The goal of transhumanists is to improve human beings so they will perform better. In doing so, they contribute above all else to creating people perfectly suited to capitalism.
It’s important to step back and take a critical look at this movement through the lens of sociology. Why? Because transhumanists seem less interested in promoting any kind of evolution than in radically renouncing politics. That’s where the problem lies.
Transhumanism emerged in the early 1990s in the United States. The term refers to an influential movement that unites a diverse group of entrepreneurs, researchers and philosophers who share the same ambition: using technological and biomedical advances to improve human beings’ physical, intellectual and emotional performance.
Their ultimate goal is to reach a new stage in our evolution where human beings will live forever, free from all forms of biological determinism.
Fuelling wild claims
Transhumanism has become the subject of genuine fascination, as well as an inevitable and controversial topic of social debate. Crystallising the hopes, fears and fantasies of our time, it has inspired increasingly sensationalist claims.
“In 200 or 300 years, the beings that will dominate the Earth will be far more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees,” said Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in 2017.
Behind the grand rhetoric and hype of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley — the birthplace of the movement — we need to question both the meaning and the social and political implications of transhumanists’ promises.
As a sociologist, political scientist, and university professor (HEC Montréal), I have been working for many years on this movement. I have written three essays that defend a critical perspective and invite us to distance ourselves from what I call “spectacle transhumanism.”
The central risk of transhumanism, as my research shows, is how it can depoliticize our imaginations. The ideal of the enhanced human suggests a future of alienated humans adapted to the capitalist world. Transhumanism abandons any political questioning of this world or its harmful effects on the planet, on humans, and on all living beings. Rather, the movement questions humanity itself, which it understands as an inadequate species of beings.
Outperforming humanity?
“We are remarkable living beings, but it would be anthropocentric arrogance to claim that we are perfect. We are extraordinary beings, but also extraordinarily imperfect,” according to Didier Coeurnelle and Marc Roux, representatives of the French transhumanist association [AFT Technoprog].
The ambition to transcend the human condition, which is fundamental to transhumanism, is based on a belief deeply rooted in the history of the movement: that human beings are deficient.
If transhumanists think humans need to be improved, it is because they believe humans are flawed. English philosopher Max More, one of the pioneers of the movement, best expressed this disparaging view of the human condition in his famous Letter to Mother Nature: “Dear Mother Nature. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution … .What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed.”
In order to correct this supposed original imperfection of human beings, transhumanists wish to use new technologies to modify their “nature.”
In the mind of transhumanists, the very survival of the human species is at stake. They believe the deficiencies of human beings have been intensified by modern societies where the pace of technological acceleration is rendering our bodies and minds obsolete.
So human beings have no future unless they agree to optimise themselves biotechnologically: “If, by some miraculous consensus, the entire human species decided to reject progress, the long-term result would almost certainly be its extinction,” declared Austrian robotics expert Hans Moravec.
Obsolete humans turn into up-to-date humans
This grand transhumanist narrative of deficient human beings with no choice but to adapt by modifying themselves amounts to a profound depoliticisation of the conditions of our existence.
Based on the premise that human beings are the problem, this type of discourse helps to absolve capitalist industrial civilisation of any responsibility for the contemporary political, social and ecological crisis.
Transhumanists do not believe in questioning the social and political organisation of our world — in this case, the capitalist world and its imperative of growth and overcoming all limits, human, living and terrestrial. Instead, they believe human beings, in the flesh, must be questioned.
To catch up with the “progress” of artificial intelligence, which they deem inevitable, and because they consider our brains to be biologically obsolete, transhumanists call for the technical “augmentation” of our cognitive abilities.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk, U.S. President Donald Trump’s “government efficiency” czar, justified the creation of his company Neuralink in these terms. The company aims to develop brain implants that Musk hopes will make our brains more efficient, faster, and ultimately more competitive.
To curb the rise of violence worldwide, and because they consider that the problem lies in the archaic nature of our moral sense that we inherited from the earliest days of our history, transhumanists propose artificially enhancing this using pharmacology: “There are few cogent philosophical or moral objections to the use of specifically biomedical moral enhancement – or moral bioenhancement,” write Australian and Swedish researchers Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson.
Nor do transhumanists blame our capitalist model of society for the ecological crisis. Instead, they see this as a question of the obsolescence of our bodies and metabolisms. The goal, in their view, is to bioengineer humans to increase the resistance of our bodies (to extreme temperatures, for example) or to make them less polluting: “We call this human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change.”
The authors of this study also evoke the use of pharmacology to artificially induce an intolerance to meat or even the genetic reduction of human size in order to reduce our ecological footprint.
Change human beings or get rid of capitalism?
When we look at transhumanism from a critical sociological and political philosophical perspective, it’s clear that the main risk it poses is not so much that its promises will be fulfilled. The real risk is that its promises will blind and distract us from what is essential: the political, social, and ecological urgency of changing our relationship with the world.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” argued Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti. Yet this is ultimately what transhumanists are promoting.
Our capitalist model of a society, based on exponential growth, is literally untenable and the pace of acceleration is unsustainable. Never mind, transhumanists say, let’s just enhance humans and their performance! Let’s upgrade them and accelerate their bodies and minds!
From this point of view, transhumanism is anything but a revolution. It is precisely the opposite: a formidable machine for depoliticising and legitimising the system.
The real imperative is not to modify human beings to adapt them to the system. On the contrary. The currents of degrowth, political ecology and ecofeminism invite us to radically question this inhumane and ecocidal model of society.
We either bifurcate by changing our political trajectory and establishing a completely different relationship with living beings. Or we adapt, with the help of technology and human engineering, to survive the increasingly degraded living conditions of the capitalocene. That’s the choice society faces today.
- is a Sociologist and political scientist, specialist in the social, political and ecological issues raised by transhumanism, HEC Montréal
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
