January 20, 2023 - 10:37am
At an UnHerd event last night, columnist Mary Harrington and Oxford University AI ethicist Elise Bohan, author of Future Superhuman, came together to discuss transhumanism — the idea that human limits such as longevity and cognition can be pushed back using technology. Is this a utopian vision of a better future or a dystopian nightmare? Below, Mary’s opening remarks are republished in full:
I hope Elise would agree, broadly speaking, with my working definition of transhumanism. A worldview in which ‘human nature’ has no special cultural or political status. And in which it’s not just legitimate but morally necessary to use technology — especially biotechnology — to improve on that nature.
When we talk about transhumanism, the temptation is to depict this as an exciting (or frightening) possible future, but in any case one that hasn’t really happened yet.
Another point on which I hope Elise and I would agree is that this is the wrong way to look at it. Transhumanism is already here. In fact it’s so well-established that there’s arguably no point in debating its pros and cons. So: congratulations, Elise. Your side already won. End of debate, we can all go and have a drink.
I’m joking, of course. There’s lots to talk about! Not least, what we can infer from how the transhumanist era is going so far.
This era began in the mid-twentieth century, with a biomedical innovation that radically changed what it is to be a human, in the human social order: reproductive technology.
The Pill was the first transhumanist technology: it set out not to fix something that was wrong with ‘normal’ human physiology — in the ameliorative sense of medicine up to that point — but instead it introduced a whole new paradigm. It set out to interrupt normal in the interests of individual freedom.
At one point in Future Superhuman Elise notes that avowed transhumanist women are rarer than men. She postulates (I’m paraphrasing) that this is because men are typically more abstract, systemic thinkers.
But I’d say on the contrary, the reason transhumanist women seem so rare is that they’re so common they don’t read as transhumanist.
Nearly every adult woman in the developed world has implicitly accepted the belief that full adult female personhood is structurally reliant on technologies that interrupt normal female fertility. And by the definition I opened with, that makes nearly every adult woman in the developed world a transhumanist.
So, how’s the transhumanist era going? The Pill was legalised in 1960 in America, and 1961 in Britain. So we have more than six decades’ worth of data on how transhumanist practice measures up to transhumanist theory.
What I suggest we can infer from the story so far in that instance is that trying to re-engineer our physiology – our nature, if you will – in the interests of freedom, progress, or whatever other name you give utopia doesn’t deliver that utopia.
Or, rather, it does, kind of. But this utopia arrives asymmetrically, depending on where you sit in the socioeconomic hierarchy. And where technology is used to “liberate” us from the kind of givens — such as normal female fertility — that were previously managed, pragmatically, by social or legal norms, what replaces it isn’t a human ‘person’ free from ‘nature’ but a market in which that ‘nature’ becomes a set of supply and demand problems.
In the case of sex, the transhumanist Pill revolution didn’t deliver (as the feminist Shulamith Firestone imagined) a polymorphous liberation of human sexuality. Or it did, but under the sign of commerce. We got the so-called “sexual marketplace” in which normative asymmetries in male and female mating preferences reappear in cartoon form, as market opportunities or as strategic weaknesses to be weaponised in a contest for personal gain. Or, straightforwardly, as commodities to buy, sell, or exploit.
Meanwhile, if those at the top of the food chain are relatively well-placed to thrive in this “marketplace”, those at the bottom — impoverished, racialised, trafficked or otherwise vulnerable people, particularly women — are far more likely to become commodities themselves.
I would argue further that the same logic will be likely to hold for any other embodied limit you destroy via biotech. I predict that should we find a “cure” for ageing, it won’t be universally available. It will be prohibitively expensive, and serve primarily as a tool for further consolidating wealth and power.
Perhaps it will require harvesting tissue from others. The fertility industry already has a thriving market for gametes or ‘reproductive services’ or renting somebody else’s womb. But so far it’s not rich, well-connected people who sell themselves in this way. Research is already being done into blood transfusions as an anti-ageing treatment, and you can be sure that should it flourish, it won’t be rich people selling their plasma either.
You’d have to be wildly optimistic to think we can blithely marketise ever greater swathes of our embodied selves without opening new vistas for class asymmetry and exploitation. And it makes no sense to argue that we will stay well-protected against such risks by moral safeguards. Because transhumanism itself requires an all-out assault on the humanist anthropology that underpins those moral safeguards.
