WELL… Grrr… A morning thunderstormknocked my high speed Internet service this
morning. And the service is being sketchy about when the Internet will be
restored.
AND SO, I’m stock using my snail-slow Android Phone hotspot
which annoyingly sometimes boots me off.
Essentially the theme is that the Left (as in
Dem-Marxists and fellow traveler atheists) screams ‘Christian
Nationalist White Supremacist Neo-Nazi’ whenever Christians point to a
lack of Biblical morality in culture and government. The screaming of course is
to silence Christian dissent to the agenda of a cultural fundamental transformation
of the American founding principles and way of life.
See what you think…
JRH
4/29/25 [Typically I make Substack primary designation but it is having
Network Issues at posting time.]
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Are there any real and credible statistics supporting a
menacing movement by Christians seeking to theocratize America with
neo-Naziism?
The public
square has never been theologically or morally neutral. Therefore, the church
must and will continue to heed its divine obligation to publicly speak the holy
Word of God.
Only a godless culture would dare to claim that the public
sphere is somehow neutral. Yet those who boldly lift their voices on behalf of
the church and her Lord in the public sphere, are facing intensifying
persecution for doing so.
Over the last few years, a frenetic buzz around “Christian
nationalism” has spread across America. Is Christian nationalism, according to
its most offensive definition, even a real threat in America? Are there any
real and credible statistics supporting a menacing movement by extremist
Christians seeking to theocratize America with white-supremacist neo-Naziism?
Prior to lockdowns, most of us had never heard of “Christian
nationalism.” Rather, it appears that the powerful gaslighting term created by
neo-Marxists is another attempt to terrify Christians out of sharing God’s
perspective on moral issues in the public sphere. It attempts to dissuade
Christians from fulfilling their vocational duties in the civil sphere.
By distorting the language of public discourse, the godless
manipulate the parameters of discussion within it. Christians who are unaware
of these political tactics cannot effectively contend for the faith.
We witness this in the abortion debate by allowing the
dialogue to be framed by rights versus responsibility language. Notwithstanding
the existence of any civil or even human rights, mankind has a moral
responsibility to care for the innocent. Also, by adopting the language of
LGBTQ+, Christians add legitimacy to the absurd concept of more than two sexes,
or multiple identities present in one human being.
Quietistic Christians have allowed themselves to be
manipulated by leftist media placing a wedge between “church” and “state.” They
claim the church’s role in society is limited to prayer and works of mercy, and
that the civic role of a Christian is, at most, voting. Many who strongly
advocate against Christian activity in the public sphere today are the same
ones who failed to respond properly and reasonably to the recent “pandemania.”
They use screeds against “Christian nationalism” to avoid participating
in the public sphere and to justify what amounts to antinomianism: the belief
that, because Christians are saved by grace alone through Jesus Christ’s death
on the cross, living a godly life in accord with divine and moral law, and
shaped by biblical principles, is at best optional. To think otherwise is
smeared as “legalism.”
Orthodox believers of goodwill, however, will find that
“Christian nationalism’s” theological and political implications by no means
fall afoul of the doctrine and practice of historic Christianity. According to
the best definition, “Christian nationalism” is basically synonymous with the
term “Christendom,” something just about all Christians, until recently,
considered a good thing.
The fearmongers even go so far as to malign “Christian
culture” through its association with “Christian nationalism.” Their views are
frighteningly aligned with those who advance communistic ideas that judge
Western culture’s hallmarks, such as Christian values, as harmful and
destructive to society.
As every attentive Christian is well aware, these ideologies
have been revealed as anti-Christian, unveiled in critical theory, which seeks
to demonize Western civilization and Christendom, and to replace it with absurd
alternatives that assault the very pillars upon which the West is founded. Even
the new atheists appreciate the invaluable benefits of
Christian civilization as the best option to all other alternatives.
Historically, the relationship between church and state in
the West was symbiotic: The church prayed, rebuked, and advised civil rulers,
who then preserved the ministry of the church from external interference. Jesus
Christ was acknowledged to be Lord of both realms, although in distinctive
ways.
Even the founding fathers of the United States did not boast
a rigid separation of “church and state.” The iconic language was intended to
protect the life of the church from overreach from the state, not the other way
around.
