The Politics of Transhumanism and

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9744.2012.01289.x

Keywords: transhumanism, millennialism, body, Enlightenment, cyberculture, extropians,

Singularity, libertarianism, eugenics, apocalypticism, EndTimes, technoprogressive

Transhumanism is a modern expression of ancient and transcultural aspirations to

radically transform human existence, socially and bodily. Before the Enlightenment these

aspirations were only expressed in religious millennialism, magical medicine and

spiritual practices. The Enlightenment channeled these desires into projects to use science

and technology to improve health, longevity and human abilities, and to use reason to

revolutionize society. Since the Enlightenment techno-utopian movements have

dynamically interacted with supernaturalist millennialism, sometimes syncretically, and

often in violent opposition. Today the transhumanist movement, a modern form of

Enlightenment techno-utopianism, has evolved a number of sub-sects, from the

libertarian utopians funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, to religious syncretists like the

Mormon Transhumanist Association, to the left-wing technoprogressives and their

bioliberal intellectual allies. In reaction to accelerating technological innovation and

transhumanist ideas apocalyptic Christians, and even secular catastrophists, have begun

to incorporate human enhancement into their EndTimes scenarios. With all sides
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believing that the fate of humanity hangs in the balance there is a growing likelihood of

violent confrontation.

Introduction

As soon as hominds developed the capacity for abstract thought they began to imagine ways that

their life could be radically improved. They developed medicines and magical practices to improve

health and grant wisdom. They developed religious worldviews that posited times and places without toil,

conflict or injustice, a more perfect world where they would be free of their vicissitudes. Eventually those

doctrines began to posit that a radically improved social and corporeal life was possible in a the

immediate future, not just in the distant past or after death, giving birth to the myriad forms of

millennialism that have roiled though the history of the last two thousand years (Cohn, 1970; Barkun,

1974).

With the emergence of the European Enlightenment in the 1700s however these aspirations found

expression in the belief that a new world could and would be built on foundations of reason, science and

technology. All people would be united in an egalitarian commonwealth, freed by machines from poverty

and the necessity of toil, from disease and even death by scientific medicine, and ennobled by heights of

civilizational achievement. Some believed these things would be accomplished through peaceful

evolution, and others through bloody revolution. Some believed that a rationalizing state would achieve

these ends, while others believed unfettered market exchange would be the engine. Some believed in new

hybrids of reason and faith while others believed reason to be incompatible with religion. It was in this

stew of often contradictory ideas about the nature of progress that modern techno-millennialism was

forged.
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With the emergence of cyberculture, the technoutopian meme-plex has found its natural medium,

and has been furiously mutating and crossbreeding with contemporary political ideologies, philosophies

and religions. Self-identified transhumanists are just one of the strands of contemporary techno-

utopianism, but even within this small global community many ideological hybrids are stirring. Much

transhumanist politics has been shaped by the libertarian leanings of its affluent, educated, male, and

American base. But in the last decade transhumanists have become far more culturally and politically

diverse, and its left wing has aligned with an international set of bioliberal intellectuals, setting the stage

for robust biopolitical conflicts. Meanwhile both religious transhumanists and groups on the apocalyptic

religious fringe have added accelerating technological change and the advent of posthumans and machine

minds to their eschatological visions. With all sides, secular and religious, Left and Right, believing that

the future of humanity hangs in the balance the prospects for violent confrontation are rising.

In this paper I will briefly discuss the flavors of transhumanism that have developed in the last

two decades, including extropian libertarianism, the liberal democratic World Transhumanist

Association/Humanity+, Singularitarian millennialism, religious transhumanism, and radical democratic

transhumanism or technoprogressivism. I will describe some of the ways that transhumanism is being

perceived by the growing apocalyptic Christian subculture in the United States. Finally I will reflect on

ways that millennialist violence might be inspired by these various subcultures.

Proto-Transhumanist Millennialism and the Body

The intertwined aspirations to transcend human limitations and enter a radically new social order

are found in the earliest recorded human cultures. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, ends with the

story of a bad king setting off on a hero's journey in searching of immortality. Failing he returns to Uruk a

wiser man, who realizes that building a city is an even greater work. In the Jewish (Isaiah 25:8, 26:19)
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and Christian traditions the messiah will establish a new kingdom on earth without war and want, and

resurrect the righteous dead who will all be given new glorified bodies. "We will all be changed—in a

flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised

imperishable, and we will be changed" (1 Cor. 15:50-55). In Buddhist millennial mythos presented in

The Lion Roar of the Wheel-Turning Monarch (Hughes,1993) the coming Buddha will establish a

righteous millennial kingdom without war and want, and the people will live to 80,000 years old. In

every instance of millennial prophesy we can find promises of both a better society and longer, healthier

lives ennobled by wisdom.

