Whatever Happened to Transhumanist Politics? [Part 1]

Transhumanism Fails To Catch Fire

As with all ideologies, there is no simple definition of what ‘transhumanism’ is yet it possesses some characteristics that will unite all transhumanists much as socialism or environmentalism will have some characteristics that unite all socialists and ‘Greens’. We will explore these below but one big distinction is required from the start – that between largely American ‘hard’ radical libertarians and accelerationists associated with infamous billionaires and a more global ‘soft’ techno-progressive transhumanist movement which is essentially a component of the liberal left on speed.

This distinction is important to hold in your mind because these two wings of the movement (although there are many other elements, factions and positions within and outside these broad categories) are as potentially conflictual as Marxism-Leninism and socialist reformism came to be after 1917. Socialism was the belief system of many intellectuals for most of the second half of the nineteenth century and came to rule a large proportion of humanity in some form in the twentieth. Will transhumanism adopt a similar historical trajectory? There is still no sign of this happening yet.

If there is one simple reason why transhumanist politics has failed to take hold in the Western democracies so far, it is probably this – it is a rather intellectual and so 'priestly' ideology representing the dynamic ideals of very few people. It has not achieved mass appeal. Unlike socialism, it has not been able to connect to a major social force as socialism did with a rising industrial working class. On the contrary, there is a risk that a population affected negatively by technology (notably the disruption expected from AI and robotics) could turn against an ideology associated with the small technocratic managerial class implementing change.

Transhumanism has also been mostly theoretical in orientation to date with a few unsuccessful political interventions. It has offered (although transhumanists would dispute this) no specific, easily understood and immediately applicable solutions to current problems as they are experienced by most voters. Transhumanists tend not to be at the forefront of debates about NATO or Gaza or migration and multiculturalism and only at the utopian end of discussions about tax and spend where they sit in creative tension (in the soft version) or outright challenge (in the hard version) with Greens.

What is Transhumanism in Outline

Transhumanism takes strong positions as an ideology - on liberty (freedom), progress, human welfare and individuality. This should make them mainstream in intellectual debate because these are also issues for non-transhumanist intellectuals but you will struggle to find progressive transhumanists being represented in mainstream media debates and discussion. Their versions of these concerns express themselves as an emphasis on human enhancement, ‘morphological freedom’ (the right to modify oneself as one wishes to enhance physical, cognitive, and emotional capabilities through utilising the advances of technology and science), longevity and the ‘proactionary principle’¹ and it has some creative philosophical positions on personhood.

To the transhumanist, the subject (that is, you and I) exists (no fluffy post modern nonsense here). It is understood to bear responsibility so there is a form of weak existentialism inherent in the ideology. Such subjects are fully responsible for risks to themselves, impacts on society and legal responsibility. The split between ‘hard’ and techno-progressive transhumanists is largely one of emphasis between freedom of the individual and responsibility to society – a traditional Right/Left division thus continues to exist in a transmuted form.

The assumption (which is a bit of a stretch when you look at humanity with an objective eye) is that the subject is fully rational with a moral sense and is or can be well informed. This in turn demands a free flow of information and discussion on which reason can act. This also underpins the difference between hard and soft versions of the ideology. Faced with human-all-too-human reality, the ‘hard’ version tends to a venture capital elitism that may disregard those who cannot fit their pure aspirational model while the ‘soft’ drifts inevitably into ‘nannying’ in order to try to drive humanity into its aspirational model, dangerously close at times to the ideal of the Soviet New Man.

All transhumanists, while claiming to be committed to personal autonomy, have a tendency to see humans that do not have their aspirations as ‘subjects’ not only as selves in themselves (which is fair enough) but as subjects to be brought into the future whether they like it or not. There is an implicit belief, common to all ideologies, that transhumanists know better what is necessary than the rest of us with implications we will explore later. There is an internal contradiction between the claim of autonomy and the claim of necessity that has yet to be ‘synthesised’ fully.

