The Singularity. The Spike. Although many of us - including me - are deeply skeptical of some of the more radical conceptions of these ideas, the notion of an ever-accelerating process of self-sustaining, technologically-mediated progress and change lies at the heart of much of what we've all come together here to discuss this weekend. And that idea - viewed both negatively and positively - has become one that is steadily making its way into mainstream culture.
The basic notion of progress lies at the heart of the concept of the Singularity or the Spike. I'm going to talk a bit about a few aspects of its history, the "state of progress" today and the prospects for our culture's embrace or rejection of that key notion in the near future. In particular, I want to propose a taxonomy of the opposition to the notion of progress that one can derive from a study of the history of the Enlightenment and its aftermath, and the contemporary cultural scene. I will also describe in very general terms the strategies available to us to counter the opposition we face, a subject we will address tomorrow in more detail.
The notion of progress as we seek it is, in fact, very new to humanity. It stands in contrast to some of the most basic and profound ideas and sentiments influencing our culture. As Virginia Postrel has said, the future has enemies. I have identified three distinct engines of opposition to the concept of progress. These are 1) romantic "naturism"; 2) what I call the "guardians"; and 3) traditional superstitions or what I will call here "magicalism". My goal tonight is to examine the origins and current workings of these three enemies of the future and the ways that we can continue our work in pursuit of progress in the face of these three powerful forces.
We search in vain throughout most of human history for expressions of the notion of large-scale progress in the human condition. Consider two extremely potent cultural expressions that are basically antithetical to the fundamental idea of progress: Confucianism and Platonism. Both posit a specific, ideal ordering of human affairs and a mythological history in which that condition had been achieved. Confucius -- Kung Fu-tzu -- appears to have believed that such a former Golden Age had actually occurred, while in The Republic, Plato proposes that elite "Guardians" of society should promulgate the fiction of a former Golden Age as a tool of governance. In both cases, history is portrayed as a process of decay, and the proper role of the select elite is the shepherding of humanity to a basically static subservience to the best possible implementation of a set of ideal relationships between individuals and classes of people. From the point of view of sheer numbers of people influenced by their ideas, Confucius and Plato stand as the two towering enemies of the notion of progress in human culture, the twin arch-anti-extropians against which our own cultural program stands in opposition. The best that either offer to humanity is stasis.
In many ways, the coming of Christianity stood as a marked departure from both the primitive notion of historical stasis and its more developed expression by the likes of Confucius and Plato. Christianity introduced a potent concept of directionality to human affairs and even a version of progress. Of course, the Christian concept of progress was founded in existing religious practice and primitive myth - especially the image of the blood-savior fertility god that dates back to the transformation of humanity from hunter-gatherers to cultivators. In fact, the Christian scriptural canon of the Old and New Testaments can be seen as a restatement of the transformation of the human mythic landscape from that of nomadic pastoralists to agriculturalists living in fixed villages. But irrational and based in myth though it may have been, the Christian world-view imagined humanity as placed in a dynamic historical context, with a beginning, middle and end, a real departure from the static or cyclic view of humanity's place in the cosmos that characterized essentially all views of man that preceded and competed with it. Thus Christianity represented a first step away from stasis.
With its roots in the crusading struggle against Islam and the social and economic dislocations following the Black Death, we all know the Renaissance as a time of new thinking and new ways of life in Europe. However, with the few notable exceptions of visionary heroes and martyrs like da Vinci and Giordano Bruno, the culture of the Renaissance embarked on these novel pathways of life and thought largely without self-consciousness of a truly new way of viewing humanity's place in the cosmos. Perhaps in an attempt to place the birth of a humanistic conception of progress as far back as possible, modern scholars tend to stress the seeds that sprouted in the period between the 15th and early 17th centuries, ignoring the fact that no really new and coherent statement of a cultural program of progress was articulated during that time.