Enlightenment thinkers took these millennial aspirations and proposed achieving a radically

transfigured body and society through science and technology. The thesis that Enlightenment ideas of

Progress and utopia are actually secularizations of Christian eschatology is not novel (Becker, 1932;

Nisbet, 1979; Bozeman, 1997), and the interweaving of transcendent expectations with the scientific

imagination probably actually began with Renaissance alchemists like Paracelsus and Nicholas Flamel,

and Christian humanists like Pico della Mirandola (Santamaria, 2011) who has God address mankind in

his 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Man:

All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our

laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of

your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that you may survey everything

else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither

mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into

whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the

lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your

intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine. (Mirandola, 1486)
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Many scholars, however, credit Francis Bacon's work as the beginning of Enlightenment science.

In his novel the New Atlantis Bacon (Bacon, 1626) imagines a proto-transhumanist utopia without

slavery or poverty, governed by a religiously tolerant scientific elite, and focusing on research with the

goal of “effecting all things possible.” The scientists of Bacon's New Atlantis were working toward the

conquering of disease, “the prolongation of life, the restitution of youth to some degree, the retardation of

age,” to increase strength and control pain, and the ‘‘making of new species, transplanting of one species

into another.”

Likewise for the Enlightenment thinkers who followed in the coming centuries human beings

were not confined to their bodies, brains or social orders by divine will and had the power to create

something better through reason and technology. The Marquis de Condorcet (1795), Benjamin Franklin

and William Godwin all proposed that eventually human beings would be able to conquer not only

oppression and inequality through reason, but also death and disease, and Denis Diderot suggested that

humanity might evolve into a great variety of posthuman species. In D'Almbert's Dream Diderot (1769)

proposed that brains might be taken apart and reconstituted later, that intelligent animals and animal-

human hybrids might be possible, and that sophisticated machines might have minds.

Enlightenment thought contained many contradictions and varied interpretations which have

given rise to many diverse and conflicting social movements, from anarchism, liberalism, and social

democracy, to Marxist-Leninism and fascism, from narratives of progress to their post-modern antitheses.

The meliorist tendency, the belief that science and technology combined with radical social

transformation would conquer disease, death and other human limitations, can be found woven in the

margins of all these traditions.

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Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Transhumanism

The historical resurrection of the thread of transhumanist thinking is just beginning (Porter,

2001). Recently, for instance, Israeli scholar Ilia Stambler has sketched in the fin-de-siecle

transhumanisms of Russian religious philosopher Nikolay Fedorov, Russian Marxist politician Alexander

Bogdanov, and French social scientist Jean Finot (Stambler, 2010). In nineteenth century America

manifestations of the conjoint bioutopian and millennial mindset can be found in both religious and

secular circles. The founding of the Unites States itself, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and the

religious understanding of the Civil War all, of course, all drew on millennialist interpretations of

America's role in prophetic history (Stuckert, 2008). In the 1830s John Darby began to propound the

dispensationalist eschatology that still dominates Protestantism today, which promised that believers

would be raptured into immortal bodies. In the 1840s the Seventh Day Adventists, preaching a strict

dietary regimen, emerged out of the apocalyptic Millerite movement in New York. In 1844 Joseph Smith

announced the distinctive Mormon doctrine of divinization, that all that human beings can become gods,

as his millennialist Latter Day Saints migrated West to their new Zion. The Oneida community,

America’s longest-lived nineteenth century commune, believed that the Millennium had already come

and that people should abjure marriage and property to live in the new Kingdom and practice eugenic

arranged breeding to create more perfect children. In the 1870s Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian

Science, a doctrine focused on achieving health through spiritual purification, while she and her followers

believed she was a key figure prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

Likewise in radical politics, influenced by spreading Darwinism (Pittenger, 1993), the idea spread

that as human beings evolved out of capitalism that they would also evolve spiritually and corporeally.

Grahamite vegetarianism, eclectic medical systems, occultism, Theosophy, and free love were woven

through the radical political culture, from abolitionism and women's suffrage to Fourierist communalism

and socialism. In Bellamy's novel Looking Backward, which inspired hundreds of socialist clubs in the
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late nineteenth century U.S. and a national political party, the citizens of his future socialist utopia were

described as having achieved "a general improvement of the species" leading to

the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secret hidden in the germ shall

be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future,

and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its

summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.

(Bellamy, 1888).

The most influential bioutopian movement of the period was, however, eugenics. The eugenicists

believed both that humanity was headed for catastrophe if population growth continued unchecked and

unguided by social hygiene, and that a radically improved social order could be achieved by combining

social reform and planned reproduction for better traits. Some have argued that transhumanism is a

modern form of eugenicism, albeit a liberal version that proposes genetic betterment through individual

germinal choice and gene therapy rather than the mandated sterilization, abortion and murder.