Naturally, humanity in itself barely changes in its own basic or base nature so it is not a surprise to see Transhumanism paradoxically repeating almost instinctive past patterns of political expression but geared to new technological (including information and communication) patterns. These are the instinctive patterns are belief systems that are built around personality types – at worst, in this case, tending to mild sociopathy, autism and aggressive autonomy on the one side [hard] and moral authoritarianism, excessive earnestness and existential anxiety [soft] on the other.

The past has shown us intellectual analogues in both classical liberalism and socialism for tendencies that are more down to personality than systematic thought. The thinking neoliberal today can drift into the hard form and the desperate left-liberal into the soft form both in frustration at recent reality not conforming to past theory and struck by the incredibly fast pace of technological innovation. Transhumanism is perhaps an escape from the present into the future in a way analogous to the attempt to escape from the present into salvation in earlier ages. Religious tropes tend to appear naturally as a concomitant of any ideology because religion reflects ‘ordinary’ human needs. Patterns repeat.²

What Is Transhumanist Ideology ³

An ideology can be very fluid. What such a thing is can be very tricky. It is probably best to accept certain basic framework positions (as with any ideology or religion) and then observe how human ingenuity, ambition and personality can twist that framework into many shapes and heresies. Still, to be classed as a member of a class of ideologues requires adherence to some core concepts that will remain long-lasting under pressure, potentially extend into all aspects of life and which the ideology cannot do without in order to exist.

Mutations of these core concepts permit different versions of the ideology just as nationalism and socialism or economic liberalism and welfarism have been merged in the past but we always have to reference back to a core ideology in describing even these hybridisations. This is why there is always such a non-meeting of minds on whether the Nazis were socialist. The two sides debating the issue are redefining socialism using only some characteristics in order to make a polemical or defensive point. The debate is sterile. National Socialism was ‘sui generis’.

We can reasonably say that transhumanism is driven by a theoretical notion of self-determination that might be regarded as a particularly radical form of libertarianism akin to anarchism but which then mutates into a non-anarchical prescription not so much for society (which becomes important at the next progressive mutation) but for our species as a whole. Transhumanism always (nevertheless) assumes a free-born individual either with resources and high intelligence or needing to be supplied with those resources and technologically made rational. It also assumes that society can be led by people who are committed to making all people happy (utilitarian hedonism is a strong philosophical commitment within techno-progressivism) but also with a clear will to action, able to know and take responsibility for consequences in the context of informed risk-taking.

The ‘first stage’ Nietzschean aspect of this is worth noting regardless of the apparently libertarian or liberal-left aspects of the case. Such a person is to be free to experiment with their own bodies and minds (though not with those of others) as a starting point. However, the politicisation of transhumanism eventually suggests a shift from personal experimentation to experimentation with social forms so that we get an individualist flip from a Nietzschean philosophical sensibility to a potential Platonic one as per 'The Republic' via utilitarian hedonism. Intellectually, transhumanism is very definitely a new ideological hybrid on the block synthesising three previously incompatible philosophical orientations.

This is quite a mish-mash that almost reverses the Western philosophical tradition in response to the ‘death of God’. The most extreme Transhumanist positions (as we shall see) go further into post-human territory in ways that become almost identical with religious and faith-based positions (see Note 2) despite determined claims that it is rational and scientific. The potential for contradiction is most fascinating because no thinkers could be more in opposition to one another than Nietzsche and Plato, let alone the implication of envisaging the death of God and the rediscovery of God as the post-human self.

With access to real power we might see Transhumanism engaging in a curious transvaluation of values, flipping from the Nietzschean to the Platonic much as the Christ of the New Testament would see (if he had lived longer) a flipping from his ministry concerned with the salvation of individual souls to the Church with its collective policing of souls. Transhumanists themselves (who, certainly on the soft side, are mostly inherently decent and well-meaning people) fail to see that there is an inherent hidden totalitarian danger in the movement, despite the avowed aims of its protagonists, as there is in all ideologies seeking to encompass the human condition and transform it, especially if it gains power and then comes into direct conflict with the ‘crooked timber of humanity’. Will its ideologues want to straighten it into a transhumanist or even post—humanist plank?

