Abstract
I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to a range of reviewers, each of whom has taken the full measure of what is on offer in The Proactionary Imperative, namely, the presentation and defence of transhumanism as an explicitly progressive ideology for the 21st century. Sociologists are by now familiar with various species of posthumanism, usually traceable to Donna Haraway’s (1985) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’. Haraway and her followers have wanted to deconstruct the ‘human’ as ideological cover for a western androcentric world-view, which has not only excluded most of Homo sapiens but is also increasingly putting the future of the planet at risk. From this standpoint, ‘progress’ is a pernicious illusion that needs to be replaced by a mutualist politics of sustainability, one associated with the ‘precautionary principle’, which places the avoidance of harm and suffering to (humans as part of) nature above all other considerations.
In contrast, transhumanists concede that humanism has not met its own aspirations, but that means we need to carry on – not abandon – the humanist project. Moreover, transhumanists would go well beyond conferring humanity on women, non-Whites and the so-called ‘disabled’ – to name just three historically disenfranchised groups to which Haraway’s cyborg metaphor was meant to draw attention. Indeed, transhumanists advocate ‘morphological freedom’, which would enable individuals to undergo various transformations – say, radical bodily, genetic or prosthetic modification – and retain, if not enhance, their standing as human beings. Indeed, transhumanists entertain the prospect that artificially intelligent machines and cognitively ‘uplifted’ animals might also count as human, despite not having been born Homo sapiens. In this respect, transhumanism is radically constructivist vis-à-vis the human.
Of the three reviewers, Daniel Chernilo’s framing captures the trans- vs post- humanist sensibility best. We do indeed side with Sartre against Heidegger on the ‘question of humanism’. Put brutally, both Existentialist philosophers were trying to define the God-shaped hole in their metaphysics that atheism left. Sartre’s answer was that we occupy God’s role, through which our humanity is then defined: we all become God by acting as if we could do anything and then taking responsibility for everything that follows. However, what prevented Sartre’s position from dissolving into the decadent libertarianism that blights much of transhumanism today is that he took seriously that all humans found themselves in this position, in which case some sense of collective will is required to authenticate these godlike capacities. Yet, Sartre clearly thought that humans must be, in the first instance, members of Homo sapiens – a question that transhumanism keeps open, rightly we believe.
In contrast, Heidegger located his God-shaped hole in an absolutely transcendent being – ‘Being’ – that cannot itself be defined yet is the source of all definition, the logos. From that standpoint, humans differ from other beings simply in terms of our capacity to represent the panoply of beings in our own imperfect version of the logos, language. Otherwise, we are just as much dependent on this undefined definer, Being, as every other being-in-the-world. Our humanity lies simply in our faithfulness in representing those with which our own fate is necessarily implicated. In this spirit, we can understand Bruno Latour as having spent the last 20 years turning actor-network theory into Heidegger 2.0, much to the joy of his fans in the politically quiescent ‘speculative realism’.
Our reviewers raise eyebrows concerning the centrality of eugenics to our conception of transhumanism. It is true, as my comments have already suggested, that transhumanism does not limit itself to the germ plasm as the platform for launching Humanity 2.0. Silicon is at least as prominent. However, sociologists cannot engage fully in discussing the future of humanity unless we make eugenics our own – however offensive that might appear to contemporary political sensibilities. Eugenics was originally presented by Francis Galton as an extension of political economy, not an application of some non-existent science of genetics. As Chris Renwick has shown in British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots (2012), eugenics was very much on the table (though ultimately rejected) when considering who should hold the first UK sociology chair, at the London School of Economics.
We would now call Galton’s discipline ‘human capital development’, and it would look like agricultural economics, with the phrase ‘raising children’ understood on the model of ‘raising crops’ – as policymakers routinely do, when fretting over matters of diet and upbringing. In fact, as argued in Chapter 3 of The Proactionary Imperative, it is difficult to imagine the welfare state having developed as it did without eugenics in the background. After all, it is one thing to mandate a redistribution of income from rich to poor simply on grounds of social justice but quite another to focus the state’s energies on ‘raising’ the poor to some socially desirable level by universal healthcare and education. In this respect, all that has changed since Galton’s days are the multiple levels – from the antenatal to the epigenetic – at which eugenic interventions are now possible. My guess is that the debates currently surrounding ‘genetically modified organisms’ in our fields and food will migrate to humans in the next generation.
I have yet to mention specifically the responses of David and Meredith and Hauskeller. They epitomize, respectively, those who do and don’t get the animus informing The Proactionary Imperative. David and Meredith rightly observe that our semi-detached considerations of the future of humanity work only if all relevant individuals are involved, or otherwise represented, in the process. For this reason, as they note, we have introduced ‘hedgenetics’ as a possible regime of personal and collective genomic ownership. We address these matters most systematically in Chapter 4, which culminates in a ‘Proactionary Manifesto’. Hauskeller’s critique is more problematic because his dogmatic commitment to the precautionary principle disables any recognition of the sense in which humanity has been defined by the enormously risky ventures – from the open seas to the laboratory – that our species has historically undertaken, despite the harms generated along the way. Of course, this fact provides little comfort to those who have suffered, which is why any Welfare State 2.0 requires safeguards, compensations, if not assurances of restoration, to society’s risk-takers. Hauskeller may be empirically correct that a proactionary world would increase our tolerance for harm, but it would also offer more enlightened and useful ways of understanding and dealing with harm. Moreover, had a proactionary mindset not already been implicit in human history, then the end of the Second World War would have witnessed a moratorium – if not outright prohibition – on nuclear physics and genetics research. But of course, and fortunately, that has yet come to pass, despite the ongoing efforts of those who promote ‘institutional review boards’.