Why I believe the stupid bullshit I believe in
So I eagerly clicked on this essay on transhumanism today expecting a bunch of “BWAH-HA-HA”-worthy philosophical treatises about the ethical merits of boinking robo-babes. Instead, I got a fairly standard discussion of Enlightenment philosophy with occasional buzzwords such as “superlative technocentricity” thrown in for good measure.
Even so, something here really stood out to me:
Third, while most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism.
Leave aside the fallacy that most transhumanists are “liberal democrats” — most of the ones I’ve read are glibertarian dorkmasters — I’m more interested in the assertion that liberal democrats supposedly believe in “human perfectibility.”
This is something I’ve heard a lot about lefty ideology, that we supposedly think people can be made “perfect” through reasoned governance. That’s not how I really see things. My general view is that we’re never going to be “perfect” in any way, that we’re all deeply flawed and fucked-up creatures and that our lives in and of themselves are fairly meaningless. I know, I’m a cheery person.
That said I think that human beings do have the ability, after much trial and error and over long periods of time, to make things somewhat less sucky for ourselves. For instance, we eventually figured out that enslaving people was a silly idea. Also, the fact that we now elect people to run our government rather than anointing them by virtue of their father’s sperm? That’s a pretty smart innovation. Ditto things like Social Security and Medicare — it’s good to not have old people dying in the streets.
None of these innovations make us more or less “perfect.” Rather they’re changes we’ve made that have made life marginally less sucky. We’ll never get to the point where people don’t drive drunk or where people don’t steal from one another or anything like that. But we can make gradual improvements over time. We learn things that we can pass on to future generations. I don’t think this makes me an idealist — at the very least, I hope that it makes me a realist.
Thoughts?
Where da photoshop?
yeah sorry for no lulz, i’m feeling more contemplative today.
Ever think you might not really have a handle on who the trans-humanists are and what they believe? Are you really doing a McArdle something-caught-my-eye-which-now-that-I-think-about-it-validates-all-of-my-deeply-held-convictions blog post are you?
I think “human perfectibility” was more popular during the Progressive Era (1890-1920) than today, and even then was a minority opinion. It’d be more accurate to say that if society was improved, then people’s behavior would improve..
I’ve always wondered how righties can claim liberals believe in human perfectibility/innate goodness/whatever while conservatives believe in falleness or whatever, and yet remain resolutely anti-regulation. How does someone believe that mankind is inherently imperfectible so things like boobs on TV and sex ed are morally hazardous but hey, pollution/greed/worker safety/etc are no big deal, markets need to be free?
Since Liberals favor controls on the behavior of businesses and other organizations — all of which are run by flawed human beings — and Conservatives do not, who in that scenario thinks people are either perfectible or indeed can even be trusted?
It is a common charge that the left has an over-sunny view of human nature (Ronald Reagan once said “Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.”)
Personally, I think it is the right-libertarians who have the rosy perspective of human nature. They tell themselves, “If only we were FREE from government mandated car-insurance and the regulation of food, drugs, and building codes! What a perfect paradise we would live in! And if anyone exploited this freedom, be assured that Adam Smith’s invisible hand will bring balance to the Force.”
No, worse that “inherently imperfectible,” depraved.
Isn’t it called “progress?”
Hey, just got push-polled by Brown people… 2nd in 2 days.
So long as there is plastic surgery, mankind is perfectable.
What?!
Progress does happen. It’s no longer BUSINESS AS USUAL to torture EVERYBODY, for example. As it was for thousands of years across the cultural board.
But as we’ve seen during the Bush administration, that kind of improvement can be undermined and reversed. We still don’t have people insisting on torturing domestic criminals — but the next Republican administration will likely head in that direction, as there is nothing stopping them.
It’s progressives who are trying to keep people from being fist fucked by the invisible hand of the market. My only guess is that conservatives like the feeling, which is why they want freer markets.
Is that guy wearing X-ray specs?
glibertarian dorkmasters
…ya know what they say, “you go with the dorks you have, not the dorks you wish you had” [squeezes eyes shut – wishes REALLY hard!]
Republicans don’t believe in human perfectibility and therefore all dress like hobos. I mean what’s the point in spending to look nice, right?
What Brad said, and…
Hughes in this photo bears a startling likeness to Peter Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove.
My first ever comment at Sadly,No! Pretty much, yeah – you got it about right. The perfectibility crap is a way of dismissing far too much left-wing ideology. Less sucky is far better a description of the way I hope the world turns out for my kids and grandkids. Good one, Brad.
Substance, Republicans believe themselves to be perfect, especially the religious ones.
I don’t think this makes me an idealist — at the very least, I hope that it makes me a realist.
Certainly. I don’t have a problem with idealism anyway, but more importantly, the conservative notion that liberals are idealistic is bald-facedly idiotic. Saying things like “Hey, corporations *will* fuck you in the ass given the opportunity, so let’s regulate them and make sure they can’t” is pretty realistic in my view.
That said, you misread the hell out of that sentence you quoted. It’s saying transhumanists believe in human perfectibility, not liberal democrats.
They say otherwise, which is the point.
I like to call myself a cynical optimist. I can see how bad things are out there – but also I can then choose to make them better. Now I have to acknowledge how bad things can be, but doing so is what gives me the chance to make a difference. I elect to be positive because I know that my approach WILL make a difference – which requires me to acknowledge what’s lousy.
Progressives tend to believe in deliberately working to making things better. Conservatives have the odd view that somehow things will be better if we don’t work together (except to gouge people for money). Conservative thought seems to have become the idea that if we stop trying to make things better, they will get better.
No two people could possibly agree on what “perfection” is, so how can it be achieved?
The NAZIs had their view, and drove/threw out or killed those who didn’t fit it, like Einstein and Frued. Smart!
Heinlein in hs later reactionary conservative years liked to say “Hemophiliacs should be left to bleed to death”. A horrible belief, and stupid- when one considers that successful genetic traits are often linked to unsuccessful ones. Hemophilia, or any negative trait might well be linked to genius in many forms.
I wonder if anti-fact conservatives can even imagine the evolutionary advantages of empathy, altruism, compassion? There was a time in human history, I suppose, when superstitious beliefs equalled survivor skills. Maybe. The trait certainly has stuck around.
Conservative thought seems to have become the idea that if we stop trying to make things better, they will get better.
Or perhaps rather that things were better in the past, so we need to stop going down the path we’re on(the words “Hell” and “handbasket” often figure in somewhere) and get back to traditional whatnot.
Y’know, I was going to say something about how dismissive he is about Enlightenment thought, but then I read the whole thing. Christ, what a puddle of drivel.
Human perfectability? Sounds like Methodism.
I am totally onboard with the Transhumanist Agenda. And the moment I can have my second Head and additional Arms installed, I most certainly will!
Maybe replace my feet with hands, like Scafandra from Aeon Flux.
We liberals don’t believe in “perfecting” humanity; we believe in people not getting fucked over. That’s really all it is.
It’s particularly galling to hear this kind of talk now, because from market deregulation to invading Iraq, who was selling a bigger mess of sunshine and rainbows and magical ponies than the conservatives?
This. All of it.
There’s nothing rose-tinted about believing that millions of people acting out of pure self-interest WILL occasionally add up to a royal fuckup – or about believing that there should be at least some laws preventing that crap from going completely off the rails. There’s nothing rose-tinted about believing that we don’t have the prison capacity to house every repeat offender, and that maybe we should push for better rehabilitative programs instead of just beating the crap out of people and hoping it sinks in. There’s nothing rose-tinted about understanding that we don’t have the power to invade every country on earth and therefore should probably fight only the wars that need to be. That’s cold hard realism.
On the other hand, it takes a completely delusional fucking asshatted toolbag to think that selfish people working for selfish reasons will somehow magically add up to an “enlightened” system.
generally, yes, Liberalism does tend to boil down to minimizing the effect of the shitty things in life, as well as trying to improve the general well being of the population. When implimented, it tends to work pretty well, I.e. w.europe, uk, scandinavia & canada (until recently). Yes, there are fuck ups, over-reaching & pig headed stupidy withing liberalsm & it’s application. But give me those over the Hobbsian dog eat dog society that the US appears to be turnng into.
I never heard of “transhumanism” before this post. Best that I can tell, it is a total load of delusional wankery.
liberalism also offers better dress sense, as well as yummy Pinot Noir
Transhumanism? Wait till Glenn “Singularity” Reynolds hears about THAT!
Well, there are certain left traditions of believing that humans are in part shaped by their social systems and when they are restrained by their social and political and economic systems they are not able to fully develop as individuals. Che and other Latin revolutionaries crystallized this as a “new man” possible under socialism.
It also could be said, however, that many leftists saw society as the entity which was more perfectible, and that once society was formed less as a destructive instrument and more of a instrument of human development, that the better aspects of human nature would be revealed.
Ask David Brooks — maybe if we all felt developed and fulfilled, we’d be bored. It would probably be more exciting to choose children at random to be trained as serial killers. That would be exciting.
