Abstract
Fuller and Lipińska claim human potential is shackled by precautionary concerns to avoid harm, placing protection against negative potentials above benefits that might arise from admittedly risky experimentation. ‘The proactionary imperative’ rebalances opportunity over protection.
With technological and scientific advancement central to human evolution, citizens have a ‘right’ to liberate science. Risk adverse science policy is supposedly detrimental to a population denied unknown opportunities. EU funding agencies believe removing barriers to innovation through challenge-led, interdisciplinary research undermines assertions that public funding policy is hampering scientific ambition. For Fuller and Lipińska, however, the research agenda should be open for everyone to steer through investment of economic and biological capital; regardless of the disparity in the information the population has to enable informed decisions about science. Public policy makers assert the importance of strategic approaches to harmonise current and future interests. At the European level, research funders seek to balance conflicting strategic priorities, national programmes and increasingly private sources with leverage potential. For the proactionary, big government’s claim to ‘know best’ when ‘protecting’ citizens from themselves jars with faith in knowing, risk taking entrepreneurs. However, this faith does not disprove the value of non-market expertise.
Allegedly, up/down replaces left/right. Scientific ‘transfiguration’ (genetic or digital) enthuses technocrats and free-marketeers while horrifying communitarians and traditionalists, teasing apart technocratic left elites from communitarian ‘masses’, and right libertarians from conservativees. ‘Humanity 2.0’ ‘playing god’ sets black sky thinkers (reaching for the stars) against (Mother Nature’s) green earth thinkers. Science/technology’s possibilities challenge existing accommodations. Is this new or imperative? ‘Young’ (‘romantic’) Marx and older ‘scientific’ Marx (2.0), romantic socialists (Goodwin/Morris) and technocratic Fabians, as syndicalists and ‘Leninist’ statists, show a left always divided. Nineteenth-century Whigs and Tories highlight similar ‘right’ differences: from Saint Simon, Owen and Comte to Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ growth off-set class-struggle. More tempered redistribution. Breeding between blue-blooded aristocrats and red-blooded capitalists synthesised political, economic and genetic variation before Mendel. Technological affordances present continuities and novelties. Do genetic enhancement, digitalised minds and space colonisation impel political re-orientation? Mass production diffused left demands. Vaccines and agrichemicals rebuffed Malthus. Technocratic ‘up’ thinking is not new. Will technocratic more displace scarcity? The internet makes music less scarce. If Maxwell’s demon (3D printers downloading medicine, food and houses to all) abolished all scarcity politics could debate human transfiguration. This has yet to arise. Most ‘transhumanists’ believe free markets already create a world where political distribution is redundant. Fuller and Lipińska disagree. They reject Marx’s ‘utopian’ ‘slur’ against Saint Simon (for believing class struggle was passé after science and industry). Today’s ‘transhumanists’ imply corporations/markets are sufficient to recreate earth in heaven. The authors rightly temper techno-libertarian ‘up-wing’ scenarios with equity and justice mechanisms for a ‘proactionary left’. They reposition left politics from welfarist ‘protectionism’ to an equal ‘right to enhance’.
Today’s science and technology are both ‘game changer’ and continuation of western scientific and Christian traditions. Today we ‘play god’ metaphorically and literally. As Unitarian Christians the authors reject the science/religion divide. Atheism just avoids cosmic disappointment. Humans should embrace cosmic uniqueness, comprehending nature and remaking it (becoming god). ‘Don’t play god’ as heuristic for ‘nature knows best’ is rejected. If some knowledge is good and practical (planned parenting), why not embrace ‘good’ eugenics? Yet ‘playing god’ takes many forms. Jesus’ ‘world historical significance’ is said to be his ‘transfiguration’ from man into the divine, an invitation for all humans to become god, not just pupils or robots. ‘Transhumanists’ seek ‘the mind of god’ (via science) and remake earth in heaven (via technology) as ‘the new protestants’. Catholicism, like today’s scientific ‘orthodoxy’ (including ‘Darwinism’) holds back individual transfiguration (the supposed precautionary protectionism of EU science discussed above being the paradigmatic fusion of Catholicism and Darwinian Orthodoxy – allegedly).
Yet, within western Christianity there are many ways of being god. Deism – God sets the clockwork waiting for Newton to reveal it. Clientalism – God regulates the market, contracting Moses, Jesus, JS Mill and so on to run franchises delivering outcomes. Ecologism – God lives in nature and humans steward Gaia or get punished (expelled from Eden). Expressionism – born a cosmic/evolutionary accident humans can (must), after the ‘miracle’ of self-consciousness, master existence and become god. Given options, none is ‘imperative’. The idea that all humans can become god-like in the sense of bodily transcendence within ‘this’ life is rather heretical. The authors’ ‘Expressionism’ is secular Christian teleology for a scientific age (zeitgeist after geist). If other gods reflect mercantilism, tribal and feudal society, Fuller and Lipińska do not explain their religion sociologically. They suggest, rightly enough, a particular (secularised) religious outlook drives today’s proactionaries. Whether this secular protestant (largely US led) drive to escape the flesh and realise heaven by hard/solitary (scientific and technical) work is itself right/desirable, is another matter. They insert equity into a ‘transhumanist’ dot.com heaven, a left politics (2.0) combining ‘black sky thinking’ with elements of Christian and Social Democratic values.
Our biological evolution enabled ‘miraculous’ consciousness, rational agency and a special moral status: giving humans the right and obligation to enhance and promote themselves. Rejecting oppressive and murderous forms of eugenics may allow for liberating eugenic promotion of positive characteristics but the distinction remains contested. The authors reject market versions of ‘transhumanism’s’ ‘proactionary’ ethos, seeking new forms of positive and collective action/regulation putting power to improve into the hands of groups with particular genes. Their concept of ‘hedgenetics’ – the pooling of resources by groups with shared genetic conditions – drawing a parallel with the very market vulture funds they seek to inhibit – may or may not work. Similarly, extending intellectual property over the human genome as a defence against private ownership creates paradoxes. Abolishing the invention/discovery distinction is consistent with ‘transhumanist’ logic. However, if such ‘inventions’ are ‘held’ collectively (passing directly into the public domain) are they intellectual property at all? Nonetheless, as markets and laboratories are not enough to ensure fair access to future opportunities, the attempt to reimagine justice and equity in a future where new and old forms of diversity will proliferate is a valuable undertaking.