Battle Plan to Be More than Well

Transhumanism is finally getting in gear

By James Hughes

6/3/2004 1:38 PM

If you could go back to the 17th or 18th century and advise some of the first democratic revolutionaries, what would you tell them? What should their priorities have been? How could Voltaire, Joseph Priestley or Ben Franklin more effectively have built a movement for a new social contract based on the rights of persons?

The spectacular successes and errors are pretty clear in hindsight. Sam Adams’ Sons of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence passed radical tracts around the British colonies in North America and led a spectacular popular anti-imperialist revolution. Their absolutely clear points of unity were “no taxation without representation” and no coercive billeting of British soldiers in colonists’ homes. Some of the radicals wanted to push the democratic revolution further and abolish slavery. But to the lasting shame of the American experiment, the revolutionaries decided they needed to preserve the tenuous unity of the anti-imperialist coalition—Northern mercantilists and Southern landowners—and put the slavery question on the back burner.

What are the choices before those of us working to create a global transhuman democracy in this century? Some agendas, such as healthy life extension, will be widely popular and win us allies and coalition partners. Some, such as a right to inheritable genetic modification, will be seen as bizarre and crazy and make it harder to find allies in the short-term, but then suddenly snap into focus for our audience in five or 15 years. Some issues will be consensual for transhumanists, and others will require internal political struggle between advocates of radically different strategies and ends. The barricades are going up and we need to start talking strategy.

This April, the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) met for its first global board meeting in Oxford, England and these questions were very much on our minds. For those who don’t know, the WTA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering the use of technology for improving human bodies and lives. I’ve been on the board since 2002. And while we’ve had many successes since then, the future has never looked brighter then it did after this meeting.

Cyborg midwife

We had been gathered by a remarkable individual, Peter Houghton. Until Houghton walked into the room in Oxford, none of us realized that our organizational maturation was being midwifed by an authentic cyborg, the first person to receive an artificial heart pump.

Houghton has a wire that runs from a shoulder bag holding a battery through his carotid artery into the valve in his heart. He replaces the battery every couple of hours, and can control his heart rate with a knob. Despite the fact that the arrangement makes him vulnerable to infection, battery failure and equipment obsolescence, it still provides Houghton with a better life expectancy than a heart transplant.

Receiving his heart pump led Houghton to a transhumanist epiphany. A veteran fighter for social justice living in a country with a universal healthcare system, Houghton’s first response was to found the Artificial Heart Fund, a lobby to encourage the use of artificial heart devices by the British National Health Service and support recipients and their families. Next, he started the Extra Life Society, a global nongovernmental organization to encourage the use of artificial organs in medicine.

Then Houghton discovered the WTA and began to lend us his considerable nonprofit expertise. For he had discovered what many disabled people discover: The healthy and able-bodied systematically underestimate the quality of life of the technology-dependent disabled. The able-bodied blithely say such things as, “Oh, I’d never want to live hooked up to a machine like that,” only to discover that life is still pretty sweet in a wheelchair or with a breathing machine. Transhumanism, on the other hand, argues that we can and should all live better lives in the future through technological enhancement. Although few disabled people and transhumanists realize it yet, we are allies in fighting for technological empowerment.

Houghton saw the connection.

A new vision

After running for and failing to win a seat on the WTA board of directors, Houghton offered to head up our fundraising efforts. The first thing he asked of us is what we should have answered a long time ago, and what we need to be able to tell every potential donor: What, precisely, is it that we want to accomplish?

Last year, bioethicist Carl Elliott, our friend and critic, published the book Better Than Well, a fascinating critique of human enhancement medicine as a capitalist plot perpetuated on gullible American psyches. Apparently, says Elliott, pining for life extension is as pointless as pining for whiter teeth or tighter abs.

Elliott’s book helped us to coin a new slogan and mission statement that answers Houghton’s question succinctly. After all, when they call you a queer it’s not an insult, it’s a flag to fly. So our first decision in Oxford was to adopt this slogan: “Better than well!” And this mission statement: “The WTA advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better bodies, better minds and better lives.”

In other words, we want everyone to have the opportunity to become better humans.

The transhumanist agenda

Before we went to Oxford, we issued a call for projects and agendas to consider, and had a dozen solid proposals to sift through and synthesize when we finally met. Some, such as the creation of a global transhumanist virtual nation with its own citizenship, were a bit beyond our current resources and efforts. Others, such as a targeted program of outreach to science fiction fans, had merits but needed to be stretched out and contextualized.