I, too , had to wiki “transhumanism” Here’s the shorter:
I dunno, sounds like “Eugenics” to me; NOT a “liberal Demoratic” position, IMHO.
As a liberal, I believe human nature is not “perfectible”, but human society is. Or rather, we may never achieve “perfection”, whatever that may be, but we can approach it, through sensible, progressive measures that act as a check on our imperfect nature.
Whoa, I don’t know how that link got there–the actual wiki link is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
WTFWP?
Transhumanism = glibertarianism + genetic determinism + medieval-Catholic style disgust of human bodies + a severe case of mind-body dualism
Brad, I honestly cannot distinguish your account of liberalism from an Andrew Sullivan style conservatism, except for the lack of wankery about Burke.
Compare and contrast with “liberal democrats”. Big Hollywood won’t.
….human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman”….
“Why don’t you use your ‘greatly expanded abilities” to take out the fucking garbage?!”
Well, in its day the big promoters of eugenics were members of the educated liberal class. It wasn’t so much a belief in the perfectibility of humankind as it was the belief in the progressive improvement of the gene pool, or ‘races’, through controlled breeding in order to eliminate disease, poverty, illiteracy, etc., which we now recognize as social problems. That requires empirically incorrect beliefs about the cause of class distinctions (i.e., it assumes poverty has natural causes and therefore natural solutions), but it also requires a fairly paternalistic desire to forcibly improve the unwashed masses of the lower classes.
I think some of the more interesting ‘liberal’ causes out there these days are still struggling with that legacy of progressive paternalism. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a great example. Or small scale international aid efforts that focus on locally-sustainable technologies (my favorite is Tiller’s International). They are liberal in the sense that they believe poor deserve a shot at a good life, but they also recognize that lasting, sustainable change has to be empowered from within a culture, not from outsiders or central governments. The latter part is a more conservative, anti-paternalistic instinct that we should cultivate more widely.
Even conservatives claim to believe our Democratic system is an improvement on the God Appointed & Anointed Monarchies Of Yore. Except they don’t. And they’re all certain THEY would be the Monarchs and Nobles in those Olden Days, and will be one of the highest nobles in the Future Aristocracy they envision; if by envision you mean “eagerly lap up whatever the real Aristocrats tell you”.
The main place I’ve seen the idea of “perfectibility” crop up in politics is in law enforcement. The liberal approach is that most crime is a result of crippling poverty and lack of real, legitimate opportunities; liberals believe most people who commit crimes can be rehabilitated through counseling, retraining, etc., and become productive members of society. In other words, under a certain set of circumstance, any given person could turn into a criminal, and under a different set of circumstances, that same person can become a leader and role model. (
Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that crime is a result of personal flaws and that most criminals are inherently bad people–evil, lazy, stupid, whatever. The only logical approach, then, is to isolate these people from society and forget about them. On the flip side, rich and powerful people earned their wealth and power through hard work, virtue, and talent. No matter the circumstances, good people will always be good and bad people will always be bad.
So a liberal sees a homeless person begging for food and thinks, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” A conservative see the same person and thinks, “Get a job, loser!”
“Perfection must be the goal and any plans that don’t include Perfection as the goal must be considered flawed.”
I love the “all or nothing” mentality. It allows a person to declare victory without fear of failing.
The idea that liberals believe that humans can be perfected is wingnut nonsense, IMO.
I visualize a nation where we could have a pretty nice life. Instead of a place where the robber barons rule us body and mind.
Not perfect, but a place where how people are doing actually matters more than someone shrieking about their bizarre version of the Constitution and their right to endless consumption of manufactured consumer products.
I don’t believe in perfection. I don’t believe that we have stopped enslaving people. I don’t believe that our existence is meaningless. I’m very liberal, although a Democrat only because of the lack of any real alternative.
POOP
Possible fixation:
Either way, he believes that liberts & libs are not really for technocratic authoritarianism, which may be a possible side effect of whatever idiocy he’s babbling for. (The Enlightenment? I’m staying right here in my cabin, it’s raining.)
What Brad hears about leftie ideology is based on “Boy, them Commies are dumb; you can’t change human nature,” reasoning (not thought, reasoning) that stems from “The New Socialist Man” & other such early Soviet hoo-hah, wherein enough to eat & reasonable living/working conditions would, it was assumed or hoped, stop people from being the hideous murderous primates & assholes we are. Dorkmasters, too.
“Fairly” meaningless? Too much credit given.
A huge part of my identity of a liberal is embracing human imperfection. We think human society can be bettered by humans in spite of our imperfection (actually a recurrent theme I keep seeing in liberalism is that many of those supposedly imperfections are actually blessings in disguise). Basically, we’re trying to broker a compromise between individual freedoms and a betterment of living conditions on a societal level (which since it outright undermines the total autonomy of the individual that conservatives love, often gets called a loss of individuality).
Basically, in the few instances where we do even vaguely approach transhumanism, it’s on a completely different scale (social rather than individual) and usually only expressed in the vaguest of ways (people probably shouldn’t smoke, buying organic/local/fair trade is better, maybe some of your income beyond a point should go automatically to helping others, etc).
Oooh, lookit that bastard Cid. Just look! Bet that commie weren’t even watchin’ football, but thinkin’ & stuff!
If humans do it, it’s human – if you want transhumanism, wait for the aliens.
They mean moral and political perfection, Brad; not physical perfection. They think *we think* in response to James Madison’s statement that if “men were angels, government would not be necessary,” we say that good government will make men angels.
Share, smile on your brother, everybody get together and try to love another — it’s human nature to resist that. We don’t like that resistance; they do. That’s what alll this is about.
The transhumanist physical perfection angle is new and weird and suspiciously like some dubious philosophical rider tacked onto a long standing and accepted argumentative bill.
Well, that wasn’t very funny.
Maybe if you had a photo of a robo-babe on the toilet…
Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that crime is a result of personal flaws and that most criminals are inherently bad people–evil, lazy, stupid, whatever. The only logical approach, then, is to isolate these people from society and forget about them.
Unless their crimes further Republican goals and they come to Jesus, then they get a radio show and a lucrative place on the speakers circuit.
On the flip side, rich and powerful people earned their wealth and power through hard work, virtue, and talent. No matter the circumstances, good people will always be good and bad people will always be bad.
Explains “country club prisons,” too, doesn’t it? Even when they’re “bad” they’re not BAD.
I’ve been among liberals my whole life and I’ve never heard anyone promote “perfecting” people. Just anecdotal evidence, but enough for me to say WTF?
many leftists saw society as the entity which was more perfectible
Yes. And “perfectible” implies improvement, which is to say change, as opposed to a lack of change, which is known as “conservatism.” Conserving wildlife and habitat is good, because we want those things to not go away. Conserving society as it is today is bad, because we want things to be better.
My new career: primers. See Dick fuck over his employees. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Your “make them marginally less sucky” is their “perfectable”.
I think there was a typo in the original;
Third, while most tra-i-nshumanists are liberal democrats,
The guy has got a beef with Duncan Black.
It’s the difference between the value of a human versus what value can be placed on a human. The conservatives (oppressors) view humans (not-conservative ones) as bothersome necessities, to be used and discarded as needed. The liberals realize humans are just humans, too. The conservatives strive to de-humanize others, the paradox is that they must first lose their own humanity to embrace that construct. Therein lies the rub. Bring on the robots, dammit!
Tris:
Unless their crimes further Republican goals and they come to Jesus, then they get a radio show and a lucrative place on the speakers circuit.
Exactly. Since wealthy conservatives are wealthy because they are good, they can’t do anything bad. See how nicely that works out? It’s the same impulse as “if the president does it, it’s not illegal”.*
It always struck me as a very melodramatic view of the world: you know who the good guys are because they wear white hats, so you don’t have to bother your beautiful mind thinking about what they are actually doing and whether those actions would be considered “good” or not. Likewise, you can just round up all the people wearing black hats and ship them off to Gitmo, because they are obviously terrorists.
It would be more accurate, I think, to say that “liberal” philosophy believes that every other human being is exactly as perfectible as I am…which would mean that I have to deal with the same flaws and potential for weakness as every other human being. In other words, I’m not inherently superior to everyone else.
It’s a bit of a rhetorical trickery: to conservatives, the statement “Human beings are not perfectible” seems to mean “Other people cannot be perfected because they are flawed, and I cannot be perfected because I am already perfect.”
*You see the same thing in the media narratives: because Republicans are better than Democrats on national security issues, we know that any action taken by a Republican administration will automatically be better than any action of a Democratic administration even if they are the exact same actions! Republicans can be forgiven for cheating on their spouses because everyone knows they support the sanctity of marriage. Ad nauseum.
Is it clear that by “liberal” the writer means it in the modern American political sense. Because there’s other meanings of “liberalism.” I notice it says “liberal democrats” not “liberal Democrats.”
“Gattica” is on the best conservative movie list because a lot of conservatives think that it represents the liberal dream. I am completely befuddled by this.
“Gattica” is on the best conservative movie list because a lot of conservatives think that it represents the liberal dream. I am completely befuddled by this.
…”picking at a scab”
wha?
