Many transhumanists support the principles of genetic engineering as a subset of self modificationism, a popular stream of thought cutting across a number of related terms. However, as TV tropes says, Genetic Engineering Is The New Nuke — and there is a history of various crazies having a field day on the subject matter.

Super babies: Probably not fascist

In 2004, professor of ethics and transhumanist critic Nicholas Agar coined the term ‘liberal eugenics’ with regards to practices such as sex-selection, eye colour selection and embryo disorder screening. The term has been more popularised in the media as ‘designer babies’, typically with regards to even more selective gene therapies around prospective athletic abilities, intelligence or other cosmetic traits. Such criticism as the term gets is typically directed towards the consumerist choices further affecting modern parenting, as well as concerns about the creep of class inequality.

However Agar’s ‘liberal eugenics’ idea caught a bad rap from day one, with it quickly being re-branded by critics as ‘libertarian eugenics’ so as to ensure non state-intervention into the matters. Philosopher and ethicist David Pearce had some things to say on the matter, criticising Agar’s lack of advocacy for reaching a super-healthy or super-well state — but otherwise supporting the conclusion that gene-therapy interventions appear desirable in the short term at least. Academic David Correia after visiting Singularity Summit 2010 wasted no time is conflating historical fascist eugenics programmes with gene therapies actually advocated at the conference, further confusing the matter.

Many of those without the time to dive into the philosophies of either Agar or Pearce found the the distinction between the fascist, very nasty eugenics programmes — and the designer baby movement — confusing due to the reuse of the term eugenics. Indeed, there are some I have found who are continuing to deliberately muddle the two terms. The subreddit /r/eugenics/ whilst having very low activity, actively promotes the link between eugenics, transhumanism, modern fascist thought and the overpopulation myth. After contacting the subreddit moderators, they laughed, glad their trolling has paid off. However I was able to remove the link between fascism and transhumanism on RationalWiki off the back of this which is something.

On the 2nd of October 2015, with a technological elite appearing to offer some kind of fascist-rebranded ideals, available to the most wealthy, the UN’s bioethics committee was compelled to offer their opinion on the matter, raising concerns over the potential inequality cost of improving the human genome. Note the UN’s use of the term ‘so-called liberal eugenics’, appearing to visibly dislike the combination of ‘liberal’ and ‘eugenics’ in the same phrase.

This finally leaves the state to eugenics advocacy within contemporary transhumanist community. High profile transhumanist politician and death-bus driver Zoltan Istvan unfortunately did make the case for restricting human breeding in 2014, however this could charitably be seen as more of a headline grabbing slogan rather than a coherent policy position. Zoltan has gone on to make similarly authoritarian statements on behalf of transhumanism as a whole, something that is currently straining the community as they seek to reconcile these points of serious misinterpretation with the desire to see Zoltan run an effective campaign.

My conclusion is that transhumanism has a rocky history with the term eugenics, and it seems to never end well. ‘Liberal eugenics’ was a very unfortunate term to have been cited in retrospect, due to it’s misunderstanding and sometimes misuse — and I would suggest retiring it from modern discourse entirely.

The prospective social impact of super babies is a serious one, but one that should mostly be addressed as the new challenge that it is, rather than anything to do with a re-emergence of a fascist pseudo-science.