What is the difference between transhumanism and democratic transhumanism? In his Democratic Transhumanism 2.0, Dr. James Hughes writes that "until very recently the majority of transhumanists have been libertarians. As a consequence, issues of equality and solidarity get scant attention from defenders of biotechnological choice and progress. This essay is an attempt to address that gap, and to argue for a ‘democratic transhumanism.'Democratic transhumanism is...the natural extension of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the rationalist and radical democratic tradition it birthed." 1
I think the term socialist transhumanism would be more accurate than democratic transhumanism, though I can see why Hughes would avoid the term socialist, with its unpleasant connotations of coercion and mind control.
Speaking of coercion, although Hughes writes that "in a liberal society, each individual will choose for themselves whether to adopt the technologies," he insists that "genetic choice and enhancement technologies must be included in a national health insurance program."
Freedom of choice here seems to be rather a one-way street. In the social welfare state that Hughes envisions, everyone must pay for the enhancement technologies, whether they choose to avail themselves of them or not. Obviously, this will involve coercion, just as the payment of taxes today involves coercion.
So we have here a contradiction: an individual is free to take or leave the enhancement technologies personally, but he is forced to pay for the enhancement of others.
Hughes cites Marshall Brain, who "suggests that all Americans receive a guaranteed basic income of $25,000 a year, paid from a general fund supported by progressive taxation, corporate fines and the sale of public resources."
The implementation of such a scheme would force working Americans to pay for their idle countrymen. When government support is assured, people have little incentive to work.
Anthropocentric Transhumanism
Hughes writes that "like animal rights, transhumanism is opposed to anthropocentrism." Yet almost immediately after he states that "the goal of transhumanism is precisely to supplant the natural with the planned, replacing chance with design. The key to transhumanism is faith in reason, not nature."
But is there anything more anthropocentric than humans taking control of evolution and "supplanting the natural with the planned"? What kind of rights would animals have in a world where transhumanist biotechnicians would be free to experiment on them in the name of "uplifting" them?
According to Reason magazine, democratic transhumanist George Dvorsky has argued that "using biotech to enhance just human consciousness is not enough-humanity has the moral responsibility to use biotech to lift the veil of brute ignorance from the animals. ‘It would be negligent of us to leave animals behind to fend for themselves in the state of nature,'" Dvorsky is quoted as saying. 2
Homosexual Transhumanism
Hughes writes that "[g]ays, lesbians and bisexuals are [together with transsexuals] natural allies of democratic transhumanism...The alleged natural law philosophers attacking gay rights and gay marriage are deploying the same argument against human enhancement..."
Hughes association of homosexuality and democratic transhumanism raises the question: Is democratic transhumanism a homosexual movement? At first blush, there would seem to be no connection between transhumanism and homosexuality. But there is a connection between transhumanism and what might be called homosexualism, as opposed to homosexuality. Homosexuality refers to sexual acts between members of the same sex, which are usually a quite private affair. Homosexualism, on the other hand, involves the quite public promotion of homosexuality and the demand that homosexuality be not merely tolerated but approved of and promulgated. Both democratic transhumanism and homosexualism involve the rejection of the natural order and both are movements aimed at destroying adaptive strategies that have evolved over evolutionary time.
The recent decision of the California Supreme Court regarding homosexual cohabitation is an attempt to give a liberal-democratic veneer of legitimacy to an unnatural, maladaptive practice. The decision illustrates how the liberal-democratic idea of equality under the law has been transformed into an idea of equality in nature. But it is not the first time that an attempt has been made to force nature onto the Procrustean bed of a political ideology.
The most clamorous case is that of the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Medelian genetics in favor of a theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (a theory that had been developed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 19th century). According to wikipedia, in the late 1930s, "Lysenko was put in charge of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union and made responsible for ending the propagation of ‘harmful' ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko served this purpose by causing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union." 3
It is notable that despite their professed belief in science and Darwinism, most liberal democrats are in fact Lamarckians/Lysenkoists, inasmuch as they subscribe to the blank-slate theory of human nature and believe that the vast majority of human characteristics are shaped by whatever current environment obtains and are not a result of natural selection.
Hughes, for example, in his Embracing Change with All Four Arms, writes that "while racism, ageism, heterosexism, and so on may be only 10% biological and 90% social construction, at least the biological factors can be made a matter of choice by genetic and biological technology." 4
And liberal-democratic ideologue Stephen Jay Gould, in his The Mismeasure of Man, goes to great lengths in his attempt to discredit Darwinism.
Years before ideologues began attempting to apply egalitarian political principals to natural phenomena, one of history's most famous homosexuals, Oscar Wilde, was quite clear about his feelings about the unnaturalness of homosexuality. In De Profundis, his long prison letter to his friend Alfred Douglas, he chided Douglas for wanting to print some of his letters in a magazine: "What was your article to show?...That along with genius goes often a curious perversity of passion and desire? Admirable: but the subject belongs to [the Italian criminologist Cesare] Lombroso rather than to you. Besides, the pathological phenomenon in question is also found amongst those who have not genius." Explaining the reason for his homosexual behavior, Wilde wrote: "Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both."
A Leftist, Global Transhumanism
Hughes stresses the leftist nature of transhumanism when he asserts that "[m]ost American scientists are secular, civil libertarian....lean towards the Democrats [and are] suspicious of the religious fundamentalist base in the Republican party." Therefore, according to Hughes, "a left-leaning, pro-science politics, i.e. democratic transhumanism, would have a natural base among scientists."
One might doubt, however, that scientists conduct their experiments believing that all DNA is created equal and has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; or that scientists feel that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing molecular structures, or that atoms have nothing to lose but their bonds.
Hughes' paper ends with a call to "build democratic global governance": "There should be a global, standing constabulary ready to rapidly intervene to prevent wars and other disasters..."
A global constabulary might also serve to enforce the payment of the taxes needed to fund "genetic choice and enhancement technologies" for all the world's citizens.
1 http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm
2 http://www.reason.com/news/show/116489.html
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
4 http://www.changesurfer.com/Hlth/Genetech.html#RTFToC6