Consensual Prosthetic Self-Determination and Progressive Democratization

I just want to repeat a paragraph from a recent post of mine decrying the tendencies to eugenicism in too much futurological discourse -- whether the prevailing neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist global developmental discourse of incumbent interests and their technocrats, or the condensed reductio of that mainstream discourse, the superlative futurology of the transhumanists, digital-utopians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, megascale geoengineers, extropians, and nano-cornucopiasts I deride here so often as Robot Cultists. The paragraph I want to reiterate is a more positive and programmatic one to which I want to append at its end a further rather expansive elaboration concerning the relation of the notion of consent to properly progressive and democratic politics more generally.

As I remarked in the prior post, I advocate a politics of consensual prosthetic self-determination, which I take to be the usual pro-Choice politics, elaborated to include both the right of all women to end their unwanted pregnancies safely as well as to facilitate wanted ones through assistive reproductive techniques, and elaborated further to include a host of familiar civil libertarian positions on biomedical and lifeway issues concerning the self-determination of end-of-life conditions, informed consensual comparatively harmless recreational drug use, consensual body modification (cosmetic procedures, sexual reassignments, body modifications like tattoos and piercings and so on), and elaborated further still in the context of actually emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions to affirm and protect the choices of sane competent adult citizens either to make recourse to or refrain from entering into emerging therapeutic regimes, whether they are normalizing or not, even when their eventual and combinatorial effects are imperfectly understood (as is usually the case after all), so long as participation is not under duress (where "duress" marks force, the threat of force, but also precarity: insecure legal status, the pressure of poverty, and the disruptions of war, pandemic, or catastrophic climate change), the decision to participate is informed (not compromised by fraud, secrecy, or misinformation), and the regime is regulated, transparent, and accountable. To this, let me add that inasmuch as all culture is best-understood as prosthetic in my view, consensual prosthetic self-determination connects up as well to the politics of free expression and association, including deployments of style as performances of subcultural identification, dis-identification, and negotiation.

Just as the scene of consent -- actually informed, actually nonduressed consent, mind you (where "informed" is not measured against the impossibility of omniscience, where "nonduressed" is not measured against the impossibility of omnipotence) -- provides the ground on the basis of which I navigate the interminable (and often productive) tension in democratic politics between the values of equity and diversity, so too consent negotiates the customary tension between individual and collective: Individual self-determination depends on consent, while the achievement and maintenance of the scene of consent is a collective project, peer-to-peer.

Notice that a democratic politics devoted to consent does not properly provoke a commitment to anarchy. This is so since, just as a consistent commitment to nonviolence compels the advocacy of a democratic state tasked with providing institutional alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes, a consistent commitment to consent compels advocacy of a democratic state tasked with the administration of equitable justice and welfare and access to reliable knowledge to ensure that the scene of consent it actually informed and nonduressed and hence substantiated rather than a vacuous formalism. And of course, to the extent that consent is legible, it enables the "consent of the governed" that legitimates the state as democratic in the first place, as does the (ill-understood, much maligned, but in fact definitive) connection in democratic governance of the taxation without which government cannot function to representation (all citizens can vote for and against current office-holders as well as stand for office themselves).

In my view, consent also provides the key to a progressive politics that is properly compatible with a commitment to democratic politics. To be devoted to democracy is usually to be progressive as well, of course -- since actual democratization remains so partially and imperfectly realized in the present this is only to be expected as an empirical matter -- and yet the usual glib identification of progressive and democratic politics yields much mischief in my view. Democracy is the idea that people should have a real say in the public decisions that affect them, and the progressive politics of democratization is the one in which we work to ensure that ever more people have ever more of a real say in the public decisions that affect them.

The actual play of diverse lifeways and the public reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders to the costs, risks, and benefits of historical change, peer to peer, that is to say the actual substance of democratic politics is unpredictable, interminable, and, therefore, strictly speaking, non-progressive. That is to say, freedom isn't going anywhere, it isn't progressing toward some destination or end: It is open, promising, threatening, problematic, ideally interminably ongoing.

And so, it seems to me that for democratically-minded people progressive politics, properly understood, should be progressing toward the achievement of an actually-legible actually-substantive scene of consent. Else, all too often, "progress" is either naturalized into a "faith in progress" that tends to function as self-congratulatory apologia for privileges that derive from exploitation, or is superlativized into a denialism about limits couched in terms of endless aspiration that tends to facilitate the deferment and externalization of costs and risks onto the vulnerable to the benefit of the privileged. That is to say, any commitment to progress that is not progress toward the accomplishment of the society of informed, nonduressed consent, will tend to be a conservative retro-futurism figuring "progress" always only as the amplification of the terms of imcumbent privilege.

