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Source: Reactionary Feminist
Disunited Posthuman Kingdom
A great deal has already written about NatCon UK, much of it variants on the argument that “national conservatism is a dead end”. I addressed the conference on Monday; it’s still ongoing, so I’ll save my wider reflections for later and just say that as “dead ends” go, it’s striking how youthful the attendees have been, and how much lively debate the event has occasioned both among conservatives and beyond.
Below is the full text of the talk I delivered, titled “Disunited Posthuman Kingdom”. Here I argue that emerging tensions between the UK’s nations, over matters such as gender identity, show how it’s not tenable for conservatives to imagine the politics of the body can be merely a matter for “individual choice”. But the scale at which we govern the politics of the body has far-reaching implications for the kind of policies we get, and thus for who emerges as winners and losers.
Disunited Posthuman Kingdom
In December last year, in the teeth of opposition, the Scottish government passed a law permitting everyone to self-identify their legal sex with only the slimmest of gatekeeping. Shortly after that, Westminster invoked the Scotland Act to block it. It caused uproar. The fight is ongoing.
In this moment three issues converged. Conservatives are hopelessly muddled on all of them.
One: is what we do with our bodies a matter for state power?
Two: at what scale should the politics of the body be governed, if at all?
And three: in what contexts should power be exerted?
Is that use of state power to be humanistic, or post-human?
Many liberal conservatives think point one is obvious. What we do with our bodies as a matter for individual conscience. This is conservative in an ironic sense, because it’s a fairly modern idea. But it’s being ‘conserved’ against those avant-garde progressives who, during the pandemic, leapt fully on board with state authority over bodies.
Since Covid, the politics of bodies are post-liberal: the governing consensus is that the state absolutely does have a say in what you do with your body. But when? To what end? And who decides?
The Scottish gender bill debacle woke even some liberal conservatives up to point two: the question of scale. What we agree about the meaning of bodies has inescapably social and sometimes far-reaching impacts. And I’ll argue here that unless we take the politics of the body seriously, and govern it at the national scale, the answer to point three is a foregone conclusion.
Failing to grapple with the proper scale for a proactive politics of the body will deliver a United Kingdom that is either dis-united, or – more likely – increasingly post-human.
Benjamin Bratton, a leading progressive theorist of the new postliberal politics of the body, mocks those who cling to individual bodily ‘sovereignty’. In his view this view is reactionary, laughable, and obsolete.
I agree with him, in this sense alone: that those on the Left or Right who still imagine we can swerve the politics of the body by ‘leaving it up to the individual’ really haven’t been paying attention.
Among those who have been paying attention, there is sharp disagreement on where the State has skin in the game, as regards what you do with your body. But it’s misleading to view these two sides as Right and Left, for all that they’re broadly coded as such. It’s more accurate to view them as humanist and transhumanist.
In Feminism Against Progress I date the inception of the transhumanist paradigm from the mid-twentieth century. The first mass-adoption technology, that propelled us into this new age, was the contraceptive pill. That is: the Pill was the first transhumanist technology.
At this biopolitical hinge moment, both Left and liberal Right assented in principle to the core transhumanist idea. That it’s legitimate to use medical technology not to fix something that is wrong, such as an infection. But instead to use it expressively: to improve at will on organismic functions that are working properly – in this case, normal fertility – in the name of personal freedom.
In the wake of this, a political contest has been ongoing for half a century, now between two competing understandings of what men and women are. These have profound implications for medicine, policy and – crucially – commerce.
Under the humanist order: human nature was the standard. This vision of personhood originates within a broadly Christian cultural and political order, and its concept of imago dei: the idea that humans as created in God’s image. The aim of humanist medicine was to restore deviations from normal, and then to stop when this was achieved.
Technology promises we no longer need by bound by this. When we embraced the Pill, we embarked on the path to mastering imago dei. And to the extent that we embrace this transhumanist template, we leave behind the humanist one.
Under the transhumanist order: human nature is the baseline. There is no theoretical upper limit to how far we can and should go, in upgrading ourselves. The endpoint is unknown, but almost certainly “posthuman”.
Half a century on, every scissor issue, where it’s not possible to be neutral, turns on these disputes. Over what humans are.
Does ‘normal’ exist?
What is sex for?
What is a woman?
What is a mother?
Are we entitled to opt out of normal developmental processes? Should we be free to modify ourselves as we see fit?
If not, why not?
What if any are the limits to this?
In under-estimating the importance of that moment, the Right acceded to nearly every one of the cyborg Left’s premises, save how fast to drive.
Take the trench warfare over whether or not schools should tell parents about a child’s desire to present as the opposite sex. Miriam Cates MP recently launched a report that showed just how far UK schools are already usurping parents’ prerogative on this and numerous other fronts, concerning sex and relationships.
If this seems to have come out of nowhere, it hasn’t. Its precursor is the 1986 court case where Victoria Gillick challenged the right of West Norfolk and Wisbech AHA and the DHS to give birth control advice to girls under the age of 16. This case established “Gillick competence”, a measure that assesses the capacity of children to assent to medical treatment.
Gillick is treated as settled case law now. Indeed, our Prime Minister just boasted about making the contraceptive Pill even easier to obtain, with even less medical gatekeeping.
But the culture war over schoolchildren being ‘transitioned’ without their parents’ consent is just what happens when you map the idea of “Gillick competence” onto a belief that “normal” is not the desired medical end-point, but a baseline we can and should surpass where desired.
The movement formerly known as “the Left” is leaning hard into the resulting post-humanism. At its radical edge it is a vanguard movement for a radical libertarianism of the body, underwritten by a ballooning biotech industry, demanding the right of every individual to pursue total biomedical self-mastery.
