“Modern history is the dialogue between two people: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god” (Nicolás Gómez Dávila, 1913)
Editor’s Note: In Part 1, Dr. Haug examined the current secular attempt to construct personal identity beyond the bounds of the creation order.
Here, in Part 2, he explores the humanist journey towards an autonomous, self-constructed, identity through concepts of transgenderism, transsexualism, and epicene genders which continues to another level within the futurist ideology of transhumanism. It is there that the religious-sounding rhetoric accelerates.
The 1998 Transhumanist Declaration, endorsed by the international World Transhumanist Association (Humanity+), advocates scientism, specifically nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Transhumanism is therefore an expression of scientism, one which Professor Joseph Pearce described as “a political ideology based upon the worship of technology, not the love of science per se. It is the enthronement of cleverness and the abandonment of wisdom.” Like its sex-gender ideological predecessors, transhumanism is designed to overcome the alleged constrictive parameters and ostensible imperfections of theistically gotten identity.
The claimed benefit of technological intervention is that it will broaden “human potential by overcoming ageing, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering and confinement to planet Earth,” according to the Transhumanist Declaration. Indeed, these are ostensible noble aspirations by an ideological elite of prominent humanist intellectuals, scientists, bioengineers, and academics. Nonetheless, under the façade of utilitarianism, they purpose to bypass anthropological restrictions and to re-create the person according to their own fantasy, an imago hominis, in the very mode of sex-gender identity advocates.
On this point, Roman Catholic Priest, Father Dwight Longenecker, warns “medical, chemical and scientific technology is bringing about the literal abolition of man and woman.” Ergo, through interventions such as hormone therapy and surgery reconstruction, a new, composite, physical gender can be technologically created to accord with the individual’s desire. In the humanist camp, Greg Epstein, a secular ethicist and former humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT, proudly declares technology is “the dominant religion of our time”; one which promotes “moral and ethical messages, not as mere secondary features, but as integral to its overall value(s) proposition”.
With these claims, Epstein believes technological progress goes to the core of human existence, to the root of identity: “The story of tech’s commercial success . . is a story about how human beings understand ourselves in the world. It is a story of where we get a sense that our existence is meaningful, that our day-to-day lives have purpose.” In Epstein’s view technology is a form of religion, one which “portends that elected souls will soon be uploaded into a paradise of disembodied immortality, while the rest will become slaves to the machines or condemned to oblivion.” Ambitious claims indeed, but entirely free of detailed moral-ethical postulates.
The emphasis on scientism is supported by the late-physicist Stephen Hawking who famously stated, “there is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works.” Hawking’s statement encapsulates the secular outlook of transhumanist scientism, and this view comprises an idealised agenda of displacing birth-sex with humanist ingenuity.
Transhumanism is reflective of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory: based on the premise that humanity is a product of the developmental process, and so continues to evolve indefinitely. In this context, Darwin wrote that “man has risen . . .from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals, and religion.”
Ignoring complex metaphysical implications, ideologically-inclined ethicists advocate that identity, sex-gender, and morality should likewise evolve unconstrained by biological factors. Evolutionary theory is a manifestation of pantheism for, by denying the existence of a sovereign Creator God outside of nature, exponents declare that ongoing human evolvement and development are expressive of the inevitable force of nature itself. In this post-truth and ethically relativist context, evolution free of traditional moral considerations could be expedited through technological progress in the form of transhumanism.
The determinist component of transhumanism was acknowledged by Brendon Foht in his 2013 lecture on Evolution and Transhumanism. His view is that “we [transhumanists] have every reason to be dissatisfied with our nature, since it was poorly and irrationally designed – the mere product of history, not reason.” Foht therefore proposed a determinist, post-humanist, solution to the imperfections of created humanity. It follows that the onus is on visionaries like him, after a necessary deconstruction process – one which Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as demolition – to reconstruct humankind scientifically, technologically, and philosophically into a new, desired, identity.
In so acting, transhumanists perhaps seek to immanentize Nietzsche’s idealist Übermenschen (“overman”) or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein concept of an imago hominis (image of man). Perhaps homo superbus – a superior person – is a preferential description. At its core, transhumanism is a form of scientific determinism which negates the fundamental precepts of traditional creationism, due to allegations of imperfection. For these materialists, it appears that Darwin’s evolvement of the species is not progressing rapidly enough.