Transhuman Eugenicism

I have regularly accused "transhumanist"-identified futurists of parochial, at best, and outright eugenicist, at worst, ideas about what constitutes "enhancement" treated as self-evident truths to guide public policy.

An "Anonymous" commenter responded in the Moot:

I've been reading your blog for quite some time, and every time you mentioned this I've always wanted to pipe up and say that I have never actually read about any transhumanists wanting to enhance humanity. Instead, I hear them talking about 'enhancing' themselves (whatever that entails -- it seems entirely reasonable that they want only to modify themselves to whatever manner they deem to be improvement). And, to me, there's absolutely nothing with this. If someone wants to do something to her own body, let her.

I just don't see [this] as being a fair criticism, since, as far as I know, there isn't anybody advocating for widespread 'improvement' of the human race. Though, I could very well be wrong -- I tend not to follow quacks too much

I advocate consensual prosthetic self-determination myself, after all, so I can't say I disapprove of folks seeking to change themselves, either, so long as they aren't under duress or unduly misinformed about risks and costs and benefits and so on. I take consensual prosthetic self-determination to be the usual Pro-Choice politics, simply elaborated to include both the right of all women to end their unwanted pregnancies safely as well as to facilitate wanted ones through assistive reproductive techniques, but also elaborated further to include a host of familiar civil libertarian positions on biomedical and lifeway issues concerning the self-determination of end-of-life conditions, informed consensual comparatively harmless recreational drug use, consensual body modification (cosmetic procedures, sexual reassignments, body modifications like tattoos and piercings and so on), and elaborated further still in the context of actually emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions to affirm and protect the choices of sane competent adult citizens either to make recourse to or refrain from entering into emerging therapeutic regimes, whether they are normalizing or not, even when their eventual and combinatorial effects are imperfectly understood (as is usually the case after all), so long as participation is not under duress (where "duress" marks force, the threat of force, but also precarity: insecure legal status, the pressure of poverty, and the disruptions of war, pandemic, or catastrophic climate change), the decision to participate is informed (not compromised by fraud, secrecy, or misinformation), and the regime is regulated, transparent, and accountable. Inasmuch as I ultimately take all culture to be prosthetic and all prostheses to be culture I also believe a defense of consensual prosthetic self-determination to connect in the largest sense to the championing of access-to-knowledge and public education and the celebration of lifeway diversity and convivial consensual secular civilization.

However, it seems to me that far too many "transhumanists" (and so-called "liberal eugenicists" more generally, whether so described themselves -- as, incredibly, some do -- or taking up comparable descriptions -- "better humans," "humanity plus" -- or deserving of the moniker come what may) have a distressing tendency to describe as "objectively suboptimal" many capacities, morphologies and lifeways that are actually viable and wanted (deafness, neuro-atypicalities, among others) but which happen to fail to accord with their own parochial values.

Much desolating talk of "efficiency," "competitiveness," "performance" tends to get megaphoned where this sort of "enhancement" cheerleading is afoot, you can be sure. It is rather what you would expect, frankly, from a "movement" whose members so often seem to treat "Science Fiction plus Vegas plus self-esteem workshops plus nutritional supplement informercials" as equaling "civilization."

Especially charming I must say are the discussions of the ways in which "atypicalities" and "sub-optimalities" impose social costs that should not be borne by the more typical and more optimal, as well as the discussions which seem to pine for bodies transformed into interminable arms races of ever more enhanced competitiveness. Quite apart from the fact that one never quite knows how to square such puritanical frugality with the predictions these futurologists are endlessly making about the stunning techno- nano- robo- info- sooper-abundance that is always just around the corner if we will truly believe in it enough, one also has to wonder about all this hardboiled hard-edge hardcore utilitarian diversity policing just what kind of person thinks this would be a marvelous way to live one's life in this breezing buzzing befuddling bedazzling world of ours?

Even those "enhancement enthusiasts" who don't go so far as to advocate coercive implementation of their stainless-steel vision of post-human sooper-models, still collaborate in the denigration of perfectly legible actually wanted lifeways of present-peers while peddling facile visions of "better-humans" who I daresay would still know hardship and humiliation contrary to the glossy brochures.

It wouldn't be fair to say that every "transhumanist"-identified person is an explicit braying coercive eugenicist, certainly -- and I do not make, nor have I ever made, that claim. But I do think "enhancement" discourse is saturated with implicit eugenicist assumptions (often under-interrogated by more or less well-meaning or at any rate deluded advocates) and unwarrantedly intolerant consequences.