In Oxford, we distilled these proposals down to six core programmatic agendas:

Global Health: Since 1946 the World Health Organization has defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” We agree with this goal. The most urgent methods for improving the health, longevity and well-being of people in the developing world are through improved access to the simplest of technologies, from clean water to improved education. But we believe that emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology, will also have a powerful role to play in improving the quality of life throughout the world, if they are safe, accessible and sustainable. Through our Global Health research program we intend to link with like-minded organizations working in global health and development policy to encourage the diffusion of emerging technologies in developing countries, and to systematically examine the problems of global equity and access to new technologies.

Relationships, Community and Technology: Many people are concerned about the effects of technology on the quality of human relationships, from the alienation that people experience in electronically mediated communication to the changes in relationships under the impacts of reproductive technologies. Through the Relationships, Community and Technology program, the WTA seeks to examine how technologies can support and improve the quality of relationships, families and communities. How can emerging technologies allow people to control their experience of trust, love, lust, jealousy, loyalty, fear, aggression and hatred, and to what effect? How can we preserve human choice and freedom in a world where people can change their own desires and motivations?

Consequences and Ethics of Emerging Technologies: Futurists have been examining the potential impacts of emerging technologies for decades, creating scenarios that inform anticipatory democratic debate and prospective social policymaking. In the program on the Consequences and Ethics of Emerging Technologies, the WTA seeks to catalog the emerging technologies we believe will extend human capacities and to create a database of their projected consequences. This database will then be the basis for proposed policies to ensure the fullest realization of human potential.

Self-determination and Human Rights: Transhumanism is, in part, a civil liberties movement with roots in the most fundamental demand of liberal democracy: Sane, adult citizens have a right to control their own bodies and minds. Through the Self-determination and Human Rights program we seek to engage the human rights community, legal scholars, reproductive rights activists, the transgendered community, the disabled and advocates of public health approaches to illicit drugs in a campaign to deepen and broaden the concept of human rights. In particular we believe that the right to technological self-determination should be protected by laws and treaties. We are working with the Transhumanist Law Network to devise the legal frameworks for this campaign.

Longer, Better Lives: The transhumanist movement believes that 20 extra years of healthy life are just as valuable in someone’s second century of life as in their first. Through the Longer, Better Lives program we seek to make the case for longer healthier lives, addressing objections to life extension, from the alleged problem of overpopulation to the threat of ennui. We will be coordinating and seeking consultation with senior citizens groups and organizations of the disabled to help them challenge ageist and ableist attitudes that discourage the full utilization of health technology.

Visions of Utopia and Dystopia: The most common objections to a transhuman future come from science fiction, from Frankenstein to Brave New World. Through the Visions of Utopia and Dystopia program, we seek to collect images of posthumanity and nonhuman intelligence— positive, negative and neutral—and engage culture critics, artists, writers and filmmakers in exploring the lessons to be derived from these cultural expressions.

The goal

What’s our goal? The bioLuddites and human-racists are already in place. They control the bully pulpit of the President’s Council on Bioethics, they have their mediagenic talking heads, their think tanks, foundation grants, journals and lobbyists. They are organizing conferences for devout Christians, radical Greens and suburban soccer moms. They have filled the media with their alarmist rhetoric.

There is no comparable, serious voice—recognized by politicians, academe and the media—articulating the transhumanist case. The WTA could barely cover the phone bill of any one of the shrill sirens of doom. Will human enhancement only be championed by glib corporate press releases and timid researchers unwilling to project the consequences of their discoveries even five years down the road? Will the only people debating realistic solutions to the problems of the 21st century be those who want to keep the 21st century from happening at all?

When journalists write on topics that touch on human enhancement they should know to turn to us for the proenhancement stance. Intellectuals, techies and policymakers should recognize the term “transhumanist” and be able to place us in the spectrum of ideas. When human enhancement and the future of the human race is debated by committees and advisory bodies we deserve a place at the table.

We need transhumanist think tanks, journals, conferences and lobbyists. We need transhumanists meeting the bioLuddites toe-to-toe in the public square, defending the rights of persons to use reason to control their own affairs. We need transhumanist clubs and study groups on campuses, and in every city in every country, educating the public about the threats and promises to come. We need a movement fighting for a positive future, and not just fighting the future. We need the WTA, and the WTA needs you.

James Hughes, PhD, teaches Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut and serves as the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association. Dr. Hughes also produces the weekly syndicated public affairs talk show Changesurfer Radio and contributes to the democratic transhumanist Cyborg Democracy blog. Dr. Hughes’ book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future will be published by Westview Press in November.