Almost all contemporary transhumanists are, however, adamantly libertarian on questions of

reproductive freedom, and consider breeding for better traits a foolish distraction from the development of

genetic therapies that would make those traits available to all. Transhumanists instead see bioutopians like

the British Marxist geneticist J.B.S. Haldane as their most immediate modern precursors. Haldane

rejected the pseudo-science and authoritarianism of eugenics and proposed instead, in his 1923 seminal

essay Daedalus, or a Science and the Future, that people would be able to choose their own genetic traits

in the future. In 1926 the Irish Marxist and scientist J.D. Bernal (1929) contributed another strain to

contemporary transhumanism with his essay The World, The Flesh and The Devil. Bernal proposed that

humans would eventually colonize space in genetically modified cyborg bodies with brains linked to

machines. For socialist futurists like J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, J.D. Bernal and H.G. Wells

worldwide cataclysmic revolution would not only transcend capitalism but also usher in the rapid advance
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in the sciences and medicine advocated by transhumanism. (See Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012 for an

elaboration on Huxley, Haldane and Bernal's proto-transhumanism.)

Haldane's friend and fellow geneticist Julian Huxley would coin the term "transhumanism" in the

1920s to describe the belief that humanity could, scientifically and spiritually, transcend itself.

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an

individual here in one way, an individual there in another way – but in its entirety, as

humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man

remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his

human nature. (Huxley, 1957)

Contemporary Transhumanism

After the defeat of fascism and the widespread rejection of anything associated with eugenics,

bioutopianism nearly disappeared in the 1950s, although both secular and religious apocalypticism was

energized by the threat of nuclear annihilation, the Cold War, and the establishment of Israel. In the

1960s however numerous trends began to re-ignite the bioutopian imagination. The emerging

counterculture began to advocate alternative healing, appropriate technologies and the revolutionary

potential of psychopharmaceuticals. On the fringe of alternative medicine grew the anti-aging subculture,

believing that vitamins, hormone replacement or cryonic suspension offered radical improvements in

longevity. Futurists began to seriously debate the ramifications of trends that had previously only been

discussed in science fiction, such as genetic engineering, artificial reproductive technologies and brain-

machine interfaces (Toffler, 1970). Feminists such as Shulamith Firestone (1970) and Marge Piercy

proposed that artificial wombs would liberate women from patriarchy.

In the 1970s these bio- and social utopian ideas converged around another transhumanist

forebear, the New York City-based futurist "FM-2030." Born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary in Iran, FM-2030
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began describing our period of history as "transhuman," transitional to the posthuman, and he promoted

putatively transhuman lifestyles and social reforms along with transhumanized bodies. He argued for

transcending both capitalism and socialism by automating work and expanding leisure. In place of

authoritarianism and representative democracy FM-2030 argued for world governance through direct

electronic democracy (FM-2030, 1970, 1977, 1989).

These trends again converged in Southern California in the late 1980s around a group of futurist

thinkers led by the philosopher Max More and his Extropy Institute, which quickly became an

international virtual community through the Internet. The Extropians defined transhumanism as a class of

philosophies which that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition, of which extropianism was the

flavor that was aligned with anarcho-capitalism (More, 1990). The Extropians were especially

enthusiastic about the prospect that nanotechnology would enable indefinite longevity and the uploading

of consciousness to nanomachine bodies. They believed the state would be made irrelevant, and blamed

the slower than desired rate of progress in science and medicine on government regulation.

In the late 1990s European transhumanists began to organize around the more academic,

politically inclusive, and less millennialist, World Transhumanist Association (WTA), founded by the

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and British Utilitarian thinker David Pearce. In the 2000s the WTA

grew quickly with chapters and allied groups in dozens of countries, and in 2009 rebranded itself as

Humanity+. While the Extropians took new names and believed that technology was advancing so

quickly that a total break with the social order was imminent, the WTA/Humanity+ has focused on

mainstreaming the transhumanist project, connecting it to the scientific and intellectual debates of the day

(Bostrom, 1998, 1999). Although the Extropians dwindled and eventually folded into Humanity+ in the

2000s, by having ceded the millennial and apocalyptic message the mainstream transhumanists of the

WTA/Humanity+ soon found themselves outflanked by a millennialist spinoff sect, the Singularitarians.
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Singularitarianism

The Singularity was first proposed by the mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge

(1993) as the point at which greater-than-human machine intelligence begins rapidly improving itself,

beinging an end to human-directed history. In physics "singularities" are the centers of black holes, within

which we can’t predict how physical laws will work. In the same way, Vinge said, greater-than-human

machine intelligence, multiplying exponentially, would make everything about our world unpredictable.