You can’t have transhumanism without throwing out humanism. And if people are just “ape-brained meatsacks” as Elise describes, urgently in need of upgrading, what possible reason could we have for objecting to a market in human organs? Or infanticide? Or genetically engineering the masses to be more docile? All these are only repellent when held against a humanist anthropology.
So if you’re assaulting that anthropology in the name of humanist values (such as freedom, or kindness, or lives lived in greater dignity) I submit that your project is unlikely to work out the way you expect it to.
In sum, then. We’re already well into the transhumanist era. But the story so far suggests that far from delivering utopia, what it mostly delivers is a commodification of the human body that disproportionately benefits those who already have power and privilege.
I don’t think we can put this back in its box. But to my eye the proper response to this era is not acceleration but a twofold resistance. Firstly, in retaining a humanist anthropology, in defiance of all those currently sawing away at the branch we’re sitting on. And secondly, in mounting a vigorous defence of those without power, now increasingly at the sharp-end of biotech’s unacknowledged class politics. Thank you.
Watch the full debate HERE.
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SubscribeAs someone whose family has been booted around by history a few times through the twentieth century, I have always found the congenital victim culture, with an emphasis on skin colours by many ethnic minorities, both meaningless and counterproductive. It’s a monumental waste of your time if you buy into those narratives: it alters your perspectives, colouring all events with the prejudices of your protest, and you will miss those opportunities that come along for improving things at both a personal and community level. There are better ways to improve things than buying into systemic narratives of political protest.
I had a rough time at school in London in the 70s (all the routine ‘paki’ abuse, plus a few assaults), but even in my teens I could see that stuff was toytown compared to the real trauma caused by partition in India or being kicked out of Africa, both of which my family experienced with huge loss. Moreover, it only takes a cursory glance at European history to see that skin colour has hardly anything to do with race – the nazis completely had it in for Slavs, but admired the Nordics, all completely random stuff, nothing to do with nothing, and the focus on equating their skin colour with victimisation by ethnic minorities is as much a costly false correlation.
The UK is a remarkably open, fair and colourblind country with plenty of opportunities for anyone with the gumption to take them, and anyone who has the luck to migrate to UK who does not see that, is lying to themselves. I cannot honestly say I have experienced any discrimination based on my race, in academia or in my profession, in four odd decades since the 70s ended.
You are also one of the top posters here. I have had a good bit of experience with the India/Africa diaspora, mostly from the Goan ones, Catholics, but also from the Hindu, and they have been exceptional every where they landed. To me they are always a sharp reminder on what immigration should be all about, not the refugee side, but that some migrants tend to have qualities which can be looked at to infer future.
I remember a study on immigrants in some big region of USA (which could never be made now) where results of migrants outcomes were quantified on their first and second generation. The result was surprising as Hungarians came at the top. They had the highest number of successful business ownership (entrepreneurship), high education levels in the second generation, and a well above average income. Such a pity studies like this are not the norm when setting up immigration policy. Immigration policy seems to be set for the advantage of the migrants rather than for the benefit of the host nation. And for some very weird Social Engineering purposes. USA has in fact outsourced its immigration policy to the Mexican Drug Cartels, and I suspect USA’s interests are not at the heart of their decisions.
Glad things are looking up for you (since the ’70s (a good while ago now!) Your remark about victim culture made me smile. Here in the U.S. some of us call it the Victim Olympics.
Just to say: what an excellent post. You remind of the kids I grew up with in the Midlands in the 70s.
Ty
The reason the German Nazis admired the Nordic peoples was not at all random. All the Nordic nations – with the important exception of most of Finland! – are of Germanic stock, ultimately. I come from Sweden originally, and the various Nordic languages – again, with the exception of Finnish, which belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family – are ultimately derived from Germanic dialects. Swedish contains a great many German loan words and also still some of the German grammar and unwieldly word order. During the 1500s, the were very large numbers of German merchants, traders and their families domiciled in Stockholm especially.
The old Norse sagas and myths are derived from the ancient Germanic ones, as were the Norse gods.
The Nazis hated the Slavs because Hitler wanted their geographical territories. This contempt had nothing really to do with “racism” but was grounded in Hitler’s changing political ambitions, targets and goals. The Poles were especially loathed and earmarked for either extinction or Germanisation (of the children, and the blond Polish children in particular). Partly this had its roots in the peace settlement after the end of WWI (which Germany lost) when East Prussia was separated from Germany by awarding Poland a “corridor” of land which included the harbour city of Danzig. The predominantly Polish West Prussia (and also other German territory) was given to Poland, along with other pieces of Germany. This was perceived by the Nazis as a great insult to Germany, and reuniting East Prussia with Deutschland was one of their (many) promises and goals.
