Transhumanism on the Air (Wesley Smith)
From Wesley Smith’s blog: I was interviewed for an hour by Derek Gilbert yesterday on KSSZ about transhumanism, post humanity, and genetic enhancement of our progeny. We discuss transhumanism as religion, its obsession with control, and its threat to human exceptionalism. If you are interested, check it out. My comments below.
Smith acknowledged that the transhumanist movement is not a fringe movement, that it is growing fast and becoming well known, with “influential thinkers” engaging in “serious scholarship” on posthumanity.
Then of course he criticized the “value system” of transhumanists.
Both Smith and the interviewer kept laughing frequently, like they could not believe the words they were about to say. Quite cheap trick if you ask me, like the style of some Fox News anchors. Needless to say, to me the effect was the opposite, like hearing a postman laughing at the Internet.
Smith said “transhumanists scout the internet, and if you say something about them you will end up on their website, and probably also this radio program will be mentioned on their website at some point”. Here it is Wesley!
When asked how how influential the transhumanist movement is, Smith answered that it is definitely not fringe though not yet mainstream, mentioned the conference at Stanford, and remarked that while transhumanists will not influence the Bush administration, some of them teach in prestigious universities and are in a good position to influence the government leaders of tomorrow.
Concerning “designer babies”, Smith thinks parents should “accept with unconditional love” their children. Even, apparently, when accepting their birth defects means condemning them to a lifetime of unhappiness. His main criticism is that transhumanist think that “being merely human is not enough”. He keeps referring to empty cliches, impossible to defend rationally, like the “joy we get from being merely human”, and that “knowing that we are going to die is a powerful stimulation to live full lives”. Even with frequent quotations from the WTA website, Smith keeps misunderstanding the transhumanist message, e.g. “transhumanists never talk of improving human capacity for love”. We do talk about it of course, and a lot, but it is difficult to expain things to those who do not wish to understand.
The basic premise of transhumanism, according to Smith, is that “being human has no intrinsic value”. He believes, instead, in human exceptionalism: humans are special, and being human has value. I agree, but prefer defining “human” based not on our current biological makeup, but rather on our capacity to think, feel, love, hope and improve ourselves and our world. Smith thinks that then “everything becomes possible” and refers to Nazi eugenics which in this context is, I believe, just smoke in the eyes.
Transhumanism, according to Smith, is a materialist religion that “reflects obsession with control”. But some minutes later he says that he wishes to see human cloning research, even therapeutic, completely outlawed regardless of its potential to save lives and reduce suffering. So I wonder who is really obsessed with control. Even if Smith’s objections seem based on humanitarian and social considerations, I still sense the old “will of god” argument against progress (at the very beginning the interviewer refers to “Transhumanism: the idea that we can be more than our God-given physical limitations"). Of course Smith is too intelligent to mention it explicitely.
Posted by G.P. on 12/13 at 06:11 PM