Beyond "No Gods, No Masters"

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

As an atheist and a democrat I won't deny an affinity for the slogan "no gods, no masters," but the pedant and rhetorician in me can't long leave such slogans well enough alone.

As an atheist who is also a democrat, I see no way of abolishing faith without abolishing style (which is not only impossible, but would be terrible were it possible), and so I see the democratic struggle instead as the secular struggle for an ever more perfect separation of church and state from which the faithful and freethinkers benefit alike.

As a person who believes that the guiding democratic aspiration of equity-in-diversity is facilitated by fact-based harm-reduction policy but who is also an anti-incumbent anti-elitist, I see no way to accomplish progressive outcomes without some folks always having to defer, from moment to moment, and in ways that are to them unwanted, to the authority of expertise (expertise in the sense of invoking relevant disciplinary knowledge, expertise in the sense of actually representing stakeholder perspectives, expertise in the sense of functioning as duly constituted agents in legitimate accountable governance, and so on), and so I see the democratic struggle instead as the struggle to widen participation in the constitution of such authorities to all their stakeholders and to deepen accountability over the exercise of such authorities to those who are affected by it.

I don't know how to capture that in a bumper sticker off the top of my head. "No gods, no masters, but yes aesthetics and yes accountable authorities" seems rather a rough draft at best.

Non-Violent Politics and the Democratization of the State

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, longtime and stubborn sparring partner "Summerspeaker" asks:

If you support structures that distribute violence, in what way are you nonviolent? How is nonviolence a meaningful concept in this context? Does nonviolence just mean opposition to nonstate violence and state violence deem illegitimate?

I respond:

If you support structures that distribute violence, in what way are you nonviolent?

I deny the facile formulation of "support" you are implying. Does one "support" gravity in recognizing it? Does one "support" the murderer who deploys a scalpel in advocating the usefulness of a scalpel in surgery?

When you leap on my apparent concession that "state structures distribute violence" you fail to see that for me the phrase might just as well be that "state structures distribute nonviolence." That the furniture of state has been an instrument of violence is obvious, I have never said otherwise, indeed I say so incessantly. But what matters to me is that this obviousness not be mistaken for a mis-identification of the state WITH violence, since the state is indispensable to nonviolent politics.

EVERY fact, every value, every norm, every custom, every infrastructural affordance is susceptible to violent misuse, is susceptible to futural refiguration as a violence where now it might not seem to be, the furniture of governance included.

Again, it would be nonsensical to deny either the conspicuous history of war, expropriation, enslavement, tyranny organized through the state form, or the permanent susceptibility to violence, corruption, injustice in every facet of governance devoted to the contrary.

But (I say it again and again and again), violence both precedes and exceeds the state, and the state form is indispensable to the struggle to overcome, circumvent and heal violence, even as it is true that historical states have enabled and exacerbated violence, even as the furniture of states are permanently susceptible to violence and violent misuse. My whole point, stated at the outset and repeated over and over and over and over again, is that democratization of the state is the struggle to provide alternatives to violence, to overcome violence, to circumvent violence, to provide recourse for the violated, to facilitate the open negotiation of the terms on which violence is legible as such.

Violence inheres as a permanent susceptibility in the condition of human plurality. Quite apart from the fact that there can be no smashing of "The State" as such, since "The State" has always been a complex, dynamic, multilateral constellation of ritual and artifice, norm and form, it is crucial to grasp that the smashing of a particular state would not be an overcoming of violence even were it to succeed, since it would not be an overcoming of the plurality in which violence and nonviolence inhere in potentia. Nonviolence is a commitment and a struggle, but one cannot ever claim it as a secure accomplishment (although one can still distinguish the comparative violence of an unjust law or a perpetrator as against the comparative nonviolence of resistance to that injustice or a victim in suffering a violation).

