What Do Transhumanists Actually Believe In?

To continue from my last post with the discussion of Russell Blackford's recent defense of the superlative technocentricity of the so-called Cosmic Engineers, I want to shift my attention away from what seems to me to be a curiously misplaced preoccupation in Blackford's piece with presumably fashionable and tyrannical political correctness among the relativist academic Left (of all things) to the one statement in the entire piece that seemed to me to name something like what Blackford thinks "transhumanism" actually, positively, substantially stands for. He writes:

I will always be looking for avenues to argue as strongly and effectively as I can for what I believe -- which includes the idea that technology can improve the human situation and enhance human capacities.

I find this statement problematic at two different levels.

First:

As an everyday sort of utterance it seems to me that the belief that "technology can improve the human situation and enhance human capacities" is as vapid a commonplace as one could ever hope to find.

Is there anybody on earth who manages consistently to disagree with this belief? Even deep ecologists who devote their lives to the critique of "the technological society" tend to defend the notion of "appropriate technology," after all, and even the ones who haven't exactly thought the matter through still tend to use pencils and wear eyeglasses and visit the doctor.

The idea that one invents tools to do wanted things with them is surely rather built in to the notion of "technology" in the first place? One doesn't want to end the story there -- there are questions about what is wanted in what sense, with what consequences, and so on, but we'll turn to a slightly deeper intervention in a moment.

As for "enhancing human capacities," this is a bit trickier, but at the same everyday speech level as the one in which almost everybody as a matter of course already believes technology can be helpful it is also true that almost everybody already believes as a matter of course that healthcare is a good thing (where it is made to be as safe and fair as may be and so on), and that healthcare is a matter of intervening in dis-ease to render ease.

Again, there are questions whether rendering ease is quite the same thing as "enhancement" but we'll get to that in a moment.

At this first level of attention, though, I just want to point out that there is a really substantial sense in which the belief Blackford declares to be his own and seems to identify with "transhumanism" constitutes such a complete commonplace that the question becomes against whom does Blackford really imagine himself to be in disagreement and why on earth would anybody imagine one needs a new (?), unique (?) "movement" or "program" to affirm or defend or promote these commonplaces?

Second:

Once we set aside everyday usage and interrogate these commonplaces in a more analytic way we find that they don't really hold up to scrutiny at all (this is no argument in my view against their perfect usefulness in their everyday usage; that would require a different argument).

Although I have no trouble at all making sense of the everyday utterance that "technology can improve the human situation," this is not at all an utterance I would be comfortable to affirm in a careful accounting of technoscientific change.

If one is taking greater care around these claims in an effort to understand technodevelopmental social struggle the first thing one will immediately observe is that while some technoscientific changes improve the situation (whether in the short term or in the longer term) of at least some human beings (though rarely all, and never in the same way or to the same extent) some do not, and that the logical possibility that technology can improve things for some is less to the point than determining just whose lot will be improved, and how much, for how long, at what cost, at what risk, to whom and on what terms, and then determining how best case outcomes might be facilitated in light of all this.

What one discovers soon enough is that it is never "technology" as such that "improves" things for anybody.

There is no such thing as "technology" at that level of generality in the first place, and it does a terrible disservice to sense to imply otherwise. Rather, there are historically situated technoscientific vicissitudes caught up in the ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle of the diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific change who share the world.

Further, it is the uses to which technoscientific discoveries are put that determines their impact for good or ill. These uses are driven by moral, esthetic, ethical, and political values -- and are not somehow determined by what passes for "technology" itself in any given moment of technodevelopmental social struggle.

This matters, because it means that even those who focus on the political problems and promises of technoscientific change in particular will rightly attend more to the terms of fairly conventional political value than to the particulars of technoscience to the extent that their concern is actually more political (facilitating equity, diversity, and consent, say) than specifically scientific.

The same sort of concern is very much alive when one wants to look closely at the notion of "enhancing human capacities." Enhancement is always: enhancement -- in the service of some ends over others; enhancement -- according to whom as against who else.

While we can agree that healthcare provision is being rendered non-normalizing in an unprecedented way by emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, the determination of what non-normalizing interventionals are "enhancements" is not somehow determined by the therapies at hand but through the scene of actually informed actually nonduressed consensual self-determination in planetary multiculture.

To the extent that "transhumanism" wants to imply that political ends like the "improvement of the human situation" are determined by scientific developments apart from political contestation and consensual self-determination then this seems to me a facile, too-familiar, dangerously anti-democratizing thesis of reductionism coupled to technocratic elitism.

To the extent that "transhumanism" wants to imply that it can dictate the terms on which non-normalizing healthcare will yield "enhancement of human capacities" and when it will not apart from political contestation and consensual self-determination then this seems to me a moralizing, too-familiar, dangerously anti-democratizing thesis of eugenicism coupled to technocratic elitism again.

To the extent that "transhumanism" wants no more than to imply that tools can be useful and healthcare can be a good thing, well, I'm afraid one doesn't need to join a Robot Cult to advocate such commonplaces, indeed one probably needs to find one's way to a Luddite Cult as marginal as the Robot Cult itself to find anybody who consistently disapproves such commonplaces.

Now, if one wants to profess faith in a technologically determined human destiny aspiring toward the accomplishment of secularized theological omni-predicates, digital superintelligence, therapized superlongevity, virtual or nanotechnological superabundance then I daresay one probably does need to join a Robot Cult to find a community of the like-minded, and the same goes for those who would recast eugenic parochialism as an emancipatory program in this day and age.

None of these results seem to me to conduce much to the benefit of those who would declare "movement transhumanism" a reasonable enterprise as it actually plays out in the world.