The Proactionary Imperative

A Foundation for Transhumanism

S. Fuller, V. Lipinska, Kenneth A. Loparo, Veronika Lipi?ska

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137302977
• eBook ISBN: 9781137302922
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The Proactionary Imperative debates the concept of transforming human nature, including such thorny topics as humanity's privilege as a species, our capacity to 'play God', the idea that we might treat our genes as a capital investment, eugenics and what it might mean to be 'human' in the context of risky scientific and technological interventions.

1

Precautionary and Proactionary as the Twenty-first-century’s Defining Ideological Polarity

1 Recalling the political theology of the old Right–Left divide

The modern Right-to-Left ideological spectrum is an artefact of the seating arrangements at the French National Assembly after the revolution of 1789. To the right of the Assembly’s president sat the supporters of King and Church, while to the Left sat their opponents, whose only point of agreement was the need for institutional reform. The distinction capitalized on long-standing cultural associations of right- and left-handedness with, respectively, trust and suspicion – in this case, of the status quo. In retrospect, it is remarkable that this distinction managed to define partisan political allegiances for more than 200 years, absorbing both the great reactionary and radical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the decline in voter turnout in most of today’s democracies suggests that this way of conceptualizing ideological differences may have become obsolete. Some have even argued that ideologies and parties are irrelevant in an increasingly fragmented political landscape. We strongly disagree. However, upon understanding what the old Right–Left division was really about, it becomes clear that it is now due for a 90-degrees rotation on its axis to recapture the spirit of the original division. That spirit is defined in a question: should it be presumed that the past dictates the future, unless proven otherwise? Those on the Right say ‘yes’ and hence practise a positive politics of induction; those on the Left say ‘no’ and hence practise a negative politics of induction. It is against this backdrop that we propose precautionary and proactionary as the poles defining, respectively, the ‘New Right’ and the ‘New Left’.

Nowadays it is common to construct the ideological spectrum by placing conservatives on the Right, liberals in the middle and socialists on the Left. The resulting pattern leaves the impression that the metaphysical individualism associated with liberalism anchors the spectrum, with the extreme ends on both sides occupied by collectivists who base group identity on either family or race (the Right) or class or state (the Left). However, this default interpretation, while perhaps correct in some of the detail, is clearly not true to the spirit of 1789. In the original National Assembly, as just mentioned, the centre was occupied by the status quo, and the question dividing the two sides was whether society should re-dedicate itself to the historic roots of the status quo (which had become corrupt in the recent past) or break decisively with the past in search of a more forward sense of self-legitimation. It was in this context that the people who would soon be known as ‘reactionaries’ sat on the right of the conservatives, while the people whom we would now consider ‘liberals’ and ‘socialists’ sat together on the left.

Over time, and for reasons that will be explored below, liberals and socialists increasingly parted company – but still in alternative ways of breaking with the status quo. Generally speaking, liberals would have people face the future as individual agents from whose aggregate decisions emerge an overall sense of direction for society, be it defined politically in terms of majority rule or economically in terms of dominant market share. In contrast, socialists would have people face the future as one collective agent explicitly dedicated to such a specific direction. Thus, liberals stress ‘equality of opportunity’ and socialists ‘equality of outcome’, both understanding a trade-off between the two forms of equality. But on the negative side, for the socialist, ‘equality of opportunity’ means that some will race ahead, while for the liberal ‘equality of outcome’ means that some will be held back. Liberals take the difference between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ as always in flux, with votes and prices signalling changes in direction, while socialists see the difference as institutionalized in a more principled way, as electoral defeats are replaced by purges and market failures by expropriation. To put it in the metaphysical language popularized by Michael Dummett (1977), liberals are antirealists and socialists are realists about the future.

