Politics of the 21st Century

Political movements in the industrialized world in the 20th century have been defined by two broad axes, economic politics and cultural politics. Economic conservatives are generally opposed to the social welfare state, trade unions, taxation, business regulation and economic redistribution. Economic progressives generally favor all these measures. Cultural conservatives are generally nationalists, ethnic chauvinists or racists, religious conservatives, and opponents of women’s equality, sexual freedom and civil liberties. Cultural progressives are secular, educated, cosmopolitan, and supporters of civil liberties and minority rights. Being situated along one of these dimensions has predicted well one’s position on a variety of other issues on that dimension, but has not predicted well one’s position on the other axis. The issues within each axis have developed an ideological consistency that held them together.

In Table One below, movements and parties can be parsed into one corner or another of the terrain, or the many points in between.



The emergence of biotechnological controversies, however, is giving rise to a new axis, not entirely orthogonal to the previous dimensions but certainly distinct and independent of them. I call this new axis biopolitics, and the ends of its spectrum are transhumanists (the progressives) and, at the other end, the bio-Luddites or bio-fundamentalists. Transhumanists welcome the new biotechnologies, and the choices and challenges they offer, believing the benefits can outweigh the costs. In particular, they believe that human beings can and should take control of their own biological destiny, individually and collectively enhancing our abilities and expanding the diversity of intelligent life. Bio-fundamentalists, however, reject genetic choice technologies and “designer babies,” “unnatural” extensions of the life span, genetically modified animals and food, and other forms of hubristic violations of the natural order. While transhumanists assert that all intelligent “persons” are deserving of rights, whether they are human or not, the biofundamentalists insist that only “humanness,” the possession of human DNA and a beating heart, is a marker of citizenship and rights.

The biopolitical spectrum is still emerging, starting first among intellectuals and activists. Self-described “transhumanists” and “Luddites” are the most advanced and self-conscious of an emerging wave of the public’s ideological crystallization. We are at the same place in the crystallization of biopolitics as left-right economic politics was when Marx helped found the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, or when the Fabian Society was founded in England in 1884: intellectuals and activists struggling to make explicit the battle lines that are already emerging, before popular parties have been organized and masses rallied to their banners.

The new biopolitics will not supplant the older political axes, but rather will another dimension of complexity to contemporary politics. As in Figure 2 below, we will find biopolitical alliances that crosscut all of our previous alliances, and various amalgams of biopolitics with economic and cultural conservatism.




A peculiarity of current biopolitics however is that while bio-conservatives have formed alliances from right to left to oppose cloning, stem cell research, genemod food, and other biotech innovations, until very recently the majority of transhumanists have been libertarians. As a consequence, issues of equality and solidarity get scant attention from defenders of biotechnological choice and progress. This essay is an attempt to address that gap, and to argue for a “democratic transhumanism.” Democratic transhumanism is more than a missing permutation of political ideas, but also the natural extension of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the rationalist and radical democratic tradition it birthed.

Democratic Transhumanism

Democratic transhumanism stems from the assertion that human beings will generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and social forces that control their lives. This fundamental humanistic assertion has led to two intertwined sets of Enlightenment values: the democratic tradition with its values of liberty, equality, solidarity and collective self-governance, and to the belief in reason and scientific progress, that human beings can use reason and technology to improve the conditions of life.

Within the democratic tradition there are many variants emphasizing various combinations and interpretations of liberty, equality and solidarity. The new Right represents the most minimal interpretation of the democratic mandate, rejecting any extension of liberty, equality or solidaristic social policies. The libertarian tradition seeks to expand personal and economic liberty, but to the exclusion of social policies to ameliorate inequality or democratize economic power.

The fullest interpretation of the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity is found in the social democratic tradition. As Amartya Sen has ably argued, true freedom for real people (as opposed to abstract Lockeian free men) requires access to health care, universal education, and the amelioration of social inequality. Social democracy pursues economic equality, the democratic control of economic forces, and solidaristic social policies, as well as personal and civil liberties and minority rights. The struggle for the most radical interpretation of democracy, of a deepening of liberty, equality and solidarity, is expressed in modern social democracy.

