by Stefano Vaj
DIVENIRE Libri
COLLANA A CURA DELLA
ASSOCIAZIONE ITALIANA TRANSUMANISTI
Divenire Libri
A series edited by Riccardo Campa
Scientific Commitee:
Riccardo Campa - Jagiellonian University in Cracow
Fabrizia Cioffi - University of Florence
Amara Graps - Southwest Research Institute in Boulder
James Hughes - Trinity College, Connecticut
Giuseppe Lucchini - University of Brescia
Alberto Masala - Paris Sorbonne University
Giulio Prisco - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
Salvatore Rampone - University of Sannio
Stefano Sutti - University of Padua
Giovanni Tuzet - Bocconi University in Milano
Natasha Vita-More - Transhumanist Arts & Culture H+ Labs
First printed in February 2014
Translated by: Catarina Lamm
Cover image: Giacomo Balla, Velocità astratta (1913)
Stefano Vaj
Biopolitics
A Transhumanist Paradigm
La Carmelina Edizioni
Copyright © 2014 Stefano Vaj
ISBN: 9788896437643
La Carmelina Edizioni
Via Mazzini 47, Ferrara
Via Placido Zurla 84, Roma
www.edizionilacarmelina.it
To Simona
“In Amfang war die Tat”[1]
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust
Table of contents
Preface, by Waldemar Ingdahl
1. Bioethics, environmentalism, biopolitics
2. Overhumanism and the “third man”
3. Voices of reaction
4. The dysgenic threat
5. Nature, culture, selection
6. Species and races
7. Drift, adaptation, differentiation
8. The “eugenic temptation”
9. The manipulation of life
10. The biotech century
11. GMOs and other monsters
12. Insemination, fecundation, gestation
13. Alternative futures
Preface
The world definitely changed on February 22nd 1997. Dolly the Sheep bleated on television the advent of cloning to the public at large. It was a quite defining moment for me personally too. While having been interested in the development of technology for a long time, what had previously only been science fiction, the very image of the Future, had become the Present.
The future in the 1990s was seen as a continuation of modernism. Similar to the present, with about the same sorts of technology and societies, only more of them. Quantity mattered, not quality. Opposing this was the narrative of eco-disaster, the man-made destruction when humanity Prometheus-like over-stepped nature’s boundaries. The green visionaries had quite strict ideals of a decentralised, small scale and self-sufficient society in mind – a society that often felt particularly vulnerable to outside pressure. After all, the fall of the Eastern Bloc was a recent event.
Dolly, and the rapid adoption of the Internet showed the fallacies of both the modernist vision, and its proposed alternative. Not only was the Future closer conceptually, but qualitatively different from the popular contemporary visions of it. The emerging technologies seem to be applied to change much of what was regarded as the fundamental human condition.
My personal interest went into exploring a new set of ideas known as transhumanism. Transhumanism advocates making technologies available to greatly enhance or even surpass basic human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. The philosophy studies the advantages and the disadvantages of adopting emerging technologies, while also making an ethical case. The adoption of such transformative technologies could lead to a transformation and increase in the scale and scope of humanity. This posthuman condition is either viewed as gradual or cataclysmic.
Transhumanists come from a wide range of philosophical and political inclinations. Personally coming from a liberal democratic view, the diversity is often astonishing. Social Democrats, anarchists, free market libertarians, Utilitarians, Kantian ethicists, and even the occasional counter-culture post-modernist flock to the ideas.
In the eclectic mixture of ideas influencing transhumanism Stefano Vaj’s book Biopolitics A Transhumanist Paradigm provides a different view. It proposes ideas influenced by archeofuturism (archeo- as in the Greek for beginning), a current influenced by post-modernism, eugenicism and even with connections with the so-called Konservative Revolution tracing its roots back to Weimar-era names such as Arnold Gehlen, Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger, and claiming Friedrich Nietzsche as one of the founders of this “overhumanist” worldview.
Of these disrupting technologies, none seem to evoke more debate and strife as the life sciences. Biotechnologies provoke the image of what is to be considered human, and natural, in a visceral fashion. An equally motley alliance of conservative politicians, left-wing activists, clergy of many various denominations, social liberals, and environmentalists has been formed since the days of Dolly the sheep. The alliances are held together by the common understanding that biopolitics decides how or if technologies such as cloning, embryonic stem cells and genetic modification will give humanity the opportunity to choose its own fate.
I wanted to understand what such a distant view as Biopolitics A Transhumanist Paradigm could provide a broader transhumanist, or bioliberal audience. Stefano Vaj points out the fundamental divide as emerging much earlier. He passes through the birth of Louise Brown, the first out-of-body fertilisation in 1978, the contraceptive pill of the 1960s, back to the primitive ”biotechnological” practices of antiquity. A certain primitive knowledge about heredity was available when humans formed their environment, and to a certain extent themselves. Animal and plant husbandry involved breeding for particular attributes, and elders decided over the lives of their newborn infants through infanticide.