The real birth of modern culture - that is a culture containing ideas, ideals and values that extropians would recognize as "modern" - happened fairly quickly in the middle of the 17th century. While Copernicus and Galileo surveyed and cleared the ground, it was Isaac Newton and Descartes who built the foundation for modernism. Newton provided the first truly universal conception of material reality that did not depend on supernatural forces to explain its dynamics, and Descartes provided a framework of systematic skepticism upon which a completely secular culture could be built. Neither man, though, had the courage to follow their insights through to their obvious implications. Newton's own mind remained mired in superstition and mystification. Descartes insisted on a duality of reality between mind and matter that, he believed, provided a firebreak against the encroachment of science and skepticism into realms that were governed by "spirituality" - we might say that he was the first proponent of Gould's "separate magisteria". It wasn't until the now often-overlooked work of Benedict Spinoza in the 1660s that the scientific, rational and skeptical program begun by Descartes and Newton gave birth to the real Enlightenment.
In my own personal studies, I have in the last few years been following the thread of the Enlightenment from what I consider to be its last high-water mark - the founding of the American Republic - back to its beginnings. In this quest I have been surprised by how quickly and early in the process of developing a secular, scientific world-view the ideas we would today describe as modern took shape. Essentially all of the basic ideas and values that underlie our conception of progress had been articulated by a few daring thinkers in a coherent world-view by 1675: What has been called the ideas and values of the "Radical Enlightenment" had been articulated as an interconnected whole by that time. These included
in other words, the idea of progress.
So what was the fate of this truly new way of looking at life and humanity's place in the universe, arrived at so quickly once the tools of empirical inquiry and systematic skepticism were developed? The purely scientific and technological aspects of the Enlightenment and its notion of progress continued to flower and build success upon success, right up through our own time. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the wider cultural, social and political aspects of the Enlightenment world-view
At the end of its first century this world-view gave rise to the first society founded by people heavily influenced by its ideals and values: The secular, limited American republic. A number of the founders of the American republic very explicitly identified themselves with the ideals and values of the Radical Enlightenment, foremost among them Thomas Jefferson. Others, like Benjamin Franklin, while less philosophically inclined than Jefferson and less explicit in their open avowal of the ideals and values of the Radical Enlightenment, were nonetheless exemplars of this new way of thinking and living. As well as a successful entrepreneur and politician, Franklin was one of the foremost experimental and theoretical physicists of his day and often wrote longingly about the bright future that science and technology and the secular civil society being built in the American Revolution would bring, lamenting that he would not live to see it. (In fact, in one notable passage, Franklin even speculated about the possibility of chemically preserving his body so that it could be resurrected by a much-advanced medical science of a future age, preceding Ettinger by 200 years!)
Perched on the edge of a vast, rich, largely unexplored continent, the new American republic was ideally located to become the embodiment of the hopes and dreams of progress engendered by the Enlightenment. And in some ways, it worked out that way. Unfettered by the social inertia of the Old World and constantly invigorated by its frontier expansion, the US became the ultimate incubator for optimism and innovation. Furthermore, the constitutional wall erected by the founders of the American republic between the secular civil society they sought to create and the world of established religions against which they were in part rebelling has remained largely intact. I would argue that this might be the most important legacy of the original Enlightenment in our own day outside of the scientific endeavor itself.
The course of the Enlightenment and the development of the concept of progress were quite different in Europe. Infected from its beginnings with a conception in class divisions (the Estates), and faced with an entrenched state religion (neither factor present in the American revolution), the French Revolution experienced a swift and cancerous radicalization in multiple directions, and a regression into extremism, terror, totalitarianism and violence. The rest of Europe reacted to this experience - mainly in horror. In much of the Old World, the Enlightenment came to be identified with the radically egalitarian ideas and violent social and political policies of the most extreme actors in the French Revolution. For both its proponents and its opponents, the French Revolution unfortunately planted the idea that the Enlightenment notion of progress was inevitably tied to struggles between entrenched classes of people. Outside of the confines of the scientific and technological world, an image of violent revolution, rather than peaceful investigation and discourse, became identified with the idea of progress outside of the scientific realm.
