Upwingers Fighting Downwingers (Rebroadcast)

0:00We are going to be doing an episode on the AI Civil War later this week. But until then, enjoy this rebroadcast of how people react to technology and risk, the difference between upwingers and downwingers. Hello and welcome to the Political Orpeneuch, a home for people who think freely. Think differently and think hard. I'm your host Andrew Heaton and I had a blast on today's interview. Dr. Fuller is a fun guest. He's very smart, but he's one of those guests that'll joke around with me. I liked him, my favorite kind of interview, and on top of that, what we're discussing is one of my absolute favorite subjects, which is a new way, a different way to look at politics outside of the left-right spectrum. I think the left-right spectrum is reductive and usually wrong.

1:03And we've done a whole episode on it in the past. I'm not going to elaborate on that point, but I'm always looking for different ways to try to look at politics. And Dr. Fuller is going to walk us through his paradigm, upwingers and downwingers. And to wet your appetite a bit on today's program, George W. Bush, the green party and the pope are on one side of that spectrum about to be described, whereas Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil and government technocrats are on the other. It's a whole different way of thinking, of organizing the political landscape, and it's what we're talking about on today's program. Now, before we jump in, I do want to give you a listening recommendation that will help you get the most out of the interview. We have been so conditioned to think of everything as left versus right, blue versus red, that almost everybody reflexively tries to translate any new system into that.

2:09So you listen for a minute and you go, okay, I figured out who the conservatives are. So I want you to fight that urge. You're going to have a moment today. I had a moment today and I had to suppress it where you go, aha, okay. All right, I know who the conservatives are. I know who the progressives are. It's a different system. It's a different way of thinking. Don't do that. You won't be doing yourself any favors. This is a good opportunity, a fun opportunity to look at society with a fresh lens. And we'll be doing a disservice if we try to turn it into a synonym for the left or the right. Because it's not. It's upwing or downwing. Right here on the political orphanage. My guest today is Dr. Steve Fuller. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick and founder of its research program in social epistemology. He's written an inappropriate amount of books on a variety of subjects. But the one that is pertinent to us today is the pro-actionary imperative. You can find that book and all of the books discussed on the show by going to mightyheaten.com

3:11slash featured. Hello, Dr. Fuller. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm great. I'm very excited to talk to you. Is a, is a mention before we start recording. I am always very eager to find new ways to look at the political landscape that is not just this left-right spectrum, which I find to be very blunt and reductive and frequently false. And you have opened my mind to an entirely new paradigm. So tell us what is an upwinger and a downwinger? Okay. First of all, I think it's, if I could say a little bit about the history of how we got to left and right, right, that we're trying to escape from. I think this is the issue. So the left right distinction basically dates from the late 18th century. And it was based, after the French Revolution, the way the national assembly was arranged. Okay. The people who were supporting the king sat on the right and the ones who are opposed to the king sat on the left. In a sense, it was about seating arrangements.

4:14Okay. Originally. And back in those days, the liberals and the socialists were both on the left and the right contained a range of people, some of whom wanted the monarchy to come back more strongly and others who in a way just wanted to keep with the status quo as it was. And that is kind of how we got this left right distinction. And this served us pretty well. I would say for a couple of hundred years, especially in the context of the nation state and in terms of democratic politics. And that's the context in which we normally talk about left and right. And there, what was, you might say, the bone of contention between the left and the right was about the relationship between the state and the people. Okay. And so you start to get this very clear sense that the state, in a way, isn't just about keeping the peace or a minimal sort of thing.

5:16But in a sense, it has a kind of responsibility for people. And the question is, how does it exercise that responsibility? And the people on the right generally thought that the less the state does, the better. And there are several reasons why people thought this. So it's not that everybody thought this for the same reason. But of course, there were some reasons, some people who we would normally call conservatives, cultural conservatives, who believe because there were already social institutions that in an awake and take care of things without the state interfering. So we talk about the family, the church, that kind of stuff. But of course, there were other kinds of right wingers. And those were the ones, sort of we call libertarians, right? Who in a sense thought that the state in its somewhat well meaning, but clumsy way got in the way of people really exercising their freedom. So the right has this kind of combination of conservatives and libertarians. Now the left, it's a similar kind of combination of different types.

6:20So the people on the left generally believe that the state was in some way a kind of engine for people to realize themselves. Right? And that the state had to be harnessed and used. And this justifies raising taxes and stuff like that. Now there were some people who in a way thought that the state or two in a way be in the business of lifting people up, making people better than the way they began. Right? Kind of a vanguardist conception of the state. Right? And here we talk about socialism, including democratic socialism, right? Where the issue is that the way you're born isn't necessarily how you ought to be. That in fact, the state ought to be in the business of pushing it forward. But then there are other people who equally call themselves part of the left, who are more of a communitarian nature. And these are people who believe that in a state that in a sense,

7:21the state should be in the business of enabling people to be all they can be kind of as they want to be. So if we talk, so in other words, the state shouldn't be transforming people, but the state should be enabling people in terms of what they already want to be. And this is a kind of, you know, and you see somebody, for example, like Bernie Sanders, kind of trading on both of these kind of images of the left and the way he politics. Okay? Now that's the left right. It's a very complex thing as I've just described it. But in a way, as you can already tell, the left and the right are themselves very unstable. Right? Each within their own fear, they're very unstable. And this is what gives kind of the opportunity for new configurations to take place. And the thing that gives rise to the new configurations taking place is that the nation state in a way is kind of losing its centrality. And what I mean by that is, I think the best way to see it is the difficulty in democratic societies in getting high voter turnouts.

