Knowing Where to Look

Edited and Upgraded from Comments, Friend of Blog Anne Corwin writes:

I don't really know anymore how to tell who is and isn't on the ">Hist bandwagon" -- from where I sit right now, transhumanism is beginning to look like an impressionist painting (the kind that looks coherent only from a distance -- the closer you get, the more definition starts to fail).

This may mean that where you are sitting right now is too close to transhumanism! One can delineate pernicious structural effects of a discourse or a social formation, but it will always remain true that many (probably most) of the individual people influenced by and disseminating that discourse, or making recourse to and maintaining that organization will not themselves be pernicious as people.

Perfectly intelligent people can nonetheless make false or invalid arguments, and exposing this falsity and invalidity can be seen as an expression of respect for that intelligence (even if in the heat of the exposure it will often feel quite to the contrary). So too perfectly nice, well-meaning, conscientious people can invigorate or symptomize pernicious discourses and exposing these symptomatic expressions and effects can be seen as an expression of respect for their capacity for critical reflection and better judgment (even if in the heat of the exposure it will often feel quite to the contrary).

Every discourse, every social formation, every organization is an impressionist painting in the sense you mean. This is a resource for profound hope because it reminds us that pernicious forms that demand reformation or circumvention but seem for now utterly intractable are always sustained in fact by individuals more complex and open than the forms they invigorate. But this can also function as a ruse that blunts one's capacity to focus at the proper level of generality at which problematic and pernicious features are actually visible in the first place.