Technoutopianism and the Left

The other strain of the Enlightenment, the belief in science, reason and human progress, has been a natural complement at the philosophical level to the democratic tradition. Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what Marx called the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. The advances in science helped delegitimate the rule of kings and the power of the church.

Nineteenth century socialists, feminists and democrats were therefore also generally champions of reason and science. Technoutopianism, atheism, and scientific rationalism have been associated with the democratic, revolutionary and utopian left for most of the last two hundred years. Radicals like Joseph Priestley pursued scientific investigation while championing democracy and freedom from religious tyranny. Robert Owens, Fourier and Saint-Simon in the early nineteenth century inspired communalists with their visions of a future scientific and technological evolution of humanity using reason as its religion. The Oneida community, America’s longest-lived nineteenth century “communist” group, practiced extensive eugenic engineering through arranged breeding. Radicals seized on Darwinian evolution to validate the idea of social progress. Bellamy’s socialist utopia in Looking Backward, which inspired hundreds of socialist clubs in the late nineteenth century U.S. and a national political party, was as highly technological as Bellamy’s imagination. For Bellamy and the Fabian Socialists, socialism was to be brought about as a painless corollary of industrial development.

Marx and Engels saw more pain and conflict involved, but agreed about the inevitable end. Marxists argued that the advance of technology laid the groundwork not only for the creation of a new society, with different property relations, but also for the emergence of new human beings reconnected to nature and themselves. At the top of the agenda for empowered proletarians was “to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” The nineteenth and twentieth century Left, from social democrats to Communists, were focused on industrialization, economic development and the promotion of science, reason and the idea of progress.

The Estrangement of Technology and the Left

So why did these two strains of thought become estranged in the late 20th century? Why are so many contemporary social democrats, feminists, and Greens suspicious and hostile to biotechnologies, computers and science in general? The answer probably starts with the left-romantic traditions that grew up in reaction to modern technology. William Morris’ pastoralist visions of a deindustrialized socialism, Luddite machine-wrecking by the proto-worker’s movement, and absorption into pseudo-science, spiritualism and back-to-land communalism by bohemian radicals were all reactions to capitalism. The romantics and Luddites associated technology with capitalism, and thought that they could create a healthier, more egalitarian society only by fighting the new technologies. In fact, in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels specifically warns against clerical, aristocratic and petit-bourgeois socialists who advance pastoralism and pre-industrial production as the cure to social ills.

But it wasn’t until World War Two that the generally tight association of the Left with science, technology and reason began to be superceded by the romantic tradition. Left interest in re-engineering the nature of Man was silenced by Nazi eugenics. The gas chambers revealed that modern technology could be used by a modern state for horrific uses, and the atomic bomb posed a permanent technological threat to humanity’s existence. The ecological movement suggested that industrial activity was threatening all life on the planet, while the anti-nuclear power movement inspired calls for renunciation of specific types of technology altogether. The counter-culture attacked positivism, and lauded pre-industrial ways of life. While the progressives and New Dealers had built the welfare state to be a tool of reason and social justice, the New Left joined cultural conservatives and free-market libertarians in attacking it as a stultifying tool of oppression, contributing to the general decline in faith in democratic governments.

Intellectual trends such as deconstruction began to cast doubt on the “master narratives” of political and scientific progress, while cultural relativism eroded progressives’ faith that industrialized secular liberal democracies were in fact superior to pre-industrial and Third World societies. As the Left gave up on the idea of a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future, libertarians became associated with technological progress. Techno-enthusiasm on the Left was supplanted by pervasive Luddite suspicion about the products of the corporate consumerist machine. Celebrating technology was something GE and IBM did in TV ads to cover up their complicity in napalming babies. Activists fight the machine.

Bioethics, Technology and Democratic Values

During this period, philosophers and theologians began to address themselves to emerging ethical issues in medicine and biological research, giving birth to the field of bioethics. Although many of the early participants in the field were motivated by theology, the field quickly adopted a set of secular, liberal democratic values and principles as their basic consensual starting place. Most notably, Beauchamp and Childress have argued for the now broadly popular core bioethical principles of autonomy, justice and beneficence, which are direct corollaries of liberty, equality and solidarity.

