tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post8148307498747379001..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Resigning Oneself to Bioconservatism; With Some Concluding Notes on the Co-Dependency of Bioconservatism and TranshumanismDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-86607945221049166612008-04-20T12:37:00.000-07:002008-04-20T12:37:00.000-07:00Dale Carrico said:Wow, I can remember writing almo...Dale Carrico said:<BR/><BR/><I>Wow, I can remember writing almost every bit of that sentence myself.</I><BR/><BR/>uh, that why I used it...<BR/><BR/><I>Why don't you ever express your thoughts in your own words?</I><BR/><BR/>Well, I often do but most of the time I've come to appreciate the value of using the words of others that far more incisive than mine due to the limits of how eloquent I can express myself in English.<BR/><BR/><I>Any one of my critics here will be the first to tell you so!</I><BR/><BR/>I can defend myself.<BR/><BR/><I>But more to the point, since I know you are a person who sympathizes with a lot of views that matter to me, I just wish you would come up with different ways to put these arguments than I do myself if only because every new expression of an idea or argument contributes to the resources available in a discourse. I'm a theory head, for one thing, invested in a lot of of highly theoretical and technical vocabularies that mean a lot to me personally and that I work to reconcile with one another in real time while I am writing these blog posts, in addition to the other things I'm doing in them. Frankly, I don't think many people who read Amor Mundi (not that many people do in the first place) have much investment in that side of what I am doing here at all -- in fact I doubt many have an inkling about these other dimensions I'm working through. Given all that, I wish more of the people who sympathized with what I am writing about would make similar points in their own styles, with their own emphases, in their own words (I think Nato and Anne and Jamais and Robin and Annalee are all doing this in ways that differ variously and very much from my own, and which I appreciate most precisely in their differences from my own writing), so that the actual work of democratizing and consensualizing technodevelopmental social struggle and celebrating lifeway multiculture, peer to peer, would have more voices, would offer a more complex and resourceful alternative to bioconservative and transhumanist discourses that hijack so much of the practical and affective life of ongoing disruptive technoscientific change and make it so much harder to imagine actually open, actually democratic, actually consensual, actually sustainable, actually fair outcomes arising from the futurity in the present.</I><BR/><BR/>Fair enough.VDThttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01496647346219341625noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-9377017674545934212008-04-19T18:20:00.000-07:002008-04-19T18:20:00.000-07:00I think it is facile, unfair and counter-productiv...<I>I think it is facile, unfair and counter-productive to dismiss a progressive as a "greedy conservative" because he promotes on a ban on specific form of technological development that you would recognize facilitated unacceptable recklessness and exploitation, exacerbated injustice and incubated dangerous social discontent.</I><BR/><BR/>Wow, I can remember writing almost every bit of that sentence myself. Why don't you ever express your thoughts in your own words? Let me say a bit more why I am harping on this point, since I know it is probably frustrating to you, or even hurting your feelings. The fact is my way of writing is idiosyncratic enough that it is a bit weird. Any one of my critics here will be the first to tell you so! But more to the point, since I know you are a person who sympathizes with a lot of views that matter to me, I just wish you would come up with different ways to put these arguments than I do myself if only because every new expression of an idea or argument contributes to the resources available in a discourse. <BR/><BR/>I'm a theory head, for one thing, invested in a lot of of highly theoretical and technical vocabularies that mean a lot to me personally and that I work to reconcile with one another in real time while I am writing these blog posts, in addition to the other things I'm doing in them. <BR/><BR/>Frankly, I don't think many people who read Amor Mundi (not that many people do in the first place) have much investment in that side of what I am doing here at all -- in fact I doubt many have an inkling about these other dimensions I'm working through. <BR/><BR/>Given all that, I wish more of the people who sympathized with what I am writing about would make similar points in their own styles, with their own emphases, in their own words (I think Nato and Anne and Jamais and Robin and Annalee are all doing this in ways that differ variously and very much from my own, and which I appreciate most precisely in their differences from my own writing), so that the actual work of democratizing and consensualizing technodevelopmental social struggle and celebrating lifeway multiculture, peer to peer, would have more voices, would offer a more complex and resourceful alternative to bioconservative and transhumanist discourses that hijack so much of the practical and affective life of ongoing disruptive technoscientific change and make it so much harder to imagine actually open, actually democratic, actually consensual, actually sustainable, actually fair outcomes arising from the futurity in the present.