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Riccardo Campa – Toward a transhumanist politics

The central transhumanist idea of self-directed evolution can be coupled with different political, philosophical and religious opinions. Accordingly, we have observed individuals and groups joining the movement from very different persuasions. On one hand such diversity may be an asset in terms of ideas and stimuli, but on the other hand it may involve a practical paralysis, especially when members give priority to their existing affiliations over their belonging to organized transhumanism.

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In order to remedy this inconvenience I have produced a document – the Italian Transhumanist Manifesto [1] – which (at least in my intentions) represents a positive synthesis of different transhumanist tendencies and philosophical propensities. In this article I shall present a few ideas “extracted” from that Manifesto – those concerning politics – hoping to contaminate with these ideas other organizations that are active abroad or internationally.


In the transhumanist movement, there are three main areas where ideological differences exist: politics, religion and science. As far as politics is concerned, a recent WTA member poll shows that transhumanists exist of many traditional political persuasions, from the far-left wing to the far-right wing, with everything in between. In terms of numbers, however, a prevalence of self-defined left-wingers can be observed (47% in total), with a preponderance of members identifying themselves as “socialist” or “progressive” as well as small fringes of anarchists (2%) and communists (1%). The libertarians are also numerous (20% the total percentage) with a smaller more radical (Randian-Objectivist, anarcho-capitalist, minarchist) component. Members also exist that support conservative, religious or nationalist ideas. Christian democrats are around 0.5%, as are self-defined right-wing extremists. Among WTA international membership, 14% already declares, however, to support an upwing position (neither on the left nor on the right, but “upward”), while 11% says that they are not interested in contemporary politics. It should also be noted that the overwhelming majority of transhumanists support democratic self-determination, while – and this detail is equally interesting – critics of democracy are spread across the entire political spectrum.


With regard to religion, 64% of transhumanists are atheists or agnostics, while 31% adhere to some form of spirituality or religious persuasion. Amongst the latter, 9% are Christian (Protestants, Catholics and Mormons), 4% are Buddhists, 2% are Pagans, 1% Jewish and 1% Muslim – just to mention some well-known religious denominations. There are also members that identify transhumanism as their “religion.”


Coming to science, we have two main propensities. On one side, we have transhumanists careful to remain within the boundaries of official and academic science, and accordingly inclined to consider science fiction, utopias and futurism little more than a pastime or useful thought experiments. On the other, there are transhumanists ready to consider possible technologies and events yet to take place as articles of faith, only because they have been predicted by some eminent futurists or science fiction novelists. Those differences concern mostly subjects such as mind-uploading, immortality, the coming of a Singularity. It appears here that 19% of WTA members deem its discourse too oriented in a utopian, futurist and science-fictional direction, while 8% believes on the contrary that the WTA is too focused on short-term, uninspirational, prosaic issues. The remaining 73% believe instead that the existing WTA approach is sufficiently balanced in this respect. Now, this does not tell much, until one considers how respondents interpret the WTA line. It is therefore more significant to observe that only 7% proclaim themselves “immortalist”, that is believers in an earthly immortality. The remaining 93% confine themselves to a much more pragmatic and realistic stance, defining transhumanism under this aspect in terms of longevism, extension of the human lifespan and life expectancy within the limit of the opportunities increasingly offered by biological and physical sciences.


If we consider i) that the vast majority of transhumanists identify themselves as left-wingers or upwingers; ii) that most non-libertarian right-wingers, as well as religious moderates, have, especially in Europe, a communitarian orientation iii) that in Europe even libertarians (those who in Europe are called “liberals”) are not prejudicially against social and public policies in the fields of research, education and health services – we can conclude that the bias of “plutocratic élitism”, that is the suspicion that transhumanism is an upper middle-class conspiracy against their fellow citizens, is purely a (false) caricature. In other words, an image created by a minority of minarchist and anarcho-capitalist transhumanists has stuck to on the entire world movement.


Indeed, the majority of transhumanists worldwide support the efforts of all those struggling against the exclusion from current and future technologies, at a social as well as at an international level. The transhumanist commitment to technological and informational empowerment can be defined at three levels of intervention: freedom, development, access.


