When selling a product, it’s useful to do two things: flatter the audience, and convince them that they need what you’re selling.

Transhumanism is a hard sell because it is neither flattering to humanity nor needed by everyone. Here I mean transhumanism in the sense of wanting to eventually modify oneself substantially rather than just considering the issues abstractly.

Transhumanism is not flattering to humanity because its whole point is that humanity isn’t the be-all, end-all of existence. Not the end of the road. This contradicts thousands of years of Homo sapiens-obsessed, Homo sapiens-centric theological and social teachings and habits. This obviously can marginalize transhumanism: how can you convince someone that they should want to change when they identify humanness with the very foundation of their being?

Two: it’s not imminently necessary to modify our brains and bodies. (Unless we want to live longer than a century or so, and many people don’t.) Human existence isn’t so terrible, at least not if you live in a developed country, where things are pretty damn good by ancestral standards. A friend of mine argues that daily life now is probably at least half as good as human life can possibly be, in terms of subjective happiness, even given superabundance. I’m not entirely sure about that, but the fact that it’s even plausible demonstrates that radical expansion of our technological powers isn’t the first thing that comes to mind as necessary to most folks. They identify it with only incremental improvements to human happiness.

The real benefits would derive, I think, from throwing out the whole Darwinian structure of pain and pleasure tied to ancestral correlates of fitness and replacing it with something more reasonable and customized to the needs and desires of the user. But communicating this radical possibility is substantially more difficult than focusing on the foothills of self-modification — prosthetics, psychopharmacology, etc. The result is some degree of fragmentation in the transhumanist community — some transhumanists that think transhumanism is about prosthetics, only moreso, and others that are envisioning a complete restructuring of the human organism based on new foundational principles.

There is also conflict with respect to interacting with interested dabblers on the fringes: the prosthetic crowd would prefer to offer their vision, because it’s more palatable and supported by near-term demonstrable advances, while the restructuring crowd offers their own which they consider more philosophically significant and deep. It can be hard to tell who is who, but a 30-minute conversation over a beer or two is generally enough to figure out where someone is coming from.