“I’m not perfect just forgiven”
is the classic Christian-conservative bumpersticker.
Which, of course, is the handy-dandy get out of jail free card for all manner of “imperfections.” And conveniently, this does not apply to any non-believing fellow human.
Conservative Christians hate evolution, but the fact is, this “freebie” “no consequences” aspect of their belief system is THE selective advantage they historically had over all other cults. And one reason their competitors went extinct.
I would love to have instead been watching football but my very non-socialist, imperfected, sub-humanist job gets in the way.
wha?
….well, if I have to explain it!……
“Liberals believe in the perfectibility of man” is right-wing hyperbole that allows them to:
1) dismiss ALL calls for social improvement, since they’re expressions of the basic (“naive,” “socialistic,” etc.) liberal mindset;
2) glory in their fundamental obliviousness and psychological ignorance about themselves, their spouses, their children, and everyone around them. Cf. number 1: if improving is predicated on “perfection,” they’re allowed to sneer at it. The idea of Dick Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Phyllis Schlafly, or any of the other right gorgons voluntarily going into therapy, and having to confront their most fundamental assumptions and fears, is sheer science fiction. But then, that’s where the ranks of the right come from. Conservatism is the political philosophy of existential cowards. You heard it here first.
3) flaunt their Christian religiosity, since that kind of “perfection” is unnecessary once you have J.C.
My god, if conservatives couldn’t spend their time looking upon those who were given some choice and made the wrong decision and thus able to be pronounced upon as morally failing, what would they do?
If I didn’t have to listen to one or another asshole small business owner tell me a million stories about somebody else or this guy they know who coulda saved up their money but now blew it and are miserable, resource draining failures, what would they talk about?
…what would they talk about?
Sarah Palin?
Brad, I love you.
Any other Neal Stephenson fans out there? I’m reminded of the secretary of Epiphyte Corp., who described herself on census forms as “trans-racial” (I’m paraphrasing, because my copy of Cryptonomicon is currently on loan for the third or fourth time). In fact, she was “trans-” just about every measure of human demographic, and what she was not “trans-“, she was “post-“.
Half or so of Saint Say-ruh’s schtick is that same sneering looking down upon and judging the morally inferior (i.e., those who chose to be librul ayleet latte sippin’ fags instead of good helicopter run-tired wolf shooters).
If Say-ruh didn’t spend so much time talking about how she’s a Real American who made the right moral choices unlike all the librul and weak-willed people who chose to be blah blah blah, she’d spend even more painful seconds blankly staring into the camera with nothing to say.
..staring into the camera with nothing to say.
…………….
http://www.sina.com
In fact, she was “trans-” just about every measure of human demographic, and what she was not “trans-”, she was “post-”.
..of course, you realize that “trans-” and “post-” really mean “not poor uneducated worthless not-like-us-“
Half or so of Saint Say-ruh’s schtick is that same sneering looking down upon and judging the morally inferior
And the other half is resentment that somewhere some “elistist” is looking down on HER for her poor education, her tacky clothes, her redneck husband, her meth-smoking kid, her pregnant daughter.
Together they’re a powerfully toxic combination.
I have no complaint with the point of the post. Well said.
Although, you know what “anointing” means, right?
Because, um… how shall I put this?
“Eewwwww”.
Oh “by virtue of”, never mind.
WTF is a transhumanist? I didn’t trust the shorter (not that there was any) much to my sorrow, went and read the damn thing.
Technology will make better human beings of us all? Yeah, sounds pretty Heinlein to me (Heinlein in his really unpretty rightwing phase. )
OT entirely – I’m making garlic mushrooms tonight – the kind they used to sell in jars at the Renaissance Fair here – take about six packages of whole mushrooms, two sticks of butter, a 48 ounce box of good chicken broth of your choice, a WHOLE JAR of chopped garlic like from Spice World, snip in one of those little plastic packs of chives, dump it all in a Crockpot or other stockpot of your choice, cook it till it’s good and hot and simmering a bit, and wait for bliss – or a heart attack, whichever comes first.
With all that butter, bliss and the heart attack could both come at the same time. :):):) But yummmmm.
Transhumanism – yeah I have to agree, sounds uneasily like eugenics to me.
Well, thank you for that. I keep hearing from right wingers how liberals believe in human perfectibility too, and I’m like where the fuck did that come from? On top of which, right wing ideology seems to suppose human perfectibility more than left wing does, the right wingers are the ones harping on the magic of free market fairies and de-regulation and how everyone will do the right thing when the bottom line motivates them to do so.
And you know, we’re not all motivated by profit alone. We’re fucked up creatures motivated by revenge and jealousy and sex and not enough time at the tit as an infant and all sorts of other things.
So .. don’t know where I was going with this but such are my thoughts.
SB – those of us without adding machines for hearts are motivated by revenge and jealousy and sex – our corporate masters – not so much.
Good thoughts.
My view is more cynical: most right-libertarians know full well what the outcomes in their ideal system would be. They just think they won’t be affected by the negative outcomes and those who are deserve it somehow.
…free market fairies and de-regulation and how everyone will do the right thing when the bottom line motivates them to do so… vs original sin Oh! the disconnect!
Linnaeus:
What you said. Exactly. These bastards don’t care about global warming because they think they’ll have the luxurious bunker to protect them. They don’t care about angry mobs because they’re sure that gated community will keep them out.
It’s not that conservatives think that give the right free market and deregulatory context people would act better. It’s that people who did act correctly would be more rewarded, and the people who acted less correctly would be more brutally, painfully, deliciously punished. And their suffering would be well deserved. And also delicious again.
They also hate the notion of global warming because it suggests there are some sort of systemic limits on what unregulated capitalism could be allowed to get away with. Therefore it’s communist, whatever them dang faggit scientist pointy head types say.
Funny because JC himself had quite a bit to say about self-righteous greedy hypocrites who justify their behavior by looking down upon others. And it wasn’t very nice. I guess they really aren’t followers of Christ in any meaningful sense, then, are they?
It’s like you’re my soulmate or something, at least outlook-wise.
My take on it (not yet having read the comments so apologies for what will inevitably turn out to be a repetition of what someone or several someones have already said) is that liberalism is a response to the facts as you outlined them in that passage. We are fucked-up creatures who fuck up frequently; the goal of liberalism is to both reduce the number of fuck-ups and to put in place programs, safety nets, or what have you so that the inevitable fuck-ups which we do not prevent (a whole lot of them) do not necessarily have to wreak havoc and bring down disaster on both the individual(s) who fucked up and society in general.
Liberalism is a response to the realities of the human condition. We fuck up. A lot, or as I like to say, “there’s way too much stupid in this world for all of it to have come about by just the efforts of the stupid people.” Conservatism (and libertarianism) are by contrast denials of the human condition. One focuses on mitigating ill effects of fuck ups; the other is solely dedicated to meting out punishment for the inevitable and succeeds only at amplifying the ill effects of fuck ups. One accepts and shows compassion towards the imperfectibility of human beings; the other demands perfection – or else.
…in any meaningful sense…
meaningful=self-justifying? well, one can pick and choose, n’est-ce pas?
got as far as glibertarian dorkmaster and careened off into the ditch laughing.
But screw Plato, it’s all his fault.
Becoming perfect robot people is one good approach. Another would be to be like a whole bunch of comic book superheroes. That would be awesome.
Maybe “transhumanism” covers a wider spectrum of philosophies than I’m aware of, but all it brings to my mind is people like Ray Kurzweil, who think that technology will soon allow the exact state of one’s brain to be scanned and downloaded into a computer, so you can “live forever.” A copy of you is living forever, that is—I don’t quite see what good this does YOU, still stuck in this body that’s going to die, but that’s just me.
It also has something to do with the processing power of machine intelligence surpassing the total of living human brains, and technological development going exponential as machines improve themselves—the “Singularity.” I think a lot of these people are glibertarian assholes, as several people have said upthread, but some of them are just in denial that these developments, even IF they occur, will only benefit the super-rich. They think it will somehow “trickle down” to everybody. The Stallman-type freetards have a lot in common with them, in that they think physical artifacts will be replaced by software, which should be free and infinitely reproducible, because they’re “just bits.”
The canard about “Liberals” believing in human perfectibility is from a mid-19th-century definition of “Liberal.” In those days, the Liberals believed that the lower orders could be raised up to live the same kind of life as the middle class, if they could be purged of all their bad habits—primarily drinking and sex, and spend all their time singing hymns while working in the mill.
The Conservatives didn’t believe any of that—they didn’t WANT the lower orders to improve themselves, to begin with, they believed it was impossible anyway, because “A leopard can’t change its spots,” and they genuinely thought it was cruel to try to deprive the masses of what few miserable enjoyments they had.
In this country, the pre-Civil War Democrats were actually the conservative party, believing politics was for the wealthy, and the only legitimate source of wealth was land ownership. They cemented their power in the big cities by buying the votes of the immigrant masses with beer and circuses. The Whigs, and later the Republicans, tried to bring in something like classical Liberalism, but the country probably wasn’t sufficiently industrialized yet.
