Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia Page 2
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
. 9
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