Most Singularitarians believe this point will occur by 2050, although only a minority of transhumanists

share this conviction (Humanity+, 2008).

The most prominent Singularitarian is the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (2006), and more

important even than greater than human intelligence for Kurzweil is the concept of exponential

technological progress. By plotting out accelerating trends such as "Moore's Law," the doubling of

transistors every eighteen months on computer chips, Kurzweil argues that he can predict when

accelerating innovation in genetics, robotics, and telecommunications will make possible technologies

such as nanorobotic brain-machine interfaces. Kurzweil predicts the melding of human and machine

consciousness into an "intelligence explosion" and super-connected posthuman civilization by 2050,

along with radical longevity, uploading of consciousness, and a cure for social problems like hunger and

climate change.

Other Singularitarians, such as the computer scientist Hugo de Garis (2005), believe an

apocalyptic "Terminator" scenario of runaway robotics is more likely." While Vinge argued that we

should aggressively pursue Intelligence Augmentation, or "IA," to try to stay ahead of artificial

intelligence, most Singularitarians are skeptical that the transhumanist program of human enhancement

and augmentation could allow human beings to stay in control of machine intelligence given the

limitations of modifying organic brains compared to the exponential mutability of computing and

robotics.
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While few in the Singularity subculture are as anxious as de Garis about the catastrophic risks of

superintelligence, few are as sunny about the post-Singularity prospects for the average person as Ray

Kurzweil. In effect, most Singularitarians have a "Left Behind" expectation that they and other well-wired

technorati will be among the lucky humans to merge with superintelligence and benefit from the "Rapture

of the Nerds" (Doctorow and Stross, 2012). Some Singularitarians are certain that "vastened" humans

and Friendly AIs will treat baseline humans with godlike compassion, while others are pessimistic about

the prospects for the left behind.

The left behind narrative is very explicit in the Singularitarian writings of computer scientist Hans

Moravec (1988, 2000). According to Moravec the human race will be superceded by our robot children,

among whom, as uploads, some of us may be able to expand to the stars. In his Robot: Mere Machine to

Transcendent Mind, Moravec says "Our artificial progeny will grow away from and beyond us, both in

physical distance and structure, and similarity of thought and motive. In time their activities may become

incompatible with the old Earth's continued existence…An entity that fails to keep up with its neighbors

is likely to be eaten, its space, materials, energy, and useful thoughts reorganized to serve another's goals.

Such a fate may be routine for humans who dally too long on slow Earth before going Ex." Here we have

Tribulations and damnation for the late adopters and the millennial outcome for the elect. While Kurzweil

acknowledges his similarity to religious millennialists by, for instance, including a tongue-in-cheek

picture in The Singularity is Near of himself as an EndTimes street prophet, most Singularitarians angrily

reject such comparisons insisting their expectations are based solely on rational, scientific extrapolation.

It was presumably a Singularitarian for instance who added this to the Wikipedia page on

singularitarianism:

Although acknowledging that there are some similarities between the Singularity

and the Rapture (i.e., millenarianism, transcendence), Singularitarians counter that the

differences are crucial (i.e., rationalism, naturalism, uncertainty of outcome, human-

caused event, nature of the event contingent on human action, no insider privilege, no
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religious trappings, no revenge against non-believers, no anthropomorphism, evidence-

based justification for belief).(Wikipedia, 2012)

Other Singularitarians however embrace continuities with religious millennialism. Futurist John

Smart (2005) often notes the similarity between his own "Global Brain" scenario and the eschatological

writings of the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. In the Global Brain scenario, all human beings

are linked to one another and to machine intelligence in an emerging global telecommunications web,

leading to the emergence of collective intelligence. This emergent, collectivist form of Singularitarianism

was also proposed by Peter Russell (1983) in The Global Brain, and Gregory Stock (1993) in Metaman.

Smart (2005) argues that the scenario of an emergent global human-computer meta-mind is similar to

Chardin's eschatological idea of humanity being linked in a global "noosphere" leading to a postmillennial

"Omega Point" union with God.

As prophetic history is autonomous of human agency for most religious millennialists, so for

most Singularitarians the technological innovations that lead to the Singularity are autonomous of human

agency. Wars, technology bans, energy crises or simple incompetence are dismissed as unlikely to slow or

stop the trajectory. Kurzweil insists, for instance, that the accelerating trends he documents have

progressed unhindered through wars, plagues and depressions (Kurzweil, 2006). More recently, in What

Technology Wants, technology writer Kevin Kelly suggests that humanity and technology have been co-

evolving along a teleological trajectory to expand intelligence to the universe (Kelly, 2010), a teleological

vision he shares with Smart and Kurzweil.