The classical Liberals died out at the end of the 19th century to be replaced by Labour in the UK, and the “liberals” as we know them here. They made a tremendous comeback with the Thatcherite/Reaganite revolution, and we are now living in the Classical Liberal paradise. It’s really amazing that modern Conservatives don’t even realize that the philosophy they’re trying to tar the “Liberals” with is their own!
Conservatives are what someone once called “Panglossian optimists” – that “this” (whatever this is) is the best that can be, the best of all worlds, and if that is good for you, fight to preserve it because whatever changes it will be worse for you.
As for liberals, we’re a mess, because all we have in common is a desire to use rationalism and empiricism in order to pursue a better world for the greatest number. So we disagree all the time about what those means are, and how to accomplish this. The world is complex and we often come to different answers about stuff in the sea of conflicting evidence and theories, and where we can agree on a few things and implement meaningful policy, it tends to work pretty well and be better than what it replaced.
What unites the right is their common agreement to say “fuck it, it will never be fixed, so let’s just make sure I get my share”, which is much easier since “do nothing” is easier to rally around than say, affirmative action or single payer health care.
Um, entirely OT, but this is my new favorite Internet thing EVAR.
Werner Herzog interprets and reads Curious George.
“Back in society, even an unspoiled mind like George’s cannot resist human materialism. He decides he must have the balloons. The saying goes, ‘curiosity killed the cat.’ In this tale, it seems we might substitute cat with monkey.”
A copy of you is living forever
…God forbid!
I guess they really aren’t followers of Christ in any meaningful sense, then, are they?
Jesus or Jeezus?
Oh, we’re quite perfectible … but that pesky humanity keeps getting in the way.
I CAN HAZ TENTACLEZ & EYEBALL-LAZERZ NAU PLZ?
I think that progressive & regressive are much better terms than liberal & conservative – one group says “this sucks – let’s make stuff better than it was before” while the other says “this sucks – let’s make stuff better like it was before.”
For instance, in the US of A it’s been proven repeatedly that “liberals” are fiscal conservatives (see budget surpluses versus deficits for details) & espouse explicit conservatism toward the environment, aka the entire bloody planet … while “conservatives” are notoriously liberal with other people’s money & civil rights, & liberally expand government (Abracadabra: DHS!) whenever they get into power.
As for “perfectability” I think in contemporary terms that comes down to whether liberals believe in the tabula rasa or that to some extent human behaviour is influenced by genetics. For me, the evidence is pretty clear that genes play a significant role, but that still leaves a lot of room for nurture to influence outcomes.
Still, it does mean that “perfectability” at the individual level is not really achievable. We’re always going to be human animals that like to fuck people we shouldn’t and eat too much sugar, but we can certainly craft a society that dampens the worst of these desires or channels them into something useful or at least not harmful. Humans are imperfect, but rationalism and empiricism can show that we’re predictably imperfect, which means that policy can compensate for our collective fuckery. We’re all different as individuals, but there are averages and tendencies that are significant enough to matter such that the occasional extreme aberration isn’t going to fuck up the system if the incentives are targeted at the fattest part of the curve.
Why worry about perfect when we can’t even manage better?
And re: transhumanism: Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition is a good primer. And funny as hell.
If I didn’t have to listen to one or another asshole small business owner tell me a million stories about somebody else or this guy they know who coulda saved up their money but now blew it and are miserable, resource draining failures
Saved up the money they earned by starting a small business? Don’t a lot of those fail a little bit?
Um, entirely OT, but this is my new favorite Internet thing EVAR.
Thanks, Loneoak.
Yeah, us liberals are the good two shoes of the political/social thinkers. We get our panties all in a knot when people are tortured, when their are ghettos and slavery and governments that sanction human slaughter.
We are humanists, we believe in humans’ ability to take responsibility for themselves and their actions by being aware of their baser tendencies and using their intellect and conscience to overcome them.
We believe we could actually find a utopian existence from what exists on the planet NOW and that all that is required is the acceptance of the higher forms of our nature and a commitment to not screw with the rest.
Transhumanists on the other hand, are self hating anti-humanists who believe that they can, by the use of technology, improve their existence and the world around them.
They somehow miss the vital elements of our existence and what hundreds of years of technology has given us when we fail to see ourselves as simply one piece of the planet and not as the Dominator Redux for the planet.
As one seemingly repellent trans-fan said in the comments:
“I think the idea that “superlative technocentricity” performs an anti-democratic ideological function, that promising techno-fixes for social problems can be used to distract from immediate social needs and injustices, is a strawman invented by intellectually dishonest idiots to support their thought policing attitude, and should not be taken seriously. On the contrary, I think it is perfectly possible to be a technoprogressive social activist focused on here-and-now AND a transhumanist, or if you prefer a “superlative technocentric”, and it is easy to remember which hat is more appropriate to the situation at hand.”
In other words, he’s just fine with bringing ma’s casserole to the UU church potluck to listen to missionary work and give his five dollars to the cause, talk to some avowed pagans and whatever, then go back to his hovel in the ma’s basement to play World of War Craft or that alternative reality “game” where people design their own alternative identity and live in an alternative universe, for a fee, until time for bed to get up for work tomorrow.
I CAN HAZ TENTACLEZ & EYEBALL-LAZERZ NAU PLZ?
Nipple lasers are where it’s at: http://gizmodo.com/5449454/nipple-lasers-nple-lazrz
The Enlightenment — yer doin’ it wrong, transhumanist dude.
I thought he meant the magazine…
I eagerly await the author’s forthcoming pointyhead-counterpointyhead debate with the former president of the World Cis-humanist Association.
Nipple lasers are where it’s at
Hey, you could poke someone’s eye out!
Transhumanism is NOT eugenics. One believes humans can exceed themselves and the other believes /some/ humans are better than others.
No, they are inherently so similar as to make the definition “same” pretty applicable.
I mean eugenics believed that with science, people could be made better. And in transhumanism they believe — wait a minute — that science could make people better.
The real difference I see is that the first seeks to do such without the consent of the party receiving the science. They also tend to view the existing world as the framework from and within which they will work.
Transhumanists seek to use science to supersede their human frailities, instead of fixing them, they just wish to selectively enhance and improve, sort of like eugenics I’d say, but far more ego centric, in that transhumanists are very much about individual, consensual transformation and experience and less concerned about efforts toward mass transformation.
What is also scary about the transhumanists is that some seem to envision a universe controlled by technology that rules over them, with of course, their best interests at heart — programmed in I presume.
They tend to view the world and humanity from a very patriarchal and primitive frame of being ego centric, controlling and hierarchy.
Eugenics functioned out of the limitations and faults of patriarchal hierarchy, but I don’t think celebrated it, they just could not see the forest for the trees and thus became the embodiment all of that they wished to overcome in humankind.
…humans can exceed themselves
Let us know when you have the metrics sorted out.
Way, way back when, when I was a teenager (back in the dark ages), I said something cynical to my dad, who pointed out that wandering barbarian tribes used to wipe out whole towns for the sheer pleasure of it, the Chinese used to consider it a classy thing to bind the feet of their upper-class women (They stopped when Westerners saw that and said “Eew!”), and the description of Athenian troops getting brutalized after the unsuccessful battle of Syracuse is a real stomach-churner.
Nah, the worst century mankind has ever experienced has to be the 1300s. Anyone who wants to say this is the worst time ever ought to read Barbara Tuchman’s book on that century. It’ll make you very happy you’re a 21st Century person.
Yes, you’re right, mankind may not be perfectible, but it’s safe to say things are a bit better now than they were before.
An elderly employer, to comfort me, once showed me a book on ancient civilizations that she looked through when she felt like the world was going to hell in a hand basket. The Chinese had recipes for small children. Strangely comforting, hey.
I see what you did there.
It’s basically the same barely-worth-mentioning distinction which separates artistic body piercing from female genital mutilation. Or a good roll in the hay from aggravated rape.
I, for one, welcome our new, trans-post-cis-human masters!
As long as we’re toasting conservative canards, can we please get some beatdown on the “Law of Unintended Consequences”?
I have a hard time deciding whether Merton’s original construction was useful or banal: that concerted social action undertaken to achieve a result may also yield unforeseen results — “unintended consequences” — and that ultimately, these may be far more consequential (for good or ill) than any desired, intended outcomes of the social action; they may even subvert the desired outcome of that action entirely.
In the hands of conservatives, this becomes a vaguely academic-sounding all-purpose defense of the status quo: it’s unwise to try to solve any large-scale social problem, as unintended consequences inevitably both will render any such effort ineffective, and create even more problems than obtain under the status quo.
There’s a number of distortions of Merton here. First, Merton never guaranteed unintended consequences. They might arise; on the other hand, concerted social action having some element of risk might simply succeed or fail according to how those risks play out, without unintended consequences arising.
Second, following this, if unintended consequences arise, this does not necessarily mean that the intended, desired consequences of the social action will not be achieved according to plan. Any unintended consequences that arise might be inconsequential with respect to achievement of the desired result; the plan might still work anyway. (And as noted, since unintended consequences are not guaranteed, the social action might simply work according to plan, full stop.)
