Transcending left and right?

(The following consists of short extracts from Chapter 1, “Vision and Roadmap”, of my recent new book Transcending Politics.)

One of the most destructive elements of current politics is its divisiveness. Politicians form into warring parties which then frequently find fault with each other. They seek to damage the reputation of their adversaries, throwing lots of mud in the hope that at least some of it will stick. Whereas disagreement is inherent in political process, what would be far better is if politicians could disagree without being disagreeable.

The division between “left” and “right” is particularly long-established. The pioneering transhumanist philosopher F.M. Esfandiary, who later changed his name to FM-2030, lamented this division in his 1977 book Up-Wingers:

To transcend more rapidly to higher levels of evolution we must begin by breaking out of the confinement of traditional ideologies.

We are at all times slowed down by the narrowness of Right-wing and Left-wing alternatives. If you are not conservative you are liberal. If not right of centre you are left of it or middle of the road.

Our traditions comprise no other alternatives. There is no ideological or conceptual dimension beyond conservative and liberal – beyond Right and Left.

Right and Left – even the extreme Left – are traditional frameworks predicated on traditional premises striving in obsolete ways to attain obsolete goals.

Esfandiary’s answer was a different dimension: “Up” – the optimistic embrace of radical technological possibility for positive human transformation:

How do you identify Space scientists who this very day are working with new sets of premises to establish communities in other worlds? Are they Right-wing or Left? Are they conservative or liberal?…

These and other breakthroughs are outside the range of all the traditional philosophical social economic political frameworks. These new dimensions are nowhere on the Right or on the Left. These new dimensions are Up.

Up is an entirely new framework whose very premises and goals transcend the conventional Right and Left…

The Right/Left establishment wants to maintain an evolutionary status quo. It is resigned to humanity’s basic predicament. It simply strives to make life better within this predicament.

Up-Wingers are resigned to nothing. We accept no human predicament as permanent, no tragedy as irreversible; no goals as unattainable.

The term “Up” dovetails with Esfandiary’s evident interest in the exploration of space. We should raise our thinking upwards – towards the stars – rather than being constrained with small-mindedness.

Professor Steve Fuller of the University of Warwick and legal expert Veronika Lipinska take these ideas further in their 2014 book The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism, in which they explore “the rotation of the ideological axis”, from left/right to up/down. Fuller and Lipinska provide some fascinating historical background and provocative speculations about possible futures – including a section on “the four styles of playing God in today’s world”.

I share the view that there are more important questions than the left-right split that has dominated politics for so long. Esfandiary was correct to highlight the question of whether to embrace (“Up”) or to reject (“Down”) the potential of new technology to dramatically enhance human capabilities.

But the “Up” decision to embrace the potential for transhuman enhancements still leaves many other decisions unresolved. People who identify as being up-wing are torn between being “right-leaning upwingers” and being “left-leaning upwingers”:

• The former admire the capabilities of a free market
• The latter admire the safety net of a welfare system
• The former mistrust the potential over-reach of politicians
• The latter mistrust the actions of profit-seeking corporations
• The former wish to uphold as much individual freedom as possible
• The latter wish to uphold as much social solidarity as possible
• The former are keen to reduce taxation
• The latter are keen to increase equality of opportunity
• The former point to the marvels that can be achieved by competitive-minded self-made individuals
• The latter point to the marvels that can be achieved by collaboration-minded progressive coalitions.

I identify myself as a technoprogressive more than a technolibertarian. Individual freedoms are important, but the best way to ensure these is via wise collective agreement on appropriate constraints. Rather than seeking minimal government and minimal taxation, you’ll see in the pages ahead that I argue for appropriate government and appropriate taxation.

However, I’m emphatically not going to advocate that left-leaning transhumanists should somehow overcome or defeat right-leaning transhumanists. The beliefs I listed as being characteristic of right-leaning transhumanists all contain significant truths – as do the beliefs I listed for left-leaning transhumanists. The task ahead is to pursue policies that respect both sets of insights. That’s what I mean when describing the Transpolitica initiative as “integrative”. Rather than “either-or” it’s “both-and”.