What is troublesome in so much of this "enhancement" discourse is the suggestion that viable wanted difference parochially designated "suboptimal" translates inevitably to inequity, that disapproved difference is dis-ease, and that ideally a commitment to justice demands arriving at homogeneity via medical intervention peddled as the arrival at an "optimality" that inevitably reflects very parochial prejudices concerning what human beings should look like and be like and what we are for.

It is not surprising to stumble upon suggestions even from "liberal" and insistently anti-authoritarian enhancement-enthusiasts that deaf parents screening for a wanted deaf child is equivalent to deafening one's actually hearing child, that parents with differently-enabled children inevitably find themselves in an especially tragic circumstance. As if a child with mild Down's cannot be a flourishing cherished person, familiar, and peer? And also as if the parent of a "normal" child, however construed, won't be beset by heartbreak, distress, tragedy as well?

It is not surprising either to hear "transhumanists" insist that we have a moral duty to "uplift" nonhuman animals into human consciousness if we can do so. Notice that this is not just a claim that it might be interesting or useful or warranted to nudge non-human animal cognition into conformity with more human forms of cognition, it is the claim that such a transformation would objectively constitute an improvement or enhancement of that cognition, that difference-from-human-norms (in whatever construal) is tantamount to inferiority, nonviability, even a kind of harm, and that, hence, policing cognitive diversity into anthopocentric homogeneity becomes a kind of moral imperative a righting of the "injustice" of parochially disvalued differences.

There is an interminable tension in democratic societies that must struggle, reform, and experiment in an ongoing way to institutionally implement the values of equity and diversity, both of which are indispensable to a properly democratic vision of social justice, a consensualist vision of equity in diversity.

It seems to me that "enhancement" advocates identified with the left (however ambivalently) too readily err on the side of "equity" over "diversity" to the cost of freedom, while "enhancement" advocates on the right too readily err on the side of affirming a facile "diversity" including most or all choices, however duressed they may be by inequitable conditions of poverty, violence, ignorance, misinformation, exploitation.

It seems to me that those "enhancement" advocates and especially "transhumanists" who are not explicit eugenicists or who abhor eugenicism (of whom there are some I'm sure) would do well to spend less time in defensive denial about how this problem relates to them, and far more time addressing its causes and symptoms among so many fellow-members of their sub(cult)ural "movement" with whom they are nonetheless so eager to affiliate despite this asserted disagreement and abhorrence.

UPDATED from some subsequent exchanges in the Moot:

Another "Anonymous" poster to the Moot declared she or he "didn't get it" when I protested the position of some transhumanists who declare "screening for a wanted deaf child is equivalent to deafening one's actually hearing child." Brave "Anonymous" wanted to know "What is wrong with that claim? (Assuming the deafening is done right after birth, assuming equivalent means morally equivalent, etc.)"

After a brief shudder I pointed out, in response:

A fetus -- actually, since we are talking here about screening, a not even conceived potential fetus -- isn't a person who can be harmed and "who" must in "their" vulnerability be protected from violation or unwanted unnecessary risk. But a woman contemplating pregnancy or actually pregnant most certainly is just that, a person who can be harmed and who must be protected from violation or unwanted unnecessary risk -- and as an actually-existing hearing child threatened with such violation most certainly is, too.

A person cannot reasonably be said to suffer violation or harm simply by virtue of being different from every one of indefinitely many alternate persons who might have emerged out of the circumstances of their conception with whatever benefits and problems that that different person would differently incarnate. All that sort of rhetoric is just the usual obfuscatory anti-choice bullshit as far as I can see.

Another commenter wondered if I really "think all screening by parents is acceptable. If not then what criteria separate good screening from bad screening."

I think this question raises genuinely difficult issues. Here was my response:

The first thing to say is that every woman makes the right choice, by which I mean to say every woman's choice is the choice she has every right to make in respect to how she wants to end or facilitate a pregnancy in her own body, as far as I'm concerned.

Does that mean that I am unaware of the irrational prejudices (in respect to race, gender, atypicality, different-enablement, and so on) that can articulate many of these choices? Not at all. Certainly, I am aware of all this.

Let me make the point in the most personal way I can think of.

I'm a gay man whose own mother would very likely have aborted me had she known I was going to be gay. She has said as much to me, and it is clear that she would have made this choice at the time as much because she didn't know she would become a person who could love a gay child as easily as a straight one when the issue arose (which it turns out, happily, she could and did), as because she was too ignorant at the time, as most people were, I suppose, to know that society would afford a gay child a flourishing life rather than a miserable one (which it turns out, happily, it could and did).

