Richard comments in the Moot: "Frankly, I wonder what will be left of transhumanism when you take away the technological determinism, but there we are."
This point has a more general force.
Drop the immortalist handwaving and you're left with commitments to universal healthcare and Pro-Choice politics -- and you don't have to join a Robot Cult to advocate that.
Drop the singularitariansim and you're left with commitments to open source and conventional security concerns -- and you don't have to join a Robot Cult to advocate that.
Drop the scientism and reductionist thought-policing and you just become a defender of consensus science where matters of prediction and control are concerned -- and you don't have to join a Robot Cult to advocate that.
The few people who feel a compelling tug from transhumanism don't feel it from the technology. One can find blue-skying about technology across good old fashioned still-vital sf fandoms and general geeky discursive spaces, none of which solicit True Belief in Superlative Techno-Futures or substitute techno-utopianism for policy discourse, or try to whomp up collective enthusiasm for pan-movements with the Keys to History that seek to prevail across the earth. The "technology-talk" which appears to be the focus of transhumanist discourse is in fact little but the occasion, the pretext for its Superlative freighting, for the problematic authoritarian compensations of Faith in the midst of the distress and dumb desires provoked by rapid, radical, ongoing and emerging disruptive technoscientific change.
Sure, transhumanists seeking to insulate themselves from forceful criticisms in the heat of the moment or to increase their membership and fundraising numbers over the longer term can "moderate" the language of their claims here and there. But this is always a matter of "damage control," always a stealthy cynical repackaging in the service of promotional palatability. The more moderated formulations never remain "moderate" or commonsensical, but either drift back into their pre-"moderated" superlative forms in the absence of ongoing scrutiny or they acquire idiosyncratic new essentially superlative connotations for the Faithful... as "technoprogressive" has for the transhumanists who stole and distorted it.
Without the "extreme" beliefs that solicit its faithfulness and hence provoke the experience of "belonging" among its members, transhumanism doesn't have much or possibly any substance to advocate in the first place.
At its ugliest it's just techno-utopian scientistic reductionism with a dose of technocratic elitism, a vulnerability to eugenicism, an embarrassing susceptibility to corporate-militarist techno-hype, and in many of its partisans what looks like a deeply unhealthy dose of body-loathing and flat-out panic at the prospect of death. Not pretty, but not exactly unheard of either as a constellation of dumb attitudes people in certain complex technoscientific societies can get caught up in until they learn better.
The most sensible among the transhumanists, so-called, like to bill the discourse as a technoscientifically literate advocacy of morphological freedom, but their cheerful solidarity with reactionaries, eugenicists, hucksters, and would-be gurus gives the lie to their apparent reasonableness. And, in any case, one simply does not have to join a Robot Cult to approve of science in its place or the politics of choice, and so one has to ask, if you don't have to join a Robot Cult, then why on earth would you?
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Monday, April 07, 2008
p2p Democratization
Friend of Blog Martin comments in the Moot:
Apart from not understanding how a system that one agrees with me doesn't exist actually does exist anyway as "an ideal," I still don't agree with what I think I hear Martin saying here, exactly.
Despite this, I suspect that Martin and I would pick out mostly similar social formations as attractive and unattractive ones on the ground, and so what he has said and what follows is best viewed as a shared effort to find the right words to describe and understand what we find similarly more and less appealing than a disagreement that equity in diversity is appealing in the first place. I mention this up front, because I'm going to disagree with Martin a lot in the specifics here, but it matters that this doesn't necessarily indicate disagreement where things count most on this topic.
Now, in my longer reply to Martin's last comment in the Moot I did actually talk about practices I affirm, Netroots blogging, organizing, donor-aggregation, and so on. Since all that is taking place non-criminally under the auspices of the actually-existing society I wonder does that mean I was defending "actual capitalism" on his terms in doing so?
To be honest, I really don't agree that the American system "comes close" to realizing market libertarian ideology. I think America is a warfare-as-welfare-for-incumbents welfare state organized to preferentially benefit incumbent interests, just open enough to release creative energies to be captured by incumbents but not enough (except occasionally and accidentally) to threaten incumbency itself.
I think "libertarian rhetoric" is a set of figures, frames, and formulations to peddle this unjust state of affairs both to the rationalizing minorities who unjustly benefit by it and to the distracted majorities who are exploited under it, but I do think it is, in essence, a lie. It is the unjust reality and the lie that sells it that I deem unhealthy, not American "proximity" in reality to the market fundamentalist ideal. I think there is no such proximity in evidence.
Surely that depends on just what is happening behind the scenes of that "more or less"? How much more evenly, how much less? Why is the state of affairs under which "exchange" takes place in contemporary corporate-militarist crony-capitalist America enough "more" like "even" that one would want to call it a "grassroots topology," rather than enough "less" like "even" that one would want to decry its inhibition of the emergence of such a "grassroots topology"?
Of course I see why this initially seems attractive as a formulation, but I think the clarity it provides is falsifying. As I said in my last post I think the intuitive force of this framing derives from its incessant reiteration throughout the long neoliberal epoch which has found its consummation (and one hopes, the beginnings of its eclipse) in our current catastrophic moment of planetary distress.
It matters enormously to insist that what governments do isn't a matter of providing "services" like firms do, or at any rate, to realize that when one assumes the vantage from which it appears that this is what they are doing one inevitably loses sight of key ways in which governance differs from other organizations (to recur to the pluralist schema I've been deploying in arguments elsewhere on the blog lately, distinguishing science -- or the efficacious mode in my terms -- from aesthetics with the faithful, or distinguishing morals from ethics with the subcultural, here we have a formulation of mine that relies on a distinction of the efficacious from the political).
One has already found oneself disastrously lodged entirely within the prepolitical "marketeer mindset" if one thinks of governance this way, and this remains true even if one goes on to decide for "pragmatic reasons" that governments are still the best suited organizations to provide some such "services" and then defend them as such.
Legitimacy simply is not a service in this sense. Providing nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes in the scene of nonduressed consent is not a service, it is the establishment of justice, it is the opening of the space of freedom as such.
Treating government as one "seed" or "node" among other organizational forms -- distinguishable from them always in the same ways as they are distinguishable among themselves, through observations of their relative size or influence or what have you -- may be right if one is just reductively charting organizational dynamics (and there are times when this is a valid and useful thing to do, don't get me wrong), but there will be many contexts in which that is a profoundly distortive lens through which to understand what is afoot here.
Once again, I find that this is a discussion that takes us deep into the heart of political theory. Democratized government is not strictly speaking "centralized" even though it still assumes the legitimate monopolistic recourse to force that marketeers identify with repressive "centralization."
The essence of p2p systems is their facilitation of equity in diversity -- which is also precisely the work and effect of democratization.
Most p2p projects are inaugurated by small groups or even single individuals and thereafter the bulk of their work is done by very few -- even if it is true that they "out-compete" non-p2p formations because in their openness they also cheaply solicit the participation of endlessly many other one-time and small-time contributors as well. This could quite superficially be treated as "centralized" in its effects however truly open it remains, if one squints as one looks at it.
Actually-existing democracy functions rather similarly in its solicitation to participation in the actual processes of representation and administration. It is open to the participation of all, but usually attracts only the participation of the interested where they are interested and to the extent that they are interested. What undergirds this participatory expressivity, administration, and oversight, of course, is the democratizing virtuous circle of taking up violence always only to repudiate it, organizing the ineradical capacity for force inhering in plurality always only in the service of the provision of alternatives to the violent resolution of disputes and for the maintenance of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent (the violation of which is always legible as violence: keeping the peace and protecting the scene of consent are essential correlates).
Law is code, code is law. What the architecture that facilitates p2p is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the p2p ethos, the law that facilitates the scene of informed nonduressed consent is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the democratic ethos.
The test and the sign of p2p is precisely the same as that of democracy -- whether it actually facilitates equity in diversity.
Martin continues:
I certainly have no quarrel with the practices of a consensual and nonduressed exchange of goods and services facilitated by money, any more than the practices of the free exchange of testimony and ideas facilitated by words and numbers.
Maybe the real dispute here is just that I assess what Martin would describe as the darker side of money coalescing into the hands of incumbents to recreate a more Broadcast model scenario as pretty straightforwardly the state of affairs with which we are presently living, while he might still think of our circumstances as better described as grassroots exchange? I have to wonder a little just how bad inequality has to get, just how corrupt and unaccountable incumbency has to get before things look less "grassroots" if this is the case!
But there is possibly a more interesting source of disagreement happening here, if I am understanding the stakes in this exchange properly.
You see, I simply don't agree that democracy is a compromise between free markets and totalitarian dictatorship, I don't agree that it represents a moderate middle ground between extremes.
Democracy is for me its own thing, understandable on its own terms, substantiated and struggled for as its own end.
But the dispute at hand may be even more stark than that. Since I think that there is no such thing as a "pure" market order in the sense mobilized by neoliberal and neoconservative market fundamentalist rhetoric and ideology, I actually don't think that constitutes in any intelligible sense an "extreme" that receives partial instantiation in a so-called "mixed economy" in the existing order. I think it is nothing more nor less than a delusive falsification of what is happening in the world -- just as the anti-political fantasy of total omnipotent repressive control over plurality is likewise finally unrealizable (however much damage can be done by the damaged people drawn to that impossible vision).
The task of legitimate democratic governance is to make and then preserve the peace and to produce and then protect the scene of consent (and yes it assumes legitimate recourse to violence in facilitating permanent alternatives to violence in so doing, with all the risks and costs and benefits inhering in this paradoxical gesture).
And as I have said many times, a substantiated as opposed to vacuous scene of consent will be informed and nonduressed.
In a nutshell, democratic government should ensure that consent is informed by providing free life-long education and free universal access to reliable knowledge, and protections against fraud and deception, and that consent is nonduressed by providing universal healthcare and a universal basic income.
This provision produces freedom, it produces peers (social stakeholders with actual equity in their actual diversity), it produces the substance of open collaboration and contestation.
For me, the poles that count are participatory democracy against elite incumbency, not Free Markets against Big Brother. I think these (democracy < -- > incumbency) represent the Left and Right, very straightforwardly.
I see neither pole as an ideal, but both as ongoing processes of interested and interminable struggle, one the struggle to ensure that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decision that affect them, the other the struggle to ensure that the incumbent interests with whom one most identifies control as much as possible (sometimes, they rationalize, for the good of all).
p2p is democratizing in its effects, which would remain just as true even if these effects were facilitated through the administrative implementation of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent by way of a mandated basic income guarantee and access to reliable knowledge. Crony capitalism as it is practiced under neoliberalism (and its fraternal twin, neoconservatism) is clearly incumbent-supportive in its effects.
Metaphors about Big Brother and Spontaneous Order and all the rest just function to provide false clarity that obscures the obvious truths that actually matter here, in my opinion.
[E]ve[n] if it is merely an ideal, the actual "capitalist" system that you critique on this blog certainly comes closer to that ideal than the socioeconomic system that you usually defend.
In other words, America leans toward laissez-faire capitalism / libertopianism more than you think his healthy.
Apart from not understanding how a system that one agrees with me doesn't exist actually does exist anyway as "an ideal," I still don't agree with what I think I hear Martin saying here, exactly.
Despite this, I suspect that Martin and I would pick out mostly similar social formations as attractive and unattractive ones on the ground, and so what he has said and what follows is best viewed as a shared effort to find the right words to describe and understand what we find similarly more and less appealing than a disagreement that equity in diversity is appealing in the first place. I mention this up front, because I'm going to disagree with Martin a lot in the specifics here, but it matters that this doesn't necessarily indicate disagreement where things count most on this topic.
Now, in my longer reply to Martin's last comment in the Moot I did actually talk about practices I affirm, Netroots blogging, organizing, donor-aggregation, and so on. Since all that is taking place non-criminally under the auspices of the actually-existing society I wonder does that mean I was defending "actual capitalism" on his terms in doing so?
To be honest, I really don't agree that the American system "comes close" to realizing market libertarian ideology. I think America is a warfare-as-welfare-for-incumbents welfare state organized to preferentially benefit incumbent interests, just open enough to release creative energies to be captured by incumbents but not enough (except occasionally and accidentally) to threaten incumbency itself.
I think "libertarian rhetoric" is a set of figures, frames, and formulations to peddle this unjust state of affairs both to the rationalizing minorities who unjustly benefit by it and to the distracted majorities who are exploited under it, but I do think it is, in essence, a lie. It is the unjust reality and the lie that sells it that I deem unhealthy, not American "proximity" in reality to the market fundamentalist ideal. I think there is no such proximity in evidence.
Martin continues: If money is exchanged more or less evenly between people, that represents a p2p, grassroots topology.
Surely that depends on just what is happening behind the scenes of that "more or less"? How much more evenly, how much less? Why is the state of affairs under which "exchange" takes place in contemporary corporate-militarist crony-capitalist America enough "more" like "even" that one would want to call it a "grassroots topology," rather than enough "less" like "even" that one would want to decry its inhibition of the emergence of such a "grassroots topology"?
If a disproportionate amount of money is taken by one seed or node (the government in this case) and redistributed, that represents a centralized, broadcast topology.
Of course I see why this initially seems attractive as a formulation, but I think the clarity it provides is falsifying. As I said in my last post I think the intuitive force of this framing derives from its incessant reiteration throughout the long neoliberal epoch which has found its consummation (and one hopes, the beginnings of its eclipse) in our current catastrophic moment of planetary distress.
It matters enormously to insist that what governments do isn't a matter of providing "services" like firms do, or at any rate, to realize that when one assumes the vantage from which it appears that this is what they are doing one inevitably loses sight of key ways in which governance differs from other organizations (to recur to the pluralist schema I've been deploying in arguments elsewhere on the blog lately, distinguishing science -- or the efficacious mode in my terms -- from aesthetics with the faithful, or distinguishing morals from ethics with the subcultural, here we have a formulation of mine that relies on a distinction of the efficacious from the political).
One has already found oneself disastrously lodged entirely within the prepolitical "marketeer mindset" if one thinks of governance this way, and this remains true even if one goes on to decide for "pragmatic reasons" that governments are still the best suited organizations to provide some such "services" and then defend them as such.
Legitimacy simply is not a service in this sense. Providing nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes in the scene of nonduressed consent is not a service, it is the establishment of justice, it is the opening of the space of freedom as such.
Treating government as one "seed" or "node" among other organizational forms -- distinguishable from them always in the same ways as they are distinguishable among themselves, through observations of their relative size or influence or what have you -- may be right if one is just reductively charting organizational dynamics (and there are times when this is a valid and useful thing to do, don't get me wrong), but there will be many contexts in which that is a profoundly distortive lens through which to understand what is afoot here.
Once again, I find that this is a discussion that takes us deep into the heart of political theory. Democratized government is not strictly speaking "centralized" even though it still assumes the legitimate monopolistic recourse to force that marketeers identify with repressive "centralization."
The essence of p2p systems is their facilitation of equity in diversity -- which is also precisely the work and effect of democratization.
Most p2p projects are inaugurated by small groups or even single individuals and thereafter the bulk of their work is done by very few -- even if it is true that they "out-compete" non-p2p formations because in their openness they also cheaply solicit the participation of endlessly many other one-time and small-time contributors as well. This could quite superficially be treated as "centralized" in its effects however truly open it remains, if one squints as one looks at it.
Actually-existing democracy functions rather similarly in its solicitation to participation in the actual processes of representation and administration. It is open to the participation of all, but usually attracts only the participation of the interested where they are interested and to the extent that they are interested. What undergirds this participatory expressivity, administration, and oversight, of course, is the democratizing virtuous circle of taking up violence always only to repudiate it, organizing the ineradical capacity for force inhering in plurality always only in the service of the provision of alternatives to the violent resolution of disputes and for the maintenance of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent (the violation of which is always legible as violence: keeping the peace and protecting the scene of consent are essential correlates).
Law is code, code is law. What the architecture that facilitates p2p is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the p2p ethos, the law that facilitates the scene of informed nonduressed consent is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the democratic ethos.
The test and the sign of p2p is precisely the same as that of democracy -- whether it actually facilitates equity in diversity.
Martin continues:
Now, obviously, with "run away" capitalism, when money coalesces into the hands of the few and monopolies form, it also becomes a broadcast form of exchange (the difference, of course, for those who support this scenario, is that the market created this outcome. The government is force, but property and the market are not force because those are their Sacred Cows.)
The goal, as I've always said, is to avoid both extremes, both worst-case scenarios. Some combination of free exchange and regulations produces a global maximum of grassroots activity, average quality of life, justice, and all those social indicators that we strive to achieve.
