Transhumanism: the ideology of the techno-world
Silvia Guerini and Costantino Ragusa – Resistenze al nanomondo
A chapter from the book: Silvia Guerini and Costantino Ragusa, The ideology of the techno-world. Resisting the megamachine, acro-pólis, 2024.
We will soon publish an English translation of the entire book on our website: Resistenze al nanomondo, www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
“The goal of transhumanism is precisely to replace the natural with the planned”1.
James Hughes
From the First Industrial Revolution, we have come to define technological developments since the 21st century as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments made possible by information technology that characterised the Third Industrial Revolution. In our view, defining the developments of the converging techno-sciences as a Fourth Industrial Revolution is somewhat reductive. First of all, this definition refers to a purely industrial process when the current transformations concern life itself. We do not have a transformation of a factory system that then has consequences for society as a whole, but we have from the very beginning a process that insinuates itself into society and into people’s existence. We are not confronted with developments that simply result from previous technical innovations, but we are confronted with a precise idea of the human being that can be realised thanks to the techno-sciences that can now extend into every dimension, penetrating right into bodies and life processes. Even advances in Artificial Intelligence, for example, do not stem from some new technological innovation, but from more powerful computers, more efficient algorithms and above all more available data.
Techno-sciences become a system, they become a horizon of meaning, they become the context of people’s existence, they become inevitable. They cannot be considered as technologies that fit into every sphere of society, leaving the possibility of using them or not, allowing a dimension of autonomy with respect to them. Once inserted, they become the environment itself, merging with it, shaping and transforming it according to their characteristics and according to the transhumanist ideology they carry. In doing so they become the new normal by shaping and transforming being-in-the-world, perceiving themselves in the world, being in the world and acting in the world. Ultimately transforming the human being.
It can be understood how in itself techno-sciences are not neutral: ‘what we consider the neutrality of technology is only our neutrality with respect to it’2.
The endless debate around their neutrality and their positive or negative use could end around the simple consideration that the harmful consequences cannot be considered as side effects: as far as genetic engineering technologies and nanotechnology are concerned, these are always announced disasters that among other things serve to speed up and normalise other steps.
Just as the atomic scientists observing the results of their tests on the inhabitants of the Bikini atolls did not have before their eyes side effects, but the very manifestation of nuclear research, the researchers developing gene editing with CRISPR/Cas9 do not have before their eyes the disappearance of DNA fragments and transmissible genetic modifications as undesirable effects, but the very possibility of intervening in the evolution of living beings.
Just as a tunnel effect microscope is not a simple instrument, but presupposes a world in which matter is manipulated at the nanoscale, techno-sciences presuppose a world in which the living becomes mere matter to be engineered and redesigned, in which every phenomenon is controlled in order to direct its direction and evolution. Human beings included.
The issue is much more radical than a debate reduced and flattened to utilities, advantages, disadvantages, risks, dangers, the reflection should be taken a little further, out of their realm of quantity, out of their mechanism, out of calculations and predictions to arrive at the radical questioning of the conception that sees the living as a machine. In this conception, only what can be measured and analysed has value, and it is this that becomes the real. But what will come out of tables, diagrams, models, enclosures, laboratories, test tubes and slides will be a minced, simplified, impoverished, degraded real. Nothing compared to the love with which Alfred Russel Wallace observed the bird of paradise in the forest of New Guinea or with which Jean-Henry Fabre spied the comings and goings of a beetle in Provence. That kind of science has disappeared, precisely because a Fabre behind the flattery of the academic world and the great scientific institutions made Victor Hugo’s words his own: ”I hate the stench of death from laboratories”, referring to vivisection on animals practised as profusely in his time as still today.
If a living being is conceived as a machine, one cannot get to know it through simple observation in its environment, it becomes necessary to break it down into its parts. ”It is in this light that one can understand why scientists think it is possible to learn more about life by cutting a frog open in a laboratory than by sitting by a pond observing frogs and fish, mosquitoes and water lilies living together”3. Modern science with its quantitative and utilitarian approach already had in its assumptions the dissection and manipulation laboratory.
Ernst Jünger, with extreme lucidity, glimpsed the paradigm of the laboratory: ”the dead element implicit in our science is demonstrated in the museic impulse, that is, to arrange what is alive in the sphere of the immobile and invulnerable, and perhaps even to form an enormous material catalogue, painfully ordered, that faithfully mirrors our life”4 and continuing with his reflections: ”many more things become visible to the poet than to the scientist, […] he can grasp connections of a different order. It is he who points out to us the essential tasks” and continues: ”He who sets out to describe a forest as an artist cannot argue with those who have specialised knowledge of parasitic plants, mole nests, cockchafer fighting and so on. He would do well to recognise from the outset that they are all right in front of him. But that has nothing to do with the forest”5.