But let me be very clear, that as a pro-choice person I fully defend the right of any woman to end an unwanted pregnancy for whatever reason makes it unwanted to her, even a person in an exactly analogous position as my Mother's in respect to the prospectively gay me.

Of course I know that pregnancies can be unwanted for reasons that are hateful, irrational, or deeply ignorant (as would have been the case with my Mother at the time, as she would now be the first to agree).

What is wanted in such cases is to shame the hateful, address the irrational, and educate the ignorant, so that differences that don't make a difference in the way they are sometimes hatefully, irrationally, or ignorantly imagined to be are no longer unwanted, so that whatever choices are made are better informed than not. The way to address hatred, irrationality, and ignorance is not through infantilization and prohibition of choices that symptomize these wrongheaded states of mind, but through argument, education, and wider exposure to differences that only seem threatening to those who lack the experience to know better.

I think that there is an incredible amount of misinformation and mystification and pernicious wish-fulfillment that takes place when talk turns to "screening away" unwanted kinds of people or "selecting for" especially wanted kinds of people as a matter of fact.

And I think much of this talk is enormously hurtful and relentlessly stupid, deeply disrespectful and insensitive to the actually viable, actually wanted, actually differently flourishing lifeways of any number of peers with whom the would be "optimizers" and "enhancers" are actually already sharing this world.

But it is crucial to distinguish the politics through which one would address this sort of hatefulness and irrationality from the politics through which one affirms the right of competent sane adults to informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination where healthcare choices, cultural investment, and so on are concerned.

I understand that it can be really tricky to hold all these demands together.

That complexity and difficulty is of course one of the reasons why those who make recourse to "enhancement" discourse in the first place seek to simplify these quandaries through a depoliticizing would-be neutralization of what are truly parochial value-judgments, treating them as already settled simply by calling them, simply, "enhancements" at all -- when "enhancement" is always actually "enhancement" to whom? "enhancement" in respect to what end? "enhancement" at what cost to what other possible ends? -- and when these values and ends and costs and risks and benefits are all manifestly under contest in fact.

But whatever the difficulty and complexity, it does seem to me that resisting the impulse to undue simplification here is what democratic commitments to consent, equity, and diversity actually require of us here.

Re-Public Piece

The journal Re-Public has published a piece of mine called Superlative Futurology. Most of the arguments there will be quite familiar to readers here. The piece appears together with a number of others that are considerably more sympathetic to transhumanism and futurology than I am myself, and I will be reviewing each of the other contributions as time allows.

Against Anarchy: The Politics Nonviolence, Civitas and p2p Democratization

I don't want to smash the state, I want to democratize it.

The following is a reverse-chronological anthologization of posts thinking democracy in relation to anarchist aspirations, nonviolent politics, and the question whether there really can be anything utopian about millions of citizens engaging in boring harm-reduction policy administration accountable both to consensus science and to its actual stakeholders on the public dime. Preview of coming attractions: if the world is not to be slaughterhouse forever, then the answer to that question has to be something like "yes."

Many of the aphorisms anthologized as Dispatches from Libertopia speak to these themes as well, I guess. As aphorisms go they are not as funny as you might like, but they don't take as long to read as my posts do.

Sometimes, in these posts I find myself trying to find new ways of talking about what seem to me very basic political ideas, even points of departure for political thinking as such. For example, there are quite a few posts that offer variations on the claim that taxation is indispensable to the creation and maintenance of public alternatives for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes rather than a form of violence, let alone the paradigmatic state violence. In spats with anarchist friends I offer up many variations on the argument that even though states notoriously can and do operate to rationalize violence and enforce hierarchies the struggle is not so much to smash states but to democratize them (as my slogan goes), since violence and hierarchy both precede and exceed state forms in a finite world shared by a diversity of stakeholders.

These can seem unconventional and even paradoxical ideas, and so I have to admit that people of good will can misunderstand or disagree with them. I know, of course, that there are plenty of people who are allies on important issues, in political campaigns, during particular actions, making radical art, and who are generally right on with their right on and yet who think of themselves as anarchists. But I personally think that what genuinely lefty, genuinely thoughtful anarchists think of as "anarchy" -- when they are not simply being naive narcissistic tools enabling reactionary politics and consumer complacency in bubbles of privilege -- is better thought of as "democracy." I get that it might seem something of a dick move to tell so many of the few people anywhere near my own wavelength as a queer atheist vegetarian democratic socialist feminist anti-racist anti-corporatist anti-militarist aesthete that their anarchism is aligned with American consumer-complacency and racist plutocracy when all is said and done -- but, honestly, if somebody who allied with me as much as so many lefty anarchists do sincerely thought I was enabling reactionary politics that horrify me, and offered up considered formulations to that effect to public scrutiny, I would want to hear them out on the subject more than I would want to devote myself to filing report after report to the hurt feelings department over it. But, hey, maybe that's just me.