Even if one would dare to argue that communism and globalism
meet the material needs of their constituents, they have consistently proven to
stifle and maim God’s beloved creation, the church, and the gospel. Klaus
Schwab, former leader of the World Economic Forum and considered one of the
five most influential people on the globe, had a clear agenda to penetrate world governments with policies that subverted the interests of
Christians. Christians are wise to refrain from understating the influence of
such deliberate agendas to silence Christ in the public
sphere.
In the recent American election, Christians were free not to
vote for Donald Trump, but it was hardly justifiable for any of them to vote
for his adversary based on her anti-Christian policy recommendations alone,
symbolized by the strategic decision to position a portable abortion clinic in
front of the Democrat convention in Chicago.
To reject “Christian culture” as a positive contribution to
“secular” public space is to welcome any number of other religious cultures to
take its place. When former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first
arrived in office, he boasted that Canada has no shared values: “Canada is
becoming a new kind of country, not defined by our history or European national
origins, but by a pan-cultural heritage,” he said. [Blog Editor: Apparently
Trudeau succeeded because Canadians just placed their version neo-Marxists in
power by giving the Liberal Party an election victory in the Canadian
Parliamentary system.]
“There is no core identity,” as Canada is “the first
post-national state,” Trudeau said. He also said, “There is a level of admiration I
actually have for China because of their basic dictatorship.” There is no
indication that his replacement, Mark Carney, thinks any differently.
What fills the dark vacuum remaining when Christian culture
is chased away? Look around you and see the bombardment of Western civilization
once founded upon God’s Word and Christ’s church. God is the sovereign Lord of
all human institutions and history, and faith in God’s providence has never
justified a retreat from vocational obligations in the public sphere and the
gifts of God of which we are called to be godly stewards.
Furthermore, Christians who criticize and discourage active
Christian political participation indirectly embrace a national anti-Christian
religion that unabashedly pursues the demise of the Kingdom of God and the
gospel on earth. Which is a greater threat to church and society: the
rhetorical phantom of Christian nationalism, or the real phenomenon of
Christian apathy?
The Rev. Dr. Maj.
(ret.) Harold Ristau is president of Luther Classical College in Casper,
Wyoming. Ristau was born in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and has
served as a parish pastor, military chaplain, African missionary, and seminary
professor. The author of several theological books and numerous shorter works,
he is married with five children and one grandchild.
I ran into a post from THE EXPOSÉ on Transhumanism. It
was posted today (4/28/25). However the focus is on a lecture given by Aaron
Kheriaty at Hillsdale College on February 2, 2024. THE EXPOSÉ
uses a Youtube video of that lecture that was posted on April 4, 2025. AND THE
EXPOSÉ produced an organized transcript of the
lecture for people to read for who choose not to watch a
55-Minute video (the lecture is about 35-Minutes followed by a Q&A).
Which incidentally is both fascinating and interesting.
For the few out of the loop of what Transhumanism
is, it is essentially a movement to meld humanity into a machine-like cyborg
plugged into an Artificial Intelligence neural network. For me this is a bit of
a Tower
of Babel agenda in which Elitists seek to become as God while
eliminating to devotion to the Almighty Creator. The Almighty did stand for the
Tower of Babel agenda and will not stand for a Transhumanist Agenda either.
“Transhumanism is a
philosophical, social, and scientific movement that advocates for the
enhancement of human capabilities through technology, aiming to transcend the
current limitations of the human body and mind. The central goal of
transhumanism is to improve physical, intellectual, and emotional abilities to
create a more advanced form of human existence. It is not only a futuristic
ideology but also a field that encompasses cutting-edge developments in areas
such as genetics, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, biotechnology,
nanotechnology, and cybernetics.”
“While some Christians will
recast transhumanism in biblical terms, the movement as a whole is
fundamentally opposed to an orthodox and biblical understanding of humanity.
Our ultimate need is redemption, not reinvention. Shatzer reveals that many
Christian transhumanists operate with at least an implicit debt to open and
process theology, which states that God is ultimately open, improving, and
adapting, like creation (97). But this theology is at odds with the God who is
the unchanging basis for all knowledge and truth. God isn’t open and risky;
he’s sovereign and omnipotent. In a world of shifting sand, he is the rock to
which we can cling for hope and redemption.”
