James McCormick has a long, but useful review of Mark Steyn's book on demography and destiny. It seems like an important companion to The Anglosphere Challenge. Be sure to read the comments as well.

A good diplomat can tell someone to "Go to Hell" and receive in response a warm handshake and profuse thanks for the kind suggestion.

Also, having read the Anglosphere Challenge, I assert you mis-read it. Anglo culture thrives from being an "open source" civilization.

...having read the Anglosphere Challenge, I assert you mis-read it.

What in the world are you talking about now?

I am talking about the horrible failure of Steyn's title "America Alone" -- we cannot isolate ourselves from the world in a blanket of smug moral superiority if there is to be any hope of exporting our memes.

It is also interesting that the ChicagoBoyz review suggests that the Mormons are the subset of America best suited to lead this project. Years ago I suggested the idea that the Mormons might be the sub-set of America most favorably situated to begin the permanent settlement of Mars.

I am talking about the horrible failure of Steyn's title "America Alone" -- we cannot isolate ourselves from the world in a blanket of smug moral superiority if there is to be any hope of exporting our memes.

What does that have to do with me?

Where is James McCormick's review? I entered "McCormick" into Amazon's "Search reviews" box, and got nothing.

It's not at Amazon--it's at Chicago Boyz. I've linked to it on the word "review."

Coming up on the full moon, heh.

Where does Steyn advocate isolationism? You must have gotten a different copy from mine.

The one flaw in Steyn's analysis is that it does not account for the possibility of radical life extension that is likely to be available by 2050. Such technologies include SENS (Strategically Engineered Negligible Senescence) and bio-nanotechnology (synthetic biology).

Mark Steyn hints at the coming transhumanist future with his comments about the future of Japan. However, for whatever reasons, implies that transhumanism would be even worse than islam (why anyone would think this is completely incomprehensible to me).

"...implies that transhumanism would be even worse than islam (why anyone would think this is completely incomprehensible to me)."

Steyn is writing about two complimentary problems. One is pressure from an expanding Islam. The other is a vacuum in the West, (especially Europe), a deep spiritual malaise, an emptiness that Islam is simply being pulled into. It is both a literal emptiness--the demographic collapse; and a crisis of civilizational morale that leaves many in the West unable to defend our civilization or faith or ideas. Or just fight back against killers.

He believes (and I am in complete agreement) that the second problem is by far the worse. If the West still had a tenth of the confidence and élan of centuries past, we would have slapped down Islamic terrorists decades ago, when they first began to surface, and they would not now be a big problem. The same with unruly Islamic immigrants, and of course without the civilizational malaise there would not have been the lack of children that is drawing in the problematic immigrants.

Islam is just an opportunistic infection. It is a problem only because we in the West have a compromised immune system.

The West has lost faith (America alone perhaps retaining it), and our other problems are but symptoms of this. (Steyn doesn't quite connect the last dot, but I would say that the West has lost its Christian faith.)

"Transhumanism" is just another symptom of the problem. Think of your typical Frenchman, who can't be bothered to have children, or to fight to correct the blatant problems facing his nation, or to dream of space colonization, or go to Mass, or fight back against terrorists or criminals, or just to hurry home from vacation because old people (including his grandma) are dying in a heat-wave. He is denying, evading, human nature. His own (his ancestors would have said "God-given") human nature. He is avoiding pain. And it is an iron law that you cannot have the deep joys that make life worth living if you won't accept the pain and risk that goes along with them.

Transhumanism is just another evasion. An evasion of human nature. You don't have to believe in God to get this, though it helps. It is a bedrock part of conservatism that there are not going to be any man-made utopias, and that humans and human institutions are always flawed. Our constitution is based on this idea. Transhumanism is a utopian project, and any conservative should be reacting like we reacted to the philosophes before another little project called the French Revolution...

The problem Steyn is writing about is in, large part, that we have nothing we believe in enough to fight and die for. You are proposing a project based on extreme avoidance of death. I'd call it worse than Islam.

If anyone is interested, I expanded on these rather odd and paradoxical thoughts a bit here.

Mr. Weidner, medical advances and market forces ensure that life extension will be available to us eventually. It will be medicine. Refusing it will be equivalent to a gangrene sufferer refusing penecillin while his children look on. Individuals will then choose: do I continue living, or do I actively select gradually increasing pain, debilitation, dementia, and death?

There's a big difference between philosophy and reality. I've watched both parents die protracted deaths and believe me, if I had a way to avoid it, I'd pay serious money. I imagine you would, too.

I'm conservative, very, and I perfectly understand your suspicion of Utopia. But I have a difficult time understanding people who drive cars, fly in airliners, get painless dentistry/colonoscopies/pick-your-modern-medical procedure, and then get on a worldwide computer network to pontificate about the evils of advancing the human lifespan.

I'm conservative, very, and I perfectly understand your suspicion of Utopia. But I have a difficult time understanding people who drive cars, fly in airliners, get painless dentistry/colonoscopies/pick-your-modern-medical procedure, and then get on a worldwide computer network to pontificate about the evils of advancing the human lifespan.

Or call transhumanism a "project" on par with French Revolution. I am not aware of anybody, Aubrey De Grey included, who has some kind of master plan to transform human species into some utopian ideal. In fact, those who call themselves transhumanists are the first to admit that they do not know what form humanity's future will take -- they just expect it to be significantly different in many aspects, especially in lifespan. Which is not at all unreasonable, given the amount of money and effort going into new medical technologies throughout the world. A researcher in France working on liver regeneration, another in Cambridge developing artificial heart, another in Japan perfecting brain-computer interface, do not have any master plan or idealized goal. But as individuals get to partake of the fruits of their labors (and to choose which one they need or not need), these individuals gradually transform themselves into, for lack of better word, "transhuman".

