Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia Read online

  Transhumanism as a Religion of Technology?

  One feature of transhumanism, the Singularity (which I discuss in chap-

  ter 3), has been called by SF writer Charles Stross “The Rapture of the

  Nerds,” connecting the transhuman faith in technology’s radical evolu-

  tionary potential to Christian theories of eschatology. Both these futur-

  isms await the arrival of a savior; where Christian eschatology awaits

  the return of God, transhumanism awaits the arrival of a host of radical

  posthuman- making technologies. While several academics in the field

  of religious studies have recently published criticisms of transhuman-

  ism and religion,16 Stross’s pithy statement remains the most viral figure of the strong methodological similarities between transhumanism and

  religious salvation history. Despite the vehement secularism of most in

  transhumanism (More declares religion “entropic” and focuses on the

  “loss of information” in his 1996 definitional essay), much of the criti-

  cism has focused on the millenarian, eschatological features of transhu-

  manism.17 Transhuman argumentation does, in an overly reductive mode, boil down to a faith that technology in the future will arrive and save us,

  not unlike the Second Coming in Christianity. More’s argument about

  transhumanism, violently opposed to religion as it is, problematizes this

  similarity by performing something of a bait and switch by suggesting

  that transhumanism will “replace religions with other types of meaning-

  fostering systems,” rather than getting past the outmoded need for faith

  itself— not unlike the process by which alcoholics transfer their addictive

  behavior to support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous instead of cur-

  ing their addiction itself. This idea, merely replacing one system of faith

  with another, is one of the central criticisms of the problematic relation-

  ship between transhumanism and religion.

  Further intensifying this critique of transhumanism, David F. Noble

  6 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  argues in The Religion of Technology (1997) that the idea of religious salvation through technology dates back to at least the Middle Ages. As Noble

  suggests, in that period the “most material and humble of human activities

  become increasingly invested with spiritual significance and a transcen-

  dent meaning. ”18 Technological progress, instead of divine contemplation, became increasingly associated with the return of a lost human perfec-

  tion.19 Noble’s argument traces how, over the course of Western history, even as the explicit connection between religious salvation and technological progress became opaque, the belief in the transcendent potential

  of new technologies clings to modernity and the project of technological

  progress. In the latter half of his book, he traces these themes through

  nuclear weapons, space travel, artificial intelligence, and genetic engi-

  neering (themselves key transhuman technologies) and shows how these

  technologies seem to their creators to fulfill key aspects of a divine des-

  tiny for humanity.

  Given Noble’s thesis, what is novel, then, about transhumanism?

  Though The Religion of Technology deals with many of the central tech-

  nologies associated with transhumanism and though the book is often

  cited as being relevant to transhumanism, Noble does not discuss trans-

  humanism explicitly in the volume. So while transhumanism may be a

  part of Noble’s religion of technology, the movement also suggests two

  changes to Noble’s thesis: One, transhumanism argues for an internal-

  ization of technology into the body. Two, transhumanism specifically

  explores what bioethicist Nicholas Agar labels “radical human enhance-

  ment,” the increase of human potential well beyond what is possible to

  even imagine the human body performing. Unpacking both these dis-

  tinctions will further clarify the newness of transhumanism with regard

  to thinking of it as a religion of technology.

  Transhumanism represents a cultural shift in which the technolo-

  gies changing the horizon of our lives have a significantly more intimate

  relationship to our bodies. As the transhuman technologies we saw in

  More’s list (“neuroscience and neuropharmacology, life extension, nan-

  otechnology, artificial ultraintelligence, and space habitation”) become

  increasingly a part of our lives, they also become part of our bodies. This

  internalization of technologies suggests that transhumanism mutates

  Noble’s understanding of the religion of technology in profound ways.

  Most of the technologies discussed in Noble’s book are external to the

  human body and, importantly, work by analogy in his argument. He cites

  moments in which the rhetoric of scientists uses metaphors for religious

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  . 7

  phenomena in which the saints fly up to heaven like a rocket ship and God ends the world in Revelations like an atomic bomb. For Noble, these

  metaphoric relationships satisfy the original religious impulse. Reading

  the more radical claims of transhuman thinkers, however, instead of pro-

  viding technological change to metaphorically emulate the power of the

  gods, transhumanism’s promise is much more radical transcendence at

  the unit of the organism itself. While artificial intelligence, in Noble’s read-

  ing of its history, might provide an analog for the immortality of gods or

  souls in various religions, the transhuman technology of radical life exten-

  sion promises to make the user literally immortal, without the need for a

  metaphoric compromise.20

  Where technologies before the emergence of an evolutionary version

  of the future fulfilled, on some unconscious level, a desire for godlike

  transcendence, the transhuman suite of technologies More lists in his

  definition are designed to be incorporated into the body with the evolu-

  tionary upshot being human transmutation into a literal godhood. For

  instance, biologist and life- extension researcher Aubrey de Grey suggests

  in a 2005 interview that “it’s reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate

  between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely. ”21 De Grey, head of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) project at Cambridge University, goes on to suggest that technology enabling

  humans to live for as long as a thousand years may be less than twenty- five

  years away from general availability. Further, de Grey suggests that aging

  and death, rather than the natural ordering principles for a human being’s

  life, are the product of a flawed biology that can be corrected through the

  application of technologies of radical life extension. De Grey’s life’s work

  has been attempting to reverse engineer the processes of aging with an

  eye toward hacking the human body to remove them. Successful out-

  comes from this hacking literally, rather than metaphorically, restore the

  human body to a state of Edenic purity, in which the flesh would never

  decay.

  By literalizing the metaphoric promise of transcendence inherent in

  technological striving, transhumanism transitions humanity from tool

  user to tool imbiber. The body that thus consumes these transhuman

  technologies becomes a technologi
cal body on orders of magnitude pre-

  viously unimaginable in human history. This technological body not only

  means an end to the reasonably stable understanding of the biological

  human but also mandates a rethinking of the core philosophical values

  of humanism. So, in this way, transhumanism seeks doubly to overturn

  8 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  notions of bodily integrity to create these posthuman beings while simultaneously creating a speculative ethics to govern the actions of these

  hypothetical posthuman beings.

  Related to this idea of a speculative ethics for hypothetical beings, the

  second transhuman addition to Noble’s theory of the religion of technol-

  ogy lies in how transhumanism, according to bioethicist Nicholas Agar,

  intensifies the general technological program of human enhancement

  into what he calls “radical enhancement.” In contrast to acceptable (to

  Agar) human enhancements such as antibiotics and automobiles, Agar

  argues that “radical enhancement involves improving significant human

  attributes and abilities to levels that greatly exceed what is currently pos-

  sible for human beings. ”22 In Truly Human Enhancement (2013), Agar illustrates the difference between beneficial and radical enhancement

  technologies by discussing “veridical engagement,” what “we can accu-

  rately imagine ourselves doing as” we watch others perform feats of skill

  and strength.23 He discusses Usain Bolt, record- breaking track star, and the Flash, fast- running hero of DC comics, to explain veridical enjoy-

  ment.24 When Bolt breaks world records on the track, we watch and identify with his struggle; although his feats amaze us, we can imagine a body

  performing them, even if it is not our body. With the Flash, however, his

  speed (which often exceeds the capacity of the human eye to observe,

  even allowing him to time travel) is so great that we cannot identify with

  his actions. The Flash represents something that is inhuman, while Bolt’s

  speed is recognizably human. For Agar, the difference between beneficial

  human enhancement and radical human enhancement lies in this abil-

  ity to recognize and function within current limits. In Agar’s bioethical

  framework, all of us running as fast as Usain Bolt thanks to robotic legs

  would be on the border of acceptable enhancement, while running as fast

  as the Flash would not because we would no longer be able to veridically

  engage as human.

  As we saw in Ettinger’s perplexity at those who choose to die, much

  of the transhuman community is deeply invested in the internal, radical

  changes suggested by the types of technology discussed by More. Many

  in the movement find Agar’s bioethical arguments outmoded and akin to

  nostalgia for a form of existence in which humanity is enslaved to death

  and aging. With this internalization and this radicalization, the idea that

  we (whether as individuals, nation- states, or species) control our destiny

  becomes more and more likely. Transhumanism envisions the world as

  one in which Nature is no longer driving our species’ evolutionary bus.

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

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  Max More, writing in 1999 in “A Letter to Mother Nature,” captures this idea best in his apostrophe to the planet. He writes,

  What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed. You seem to have lost

  interest in our further evolution some 100,000 years ago. Or perhaps you

  have been biding your time, waiting for us to take the next step ourselves.

  Either way, we have reached our childhood’s end.

  We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution.25

  The amendments he goes on to propose include standard transhuman

  topoi such as no longer tolerating “the tyranny of aging and death,” sup-

  plementing “the neocortex with a ‘metabrain,’” and asserting that “we will

  no longer be slaves to our genes. ”26 In all these cases, we, More argues, must evolve ourselves in the face of a mother who has “lost interest” in

  her children.