Anyway, also anthologized here are posts on issues of access-to-knowledge and peer-to-peer democratization and on the anti-democratizing politics of elite-incumbent design culture (some of the posts anthologized under the separate heading Futurology Against Ecology are also relevant to this topic). What all these pieces share is the conviction that democratization is an interminable process of social struggles and experimental implementations, efforts to give ever more people ever more say in the public decisions that affect them, struggles for a sustainable, consensual, equitable, and diverse shared and made world, peer to peer.

A Clash of Spontaneisms: Howard Kunstler on Thomas Piketty, posted April 29, 2014.

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Not A Deeper State Than Our State of Democratizing Capability, posted February 23, 2014.

American Anarchism Is Racist Through and Through, posted July 20, 2013.

The "Mixed Economy" Isn't A Mix, It Is "Ideal" Capitalism and Socialism That Are Mixed Up, posted June 15, 2013.

Beyond "No Gods, No Masters," posted September 30, 2012.

Non-Violent Politics and the Democratization of the State, posted September 24, 2012.

Nonviolent Statism? posted September 20, 2012.

Conversations With Anarchists and Democrats, posted September 19, 2012

Nonviolent Revolution As the Democratization of the State, posted September 17, 2012.

And Many More! (A Happy Birthday to Occupy As It Is Growing Up) posted September 17, 2012.

The Ambivalence of Investment/Speculation As the Kernel of Reactionary Futurology, posted March 29, 2012.

"Stand Your Ground" As Secessionist Treason, posted March 24, 2012.

To Be Anti-Establishment Is Not the Same Thing As To Be Anti-Government -- In Fact Anti-Governmentality Is Almost Inevitably A Crypto-Establishmentarianism!, posted January 10, 2012.

Why I Am Not One of Those Democrats Who Are Fond of Ron Paul, Not Even Up To A Point, posted December 19, 2011.

Belgium Is Not Anarchy; Or, Scattered Speculations on the Radical Democratic Imaginary Against the Anarchic Imaginary, posted September, 2011.

cDc's Oxblood Defines "Hactivism" and Critiques Anonymous, posted August, 2011.

It Turns on Power: A Schematic Distinguishing the Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle from Futurological Anti-Politics, posted August, 2011.

Riot, Try It: A Pragmatics of Urban Disruption in a Planet of Slums, posted August, 2011.

Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist (Or Am I?), posted July, 2011.

Indebtedness As A Lifelong Condition of Existential Precarity, posted July, 2011.

Politics of Design. Anti-Politics of Design, posted April, 2011.

The Egyptian Revolution Is Not Miraculous, posted February, 2011.

Democracy and Nonviolence, posted January, 2011.

p2p-Democratization, posted August, 2010.

Democracy Is Not Anarchy, posted July, 2010.

The Peer, posted February, 2010.

Prologue for Futural Politics, posted August, 2009.

Consensual Prosthetic Self-Determination and Progressive Democratization, posted June, 2009.

More on Freedom, posted May, 2009.

Arendt, Fanon, King On Violence, posted May, 2009

Designs on Us: Same Basic Contentions on the Politics of Design, posted May, 2009.

Science, Politics, and Administration, posted March, 2009.

Is Obama the Face of Ongoing p2p-Democratization? posted March, 2009.

Democracy, Consent, and Enterprise (And Their Contraries), posted September, 2008.

p2p Is Not Anarchy, posted April, 2008.

Left and Right, Back to Basics, posted December, 2007.

Eight Propositions on Taxes, posted December, 2007.

What's Wrong With Elitism? What's So Good About Democracy? posted December, 2007.

Thinking About the Politics of Design, posted December, 2007.

Democratic World Federalism Discussion on CRN, posted September, 2007.

Thinking Out Loud About Democratic World Federalism, posted September, 2006.

Why I Want to Democratize the State Rather Than to Smash It, posted June, 2006.

Democracy Among the Experts, posted June, 2006.

People-Powered Politics and the Emerging Technoprogressive Mainstream, posted June, 2006.

The Politics Are Prior to the Toypile, posted June, 2006.

Technology and Terror, posted March, 2006.

Technology Needs Democracy, Democracy Needs Technology, posted February, 2006.

World Without Work, posted January, 2006.

Trouble in Libertopia, posted May, 2004.