Beyond Caution: The Party of Life

Statement for Vital Progress Summit 2004 with new introduction

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

Just four years after Joy’s warnings against GNR technologies, the President’s Commission on Bioethics released its report Beyond Therapy. Some committee members later said they did not endorse the report so it is probably mostly the view of chairman Leon Kass and members Francis Fukuyama and Michael Sandel.

The philosophical opponents of transhumanism and many of the changes consistent with transhumanism (including in vitro fertilization in the case of Kass) seemed to congregate around The New Atlantis. Appropriately named after the Platonic fantasy of a perfect unchanging society now lost to the world, this publication aims to shape "the nation's moral and political understanding of all areas of technology" in a way antithetical to transhumanist ideals and aspirations.

At this time, transhumanists were faced with three prominent intellectual threats to our preferred future. Bill Joy had excited the doomsters and technophobes but had also invigorated the side of progress; Leon Kass (whose essay bemoaning Jewish support for life extension I had read), philosopher Michael Sandel, author Francis Fukuyama (who, in a 2004 Foreign Policy article described transhumanism as “the most dangerous idea in the world.” and the precautionary principle.

In a widely cited 2004 article in Foreign Policy, political scientist and neoconservative Francis Fukuyama described transhumanism as “the world’s most dangerous idea.” He had elaborated on this claim in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.

Referring to transhumanism as “a strange liberation movement” Fukuyama said:

Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. They want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As "transhumanists" see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution's blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species.

Fukuyama was and is well-respected (as I do for his 1995 book, Trust) despite the decisive refutation of his 1992 declaration that because the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, history had come to an end.

With the gathering of these explicitly anti-transhumanist forces, we at Extropy Institute organized the Vital Progress Summit online in February 2004, chaired by Natasha Vita-More. This event was also inspired by earlier discussions of this threat at our 2001 Extro 1 conference, “Shaping Things to Come” sessions on the precautionary principle (“Overcoming Resistance to Superlongevity and Augmentation.”) The keynote participants were Ronald Bailey, Robert A. Freitas, Jr., Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, Max More, Christine Peterson, Michael Shapiro, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More, Roy Walford most of whom provided statements alongside mine, reprinted below.

---

Beyond Caution: Exploring, Inspiring, Reassuring

Statement for Vital Progress Summit 2004

By Max More, Ph.D.

A deep metaphysical and existential anxiety lurks behind seemingly diverse forms of opposition to progress in any technologies capable of altering “human nature”. What is common to Kass’s fear of going “Beyond Therapy”, Fukuyama’s fear of “our posthuman future”, and the fear of the more extreme wielders of the precautionary principle?

For Kass, the use of technology to overcome the historical, biologically rooted limits of humans is “the deepest source of public anxiety about biotechnology” and raises the weightiest questions of “the nature and meaning of human flourishing, and the intrinsic threat of dehumanization (or the promise of super-humanization)”. In the case of the Precautionary Principle, note how it is applied primarily to genetic engineering and to alterations in the “natural order of the biosphere.

Shock and Awe Times Four

Our hearts should go out to those who are not born neophiles (lovers of progress, exploration, and discovery). We need to understand why their philosophical immune system has been activated. We need to go gently on the attack, putting more effort into acknowledging, reassuring, and curing. Their ailment goes deeper than the future shock associated with Toffler. Today’s reaction against a possible transhuman transition represents a fourth traumatic metaphysical-existential shock.

The first shock came with the Copernican revolution in which our culture lost the reassuring and situating idea that the Earth was the center of all Creation. Humanity experienced a second profound metaphysical shock in the Darwinian Revolution, which removed from our species any claim to be the special design and the center of a divine plan. The third shock arrived about a century ago with the unveiling of the unconscious mind. No longer masters of the universe or of the world, we could no longer even be sure that we had dominion over ourselves.

Now a fourth chapter in this disturbing tale threatens to unfold: The removal (or transformation) of the central characters of this drama - human beings themselves. Most opponents of progress are holding on tight to the “eternal verities” of human nature. They prefer the devil they know (disease, aging, death, emotional and cognitive shortcomings) to the great unknown of a transhuman future. Leon Kass has been known to quote Nietzsche. In the character of Zarathustra, Nietzsche vividly conveyed the metaphysical shock of his time:

How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as if through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?