I certainly have no quarrel with the practices of a consensual and nonduressed exchange of goods and services facilitated by money, any more than the practices of the free exchange of testimony and ideas facilitated by words and numbers.
Maybe the real dispute here is just that I assess what Martin would describe as the darker side of money coalescing into the hands of incumbents to recreate a more Broadcast model scenario as pretty straightforwardly the state of affairs with which we are presently living, while he might still think of our circumstances as better described as grassroots exchange? I have to wonder a little just how bad inequality has to get, just how corrupt and unaccountable incumbency has to get before things look less "grassroots" if this is the case!
But there is possibly a more interesting source of disagreement happening here, if I am understanding the stakes in this exchange properly.
You see, I simply don't agree that democracy is a compromise between free markets and totalitarian dictatorship, I don't agree that it represents a moderate middle ground between extremes.
Democracy is for me its own thing, understandable on its own terms, substantiated and struggled for as its own end.
But the dispute at hand may be even more stark than that. Since I think that there is no such thing as a "pure" market order in the sense mobilized by neoliberal and neoconservative market fundamentalist rhetoric and ideology, I actually don't think that constitutes in any intelligible sense an "extreme" that receives partial instantiation in a so-called "mixed economy" in the existing order. I think it is nothing more nor less than a delusive falsification of what is happening in the world -- just as the anti-political fantasy of total omnipotent repressive control over plurality is likewise finally unrealizable (however much damage can be done by the damaged people drawn to that impossible vision).
The task of legitimate democratic governance is to make and then preserve the peace and to produce and then protect the scene of consent (and yes it assumes legitimate recourse to violence in facilitating permanent alternatives to violence in so doing, with all the risks and costs and benefits inhering in this paradoxical gesture).
And as I have said many times, a substantiated as opposed to vacuous scene of consent will be informed and nonduressed.
In a nutshell, democratic government should ensure that consent is informed by providing free life-long education and free universal access to reliable knowledge, and protections against fraud and deception, and that consent is nonduressed by providing universal healthcare and a universal basic income.
This provision produces freedom, it produces peers (social stakeholders with actual equity in their actual diversity), it produces the substance of open collaboration and contestation.
For me, the poles that count are participatory democracy against elite incumbency, not Free Markets against Big Brother. I think these (democracy < -- > incumbency) represent the Left and Right, very straightforwardly.
I see neither pole as an ideal, but both as ongoing processes of interested and interminable struggle, one the struggle to ensure that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decision that affect them, the other the struggle to ensure that the incumbent interests with whom one most identifies control as much as possible (sometimes, they rationalize, for the good of all).
p2p is democratizing in its effects, which would remain just as true even if these effects were facilitated through the administrative implementation of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent by way of a mandated basic income guarantee and access to reliable knowledge. Crony capitalism as it is practiced under neoliberalism (and its fraternal twin, neoconservatism) is clearly incumbent-supportive in its effects.
Metaphors about Big Brother and Spontaneous Order and all the rest just function to provide false clarity that obscures the obvious truths that actually matter here, in my opinion.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
The Retro-Futurist "Revolutionaries"
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot -- h/t Seth.
Most of the parochial visions of "the future" after which superlative technocentrics pine and for which they would eagerly substitute the pleasures and dangers of open futurity, peer-to-peer, finally amount to the conjuration of sweeping transformation at the level of alluring surface details, but always in ways that leave intact all sorts of key reactionary right-wing status quo assumptions about "liberty" as consumption from a menu provided by elites, "competition" as market exchange however duressed, "innovation" as looting of the commons, "value" as price, "endless expansion" as an iron law rather than an offense to logic and common sense, "value-maximization" as a model of rationality even though it is actually a recipe for insanity, and so on.
Most of the parochial visions of "the future" after which superlative technocentrics pine and for which they would eagerly substitute the pleasures and dangers of open futurity, peer-to-peer, finally amount to the conjuration of sweeping transformation at the level of alluring surface details, but always in ways that leave intact all sorts of key reactionary right-wing status quo assumptions about "liberty" as consumption from a menu provided by elites, "competition" as market exchange however duressed, "innovation" as looting of the commons, "value" as price, "endless expansion" as an iron law rather than an offense to logic and common sense, "value-maximization" as a model of rationality even though it is actually a recipe for insanity, and so on.
Techno-Utopian Superlativity Is an Ideological Profession, Not a Scientific Practice
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot.
I'm not a computer scientist, a molecular chemist, a roboticist, a gerontologist, or what have you. But, of course, very few of the techno-utopians who crow about my refusal to engage with their "technical arguments" about the odds of a Robot God, techno-immortality, or nano-santa are scientists themselves or making claims in line with scientific consensus.
It is intriguing to note that it is their clueless immodesty on this score rather than my own sensible deferral to actual scientific consensus that tends to be considered by them the consummate "championing" of Science.
Not to put too fine a point on it, engaging in "technical" discussions with crackpots validates them more than they deserve... though I imagine that at least some actual scientists might enjoy the sport of it. More power to them.
Techno-utopian superlativity is essentially an ideology, and as it happens my own training in rhetoric and ideologiekritik actually provides the perfect background to critique superlativity on terms most relevant to it.
I'm not a computer scientist, a molecular chemist, a roboticist, a gerontologist, or what have you. But, of course, very few of the techno-utopians who crow about my refusal to engage with their "technical arguments" about the odds of a Robot God, techno-immortality, or nano-santa are scientists themselves or making claims in line with scientific consensus.
It is intriguing to note that it is their clueless immodesty on this score rather than my own sensible deferral to actual scientific consensus that tends to be considered by them the consummate "championing" of Science.
Not to put too fine a point on it, engaging in "technical" discussions with crackpots validates them more than they deserve... though I imagine that at least some actual scientists might enjoy the sport of it. More power to them.
Techno-utopian superlativity is essentially an ideology, and as it happens my own training in rhetoric and ideologiekritik actually provides the perfect background to critique superlativity on terms most relevant to it.
If Everything Is Faith Then Nothing Is
Some highlights, if that's the word, from my latest exchange in the Moot with Mormon Transhumanist Lincoln Cannon:
Dale, you continue to misconstrue (purposefully?) my arguments. I've not claimed sufficent evidence of resurrection, in a corpse or anywhere else, yet you pretend repeatedly (repeatedly... repeatedly) that I have.
You tell me it is a faithful utterance for me to claim that everybody dies, and then whine that I purposely misconstrue your respect for evidence and so on. I honestly can't tell what you even mean by evidence or faith half the time.
However, in contrast, you continue to claim sufficient evidence against resurrection.
Sigh...
Is your hard core scientist at work behind that claim? When you speak of scrambled eggs, you speak of eggs that will remain scrambled, and you see no fanciful magical notion in that? I've never experienced any egg that remains scrambled in perpetuity.
You think it's magical thinking for me to expect my scrambled eggs not to spontaneously unscramble on the plate?
No one else, other than you, that I know has ever made such a claim. The point is that the scrambled egg almost certainly will not remain scrambled. Most likely, at least in the short term, its component parts will become part of other systems. However, given sufficient interest and power, I imagine something sufficiently like the original egg could be restored. That, however, demonstrates a problem with your analogy. Eggs do not have and appear quite unlikely ever to have sufficient interest or power in restoring themselves. Perhaps non-eggs with sufficient interest and power will restore eggs in the future. However, those non-eggs, assuming they are more closely related to us, may be more interested in restoring us -- not in any absolute way, but in a sufficient way, as waking up in the morning is a sufficient restoration of the person you were when you went to bed in the evening.
You got me, Lincoln. In a magical future we may invent scrambled egg reassembly technology. This is what it is like, ladies and gentlemen, to argue with transhumanists. By the way, every single one of you is going to die.
In response to my request for extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claim that resurrection is impossible, you asked what counts for me as evidence for empirical claims. My answer is: experience.
The experience of hairs springing up on the nape of your neck upon reading what is for you a good poem is not evidence in the scientific sense, and this is part of what I am trying to get at when I insist that we walk and chew gum at the same time, recognizing at one and the same time that science actually is an actual thing providing actual benefits unique to it, while also recognizing that not only science is such a thing providing actual benefits...
However, your claim that resurrection is impossible does not remotely merit the esteem of objectivity, as none of us appear to have shared such experience. You appear to be claiming that you have experienced the impossibility of resurrection, but I don't believe you.
What shall we talk about next, leprechauns? The defeasibility in principle of all warranted scientific consensus fails absolutely to rule them out too. You have never given me any reason to entertain the possibility of resurrection scientifically, so why should I?
I get it, you're scared of dying, or whatever. Fine, go to church or to a brothel or to a therapist or to a drug dealer or to an art gallery or to the movies and deal with it as you see fit. Who cares? Just don't pretend this is a scientific response or that scientific responses aren't scientific when they are.
These fun and games with defeasibility are neither here nor there.
Do I have to pretend "climate skeptics" or studies of "faith healing" or champions of "safe cigarettes" are as scientifically warranted as the contrary scientific consensus on these questions just because as good pragmatists we know that no warranted belief is certain however rightly confident we are in it, that no description is indefeasible in principle by better candidate descriptions that may arrive along the road of inquiry, and that word-world correspondence is a naive and incoherent model of truth?
The answer, for those keeping score at home, is: No.
Rather, I think you are exagerating [sic] as an expression of incredulity, which incredulity is certainly not unusual, but is equally certainly not empirical, objective or scientific.
Declaring things possible without reason and then pointing out nobody is in a position absolutely to disprove them actually isn't science, properly speaking, Lincoln. It can make for interesting poetry, however, or philosophical theory (I have always thought of philosophy as a literary genre rather than a science in any case). It really pays to grasp the difference between these sorts of things...
Science does not somehow compel your faith in this thing. ["This thing" is my belief that everybody dies and that I see no actual cause to seriously entertain the alternate prospect. Lincoln calls this my "faith in superlative death" for some reason.]
We are not only compelled to belief by scientific warrant, it is true. Scientific (or more generally, efficacious), moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political beliefs are all warrantable according to their proper criteria.
If you say it is "faithful" to describe people as always mortal this is just plain wrong. If you point out that your desire to live forever in a robot body is not perfectly disqualified by science then that is strictly speaking right, although not particularly worthy of attention, and certainly you are not being exemplarily scientific in the moments when you claim to believe that you will live forever in a robot body because you want to and it's not logically impossible. If you point out that not only scientific beliefs are valuable, I agree of course and I never said otherwise.
While I agree that science and religion are distinguishable, I disagree with your implication that science does not rely on faith.
Here we go.
The contextual assumptions and methods of science certainly are matters of faith, and will be so always unless we manage somehow to attain to omniscience -- which, in actual manifestation, neither you nor I anticipate. Moreover, religious knowledge should be leveraging the improved epistemic processes of science to the extent they are applicable to its domain, yet this will not somehow drive faith out of religion. There is nothing necessarily irrational, anti-scientific, or willfully-ignorant in the definition of "faith".
Yeah, your Mormon faith is just as scientific as a good engineer's trust in long-warranted claims in physics, and your belief that you might live forever is just as factual as my belief that everybody dies. All very exciting.
Pretending that somehow faith is an altogether separate and unrelated idea from science (holding two ideas in your head at the same time) is not an intellectual strength. Reconciliation, syncretization, even atonement, are intellectual strengths. The former is lazy, whereas the latter is empowering.
How could I have been so lazy to distinguish science from morals, from aesthetics, from ethics, from politics? Everything is so much clearer to me now. I could have been a Mormon Robot Cultist like you all along and just as reasonable as can be! It's a bracing feeling, like a cold shower with a strong rough pungent bar of soap!
Thank you for acknowledging that my faith need not be scientific to deserve affirmation.
Well, I've never said otherwise, and I've written about this repeatedly and at length. But I must say I didn't quite realize that for you "affirmation" would require complete conversion to Mormon Robot Cultism... but I'm ever so much happier now that you've shown me the light of your faith that it's all good.
Please know that I fully agree that we should not pretend to scientific theory where there is none (yet), which is precisely why I've attacked your claim that resurrection is impossible.
You are going to die.
While I fully agree that there generally is no value, and indeed immorality, in attempts to force my will or desires or the law of my community on others, as it turns out, the law of my community, as well as my wills and desires are directed at atonement, or fulfillment of and reconiliation with others' wills, desires and laws. Basic to my faith is interest in the discovery and creation of worlds without end, each consistent with the desires, wills and laws of its inhabitants. So, in spirit, I do agree with your statement, although my faith is abstracted enough that it would almost be accurate to claim that I also disagree with your statement. In a sense, I do intend a universalizable faith, but only in a pluralistic sense, which is a very loose universalization at most, to be sure. This perspective is among the reasons pragmatism is so popular among Mormon philosophers.
I wanna be a transhumanist Mormom, ma!
You claim that I'm using superlativity differently than you. However, I don't think that's the case.
Oh, believe me, it is.
I do think you've not yet recognized that you are treating death in a manner analogous to that in which some Transhumanists treat immortality.
This is a palpably, indeed, flabbergastingly false assertion.
Your explicit claim that resurrection will be impossible corresponds to their implied claim that dying will be impossible.
Genius!
[Y]ou pretend that the observations of most or all humans on Earth is somehow evidence that resurrection is impossible.
How desperately you cling to the fact that defeasible science cannot rule out anything absolutely! Of course I grant all that, that's philosophy 101. My point is that neither is there any scientific reason to entertain some possibilities seriously, without cause.
That's poor reasoning, Dale. Your claim that resurrection is impossible is indeed faithful and unscientific, and will remain so unless you actually attain to omniscience, which in itself would produce the resurrection along with all sorts of nonsense.
You're going to die, Lincoln. I have no cause to seriously entertain alternate claims on this matter -- at least not from a scientific point of view -- even though you are quite right to point out that it is not the power nor frankly the job of science to provide indefeasible descriptions as candidates for our warranted belief, and so your pining for immortality is not strictly speaking ruled out logically as impossible, for whatever that's worth.
In response to my description of the limits of knowledge (that it is always ultimately faith-based), you respond that my description implies that nobody knows anything in any meaningful sense. I disagree, of course, and am somewhat surprised by your response, given your pragmatism. To acknowledge the limits of knowledge is not to become nihilistic.
You are not acknowledging the limits of knowledge as far as I can see but treating factual accounts and faithful aspirations as indistinguishable. I don't know that I think that this is nihilistic of you, but more to the point it sure seems to me relentlessly cynical and deceptive....
Meaning, in the only way "meaning" has any meaning, remains quite accessible without any appeals to actual absolutes, in knowledge or otherwise. Thus, I care about this argument because it is meaningful within the context of meaning as we actually experience it.
Not only science produces meaning, but the meanings produced by science provide benefits unique to science and it pays to understand the differences that make a difference here....
You know, of course, that I am far from alone in my faith.
That's why I am a strong defender of secular multiculture and the separation of church and state.
Indeed, I share substantial portions of my faith with the majority of humans on Earth. The peculiarly Mormon portions of my faith are likewise shared with millions of persons, many of whom are among my closest family and friends. And the peculiarly Transhumist portions of my faith, although far less wide spread, are yet shared to extents I value. Given this, I'm not sure what you intended me to understand by your claim that you somehow better represent planet Earth.
You're right, Lincoln, everybody is a Mormon Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultist like you. You are Everyman....
Faith in theological ideas like transfiguration and resurrection to immortality are more representative of planet Earth than most of the ideas expressed on Amor Mundi.
But I for one salute our coming Mormon Robot Overlords!
Yes. They did laugh at the Wright Brothers. No. They were not vindicated. Moreover, to the extent their laughter was not compassionate, they were never and will never be vindicated, regardless of the success or failure of the targetted [sic] engineer. Vindication has no meaning without ultimate appeal to compassion.
What a way to ignore the point. It isn't only the Wright Brothers -- so beloved by techno-utopian crackpots looking to fund their Robot God pet projects -- who got ridiculed for their far-out plans back in the day. Would-be inventors of fountain of youth elixirs, perpetual motion machines, and circle squaring maths were also ridiculed and it is their plans not their detractors who were vindicated. That's not something Robot Cultists like to remember from history for obvious reasons. But, yes, Lincoln, you're quite right, it's nice to be nice.
You tell me I'm going to die. I agree that to some extent at some time and place, I'll almost certainly die, and my faith is that subsequently, to some extent at some time and place, I'll live again. You tell me that my consciousness will never be uploaded into a computer. I tell you that you have no sufficient evidence against uploading, and that if uploading is possible then you and I are almost certainly already uploaded.
Whatever gets you through the night.
You tell me that resurrection is impossible. I tell you that you have no sufficient evidence against resurrection, and that you do have, instead, a faith in superlative death.