8:25Okay? So in other words, people don't believe that the elected politicians who will self-identify as being on the left and the right, that necessarily they have a one-two matter, that in some sense the politics is happening somewhere else. Right? And that in the sense the nation state has been sort of evacuated of the kind of significance and meaning that it had over the previous 200 years. And this is where I think we are now. Right? That there is a kind of crisis of legitimacy with regard to the nation state. And this then shakes up the whole left right thing that that that very much presumed that. And so this is where we get to up and down. Okay? And I'm gonna pause you real quick just to make sure that I'm following so far. While I would have some minor quibbles with your description of the left-right spectrum, by and large, I understand where you're coming from and you're kind of saying that it made sense for a while, but it's become something of an adivism largely because you think the role of the nation state has declined in terms of what it's doing and also the participation of the democratic

9:29election has declined. Okay. All right. That's right. People don't believe in it anymore. I mean, I think this is right. And this is what makes it easy, for example, for somebody like Donald Trump to get traction, right? Because in a sense, you know, it's, you know, because you think about it, right? I mean, he gives speeches where he's kind of talking about the crisis of legitimacy of the state and people eat it up, right? They see it immediately drain the swamp. Everybody relates to that. I don't think this would have been possible, let's say, during the Cold War. Okay. And the Cold War was all about nation states, right? No, the trust data during the Cold War was teeteringly high. Like if you asked the average American of the Cold War, could do you trust your elected leaders regardless of party? It was like 60 to 80 percent. It was like, yeah, most Democrats Republicans at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so this is the thing that and it's true across the world. It's not just the United States. It's true across the world. There was a real crisis of legitimacy. And so you, you basically start to see these kind of alternative forms of politics

10:30that are forming. And often they're not given the credit it. They're not given the credit for being alternative forms of politics because they're not using the ballot boxes. Their primary means of interacting. Right. So you think for example about green politics, right? Or even the kind of politics that one might associate with Silicon Valley. Okay. We're in a sense they're not talking about ballot boxes, but they're talking about apps that in a way enable people to interact with each other in all new kinds of ways. Right. That in a way, you know, you know, either intentionally or not, steer to support rather traditional ways of people interacting that actually in a way with servicing the kind of nation state politics of the left and right. Okay. And so we see this happening and it's especially true among the younger generation. And in a sense, this is kind of where the upright, excuse me, up, down distinction comes from. Right. Okay. And in a way, what both of these do is they kind of rearrange the sort of unstable elements of the left and right in new

11:33configurations. So in other words, upwingers, you could see elements of the old left and the old right in them. Same thing with the downwingers. Okay. And to just make a very kind of kind of crude way of thinking about it. Okay. So the upwingers are the people who in a way do not take the biological basis of human beings on earth as the final word. Right. Who in a sense kind of when they identify, even when they're talking about humanity, it's with something else. It's something that may have cosmic implications, you know, in terms of, and I mean, literally cosmic, not just in a spiritual sense, but blasting off the other planets and so forth, but also the possibility of uploading one's consciousness to a machine and carrying on indefinitely that way. Right. So in other words, the upwingers in a way have this very radically sort of self transformative notion of what lies in the future, whereas the downwingers are the exact opposite. The downwingers are the

12:38people who say, look guys, we're upright a apes on earth. And if we don't behave ourselves, we'll be God, right. Bottom line. Right. And so the more radical kind of environmental politics, you know, you know, some of which if fuels a lot of the sort of climate change issues that are going on now is very much of this kind. And if you ask, what's the conception of humanity that the downwingers have? Well, it's basically homo sapiens living on earth and story, right. And the thing that, you know, in a sense, the thing that unites these two radically different ways of seeing humanity is that both of them are incredibly skeptical about the nation state. Right. In other words, they don't think the nation state is up to the task of dealing with this kind of more comprehensive notion of humanity that has come on the horizon. Okay. This is fascinating. So to make sure that I understand upwing versus downwing, upwingers are kind of

13:39technologists, radical optimists, I'm thinking of like Elon Musk in terms of let's build a base on Mars, uh, rake hurts while in terms of I will rebuild my father and I will, I will upload my brain computer, um, on a more benign level, uh, maybe 20 years ago, people that, uh, wanted to, uh, back when, um, uh, what do you call it? There was a certain type of, uh, a stem cell research. Stem cell research was controversial back in the 90s, but the upwingers are being favor of stem cell research. So they're kind of, right. That was a very decisive issue, right? That's, you, you've hit on something that actually was a kind of important, uh, tipping point issue in terms of the, of distinguishing upwingers and downwingers. Okay. When, uh, George W. Bush is bioethics. Uh, he was, he was against stem cell research, right? Exactly. That's the point. In 2004, they delivered this kind of pronouncement, the, uh, Bush's bioethics panel, um, which, uh, said that, uh, the, the federal government, the United States federal government should not be funding stem cell

14:40research. It was on the back of that that then you started to get this, uh, that the transhumanist started organizing against that kind of judgment. And you started to see in a very self-conscious way, uh, this upwinger, downwinger thing, manifesting itself. Okay. So, okay. So that, so that was important. That was an important event. But, but it's interesting that you, you mentioned George W. Bush because normally people would not lump in, say like, uh, the green party and, um, kind of almost spiritual ecologist, spiritual environmentalists with George W. Bush, but it sounds like they would be both downwingers that there's a kind of older, uh, religious view of, man is not a god. There are certain things that we shouldn't tinker with. Yes. We, we invite through our own hubris, our destruction. But then on the, on the, on the kind of, uh, the left wing side, as you would put it, there's this sort of like, we ought to be living in Furngoa. Like, we ought to be in a, uh, in an environmental equilibrium and trying to tech our way out is to be contravened of the, the, the homeostasis of the universe for something like that. Right, right.