I appreciate the DOGE efforts led by Elon Musk. HOWEVER, a red flag
for me is Musk’s promotion of Transhumanism. At this stage I do not
know is looking at only the positive propaganda of human enhancement or is
ardently an anti-God Transhumanist. For now – to me then – Musk is enigma about
his end game versus his current DOGE actions.
Well…Those are my precursor thoughts to THE EXPOSÉ. You should watch or read Aaron
Kheriaty below.
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The transhumanist dream is to live forever. Living
forever in the digital cloud or the mainframe computer in the sky constitutes
the transhumanists’ religious doctrine. It is salvation by digital
technology.
Transhumanism is clearly a religion – indeed, a
particular type of neo-Gnostic religion, Aaron Kheriaty says.
“It attracts adherents today – including educated,
wealthy, powerful, culturally influential adherents – because it taps into
unfulfilled, deeply religious aspirations and longings. Transhumanism is an
ersatz substitute religion for a secular age,” he said.
After describing what transhumanists are aiming for,
Kheriaty said, “I can only conclude that the transhumanists’ dream is … a
philosophy of death.”
Earlier this month, he gave a lecture on transhumanism at Hillsdale
College CCA’s ‘Artificial Intelligence’ seminar. He
demonstrated how Yuval Noah Harari’s beliefs, the
same philosophy among many of today’s elites, can be traced back to an ideology
that existed during the 1940s, as demonstrated by C.S. Lewis’ book ‘That
Hideous Strength’.
Here’s the video link to my recent talk at Hillsdale College
on AI and Transhumanism. I’m including below the text of the speech if you
prefer to read rather than watch it.
My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man
chock-full of big ideas. He explained during the covid crisis: “covid is
critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimise, total
biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to
monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin.” In
a 60 Minutesinterview with
Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: “What we have seen so far is
corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet,
what movies we watch. The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin.”
He likewise told India Today, when commenting on changes accepted
by the population during covid:
We now see mass surveillance
systems established even in democratic countries which previously rejected
them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously,
surveillance was mainly above the skin; now we want it under the skin … Governments
want to know not just where we go or who we meet. They want to know what’s
happening under our skin: what is our body temperature; what is our blood
pressure; what is our medical condition?
Harari is clearly a man who wants to … get under your skin.
He just might succeed. Another recent interview finds him waxing philosophical:
“Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really
acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading
humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer
human life.” As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel when he talks about the
Absolute, when Harari talks about the future, he sounds like he’s going up in a
balloon.
Forgive me, but a few last nuggets from Professor Harari
will round out the picture of his philosophy, and his lofty hopes and dreams:
“Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have
this soul or spirit, and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening
inside me, so, whatever I choose, whether in the election or in the
supermarket, that’s my free will – that’s over.”[i] Harari
explains that to hack human beings you need a lot of computing power and a lot
of biometric data, which was not possible until recently with the advent of AI.
In a hundred years, he argues, people will look back and identify the covid
crisis as the moment “when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially
surveillance under the skin – which I think is the most important development
of the 21st century, which is this ability to hack human
beings.”
People rightly worry that their iPhone or Alexa have become
surveillance “listening devices,” and indeed, the microphone can be turned on
even when the device is turned off. But imagine a wearable or implantable
device that, moment-to-moment, tracks your heart rate, blood pressure and skin
conductance, uploading that biometric information to the cloud. Anyone with
access to that data could know your exact emotional response to every statement
made while you watch a presidential debate. They could gauge your thoughts and
feelings about each candidate, about each issue discussed, even if you never
spoke a word.
I could go on with more quotes from Professor Harari about
hacking the human body, but you get the picture. At this point, you may be
tempted to dismiss Harari as nothing more than an overheated, sci-fi-obsessed
village atheist. After years binging on science fiction novels, the balloon of
his imagination now perpetually floats up somewhere above the ether. Why should
we pay any heed to this man’s prognostications and prophesies?
It turns out that Harari is a professor of History at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His bestselling books have sold over 20 million
copies worldwide, which is no small shakes. More importantly, he is one of the
darlings of the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) and a key architect of their
agenda. In 2018, his WEF lecture at the WEF, ‘Will the Future Be Human?’,
was sandwiched between addresses from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
French President Emmanuel Macron. So, he’s playing in the sandbox with the big
dogs.
