From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 00:53:07 MST
spike66 asked,
> What were the sixties about?
The sixties were very much a transhumanist movement before today's version.
It was not technology-based, but was idea based. Radical new ideas
abounded. One idea was that one could let one's hair grow as long as you
wanted and that you could look the way you wanted. Everyone could choose
for themselves. Another idea was that you could love whomever you wanted
and that old rigid social systems should be abolished. Again, people could
choose for themselves. Another was that there might be new ways of
thinking. Political theories, social theories, new-age theories, new
artistic movements, new musical movements, even new drug movements, all
involved new ways of thinking.
A whole generation woke up and decided that if they didn't like the way
things were that they could change the world. There was no reason to grow
up in a stereotyped world to become stereotyped people. Every individual
was allowed to choose for themselves what they would become, what they would
look like, how they would act, and how they would associate with others.
Old rules about race, religion, morality, expectations, traditions, and
habits were tossed out on their ear. Everybody tried to figure out what
they would do if they were designing the whole world from scratch. New art
forms appeared, new music appeared, new fashion styles appeared, new drugs
appeared, new family groups and relationships appeared, new political
theories appeared, new religions appeared, new causes appeared, anything
that could be tried was tried.
The whole "New Age" movement was based on the idea that we were no longer
limited by history and the way things were. We had enough knowledge and
capability to remake the whole world, including ourselves, into any image we
desired. A million different versions of remaking the New Age appeared.
Religions, drugs, ecology, free-love, and politics were just some of the
tools used to try to remake the world. Everybody tried to invent their own
version of utopia and convince every one else to transcend previous
limitations to become something new.
It sounded very much like the stuff I hear on this list. I think the
current transhumanist movement is really just an echo of the sixties. We
are just using more technology in today's version. Super-technology isn't
the real driving force behind transhumanism. The real explosion of
transhumanism occurred as soon as whole masses had enough to eat that they
could spend most of their time thinking about themselves and the world
instead of merely struggling to stay alive. Pure thought and planning
toward self-transformation are the real keys to transhumanism, not
technology. We may have discarded a lot of sixties ideas that didn't seem
to be productive, but the main goal of self-determination and
self-transformation were the same.
This is part of the reason I do not see progress being as rapid as some
people imagine. The roots of our movement go back a lot farther than people
imagine. As such, they were not as rapidly successful as people think, and
they are not producing as much as people predicted. I expect the results of
our current efforts to be similar to the results of the sixties. There will
be a million different radical new ideas tried. And most of them will fall
by the wayside as quaint anachronisms by the future. Only a few of them
will survive and become commonplace. And positioned against the larger
backdrop of history, they won't seem as radical or as new as we expected. I
think we have already lived through many "singularities" and many stages of
ever-accelerating technology without realizing it.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <http://HarveyNewstrom.com>
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