15:43Well, this is where the Pope comes in. Um, so, so Pope Francis in, in I think 2015, uh, put out this encyclical called Loudoutus C, where he very explicitly joins together the plight of the poor, which is, uh, you know, kind of the social injustice agenda of the Catholic Church, especially you may know Pope Francis as a Jesuit is a, of the more liberal type of Catholic. Um, with environmentalism, right, that that in a way, the protection of the earth and the protection of the poor go hand in hand because the poor are always in the front line of environmental dispoliation, right? Uh, and, and that that was the message of Loudoutus C, it was a very radical kind of message coming from the Catholic Church, but it brought together the factions of the downwingers. In fact, when I have to somebody asked me, you know, responding to the kind of point you were raising, you know, what would be an example of someone who could really capitalize on bringing together these different kinds of folks as downwingers? Oh, this Pope is, and that's what he's trying

16:46to do. Social justice and environmentalism, it's a beautiful mix. Mm hmm. So, so, so then on the upwinger side, um, you've got your, uh, techno optimists, kind of libertarians and probably kind of, techno-crat Democrats. Uh, that's right. That's right. People that think we can tech our way out of things and sort of you humanity as an open-ended question. And, and that's right. Keep changing it. Whereas the, the downwingers are sort of religious people and, uh, environmentalists that want us to come down to earth. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Uh, and that's where we are. Fascinating. Okay. Well, let's, let's, let's, uh, let's pick this apart in your book. You talk about the, uh, the animating, uh, principles of these two groups are, are pre-cautionary versus pro-actionary. That's right. Exactly. What are these two terms mean? How do they pertain to it? Okay. So, we're talking about attitudes toward risks. Okay. Okay. Great. All right. So, so, so that's the first

17:48point. So, when we went, and this is an interesting way of thinking, you know, this is what makes it kind of a new way of thinking about politics. Okay. Uh, because, um, we're basically talking about politics based on risk. So, risk is given. Right. And then the question is, do you think of risk as something that an essential one will avoid or minimize? Right. Because some sense of threat. And that's the precautionary approach. Right. That is the downwinger approach. Right. That's the idea. Don't introduce innovations. Right. If you think that there is some reasonable probability that it might cause harm, regardless of the benefit, it might bring. Right. That's the precautionary principle. And it is enshrined in, um, European Union, uh, environmental legislation, some health legislation, even. Um, and one of the things that is very often a sticking point at a lot of these global climate summits. Right. Because there will be certain countries that will insist on the precautionary principle as a kind of guiding principle. And the

18:50United States and other countries, um, do not believe in this, not just the United States, China, for example, I mean, you know, do not believe in the precautionary principle as having that kind of normative standing, right? So that's one attitude toward risk. Okay. So, so, so let me make sure I understand this for a first, we're discussing prec cautionary. And this is, um, the, the, the, the hinge point between the upwingers and the downwingers is how they, how they approach risk. Uh, we can get back to humanity, but that's kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the downwingers are risk averse. And so they're precautionary. And so if a new technology is introduced, um, there's upside, there's downside. We don't quite know what it is yet. The downwiggers are going to go, well, then don't do it. We're, we're, let's, let's play a regulatory commission and charge of it and think about it. And let's, let's figure out all of the details before we start doing it. I mean, they think about it. I mean, you know, if you want to put a kind of, uh, a positive gloss on the precautionary principle, because as you may know, right, I wrote this book

19:51called a pro-actionary imperative because I'm on the other side of the argument. Uh, but the point is if you want to, uh, if, if you want to give a kind of positive spin on what these precautionary guys are about, I mean, you think about it as kind of a hypocritic oath writ large, right? Namely do no harm, right? You know, the advice that hypocrite escaped the positions and the ancient Greeks, right, uh, was that whatever you do, don't do harm, right? And the precautionary principle comes from that and it's applied as a kind of general ethic. Um, and there's another thing that, that is also behind it, I would say of a more metaphysical nature. And that's a kind of a certain conception of how what's this, what sustainability means. And that has to do, and you mentioned the term before equilibrium. Um, and, and this idea that in some sense, uh, the earth, uh, which is the place where we live has a kind of natural equilibrium. And so the precautionary principle first gets introduced formally in the early 19th century as a principle of forestry, right? Uh, in Germany,

20:53you know, given, you know, what's up with the industrial revolution beginning. And so the question is how many trees are we just, you know, you know, sort of chop down to build factories houses, whatever, right? Uh, and the answer was, well, only chop down as many trees as you can replace. Right? So it's a kind of steady state principle of what nature is about, right? And if you violate the steady state principle, um, that, then you're, you're in some kind of bad situation. Uh, and that's where the precautionary principle comes from. Yeah, there seems to be like, like a theological element to this as well, uh, of, um, do not play God with the earth or humanity, but if you're coming from the Bush perspective, we shouldn't be playing God. And if you're coming from the Jill Stein perspective, um, we, we are, you know, we're, we're gardeners, not owners of said, said thing. So it's a very, it's a very strange view. And, and, and one of the things that is really tricky about being a precautionary character, right? Holding these precautionary downweigher views is exactly how do you finesse it with evolution? Okay? Because the thing about evolution, right? Is

21:58that it, you know, especially if you believe Darwinian evolution, I'm not saying you have to, but, but, but a lot of these people, right, a lot of the precautionary principle stuff is actually, you know, founded on scientific reasoning, right? I mean, the sciences, there is a scientific element to this that should not be neglected. Uh, but nevertheless, if you look at the kind of when which evolution tends to understand nature, right, it's a kind of blind changing process, right? Where species come and go naturally, right? I mean, I mean, that would, you know, if you look at Darwin, I mean, you know, in other words, if you didn't come in thinking about this issue of risk, will you just look at what is the story that evolution, Darwinian evolution is telling you, right? It's not that species are conserved, right? Species, right? They're there for a while. Then the environment changes and puts their God in some, then, then the bunch of places, right? I mean, that's also, I feel like there's a kind of inherent contradiction with that. I, I make a delineation in my mind between what I call ecoists and environmentalists. I am an environmentalist. I am

