The August issue of Britain's
The Socialist Standard has this nice, short comment about transhumanism:
Here’s an early notification for the ‘Perfect Body Conference’, in
case you’re swinging by Linköping in Sweden between October
9 and 16 and have a consuming interest in ‘transhumanism’
issues. The blurb describes it thus: ‘Enhancement, paraphrased
as the improvement of desired characteristics, means to apply
a certain focus on abilities, capacities and quality of life. These
categories can be viewed and defined from different valuedriven
perspectives which are based upon certain viewpoints on
what constitutes “normality”’.
Thinking of giving it a miss? Well, shame, because the
transhumanism debate could turn out to be one of socialism’s
hottest topics, after the grubby internal politics of capitalism has
been consigned to the archives. At stake is the question of what
‘human’ means, now that technology promises the potential of
almost unlimited physical and intellectual enhancements, up to
and including immortality. At one level, you might think, what is
there to debate? Who would wheeze around in an old banger
of a body if they could breeze around in a macho Maserati or a
female Ferrari? Why be ein dummkopf if you could be Einstein?
Why put up with breakdown illnesses and debilitating corrosion
if they can be engineered away, leaving you Kwik and Fit? Why
die, for heaven’s sake?
The debate is raging before the technology has even
developed, which is no bad thing, and much of it mirrors current
consumerist paradigms, with the libertarian ‘devil-take-thehindm ost’
transhumanists at one extreme and, glaring at them
from the liberal pole, the bleeding-hearts who worry (correctly)
that any future Smart Toolkit for beauty, brains and longevity
will only be sold in Harrods and not in Halfords. But these
are only the two most obvious and energy-lite arguments,
and neither penetrate far into the complexities of the issue.
Others do, however, and Wikipedia provides an invaluable and
entertaining list of these, including the Playing God argument,
the Gattaca argument, the Frankenstein, the Eugenics Wars
and the Terminator arguments. These criticisms all form points
on a gradient between outright infeasibility (the Futurehype
argument) and downright undesirability (Terminator) .
From a socialist perspective, a debate can be said to have
real ‘legs’ if it can be extended beyond the context of capitalism
and still have meaning in a socialist society. From this point
of view, most of these arguments presuppose capitalist
hierarchical principles and would not survive into socialism.
Will the technology fail to serve all humanity and instead reflect
and extend today’s social divisions and class barriers? Yes,
probably. What else would you expect? The smart money is
on immortal elites backed up by armies of supersoldiers –
another reason to get socialism soon, before our working class
descendants have the capability of independent thinking bred
right out of them. Meanwhile disabled people, in the face of
the transhumanist ideal of ‘perfectibility’, are looking nervously
back over their shoulders at the eugenics movement of the
1930s and its macabre culmination in the Nazi death-camps.
For them, as for other groups historically classified as ‘Other’,
‘transhuman’ carries an extra chill undertone, like the phrase
‘defect-free’ or perhaps ‘unJewish’.
But that is today’s debate, within the context of capitalism.
The fear of being marginalised and oppressed by modifications
to the definition of ‘Normal’ could not conceivably be exported
into a society which has abolished the class basis of
oppression. Nor would people, in a society without systems
of social preferment, need to be paranoid about genetically
engineered social elites. Where it gets interesting is when
transhumanism invites one to ask even more fundamental
questions which even socialism would struggle with. What
exactly is a human, and what level of enhancement, if any,
ought to be considered ‘enough’?
Socialist society is inclusive in its nature, which means that
people are not to be judged or excluded on the basis of how
pretty, young or smart they are. But what if it embraces the
technology to make everyone ‘perfect’, and if so, who decides
what ‘perfect’ is, and what would this say about social and
biological diversity? And what of death, that ultimate motivator
and engine of evolution? Would the achievement of immortality
create a socialist society of incomparable cultural and technical
sophistication or, conversely, a dispiriting world of torpid,
plastic-faced Barbie dolls who can’t see the point of opening a
book? Would the quest for perfection ultimately allow humans to
conquer the stars, or make us so niche-specific that we became
unable to adapt to future environmental upheavals, thus
triggering our own extinction? Even given such imponderables,
could any species, no matter how intelligent, ever resist the lure
of this Pandora’s Box? When the time comes to formulate the
political agenda of socialist society, transhumanism will surely
be right up there, because it calls into question everything that
humans think they know about being human.