Against this, treating biopolitics as a matter of individual conscience means, in practice, giving this movement carte blanche. Gender critical feminists get this. Just because most people don’t identify as transgender doesn’t prevent “gender self-id” allowing males into single-sex changing rooms. Like pandemic policy, the politics of gender are inescapably social.
As such, the battlefield is institutions: political, regulatory, legal and educational. And also those commercial ones with an interest in profiting from the abolition of imago dei. For the cyborg Left is already shaping policy, regulations, institutions and moral norms, nationally and internationally, in line with the posthuman vision. And it’s doing so largely upstream of electoral politics: for example via NGOs, academia and regulatory bodies.
This isn’t just about “trans rights”. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. If we’re all an assemblage of systems that can be started, remodelled, and ended at will, reframing sexed development as a menu of expressive options stands for a wider campaign for individual control over normative developmental pathways.
This abolition of imago dei extends into the so-called “right” to maximise individual freedoms (for some, at least) at the beginning of life. Big Fertility is already a global industry; Big Biotech, spearheaded by transgender rights, is a rapidly growing one.
And at the end, too. Big Death. This now accounts for 3.3 percent of all Canadian deaths. It could be such a growth market here, too, if the persistent campaigners for “assisted suicide” get their way.
Those still muttering about about individual choice ignore the stark class and power asymmetries that emerge under the transhumanist paradigm. Think of how the utopian aspirations of Covid policy measured up to those policies’ brutally asymmetrical impacts in compounding health, education, and employment disparities.
Now extrapolate that to every domain where biotech offers supposed new bodily freedoms.
Think of the asymmetry, for example, between those buying gametes or gestational “services”, and those selling them. Between the “freedom” of an individual to commission a baby to order, and the “freedom” of the resulting child to know his or her genetic heritage. Or between a Polly Toynbee campaigning for “assisted suicide”, and an impoverished woman in Canada opting to die because the state has refused her appropriate support.
The mainstream Right is asleep at the wheel on these matters. The Scottish self-ID proposal got all the way through Holyrood before Westminster realized just how wide-ranging and disastrous its knock-on effects would be for administration, data collection, service provision and much else besides, to say nothing of women, and invoked the Scotland Act.
We can extend the same potential for intra-Union chaos, to every biopolitical scissor issue. And there are many. To take just one of many examples, consider First Minister Humza Yousaf’s proposal to decriminalise abortion to term.
Polls show only around 10% of Britons support this. But the UK is small enough that what’s legal in Scotland on abortion would effectively be legal in England too.
Would we see intra-Union criminal proceedings as a result? Wherever you stand on abortion, it is difficult to see how any such conflict could avoid further undermining the Union, as is already happening with gender self-ID.
And in any case devolved administrations should not be able to steer national policy, especially on issues that are this contentious and cut this close to the heart of what a person is. The tail cannot wag the dog.
Add to this that the tail is also often encouraged in its wagging, by extra-national interests. The supposedly “rules-based international order” increasingly embraces the Brattonist vision, of a globalized, borderless, digitally-enabled post-individualist biopolitics: the Leviathan that will supposedly give us all maximum individuation and maximum care.
For example the UN’s supposedly independent expert on “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”, was recently exposed as an uncritical proponent of transhumanist gender “affirmation”, which is to say straightforwardly a transhumanist one.
Such individuals and institutions work internationally to propagate the post-human vision over the older, humanist one. This means in particular using institutional power to flatten the restraining influence of local cultures on libertarianism of the body, and ensuring ‘democratic’ biopolitical demands only ratchet one way. Hungary’s recent legislation on questions of sexuality is not, for example, permitted to set the direction for the EU. Meanwhile that nation is under considerable pressure to accept wider EU biopolitical norms.
I’m bearish on the long-term prognosis for nation states. This is perhaps heresy for a “National Conservatism” conference. But for all that this picture is not rosy, one field in which we can, and we must defend this political scale, is as intermediary scale between the unprotected lone self and Leviathan, is on the politics of the body.
To the extent that nations can still act according to their democratically determined conscience, they are trying to do this. We’re seeing new biopolitical divergence according to local culture and conditions, as in Hungary (already mentioned) or moves by Georgia Meloni to ban surrogacy in Italy.
But this means actually using power, at the national level, to mount that defence. In this light, those who set policy in Westminster would be wise to treat Scottish gender self-ID as a warning to ensure these matters are being governed at the appropriate scale. There will be more of these.
It should already be obvious that letting a devolved administration set British policy on abortion, surrogacy, gender, the sex industry and so on, means in practice letting the international NGOcracy do so. If that sounds fine to you, I suggest you spend a bit of time reading recent UN special reports on these topics.
If that doesn’t sound fine, then the politics of the body has to be taken seriously and governed proactively at national level.
When (as is more or less inevitable) you get called names for suggesting it’s appropriate to use state power in pursuit of a humanist, rather than a transhumanist politics of the body, remember that the other side is perfectly happy to mobilise coercive force, and just wants to use a dead form liberalism as a stick to beat you with.
And when that dead liberalism is used to argue that Westminster should hand off the politics of the body to devolved administrations, consider that in effect this means handing it off to biotech lobbyists, activist NGOs of uncertain funding, and international bodies that are many things but certainly not elected or responsive to the cultural conditions of the British Isles.
If we treat these as questions to fudge, to devolve, or to leave to individual conscience, we’ve already conceded. The winners will be those multinational industries hovering to profit from still further industrialising the human person.
Our Union can and must wield national legislative power to defend against the prospect, utopian in theory but nightmarish in practice, of a universal post-humanism. If it stands for anything, it must be for those bounded, culturally specific, and embodied ways in which we live with one another, here and now.
Thank you.
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