Left BioCon Futurist Scenario Building
J. Hughes
2007-02-26 00:00:00

Hayes is the co-founder of the Left bio-con lobbying group the Center for Genetics and Society (CGS), whose $800,000 per year budget is Hayes' and Marcy Darnovsky's reward from the progressive Tides meta-foundation for their decade-long struggle to wake up leftists and feminists to the need to rein in procreative self-determination before we slide down the slippery slope into a "techno-eugenic future." (Pay attention IEET fellows and interns! We need to figure out a way to sell fear instead of hope, and scare at least 5% as much money up as this one left-wing nonprofit arrayed against us! I won't even mention the Discovery Institute, Center for Bioethics and Culture, Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, the inside-the-beltway Kassite bio-cons, and the rest of the Christian Right biopolitical bulwark… )

Being subsidized by lefties in San Francisco, the CGS has been careful not to openly endorse alliances with the Christian Right, unlike the out-of-the-closet kinky bio-con bedfellow alliance of Nigel Cameron and Lori Andrews' Institute for Biotechnology and the Human Future (although the 900 pound gorilla of the Christian Right, in the person of Cameron and his posse, is definitely on top now in the IBHF bed – and I just killed that metaphor… )

Hayes and Darnovsky's diffidence about openly acknowledging that they find themselves allied with the Christian Right is certainly commendable and understandable given their friends and their background. Nonetheless they do find themselves allied with the Christian Right, and their unwillingness to embrace their new political locus doesn't stop every Christian Right conspiracy theorist from trumpeting their bio-apocalyptic pronouncements as evidence of the broad left-right alliance emerging to rein in reproductive rights, cognitive liberty and bodily autonomy, in order to stop Satan's plan to build human-angel hybrids. At least Wesley J. Smith had the courage to openly burn all bridges with progressives, and with the reality-based community altogether, in his migration from Naderite to fellow of the Creationist Discovery Institute.

Anyway, why am I flattered by Hayes' article? In Citizen Cyborg I presented a model of a two-dimensional twentieth century political landscape framed by economic egalitarianism/neoliberalism on one dimension, and cultural liberalism/conservatism on the other. That way of summarizing Western politics has substantial empirical validation, and is certainly not novel on my part. Based on that model, however, I argued that biopolitics is emerging as a new third dimension with transhumanists at one end, and bioconservatives at the other end.




While bio-cons like WJ Smith, Nigel Cameron, George Annas, Lori Andrews and Jeremy Rifkin basically agree with that model as a way of explaining the new "fusion biopolitics", Darnovsky and Hayes reject the model. From their perspective the "good progressives" have nothing in common with, and no reason to ally with, the Christian Right. So what then is Hayes' alternative political science?
The conflict between Left and Right has historically centered on different levels of concern regarding equality. The conflict between libertarians and communitarians centers on different levels of concern regarding solidarity, that is, the willingness to forego individual desires in the interest of the community as a whole. In the United States the political landscape thus includes the libertarian right (e.g., Milton Friedman and the Cato Institute), the libertarian left (much of the 1960s counterculture and Hollywood), the communitarian right (religious and social conservatives, and some neoconservatives) and the communitarian left (labor unions, the religious left, social justice advocates, and many environmentalists)."
Nice! A good Old Left move that I can really appreciate! People who believe women should control their own bodies, gay people should be able to marry, faith-based politics is a bad idea, ganja smokers shouldn't go to prison for decades, and that the government shouldn't be reading your mail, are all re-assigned to the effete intellectual elitist enclave of "Hollywood." The good progressives are the ones who don't mind the state telling us what to do, the "communitarian left," the hard workin', church-goin', planet lovin', apparently not Hollywood-livin', Left.

Do you begin to see the problems with the empirical reality here when the environmentalists are supposed to have more in common with trade unionists than they do with the 1960s counterculture? Yes, the Apollo Alliance shows that coalitions of environmentalists and trade unionists can be built around common agendas of technogaian social investment. Yes, local toxics issues often emerge out of the kitchens of working class moms mad about local poisons. But you don't get very far by insisting that Green enthusiasm for species protection, and populist neighborhood activism, and labor enthusiasms for a pro-active NLRB somehow automatically make everybody bosom buddies in the "communitarian left" corner.