You ask in what way am I nonviolent? Well, for one thing I am not in the habit of making immodest declarations of such accomplishments having had ample experience of my proneness to ignorance and error, and so I would prefer to declare myself earnestly committed to nonviolence and strongly opposed to those, especially those who deem themselves democrats, Democrats, or radicals of the left, who are not also so committed to non-violence. Still, I will add that I was literally trained in nonviolent civil disobedience by the King Center in Atlanta when I was a co-ordinator for Queer Nation Atlanta. I regularly teach the theory of nonviolent resistance and revolution, as well as rhetorical strategies for reconciliation, mediation, and peacemaking. And as I have said, I am committed to the ongoing democratization of the state. Part of this requires a commitment as well to arguing with those who would smash the state out of a hasty mis-identification of the state with the violences it has been historically instrumental to and remains structurally permanently susceptible to.

Those who foolishly pine to demolish rather than to democratize it are paranoiacally misapprehending essential, exhaustive, ubiquitous violence in even those comparatively democratic state forms which

1. provide for comparatively peaceful changes in leadership,

2. provide for comparative accountability of governance to the people governed,

3. provide for comparative amelioration of tendencies to corruption, violation, and abuse in the state form through separation, federation, and subsidiarity of their powers,

4. provide for comparative equity in recourse to law and its nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of interpersonal disputes or disputes of citizens with duly constituted authorities,

5. provide for comparative protection of minorities from majorities through the rite of rights culture,

6. provide the general welfare (education, healthcare, income) through which a scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday interpersonal commerce is comparatively secured, a scene of consent the substance of which is paid for by

7. the provisions of a comparatively progressive taxation

a. that circumvents anti-democratizing concentrations of wealth that skew communication of fact and merit and hence corrupt accountability of governance,

b. that yokes the maintenance of government to the people governed through the principle of no taxation without representation,

c. that creates no initial barrier to accomplishment but functions as an a posterior filter ensuring that to those to whom more is given more is required,

8. comparatively accountably administer common and public goods in the public interest and hence circumvents the structural violences involved in the externalization of social costs, the misappropriation of the common inheritance and commonwealth of civilization, the violation of the planetary resources on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing,

9. and provide comparatively open occasion for the ongoing contestation and collaboration over the terms on which violence is legible as such through the comparative championing of rights to free expression, press, and assembly, comparative generality of the franchise and right to run for elective office, comparative equity of recourse to law, comparative celebration of diversity secured through comparative equity of the scene of consent.

Needless to say, all these "comparatives" name for me sites of ongoing democratizing reform and struggle, while no doubt for others they function as alibis and rationalizations for complacency in the face of ongoing inequities, exploitation, abuses, and parochial privileges.

You ask, "Does nonviolence just mean opposition to nonstate violence and state violence deem[ed] illegitimate?" Well, depending on what you mean by "deemed" (by whom? as registered how? with what consequences to whom?), I think maybe my answer is "yes," although it seems to me anybody who wants to put "just" before that "mean" there almost certainly is not grasping what I mean at all.

Having argued with you so often, for so long I must confess that I suspect you are looking to dismiss the force of my commitment to nonviolence on these terms the better to engage in a vision of "radical politics" that amounts to a profoundly superficial, irresponsible, self-congratulatory disavowal of the political altogether. Again, I say that because we have been arguing on these topics now for years and there is nothing I say here that I have not said to you before, and often, and painstakingly, and yet it seems as if for you none of these endless careful delineations remain in your memory at all, there is nothing but your eagerness to seize on one word or phrase that gives you the longed-for evidence to expose the secret authoritarian in me and the longed-for permission to get on with the eating of the cake and having it too that is what your dance party anti-politics peddling itself as revolutionary politics finally amounts to. I'm glad to have an occasion to rehearse some basic propositions on democratic governance and democratizating struggle from my perspective as an advocate of nonviolence, but it is getting really hard for me to continue to treat you as a serious good-faith interlocutor or reliable ally in democratization given the eternal recurrence of these facile interventions of yours and airy declarations (both in the Moot and on your blog) of my dastardly deep-seated reactionary authoritarianism and all the rest of that nonsense.

Nonviolent Statism?

