The True Origins of Transhumanism

How Russians, robots, and dolphins spawned a movement at Esalen

The ultimate goal of personal transcendence was to leave the sinful, temporary body behind and float as a free, perfected consciousness. All that prior consumption was just fuel for the rocket, and the regrettable destruction something to leave behind with the rest of physical reality.

This wasn’t a break from consumer capitalism, but the fulfillment of its ultimate purpose. And, by the 1970s, many other sectors and industries seemed to be coalescing around the same set of potentials. Computer scientists were pondering artificial intelligence; personal transformation gurus were helping people walk over burning coals; specially phased audio tapes helped people journey out of body. Mind over matter became the mantra. People sought to escape biological limits before middle age, not to mention death.

As the beating heart of this spiritual, technological, and cultural innovation, the Bay Area began to attract global attention from those looking to overturn or escape the established order. Wealthy progressives believed that they could apply the insights they had gained in their personal spiritual journeys to the world at large. They initiated projects to end hunger, cure cancer, communicate with animals, and contact aliens. Their most significant undertaking was to address the nuclear standoff between the United States and Soviet Union by holding a series of meetings between the two nations’ most spiritually awakened and politically connected individuals.

The Soviet–American citizen diplomacy program brought together America’s leading spiritual teachers, scientists, and psychologists with those of the Soviet Union. The Russian equivalent of New Age spirituality was represented by the practitioners of cosmism, a form of gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit. Their pursuit of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences. Believing that not only could human beings transcend our mortality but that we could bring physicality with us — at least in some form — the cosmists convinced America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way of beating death.

The cosmists’ original idea held that one could resurrect the dead by rearranging their atoms to the precise positions they were in while the person was alive. But the cosmists were working on other solutions, such as perfecting humans through intentional evolution, moving human consciousness into the bodies of robots, conquering death, colonizing space, or uploading ourselves to computers.

Such were the origins of today’s transhumanist movement. These conferences were formative experiences for Silicon Valley’s most influential executives, investors, professors, scientists, and technologists — some of whom founded the biggest digital companies in the world. This vision still motivates the development of artificial intelligence, private space exploration, robotics, data surveillance, and life extension.

Transhumanism exalts and preserves one particular expression of humanity while leaving the rest of messy creation behind — or even exploiting it — in order to escape before the body dies or the world ends.

This was section 70 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.