In his WEF lecture, Harari explained that in the coming
generations, we will “learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds,” such
that these will become “the main products of the 21st century
economy: not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and
minds.”[ii] The few masters of the economy, he explains, will
be the people who own and control data: “Today, data is the most important
asset in the world,” in contrast to ancient times when land was the most
important asset, or the industrial age when machines were paramount. WEF
kingpin Klaus Schwab echoed Harari’s ideas when he explained: “One of the
features of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it doesn’t change what we
are doing; it changes us,” through gene editing and other biotechnological tools
that operate under our skin.[iii]
Even the dreamy-eyed Harari admits there are some potential
dangers with these developments: “If too much data is concentrated in too few
hands, humanity will split not into classes but into two different
species.” That would not, one supposes, be a good thing. But all things
considered, he is more than willing to take these risks and forge ahead with
this agenda. To be fair, Harari does not advocate for a future totalitarian
state or rule by all-powerful corporations, but hopes to warn us of coming
dangers.
In an exceptionally naïve proposal, however, Harari believes
that the obvious problems posed by a tyrannical biosecurity state can be solved
with more surveillance, by having citizens simply surveil the government: “Turn
it around,” he said in a talk at the Athens Democracy Forum, “Surveil the
governments more. I mean, technology can always go both ways. If they can
surveil us, we can surveil them.”[iv] This proposal is – not to
put too fine a point on it – incredibly stupid. As most of us learned in
kindergarten, two wrongs don’t make a right.
The WEF made waves a few years back by posting on their
website the slogan, “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.” Although the
page was later deleted, the indelible impression remained: it provided a clear
and simple description of the future envisioned by Davos Man. As the WEF
savants predict, at the last stage of this development, we will find ourselves
in a rent-only, subscription-only economy, where nothing really belongs to us.
Picture the Uberisation of everything.
To get a sense of this future, imagine the world as an
Amazon warehouse writ large: a mandarin caste of digital virtuosos will call
the shots from behind screens, directing the masses below with the aid of ever
more refined algorithmic specificity. The prophetic Aldous Huxley foresaw
this Brave
New World in his 1932 novel. These changes will challenge
not only our political, economic, and medical institutions and structures; they
will challenge our notions of what it means to be human. This is precisely what
its advocates celebrate, as we will see in a moment.
Corporatist arrangements of public-private partnerships,
which merge state and corporate power, are well suited for carrying out the
necessary convergence of existing and emerging fields. This biological-digital
convergence envisioned by the WEF and its members will blend big data,
artificial intelligence, machine learning, genetics, nanotechnology and
robotics. Schwab refers to this as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will
follow and build upon the first three – the mechanical, electrical and digital
revolutions. The transhumanists – who we will meet in a moment – have been
dreaming of just such a merging of the physical, digital and biological worlds
for at least a few decades. Now, however, their visions are poised to become
our reality.
Mechanisms of Control
The next steps in hacking human beings will involve
attempted rollouts – which we should vigorously resist – of digital IDs, tied
to fingerprints and other biometric data like iris scans or face IDs,
demographic information, medical records, data on education, travel, financial
transactions and bank accounts. These tools will be combined with central bank
digital currencies, giving governments surveillance power and control over
every one of your financial transactions, with the ability to lock you out of the
market, to limit your ability to buy and sell, if you do not comply with
government directives.
Using biometrics for everyday transactions routinises these
technologies; we get used to them. We are conditioning children to accept
biometric verification as a matter of course. For example, face IDs are now
used in multiple school districts to expedite the movement of students through
school lunch lines. Until recently, biometrics such as fingerprints were used
only for high-security purposes – when charging someone with a crime, for
example, or when notarising an important document, for example. Today, routine
biometric verification for repetitive activities from mobile phones to lunch
lines gets young people used to the idea that their bodies are tools
used in transactions. We are instrumentalising the body in unconscious and
subtle, but nonetheless powerful, ways.
Those with economic interests in creating markets for their
products – whether vaccines, digital surveillance hardware and software, or
harvested data – will continue to deploy the carrots and sticks of access to
medical care and other services to strong-arm acceptance of digital IDs in
underdeveloped nations. India, for example, is very far along this road right
now. In developed nations, they will initially use a velvet glove approach of
subtle nudges, selling digital IDs as convenience and time-saving measures that
will be hard for many to turn down, like skipping long TSA security lines at
busy airports. The privacy risks, including the possibility for constant
surveillance and data harvesting, will fade into the background when you’re
about to miss your flight if you can’t skip to the front of the TSA line.