Third, unintended consequences might be beneficial! And so forth.
But what I most want to scream, as conservative commentators go on about this topic so very pleased with themselves, is this: INACTION ALSO HAS UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES! The unremediated status quo is itself a large-scale social plan. Large-scale, negative, unforeseen consequences of “doing nothing” are everywhere in evidence as we survey the financial and economic crises of the last several years, for fucks sake.
Holy purple buttfucking Jesus, how stupid are these people?
In conclusion, I hate that shit, and I want you all to hate it, too. Also.
INACTION ALSO HAS UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES!
I know it’s time to go to sleep when I hear Rush (“if you do not decide you still have made a choice” or something like that). Discussing right-wing fantasies is hard enough without reliving 1982.
OT but an excellent description of just about every troll who’s ever darkened the doorstep of Sadly, No! from Saul to Iris to the many faces of Truthy.
http://www.cracked.com/funny-3809-internet-argument-techniques/
While it is true that everyday cruelty and horror has been reduced overall — the thumbscrew is no longer business as usual, for example — technology compensates for that. In the wrong direction.
You can’t consider the 20th century without taking into account the First World War and the Second World War. There is no slaughter in history that even comes close.
The T’ai P’ing Rebellion was the bloodiest civil war in history—probably the second bloodiest war after WWII, although some people deny even that.
As usual, Harry Flashman is the go-to authority.
transhumanism
something new to ignore
I recall vividly Flashy’s description of the trashing of the Chinese Summer Palace. And we thought the museum in Baghdad was a crime against culture.
Nevertheless, the 20th century can’t be beat — here are the “top” 30 massacres:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/atrox.htm
This is, BY FAR, teh stoopidisest post and thread I’ve ever read on your normally awesome website. Trans-humanism is defined in the comments as “an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities.” Then the commenter says this sounds like eugenics. Good god! If technological improvement is eugenics then so are; antibiotics, blood pressure cuffs, exercise bicycles, Paxil, and – this is the part that blows my mind – BOOKS!! Books are a technology that often attempt to improve our characteristics and capacities! I guess I have to remind you that eugenics is defined as, “the study of methods of improving genetic qualities by selective breeding.” Trans-humanists want to improve the people who are actually born, while eugenicists want to improve society BY DECIDING WHO SHOULD BE BORN.
Yeah, we have a lot to be proud of…problem with bringing this up with the Party of Confederate Treason is that they still consider Sherman’s March to the Sea the greatest “atrocity” in History.
if humanity keeps on improving through science at the rate it has been, pretty soon there’ll be nothing left but cockroaches
Then there’d be a health-care system driven solely by money.
the problem with eugenics is, what is your idea of ‘good’
I see a lot of stupid in here too. Transhumanists are just cyberpunks who take themselves seriously.
It is not eugenics to want a digital video storage in your head, or to have 12 fingers, or to be able to see heat or hear microwaves. To call cybernetics eugenics is just pretty fucking stupid, really. I’m sorry.
We already do all kinds of shit to our bodies in the name of survival and expression. Replacing or adding parts for functionality or sensation or appearance is just something that is going to happen.
Let us know when you have the metrics sorted out.
measurement has never been my friend.
The Chinese had recipes for small children.
Zombiez have always been with us. I mean you.
The Chinese had recipes for small children.
umm, wouldn’t recipes for LARGE children have been more effective?
I know it’s time to go to sleep when I hear Rush
THEY CALL ME THE WORKING MAN
I GUESS THAT’S WHAT I AM.
To further torment N_____BBBBB:
…. wandered home though silent streets
And fell into a fitful sleep
Escape to realms beyond the night
Dream can’t you show me the light?
It is not eugenics to want a digital video storage in your head,
my attempts to install my iPod in my skull have been notably unsuccessful.
…and kind of messy.
wow, that’s a lot of zombie for one thread. Maybe I didn’t hear the Zombocalypse Call?
Well, shit, you’d expect somebody would still be up besides me. But since that seems to not be the case, here’s some Fuckin Kansas:
Cast this shadow long that I may hide my face
And in this cloak of darkness the world I will embrace
In all that I endure, of one thing I am sure
Knowledge and reason change like the season
A jester’s promenade
Lying at my feet I see the offering you bring
The mark of Cain is on our faces, borne of suffering
O, I long to see you say it’s not been wrong
I stand before you now, a riddle in my song
The answer is that sweet refrain
Unheard it always will remain
Beyond our reach, beyond our gain
Take THAT, you retro-humanists.
And some BOC:
I am becalmed
Lost to nothing
Warm weather and
Holocaust
Left to die by two good friends
Abandoned me and put to sleep
Left to die by two good friends
Tears of god flow as I bleed
Never mind digital storage space in your head.
What about digital storage in your PENIS?
If iPods keep getting smaller it might become feasible, but unlike ZRM I’ve never gotten it up to try.
What, you want me to post Cheap Trick Lyrics? Or Journey?
or Styx?
I’ll do it. Zombie, after all.
well, look M, I love music, but I ain’t gonna fuck my ipod.
If that doesn’t hit 3Bulls words of wisdom, I’m giving up.
and by “giving up” i mean “being even more annoying”
True, I guess the interface would be a little awkward.
But it isn’t any more eugenic than wanting 12 fingers, or being able to see light or hear microwaves.
Look, I don’t want “Sex Dwarf” blaring out from the groinal regions when I’m trying to get busy.
being able to see light
unless I’m mistaken, we can usually already do that.
Wow, a typo.
I guess I really do need some sleep now.
not a failing of zombeez
The only ones up at this hour are zombies and freight-dogs*
*That’s what airline pilots call us night freight haulers.
Nah, the worst century mankind has ever experienced has to be the 1300s. Anyone who wants to say this is the worst time ever ought to read Barbara Tuchman’s book on that century. It’ll make you very happy you’re a 21st Century person
yeah, it was pretty shitty round about then. Just read “World Without End”, which is based roundabout that time, and it was a shitty, shitty time. Particularly if you were poor, a woman, or just travelling to market on the wrong day. And if you were caught stealing shit form the cathedral…… just don’t go there….
I’m going to be a different sort of skeptic, in that I just don’t think there’s anything which counts as any sort of ‘movement’ for transhumanism. There are actual scientists and researchers who regularly produce results which could have impacts on human existence, and they in no way depend on any “transhumanism” movement to do so.
ZRM:
There’s no swimming in the heavy water / nor singing in the acid rain
There are actual scientists and researchers who regularly produce results which could have impacts on human existence, and they in no way depend on any “transhumanism” movement to do so.
But imagine how much more productive they would be if they had 12 fingers (each) and the ability to see farts.
If they’re bad enough, you’ll think you could see them. Even have to cut through them with a machete.
And aren’t a lot of these libertaritard types who not only think about and write about (like science fiction types have for generations) but actually think they have a ‘philosophy’ or movement about this potential bio/cyber tech, etc., the same ones who bitch and moan about having to follow any additional steps or rules or procedures imposed by current technologies and their limits?
Let’s confuse them.
Let’s start a faux ‘dissident’ transhumanist breakoff movement which proposes that, yes, we dedicate ourselves to moving beyond the limits of our existing humanity, but that the fruits of these transhumanist labors first go to the poorest and most exploited of our world. Hee hee.
Let’s start a faux ‘dissident’ transhumanist breakoff movement which proposes that, yes, we dedicate ourselves to moving beyond the limits of our existing humanity, but that the fruits of these transhumanist labors first go to the poorest and most exploited of our world.
Won’t work. The wingnuts think their victims, so they’ll call first dibs. And I don’t want to live in a world where Sarah Palin has tentacles. (Or, as my spell-checker suggested, testicles.)
Well, if “poorest” and “most exploited” aren’t specific enough, let’s say “third world,” “indigenous”, and “economically impoverished”. Or just be crazy specific and say “Haitians”. There you go. No transhumanism movement for all of us until all Haitians are eternally living super robot people!
El Cid is hitting on my objection to cybernetics. The benefits of such technology will only exacerbate the existing economic and status gap between rich and poor. Once you start creating a mechanically altered race of rich jerks who can see farts and crush beer cans by thought, how much harder will it be to raise their taxes and ensure others benefit from this sort of thing?
You already see the fringes of this in Olympic sports, where people like Michael Phelps not only have far better training facilities and coaching than atheletes from poorer countries, he has a fancy $10,000 swimsuit which shaves an extra second off his times which few others can afford. It’s bullshit, and it’s why olympic medal counts really closely map to a country’s economic status. The G20 take almost all the medals.
What, like every other scientific advance in the history of mankind? Oh noes.
What’s also funny, and by “funny” I mean annoying and tiring yet still ridiculous, is how I’ve encountered a number of these ‘transhumans’ (i.e., people who openly support these technological enhancements etc. of humans ideologically) — thankfully mostly on the internet, a couple of times in the meat world — who actually view themselves as some sort of band of noble dissidents, a persecuted (including ignored) minority of the better philosophied…
At times even they seem to convince themselves, much like someone lost in Federation / Klingon simulation or whatever alternate reality game, that they somehow already are better than the rest of us because they desire a post-human future. I.e., I favor becoming a super-cyber-robot person someday, therefore I somehow already am superior to all the rest of you keeping your thoughts about the nature of humankind to yourselves.
