Critique or Defamation?

Over in the Moot, reader "Smartypants" distinguishes "sustained critiques of transhumanism versus sustained critiques of transhumanists," and then proposes that "[m]uch of your analysis on this subject, and even the analysis that looks like a critique of the philosophical underpinnings, actually falls in the latter category."

Let me get this straight. Are you saying this is the case because I am reading claims and conduct attributable to actual people?

The "-ism" is grasped as a generalization from the assertions and behaviors of the actual "-ists," surely?

Even your work on superlative technocentricity is a canard as it relates to what transhumanists see as the 'philosophy' of transhumanism. It's based largely on your ongoing observation of numerous examples of superlative discourse issuing from transhumanists.

Uh, yes that's true. It's based on what people actually say and do, rather than on the way they promote themselves. Non members have no responsibility to ensure that their critiques tow the Party Line, after all.

And you will forgive me, but "transhumanism," so-called, is simply not a philosophy in any meaningful sense. It isn't a world view encompassing all the dimensions of human life or meaning nor does it seek to hold its historical moment whole in thought -- it is far too focused in its instrumental concerns to pass muster as a philosophy worthy of that name, in my understanding of what philosophies do. There are lots of things that are valuable that aren't philosophies so transhumanists really shouldn't take that assessment too harshly. But I will add that to the extent that philosophizing does happen in "transhumanist" social and cultural spaces, I have to say none of that thinking seems to me unique or original enough to demand a new name to describe the perspective. Reductionism, technocracy, scientism, Social Darwinism, disdain of the flesh, and techno-utopianism aren't exactly new perspectives in North Atlantic intellectual life since 1660. Sorry.

You may see no difference between these categories, but your transhumanist interlocutors surely do, and will continue to accuse you of attacking strawmen until you seriously engage with the structures of transhumanism

It is commonplace for members of marginal sub(cult)ures to mistake critique for defamation -- even when they are making claims in argumentative forms that seem to solicit warranted belief.

It is not me, it is the transhumanists who claim to be members of a subculture and a movement with which they identify. You can't claim to identify with a marginal community exhibiting discernible traits and beliefs generally in common, and then complain that every attribution of such generalities are "strawmen" because they fail to account for dime-thin differences of expression among the members.

If you make an argument, you open yourself to critique, if you just want to offer up expressions of faith for the Faithful, don't publish your writing for a general audience.

If you willingly raise the banner of a movement, you become answerable to its tendencies as discerned from generalizations from actual things its members say and do.

I am forever being castigated by transhumanists for "unseriousness" because I won't indulge in what they think of as "technical" discussions, few of which pass muster as technical in the first place for those who are not already True Believers, or because I won't indulge them in their demand that I treat every individual member as a completely distinct ab initio creation whose every utterance and shade of conviction I must grasp in its glorious individuality before I can be said to do justice to it, individual differences that appear significant only to the individuals themselves from the perspective of their already shared True Belief in the generalities that interest me.

Sorry, every fundamentalist will assure you that only those on the Inside know what it is to treat them "seriously," that critics and outsiders are missing the real originality, the real significance, the real force of their views, the true complex beauty of their system, and so on.

(starting with the foundational documents of the WTA) rather than the discourse of transhumanists."

Well, first of all, I am not a True Believer and so you are not empowered to insist to me that the only texts worthy of my consideration are the canonical texts of your Church. This is a straightforward fundamentalist demand. It would not be responsible, but actively irresponsible for me to confine myself to such materials if what I am looking for is an objective and sound accounting of how people who identify as transhumanists differ in what they say and do and want from people who do not so identify.

But I want to say that this is especially so for many of the documents you are talking about here, which are functioning as promotional documents designed to attract mainstream media attention and paid memberships and other forms of support.

This latter task is harder, less fun, but probably bears more fruit for you professionally in the end.

Back here on planet Earth, you will find that there are few professional gains to be made by taking the PR documents of an extremely marginal Robot Cult at face value, or at any rate reading them without the context of representative statements by members that elaborate and sometimes subvert the expectations generated by such promotional materials.

By the way, there is little in the way of professional benefit that attaches to attacking Robot Cults either. I do it because it is the right thing to do, not because I think it is some kind of boon to my career. Believe me, it isn't.