Genuine question. What's so bad about transhumanism? I think immortality would be pretty cool for those who want an extended life span
I think if immortality becomes within human reach, it will suddenly be starkly apparent who is and isn’t considered human. People on tumblr were celebrating David Koch’s death recently—rooting for transhumanism means rooting for a world in which David Koch lives forever, while a poor Mexican immigrant woman doesn’t. It is naive to think that the millions of people around the world who are barred access to proper medical care today will get a fair share of the spoils of transhumanism tomorrow, and it seems more realistic that a transhumanist society will mainly give us immortal Trump, and immortal dictators, oil barons, rich war criminals, and immortal Silicon Valley white males, and immortal first world elites.
You might say “But all advances in medicine are more readily accessible to first world elites and are out of reach for millions of people, so does that make medical research bad too?” but the ‘advances’ favoured by transhumanists are on a whole other level of hubris that would have different implications and consequences. (I mean, eugenics was the subtext of every transhumanist manifesto I’ve come across.) I am reminded of this quote from Sapiens that starts with: “Suppose science comes up with cures for all diseases, effective anti-ageing therapies and regenerative treatments that keep people indefinitely young. In all likelihood, the immediate result will be an unprecedented epidemic of anger and anxiety.”
I wrote a post about this last year in which I mentioned that transhumanist rhetoric also pushes us further along the Cartesian dualism slippery slope. Promises to improve our subpar bodies or plug our consciousness onto better receptacles means you don’t think of your body as your self; it feeds into the same “I am not my body, I own my body” mindset that enables the ever-increasing capitalist commodification of human bodies (as a sum of parts up for sale) that harms women disproportionately (as women have historically been the Body so that men could arrogate the right to be the Mind). Disregarding the body and reducing your personhood to nothing but your mind or intellect is the first step to denying some people personhood because they do not have the right kind of intellect, or not enough of it. This glorification of the human mind and contempt for the human body in its current, un-enhanced state, also translates into contempt for people whose bodies are seen as even more intolerably deficient—hence all the distasteful rhetoric about how transhumanism will finally rid us of disability / the disabled.
This contempt for the human body is also linked to a very male contempt for boundaries, to men’s obsession with unchecked growth and their disdain for the inescapable limitations of the natural world, which is destroying our planet. Buying into the Cartesian idea that you are a mind “driving” a body (rather than being a body, with your mind as a physical body part among others) leads to perceiving the body as a boundary standing between your consciousness /your self, and the outside world. A very frustrating boundary at that, limited in many ways, prone to illness and ageing. I remember reading a quote by a prominent transhumanist (CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation) that went “We seek to void all limits tolife, intelligence, freedom, knowledge, and happiness.” Imagine how much better we would all feel about ourselves if, rather than perceiving our body as limiting our lifespan and freedom and capacity for happiness, we acknowledged it for what it is—our only source of happiness and freedom to explore the world, our incredibly complex and beautiful way of experiencing the universe, of creating sensations of pleasure and wonder, of remembering them and anticipating more. If we thought of our body not as an unsatisfactory flesh prison for our consciousness in need of video game-like enhancements but as a mind-boggingly refined organism, a delicately balanced whole that is more than the sum of its parts, we wouldn’t be so eager to risk destroying this balance by attempting to “void all limits” that make it viable.
The word that comes to my mind to describe transhumanism is ungrateful, both towards nature and towards women. The latter is a no-brainer; women created every human body that ever walked on this Earth and the (overwhelmingly male) transhumanist pioneers, who scorn human bodies in their current state and seek to improve them, really scorn women’s work as inadequate and reveal the same obvious womb envy that led to male-created religions in which male gods are the creators of all life. And this lack of gratitude, respect, and, I want to say, loyalty towards the human body—seeing it as disposable once we find a better, more durable way to store our consciousness—very much mirrors a lack of gratitude, respect and loyalty towards nature in general (which our bodies are a part of), seeing natural resources as disposable, deciding against all evidence to the contrary that the natural world needs to be tinkered with and improved by humans rather than cared for and valued as it is—what Paul Kingsnorth calls “human imperialism” seems to be at the core of the transhumanist mindset.
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