From: Regina Pancake (regina@appliedfx.com)
Date: Mon Aug 19 2002 - 08:57:48 MDT
So here's a twist.
I tend to think of myself as a "Green/Transhumanist.
How many of this list see themselves the same, or are Green and
Transhumanist just not to be uttered in the same sentence?
Something like Compassionate Republican maybe, or no? ;)
I've been associated with the Extropians for more than 10 years now. Its
really starting to bubble out there and a lot more people know what I'm
talking about with out the "Big Explanation" as a precursor to any dinner
conversation or casual chats on long car rides. They key on the word
Transhuman more than Extropian by far.
Regina
At 04:02 PM 8/19/02 +0000, you wrote:
>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
>
>---END---
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