Stefano Vaj promotes a conception of historical destiny, native to an extrapolated common Indo-European culture. It is important to revive drive and values from this historical and mythical past, in order to prepare for the conflicts of the big biopolitical divide of tomorrow. This Nietzschean view takes a step from notions of the unnatural, as human civilisation and the will to improve, is in a sense unnatural per se.
The book takes a stance against biopolitics as a concept; the bioconservative and bioliberal positions limit the scope of the debate to merely discussing the application of technology rather than biological change. It argues that the idea of progress is naive, while formulating it as a thin individualism and the result of deliberate policies. Francis Fukuyama, the promoter of a Hegelian “end of history” with the democratic free market as the pinnacle, is a clear target for attacking as a proponent of status quo.
Dysgenic arguments basically propose that if more survive in the human gene pool, inferior attributes will have an opportunity to propagate to coming generations. Eugenics did indeed have influence in the early 20th century, but researchers often used fallacious arguments, tying attributes such as intelligence or health to traits such as skin colour, wealth or even certain religious creeds.
Genetic interactions controlling how attributes arise are much more complicated than eugenics saw them. Cancer, obesity or mutations may look similar in their expression in the individual, but may have occurred in different ways by the interaction of heredity and environment as recently shown by the evolving field of epigenetics. Recent developments in medicine and their rapid adoption are indicated as a de facto adoption of eugenics by parts of the population.
The question is if transhumanism actually needs the burden of eugenics in order to show that humanity has strived for betterment during the course of h
istory? It is necessary to show that people have done different choices with the technologies at hand.
There are some points to be taken from the idea of the superman as projected by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the Italian futurist movement of the early 20th century. Ultimately, the individual and society needs to reach control and empowerment. But what this destiny, this Nietzschean Becoming would constitute, is unclear. Moving beyond oneself requires values in order to reach empowerment.
Acknowledging our own artificiality is important, but just in order to see that further enhancement is possible. The market system needs further development, in order to create values. An artificial uterus can be need for many reasons, hardly all of them for a big purpose. Sometimes mere procreation is radical enough.
The author points out the slight difference between giving a diabetic infant insulin for the whole course of life, or inserting an insulin producing gene into an embryo. Endorsing self-determination for communities as discussed in by the author is certainly important in order to achieve improvement. Transhumanism propagates morphological freedom; the right of self-determination to maintain or modify one's own body, through informed, consensual recourse to technology. This also includes the right to refusal of a particular technology. Right as are seen as cultural and societal concepts in the book, which is the most functional way of discussing rights. Rights do not need to be tied to concepts such as divinities, a natural order or particular courses of history to be able to protect the rights of the individual.
Philosopher Michael Polanyi saw knowledge, creativity, and technology charged with strong personal sentiments and ideas. He argued against the position that technology is value-free. The use of technology is best seen as a process of negotiations, a “marketplace of ideas.” In fact, tacit knowledge as guesses, hunches and personal visions are as decisive as informed, committed actions in determining how a specific technology will be applied.
This mixture can also been seen from the various currents in transhumanist ideas. Transhumanism emerges, not from a big leap expending the energy, but from a multitude of smaller practices leading to vast transformations.
Waldemar Ingdahl
1. Bioethics, environmentalism, biopolitics
The set of topics that can be subsumed under the term “biopolitics” represents a fundamental divide in terms of worldviews. Not only that. It is the crucial question of our time, regarding the very identity of our species, its future and the meaning of its presence in the world.
The relation between man and his environment, the origin of life and of the various species, heredity, anthropology, reproduction, selection, health, demography, represent as many “sensitive” arguments which, following their Freudian repression[2] during much of the latter part of last century, have overwhelmingly made their comeback. Hence real or professed environmental catastrophes fill the papers, as do topics such as the patentability of a new species, a cloned Australian sheep or the proclamation of an analogous cloning of a child by a tiny sect,[3] while clashes over IVF, abortion or genetically modified crops are all the rage.
Today these debates are mostly dominated by so-called experts in bioethics, people who are normally earmarked by a strong confessional bias, which in Italy is usually either post-Marxist or Catholic. On the other hand, if the scientific establishment and the food – and chemico-pharmaceutical industries only mind their own short term interests, the “bioethical” line does not usually go beyond the biblical curse against the temptation to “play God,” and opposes every new form of man’s mastery over man and the world.
Indeed, today anyone with genuine ideological concerns on these matters is almost by definition consigned to the “bioethical” camp, given that, as in the case of environmentalism, his adversaries do no perceive – or refuse to perceive – the problem and move only inside a logic of sheer lobbyism, which does not even attempt to go beyond petty political polemics (“transgenic food is cheaper, and in any case it goes against free trade to prohibit their importation”).