Transhumanist objectives find concordance with the feminist stratagem in eliminating differing roles between the sexes through a specific process, referred to by writer Mary Harrison as “Cyborg Feminism.” Specifically, says Harrison, “The final frontier for equality” is that of “reproduction.” Hence, the plan is to “replace the sexes with an atomized, sexless, liberal person.” To do this, an artificial womb would be required whereby the normal creative process is circumvented or eliminated through new technology. Women are thus no longer required for the reproduction process; instead, a deconstructed birth function would amount to a negation of motherhood. Hence, the advent of the techno-woman.
The historian Nadya Williams describes this process as a devaluing of relationships which constitute “a core part of not just what it means to be a man or woman, but what it means to be human.” She concludes that “people are more than just bodies” and that such a radical proposal is an instance of “scientific misogyny.” In this vein, the metaphysical consequence of a pseudo-scientific refabrication of a human being is well described by Frankenstein’s author, Shelley, as follows: “Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” An idealized transhumanist utopia will ultimately come to nought. The reason being that the realism of biological constraints will inevitably prevail.
Advances in technology and science, conducted through a process of rationalism and empiricism, has resulting in discoveries which contribute towards the betterment of humankind. These efforts are to be lauded. Still, epistemological scientism with its necessary stance of scepticism, cannot resolve metaphysical concepts surrounding morality, ethics, transcendent values, meaning, identity, truth, and natural justice.
An inquiry into the nature of ultimate reality – the search for eternal and universal truths and values – does require rationality, but one exercised through a religious and philosophical lens, not one of applied science. Christopher Dawson – renowned as “the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century” – crystalizes this issue when he remarks, “the development of scientific specialism has in no way lessened man’s need for a historical faith, an interpretation of contemporary culture in terms of social processes and spiritual ends.”
The terms “Christian” and “Transhumanism” are diametrically opposing concepts, quite incompatible with each other. In a wide sense, post-humanists insist immortality is possible through advanced technology whereas Judeo-Christianity states otherwise. Science, in the form of technology including transhumanism, concerns the realm of empiricism and cannot convincingly enter into the arena of moderating supra-natural concepts. Therefore, the critical issue remains that of moral authority. However, the corporeal cannot construct the incorporeal. The latter concept remains the exclusive providence of religion, particularly Judeo-Christianity with its clear moral-ethical absolutes, which themselves give rise to the natural law ethical precepts from which personal identity is derived.
In the result, proposals for a post-creation order like transhumanism which is based on scientific empiricism alone, confront a substantive, coherent, and rational moral and ethical paradigm that becomes their nemesis. The German writer, Ernst Jünger in his work The Glass Bees, addresses this exact point, “Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable.” The “incalculable” refers to transcendent yet definitive values and morality, both of which are characteristic only of personal human identity.
It can be highlighted that definitive natural law precepts, not atheistic humanism through populist ideologies, provide the basis of America’s founding documents. These seminal papers have, for centuries, moderated challenges to established truths, definitive morals and ethics, behaviour in the public area, justice (both distributive and social) and the like. Furthermore, the principles espoused in the documents have given rise to the dominance of American exceptionalism on the world stage.
In short, it is the Founders’ insistence on natural law’s moral-ethical precepts as pertaining to the individual made in the image of his Creator, and society as reflective of such individuals – as understood within the Judeo-Christian order – that dominates Western civilization and imparts the uniqueness of America’s distinctive character. This is particularly so as pertaining to moral clarity and ethical prudence. And, while scientific and technological benefits for humankind are to be encouraged, the personal identity, the dignity, and sui generis of all persons remain inexorably founded upon core moral-ethical constitutional principles derived from eternal law.
Finally, in a review of this writer’s book, Politics, Law, and Disorder in the Garden of Eden: The Quest for Identity, editor Paul Krause concludes:
“We all live by identity. No one lives without an identity. The problem is not identity politics, per se, but that the normative identities we have grown accustomed to which provided meaning and stability to our restless souls are fading away. Take the issue of Christian identity as the most obvious example. [One hundred years ago,] nearly everyone living in countries counted as ‘Western’ were Christian and they would have used the term Christendom instead of Western Civilization as a point of identification. It is not that we are besieged by radical identity politics but that we have lost all sense of identity that causes mass swaths of people to look for the stabilizing anchor identity provides.”
For this reason, the affirmation of core principles establishing America’s founding – particularly the natural law principles of the individual’s personal identity as made in the image of the Creator; coupled to the definitive moral-ethical tenets derived from Judeo-Christian based principles underlying much of Western civilization – is essential for the well-being of all those in the public square.