Anarchists recoil in alarm from my proposal that violence both precedes and exceeds the state, and my conclusion from this that the advocate of nonviolence should then be concerned not with smashing but democratizing the state. How they shake their heads at me! As though the very idea of nonviolent governance is inconceivable... despite the fact that in the actual world, all around them, nonviolent governance is happening all the time, nonviolent governance is in fact commonplace, ubiquitous. To amplify a bit:

My point is NOT to deny the specific violences of actual states but to argue that violence does not exhaustively characterize states.

A corollary to this point: contrary portrayals by anarchists are actually paranoid and function to rationalize anti-democratization.

My point IS to deny that violence is either essential or definitive of states. (Yes, I know this view is unorthodox, for more about what I mean and why I mean it read relevant posts archived at the sidebar under the heading Against Anarchy.)

A corollary to this point: contrary portrayals by anarchists render the productivity of power invisible at the cost of productivity and the possibility of civitas invisible to the risk of its possibility.

And For My "Advanced" Readers: Even granting the epistemic violence of the circumscription of possibility and importance through which the maintenance of values, norms, and affordances yields the apparent normality that sustains this palpable ubiquity of nonviolence in democratic governance, it is crucial to grasp that the attempted attribution of specific violences to these operations is no less dependent on alternate circumscriptions and so provides no basis for an objection to my initial point (indeed, the objection seems rather conspicuously a matter of trying to have your cake and eat it, too). This is especially important to the extent that, as I would argue, a feature of democratic governance is the facilitation of an openness to the perpetual re-contestation of the norms through which such epistemic violences play out, which suggests that democratization of the state provides pathways to nonviolence at multiple levels in a virtuous circle, just as the anti-democratizing extremities of totalitarianism and anarchism yield in my view vicious circles of ramifying violence.

Nonviolent Revolution As the Democratization of the State

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, a reader thinks I am talking nonsense:

Nonviolent statism is a contradiction in terms. Please ditch one or the other.

I disagree with you.

Understand what I am saying: I am very familiar with your objections, of course. I understand where you are coming from. I am very aware that it is commonplace to define the state as that institution that has a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force and that this is often taken to justify the identification of state with violence (even when it is quite obvious that enormous amounts of what happens through government has nothing at all to do with violence on any plausible description).

I am aware that my viewpoint is a minority viewpoint, in fact I will go so far as to say that I know of no political theorist who characterizes this issue in quite the way I do. (But Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Chantal Mouffe, and a host of scholarship about and experience with radical nonviolent civil rights, queer, feminist, environmentalist activism has contributed to my perspective here.) Nonetheless, I do believe what I do and for reasons I think are good ones. Even if I cannot persuade you of my position, I propose it is one that deserves consideration among the more usual alternatives.

Violence precedes the emergence of the state and violence exceeds the existence of the state. I begin here because this recognition matters enough to be a point of departure for thinking the political. It is an axiom closely connected in my view to Hannah Arendt's starting point: "Plurality is the law of the earth."

I am far from denying the obvious fact that many (even most) states historically do indeed engage in systematic exploitation and offensive war-making. This is why the radical left critique of states that function as nothing but the institutional legitimation of violence for elite-incumbent classes -- or critique states to the extent that they are functioning this way -- is a powerful one with which I strongly agree as it applies to many historical (in a sense of the historical that includes the present) states or episodes or particular tendencies.

But I simply do not agree that states are exhaustively or even essentially characterized by violence or that their abolition would eliminate violence from human affairs. To smash the state is always (whatever else it may be) to smash the space of democratization, and spontaneist fantasies declaring contracts nonviolent by fiat whatever misinformation or duress articulates their terms, or dreaming of a consensus beyond the law arising out of an unrestrained angelic human nature, or promising to unleash a techno-transcendental superabundance that circumvents the impasse of stakeholder politics offer no living, abiding alternatives to the interminable democratizing struggles addressed through or addressed to governments toward sustainable equity-in-diversity.