This is not to say that the core values of the Enlightenment were only expressed and adopted in the United States. Happily, this was not the case. First, on a basic cultural level, the American revolution was simply one episode in the continuing evolution of the basic conception of civil society in the English-speaking world that has its roots in customary liberties recognized since well before Magna Carta. The American revolution recast those liberties in universal terms, though, that transcended the specific history of the English people. Within 50 years of the American revolution, the basics of constitutionally limited, secular government had been established throughout the English speaking world, albeit mainly without the clarity found in the US Constitution. Beyond that realm, within a hundred years of the American revolution the ideals of secular civil society developed in the High Enlightenment of the mid-18th century had become the accepted ground of political and cultural life throughout the developed world.
However, in a very real sense the establishment of the American republic does present a maximal advance of the Enlightenment value of progress in some very important ways. Nowhere else and never since was the program of establishing a secular, limited government undertaken with such freedom from the institutions and prejudices of the pre-Enlightenment era, and without the influence of those forces that developed in opposition to the Enlightenment in Europe having such a hand in that process. It is to those forces that I now turn.
The Enlightenment ideal of progress was perhaps most corrosively undermined - especially at first in the Old World - by the concept of "the noble savage", popularized by Rousseau. Although often identified with him, this unfortunate myth actually predated Rousseau by at least a century. (In fact, Rousseau was a strikingly unoriginal thinker, being more of a popularizer of ideas he took from elsewhere without attribution; in that regard creating a niche today occupied by his direct intellectual descendant, Jeremy Rifkin.)
The idea of the noble savage has turned out to be crucially important in the development of Western attitudes toward the value of progress. This image or meme has become a magnetic attractor for a whole mish-mash of other ideas and values and is vitally important today as one of the driving concepts behind many of the cultural trends which stand in opposition to the ideal of human progress.
Where did this fantasy of the noble savage come from? How was it planted within the heart of the Enlightenment? I believe it was - unfortunately - present from the very beginning and its place there is easily understood. The adventurous thinkers of the early Enlightenment developed a conception of civil society very different from the one they saw around them in Europe: Their ideals called for a society of tolerant, open-minded people who treated each other with respect as equals and who were not encumbered by the thick growth of superstition and tradition against which they sought to contrast their ideas. The indigenous people of the New World provided a ready, exotic and largely unknown canvas upon which they could project these ideals. Almost from the first - and long before Rousseau - the political and social writings of the active figures of the early Enlightenment were filled with fantastical descriptions of the lives of the "noble Iroquois" and other tribes of North America. By the middle of the 18th century, the time that most people identify as the "High Enlightenment", this idealized notion of the noble savage had become a fixture in the thinking of the more progressive elements of Western civilization.
The concept of the noble savage became a stalking horse for one element of the wrong turn taken by the Enlightenment, that is the idea that somehow "civilization" itself represents some kind of perverse disconnection from "Nature", which came to be perceived as the source of all that was good and worthwhile in the world. Thus, the very naturalistic and scientific values that had empowered the early Enlightenment turned against themselves through the figure of the noble savage. This thread of romantic naturism has become one of the three paramount threats to the conception of progress that we as extropians value.
The second "wrong turn" that began in the late Enlightenment, and that was very much in evidence in the horrors of the French Revolution, was the goal of "rational" management of human affairs on a large scale. In hindsight and to people who hold extropian values, Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand of the marketplace is the obvious corollary of the political and intellectual liberty of the individual that were foundations of Enlightenment thought. But we must remember that The Wealth of Nations was only published in 1776, late in the development of the Enlightenment. Just as the image of the noble savage was able to fill the vacuum of knowledge about the primitive state of humanity, ideas about rational, large-scale management of society were able to grow in the empty spaces of knowledge about the actual workings of the societies in which Enlightenment thinkers lived.