Already in this first mechanistic conception of the living, which later became genetic and computerised, a social mechanics, a genetic and social engineering, a social algorithmisation is presupposed, whose rationality is intended to be total for a systematic manipulation and redesign of every dimension. Right down to life in vitro, sterilised by itself. To scientifically organise humanity is the legitimate claim of modern science that has become techno-science, of the eugenicist and transhumanist ideology that from its beginnings sets out to generate and guide the evolution of a new humanity and the smooth running of everything.
The techno-sciences thus become the supreme instance: everything must be judged from them and, of course, without ever departing from their paradigm of progress at all costs because progress must not be halted and we must participate in it as responsible co-managers of the risks and disasters announced. The technological universe becomes the only horizon of meaning, nothing else can be conceived and the only truth is the technical one.
Already in the 1950s, Jacques Ellul and Bernard Charbonneau, having well understood the direction of the techno-scientific system, were trying to open the eyes of most people with a strong and lucid critique against the ”genetic bomb, scientific eugenics, the fabrication of man by man”, the ”man-machine: ‘a man of flesh who must be integrated into this iron mechanism”, to use Charbonneau’s words.
Ellul identified five paradigms of the advance of the technical system: ”[…] it seems to me that I detect five lines of force in this race of the technical universe towards absurdity. The first paradigm is the desire to standardise everything, an ancient tendency but one that was only a tendency […] the second is the obsession with change at all costs, it is the popular form taken by the myth of progress […] the third is growth at all costs […] the fourth is doing things faster and faster […] and finally the fifth is the rejection of any judgement on what is done by techniques”6.
”Is it necessary to consider the totality of the human being? Or should we conceive of him as a collection of separate parts, a mechanical machine composed of multiple cogs that can be detached, transferred, reassembled in another way…?’ Ellul asked himself, answering: ‘Because that is precisely what all these genetic engineering operations are about: the implicit denial of man as a person, to consider him as an automaton, a robot from which a part is taken, grafted, replaced’7.
The transhumanist movement emerged in the United States, in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s, but let us take a few steps back in history to understand this ideology and to trace its origins. Let us go back to 1883, when Francis Galton first used the term eugenics, recommending a ”gentle form of eugenics”. Transhumanism is eugenics, the selection of the human. Eugenics over time has taken different forms and languages, but remained unchanged in its principles of selection of the human.
In the 1920s, the term ectogenesis was coined by the geneticist and biologist J.B.S. Haldane to denote the development of a new being outside the maternal body. Haldane considered ectogenesis ”an important opportunity for social engineering” inscribed in a eugenic society where a complete separation of procreation from sex would lead to a ”liberation of humanity in a whole new sense”8. Haldane was interested in understanding the origin of life in order to direct its development. His aim, and that of the coterie of scientists he represented, was to synthesise living creatures in biochemistry laboratories, an aspiration that would take shape in synthetic biology and genetic engineering laboratories in the years to follow.
The obsession with the creation of life shines through from the very beginning of this research, in the words of the research biologist Jacques Loeb: ”I wanted to take life into my own hands and play with it. I wanted to manipulate it in my laboratory like any other chemical reaction, to initiate it, to stop it, to study it under any conditions, to direct it at will”9and in his book The Mechanics of Life, whose title already represents the mechanistic conception of the living, we read: ”Our social and ethical life will have to receive a scientific basis and our rules of conduct will have to be harmonised with the results of scientific biology”.
Haldane together Julian Huxley forcefully promoted ‘positive eugenics’. The control of human reproduction, depopulation, and the control and management of peoples have always been the obsessions and aims that have united the powerful. If we think of the Fabian Society’s Webbs’ club in England, it brought together eugenicists, technocrats and transhumanists, both reform-minded socialists and right-wing conservatives, who disagreed on many political issues, but were in perfect agreement on the fundamentals.