The elective affinity between libertarian politics and Singularity can be partly explained by the

idea of technological inevitability. Collective agency is not required to ensure the Singularity, and human

governments are too slow and stupid to avert the catastrophic possibilities of superintelligence, if there are

any. Only small groups of computer scientists working to create the first superintelligence with core

"friendliness code" could have any effect on deciding between catastrophe and millennium.
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This latter project, building a friendly AI, is the focus of the largest Singularitarian organization,

the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), headed by the autodidact philosopher Eliezer

Yudkowsky. In "Millennial Tendencies in Responses to Apocalyptic Threats" (Hughes, 2008) I parse

Yudkowky and the SIAI as the "messianic" version of Singularitarianism, arguing that their semi-

monastic endeavor to build a literal deus ex machina to protect humanity from the Terminator is a form of

magical thinking. The principal backer of the SIAI is the conservative Christian transhumanist billionaire

Peter Thiel. Like the Extropians Thiel is an anarcho-capitalist envisioning a stateless future and funder of

the Seasteading Foundation which works to create independent floating city-states in international waters.

He also is the principal funder of the Methuselah Foundation, which works on anti-aging research. In

2011 and 2012 Thiel was the principal financier of the SuperPAC backing libertarian Republican Ron

Paul, and he supports other conservative foundations and political projects on the Right.

While Kurzweil is decidedly more liberal than Thiel, as a techno-utopian entrepreneur and

inventor Kurzweil shares the broadly libertarian outlook of most Singularitarians. In 2009 Ray Kurzweil

co-launched with Peter Diamandis the Singularity University with backing from Google and other

corporate sponsors, and housed at the Ames Research Center campus of NASA. At Singularity University

entrepreneurs spend tens of thousands of dollars to network with one another and venture capitalists, and

imbibe the Singularitarian vision that sees their inventions and enterprises as key to the coming

millennium. Diamandis (2012) recently published Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think,

which argues that the world is inexorably improving because of technological innovation, the benefits of

which will quickly filter down to the poor.

In 2009 the libertarians and Singularitarians launched a campaign to take over the World

Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, pushing out the Left in favor of allies like Milton

Friedman's grandson and Seasteader leader Patri Friedman. Since then the libertarians and

Singularitarians, backed by Thiel's philanthropy, have secured extensive hegemony in the transhumanist

community. As the global capitalist system spiraled into the crisis in which it remains, partly created by
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the speculation of hedge fund managers like Thiel, the left-leaning majority of transhumanists around the

world have increasingly seen the contradiction between the millennialist escapism of the Singularitarians

and practical concerns of ensuring that technological innovation is safe and its benefits universally

enjoyed. While the alliance of Left and libertarian transhumanists held together until 2008 in the belief

that the new biopolitical alignments were as important as the older alignments around political economy,

the global economic crisis has given new life to the technoprogressive tendency, those who want to

organize for a more egalitarian world and transhumanist technologies, a project with a long

Enlightenment pedigree and distinctly millenarian possibilities.

Technoprogressives and BioLiberals

In my 2004 book Citizen Cyborg I argued for a social-democratic version of transhumanism,

"democratic transhumanism," as the natural product of the egalitarian wing of the Enlightenment, one

which could unite disparate contemporary political projects. This term has now been superceded among

left-wing transhumanists by the more mellifluous "technoprogressive." In surveys I conducted in 2003,

2005 and 2007 of the global membership of the World Transhumanist Association left-wing

transhumanists outnumbered conservative and libertarian transhumanists by 2-to-1 (Humanity+, 2008).

By 2007 16% of respondents specifically self-identified as "technoprogressive."

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom and

myself, is the principal organization of technoprogressive intellectuals. Initially the debate between the

technoprogressives and the libertarian and Singularitarian transhumanists was around whether

government-funded research and health and safety regulations are necessary for the development of

emerging technologies, and whether equitable access to enhancement required its provision through

universal healthcare. But the growing apocalypticism within the transhumanist movement has also opened
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debates over whether public policy is a useful focus for catastrophic risk mitigation, versus technoutopian

denial or magical techno-fixes.

In April 2000 Wired magazine published an essay by Bill Joy, the chief technologist and co-

founder of Sun Microsystems, titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” in which Joy contemplated the

likely apocalyptic consequences of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Joy

argued that because these technologies can potentially self-replicate they pose a novel threat and that

research on them should be “relinquished,” or banned worldwide. This essay led to debate in

transhumanist and futurist circles about whether technologies could be relinquished, and what more

effective ways to mitigate their risks might be.