Much of the history of the concept of progress over the 300 years since the flowering of the modern mind has been marred by the chimerical ideal of so-called "rational", detailed and large-scale management of human affairs. The obvious great landmark in this sad journey was the work of Karl Marx and the political movements and parties to which it gave rise. Describing his view of social progress as "scientific", Marx laid claim to the heritage of the Enlightenment's core values of systematic skepticism and free inquiry. Furthermore, with his stress on the progression of history from one distinct stage to another in a clearly defined process, which he depicted as a steady improvement in the human condition, Marx wrapped himself in the mantle of the ideal of progress itself. But in fact, just as the noble savage served as a conduit for the corruption of natural science into a "naturalistic" antipathy to civilization itself, so Marx's conception of "scientific socialism" served as a vector for re-infection of the West with the Platonic ideas of an enlightened guardian class - the so-called "vanguard" - and dogmatic idealism. I call this idea that progress can be managed simultaneously on both a large scale and in detail "Guardianism", in homage to its most eloquent and influential advocate, Plato.
The third force that stands in opposition to the ideas and values developed in the early radical Enlightenment was not one that grew out of the Enlightenment itself, but rather is simply the still very vital and continually evolving traditional pre-scientific mind-set itself. Those raised in the secular educational system of the modern West too often ignore the fact that the number of people who have truly embraced the secular, skeptical viewpoints of science and individual liberty is in fact exceedingly small and always has been. A natural human process of self-selection tends to insulate those who have internalized the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment from exposure to the mainstream culture that is still dominated by traditional religious beliefs and sentiments in most of the world. Thus it bears repeating here tonight that studies show that contemporary Americans overwhelmingly and firmly believe in a personal deity and various sub-spirits who regularly override the workings of the natural world. Two-thirds of humanity lives outside the developed world where the influence of Enlightenment thinking has been the greatest, and it goes without saying that the skeptical, scientific frame of mind is utterly foreign to the vast majority of people who live in that portion of the planet. Therefore it should not surprise us that the most common reaction to the notion that humans can progress beyond their current nature by their own initiative is to condemn such ideas as blasphemous. I call this third front of opposition to the ideals of the Enlightenment "Magicalism".
So there are three basic sources of opposition to the value of progress that we as extropians espouse:
It isn't hard to see the contemporary expression of these three forces opposing progress in the human condition. The most potent expression of romantic Naturism is the mentality of the modern Green movement. The Guardian mentality finds its most effective expression in the kind of bureaucratic regulation that has developed as the hallmark of the modern nation state and the class of professional "policy wonks" who people its many agencies. And magicalism works its spells through the established sects of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, the many faces of primitive traditional spiritualism and the new voodoo of New Age crystal power.
How is it that on the one hand the figures of the early Enlightenment so swiftly generated what we recognize as the modern concept of progress, and on the other that such powerful opposing forces also quickly developed and have been able to hold their own in the face of the obvious validity of the scientific and liberal world-view? The answer lies in the incompleteness of the very natural science upon which the Enlightenment program was based. Consider the state of knowledge of the natural world and man's place in it in 1700. The rush of insight and philosophical optimism that marked the early radical Enlightenment was based primarily on a very few theoretical and empirical scientific breakthroughs, primarily those of Newtonian physics, observational astronomy empowered by the invention of the telescope, and a first view of the world of microbiology made possible by the development of the microscope. Although a very few dared to see the entirety of the world in terms of science, this was in many ways a leap of faith: Wholly lacking at the time was the kind of theoretical framework that would make possible a real science of life, both at the biological and behavioral levels, much less the depth of empirical observation necessary to validate such theories. Also missing was what we would call a theory of information, much less the deep unity of the life sciences and information theory that we perceive today.
Thus, the opponents of progress took root and flourished in the blank spaces on the cognitive map created by those who developed the modern conception of the world. In a very important sense, the Enlightenment world-view was significantly premature: In the first flush of excitement engendered by the power of the Cartesian method and Newtonian physics, the leading edge of the modern world-view rushed ahead of what could be established with the methods and with the values upon which it was based. This created the environment in which romantic Naturism, technocratic Guardianism and reactionary spiritualism could thrive.
The cultural scene in which we find ourselves today is very different from the one in which the modern opponents of progress first articulated their resistance to this basic value. Darwin, Watson and Crick, Turing, Von Neuman, Hayek and the many others whose work followed these pioneers have since provided the theoretical framework for a truly scientific approach to the areas in which the first leaders of the Enlightenment were forced to fall back on little more than faith in their basic values. The work of these people began the process of filling in those blank areas on our cultural map in which a reaction to progress was able to thrive. In particular, a rigorous scientific approach to the nature of humanity itself has now become possible.