The Potential Radicalism of Transhumanism

Freedom to experiment for most transhumanists is not just personal but has to become institutional. It has developed a positivist ideological position that 'knowing knows no boundaries' - that scientific method is everything in discovering what is and what is possible. Society more generally may be wary of this position for the rather obvious reasons that a) the consequences of science and technology have proven disturbing (nuclear weapons) and present serious potential risks (garage virus production and 'grey goo') and b) bad actors and demonstrable sociopathy and falsification in science as well as special interest manipulation of research may make it important to control and question scientific behaviours in the interests of society. The ideal of freedom in science appears utopian when set against the realities of ignorance, sociopathy and self interest.

Transhumanist radicalism has to go further into social and political action because its project cannot easily be siphoned off into the private sphere (as, say, paganism can). Transhumanism requires a particular model of the public sphere based on its ideal of freedom to flourish. It needs Big Science whether funded by billionaires whose net worth is equal to the GDP of a mid-sized sovereign State or through taxes by the State. The ideology is thus eventually social and political because technology is rarely produced at the level desired by transhumanists by amateurs in garages. Amateurs in garages are accepted as potentially dangerous by most responsible transhumanists.

This social and political aspect of transhumanism goes beyond seeking a general cultural acceptance of transhumanism's notion of freedom towards political decisions that permit its particular form of freedom – after all, cultural debate could enforce a collective ban on its 'freedoms'. Their technologies could be limited by regulation or controlled or banned by legislation under the precautionary principle [See Note 1] that they think too limiting. If it started to acquire more power and failed to persuade the system in which it operates today that it is responsible, transhumanism could find itself not merely ignored but repressed, possibly violently in some circumstances, as a 'terrorism' risk (after all most anything else inconvenient to the system can now be classed as terrorist as we have seen with the absurd designation of Palestine Action in the UK).

At the other extreme, it could, with power to hand, offer an unregulated capacity for personal change that, whatever the moral claims of transhumanists, might result in subsequent harms to the 'movement' if radical changes were implemented without the skills, intelligence or information necessary to use technologies correctly. In other words, for a variety of reasons, transhumanism is drawn ineluctably towards political action whether indirect through lobbying or through party formation and lobbying not only to meet its aspirations but, in due course, to defend itself⁴.

‘Hard’ American transhumanism [although not it would seem the US Transhumanist Party] has billionaire money behind it and does not care over much about radical outcomes but ‘soft’ Anglo-Global transhumanism needs to engage with society and with the State in managing its own environment. ‘Soft’ transhumanists, cross-linked to a less ideological network of techno-futurists and activists, are already at the cutting edge of seeking a regulatory approach to artificial intelligence⁵ that is anathema to some in the ‘billionaire community’ (although not to Elon Musk whose worries about AI are well known and whose commitment to humanity sets him apart from radical ‘Thielian’ transhumanism proper).

Being, Time & Transhumanism

There is also the issue of 'time' - that is, the problem of the irreversibility of some life-changing or transformative states of being that new technologies might permit and radical transhumanists advocate. This is the 'regretted tattoo' problem and, of course, the regretted sex change but the regret might relate to something existential not only gender but the nature of human being itself.

The transhumanist (it is in the name) questions traditional ideas of the human. Their drive can go beyond what we are ('know thyself') towards a new normative 'what we should be' or at least 'what we could be'. However, what we ought to be is not a moral imperative according to conservative social or group norms expressed as conventional morality, it is what transhumanists as individuals think we could be if technology was allowed something close to free rein in ‘creating us’. At best it is a highly creative view of our being but, at its worst, it may be an expression of neurosis regarding death and the perceived inadequacy of quotidian social reality.

