From Utopia to Extropia

My hands are in a sorry state that prevent much further typing, which partly explains my limited activity on this blog. As they get slightly better, however, I cannot avoid writing this essay, prompted by a recent debate on Utopia. I explain the absurdity and intrinsic totalitarianism of Utopia stricto sensu, several ways to fix the invalid concept into valid, useful ones, and at the intersection of them, Extropianism, that intentional projection into the future of mankind.

Last saturday, I went to church: the Salon of the Boston Objectivist Network. People with same basic beliefs gather to feel good and sane. The topic was Utopia & Dystopia. The usual moderator could not come, and one person disserted randomly for an hour and a half, without making a point or conceptualizing much. I was bored. I didn't interrupt the speaker. But wrote down ideas. I decided my ego would be more inflated by exposing my ideas to voluntary readers than by throwing it at the faces of people who were not asking for it. I just insisted that next time, we should abide by strict time limits on whoever has the floor. The formula works great for scientific conferences, where junior speakers are given 10 to 15 minutes, normal speakers 20 to 25, and even great speakers are only invited to speak 45 minutes, before it's time for Q&A. There's no reason that local church speakers should not be held to same standards. Knowing that you have a deadline keeps you relevant, by forcing you to make a point concisely, hence to conceptualize; I'm sure our speaker could have done a great speech given such constraints. Anyway, here are those ideas concerning Utopia that the speaker didn't treat at all, yet I think are very important, and that I would have liked to expose in 5 minutes, if allowed to intervene.

The word Utopia comes from Thomas More's 1516 book Utopia, where he describes his idea of a perfect society in an imaginary island. As an etymology, the speaker explained that Topos is greek for place, and U- is a pun between EU- that means good and OU- that denotes negation, so Utopia, with an ending reminiscent of a country name, is that good place that isn't. More generally, a Utopia is an ideal of how a particular author would engineer human institutions so as to achieve a good society. The concept predates the word, and the speaker mentionned Plato's Republic, that well-known and often admired early example of such a mental construct, without mentionning that just like More's Utopia, Plato's dream is a typical totalitarian project for a racist eugenistic sexist slaver caste system, ruled by philosophers like Plato imagined himself, maintained by a police state, oppressing producers, and exploiting slaves -- the ever similar totalitarian project that all black magic minds conceive, from the priests of ancient Egypt to the modern socialists. I noticed it in my essay on Black Magic, and I'm told that Shafarevich's book Socialism develops this topic fully.

It is no surprise that all Utopias end up, in one way or the other, becoming some variant of totalitarian socialist dystopia, and that utopian has thus been used as a derisive term to mock people who propose absurd grand changes to society. Indeed, the very idea that one man, or a committee of men, could engineer a whole society, thereby subjecting all men, present and future, to his alleged social genius, is intrinsically totalitarian; it is the symptom of an extraordinary hubris in its proponent, and an extraordinary spite for the rest of mankind, as marvelously denounced by Bastiat in The Law. Such mental constructions are deeply ignorant of the dynamic nature of society, as an emergent phenomenon that arises out of the individual behaviour of myriads of participants, who cannot be compelled magically by statements of the rulers, but only by a superior violent force that follows laws of its own. Hayek systematically developed the theme of society as an emerging order, and how presumptuous constructivists are in their belief they can engineer something that is vastly more complex than they can fathom in its use of information for dynamic adjustment. The whole tradition of liberty, from the Taoists to present day libertarians, is about studying this dynamic nature of society and what kind of order or chaos emerges from the admission and enforcement of rules of social interaction that either acknowledge the natural rights of man or deny them. Hence our denouncing the ever renewed philosophical absurdities and totalitarian ideals based on which the proponents of statism justify their oppressive schemes.

Does that mean that there is nothing to be saved from the concept of Utopia? No. By relaxing one or the other amongst the constraints that define a Utopia stricto sensu, several different concepts can be found the pursuit of each of which is not intrinsically absurd, but a valid endeavour. Utopia is about wondering how to engineer a whole society to make it good. Instead, we could study the nature of man and human societies, without the hubris of whole-society engineering, and based on the knowledge of what social rules lead to what consequences, derive conclusions about how to make society a better place. Such social studies are the basis of the tradition of liberty scholarship, from Lao Tseu's Tao Te King to Mises' Human Action, to contemporary authors of which I am an immodest example. While our tradition certainly proposes an ensemble of normative prescriptions, which we call Natural Law, these prescriptions remain general and not only cannot be construed as a whole-society engineering, but specifically deny anyone the right or capacity to conduct such whole-society engineering. And this is how, when libertarians themselves are accused of being utopians by statists, it is but yet another case of statists accusing libertarians of their own faults.