Ultimately, the Nazi “race policies” were all about political power and grabbing that which other peoples had – their wealth, their land.
Ultimately, the X group with X policies grabbing political power, other people’s wealth, opportunities and land.
It seems the human races just repeats this pattern again and again… I hope people stick to their guns and demand equal human rights regardless of race, sex, relion. I think It really is the only way.
One thing I know from London in the last few decades is the different ethnic groups who are not White seem to have very ‘racist’ feelings towards each other. When I ride in taxis I usually try to get the driver to tell me about what his rides are like, and they are not reticent about it. Because I can have some points of reference if they are Muslim the drivers seem to not hold back in listing differences by ethnicity, and what they tell me would not be said by White drivers to a stranger.
Any idea that there is ‘Political Blackness’ which is some kind of umbrella has not been my experience, looking from the outside. I do not see a solidarity of unifying feelings, more like everyone sees the image of a ladder, and where each group is, and is going. It is all very different to USA, where I live.
It gives hope. One day a great leader will use divide and rule upon them and they will lose their power.
I would have loved to have had one taxi ride in Germany where I was not lectured on Turkish/Kurdish politics. There was no stopping a lecture. Even at 5 a.m.
Recent stats of NYC, show that blacks perpetrate most crime against Asians and that started way before Trump came on the scene. Leftists would have you believe that Trump’s use of the ‘China Virus’ causes it, but there is no evidence of that.
“If anything, blackness has become an aesthetic, a chic identity swallowed up into the consumerist economy”.
So true whether it is the multi-millionaire footballers kneeling, the never-ending blm “in screen” logos on sky sports or the over-representation of BAME individuals and couples in so many adverts (and historic tv dramas!).
Quite so, it’s a fashionable media thing. The advertisements are particularly amusing, and the subject of domestic fun and games. When will the first mixed race couple appear? Ah, first time obviously. And usually he’s black and she’s white, for some reason. Mixed race Asian and Afro-Caribbean? Not so much. Curiously, one of the biggest ethnic minorities in the country (the Poles) are absent from our TV and radio dramas. I think one might have appeared in Ambridge once, but can’t be sure (in the days when I listened to R4 I always reached for the off button the moment that annoying jaunty theme tune came up).
Yes, they are very racist in their BAME choices.
There are far more South Asians in the UK than blacks – but on adverts and on tv there are far more blacks than all other BAMES combined.
I also notice that the young and energetic characters are more likely to be BAME, but any old, worn out characters are usually white.
And of course the young black dudes are always heroically virtuous (when not put-upon victims) and never the bad guys – just like real life
It is a bit of a cliche black guy white woman. I personally know more white guys married or partnered to black women in the south-not-London England, but I suspect the reason you don’t get the white-guy-black-woman couples is because of the perception among the left-leaning-virtual-signaling chattering classes that it is whitey and males ‘colonising’ and taking advantage of black women as in the nasty days of slavery and colonialism. That’s what the memo said.
Yes, I have know and been friends with quite a lot of black woman/white man couples. I cannot, offhand, recall knowing any black man/white woman couples.
Very different than in the USA then. I live in a very mixed race place, and have all over the South USA, and I have almost never seen the Black Woman / White Male, but the other are exceedingly common.
In much of the parts of America there is a real feel of desperation among Black Woman that they will never find a high status, or middle status Black Man because so many are with White Women. The Black culture in USA has a terrible problem with stable marriage and more Black Women continue to secondary education than Black Men, and after graduating are really having a terrible time getting with a man of equal status and qualification because the more successfull Black Males are so often taking white wives and very few White Men are taking Black wives.
This is a real problem in USA, one which is much bigger than Europeans understand.
That’s interesting, Women generally marry up… And one of the unintentional reasons for the widening inequality – A woman lawyer will want to marry another lawyer…
“I cannot, offhand, recall knowing any black man/white woman couples.” Perhaps it’s because after the initial flush of ‘romance’ a lot black men having been brought up in a single parent situation cannot cope and do exactly as their own fathers did and leave? Might also explain why many mixed couples are as Chris observes, as white men are more reliable?