In the seventies, countering the pervasive hysteria about in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering, and the theological warnings about playing God, there were occasional secular humanist voices such as John Fletcher who argued that humans have a right to control their own genetics. But the focus of most bioethicists’ attention was on protecting patients from unethical scientific research and overly aggressive applications of end-of-life care, protecting the public from science and technology rather than securing their rights to it. As bioethics matured it became clear that professional bioethicists gained far more traction by exacerbating the public’s Luddite anxieties than by assuaging them. If cloning is really just the creation of delayed twins, and not a profound threat to everything we hold dear, who is going to fund bioethics conferences to address it, and empower bioethicists to forbid scientific research into cloning?

Today most bioethicists, informed by and contributing to the growing Luddite orientation in left-leaning arts and humanities faculties, start from the assumption that new biotechnologies are being developed in unethical ways by a rapacious medical-industrial complex, and will have myriad unpleasant consequences for society, especially for women and the powerless. Rather than emphasizing the liberty and autonomy of individuals who may want to adopt new technologies, or arguing for increased equitable access to new biotechnologies, balancing attention to the “right from” technology with attention to the “right to” technology, most bioethicists see it as their responsibility to slow the adoption of biotechnology altogether.

Bioethics is proto-biopolitics. As public debate and biopolitical ideologies crystallize and polarize, bioethicists will increasingly be revealed as partisan activists rather than experts applying universally accepted ethical principles. In fact, the mask has already seriously slipped. While President Clinton’s Presidential Bioethics Commissison was broadly representative of academic bioethics, the political design of President Bush’s Bioethics Commission is quite naked. Bush chose Leon Kass as Grand Vizier of his committee, a man who is opposed to every intervention into human reproduction from in vitro fertilization to reproductive cloning, capping the ascendance of Luddism in bioethics. Kass in turn stacked the committee with both conservative bioethicists, such as Mary Ann Glendon and Gilbert Meilander, and conservatives with little or no connection to academic bioethics, such as Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer. The current campaign of the Bush administration and Kass’ committee is to criminalize the use of embryos and embryo cloning in research.

Although the backbone of opposition to stem cell research using embryos research comes from the right-to-life movement, the Christian Right has been joined by the Left bio-Luddites. Jeremy Rifkin, long a gadfly organizing left-right coalitions to oppose gene patenting, cloning and surrogate motherhood, distributed a petition in March which was signed by more than a hundred prominent bioethicists and progressive activists implicitly endorsing the Republican-backed Brownback legislation in Congress to criminalize medical research using embryos. Fortunately, the coalition in support of embryo cloning research quickly contacted many of the signers and discovered they had no idea that they had endorsed the criminalization of medical research. Now pro- and anti-embryo cloning petitions for progressives and conservatives have proliferated, making clear both that biopolitics is orthogonal to the pre-existing political landscape, and that bioethics is increasingly a political, not merely academic, exercise.

Why Democrats Should Embrace Transhumanism

Luddism is a political dead-end for progressive politics. Progressives must revive the techno-optimist tradition if they want to achieve the goals of furthering liberty, equality and solidarity.

First, left Luddism inappropriately equates technologies with the power relations around those technologies. Technologies do not determine power relations, they merely create new terrains for organizing and struggle. Most new technologies open up new possibilities for both expanded liberty and equality, just as they open new opportunities for oppression and exploitation. Since the technologies will most likely not be stopped, democrats need to engage with them, articulate policies that maximize social benefits from the technologies, and find liberatory uses for the technologies. If biotechnology is to be rejected simply because it is a product of capitalism, adopted in class society, then every technology must be rejected. The mission of the Left is to assert democratic control and priorities over the development and implementation of technology. But establishing democratic control over technological innovation is not the same as Luddism. In fact, to the extent that advocates for the democratic control of technology do not guarantee benefits from technology, and attempt to suppress technology altogether, they will lose public support.

