Clear Bright Future by Paul Mason

Author:Paul Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241320112
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

From there, said Fromm, it is just a short journey to the slogan of the Spanish falangists in 1936: ‘Long Live Death!’ Turn to the post-humanist ethics brigade and the project is explicit. ‘Posthuman ethics has consistently sought the silencing of what is understood as human speech emergent through logic, power and signification,’ writes MacCormack, adding, ‘the absence of the human is the most vital living yet to be accomplished’.33

I want to defend human beings against algorithms that predict and dictate our shopping choices, our voting patterns and our sexual preferences; against repressive governments who would use algorithmic control to convert us into the submissive, semi-automatons that their ideology demands; against kleptocrats and billionaires who would combine, as they did in the election that produced Trump, to leverage the massive power of algorithmic control, deregulation and business secrecy to rig the electoral system.

I want to defend the idea that every one of us – the transgender activist in London, the female factory worker in Guangdong, the Kanak teenager fighting for independence on New Caledonia – has a universal quality from which inalienable human rights derive.

To defend humanism we need, of course, to rescue the idea from Eurocentrism: but I do not want to replace it with cultural relativism. As we defend the values of the Renaissance, the scientific method, the Enlightenment and the radical humanism of Marx, we are not defending something specifically ‘white’, male or even European. We are defending, for example, the achievements of Islamic humanism – maths, algorithms, jurisprudence and the rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings between the sixth and thirteenth centuries CE.34 We are defending the wisdom of the freed African slave and playwright Terence, who wrote in 163 BCE: ‘nothing human is alien to me’.35

Like the black liberation theorist Frantz Fanon, I want humanism to expand so that it can acknowledge and make reparations for the crimes committed by Europeans in the developing world, not ignore them.36 I want a form of humanism that is not centred on ‘man’ but on men and women. Because women’s biological difference from men has been for tens of thousands of years the justification for domestic slavery and oppression, and because these survive alongside women’s participation in the workforce, humanism has to incorporate a female idea of freedom that diverges in some respects from the male idea.

To the question ‘are we already post-human?’ I want everyone reading this book to make a conscious choice: to answer no.

In fact, once you answer no, it opens up a whole range of more interesting questions about the way human nature is changing under the impact of digital networks: questions that social psychologists have been exploring for two decades.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.