I think these are profoundly mistaken views, widespread though they are. Of course, self-identified anarchists are comparatively rare, but the advocacy of "smaller government" without a supplementary characterization of good government amounts to anarchism in substance and this political viewpoint is far from rare, as is the cynical belief that there is a necessary tradeoff between order and violence that essentially accepts the premise of anarchism but regards anti-statist activism as unrealistic anyway.

I propose the contrary proposition that democratization is the historical struggle through which states are rendered ever less violent.

Democratization rendering states less violent happens when elections make possible peaceful transitions among leaders. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when civil rights and juries and court appointed defense attorneys provide ever wider more equitable recourse to courts for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when taxation is yoked to representation making government directly accountable to the consent of the governed. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when checks and balances make branches and layers of government compete for positional advantage not through corruption but through the policing of corruption within governance. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when social democratic states provide the security of general welfare, basic income, healthcare, education, access to reliable information all to better ensure that everybody can engage in everyday commerce on legibly informed non-duressed consensual terms. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when public goods and common goods are accountably administered by democratic governance in the name of the common good to circumvent the violence of their exploitation or mismanagement for the parochial benefit of minorities. The examples can be multiplied, but I am illustrating what some fellow radical democrats would seem to regard as an initially or apparently counter-intuitive principle I am advocating.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities." Although this formulation has had a vital life in the history of progressive struggles for equity-in-diversity, my own point is a different one. It is not only through instituted governments that people accomplish goods collectively of which they are incapable or in which they are frustrated individually. Hence it is necessary to make a more specific case for the collective work of good democratic government in particular. In my view, democratic government facilitates the nonviolent adjudication of disputes and enables people to have a say in the public decisions that affect them (including disputes over what constitutes violence, over what constitutes the public, over what constitutes such a say, and over the terms of the administration of government), through periodic election of accountable representatives, through equal recourse to laws, through the maintenance of individual rites/rights cultures and civil protections of the rights of minorities against majorities, through the maintenance of a legible scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce through the provision of general welfare, and through the sustainable, equitable administration of public and common goods otherwise vulnerable to violation and exploitation by incumbent-elites.

As I say, violence both precedes and exceeds "the" state-form. The truth is that no state, even totalitarian ones, has sufficient means of violence to subdue entire populations in every aspect of their lives to the will of their rulers. Violence CANNOT be the essential characteristic of even the most tyrannical states, and countervailing strains of civitas, consensual accountable equitable participatory governance, are always discernible.

Again, my point is not to deny but to decry the violence of undemocratic states. But in my view the democratization of the state is indispensable to nonviolent revolution. Fantasies of smashing the state rely on a mistaken identification of the state form with violence, and always amount to the facilitation of violence on the part of merciless muscled moneyed minorities who will go ahead and legitimize their abuses as the cost of whatever measure of order they maintain. In democratic states order and consent are one and the same (and exceptions threaten the legitimacy of that order) and the permanent vulnerability of the state form to corruption, abuse, violence confronts the vigilence of an empowered population to which that state is beholden for its funding and maintenance at every layer.

I appreciate the politeness with which you to entreat me to renounce either my commitment to good democratic government or my commitment to nonviolent stakeholder politics and change, but I fear I must decline. I am indeed committed to both, I believe that the commitment to each bolsters the commitment to the other, and I believe that it is those who find these commitments incompatible who are wrongheaded and confused.

Way of Death?

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, "JimF" said:

I do not happen to think that cryonics should be **illegal**. I think people should be free to spend their money, and dispose of their corpses, as they see fit (in the latter case, as long as it doesn't create a public health hazard, of course).

Yeah, that's how I feel about it, too. Certainly the official verbiage of the organizations shouldn't be allowed to create the false and fraudulent impression that the current state of scientific knowledge provides any grounds for actual confidence that severed hamburgerized heads will be nanobotically or digirifically resurrected or whatever -- but it seems to me that contra the handwaving of True Believers in faithly settings the organizational discourse covers its ass more or less. Beyond that, so long as you say as there is no hazard to public health, it doesn't seem to me on the face of it that cryonics should be any more illegal than embalming is, or cremation, or shooting corpses into the Sun or what have you.

