fehlinger notes: Cult true believers are never interested in "genuine understanding". In public "dialogue", they are simply interested in PR and spin control. (E.g., the Scientologists who post on alt.religion.scientology.)

This is true and an immensely important point to keep in mind. It is just one more reason to be troubled by the (apparently well-nigh irresistible) tendency of online technocentric discourses to take up sub(cult)ural forms; that is to say, to take on the special energies and obfuscatory defensiveness of marginal identity movements. And I say this as a person whose own preoccupations incline very much to technocentricity, but one hopes in its reality-based rather than faith-based tonalities.

When we're talking about singularitarians, technological immortalists, extropians, cybernetic totalists, enhancement perfectionists, and the other very recent, very voluble technocentric sub(cult)ural formations it pays to remember that the True Belief arises in these cases in response to the worldly catnip promises of immortality, comic book superpowers, soopergenius brains, endless delights, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, on the one hand, as well, on the other, to the psychic and existential uncertainties of rapid, sweeping, intensive global technodevelopmental change, the specter of insanely destructive devices, the technoconstituted skewing of force in the direction of indifferent elite organizations, and so on.

Technocentric discourses of transcendence, in other words, are activating powerful unconscious drives and generic archetypes. Of course, the promises and threats of ongoing and proximately upcoming technoscientific change are indeed incomparable.

That is the whole point.

Never has the need for reasonableness been more urgent, rarely have the prompts for irrationality been more numerous or more insistent.

Problematical Posthumanistical

I want to re-iterate again my insistence that in its primary current technocentric usage the term "posthuman(ist)" looks to me to be at best conceptually confused and at worst actively pernicious. This is especially so to the extent that it is meant to express some kind of idealized superlative technodevelopment state (either utopian or dystopian) at which some elite few or even "all" humans are presumably aiming, converging, accelerating, or what have you, rather than simply a term denoting a critical or skeptical attitude in the present concerning the limitations of humanist discourses and institutions.

When I say that some "posthumanist" discourses -- again, especially in their technocentric variations -- are conceptually confused I refer to the simple fact that either humans "are" posthuman in this sense right now already, or we never will be. That is to say, humanity was "essentially" prostheticized when members of the species stumbled their way into urban/cultural/linguistic lifeways, and humanity has variously interminably re-articulated and re-incarnated its being through techniques and technologies ever since.

When I say that some "posthumanist" discourses are perniciously anti-democratizing, I refer to avowed "Posthumanists" who like to use that term to express their identification here and now with projected differently technologized beings (prostheticized or genetically therapized supermen, sentient spacecraft, hive minded robot armies, superintelligent digital networks, and so on -- and, yes, dear readers, these people really do indeed exist), and my point is that this gesture of identification is making a move the essential political content of which is its disidentification with human beings as they currently exist.

This move tends to be fairly straightforwardly sociopathic, when all is said and done, and in any case anti-democratizing in its effects. It is no accident that some of the most conspicuous, usually avowedly sub(cult)ural, expressions of "Posthumanism" -- especially online -- are such strange attractors for the political Right (consider, at a glance, the market fundamentalist "Extropian" or "libertopian" variations of posthumanism, the priestly-authoritarian religiosity of the "Singularitarian" variations of posthumanism, and then the "apoliticism," "anti-politicism," and status quo apologetics of the reductionist technocrats, the more mainstream Bayesians, "Brights," and cybernetic totalists which I tend to denote as the "statisticians and bomb builders" variations of posthumanism), and again and again and again one finds in them an eager or "reluctant" embrace of (or relative indifference to) anti-democratic policy facilitated by a prior disidentification with contemporary humanity.

It is worth noting that, inasmuch as humanity "in general" is already quite as prostheticized as it ever will be -- even though, one can be sure, human beings will come to be radically differently prostheticized in years to come, as has happened over and over and over again in humanity's pasts and presents -- this means that the sub(cult)ural "Posthumanists" one finds online, full of enthusiasts handwaving about the pet futures with which they identify and which, hence, they insist must prevail, are lodging their own parochialism at the site of the very open-ended, unpredictable, prosthetic experimentalism which actually fatally undermines all such parochial pretensions. Posthumanist futurists tend to substitute for the richness of open futurity the poverty of "the future" that stars their own eyes.

Rather, it seems to me one could simply chart the historical vicissitudes of human prostheticization (culture is another perfectly good word for this) and marvel at the spectacle for its beauty or its complexity, or, sometimes perhaps more critically and opportunistically assess the costs/risks associated with its variations as one sees them or confronts them and seeks to chart a progressive course. This is not so much, I fear, the attitude inculcated by the default "posthumanist" and "transhumanist" discourses one stumbles upon online and elsewhere, which -- as I have noted many times in the past -- seem too often to amount to essentially religious attitudes toward technodevelopmental quandaries, and seem preoccupied for the most part with producing and then shoring up the viability of various marginal sub(cult)ures and their correlated membership organizations.