That shock is resurgent today. Apologists for the “natural order” don’t want to recognize that, for humans, causing change is natural. This opposition, this neophobia, takes several forms. For the deeply religious, human enhancement should be opposed because it makes it obvious that the existing order is flawed. This strikes at the root of belief in a perfect being. The extreme environmentalists resist the technologies of transformation because of their commitment to Nature as inherently benevolent and humanity as inherently evil or debased.

A lesser but overlapping form of opposition derives from rationalizing the existing order. Over many centuries everyone has known that humans must age and die (and must fight the infidel, look to higher forms of intelligence for solutions, and so on). The painful reality and inevitability of weakness and death induces a psychologically powerful defensive reaction seen even among many humanists: If this apparently miserable fact is something we cannot change then it must really be good, be necessary for our lives to be meaningful, or is an essential part of the “best of all possible worlds”.

Evolutionary psychology probably plays a role in reinforcing these causes of excessive caution. For the vast majority of human history we lived on the edge of survival. There was no canned food, no safety net, no backup plan. Experimenting with a radical innovation involving a vital matter like food production could and usually would lead to disaster. Great caution has survival value when you have no reserves. As we have deepened our reserves and interconnected our diverse cultures and institutions, we can afford to lessen caution and apply it in more focused and intelligent ways. Yet our psychology has yet to catch up with this reality.

Beware of Perfection

One point on which I can agree with Kass (but not a way he would like) is his warning about the pursuit of perfection. He talks of pro-enhancers as seeking perfection of mind and body. This would indeed be a mistake, but Kass has it backward. The religious opponents of enhancement are the ones who believe in a heaven of passive perfection – a realm where nothing changes, no one develops, and everyone rests forever. As Zarathustra put it: “Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want anymore: this created all gods and other worlds.”

Those of us who favor advancing technologies both to heal humanity of its historical afflictions and to enable our continued growth as a species have little patience for perfection. Perfection is not the real issue. The real issue is the pursuit of fundamental knowledge and the breaking of the chains of human nature. The Precautionary Principle and the gloomy visions of Kass, Fukuyama, McKibben and the rest are new only in their proximate cause: The advent of molecular biology, genetic engineering, and the early whispers of the transhuman joining of biology and technology. In essence and in effect they are echoes of our myths of the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, of Pandora’s Box, of Icarus, of Prometheus (and now of The Terminator and The Matrix minus the hopeful conclusion).

Let’s Stop Stopping

The Precautionary Principle creates an impossible standard. It would have us stop progress until we have proof of safety. But we can’t know what is safe without trying it out. Nor can we know all the potential benefits. And, as others have pointed out, precaution of this kind and relinquishment of the Bill Joy variety carry their own risks.

As Bill McKibben insists, Enough is Enough! Fine. But enough for who, and for how long? McKibben sees us as asking for too much. Kass and Fukuyama reflect the same value system. They worry about loss of dignity resulting from superlongevity and enhancement. But this is nonsense. Instead we can look forward to more time for self-development along with more ability to overcome the biological and neurological limitations to self-actualization. Dignity requires the freedom to make choices and Kass is trying to take that away or, rather, prevent increased opportunities for dignity coming into being.

The Party of Life

None of us plans to force upon Kass, Fukuyama, or McKibben superlongevity or the other enhancements they fear. We ask in return for the same freedom to pursue our way: the way of what Friedrich Hayek called “the Party of Life”.

We can appreciate and respect what Kass calls the “giftedness” of the world (though it is a fact, not a gift). We can take precautions. We can allow for a plurality of values and choices. At the same time, the diverse people who comprise the Party of Life can balance precaution with pioneering, relinquishment with reaching, hiding with exploring. As the “mind of nature” we can choose the noble responsibility of appreciating what is while creating what can be.

Even as we explore, venture, develop, experiment, stretch, grow, and dare, we would do well to embrace those who pull back in fear. Our responsibilities as reasonable proponents of profound technological progress, include envisioning positive futures, developing pathways to those futures, communicating those futures, and thereby soothing the fears of those ridden by metaphysical anxiety. Only then can we all join today in welcoming and shaping an ever-improving future.

---