  More’s use of “childhood’s end” in talking to Nature about transhu-

  manism is particularly telling. The phrase is also the title of an Arthur C.

  Clarke novel from 1953 in which an alien race called the Overlords arrive

  on Earth to steward our species’ transition into a new age of evolution-

  ary existence as beings of pure energy. In the novel, Clarke articulates a

  number of the major themes that become associated with transhuman-

  ism and give transhumanism one of its most potent images. From the

  star child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to the titular hero of

  Lucy (2014), the trope of an evolutionary explosion and the emergence

  of humanity’s new evolutionary destiny is constantly imagined and pre-

  sented as a maturation from infancy to full adulthood. Like the child that

  must inevitably leave the nest, More argues in his letter, humanity has

  come into its adulthood, ready to make decisions about its own destiny.

  This sense of destiny is, finally, what signals transhumanism as a muta-

  tion in Noble’s religion of technology. Where Noble suggests a desire to

  satisfy God’s plan for humanity through technological enhancement,

  transhumanism instead appears to argue that we will make ourselves

  into gods. This internalization of control is one of transhumanism’s most

  interesting features: as More also makes clear, even a blind external force,

  such as evolution, is too little control in the hands of humanity.

  Evolutionary Futurism

  Up until this point, we have been discussing transhumanism in a number

  of terms: as a movement, as a philosophy, even as a new mutation in the

  10 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  religion of technology that has driven Western progress narratives since the Middle Ages. Transhumanism, we can conclude, has a complicated

  definitional history. Max More insists that transhumanism is a philosophy,

  as we have seen. However, many transhumanists have defined the move-

  ment as a mode of living that is at home in the future.

  But what would it mean to be “at home in the future”? We might answer

  this question by attuning ourselves to the medium in which transhu-

  manists project their futuristic habitation, namely language itself. While

  transhumanists argue that their vision of the future will come to pass,

  this future is, as all futures ultimately are, a linguistic mirage, a projec-

  tion of a particular configuration of technoscientific knowledge and

  ideological hopes that coagulate into a coherent image of tomorrow.

  In other words, we can productively define transhumanism by taking

  recourse to the rhetoric it uses to create this futuristic vision. Thinking

  about linguistic projection, rhetorician John Poulakos, in arguing for

  the rehabilitation of the ancient rhetoric teachers known as the Soph-

  ists, defines rhetoric as “the art which seeks to capture in opportune

  moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which

  is possible. ”27 He clarifies the Sophists’ use of the possible ( to dynaton) as a strategy that “affirms in man the desire to be at another place or at

  another time and takes him away from the world of actuality and trans-

  ports him in that of potentiality
. ”28 Thus, as Poulakos argues, rhetoric for the Sophists is not the act of changing minds but of presenting possible,

  desirous futures.

  Having said that, in this book I do not consider transhuman-

  ists as rhetoricians (and certainly not as Sophists). Instead, by focus-

  ing on their use of to dynaton to project the desirability of a future, I want to imagine transhumanism as a rhetorical mode, a means of creating and seducing through language about the future. By rhetorical

  mode, I mean, as Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts- Tyteca define in

  The New Rhetoric, the “way in which we formulate our thought [that]

  brings out certain of its modalities, which modify the reality, the certainty,

  or the importance of the data. ”29 In other words, a rhetorical mode is the way of mapping the general flux (raw data) of experience into a specific program for action. Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca’s study of the

  “affective categories” of language and “the modalities of thought under-

  lying variable grammatical forms” highlights how rhetorical choices— of

  words, of grammar, of tropes, of figures— shape the cultural reality of

  any utterance and how repeated patterns of these choices emerge as

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  . 11

  modalities of suasive communication.30 To use Poulakos’s terminology, a rhetorical mode, then, is the way of projecting a particular future through

  language.

  To turn specifically to the rhetorical modality of transhumanism, Timo-

  thy Morton suggests that rhetorical modes are “affective- contemplative

  techniques for summoning the alien,” which is an image of the function

  of language that speaks specifically to what transhumanists do when they

  talk about their version of the future.31 Rhetorically contacting what Morton calls the “the strange stranger,” transhumanist language offers a series

  of linguistic operations that project near- future evolutionary change and

  position technical artifacts as the vectors for producing this imminent

  overcoming. It is also a way of expressing the inevitability of this radi-

  cal futurity and its desirability. As we have already seen, transhumanism

  offers a uniquely alien vision of the future that is simultaneously made

  less strange through a variety of rhetorical strategies.

  In tracing this rhetorical mode, this project summons an even more