Rethinking Transhumanist Politics 1 — What Do We Want?
Transhumanist political parties are one of the greatest oddities of modern history. And they’re also quite a failure, at least for now.
The first transhumanist political movement, the U.S. Transhumanist Party (TP), was created by Zoltan Istvan in 2014. Istvan ran for American president in the 2016 election, and it’s fair to say he didn’t make much of a splash: he most definitely didn’t win any states.
Six years later, the party has over 1,000 members (which is not that bad of a start) but no real traction. It’s just one of those amusing side-shows in American politics, like TV fighters who run for governor. Joe “Tiger King” Maldonado has had more success in U.S. politics than the Transhumanists.
The TP trajectory can be summed up in that of its founder: Istvan ran for California governor as a libertarian, and then against Donald Trump in the Republican Primaries for the 2020 presidential election. It’s a bit all over the place.
Europe is the only other place where something that you might call a somewhat significant Transhumanist political movement has emerged. There are various branches of the U.S. TP, ranging from one-man band to fairly irrelevant, and there’s Humanity Plus, the former World Transhumanist Organization, that really is more of a lobbying group for enhancing human capacities.
Even a cursory glance at this limited political landscape gives you two strong conclusions: one, that Transhumanism in politics has a strong tinge of what we might call libertarianism, specifically its Californian flavor; and two, that it’s going nowhere in particular at a very slow pace.
Transhumanism as a political movement faces many self-evident obstacles. But I would summarize them all in one: there currently is no good way of achieving political representation for a set of ideas that are spread among citizens of multiple countries and jurisdictions. And then there’s another massive hurdle: we need to agree on what the hell transhumanism is, to start with.
If you google that question, the first answer suggested comes from Wikipedia: transhumanism is “a philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.”
In 2006, the European Parliament, which really shouldn’t be taken as an authority on anything at all, stated that transhumanism is the political expression of “the potential of technology to make individuals ever more perfect.”
This is extremely unsatisfactory but I’m afraid is what we have. Some time ago, after I published an essay on the depiction of generation ships in science-fiction, there was a small amount of discussion of the matter in Reddit’s Transhumanist group. When I explained that I’m a transhumanist but not particularly interested in body enhancements and the like, but a member of the Turing Church, which aims for technological resurrection, there was some puzzlement.
The fact is, most transhumanists have extremely little in common. Some are all hot for cryonics, while others are all into the cyborg stuff, and others would prefer to inhabit the cloud, turned into pure digital information.
Transhumanism as a whole is not just a very small constituency currently, and one that is spread among many countries, but also one that is impossible to please with any single set of policies or objectives, it would seem.
However, there is something all transhumanists have in common, something that we can, and should, build around: we all believe in the transforming power of technology, and the need for sustained technological advancement.
This is more relevant than it appears, because we’re deep into the 21st century, not in the 20th century anymore. In the 20th century, saying that one is in favor of technological progress would have raised no eyebrows in any developed country, except among very minor religious groups; but, in the 21st century it must be obvious to all that technological progress is not a given and is, in fact, threatened from multiple directions, including radical ecologists, religious fundamentalism on the rise across the West and, more widely, the general ideological thrust of our societies.
Consider the facts: between 1969 and 1972, twelve humans set foot on the Moon. It was almost 50 years ago, and nobody has been able to replicate that feat. For almost a decade until 2020, the United States — the country that put boots on the moondust — lacked a capacity to send humans into space and had to pay Russia for seats on its Soyuz capsules — themselves relics of 1960s technology that are still used because Russia’s own space program is even more adrift than the U.S.’
This is just an example, and I could use countless others: weapons? Most armies across the world rely on the Kalashnikov rifle, a 1945 design, and most air forces on 1960s and 1970s products such as Sukhoi, F-16 and F-18 airplanes that remain mostly unmatched. Commercial airplanes? The last Concorde was built in freaking 1979, and last flew in 2003. Because of multiple developments, including higher fuel prices and the search for greater profitability in the industry, we all fly slower, and spend those longer hours crammed into much narrower space while eating much worse food and getting much worse service than it used to be the case three decades ago.
Anyone can counter with the obvious examples: computers are now so much more advanced than ever, and keep improving at a pretty steady rate; in fact, our cellphones are powerful computers, better than anything that ever went into space. But such advancements — there are others, for example, in medicine — are not the rule.