Freedom. If the struggle to increase the human and economic resources devoted to technoscience and research is a fundamental step, it is equally obvious that without real freedom of research, as defined by the scientific method and ethos, such a fight would be futile. The resources would be simply wasted. Our priority is therefore for an anti-prohibitionist fight in order to obtain the freedom for the scientific research in all fields, plus the freedom to mutate, to evolve, to transform one’s phenotype and one’s genotype. To be more specific, the optimal employment of already meager available resources is today seriously hindered by illiberal laws such as (Italian) Law no. 40/2004 on procreative technologies, cloning, genetic engineering and stem cells research. The abrogation or radical reform of this statute is the top specific goal of transhumanists.


Development. At a second level, we find the issue of development. Once promethean technoscientific research has been liberated from religious, political and economic hindrances, a plan must be established to stimulate research programs that, with all due respect to researchers’ autonomy, should not lose sight of priorities related to the improvement of societal and individual conditions, starting from health, quality of life and life expectancy. For instance, Italy, while being a relative forerunner in the field of robotics, does not invest enough in the biotech area, starting from fundamental biological research up to gerontology and cutting-edge medical research. On the other hand, it is obvious that any efforts in this direction would not make sense without a reform of the Italian research and academic system towards greater transparency, meritocracy and efficiency.


Access. But we do not stop here. We should not be contented with formal freedom and effective public support for technoscientific research programs, we also demand substantial freedom. Which means we must demand and obtain social policies and guarantees so that one’s income does not end up being the only parameter deciding who has the actual chance of enhancing oneself, of slowing down aging, of postponing death. It means popular sharing of benefits of scientific research and technological innovation. It means a socialized access to technologies. A citizen may be entitled to decide what to do with his or her own life, but citizens must be supported in such choice by the community they belong to, last but not least because it would be very myopic to show any ambiguity on this point, an ambiguity that would throw into the bioluddite camp the mass of those excluded.


A policy of shared access to technology is legitimized by the collective nature of the scientific effort. Each and every discovery, invention, innovation, owes its existence to the joint effort of many minds, working in different places and eras. When we were born, our community made us to participate in its language, knowledges, information. Our personality does not come from nothing. This is true for citizens as well as for scientists and researchers. A quantum computer, for instance, manufactured by an international company would not be conceivable without the ideas of Democritus, Galileo, Leibniz and many other thinkers. Moreover, scientific research is often directly or indirectly financed or made possible by public funding. It would be unfair to take money from workers’ and citizens’ pockets to finance research programs if the ultimate result would be their social marginalization. The inventor and the discoverer deserve recognition, including monetary rewards, which may also be necessary to make possible the private funding of their efforts; but it is exceedingly inefficient to grant unconditional and monopolistic proprietary rights on new technologies by the mechanical and ever more extensive granting of patent and other protections that may vastly exceed the abovementioned purposes and not recognize the collective contribution behind the relevant findings.


The negative side effects of this mistaken perception of science and technology as a proprietary product of private efforts are very visible. They take place in a world where, notwithstanding any technological progress, human beings are often still laboring the same number of hours in more precarious contexts than their fathers and without profiting from the developments taking place. In this we identify a flaw of current production systems which should be corrected.


In short, a synthetic approach to transhumanist politics should be denoted by strategic and value criteria that originate from different ideological components of transhumanism. Those who insist on the importance of market mechanisms and an open, free society are often extropians; technoprogressives tend to be concerned with social justice and State intervention; and those with a more Nietzschean or postmodern penchant are likely to emphasize the importance of empowerment, popular sovereignty and cultural and ethnic identities. Let us make it clear, however, that in the synthetic vision above the centrality is lost of the three grand idols of the ideologies of the XIX and XX centuries: the market, the State, the race. They lose their place in the name of a higher value, self-directed evolution.



Note

[1] R. Campa, “Manifesto dei transumanisti italiani”, in Letteratura Tradizione, vol. nr. 43, Heliopolis Edizioni, Pesaro 2008, and in Divenire. Rassegna di studi interdisciplinari sulla tecnica e il postumano, vol. 2, Sestante Edizioni, Bergamo 2009. Online: English version at http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/2520; and Italian version at http://www.transumanisti.it/1.asp?idPagina=3.

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Special issue: right-front, transhumanism
Tags: democracy, italy, riccardo campa, transhumanism

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2 comments

1. Ο/Η Miles to go before I sleep…. » Blog Archive » Re-Public: Transhumanism? (deel 2) :
   June 24th, 2009 at 13:39

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2. Ο/Η Riccardo Campa – Toward a transhumanist politics | transhumanism / transhumanismus :
   July 27th, 2009 at 08:26

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