Ready or not, here comes transhumanism
My two-part debut at Public Discourse explains how to stop such a miserable fate
I had the honor of giving a speech at Notre Dame’s annual Fall Conference in November 2021.1 The theme of last year’s conference was “human dignity in a secular world.” One of the highlights was Alasdair MacIntyre’s controversial (to some) speech, taking aim at the post-WWII conception of human dignity; it’s worth a listen.
Anyway, the good folks at Public Discourse were kind enough to solicit my speech for publication, as a two part series:
Part I - “On Tech and Dignity: The Posthuman Technology That Threatens Us All”
Part II - “On Tech and Dignity: How We Can Stay Human”
My basic claim is that transgenderism is the first step toward a posthuman future. This is how I’d frame the stakes:
Before you commit to thinking this argument is a stretch, it’s a non-starter to object on the ground that average trans people and their “allies” don’t agitate for posthumanity. That’s because movements aren’t pushed forward by their clueless mainstream, but by their true-believer vanguard. Here, that vanguard is shockingly, but helpfully, explicit about its posthuman aspirations. In an anonymous 2018 essay—“Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper”—the author posits that a tech-enabled decoupling of gender from reproduction will enable us to triumph over our own nature. The author explains that “trans femininity” “both recognizes the obsolescence of a human future and aligns itself with the production of inhuman intelligences and an inhuman future.” Moreover, trans women’s “flesh is how the machinery beneath infiltrates the human race. It breaks these lucky few free from the horrid curse of being human towards the lesbian autoproduction of demons.”
It’s only a matter of time before such logic is firmly and explicitly part of mainstream discourse. You’ve seen it happen before: Today’s fringe-y, weird online essay is tomorrow’s Very Serious white paper from the Brookings Institution, soberly reported on by the Times.
I hope you enjoy reading the essay as much as I enjoyed writing it. Drop a comment with your reaction—positive or negative—and share it far and wide.
People need to be thinking about these things. We no longer have the luxury of burying our heads in the sand.
The de Nicola Center’s annual Fall Conference brings together the world’s leading Catholic thinkers, as well as those from other traditions, in fruitful discourse and exchange on the most pressing and vexed questions of ethics, culture, and public policy today. Since the first conference in 2000, this annual event has become the most important academic forum for wide-ranging conversations that engage the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition from a variety of disciplinary points of departure, including theology, philosophy, political theory, law, history, economics, and the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, literature, and the arts. Recent past speakers include Nobel Laureate James Heckman, John Finnis, Mary Ann Glendon, Rémi Brague, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
A very interesting piece, Deion, and I'm glad that the content of your speech is now available in written form! The area of technology is one where you vastly outpace me, and I will have to consider it further (perhaps, weather permitting, on a walk outside away from my computer). I definitely agree that there is a dangerous disdain in our culture for being human, and you give me ample reason to think that our current approach to technology is deeply linked to it. Of course, the end of your piece, discussing He who "did not count equality with G-d a thing to be grasped" but became man that we might be drawn into Him (Who, notably, maintains His human nature and body in Heaven, and for the rest of eternity), rings particularly true. In a way, it connects to your piece from two weeks ago about euthanasia; in Christ we find reason for all our human frailty, because He looked at it and not only said that it was good for us to be human, but for He Himself to become human.
Wow! What an interesting and stimulating essay, Deion. I'm struggling, though, with one aspect of it. You say: "When we’re steeped in a religious mode of being, we’re content just to be human". I'm not so sure about that. Couldn't the secular transhumanists reproach you with the idea that the ORIGINAL transhumanists were...Christians! Isn't Christianity often about "transcending" our material, physical, biological nature, and living on a higher spiritual plane? Let's say I become a monk and live in a cloister my whole life. Haven't I sacrificed elements of my humanity -- like the chance to have children -- for the ethereal, spiritual benefits of living closer to God? I'm not saying such a choice is wrong, but it's not especially HUMAN. It's...superhuman? Transhuman? I guess what I'm saying is that the tension between accepting and rejecting various elements of humanity has always been part of the human condition. Maybe the dilemmas posed by modern tech aren't so revolutionary?