It's a mighty thin thread you're hanging on, and I think you would be better served getting some therapy and coming to terms with your mortality and moving on. But that's not my business and I don't really care so long as you don't evangelize me, or try to undermine the status of science, or get in the way of my own consensual practices of private perfection and public expression to the extent that they do no harm to the general welfare.
Vulnerable processes in demanding environments [like life -- ed.] are not nothing, impotence or perpetual death.
Well, they have always eventuated in death and there never has been a resurrection and there is no cause to seriously entertain the likelihood of one, but, whatever floats your boat.
Clearly, you make a logical mistake in supposing, as you have, that any actual resurrection would imply that resurrection must be pervasive in time and space.
In magical leprechaunland resurrections happen every day, so I too may be immortal and I am edified to think so. Disprove it! You can't? And you claim to be more reasonable than me when you doubt magical leprechaunland resurrection? You call yourself a pragmatist. The very idea.
If resurrection is possible, only something akin to a perpetual motion machine could ensure that you are never resurrected. And again, you have no sufficient evidence that resurrection is impossible.
It's so consoling to believe in magic.
You tell me that you think I'm deluded for wondering whether humans can be transfigured or resurrected. I may indeed be deluded, but I'll add some observations.
First, although you may protest, your faith in prosthetic freedom corresponds to my faith in transfiguration.
Language, spectacles, vaccinations, and transsexual surgeries actually exist. They testify to our humanity, to ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle in historical human multiculture, and they most emphatically don't make of some of us or all of us into exemplars of some "post-human" species. Robot bodies and digital uploaded consciousnesses don't exist. All of this actually matters.
Second, given your limitations (which I presume are similar to mine), your claim that resurrection is impossible is a better candidate for delusion than my recognition that there is no sufficient evidence for or against resurrection.
Wow, not only does our inability to conclusively logically disprove resurrection make it equivalently scientific as the claim that everybody dies, but you believe that the resurrection claim is scientifically stronger than the contrary claim.
Up is down. Check!
If faith is delusion, you and I are both deluded.
No difference between science and religion. Check!
If unwarrented scientific claims are delusion, perhaps only you have the honor.
Only the person concerned to preserve the criteria on the basis of which factual statements are warranted as such is deluded, while the person who demands we entertain non factual but logically "possible" descriptions, however implausible or unmotivated, as warranted is not deluded. Reasonable is delusion, faith is fact. Check!
I agree with your observation that some who fail to come to terms with mortality substitute a life lived with fearfulness that is a death in life. I, too, work against such perspectives, although not at the extreme you do, which extreme introduces other detriments.
Don't be "extreme" in recommending people come to terms with mortality. Mainstream belief is extreme, extreme Robot Cult beliefs are reasonable. Check!
Your faith in superlative death would substitute a living life with a life lived.
No matter how many times you say it this phrase is not one whit more meaningful. And given the fact that I introduced the term Superlative in the critique to which you claim to be responding and gave it a meaning in that critique that you are repeatedly refusing to apply while still reiterating the term itself, I will assume that part of what you are up to is to steal the term the better to domesticate the threat it represents to the dissemination of your worldview. Transhumanists stole technoprogressive, why not try to steal superlative too?
You marginalize possibilities when you posit only finite demanders. Anything short of eternity (in quality and quantity) is unworthy of your unprovisional consent. In that, you damn yourself.
Yes... to reality.
I like reality, the water's fine.
You say you do not agree that all claims become more factual the more fervently we pine for them to be true. In that, you appear to be acknolwedging that some claims become more factual the more fervently we pine for them to be true.
You have to be pretty desperate to find such an acknowledgment in what I said. But, let me clarify it for you now. Fervency of belief is irrelevant as a criterion for warrantability in the efficacious mode...
You say you do not agree that heavier-than-air flight was invented only when enough people believed in it enough to make it so. I actually do agree that I see heavier-than-air flight occurring in nature, and I actually do believe that it was possible prior to human belief in it.
Wow, what a stunning concession to the obvious.
However, our faith was essential in our engineering efforts, and so will faith remain essential in future engineering efforts. The strategy of clapping louder, understood as a metaphor that in practice should be fully extended to WORK, is indeed working, although not always so fast or so well as we would like. I anticipate there will always remain work to do in pursuit of the better world.
We're talking about the criteria on the basis of which we warrantedly affirm candidate descriptions for instrumental belief as true, we are not talking about how motivation enables projects to find their way to fruition where they already conform to the physical and social strictures at hand. Or if that is what you are talking about, that isn't what I was talking about.
But, no, clapping louder won't make you immortal. However loud you clap.
Finally, I'll respond, in a somewhat tangential way, to your question: "What the hell are you gabbing about then?" I'm gabbing about similarities and differences I perceive between your ideas and my own, and I'm doing that because I value your divergent perspectives, which you have, as yet, continued to gab about.
That's fine. I am enjoying this exchange much less at this point than you appear to be. If there weren't an audience of lurkers here I am presumably instructing on matters of concern to me concerning pragmatism, pluralism, and the critique of superlativity through the publication of this conversation with you I would very likely simply be ignoring you at this point, on this topic at any rate.
Dale, you continue to misconstrue (purposefully?) my arguments. I've not claimed sufficent evidence of resurrection, in a corpse or anywhere else, yet you pretend repeatedly (repeatedly... repeatedly) that I have.
You tell me it is a faithful utterance for me to claim that everybody dies, and then whine that I purposely misconstrue your respect for evidence and so on. I honestly can't tell what you even mean by evidence or faith half the time.
However, in contrast, you continue to claim sufficient evidence against resurrection.
Sigh...
Is your hard core scientist at work behind that claim? When you speak of scrambled eggs, you speak of eggs that will remain scrambled, and you see no fanciful magical notion in that? I've never experienced any egg that remains scrambled in perpetuity.
You think it's magical thinking for me to expect my scrambled eggs not to spontaneously unscramble on the plate?
No one else, other than you, that I know has ever made such a claim. The point is that the scrambled egg almost certainly will not remain scrambled. Most likely, at least in the short term, its component parts will become part of other systems. However, given sufficient interest and power, I imagine something sufficiently like the original egg could be restored. That, however, demonstrates a problem with your analogy. Eggs do not have and appear quite unlikely ever to have sufficient interest or power in restoring themselves. Perhaps non-eggs with sufficient interest and power will restore eggs in the future. However, those non-eggs, assuming they are more closely related to us, may be more interested in restoring us -- not in any absolute way, but in a sufficient way, as waking up in the morning is a sufficient restoration of the person you were when you went to bed in the evening.
You got me, Lincoln. In a magical future we may invent scrambled egg reassembly technology. This is what it is like, ladies and gentlemen, to argue with transhumanists. By the way, every single one of you is going to die.
In response to my request for extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claim that resurrection is impossible, you asked what counts for me as evidence for empirical claims. My answer is: experience.
The experience of hairs springing up on the nape of your neck upon reading what is for you a good poem is not evidence in the scientific sense, and this is part of what I am trying to get at when I insist that we walk and chew gum at the same time, recognizing at one and the same time that science actually is an actual thing providing actual benefits unique to it, while also recognizing that not only science is such a thing providing actual benefits...
However, your claim that resurrection is impossible does not remotely merit the esteem of objectivity, as none of us appear to have shared such experience. You appear to be claiming that you have experienced the impossibility of resurrection, but I don't believe you.
What shall we talk about next, leprechauns? The defeasibility in principle of all warranted scientific consensus fails absolutely to rule them out too. You have never given me any reason to entertain the possibility of resurrection scientifically, so why should I?
I get it, you're scared of dying, or whatever. Fine, go to church or to a brothel or to a therapist or to a drug dealer or to an art gallery or to the movies and deal with it as you see fit. Who cares? Just don't pretend this is a scientific response or that scientific responses aren't scientific when they are.
These fun and games with defeasibility are neither here nor there.
Do I have to pretend "climate skeptics" or studies of "faith healing" or champions of "safe cigarettes" are as scientifically warranted as the contrary scientific consensus on these questions just because as good pragmatists we know that no warranted belief is certain however rightly confident we are in it, that no description is indefeasible in principle by better candidate descriptions that may arrive along the road of inquiry, and that word-world correspondence is a naive and incoherent model of truth?
The answer, for those keeping score at home, is: No.
Rather, I think you are exagerating [sic] as an expression of incredulity, which incredulity is certainly not unusual, but is equally certainly not empirical, objective or scientific.
Declaring things possible without reason and then pointing out nobody is in a position absolutely to disprove them actually isn't science, properly speaking, Lincoln. It can make for interesting poetry, however, or philosophical theory (I have always thought of philosophy as a literary genre rather than a science in any case). It really pays to grasp the difference between these sorts of things...
Science does not somehow compel your faith in this thing. ["This thing" is my belief that everybody dies and that I see no actual cause to seriously entertain the alternate prospect. Lincoln calls this my "faith in superlative death" for some reason.]
We are not only compelled to belief by scientific warrant, it is true. Scientific (or more generally, efficacious), moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political beliefs are all warrantable according to their proper criteria.
If you say it is "faithful" to describe people as always mortal this is just plain wrong. If you point out that your desire to live forever in a robot body is not perfectly disqualified by science then that is strictly speaking right, although not particularly worthy of attention, and certainly you are not being exemplarily scientific in the moments when you claim to believe that you will live forever in a robot body because you want to and it's not logically impossible. If you point out that not only scientific beliefs are valuable, I agree of course and I never said otherwise.
While I agree that science and religion are distinguishable, I disagree with your implication that science does not rely on faith.
Here we go.
The contextual assumptions and methods of science certainly are matters of faith, and will be so always unless we manage somehow to attain to omniscience -- which, in actual manifestation, neither you nor I anticipate. Moreover, religious knowledge should be leveraging the improved epistemic processes of science to the extent they are applicable to its domain, yet this will not somehow drive faith out of religion. There is nothing necessarily irrational, anti-scientific, or willfully-ignorant in the definition of "faith".
Yeah, your Mormon faith is just as scientific as a good engineer's trust in long-warranted claims in physics, and your belief that you might live forever is just as factual as my belief that everybody dies. All very exciting.
Pretending that somehow faith is an altogether separate and unrelated idea from science (holding two ideas in your head at the same time) is not an intellectual strength. Reconciliation, syncretization, even atonement, are intellectual strengths. The former is lazy, whereas the latter is empowering.
How could I have been so lazy to distinguish science from morals, from aesthetics, from ethics, from politics? Everything is so much clearer to me now. I could have been a Mormon Robot Cultist like you all along and just as reasonable as can be! It's a bracing feeling, like a cold shower with a strong rough pungent bar of soap!
Thank you for acknowledging that my faith need not be scientific to deserve affirmation.
Well, I've never said otherwise, and I've written about this repeatedly and at length. But I must say I didn't quite realize that for you "affirmation" would require complete conversion to Mormon Robot Cultism... but I'm ever so much happier now that you've shown me the light of your faith that it's all good.
Please know that I fully agree that we should not pretend to scientific theory where there is none (yet), which is precisely why I've attacked your claim that resurrection is impossible.
You are going to die.
While I fully agree that there generally is no value, and indeed immorality, in attempts to force my will or desires or the law of my community on others, as it turns out, the law of my community, as well as my wills and desires are directed at atonement, or fulfillment of and reconiliation with others' wills, desires and laws. Basic to my faith is interest in the discovery and creation of worlds without end, each consistent with the desires, wills and laws of its inhabitants. So, in spirit, I do agree with your statement, although my faith is abstracted enough that it would almost be accurate to claim that I also disagree with your statement. In a sense, I do intend a universalizable faith, but only in a pluralistic sense, which is a very loose universalization at most, to be sure. This perspective is among the reasons pragmatism is so popular among Mormon philosophers.
I wanna be a transhumanist Mormom, ma!
You claim that I'm using superlativity differently than you. However, I don't think that's the case.
Oh, believe me, it is.
I do think you've not yet recognized that you are treating death in a manner analogous to that in which some Transhumanists treat immortality.
This is a palpably, indeed, flabbergastingly false assertion.
Your explicit claim that resurrection will be impossible corresponds to their implied claim that dying will be impossible.
Genius!
[Y]ou pretend that the observations of most or all humans on Earth is somehow evidence that resurrection is impossible.
How desperately you cling to the fact that defeasible science cannot rule out anything absolutely! Of course I grant all that, that's philosophy 101. My point is that neither is there any scientific reason to entertain some possibilities seriously, without cause.
That's poor reasoning, Dale. Your claim that resurrection is impossible is indeed faithful and unscientific, and will remain so unless you actually attain to omniscience, which in itself would produce the resurrection along with all sorts of nonsense.
You're going to die, Lincoln. I have no cause to seriously entertain alternate claims on this matter -- at least not from a scientific point of view -- even though you are quite right to point out that it is not the power nor frankly the job of science to provide indefeasible descriptions as candidates for our warranted belief, and so your pining for immortality is not strictly speaking ruled out logically as impossible, for whatever that's worth.
In response to my description of the limits of knowledge (that it is always ultimately faith-based), you respond that my description implies that nobody knows anything in any meaningful sense. I disagree, of course, and am somewhat surprised by your response, given your pragmatism. To acknowledge the limits of knowledge is not to become nihilistic.
You are not acknowledging the limits of knowledge as far as I can see but treating factual accounts and faithful aspirations as indistinguishable. I don't know that I think that this is nihilistic of you, but more to the point it sure seems to me relentlessly cynical and deceptive....
Meaning, in the only way "meaning" has any meaning, remains quite accessible without any appeals to actual absolutes, in knowledge or otherwise. Thus, I care about this argument because it is meaningful within the context of meaning as we actually experience it.
Not only science produces meaning, but the meanings produced by science provide benefits unique to science and it pays to understand the differences that make a difference here....
You know, of course, that I am far from alone in my faith.
That's why I am a strong defender of secular multiculture and the separation of church and state.
Indeed, I share substantial portions of my faith with the majority of humans on Earth. The peculiarly Mormon portions of my faith are likewise shared with millions of persons, many of whom are among my closest family and friends. And the peculiarly Transhumist portions of my faith, although far less wide spread, are yet shared to extents I value. Given this, I'm not sure what you intended me to understand by your claim that you somehow better represent planet Earth.
You're right, Lincoln, everybody is a Mormon Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultist like you. You are Everyman....
Faith in theological ideas like transfiguration and resurrection to immortality are more representative of planet Earth than most of the ideas expressed on Amor Mundi.
But I for one salute our coming Mormon Robot Overlords!
Yes. They did laugh at the Wright Brothers. No. They were not vindicated. Moreover, to the extent their laughter was not compassionate, they were never and will never be vindicated, regardless of the success or failure of the targetted [sic] engineer. Vindication has no meaning without ultimate appeal to compassion.
What a way to ignore the point. It isn't only the Wright Brothers -- so beloved by techno-utopian crackpots looking to fund their Robot God pet projects -- who got ridiculed for their far-out plans back in the day. Would-be inventors of fountain of youth elixirs, perpetual motion machines, and circle squaring maths were also ridiculed and it is their plans not their detractors who were vindicated. That's not something Robot Cultists like to remember from history for obvious reasons. But, yes, Lincoln, you're quite right, it's nice to be nice.
You tell me I'm going to die. I agree that to some extent at some time and place, I'll almost certainly die, and my faith is that subsequently, to some extent at some time and place, I'll live again. You tell me that my consciousness will never be uploaded into a computer. I tell you that you have no sufficient evidence against uploading, and that if uploading is possible then you and I are almost certainly already uploaded.
Whatever gets you through the night.
You tell me that resurrection is impossible. I tell you that you have no sufficient evidence against resurrection, and that you do have, instead, a faith in superlative death.
It's a mighty thin thread you're hanging on, and I think you would be better served getting some therapy and coming to terms with your mortality and moving on. But that's not my business and I don't really care so long as you don't evangelize me, or try to undermine the status of science, or get in the way of my own consensual practices of private perfection and public expression to the extent that they do no harm to the general welfare.
Vulnerable processes in demanding environments [like life -- ed.] are not nothing, impotence or perpetual death.
Well, they have always eventuated in death and there never has been a resurrection and there is no cause to seriously entertain the likelihood of one, but, whatever floats your boat.
Clearly, you make a logical mistake in supposing, as you have, that any actual resurrection would imply that resurrection must be pervasive in time and space.
In magical leprechaunland resurrections happen every day, so I too may be immortal and I am edified to think so. Disprove it! You can't? And you claim to be more reasonable than me when you doubt magical leprechaunland resurrection? You call yourself a pragmatist. The very idea.
If resurrection is possible, only something akin to a perpetual motion machine could ensure that you are never resurrected. And again, you have no sufficient evidence that resurrection is impossible.
It's so consoling to believe in magic.
