[extropy-chat] Andrew Sullivan and Slavoj Zizek- Transhumanists?

[Nicholas Anthony MacDonald]

>From Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish:

"We just learned that some 40 percent of Americans are on some kind of constant medication - many designed to ease the ups and downs of mild depression, or heartburn, or obesity, and so on. We have drugs for hard-ons; and we have elaborate plastic surgery for anyone feeling ugly or fat. We have fat-burning pills and hair-growing treatments. We have pills to send us to sleep; we have medical contraptions to give us better sleep (yay!); we have addictive drugs, like caffeine, to wake us up and keep us awake. The line between pharmaceuticals that actually cure illness and those that enhance our quality of life, or extend it to lengths once thought inimaginable, is getting blurrier all the time. What is health, after all, if not somewhat relative? Am I sick now that my apnea is untreated? Or am I just living with something that humans have lived through for centuries? Do our zoloft prescriptions always treat serious depression - or are they often a means to maximize our social interaction, prevent unsettling bouts of inertia or sadness? I ask all these questions because the brouhaha over steroids in sports strikes me as somewhat off-key. Our cultural norm is that drugs that do not harm you are perfectly legit in increasing your enjoyment of life, or enhancing your ability to perform certain tasks. Why, then, are steroids so illegitimate in sports? Yes, they can harm a body, but only if taken in excess and outside a doctor's supervision. Yes, it's unfair when some players use them and others don't. But the answer to that might just as well be universal steroid use as a universal ban. I think trying to stop this is almost certainly futile (the steroid technology almost always out-strips the testing technology) and not obviously virtuous. The notion that there is some "pure" human being out there - unaffected by the technology that now enhances our lives in so many ways - is fiction. Why are sports the only arena in which this fiction is maintained? And why would it be so bad to aknowledge reality and celebrate the new 
not that comfortable with that idea; but I'm having a hard time coming up with good arguments as to why I shouldn't be."

Sounds like he's leaning towards transhumanism at least- not a suprising position for Sullivan, a man who's own immune system is being saved from collapse by a handful of pills.  What is suprising is that he linked to this:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n10/zize01_.html

Slavoj Zizek takes on his fellow neo-Hegelians, Fukuyama and Habermas, and while he never says transhumanism by name, we know where he's going with it.

When a psychoanalyst with Marxist sympathies and a journalist with Neoconseravative ones are in agreement on something, you know either hell has frozen over- or transhumanism is on the march.  I'm guessing the latter.

-Nicq MacDonald