The relevance of this history to transhumanists and extropians should be obvious. The core values of the Enlightenment ultimately lead to transhumanism and, I believe, to extropianism. For years I have come more and more firmly to the conclusion that we are the inheritors of the program begun by Spinoza and Jefferson. Unflinchingly following the ideals first developed as a coherent whole in the 17th and 18th centuries inevitably leads to the conclusion that humanity can and should transcend the limits imposed by blind evolution as we take into our hands the tools we have developed through the scientific method. We are the new cutting edge of the Enlightenment. Thus, the 300-year-old conflict I am talking about this evening is uniquely one that we as transhumanists must be ready to address.
Consider what it is now possible to say to the opponents of the enlightened view of the world. Freed of the fantasy of the noble savage that led to the intellectual felony of Margaret Meade's fiction about the life of the indigenous Samoans, we can now look to a real natural history of humanity. We can see that primitive humanity was just as diversely adapted to the many environments in which it lived as one would imagine if approaching the subject with an open mind. Yes, when they lived in biologically rich environments such people were able to achieve periods of relative peace and prosperity; but on the whole Neolithic hunter-gatherers have lived much as you would imagine an amplified great ape would live with only a simple technology: With competition and conflicts for status and mating opportunities making up much of the texture of their life, and tribal conflicts and a basically static mythic culture providing the only large-scale background to the human condition. And, adopting the approach to human nature offered by evolutionary psychology, we can now understand the inherently and deeply conservative character of primitive homo sapiens: Living so close to the sharp edge of a natural world insensitive to the pain it can cause to humanity, primitive humans dared not innovate too much for fear of losing whatever small surplus they may have gathered from time to time.
Beyond the realm of theory and science per se, we can also respond to much of the practical critique of progress offered by the Naturists with a much more refined set of technological tools available to us now. With the kinds of sophisticated manufacturing techniques available to us now, and that are very swiftly developing, improvement in the material well-being of humanity does not necessarily involve a destruction of the non-human environment. We can walk more lightly upon the Earth and do so with shoes on.
To the Guardians, we can point not only to the failure of their most ambitious projects - the socialist paradise of the Soviet Union, and Hitler's, Mao's and Pol Pot's attempts to remake man in an ideal image - but also to a deeply articulated theoretical basis for explaining these failures rooted in information theory and a scientific understanding of how people actually behave in various social systems. Placing a high value on the autonomy of the individual and maximally open social systems is no longer a matter of faith, but can be shown to be the best possible approach to life in society.
Again, as with the Naturists, we can now respond to the Guardians' call for top-down management of our lives with a much-improved technology of social life. Much of the mistrust of the individual upon which the Guardian mentality is based is premised on the traditional necessity that only a small minority of society could be well-informed and could exercise effective control over the details of life. With the rapid development of communication media we see happening now, it is finally no longer necessary that the vast majority of humanity be ignorant and impotent to control their own lives.
Finally, to the spiritualists, we can now offer a fully-articulated theory of the mind as a function of the brain. Where Descartes could feel justified in positing that mind was a separate "substance" not subject to the workings of the natural world, we can now point to a rapidly advancing cognitive science that places our innermost being within the realm of the knowable, not in a mysterious world of gods and demons.
As with the Naturists and the Guardians, we can now also finally offer a pragmatic response to the traditional Spiritualist position that it is only in the authority of a deity that morality can be based and only in pursuit of spiritual contact with that deity that true happiness can be found. Contemporary cognitive science not only possesses much deeper descriptive insight than did first attempts at a scientific psychology, but it also holds the promise of a truly rational morality and undoubtedly offers real tools to those struggling with the inevitable emotional challenges of life.