You tell me that you think I'm deluded for wondering whether humans can be transfigured or resurrected. I may indeed be deluded, but I'll add some observations.
First, although you may protest, your faith in prosthetic freedom corresponds to my faith in transfiguration.
Language, spectacles, vaccinations, and transsexual surgeries actually exist. They testify to our humanity, to ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle in historical human multiculture, and they most emphatically don't make of some of us or all of us into exemplars of some "post-human" species. Robot bodies and digital uploaded consciousnesses don't exist. All of this actually matters.
Second, given your limitations (which I presume are similar to mine), your claim that resurrection is impossible is a better candidate for delusion than my recognition that there is no sufficient evidence for or against resurrection.
Wow, not only does our inability to conclusively logically disprove resurrection make it equivalently scientific as the claim that everybody dies, but you believe that the resurrection claim is scientifically stronger than the contrary claim.
Up is down. Check!
If faith is delusion, you and I are both deluded.
No difference between science and religion. Check!
If unwarrented scientific claims are delusion, perhaps only you have the honor.
Only the person concerned to preserve the criteria on the basis of which factual statements are warranted as such is deluded, while the person who demands we entertain non factual but logically "possible" descriptions, however implausible or unmotivated, as warranted is not deluded. Reasonable is delusion, faith is fact. Check!
I agree with your observation that some who fail to come to terms with mortality substitute a life lived with fearfulness that is a death in life. I, too, work against such perspectives, although not at the extreme you do, which extreme introduces other detriments.
Don't be "extreme" in recommending people come to terms with mortality. Mainstream belief is extreme, extreme Robot Cult beliefs are reasonable. Check!
Your faith in superlative death would substitute a living life with a life lived.
No matter how many times you say it this phrase is not one whit more meaningful. And given the fact that I introduced the term Superlative in the critique to which you claim to be responding and gave it a meaning in that critique that you are repeatedly refusing to apply while still reiterating the term itself, I will assume that part of what you are up to is to steal the term the better to domesticate the threat it represents to the dissemination of your worldview. Transhumanists stole technoprogressive, why not try to steal superlative too?
You marginalize possibilities when you posit only finite demanders. Anything short of eternity (in quality and quantity) is unworthy of your unprovisional consent. In that, you damn yourself.
Yes... to reality.
I like reality, the water's fine.
You say you do not agree that all claims become more factual the more fervently we pine for them to be true. In that, you appear to be acknolwedging that some claims become more factual the more fervently we pine for them to be true.
You have to be pretty desperate to find such an acknowledgment in what I said. But, let me clarify it for you now. Fervency of belief is irrelevant as a criterion for warrantability in the efficacious mode...
You say you do not agree that heavier-than-air flight was invented only when enough people believed in it enough to make it so. I actually do agree that I see heavier-than-air flight occurring in nature, and I actually do believe that it was possible prior to human belief in it.
Wow, what a stunning concession to the obvious.
However, our faith was essential in our engineering efforts, and so will faith remain essential in future engineering efforts. The strategy of clapping louder, understood as a metaphor that in practice should be fully extended to WORK, is indeed working, although not always so fast or so well as we would like. I anticipate there will always remain work to do in pursuit of the better world.
We're talking about the criteria on the basis of which we warrantedly affirm candidate descriptions for instrumental belief as true, we are not talking about how motivation enables projects to find their way to fruition where they already conform to the physical and social strictures at hand. Or if that is what you are talking about, that isn't what I was talking about.
But, no, clapping louder won't make you immortal. However loud you clap.
Finally, I'll respond, in a somewhat tangential way, to your question: "What the hell are you gabbing about then?" I'm gabbing about similarities and differences I perceive between your ideas and my own, and I'm doing that because I value your divergent perspectives, which you have, as yet, continued to gab about.
That's fine. I am enjoying this exchange much less at this point than you appear to be. If there weren't an audience of lurkers here I am presumably instructing on matters of concern to me concerning pragmatism, pluralism, and the critique of superlativity through the publication of this conversation with you I would very likely simply be ignoring you at this point, on this topic at any rate.
p2p Is Not Anarchy
In a post yesterday I described peer-to-peer democratization as one of my chief personal and scholarly interests. I wrote:
Friend of Blog Martin responded in the Moot: "Ironically, the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money is 'p2p' while basic income guarantee represents a centralized, 'broadcast' form of economic exchange.
I strongly disagree with this characterization (if I am understanding it aright), but saying why takes us into right into the heart of democratic theory and rhetoric.
First of all, just to get this out of the way, when Martin refers to "the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money" as a kind of actually-existing p2p formation it is truly crucial to remind everybody that this "laissez-faire capitalist system of exchanges" does not, nor has it ever, nor could it ever exist.
The formations that we describe as "Market" orders, such as they are, depend on laws backed by force, depend on norms practiced in the context of relatively stable institutions providing for the resolution of disputes beholden to legitimate governance, depend on infrastructure maintained to provide equity for all citizens rather than profit for a minority of owners, and depend on prices articulated by treaties, protocols, agreements, regulations enacted by authorized representatives, and on and on and on and on and on. The actual historical forms that so-called free, so-called spontaneous, so-called natural markets take will actually definitively reflect the particular historical forms of these laws, norms, protocols, treaties, assumptions on which they also depend for their maintenance.
Laissez-faire capitalism and the fantasy of "spontaneous order" are entirely rhetorical constructions deployed by incumbent interests to bamboozle majorities into collaborating in the terms of their own exploitation by incumbent interests who benefit from the indispensable unpaid or ill-paid looting of their common heritage, earthly commons, and their common peers.
These things must be said, else conversations like this, however progressive and democratic their aspirations, will end up endorsing deep assumptions on which incumbent and anti-democratic politics quite to the contrary of our aspirations rely for their ongoing intelligibility and force.
Now, more to the point at hand, what Martin is deploying in his ironic observation is Yochai Benkler's distinction between a Broadcast Media Model and a Peer-to-Peer Model, which Benkler goes on very provocatively and (apparently for Martin as much as for me too) powerfully to subsume under the more general distinction between an Industrial Model and Peer Production Model that can be applied to organization more broadly. Martin and I both agree that this distinction has real salience if we would grasp the significance of emerging shifts in the practice of governance in networked societies.
But it seems to me if you want to apply Benkler's industrial versus p2p figure to governance, the proper place to apply it is to the shift from sovereign to ever more democratic governance, and not as yet another retelling of the right-wing fantasy of Big Brother against Free Markets.
The current Netroots challenge of the Democratic Party corporatist "Machine Politics" and the corporate media via blogs, small campaign donor aggregation, rapid media pushback, public fact-checking, incumbent challenges, and so on very palpably represents a shift from a hierarchical-broadcast-gatekeeper model of partisan politics to a mass amateurization of politics peer to peer. If one locates p2p instead in the place of "spontaneous order" from neoliberal and libertopian ideology, such shifts -- which are the only rival to human influenced ecosystemic change and resource descent as the most significant force afoot in the world at the moment -- become difficult to grasp in their significance or even become invisible altogether.
We all have to push beyond the libertopian figuration of government as always equaling Big Brother and markets as always equaling Spontaneous Order, and then locating violence always on the one side and then nonviolence always on the other, locating centralization always on the one side and decentralization always on the other.
I doubt that Martin is actually entrapped by these metaphors as much as, say, the silly online anarcho-capitalists and dynamists and Randians and the rest are (poor things), but come what may his opening gambit essentially reproduces that conventional market libertarian/neoliberal figure and relies for its force on the intuitive plausibility that comes from that figure's incessant repetition since WWII (as a forceful opposition discourse since Hayek's Mount Pelerin declaration, and as a forceful orthodox discourse since the appointment by Carter of Volcker as Fed Chair and by every Administration, very much including Clinton's, since then).
Grasping what is wrong with this figuration at its heart is key to grasping how specifically deranging it is to read p2p democratization through the lens of this figure, this framing.
Violence inheres in human plurality as a permanent possibility, and human beings are always capable of retroactively justifying any conduct, however violent or unjust, if they have the authority to get away with it. Governments claim and then exercise a monopoly on the legitimate recourse to coercion within particular geographical or jurisdictional bounds. That an authorized minority can and almost inevitably will exercise violence on the majority is another permanent and ineradicable possibility inhering again in the basic fact of human plurality in its actually-existing diversity.
The violent state is ineradicable, not to be wished away by New Age fantasies of a triumph of love over all, nor defined away as free marketeers do when they simply claim that all market exchanges, however duressed, are noncoercive by fiat, nor smashed in some revolutionary's or anarchist's daydream of violence.
The State cannot be wished away or smashed, but at best democratized, tasked to maintain institutions that provide for nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes and to maintain the legible scene of informed nonduressed consent for their citizens, through the connection of a guarantee of representation and legal recourse to any who are taxed to support its ongoing functioning, through the multilateral antagonisms of a separation of powers, through the dedication to a Constitution and delineated Rights invested with a formal universality soliciting foundational investment rendered especially resistant to tampering, through the solicitation of ever wider ever more diverse participation, and so on.
Where governance is backed by the consent of the governed as well as by its ineradicable violence, it can legitimize and so transform the red thread of that violence into one tasked always only with preserving the peace and protecting the scene of consent on which it depends. The creation of this virtuous circle is the great triumph of democratization, to the extent that we have managed through centuries, bit by bit, to institute it, struggle for it, and in struggling through it to invigorate it.
What I worry that Martin is decrying in his response as the "centralization" or "industrialization" of a government regulation and subsidization of p2p formations is in fact the legitimacy that is ineradicably connected to the monopolization of the recourse to violence to preserve the peace and protect the scene of consent.
But the alternative to such centralization is not free love or a market provision of these "services," but inevitably the disintegration of freedom and the reappearance of the tyrannical sovereign "centralized" form of authority at the local level. p2p won't smash the state (nor should anybody in their right mind want to smash the state), but p2p can facilitate its ongoing democratization to the emancipation of us all.
As it happens governments (even the cranky minarchist Founding Era United States) have always subsidized the media infrastructure on which they depend for the administration of trade, intelligence, and defense, from roads, to postal services, to universities and presses, to telegraphy and telephony, to radio, to television, to the internet. Subsidizing peer production practices with a basic income guarantee (my "pay-to-peer" scheme) would be an extension of this practice, even further substantiating the democratic civilizational ethos that citizens are peers rather than clients of or footsoldiers for self-appointed elites.
That this development would not properly be described as "centralized" or "broadcast" or "industrial" in essence -- even if a neoliberal/libertopian mindset will assume otherwise since the development is to be brought into being in the first place only through the administration of a legitimate governance tasked to provide equity to all its diversity of stakeholders -- would surely be substantiated through a survey of its actual effects, which in my expectation would be a massive expansion and leveling of the actual practices of public agitation, organization, participation, criticism, collaboration, contestation, and so on.
p2p democratization so far has emerged out of some really small changes in transaction costs for certain kinds of organized activity, changes so small that almost nobody ever grasps their significance until they find themselves wallowing in the effects.
We must never underestimate the impact of losing Net Neutrality battles, losing media consolidation battles, losing copyfight battles, losing privacy battles on the ongoing p2p revolution. There is nothing inevitable in this marvelous thing that is happening around us (in the nick of time, given the bloodyminded lies and crimes of the Right and given the unprecedented crises arising from our long abuse of the environment). We have to fight for it. p2p democratization is technodevelopmental social struggle. Instituting Net Neutrality, breaking up media monopolies, providing free fast wifi everywhere, subsidizing p2p with basic income can make p2p practices harder to circumvent and strengthen democracy, but these measures require struggle.
It's far too early for triumphalism, especially any foolish triumphalism inspired by faith in the fantasy of inherently libertory technologies presumably at hand. Neoliberal forces and market libertarian ideology are nothing but obstacles to the actual political work at hand.
I think of as peer-to-peer democratization [as] encompassing the analysis of Netroots organizing, copyfight struggles, basic income advocacy (what I call "pay-to-peer"), and also connections between p2p formations and the history of nonviolent activism, what I think of as p2p peacework or peace in pieces.
Friend of Blog Martin responded in the Moot: "Ironically, the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money is 'p2p' while basic income guarantee represents a centralized, 'broadcast' form of economic exchange.
I strongly disagree with this characterization (if I am understanding it aright), but saying why takes us into right into the heart of democratic theory and rhetoric.
First of all, just to get this out of the way, when Martin refers to "the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money" as a kind of actually-existing p2p formation it is truly crucial to remind everybody that this "laissez-faire capitalist system of exchanges" does not, nor has it ever, nor could it ever exist.
The formations that we describe as "Market" orders, such as they are, depend on laws backed by force, depend on norms practiced in the context of relatively stable institutions providing for the resolution of disputes beholden to legitimate governance, depend on infrastructure maintained to provide equity for all citizens rather than profit for a minority of owners, and depend on prices articulated by treaties, protocols, agreements, regulations enacted by authorized representatives, and on and on and on and on and on. The actual historical forms that so-called free, so-called spontaneous, so-called natural markets take will actually definitively reflect the particular historical forms of these laws, norms, protocols, treaties, assumptions on which they also depend for their maintenance.
Laissez-faire capitalism and the fantasy of "spontaneous order" are entirely rhetorical constructions deployed by incumbent interests to bamboozle majorities into collaborating in the terms of their own exploitation by incumbent interests who benefit from the indispensable unpaid or ill-paid looting of their common heritage, earthly commons, and their common peers.
These things must be said, else conversations like this, however progressive and democratic their aspirations, will end up endorsing deep assumptions on which incumbent and anti-democratic politics quite to the contrary of our aspirations rely for their ongoing intelligibility and force.
Now, more to the point at hand, what Martin is deploying in his ironic observation is Yochai Benkler's distinction between a Broadcast Media Model and a Peer-to-Peer Model, which Benkler goes on very provocatively and (apparently for Martin as much as for me too) powerfully to subsume under the more general distinction between an Industrial Model and Peer Production Model that can be applied to organization more broadly. Martin and I both agree that this distinction has real salience if we would grasp the significance of emerging shifts in the practice of governance in networked societies.
But it seems to me if you want to apply Benkler's industrial versus p2p figure to governance, the proper place to apply it is to the shift from sovereign to ever more democratic governance, and not as yet another retelling of the right-wing fantasy of Big Brother against Free Markets.
The current Netroots challenge of the Democratic Party corporatist "Machine Politics" and the corporate media via blogs, small campaign donor aggregation, rapid media pushback, public fact-checking, incumbent challenges, and so on very palpably represents a shift from a hierarchical-broadcast-gatekeeper model of partisan politics to a mass amateurization of politics peer to peer. If one locates p2p instead in the place of "spontaneous order" from neoliberal and libertopian ideology, such shifts -- which are the only rival to human influenced ecosystemic change and resource descent as the most significant force afoot in the world at the moment -- become difficult to grasp in their significance or even become invisible altogether.
We all have to push beyond the libertopian figuration of government as always equaling Big Brother and markets as always equaling Spontaneous Order, and then locating violence always on the one side and then nonviolence always on the other, locating centralization always on the one side and decentralization always on the other.
I doubt that Martin is actually entrapped by these metaphors as much as, say, the silly online anarcho-capitalists and dynamists and Randians and the rest are (poor things), but come what may his opening gambit essentially reproduces that conventional market libertarian/neoliberal figure and relies for its force on the intuitive plausibility that comes from that figure's incessant repetition since WWII (as a forceful opposition discourse since Hayek's Mount Pelerin declaration, and as a forceful orthodox discourse since the appointment by Carter of Volcker as Fed Chair and by every Administration, very much including Clinton's, since then).
Grasping what is wrong with this figuration at its heart is key to grasping how specifically deranging it is to read p2p democratization through the lens of this figure, this framing.
Violence inheres in human plurality as a permanent possibility, and human beings are always capable of retroactively justifying any conduct, however violent or unjust, if they have the authority to get away with it. Governments claim and then exercise a monopoly on the legitimate recourse to coercion within particular geographical or jurisdictional bounds. That an authorized minority can and almost inevitably will exercise violence on the majority is another permanent and ineradicable possibility inhering again in the basic fact of human plurality in its actually-existing diversity.
The violent state is ineradicable, not to be wished away by New Age fantasies of a triumph of love over all, nor defined away as free marketeers do when they simply claim that all market exchanges, however duressed, are noncoercive by fiat, nor smashed in some revolutionary's or anarchist's daydream of violence.
The State cannot be wished away or smashed, but at best democratized, tasked to maintain institutions that provide for nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes and to maintain the legible scene of informed nonduressed consent for their citizens, through the connection of a guarantee of representation and legal recourse to any who are taxed to support its ongoing functioning, through the multilateral antagonisms of a separation of powers, through the dedication to a Constitution and delineated Rights invested with a formal universality soliciting foundational investment rendered especially resistant to tampering, through the solicitation of ever wider ever more diverse participation, and so on.