Patrick,
The evil is not in advancing human lifespan per se. It's in the thinking that I believe is accompanying it.

for just one example, the problems in Europe are intimately bound up in the idea of cradle-to-grave security, which Europe has embraced more thoroughly than any other place. You can't lose your job, your pension, your long vacations. The state cares for your health, and for your aged parents. There's still the risk of having something terrible happen to your children, but many people have eliminated that problem by.....not having any. And of course they don't want to fight in wars.

SO, how much bigger will the temptations of security be when we can live 1,000 years? And if we have that kind of radical technology, we may be able to also reshape minds---how big will the temptation be to increase security by adjusting thoughts? Or eliminating those who have bad thoughts? Especially in a place that even regulates the curvature of bananas? I can think of a few people I'd be sorely tempted to just "improve-or-eliminate," and I'm very old-fashioned, moral and conservative. My ideas are already considered odd and outdated, and coming generations will be even less bound by such old notions.

Ilya,

"...Or call transhumanism a "project" on par with French Revolution. I am not aware of anybody, Aubrey De Grey included, who has some kind of master plan to transform human species into some utopian ideal."

But the French Revolution was nobody's plan or project. The project was to eliminate old out-dated institutions and ideas, and then stand back and watch humanity ascend like a soap bubble to a better future. And of course everyone would be free to chose whether to partake of this charming new world or not. But ideas have consequences, and this idea ignored human nature. And so something had to give--either the idea or human beings. And in fact in many places it was humans that were to be altered, and this led in a straight line to Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden...

There is no master plan, but there is a plan implicit in transhumanism. and if people like me are correct, this plan will collide with human nature, and the temptation to steam-roller human obstacles will be enormous.

John, I think I'm mostly in agreement. Put utopians into power and they become totalitarians--it's a law of nature, apparently!

Check the forums at, say, betterhumans dot com, and you'll find plenty of (what I hope are) dumb teenagers calling for the extermination of Christian conservatives, capitalists, etc. etc., basically anyone who disagrees with them.

I hope for, and expect, that no overarching totalitarian project will emerge from transhumanism. The scary part to me is what David Brin calls "democratization of the means to do harm," which we already deal with, but which will gain new meaning when nutjobs move from airliners and C4 to engineered plagues and gray-goo machines. It's inevitable, and the only sure way to escape is widespread space settlement. (Hey, Stephen Hawking agrees with me.)

Patrick, I agree with much of this but think you are being too unimaginative. There doesn't need to be an "overarching totalitarian project." There's a little well-meaning totalitarian in all of us, and the changes that just grow organically without any obvious project are the hardest to resist or criticize.

Simple bio-medical advances can have sweeping consequences that we can't debate or fight against simply because no one foresees them until it's happened. No one thought the invention of The Pill would do more than make it a little simpler and safer to do what we had always done. In fact it transformed human societies radically, and to that invention can be traced partial responsibility for the fact that in many European cities the most popular name for newborns is Mohammed...

John, you have a very odd view of French Revolution: was nobody's plan or project. The project was to eliminate old out-dated institutions and ideas, and then stand back and watch humanity ascend like a soap bubble to a better future. And of course everyone would be free to chose whether to partake of this charming new world or not

First, that "elimination of old out-dated institutions" has no parallel in transhumanism. And second, Robespierre et. al. did not (or even pretend to) "stand back and watch humanity ascend". From the very start they had clear ideas about what they wanted to bring about, and absolutely no intention to let the masses "chose whether to partake". Universal education, standardization of weights and measures, reforming the CLOCK and the CALENDAR(!) -- those guys were totalitarian and knew it, even if the word was not invented yet.

So I disagree about French Revolution being in any way appropriate parallel to transhumanism. As for the law of unintended consequences, I would say that positive effects of the Pill and the Internet (which you mention on your blog) greatly outweigh the negatives, and expect the same with life extension. The reasons for my optimism are best expressed in David Brin's essay Rand linked to earlier -- see the part about Locke.

Ilya,
My reference was not about people like Robespierre, and the other revolutionaries, but to the Philosophes, the thinkers who laid the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution. The parallel is that they, like the theorists of transhumanism, are oblivious about what their ideas will lead to once they start to be actually acted upon, and seized upon by people more ruthless than they. The Robespierres of the future will come, but we are not there yet.

I'm not arguing the positives and negatives of the Internet or the Pill (impossible to say) but to point out that it is a reasonable position to say that their consequences have been drastic—revolutionary—in ways the founders never dreamed. And therefore, getting back to the original question I was responding to: "transhumanism would be even worse than islam (why anyone would think this is completely incomprehensible to me)", I'm pointing out that it is a perfectly comprehensible thing to say. It was a reasonable speculation by Mr Steyn.

And my other point, buried back in there somewhere, is that spiritual dangers are just as real as physical dangers. Patrick is clear-eyed about "democratization of the means to do harm" which is good, but I can never get much traction when I try to explain that having bad ideas infect people's souls can be just as dangerous, in a down-to-earth practical way, as "gray goo." But that's basically what Steyn's book is all about.

Absolutely agree about bad ideas infecting souls. Millions of Americans still think, consciously or unconsciously, that communism was a good thing. Many of them are still hard at work--in Congress, for instance.

Personally, I think the Warren court had more impact than the technology of contraception. Individual humans in near-immune positions of great power... yippee.