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The Proactionary Manifesto
Abstract
‘Humanity’ is about more than the survival of the animal Homo sapiens. That point is already made in the word: ‘humanity’ literally means the quality of being human, independent of who or what may possess that quality. The ancient Greeks had various ways of deciding who might be so qualified: some wanted evidence of ‘good character’, others were satisfied with an ability to pay. That all members of Homo sapiens are eligible to be treated as humans is essentially an Abrahamic theological aspiration that over the past five centuries has been sharpened by science. This aspiration has typically included a desire to overcome the body of one’s birth; hence the world-historic significance of Jesus — and not only in Christianity, which depicts his resurrection as having redeemed the idea of a humanity created ‘in the image and likeness’ of God, but also in the progressive secular world, where Jesus stands for the refusal to accept that one’s starting position in life determines one’s destiny. To be proactionary is, in the first instance, to identify with this progressive historical narrative, which in the secular West has been known mainly as ‘Enlightenment’ but in our own day is expressed as the drive to ‘human enhancement’.
Claude Lévi‐Strauss's Myth and Meaning discusses the cultural significance attached to twins in nonliterate societies. Twins are invested with ambivalent feelings, embodying abundance and loss, security and threat, natural and unnatural, good and evil. Twins also challenge the “identity” of being one thing or the other. The spliced‐lipped, incipient twin, hare, as messenger/transgressor between binary opposites, is also the mythical carrier of order and mishap. Being born feet first, wanting to move too fast, to get ahead of oneself or one's twin at the expense of mother and nature, is also invested with moral significance. Mythic thinking is about projecting the desire for social order onto nature. Yesterday's twins are today's clones. Advocates of cloning, and in particular human cloning, are united in the claim that their critics engage in scientifically illiterate mythic thinking, but, as Lévi‐Strauss concluded, belief in the inevitability and moral superiority of change, progress, and history also represents a form of “mythic thinking” in modern “scientific” cultures. This entry highlights the mythic constructions of all sides of the cloning debate. It suggests the socially based nature of beliefs in general.
Political parties advocating transhumanist ideas have recently sprung up in a great number of countries, supported by rapid technological and scientific progress. This article examines whether any of the various frameworks of niche party theory can adequately describe transhumanist parties. It is discussed how the nicheness of transhumanist parties can be conceptualized. After determining the common set of issues that ideologically diverse transhumanist political organizations accentuate, this article conducts a qualitative analysis to justify the “proto-nicheness” of transhumanist parties within the spatial and salience theories. Two new accounts will be put forward based on Bischof’s consumer market analogy and Hughes’s three-dimensional conceptualization of contemporary politics.
Republicanism gives non-domination a central role. However, the modes of domination change over time. Expertise and anticipation have gained growing relevance in this respect. An emergent form of anticipation is pre-emption. This represents a peculiar ‘politics of time’, whereby an eschatological event is set and continuously postponed, past, present and future are no longer sequentially connected, and change reproduces the ruling order. Mainly addressed in relation to the military and security, pre-emption plays a growing role in the environmental field. The paper discusses three examples: human enhancement, responsible innovation and the ‘ecomodernist’ take on the Anthropocene thesis. In all cases, what is promised on one side – respectively, empowerment, participation and care for nature – is denied on the other, hampering a transformative green politics. To circumvent this deadlock the paper explores the connection between non-domination and inoperosity. The latter does not mean passivity, resignation, but action free from the compulsion to achieve and expand. Non-domination requires recognition of limits as constitutive of the relationship with oneself and the world. On this view, a promising terrain of inquiry for civic republicanism is offered by ‘prefigurative’ mobilizations.
Political parties advocating transhumanist ideas have recently sprung up in a great number of countries, supported by rapid technological and scientific progress. This article examines whether any of the various frameworks of niche party theory can adequately describe transhumanist parties. It is discussed how the nicheness of transhumanist parties can be conceptualized. After determining the common set of issues that ideologically diverse transhumanist political organizations accentuate, this article conducts a qualitative analysis to justify the “proto-nicheness” of transhumanist parties within the spatial and salience theories. Two new accounts will be put forward based on Bischof’s consumer market analogy and Hughes’s three-dimensional conceptualization of contemporary politics.
This volume collects recent essays and reviews by Thomas Nagel in three subject areas. The first section, including the title essay, is concerned with religious belief and some of the philosophical questions connected with it, such as the relation between religion and evolutionary theory, the question of why there is something rather than nothing, and the significance for human life of our place in the cosmos. It includes a defense of the relevance of religion to science education. The second section concerns the interpretation of liberal political theory, especially in an international context. A substantial essay argues that the principles of distributive justice that apply within individual nation-states do not apply to the world as a whole. The third section discusses the distinctive contributions of four philosophers to our understanding of what it is to be human--the form of human consciousness and the source of human values.
To what extent should we use technology to try to make better human beings? Because of the remarkable advances in biomedical science, we must now find an answer to this question. Human enhancement aims to increase human capacities above normal levels. Many forms of human enhancement are already in use. Many students and academics take cognition enhancing drugs to get a competitive edge. Some top athletes boost their performance with legal and illegal substances. Many an office worker begins each day with a dose of caffeine. This is only the beginning. As science and technology advance further, it will become increasingly possible to enhance basic human capacities to increase or modulate cognition, mood, personality, and physical performance, and to control the biological processes underlying normal aging. Some have suggested that such advances would take us beyond the bounds of human nature. These trends, and these dramatic prospects, raise profound ethical questions. They have generated intense public debate and have become a central topic of discussion within practical ethics. Should we side with bioconservatives, and forgo the use of any biomedical interventions aimed at enhancing human capacities? Should we side with transhumanists and embrace the new opportunities? Or should we perhaps plot some middle course? Human Enhancement presents the latest moves in this crucial debate: original contributions from many of the world’s leading ethicists and moral thinkers, representing a wide range of perspectives, advocates and sceptics, enthusiasts and moderates. These are the arguments that will determine how humanity develops in the near future.