22:58for conservation. I am for protecting the environment. I, I camp all the time. I'm not an ecoist because it's not like a religion, a religious thing for me. I, I don't think humanity is a bespoilt, sinning plague upon the earth. But for people in the ecoist camp, there's this kind of idea that, we simultaneously ought to be a part of nature, but if too many of us get together, that it's no longer nature. And I will, how, how are we, so like our humans nature or not nature, like, like if we're, if we're not nature, well, I'll tell you what really kind of confuses the issue. I mean, as often happens, things that confuse the issue actually make the issue prominent. Okay. And, and, and here I would bring up the concept of the antipocene. Okay, so you know this, this is the antipocene, which is a concept that now geologists use, right? To define periods of, of the earth's history in terms of the kinds of changes going on. And so we've got this period now, at least, you know, for the past 15 years or so at least, the geologists have been taking this

23:58idea seriously. It was proposed early in the 20th century, but, but, but it's now given scientific respectability. And I'm not saying it doesn't have a basis. I'm not saying, I'm not saying the empirical basis is wrong. But what it basically says is, right, that since the industrial revolution in Europe, that in fact human beings as a species are the ones who are primarily responsible for all the climate change that has gone on. That's basically what the point is. And it has to do largely with the increase in carbon emissions right from the industrial revolution afterwards and the way in which, you know, it started Europe, but it then became part of the whole world. Now, I don't, you know, empirically speaking, you know, I personally, I don't have an objection with this as an empirical fact. I mean, but the point is, of course, that that it becomes very damning if, as you were suggesting, you start with a certain kind of conception of how the world ought to be, right? How the natural world ought to be. And that in a sense, you know, if species are dying and

24:59certainly a lot of species have died and become extinct and human beings are implicated, there's no doubt about it, right? And maybe, you know, and more than ever before, no doubt about it. But the point is, is this what anti, this is not anti evolution. This is part of evolution, right? So in a sense, calling it the end of proceed in a way, in a way avoids the bigger question that we are part of evolution and evolution has always had this kind of radical this built into it potentially, right? And so in that sense, when we're looking at this from some kind of ethical or political standpoint, we need to be a bit sophisticated, okay? And we can't just say, oh, just because human beings are the ones causing all climate change, therefore human beings are bad, right? That doesn't follow, right? I mean, especially if you're an evolutionist, especially if you're an evolutionist. And so, yes, I, you know, in a sense, this is where I think the downwingers are kind of, you know,

26:00the whole metaphysics of it isn't quite worked out because you're right. There is a kind of religious residue, right? Which in a way, connects a lot of this kind of extinction of species and all these bad things that we're doing to the environment. I think with kind of original scene and that we bring mortality into the world, right? Through Adam's fall. I think there's some of that that is actually kind of built into this kind of perspective. I'll tell you something I've been using about and then we can move on to the pro-actionary side of this because I don't want to just, I have just learned the term downwinger. I don't feel appropriate for me to just dunk on them. I don't fully understand the concept yet. But I was, I like, here, recently, I've been getting to get the conversations with friends about energy and carbon. And I am an agreement that we have anthropocusing climate change that that is being caused by the carbon, et cetera, et cetera. And then I will bring up, you know, the, the economic efficiency of renewable energy is radically getting better. The, the efficiency of like, we're going to be fine guys and everybody

27:04gets mad at me for saying, I think we're going to be okay. And I think it's because they're, they're like, but we deserve it. We deserve something bad to happen to us. If you're removing the punishment by doing this. And I'm like, oh, I don't, I don't really see us as a guilty species deserving of the wrath of the Earth. Yeah, this is the thing. I mean, this is where, I mean, it's in a way, part of what motivated me to do this kind of distinction, has a lot to do with the fact that I'm some one of the, one of the things that make me different from a lot of the other people who talk about stuff like this is actually to leave the theological stuff. The theological backstory has not gone away. It's just been sublimated. Okay. I agree. And, and, and, and this is an example of it. There's examples all over the place of it because theology is kind of both many splendor thing you might say influences the way we think in lots of ways. And this includes also the pro-actionaries. So the pro-actionaries are just as theological. Okay. Let's not, you know, so, yeah, yeah, let's not let's let love the, yeah, it's not a point is that

28:08this is all about. I think, you're a large extent, it's about theology. Okay. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And, and the pro-actionary, so the pro-actionary principle, again, we're talking about risk and, and the attitude toward risk on the, on the part of the pro-actionary is that it is an opportunity, right? Because that's, you know, opportunities arise when there's uncertainty and nobody quite knows how to play it. And so if you're, if you strike first, you could take advantage of the situation, right? That's that, you know, and, and that is something that comes about because of uncertainty. And there's risk, of course, because you make fail, right? So it's a kind of gamble. But nevertheless, you may succeed. Now, what I've just described here is basically the mindset of an entrepreneur, right? In the class, the classic sense, right? The entrepreneur, these are kind of opening, sees a kind of opportunity, and then sees as that. Doesn't run away from it, doesn't say, my God, I don't know what's going to happen next. No, they try to make what happens next, right? And that is the pro-actionary approach generally speaking. And, and this is a, and in the upwinger

