What's Wrong With "Transhumanism"?

This is my latest of countlessly many efforts to date to characterize succinctly my criticism of the so-called transhumanist "movement," "ideology," "program," whatever it is. This one was written in response to a press query. You would be surprised how often I get such questions, I think usually from would-be journalists or perhaps grad students sniffing around for some writing angle. As always happens in such efforts, this version of my critique emphasizes some things, de-emphasizes others, captures some things nicely pithily, misses other things entirely, but since I cannot know what if anything will come of it, I figured I'd post it here at any rate so that the minutes of effort it represents aren't wasted entirely. This time the questioner also wanted to know how "technoprogressivism" differed from "transhumanism," possibly fancying some juicy sectarian squabble between weird futurological gurus might be in play. If nothing else I hope I managed to disabuse him of that.

People mean different things by "transhumanism," both those who sympathize or even identify with it, and those who disapprove or even ridicule what goes on it its name. I use the term "transhumanism" myself to deploy critiques of a complex of overlapping techno-utopian technodevelopmental attitudes and programs, all of them anti-democratizing in their primary impact, in my view:

[1] Transhumanism arises out of a familiar strain of Enlightenment thinking that tends to a distortive mechanistic reductionism and un(der)critical technophilia, a strain that has met with criticisms since it first emerged both from Romantic (and other) critics of Enlightenment but also from different quarters within Enlightenment as well;

[2] It activates and exaggerates the familiar irrational passions of instrumental rationality (dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence in particular) especially in moments of disruptive change;

[3] It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic technodevelopmental vision of collaborative problem solving and consensual self-determination a more faithful "transcendental" vision aspiring after personal superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance -- this being a superficially "technicized" and hyper-individualized appropriation of omnipredicated Divinity, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence -- a vision that is conceptually confused and usually terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;

[4] It affirms a politics of biomedical "enhancement" that in valuing a parochial "perfectionism" over a consensual diversity of lifeways amounts to eugenicism;

[5] It endorses elite-technocratic circumventions of stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change (especially worrisome given the tendency to eugenicism), usually justified with the familiar anti-democratic alibi that "accelerating change" is ill-understood by everyday people affected by it (of course any characterization of technodevelopment as monolithically accelerating is patently false, and often, I think, is little more than a description of the catastrophic social instability provoked by neoliberal financialization of the global corporate-militarist economy as experienced by the relative beneficiaries of that instability, that is to say, by the mostly white, mostly male, mostly well-off, mostly well-educated, North Atlantic consumers who identify in the main as "transhumanists");

[6] It is relying ever more conspicuously on a discourse of existential risk (an analog to and exacerbation of reactionary "war-on-terror"-discourse) and geo-engineering response that conduces especially to the benefit of incumbency over democracy, the corporate-military-industrial-broadcast complex over emerging insurgent p2p-formations;

[7] It substitutes for the politics of democratizing social struggle amidst a diversity of stakeholders over new and actually-emerging technoscientific changes a dangerously inapt politics of sub(cult)ural identity, a movement politics mobilizing personal and shared-group identification with particular idealized (often incoherent) technodevelmental outcomes designated "the future," organized by dis-identification with actually existing planetary peers in their diversity;

[8] It is constituted in its organizational substance by an archipelago of inter-related so-called "think-tanks" and membership organizations supported by fandom subcultures, many of which are disturbingly indistinguishable from cults with all that this implies in the way of social alienation, manic PR and hyperbolizing rhetoric to attract attention rather than contribute to sense, criticisms misconstrued and attacked as defamation, and the whole banal bestiary of authoritarian hierarchy from True Believers to would-be gurus peddling pseudo-science.

These critiques are overlapping, but not seamlessly so, and one will find "transhumanist-identified" people who will represent better or worse targets for various combinations of these, as you will also find different levels of awareness and understanding among them about the entailments between these critiques.

It is true that for better or for worse I have personally become associated with the term "technoprogressive," but when I hear talk of "technoprogressive resistance to transhumanism" it seems especially important to me that you grasp that "technoprogressive" as far as I have ever been concerned is just a shorthand for the more gawky, awkward phrase "conventionally progressive, democratizing politics focused on questions of technoscientific change." It is not, properly so-called, some rival ideology to "transhumanism." Indeed, many "transhumanists" have appropriated the "technoprogressive" label themselves as a stealthy PR designation of some versions of the "transhumanist program" and so I can't say with confidence that the term is a proper placeholder for resistance to "transhumanist" silliness in any case.

I am personally interested in a potentially democratizing confluence of p2p-formations and an emerging planetary environmentalist politics as a way of overcoming the postwar impasse of corporate-militarist (neoliberal/neoconservative) Washington Consensus global hegemony. Also, I am interested (and, not to put too fine a point on it, enormously worried) about the planetary dissemination of non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicines in a world of precarious status/labor, fearing an anti-democratic imposition of experimental subjection in the service of elite "enhancement" rather than a progressive politics of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination. Surely what is wanted is an equitable sustainable consensual technoscientific planetary multiculture.

This perspective puts me at odds with so-called "transhumanists" most of the time, who either disapprove of this emphasis, or who have nothing to contribute to its accomplishment while at once offering up endless confusions that befuddle the proper work of democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle on which its progressive accomplishment entirely depends.

But I cannot pretend that my "technoprogressive" vantage (one among many that are possible) provides me a rival ideology, program, or subculture with which to confront organized "transhumanists" on their preferred terms. It doesn't.