Friday, September 15, 2017

Something to Think About With Transhumanism - A Critique of Utopianism From Marx and Hayek

The following excerpt was taken from the book Hayek, Marx, and Utopia the question is... does this form of utopian thinking also apply to Transhumanism? After all... the idea behind Trans-humanism is to go "beyond" being a mere human. This is very vague and open-ended. In this sense, one could say it could also be a nice trap to sell people to embrace an anti-humanist stance with fancy terminology. If you watch this video here of Max More, he actually does kind of say that Transhumanism is against the ideology of humanism which has been progressing since the Renaissance. See here for the connection between Judaism and Transhumanism, see here for the Jewish utopia. Can people not see a connection between Transhumanism, slavery, usury and Judaism? See here for the history of Jewish slavery and here for more about banking, especially this post.
========================================================================

Both Marx and Hayek indict utopianism for its fundamentally nonradical method of theorizing. For both thinkers, the radical is that which seeks to get to the root of social problems, building the realm of the possible out of the conditions that exist.

By contrast, the utopian is, by definition, the impossible (the word, strictly translated, means ''no-place"). For both Marx and Hayek, utopians internalize an abstract, exaggerated sense of human possibility, aiming to create new social formations based upon a pretense of knowledge.

In their blueprints for the ideal society, utopians presuppose that people can master all the sophisticated complexities of social life. Even when their social and ethical ends are decidedly progressive, utopians often rely on reactionary means. They manifest an inherent bias toward the statist construction of alternative institutions in their attempts to practically implement their rationalist abstractions. Both the Marxian and Hayekian perspectives agree that utopianism:

1. fails to take into account the social and historical context of the society that exists;

2. fails to recognize the internal relationship between the theorist and his or her sociohistorical setting;

3. reifies human rationality as a capacity abstracted from social and historical specificity;

4. depends on constructivist rationalism to bridge the gap between conscious human purposes and unintended social consequences; and

5. fails to appreciate the complexity of social action that is constituted by both articulated and tacit elements.

And yet, despite their common anti-utopianism, Marx and Hayek differ with regard to some crucially important epistemic premises. For Hayek, Marx's vision of the ideal communist society rests on the mistaken assumption that in the future, people will be capable of mastering their own destiny. In Hayek's view, this grandiose Marxist illusion served as an ideological legitimation for modern attempts to achieve the millennium through the coercive power of the state.

Hayek explains that for important ontological and epistemological reasons, such a utopian goal must engender dystopian consequences. For Marxists, however, any such epistemic constraints are historically specific to capitalism. Such critics as Hilary Wainwright contend that Hayek embraces a "dogmatically individualist" view of knowledge that does not recognize the potential for efficacious collective action.

Despite their differences, both Marx and Hayek embrace a profoundly anti-utopian mode of inquiry. Marx identified this method as dialectics. His own use of dialectical conceptual tools represented the apotheosis of genuinely radical social theorizing. Indeed, Marx's insightful critique of his utopian contemporaries was a reflection of this dialectical approach.

No comments:

Post a Comment