29:14mentality, right, is very much associated with with this movement, which, which the pro-actionary imperative book is supporting transhumanism. Okay? Now, the thing I would, so, so this term, I mean, you might want to return to it, you know, and the various things that it stands for. But the origin of the term is very much connected to this point. So, so transhumanism was coined in the 1950s by Julian Huxley, okay? Who was the first scientific director of UNESCO, and also the person in the United Kingdom, who was responsible for laying out what we now call the neo-Darwinian synthesis. In other words, bringing together a kind of Darwin-based account of natural history, because that's what Darwin's strong point was. He was a natural historian. He could give you a kind of, you know, long, long term account of how species develop with genetics. In other words, with the mechanism that actual, and, and of course, knowledge of the genetics, and, and more recently, the molecular

30:17biology is all 20th century stuff. Okay? And, and so Huxley, who's writing in the middle of the 20th century, writes, puts together, and he's one of, I mean, he's not the only one, but he's the one in the UK who does it very successfully, and, and talks about it as an evolutionary synthesis. And so he draws a conclusion from this, and the conclusion is, you know, that in a sense, it's not only that we know evolution is true, but it turns out that we, homo sapiens, are the first species to know that, and that knowledge of evolution, right? Because it's one thing to say that dogs and cats and apes obey evolution, that they do things according to laws of evolution, right? But it's another thing to know that's what you're doing. Okay? That it's something that you're behaving according to those rules. And Huxley says, this then puts us a special moral burden on human beings. And what does that mean? Well, that means we ought to be steering evolution. In other

31:18words, you know, evolution as Darwin presents, it had people generally in biology, except, right? Is it kind of blind process? You don't know what's going to happen next. Well, Huxley says, we can take steer of this. We can take control of this because we now know how it works. And so, you know, in a sense, what Huxley was doing, and, and, you know, we don't necessarily have to go into this, but, but he was basically reinventing eugenics in the early 20th century. There was a lot of interest in this kind of thing, but long before any of the genetics and molecular biology had been worked out. And of course, it led to all kinds of atrocious political consequences in the in the first after the 20th century. Wait, wait, wait, this, this is great because there's a lot of libertarians who listened to the show who were probably they were with me going, yeah, slam down those stupid ecuists, those stupid downwangers, but they're the same campus as the eugenicists. Like a eugenicist would be an upwanger, right? Of course. Okay. Interesting. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no,

32:21go to, of course, of course, I mean, and, and, and, and, and of course, one of the problem, I mean, you know, one of the problems, of course, was with the world war two and the Nazis, you know, it put eugenics into distribute. Now, Huxley himself is the first scientific director of UNESCO, actually helped some of the more prominent, let's say, German researchers working in the Nazi regime to migrate to Britain and the United States, other places like that. So they could continue their research. One of the famous ones is Conrad Lorenz. Okay. Uh, I don't know if people know about him anymore, but, but, but he won the Nobel Prize eventually and so forth. But the point was, um, Huxley was very concerned that because of the atrocities of the Nazis, um, that, that this whole general way of looking at evolution, where the, the sense in which once you know how it works, you have a responsibility to take control of it would be kind of thrown out the window because of the atrocities

33:21of the Nazis. So Huxley in a way managed that transition very well. The Huxley, I believe, died in 1975 and, and, and you know, toward the end of his life, like in the 60s and 70s, he was a guy who was very actively campaigning for in vitro fertilization, for example, right? And, and, and, you know, uh, and, and he was very aware of the molecular revolution in biology and he very much foresaw that we would be doing stuff like, you know, what we now call CRISPR and, you know, gene editing and things of that kind. Okay. Now, uh, you see, this is a, all of this, of course, is playing with uncertainty in a sense because you're, you're, you're sort of bang rolling what you know into what you don't know, right? So we do know a lot about how the genes work. We do know a lot about the sort of biochemistry of it at a very micro level, right? Uh, but we don't actually know about what we're trying to affect, right? Which is to come up with, you know, new species or, or more enhanced humans or something like that. And so it's the pro-actionary mentality that tells you to go for it,

34:26right? That basically says, you know, you've learned all this much. Now try to bankroll it into this new sphere. So you become kind of like, you know, entrepreneurial scientists, in a sense. So one of the lines I believe this is a quote from your book, uh, if, if not, I'm going to attribute it to myself, and I'm fairly confident it's you. The quote is, are we animal suffering from brains that are too large or deity suffering from insufficient resources, which I think is a fascinating way to, to look at this. Uh, well, yeah, I think that, well, that's true. Whoever said it is correct. I think it's you. I think I've paraphrased a your book. Uh, the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I think that's right. If I may say, I mean, I think um, the here's the other thing too. If you're an evolutionist, right, any given species, and so we say homo sapiens as a species, um, is a transition point, right, that evolution is always changing. You know, any question is whether we take, we have any control over it. I mean, that I would say that's Huxley's, and I think that's the original transhumanist

35:30position, right? Namely, yes, evolution is going to happen anyway. And the question is whether we take control over it. Um, and, and from that standpoint, you're always talking about moving on to, um, you know, different other ways of being where you, in a way, bankroll your humanity into something that even has greater potential, right? I mean, I think that, that, that's kind of what the, the general game plan is all this. So I'm back when I was in high school. I remember we were doing some kind of debate and somehow it involved geogetics. I don't remember why we were debating that topic at high school, but I remember I was reading the, um, there, there was an ethical statement put out by, I think it was like the Orthodox bishops conference of the United States. It might have been the Catholics, but then even a bunch of bishops got together. What they said was that it was ethically permissible to do genetic engineering on people to remove defects, but it was not ethically permissible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it would be okay. According to that ethical rationale, if, if I have a child in vitro and they are going to have, um, down syndrome, but we can tweak that