Where governance is backed by the consent of the governed as well as by its ineradicable violence, it can legitimize and so transform the red thread of that violence into one tasked always only with preserving the peace and protecting the scene of consent on which it depends. The creation of this virtuous circle is the great triumph of democratization, to the extent that we have managed through centuries, bit by bit, to institute it, struggle for it, and in struggling through it to invigorate it.
What I worry that Martin is decrying in his response as the "centralization" or "industrialization" of a government regulation and subsidization of p2p formations is in fact the legitimacy that is ineradicably connected to the monopolization of the recourse to violence to preserve the peace and protect the scene of consent.
But the alternative to such centralization is not free love or a market provision of these "services," but inevitably the disintegration of freedom and the reappearance of the tyrannical sovereign "centralized" form of authority at the local level. p2p won't smash the state (nor should anybody in their right mind want to smash the state), but p2p can facilitate its ongoing democratization to the emancipation of us all.
As it happens governments (even the cranky minarchist Founding Era United States) have always subsidized the media infrastructure on which they depend for the administration of trade, intelligence, and defense, from roads, to postal services, to universities and presses, to telegraphy and telephony, to radio, to television, to the internet. Subsidizing peer production practices with a basic income guarantee (my "pay-to-peer" scheme) would be an extension of this practice, even further substantiating the democratic civilizational ethos that citizens are peers rather than clients of or footsoldiers for self-appointed elites.
That this development would not properly be described as "centralized" or "broadcast" or "industrial" in essence -- even if a neoliberal/libertopian mindset will assume otherwise since the development is to be brought into being in the first place only through the administration of a legitimate governance tasked to provide equity to all its diversity of stakeholders -- would surely be substantiated through a survey of its actual effects, which in my expectation would be a massive expansion and leveling of the actual practices of public agitation, organization, participation, criticism, collaboration, contestation, and so on.
p2p democratization so far has emerged out of some really small changes in transaction costs for certain kinds of organized activity, changes so small that almost nobody ever grasps their significance until they find themselves wallowing in the effects.
We must never underestimate the impact of losing Net Neutrality battles, losing media consolidation battles, losing copyfight battles, losing privacy battles on the ongoing p2p revolution. There is nothing inevitable in this marvelous thing that is happening around us (in the nick of time, given the bloodyminded lies and crimes of the Right and given the unprecedented crises arising from our long abuse of the environment). We have to fight for it. p2p democratization is technodevelopmental social struggle. Instituting Net Neutrality, breaking up media monopolies, providing free fast wifi everywhere, subsidizing p2p with basic income can make p2p practices harder to circumvent and strengthen democracy, but these measures require struggle.
It's far too early for triumphalism, especially any foolish triumphalism inspired by faith in the fantasy of inherently libertory technologies presumably at hand. Neoliberal forces and market libertarian ideology are nothing but obstacles to the actual political work at hand.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Open Futurity Against "The Future"
Open futurity arises out of present practices of collaboration and contestation, while "the future" is a racket parochially owned by self-appointed "elite" minorities who pretend to the power of prophesy while seeking to implement outcomes undemocratically to their preferential benefit.
What I Work On, What I Think About, What I Blog On
Professionally, I suppose, my most legible area of research is in science and technology studies, especially technocultural and technoethical theory. My primary interest these days is the political theory of networked societies in a moment of transition from broadcast to p2p, especially
The superlative discourses to the critique of which I am devoting so much of my blogging these days seem to me to symptomize prevailing irrationalities of technodevelopmental discourse in a neoliberal/neoconservative epoch. These would be well worth understanding on terms other than the ones they use to promote themselves for that reason alone, quite apart from my sense they are dangerously anti-democratizing as well.
From that more polemical standpoint, transhumanism, singularitarianism, techno-immortalism, neoliberal-eugenicism, technocratic elitism, scientistic reductionist triumphalism and my other usual targets for critique are marginal (some more than others) sub(cult)ural locations that are connected to more prevailing and more influential discourses and rhetoric and frames (on which they depend and to which they perniciously contribute) that stand in complex relations to corporate-militarist technodevelopmental formations in the present in ways that demand the scrutiny of democratically-minded people. However marginal they are (and the fact of their marginality is in some respects intriguingly different from the fact of their actual influence rhetorically/discursively) they also could become far more actively dangerous even where they are now palpably marginalized by way of more than one plausible funding or organizational pathway (inklings of which I already see in motion in some cases) and it is good to expose these possibilities and fight them on that level as well in my view.
[1] what I think of as peer-to-peer democratization (encompassing the analysis of Netroots organizing, copyfight struggles, basic income advocacy as what I call "pay-to-peer," and also connections between p2p formations and the history of nonviolent activism, what I think of as p2p peacework or peace in pieces),That's what I'm working on, thinking about, and teaching in my courses when I can. (I spend a lot of my time lecturing in the history of philosophy, critical theory, political theory, aesthetic theory, all of which is of course pitched at a level of generality and covers timescales that have me emphasizing different issues than these in my classes -- fortunately, these are enormously provocative and fun things to devote one's time and attention to as well.)
[2] what I see as the conjunction of p2p practices and permaculture practices (encompassing commons models of seed/water sovereignty politics, networked/decentralized models of renewable resource provision, thinking of the role of mass-mediation in the emergence of planetary political consciousness, networked localisms, and what I call appropriate and appropriable technology discourses), and
[3] what I think of as the prevailing biopolitical regime of neoliberal-eugenic bioremedial networks (encompassing work on medical surveillance, normalizing therapization in the name of universal care, ongoing enclosure of the genomic commons, precarity and duressed corporate-militarist experimental subjection) together with the possibilities for informed nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination and planetary lifeway multiculture as an alternative regime facilitated by p2p networks.
The superlative discourses to the critique of which I am devoting so much of my blogging these days seem to me to symptomize prevailing irrationalities of technodevelopmental discourse in a neoliberal/neoconservative epoch. These would be well worth understanding on terms other than the ones they use to promote themselves for that reason alone, quite apart from my sense they are dangerously anti-democratizing as well.
From that more polemical standpoint, transhumanism, singularitarianism, techno-immortalism, neoliberal-eugenicism, technocratic elitism, scientistic reductionist triumphalism and my other usual targets for critique are marginal (some more than others) sub(cult)ural locations that are connected to more prevailing and more influential discourses and rhetoric and frames (on which they depend and to which they perniciously contribute) that stand in complex relations to corporate-militarist technodevelopmental formations in the present in ways that demand the scrutiny of democratically-minded people. However marginal they are (and the fact of their marginality is in some respects intriguingly different from the fact of their actual influence rhetorically/discursively) they also could become far more actively dangerous even where they are now palpably marginalized by way of more than one plausible funding or organizational pathway (inklings of which I already see in motion in some cases) and it is good to expose these possibilities and fight them on that level as well in my view.
Friday, April 04, 2008
The Anti-Democratizing Politics of Superlativity
I maintain that Superlative Technology Discourses tend to disdain actually progressive engagement in technodevelopmental social struggle for an aspiration after technoconstituted super-predicated capacities.
Such superlative aspirations will often have a politics of their own, to be sure.
But these politics are almost always sub(cult)ural. This is not surprising, inasmuch as Superlative aspirations require the initial substitution of this-worldly concern, with its open futurity, for "other-worldly" investment in forcefully imagined and desired technodevelopmental outcomes -- typically designated as "the future."
This substitution solicits faithful True Belief and sub(cult)ural identification with the fellow-faithful who substantiate in their shared professions of True Belief the plausibility of beliefs that are not substantiated by experience otherwise. Probably needless to say, this is all quite familiar from conventional fundamentalist politicizations of religiosity, as well as in the politics of marginal cults, defensive subcultures, and ideological pan-movements.
Within the organizational life of Superlative Technocentric sub(cult)ural formations the politics will tend to be enormously defensive. This is especially the case so long as these organizations remain numerically marginal and conspicuously unconventional, as are the "transhumanists," the "singularitarians," and the "techno-immortalists" whose exemplary texts and figures are the most frequent focus of my critiques here. Sometimes the defensiveness of marginal Superlative sub(cult)ural politics will inspire a strategy of outreach and public relations to cultivate mainstream respectability and wider membership but one that requires a self-conscious course in stealth at best and deception at worse about the beliefs that are at once most definitive and most marginalizing in the outlook they would "promote." Sometimes this defensiveness will inspire instead a more stringently separatist and authoritarian organizational culture, providing for a marginalized but more monolithic membership the false bolstering confidence of obedience to the utterances of a priestly elite.
Neither the cynicism of the first tendency nor the authoritarianism of the second are particularly conducive, to say the least, to democratizing attitudes, strategies, or effects, and this is notwithstanding the fact that at least some who engage in these actually anti-democratizing politics may earnestly affirm democratic values as their own (of which they might simply have an inadequate or simply too glib and hence vacuous an understanding, or which they might subordinate to what they consider more "pragmatic" organizational considerations in the present, or what have you).
I have also repeatedly described a host of more concrete anti-democratizing tendencies in Superlative Technology discourses (of which there are sure to be many more than just these, but these will do for a start) that deserve scrutiny and even vigilance:
First, that in their hyperbolic foregrounding of "existential risk" and "accelerating change" they too readily provide rationales for the circumvention of democratic politics (and, no, this is not the same thing as a claim that there are no risks, nor that real risks like climate change, resource and energy descent, arms and weapons proliferation and so on are unimportant).
Second, that in their focus on security, software, and robotics, for example, they provide a handy justification for ever-increasing skewed investment in military research and development in particular.
Third, that in their constant reiteration of security concerns, existential risks, and apocalyptic imagery they seem to make recourse to now all-too-familiar, tried and true strategies of reactionary and authoritarian fearmongering.
Fourth, that in their sanctimonious assumption of a need for "us" to "save the world" they seem to appeal too eagerly to familiar exceptionalist and imperialist intuitions about the special Destiny of the "Civilized" World that reframes as a Burden its assumption of unearned privileges and authorities.
Fifth, that in their constant dismissal of majority input and opinion as definitively more ignorant or more irrational than their own, and in their consequent insistence (sometimes, oh so reluctant) on the need for technocratic decision-making they appeal to perfectly conventional intuitions of conservative and incumbent interests as to the indispensability of (self-appointed) elite and priestly Gatekeepers of "True Knowledge" and "The Way."
And sixth, that in making incessant recourse to notions of "innovation," "competitiveness," "investment," "modernization," "early adoption," "diffusion," "spontaneous order," "market exchange," "underdeveloped regions," among other comparable terms of art in particular highly prejudicial construals treated as though they were "politically neutral" as a way to describe planetary technodevelopmental struggles they privilege and so consolidate neoliberal and neoconservative narratives that serve incumbent interests above all, and conjure up in the name of "the future" an endless prolongation and intensification of the status quo, a foreclosure of open futures in the service of a parochial fantasy of "the future" that is always, in essence, retro-futurist.
As a curious complement to this last concern, it is also true that Superlative technocentrisms inspire in some of their adherents a kind of quiescent "apoliticism" or what they will even insist is an active "anti-politicism," but one that functions primarily to endorse key social and cultural assumptions of the status quo. This result is, of course, doubly ironic, since this is politics figured as anti-politics, but also because this essentially conservative attitude tends to frame itself precisely to the contrary as a radically transformational and forward-looking viewpoint, hence, once again, my designation of such discourses as retro-futurist.
Whatever these practical anti-democratizing effects, we also do well to bear in mind the basic incompatibility between a commitment to democratic politics and any exclusive or even primary commitment to sub(cult)ural or identity politics in the first place (a point not confined to the identity politics of sub(cult)ural futurisms). Politics is the ongoing contingent reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders with whom one shares the world, and democratic politics struggles to provide nonviolent alternatives to duressed resolution of disputes by ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
Democracy then, the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, is not a project to implement some ideal order the form of which is known to some in advance of its actual realization, but is instead an ongoing and in fact interminable project of democratization, an opportunistic, collaborative, agonistic, improvisatory, experimentalist, never-ending struggle in which people have a say in shaping developments that affect them and work to implement architectures to facilitate ever more people having ever more of a say in shaping such developments.
Sub(cult)ural identification relies for its force on dis-identification with those who are cast as outside the bounds of that culture, and sub(cult)ural politics consists of policing those bounds, ensuring the continence of the culture of identification by ensuring its homogeneity (where it matters) within the boundary, defending the boundary itself from impurity and intrusion, and usually by seeking to expand the boundary through conversion and conquest beyond it.
Where politics seeks the reconciliation of differences (and many political variations are content to effect such reconciliation by violent means), sub(cult)ural politics always seeks to prevail over differences, to sweep the world, to implement its sub(cult)ural vision as a totality. Strictly speaking, then, sub(cult)ural politics are not politics at all, but the substitution of moralizing for politics.
Even political modalities that are more embracing of violence than I am as a properly democratically-minded person will still register the ineradicable fact of pluralism in the provision they make for resistance and revolt. Moralizing, on the contrary, in seeking to universalize the continence and homogeneity of moral-identification is always an anti-politics seeking to overturn the political as such. Techno-utopian discourses, especially in their Superlative and sub(cult)ural modalities are just an urgent contemporary illustration of a familiar and general tendency. It is in that light that we should understand the too-eager Superlative embrace of "the future" that obliterates open futurity, as well as the too-eager Superlative identification with a post-human species at the cost of dis-identification with the humanity with whom we actually share the world and actually share the work of collaboration and contestation in the present that opens onto futurity.
Such superlative aspirations will often have a politics of their own, to be sure.
But these politics are almost always sub(cult)ural. This is not surprising, inasmuch as Superlative aspirations require the initial substitution of this-worldly concern, with its open futurity, for "other-worldly" investment in forcefully imagined and desired technodevelopmental outcomes -- typically designated as "the future."
This substitution solicits faithful True Belief and sub(cult)ural identification with the fellow-faithful who substantiate in their shared professions of True Belief the plausibility of beliefs that are not substantiated by experience otherwise. Probably needless to say, this is all quite familiar from conventional fundamentalist politicizations of religiosity, as well as in the politics of marginal cults, defensive subcultures, and ideological pan-movements.
Within the organizational life of Superlative Technocentric sub(cult)ural formations the politics will tend to be enormously defensive. This is especially the case so long as these organizations remain numerically marginal and conspicuously unconventional, as are the "transhumanists," the "singularitarians," and the "techno-immortalists" whose exemplary texts and figures are the most frequent focus of my critiques here. Sometimes the defensiveness of marginal Superlative sub(cult)ural politics will inspire a strategy of outreach and public relations to cultivate mainstream respectability and wider membership but one that requires a self-conscious course in stealth at best and deception at worse about the beliefs that are at once most definitive and most marginalizing in the outlook they would "promote." Sometimes this defensiveness will inspire instead a more stringently separatist and authoritarian organizational culture, providing for a marginalized but more monolithic membership the false bolstering confidence of obedience to the utterances of a priestly elite.
Neither the cynicism of the first tendency nor the authoritarianism of the second are particularly conducive, to say the least, to democratizing attitudes, strategies, or effects, and this is notwithstanding the fact that at least some who engage in these actually anti-democratizing politics may earnestly affirm democratic values as their own (of which they might simply have an inadequate or simply too glib and hence vacuous an understanding, or which they might subordinate to what they consider more "pragmatic" organizational considerations in the present, or what have you).
I have also repeatedly described a host of more concrete anti-democratizing tendencies in Superlative Technology discourses (of which there are sure to be many more than just these, but these will do for a start) that deserve scrutiny and even vigilance:
First, that in their hyperbolic foregrounding of "existential risk" and "accelerating change" they too readily provide rationales for the circumvention of democratic politics (and, no, this is not the same thing as a claim that there are no risks, nor that real risks like climate change, resource and energy descent, arms and weapons proliferation and so on are unimportant).
Second, that in their focus on security, software, and robotics, for example, they provide a handy justification for ever-increasing skewed investment in military research and development in particular.
Third, that in their constant reiteration of security concerns, existential risks, and apocalyptic imagery they seem to make recourse to now all-too-familiar, tried and true strategies of reactionary and authoritarian fearmongering.
Fourth, that in their sanctimonious assumption of a need for "us" to "save the world" they seem to appeal too eagerly to familiar exceptionalist and imperialist intuitions about the special Destiny of the "Civilized" World that reframes as a Burden its assumption of unearned privileges and authorities.