Unlike their right-of-centre colleagues, liberals and socialists agree that the future – not the past – provides the ground for societal legitimation. But that is still not quite the right way to distinguish the ends of the ideological spectrum. In particular, what distinguishes liberals and socialists with regard to the future is their rather different attitudes towards the past – especially when the past has not turned out as they would have liked. While it would seem natural to interpret the 1789 Right–Left split in terms of a past versus future orientation, in fact all the ideologies looked to the past in one crucial respect: for an appropriate account of human nature – specifically, of human potential. However, they differed in terms of how much of that potential has been revealed in actual human history. The right-wingers believed that most or all of that potential had been already revealed, such that long-surviving patterns of conduct were the ones worth taking forward into the future. (In this respect, despite his belief in the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy, Francis Fukuyama [1992] remained very much a student of the ultra-conservative Leo Strauss in his confidence that history has already revealed the full range of feasible polities.) The Left-wingers held that relatively little of that potential had been realized, but substantially new social arrangements would provide the opportunity to reverse that state-of-affairs. True to Bismarck’s definition of politics as the art of the possible, behind this difference in sensibility lay alternative metaphysical interpretations of what is ‘possible’.

Right-wingers clung to an understanding of what is possible that would have been familiar to Aristotle and remained largely unchallenged until the Franciscan scourge of Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, took to the world-historic stage in the fourteenth century. Aristotle had effectively equated the possible with the empirically probable, itself a gloss on ‘natural’. In contrast, Left-wingers availed themselves of Duns Scotus’ more modern ‘semantic’ identification of the possible with the conceivable – that is, including logically coherent yet unrealized states-of-affairs. In shifting the meaning of the possible from what has been experienced to what might be realized, Duns Scotus had effectively elevated humanity from the highest animal to an aspiring deity. That is the moment when ‘possible’ began to stand for a ‘Left’. After Scotus, we were no longer creatures whose existential horizons are defined by the collective experience of our ancestors but rather ones who within each generation possesses the capacity to construct the world anew from first principles – as God himself did, in Augustine’s phrase, creatio ex nihilo (Fuller 2011a: chap. 2).

One downstream effect especially relevant to the proactionary principle is worth flagging here, as it will be stressed later in the book: namely, the secular reinvention of divine creativity that occurred five centuries after Scotus when another clerical follower of Augustine, the abbot Gregor Mendel, discovered that the factors responsible for the hereditary transmission of traits do not simply draw upon the actual history of sexual reproduction but are constituted as a set of permanent possibilities that might be realized at any time under the right conditions. Thus, the science of genetics emerged in the early twentieth century to determine how that might happen in practice, a task that has turned out to be trickier than first supposed. In any case, true to the proactionary spirit, theology and biology become one in the aptly named field of genetics.

This historical trajectory also explains the emphasis that we place in this book on ‘eugenics’ as a project that, if nothing else, was intended to enable humans to step up to their divine capacity by taking responsibility for the successive production – as opposed to mere ‘reproduction’ – of nature. By the time Francis Galton coined ‘eugenics’ in the late nineteenth century, humans had domesticated many animal and plant species – not to mention the physical environment more generally – to great effect. But our self-domestication remained shrouded in the pseudo-sociology of inheritance law, whereby capital was prescribed to travel along lines of familial descent. In this respect, eugenics marked a ‘coming of age’ for humanity when it started to take seriously its powers over life and death that it had taken for granted for centuries. We shall return to this point in Chapter 3.

In our own day, the Scotist revolution has not escaped critical notice by those comprehensively conservative religious thinkers who call for a ‘neo-orthodox’ revival in Christianity (Milbank 1990). In this context, Duns Scotus stands accused of having combined and radicalized two strands in Augustinian theology: (a) God is (always) free to create any conceivable world; (b) we are created in the image and likeness of God. From these premises it is then easy to conclude that we have an obligation to explore those unrealized possibilities (Funkenstein 1986: chap. 2). In that case, the fact that in 1789 France the established church continued to support the status quo – a hereditary monarchy, even after it had been shown to be corrupt – appeared as an affront to those who believed that our divine entitlement rendered us capable of much more than simply perpetuating the legacy of previous generations. Indeed, humans may have the wherewithal to constitute a government from first principles, the sort of ‘second creation’ adumbrated in eighteenth-century social contract theory that had been put into practice on a large scale only a few years earlier in the founding of the United States of America (Commager 1977).