What it does display is the basic validity of my original argument. Social democrats are people who combine cosmopolitan tolerance and wide personal liberties with egalitarian social policies and a willingness to regulate corporate power in the public interest. The authoritarian left are those who dispense with all individual liberties as effete petit-bourgeosie "counterculturalism" in favor of unchecked state power. No, I'm not calling Hayes a Leninist, or even a "populist," but I shouldn't have to remind any progressive of the disastrous history of leftists who rejected individual rights as frippery in the 20th century.

At least so far the Left bio-cons resemble the neo-cons more than Mussolini, that is good progressives who decided that the 1960s counterculture threatened the stability of Western democracy, and that we – and the rest of the world - needed a nice long tutelage about the virtues of faith, family and the American Way under Presidents Reagan the Clinically Demented, and Bush the Wiser, and Bush the Less Wise. You can however hear the worry in Hayes' analysis that the neo-cons are bad communitarians and belong over with the religious and social conservatives, even while Hayes and Darnovsky have enthusiastically endorsed recovering(?) neo-con Francis Fukuyama's latest biopolitical masterpiece Beyond Bioethics. (Read Russell's dissection of the execrable argumentation in that piece of unreconstructed hate speech towards alternative family structures.)

I will also reiterate the charge that the bio-cons of Left and Right are human-racists, recapitulating every argument ever trotted out against miscegenation and multiculturalism over the last two hundred years; THOSE PEOPLE will be entirely different from us, THEY will have entirely different values, THEIR KIDS will take all the seats in school and all the jobs and use our kids as chattel slaves. OUR society can't tolerate co-existence. We have to protect our way of life by making sure we never have to live with (fill in your bio-apocalyptic scapegoat here). So, yes, I do get really worried when "communitarians" reject individual rights, insist women should not have the right to control their own reproductive choices, and embrace calls for racial purity and unity, all in order to stop "genetic genocide." Call me a crazy, but it sounds familiar.

So what does Hayes see when he scries the future? Four possible outcomes:
In “Libertarian Transhumanism Triumphs,” both left- and right-libertarian values prevail. In “One Family, One Future,” communitarian values grounded in quasi-religious solidarity and patriarchy prevail. In “A Techno-Eugenic Arms Race,” a lethal mix of communitarian nationalism and libertarian techno-capitalism spins out of control. The scenario “For the Common Good” is grounded in communitarian values of the sort historically associated with social democracy and liberal internationalism.
It won't give away too much to say that he really hopes we adopt "the common good" model supported by good communitarians. That scenario culminates in the global ratification of a "Universal Convention on Biomedicine and Human Rights." What would it forbid? Suddenly his prognostication stutters – we don't know what biopolicy every country in the world will be in perfect consensus about in 2020, but given his enthusiasm for Fukuyama's new biopolicy masterpiece it probably includes bans on reproductive technologies that "disrupt traditional family structures," but not the global annulling of patents on the human genome, something even Michael Chrichton can see the logic of.

Finally I am flattered by Hayes' persistent refusal to acknowledge that there are any progressives outside of those Hollywood types who might disagree with his bio-Luddite prescriptions. He sincerely wants the world of 1995 back, when anyone enthusiastic about the medical potentials of genetics or nanotechnology was very likely to list The Fountainhead as their favorite novel.
"Some transhumanists claim to be motivated by social democratic rather than libertarian values, and suggest that we use genetic modification to bring everyone up to at least the current mean in health, intelligence, and life expectancy, after which all humanity would begin its posthuman journey in unison. But even if such a scenario made sense scientifically, it is imaginable only under the most absurdly authoritarian conditions."
What? Yes, that would be a strange policy prescription if someone argued that no one with an 80 year life expectancy should be allowed to have a 100 year life expectancy until all people with less than 80 year life expectancies caught up. That's really only a policy that a left authoritarian would dream up, someone like Pol Pot who argued that the best way to level out inequalities caused by literacy and education wasn't to make literacy and education accessible to all Cambodians, but to kill anyone with that sign of the effete cyborg, eye glasses.

To Worldwatch, CGS and all the bio-cons: yes! we do want a global debate about the right of people to control their own bodies, brains and reproduction; about the desirability of using technologies to enable greater life, health, ability and happiness for all; about whether we need a "Universal Convention on Biomedicine and Human Rights," and what its content should be, and whether we can create the global instititutions necessary to regulate the risks of emerging technologies while ensuring universal access to safe and empowering technologies. And I doubt very much that the result of that global conversation will be at all what you hope for.