<BR/><BR/>Anyway, to zero in on your specific intervention, you write: <I>I think it is facile, unfair and counter-productive to dismiss a progressive as a "greedy conservative" because he promotes on a ban on specific form of technological development</I>. <BR/><BR/>Of course there will be many occasions in which I will agree with you -- assuming the reasons for the proposed ban relate to real harms, cannot obviously be addressed in other ways, don't take the form of bans that swell into blanket banning of whole realms of agency, don't assume the ambition of perpetual bans, and so on. When the impulse to ban starts getting sweeping and eternalizing one should really take a second look at what might really be afoot in its recommendation. <BR/><BR/>But the thing in what you say that seems to me to mark the more important misunderstanding between us here is that you seem to think my point in calling out would-be progressives as actual conservatives when they make bioconservative arguments for bioconservative outcomes actually is to call people non-nice names. <BR/><BR/>Look, even progressive people have conservative reactions to some change, even conservative people will collaborate in progressive ends sometimes. This is one of the reasons why we can be hopeful about democracy and progress even in times like these. <BR/><BR/>The theoretical point that matters to me here is simply this (a familiar point I hammer here a lot): Politics isn't morals. <BR/><BR/>Politics isn't organized by identifications and disidentifications in the way morals are (the political philosopher Carl Schmitt made precisely this mistake in his own notorious theory of the political, and he could not have be en more utterly more disastrously wrong in taking this tack), politics isn't about policing the continence of tribal formations at all the way morals very definitely are. Nor is it correct, however commonplace it may be, to think the distinction between the left (democratization) and the right (incumbency) as cult-like formations -- like transhumanism and bioconservatism (which as far as I know, unlike transhumanism, doesn't have <I>any</I> card-carrying "members" or "organizations" so-identified at all), are only, you know, much, much BIGGER and world-historical. <BR/><BR/>If you aspire to be a secular democratic progressive person and work to facilitate progressive democratic outcomes (like I'll admit I very much want to do myself) that doesn't mean you won't inadvertently or sometimes actively contribute to very different outcomes out of fear, ignorance, weakness, prejudice, skewed priorities, bad luck, inertia and so on, here and there (as I have done countless times all my life myself). <BR/><BR/>The point is that when these things are pointed out to you, what you do is you reassess what you are up to, you change direction precisely because you want to be progressive. You don't pout and stamp and get defensive about the unfairness of being criticized for your complicity (well, maybe a little bit, maybe initially, we're none of us Saints) in outcomes you do or know you should disapprove of. <BR/><BR/>You try to understand what went wrong, or why you looked at things wrong, or why your critics are looking at what you are doing wrong, or try to rethink how better to keep from getting read wrong. <BR/><BR/>In a moment when fear of difference or greed for one's position or privileges get the best of you, you can easily act against the grain of the democratization you would otherwise struggle to realize in the world with your peers. <BR/><BR/>Still, the business of analysis is to call a spade a spade when it is one. If somebody tells me my fear is making a conservative out of me, that is something I take seriously. That doesn't mean I'll agree with every indictment I hear that takes such a form, especially when it is coming from cynical conservatives scoring gotchas to undermine progressives by using their actual earnestness against them. <BR/><BR/>But when a presumably progressive person starts advocating blanket perpetual bans of all genetic engineering out of fear for same-sex conception, refusing to grant that any treatments might eventuate from this banned work that might be safe, useful, wanted, or empowering, you'll forgive me when I say that their fear has caused them to become conservative. <BR/><BR/>Not only is this not counterproductive or facile but it may be the single most useful thing to say to such a person. <BR/><BR/>To construct elaborate "new" political mappings letting people think they are "beyond left and right" in such moments is just to provide alibis for people when they are at their worst, when they need to think more deeply about what they are doing and change course.