The next year transhumanist leader Nick Bostrom (2001) published "Analyzing Human

Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards," which discussed both natural and man-made catastrophes,

from asteroid impacts to totalitarian mind-control, that could end human existence as we know it. When

Bostrom became the director of Oxford's Future of Humanity he created a program on Global

Catastrophic Risks which resulted in a book by the same name in 2008. This growing focus on

catastrophic scenarios from transhumanists has forced many to seriously engage with the regulatory and

security policies that would mitigate those risks, in addition to promoting the use of emerging

technologies that might make civilization more resilient to those risks.

While sections of the transhumanist movement moved to the Left and into more serious

engagement with public policy, left-leaning intellectuals in bioethics and public policy, who in the past

were critical of transhumanism on a variety of grounds, were becoming more open to alliances with

transhumanists. Under the Bush administration, the ascendance of the religious Right and of the

conservative, Leon Kass-directed President's Council on Bioethics (2003) had a polarizing effect on

biopolitical intellectuals, driving many to more clearly advocate for the right to human enhancement.

British bioethicists like Jonathan Glover, John Harris and Julian Savulescu joined with American

bioethicists Arthur Caplan, Henry Greely, Allen Buchanan, Maxwell Mehlman and Gregory Pence in
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defense of reproductive cloning, germinal choice and cognitive enhancement. Belying their protestations

to be more moderate than transhumanists some bioliberals have gone one step further than the

transhumanists to argue for a moral obligation to adopt enhancements.

Religious Transhumanism

Today self-identified transhumanists are mostly secular and atheist. In a survey conducted in of

the 5000 or so members of the World Transhumanist Association in 2007, more than nine out of ten

affirmed the statement “Do you expect human progress to result from human accomplishment rather than

divine intervention, grace, or redemption?” (Humanity+, 2008) Ninety percent denied “clear divinely-set

limits on what humans should do,” and ninety percent affirmed that their “concept of ‘the meaning of life’

derived from human responsibility and opportunity, not than from divine revelation.” On the other hand,

while two-thirds identified as atheist, agnostic, secular humanist or non-theist, a third self-identified with

some kind of religiosity or spirituality, including Christian (8%), spiritual (5%), Buddhist (4%), religious

humanist (2%).

One of the largest transhumanist groups is the Mormon Transhumanist Association which sees

transhumanism as the fulfillment of Mormon prophecy. They note in a 2006 document:

Mormon teachings of the Millennium and immortality parallel Transhumanist

ideas regarding the Singularity and transhumans in at least the following ways:

First, a period of dramatic and unexpected change is imminent. Although some

ridicule and few have recognized its signs, the Millennium approaches, and we should

prepare ourselves for the Day of Transfiguration and its attending changes. Likewise,
 Preprint: Hughes, James. 2012. "The Politics of Transhumanism and

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

although critics scoff and despite the intuitive linear view of change, the Singularity is

nearer than we anticipate, and we should review and mitigate associated risks.

Second, minds and bodies may be changed diversely. In the twinkling of an eye,

we and other animals may be transfigured or resurrected to bodies of varying types and

degrees of glory. Similarly, information technology may enable genetics, nanotech and

robotics to enhance the minds and bodies of humans and other animals.

Third, anatomical changes may extend lives indefinitely. From one

transfiguration to another, exchanging blood for spirit, we may attain immortality.

Analogously, as transhumans, we may extend or exchange our biological substrate with

another to ensure persistence of our identity.

Fourth, our work may contribute to these changes. Transfiguration and

resurrection may be ordinances for us to perform for each other. Comparatively, our

science may provide technology that enables us to enhance ourselves and attain indefinite

longevity.

While the Mormon transhumanists are the best organized and most successful manifestation of

the syncretism of transhumanism and Singularitarianism with religious millennialism there is no

fundamental obstacle to the positive adoption of the Singularity and transhumanist goals of health,

longevity and cognitive enhancement into any faith, as I have argued elsewhere (Hughes, 2007), both as

acceptable for the faithful and as a part of the fulfillment of prophecy. Unfortunately, so far, there are far

more religious who see transhumanism and Singularitarianism as antithetical to their faith, and on the

wrong side of Manichean struggles to come.