Thus, we are poised to continue the program of the Enlightenment, now with a full set of tools only imagined by its founders. Unfortunately, in this last three centuries, the enemies of progress have had time to prepare their positions for this renewal of progress outside of the purely scientific and technological realms. The idea of a duality between mind and matter, first proposed by Descartes, is one of the battle lines that has been taken up by the forces of traditional superstitions and their modern spawn, the New Age gurus. Take a few moments to peruse the rambling discourse of the guru de jure, Deepak Chopra. Here you will see one flank of this line manned by a profitable enterprise selling feel-good nonsense that excuses its consumers from the burden of having to actually work at understanding the world. On the opposite flank of this front, vigorous defenders of traditional formulations of supernaturalism and spirituality such as Pope John Paul and Prince Charles man a heavily entrenched position, fortified with appeals to authority and fear.
From that fortress of tradition, leaders of reaction reach across to the front of the romantic Naturists. Ironically, this strategic alliance is strengthened through an equation of god with the workings of the natural world, an idea first propounded by the deists, who were seen in the first phase of the Enlightenment as the worst kind of "Spinozistic" moderns. Just beyond these religious traditionalists stand seemingly secular conservative "ethicists", such as Leon Kass, who has recently drawn a line in the sand against human augmentation, explicitly calling for a halt to any kind of biotechnology that might result in alteration of humanity's genetic endowment, whether in germ line or somatic cell manipulation.
The far flank of the Naturist front is held by the Greens. Born in the quite reasonable conservation movement of the late 19th century, the politics of modern environmentalism was significantly radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s as the externalized costs of early-stage industrialization began to become apparent. At the same time, the ideological descendants of the first conservationists - who merely proposed a form of rational resource management - became allied with the Guardians on the political left. Thus one sees a constant equation of environmental preservation with a deep mistrust of open markets and the kinds of steady, incremental reduction in individual liberty that lie at the heart of the Guardian mentality. The commonality along this front - from the conservative "bio-ethicists" to the radical Greens - is the apotheosis of nature into an absolute good, whether on explicitly religious grounds or in the Romantic tradition of Rousseau, as a reaction to the supposed evils of civilization.
The Guardians defend the third front of opposition to progress. On the left flank stand those who have absorbed the traditional socialist managerial mentality, exemplified by the Green party in Europe and their forward scouts, the anti-globalists in the streets at every economic summit and meeting of those who seek to lower barriers to the free exchange of goods and ideas. The opposite flank of this front is defended by the essentially reactionary "conservatives", who espouse a politics based on nostalgia for the imagined peace of a previous era in which things "just didn't change". The mainstream conservative Guardians continually give rise to a kind of reactionary "folk mentality" that is mistrustful of cultural innovation and abhors openness to "foreign influences".
This map of opposition to the core notion of humane progress should give us cause for deep concern. As my graphical depiction of those who stand opposed to continuing with the program of the Enlightenment demonstrates, we are in a very real sense completely encircled in the cultural, social and political realms. Furthermore, the battle-lines are becoming increasingly clear to the combatants. From the daily more open opposition to any kind of biotechnology we see among the Greens to the clear hostility to it explicitly avowed by such arch-conservatives as the Pope and the Prince of Wales, to Bill Joy's calls for "relinquishment" of the pursuit of Nanotechnology, AI and genetic engineering, the program of human augmentation and truly meaningful improvement in the human condition is portrayed as an evil to be regulated, banned and demonized. Just as Winston Churchill identified an Iron Curtain of totalitarianism that was falling across Europe half a century ago, I see an Iron Triangle of opposition to meaningful progress in the human condition - and thus to transhumanism - vying for control of the cultural scene.
So we must ask the question posed by another revolutionary, "What is to be done?" I see basically three strategic options that must be pursued by the new leading edge of a revitalized Enlightenment - we transhumanists - as opportunities arise. Expressed in the unavoidable terms of conflict suggested by the spatial metaphor of encirclement, these are:
The strategy of contesting the middle ground is suggested by the fact that the encirclement of transhumanism as the contemporary embodiment of Enlightenment ideals and values has taken place from strong points anchored in extremism. Between each of the three extreme positions marking the cornerstones of opposition to continued progress lie moderate positions that can be wooed by appeals to those values of the Enlightenment that have become well-established in the culture of civic life of the modern world.