Fifth, that in their constant dismissal of majority input and opinion as definitively more ignorant or more irrational than their own, and in their consequent insistence (sometimes, oh so reluctant) on the need for technocratic decision-making they appeal to perfectly conventional intuitions of conservative and incumbent interests as to the indispensability of (self-appointed) elite and priestly Gatekeepers of "True Knowledge" and "The Way."
And sixth, that in making incessant recourse to notions of "innovation," "competitiveness," "investment," "modernization," "early adoption," "diffusion," "spontaneous order," "market exchange," "underdeveloped regions," among other comparable terms of art in particular highly prejudicial construals treated as though they were "politically neutral" as a way to describe planetary technodevelopmental struggles they privilege and so consolidate neoliberal and neoconservative narratives that serve incumbent interests above all, and conjure up in the name of "the future" an endless prolongation and intensification of the status quo, a foreclosure of open futures in the service of a parochial fantasy of "the future" that is always, in essence, retro-futurist.
As a curious complement to this last concern, it is also true that Superlative technocentrisms inspire in some of their adherents a kind of quiescent "apoliticism" or what they will even insist is an active "anti-politicism," but one that functions primarily to endorse key social and cultural assumptions of the status quo. This result is, of course, doubly ironic, since this is politics figured as anti-politics, but also because this essentially conservative attitude tends to frame itself precisely to the contrary as a radically transformational and forward-looking viewpoint, hence, once again, my designation of such discourses as retro-futurist.
Whatever these practical anti-democratizing effects, we also do well to bear in mind the basic incompatibility between a commitment to democratic politics and any exclusive or even primary commitment to sub(cult)ural or identity politics in the first place (a point not confined to the identity politics of sub(cult)ural futurisms). Politics is the ongoing contingent reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders with whom one shares the world, and democratic politics struggles to provide nonviolent alternatives to duressed resolution of disputes by ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
Democracy then, the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, is not a project to implement some ideal order the form of which is known to some in advance of its actual realization, but is instead an ongoing and in fact interminable project of democratization, an opportunistic, collaborative, agonistic, improvisatory, experimentalist, never-ending struggle in which people have a say in shaping developments that affect them and work to implement architectures to facilitate ever more people having ever more of a say in shaping such developments.
Sub(cult)ural identification relies for its force on dis-identification with those who are cast as outside the bounds of that culture, and sub(cult)ural politics consists of policing those bounds, ensuring the continence of the culture of identification by ensuring its homogeneity (where it matters) within the boundary, defending the boundary itself from impurity and intrusion, and usually by seeking to expand the boundary through conversion and conquest beyond it.
Where politics seeks the reconciliation of differences (and many political variations are content to effect such reconciliation by violent means), sub(cult)ural politics always seeks to prevail over differences, to sweep the world, to implement its sub(cult)ural vision as a totality. Strictly speaking, then, sub(cult)ural politics are not politics at all, but the substitution of moralizing for politics.
Even political modalities that are more embracing of violence than I am as a properly democratically-minded person will still register the ineradicable fact of pluralism in the provision they make for resistance and revolt. Moralizing, on the contrary, in seeking to universalize the continence and homogeneity of moral-identification is always an anti-politics seeking to overturn the political as such. Techno-utopian discourses, especially in their Superlative and sub(cult)ural modalities are just an urgent contemporary illustration of a familiar and general tendency. It is in that light that we should understand the too-eager Superlative embrace of "the future" that obliterates open futurity, as well as the too-eager Superlative identification with a post-human species at the cost of dis-identification with the humanity with whom we actually share the world and actually share the work of collaboration and contestation in the present that opens onto futurity.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Pluralist Reasons Against Authoritarian Reason
I'm not a "post-modernist." Anybody who knows the history of serial quarelles des anciens et modernes since the 17C -- let alone much earlier variations in the Roman imagination of the Greeks, or in the Greek imagination of the "East" -- understands that the "high modern" "late modern" "a-modern" "post-modern" "post-post modern" skirmishes to and fro are a very old, and essentially modern, if I may say so, story.
But, that said, I definitely do play the post-modernist online from time to time. I find myself in this curious position not only because of my elite effete aesthete penchant for paradoxical wordplay but because I know that whatever positions I actually make a case for, the most vitriolic opponents of "post-modernism" (whatever, finally, that is supposed to mean to them in the long dark night of the soul train) definitely seem to have people like me in mind as their targets, so it makes a certain sense to defend myself on the terrain where the actual battle keeps unfolding for now.
What is especially interesting to me is that in defending the pragmatist, pluralist, post-structuralist, polycultural, post-humanist humanities theses that often get me pilloried for post-modernism I find myself at odds with many people who under other circumstances I would assume to be clear allies, defenders of practical science, "reality-based" progressive activists, freethinkers, and so on. I also find it interesting just how many pieces I have written on Amor Mundi over the years really do seem to be variations on this topic of my skepticism toward "priestly" or too authoritative understandings of truth, knowledge, science, selfhood, reality, the good, the future, and so on. Although these are far from the pieces of mine that have drawn the most eyeballs to this site or the most comments to the Moot (I guess my brand of cheerful comparatively nonjudgmental atheism in such posts does occasionally draw some notice at least), many of these happen to be the pieces I am proudest of, the pieces that seem to me to go to the real heart of my personal preoccupations, and the pieces that reflect my own best sense of what Amor Mundi is about most of all (or wanted to be, in its early days).
1. Values: Morals Versus Ethics, November 4, 2004.
2. Fundamentalist Devils, Postmodernist Angels, November 29, 2004.
3. Progress as a Natural Force Versus Progress as the Great Work, January 05, 2005.
4. Subject, Object, Abject, April 20, 2005.
5. Sovereign Or Subject?, April 21, 2005.
6. Selves Are Fictional But Not Illusory, June 10, 2005.
7. Is Science Democratic?, July 27, 2005.
8. Without God, August 19, 2005.
9. The Republican War on Science Is Premodern Not Postmodern, September 20, 2005.
10. But Then Who Will Save Us?, September 27, 2005.
11. MoPoMo, February 11, 2006.
12. Posthuman Terrains, July 10, 2006.
13. Our PreMo President, October 09, 2006.
14. Technoethical Pluralism, November 23, 2006.
15. Zerzan's Premodernist Complaint about "Postmodern" Thought, December 06, 2006.
16. Anti-Intellectual Arguments Against Anti-Intellectualism Are Always Such Fun!, December 29, 2006.
17. Faith in Technology?, February 5, 2007.
18. Mass Mediated Hand Holding: Depressive Bioconservative Cinema and Its Manic Technophiliac Twin, February 11, 2007.
19. What "Becomes" Post-Humanity?, March 10, 2007.
20. The World Needs Democracy, Not Saving (And Especially Not Self-Appointed "Saviors"), March 31, 2007
21. Close to You; Or, Truth-Talk Among the Philosophers, April 15, 2007.
22. "Relativisms," Left and Right, June 02, 2007.
23. Problematical Posthumanistical, June 02, 2007.
24. Richard Rorty, October 4, 1931 -- June 8, 2007, June 10, 2007.
25. More Rorty, June 12, 2007.
26. Priestly "Science" and Democratic Politics, July 17, 2007.
27. Pragmatic Science, Not Priestly Science, July 13, 2007.
28. Freedom and Figurative Language, August 10, 2007.
29. Confusing Moralizing for Politics, August, 2007.
30. Is Rationality Always Instrumental?, November 11, 2007.
31. But I'm Not a Relativist, December 10, 2007.
32. Many of the Faithful Are Really Just Aesthetes, December 10, 2007.
33. Scattered Speculations on Secularism, Atheism, and Anticlericalism, December 29, 2007.
34. As An Actual Person, May I Point Out That I'm Actually Speaking A "Language of the People" Already, Thank You Very Much?, February 15, 2008.
35. Transhumanists Appoint Themselves Master Defenders of "The Enlightenment", February 16, 2008.
36. From Enlightenment to Eliminationism in a Single Bound, February 17, 2008.
37. Loss, Connection, Transformation, March 03, 2008.
38. A Faith in Finitude?, March 29, 2008.
39. Moralizing Isn't Politics, April 20, 2008.
40. Science, Politics, and Administration, March 22, 2009.
41. Let A Bazillion Flowers Bloom, December 3, 2009.
42. Pluralist Reasonableness Against Fundamentalist, Reductionist, and Relativist Unreasonablenesses, May 16, 2010.
43. Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes, June 6, 2010.
44. Rhetoric and Nonviolence, June 12, 2010.
45. We Already Won the Culture Wars, August 17, 2010.
46. Sold Out Truths, December 30, 2010.
47. "Smug Atheists" Should Read More SF Counsels io9, November, 2012.
48. More on Irreligiosity, October 5, 2014.
49. Why Our Militant Atheists Are Not Secular Thinkers, December 22, 2014.
50. Religious Beliefs Don't Pass Scientific Muster: But That Recognition Goes Both Ways, January 9, 2015.
51. Sunday Morning Twitter Sermon, February 8, 2015.
But, that said, I definitely do play the post-modernist online from time to time. I find myself in this curious position not only because of my elite effete aesthete penchant for paradoxical wordplay but because I know that whatever positions I actually make a case for, the most vitriolic opponents of "post-modernism" (whatever, finally, that is supposed to mean to them in the long dark night of the soul train) definitely seem to have people like me in mind as their targets, so it makes a certain sense to defend myself on the terrain where the actual battle keeps unfolding for now.
What is especially interesting to me is that in defending the pragmatist, pluralist, post-structuralist, polycultural, post-humanist humanities theses that often get me pilloried for post-modernism I find myself at odds with many people who under other circumstances I would assume to be clear allies, defenders of practical science, "reality-based" progressive activists, freethinkers, and so on. I also find it interesting just how many pieces I have written on Amor Mundi over the years really do seem to be variations on this topic of my skepticism toward "priestly" or too authoritative understandings of truth, knowledge, science, selfhood, reality, the good, the future, and so on. Although these are far from the pieces of mine that have drawn the most eyeballs to this site or the most comments to the Moot (I guess my brand of cheerful comparatively nonjudgmental atheism in such posts does occasionally draw some notice at least), many of these happen to be the pieces I am proudest of, the pieces that seem to me to go to the real heart of my personal preoccupations, and the pieces that reflect my own best sense of what Amor Mundi is about most of all (or wanted to be, in its early days).
1. Values: Morals Versus Ethics, November 4, 2004.
2. Fundamentalist Devils, Postmodernist Angels, November 29, 2004.
3. Progress as a Natural Force Versus Progress as the Great Work, January 05, 2005.
4. Subject, Object, Abject, April 20, 2005.
5. Sovereign Or Subject?, April 21, 2005.
6. Selves Are Fictional But Not Illusory, June 10, 2005.
7. Is Science Democratic?, July 27, 2005.
8. Without God, August 19, 2005.
9. The Republican War on Science Is Premodern Not Postmodern, September 20, 2005.
10. But Then Who Will Save Us?, September 27, 2005.
11. MoPoMo, February 11, 2006.
12. Posthuman Terrains, July 10, 2006.
13. Our PreMo President, October 09, 2006.
14. Technoethical Pluralism, November 23, 2006.
15. Zerzan's Premodernist Complaint about "Postmodern" Thought, December 06, 2006.
16. Anti-Intellectual Arguments Against Anti-Intellectualism Are Always Such Fun!, December 29, 2006.
17. Faith in Technology?, February 5, 2007.
18. Mass Mediated Hand Holding: Depressive Bioconservative Cinema and Its Manic Technophiliac Twin, February 11, 2007.
19. What "Becomes" Post-Humanity?, March 10, 2007.
20. The World Needs Democracy, Not Saving (And Especially Not Self-Appointed "Saviors"), March 31, 2007
21. Close to You; Or, Truth-Talk Among the Philosophers, April 15, 2007.
22. "Relativisms," Left and Right, June 02, 2007.
23. Problematical Posthumanistical, June 02, 2007.
24. Richard Rorty, October 4, 1931 -- June 8, 2007, June 10, 2007.
25. More Rorty, June 12, 2007.
26. Priestly "Science" and Democratic Politics, July 17, 2007.
27. Pragmatic Science, Not Priestly Science, July 13, 2007.
28. Freedom and Figurative Language, August 10, 2007.
29. Confusing Moralizing for Politics, August, 2007.
30. Is Rationality Always Instrumental?, November 11, 2007.
31. But I'm Not a Relativist, December 10, 2007.
32. Many of the Faithful Are Really Just Aesthetes, December 10, 2007.
33. Scattered Speculations on Secularism, Atheism, and Anticlericalism, December 29, 2007.
34. As An Actual Person, May I Point Out That I'm Actually Speaking A "Language of the People" Already, Thank You Very Much?, February 15, 2008.
35. Transhumanists Appoint Themselves Master Defenders of "The Enlightenment", February 16, 2008.
36. From Enlightenment to Eliminationism in a Single Bound, February 17, 2008.
37. Loss, Connection, Transformation, March 03, 2008.
38. A Faith in Finitude?, March 29, 2008.
39. Moralizing Isn't Politics, April 20, 2008.
40. Science, Politics, and Administration, March 22, 2009.
41. Let A Bazillion Flowers Bloom, December 3, 2009.
42. Pluralist Reasonableness Against Fundamentalist, Reductionist, and Relativist Unreasonablenesses, May 16, 2010.
43. Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes, June 6, 2010.
44. Rhetoric and Nonviolence, June 12, 2010.
45. We Already Won the Culture Wars, August 17, 2010.
46. Sold Out Truths, December 30, 2010.
47. "Smug Atheists" Should Read More SF Counsels io9, November, 2012.
48. More on Irreligiosity, October 5, 2014.
49. Why Our Militant Atheists Are Not Secular Thinkers, December 22, 2014.
50. Religious Beliefs Don't Pass Scientific Muster: But That Recognition Goes Both Ways, January 9, 2015.
51. Sunday Morning Twitter Sermon, February 8, 2015.
Better Safe Than Sorry; Or, Why Bother With the Transhumanists?
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot
Of transhumanism and singularitarianism and the other branches of techno-utopian Robot Cultism I've been critiquing here rather a lot lately, an Anonymous comment in the Moot holds up a genial and calming hand and proposes that it is, after all, "mostly goofy fun that explodes in to heated debate equivalent to the way people get emotionally attached to discussions about who should play shortstop for the Yankees."
This comment recurs fairly regularly in some form or other in the Moot -- earlier versions of responses to it can be found here and here, for example. I understand the sentiment, and I would like to agree with it in a general sort of way, especially since I actually am a nerd and enjoy geeking out with science fiction enthusiasts on science fictional topics of the kind that preoccupy many transhumanists and since many transhumanist-identified folks are plenty likeable as far as that goes however philosophically incoherent and politically pernicious the roller coaster they are riding and exhorting others to ride with them actually happens to be… But there are a couple of things that give me pause in taking up this suggestion when all is said and done.
First, however goofy and marginal Superlative Technocentrics may seem (and, crucially, mostly are, so far) in their cul-de-sac sub(cult)ures, it is also true that they crystallize tendencies to techno-utopian hyperbole, technocratic elitism, scientistic reductionism, glib "enlightened" eugenicism, and odes to wild-eyed military spending that also characterize actually prevailing corporate-militarist developmental assumptions and rhetoric. But with the explicitly transhumanist versions of the rhetoric there is the benefit that the bloody-minded bat-shit craziness of this constellation of assumptions and aspirations is plainer to see for most people in its stark extremity, and hence exposing the one provides a good and underexploited way of trying to drive home the more general critique of corporate-militarist technodevelopmental rhetoric, policy, and outcomes as well.
Second, it is also true that the transhumanists and singularitarians and other Superlatives make good copy for corporate media outlets precisely for their goofiness and extremity and, frankly, from the perspective of lots of corporate-militarist incumbent interests, many of their views make good plain sense, too -- "in moderation," of course! -- and so transhumanists and techno-utopians generally have managed to make a good deal more noise and hence a good deal more mischief deranging sensible and progressive public discourse on technodevelopmental issues in my view than their persistently small numbers would otherwise justify.
It is indeed true that there can sometimes seem something rather silly and sad about all these privileged boys with their toys who think they're the smartest guys in the room indulging their fantasies, calculating the Robot God odds and contemplating imperishable robot bodies and nanobotic genie-in-a-bottle treasure caves and stainless-steel soopergenius labs in the asteroid belt, or whatever it is that is going on their heads…
Wouldn't it be better to be kind to the poor dears, after all?
But then I think how silly the Neocons once must have seemed in their forlorn whiteboy clubhouses, plotting and planning for the future in the University of Chicago or what have you, reading Milton Friedman and Atlas Shrugged and starting to craft their Noble Lies, their racist Southern Strategy, their Contract Hit on America, and their Project for a New American Century...