We come to 1957 when Julian Huxley and Theilard de Chardin coined the term transhumanism to describe the belief in the possibility of transcendence of humankind. A new term to be used in place of eugenics, a term that by then had a bad reputation, but it is sufficient to read the 1946 document ”UNESCO: Purposes and Philosophy of the Organisation” drafted by Julian Huxley, the organisation’s first director-general, to realise that eugenics had never disappeared: ”With its philosophy and broad cultural and ideological baggage, the organisation wishes to assist the emergence of a general and unique world culture. […] For the time being, the indirect effects of civilisation are likely to be dysgenic rather than eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the deadweight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and inclinations to disease, which are already present in the human species, will prove to be additional burdens to the real progress that is to be achieved. Therefore, even if it is entirely true that any radically eugenic policy will be politically and psychologically impossible for many years to come, it will become important for Unesco to see that the eugenics problem is considered with the greatest care, and that the thinking of the public is informed of the issues involved, so that what may now be unthinkable may at least become thinkable Eugenics is yet another and quite different kind of borderline subject, on the borderline between the scientific and the unscientific, constantly in danger of being regarded as a pseudo-science based on preconceived political ideas or assumptions of racial or class superiority and inferiority. However, it is essential that eugenics should be brought entirely within the confines of science because, as already indicated, in the not too distant future the problem of securing an average social position for human beings is likely to become urgent; and this can only be achieved by applying the findings of a certainly scientific eugenics. […] the applications of genetics in the field of eugenics immediately raise the question of values – what characteristics and qualities should we wish to foster in the human beings of the future? […] in order to carry out its work, an organisation such as Unesco needs not only a set of aims and objectives for itself, but also a working philosophy, a working hypothesis with reference to the existence of man and his aims and objectives, a hypothesis that will dictate, or at least indicate, a well-defined line to deal with these problems”.
Well before Nazi Germany, between 1905 and 1972, the USA carried out an immense programme of forced sterilisation for the disabled, psychiatric patients, the blind, the deaf, prisoners, the homeless, lepers, syphilitics, tuberculosis. Eugenics researchers, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and other American philanthropists, promoted eugenic legislation in more than twenty-seven US states, with forced sterilisations for ”mentally deficient inferiors”, so that by the 1960s, when most of these laws were beginning to be repealed, more than 60,000 people had been sterilised for eugenic purposes.
Hitler was inspired by a famous American biologist, one of the advocates of the sterilisation campaign, for his racial extermination programmes and it was a Nazi physiologist who first came up with the idea that one could remove the nucleus from an ovum and then introduce the nucleus of another ovum into it, thus inventing the concept of the ‘mother-carrier’.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heritage and Eugenics – later renamed the Max Planck Institutes – was founded in Berlin in 1927 thanks in part to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation interested in the research on twins conducted by Von Verschuer, director of the Institute, eugenicist, pioneer in genetic research for the study of heredity, supporter of forced sterilisation programmes. At his side as assistant was Josef Mengele. After the war Von Verschuer taught human genetics at the University of Münster and became a member of the American Eugenetics Society. While the atrocious experiments during the Nazi period in the concentration camps are today recognised and remembered, there is a tendency to forget the role played by renowned clinics and research centres that continued to carry out the same eugenic principles even after the end of the war, often with the same scientists, the latter apparently enjoying a strange immunity that differentiated them from other war criminals. Evidently in the eyes of the scientific research world they were not so criminal.
The American Eugenics Society in the 1960s began to take an interest in developments in genetics and thus became the Society for the Study of Social Biology, stating that the change of name did not represent a change of policy, but rather a desire to place emphasis on studies of the biological, social and medical aspects that shape human evolution, conducted with a view to intervening in it.
By arriving at the cybernetic paradigm and the development of genetic engineering and synthetic biology, we can understand that transhumanism is both the culmination of techno-scientific development and the convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, computer science, neuroscience and the ideology behind it.
Nanotechnology that reaches the deepest levels of the world’s structure and biotechnology that reaches the deepest levels of the living bring about a substantial transformation. Whereas previously artefacts were constructed from natural elements without being able to disregard their limits, with the modification at the atomic level of matter the same natural elements are reconstructed to overcome these limits or to make them take on new characteristics. The natural world thus becomes an artificial category, and molecular fabrication brings a completely different idea of what is to be considered a material limit, and nanotechnology makes it possible to enter into the very nature of matter. At the same time, biotechnology opens up the possibility of intervening in life processes with genetic modification and genetic bricolage.
Transhumanists are proponents of what they call ‘conscious self-directed evolution’: taking the destiny of species into their own hands with the development of biotechnology, nanotechnology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, giving a precise direction to the path of evolution of the human species and the entire living being.