All across the fields of human endeavor, what appeared when I was a little kid in the 1980s like an unstoppable march towards flying cars and moon-cities has slowed to a crawl, at best. Just check out any non-fiction book, any novel, any movie released between 1950 and 1980, that would include a depiction of what they thought life and tech would be like in 2020.
There are many reasons for this. And some of these reasons may be unrelated to political will or support for technological development: it simply may be the case that the pace of advancement that we saw between 1903, the year in which the first plane flew, and 1969 couldn’t really be kept, especially in the absence of two world wars and one Cold War to speed things up.
Let’s simplify things: let’s say that the reason for slower tech development is 80% structural (big picture, circumstantial) and 20% political (contingent, dependent on the decisions of powerful humans); or 90% and 10%; or even 99% and 1%. I don’t care about the exact percentage. My point is: we need to maximize the political component of this equation.
I don’t think any transhumanist, any person who wants tech development can honestly disagree with this point. In fact, that’s the whole reason why the American TP has over 1,000 members and Humanity Plus exists, to start with.
Now, some may object, and argue that we are indeed maximizing the political component. Since 1969, the seemingly unstoppable rise of atheism and progressive politics in the West pushed anti-tech crazies to the margins of societies. But the fact is that only some of those anti-tech crazies, the Christian ones, have been dealt with.
As I write, in late 2020, the biggest forces against technological development don’t come from Christian churches. They come from the woke movement gaining traction all across the world.
This is not a criticism: it’s a statement of fact. I’m not a man of the Right. Both my grandparents fought for the Spanish Republic against Fascism in the 1930s, and both ended up interned in camps, one in France and the other in northern Africa. I’m an Atheist, a long-time fan and follower of the Communist philosopher Slavoj Zizek, about whom I’ve written extensively for years, and a keen student of Marxism who thinks all those who despise Karl Marx are merely ignorant.
But I’m not blind or dumb, or in the pay of a conservative think-tank. It’s obvious that no Christian church has driven any prominent scientist away from research for centuries now. But progressive politics and agendas have been causing havoc in universities and all institutions connected to research and tech for decades.
Cases abound and, in fact, are reported (in the smallest possible print, in the darkest possible corner) about every month now. Notable examples include that of James Watson, Nobel Prize winner who co-authored with Francis Crick the paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. In 2007, following some statements on average intelligence and race, he was forced to resign from his position as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, focusing on work on cancer and molecular biology — in the process giving us the expression “watsoning” for any public defenestration of un-woke scientists.
An isolated case? In 2010, Harvard Law student Stephanie Grace was “watsoned” for similar comments… made in a private email that was leaked to media. In 2014, Mozilla founder and CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign his position after he was attacked for contributing to an organization that campaigned to support traditional marriage in California. British Nobel Prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt in June 2015 resigned from his post at University College London over jokes he made about female scientists in a closed meeting in South Korea, having forewarned that they were jokes. In 2017, in one of the most astonishing intellectual scandals in recent history, the inventor of the first virtual reality headset, Palmer Luckey, was forced out of the same company he had created because he had given money to Donald Trump’s election campaign.
This is happening all of the time, all over the West. “Canceling” is real, and frequent; being a Nobel Prize winner is no guarantee of even being allowed to speak. And it’s getting worse as the woke movement has for all purposes almost complete control of global corporations and American academia, the West’s most powerful intellectual establishment. People are not being hired because they’re too white or too Asian or not progressive enough, they are being suspended because somebody mistook a Chinese word for the taboo N-word of America, they are being subjected to humiliating struggle sessions in which they’re forced to demonstrate they hate themselves more than any Progressive could ever hate them.
Look, there are two possibilities here. Perhaps, you’ve been reading this and are now thinking: go on, I’m listening. In that case, just so you know, this is the first of four posts on this subject, so I guess we’ll meet again soon. Or, maybe, you’ve read all of the above, and are now thinking: “fuck those Nazis, fuck those racists. Good riddance to them. We don’t need their kind. Free speech, all that shit, all of it is overrated.” If so, I have five words for you, reader:
You are mankind’s biggest enemy.
(To be continued)
Cover picture from Pixabay.