This Scotist mentality, which marked where the Left broke most sharply with the Right in the French National Assembly, is characteristic of what we are calling the ‘proactionary’ pole of the newly emerging ideological spectrum. In effect, it interprets the ‘meek’ in the third verse of Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’ – ‘Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the Earth’ (Matthew 5:5) – to refer to humanity’s unrealized potential to rule itself (despite its current state of powerlessness). Much of the ‘prophetic’ strain in modern evangelical Christianity stems from this interpretation (Swartz 2012). In contemporary US political philosophy, its subtlest advocate has been Roberto Unger, its most popular one Cornel West. The two teamed up in Unger and West (1998).

The most general practical consequence of the Scotist shift was that people came to take the better worlds that they could imagine as no mere passing fantasies but as motivators to action. This fundamental change of attitude to the contents of one’s own mind came to be widely held only in the second half of the eighteenth century and may have been related to the concentrated doses of alcohol and caffeine that started to circulate in European brains (Fuller 2012: Epilogue). However, the shift can also be clearly noted in the previous two centuries, albeit esoterically, in the striking tendency of the founders of the Scientific Revolution – most notably Johannes Kepler – to promote the cognitive significance of their dreams from not simply predictions, as per the ancients, but outright blueprints for understanding reality (Koestler 1959).

In the run-up to the Scientific Revolution, Duns Scotus’ radical reinterpretation of ‘the possible’ was popularized by John Wycliffe, who rendered his teacher’s revisionary scholasticism concrete by having the Bible translated into English so as to unleash human potential. This project finally received royal approval more than two centuries later with the publication of the King James Version in the early seventeenth century. The King’s lawyer, Francis Bacon, shared this spirit as concomitant with the experimental method, which he famously portrayed as extracting from nature secrets that it might otherwise hide forever (Fuller 2008a: chap. 2). While much has been made of the suspicion if not outright hostility towards nature that is reflected in Bacon’s sentiment, it is perhaps best understood as humans seeing in nature what they regard as being in most need of correction or elaboration in themselves, given the hereditary burden of Original Sin that attaches to our animal nature (Harrison 2007).

Duns Scotus had paved the way linguistically for Bacon’s vision, which was now proposed to harness the new science to the political ascendancy of England, by introducing a manner of speaking that analytically detached God’s attributes (i.e. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence) from a unique deity. Scotus’ linguistic innovation made it possible for humans to aspire to god-like powers without outright turning into God, thereby staying on the right side of religious heresy (Brague 2007: chap. 14). Of course, theists had to entertain an increasingly problematic – and ultimately secularizing – consequence of the Scotist move: namely, that divine attributes differ from corresponding human ones only by degree and not kind, which in turn has been the basis for both the ‘literalist’ reading of the Bible and the idea that nature can be read as a book written in a decipherable (typically mathematical) code (Fuller 2010: chap. 5). In any case, the subtle but systematic abstraction of divine function from divine substance begun by Scotus unleashed enormous consequences ranging across logic, physics and economics, resulting in a conception of value based on efficient exchanges of energy, as humans tried to approximate God’s capacity to create ex nihilo (Cassirer 1923; for more critical views of the same development, see Mirowski 1989, Rabinbach 1990). We return to this theme in the next chapter under the US engineer Buckminster Fuller’s (1968) rubric of ‘ephemeralization’.