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

Anti-H+ Apocalypticism

In an April 2012 survey conducted by Ipsos in 21 countries 14% of respondents said they

believed the world would end in their lifetimes (Gottfried, 2012). The two countries with the highest

levels of apocalyptic beliefs were Turkey and the United States, where 22% of the population agreed. In a

poll in March of 2012 conducted by the National Geographic Society a third of Americans believed that a

major worldwide disaster would strike within the next four years, and two thirds believed global

catastrophe likely in the next twenty years (National Geographic. 2012). In a Pew Research Center poll

in 2010 41% of Americans said they expect Jesus' return by the year 2050, and 58% said they expected

another world war in that period (Pew, 2010). Of course all of these apocalyptic expectations are much

more common among American conservatives and evangelicals. For instance majorities of American

evangelicals and Republicans see contemporary natural disasters as the fulfillment of EndTimes

prophecies (Samuel, 2011)

Many social scientists believe that millennialism, xenophobia and conspiracism spike in times of

economic crisis, but it is hard to say whether apocalyptic expectations are higher today than they have

been in the past. Apocalypticism does not require majority adoption to be profoundly disruptive, however,

only that small groups believe that ordinary laws and goals are now pointless, and that their actions are

divinely sanctioned and have world historical importance. That is why the confluence of the emerging

millennialist worldview of Singularitarians and transhumanists with the eschatologies of the religious

Right is so rife with violent potential.

One example of the working of paranoid ideas about transhumanists into EndTimes eschatology

can be found in the ministry of Tom Horn, founder and director of the website Raiders News Network. A

retired minister, Horn founded Raiders in 1999 to promote his theories about how UFOs, occult

phenomena and transhumanist technologies fit into the EndTimes. Horn and his growing network of like-

minded conspiracists (Horn, 2012) promote the common bioconservative accusation that transhumanism
 Preprint: Hughes, James. 2012. "The Politics of Transhumanism and

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

is a hubristic form of humanism, replacing the worship of God with the worship of man. Specifically, in

books such as Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology,

Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

(Horn and Horn, 2011) and Nephilim Stargates: The Year 2012 and the Return of the Watchers (2007)

Horn argues that transhumanist technologies will be used by Satan to create "nephilim," demonic angel-

human hybrids, which will play some role in the Apocalypse. According the Horn ally Stephen Quayle,

author of Genetic Armageddon:

A terrifying future thunders toward mankind, an impending fate embodied by

monstrous, blasphemous combinations of human and animal genetic materials, of

man/machine cyborgs, and of beings not only with increased capacities and extended life-

spans, but also with re-engineered morality void of compassion. This future is so

abhorrent as to almost defy the imagination. These new beings, and the transhumanists

looking forward to their arrival, will not be benevolent. (Quayle, 2003)

While these fringe groups are colorful, they echo a much wider set of anti-transhumanist

criticisms from the Christian Right. Since 2002 a growing network of religious conservative bioethics

organizations - including the Center for Bioethics and Culture in California, the Center for Bioethics and

Human Dignity in Chicago, the Discovery Institute in Seattle, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center

and Culture of Life Foundation in Washington D.C. - have been adding opposition to transhumanism and

human enhancement to their agenda alongside evolution, abortion, embryonic stem cells, euthanasia and

more recently, Obamacare. While these organizations and their spokespeople are not apocalyptics, the

criticisms they wage against transhumanism often reflect the view that human enhancement might be

more that a spiritual distraction or heressy, but a cause for civil war. For instance Christian conservative

critics of transhumanism frequently point to Julian Huxley's role as a founder of UNESCO, and the

alleged embrace of eugenics and transhumanism by New World Order elites, to paint transhumanism as a
 Preprint: Hughes, James. 2012. "The Politics of Transhumanism and

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

central anti-Christian ideology (Taylor, 2012), the promotion of which is likely to play a role in the

conflict between Christians and the Antichrist (Gillette, 2012).

The idea that human enhancement will lead to a civil war between the enhanced and unenhanced

has also been promoted in secular bioconservative circles for the last decade. In 2002, for instance, the

liberal bioethicists George Annas and Lori Andrews published "Protecting the endangered human:

Toward an international treaty prohibiting cloning and inheritable alterations," in the American Journal of

Law & Medicine, in which they argued that human enhancement should be declared a “crime against

humanity," on the grounds that

"The posthuman will come to see us (the garden variety human) as an inferior

subspecies without human rights to be enslaved or slaughtered preemptively. It is this

potential for genocide based on genetic difference, that I have termed "genetic genocide,"

that makes species-altering genetic engineering a potential weapon of mass destruction."

(Annas, 2001)

More recently in Humanity's End (2010) the liberal bioethicist Nicholas Agar argues that posthumans

cannot peacefully or equitably co-exist with humans, since “once posthumans come into existence, they

may view humans as morally required to defer to them, to permit our interests to be sacrificed to promote

theirs. Thus, the path of radical enhancement for some humans significantly threatens the interests of

other humans.” On these grounds Agar argues, like Annas and Andrews, that we must forbid human

enhancement as a matter of self-defense (Agar, 2010).