Unless we collectively decline to participate in this new
social experiment, digital IDs – tied to private demographic, financial,
location, movement and biometric data – will become mechanisms for bulk data
harvesting and tracking of populations around the globe. We should resist –
including by opting out of the new face ID scans at TSA airport screening
checkpoints, which we can still legally do.
Once fully realised, this surveillance system will offer
unprecedented mechanisms of control, allowing the regime to be maintained
against any form of resistance. This technocratic dream would entrench the most
intransigent authoritarian system the world has ever known – in the sense that
it could maintain itself against any form of opposition through monopolistic
technological and economic power. The suppression of dissent will not require
handcuffs or prisons; it will happen in large part through the system’s
financial controls, especially if we adopt central bank digital currencies. Try
to resist or step outside the system’s strictures and the doors to markets will
simply close. This means that once this system is in place, it could prove
almost impossible to overthrow.
Microwaved Eugenics
Harari – who I cited extensively at the beginning of this
talk – is among the more prominent members of a new species of academics,
activists and “visionaries” who refer to themselves as transhumanists. These
folks aim to use technology not to alter the lived environment, but to
fundamentally alter human nature itself. The goal is to “upgrade” or “enhance”
human beings. This is both possible and desirable, as Harari explains, because
all organisms – whether humans or amoebas or bananas or viruses – are at bottom
just “biological algorithms.” This is the old materialist, social Darwinist
ideology turbocharged and techno-upgraded with the tools of gene editing,
nanotechnology, robotics and advanced pharmaceuticals. Transhumanism is
microwaved eugenics. There is nothing new under the sun.
The 20th century eugenicists referred to disabled
persons as “useless eaters.” Echoing this rhetoric on multiple occasions,
Harari has puzzled over the question of what to do with people in the future
who will refuse AI-mediated enhancement – folks he refers to as “useless
people.” “The biggest question maybe in economics and politics in the coming
decades,” he predicts, “will be what to do with all these useless people?”[v] He
goes on to explain, “The problem is more boredom, what to do with them and how
will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically
meaningless, worthless.”
Harari suggests one possible solution to the problem of what
to do with all these useless people: “My best guess at present is a combination
of drugs and computer games.” Well, at least we have a head start on that, a
fact that does not escape Harari’s attention: “You see more and more people
spending more and more time, or solving their time with drugs and computer
games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs,” he explains. This is where Harari
predicts those who refuse to be hacked for AI-enhancement purposes will find
themselves.[vi]
Encountering Harari’s thought was not my first brush with
the transhumanist movement. Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at Stanford
University sponsored by the Zephyr Institute on the topic of transhumanism. I
critiqued the idea of “human enhancement,” the use of biomedical technology not
just to heal the sick but to make the healthy “better than well,” i.e., bigger,
faster, stronger, smarter, etc. The event was well attended by several students
from the Transhumanist Club at Stanford.
We had a cordial discussion and I enjoyed chatting with
these students after the talk. I learned the symbol of their student group was
H+ (“humanity-plus”). They were exceptionally bright, ambitious and serious
young men and women – typical Stanford students. Some of them had read their
Plato in addition to their Scientific American. They sincerely
wanted to make the world better. Perhaps there were a closet authoritarian or
two among them, but my impression was that they had no interest in facilitating
world domination by oligarchic corporatist regimes empowered to hack human beings.
Nevertheless, I got the impression that they did not
comprehend the implications of the basic premises, the axioms, they had
accepted. We can choose our first principles, our foundational premises, but
then we must follow them out to their logical conclusions; otherwise, we
deceive ourselves. These Stanford students were not outliers, but
representative of the local culture: transhumanism is enormously influential in
Silicon Valley and shapes the imagination of many of the most influential tech
elites. Proponents of transhumanism include the Oxford University philosopher
Nick Bostrom, Harvard geneticist George Church, the late physicist Stephen
Hawking, Google engineer Ray Kurzweil and other notables.