Also, generally in the black community it is far less acceptable for a black woman to go with a white man even amongst the women
Well, it’s cheap. Would you rather pay your minority workers a decent wage and have functional benefits, or would you have an half-assed slogan pretending to care? Remember, everything is about race or sexuality now. Discussion of class has conveniently disappeared.
Everywhere in the wider world an ethnic minority is understood to be a numerically minor population with a deep history on the soil. A foreign population colonising another people’s land are not an ethnic minority.
It is an Establishment abuse, therefore, to label populations coerced upon the three peoples of Britain “ethnic minorities”, just as it is an abuse to label the natives’ rejection of these populations “racism”. Something truly terrible has been done to the British people, as it has to all European populations wherever they live. The extent to which you, dear reader, appreciate this is the extent to which you are free from the dictates of the powerful.
“This would extend into the 1970s and 80s, when South Asians and black people were united under the banner of ‘political blackness’.”
I’m pretty sure this would have been limited to very small handfuls of political activists and wouldn’t have had any relevance to the wider population at all.
I (just about) remember the 80s, with the huge antagonisms between South Asians and West Indians (there were very few Africans back then). The last thing just about any South Asian would have wanted would have been to be lumped under one identity with West Indians as ‘black’, and vice versa. That’s to put the case mildly.
Political commentators have to be careful not to extrapolate their personal experience within some activist groups to the wider population.
Yes, I seem to remember that in the 80s the GLC-type racial activists were trying to impose ‘political blackness’ on Asian folk, and they simply weren’t having it.
And I well remember the antagonisms you describe from my 70s schooldays. Also the antagonisms between different South Asian groups/castes and between West Indians and Africans (there were a few Africans at my school) etc. The most ‘Islamophobic’ folk I’ve met in recent years are young people of Hindu and Sikh ancestry (and gay people).
This might have something to do with the attitude of many Moslems towards Hindus, Sikhs and gay people.
Of course
In the U.S., I am waiting for the outcry against the term, “Latinx,” which stifles the cultural richness of their language. That said, generally this population is not radical, and may not call out this liberty. (Those who are radical might embrace the term.) The term just sounds terrible, and for that reason alone, it is pretty vile to use it. Who asked them? Can they vote on this?
As you night know, Latinos in the USA harken from many countries, many of which are ‘more conservative’ than the Democrats like to admit. They honor family & country. During the 2020 election there was a noticeable Latino shift to the right, especially amongst Cubans and Venezuelans who abhor the Socialist regimes they escaped; they are finding a comfortable home in the Republican Party, so one can expect that trend to continue, at least if they want to be successful in the USA. The Left’s nihilism is a dead end.
Funny, but interesting: Just before the 2020 election, my Ecuadorean housecleaner told me that she was going to vote ‘TRUMP’ (she’s legal). I was surprised. She told me that she sympathized with Americans who feel that their country is being ‘overrun’; She said that Ecuador was experiencing that inflow as well by Venezuelans and others who were pouring into Ecuador because the country uses American dollars as its currency (which I did not realize). Her relatives in Ecuador were alarmed & concerned about their own country being overrun.
The political agenda is being dictated by a mouthy minority with next to no understanding of reality; which is then disseminated by an MSM dominated by privileged f***s churned out by ‘elite’ universities who have probably never even met a ‘poor’ person. It is of very little interest or relevance to the majority of people (in my experience), who simply focus on getting by/on in life: though they would like to be able to vote for some sensible/representative politicians every few years who would help them out a bit.
The post above by Prashant Kotak speaks vey directly of the people I grew up with and their attitudes. I cannot recommend it enough, or add to it.
I just wish commentators and politicians could stop trying to stick people in boxes, label them and think that’s job done.
That 1983 election poster needs to be dug back up again. Great riposte to people and ideologies intent on dividing people up into hierarchies based on skin colour. Whether it’s a hierarchy of (supposed) victimhood, it’s still a hierarchy based on skin colour. Which used to be racist.
I assume you refer to the ad featuring a black man with the headline: ‘Labour says he’s black. The Conservatives say he’s British’. It was indeed a truly great ad and I know, and worked with, the guy who wrote it.
As the writer points out, many immigrant groups are more conservative than the native Brits and it seems to me that if anyone can save England (there is no hope for Scotland and Wales) for democracy and free speech etc it might be them. I refer to people like Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch. the black female Tory MP. and commentators like Esther Ekoko and Mahyar Tousi etc.
(Apologies if I have misspelled any names).
A blind man completely misses the point of being human.