Myself, I always rather liked the fictional depiction of the Bene Gesserits on Chapterhouse dropping bodies in orchards with a freshly planted tree on top of each departed member of the community. I rather like the idea of a white-petalled dogwood flowering on a hillock where I used to be. I remember driving past woods in Indiana as a kid when dogwoods were blooming among the trees thinking the forest, like the monolith in 2001, was full of stars.

[edited]

Cryonics and Other Pseudo-Scientific Faith-Based Initiatives

I posted this comment in the midst of the discussion occasioned by my recent anti-cryonics post at the World Future Society. There is plenty of phrase-recycling in it so I wouldn't treat it as a post if I weren't busy prepping for teaching today, but it is still worth reminding people of the connections between the various sects of the Robot Cult as well as the rhetorical connections of their discourse to faith-based religiosity on the one hand and marketing hyperbole on the other.

There is no point in sparring with a True Believer, you tend to arrive all too soon at flinging "I know you are but what I am I?" at one another until everybody is much more tired but nobody more enlightened.

The only thing anybody can say with warranted confidence is that cryonics is a rather elaborate corpse disposal method -- like getting embalmed and then buried, like getting shot into orbit post mortem, like getting compressed into a diamond on a ring for a spouse to remember you by, like getting mummified and interred in the immortality-engine of an Egyptian pyramid. People of faith often declare that these rituals facilitate eventual resurrection, transcension, heavenly ascension. As an atheist I cannot claim that such claims hold much allure for me -- but I don't feel particularly inclined to argue with those who want to believe such things, any more than I would argue with a child who believes in Santa Claus. But what I disapprove are efforts to treat articles of faith as scientific hypotheses or to mistake religious proselytizing as serious political policy or stakeholder reconciliation.

It is hardly surprising to discover that not everything Robot Cultists believe is false (most of what everybody believes is factually true else communication not to mention survival, even with the wrongheaded, with the mad, and with the indoctrinated, would scarcely be possible), but what matters when it comes to the scientifically warranted beliefs and the scientifically legible concerns that are deployed by Robot Cultists will be the ways in which they are inevitably slotted into techno-transcendentalizing narratives that leave all facts behind and leap into pseudo-science and fantasy very quickly indeed.

There are, after all, plenty of real concerns among computer scientists about user-friendly coding and network security without going off the deep end and starting to handwave about Friendly AI and a history-shattering Singularity as half-rapture half-apocalypse existential risk. There is plenty that is promising for materials science, electronics, sensor technologies, biomedical techniques arising from discoveries in molecular biology and at the nanoscale without going off the deep end and starting to handwave about swarms of robust reliable programmable room-temperature self-replicating nanobots that can make nearly anything for almost nothing. There are plenty of lives to be saved by struggling to make clean water available to people in overexploited regions of the world and advocate for single-payer healthcare and demand more public investment in science education and medical research without losing a single second and diverting a single dollar to techno-immortalist outfits like SENS, cryonics, or -- even worse, because conceptually utterly incoherent -- "uploading" nonsense. What is distinctive in the discourse of the Robot Cult will be the organization of modest or superficially scientific observations through theological/ mythological frames and narratives in the service of transcendental aspirations that have nothing to do with consensus science or actual progressive development, often drawing on techniques from marketing and PR to do so.

Not content simply to engage in their endless cynical terminological sanewashing PR shenanigans (we're not talking about immortality but "indefinite healthspan," we're not talking about eugenics but "enhancement"!), adherents of the techno-immortalist sects of the Robot Cult go on to share with anti-abortion extremists the tendency to imply that the those who disagree with their marginal views are "deathists" or "anti-life," and also their opportunistic recourse to befuddlements introduced by technodevelopmental disruption to flog their (different) marginal and counter-intuitive aspirations -- as when anti-abortionists exploit sonogram imagery to render more apparently plausible pseudo-scientific "partial birth abortion" or when techno-immortalists exploit revival from once-fatal heart attacks to render more apparently plausible pseudo-scientific "cryonics" or "uploading."