Second, technology can help us transcend some of the fundamental causes of inequalities of power. Although we will never eliminate inequalities of intelligence and knowledge, the day is not far off when all humans can be guaranteed sufficient intelligence to function as active citizens. One of the most important progressive demands will be to ensure universal access to genetic choice technologies which permit parents to guarantee their children biological capacities equal to those of other children. Technologically assisted birth, eventually involving artificial wombs, will free women from being necessary, vulnerable vessels for the next generation. Morphological freedom, the ability to change one’s body, including one’s abilities, weight, gender and racial characteristics, will reduce body-based oppressions (disability, fat, gender and race) to aesthetic prejudices.

Third, Left Luddism is boring and depressing; it has no energy to inspire movements to create a new and better society. The Left was built by people inspired by millenial visions, not by people who saw a hopeless future of futile existential protest. Most people do not want to live in a future without telecommunications, labor-saving devices, air travel and medicine. The Next Left needs to rediscover its utopian imagination if it is to renew itself, reconnect with the popular imagination, and remain relevant. The Next Left needs visionary projects worthy of a united transhuman world, such as guaranteeing health and longevity for all, eliminating work, and colonizing the Solar System.

Why Transhumanists Should Embrace Democratic Values

What reasons can we mobilize to convince generally libertarian transhumanists to embrace egalitarianism, majority rule and the social welfare state? The best argument would be a proof that social democracy maximizes social welfare better than the chimerical unfettered free-market. But this is also the most difficult argument, since it weighs actual existing states against as yet unobserved perfect markets. Of course, the democratic Left is not immune to this style of argument either, pitting actual existing capitalisms against idealized democratic socialisms. Unfortunately, when both sides restrict themselves to empirical comparisons of states and social policies there are too many mitigating circumstances to come to many conclusions other than that the complete elimination of markets or of states do not generally work very well. Political convictions are largely a matter of faith.

What then of arguments from within the transhumanist worldview?

First, state action is required to address catastrophic threats from transhumanist technologies. Most transhumanists acknowledge that nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence could cause catastrophes if used for terrorist or military purposes, or accidentally allowed to reproduce in the wild. Contemplation of these catastrophic scenarios has led prominent transhumanists, such as Max More the founder and president of the Extropy Institute, to move away from libertarianism and to endorse prophylactic government policies. Requiring nanotechnology firms to take out insurance against the accidental destruction of the biosphere just isn’t very practical. What insurance policy covers accidental destruction of the biosphere? How could the externalities of bioterrorism be internalized into a cost accounting of a gene therapy firm? Only governments are in a position to create the necessary levels of prophylaxis, and most transhumanists can agree on this point.

Second, only believable and effective state-based policies to prevent adverse consequences from new technologies will reassure skittish publics that they do not have to be banned. Because of the weakness of social democracy in the U.S., current technology policy is dominated by ignorant hysteria on one side and greed on the other, politicians feeding off of populist Luddite hysteria and corporate anti-regulatory lobbyists. Publics must be offered a choice other than that of unfettered free-market technology versus bans. If transhumanists do not acknowledge the legitimacy of regulation, and attempt to craft and support responsible legislation, they cede the field to the Luddites. These choices require strong social democratic governments, such as those of Europe, that can act independent of corporate interests and vocal extremists. We need a strong social democratic regulatory apparatus that does not block transhuman technologies for Luddite reasons, but that also will ensure that transhuman technologies are safe and effective. The case of cryonics shows how spectacular frauds or iatrogenic disasters can set back acceptance of transhuman technology altogether. Human enhancements must be proven safe before being used, but not held hostage to vague Luddite anxieties.

Third, social policies must explicitly address public concerns that biotechnology will exacerbate social inequality. Libertarian transhumanists have a forceful answer to the challenge that biotechnology will be used for totalitarian applications: in a liberal society, each individual will choose for themselves whether to adopt the technologies. But what is their answer to the threat of growing class polarization? Biotechnologies will make it possible for the wealthy to have healthier, stronger, more intelligent and longer-lived children. Overcoming popular resistance to technology will require not only assuring publics that they are safe and will not be forced on anyone, but also that there will be universal, equitable access to their benefits through public financing. In other words, genetic choice and enhancement technologies must be included in a national health insurance program.

Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will also exacerbate inequality by contributing to structural unemployment through automation. Work will be increasingly unnecessary in the 21st century. If techno-optimists do not work to ameliorate structural unemployment through expansions in the welfare state, job retraining, establishing a shorter work-week and work-life, and a guaranteed social income, then we are likely to see the return of old-school Luddism, machine-smashing by the unemployed.Fourth, monopolistic practices and overly restrictive intellectual property law can seriously delay the development of transhuman technologies, and restrict their access. Applications of intellectual property law that are over-generous to corporations may restrict access to information and tools in ways that slow innovation. By engaging with law and public policy, transhumanists can protect the public commons in biomedical information essential to the advance of science.

Fifth, only a strong liberal democratic state can ensure that posthumans are not persecuted. The posthuman future will be as threatening to unenhanced humans as gay rights or women’s liberation have been to patriarchs and homophobes, or immigrant rights are to nativists. While libertarian transhumanists may imagine that they will be able to protect themselves if they are well-armed and have superior reflexes, they will be severely outnumbered. Nor is civil war an attractive outcome. Rather transhumanists must understand their continuity with the civil rights movements of the past and work to build coalitions with sexual, cultural, racial and religious minorities to protect liberal democracy. We need a strong democratic state that protects the right of avantgarde minorities to innovate and experiment with their own bodies and minds.

Transhumanists must also come to some terms with congenial wing of the animal rights movement since, like animal rights, transhumanism is opposed to anthropocentrism. But rather than rights for all life, transhumanist ethics seeks to establish the solidarity of and citizenship for all intelligent life. Transhumanists look forward to a society in which humans, post-humans and intelligent non-humans are all citizens of the polity. Consistent with this would be the demands of the Great Ape Project for an extension of human level protections to the great apes.

Sixth, libertarian transhumanists are inconsistent in arguing for the free market. The dominant argument for the free market on the part of libertarian transhumanists comes from Hayek: that the market is a naturally evolved, emergent phenomenon without conscious guidance, which allocates resources better than planning. But the goal of transhumanism is precisely to supplant the natural with the planned, replacing chance with design. The key to transhumanism is faith in reason, not in nature.

In any case, the assertion that the market s naturally evolved while governance structures and polities are artificial impositions on nature is bad sociology. All functioning markets require norms, rules, laws, legislatures, police, courts and planning. All democratic polities require the action of millions of autonomous agents aggregating their interests, expressing themselves in voluntary behavior, and creating an emergent political system. The market is not any more natural than democracy, even if being “natural” was a transhumanist virtue.

Weaving a New Democratic Transhumanism

Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transhumanists

At the 2003 Transvision conference Vanessa Foster, the chair of the National Transgender Acton Coalition, took the podium in the “The Future of Sex and Gender” workshop and announced that she was a pre-operative transsexual. Her presentation was built around the theme of the village mob’s attack on a misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster. Between images of beautiful transsexuals and stills from Frankenstein movies, Ms. Foster declared that transsexuals were the first transhumanists. As history we can debate the point, but as politics it was an historical moment. Transhumanism as a vanguard civil rights movement had arrived, and the stunned but open expressions on the faces of the largely straight male audience showed the work that transhumanists still needed to do to reach out to the disparate constituencies that will build democratic transhumanism.

There are many constituencies and ideological threads that need to woven into democratic transhumanism. First among them there are the disparate movements working to deepen our understanding of human rights to include the rights to control the body, such as transsexuals, the shock troops of transhumanism. Reproductive rights activists, who insist that women have subsidized access to reproductive and contraceptive technology, are natural allies of a democratic transhumanism. Although many feminists have been influenced by ecofeminist bioLuddism and left Luddite arguments about the danger of corporate technology, there is a broader feminist constituency that sees no contradiction between women’s empowerment and using technology to expand their control over their lives. Only a democratic transhumanism, which embraces the need for safety regulation, can respond adequately to the legitimate concerns about the dangers flags about medical technology raised for feminists by spectacular disasters like hormone replacement therapy.

