Volume 1, Issue 2 
2nd Quarter, 2006


Democratic Transhumanism

James Hughes, Ph.D.

page 5 of 8

Max More and Natasha Vita-More began work in the 1980s and 1990s establishing the Extropy Institute, and there began to be a Hughesreal melding of these ideas with people in the libertarian movement. One libertarian is Ron Bailey, a writer for Reason Magazine. Bailey will soon release his book, “Liberation Biology”, which will join the panoply of transhumanist books that have come out this year. These ideas begin to associate transhumanism not with the political Left, as it had been before, but with a libertarian kind of politics.

Certain core elements of the transhumanist movement are distinguishable from other, more common types of politics. One of the key arguments in transhumanist or biopolitical politics is the argument over what a citizen is going to be. Is a citizen going to be defined by personhood, with interests over time and an objective experience of selfhood - or is it going to be defined by "human-racism," by being human, humanness of some kind? Or do we believe that all human beings are bad and we have to go back to some kind of natural order?

On one hand, there are people who believe that a polity is central and that the polity can be diverse. On the other hand, there are those who believe that only humans should be in that polity, or that we should not have a polity at all because human beings are bad.

Transhumanism is also defined by a classical struggle over reason and human liberty; progress versus sacred taboos, nature, and romanticism. This gives transhumanists a natural affinity with the politics of cultural progressives, people who are for gay and lesbian rights, people who are for a liberated role for women, and anti-racists.

The final defining characteristic of tranhumanism is the argument about whether human beings can effectively create institutions that manage the risks that we face or whether we will always be punished for the hubris of attempting to understand and control our own condition. If we are always going to be punished, then we must have a static social and technological order. If we can understand those risks, then we can have a progressive social order.

The term "human rights" has been hijacked by the human racists and we need to liberate it from them. We must create a new engagement with the human rights movement and say, "We want rights, but they do not have to be defined by humanness." The Universal Declaration of the Human Genome stated that the human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family and the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. If this is true, then we cannot have posthumans, as Fukuyama says, because we will not be able to recognize each other as members of the same polity.

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