From: Waldemar Inghdahl (waldemar.ingdahl@eudoxa.se)
Date: Mon Jun 18 2001 - 11:37:29 MDT
What we often hear on this list is the eclectically absorbed view that philosophy has nothing to do with practical life or with reality. I have also heard someone argue that we should all sit around and wait for technology to just "happen" (not much of dynamic optimism there, rather fatalism). One might wonder why one is interested in participating in a movement that concerns itself with ideas if one harbours those thoughts. Or... maybe it doesn't any more...? Maybe there is something else that is sought after?
It is a tragic irony of our times that the two worst, bloodiest regimes in history, the Nazis of Germany and the Communists of Soviet Russia, both of whom were motivated by brute power- lust and a crudely materialistic greed for the unearned, showed respect for the power of philosophy and spent billions of propaganda and indoctrination. Today, when looking back we are appalled. Their ideas were so openly morally debased and unpractical, they were nuts! But even so millions followed and died for those ideas. In the US and other Western countries who claim to believe in the superiority of the human spirit over matter, you often find that its citizens neglect philosophy, despise ideas, starve the best minds of the young, offer nothing but the stalest slogans of cyncial pragmatism, and wonder why they are losing the world to the thugs.
The real enemy of transhumanism isn't Jeremy Rifkin, it isn't a specific ideology, nor an entity but a vacuum, an absence, the emptiness left by the collapse of philosophy. In that emptiness, mindless men rattle frantically, desperately seeking some way to exist on earth- which they cannot find without the tool they have discarded. Ideas, in a philosophical system that can show them what is moral and practical. How should a man live on this earth if he wants to be practical and moral? By "writing some computer code"? People get the message, transhumanists do not take their ideas seriously either. This is why so many flock to the stasists, they at least give an option- the only option left on the field. You may choose among a technocratic view or a reactionary view- but both are still stasism.
It is rather odd to hear these views propagated on the "extropians"- list, and you might wonder why I reply them. Unfortunately, it is because I think that they are very represetative of the transhumanist movement today.
Yesterday, I read into some of my old paper issues of Extropy- magazine. I get a very different picture. Not of a ready, fully baked philosophy- but a philosophy that is vibrant and growing, strenghtening itself by exploring new venues. But that stopped. Why? I think it was because transhumanism started to discuss by the mid 90's its applications in present day society. That wasn't liked by many members.
When I read Max More's philosophy I am still very much enthusiastic about it but there are some problems. One of the problems is that I frequently get the impression that Max supposes that his reader will understand the underlying current of liberal and humanist thought in his texts. I am sorry to say this, but liberal and humanist thoughts are not the dominant part of the mainstream today. Many readers missed this, often since they had no experience with complex ideological systems, so they put in their own meaning in the word. "Transhumanism" became a general "nice"- word, that could be filled with whatever meaning the reader felt was "nice" (often not contemplating the specific reasons why what he felt was nice was so). The philosophical implications of transhumanism because a too difficult question, since it would raise questions in the reader's mind that he had no possibility of facing, unaccustomed to philosophy and abstract thought as he was. The broad generalizations of a philosophical system he had
often found either ridiculed in the cultural climate he lived in, or something that he "shouldn't" worry himself with.
A philosophy without philosophical thought? So, what to fill this blank with? What filled the blank was technology, that was thought to be uncharged with cultural meaning.
Transhumanism has everything to do with lawn chairs, microwave owens and Pokemon collectable trading cards.
If a certain technology is developed it may have many good and practical applications, but it may also be applied in bad and impractical ways. Technology is a venue to make humanity's problems more agreeable, but it is not the fundamental part of transhumanism
For transhumanism it wouldn't be a problem if MIT tomorrow published the fact that there are unsurmountable problems in applying nanotechnology, because transhumanism spans over further areas than just technology. It is a distinct philosophy with a view of the world, a theory of knowledge, a moral system and a political theory. We are talking about a dynamist approach to technology, humanity, and society. Not of specific technologies.
When discussing a specific technology it is from the dynamist viewpoint and through a dialectical societal analysis of its societal consequences.
Why are we positive towards human change? In the end it gets down to the fact that man has the right not to have his freedom infringed, and that of course includes the right of men to develop themselves and their right to implement their freedom in creating new technologies- as long as it doesn't hurt other people.
Transhumanism creates a meaning for humanity's technology and a meaning to the societal changes it has observed. It is building a new culture with it's distinct Great Narrative. But that goes for the lawn chair as well for the computer, morphological freedom as well as free global movement of capital. After all, the computer in front of you is just a pile of metal, who gives it its meaning? The user gives the computer its meaning. According to what? And then you are back to philosophy or ideas, the distinction of seeing the computer as a tool of enslavement, of emancipation or just as a worthless pile of junk.
Difficult questions, indeed. And there is a great responsibility carried by the philosopher. In order to take that responsibility seriously one has to think of a wide range of subjects and building a system of ideas through dialectical thinking and a good discourse.
Yours truly.
Waldemar
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