Then I find myself thinking it's a good thing indeed for at least a few of the folks who know enough to know better here and now to try to nip this thing in the bud via exposure, analysis, ridicule, and the proposal of more progressive alternatives.
Francis Fukuyama once declared transhumanism the most dangerous idea in the world. Of course, when he said that he was studiously avoiding the more obvious candidate for that title to which he himself had been so long devoted, Neoconservatism itself.
But there are good reasons for those of us who would gladly observe the ongoing eclipse of the Neoconservative movement in the ruins wrought by its false and facile fantasies to pay close attention to transhumanism as an aborning potential successor movement (think of Glenn Reynolds if you want to understand with what ease such a transition can be made), a retro-futurist successor to Neoconservatism just now stitching together its organizations, its donors, its think-tanks, its public intellectuals.
Born in the irrational exuberance of digital techno-utopianism, in the freewheeling anarcho-capitalist crypto-anarchist cryonicist gun-nut techno-utopianism of the California Extropians movement, devoted to market fundamentalism and limit-denialism (a hostility to biological life and death, a hostility to sensible regulations of corporate greed, a hostility to environmental concerns), now transhumanism is trying to be a wee bit more suave and more savvy in its surface representation -- even though the market fundamentalists, the social Darwinists, the scientistic reductionists, the technocratic elitists, the liberal eugenists are all still there, even among the so-called "democratic transhumanists," making their "serious" cases to their respectful colleagues, thronging their organizational advisory Boards, providing more and more of the donor dollars on which they depend to do their futurological "work."
I hope the transhumanists are as harmless as they deserve to be. I would like to enjoy blue-skying with them as geeks who like some good science fiction if they would just drop the pretensions to being a "movement" holding the Keys to History, the self-appointed assumption of a Priestly "protectorate" of Science and Enlightenment on their parochial construal of it, and all the fundamentalist paraphernalia of their Superlative Technocentricity.
But just in case, I think there is something to be said for paying attention to them, naming names, following the money, mapping the organizations, their staffs, advisors, donors, and inter-relations, and otherwise connecting the dots. Better safe than sorry.
Of transhumanism and singularitarianism and the other branches of techno-utopian Robot Cultism I've been critiquing here rather a lot lately, an Anonymous comment in the Moot holds up a genial and calming hand and proposes that it is, after all, "mostly goofy fun that explodes in to heated debate equivalent to the way people get emotionally attached to discussions about who should play shortstop for the Yankees."
This comment recurs fairly regularly in some form or other in the Moot -- earlier versions of responses to it can be found here and here, for example. I understand the sentiment, and I would like to agree with it in a general sort of way, especially since I actually am a nerd and enjoy geeking out with science fiction enthusiasts on science fictional topics of the kind that preoccupy many transhumanists and since many transhumanist-identified folks are plenty likeable as far as that goes however philosophically incoherent and politically pernicious the roller coaster they are riding and exhorting others to ride with them actually happens to be… But there are a couple of things that give me pause in taking up this suggestion when all is said and done.
First, however goofy and marginal Superlative Technocentrics may seem (and, crucially, mostly are, so far) in their cul-de-sac sub(cult)ures, it is also true that they crystallize tendencies to techno-utopian hyperbole, technocratic elitism, scientistic reductionism, glib "enlightened" eugenicism, and odes to wild-eyed military spending that also characterize actually prevailing corporate-militarist developmental assumptions and rhetoric. But with the explicitly transhumanist versions of the rhetoric there is the benefit that the bloody-minded bat-shit craziness of this constellation of assumptions and aspirations is plainer to see for most people in its stark extremity, and hence exposing the one provides a good and underexploited way of trying to drive home the more general critique of corporate-militarist technodevelopmental rhetoric, policy, and outcomes as well.
Second, it is also true that the transhumanists and singularitarians and other Superlatives make good copy for corporate media outlets precisely for their goofiness and extremity and, frankly, from the perspective of lots of corporate-militarist incumbent interests, many of their views make good plain sense, too -- "in moderation," of course! -- and so transhumanists and techno-utopians generally have managed to make a good deal more noise and hence a good deal more mischief deranging sensible and progressive public discourse on technodevelopmental issues in my view than their persistently small numbers would otherwise justify.
It is indeed true that there can sometimes seem something rather silly and sad about all these privileged boys with their toys who think they're the smartest guys in the room indulging their fantasies, calculating the Robot God odds and contemplating imperishable robot bodies and nanobotic genie-in-a-bottle treasure caves and stainless-steel soopergenius labs in the asteroid belt, or whatever it is that is going on their heads…
Wouldn't it be better to be kind to the poor dears, after all?
But then I think how silly the Neocons once must have seemed in their forlorn whiteboy clubhouses, plotting and planning for the future in the University of Chicago or what have you, reading Milton Friedman and Atlas Shrugged and starting to craft their Noble Lies, their racist Southern Strategy, their Contract Hit on America, and their Project for a New American Century...
Then I find myself thinking it's a good thing indeed for at least a few of the folks who know enough to know better here and now to try to nip this thing in the bud via exposure, analysis, ridicule, and the proposal of more progressive alternatives.
Francis Fukuyama once declared transhumanism the most dangerous idea in the world. Of course, when he said that he was studiously avoiding the more obvious candidate for that title to which he himself had been so long devoted, Neoconservatism itself.
But there are good reasons for those of us who would gladly observe the ongoing eclipse of the Neoconservative movement in the ruins wrought by its false and facile fantasies to pay close attention to transhumanism as an aborning potential successor movement (think of Glenn Reynolds if you want to understand with what ease such a transition can be made), a retro-futurist successor to Neoconservatism just now stitching together its organizations, its donors, its think-tanks, its public intellectuals.
Born in the irrational exuberance of digital techno-utopianism, in the freewheeling anarcho-capitalist crypto-anarchist cryonicist gun-nut techno-utopianism of the California Extropians movement, devoted to market fundamentalism and limit-denialism (a hostility to biological life and death, a hostility to sensible regulations of corporate greed, a hostility to environmental concerns), now transhumanism is trying to be a wee bit more suave and more savvy in its surface representation -- even though the market fundamentalists, the social Darwinists, the scientistic reductionists, the technocratic elitists, the liberal eugenists are all still there, even among the so-called "democratic transhumanists," making their "serious" cases to their respectful colleagues, thronging their organizational advisory Boards, providing more and more of the donor dollars on which they depend to do their futurological "work."
I hope the transhumanists are as harmless as they deserve to be. I would like to enjoy blue-skying with them as geeks who like some good science fiction if they would just drop the pretensions to being a "movement" holding the Keys to History, the self-appointed assumption of a Priestly "protectorate" of Science and Enlightenment on their parochial construal of it, and all the fundamentalist paraphernalia of their Superlative Technocentricity.
But just in case, I think there is something to be said for paying attention to them, naming names, following the money, mapping the organizations, their staffs, advisors, donors, and inter-relations, and otherwise connecting the dots. Better safe than sorry.
Friday, March 28, 2008
The Fallen World and the World to Come; Or, Techno-Utopians Give 'Em That New-Fangled Religion
Reader FrF in the Moot directed my attention to an editorial I would not otherwise have read, from the Superlative Techno-Immortalist (and also, rather predictably, market libertarian) blog Fight Aging!
In it, the editorialist, "Reason" (of course) declares that "[w]e are all doomed unless we dig ourselves out of the hole of aging via the future of medical technology."
By "doomed" the author means to point out (for those of you not paying attention in the back row) that all human beings now living, like all human beings who have ever lived, are, indeed, mortal.
While there is of course an enormous literature spanning millennia devoted to the ways in which human beings individually and human societies collectively have struggled to work through (or not) the existential dilemmas introduced by the inescapable fact of human mortality, it does seem to me that there is something more than usually alienated happening in the conjuration of doom in this piece and in comparable pieces by Superlative Techno-Immortalists.
The proximate inspiration for this editorial was the recent spate of studies and articles like a recent New York Times piece noting "disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades," as well as other recent studies pointing to the impact of diet and exercise on healthy lifespan also correlated in complicated ways to socioeconomic status, access to information, lifeway precarity and stress, and so on.
About all this, "Reason," The Techno-Immortalist wants to know: "What does it matter that some of us are a handful of percentage points more or less doomed than others…? It's still doom, and we'll all be just as rescued by technologies capable of repairing the damage that is aging."
There are a couple of things I want to direct your attention to in this extraordinary statement. First of all, in this formulation wealth disparities, differences in access to knowledge, distinctions of status, actual exhibitions of lifeway diversity are regarded as a matter of an utterly negligible "handful of percentage points more or less doomed than others."
That is to say, seen against the backdrop of the epic conflict of "Immortalism" Versus "Deathism" on which the Superlative Techno-Warrior imagines himself to be fighting, almost every difference that makes a difference in the actually existing texture of pleasure, danger, suffering, opportunity, awareness, exploitation, resistance of all the actually-existing people who have ever lived or are now living on earth is handwaved away as a near irrelevance.
Of course, I don't doubt that these textures assume their more proper importance in "Reason's" actual everyday life. I don't mean to suggest that just because he seems indifferent to and even dismissive of most of the actual differences that make a difference to the overabundant majority of human beings on earth the overabundant majority of the time they spend on earth in the context of contemplating the stakes of a particularly urgent problem, that this means he feels this way all the time or in some more fundamental way. But it still bears scrutiny to think just what it means to think this way under any circumstances, even if in strictly delimited contexts, especially if these are the contexts to which one devotes considerable public attention.
The fact is, I personally believe that there is something brutally obliterative that happens to anyone who would assume such a vantage, even if only selectively. And just so readers don't think I am merely seeking to demonize and so trivialize a perspective with which I disagree, let me say that I think there is something about the harsh worldly indifference "Reason" exhibits when he is thinking about his "doom" here that is deeply akin to the occupational hazards of theorists and philosophers to assume bloodless abstract vantages from which to survey the dynamic befuddling and too often threatening complexities of history and culture, a temperamental tendency to consoling abstraction to which I no doubt am no less deeply prone myself than other philosophically-inclined people are.
I think that one's arrival at such perspectives risks a derangement of one's inhabitation of the world in a way that skews both perceptions and priorities more generally. But also, and more to the point for the partisans of alienated techno-utopian perspectives in particular, surely this calls into question the ability of such people to assume the role of architects for the glorious futures they presumably disdain the present world for in the first place?
To what weird and alienated preoccupations would such coming futures presumably be most or even exclusively answerable?
Who, to be blunt, really wants to live forever in a future articulated by people who seem to disdain, in their thinking of that devoutly longed-for future, everything and everybody and every way of life and every actually wanted merely mortal pleasure and meaning and struggle playing out in the world as it is?
After all, isn't there something just plain worrisome about someone who wants to say of mortality that it is not just something that, well, sucks rather and something it can be difficult to come to terms with, but actually something from which we need urgently to be "rescued," something that means we are all of us now in some "hole" we must dig our way out of?
Again, my point is not to pretend that illness, vulnerability, and death are particularly thrilling prospects for me.
But I will admit that I feel a certain responsibility to the demands of basic legibility in the world of which I am a part to speak of meaning and dignity and human value in ways that don't manage deeply to disrespect the actual gorgeous beauty and genius and courage and significance of every human life that has happened always to be mortal so far and remains always mortal here and now by insisting of these mortal lives that somehow they were and are only utterly doomed or disastrous or insignificant just for the fact of their mortality.
To lose sight of the value of lives as they are actually lived is not the courageous affirmation of life the Techno-Immortalist sometimes try to sell it as -- often in the hyperbolic tonalities of salesmen sharking around some ignorant mark -- but to affirm what amounts to a falsifying idealization of a "life" that actually denigrates those lives actually lived in the world. And while I definitely do not mean to attribute this particular attitude to the editorialist "Reason," I will say that part of what makes me nervous in reading arguments like his is that I know how often the assumption of a vantage of indifference to worldly complexities coupled with a pining for personal transcendence and an evangelical fervor to be part of a movement that "sweeps the world" is to embark on a puritanical rampage of revenge against the vulnerability and variety of life as it is lived in its diversity, a frankly infantile and finally doomed (but no less dangerous for that) existential revolt against the perceived threat of too uncontrollably delicate and too unpredictably diverse worldly human lifeways in what amounts to a hostile and hysterical authoritarian rage for control and for order.
It is no surprise at all that the editorialist -- who goes by the moniker "Reason" because, you know, that is what he has more of than you do, which is why no doubt he keeps saying all these awful curious things so incessantly presumably -- disdains the very notion of paying attention to "the general pattern of wealth, use of medical resources, good health practices, and all that other fun stuff that fits in with 'socio-economic status,'" saying all this amounts in the end to what he calls "playing the game called 'who has more.'" As is usually the case with right wing market libertarians the question "who has more" does indeed feel like a "game" to those who are or would be situated closer to what George W. Bush once admitted to be his real political "base," that is to say, "the haves and the have-mores" than it does to other people.
The editorialist is certainly not averse to playing his own games in this area, taking pains to frame these disparities as mostly a matter of "exercise habits and excess body fat... all sorts of ways in which we can choose to damage ourselves, or let damage continue at a greater rate due to circumstances we can control." (Emphases added by me.) That is to say, once we disdain the idea of taking the palpable impact of lived socioeconomic disparities into account we then are perfectly predictably encouraged to hyper-inflate the role of individual responsibility for both personal success or misfortune, absolving the privileged from attending to their actual dependency for their success on majorities who fail to benefit from their own contribution to the outcomes enjoyed by privileged minorities while adding insult to injury, endlessly harassing the vulnerable for their suffering which is largely a consequence of public decisions in which they have little real say.
But it seems to me that the socially alienated perspective that "Reason" exhibits in his indifference to social injustice and individual suffering is less interesting than the deeper alienation of his perspective on the "doom" of mortality, what is palpably for him an incomparably deeper form of injustice and suffering, one that is actually underwriting in its depth and intensity his socially alienated perspective otherwise.
Of those who are preoccupied with actually-existing worldly lifeway differences and their impacts on actually-existing suffering, opportunity, health, and so on, "Reason" admonishes that "[t]hey are the voice of the shiny trinkets of the now…." Against these voices from the Fallen World, he counterposes the voices of those who see the World to Come: "All of this is irrelevant and unimportant, however, when compared to the speed with which medical technologies for the repair of aging are developed."
Understand this clearly: Techno-Immortalists like "Reason" demand we disdain the address here and now of actually-existing disparities that contribute to actually-addressable suffering in the world, the better to invest our energies in the programmatic faith in non-existing "medical technologies" that would presumably deliver us from this despised world unto salvation in techno-utopian Heaven.
It does not seem to me the least bit accidental that this disdain of worldly concerns is couched in terms of a repudiation of "shiny trinkets," the same hostility to the present world of flesh and diversity and desire that reappears in every generation's would-be ascetic priests and cult gurus and Dear Leaders.
"Reason" offers up this consummating juxtaposition: "If we can make that happen rapidly enough, we're all rescued. If not, we're all doomed."
But what if we fail to feel doomed in our lives just because we are finite and vulnerable and error-prone and mortal?
What if we are eager to contribute to the collaborative solution of shared problems (including problems of disease and avoidable suffering) and to the sum of lifeway multiculture, but see this as an embrace of the finitude and plurality of a humanity forever in reformation? What if we are altogether unmoved by denialist repudiations of that finitude and plurality, what if we abhor the insistence that this open humanity must instead be junked to make way for some parochial fantasy of a "post-human" species soliciting the identification here and now of a handful of privileged sociopaths who are scared of death and contingency?
I will be as happy to contribute my support to a technoscientifically and socially progressive democracy devoted to the funding, regulation, and fair distribution of expanding medical knowledge and techniques to expand thereby the scene of informed consensual prosthetic self-determination, including championing non-normalizing modifications and interventions into hitherto customary capacities, morphologies, and so on.
But I don't see this as a need for rescue so much as an embrace of the collective genius and diverse beauty of an ever-more consensual sustainable democratic human planetary multiculture.
The world doesn't need saving or leading or controlling or rescue from your Robot Cult, thanks very much.
Worldliness is contribution to the collaborative solution of shared problems and contribution to the sum of creative expressivity, peer-to-peer.
Finite, mortal, vulnerable, this-worldly, but open, consensual, critical, fair, and free.
Peer-to-peer.
In it, the editorialist, "Reason" (of course) declares that "[w]e are all doomed unless we dig ourselves out of the hole of aging via the future of medical technology."
By "doomed" the author means to point out (for those of you not paying attention in the back row) that all human beings now living, like all human beings who have ever lived, are, indeed, mortal.