And all of these for the weirdeologues comes back to consumerist fetish culture — not, how can we improve human life for everyone, but how can I be among the first to possess laser farts and thus even more greatly sneer at the prole inferiors among us.
Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire covered a lot of this ground. He used the term Post-Human instead of Transhuman.
The movie Code 46. works through some of the implications of a world based on genetic determinism and the access to ‘coverage’ that results. And it has on of the most fucked up sex scenes in all of filmdom.
I think we’re going to plunge right in to cyborg life without so much as a look back. Kurzweil’s logic of technological progress is pretty hard to argue with. Who are we going to appeal to to limit the merging humans and machines? God?
laser farts
Research funded by a consortium of trouser and jeans manufacturers.
Shit, many of these right wing shitbags are already in opposition to any effort to develop the best of our human nature already. They don’t want the best of human nature to be developed and emphasized. They just want miserable, greedy shitbags such as themselves to be able to buy superpowers and to be able to concentrate entirely on their own masturbatory interests and leave humanity in only the amount and type of maximal suffering which suffices for their personal entertainment.
By the way, you can’t help education by throwing money at it, but we really need to devote a lot more resources to developing brain superchips that rich people can buy to live in a virtual dream world.
Shit, many of these right wing shitbags are already in opposition to any effort to develop the best of our human nature already. They don’t want the best of human nature to be developed and emphasized. They just want miserable, greedy shitbags such as themselves to be able to buy superpowers and to be able to concentrate entirely on their own masturbatory interests and leave humanity in only the amount and type of maximal suffering which suffices for their personal entertainment.
They believe in zero-sum technological improvement. In order for them to have their laser farts and cyborg girlfriends, the rest of us have to eat shit. If improvement was socialized they might not get anything better than, say a better quality of life and a few more years of it.
I think we are missing the bib picture here. Think this a bit further.
Any such technology would first be used in military, meaning some sort of supersoldiers. None of the wingnuts would join military to save their life, so I think they have to wait for the second stage, Adult entertainment.
Now, think (but without too much detail) of all the rightwing bloggers spending all their spare time with their new toys.
Not only would the number of bloggs fall dramatically, but in 40 or 50 years the bloggers would be extinct. It would be great benefit for the gene pool. Not in our life time, perhaps, but the following generations would praise us.
Well, the Internet may have been developed in a military industrial complex content, but that 2nd stage — pr0n — didn’t take a long time in following.
Second, what I felt like was being emphasized here was not so much the impacts of these bio-cyber-virtua-tech possibilities on the world, and how they’d likely work out, but the propensity for a band of gliberdouches to pretend that they’re part of some transhumanist revolutionary front, and why.
That Thing With The Stuff:
(Nice nym.)
I feel ya, brother. Add this: liberals are trying to repair the unintended consequences of previous conservative policies. (To the extent that they really were unintended.)
Every new technology follows a predictable pattern: First, it is developed and implemented by the military, and quickly adapted to industrial use. The first domestic application is marketed to the elite rich, which is then sought as a status symbol by the merely well-to-do. Eventually it becomes widely available to the middle class and finally to everyone, at which point it ceases to be a luxury, and comes to be regarded as a necessity. Think telephones, automobiles, computers, cell phones, etc. Things like physical enhancements, brain programming “wet-wear” and cybernetic implants will probably follow this pattern. Our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will learn about what life was like back before people had laser fart capabilities, and wonder how we managed to live at all.
Just in time, the Guardian‘s Charlie Brooker on augmented reality:
Well, there are some crap arguments coming from both sides. Transhumanism isn’t eugenics by any means, but neither does having contact lenses or an artificial hip, say, make you “transhuman” by any reasonable meaning of the term.
The end goal of transhumanism is to achieve a state in which you can achieve ultimate control over the nature of your personal existence or consciousness by replacing your body’s biological systems with technology that you can then manipulate as you please. The usual mechanism by which this is supposed to be achieved is usually nanotechnology, which has assumed the place in futurists’ thoughts that atomic energy did in the mid-twentieth century: as a sort of magic fairy-dust that will automagically solve all the world’s problems by being sprinkled over them. (Genetic engineering is still a strong second place, although it’s lost a bit of its luster, and your hard-core transhumanists see it as an interim solution, at best, because it’s still meat-based.)
When this is all supposed to go down varies from transhumanist to transhumanist. Hans Moravec, who coined the term “bush robot” (luckily, it’s not what you think; he’s referring to a nanotech transhuman with fingers that can manipulate matter on an atomic scale), thinks that this technology will be available in about a half century, and your believers in the technological singularity, aka the Eschaton or The Real End Of History, We Mean It This Time, Honest, have previously pegged this event occuring in 2012 (the late druggie guru Terence McKenna nailed it down to December 21, 2012), although the belief that this technological Jubilee will happen in less than three years’ time has been somewhat dampened by the realization that technology is nowhere near that advanced; hell, AT&T can’t even get a decent 3G network going. But you still have some people saying that they’re not saving for retirement because gerontology will continue to advance to the point that people will become effectively immortal and, therefore, never retire. In other words, it’s your basic millenarian cult that’s read Transmetropolitan.
You left out the porn angle, Steerpike (VHS, anyone?)
My big takeaway from this article: Professor Hughes has achieved perfection: he is a perfect douche.
Yep. That’s pretty much how I see it.
I don’t know how many times I have gotten into an argument with some non-lefty jackass who tries telling me that I just want the government to take over everything and/or tell everyone how to live.
In reality, I’d just like to live in a society in which tens of thousands don’t die or declare bankruptcy because they get sick … where science and reality trumps religion when it comes to public policy … where businesses are kept in check so they don’t screw over their workers, the environment, and/or our economy … where going to college doesn’t take a lifetime to pay in full … and where every person has equal rights under the law.
That’s not socialism, fascism, communism, totalitarianism, or even perfection.
That’s basic human decency.
And it’s a sad, pathetic commentary about our nation that so many fight so hard against it …
Again, I recommend Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition.
I think a lot of your glibertardian transdouchealists think that “basic human decency” is one of those primitive failures which can soon be edited out our genetic code, so they don’t have to be bothered by those undesired whinings any more.
out of our genetic code
Why would this kind of technology follow a different pattern than the rest of human history? If someone developed something they believed would “improve” humanity for the “greater good”, they’d impose it on the rest of the world with religious zeal. ie, Star Trek’s Borg. Resistance is futile, you’ll be assimilated, etc. Eugenics with advanced technology.
By the way, a lot of these douches squealing about the awesome scientific post-mere human future think that global warming is all made up.
The fuck? How can you claim that it’s something “they” believe in when this very sentiment is expressed right on this blog? Projecting much?
I don’t say this often, but fuck you, you strawman-building asshole.
Prospero:
What, like every other scientific advance in the history of mankind? Oh noes
Uhm, not exactly.
Nobody, and I mean *nobody*, believes humans are basically *unrealistically* decent more than glibertarians. Somalia is not even close to a worst-case scenario on that kind of world. There’s tons of sociopathy waiting to be unleashed, all their “no use of force against anyone” principles being so much happy horseshit.
Nothing proves the ivory-tower spoiled-brattiness of Megan like the fact that she doesn’t understand the whole “raped and beaten to death” outcome of her scenario
And some more technologies that did not primarily benefit the super-rich.
That, of course, is the saving grace of the whole thing. Those folks (the Ole Perfesser comes to mind) have zero real-world impact.
Any thoughtful person, liberal or otherwise, doesn’t buy into the fallacy of human perfection. We do realize, however, that culture progresses, little by little, through education–another way of governing by reason and logic.
Regulating business and financial markets is necessary because we all know that these people, left to the own devices, will steal. They always have and always will. All we can do is apply a set of standards that prevent it, force everyone who wishes to do business to comply, and keep a pistol full of STFU bullets ready to fire at those who really think that industrial revolution era free markets are anything but a modern system of indentured servitude for workers. Bringing the study of human nature into the discussion is a pointless diversion tactic. We should not respond to it.
Littlepig, I for one do not wonder why there are so few female libertarians, and the few that exist seem to like rape. I’m pretty sure “rape” in glibertopia would be a civil tort, with liability payable to the woman’s owner for abusing his property.
Well said, tsam.
I’m pretty sure “rape” in glibertopia would be a civil tort, with liability payable to the woman’s owner for abusing his property.
So Bronze-Age Semites had it right? Who knew?!
Prospero: Fuck me? Fuck you. We’re talking about types like Glenn Fucking Reynolds.
But in general, if you think you’re some sort of a special person because you favor some sort of technological advancements which might improve the human experience — as though everyone else is sitting around with their asses planted firmly on top the nearest sun dial — super extra hearty fuck you.
