Humanity: The Remix

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"Today human intelligence, in the form of technology, is about to make possible the elimination of pain and lives filled with unimaginable pleasure and contentment," writes James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Westview, 2004). The former editor of a zine called EcoSocialist Review who teaches health policy at Trinity College in Connecticut, Hughes, 44, is executive director of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA). His goal, he says, is to convince fellow liberals that a pro-technology, democratic form of transhumanism is the way of the "Next Left."

Hughes says that Western radicals at least as far back as the 18th century saw science as a tool for advancing democracy. He argues that a pro-tech vision actually dominated the American and European left well into the 20th century, personified by the likes of the liberal British biologist J.B.S. Haldane and the writer H.G. Wells. After World War II, with its gas chambers and atomic bombs, a long-dormant "pastoral" left rose to prominence, closer in spirit to romantic thinkers like Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Since then, he adds, "any kind of narrative of a radically transformed life through new technologies is immediately dismissed."

"Pastoralists are okay with a radically transformed life through yoga or organic gardening," Hughes says, "but once you start a discussion about using tech to end disease, death, poverty, or work, a wall goes up." As he noted in a recent phone interview, Hughes believes that the left must embrace a transcendent vision if it is to succeed. Along with calls for social equity and responsibility, he says, "we also need to give ourselves permission to be excited about new technologies."

The author Jeremy Rifkin, a longtime critic of life patenting and the biotech industry, disagrees. "Transhumanism is the ultimate illustration of how Enlightenment rationalism can easily run amok and create extreme pathology," he says. In their faith that they can harness such powerful technologies to achieve their social ends, the transhumanists are falling victim to an old, misguided Western faith in human perfectibility. Rifkin's fear is that under the guise of progress, the public will be seduced by a new technology whose destructive power far exceeds its benefits.

Thinkers across the political spectrum share similar concerns. Last year, the conservative scholar Francis Fukuyama, author of Our Posthuman Future (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), spoke out against trans-humanism when the journal Foreign Policy asked him and several other thinkers to list "the world's most dangerous ideas." Fukuyama argues that modern society must learn to respect human nature in the way it now respects the rest of nature. If we don't, he warns, "we may unwittingly invite the transhumanists to deface humanity with their genetic bulldozers and psychotropic shopping malls."

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