Part flim-flam, part marketing hype, part newfangled theology, the Robot Cult -— whether in its eugenicist transhumanoid sects, or in its dead-ender AI (artificial imbecillence) Singularitarian nerd-rapture sects, or in its vitamin supplement replacement parts shiny robot body soul-migration techno-immortalist sects, or in its genies-in-a-bottle nano-cornucopiast sects, or in its greenwashing denialist “geo-engineering” sects —- takes all the lies of crass commercialism, all its infomercial boner pills and anti-aging kremes and endless promises of consumer ecstasy, and then sets the volume dial on eleven, turning what was just ugly stupid embarrassing commonplace circus-barker deception and crack-pottery into full on fulminating faith.

Drawing on culturally disseminated figures and conceits of mythology and theology (eden, prometheus, golem, invincible armor, the philosopher’s stone, rapture, love potion, sorcerer’s apprentice, excalibur, the fountain of youth, frankenstein, omnipotence- omnibenevolence- omniscience-) whose historically-weighted intuitive force reassures them, together with the fervency of the never-changing professions of their fellow-faithful, Robot Cultists keep telling themselves and telling us —- in a tune that never really changes year after year after year even while they also congratulate themselves on their unflappable embrace of “accelerating change” —- that there is some substance in their faith-based initiative, that their roseate “The Future” is real and that in it they can be young and rich and invulnerable and right and cared for forever.

Any child of two already knows where the Robot Cultists are coming from. We have serious problems in this world and we need serious people to help solve them. Pseudo-scientific wish-fulfillment fantasists might be enjoying the haze they’re in, like any techno-fetishizing bourgeois consumer dupe, but they are part of the problem and not part of any real solutions. For all their put-upon litigious sputtering, the Robot Cultists are lucky I restrain myself so far as to use the gentle word "scam" to describe their enterprise.

Cryo Kitsch And PR

io9 has covered the Kim Suozzi cryonics story. I found especially interesting a comment there bemoaning, "a shocking amount of negativity in these comments." In this formulation, "negativity" is identified with skepticism and "positivity" with credulity. You know, Science!

Chiming in on this sentiment, another Robot Cultist cries out: "People are so damn attached to dying, it just makes me sick. Cryonics really needs better PR. There's so much misinformation floating around." That last line is especially rich. Actually all three lines in a row are pretty rich in their own separate awful ways.

The original comment continues: "As science and medicine advance it seems inevitable that we will eventually conquer disease, aging and even death." It's interesting that literally all the evidence in the world and in all of history always only absolutely attests to the fact that every person will inevitably die, and yet for this True Believer what seems "inevitable" instead is something that has never happened, ever, and which no one can feasibly describe happening. C.S. Lewis insisted that the technological imaginary is continuous with the magickal imaginary, and in moments in which "technology" is simply assumed, as a matter of the unfolding of "its" own inner logic, to render inevitable what is now impossible that continuity is exposed quite acutely.

At the end of the comment, its author declares that "If people want to donate their money to a more 'worthy' cause, please do so. For me, trying to save this girls life is as worthy as it gets." Just to be clear, the worthy causes to which the author refers here are suggestions elsewhere in the comments that money might be more usefully directed to medical research addressing the actual condition from which Kim Suozzi is suffering and dying. For the Robot Cultist in question, it is so ironic to call such efforts worthy that they put the word in scare quotes. Nice.

But more to the point, you will notice that by hiding behind the suffering sentimentalized body of Kim Suozzi the commenter seeks to present as an unchallengeable assertion that cryonics is a matter of "sav[ing] this girl's life" when of course all that is certain is that cryonics -- like burial, like cremation, like getting shot into orbit post-mortem, like getting compressed into a diamond on a ring for a spouse to remember you by, like getting mummified and interred in the immortality-engine of an Egyptian pyramid -- is a corpse disposal method. That it could be more than that is precisely what is under discussion and looks to be in the gravest doubt to anybody who notices how hypothetical most of the enterprise is and how freighted with objections are the few aspects of the enterprise that aren't hypothetical. But never mind, look, a dying girl, a roseate dream of techno-heaven, and a line of footprints in the sand!

