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To: Poet who wrote (18935)	8/5/2002 4:10:39 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Since you've already had a belly-full of political labels, you'd better duck and cover because here are some more. <g> Tucson, Arizona Monday, 5 August 2002 How we label ourselves is changing By Walter Truett Anderson So you think you're a liberal Democrat. Or perhaps a moderate Republican, or an Independent. But are you an extropian trans- humanist? You may soon have to decide. Technology is breeding strange new movements, and since ethical questions posed by advancements in technology affect us all, how we label ourselves is bound to change. So much for the "end of ideology." Most of the old ideologies - socialism, free-market liberalism - are alive and kicking, and new ones keep popping up. Environmentalism, for example, has grown rapidly from a cause focused on a few issues to a full-blown international political movement complete with Green parties and an army of theoreticians. Anti-globalism shows signs of expanding in the same way. Now, virtually unnoticed by most political observers, a new movement variously called extropianism or transhumanism is springing up around the world. Its core belief is that the human species can and should be improved in any way possible through the free development and use of technology. Its chief opponents are the various movements and groups that have taken the field against what they see as rampant and unregulated technological progress. The Luddites and the Greens say slow down; extropians and transhumanists say full speed ahead. The word "extropy" was coined in the late 1980s by a pair of philosophy graduate students who wanted a word to serve as the opposite to the scientific term "entropy" - which means a decline in a system's useful energy. Extropians don't like to talk about decline. Instead, they cheer for onward-and-upward progress: longer lives, enhanced powers of body and mind, exploration into space, boundless expansion in all directions. Transhumanism emphasizes the idea of progress beyond humanity as we currently know it, by any and all means - genetic engineering, nanotechnology and human-machine convergence being among the favorites. All this could easily be dismissed as an enthusiasm of techie intellectuals - and it is that, but it is also a good deal more. It engages some major political issues that are already on the table, such as how much governments should regulate biotechnology and human stem cell research and some that lurk in the future, such as whether people should try to "terraform" other planets to make them suitable for human habitation. And it may have the potential, over time, to bring about some major political realignments. Most people who have become attracted to extropian-transhumanist ideas are young, male, well-educated and libertarian in their politics, inclined to believe that governments are more likely to hinder self-directed evolutionary progress than to help it. But according to a recent analysis of the movement by political scientist James J. Hughes at Trinity College in Connecticut, transhumanists come from all over the political spectrum, ranging from bleeding-heart socialists who think governments should take responsibility for fair distribution of technology's benefits to neo-Nazis who yearn for a state-supported 21st-century program of Hitlerian eugenics. And Hughes, who has studied the progress of such groups as the World Transhumanist Association, reports that a growing faction is dedicated to building a "broad liberal democratic philosophic foundation" in the movement. This might revive some of the enthusiasm for science and technology that was once common in Marxist and center-left political groups before, as he puts it, "left techno-optimism was supplanted by pervasive Luddite suspicion about the products of the corporate consumerist machine." We shall see. The whole movement - or at least the rather ungainly names that currently label it - may well continue to flutter about on various Web sites without mustering any substantial impact on the course of applied technology, public policy or public opinion. But the very fact that it exists at all is an indicator of change, a sign that many people are thinking seriously about science and technology. There's every reason to expect that scientific-technological progress is going to continue racing ahead in the near future, becoming increasingly capable of touching everybody's life in one way or another - and even raising serious questions about the future of humanity itself. Such large matters are what politics is about, and it seems likely that concerns about how we deal with powerful new technologies are going to be on the political agenda for a long time to come - breeding new controversies and new movements with curious names. * Political scientist Walter Truett Anderson writes for Pacific News Service, 660 Market Street, Room 210, San Francisco, CA 94104; e-mail: waltt@well.com.