From: Sean Kenny (seankenny@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 19 2002 - 10:02:53 MDT
courtesy of http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/ and The CoV List
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=816
Are You An Extropian Transhumanist?
Pacific News Service, Walter Truett Anderson, 07/31/2002
The writer Walter Truett Anderson probes the outer fringes of political
thought and finds two nascent movements that may eventually make us all ask,
"Am I an extropian transhumanist?"
So you think you're a liberal Democrat. Or perhaps a moderate Republican, or
an Independent. But are you an extropian transhumanist?
You may soon have to decide. Technology is breeding strange new movements,
and since ethical questions posed by advancements in technology affect us
all, how we label ourselves is bound to change.
So much for the "end of ideology." Most of the old ideologies -- socialism,
free-market liberalism -- are alive and kicking, and new ones keep popping
up. Environmentalism, for example, has grown rapidly from a cause focused on
a few issues to a full-blown international political movement complete with
Green parties and an army of theoreticians. Anti-globalism shows signs of
expanding in the same way.
Now, virtually unnoticed by most political observers, a new movement
variously called extropianism or transhumanism is springing up around the
world.
Its core belief is that the human species can and should be improved in any
way possible through the free development and use of technology. Its chief
opponents are the various movements and groups who have taken the field
against what they see as rampant and unregulated technological progress. The
Luddites and Greens say slow down; extropians and transhumanists say full
speed ahead.
The word "extropy" was coined in the late 1980s by a pair of philosophy
graduate students who wanted a word to serve as the opposite to the
scientific term "entropy" -- which means a decline in a system's useful
energy. Extropians don't like to talk about decline. Instead, they cheer for
onward-and-upward progress: longer lives, enhanced powers of body and mind,
exploration into space, boundless expansion in all directions.
Transhumanism emphasizes the idea of progress beyond humanity as we
currently know it, by any and all means -- genetic engineering,
nanotechnology, and human-machine convergence being among the favorites.
All this could easily be dismissed as an enthusiasm of techie
intellectuals -- and it is that, but it is also a good deal more. It engages
some major political issues that are already on the table, such as how much
governments should regulate biotechnology and human stem cell research, and
some that lurk in the future, such as whether people should try to
"terraform" other planets to make them suitable for human habitation. And it
may have the potential, over time, to bring about some major political
realignments.
Most people who have become attracted to extropian-transhumanist ideas are
young, male, well-educated and libertarian in their politics, inclined to
believe that governments are more likely to hinder self-directed
evolutionary progress than to help it. But according to a recent analysis of
the movement by political scientist James J. Hughes at Trinity College in
Connecticut, transhumanists come from all over the political spectrum,
ranging from bleeding- heart socialists who think governments should take
responsibility for fair distribution of technology's benefits to neo-Nazis
who yearn for a state-supported 21st-century program of Hitlerian eugenics.
And Hughes, who has studied the progress of groups such as the World
Transhumanist Association, reports that there is a growing faction dedicated
to building a "broad liberal democratic philosophic foundation" in the
movement that might revive some of the enthusiasm for science and technology
that was once common in Marxist and center-left political groups before, as
he puts it, "left techno-optimism was supplanted by pervasive Luddite
suspicion about the products of the corporate consumerist machine."
We shall see. The whole movement -- or at least the rather ungainly names
that currently label it -- may well continue to flutter about on various Web
sites without mustering any substantial impact on the course of applied
technology, public policy or public opinion. But the very fact that it
exists at all is an indicator of change, a sign that many people are
thinking seriously about science and technology.
There's every reason to expect that scientific-technological progress is
going to continue racing ahead in the near future, becoming increasingly
capable of touching everybody's life in one way or another -- and even
raising serious questions about the future of humanity itself. Such large
matters are what politics is about, and it seems likely that concerns about
how we deal with powerful new technologies are going to be on the political
agenda for a long time to come -- breeding new controversies and new
movements with curious names.
Anderson (waltt@well.com) is a political scientist an
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