Must Moot!

Man, the comments accumulating under that last post are getting to be must read.

I'll snip from just one of them (click the link to read the whole thing), by one of my favorite bloggers and regular reads, Athena Andreadis:

…I'll comment just once, as a practicing molecular neurobiologist with dementia as her research focus, in the forlorn hope that this may stem the tsunami of nonsense (or at least counteract the conclusion that silence means the charlatans have carried the day). The central "argument" is the statement that "brain tissue retains its attributes postmortem" -- which, as much else in biology, means something very different at each scale. Bottom line: this is completely untrue in connection with the discussion focus here; namely, continuity of a specific individual's consciousness and personality. Everyone who does even in vitro brain tissue work, let alone in vivo, knows that even a few hours postmortem are enough to usher in irrevocable degradative changes… [P]eddling pseudoscience has real consequences, especially in a culture that has turned as hostile to reality as the contemporary US has…. As for the larger issue of "respectable scientists" -- I'm actually the exception in bothering to discuss such items at all. The vast majority of biologists put transhumanist "science" in the same category as crystal divination and Tarot cards. Some of them may very well accept an invitation to talk at a TH gathering, why not? Free food, a hefty per diem, maybe a nice meeting location, perhaps even eager apprentices for their lab -- but I suspect their attitude would cool significantly if they were asked to explicitly endorse the TH agenda. Scientists are fallible humans, with pride, vanity, mortgages and the very common propensity to fall in love with their theories. However, what legitimate science has that saves it from turning into religion is the self-correction tool: it changes its conclusions whenever new facts come in. Sooner or later, errors are corrected. Scientific consensus is a fluid, dynamic process, rather than an endpoint. As it should be, given what science tries to accomplish: not power, glory or profit, but the understanding of reality.

Yay, Athena!

I must say, it is a strange thing the way a reasonably technoscientifically literate and concerned nonscientist can seem to be at a disadvantage with a crusading pseudo-scientist when one admits their limitation while the other leverages a refusal to do the same. There is a danger that under such circumstances my blog risks becoming a vector through which futurological pseudo-scientists spam the credulous to their own benefit despite my own resolute skepticism. In my view, what is actually distinctive about the transhumanists and techno-immortalists is actually not happening at the level of scientific claims at all but through the framing and tropes and narrative gestures that these con-artists and True Believers use to organize superficially scientific content for mostly nonscience pop-tech and sfnal fandoms. Given this view, I have also always thought that my own training in literary, cultural, and rhetorical analysis is actually especially relevant to understanding what is going on in their discourse. But of course, this perspective doesn't fly when I am caught up in disputes with THEM as well as it does when I am trying to understand them from the outside for outsiders.

One has to balance whether fact-based concern and policy is more abused by exposing this futurological nonsense to scrutiny (even where the kind of scrutiny I focus on at the level of discourse is entirely dismissed as non-scientific or even anti-scientific by the flim-flam artists with whom I am arguing) or more abused by just deleted this crap in the expectation that it will not be a good faith conversation in any case given my focus on rhetoric and culture and is, after all, usually or mostly beneath serious consideration on its own terms or the terms of actual scientists. So far, contrary to the whining of futurologists about how unfair and unserious and censoring I am, I have tended to be generous giving these people rope to hang themselves with unless they are commandeering discussion threads or just flinging insults (that's my job!) or we reach obviously diminishing returns. Such good deeds, I have noticed, rarely go unpunished.

Check the extremely interesting conversation for yourself and by all means add your two cents. Skeptics about and satirists of the Robot Cultists are especially welcome guests, Robot Cultists are discouraged from wiping their feces on the walls and lampshades.