Transhumanist politics

Transhumanist politics constitutes a group of political ideologies that generally express the belief in improving human individuals through science and technology. Specific topics include space migration, and cryogenic suspension. It is considered the opposing ideal to the concept of bioconservatism, as Transhumanist politics argue for the use of all technology to enhance human individuals.

History The term "transhumanism" with its present meaning was popularised by Julian Huxley's 1957 essay of that name, at a time when his open endorsement of eugenics became socially controversial. Natasha Vita-More was elected as a Councilperson for the 28th Senatorial District of Los Angeles in 1992. She ran with the Green Party, but on a personal platform of "transhumanism". She quit after a year, saying her party was "too neurotically geared toward environmentalism". James Hughes identifies the "neoliberal" Extropy Institute, founded by philosopher Max More and developed in the 1990s, as the first organized advocates for transhumanism. And he identifies the late-1990s formation of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), a European organization which later was renamed to Humanity+ (H+), as partly a reaction to the free market perspective of the "Extropians". Per Hughes, "[t]he WTA included both social democrats and neoliberals around a liberal democratic definition of transhumanism, codified in the Transhumanist Declaration." Hughes has also detailed the political currents in transhumanism, particularly the shift around 2009 from socialist transhumanism to libertarian and anarcho-capitalist transhumanism. He claims that the left was pushed out of the World Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, and that libertarians and Singularitarians have secured a hegemony in the transhumanism community with help from Peter Thiel, but Hughes remains optimistic about a techno-progressive future. In 2012, the Longevity Party, a movement described as "100% transhumanist" by cofounder Maria Konovalenko, began to organize in Russia for building a balloted political party. Another Russian programme, the 2045 Initiative was founded in 2012 by billionaire Dmitry Itskov with its own proposed "Evolution 2045" political party advocating life extension and android avatars. In October 2013, the political party Alianza Futurista ALFA was founded in Spain with transhumanist goals and ideals inscribed in its statutes. In October 2014, Zoltan Istvan announced that he would be running in the 2016 United States presidential election under the banner of the "Transhumanist Party." By November 2019, the Party claimed 880 members, with Gennady Stolyarov II as chair. In 2016, Klaus Schwab, in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, asserted that transhumanist technologies like gene editing such as CRISPR and others will inevitably merge human physical, digital, and biological domains, presenting this transformation as an unstoppable driver of human progress in a new political and societal era. In 2016, Yuval Noah Harari's book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow popularized transhumanist ideas, envisioning a future where biotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence enable humans to transcend biological limits, potentially creating "superhumans" with enhanced cognitive, physical, and emotional capacities. In 2018, Yuval Noah Harari, in works like 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and public talks, called humans “hackable animals,” asserting that AI and biotechnology will inevitably enable entities to manipulate human behavior and cognition, presenting a transhumanist future as both unavoidable and politically transformative. Other groups using the name "Transhumanist Party" exist in the United Kingdom and Germany.

Core values According to a 2006 study by the European Parliament, transhumanism is the political expression of the ideology that technology and science should be used to enhance human abilities and characteristics like physical beauty, or lifespan. According to Amon Twyman of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), political philosophies which support transhumanism include social futurism, techno-progressivism, techno-libertarianism, and anarcho-transhumanism. Twyman considers such philosophies to collectively constitute political transhumanism. Techno-progressives, also known as Democratic transhumanists, support equal access to human enhancement technologies in order to promote social equality and prevent technologies from furthering the divide among socioeconomic classes. However, libertarian transhumanist Ronald Bailey is critical of the democratic transhumanism described by James Hughes. Jeffrey Bishop wrote that the disagreements among transhumanists regarding individual and community rights is "precisely the tension that philosophical liberalism historically tried to negotiate," but that disagreeing entirely with a posthuman future is a disagreement with the right to choose what humanity will become. Woody Evans has supported placing posthuman rights in a continuum with animal rights and human rights. Riccardo Campa wrote that transhumanism can be coupled with many different political, philosophical, and religious views, and that this diversity can be an asset so long as transhumanists do not give priority to existing affiliations over membership with organized transhumanism. Truman Chen of the Stanford Political Journal considers many transhumanist ideals to be anti-political.

Anarcho-transhumanism

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