“The idea of a fixed species becomes problematic and the criterion of reproduction loses its meaning. […] The more powerful and accessible our technologies become, the more our purpose will be to define ourselves. Consequently, human groups will distinguish themselves according to the values that will guide their choices in how to use these new powers to determine their morphology and destiny’10 states Nick Bostrom. The idea is that physical and cognitive characteristics and the genome itself can and should be questioned, both in philosophical and operational terms, and not just to make a few changes, but to completely and radically redefine the design of the human and the very concept of being human. An essentially anthropotechnical conception in which the human being is indeterminate and is co-constructed with technology, an indetermination that is technical hybridity, in which the very nature of man, his biological existence, is technological.
In this ideology, the body becomes a hindrance, a limitation to be overcome, optimised, implemented in a process that will never end. The body becomes a hacherable platform and the techno-sciences, which can offer multiple and recombinable possibilities, are seen as liberating, interestingly enough, we find this conception both in the world of biotechnological research and in the academic world of transfeminist cyborg theorists. A supposed liberation from natural constraints for a voluntary submission to technological constraints.
Directly from the transhumanist world comes ”morphological freedom”: the right to modify oneself in accordance with one’s wishes. Nick Bostrom defines it as ”the civil right of a person to maintain or modify one’s body according to one’s will, through informed and consensual recourse to, or rejection of, available therapeutic or enhancing medical technologies”11.
Gender ideology in its meaning-demolishing work paves the way for the normalisation of the alteration of human biology and genetic engineering12. From Martine Rothblatt we read: ”Ensuring the ethical use of biotechnology will be as great a concern for transhumanists as it is for defenders of gender freedom”. The human being is thus ready to become a permanent construction site, an endless disassembly and reassembly, a neutral human being made sterile ready for the laboratories of artificial reproduction. A permanent mutation in which everything must be interchangeable and mutable in order to become artificial.
Transhumanism is a profound attack on the sexed roots, on the dimension of procreation and on reality itself. We are born with a sex, sex is not assigned at birth, which is why it is essential to erase this link with life and reality, this our first recognition in the world, of ourselves and others. The meaning of male and female vanishes, they become mere subjective sensations, no longer the reality of bodies, and subjective desire becomes truer than objective reality. The dissociation with one’s own sexual body leads to a dissociation with reality and accustoms the mind to all kinds of lies13.
Medically assisted procreation (MAP) is one of the Trojan horses of transhumanism because it creates the context in which artificial reproduction will become the normal way of coming into the world.
It is a process that will have no limits from the moment that when the logic of artificial reproduction is accepted, the direct consequence is the continuous optimisation and implementation of the whole process: the embryo becomes a product and what is a product can be subjected to any selection, modification, experimentation. The laboratory environment transforms the process of birth into a technical operation and with artificial reproduction we are transformed as we come into the world.
Eugenics, the driving force and direction of genetic research, has also been present ever since the origin of artificial reproduction technologies, in their zootechnical development and in the transition to humans. Richard Edward, creator of the birth of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, stated as early as the 1980s that when it is technically possible it will be legitimate to genetically modify the human species. At the moment we still do not have genetically modified babies, but in 2018 the British Bioethics Committee stated that ”Modifying the DNA of an embryo to influence the characteristics of a future person [hereditary genetic modification, Ed. note] could be morally permissible and the threshold of the baby girls edited in China has been crossed, and it is a threshold from which no one can think of going back. Meanwhile, the thought is being instilled that it is preferable and safer to hand procreation over to technicians. Natural procreation will at first become something irresponsible, unsafe, unhygienic, not sufficiently submissible to algorithmic techno-medical controls, at a later stage it will become criminal to continue to want to procreate without selecting gametes and embryos. Artificial reproduction will become a ‘moral duty’14.
The so-called right to have a child of people with sterility or infertility from organic or mostly environmental causes, the so-called right to have a child of same-sex couples and single women, and the problem of denatality serve as a pretext for the normalisation of assisted fertilisation techniques15.
The human being of transhumanism will be a biomedicinalised human being who will have to correspond to continually updated perfectibility criteria for continuous adaptation to a machine world. A techno-scientific adaptability that will become the only possibility. The principle of the cybernetic paradigm whereby ”we have always modified our environment so radically that we are now forced to modify ourselves’16takes concrete and dramatic form.
An analysis that is the child of the myopia that generated it continues to think of the forthcoming technological developments as accessible only to the rich, where they would create a division of society between the super-rich implemented and the super-poor. Certainly, a divide will be created, indeed, it will be consolidated, but it will not be a question of class, but between those who will accept to inoculate themselves, to undergo preventive gene therapies, to use assisted reproduction clinics, to implant a microchip under the skin, and those who will not accept this. Only at first will certain technological developments come at a high cost, the aim is for everyone to have access to them and to want to have access to them, the aim is to spread these technologies that will have to universalise and become the norm. The progressive and leftist world is already ready to fight for equality in submission to techno-scientific domination and for poverty the yoke of universal income will take care of it.
