The History of Transhumanism: Origins

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David Runciman (1:09)

Hello, my name is David Runciman and this is Past Present Future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today, it's the start of a new series, in which I'm going to be talking to the historian of ideas, Duncan Bell, about the history of transhumanism. That is the idea that human beings can be transformed with science and technology to become something different, something better. It is an idea that has enormous cache at the moment in Silicon Valley and beyond, but it has a really surprising and fascinating history going back to the 19th century.

We are going to be talking about Darwinism and Marxism, real science and science fiction. We're going to be talking about spaceships and supercomputers and sex too. We're going to be talking about eugenics and cryonics. We're going to be talking about hippies and cyber punks. We are going to be talking about Elon Musk. We're also going to be talking about millenarianism. It's all here, the weird, the wonderful, and frankly, the downright mad.

Duncan, we should probably start with trying to define what transhumanism is, or at least where the word comes from. It's quite a slippery concept as we will see. We're going to do the history of it, but the history is going to take us back in some ways before the origin of the word. Let's start with the origin of the word. My understanding is it's pretty recent coinage. We're talking about the 1950s, is that right? Transhumanism is a word that is picked up and starts to be being used. Is it a term as recent as that?

Duncan Bell (2:46)

The term itself can be traced back in various ways much further back than that. Some people trace it as far back as Dante, for example. But the 1950s is the period that most people would point to where it's popularized.

Julian Huxley, a very prominent British biologist and science communicator, wrote an essay in the late 1950s, 1957 I think, called Transhumanism, in which he outlined a philosophical perspective which, broadly speaking, we can see as a foundation for what many people think of as transhumanism today.

He'd used the term earlier in the 1950s, so even in his own terms it wasn't the first usage. But my own view is that we shouldn't really look to terminology to be the main guide for usage. Some transhumanists today, for example, think that Huxley's use of it actually bears very little relation to contemporary usages. So I think it's probably best to focus on belief system, a philosophical, technoscientific worldview shared by various people over time that comes to be called transhumanism at a certain moment. And I would also say that there's plenty of people today I would call transhumanists who don't use the term and sometimes deny its applicability to their ideas.

David Runciman (4:04)

Well, come on to those people. There are plenty of people today who fall into this space for all sorts of different reasons. So if it's not the word but the belief system, what did Huxley think the belief system was and what is the, as it were, the broader belief system within which that might fall? If there are people who want to say he got it wrong even though he popularized it, what is the realm of ideas that we're talking about here?

Duncan Bell (4:28)

So in general terms, I would say that transhumanists believe that extensive technological enhancement can create individuals who are much smarter, much healthier, much longer lived, much more emotionally sophisticated than existing humans.

So that's a focus on individual augmentation through the application of science and technology. They almost always combine this with the belief that human destiny lies in space. So it's not necessarily integral to that prior claim about individual augmentation, but the two tend to go together in most, if not all, transhumanist arguments. So one reason that Huxley is sometimes pushed aside from the transhumanist canon, despite using the term, is that he wasn't in favour, at least in anything like the short term, of space colonisation.