Techno Traditionalism
Source: Jan Cozier / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Western civilization has gone astray. Collectively, we never got richer and we didn't know more about how the world worked. Science and technology continue to advance, but our societies are fraught with disease that comes in many forms, including increased use of antidepressants1 , decreased religiosity, and a sense that life has lost its meaning2 .
One consequence is that the marriage becomes unpopular and the birth rate drops.
Thinking people want to know what happened and what we should do next. One of the most original views on these issues comes from Mary Harrington, who coined the term "reactionary feminism." 3
Harrington's friend, Louise Perry, has just published her fourth book which brilliantly chronicles her journey from progressive feminist to matriarch with more traditional perspectives on sex and marriage. Like Harrington, Berry no longer believed that the pill and the sexual revolution it sparked were as good for women as we were told. At the very least, they argue, we need to reassess the forces unleashed by technology that have separated sex from reproduction.
It is therefore not surprising that Berry and Harrington were skeptical of radical innovations in reproductive technology. But Harrington goes further than Perry and blames an ideology called "transhumanism" for many of our modern woes.
Is “transhumanism” a problem?
What is Posthumanism? And what example of technology would transhumanists prefer?
According to Herrington, "The pill was the first transhumanist technology: it was not intended to fix what was wrong with 'normal' human physiology...but rather to provide an entirely new paradigm." 5 Transhumanism, according to this view, is the desire to use technology to enhance our own abilities or those of our children beyond what is natural to our species .
I agree with Harrington's view that the pills had significant and often unrecognized costs, including their psychological impact on 6 women and how they changed norms about dating and sex. 7 But transhumanism, as you describe it, has nothing to do with it.
"Transhumanism" is a new term that most people have never heard of, so it's not reasonable to blame it for our current social problems. More importantly, if we think of transhumanism as how we use science and technology to try to rise above what is normal for our species, the project of transhumanism is as old as civilization.
Technology is a tool that has costs and benefits. It can be used to improve or worsen a person's condition. And that can have unintended consequences. But technologies designed to enhance our abilities don't have to be part of some sinister transhumanist agenda.
For example, the invention of agriculture resulted in a constant supply of food and gave rise to cities. But it also made monocultures more susceptible to late blight and the transmission of zoonotic diseases such as influenza from pets. Despite the problems it created in its early days, agriculture is now a major reason for people to live longer and healthier lives.
Without agricultural innovation, including chemical fertilizers, crop breeding and engineering, and animal husbandry, the world would not be able to feed billions of people. Without antibiotics and vaccines, we wouldn't be able to live in cities without the constant invasions of the plague.
Harrington would argue that inventions such as modern agriculture and medicines such as antibiotics and vaccines are distinct from reproductive technologies.
I think that's wrong.
Vaccines create opportunities not found in nature, and antibiotics, most of which are synthetic, facilitate operations that allow us to improve and extend our lives beyond what is "normal" for our species.
The desire to elevate our abilities above the norm didn't start with contraceptives or some abstract ideology called "transhumanism." It is so ancient that it has been incorporated into one of the fundamental myths of our civilization - the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to improve the human condition from the cruelty of nature.
Technology and tradition
The desire to improve our abilities becomes especially understandable when we realize that evolution doesn't always make choices in favor of health, happiness, or longevity. In fact, it rewards miserable behaviors like rape and infanticide towards non-parents, so much so that those behaviors make it more likely that our genes will end up in our bodies in the future. There is no doubt that we should be able to try to improve what nature has given us. This becomes even more important when one considers the increased burden of mutations in modern populations, to which civilization has contributed through medicare and welfare programs. 8
However, Harrington is correct that freedom should not trump all other values when it comes to children, and Berry is correct that sex and marriage are about more than consent and autonomy. We have reason to be wary of the broader social implications of reproductive technologies.
But Harrington has other technology issues that I think we need to put aside. There are concerns about equality: "I expect that if we find a 'cure' for aging, it will not be available to the public. It will be very expensive and will serve primarily as a tool to increase more wealth and power."
This objection is false for two reasons: first, all innovation is inherently expensive and time-consuming. But when the wealthy spend money there, economies of scale exist. From bifocals to textbooks, markets make innovation cheaper, better, and ultimately more accessible. Of course, governments can support this process. The second, and most important, problem with Harrington's argument is that it is driven by the egalitarian ideals that gave rise to our current political system.
The technical traditionalist, to use Harrington's term, retreats into the past, into a different set of values.
Technology supports Platonic ideals of truth, beauty and goodness. They adhere to the Aristotelian idea that happiness comes from a life of perfection, not from hedonism. They understand, according to Darwin and Nietzsche, that the natural capacities needed to lead a good life are unequally distributed within and between populations. For this, they are ready to put forward inequality in the service of other transcendental values.
Technologists want to use scientific innovation to improve and extend their lives and those of their children. They also want to make it accessible to the whole community. They embrace these techniques even though their use violates intuition - which is certainly a useful guide from an ancestral perspective - what is natural is wonderful and what is unnatural is offensive.
Like retro-feminism, "techno-traditionalism" is a fun term in the age of memes. But the underlying idea is serious. The reproductive revolution is coming: the selection of embryos for their mental and physical characteristics is about to take place, and the technology that will improve them (in vitro epigenetics) will appear in a few years.
Harrington and Berry are valuable voices in an age of intellectual consensus. They are right to wonder if the “progressives” advocated by those who call themselves progressives are real. But I think they are wrong about some aspects of breeding techniques.
I write this in the spirit of friendly opposition, recognizing that it is better to openly discuss the values we want our civilization to represent than to wake up in a pub with cloudy eyes wondering how we got here. .
