Doubts About Transhumanism Transcend Political Ideology

This article from The Guardian (a leftist UK newspaper) is an intelligent, if relatively shallow, discussion of transhumanism. The author discusses issues such as drugs to enhance cognition and what it might mean if parents gave such medicines to their children to aid in learning.

I don’t have principled objections to such medicines, assuming safety and proper use; for example, to treat dementia. However, it would seem to be potential child abuse to give such strong medicines that could have unknown impact on the brain to children when we could not possibly know their potential long term side effects.

That issue aside, the biggest problem I have with transhumanism is its hubristic conceit that we have the wisdom to decide which human attributes are better than other human attributes, and that we should design in the former and eradicate the latter. More arrogantly, transhumanists believe we should “seize control of human evolution” and change our progeny at the genetic level so that the parental dictated “enhancements” pass down the generations. This is nothing less than the resurrection of a new eugenics and the emergence of scientism as a new religion, complete with an eschatology akin to a corporeal New Jerusalem.

I have written in some detail about this, and discussed the eugenics potential of transhumanism in Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World.