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-32051425814229564082008-04-19T16:56:00.000-07:002008-04-19T16:56:00.000-07:00Dale Carrico said:I actually don't like the rebutt...Dale Carrico said:<BR/><BR/><I>I actually don't like the rebuttal that claims bans on technodevelopmental outcomes in particular are "ineffective" -- since it seems to me too readily to tap into the triumphalist mindset of so many technocentric arguments: "this or that fetishized developmental outcome will arrive inevitably," "it will overcome any regulatory barrier," and so on. This sort of attitude connects to the anti-political views of too many technocentric discussions. I also think it forces those who would emphasize social concerns always into a defensive and "negative" argumentative position. Simplistic insensitive technologists who frame themselves as spokespeople of an inevitable future, assuming the mantle of the bulldozing forces that will eventuate in that future, delineate its glories (sometimes offering reassuring pats on the head to those who worry about the losers in such a future and along the path to it)... meanwhile, critics just constantly point to complexities, uncertainties, costs, risks, and maldistributions that the triumphalists are incessantly missing or evading or denigrating in their accounts. Even if the critics are more right than not, it remains true that triumphalist enthusiasm will have an allure that is compelling.</I><BR/><BR/>I actually agree. I wanted to word my question in a way that takes what you just into account but didn't. That being said, I think you might underestimate the value of pointing out 1) that some bans work and some don't, and 2) some bans have negative unforeseen consequences and actually detailing what those would be in the case of the specific ban that is being proposed.<BR/><BR/><I>Democracy, consent, free expression, equity, and diversity are values we can celebrate, and strengthen, and defend, and implement. They can capture people's imaginations and provoke their engagement.</I><BR/><BR/>I agree. However, this is often dismissed as utopian rhetoric. So I'm trying to find a way to immunize myself from that accusation.<BR/><BR/><I>I say you are actually encountering progressives whose courage has failed and who are at risk of becoming conservative precisely because they are afraid (or perhaps because they cling too greedily to a status quo they imagine more comfortable and supportive of them than the future their peers would demand and build together). This is nothing new. Almost every conservative on earth became one because of such fear or greed. That's what it means to defend incumbency over freedom, to disvalue the equity in diversity of which freedom consists and on which freedom depends. Tell your friends that if they would be progressives they must find a way to defend equity, diversity, consent, and democracy in the world of changing realities, and that this is what it means to grow up. Otherwise they should just become conservatives and be done with it.</I><BR/><BR/>This is where I strongly disagree with you. I think it is facile, unfair and counter-productive to dismiss a progressive as a "greedy conservative" because he promotes on a ban on specific form of technological development that you would recognize facilitated unacceptable recklessness and exploitation, exacerbated injustice and incubated dangerous social discontent.VDThttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01496647346219341625noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-35208327209764224132008-04-19T11:20:00.000-07:002008-04-19T11:20:00.000-07:00> [B]ioconservatives tend to advocate a tyrannical...> [B]ioconservatives tend to advocate a tyrannical curtailment<BR/>> of autonomy to protect people from the dangerous diversity<BR/>> they would consensually collaborate in the making of peer-to-peer,<BR/>> while transhumanists tend to advocate technocratic elite circumventions<BR/>> of peer-to-peer democracy to protect people from their dangerous<BR/>> ignorance, passions, biases, or the sluggishness of actually<BR/>> collaborative deliberation in the face of "accelerating change."<BR/><BR/>There's a certain hysteria shared by both tribes as well -- a<BR/>Chicken Little sensibility about the future.<BR/><BR/>These folks all have great confidence in their own crystal balls,<BR/>and think that the Big Things they're sure they see comin' down<BR/>the pike justify a lot of shouting from the rooftops in the present.<BR/><BR/>I think they should all just sleep it off.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.com