And if you further combine your weird idiotic fetish of believing that you’re somehow different than all the rest of us rationalists who would prefer humanity to be genuinely improved than giving a bunch of whining Reaganites their cyberjaculatory fantasies NOWWW, with actual libertardian leanings of insane anti-gubmit and pro-supercapitalist fetishism, then whirling in the air and slam down on the pavement fuck you.
Incidentally, I think this is pretty much the fantasy end-state for transhumanists.
They believe in zero-sum technological improvement.
The fuck? How can you claim that it’s something “they” believe in when this very sentiment is expressed right on this blog? Projecting much?
No, asshole, I’m reading with comprehension. Brad’s post:
That’s the exact opposite of zero-sum. He’s saying, and I agree, that things can get better for everyone.
And for the stupid among us – and I mean you – I can claim I know what “they” believe because I’ve read endless screeds from libertarians of all stripes and actually thought about what they mean.
That said I think that human beings do have the ability, after much trial and error and over long periods of time, to make things somewhat less sucky for ourselves. For instance, we eventually figured out that enslaving people was a silly idea. Also, the fact that we now elect people to run our government rather than anointing them by virtue of their father’s sperm? That’s a pretty smart innovation. Ditto things like Social Security and Medicare — it’s good to not have old people dying in the streets.
Or as it was once put “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice”. Somehow that feels like an appropriate way to put things today.
More specifically about Social Security — it’s not just about not having old people dying in the streets. It’s also about not having middle aged people feeling a need to “invest” in order to have enough to retire with the result being a glut of money being allocated to markets producing bubble after bubble while certain populations still don’t have access to capital.
I wonder how all this talk about “fear! fear! you won’t have enough money to retire on unless you invest! invest!” has affected our markets lately? hmmm … perhaps the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?
@ DAS: FWIW, one of the original impulses for Social Security was that the owners and executives of some of the largest supercompanies of the 1920s saw a continued reliance on private pension funds as too expensive and too risky.
The Commander in Chief weighs in;
“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago – “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak -nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
So it’s really going to happen–a Republican will take Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat and kill Obamacare once and for all. So many ironies, so many liberal hopes and dreams dashed on the cold hard rocks of the TEA Party Movement.
Brown is going to win, liberals, and you’re going to try very hard to spin this one–but you won’t be able to. It will be clear after the great Brown victory that conservatives are in the driver’s seat.
What I really love is the fact that Hopey wasted what remains of his political capital trying to defend Coakely.
Brown is going to win, libs, he’s going to kill Obamacare, and you’ll just have to suck it.
Conservatives in the Driver’s Seat said,
Got it bookmarked!
So how nervous are you about Tuesday night, liberals?
You must be shitting your pants right about now. And Ted Kennedy must be spinning around in hell.
Not much better than Kennedy I’m afraid.
Random statement…
Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m tired of conservatives driving it into my seat.
Anyway…
To expand on my earlier rambling; Regulation is a safeguard against human nature. It was never intended to perfect the human, but rather to protect those who are unable to protect themselves. The rational thinker would call that rational thinking.
Not much better than Kennedy I’m afraid.
If you want irony, check out the name of the Officer who busted Bush for DUI.
As people have been saying on this website for months, Obamacare was dead long before this race was an issue you dumb fuck. The only thing Brown has left to kill is Liebermancare.
Tsam, that’s probably the most concisely well put phrase I’ve read in this entire thread, and it pretty much sums up why I’m a Democrat also. Well said.
Should I, perhaps, bookmark this?
It must be nice to be so comfortable while damning Trans-humanists for trying to improve people’s quality of life via technology, but I was on a dialysis machine for 10 years before I got a kidney transplant [for free! Thank You Medicare – which I got not because I was old, but because my kidneys failed]. So let me put it this way: EAT A DICK STRAIGHT UP!
This is something I’ve heard a lot about lefty ideology, that we supposedly think people can be made “perfect” through reasoned governance. That’s not how I really see things. My general view is that we’re never going to be “perfect” in any way, that we’re all deeply flawed and fucked-up creatures and that our lives in and of themselves are fairly meaningless.
I’d expand a bit on this: I think the raison d’etre of progressivism is the understanding that humanity and humans are flawed beings and the quicker we all come to understand and appreciate our differences, and learn to see past them, the quicker we can achieve a more harmonious society.
Which, you’ll note, is diametrically opposite of “transhumanism”.
What the fuck does this technological development, which came out of a long line of health investigation and engineering going back the the Greek and medieval Islamic era have to do with people who write blogs about how awesome it will be when our cyberbeings can live forever?
You’re telling me that transhumanists funded the development of kidney dialysis? Thomas Graham, 19th century chemist and scholar of gas diffusion, was a transhumanist? Anyone who believes in the possible applicability of technologies to improve human existence is a transhumanist? Mobile kidney dialysis centers now make you listen to lectures by Ray Kurzweil or some such?
And someone mocked me for making up a straw man! By this measure, we’re all either simply Luddites or Transhumanists, which seems to do the actual transhumanists, particularly right wing libertarian transhumanists, the favor of defining them so broadly as to make the distinctions meaningless.
What El Cid said. The subjects under consideration are the bizarre and unprovable statements of Prof Hughes in re Transhumanism, not “is technology a good thing?”.
No Transhumanists were used in the development of the dialysis machine, Mr. ESRD recipient.
El Cid,
This long line of ‘technological development’ that you speak of was rooted in the same values that most trans-humanists adhere to today. Trans-humanists believe in using technology to improve our capabilities and characteristics. Try not having functioning kidneys – it’s a characteristic you need to change or you’re gonna die. The problem is that by attacking trans-humanists because they’re using technology to augment people’s ability to thrive and survive, you’re, by extension, attacking doctors and scientists who are trying to do the same thing. I’d suggest you find a better definition of trans-humanist, one that specifically concerns augmenting perfectly healthy people in order to make them better. But before even defining ‘trans-humanism,’ this post criticizes it. It’s not my reasoning that divides people into the binary opposition of Luddite vs Trans-humanist – it’s the stupid logic in the post and subsequent thread.
Anonymous, medicine is great stuff, transhumanism is a fetish arising from it.
But before even defining ‘trans-humanism,’ this post criticizes it.
You’d have a point if this were the first time it had ever been discussed here.
Substance – have you looked up the word Transhumanism?:
“Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable.”
Sounds like science and medicine to me – where’s the distinction?
Now, if you think all trans-humanists want to live forever with their head in a jar, that’s another thing – perhaps we should refer to them as post-humanists. Look at the phrase: ‘involuntary death as unnecessary AND undesirable.’ I guess it’s a problem with the word ‘and’: I think death is undesirable, but I do think it’s necessary.
tigrismus – I didn’t know this blog was like LOST and that if I missed a single post I’d be unable to join the conversation later….
In the use of the word “transhumanism”. If you want to accept that definition, it’s a wholly unnecessary word, but people use it because It’s COOL.
So it either means nothing or it’s a code-word for scary geeks. Pretty obvious that it’s the latter.
Of course you can join the conversation, but maybe hold back on the “you criticize something before you even define it” condemnations. It’s neither true nor constructive.
The problem is that by making the definition of trans-humanism so broad as to encompass every single scientific development throughout human history that has benefited people, you’re, by extension, making the definition completely fucking worthless.
After all, I wear glasses — does that make my ophthalmologist a trans-humanist? What about the six screws and 12 rods holding my lower back together — does that make me a trans-humanist?
Words have meanings you can’t just change because you want to be shielded from criticism.
I missed a single post I’d be unable to join the conversation later….
Are you kidding? I took last week off and had to tithe my annual salary to the Nosians!
Glibertarians are ‘liberal democrats’ too, in that they are at least purportedly in favor of liberal democracy. I think the statement as written is an accurate reference to how self-proclaimed libertarians can cross the line from liberalism to authoritarianism (which is what liberalism is opposed to in this sense, not conservatism).
What about the six screws and 12 rods holding my lower back together — does that make me a trans-humanist?
And what about that vibrator up MY ass? Huh? Transhumanist?
Um…maybe that should have been said in my private voice…
And what about that vibrator up MY ass? Huh? Transhumanist?
So THAT explains why you always sound like you’re talking through a fan!
The government believes in transhumanism and bailed out General Motors so I could use wheels instead of legs. ARE YOU PEOPLE AGAINST CARS?
Lookit me! I’m Transhuman!!!
So, now I’m confused. What definition are we using for trans-humanist? Where has the term been defined?
I found several posts from this site on the subject of Transhumanism, and I went back and read them, they all sort of implicitly suggest that trans-humanists all want to live forever. But no explicit definition. I found and quoted a specific definition:
“Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable.”
Then I looked at the words and suggested that the definition might apply to science and medicine, specifically, keeping people alive on dialysis machines. Basically, the responses I got was “that’s not trans-humanism” apparently because my example doesn’t comply with some person’s own individual understanding of the word/ideology.
Could the definition of trans-humanism quoted above include under its umbrella, science and medicine? I thought so, and I said why.
Then someone wrote:
“Words have meanings you can’t just change because you want to be shielded from criticism.”
Who looked up the meaning of the word, and who relied on their own, idiosyncratic definition of the word?