On the political front, values of liberty, toleration and free expression are our most powerful tools. A recent example of appealing to the established middle ground is the reaction to Bill Joy's calls for relinquishment - such as Ray Kurzweil's and Max More's - that have pointed out that Joy's proposal necessarily entails restrictions to liberty that most people would find intolerable.
On the "nature" front, the simple value of humane compassion presents our most potent defense of moderation against the enemies of civilization. While the majority of people support moderate conservationist goals and do value wilderness as one among many good things, the radical environmentalist and "naturist" movement can be shown to impose a high human cost by penalizing the majority of humanity that still lives in abject poverty and by hobbling the development of medical science.
On the "spiritual" front, our best appeals to moderation are again based on the value of toleration and the successes of the scientific method itself. On the one hand, the post-modernist relativism that has nurtured the growth of the "everything's true" New Age mentality also makes that segment of the spiritualist realm far less potent as proselytizers than traditional religious groups. On the other, we have seen that at least some power centers of traditional superstition such as the Vatican slowly but surely retreat in the face of the obvious successes of the scientific method as a way of knowing the world. Thus we have seen the very belated admission that the persecution of Galileo by the Church was an error and even sidelong remarks from the Pope that that Darwin fellow might be on to something, after all.
As effective as appeals to the middle ground can be in the short term, however, ultimately the Enlightenment program cannot avoid direct conflict with the strong points of its opposition. The core logic of Enlightenment values inevitably lead to a valuation of progress that cannot remain locked forever into an ambiguous middle ground. In fact, the speed with which our scientific and technological work is progressing allows very little time for appeals to the middle ground to work as effective tools. Put simply, the faster and greater our success on the scientific and technological fronts, the shorter the time during which we can rely on appeals to the middle ground as a defense against the enemies of progress.
I believe that for transhumanists, open and direct conflict is unavoidable on each of the three fronts opposed to our program. On the religious or spiritualist front, in the end we cannot accommodate limits on our knowledge and actions imposed in the name of supernaturalism, whether based on tradition, imagined revelation or a mish-mash of syncretistic, subjective symbols. On the political front, we do not seek to force our plans on anyone, but ultimately, our basic values of individual autonomy are fundamentally incompatible with the kinds of limitations desired by Guardians of both culturally conservative and "progressive" tendencies, whether they espouse some limited "liberal" ideology or are more explicitly collectivist. And we certainly cannot avoid clear conflict with arguments by cultural conservatives like Leon Kass', who oppose human cloning and genetic augmentation based on an irrational "moral disgust". Neither are our values compatible with the "for your own good" management of the bureaucratic wing of the Guardian mentality. Finally, we will not be able to stand restrictions on our program proposed in the name of a romantic division drawn between humanity and nature: We are about the program of changing our own "nature" and no amount of rhetorical diplomacy can mask that fact forever or, in the current situation, even for very long.
If open and perhaps vigorous conflict is inevitable - at least in the cultural sphere, and perhaps beyond in the world of atoms as well as memes - two other strategies must be pursued to allow continued progress with our now much amplified world-view. I call the first of these "fortification of the core". By this I mean that we must identify key cultural, institutional and legal factors that protect our right to continue to pursue progress and work to strengthen them against the onslaught of our opponents. Fortunately, the pioneers of the Enlightenment have left us powerful tools to work with. I identify the founding of the American Republic as the last high-water mark of the Enlightenment because, in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, it bequeathed to us the most potent defenses we have against those who would thwart progress in the human condition. As Jefferson said, "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance": We must be sensitive to every attempt to restrict the liberty of those who espouse unpopular opinions, every move to break down the wall between church and state, every encroachment of government power into the liberty of the individual, for every such move is a direct assault on our ability to move forward with our program of transcending the limitations of the human animal.
In this regard every transhumanist should take the personal responsibility of supporting the kinds of public interest groups - like the Institute for Justice, the Electronic Freedom Foundation and, yes, even the ACLU - who do the important work of protecting our liberty. We must be watchful of the growing trend against "globalism", that is really just a resurgence of a kind of tribalism that seeks to raise barriers to the free exchange of goods and ideas. And we have to look to identify "for-your-own-good-ism" in all its seductive forms.