While there is of course an enormous literature spanning millennia devoted to the ways in which human beings individually and human societies collectively have struggled to work through (or not) the existential dilemmas introduced by the inescapable fact of human mortality, it does seem to me that there is something more than usually alienated happening in the conjuration of doom in this piece and in comparable pieces by Superlative Techno-Immortalists.
The proximate inspiration for this editorial was the recent spate of studies and articles like a recent New York Times piece noting "disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades," as well as other recent studies pointing to the impact of diet and exercise on healthy lifespan also correlated in complicated ways to socioeconomic status, access to information, lifeway precarity and stress, and so on.
About all this, "Reason," The Techno-Immortalist wants to know: "What does it matter that some of us are a handful of percentage points more or less doomed than others…? It's still doom, and we'll all be just as rescued by technologies capable of repairing the damage that is aging."
There are a couple of things I want to direct your attention to in this extraordinary statement. First of all, in this formulation wealth disparities, differences in access to knowledge, distinctions of status, actual exhibitions of lifeway diversity are regarded as a matter of an utterly negligible "handful of percentage points more or less doomed than others."
That is to say, seen against the backdrop of the epic conflict of "Immortalism" Versus "Deathism" on which the Superlative Techno-Warrior imagines himself to be fighting, almost every difference that makes a difference in the actually existing texture of pleasure, danger, suffering, opportunity, awareness, exploitation, resistance of all the actually-existing people who have ever lived or are now living on earth is handwaved away as a near irrelevance.
Of course, I don't doubt that these textures assume their more proper importance in "Reason's" actual everyday life. I don't mean to suggest that just because he seems indifferent to and even dismissive of most of the actual differences that make a difference to the overabundant majority of human beings on earth the overabundant majority of the time they spend on earth in the context of contemplating the stakes of a particularly urgent problem, that this means he feels this way all the time or in some more fundamental way. But it still bears scrutiny to think just what it means to think this way under any circumstances, even if in strictly delimited contexts, especially if these are the contexts to which one devotes considerable public attention.
The fact is, I personally believe that there is something brutally obliterative that happens to anyone who would assume such a vantage, even if only selectively. And just so readers don't think I am merely seeking to demonize and so trivialize a perspective with which I disagree, let me say that I think there is something about the harsh worldly indifference "Reason" exhibits when he is thinking about his "doom" here that is deeply akin to the occupational hazards of theorists and philosophers to assume bloodless abstract vantages from which to survey the dynamic befuddling and too often threatening complexities of history and culture, a temperamental tendency to consoling abstraction to which I no doubt am no less deeply prone myself than other philosophically-inclined people are.
I think that one's arrival at such perspectives risks a derangement of one's inhabitation of the world in a way that skews both perceptions and priorities more generally. But also, and more to the point for the partisans of alienated techno-utopian perspectives in particular, surely this calls into question the ability of such people to assume the role of architects for the glorious futures they presumably disdain the present world for in the first place?
To what weird and alienated preoccupations would such coming futures presumably be most or even exclusively answerable?
Who, to be blunt, really wants to live forever in a future articulated by people who seem to disdain, in their thinking of that devoutly longed-for future, everything and everybody and every way of life and every actually wanted merely mortal pleasure and meaning and struggle playing out in the world as it is?
After all, isn't there something just plain worrisome about someone who wants to say of mortality that it is not just something that, well, sucks rather and something it can be difficult to come to terms with, but actually something from which we need urgently to be "rescued," something that means we are all of us now in some "hole" we must dig our way out of?
Again, my point is not to pretend that illness, vulnerability, and death are particularly thrilling prospects for me.
But I will admit that I feel a certain responsibility to the demands of basic legibility in the world of which I am a part to speak of meaning and dignity and human value in ways that don't manage deeply to disrespect the actual gorgeous beauty and genius and courage and significance of every human life that has happened always to be mortal so far and remains always mortal here and now by insisting of these mortal lives that somehow they were and are only utterly doomed or disastrous or insignificant just for the fact of their mortality.
To lose sight of the value of lives as they are actually lived is not the courageous affirmation of life the Techno-Immortalist sometimes try to sell it as -- often in the hyperbolic tonalities of salesmen sharking around some ignorant mark -- but to affirm what amounts to a falsifying idealization of a "life" that actually denigrates those lives actually lived in the world. And while I definitely do not mean to attribute this particular attitude to the editorialist "Reason," I will say that part of what makes me nervous in reading arguments like his is that I know how often the assumption of a vantage of indifference to worldly complexities coupled with a pining for personal transcendence and an evangelical fervor to be part of a movement that "sweeps the world" is to embark on a puritanical rampage of revenge against the vulnerability and variety of life as it is lived in its diversity, a frankly infantile and finally doomed (but no less dangerous for that) existential revolt against the perceived threat of too uncontrollably delicate and too unpredictably diverse worldly human lifeways in what amounts to a hostile and hysterical authoritarian rage for control and for order.
It is no surprise at all that the editorialist -- who goes by the moniker "Reason" because, you know, that is what he has more of than you do, which is why no doubt he keeps saying all these awful curious things so incessantly presumably -- disdains the very notion of paying attention to "the general pattern of wealth, use of medical resources, good health practices, and all that other fun stuff that fits in with 'socio-economic status,'" saying all this amounts in the end to what he calls "playing the game called 'who has more.'" As is usually the case with right wing market libertarians the question "who has more" does indeed feel like a "game" to those who are or would be situated closer to what George W. Bush once admitted to be his real political "base," that is to say, "the haves and the have-mores" than it does to other people.
The editorialist is certainly not averse to playing his own games in this area, taking pains to frame these disparities as mostly a matter of "exercise habits and excess body fat... all sorts of ways in which we can choose to damage ourselves, or let damage continue at a greater rate due to circumstances we can control." (Emphases added by me.) That is to say, once we disdain the idea of taking the palpable impact of lived socioeconomic disparities into account we then are perfectly predictably encouraged to hyper-inflate the role of individual responsibility for both personal success or misfortune, absolving the privileged from attending to their actual dependency for their success on majorities who fail to benefit from their own contribution to the outcomes enjoyed by privileged minorities while adding insult to injury, endlessly harassing the vulnerable for their suffering which is largely a consequence of public decisions in which they have little real say.
But it seems to me that the socially alienated perspective that "Reason" exhibits in his indifference to social injustice and individual suffering is less interesting than the deeper alienation of his perspective on the "doom" of mortality, what is palpably for him an incomparably deeper form of injustice and suffering, one that is actually underwriting in its depth and intensity his socially alienated perspective otherwise.
Of those who are preoccupied with actually-existing worldly lifeway differences and their impacts on actually-existing suffering, opportunity, health, and so on, "Reason" admonishes that "[t]hey are the voice of the shiny trinkets of the now…." Against these voices from the Fallen World, he counterposes the voices of those who see the World to Come: "All of this is irrelevant and unimportant, however, when compared to the speed with which medical technologies for the repair of aging are developed."
Understand this clearly: Techno-Immortalists like "Reason" demand we disdain the address here and now of actually-existing disparities that contribute to actually-addressable suffering in the world, the better to invest our energies in the programmatic faith in non-existing "medical technologies" that would presumably deliver us from this despised world unto salvation in techno-utopian Heaven.
It does not seem to me the least bit accidental that this disdain of worldly concerns is couched in terms of a repudiation of "shiny trinkets," the same hostility to the present world of flesh and diversity and desire that reappears in every generation's would-be ascetic priests and cult gurus and Dear Leaders.
"Reason" offers up this consummating juxtaposition: "If we can make that happen rapidly enough, we're all rescued. If not, we're all doomed."
But what if we fail to feel doomed in our lives just because we are finite and vulnerable and error-prone and mortal?
What if we are eager to contribute to the collaborative solution of shared problems (including problems of disease and avoidable suffering) and to the sum of lifeway multiculture, but see this as an embrace of the finitude and plurality of a humanity forever in reformation? What if we are altogether unmoved by denialist repudiations of that finitude and plurality, what if we abhor the insistence that this open humanity must instead be junked to make way for some parochial fantasy of a "post-human" species soliciting the identification here and now of a handful of privileged sociopaths who are scared of death and contingency?
I will be as happy to contribute my support to a technoscientifically and socially progressive democracy devoted to the funding, regulation, and fair distribution of expanding medical knowledge and techniques to expand thereby the scene of informed consensual prosthetic self-determination, including championing non-normalizing modifications and interventions into hitherto customary capacities, morphologies, and so on.
But I don't see this as a need for rescue so much as an embrace of the collective genius and diverse beauty of an ever-more consensual sustainable democratic human planetary multiculture.
The world doesn't need saving or leading or controlling or rescue from your Robot Cult, thanks very much.
Worldliness is contribution to the collaborative solution of shared problems and contribution to the sum of creative expressivity, peer-to-peer.
Finite, mortal, vulnerable, this-worldly, but open, consensual, critical, fair, and free.
Peer-to-peer.
Critique or Defamation?
Over in the Moot, reader "Smartypants" distinguishes "sustained critiques of transhumanism versus sustained critiques of transhumanists," and then proposes that "[m]uch of your analysis on this subject, and even the analysis that looks like a critique of the philosophical underpinnings, actually falls in the latter category."
Let me get this straight. Are you saying this is the case because I am reading claims and conduct attributable to actual people?
The "-ism" is grasped as a generalization from the assertions and behaviors of the actual "-ists," surely?
Even your work on superlative technocentricity is a canard as it relates to what transhumanists see as the 'philosophy' of transhumanism. It's based largely on your ongoing observation of numerous examples of superlative discourse issuing from transhumanists.
Uh, yes that's true. It's based on what people actually say and do, rather than on the way they promote themselves. Non members have no responsibility to ensure that their critiques tow the Party Line, after all.
And you will forgive me, but "transhumanism," so-called, is simply not a philosophy in any meaningful sense. It isn't a world view encompassing all the dimensions of human life or meaning nor does it seek to hold its historical moment whole in thought -- it is far too focused in its instrumental concerns to pass muster as a philosophy worthy of that name, in my understanding of what philosophies do. There are lots of things that are valuable that aren't philosophies so transhumanists really shouldn't take that assessment too harshly. But I will add that to the extent that philosophizing does happen in "transhumanist" social and cultural spaces, I have to say none of that thinking seems to me unique or original enough to demand a new name to describe the perspective. Reductionism, technocracy, scientism, Social Darwinism, disdain of the flesh, and techno-utopianism aren't exactly new perspectives in North Atlantic intellectual life since 1660. Sorry.
You may see no difference between these categories, but your transhumanist interlocutors surely do, and will continue to accuse you of attacking strawmen until you seriously engage with the structures of transhumanism
It is commonplace for members of marginal sub(cult)ures to mistake critique for defamation -- even when they are making claims in argumentative forms that seem to solicit warranted belief.
It is not me, it is the transhumanists who claim to be members of a subculture and a movement with which they identify. You can't claim to identify with a marginal community exhibiting discernible traits and beliefs generally in common, and then complain that every attribution of such generalities are "strawmen" because they fail to account for dime-thin differences of expression among the members.
If you make an argument, you open yourself to critique, if you just want to offer up expressions of faith for the Faithful, don't publish your writing for a general audience.
If you willingly raise the banner of a movement, you become answerable to its tendencies as discerned from generalizations from actual things its members say and do.
I am forever being castigated by transhumanists for "unseriousness" because I won't indulge in what they think of as "technical" discussions, few of which pass muster as technical in the first place for those who are not already True Believers, or because I won't indulge them in their demand that I treat every individual member as a completely distinct ab initio creation whose every utterance and shade of conviction I must grasp in its glorious individuality before I can be said to do justice to it, individual differences that appear significant only to the individuals themselves from the perspective of their already shared True Belief in the generalities that interest me.
Sorry, every fundamentalist will assure you that only those on the Inside know what it is to treat them "seriously," that critics and outsiders are missing the real originality, the real significance, the real force of their views, the true complex beauty of their system, and so on.
(starting with the foundational documents of the WTA) rather than the discourse of transhumanists."
Well, first of all, I am not a True Believer and so you are not empowered to insist to me that the only texts worthy of my consideration are the canonical texts of your Church. This is a straightforward fundamentalist demand. It would not be responsible, but actively irresponsible for me to confine myself to such materials if what I am looking for is an objective and sound accounting of how people who identify as transhumanists differ in what they say and do and want from people who do not so identify.
But I want to say that this is especially so for many of the documents you are talking about here, which are functioning as promotional documents designed to attract mainstream media attention and paid memberships and other forms of support.
This latter task is harder, less fun, but probably bears more fruit for you professionally in the end.
Back here on planet Earth, you will find that there are few professional gains to be made by taking the PR documents of an extremely marginal Robot Cult at face value, or at any rate reading them without the context of representative statements by members that elaborate and sometimes subvert the expectations generated by such promotional materials.
By the way, there is little in the way of professional benefit that attaches to attacking Robot Cults either. I do it because it is the right thing to do, not because I think it is some kind of boon to my career. Believe me, it isn't.
Let me get this straight. Are you saying this is the case because I am reading claims and conduct attributable to actual people?
The "-ism" is grasped as a generalization from the assertions and behaviors of the actual "-ists," surely?
Even your work on superlative technocentricity is a canard as it relates to what transhumanists see as the 'philosophy' of transhumanism. It's based largely on your ongoing observation of numerous examples of superlative discourse issuing from transhumanists.
Uh, yes that's true. It's based on what people actually say and do, rather than on the way they promote themselves. Non members have no responsibility to ensure that their critiques tow the Party Line, after all.
And you will forgive me, but "transhumanism," so-called, is simply not a philosophy in any meaningful sense. It isn't a world view encompassing all the dimensions of human life or meaning nor does it seek to hold its historical moment whole in thought -- it is far too focused in its instrumental concerns to pass muster as a philosophy worthy of that name, in my understanding of what philosophies do. There are lots of things that are valuable that aren't philosophies so transhumanists really shouldn't take that assessment too harshly. But I will add that to the extent that philosophizing does happen in "transhumanist" social and cultural spaces, I have to say none of that thinking seems to me unique or original enough to demand a new name to describe the perspective. Reductionism, technocracy, scientism, Social Darwinism, disdain of the flesh, and techno-utopianism aren't exactly new perspectives in North Atlantic intellectual life since 1660. Sorry.
You may see no difference between these categories, but your transhumanist interlocutors surely do, and will continue to accuse you of attacking strawmen until you seriously engage with the structures of transhumanism
It is commonplace for members of marginal sub(cult)ures to mistake critique for defamation -- even when they are making claims in argumentative forms that seem to solicit warranted belief.
It is not me, it is the transhumanists who claim to be members of a subculture and a movement with which they identify. You can't claim to identify with a marginal community exhibiting discernible traits and beliefs generally in common, and then complain that every attribution of such generalities are "strawmen" because they fail to account for dime-thin differences of expression among the members.
If you make an argument, you open yourself to critique, if you just want to offer up expressions of faith for the Faithful, don't publish your writing for a general audience.
If you willingly raise the banner of a movement, you become answerable to its tendencies as discerned from generalizations from actual things its members say and do.
I am forever being castigated by transhumanists for "unseriousness" because I won't indulge in what they think of as "technical" discussions, few of which pass muster as technical in the first place for those who are not already True Believers, or because I won't indulge them in their demand that I treat every individual member as a completely distinct ab initio creation whose every utterance and shade of conviction I must grasp in its glorious individuality before I can be said to do justice to it, individual differences that appear significant only to the individuals themselves from the perspective of their already shared True Belief in the generalities that interest me.
Sorry, every fundamentalist will assure you that only those on the Inside know what it is to treat them "seriously," that critics and outsiders are missing the real originality, the real significance, the real force of their views, the true complex beauty of their system, and so on.
(starting with the foundational documents of the WTA) rather than the discourse of transhumanists."
Well, first of all, I am not a True Believer and so you are not empowered to insist to me that the only texts worthy of my consideration are the canonical texts of your Church. This is a straightforward fundamentalist demand. It would not be responsible, but actively irresponsible for me to confine myself to such materials if what I am looking for is an objective and sound accounting of how people who identify as transhumanists differ in what they say and do and want from people who do not so identify.
But I want to say that this is especially so for many of the documents you are talking about here, which are functioning as promotional documents designed to attract mainstream media attention and paid memberships and other forms of support.
This latter task is harder, less fun, but probably bears more fruit for you professionally in the end.
Back here on planet Earth, you will find that there are few professional gains to be made by taking the PR documents of an extremely marginal Robot Cult at face value, or at any rate reading them without the context of representative statements by members that elaborate and sometimes subvert the expectations generated by such promotional materials.
By the way, there is little in the way of professional benefit that attaches to attacking Robot Cults either. I do it because it is the right thing to do, not because I think it is some kind of boon to my career. Believe me, it isn't.
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