For scholar Francis Fukuyama, the loss of humanity’s ‘essence’ lies unrecognised beneath transhumanism’s mountain of promise for a techno-scientific future of imaginative self-improvement. This paper aims to further our critical engagement with an ideology emerging across influential sectors of society.
In 2004, when Foreign Policy asked eminent scholar Francis Fukuyama to write an article answering the question, What is the world’s most dangerous idea?, he responded with a piece titled Transhumanism. Fukuyama argued that the transhumanist project will use biotechnology to modify life until humans lose something of their ‘essence’, or fundamental nature. Doing so will disrupt the very basis of natural law upon which, he believes, our liberal democracies are founded (Fukuyama, 2004). For Fukuyama, these losses lay unrecognised beneath a mountain of promise for a techno-scientific future of imaginative self-improvement.
Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which transhumanism plays a central guiding role, is shaping the policies of global corporations and political governance (Philbeck, 2018: 17). The converging technologies of this revolution are nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive sciences (NBIC), and artificial intelligence (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002). The political class and the new technology elite routinely tell us that ‘the age of AI has arrived’ (Kissinger et al., 2021). Simultaneously, modern humans have also become increasingly dependent on advanced technologies and the complex systems they enable. These changes have presented new challenges to old questions, namely: what does it mean to be human? And what future do we want for ourselves?
From the hype of super-intelligence to self-assembling nanobiology, the world can seem increasingly science-fictional. Contemporary technological society is “harder and harder to grasp”, is full of “disruptions…that move ever faster”, and is confronting us with “situations that seem outrageously beyond the scope of our understanding” (Schmeink, 2016: 18).
This paper aims to further our critical engagement with an ideology that is emerging across influential sectors of society. With this aim in mind, I will make three essential arguments: Firstly, transhumanism is a movement based on a techno-scientific belief system that is striving towards the technological enhancement of biology and, in this regard, is self-consciously promoting bio-social engineering. Secondly, the technologies of transhumanism have the potential to bring tremendous financial and political gains to corporations and governments who are not incentivised to seek out nor address their potential dangers. Thirdly, the discontent towards transhumanism is diverse and comes overridingly from the threat to traditional values, nature-based ways of life, freedom, equality, and the loss of bodily autonomy to the will of those who operate these powerful systems.
Much of the current scholarship on transhumanism focuses on the intellectual contribution of the movement, with minimal work assessing socio-political impacts. This neglect is worrying since, within the reality of global capitalism, transhumanism may be overridingly motivated by economic and political forces as it may be by ideology. Furthermore, perhaps only a minority of humans may be able to access certain NBIC technologies or utilise them for profits (McNamee and Edwards, 2006: 515). Of course, the socio-economic ramifications may be culturally and politically disruptive in unanticipated ways. It is this overwrought relationship—of transhumanism, the global economy, profitable science, human nature, and traditional belief systems—that demand further critical examination.
Transhumanism: A brief history
Transhumanism is a predominantly Anglo-American movement that has flourished since the 1980s in “American circles of science fiction fans” and with “computer experts and techno-geeks” (Manzocco, 2019: 36). Today, California’s Silicon Valley, with its culture of technological optimism and imaginative entrepreneurship, is the hub of transhumanist thought and innovation. Though scholars have noted that there is no single definition of transhumanism, the essence of transhumanist ideology is to use science and technology to re-design and re-shape the human condition away from randomness, imperfectability, and decay, towards order, perfectibility, and control (Bostrom, 2005: 14).
This ideology emerged in early 20th Century Britain. There is a clear continuity of ideas between current proponents of transhumanism and those who were writing before the Second World War of the potential of science to shape the trajectory of nature, while fostering international cooperation and governance. They included British scientists and thinkers such as Julian Huxley (credited with first using the word Transhumanism in the 1950s), his brother Aldous, and his grandfather Thomas Huxley, as well as their colleagues J.B.S. Haldane, H.G. Wells, J.D. Bernal, and Bertrand Russell. These influential thinkers and internationalists were writing and working on promoting political and scientific outlooks that would form the basis of a century of scientific transhumanist thought (Bostrom, 2005: 4-6; Bohan, 2019: 74-108). The subjects they explored still attract transhumanists today: behavioural conditioning, genetic control, technological augmentation, artificial foods and wombs, space travel, life extension, and total disease control. These and other themes circle around the assertion that nature, including human nature, operates optimally under scientific adjustment and management (Bohan, 2019: 99-100).
Early transhumanists (or proto-transhumanists) viewed techno-scientific advancement as a cure for ‘primitive’ human nature (anger, violence, excess fertility), physical limitations (disease and possibly death), political ignorance, and international conflict. It was the Enlightenment ideal of mastery over nature, including human populations, that Aldous Huxley so aptly demonstrated in his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, written in 1931, illustrates a scientific dystopia where transhumanist aims (genetic engineering, anti-aging interventions, biotechnology and enhancement drugs) are used to manage society implicitly through pleasure rather than explicitly through force. Huxley’s depictions were based less on his prophetic abilities and more on his intimate knowledge of the possibilities of social engineering as discussed and promoted by the scientific minds with whom he mingled. His later essay, Over-population, surmises that his novel’s projections were “coming true much sooner than” anticipated (Huxley, 1960: 1).
PERCEPTION RESET 