Transhumanism as a New Social Movement

The Techno-Centred Imagination

James Michael MacFarlane

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030400903
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Mente e corpo in filosofia

This book explores Technological Human Enhancement Advocacy through ethnographically inspired participant observation across a range of sites. James Michael MacFarlane argues that such advocacy is characterized by 'Techno-centrism, ' a belief grounded in today's world while being also future-oriented and drawn from the imagination. This blurring of 'real' and 'imagined' futures borrows from the materialist grounding of the scientific worldview, while granting extended license to visions for technology as an enabler of forward-facing action, which include reviving humanist ideals associated with the modernization project. While Techno-centrism is arguably most pronounced in transhumanism—where it is acted-out in extreme, almost hyperbolic ways—it reflects more generally held, deep-seeded concerns around the future of science, technology and human self-identity in the new millennium. Far from being new, these emerging social forms capture unresolved ambivalences which have longcast a shadow over late-modern society and culture.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. M. MacFarlaneTranshumanism as a New Social MovementPalgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successorshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40090-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge?

James Michael MacFarlane¹

(1)

Oxford, UK

James Michael MacFarlane

“Historians and sociologists inform us that the West’s mystical heritage […] crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age. According to this vision technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, skeptical inquiry, and material progress.

But the old phantasms and metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases they disguised themselves and went underground, worming their way into the cultural, psychological, and mythical motivations that form the foundations of the modern world.”

Erik Davis, Techgnosis [1998]

End Abstract

In the last decade, scientific and technical advances have led to an unprecedented questioning of dominant doctrines concerning the human condition, yet fledgling social formations organised around this prospective technological re-negotiation of humanity remain under-researched. While journalists and other interested commentators operating within the popular media have offered periodic coverage of such developments, scholarly attention has been comparatively sparse. This study is intended to redress this balance. The introductory chapter opens by outlining the background for the research, tracing a brief chronological history of the novel social-cultural and philosophical forms currently travelling under the rubric of ‘Transhumanism’: perhaps the boldest and most unabashed variant of technological human enhancement advocacy (THEA) circulating today. It proceeds to discuss the intricate associated politics emerging, as the movement attempts to gain size and garner increasingly mainstream political traction in the current period. Next, it offers an account of my motivations for the project and clarifies the distinctive contributions of the work towards existing debates. I stress the importance for scholars to engage seriously with the emerging social, cultural and political forms opening around ambitions for technological human enhancement in the twenty-first century. Finally, it closes with an outline of the thesis structure, indicating how the chapters to follow will contend with this challenge.

1.1 Background for Study

Two key descriptors have come to gradually gain increased currency within academic circles over the last 30 years: Transhumanism and Posthumanism . Although widespread conceptual confusion persists between the two terms, generally it is accepted that the former signifies an intensification of Enlightenment humanist thought, while by contrast the latter typically denotes normative distancing from the canons of violence and subjugation associated with the humanist project. The emerging ideological schism between the twin vectors of transhumanism and posthumanism is the most recent manifestations in a long series of marked historical ambivalence towards the question of what it means to be human. In this sense, the new movements can be seen to have commonality in so far as that they both appear to be streaming beyond humanism , and apparently share an interest in human co-evolution with technologies (Ranisch and Lorenz Sorgner 2014: Chap. 1). This study arises against this backdrop as an effort to investigate the emerging interspersed social-political movement(s) currently operating under and around the banner of ‘transhumanism’ through engaged empirical investigation. The research employs multi-sited participant-observational methods, qualitative interviews and surveys to form a detailed account of transhumanist ambitions and operations as they are envisioned and enacted by those associated with the cause.

My motivations for conducting a research project of this kind stem from a wish to understand better the various social, cultural and philosophical forces which drive contemporary hopes, dreams and aspirations for new technology as an agent of radical human self-transformation, as exemplified in transhumanist philosophy. Ultimately, I wished to deconstruct the technologically focused visions of transhumanists to identify how—and specifically under what psychological, social and cultural conditions—such belief systems emerge, and the various intersubjective sources of motivation and continual legitimation which advocates use to advance the pursuit of technological human enhancement. This focus, I hoped, would enable me to understand how enhancement-based technological expectations come into being, and why despite criticism and dissuading evidence, these elaborate visions continue to inspire new subcultural forms which mark the contemporary world. Beyond these personal motivations, given the rising level of academic interest in both transhumanism and posthumanism, there is also a significant disciplinary cause to research this space. I will now discuss my intellectual motivations for the project.

1.2 Motivations/Key Contributions

1.2.1 Motivations

This research is timely and contributes to sociological knowledge in ways that will be of significance for the future study of new social movements formed around technological human enhancement, and broader subcultures of radical support for techno-science. At present, the transhumanist movement represents a rich site—inhabiting a unique social space at the intersection between technology, science, politics and twenty-first-century media dynamics—which remains under-researched. The key themes emerging from the study range from questions of self-identity in hyper-technological societies, post-industrial techno-philia and the networked mobilisation of non-spatially determined communities of thought. My chief motivation to produce this study comes from an interest in the highly persistent techno-utopian—or at least techno-utilitarian—thinking residual within late-modern cultures, as some continue to believe the ever-ambitious strategic application of science and technology might be used as a bootstrap to radically surpass or supplant existing social, political and economic schema. Over the last quarter-century, transhumanism has then come to represent an enduring set of techno-optimistic ideas surrounding the future of humanity, with its advocates seeking to transcend limits of the body and mind according to an unwavering Enlightenment-derived faith in science, reason and individual freedom. To the tune of ‘progress’ associated with this period in European history, transhumanists today are concerned with liberating humans from the present constraints to our being, with newly emerging technologies expected to provide means for as-yet latent capabilities to become more fully realised. While the sciences and technologies allied to the movement run the gamut from the existing and emerging to the outright speculative, all are equally celebrated according to their assumed potential to empower Homo sapiens over the ‘natural’ contingencies of birth, life and death.

