It is a techno-transcendental commonplace to pretend that medicine is confounding long definitive biological limitations in human health, capacity, lifespan, and so on. These claims are usually just completely false, but they are always overblown. The Pill provides a fine illustration of the point, since it truly did enable a fundamental and profoundly emancipatory transformation of the human condition in my view, but without rendering humanity "post-human" in the sense that interests the superlative futurologists in the least.
I see no reason to expect any radical enhancement of definitive human capacities or any increase of lifespan beyond the upper bound some lucky humans have always enjoyed in recorded history (although I would like to think medical improvements might enable many more humans to share in that bit of luck) of the sort that would render "posthuman" or "transhuman" terms more apt now than they have been since World War II to characterize human beings. But quite apart from this sort of well warranted skepticism about imminent techno-transcendental expectations -- whether originating in ill-informed credulity, promotional fraud, pseudo-science, or wish-fulfillment fantasizing -- I must say that I find techno-transcendental interpretations of such projected outcomes profoundly wrongheaded in principle even if they were not also wildly implausible or premature.
On the one hand, these futurologists seem too eager to treat biological limits as self-evident givens, when the terms of bodily legibility and the significance with which biological traits and capacities are freighted are in fact historically varied, constructed and contingent. While on the other hand, futurologists seem to dismiss the extent to which salient continuities in human life -- and especially a shared vulnerability to suffering, correction, injury, abuse, neglect, disease, mortality -- have provided a context within which humans have testified together to our hopes and our histories, a context out of which humans have elaborated our still fledgling morals, ethics, politics, aesthetics. If our technique ever truly were to confound long definitive human limits, such as they are, this would hardly be experienced as an ecstatic overcoming of all limits but as a confrontation with new, and utterly bedeviling, limits to our sense of sharable experience and shared significance.
I see no reason to expect any radical enhancement of definitive human capacities or any increase of lifespan beyond the upper bound some lucky humans have always enjoyed in recorded history (although I would like to think medical improvements might enable many more humans to share in that bit of luck) of the sort that would render "posthuman" or "transhuman" terms more apt now than they have been since World War II to characterize human beings. But quite apart from this sort of well warranted skepticism about imminent techno-transcendental expectations -- whether originating in ill-informed credulity, promotional fraud, pseudo-science, or wish-fulfillment fantasizing -- I must say that I find techno-transcendental interpretations of such projected outcomes profoundly wrongheaded in principle even if they were not also wildly implausible or premature.
On the one hand, these futurologists seem too eager to treat biological limits as self-evident givens, when the terms of bodily legibility and the significance with which biological traits and capacities are freighted are in fact historically varied, constructed and contingent. While on the other hand, futurologists seem to dismiss the extent to which salient continuities in human life -- and especially a shared vulnerability to suffering, correction, injury, abuse, neglect, disease, mortality -- have provided a context within which humans have testified together to our hopes and our histories, a context out of which humans have elaborated our still fledgling morals, ethics, politics, aesthetics. If our technique ever truly were to confound long definitive human limits, such as they are, this would hardly be experienced as an ecstatic overcoming of all limits but as a confrontation with new, and utterly bedeviling, limits to our sense of sharable experience and shared significance.