The Transhumanist Dream
Returning to Harari’s 2018 talk at the WEF, he admits that
control of data might not only enable human elites to build digital
dictatorships, but opines that hacking humans may facilitate something even
more radical: “Elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life
itself.” With his Davos audience warmed up, he then waxes to a crescendo: “This
will not just be the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, it will be
the greatest revolution in biology since the beginning of life four billion
years ago.”
Which is, of course, a pretty big deal. Because for billions
of years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of the game of life,
as he explains: “All of life for four billion years – dinosaurs, amoebas,
tomatoes, humans – all of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and
to the laws of organic biochemistry.” But not anymore: all this is about to
change, as he explains:
Science is replacing evolution
by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design – not the intelligent
design of some god above the cloud, but our intelligent design, and the design
of our clouds: the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud – these are the new driving
forces of evolution. At the same time, science may enable life – after being
confined for four billion years to the limited realm of organic compounds –
science may enable life to break out into the inorganic realm.
The opening sentence here perfectly echoes the original
definition of eugenics from the man who coined the term in the late 19th century,
Sir Francis Galton who was Charles Darwin’s cousin: “What nature does blindly,
slowly, and ruthlessly [evolution by natural selection], man may do
providently, quickly, and kindly [evolution by our own – or by the cloud’s –
intelligent design].” But what is Harari talking about in that last sentence –
life breaking out into the inorganic realm?
It’s been a transhumanist dream from the dawn of modern
computing that someday we will be able to upload the informational content of
our brains, or our minds (if you believe in minds), into some sort of massive
computing system, or digital cloud or other technological repository capable of
storing massive amounts of data. On this materialist view of man, we will then
have no more need for our human body, which, after all, always fails us in the
end. Shedding this mortal coil – this organic dust that always returns to dust
– we will find the technological means to … well, to live forever. Living
forever in the digital cloud or the mainframe computer in the sky constitutes
the transhumanists’ eschatology: salvation by digital technology.
This project is physically (and metaphysically) impossible,
of course, because man is an inextricable unity of body and soul – not some
ghost in the machine, not merely a bit of software transferable to another
piece of hardware. But set that aside for now; look instead at what this
eschatological dream tells us about the transhumanist movement. These
imaginative flights of fancy have obviously moved well beyond the realm of
science. Transhumanism is clearly a religion – indeed, a particular
type of neo-Gnostic religion. It attracts adherents today – including educated,
wealthy, powerful, culturally influential adherents – because it taps into
unfulfilled, deeply religious aspirations and longings. Transhumanism is an
ersatz substitute religion for a secular age.
That Hideous Strength
I cannot emphasise enough the importance for our time of
C.S. Lewis’s book, ‘The
Abolition of Man’.Lewis once remarked that his
dystopian novel, ‘That
Hideous Strength’, the third instalment in his “space trilogy,”
was ‘The Abolition of Man’ in fictional form. Those who have
learned from ‘Huxley’s Brave New World’ and Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’would
do well to also read ‘That Hideous Strength’, an underappreciated
entry in the dystopian fiction genre. Back in 1945, Lewis foresaw Yuval Harari
and his transhumanist ilk on the horizon. He brilliantly satirised their
ideology in the novel’s character of Filostrato, an earnest but deeply misguided
Italian scientist.
In the story, a cabal of technocrats takes over a bucolic
university town in England – think of Oxford or Cambridge – and go to work
immediately transforming things according to their vision of the future. The
novel’s protagonist, Mark Studdock, is recruited away from the university to
the technocrats’ new institute. Mark desires above all to be part of the
progressive set, the “inner ring” that is steering the next big thing. He
spends his first several days at the NICE (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments)
trying in vain to ascertain exactly what his new job description entails.
Eventually, he figures out that he has been retained mainly
to write propaganda explaining the Institute’s activities to the public.
Somewhat dispirited – he is a scholar of the social sciences, after all, and
not a journalist – he sits down at lunch one day with Filostrato, a member of
the NICE inner circle, and learns a bit about this scientist’s worldview.
It happens that Filostrato has just given orders to cut down
some beech trees on the Institute’s property and replace them with trees made
out of aluminium. Someone at the table naturally asks why, remarking that he
rather liked the beech trees. “Oh, yes, yes,” replies Filostrato. “The pretty
trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but
not the brier. The forest tree is a weed.” Filostrato explains that he once saw
a metal tree in Persia, “so natural it would deceive,” which he believes could
be perfected. His interlocutor objects that a tree made of metal would hardly
be the same as a real tree. But the scientist is undeterred and explains why
the artificial tree is superior:
“But consider the advantages!” he says. “You get tired of
him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It
never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and
mess.”