On the Christian Right these race war speculations are taken with much greater gravity. The

Wikipedia page on the "New World Order" (Wikipedia, 2012) notes for instance that anti-globalist

conspiracists

speculate that the global power elite are reactionary modernists pursuing a

transhumanist agenda to develop and use human enhancement technologies in order to

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

become a "posthuman ruling caste", while change accelerates toward a technological

singularity…Conspiracy theorists fear the outcome will either be the emergence of a

Brave New World-like dystopia — a "Brave New World Order" — or the extinction of

the human species. (Wikipedia, 2012)

One of the most prominent promoters of this kind of conspiracy theory is the television and radio show

host Alex Jones, founder of website Infowars where a constant stream of articles, podcasts and video can

be found with titles such as "United Nations Envisions Transhumanist Future Where Man is Obsolete"

(Dykes, 2012).

There is a precedent for this kind of apocalyptic Luddism leading to violence: Theodore

Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Kaczynski waged a bombing campaign for eighteen years in the United

States against scientists engaged in projects that he thought threatened human nature, principally through

cybernetics and genetic engineering. Between 1978 and 1996 Kaczynski mailed 16 bombs to targets in

academia, killing three and maiming 23 people. He used his bombings to blackmail the media into

publishing his 35,000 word manifesto in which he specifically addresses the need to dismantle medicine

along with all other parts of industrial civilization, because of the threat from human genetic

manipulation. “(M)an in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of chance, or of God

(depending on your religious or philosophical opinions), but a manufactured product…The only code of

ethics that would truly protect freedom would be one that prohibited ANY genetic engineering of human

beings…” (Kaczynski, 1996).

Taking up Kaczynski's mantle in 2011, a loose alliances of anarchist anti-nanotechnology groups

in Europe and Latin America have claimed responsibility for the shooting of a nuclear-engineering

executive in Italy, bombing attempts on nanotechnology laboratories in the Mexico and Switzerland, and

attacks on scientists in France, Spain and Chile. The groups directly cite the inspiration of Kaczynski and

their manifesto argues that nanomedical robotics will inevitably lead to mind control, dehumanization,
 Preprint: Hughes, James. 2012. "The Politics of Transhumanism and

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

and run-away "gray goo" that would destroy the Earth. They specifically single out Peter Thiel, the

transhumanist biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and the Singularity Institute among their dozens of

targets (ITTW, 2011).

Conclusion

In the film Terminator 2 Sarah Connor has a vision of the nuclear devastation that will be

unleashed when Skynet wakes and begins to wage war on humans. Her determination to do what is

necessary to stop the apocalypse is steeled, and she sets off to kill the scientists involved in the creation of

artificial intelligence, and blow up their labs. As the conviction spreads among putatively secular

Singularitarians that this apocalyptic outcome is a likely result of unchecked computing innovation in

corporate and military labs the puzzle is why so few have been moved to do more than contribute a

couple of dollars to friendly AI research. Partly this is because the men attracted to techno-millennialism

have not grown up with guns or served in the military, they see the computer as their tool of change, and

they rarely live near like-minded comrades with whom they could develop a plan for direct action.

But meanwhile in the Christian and secular apocalyptic subcultures, where guns, tight knit groups

and visions of apocalyptic violence abound, anxieties about killer robots, genetic engineering, and

posthuman elites with genocidal plans are being woven into eschatological timelines. Although abortion

clinics, Muslims and immigrants have so far been the principal targets of far right direct action, it seems

like that, as the anarchists have now done, apocalyptics will begin to focus on transhumanists and

Singularitarians.

Technoutopians on the American Right, such as Peter Thiel, Glenn Harlan Reynolds and Newt

Gningrich, might complicate this story by validating parts of the transhumanist vision for religious

conservatives and apocalyptics, although a jihadist who sees genetic engineering and nanotechnology to

be part of their arsenal is probably even scarier than who doesn't. Groups like the Mormon Transhumanist
 Preprint: Hughes, James. 2012. "The Politics of Transhumanism and

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

Association, working within different faith communities, might also help defuse millennial violence,

although religious transhumanists are usually far too heterodox to be convincing interlocutors.

In radical politics there may also be opportunities for millennial movements to adopt a more

nuanced attitude toward transhumanism and the Singularity than the anarchist bombers have this last year.

Perhaps our global economic crisis, with widening class divisions and deepening unemployment, will

create the context for a new technoprogressive synthesis of egalitarian millennialism and

technoutopianism, with promises of universal anti-aging and cognitive enhancement, a basic income

guarantee and shorter work weeks, a post-gender transhuman social democracy with world government.

It is remarkable that Francis Fukuyama, who famously argued transhumanism to be the world's most

dangerous ideology, and in Our Posthuman Future (2002) that transhumanism would destroy democracy,

has more recently opined (2012) the world desperately needs a new global, egalitarian redistributionist

ideology and social movement that also embraces technological innovation. Perhaps his appeal will be

answered by a form of millennialist transhumanism.

the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626-2030," Zygon 47(4): 757–776.

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