36:33gene and remove that for their born, that's okay. But what we couldn't do is we couldn't go, well, squirt an IQ in there. Let's just double that IQ and let's give them better math skills. And we'd prefer that they have blue eyes and 2020 vision. Yeah. So an upweager would be like, do it all. Let's just, let's just make a whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, in a sense, let's sort of this way upweager would have to give arguments not to do it. Let's got it. All right. But what I think the bishops are getting at here is the fact that downwingers in a way, so this is this distinction that you just raised about the bishops between the therapeutic uses of genetic gene editing and the enhancement uses. Yes. Okay. This is a very downwinger distinction. Let's put it that way. Okay. Okay. Because it's obviously, it's obviously got, it's very value-laden, right? Therapy is good. Enhancements bad, right? Now, if you're someone who takes the upward interview and you look at that distinction, you don't see much of a difference. Okay. So in other

37:37words, and for practical, you know, some of it for practical reasons. So, for example, all kinds of therapies have all kinds of unintended consequences and stuff like this, right? It's not just dealing with the specific thing you want to deal with, but it deals with other things as well. And, you know, they're, you know, so for example, I mean, it might seem a little strange to raise this, but, but, you know, let's say, you know, let's say we have some kind of ideal of a human being that says, look, if you're a normal human being, you should be able to see and you should be able to hear. Okay. And so that blindness and deafness, in a sense, mandate kind of therapeutic gene-editing approaches. And you could imagine these, these vicious people, yeah. Yeah, and a bishops will certainly go for it, right? Yeah. And, but the problem, of course, is, you know, when you actually have had a certain percentage of the population who are deaf and

38:38blind, right? Then they find this, in fact, quite intrusive, right? So in other words, you know, and so there is now this kind of disability culture, which in a way is, in its own kind of interesting way, is questioning the clear-ness of the therapeutic approach that in other words, from their standpoint, given the kinds of cultures that one has developed from being sightless, right? Or, or, or, you know, hearing, hearing impaired, right? That in a sense, it is enhancing, that therapeutic approach is kind of enhancing in a sense that it would potentially destroy their culture, that they have developed by virtue of being in this kind of alternative way of being. I've, I've, I've, I've spent some time with the deaf culture. When I moved to Washington, do you see years ago, the intern housing that I have is a Gallaudet University, which is a school for the deaf, which is awesome, by the way, because you can sing whenever you want. It's great. I had a really good time, but I ended up hanging out with deaf culture, and I, I don't know where exactly

39:41we were with cochlear implants at that time, but they were new to me. I think that they were reasonably new. And one of the big discussions that was going on in the deaf community was you have two deaf parents and, and sign language is a language like a site because sign language was, it was, it was developed. It is worth thogonal to, to text. That is to say that it, it's unrelated, Australian sign language is completely different than American sign language because they were developed separately, so they're completely unintelligible on another. And a lot of the parents were kind of having debates of like, but if we give our kid a cochlear implant, they won't speak our, they won't need to speak our language, maybe our language would die out. And so there were these kind of internal debates as to like, if we, if we hold and quote, fix ourselves as our culture going to disappear, because we don't want our culture to disappear. Well, that's, that's a real issue. Right. That's, that's a real issue. And that's, and you see, the reason why I bring this up is because this hits the therapeutic side, right? The side that considers them set, because because what it draws attention to is the idea of thinking that there is anything that is purely

40:42therapeutic, right? That in some, because therapy again, just like the way these downwingers think, presupposes a kind of natural way of being, normal way of being. Right. So this whole idea of wanting, you know, every deaf person to have a cochlear implant, right, is in a way underscoring, right? You know, in a way, stigmatizing the disability, right? This, it's stigmatizing, it's stigmatizing being deaf. I got it. So the distinction that I made earlier that I borrowed from the bishops, it is, it is presupposed on the idea that there is a natural state of mankind. Exactly. And that is what we should be aiming for. And if we, if we expand beyond that remit, we've, we've reached too far to the stars. We need to come back down to Earth. Okay. That's right. And the point is that the natural norm itself may be questioned, right? And this is where these bishops don't, they have it, they haven't been sufficiently sensitive to one of the, what, I mean, I'm not a, as, you know, I'm not the biggest defender of evolution in the world.

41:42But I think one of the things that evolution get bring to the table, that's very important, is the idea of variation within species, right? And that there is always a certain percentage, right? That is outside the norm in a very substantial kind of way. And nevertheless, those things flourish too, right? So it's not like it's just one kind of thing that's able to survive within a species, but it's a range because there's different environments in which a species need to survive. And so different versions, different variants survive in different places. And so what this then does is it has allowed for many centuries for deaf and blind people to be able to survive as human beings. You see, and there's a sense of which the bishops are not sufficiently sensitive to that sense of the natural variation of the human condition. So what, what are some of the flash points between the, the downwinger, upwinger view? Like we, genetic experimentation is kind of what we've been talking about. So that makes sense.

42:44Stem cells, like GMO foods, right? Right. Okay. That makes it so like Monsanto. I look at Monsanto, and I'm like, I don't know whether the company acts ethically in terms of business, but the idea of making crops have better yields to me is just brazenly obviously a good thing. Right. Well, that's a good example right there, right? Also a nuclear nuclear energy. Oh, okay. That makes sense. So nuclear energy upwingers are like, yes, but it's basically cheap, almost free energy with very low downside, but the downwingers are like, but it could cause Godzilla. So we got to not take that risk. Well, see, but this is where the issue of how the probabilities weigh in people's minds about this. And this is why the attitude toward risk is the central point, right? Because the probabilities are not very high. But of course, you can kind of jack up the anxiety. If you say even if the probability is low, if it happens, the effects would be enormous. And so that did skews people's judgments on the matter. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So because if you're a