Are you quoting that wise French philosopher Eric Cantona?
Very well said. Some of the most talented young politicians in the Tory party are not white. They hold the key to our future.
Why is there no hope for Scotland and Wales?
Cos they’re full of Jocks and Taffys…….
I’ve always thought that the stereotypical Asian corner-shop owner should be a natural Tory voter. I haven’t seen much sign of the Tories tapping into that, though.
Black people, with various backgrounds, are acting politically across the spectrum.
Well, yes; this is something everyone but white leftists has understood forever. The idea of black people as an unthinking monolith is, or should be, offensive on its face, yet conservative blacks are treated by the left as heretics.
There seems be a ‘healthier’ and less ideologic black community in the UK – at least from my vantage point. I am guessing, I could be wrong, that it has to do with Britain’s superior school system at the primary level. When we lived in London in the mid-1990’s our kids started school in London and we were pleased and astonished to see that much was expected of even very young students, not in a ‘pressurized’ way either. There was also a profound respect for the English language. We also found teachers ‘very loving’ versus some rather brutal approaches stateside when we returned, even at the ‘fancy’ private school our girls attended in NYC.
It’s with great misfortune for the black community and other minority communities that the Teacher’s Unions have had such a negative grip on education in the USA. The unions are not educating blacks at all in NYC; less than 25% of NYC students can pass the state exams whilst taxpayers pay the highest per capita per student in the world ($22K). It’s outright criminal. The city’s solution = get rid of the state exams (no one will see the bad performance), abolish special merit-entrance schools like Bronx Science & Stuyvesant High Schools (eliminate competition so that everyone is a loser), and hamper the charter school movement at all cost (eliminate schooling choice). Blacks have a right to be angry today as the most profound ‘systemic racism’ in the USA is in the left / progressive control of education (really just a baby sitting service which some have even admitted) perpetrated by the Teacher’s Unions.
Yet, the HUGE mysteries are (1) Why does the black community accept such lousy education for their children? (2) Why do they keep voting Democrat – a party which is glad to keep blacks as an underclass?
Those days are long gone. Primary age children are now taught more about gender identity than arithmetic. As for the English language….we pay classroom assistants to translate the teaching into the child’s home language ( Polish, Slovenian, Pashtun etc, etc) so they are not oppressed into understanding or speaking English except at the most basic, street picked up level. Afro Caribbean children are not discouraged from using the tongue of the ghetto, although many of them do not actually live there.
Of course, this leaves the children of the Nazghul , whose parents are paying for their segregated education, with a considerable advantage on the wider stage, which I’m sure is completely coincidental.
It always amuses me that the left think of black people as a monolith and then when one of them steps out of line and votes for the wrong person they immediately attack them as being ‘not really black’. Kinda racist.
You can spot an Antifa Fascist thug by a skateboard. They train in combat use of these deadly weapons, and can carry them with impunity. Just watch film of how they use them as weapons – amazing how this is not known.
Be careful, Mumford and Sons won’t let you listen to their music if you’ve read (gasp) that book…
Where are “white people” here, other than as the Tory or Labour government, or the “Far Right”?
What is the difference between migration and diaspora in”…a history of colonial subjugation, migration and diaspora…”. Why this faux listing of three items in “discourse,” so that we do not unpack ideas separately, but link everything as a packet of grievance or whatever? Sorry, am not articulate, but I sense something going on in this sort of writing.
Who is going to write about current colonial subjugation by people supposing they have a right to walk in on countries they are now walking into? I mean, try to unpack that rather than leaping to call it out as ray schism.
That “blackness is the sacred unifying glue of the “African diaspora”” is okay. Calling out turf in other countries and not unifying with the natives is a good thing? We want ours? Give us. What about recognizing that you really are imposing on the natives, even a weensy bit?
Yes, you are British for one or two generations. good. but migration is happening so quickly and when you want to be a bloc…well, you are causing division. Just be British or American? It does not erase Blackness. If you can at least try to see how this is true…
That reverses the chronology: Wilson’s government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act on 1st March, 1968, then Powell made his speech on 20th April, 1968.
Quite so. But what all this ‘identity’ stuff (amongst other things) is about is to keep people from seeing that we are all one, and keep us at each others throats. Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ song has the following lines:
“Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me …’
If we all came to realise that fact the world would change overnight. Unfortunately, there are people, forces – whatever – who are keen that that should not happen; after all, who would buy the guns and bombs and all the other stuff designed to keep people churning.