INTRODUCTION

On May 15 2023 Mary Harrington gave a keynote address at the London National Conservatism Conference. She expanded on her work on transhumanism, doing her audience the courtesy of believing that they could understand her thesis. The NatCon audience work more by gut than thought (with some notable exceptions) but those that did have the wit to follow her were treated to a clean delineation of one of the political issues of our time: the transhumanist axis.

SUMMARY OF THE SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

She started off with the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill on gender self-id which was vetoed by the UK Government, and used that example to segue into to a debate on what power the state should have over the human body. She argued that this debate has become necessary due to a convergence of issues on state power and its appropriate level of granularity, and it provides a context and framework for a new “politics of the body”.

She defined her terms and the battleground for this new politics, which she terms “biopolitics”. On one side is the “posthumanist” belief that technology can be used freely and expansively to enhance the body. In contradistinction to this is the other side: the “humanist” belief that technology should be constrained to only restore the body to its normative state: repair, not enhance. The phrase “transhumanist axis” covers the scope of this battle and acts as an umbrella term.

She placed this battleground in its historical context by introducing the contraceptive pill as the first transhumanist instrument, and characterized it as the opening shots in the war between the humanist and posthumanist approach. She then explored further skirmishes in this war, such as gender rights.

She emphasized that the right should join in on the humanist side and with some aspersion excoriated its recusal from this war, a 2020s white feather although she didn’t use that phrase.

She then discussed the level: is this a supranational, national or subnational conflict? She believes that that biopolitics should best be conducted at the national level, arguing that if it’s left to the subnational level then the differential approaches of devolved administrations on transhumanist issues like abortion and gender self-id would eventually place the unity of the United Kingdom under stress.

She then pointed out that conducting biopolitics at the supranational level would allow the creation of an international standard for it. To defend against this, she restated that biopolitics should be conducted at the national level, with individual nations using their national culture and demos to cope with different standards between countries instead of imposing an international transhumanist standard across all. No “Universal Declaration of Body Rights” so to speak, although again she did not use that phrase.

She closed by recommending that the war should be fought. That supranational bodies should be prevented from setting international transhumanist standards on abortion, surrogacy, and gender. That subnational bodies should be constrained from transhumanist issues as illustrated by the Scottish gender self-id bill. And that it should be fought by the right on the humanist side on the basis of the nation state.

MY COMMENTARY

I’ll bet that when you read the heading you thought it would be about transgender, and although that is one of the transhumanist subcategories it is only one of many and not the most. In Harrington’s structure transhumanism also includes contraception, abortion, Gillick competence, marketing of organs, drugs, vaccination and anti-vax, elective surgery, cyborgism, suicide and euthanasia: all the toys in the human box. The transhumanist axis as she defines it (there are other definitions, less well thought out) is an axis with an authoritarian point at one end of “thou shall not alter the body past its nominal state and the State governs it” and the libertarian point at the other end with “thou shall alter the body as you see fit and the State has no dominion”. The former is yclept “humanist”, the latter “posthumanist” and the axis between them the “transhumanist axis”. Her embrace of religious and classical language such as “Imago Dei” highlights this, as it also speaks to the division between the world that is yours (the finite temporal self) and the world that is not (the infinite and eternal) and provides a framework for her logic. She believes that this axis emerged when contraception became available. I’d date it to the Suicide Act, another severing of the law of God from the law of the body. But either way it was in the late 50’s/early 60s.

In the 2020’s the prominent issue is transgender, and Britain’s increasingly authoritarian bent tilts it in an imposed humanist direction, forbidding trans people from altering their body – witness the statement that “the NHS has banned blockers” despite the fact that the NHS cannot ban *anything* without legislation or regulation. But as Harrington points out this is just the latest in a long string of issues, with vaccination just past and euthanasia, surrogacy and abortion ahead. This transhumanist axis will be as important in 2020s politics as Leave-Remain or the Libertarian/Authoritarian axis was in the 2010’s.

THE CLEITOPHON CRITERION

PB commentator @Cleitophon dictates that PB articles should have a betting application. I agree and plead that this article has an exquisitely important betting application: the accuracy of opinion pollsters. If this axis is as important as others, and I argue that it definitely is, then opinion pollsters badly need to start measuring this and taking it into account.

TERMINOLOGY

In her speech Harrington flitted between the terms “posthuman”, “posthumanist”, “posthumanism”, “transhuman”, “transhumanist” and “transhumanism”, treating them interchangeably. I don’t know if she uses them more precisely in her other works or whether this was just a function of her giving a verbal speech. I’ve tried to clean this up by using “transhumanist” for the axis and “humanist” and “posthumanist” for each end of that axis. Apologies if this misrepresents.

The use of warfare terminology (“battle”, “war”, “conflict”) is an insertion by me to add clarity. Although the speech occasionally glanced at this in phrases such as “defend from”, the speech was not conducted at a martial level. Instead it was conducted at an abstract level using religious/classical/older phrases such as “Leviathan” that were not easily interpretable. Consequently for ease of reading I recast the text using martial/political terms that were absent from her original and the reader must understand this. Again, apologies for the abrepresentation.

OTHER

As you may know I intended to write a series of articles on issues of our time, as we leave worn-out neoliberalism behind as globalism retreats following US hegemony and we construct a new politics in our new multipolar world. Unfortunately the reading and writing time for each article stretched into months and I have to sleep occasionally, so it was put aside in favour of the Measurement series. But the advent of free AI summarizers enables very rapid development compressing the writing and research time from months to days or even hours, and this is the first one done in that manner. The next in the measurement series is still about political parties, but the next in the Ideas series will be about Solarpunk

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