“I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather
amusing,” Mark says.
“Why one or two?” Filostrato replies. “At present, I allow, we must have
forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then,
why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth.
In fact, we clean the planet.”
When asked if he means that there would be no vegetation at
all, Filostrato replies, “Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English
fashion, you shave him every day. One day, we shave the planet.” Someone
wonders what the birds will make of it, but Filostrato has a plan for them too:
“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree, I would have the art birds
all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the
singing, you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers
dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”
Mark replies that this sounds like abolishing pretty much
all organic life. “And why not?” Filostrato counters. “It is simple hygiene.”
And then, echoing the rhetoric of Yuval Harari, we hear Filostrato’s soaring
peroration, which would have been right at home in World Economic Forum’s
annual meeting in Davos:
“Listen, my friends. If you pick
up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not
say, ‘Oh, this horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it? … And you,
especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own
on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath … And
what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are
clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms – sweat, spittles,
excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and
the organic are interchangeable conceptions … After all, we are organisms
ourselves.
“I grant it … In us, organic
life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that, we want no more of
it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like
what you call the blue mould – all sprouting and budding and breeding and
decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we
learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to
build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of
dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”[vii]
Someone interjects that this last part does not sound like
much fun, but Filostrato responds, “My friend, you have already separated the
Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away …
Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it
away, then real civilisation becomes possible.” Keep in mind that this was
written decades before the invention of in vitro fertilisation and other
assisted reproductive technologies, as well as the sexual revolution that brought
widespread acceptance of the oral contraceptive pill. As Lewis reveals at the
end of the novel, however, the NICE is not controlled by brilliant men of
science but is ultimately under the sway of demonic forces.
In both the real character of Harari and the fictional
character of Filostrato, we find men who embrace, indeed celebrate, the idea
that human beings can shed the messy business of organic life and somehow
transfer our bodily existence into sterile inorganic matter. We encounter in
both characters the kind of man who wants to bleach the entire earth with hand
sanitiser. Were we not nudged, perhaps a bit too far, in the direction of
Filostrato’s dream during covid, as we attempted to fully disinfect and sanitise
our lived environments, and transfer all our communications to the digital
realm? Have we not also moved in this direction by spending more waking hours
glued to screens in a virtual world than interacting with people in the real
world, while reams of behavioural data are extracted from our every keystroke
and click for predictive analysis by AI?
Organic matter is alive, whereas inorganic matter is dead. I
can only conclude that the transhumanists’ dream is, in the last analysis, a
philosophy of death. But we must grant that it has become an influential
philosophy among many of today’s elites. In one way or another, all of us have
been seduced, to some degree, by the mistaken notion that by massively
coordinated vigilance and the application of technology, we could rid our lived
environments of pathogens and scrub our world entirely clean – perhaps even
thwarting death.
As the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce pointed out,
philosophies that begin from faulty premises not only fail to achieve their
purpose, they inevitably end up producing the exact opposite of their stated
goals. Transhumanism aims at superior intelligence, superhuman strength and
unending life. But because it is grounded in an entirely false notion of what
it means to be human, if we recklessly embrace the transhumanist dream, we will
find ourselves instead in a nightmare dystopia of stupidity, weakness and
death.
Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a psychiatrist and director of the
Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy
Centre. This lecture was adapted from his book, ‘The New Abnormal: The Rise of
the Biomedical Security State’ (Regnery, 2022).
[vii] Lewis, C. S. That Hideous
Strength. HarperCollins, pp. 169-170.
Rhoda Wilson:
While previously it was a hobby culminating in writing articles for Wikipedia
(until things made a drastic and undeniable turn in 2020) and a few books for
private consumption, since March 2020 I have become a full-time researcher and
writer in reaction to the global takeover that came into full view with the
introduction of covid-19. For most of my life, I have tried to raise awareness
that a small group of people planned to take over the world for their own
benefit. There was no way I was going to sit back quietly and simply let them
do it once they made their final move. See Full Bio
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