Transhumanism shares with the classic pagan sensibility the fundamental law that we should do what we will and harm no one. Like paganism, transhumanism becomes troubling to conventional or traditional society because while the ‘harm no one’ injunction is uncontroversial a) doing what we will is a radical individualism that can work against the consensual hive-like moral assumptions of the social and b) a question arises who is deciding what in relation to those harms (the ‘sin of pride').

The Luciferian implications of transhumanism as ‘light-bringer’ can become reinterpreted by some traditionalists as Satanic. From there, we drift into the world of conspiracy theory about the Illuminati and the New World Order. Some of Peter Thiel’s darker apparently right wing public statements and evasions do not help here and there is a rich undercurrent of fear about his political influence across the internet.

Transhumanism is, like post-Christian Paganism, also problematic because of the problem that we cannot know other minds - without moral sanction and regulation, and above all policing, how can we know that the transhumanist is not willing harm others despite their claims? Or so says the paranoid traditionalist observer. Similar to that problem is the one that states that the transhumanist may be claiming to have full knowledge of their technology and its consequences but is dealing with futures which are unknown. They either refuse to consider harms that might occur or are less clever than they think they are and will cause harms regardless of intent.

This can appear especially concerning in that ‘hard’ transhumanism constantly emphasises enhancement through often untried or unverified technological or scientific experimentation. Even if the 'right' to cause harm to oneself from ignorance was conceded (which many conventional minds would not), there is no right from freedom to cause harms to others from ignorance. And there is an issue (from personal experience) of some transhumanists thinking they are much cleverer than they actually are. Some are people of extremely high analytical intelligence (and they know it) but have a disproportionate weakness in synthetic or social intelligence. Their transhumanism (in some cases) become a de-humanisation of the humanity they think should transcend itself through technology.

Negating Humanity?

At a deeper level, there is a profound potential negativity implicit in transhumanist thought about what we are as humans today which echoes some Judaeo-Christian and Neo-Platonic sentiments about our species - as flawed creatures mired in the original sin of having evolved from bubbling mud in the first case or mired in the mud as creatures distant from abstract divine origin. The Catholic Church is certainly nervous of any ideology that purports to replace God as creator of future Man. There is certainly a Gnostic strain in transhumanism. Some very extreme theories would have humans become translated into code or, ultimately, pure energy though this is very much at the speculative science fiction end of the movement and not typical.

In another shift from recent ‘spiritual’ thinking and in a reversion to Judaeo-Christian norms, nature is there to be commanded by transhumanism. This means there is little room for ideological dialogue between transhumanism and the deep ecological movement even if some pragmatic progressive transhumanists have applied transhumanist ideology to the planet as much as to the species (see Note 5)

As humans are to be guided towards their new future despite themselves so nature is to be restored by human technological efforts. Nature left to itself is inefficient, wasteful and cruel, filled with suffering (which is very true). Transhumanism in this regard has a correct analysis. The cultural fashion has become to romanticise and idealise nature but, while being the material substrate without which we cannot live any more than we can live without a body, Nature has no mind. It does not care whether we live or die. Transhumanism tends to want to shape Nature into a form suitable for a ‘sustainable’ future humanity which is certainly not quite how most in the ecological movement see sustainability.

A Lovecraftian view can also sometimes be found amongst popular transhumanist fellow travellers- the universe is cold and meaningless and humans have emerged as a result of processes over which we have no control …. except potentially through the judicious application of science and technology. We are constantly flipping back to the Nietzschean from the Platonic in this oscillation between opposites. The transhumanist, instead of accepting the romantic view of the natural, tends to accept it as it is. This can lead lead some extreme transhumanists covertly into territory not that much different analytically from Hitler's as a brute struggle for existence along Darwinian lines. Then a basic decency linked either to personal freedom or social conscience pulls the movement back from the brink. But some may teeter on that brink yet!

