[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Thu Oct 20 17:00:19 UTC 2011


On 20 October 2011 07:21, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> Joseph Bloch wrote:
>>
>> An interesting article by Ron Bailey over at Reason, concerning his
>> debate with Peter Lawler last week:
>>
>> http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/18/transhumanism-vs-bioconservati
>
> Similar themes came up in my debate yesterday evening at the Manchester
> University student union, where I was debating David king from Human
> Genetics Alert. He argued (from a pretty leftist standpoint) that
> enhancement embodies the ideal of capitalism and since capitalism is bad
for
> human value and diversity hence most enhancement is bad. As he saw it,
> western liberal individualism promotes uniformization in respect to the
> market.

This is a quite interesting issue which I discussed at some length in the
interview recently made available online in English at
http://www.biopolitcs.com.

The very idea that there would be social pressure, and actually a rush,
towards the adoption of safe, unexpensive, painless enhancing, eugenic and
life-extending technologies, and that laws increasingly difficult to enforce
would have to be enacted not to make them "compulsory", but rather to
prevent their spreading, is the best counter-argument in fact against the
spectre of a overhumanist "totalitarism" with all the usual Hollywood,
tear-inducing trappings.

Intelligent anti-transhumanists, such as Jürgen Habermas, fully realise
that, and seem ready to renounce values such as freedom, self-determination,
involuntary-suffering avoidance and protection of human lives for the sake
of humanism. This is of course a major tactical point, because I suppose
that most of their constituencies and audiences are not equally ready to do
so. That is, except for our friend Charles Stross, who appears on the same
line to consider a Vile Offspring that which becomes too detached from its
human origins.

On the other hand, don't they really have a point, from an entirely
different perspective?

The idea that individual excellence is a capitalist value is of course
stupid.
Individual (and, for that matter, collective) excellence has always been,
and still is, equally a goal of anti-capitalistic systems such as, eg, the
late Democratic Republic of Germany in its efforts to achieve top placements
in olympic sports.

It is however true that globalised western capitalism might indeed involve a
risk a loss of diversity across our species, given its ability to reduce,
both socially and inter-culturally, the *plurality* of models of excellence
and of value systems to a single normalised "Ken & Barbie" paradigm, where
for instance a  disproportionate importance is attributed to one's ability
to accumulate exchange units, that is money, or rather empty status symbols,
in comparison with other possibly desirable features and optimality views.

But, besides the fact that the process is already in place irrespective of
any possible accelerating technology, genetic engineering and other similar
tools allow a much greater uniformisation as well as a much greater
*diversification* of the humankind than it has traditionally been the case.
It is not the technology the problem, but what we choose to do with it.

There again, Habermas does not miss the point, coming of course to value
judgments opposite to mine, when he warns against what he regards as the
“nightmare scenario” of a “genetic communitarianism”, in which different
cultures could carry forward a “genetic self-optimization of mankind in
different directions, thereby ending up jeopardising the unity of human
nature as a basis with respect to which all men have until now been able to
understand and mutually recognise each other as members of the same moral
community” (*The Future of Human Nature*, Polity Press 2003).

--
Stefano Vaj
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