It is crucial to realise that transhumanists are not a few fringe technology freaks influenced by science fiction, but are founders, funders, and executives of numerous foundations, institutes, start-ups, research projects, and companies of international importance. They advise the defence, security and biomedical sectors, they have the power to direct the cutting-edge research taking place within technopoles, the policies of governments, international bodies and organisations. They are able to bring into play very strong political pressures and considerable means to shift balances and cutting-edge research, even to the point of promoting certain paradigms, supported by themselves, reinventing even bioethics to their benefit.
Natascha and Max Moore, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, James J. Hughes, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweill, to mention only the best known names, are the founders of the worldwide transhumanist association, now known as Humanity+. This ideology is not always immediately recognisable, it has the characteristic of being fluid, adapting itself to multiple contexts even apparently at odds with each other, thus we have a transhumanism with the glittering progressive face of LGBTQ+ rights and a transhumanism that penetrates conservative circles championing, for example, the fight against denatality, but obviously offering artificial reproduction techniques as a (false) solution.
In order to avoid the risk of transhumanism being reduced to a tendency of a few eccentric researchers, of philosophers confusing reality with their dreams, one must not focus on what is not yet there. If we are talking about nanotechnology, we should not focus on the risk of the ‘Gray goo’ catastrophe – the uncontrolled replication of nanorobots – and similarly, if we are talking about transhumanism, we should not focus on the projects of cryopreservation of the brain or the transposition of the brain into a computer, but on what is already there. Transhumanist ideology – the overcoming of limits, the implementation of the human being, the redesigning and artificialisation of the living – is not merely abstract speculation, but has already materialised in transgenic chimeras, medically assisted procreation, genetic editing, genetically modified organisms, medical genetic engineering technologies, brain implants, new smart city devices… The mass testing and dissemination of nanotechnological mRNA gene sera for Covid and the development of new self-replicating mRNA sera have exceeded all our expectations. What was needed was a network capable of marking out the new time, of connecting what was previously isolated, of bringing together and simultaneous what was not yet communicating, of putting bodies and machines in constant relation: the 5G network and the forthcoming 6G network.
1 James Hughes, Democratic transhumanism 2.0, 2002.
2 Jean Bernard-Maugiron, Bernard Charbonneau & Jacques Ellul, Deux libertaires gascons unis par une pensée commune, LesAmis de Barteby, 2017.
3 Wolfi Landstreicher, A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific World View, transl.it., A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific World View, in The Scream of the Earth, no.7, July 2019.
4 Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939, translated in Italian, Sulle scogliere di marmo, Mondadori, 1945.
5 Ernst Jünger, An der Zeitmauer, 1959 translated in Italian, Al muro del tempo, Volpe, 1969.
6Jacques Ellul, Le Bluff technologique, Hachette, 1988.
7 Jacques Ellu, op. cit.
8 J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future, Cambridge, 1923.
9 Jenny Kleeman, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, 2020, translated in Italian, Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, Il Saggiatore, 2021.
10 Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, Bollati and Boringhieri, 2018.
11 Nick Bostrom, In Defense of Posthuman Dignity, in Bioethics, XIX, 2005
12 For further study: Silvia Guerini, Dal corpo neutro al cyborg postumano. Riflessioni critiche all‘ideologia gender, Asterios Editore, second edition 2023; Il Mondo Nuovo 2.0, Elisa Boscarol’s youtube channel.
13 Silvia Guerini, Dalla negazione del trascendente all‘umanità cibernetica e transumana, in L’Urlo della Terra, no. 12, July 2024, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/dalla-negazione-del-trascendente-allumanita-cibernetica-e-transumana-silvia-guerini/, accessed 24/10/2024, h. 19.47
14 For further study: A.A. V.V., Silvia Guerini, Costantino Ragusa (eds.), I figli della macchina. Biotechnology, artificial reproduction and eugenics, Asterios Editore, 2023.
15 Silvia Guerini, Verso la riproduzione artificiale per tutti. New guidelines for access to assisted reproduction techniques in Italy, in https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/verso-la-riproduzione-artificiale-per-tutti-nuove-linee-guida-per-laccesso-alle-tecniche-di-fecondazione-assistita-in-italia/, consulted on 24/10/2024, h. 19.23
16 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: O Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT Press, 1948.