Another way of fixing the concept of Utopia is futurology: trying to devise knowledge about the future of society, without any value judgment about such progress being good or bad. Understanding the basic laws of Human Action, its principles of conservation and creation, its fundamental constants and its evolutionary forces, the dynamics between inertia and adaptability at the individual level as well as at the level of the communities that serve as context for individual behaviour, the impact of advancing technology and religious superstitions, are keys to making meaningful predictions. Few people master either the general principles or the important particular facts, and even fewer combine the knowledge of both, so that futurology a domain explored by more fools than wise men; this doesn't mean that useful predictions can't be made, or that it is impossible to distinguish the good grain from the chaff.

And of course, we can always strip away the concept of Utopia from its grandiose claim to command the whole society, leaving the aspiration to engineer a better world (i.e. rationally change) through individual action starting at a small scale. But then, what is left is general morality, rational action, individual entrepreneurship; a topic of general utility in all occasions, and therefore too vast to be specific, or too specific to be a matter of discussion. In either case, a lot could be said about it, but no one could construe it as a well-defined narrow subgenre of human action, because it is Human Action itself.

At the intersection between these various fixes to the concept of Utopia, we find Extropianism. Extropians are ultra-individualist futurist entrepreneurs, or as some of them say, Anarcho-Capitalist Transhumanists. At least, such are those originally called Extropians, for the term has since derived to cover all kinds of transhumanists ignorant of basic Praxeology; but I'll use the term in its original acception. Extropians, thus, look into the future to understand how technology can and therefore will change the world, and then take part in shaping that future in such a way that may bring them the extension of their life and freedom. They seek for themselves nothing less than immortality and the conquest of the Universe.

In the 1980s, Extropians gathered, cross-fertilized and popularized such ideas as artificial intelligence emerging from massively networked computers, as nanotechnologies that give us atom-level control in material engineering, as customizing one's own body and genome to fit new environments, as bioengineering applications of the above to achieve biological immortality, as uploading a person's brain patterns into a computer simulation, as cryonically freezing bodies to preserve people until they can be resurrected or uploaded by superior future technology, as entities starting from some or all the above, using consciously designed self-modifications, and therefore competing on a new faster darwinian evolution track as freed from the constraints of blind biological reproduction, as the result of such new revolution being a world dominated by entities as far beyond humanity as humanity is beyond the animal kingdom, as those transhuman or posthuman entities, freed from our physical limitations, conquering the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, on a propagation wave going at nearly the speed of light.

What Extropians see in a relatively near future (by historical scales at least) is a probable technological Singularity: an acceleration of technological progress such that our world is transformed into some new-level so far beyond that we can't possibly fathom what will happen next, except for the universal constraints known from Physics and Praxeology, their laws of constant Conservation and irreversible Evolution. Extropians hope to be part of that future and to reach immortality by becoming themselves those transhuman beings. On this path, long-term rivals or enemies will include not just the humans who will fight technological progress, but also other transhumans who make the step forward at about the same time, and more worriedly inimical artificial posthuman entities that may appear before they are ready. All this may seem crazy, but not so much if you ponder the claims carefully: inasmuch as any of the above prediction is physically possible then that thing will certainly happen, for it will be attempted, by people that extropians themselves exemplify, and when it happens, there is no way back. And these things all are physically possible indeed, according to our knowledge, and up to various guessed details. The one impossible prediction that remains is one of timing. How fast will things happen? Is it ten years, one hundred, one thousand or ten thousand? We can't know for sure before it happens, and after it does, it's too late to know: the Universe will be settled by entities as superior to what we are now as we are superior to animals. What matters most to these individual entrepreneurs is what can one do, if anything, to make this Singularity happen faster -- and to be part of it rather than left behind. And that's how you find extropians working to build an artificial intelligence, to create nanotechnologies, refine genetic engineering, conquer space... or simply to neutralize the psychological barriers that keep mankind from going forward.