Frustration with the human condition has led many mortals astray. Indeed, the primal temptation that came to Adam and Eve in the garden was, in essence, to escape their own creaturely finitude and grasp after knowledge that had been forbidden them. Thus, by eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve effectively redefined humanity, now "knowing the difference between good and evil."
Efforts to transcend the natural limits of human life and experience are regular features of ancient mythologies and modern literature. Strangely enough, ideas and proposals once limited to the world of science fiction are now taken seriously in some scientific circles.
If you demand evidence for that assertion, just consider the "Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights" conference, held May 26-28 at the Stanford Law School.
Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and Special Consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture, attended the sessions and has offered this summary analysis: "If you want to know what it feels like to wander into a Salvador Dali painting, try attending a conference of transhumanists."
Smith offers a rather comprehensive report on the conference in "The Catman Cometh – Among the Transhumanists," published in the June 26, 2006 edition of The Weekly Standard. As he explains, "Transhumanism is a radical movement emanating from the universities that seeks to enhance human capacities via technology. The ultimate goal is a utopian world of 'post-humans,' such as human/robot hybrids and human consciousness downloaded into computers that will live for thousands of years."
Consider some of the ideas that were floating around at the conference. Smith cites James Hughes, a professor of health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, who argues that human beings must eradicate "human racism," defined as the belief that humans should be accorded a special moral status just because they are human. Hughes is the author of Citizen Cyborg, a book that offers his vision of a transhumanist future. He argues that we must replace the notion of humanity with the concept of "personhood." As Smith explains, "Under personhood theory, some humans would be excluded, but all self-aware entities – whether human, post-human, machine, chimera, or robot – would qualify for the rights, privileges, and protections of citizenship."
Smith also reports that Nick Bostrom, cofounder of the World Transhumanists Association, is seeking to maintain some sense of "post-human dignity," but he also denies that this dignity can be "based on substrata." In other words, it should not matter whether a "being" is biological, or merely mechanical.
The conference also featured an ideological array including feminists like Annalee Newitz, who called for a transhumanist future in which female biology would be fixed, allowing women "better control over female evolution." Women should not have to rely upon males for "genetic material" in the making of babies. Newitz, a contributing editor at Wired magazine, also argues that men should be surgically altered so that they can become biological mothers.
As Newitz states in the conference brochure, "For thousands of years, women have been subjected to a genetic engineering program known as patriarchy – from an evolutionary perspective, patriarchy is a system in which men choose mates for women, and it has affected the culture and genetic make up of countless generations. Today many of us live in post-patriarchal societies with fairly advanced reproductive technology. Can we use this technology in the service of a feminist genetic engineering project? I argue that we can."
Human enhancement is the goal of many, if not all, of the participants. At times, the notion of "enhancement" takes on twisted forms. Susan Stryker, identified as "an internationally recognized independent scholar and filmmaker whose historical research and theoretical writings have helped shape the field of transgender studies," joined with Nikki Sullivan of Macquarie University in Australia to present a paper entitled "King's Body, Queen's Member: State Sovereignty, Transsexual Surgery, and Self-Demand Amputation."