Instead of deploying a bastardised form of German Idealism and then making humanity conform to nature in its cruelty (and inefficiency) like the national socialists, in yet another paradoxical relationship to history transhumanism adopts a more Bolshevik or Stalinist approach - that the application of technology can transform humanity within Nature so that it transcends it. An ‘improved’ humanity becomes something that Nature on its own is incapable of producing or producing only after vast unnecessary suffering over very long tracts of time. This is like the Soviet New Man without Marxism-Leninism: it is no accident that an important precursor of transhumanism was indeed Russian Cosmism that, ultimately, contributed to sending cosmonauts into space and that transhumanism has found a home in post-Soviet Russia.

Transhumanists also tend to have an interest in science fantasy as a way of envisaging what is possible. Anyone who has attended a transhumanist meeting will at some point hear someone putting forward some imaginative transcendent vision of our future. This is a tradition that goes back to Olaf Stapledon in the interwar period as well as to H G Wells romantic-utopian 'Things to Come'. Transhumanists can often think imaginatively in terms of aeons and the cosmic before coming back to earth with a bump. But there is a bit of history to note here. Progressives of the pre-First World War and interwar era were not averse to eugenics and techno-corporatism. Fascism (in alliance with artistic futurism), communism and national socialism were all expressions of a technological impulse that is not so very distant from the current myths and fantasies of more radical transhumanism. Ironically transhumanism, for all its talk of the future, is thus extremely old-fashioned ideologically. This alone may explain why it is being marginalised in contemporary society. The public has become very wary of grand theory in politics and not without reason.

Transhumanist Value Propositions

This leads us to two transhumanist value positions - that humans should be 'enhanced' and that they should live a long time (with the assumption that the long life is not as a dribbling incontinent person surviving decades in an institution). Enhancement is to be of intelligence, fitness and capacity. The radical view here is that humanity can transcend its own biology. This perhaps forgets that there is only a narcissistic point in a human living a long time without progeny and if the benefits are not heritable. To claim to transcend biology requires that the transcendence is social as much as individual. ‘Hard’ (rather than soft) transhumanists are not always good at understanding this.

The world they envisage is also often classically hedonistic – to caricature this a little, we have self-sufficient god-like individuals existing for a very long time (perhaps forever) in a state of pleasure. It is like a pagan heaven or late 1950s Playboy American science fiction but it is an ideal construct as un-human (which is intended) as any mental ideal constructed by Plato or many a religion looking for succour from the pains of this world. It is an aspiration but one so distant from the current capacity (socio-economic or socio-cultural) of humanity as to be meaningless. It is also only a vision for all humanity in the very distant future.

More measured ‘hard’ transhumanism in the meantime drifts into the possible medium-term prospect of a long-lived elite with a great deal of money to enjoy it. It is no accident that popular science fiction (which always represents the anxieties more than the hopes of an age) generally sets its stories in a world of extreme inequality where elites act with relative impunity. It could be argued that humanity will eventually see 'trickle down' to the masses from the idealism of the rich but this seems be dubious on recent history. We must consider the social and cultural ‘ressentiment’ at resources being diverted from the general to the particular, at prospective unequal prospects for life itself and the reasonable expectation that the rich will not be any more generous than they are now in spreading benefits.

On the contrary, radical enhancement is just as likely to result in a very long-term speciation of humanity into the privileged and the mass that is technological and biological in a way not seen before. One particular area of normative contestation in this context is that consenting and well-informed adults will have a right to select the most fit children based on genetic testing under transhumanism. I have little problem with this if the interests are entirely those of the child and not selection to please the ideology or vanity of the parents. To select against disease seems reasonable. Nevertheless, this offends against the preferred lottery approach of religious-minded people where 'God chooses' and the social danger is precisely of an elite building genetic superiority into itself until eventually it becomes a new species. It would be a wonderful irony if arificial intelligence saw our elites as a threat and allied with ordinary humanity to remove them!

