OK, "deluded" is probably more accurate. You sincerely think you are offering some third way that is neither transhumanist or bio-conservative. But the fact remains that I got the wrong impression of your position regarding Dvorsky, so I think the explanation has got to be that said "third way" is paved with bullshit and you haven't realized that yet. Thinking that some Transhumanists are fetishizing robots and over-estimating how possible various transhumanist ideas are doesn't put you into a third category. It's a clear line and everyone is on one side or the other: either you believe we should say "Enough" at natural conception with a law, or you believe it isn't enough, and we should (continue to) allow people to be created that aren't from natural conception.
I don't see myself offering a Third Way, because I think transhumanism and bioconservatism are both "no ways." Advocating consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, isn't about implementing A Way, it is about keeping futurity open.
Zealots always see "a clear line" they push folks to either side of, and both transhumanists and bioconservatives do the same thing when they start carving up the world into warring tribes that reflect their assumptions while ignoring the complexities of the world.
I don't think actually progressive technodevelopmental social struggle is facilitated by either transhumanist or bioconservative hyperbole or moralizing. Bioconservatism and transhumanism are both ideologies, perfectly complementary and to a certain extent inter-dependent in their shared recourse to superlative figures one side vilifies and the other side valorizes.
I think both perspectives derange efforts to achieve fairer distributions of technodevelopmental risks, costs, and benefits by activating irrational panics, desires, and moralizing where what is wanted in openness, critical thinking, and democratic deliberation.
The danger is that bioconservative and transhumanist frames and figures are essentially the lens through which everybody thinks about emerging technologies now.
Because of bioconservative and transhumanist hype it's always about "living forever" and "babies designed to order" and "uploaded robotic minds" and "clone armies," when what really matters is research and development and regulation for emerging and improving therapeutic techniques for hitherto untreated conditions, providing access to those techniques, and providing access to reliable information about those techniques in a scene of informed nonduressed consent.
If you feel content to say "Enough" it just means you're privileged. Sorry, that's it. People in the world do not have enough, enough freedom, enough health, enough legal recourse, enough equity. I'm far from satisfied.
I definitely don't approve of those who claim to love progress so that they don't have to work for justice here and now with what we have on hand, but neither do I revile the very possibility of a progress that should be made to benefit everybody by everybody, peer to peer.
Bioconservatives want to sell nostalgia as progress and transhumanists want to sell hype as progress.
I'm not fooled and I'm not interested.
2 comments:
The future is just as open if we prohibit non-natural conception (I hope I don't have to keep defining what I mean by that for people), in fact, in terms of human freedom, it would be more open, with less coercive eugenic pressure, less government regulation, less forcing people to work a million jobs to research and develop it, and, for the people created, more of a sense of self-determination and equality with humans throughout history and across the globe.
Saying "Enough" (I'm referring to the McKibben book that advocates a ban on germline GE) doesn't mean letting everything go to pot and stopping all research into diseases, it just says we don't need to intervene on the genomes of the yet-to-be-conceived. Germline GE won't help any people that are not privileged to have healthy lives, in fact, it diverts care from them in a very quantifiable way and also diverts sympathy from them, as they become to be seen as "defective" people that shouldn't have been born in the first place. It's like most of us are so privileged and satisfied that people that need our care make us uncomfortable, but we are also so selfish and lazy that we just want to reset the MAtrix with them not in it. We think that calling for research and development into germline GE so that we can "eradicate" their disease is somehow compassionate, people actually are surprised when the people with the disease they want to eradicate point out that it is them they want to eradicate. Those transhumanists are so deluded (see my blog for posts by "Musclehippy") they don't even understand that to "eradicate" a disease, we'd have to intervene on every pregnancy in the whole globe! Talk about a huge carbon footprint! But how would that be avoided? What couple would we say should not be screened and intervened for something?
I'm not selling nostalgia, you still are refusing to see how a ban would bring about those good things you say we agree on. You're the one that wants to keep slogging through the status quo that we've been in since HG Wells and Huxley's day, endlessly arguing with our peers and . I'm advocating a major change, one that is necessary if we are to focus on the things that matter, like global warming, economic justice, world hunger, etc. God that's a good argument, I hope you stand up and walk around the room a couple times and come back and say you agree with me.
Remember the CU compromise plan I'm proposing too, and how if we do this right, full equal protections and federal recogition would accompany giving up the transhumanist goals of same-sex conception and germline engineering.
The future is just as open if we prohibit non-natural conception
Yeah, and when you close a door it's still open.
(I hope I don't have to keep defining what I mean by that for people)
No poofters!
in terms of human freedom, it would be more open,
Bioconservative freedom... now with more bans!
with less coercive eugenic pressure,
I also disapprove of eugenic pressure -- which is why I insist on the scene of actually informed, actually nonduressed consent. That scares you -- because you want to exert the direct conspicuous pressure of bans to impose a eugenic vision of proper humanity you denote "natural" however parochial it actually is.
less government regulation,
Except, you know, for the police state enforcing bioconservative bans and stuff.
less forcing people to work a million jobs to research and develop it,
There are plenty of people who are eager to help relieve suffering from hitherto untreated conditions, there's no need to "force" people. Do you want to "relieve" people from being "forced" into healing professions as of now as well?
for the people created,
uh, you mean born?
more of a sense of self-determination and equality with humans throughout history and across the globe
Self-determination survives education, it'll survive awareness that parents exercise prenatal care on their potential offspring as well.