One complicating factor in defining the original Right–Left divide was the emergence of comparative cross-cultural histories of governance in the half-century prior to the French Revolution, most impressively by Baron de Montesquieu. Officially presented as updating a line of inquiry initiated by Aristotle, both a ‘Right’ and a ‘Left’ spin was given to its eighteenth-century revival. Right-wingers (e.g. David Hume) concluded that the variety of governance patterns found throughout the world argued against the possibility of a universally applicable blueprint for social organization. After all, each society, true to the accumulated experience of generations of its members inhabiting the same place, would have hit upon custom-made social arrangements. In the nineteenth century, ideologies that we now recognize as both ‘cultural relativist’ and ‘racist’ – often not clearly distinguished from each other – developed this approach, typically to promote a conception of the state based on ‘nationality’. In contrast, Left-wingers (e.g. Marquis de Condorcet) interpreted the variety of governance patterns as alternative realizations of a universal human potential, from which everyone may learn as we converge on a common progressive trajectory. Implicit here is the prospect that humanity is collectively advanced by tapping into opportunities already present in some culture’s past but which have yet to be fully realized or sufficiently extended (Fuller 2011a: chap. 1). Perhaps ironically, a latter-day descendant of this sensibility may be found in the attitude of transnational pharmaceutical firms, armed with medical anthropologists, who see the world’s cultural diversity as so many simultaneous experiments in collective human survival (Brown 2003: chap. 4). Nevertheless, we believe that overall Condorcet has the better side of the argument.

2 Right vs. Left as a contest over the past to determine the future

As we have just seen, the original Right- and Left-wingers were arguing from much the same empirical base, but whereas the right-wingers treated the sheer survival of social practices as self-validating and hence stressed the costs of deviating from them, the Left-wingers conjured the benefits that would have been (and perhaps may still be) accrued by pursuing versions of known alternative practices. This difference may be seen as a political version of the complementary relations exhibited by matter in motion at the quantum level that Werner Heisenberg formulated as the ‘uncertainty principle’: The Right espouses a politics of position, the Left a politics of momentum. The Right holds that we are where we belong, while the Left presumes that where we are is no more than a state in motion. At stake here is what the analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman (1955) originally called ‘projectibility’, which he described as the ‘new riddle of induction’ – in short, which aspects of the past are worth projecting into the future? (Goodman himself imagined two predicates, ‘grue’ and ‘green’, both of which are true of all emeralds before now but ‘grue’ claims that in the future they will be blue not green.) The original 1789 ideological divide vividly illustrates why the answer is far from obvious – though in less dramatic ways judges routinely face a version of this problem when selecting cases as precedents for framing the case under adjudication.

On the one hand, the Right-wingers practise a kind of ‘straight rule’ induction, whose presumption is that the future continues the dominant tendency in two senses of ‘dominant’: given our knowledge of the past, it is the most obvious course of action in light of the most obvious framing of the situation. Thus, special reasons must be offered to change a course of action that has been established on, respectively, such empirical and conceptual grounds (cf. Fuller and Collier 2004: chap. 10). This general approach, admitted by Hume to be our default habit of mind, is properly called ‘conservative’. It was accorded a metaphysically (and politically) elevated status as the working of ‘natural reason’ by the cleric Richard Whately (1963) in the most authoritative logic textbook in early nineteenth-century Britain.

On the other hand, the Left-wingers interpret the dominant tendency as an extended contingency that is reversible under the right conditions to reveal alternative lines of thought and action that had been obscured or suppressed. The difference between liberals and socialists on this score has turned on whether any of those alternatives are, so to speak, ‘The Truth-in-Exile’. Generally speaking, liberals say no, socialists say yes. Whereas liberals hold that any alternative is in principle realizable under the right circumstances, socialists privilege a limited number – if not simply one – of those alternatives as providing an authentic realization of human potential (of course, without denying the need to apply force to enable its realization). Thus, while liberals have focused on maintaining an ever-present capacity to reverse any regime that happens to be dominant at the moment (e.g. via regular elections, free markets), socialists have concentrated on identifying the one true regime that is worth pursuing in the face of anticipated resistance, as it overturns entrenched habits of thought and action.

Informing this division in the Left is the dual character of the deity implied by the Scotist revision of the concept of possibility previously mentioned. God is the only being who can do whatever he w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• 1 Precautionary and Proactionary as the Twenty-first-century’s Defining Ideological Polarity
• 2 Proactionary Theology: Discovering the Art of God-Playing
• 3 Proactionary Biology: Recovering the Science of Eugenics
• 4 A Legal and Political Framework for the Proactionary Principle
• The Proactionary Manifesto
• Legislation and Cases
• Bibliography
• Index