43:45downwinger, there's this kind of hepocratic oath of just it's not about net net gain. It's about prevention of bad outcome. It would be better. That's right. Better to stop bad things happening even if more good things happen. Whereas a pro-actionary person is thinking of just promoting opportunity. So if I am creating more venues of actionable things that can occur, most of which are good, some of which are bad, that is a positive thing. Even if there's some collateral damage, as long as the collateral damage is outweighed by the good stuff, the pro-actionary saying, yay. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the assumptions of the pro-actionary principle, which is not a trivial assumption, is that in some sense, you have to imagine not only that you're allowed to do lots of different things and try things out, but also that in some way the world is kind of open ended in a real sense. So in other words, it's possible not everyone suffers the same damage. Right. You have to, you know, because if you're imagining that, you know, if you get this wrong,

44:48everyone is going to be destroyed. If you have that kind of mentality, which I think a lot of the pro-corsionary people want to get a stab with regard to, let's say, radical climate change genres, right, will all be fried, right? It'll be that kind of thing. The pro-actionary principle doesn't have that kind of view of the world, right? The pro-actionary principle basically has a view that, yes, damage will be done, but in a sense, the damage will always be collateral, right? In other words, it'll always be to the side. It won't be the damage that will be so damaging that it'll prevent any further experimentation and advancement. And I think that's kind of a big assumption, right? I mean, you know, so for example, I'll tell you one context where this pro-actionary stuff actually was operating during the Cold War. And do you know or remember, though you seem to be a sort of younger person, Herman Khan? Is that not something? Not Herman Kane, but Pizza Guy for Herman Khan. No, no, no, no, Herman Khan, K-A-H-N. He was the leading in America. He was the leading

45:55Cold War defense analyst. He was at the Hudson Institute, think tank. And he was the one who talked about thinking the unthinkable, okay? And that was the idea of having a survivable nuclear war. Okay? He was talking about this in the early 1960s. He's kind of the template for Dr. Strangelove, if you know that movie from the 1960s, right? With Peter Sellers, the way the thinking that was going on in there, well, Herman Khan, so Herman Khan basically talked about scenarios about, what's the worst that could happen? So in other words, he turns a hole precautionary thing on its head, right? Because we're talking about a world where you got the US and the USSR, right? Continually building all these nuclear warheads and they're trying to control the escalation, but it's very difficult. And of course, these two countries are very suspicious of each other at the same time. And they're already, have been a lot of kind of false alarms, like the Bay of Bix,

46:59Bay of Pigs crisis in Cuba in the early 60s, right? And so Khan, and this is a pro-actionary, I was like, how bad could it get? Suppose we have a nuclear war, right? And his attitude was, okay, let's see, let's see what we've got. And you got to imagine that this is going to happen, hit for a tad kind of way, right? So you take out these cities and then the other guy takes out the other cities and it's not going to last very long. And you think about, okay, how much of the world's population do you actually take out from this? And so he estimated about a third, okay? A third of the whole population. And perhaps the third in the most productive, you know, the basically parts of the world that actually are the source of the issue, okay? And he said, nevertheless, that does leave a lot of people. And you know, under the right circumstances, these people could build up civilization after a certain amount of time, okay? And what he did, what he suggested,

48:03and what was followed by the United States, and you may know DARPA? Have you heard of DARPA? That's a big, big progenitor of the internet in many capacities. This is the point, okay? So the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency was designed to come up with technologies for the day after Doom's Day, okay? And the internet was one of them. So if you imagine that the telephone system was taken out by nuclear exchange, right? Nevertheless, you wanted some kind of alternative communication system that would not have been disrupted by it, but on the basis of which you could then start to rebuild stuff, okay? There was no particular need for the internet, okay? Except if you imagine that there might be a nuclear war tomorrow, and that you need something else, you know, to be able to pick up the pieces. And DARPA, generally speaking, had this kind of mentality, which I do associate with a pro-actionary mentality,

49:03whereby nothing's too bad to be thought about, right? Imagine the worst, and then come up with the technologies that would still be usable. In fact, I have an enormous amount of use in virtue of the destruction or whatever happens, okay? So this is radical pro-actionary thinking, and this is in fact what led to the internet and a lot of other things, okay? And I think that this in a sense is kind of the world in a way that the pro-actionary is envisioning, you know, what, you know, if you're going to talk about taking risks, and this is sometimes, by the way, one of the things I think transhumanists is they're not sufficiently upfront about. If you're going to talk about living a life of taking risk and all that jazz, you've got to realize that yeah, you might get it wrong. Yeah, you know, there might be a real disaster. Those those downwingers might be right from time to time, you know? So what do you do about it? What do you

50:06do about it? Especially, you know, if you don't want to turn the game over to them, right? Is that you have to anticipate in advance that there will be these kinds of damages done, and then come up with clever technologies that enable us to bounce back from it. So from the upwinger perspective, it would be better to move forward knowing that we're going to screw up periodically than it would be to just stay in the dark ages. Like we like exactly the upwinger fear is stagnation and yeah, we avoid doing extra bad stuff, but all the current bad stuff keeps happening. Where's the the that's right. Yeah. Okay. And in fact, you know, within Silicon Valley, right, there is this kind of narrative that flows about how, you know, science technology have been stagnating since the 1970s, right? I mean, you've heard that you familiar with this, right? And that's part of it. It's because of a lack of a risk taking culture. You know, and so what ends