However, collective opposition to initial genetic enhancement may be on rockier ground. It is reasonable to ensure that a child is best fitted as possible for survival, health and achievement. The brutal and destructive (and bad science) of national socialist racial eugenics should not be confused with a more progressive attempt to use scientific discovery to improve the lives of unborn children. Not all fertilised eggs can become fully human or else the world would have sunk under trillions of starving persons. The new technology may simply mean that the choice of the future is shared between man and nature rather than left just to a cruel and wasteful evolutionary process that frequently makes mistakes. Whether man is actually fitted to make the necessary choices should be the matter for debate rather than the choice itself.

Even if the ideological framework for enhancement is a blast from the past, the aims within that framework are generally progressive - "curing disabilities, improving general health conditions, longevity, upgrading intelligence, exerting better emotional control, widening the opportunities for aesthetic expression, achieving spiritual goals, and ensuring better lives for our children". So, there is good in transhumanist thought despite the caution and criticisms expressed throughout this article. Subject to the risk of the sinister in 'emotional control' (which places transhumanism dangerously close to the liberal-centrist’s discovery of surveillance, social control and abandonment of free expression) and allowing for caution on the spiritual guff, no right-minded person is likely to have a problem with any of the other aims … yet the question recurs - if there are so many benefits why is it not only that there is no viable transhumanist political party of any consequence but that transhumanists are not influential in mainstream party politics? The next article will explore this further.

1. The proactionary principle is an attitude to risk-taking that stands in opposition to the precautionary principle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proactionary_principle

2. A type case of this is Marxism which, despite being a materialist ideology like transhumanism, very quickly started to mirror tropes of the Church - it had an eschatology, a soteriology and eventually martyrs and so much more. In past transhumanist dealings I have seen (in admittedly a very few transhumanists) the seeds of beliefs that would become almost indistinguishable in form though not in content from those of religion. One of the elements in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Wise Blood’ (1952) which was filmed by John Huston in 1979 and which is well worth watching is how a tormented individual creates an atheist Church in the Deep South and how this apes the forms of local religion and culture regardless of the content. Ideologies ineluctably keep repeating the same basic forms of organisation over and over again regardless of content because there is no other way of drawing in masses acculturated to such forms.

3. I am indebted to a summary of a thesis by Krisztián Szabados of Budapest’s Corvinus University, ‘Transhumanism as a Thin-centred Ideology’ (March 2021) for a useful outline of Transhumanist ideology but the article is also drawn from a long period of personal involvement in transhumanist discussions and even politics as a (mostly) constructive critic.

4. For anyone who wants to read more into political transhumanism, Wikipedia has a useful review at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanist_politics I have conflated its four categories of transhumanism into two ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tendencies based on a broad historical Left/Right libertarian/progressive division because this article is not a description of the phenomenon but a broader critique of its ‘problems’. You will note that the ideology has a huge range of conflicted interpretations that are reminiscent of the world of the First International with its statist and anarchic wings. We are still talking about very small numbers of activists. The US Transhumanist Party claims under 1,600 members rather than the half a million Leader Istvan Zoltan had targeted ambitiously for 2024. This is significantly less than the UK’s most radical working class socialist party [Workers Party of Britain].

5. 'Soft’ progressive transhumanists are often extremely concerned about existential risk to humanity - after all, there is no transhumanity without the human base line. Again, there are cross-links with more apolitical and less ideological futurists, a large community in its own right. A good starting point for understanding ‘progressive’ concern about humanity not making it to the next stage of evolution can be seen in the Future of Life Institute - https://futureoflife.org Transhumanism has a difficult relationship on occasions with the Green Movement with progressives tending to add climate change to the category of existential risks to the species and to the future but other more hard-line activists getting irritated with what they see as Green monomania, overly concerned with just one risk that may not be truly existential (unlike an asteroid of sufficient size hitting the planet) and too uninterested or opposed to claimed technological solutions like geoengineering.