Both of these strategies depend for their effectiveness on meaningful coordination among a wide front of people and groups who share an interest in the future of human progress and a continuing development and implementation of the values of the Enlightenment. I am happy that Extropy Institute is taking steps beyond what it has done so far to work toward such efforts and we all look forward to hearing Natasha Vita More's discussion tomorrow of concrete steps we are taking in this direction.
Ultimately, though, another strategy may well become necessary to continue the program of the Enlightenment into the frontier of transhumanism. It is not my intent to debate the merits of the current generation of genetically modified food crops tonight, nor of the publicly announced plans to pursue human cloning with current limited technology. For better or - and it seems obvious to me - for worse, these development have provided significant force to those who seek to place cultural and legal limits on our right to pursue our own augmentation. Significant segments of the realm of public discussion have been infected with an irrational and fearful reaction to these developments. And legal restrictions on biotechnology are now a reality in more and more places in the "developed world" that is ostensibly the part of our planet guided by the values of the Enlightenment.
Naturally, it is not possible to know the future, as we know the present or the past. We can only develop various scenarios and try to assign probabilities to them. One possible scenario in our future is one in which the current move to place legal restriction on biotechnology and the efforts of our opponents to demonize the project of augmenting the human animal achieves widespread success. How likely that scenario is to be our actual future, I leave to tomorrow's discussion. But the last strategy I describe is one that addresses a world in which our freedom of action is more restricted than it is today, however probable such a world is.
Imagine that one or more of the centers of the developed world - the US, the EU, East Asia or the Anglophone areas of the southwest Pacific region - have explicitly prohibited and criminalized important elements of the transhumanist program. In such a situation, those who would continue with the program of progress in the human condition would have to create safe havens that are more insulated from attacks by our opponents than might be possible in current conditions. By this I mean the establishment of "free science" enclaves that can work beyond the reach of the kinds of restrictions I am describing.
I have given a good deal of thought to what would be involved in creating and operating such an enterprise, both from a legal and financial perspective, and the practical point of view of all the various elements implied in establishment and operation of what is essentially a clandestine laboratory. I will not go into the ideas I have developed along these lines in detail tonight, but hope to discuss them in more detail tomorrow.
For now, suffice it to say that I believe that people who are serious about continuing with the transhumanist agenda should be willing to give serious thought to this option that I call "strategic displacement". I use this rather bland term to avoid the word "retreat", because this move would not be a retreat, but rather would be simply a temporary removal of our activities from the sanction of existing social and cultural authorities, until such time as we would be able to again pursue our efforts openly.
Of course, by its very nature, implementation of this strategy - especially in its early stages - is one that will not be apparent to the world at large. So my final remarks on this subject should be taken as either a call to action or as intentional disinformation. With that in mind, I will say that steps should be taken now - especially given the speed of current advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics - to lay the groundwork for one or more secure enclaves in which this work can continue if it were to become the subject of more oppressive restrictions than we now face.
The key ingredient for such work is - not surprisingly - money. Given the history of funding for cryonics - over the last few decades the only real example of attempts to establish explicitly transhumanist technological institutions - this effort must be undertaken with sufficient funding and resolve that it can be implemented swiftly and in a financially secure way. Unless a well-funded effort - at least on the exploratory level - is begun soon, a swift turn against the leading edge of progress in the developed world could result in a real blunting of the advance of that front.
I conclude tonight with what I hope is an
appropriately critically optimistic note. The rate of progress
in development of the scientific world-view we have experienced
in the last few decades does point to an acceleration, whether
we see it as leading to a "Singularity" or not. Those
advances have resulted in a substantial strengthening of the program
of human progress that began 300 years ago. The point of my musings
on history and strategy tonight has been to stress that the future
has not been finally won for the value of humane progress; that
we must continue the process of vigorously promoting the idea
that things can and will get better. And that there is a clear
path forward - even in the face of strong opposition.