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Democratic Transhumanism

James Hughes, Ph.D.

page 4 of 8

There are many surprising, emerging conservative alliances. Nigil Cameron, a well known anti-abortion bioethicist is aligned with Lori Andrews, a well-known feminist. Andrews wrote a book in the 1970s about Huey Newton and the Black Panthers and was a Hughes staunch libertarian feminist in the 1980s. She is also known for her "Saul on the road to Damascus" experience, when she discovered that the commodification of the human body is going to lead to capitalism taking over everyone's bodies and that women will, as a result, be oppressed by patriarchal medicine. She bought into the biocon critique, and she and Nigel set up an institution in Chicago called The Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future.

The Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future has an equal number of right-wing and left-wing fellows. They include people coming out of the anti-abortion movement, Paige Cunningham and Christopher Hook (one of the Christian Right activists who writes for Christianity Today); William Hurlbut, conservative theologian on the President's Council; and C. Ben Mitchell, who's at the Chicago Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. The fellows also include various left-wingers: Lori Andrews, who is pro-choice; Brent Blackwelder, who is from the "Friends of the Earth"; Judy Norsigian, who was central to the "Our Bodies, Ourselves" Project, and staunchly pro-choice.

What causes these unlikely alliances? On one hand, there is the dominance of a pastoral version of left-wing thought, which says that all these technologies are leading in a bad direction. The Center for Genetics in Society in California is one of the leading articulators of that theory. They believe that we are heading towards techno-eugenics[1] and that we need to stop that.

There also exists the pastoral elements within the environmental movement, including Jeremy Rifkin, who is not so much focused on this any more, and his protégé, Andrew Kimball, and the ETC[2]; the deep ecologists; anti-genetic-modification groups, which have begun to expand their scope into anti-GM for human beings as well; the disability rights extremists (people opposed to cochlear implants and the backlash against Christopher Reeve, arguing that Christopher Reeve was distracting people with paralysis from the need to accept that they have paralysis and move on).

Transhumanism Movement
On the other side, we have the transhumanism movement. Transhumanism is actually a pan-cultural and pan-historical tendency, which means that human beings want to transcend the human condition. In the past, they have attempted to do so through such avenues as drugs or spiritual disciplines of one kind or another. What defines transhumanism as a modern movement is when these aspirations come together with science, reason, humanism, and the other products of the Enlightenment, and people actually begin to use those modalities instead of these other spiritual modalities.

Some people who represent an early stab at this movement are political revolutionaries as well, including J.P. Condercet and William Godwin (the father of philosophical anarchism), both of whom foresaw the conquering of death as something that humanity would eventually achieve; H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, socialists of one variety or another, who foresaw future revolution of the human race; and BS Haldane and Bernal, both Marxists, who argued for in-vitro fertilization and cybernetic implants. After World War II, things began to move away from the association with the Left of these techno-utopian ideas. For instance, Julian Huxley coined the term, "transhumanism", in 1957 and defined it as "the human species transcending itself." FM 2030[3], who was influenced more by the New Left and counterculture, begins to argue that we are in a transhuman stage of history. This is when the term transhumanism itself comes into fore.

Footnotes
1. Eugenics is the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=eugenics March 23, 2006 3:01PM EST (back to top)

2. The Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC) is dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights. To this end, ETC group supports socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized and it addresses international governance issues and corporate power. ETC group works in partnership with civil society organizations (CSOs) for cooperative and sustainable self-reliance within disadvantaged societies, by providing information and analysis of socioeconomic and technological trends and alternatives. This work requires joint actions in community, regional, and global forums. http://www.etcgroup.org/about.asp March 23, 2006 3:05PM EST (back to top)

3. FM-2030 was a name adopted by the transhumanist philosopher and futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (October 15, 1930–July 8, 2000), who professed "a deep nostalgia for the future." He wrote one of the seminal works in the transhumanist canon, Are You a Transhuman?. He also wrote a number of works of fiction under his original name F.M. Esfandiary. The son of an Iranian diplomat, he had lived in 17 countries by the time he turned eleven, and later served on the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine from 1952 to 1954. On July 8, 2000, FM-2030 succumbed to pancreatic cancer and entered cryonic suspension at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he remains today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 March 23, 2006 4:23PM EST (back to top)

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