Designing Dystopia

The Transhumanist Temptation to Play God

A recent book from Sophia Institute Press provides a handy primer for a rapidly growing and ominous mindset of our era, transhumanism. In The Transhumanist Temptation: How Technology and Ideology Are Reshaping Humanity—And How to Resist, a thoughtful young writer named Grayson Quay looks at how the idea of transcending our humanity originated and how it impacts our social and political life today.

The term transhumanism was popularized by British scientist Julian Huxley (1887–1975), a grandson of T. H. Huxley (also known as “Darwin’s bulldog”). In a 1957 essay, he expressed a thought that many intellectuals shared—that we humans have somehow found ourselves in charge of evolution.

Their mid-20th-century aspirations combined with the then-popular existentialist mindset, which held that a human being is “the being that defines itself” (àla Sartre), to foster an intellectual climate in which, as Quay puts it, “the individual’s freedom to craft his or her own identity becomes sacrosanct. Inhibiting that freedom becomes blasphemy.”

“It’s unlikely that any of these thinkers envisioned virtual immortals, cyborg supersoldiers, or vat-grown designer babies,” he observes, “but they all played a role in demolishing the barriers that made such innovations morally unthinkable.” Huxley, Sartre, and the existentialists are now long forgotten in popular culture, but those barriers are still demolished.

For example, our bodies have become regarded as fully modular and interchangeable. Women are described by medical professionals as “vagina owners” rather than women, or “chestfeeders” rather than breastfeeders. Transgenderism, Quay reminds us, is an early stage of transhumanism.

Stranger Things Will Follow

As Quay observes, “In the transhuman future, your body is not an integral part of your identity. It’s a thing, or rather a collection of things, all of which have specs and price tags.” And it is scheduled for planned obsolescence: you morph into a bionic entity, integrating artificial intelligence and replacing parts as you go along.

Quay urges us to look beyond headline grabbers to see that, in the big picture, our society has been headed this way for a long time. Transhumanism just takes popular ideologies about the autonomous self to their logical conclusion. He places the ultimate origin in the Garden of Eden, where the serpent tempted Eve with, “Ye shall be as gods.”

He is not saying that we will all willingly become transhumanists. Rather, in a society built around transhumanist aspirations,

If you want to be “normal,” you’ll have to become transhuman…. It may be that no one will force you to grow your baby in a pod or get augmented reality visual implants. But you won’t be the one controlling those technologies, either, and the ways in which they’re reshaping you and the people around you might not become obvious until it’s too late.

Transhumanism has begun to invade the church. Yes, there is a Christian Transhumanist Association, but one needn’t bother to join. In 2023, the Anglican Church of Canada adopted a rite for blessing gender transitions. Among mainstream Protestant groups, we can expect every similar development to be handled the same way, providing proof that that church “is no longer operating from Christian premises but merely applying Christian language to the transhumanism that permeates our culture.”

Urgent but Gloomy

Quay sees no hope of transhumanism just fading away; it is embedded in our culture:

There’s no saving the American left from its total bondage to transhumanism. The Democratic Party’s alliances with feminism (largely reduced to birth control and abortion), the LGBT movement (swallowed up entirely by transgenderism), and an elite class that prides itself on its decadent late-liberal values have made sure of that. But although the right has a better chance at winning some partial and temporary victories for humanity, certain movements within it simply offer transhumanism in a different guise.

Is he being too harsh? It’s worth reflecting that top female Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris would not likely oppose—on their own—something so deeply wrong as double mastectomies for minor girls on the grounds that the girls were “born in the wrong body.” That’s how far transhumanism has penetrated already.

The shocking part of Quay’s book—the reason friends recommended that I read and review it—is the question he asks: Will most Christians even want to oppose transhumanism?

Transgenderism follows the same transhumanist logic as birth control, abortion, and surrogacy: horror and resentment toward a healthy bodily function plus insistence on one’s inalienable right to control, halt, or outsource that process. As with birth control, the point is not happiness. It’s autonomy.

Are We Already Transhuman-Compliant?

Quay’s argument demands a thoughtful response. How much of the insistence on the right to artificially control one’s own fertility functions as an early acceptance of transhumanist premises?

Despite the “How to Resist” phrase in the subtitle, Quay has little to say about proposed responses; perhaps that is for another book. Here he mainly challenges us to consider the extent to which we are already transhuman-compliant. We can’t be sure where we should go unless we first understand where we are.