Basically, religious nutball.
“Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable.”
That’s a self-serving definition. You’re retroactively defining any techological advancement as “trans-humanism”. There’s nothing “Trans” about that, unless you collate “Transhumanism” with the Industrial Revolution.
That kind of reasoning is barely a step above the neo-con syllogism “conservative means good, liberal means bad”.
Frankly, when I see transhumanists discussing ways to make women’s lives easier by implanting wombs in men geeks because they seem more like hens than many modern women (they sit around all day clicking and clucking), then I’ll believe its maybe a little more than a bunch of guys with marshmallow arms and man-boobs duking it out with eachother on discussion boards, imagining they can grow super dicks and supplemental, subservient hot chicks.
Little Pig, that’s the definition of transhumanism I found on the web – can you point to another definition somewhere that won’t be self-serving for me?
Glenn Reynolds to trans-humanism is what Stalin et all were to atheism. Meaning yeah, he’s that, but it’s not all that informs his words and actions. You just let your hatred to completely blind you. You’d seriously rather have all of humanity suffer and die rather then have some people you don’t like to get out of this shitpile before others.
Yet at the same time it’s claimed here that some technological advances are evil because they’ll only benefit super-rich and somehow take from everyone else. That’s definition of zero-sum.
http://www.redstate.com/haystack/2010/01/18/remembering-martin-luther-king-jr/#comment-1456
MLK was a “progressive,” which in those days was code for communist. In his phone call to LBJ a few days after JFK’s assassination he asks if LBJ is going to continue JFK’s progressive agenda and when LBJ says yes, offers his support. Read the second paragraph that Haystack quotes above; that is the vernacular of the anti-American left, the Left that holds America responsible for the whine of the bullets and the blood in the streets. Reagan would never say words like that!
Those of you born in another place and time have no idea how incendiary the “I Have a Dream” speech was to White Southerners. Telling a White Southerner in 1963 that you, a Black man, dreamed of a day in which little Black boys would sit down with little White girls was nothing less than a declaration of war, and Martin Luther King knew that as surely as he knew the Sun would rise in the East. That’s why he said it. As soaring and beautiful as those words are, that was one of the most provacative political speeches ever delivered; it was meant to unleash the dogs of war and it did.
http://community.adn.com/adn/node/105992#comment-22112
I think developing Pebble would be a good thing for the state, but apparently you represent the will of the people in SW AK, so you guys can just hang out there unemployed, sleeping til noon or later, playing lots of bingo, and screwing your daughters; gotta preserve that culture, right? And before you utter your usual RACIST!!! scream, just go read the statistics for that wonderland you’re so proud of. Oh, and I know, they’re white man statistics.
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/01/17/dailykos-short-bus-riders-wants-to-send-martha-coakley-and-me-to-jail/#comment-51485
The heavy union “membership” is in the public sector. The vast majority of those people are union members or fee payers only because somebody in HR told them during their new employee orientation that they had to join the union to keep their job. Some number of malcontents and wannabe supervisors become union stewards and activist members. The big wall-to-wall public employee union organize around malcontents, elevate them to hero status among the activist members. They use the grievances of the malcontents and incompetents as organizing tools and turn grievances into Saul Alinsky moments with polls and protests and mau-mauing supervisors. Arbitrations are turned into show trials worthy of Stalin if you let them. The way to deal with them is usually to ignore them unless you can whack somebody. You target the activist members; they make it easy for you since the unions organize around malcontents and incompetents. So, if one of their activists misbehaves, you whack him and force the union to defend him. If the union pulls out all the stops to defend him, you make sure the arbitration hearing is at the workplace so the other union members see that their dues are being spent on this person’s defense. The other members know who the screwups and loud mouths are and don’t like seeing their money wasted. They especially don’t like seeing somebody like that get their job back because the union won an arbitration. Sometimes as an employer you take on bad cases that you aren’t likely to win just so you can show that you tried to get rid of the employee but the union thwarted it.
You all Really need to visit this guy at REDSTATE sometime, and give him 10 comments real quick like.
http://www.redstate.com/users/achance/
I agree generally, although instead of “less sucky” I’d have just said “conform more to society’s current values and worldview.” Yeah, we got rid of slavery, but we’re imprisoning people at a rate that would make the average Middle Ages despot blush. We say we’re against torture now, but…. We improved labor law in the US, and then outsourced labor to countries that won’t fight multinational corporations. Etc.
But I don’t get the thing about leftists being all for the perfection of humans that the right accuses us of either. They’re the ones in favor of abstinence-only sex ed, on the premise that if you tell teens only the best form of contraception (abstinence), then they’ll use it. Liberals and leftists know kids and adults won’t always be abstinent, so we help them with other precautions.
The same could be said about every social issue: the right believes that there’s a platonic ideal that the law can force people to adhere to, while the left accepts the diversity of humankind and the autonomy of each individual to choose what’s best for them.
Anyway, that probably explains why most real leftists I know have a fairly negative view of human potential but a generally more positive view of people generally right now. Then again, right and left are such fucked up categories in the US that trying to search for an over-arching ideology for either will be fruitless.
Lookit me! I’m Transhuman!!!
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever hoid.
There’s nothing “Trans” about that, unless you collate “Transhumanism” with the Industrial Revolution.
I dunno, LP. I’d make that argument in a heartbeat, but it’s damnably not a progressive point of view.
The Industrial Revolution basically outsourced good old manual labor to machinery, by making machinery an extension of human abilities.
You can lift 100 pounds by yourself. You can lift five hundred with a lever, a thousand with a pulley, and ten thousand with a crane.
The only real difference between that and a prosthetic limb that allows me the same capacity is the fleshware interface.
I’m not saying that the IR was transhumanist, but I can certainly see it as kicking off that movement, one that alters the human condition to overcome and shape its environment to better suit its needs.
Not surprising …
Two things you seem to not grasp:
1. To use the actual meanings of the words in question, transhumanism is easily defined a belief that we can use science and technology to move our species “past human.” In other words, using our knowledge to basically change our species for the better (though what constitutes “better” is up for discussion). But what you’re doing is making the definition so broad as to include any advancement in medicine, science or technology that helps us as being transhuman. It’s not only ridiculous, it’s not even factually true since many advancements are not designed to move us past being human — they are to improve a quality of life, keep people from dying, or to help them do a job. That’s not transhumanism. That’s just plain old medicine and science.
Besides, if you want to make the definition so damn broad as to encompass all advancements ever, then the definition becomes diluted and loses any real meaning.
2. You’re also using a specious and almost child-like logic to defend the belief (though, to be fair, I’ve never attacked it — just some its more stupid adherents). Your argument basically boils down to: “Transhumanists favor the use of doctors, science and technology. Thus, any criticism of transhumanism is also criticism of doctors, science and technology.” It’s like saying, “Green Bay Packers fans are people. Thus, any criticism of the Green Bay Packers is a criticism of all people.” Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way to those of us over the age of seven.
Who actually looked at the meaning of the words in question to come up with a definition, and who searched the Internet for one favorable to their position?
Here’s the definition of transhumanism from the OED:
1957 J. HUXLEY New Bottles for New Wine 17 The human species can..transcend itself..in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. 1973 Valley News (Van Nuys, Calif.) (West Valley ed.) 26 Apr. 38A/1 Dr. James A. Rafferty will speak on ‘Transhumanism and Psychic Energy’. 1990 Extropy Summer 6/1 The alternative to religion is not a despairing nihilism, nor a sterile scientism, but a transhumanism. 1997 N. WALTER Humanism 83 Transhumanism..is defined by so-called ‘Extropians’ (who defy entropy) as ‘philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and limits by means of science and technology’. 2006 Church Times 31 Mar. 11/3 Unlike Professor Fukuyama, however, I do not see Transhumanism as the most dangerous idea in today’s world.
The prefix ‘trans’ does not always mean ‘past’ – it means “across, through, or between.” You’re talking about post-humanism, not trans-humanism.
Here’s the big question: how much technological augmentation can be done to a person before they are considered a ‘trans-human’ or a ‘post-human? Or I suppose the question could be rephrased, “How much augmentation must a transhumanist believe necessary or desirable before they can be considered a transhumanist?” Does a boob job make someone a transhumanist or do they have to have their brain removed from their dead or dying body and submerged in a tub of goo? Is it somewhere in the middle? Certainly keeping someone alive ‘artificially’ on a dialysis machine can be seen as a technologically-derived method of enhancing a person’s ability to survive.
Green Bay Packers fans ARE NOT PEOPLE, but if they were, any criticism of them would, by extension, apply only to humans who share relevant similarities expressed in the criticism, but should not, of course, extend to people who share no other similarity other than being human. Otherwise all criticism of a group of people is problematic. For instance if you say, “I hate Packers fans – they eat too much cheese,” that might apply to other people who EAT CHEESE, but, by no means, does it apply to all people just because Packers fans are people. So if you criticize transhumanism, your criticism can be seen to apply to people whose methods and ideology overlap with transhumanism’s.
That’s a religious question, Mr. or Mrs. Kook.