ABSTRACT
Our 21st-century captains of industry are based in Silicon Valley rather than Manhattan, and they owe more to Harpo Marx than their predecessors (1940s offices certainly lacked LEGO stations and secret ladders between floors). These leaders haven’t run for political office yet, although they’ve bought major newspapers. They’ve also raised the ante on the notion of creative destruction, not merely overturning industries but now seeking to change our very humanity. Whether or not they claim the title of transhumanism, they seek to increase our physical and mental abilities and lengthen our life span even to the point of infinity—or perhaps better said, of divinity. This chapter marks out the signposts of our situation in terms of three areas: politics, metaphysics, and existential concern. Three thinkers—Hobbes, Arendt, and Nietzsche—will mark our way. They raise, respectively, the themes of democracy and human speciation, the philosophy of nature and the categories of human existence, and the function of god and the perils of human freedom. Having framed our argument, the chapter then ends with a turn toward sociology, where we examine the biases of contemporary debates about transhumanism.