51:06up happening is that things that already are known to work just keep on working, and this applies both whether we talk about science or technologies, right? After the the initial breakthroughs are made, people just keep on, you know, doing more and more of it in more and more clever ways. And so all that happens is people get kind of over adapted to what they already know and what they expect. So in terms of like if we were if we were going to put this in sci-fi terms, the downwingers are the ones that are seeing that are seeing a disturbing future in terms of like gattica where there is a a class-based genetic system or Dr. Strangelove where we blow ourselves up or maybe like some kind of horrible ecological disaster like blade runner. Are the are the upwingers worried about something or is there defining feature that they're just not worried? I think what they're worried about is that we are not we're not taking the risks to begin with

52:08because I think they also believe that they don't actually buy the idea that there is a steady state world. Okay, so this is this is I think I think when it has to return to this point, right? Namely that doing nothing or trying to create a steady state world is doing damage, right? Yeah. And and I think that's that's an assumption that they may. And and it's and of course obviously I agree with them on this, but but but it is a it's a tricky argument to have. In other words, how do you persuade people? One one way or another. I mean, I think of course if you really take evolutionary science seriously, that he state doesn't make any difference except as a kind of temporary local arrangement, right? So you can imagine certain. I think the the upwingers have a tough thing that they've they've got rockets on their side and they've got off to the other side. So they've got some great intellectual capital, but the downside is they're having to explain opportunity cost, which is counterintuitive to human beings.

53:13Opportunity cost is so much more difficult to explain than like, hey, we're going to do this thing right now that is going to prevent something bad from happening and going right, but we're going to be getting 20% less economic growth over 40 years, but that's in the future. That's an abstract concept. And so the upwingers in this weird position of going, but you understand that more people will stay impoverished unless we do this thing, but it's going to be over, you know, it's going to be in the future. We're talking about potentialities, opportunity cost is a difficult thing to communicate. And I would assume that that's something that upwingers are more worried about. Yes, I think that's a good way to know. No, no, that's exactly right. Yeah. And I think and to be honest with you, I do think the upwingers ought to be more upfront in a way about the opportunity cost because I think very often when so, for example, I again, I don't know how much would there is this movement called effective altruism? Have you ever? Yes. Yeah. I've been trying to get the yellow. Yeah, I've been trying to get somebody on to talk about it because I think

54:14it's a great topic and my listeners would love it because we did a fund razor from mosquito nets in Africa last year and like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hope to do an episode on it at some point. Right. Okay. And they do mean well. But, but, you know, if you look at kind of the way they conceptualize the future, right? A lot of it does pre-sup, you know, does trade, let's put it this way, does trade on this idea that we are on the verge of losing things, right? That we need to preserve certain things and that we need to act now. And, you know, I think in a way that kind of really does not quite get what our relationship to the future is. So let's assume, see, people living in the future, regardless of what they do, people living in the future will take their world as the

55:14starting point. Okay. They will take that as normal. Now, we, you know, and just like we do now, and we look at how people in history talked about the future and how people were talking about their own times and people have all kinds of views and people talk about wanting to defend all kinds of stuff that they think will be lost in the future. And we're sitting here now and saying, yeah, we lost those things, but that wasn't so bad to lose, right? Because now we have these other things. Okay. And I do think effective altruism has a real blind spot this way, because and the blind spot that comes from its kind of residual precautionary thinking. Even though they think of themselves as being very futuristic, they're very sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's very much constrained by a sense of preserving what we, what we right-minded in lighten people think is good now. And wanting to make sure that future generations,

56:17you know, have it, but you know, can take advantage of it. And I don't see why we have to have that kind of relationship to the future at all. Well, I will go ahead and top it off there. This has been a fascinating conversation. I've really, really enjoyed speaking to you, Dr. Fuller. And I also very much appreciate just having a new paradigm and heuristic with which to look at the landscape. I thank you for that. Well, no problem. And let me know when you've got this thing posted so I can publicize it. Thank you. I will do just that. What a fun guy. Not only did I enjoy that chat, Dr. Fuller and I keep it going on this week's bonus episode available exclusively to patrons in which we get into some weird stuff. We talk about transhumanism, phionics, radical life extension, what potential technologies we are bearish or bullish on. We even get into a little bit of theology. Patrons, that is your forthcoming bonus episode. It'll be there on your feed just as there is a bonus episode each and every week

57:20provided to you in gratitude for supporting this show and making it all possible. For everybody else, I'm glad you enjoyed the show. I'm glad you listened. If you'd like to hear the extended chat with Dr. Fuller about transhumanism, why not use this as an opportunity to step up, support the show and become a patron. Head to patreon.com slash Andrew Heaton. That's patreon.com slash Andrew Heaton. All right, little bit of announcements for we close up. They're not even really announcements. They're more of verbal show notes, little bit of verbal show notes for you. On today's program, we mentioned some things about genetic engineering and chryonics, both of which I have previously covered on my unrelated sci-fi podcast, alienating the audience. So if you were intrigued by the ethical dimensions of modifying people, I have pasted those links to those sci-fi episodes in today's episode description about gattica and chryonics. Also very pertinent, I will put in a link to the episode we did a couple months ago with Hiram Lewis on why the left-right spectrum

58:26is bunk. If you haven't listened to that, please listen to that. He makes a very compelling case that the left-right spectrum really is a useless, adivistic thing employed by dumb people in shi-sters and we should all break out of it. And if you're new to the program, but you like what you heard, go to mightyheaton.com slash best of. You can go straight to the 10 all-time best episodes of the show. Just binge your way in one setting, fall in love with me, fall in love with the show, stalk me, all those things mightheaton.com slash best of. But mostly patreon.com slash handy. Alright, that's the show. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Eric Stype, who edited today's program. Thank you Steve Fuller for coming on to talk about Upwing and Downwind. Thank you patrons of the show who make it all possible. I will see you, lovely people, and are shining genetically enhanced new future on the god damn moon. Until next time, I've been Andrew Heaton.

59:28And so have you.