#i wrote this list very quickly and didn't have time to proofread or check the rubin and midgley quotes so i am posting it nervously

[hedgehog-moss]

do you have any recs of books that explore and criticize transhumanism as a bad thing?

Yes! I do. Here’s a transhumanism-critical reading list (and my initial post about it, as I assume that’s why you asked me):

Charles T. Rubin’s Eclipse of Man: Human Extinction and the Meaning of Progress was interesting—I remember one chapter in particular in which he argues that unlike humanism, transhumanism has shown no interest in developing a system of morals that structures and grounds its ideals and proposals, a fact he finds worrying in itself—as a movement it appears to have (and to want) no grounding values other than a technological version of “might dictates right”.

I recommend browsing the “Futurisms” tag of the New Atlantis’s website; lots of insightful articles critical of transhumanism and biotech enhancement / over-reliance on technology in general.

(Not a book rec just a passing remark: there is a paradox very dear to science-fiction writers who love exploring its consequences, and it is that humans can try and try to design the ‘perfect robot’, but something will always go awry because the designers are not perfect, and cannot help corrupting their creations with their own flaws and damaging values. Transhumanists don’t often ponder the fact that the ‘perfect enhanced transhuman body’ will have been designed by a very narrow demographics of imperfect normal humans, and what does that mean regarding the kind of ‘future human’ they choose to design? Rubin wrote somewhere, don’t remember if it was in his book or one of his articles, “If human beings are even half as imperfect as transhumanists apparently believe, why should we trust our unenhanced opinions about what would constitute an improvement in our lives?”) (This question is particularly salient regarding the fact that the vast majority of transhumanism enthusiasts are men—what will ‘mental and physical enhancements’ designed by men mean for women?)

Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution criticises biotech enhancement from a political angle (e.g. genetic enhancements threaten the most basic premise of our democracies: the belief that human beings are born equal. What does this mean for the future of democracy?) There is obviously a lot of talk about the eugenicist subtext of transhumanism.

The aim of this book is to argue that Huxley was right, that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a “posthuman” stage of history. This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is what defines our most basic values. Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for [democracy].

Mary Midgley, in her book Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Making, is very critical of fantasies of cyborg bodies and immortal life (in the early 90s the term transhumanism wasn’t yet widespread, but she talks of “mechanized neo-men”), and this is one of the rare texts in which I found a critique of transhumanism as a specifically male power fantasy (e.g. the deep resentment of the very existence of limits and boundaries.)  I like how direct she is in her criticism too; commenting on transhumanist quotes by men and calling their ideas “naive” or “weird and startling”, saying things like “All this is assumed to be both desirable and  biologically possible” then proceeding to explain why it is neither—and arguing that transhumanism sees itself as scientific in its subject matter but is actually highly emotive (which is not bad in itself, but here we are talking negative emotions—fear of death and the ‘decay’ of ageing or illness are the main catalysts behind biotech enhancements.)

Melinda Charis Hall’s The Bioethics of Enhancement—which I found quite dry in parts, but I haven’t found a lot of books discussing transhumanists’ attitude towards disability and its potential impact on disability rights. 

Transhumanism explicitly rejects the disabled body and can increase stigma against persons with disabilities in two ways. First, it plays upon fears of disablement. Second, the transhumanist point of view endorses a hierarchy of value and well-being among lives on the basis of capabilities; that is, the greater the number of capabilities, the larger the opportunity range, the better the life.

Bill McKibben’s Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, which you can read on OpenLibrary

Nicholas Agar’s Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement 

This critical review of the book “Beyond Mankind”, especially this part on the concept of living forever through biotech enhancements:

Harris admits that “for the foreseeable future” there are likely to be “parallel populations” of mortals and immortals, but argues (as per the democratic presumption) there is nothing we can or should do to prevent that. My freedom to choose immortality is the trump card. Besides, he notes, the “poetic imagination” has long prepared us for this situation. Unfortunately, he does not pause to examine how often in such stories the mortals are playthings of the immortals. At what stage might the unenhanced start looking like they lack true autonomy to the enhanced?

I have not read it yet, but Robert Frodeman’s Transhumanism, Nature, and the Ends of Science: A Critique of Technoscience looks promising. I have read a review that suggests the author shares my main beef with transhumanism:

His main point is that transhumanism, like our technocientific culture in general, always wants more. It is a culture of excess and always wants to push limits. While Frodeman pays some attention to the social and political risks posed by transhumanism, his first and main project in this book is thus offering a thesis on what’s wrong with our culture and with our goals and desires. His view [is that] we have enough, [and] instead of wanting more gadgets, we should be concerned with the good life and the meaningful life.

This quote from the article “Humanism and Transhumanism”:

“The name of the movement known as “transhumanism” may suggest that it arises out of humanism. At the very least, it is a descendant of what was once known as humanism, and could be seen as just one more utopian humanism. But the “trans” is the operative part of the term, and it should be taken seriously. Transhumanism is not simply utopian in the same way as the humanisms of Marx or B.F. Skinner; rather, it is qualitatively different in that it “goes beyond,” avowedly disregarding and leaving behind human beings themselves — the very beings that were the central concern of all previous humanisms. [...] 

Curiously, from the point of view of the original humanism, the project of transhumanism looks remarkably theological. After all, Kurzweil’s ultimate dream is of men made into gods. [T]he transhumanist vision makes clear [...] how profoundly hostile such ambitions are to human life — even when they present themselves as liberating, improving, or merely assisting it. Human beings, by their very nature, are never entirely at home in a world of things, much less in a world ruled by gods.”

^ This reflexion on how transhumanism, despite what its name suggests, is not at all a continuation or development of humanism, ties with a point that Hava Tirosh-Samuelson makes in her paper “In Praise of Human Dignity”: that “The humanities have lost their prestige, funding, identity, and public purpose” and that this decline coincided with the rise of transhumanist thinking. (I posted a quote from it here about how the tension between the two plays out.)

This article (not very interesting) briefly brings up a point on the financial weight and political influence of the transhumanist movement that I wish was discussed more often, and more in depth, because it’s true that many billionaires are very interested in this ideology:

“Unfortunately, transhumanism has turned into an ideological movement that benefits from exorbitant economic backing and infiltrates academic institutions and funding bodies to an extent where they threaten to marginalize other views. If they don’t get into the Ivy Leagues directly, they simply build their own universities and think-tanks: such as the Singularity University in Silicon Valley that churns out a class of well-funded brainwashed entrepreneurs each year to build the technologies needed for the transhumanists’ visions. From thereon governments and institutions (such as the United Nations) are influenced to embrace this future as well [...].”

And to me the fact that billionaires and rich Silicon Valley-type elites are so into transhumanism confirms every point in this list—that this ideology is conceived by and for people who a) are male, b) are extremely individualistic, c) don’t care about democracy or the greater good of human society, d) can’t comprehend what ‘enough’ means or the dangers of an ideology that disdains natural limits and generally views ecosystems (including natural organisms / bodies) as deficient systems that can only be enhanced by human tinkering.