However, as Bard (2012) recognises, in addition to a determined belief in technological progress, transhumanism has also apparently inherited a range of problems and conceptual fallacies from the Enlightenment. In response, an array of critics within the modern Western Academy have attacked transhumanism and the ideas underpinning the movement on moralistic grounds. Perhaps most famously, in his 2002 text, Our Posthuman Future, liberal economist and philosopher Francis Fukuyama described transhumanism as one of the world’s most dangerous ideas (Fukuyama 2002). Similarly, left-leaning German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has made the case that embryonic genetic modification of the kind which transhumanists extol would undermine the moral autonomy of future generations (Habermas 2003). Other academic commentators from the natural sciences—such as experimental polymer physicist Richard Jones—have dismissed the transhumanist notion of technological transcendence on technical terms (Jones 2016). Apparently unscathed by these hang-ups, the movement seemingly pushes on with an almost millenarian fervour.

In addition to this external criticism, fractious divisions have also been reported across transhumanist groups, apparently born out of long-standing political tensions arising at the dawn of the modern period which have yet to be resolved. Speaking to this point, American Bioethicist James Hughes (2015) suggests present-day transhumanists have come to inherit all the same arguments about the value and meaning of liberty, equality and solidarity that divided their Enlightenment forebears. Such quintessentially modern political debates related conditions of life within present-day liberal democratic societies have been re-enlivened with a ‘new’ technologically focused gloss by those who apparently believe in the limitless potential of Homo faber. No doubt, this rendering of humanity has a deep history which predates transhumanism, and has been the subject of long-running theoretical discussions in the philosophy of science and technology. The work of two influential theorists of technology should be noted as precursors to the project: Ernst Kapp and Lewis Mumford.

The study’s underlying theoretical position follows the work of German philosopher Ernst Kapp (1808–1896) who suggested technology represents an extension of the human nervous system. In his efforts to formulate a philosophy of technology, Kapp wrote on the notion of technology as ‘organ projection’—an idea first outlined in his Grundlinein einer Philosophie der Technik (1877). Here, he raised the analogy between tools, organs and machinic networks, describing the rail-road as externalisation of the circulatory system (Chap. 7), and the telegram as an extension of the nervous system (Chap. 8). According to Kapp’s analysis, such apparent morphological parallels between the organistic body and technology are not always the result of overt conscious processes, but rather may be animated through covert desires concealed by the subconscious (Chap. 9 in Kapp 1877). Ultimately then, Kapp’s technically orientated adaptation of Hegelian dialectic called for the technological ‘colonisation’—and ultimately transformation—of ‘external’ natural environments, a move which he believed ought to be complimented by an ‘inner’ colonisation of the human environment in the form of governance and politics. In this sense, for Kapp, technological attempts at reconfiguring the external, physical world are coupled with other intersubjective colonisations, or attempts at purposeful development based within the domain of symbolic systems, such as language and semiotics. In his far-reaching and detailed account of the complex interplay between philosophy, geography and technics, Kapp’s Grundlinein worked to formalise the conceptual framework necessary for analysis of technology as a projection of human mental-life, and canonised the idea that technological processes—as broadly construed, including semiotic and cultural constructs such as language and the state—could be understood as the externalisation of human nature. His theory of organistic human-extension was also the first to capture how systematic-technological ways of looking at the world apparently bleed into a range of traditionally non-technical domains, such as culture and politics. As such, this project takes inspiration from Kapp in its shared nexus of concern: not the material situation and effects of technology as a tool, but rather the symbolic, mental-psychic impulses and ideational systems which are found in tandem with technological ambitions and practices.

Moreover, the research also takes theoretical direction from one of Kapp’s twentieth-century intellectual successors, worldly romanticist philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) who built on the notion of technology as material extension of organic human embodiment, as well as the closely analogous manufactured quality of social and cultural orders. Particularly influential in this regard is Mumford’s classic Technics and Civilization (1934) in which he spends the first two chapters expounding the psychological and cultural origins of technology (Chaps. 1 and 2). Across this seminal work, Mumford offered a far-reaching analysis of the history of mechanical civilisation, explicitly by way of reference to his understanding of human temperament. After outlining what he took to be the core institutional and psychic sources of the machine, in the final portion of the text, Mumford shifted his concern to the emergent results of such machinist obsessions, devoting the last third of his book to examining social reactions to technology. This comprehensive multi-faceted account of ideational cause and technical effect again set a new standard for the philosophy of technology in discussion of human values, highlighting the two-way flow between technology and culture—a complex dynamic which I argue should be seen as a core driver behind the transhumanist movement today. Further to this point, continuing the significance his earlier work granted to the subtler aspects of human experience in determining both the social role and material format of technology, in Art and Technics (1952) Mumford notably contrasted art as the inner life of the mind with technics as power-manipulation of external objects. In a fashion clearly analogous to Kapp, here, through comparison between technical and artistic practices, he suggested technologies arise from—indeed, are made possible through—the manipulation of symbols, the likes of which he believed could be expressed in ways which are either in accordance with or in divergence from human nature.

The project’s central focus and overarching conceptual framework is, then, inspired by the interpretivist vein in the philosophy of science first outlined in Art and Technics, albeit with some clarifications offered by Mumford later in his career. Lastly then, in The Myth of the Machine (2 vols., 1967, 1970), Mumford expanded on his early work, directing attention to the role of subjectivity in the process of knowledge formation, and meditating on how this interpretive quality has influenced the sum of human development over time. In The Myth, he meditated on interpretative power as it flows across the terrain of subjectivity, arguin...