An ideological thread that has grown in academia for the last twenty years, inspired by left feminists’ rejection of ecofeminist bioLuddism, is found in the cyborgology of Donna Haraway. In 1984 Donna Haraway wrote “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” as a critique of ecofeminism, and it landed with the reverberating bang of a hand grenade. Haraway argued it was precisely in the eroding boundary between human beings and machines, in the integration of women and machines in particular, that we can find liberation from the old patriarchal dualisms. Haraway concludes “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” and proposes that the cyborg is the liberatory mythos for women. Haraway’s essay and subsequent writings have inspired the new sub-discipline of “cyborgology” or “cyberfeminism,” made up of culture critics who use the cyborg metaphor and the postmodernist questions Haraway poses to explore the woman-machine interface. As yet there has been little cross-pollination between the left-wing academic cyborgologists and the transhumanists, but the mutual recognition and ties are growing.

Gays, lesbians and bisexuals are also natural allies of democratic transhumanism since the right to control one’s own body means being able to share it with other consenting adults. The alleged natural law philosophers attacking gay rights and gay marriage are deploying the same arguments against human enhancement, and when they attack gays and lesbians’ use of reproductive technology they provide a natural link issue. While in-vitro fertilization allows lesbians to have children without having sex with a man, cloning would allow them to have a child related to only one parent. Work on fertilizing eggs with the DNA from another egg, or replacing egg DNA with sperm DNA, would allow gay parents to both have a genetic link to their children.

One activist who saw that link and ran with it is veteran gay rights activist Randy Wicker. Wicker was one of the first gay rights campaigners to go on radio and television in the early 1960s, and he was active in gay rights in New York City till the 1990s. Then in 1996, when an international backlash started against the cloning of the sheep Dolly in Scotland, Wicker had an epiphany. He saw that the right to clone was a fundamental reproductive rights issue and gay rights issue since “Cloning renders heterosexuality's historic monopoly on reproduction obsolete.” Wicker started the Clone Right United Front with other gay rights activists, then co-founded the Human Cloning Foundation, and has become a national spokesman on cloning as a reproductive right.

Wicker is fighting an uphill battle trying to fight the hysterical opposition, especially in light of the many birth defects that still plague mammal clones. But he is beginning to have some progress convincing gay activists, such as Chandler Burr, author of A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origin of Sexual Orientation, who acknowledges that cloning and reproductive technology would allow gay couples to have children that were related to only one or both of their parents, and therefore poses a profound challenge to heterosexism. "It takes us another degree further from the idea that babies are produced only by two heterosexual people having heterosexual intercourse.”

Another enormous constituency for democratic transhumanism are the millions of people that are made criminals by laws against cognitive liberty, i.e. laws against illicit drugs. Drugs are of course a significant public health problem, but the Drug War only makes that problem worse, while it diverts resources from vital social needs. If people’s use of drugs makes them sick, they should be cared for by the health care system, not by a prison. But our drugs and other brain control technologies will only become more complex, and the technologies of surveillance and repression more powerful. A society that denies us the right to put cannabis in our brain is a society more likely to deny us a right to the many intelligence and mood modifiers that will soon be available. Instead of allowing individuals to use brain technology in self-determining ways, and helping those who have problems, the Drug War is increasingly threatening to use brain technology as a weapon of control. For instance, the emerging lines of drug vaccines are not simply developed as voluntary tools for people trying to kick addictions, but as preventive measures that businesses can require their employees to take, allow with regular drug testing.

A far better use of public monies, as transhumanist David Pearce proposes in “The Hedonistic Imperative,” would be to develop better drugs with fewer health risks. Ironically, after warning of the anti-democratic consequences of mass intoxication in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley came to the opposite conclusion toward the end of his life, after a positive experience with mescaline. In Doors of Perception he writes “The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short.”

Fighting the Drug War puts democratic transhumanists in solidarity not only with the millions of political prisoners serving time for nonviolent drug use and possession, but also with the new cutting edge activists for cognitive liberty, such as Wrye Sententia and her Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, who says "We seek to establish, promote, and protect the right of each individual to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, to engage in multiple modes of thought, and to experience alternative states of consciousness."