If you are worried that people will select offspring according to harmful or superficial or homogenizing criteria the solution is education, not bans -- unless you are a self-appointed gatekeeper who thinks you know more than people do themselves about what they want.
In that case don't pretend to be democratic or progressive, because you're not.
Solidarity does not require homogeneity with humans throughout history or across cultures, indeed I celebrate equity in diversity.
No doubt you think that all this is "BS." Whatever.
Saying "Enough" (I'm referring to the McKibben book that advocates a ban on germline GE) doesn't mean letting everything go to pot and stopping all research into diseases
I knew the book to which you were referring -- I strongly prefer Deep Economy, myself, as it happens, and I teach McKibben to undergraduates in my Green Rhetoric class.
You bioconservatives confront a real quandary as far as I can see: Even if you want to promote healthcare interventions that seem comfortably familiar but still progressive, something like a "Hayfleckian" utopia that accomplishes the distribution to everyone of the best healthspan presently available only to a lucky few now, you will end up mobilizing r & d that also yields non-normalizing interventions of the kind you seem to abhor.
This doesn't yield the triumphalist escalator to superlative transhumanist formulations, but it does yield an enormously complex dynamic in which hitherto customary capacities, morphologies, and expectations are called profoundly into question, with important consequences to our efforts to determine equity, general welfare, basic standards, decisional competence, reliable knowledge, and so on.
Once again, the hyperbole of both transhuman rah rah and bioconservative tsk tsk makes this urgent deliberation far harder and less clear than it should be, and disastrougly so given the proximity and hence urgency of actually emerging techniques.
I understand many of the worries about corporatism, eugenicism, and irrational expansionism that fuel the politics of bioconservativism in its legibly leftmost forms, but enforcing stasis in the name of a parochial conception of the "natural" seems to me a recipe for authoritarianism whatever one's angelic intentions, and so I turn instead to the strongest possible defense of the scene of legible consent. This approach too is fraught with difficulties, as no doubt you will be quick to point out (often to my benefit).
Germline GE won't help any people that are not privileged to have healthy lives
It is the task of progressives to see to it that it does.
diverts care from them in a very quantifiable way and also diverts sympathy from them, as they become to be seen as "defective" people that shouldn't have been born in the first place
That is one of my critiques of transhumanism -- which earns that criticism from me by literally performing such denigrations of neuro-atypicality, the non-hearing, and so on. But I personally take the opposite position very forcefully in my writing. That should matter to you.
A proper championing of the differently enabled should include both a defense of all folk's desires to make informed consensual recourse (or refrain from this) to non-normalizing technique (or "normalizing" ones) as they see fit, in the service of whatever lifeways they would incarnate.
Treating the differently enabled like endangered species or pets in a zoo is hardly the epitome of respect for diversity you seem to think it is. If you would respect the dignity of the differently enabled, affirm what they consent to on their own terms and celebrate the lifeway multiculture that eventuates from consent, even if you find it skeery and unnatural.
It's like most of us are so privileged and satisfied that people that need our care make us uncomfortable, but we are also so selfish and lazy that we just want to reset the MAtrix with them not in it.
Speak for yourself.
We think that calling for research and development into germline GE so that we can "eradicate" their disease is somehow compassionate,
I don't.
people actually are surprised when the people with the disease they want to eradicate point out that it is them they want to eradicate.
I make this point to transhumanists all the time.
I'm not selling nostalgia, you still are refusing to see how a ban would bring about those good things you say we agree on.
I'm sure your ban would be an awesome ban bringing all sorts of awesome good things.
You're the one that wants to keep slogging through the status quo that we've been in since HG Wells and Huxley's day
Except that, well, no, I don't. Quite to the contrary.
I'm advocating a major change,
Bans on procreative practices bigoted elites disapprove of aren't exactly new, guy.
one that is necessary if we are to focus on the things that matter, like global warming, economic justice, world hunger, etc.
Nonsense. Queer couples having babies can still defend the multilateral treaties that will criminalize pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, struggle for a basic income guarantee funded by progressive taxation of income (including investment income) and real estate, and defending seed sharing, water sovereignty, and so on.
If safe techniques emerge for same-sex conception and some informed nonduressed people consent to it, the world won't end however skeered you are at that prospect, and nothing is to keep progressive people from concentrating on the other just and sustainable outcomes that are possible and necessary.
Remember the CU compromise plan I'm proposing too, and how if we do this right, full equal protections and federal recogition would accompany giving up the transhumanist goals of same-sex conception and germline engineering.
Oh, believe me, John, I do remember your rather crazy homophobic plan to "ensure" the legalization of same-sex marriage only by proposing a ban on same-sex reproduction as if anybody but reactionary bigots who don't want queers to get married in the first place give two shits about whether or not they safely find ways to have kids together.
Look, queer marriage is coming anyway. We don't need to enshrine second-class citizenship through a bioconservative procreation ban -- we'll get everything we want exactly as we deserve to anyway. Deal with it.
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