Once upon a time, by ecology, one meant simply the science of the equilibrium and interaction between the different species, and between these and their chemical and physical environment, while today the term has moved on to refer to the sensitivities and ideology that also go under the name “environmentalism.” Similarly the term bioethics, as Leon R. Kass remarks, was in reality coined by the biologist Van Rensselaer Potter “to designate a ‘new ethics’, to be built not on philosophical or religious foundations but on the supposedly more solid ground of modern biology – the term was applied to the study of all intersections between advances in biological science and technology and the moral dimensions of human life.”[4] In fact, Kass, leader of the so-called bio-luddite[5] trend, is still anxious to emphasise that the Presidential Committee headed by George W. Bush is not a committee of “bioethicists,” but on bioethics.[6] In any case, already at that time the term stood above all for the specialisation, political or academic, that consists in monitoring and denouncing the results of modern biology.
Despite this, even the “experts in bioethics” rarely deal with other things than the immediate consequences of… yesterday’s innovations, from GMO’s to mammal cloning to artificial fertilisation. Areas of broader interest and more long-term have for long been explored, if at all, only by classical science fiction, especially after World War II, which even though they often offer reassuring and politically correct epilogues (the mad scientists are rendered harmless, the genetically modified “supermen” are overcome by brave American citizens) have at least had the merit to explore radically different scenarios from those we are used to, and that yet are inevitably looming.
For example, a writer like David Gerrold, still active and of respectable fame, has written a whole saga, articulated through many novels and short-stories, about the collision between the usual, Star Trek-style “Terrestrian Federation” and the Morthan civilisation (from “more than,” to imply “more than human”). The latter is a culture created in space, away from the sphere of influence of the Federation, by a group of genetically modified people, which, after separating from the rest of humanity and its rules and conventions, has continued to select and modify its own genetic code, with the deliberate goal of creating a superior race capable of exceptional intellectual and physical performance (there is no need to point out that the scenario is a thinly veiled allegory of World War II). Similar themes are found also in Jerry Pournelle’s future history, in particular as regards the war against domination by the planet Sauron,[7] and in other examples, too many to be mentioned here, describing future ecological catastrophes and/or radical mutations of our species and of its environment, as well as the radically post-human context of the Australian Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder.[8] However, many of the ‘golden age’ science fiction writers were already intensely engaged in the theme of human nature and of its possible future changes, such as Poul Anderson, Robert A. Heinlein and Charles L. Harness. Such writers only prolong a science fiction tradition that goes back at least to the men-beasts of Herbert G. Well’s 1896 classic The Island of Doctor Moreau.[9]
In any case, as Brian Alexander remarks, Heinlein played a decisive part in the cultural uptake of these themes by popular culture, Anglo-Saxon and other, where it also yielded the naïve enthusiasm of currents such as life-extensionism, in which well before New Age one mixed a sense of momentous rupture and the overthrow of many of the traditional axioms of Western, Judeo-Christian and “democratic” correctness with all sorts of detritus and remnants of egalitarian and eschatological ideologies.[10]
In reality, a true reflection on “the biological revolution” has its roots, and since the end of the 19th century has had a first possible response at a very different level, in the overhumanist notion of Zeit-Umbruch, “the rupture of historical time.” Indeed, with these reflections, the idea of the advent of a “third man” makes its way for the first time into the philosophical, anthropological and artistic-reli
gious camp, summoned to totally take over his own destiny in a “new beginning,” that does not so much anachronistically repeat, as retrieve and reproduce the stance with which the Indo-European revolution had once faced the challenge of the Neolithic era. And this in particular through a cultural and postmodern integration of contemporary technology, which went beyond the crisis of civilisation that was already looming.
More recent “bioethical” reports display reasonable awareness of the genealogy of these basic issues. Giuseppe Lissa writes:
At this time, marked according to Nietzsche by the death of God, a deep crisis passed through and lacerated the body of Western tradition, domineered by a Platonic-Judeo-Christian inspiration[11], generating primarily negative effects also upon the liberal tradition which had inherited its most important demands… Freedom, according to an ancient Jewish idea, revived by Hannah Arendt, resides in man’s capacity to tear himself away from the natural, historical and cultural determinisms that pursue him…Now, it is this very prerogative that is being re-examined by the age here considered…Beyond the gap which this transition allowed us to transcend, the essence of man found itself displaced, and put back in power...That however was not all. [Biology], by uncovering the mysteries of the body, enabled man to intervene upon it in order to change it and have it conform to the dreams of perfection he had dreamt at the time when his humanity had lost its way behind the illusory belief that this perfection consists in the realisation of power. As it was transformed into Medicine, Biology nourished the Faustian medical myth and incited him to imagine that he could extend his own vital powers and transform his own body to the point of making it equal to the image of his desire, which was, as said, a desire of power. Hence he totally submitted to this desire and sustained the ambition of exercising his patronage on the entire evolutionary process discovered by Darwin, fancying himself able to direct it in such a way as to have it correspond to all his expectations.[12]