Over on technoliberation I have tried to provide initial responses to a couple of questions that seem to me pretty pertinent for any technoprogressive stance. Hopefully, the discussion of these questions will continue on there from here.
Question One
In light of the fact that two billion people lack access to essential medicines and forty thousand people die daily as a result and poor people lack access to essential medicines because research and development do not address their priority health needs, because health systems are inadequate, and because existing medicines are unaffordable to them; when and how exactly [do you] expect “all humans can be guaranteed sufficient intelligence to function as active citizens”?
This is why “progressive” always has to have priority over “techno” in legible-left
technoprogressive formulations, in my opinion. In the absence of a clear commitment to progressive democratic politics in the world we live in now it is too easy for a stated “commitment” to social justice and emancipation to be empty and abstract. If one’s commitment to justice is always projected onto a future that will arrive elsewhen, then this is not always going to be usefully distinguishable to those in the present who disdain a commitment to justice altogether.
And the problem goes deeper than that. Unless we actively strive to ameliorate suffering and injustice here and now with the tools that are available here and now there is no reason at all to assume that these ends would be the ones to which “superlative” technologies would be put even when they did arrive on the scene in that longed-for future.
Distributing
lifestraws and
insecticide-treated mosquito nets, supporting
treatments for neglected diseases that are widespread but unprofitable because they target the “developing world,” fighting
disastrously injurious subsidies the North Atlantic agribusiness, overcoming antidemocratic
patent and
copyright regimes, supporting
Apollo Projects and
green-roof initiatives, fighting for ”
net neutrality,” and the facilitation of
p2p global initiatives, funding
public stem-cell research,
nanoscale science,
genetic and cognitive technoscience, insisting that
family planning initiatives respond to the recommendations of consensus science rather than fundamentalist matrons and patriarchal prigs, strengthening global institutions and treaties to monitor and regulate
climate change,
biodiversity,
weapons proliferation,
pandemics,
human trafficking…
Other issues we talk about here, like facilitating
global rights culture, a global culture of consent, universal basic
health care, lifelong
education, global
basic income guarantees,
strengthening and democratizing the United Nations, and such—while not as conspicuously (pornographically) “techno"progressive as discussions of clone armies and FAI, I suppose, are no less vital preparations for the emerging (not distant futural, but already emerging right now) technoscientific worlds that pose such hopes and dangers for our democratic values as technoprgressive folks in all our diversity.
All these struggles do more than do technoprgressive work in the present, they inculcate sane and emancipatory technoscientific norms in secularizing democratizing societies. Inculcating these habitual associations rather than, say, immediate concerns with short-term profit-making or national military advantage, is one of the few things we can do to better assure that so-called superlative technologies will be emancipatory rather than horribly exacerbate injustice, exploitation, and suffering whenever they arrive.
Question Two
Rather then struggling to end “body-based oppressions (disability, fat, gender and race) to aesthetic prejudices” through social solutions such as education and laws, won’t morphological freedom, the ability to change one’s body, including one’s abilities, weight, gender and racial characteristics not only facilitate body modification influenced by internalized discrimination (disabledism, weightism, sexism and racism) and Western cultural colonialism but reduce human biodiversity?
Sexism, heterosexism, racism, human-racism all exist, they all do real work in the world. There is no question that modification practices will be articulated by these conventions, just as film-making, writing, enterprise, teaching, muddling through relationships all bear the imprint of these conventions right now.
Some will modify themselves in ways that cite these irrational conventions of embodiment very literally, they will try to be conduits through which these norms express themselves rather directly and no doubt sometimes in ways that are in significant measure stultifying. But so too many will modify themselves in ways that cite these conventions ironically, parodically, creatively, subversively, while some will actively resist them.
It is already true that we all “do” our race, our sex, our gender differently from one another. The multiple conventions that bear down on us all offer us the promise of social legibility while threatening us with stigma should we color outside the lines too much. But whatever their promises, whatever their threats they do not align into a seamless whole. They make competing demands on us. Many of us are forced into creative compromise just to navigate all the things we are and that are asked of us. Just think how such competing demands will be exacerbated by modification medicine!
To a crucial extent the damage done by these conventions has been made possible by the fantasy that some norms and not others were “natural” ones, or “naturally valorized” ones. But modification will expose this fraud for all to see. Morphological freedom will teach the world the lesson Oscar Wilde already understood well over a century ago: “To be natural is such a difficult pose to keep up.” Without the foundation of givenness or inevitability it is difficult to see why normality would exert quite the devastating force it has done, hitherto.
Recall that human embodiment and identification have
always been a dance of biology with culture. The regime of
normalization that governed the now-obsolescing era of modern medicine’s many wonders (and crimes) is no more “natural,” certainly, than would be a regime of
variation in a era of morphological freedom to come. What is quite clear is that the exposure of the artifice of the natural will either give way to a regime of consensual prosthetic practices of a piece with the ongoing deepening of democracy, or it will express the parochial attitudes of particular elites deploying superlative medicines self-consciously instrumentally and anti-democratically.
Again, the either-or (no doubt this is an oversimplification, by the way, as either-ors tend to be) here looks to me to be a
political one more than a technological one.
Dale Carrico Ph.D. was a fellow of the IEET from 2004 to 2008 and is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.
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