Are we willingly to sacrifice our humanity in the name of advancement?
Smart phones grant us access to a world of road maps and obviate the need for self-orientation. The human memory is no longer required to store or recall much now that vast resources of information are only a mouse-click away. We have already willingly given up so much in the name of access and convenience, that we barely notice each time we we are asked to surrender a little more.
The transhumanist push towards a reimagining of the human, humanity, and our shared future is a primary component of three growing cultural trends: artificial intelligence, human augmentation, and the transgender phenomenon. The means of effecting these transformative developments are entirely technical, and promise liberation from reproduction, liberation from disease and mortality, and liberation from the body itself.
AI technology is pushing for humans to be be artificially gestated.
The ongoing effort to change language, and redefine ‘male’ and ‘female’ so they refer to something other than sexual dimorphism, is designed to establish a Cartesian mind-body dualism in which the mind can dominate body to such an extent that personal subjectivity can decisively contradict biological reality.
In the current cultural climate, to question the concept of transgenderism is to question the right of trans individuals to exist. This is an extremely effective strategy that deters the skeptic from digging into an ideology by labelling them bigots for doing so. The implications of transgenderism are so serious and far-reaching that questions must be asked. It is not simply about societal acceptance of people with alternative views or lifestyles, but the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human.
Transhumanism- h+ is an international philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.
The most common transhumanist thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.
This agenda is upon us.
The transhumanist push towards a reimagining of the human, humanity, and our shared future is a primary component of three growing cultural trends: artificial intelligence, human augmentation, and the transgender phenomenon. The means of effecting these transformative developments are entirely technical, and promise liberation from reproduction, liberation from disease and mortality, and liberation from the body itself.
It is no anomaly that the movement is hitting its cultural stride in the debate over pronouns. The first step in changing how we think about our bodies and what it means to be human is to change how we speak about these things. Transgender speech codes demand that we renounce our bodies’ basis in biology, and instead consider them constructs of arbitrary (and somehow unjust) societal expectations. We are not to think about ‘mother’ and ‘father’ as reproductive terms, but as culturally specified relationships. This aggressive effort to change and police the use of language, and to redefine terms like ‘male’ and ‘female’ to deny the sexual difference characteristic of all mammals, is designed to uncouple mind from body and humans from evolutionary and reproductive logic. Instead, an ideology of emotion is to be given dominion over biological reality.
With the widespread acceptance of human augmentation, bio-tech, AI, and transgenderism, we are removing agency from the human body, and granting it entirely to the mind.
The concerns we perceive to be on the fringes of culture, or esoteric and only vaguely relevant to some distant future, are in fact part of a giant ideological redefinition of humanity. If we do not attend to these debates and their implications, we are going to awaken one day to find that developments have overtaken us, that it’s too late, and that our bodies are of no importance.
Source: Libby Emmonds writer for Quilette online Magazine
https://quillette.com/2018/07/11/the-transhumanism-revolution-oppression-disguised-as-liberation/